I think you'd have difficulty convincing most people that you're sane, with a stated premise that government spending in itself is flawed.
These concepts aren't simple, and they're difficult to express even when people are working from the same worldview. Give politicians some credit-- the vast majority are trying to execute their offices faithfully and well, whether or not you agree with the results.
Re:China's military plan? Human Wave Attacks!
on
The Future of NASA
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· Score: 1
Spectacular events like putting a man on the moon don't do a good job of defining the abilities of our aerospace industry. Strong and continuing US spending on R&D has advanced our technical abilities way beyond any other countries in a broad range of useful space tech and research, from composites to computing and electronics to imaging devices, propulsion systems, and all manner of odds and ends.
Anyone can put a man on the moon given a couple billion dollars and a few years, but development of space infrastructure is on an entirely different roadmap.
Where it counts, America still has massive technological superiority in the aerospace field, and will likely maintain it during the next 10-20 years, even if NASA as we know it disappears.
Sold nukes? Lots. To Israel. Great plan, eh?
on
The Future of NASA
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· Score: 1
Well, that would depend how many nukes we gave Israel before they started making their own....although I suppose that since we and the French also gave them the tech to start making their own, we're effectively responsible for all of it.
Great plan, I'm sure they're far more able to keep those nukes safe and un-used than we would be!
And if we're going to go with chemical/biological weapons... a more dubious interpretation of WMD in my mind... well, we hooked Iraq up in the '80s. That's why Bush knew he'd find WMD there, so it must have been quite a surprise when he discovered that they got rid of it all...
Our military was so strong and effective, not even the Soviet troops in Grenada could hold them off for a day.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
Yes, the legions of heavily-armed Soviet shock troopers hiding in Grenada, hidden cunningly throughout a secret tunnel and bunker network covering all 85,000 acres of the island! The ones who had nuclear missiles pointed at our grandmothers! Indeed, a clear and present danger to national security!
Even better, the invasion of Grenada was a perfect opportunity to show Margaret Thatcher's secret life as a communist sympathizer! When she denounced Reagan for invading Grenada, it showed her true sympathies... harboring communists within the Commonwealth of Great Britain itself!
Haha, indeed. Of course, America hasn't shown much compunction about killing millions of other countries' people when 'national security' is at stake.
I don't trust Bush or his puppeteers with any degree of power, and I live in the USA.
...or... they could just spend 80% of GDP on it.
on
The Future of NASA
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· Score: 1
If US boosted enough material for military bases and for food production (remember -- McDonalds make their food out of local products!), they would have to build systems with low cost to orbit.
Nah. Lowering costs doesn't happen when you're working with an unlimited government grant with no oversight or transparency, as is the case with defense procurement.
Either they'll spend 80% of GDP on it and impoverish everyone even further, or they'll start citing national security and use Orion-style launching systems.
Want to be a downwinder for *that* space base? Heh...
China's military plan? Human Wave Attacks!
on
The Future of NASA
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
We don't hear much about China's space program because they're ~20 years behind us.:P
Not that that's an incredible hurdle to overcome, given the sorry state of NASA, but as far as aerospace tech in general goes the Chinese are way behind.
People won't notice unless they're quite obviously in danger of attaining parity, at which point it would likely be far too late to do anything about the situation.
Small strings of random junk are a great argument for bayesian filters with a *really* large set of known spam e-mails. Most of the nonsense words are ~5 characters.
As long as it's short, they'll start repeating pretty quickly if you have access to industrial-scale spam gathering for your 'known evil' list of e-mails.
Even better, random words which aren't in the system yet are disregarded, letting the spams stand on their own merits.
I'm not sure what sovereignity has to do with how a TLD is used outside the boundaries of a state.
I'm sure that the government can attempt to legislate how the internet works within their borders, but since all of the relevant DNS information is located on servers elsewhere in the world, as well as the vast majority of all internet users, they're kinda up shit creek without a paddle.
Unlike conventional resource-pillaging, the value of a TLD isn't 'in' a country. It's an arbitrary construct which derives meaning from the value that the internet as a whole assigns to that TLD.
Hell, I'd argue that if anyone is ripped off by enterpreneurs buying TLDs, it's the organization which assigns TLDs in the first place, and in this case Niue and the enterpreneur collaborated in ripping them off.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Power to the people, from the people. Support pro-privacy initiatives on the state and local level.
