Even them tunnels are partly unusable. At $ 100 mil a mile just one mile of reused tunnels could pay for an awful lot of things like Hospitals, Law enfocement and urban renovation with the money that is saved.
The real challenge in Engineering in not to replace the old with the new and then throw the old away. It is to find new uses for what other people throw away as junk. A fiend of my fathers has a business that recycles waste. Alot of people crack jokes about this guy and how he makes a living. Maybe it is because he drives an expensive top of the line Mercedes Benz and they dont??
If this New Yorker pull this off he will make a killing by underbidding alot of people that probalby consider themseves smarter than he is. I wish him good luck! This is a really cool idea.
So what? Pack a cargo hold half full of lead, put the bomb in there and pack another half cargohold worth of lead on top of it. Then sail the thing into position off the US coast and sink it. After a sutable amount of time detonate your 30 kiloton nuclear warhead and let the 300 meter tidal wave do the rest.
Another variant might be what I suggested in my previous post only use a 767 cargo jet. Thousands of them come into the US every day as well.
How about this? Send 50 holy warriors each with a small easily hidden capsule full of to 50 major US cities. Once there they dump the stuff into the water supply.
The best defence against this is not High tech monitoring systems and "son of starwars" prestige projects that try to find the needle in the haystack. It is placing agents and infiltrators at the source of the trouble and keeping close tabs on everything the A-Bomb throwing troublemaker does. The trouble with the USA's ruling oligarchy is that it has come to believe that only satilites and hightech sensors are any use at spying. Which is also why they are so bloody suprised everytime a basic, "off the shelf" human spy equipped with only a couple of primitive MK.1 eyballs and some unsophisticated organic accoustic sensors, crawls up their arse and steals the A-Bomb serets they left lying around on the counter in the mess hall.
Actually the US armed forces formed a special unit to test the security of their bases by attacking them. All the base commander was told was that it would happen in the next three months. Among this groups achievements was hijacking a nuclear submarine. Not suprizingly the team was booted out of the military because Egos in the Pentagon had benn deflated. If a US SSN can be hijacked smuggling a warhead into the US is peanuts.
Why hasn't it happened yet?? It is also possible that an ICBM would go off on its own. Why has that not happened yet? Just because it has not happened yet does not mean it won't happen in the future. Maybe the worlds governments have just been sucsessful at stopping such attemts so far. All in all i don't see how it is practically possible to stop somebody from smuggling a warhead into the US. An even easyer coup would be to smuggle in Biological agents or highly toxic substances. If US customs can not stop cocaine from being smuggled in by the ton why should they find it easyer to locate a small box full of bioagents.
Quite simply, the collective intelligence level is dropping so rapidly that it's becomingincreasingly difficult for producers to insult the intelligence of the American public....
<sarcasm>
GW, Bush Jr.is campaingning somewher in the US. He stops in some unnamed town to give a speach. At the end of his speach an inspired female voter yells at the top of her voice:
- Mr Bush, You'll get the vote of every thinking American!!"
Bush looks at the woman for a moment and then replies:
- "No, m'am that is not enaugh, I need a majority!"
They do not have to be on par in miturization. They could just buy one of the KGB mini nukes Gen. Lebed could not find a few years back when the Russians did an inventory.
The NMS wil have 0 practical value for preventing strikes on the US for a variety of reasons. You have allready adressed the proctical impossibility of finding a nuke smuggled into the US. Add to that:
The efficiency of this system will never reach 100%. The techincal difficaulties are too big.
Decoys, by launching decoys a system like the NMS which is osteniably designed to deal with smaller attacks can be overloaded.
It relies on ground stations without whom it is impotent and these stations are vulnerable.
The simple fact is that if anyone who manages to build a hand full of nukes would also have to build the ICBM's to carry them from the middle east to the US. Which is not easy, the project is impossible to hide, as are the launch sites. Then to strike at the US he would have to launch several ICBM's carrying decoys to hide his hand full of nukes from the NMS. This in turn requires detailed technical knowledge of the sensor arrays used by the NMS. Information which a Nuclear Banana Republic might not find to be partickularly easy to obtain. The effort involved even in just creating a launch system able to reach the USA is enormous never mind the ELINT/jamming/decoys required to assure success.
