I drove my car to the top of Pike's Peak several years when I was on vacation. Driving up is easy. Driving back down, on the other hand, is the real challenge.
It was especially fun considering that my car was sold in a part of the country that was basically at sea level so the computer had trouble dealing with the air at that altitude. How will their automated system deal with the engine stalling out, causing a lose of both power steering and power braking ever couple of minutes?
There's something else I took issue with in the article:
Humans are not very good at driving cars, as is evidenced by our ability to destroy 1.3 million souls on our roads each year.
I don't know where to get good statistics for the rest of the world but you can get information about accident rates and total miles driven in the US and it works out that in the USA the averages are about 1 accident (any severity) for every 500,000 miles driven and 1 death for every 80 million miles driven. That's pretty damn good.
You don't need Pulseaudio if your machine has a single set of speakers and a single input device or maybe a couple of devices that never change.
As soon as you add things like bluetooth or USB headsets into the mix and want to do things like move audio streams between output devices without stopping them (play the sound from the DVD I am watching on the main speakers, unless I turn on the bluetooth headset) you either need to modify each and every application to understand all these devices or else you need some kind of sound server.
Well, if there is mechanical "switch" independant of what any microcontroller says (like: mechanical switch connected to microcontroller in cars. You can "push breaks" in SW, albait it is mechanical part), then I am accepting your argument.
Besides this there are reactor designs that are prevented from exploding or melting down by the laws of physics, regardless of any control system tries to do be it a mechanical switch or a microcontroller.
You could do that but since we have the technology why not launch it all at once? Since fuel costs are more-or-less constant from 2,000 - 8,000,000 tons go for broke and launch a small city as a complete turnkey base. You should have plenty of capacity to store enough supplies to last for decades.
We will never run out of Uranium and Thorium. Forget about Thorium and focus on Uranium.
Why? Thorium is three to four times more abundent. It's literally everywhere - we throw away 13 times more thorium energy embedded in coal ash than we get from burning the coal.
That treaty won't be worth the paper it is printed on once some entity that has enough resources to defend its property rights actually makes a large investment in space.
Any settlers to Mars would need certain things provided to them, regularly, for the foreseeable future (at least a year or two):
* air * food * water
There's no technical reason not to launch all the equipment the settlers would need to be self sufficient in those areas all at once in a Project Orion vehicle.
Without "space gold" being identified as existing on Mars
Both the moon and Mars are loaded with thorium. Of course, the Earth is loaded with 130 trillion tons of it so even if we started using it for all our energy we wouldn't run out any time soon but it still might be valuable enough to ship back to Earth.
That's the plan I use and it's pretty awesome. I live in the Dallas area so I don't need to worry about their coverage problems and get HSPA+ without paying extra.
If you live in an area where their coverage is good it's hard to beat T-Mobile on price.
Simple, buearucrats would rather have no answer than give the wrong one
For decades the answer to this kind of question would be, "I can neither confirm nor deny that a missile was launched off the coast of California..."
Had the Pentagon said that the story would have gone away in short order. Everybody would have assumed it was some kind of secret US missile test and forgotten about it the next day.
So yeah, if you believe that the government can create that good of a cover story with that much independent evidence in a 36 hour period, well, you have more faith in government agencies than I do.
That's the bizarre thing - why did it take 36 hours to get an answer and why didn't the definitive answer come from a definitive source?
So it was flight 808. Either the DoD and FAA were unable to figure that out in short order or else they just don't care about giving the public answers to those kind of questions.
Neither one of those possibilities is particularly good.
my bet would be that our STs can identify them by name just from their signatures
It was my experience that the level of proficiency you are describing was extremely rare.
The whole "the Chinese did it" theory is just way too Tom Clancy to be real.
It's far more likely that if anything was launched and it wasn't just a rare type of airplane contrail it was a US launch instead of any other country's. You shouldn't discount the possibility that someone couldn't sneak up on the US coast and launch a missile, however.
Slashdot Mirror
The underpants bomber was on a terrorist watchlist and was flying without a passport. The US government intervened to let him board the plane anyway.