Terrorism at its finest, apparently. Hunger strikes qualify as well-- attempted suicide is illegal in many jurisdictions.
So, if you're suspected of being even coincidentally involved with someone planning a hunger strike in protest, your financial records are fair game. Rules benefiting law enforcement bend to fit unexpected circumstances rather well... Feel safe now?
What I take issue with personally is the false representation of the program as an image editor an manipulator. If certain images can not be manipulated or even viewed, that information should be clearly and prominently located in the documentation and advertising for the product.
It is not.
Making a crippled product available is fine, but given that the product is represented as non-crippled, they should be liable for making that false representation.
Try the "No Child Left Behind" act on for size, dearie. There's even more emphasis on fact regurgitation now... go standardized testing and block grants based on testing performance, go!
The tunnel will have to be significantly longer than the span of water it crosses, in order to allow for the tunnel to reach relatively non-permeable rock by the time you're under wet stuff and to allow a relatively shallow grade.
The Chunnel's average depth under the seafloor is 40m, dropping that distance at a 2% grade takes 2km of rundown on each end... and that's not counting the 100m or so of ocean you have to dip under.
Trains really don't do well on steep grades-- inefficient as hell compared to nice shallow glides, although this is less of a problem on pure-electric trains that don't have to worry about keeping their diesel generators running in an efficient RPM-range.
So, the shortest crossing point doesn't necessarily correspond to the shortest required tunnel, depending on the contours of the seafloor/coasts and the various rock formations around.
Gibraltar is also a hell of a lot funkier from an engineering perspective. The English Channel averages only about 100m deep, while the Strait of Gibraltar appears to be significantly more irregular, with bits running to about ~300m deep from what I can find on the net.
Don't pretend that the people who make/design/decide these things have motives pure as the driven snow, either.
I'm sure that techno-jesters working for the proponents of these systems know more about the technical principles behind biometrics, phone taps, or data-mining than I do.
But I do know that I know a hell of a lot more than they ever will about the kind of society I want to live in.
Chemical engines are only capable of a theoretical max of ~400 seconds of specific impulse, with 175-300 seconds about as good as it gets for commonly-used propellants.
Ion engines in production easily achieve 3000+ seconds of impulse. So, once you're in orbit, ion engines are the way to go.
Cut your fuel mass by an order of magnitude, and enjoy. All you need is that handy nuclear reactor for power, and they build 'em pretty light nowadays.
Re:Instant +5 Funny comment
on
Superball!
·
· Score: 1
Well... technically, Ockham's Razor is the principle proposed by William of Ockham in the fourteenth century: "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate."
The generally accepted English translation of that states that "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily."
And without multiplication, math becomes crippled, man! So like, maybe a universe that can be quantified in mathematics isn't more plausible than "an infinitely complex and powerful beeing, that can't be predicted, or expressed in math"!
MY GOD MAN, OCKHAM'S RAZOR JUST PROVED THE EXISTENCE OF GOD!
Of course, this sudden display of logic is someone's cue to bring up the Hitchhiker's Guide proof of the nonexistence of God, but... never mind.
...and it frustrates me immensely that these inconsiderate asshole game developers always force me to fight my way through levels 1-23 again and again!
That's why I support the concept of characters starting at the level of their real-life avatars-- I want to be working on level 25 from the beginning! I suspect that the reason for this travesty is the game developers' belief that their target market would start with 'negative levels' under this arrangement.
I can see the tech support queries now... "D00D WTF WHY AM I LEVEL MINUS 12 DOOD!?!?!?"
OK, OK. I guess it would be unfair to subject their game moderators to the kind of temptation those sorts of questions would create. Not to mention the 'negative hit point' totals possessed by the truly MMO-obsessed...
...and I'd like to see that Borg-Cube heading off into deep space at some nice high tau-factor carrying with it John Ashcroft, Larry Ellison, FOX News, the Religious Right, the RIAA/MPAA, Ken Lay, and anyone else who feels the need to 'get all up in my bidness'.
My belief system considers willful ignorance to be unholy, and has no problem with consenting adults performing any sex acts that they see fit in privacy.
Given that you obviously don't subscribe to my belief system, please enlighten me as to why society as a whole should subscribe to yours.