Charging a handfull of holy warriors with transporting it into the US in one of the millions of containers that enter that country every day is so much easyer. Just getting the thing into New York Harbour would be enaugh just sail it to the pier and detonate the thing.
The only way to prevent that is to search every vessel that comes into the USA's EEZ with a geiger counter. Which would in turn require the US not only to ratifyin UNLOS but also altering it to give the US the right to conduct boardings and forced searches in its EES. Which would in turn have the side effect of giving China the right to force down or even Shoot down US Elint aircraft in its EEZ.
So why not just get together and form a website like slashdot for publishing scientific research. It could be run by an internnational organization, the UN for example. Add a searchable online library and that cuts out the publishers completely.
....public archives introduce errors into the articles, making them unreliable!....What if a g (microgram) suddenly becomes a mg (milligram)?
How? aren't these articles submitted on electronic format allready? All that is needed is a simple conversion to HTML format. That has no more risk to it than the editing/typesetting done by the Scientific Journals.
....various publishers are thinking about changing their business model: instead of billing readers, they plan to bill authors....f journal articles became freely available after a while, some libraries might stop subscribing to them.
Charging researchers is not a good idea. Alot of research is done on a shoestring budget and not everybody might be able to afford what a big time publisher regards as a few thousand dollar peanut fee.
If the researchpapers were released to a central archive after six months I rather doubt that people would stop subscribing. I for one would not like to be six months behind on cutting edge research.
A free and indipendent online archive would of course have the advantage of being completely up to date and not up to date minus six months.
Sarcastic Rant:
Where was the FCC when Microsoft cornered the OS, Internet browser and Office markets? Where was the FCC When Boeing swallowed and digested McDonell Douglas and became the only really signinficant manufacturer of airliners with a 80% world market share? Why is the European software industry dead? Why did the European Aircraft manufacturers allmost go the same way as the European Software industry?
Simple! For most of the latter half of the last century the US industriy became dominated by Mega corporations while the European industry remained fragmented. This enabled US corporations to out compete the Europeans until the latter finally figured out that the only way to compete with the US is to form equally large and equally slimy Megacorporations of their own.
So what does this have to do with the topic of this thread? Simple! If a few big media corporations control all the most frequently used news mediums it is easyer to influence public opinion. A decentralized system of many indipendent Newspapers, Radiostations, TV-channels is an unpredictable animal, and Politicians do not like unpreditable things. The Vietnam war clearly demonstrated that the media is a powerful tool to infuence public opinion. So powerful it caused US foreign policy to change. Public opinion would in future be an all important factor. Not just in national politics but in world politics. Ever since Politicians in Democratic countries all over the world hav been looking for a (Democratic) way to aquire that greatest luxury of Dictators, Control over the media.
But how? Well, how do you normally gain control of a market now a days? You become the single biggest player on it, then you drive the competition off the market. Cases in point Microsoft and Boeing. And in case you think I am dumping on the US the US mobile phone industry is now under a similar attack by European Mobile phone giants like Deutsche Telekom. Shure, the US Congress is legislating to prevent it but if the Tele-Giants stay at it they will succeed where Microsoft, Boeing and others suceeded before them, and corner a fat profitable market. They learned from the best!
Rupert Rupert Murdoch demonstrated how this can be applied to the media. You lobby politicians to pass legislation to make consolidation of news and entertainment mediums in the hands of a few Media moguls easyer. First national control and then you take the act Gobal. If you manage that, then you and your clique of 4-5 that control 90% of what the public hears negotiate with governments. A very democratic way to control the media. And a method which into the bargain is comaptable with all the best traditions of Democracy and a free market system. People like Rupert Murdoch are the "Kingmakers" of the 20'th and probabley also the 21'st century! SMILE!! Get used to it!!!
<sarcasm>
Let me guess, card carrying Republican, Picture of Joe McCarthy on the wall right next to the shotgun and gandpa's ole "Uppedy Nigga Lynching rope"?
</sarcasm>
Fanatiscism is the refuge of the intelectually under developed!
Yaaaaawn! You bore me!
Da Rabbit!