Like blowing themselves up in the security checkpoint line, for example.
I drove my car to the top of Pike's Peak several years when I was on vacation. Driving up is easy. Driving back down, on the other hand, is the real challenge.
It was especially fun considering that my car was sold in a part of the country that was basically at sea level so the computer had trouble dealing with the air at that altitude. How will their automated system deal with the engine stalling out, causing a lose of both power steering and power braking ever couple of minutes?
There's something else I took issue with in the article:
I don't know where to get good statistics for the rest of the world but you can get information about accident rates and total miles driven in the US and it works out that in the USA the averages are about 1 accident (any severity) for every 500,000 miles driven and 1 death for every 80 million miles driven. That's pretty damn good.
You don't need Pulseaudio if your machine has a single set of speakers and a single input device or maybe a couple of devices that never change.
As soon as you add things like bluetooth or USB headsets into the mix and want to do things like move audio streams between output devices without stopping them (play the sound from the DVD I am watching on the main speakers, unless I turn on the bluetooth headset) you either need to modify each and every application to understand all these devices or else you need some kind of sound server.
I don't know why people pretend that these two approaches are incompatible.
Users that compile their own kernel or distros that don't want to provide their own userspace solution get a good default.
Users or distros that want to use a userspace solution will disable that KCONFIG option and use their own method for grouping processes.
Besides this there are reactor designs that are prevented from exploding or melting down by the laws of physics, regardless of any control system tries to do be it a mechanical switch or a microcontroller.
When the last time the government solved the problem that it told you it was trying to solve?
Tom Baugh is looking less and less crazy by the day.
Things are playing out almost exactly as he predicted.
So you're advocating molestation as a form of extortion? Fuck you.
The head of the TSA said today that they want to expand into ground transportation as well. They'll find a way to grope you one way or another.
Because assholes are attracted to the levers of power, almost by definition.
You could do that but since we have the technology why not launch it all at once? Since fuel costs are more-or-less constant from 2,000 - 8,000,000 tons go for broke and launch a small city as a complete turnkey base. You should have plenty of capacity to store enough supplies to last for decades.
Until they discover that you can save a lot of time, money and frustration and maybe even get more interesting conversations by hiring a professional.
It sounds more similar to Motoblur.
But at the same time we've let coal power plants dump radioactive waste into the atmosphere all day for over a hundred years.
Why? Thorium is three to four times more abundent. It's literally everywhere - we throw away 13 times more thorium energy embedded in coal ash than we get from burning the coal.
China does not have a monolopy on oppressive governments.
That treaty won't be worth the paper it is printed on once some entity that has enough resources to defend its property rights actually makes a large investment in space.
There's no technical reason not to launch all the equipment the settlers would need to be self sufficient in those areas all at once in a Project Orion vehicle.
Both the moon and Mars are loaded with thorium. Of course, the Earth is loaded with 130 trillion tons of it so even if we started using it for all our energy we wouldn't run out any time soon but it still might be valuable enough to ship back to Earth.
Population density?
That's the plan I use and it's pretty awesome. I live in the Dallas area so I don't need to worry about their coverage problems and get HSPA+ without paying extra.
If you live in an area where their coverage is good it's hard to beat T-Mobile on price.
For decades the answer to this kind of question would be, "I can neither confirm nor deny that a missile was launched off the coast of California..."
Had the Pentagon said that the story would have gone away in short order. Everybody would have assumed it was some kind of secret US missile test and forgotten about it the next day.
That's the bizarre thing - why did it take 36 hours to get an answer and why didn't the definitive answer come from a definitive source?
So it was flight 808. Either the DoD and FAA were unable to figure that out in short order or else they just don't care about giving the public answers to those kind of questions.
Neither one of those possibilities is particularly good.
It was my experience that the level of proficiency you are describing was extremely rare.
It's far more likely that if anything was launched and it wasn't just a rare type of airplane contrail it was a US launch instead of any other country's. You shouldn't discount the possibility that someone couldn't sneak up on the US coast and launch a missile, however.