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I think you'd have difficulty convincing most people that you're sane, with a stated premise that government spending in itself is flawed.
These concepts aren't simple, and they're difficult to express even when people are working from the same worldview. Give politicians some credit-- the vast majority are trying to execute their offices faithfully and well, whether or not you agree with the results.
Spectacular events like putting a man on the moon don't do a good job of defining the abilities of our aerospace industry. Strong and continuing US spending on R&D has advanced our technical abilities way beyond any other countries in a broad range of useful space tech and research, from composites to computing and electronics to imaging devices, propulsion systems, and all manner of odds and ends.
Anyone can put a man on the moon given a couple billion dollars and a few years, but development of space infrastructure is on an entirely different roadmap.
Where it counts, America still has massive technological superiority in the aerospace field, and will likely maintain it during the next 10-20 years, even if NASA as we know it disappears.
Well, that would depend how many nukes we gave Israel before they started making their own. ...although I suppose that since we and the French also gave them the tech to start making their own, we're effectively responsible for all of it.
Great plan, I'm sure they're far more able to keep those nukes safe and un-used than we would be!
And if we're going to go with chemical/biological weapons... a more dubious interpretation of WMD in my mind... well, we hooked Iraq up in the '80s. That's why Bush knew he'd find WMD there, so it must have been quite a surprise when he discovered that they got rid of it all...
Our military was so strong and effective, not even the Soviet troops in Grenada could hold them off for a day.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
Yes, the legions of heavily-armed Soviet shock troopers hiding in Grenada, hidden cunningly throughout a secret tunnel and bunker network covering all 85,000 acres of the island! The ones who had nuclear missiles pointed at our grandmothers! Indeed, a clear and present danger to national security!
Even better, the invasion of Grenada was a perfect opportunity to show Margaret Thatcher's secret life as a communist sympathizer! When she denounced Reagan for invading Grenada, it showed her true sympathies... harboring communists within the Commonwealth of Great Britain itself!
Haha, indeed. Of course, America hasn't shown much compunction about killing millions of other countries' people when 'national security' is at stake.
I don't trust Bush or his puppeteers with any degree of power, and I live in the USA.
If US boosted enough material for military bases and for food production (remember -- McDonalds make their food out of local products!), they would have to build systems with low cost to orbit.
Nah. Lowering costs doesn't happen when you're working with an unlimited government grant with no oversight or transparency, as is the case with defense procurement.
Either they'll spend 80% of GDP on it and impoverish everyone even further, or they'll start citing national security and use Orion-style launching systems.
Want to be a downwinder for *that* space base? Heh...
We don't hear much about China's space program because they're ~20 years behind us. :P
Not that that's an incredible hurdle to overcome, given the sorry state of NASA, but as far as aerospace tech in general goes the Chinese are way behind.
People won't notice unless they're quite obviously in danger of attaining parity, at which point it would likely be far too late to do anything about the situation.
Small strings of random junk are a great argument for bayesian filters with a *really* large set of known spam e-mails. Most of the nonsense words are ~5 characters.
As long as it's short, they'll start repeating pretty quickly if you have access to industrial-scale spam gathering for your 'known evil' list of e-mails.
Even better, random words which aren't in the system yet are disregarded, letting the spams stand on their own merits.
I'm not sure what sovereignity has to do with how a TLD is used outside the boundaries of a state.
I'm sure that the government can attempt to legislate how the internet works within their borders, but since all of the relevant DNS information is located on servers elsewhere in the world, as well as the vast majority of all internet users, they're kinda up shit creek without a paddle.
Unlike conventional resource-pillaging, the value of a TLD isn't 'in' a country. It's an arbitrary construct which derives meaning from the value that the internet as a whole assigns to that TLD.
Hell, I'd argue that if anyone is ripped off by enterpreneurs buying TLDs, it's the organization which assigns TLDs in the first place, and in this case Niue and the enterpreneur collaborated in ripping them off.
Means their princesses won't go down on him.
At least, they won't go down on him if he's not wealthy enough to ignore the cost of cable. But hell, anyone could have told him that...
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Power to the people, from the people. Support pro-privacy initiatives on the state and local level.
Three quick words for you.
Boston Tea Party.
Terrorism at its finest, apparently. Hunger strikes qualify as well-- attempted suicide is illegal in many jurisdictions.