--- "Ok who left his pet Troll unteathered?? This is not funny anymore!" ---
<sarcasm>
Lets be realistic here! It is quite obvious Chinas whole space programs only aim is to "thump" the space shuttle. I can see the US newspaper hedlines now:
"US Space shuttle forced to land on Hainan Island by Chinese orbital space gunboat!"
</sarcasm>
On a more serious note I heard in the news the other day that ESA is going ahead with a Single Stage To Orbit launcher. The project manager even claimed it has guarenteed funding to see it through?!? I'd have thougt that would on its own be enaugh to heat things up under Baby Bush's ass??
Da Rabbit!
But will bio-computers run DOOM?
on
Hacking Biology
·
· Score: 1
So in 30 years time when I visit my grandkids my grandson will drag me up to his room show me a cube full of green sludge and go:
See grandad that's my new PC! "Virtual Reality Doom 7" kicks ass on this baby! Lets do a deathmantch, Huh grandad! Pleeeease
Ok lets sum up you basic Techno Trance super hit...
Get a musical keyboard, hit the keys randomly to produce a 3 second collection of noises. Record the noises in a.wav file join it N times until you have a several minutes of the same noises being repeated again and again. Then get some durnken slob to make bowel noises and add them to the sound track at regular intervals, PRESTO.. Thechno Trance....
Well at least they did not fuck up a simple conversion from meters to inches. DOOOOOOOOOOOH!
In 15 years shit is bound to happen on a pioneering space station designed to stay in orbit for 15 months and it is really amazing how well it went and how well the Russians dealt with it. Mir is arguably the greatest accomplishment in space so far greater than the Appollo missions and right up there with Hubble. Can you point to anyone who did better than Mir in the last 15 years with his space station? NASA perhaps? Oh... wait... Mir was the only Space Station in orbit after Skylab was scrapped. And darn it.. if it isn't the experiences with Mir that make the International Space Station possible in the first place! Dammn communists and their stupid ideas!
What the writer of the top post on this thread misses completely is that none of this is certain..
Hehe.. That is precisely why we are all having this argument:)
Nothing on this subject can ever be certain, the timescale is too large. We can only put our stock in the explanation that agrees best with the most reliable data we have. And at the moment that is Milankovich or a variant there of. Which is why this debate will go on and on and on and on and on....
Until we are all sitting in a circle around a fire in an iglu on top of a 2km icecap, still arguing... or will it be a straw hut in the crocodile infested N-Norvegian Everglades?;)
Given the rampant bias of today's journalists, especially when it comes to PC topics like global warming, I don't think this counts for much. I also note that you say "reputable" Journalists. Does this mean good ol' boy establishment journalists who always spout the party line?
Don't make the mistake of assuming that just because somthing is PC it is by default a malicious lie. Not all journalists are sensationalists. When I say Reputable journalists I mean they were willing to submit their findings to be critisized in a public forum. They made a documentary where took the list and simply checked every name and tried to verify the claim of the petitions originators that all these men were "eminent climate researchers" this turned out to be a false claim. Only a small minority of the signitories to the petition were qualified to make such a claim. What the petition's originators basically did was hold a conference and have all the guests sign a petition, then they claimed they (the guests of the conference) were all "climate experts". This is easy to check and the results of the investigation were pretty hard to argue with.
On point 3 and 4 you seemd to be suggesting (or perhaps formulated your staements slightly ambiguously?) that because the temperatures for 7500 of the last 10000 years were warmer than today the whole possibility of rapid global cooling triggered by warm weather is humbug. If you take a look at the analysis results of the two teams that drilled throug the Greenland glacier you would see that such warm periods do certainly happen but are not the norm they are the exception and have been that for at least the last 125.000 years and they ended rapidly.
Entirely true! McCarthy's statement, so prominently featured in SlashDot...
I won't argue with you on the subject McCarthy's lapse of scientific professionalism. On that point I agree with you completely, he made statements that he was unable to back up with data. I was trying to make the point that McCarthy or not the volume of ice of the N-Polar ice cap is smaller on average than it has been previously. True this is hard to prove directly, what is irrefutable however and can be easily measured is that the average salinity or the N-Arctic ocean has decreased measurably. The fresh water needed to decrease the oceans salininty can only come form two sources, increased rainfall or melting polar ice. The data documenting this did not originate form Mr. McCarthy.