So, if you're suspected of being even coincidentally involved with someone planning a hunger strike in protest, your financial records are fair game. Rules benefiting law enforcement bend to fit unexpected circumstances rather well... Feel safe now?
What I take issue with personally is the false representation of the program as an image editor an manipulator. If certain images can not be manipulated or even viewed, that information should be clearly and prominently located in the documentation and advertising for the product.
It is not.
Making a crippled product available is fine, but given that the product is represented as non-crippled, they should be liable for making that false representation.
...at least he isn't laying the pipes without the plumbing to go with it.
Try the "No Child Left Behind" act on for size, dearie. There's even more emphasis on fact regurgitation now... go standardized testing and block grants based on testing performance, go!
The tunnel will have to be significantly longer than the span of water it crosses, in order to allow for the tunnel to reach relatively non-permeable rock by the time you're under wet stuff and to allow a relatively shallow grade.
The Chunnel's average depth under the seafloor is 40m, dropping that distance at a 2% grade takes 2km of rundown on each end... and that's not counting the 100m or so of ocean you have to dip under.
Trains really don't do well on steep grades-- inefficient as hell compared to nice shallow glides, although this is less of a problem on pure-electric trains that don't have to worry about keeping their diesel generators running in an efficient RPM-range.
So, the shortest crossing point doesn't necessarily correspond to the shortest required tunnel, depending on the contours of the seafloor/coasts and the various rock formations around.
Gibraltar is also a hell of a lot funkier from an engineering perspective. The English Channel averages only about 100m deep, while the Strait of Gibraltar appears to be significantly more irregular, with bits running to about ~300m deep from what I can find on the net.
Don't pretend that the people who make/design/decide these things have motives pure as the driven snow, either.
I'm sure that techno-jesters working for the proponents of these systems know more about the technical principles behind biometrics, phone taps, or data-mining than I do.
But I do know that I know a hell of a lot more than they ever will about the kind of society I want to live in.
Chemical engines are only capable of a theoretical max of ~400 seconds of specific impulse, with 175-300 seconds about as good as it gets for commonly-used propellants.
Ion engines in production easily achieve 3000+ seconds of impulse. So, once you're in orbit, ion engines are the way to go.
Cut your fuel mass by an order of magnitude, and enjoy. All you need is that handy nuclear reactor for power, and they build 'em pretty light nowadays.
Ahh, but is this fat pipe covered under fair-use?
;-)
Wouldn't want the RIAA to get unduly excited.
Well... technically, Ockham's Razor is the principle proposed by William of Ockham in the fourteenth century: "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate."
The generally accepted English translation of that states that "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily."
And without multiplication, math becomes crippled, man! So like, maybe a universe that can be quantified in mathematics isn't more plausible than "an infinitely complex and powerful beeing, that can't be predicted, or expressed in math"!
MY GOD MAN, OCKHAM'S RAZOR JUST PROVED THE EXISTENCE OF GOD!
Of course, this sudden display of logic is someone's cue to bring up the Hitchhiker's Guide proof of the nonexistence of God, but... never mind.
I am a level 24 orc-slaying warrior...
...and it frustrates me immensely that these inconsiderate asshole game developers always force me to fight my way through levels 1-23 again and again!
That's why I support the concept of characters starting at the level of their real-life avatars-- I want to be working on level 25 from the beginning! I suspect that the reason for this travesty is the game developers' belief that their target market would start with 'negative levels' under this arrangement.
I can see the tech support queries now... "D00D WTF WHY AM I LEVEL MINUS 12 DOOD!?!?!?"
OK, OK. I guess it would be unfair to subject their game moderators to the kind of temptation those sorts of questions would create. Not to mention the 'negative hit point' totals possessed by the truly MMO-obsessed...
Oh, they're not new. We've had moron overlords for centuries.
...and I'd like to see that Borg-Cube heading off into deep space at some nice high tau-factor carrying with it John Ashcroft, Larry Ellison, FOX News, the Religious Right, the RIAA/MPAA, Ken Lay, and anyone else who feels the need to 'get all up in my bidness'.
My belief system considers willful ignorance to be unholy, and has no problem with consenting adults performing any sex acts that they see fit in privacy.
Given that you obviously don't subscribe to my belief system, please enlighten me as to why society as a whole should subscribe to yours.
Real posters don't reply to sigs, either. ;-)