Post #352 raises a good question. How does this reduce emissions. The fact is that it is not the Banana republics fo S-America or the Coco-bean states of Africa that account for 80% of the harmful emmissions. It is N-Amerca, Russia, China, and Europe. Of these parties only the Chinese are really beginning to wake up to the reality of pollution management and the Europeans (the EU to be precise not all Europeans by a long shot) are sticking to the pollution reduction accords made and signed but not ratified by most countries at envirometal conferences in Rio and Kyoto.
This whole Quota system is a strange scheme designed to convince people that they reduce a problem can profiting from doing it without actually doing anything other than trading papers for money. It cleverly disguises the fact that it will not reduce over all pollution levels. Which is really what it all boils down to.
How about this? The US.Govt sells drug smuggling liscenses that can be traded freely on the stockmarket. This will have the dual effect of reducing the over all drugconsumption in the US and it will enable us to fight drugsmuggling more effectively.
See the logic? It makes sense don't it? Kind of like a "Thigh Master" exercise device. You can loose all your ugly fat by exercising 20 minutes every day, never breaking a sweat while you do it and without cutting down on your consumtion of: Greasy burgers, pizzas, cream cakes, Coca Cola, Icecream......
I think the US Marines sum it up best; No pain, no gain!
By the same logic why not sell liscenses to sell drugs, steal, rape murder or molest children?
That will enable us to afford better equipped policeforces to fight these crimes while reducing the overall frequency of such crimes being committed....
1.That petition has been taken apart by several reputable Journalists and found to have been signed by alot less people than that. And that most of them were not Scientists qualified to make such an radical statement on global warming.
2. I can only refer you to recent research results reached by European scientists studying ice core samples from the Greenland glacier. Results that have been confirmed by a US team that made a similar core sample on the Greenland glacier.
3. Not true there have been numerous "mini iceages" or cold periods that have segnificantly influenced human history. One of them is thought to have contributed to teh fall of the Roman Empire.
4. The Viking settlements in Greenland were destroyed by a rapid climate change that resulted in significantly colder weather than today. Before that time it was possible to grow corn and other plants in Iceland that do not reach maturity in that country any more due to cold weather. Archeological evidence shows that farmers in the region abruptly stopped growing grain as the Greenland settlements collapsed. The weather was warmer than to day when Greenland was settled.
5. Partly true. While we have no way of knowing if the ice melting though is a normal situatio at the N-Pole it is a recorded fact that the N-Polar ice cap is progressively thinning. This results in salininty of the water in the N-Atlantic decreasing with potentially disaterous results for the Gulf-Current.
Global warming was a fad, it has now become a fact. There are no "so called proofs" for global warming just cold hard data that documents it.
The latest Research seems to indecate that Global Warmin does not turn the earth into a Greenhous or a Sauna it triggers an Ice age.
How? Well the increased heating causes melting of the polar caps and increased rain fall, partickularly in the critical area of the Atlantic south of Iceland where the Gulf current heavy with warm salty water sinks to form a current that flows along the ocean floor into the Indian ocean where the current rises to the surface again. This system is called the "Great Conveyor" due to its similarity to a conveyor belt in a factory.
So why should we care about increased rainfall in the ocean around Iceland and holes melting into the N-polar ice cap.?
The reason we should care is that if the salty water in this area is dilluted the "Great Conveyor" will be cut. This means that the critical area where the Gulf current sinks moves south or the conveyor is cut alltogether.
What is the result of this development?
The Gulf current and its warm water is what makes large tracts of Europe and N-America habitable. So if the gulf current moves south we get a nasty cold period, a mini Ice age. If the Conveyor is cut we get a full blown ice age.
Contrary to popular opinion climatic changes do not happen sloooooowly they happen fast. We could see a the climate in say S-England change from what it is now to a type of climate that is common in N-Norway today within a human life time. This exact thing has happened before, the last time it happened was about 10.500 years ago when climatic conditions in S-England changed within 50-60 years to sub arctic conditions and remained htat way for over a thousand years.
Popular myths:
Climate changes happen slowly over hundreds of years! Wrong it changes fast and the changes are ill-predicteble.
The Global warming will cancel out the ice age! Wrong it causes the ice age.
I live far from the ocean and way south I should not worry! Wrong you should. All human kind should worry. A drop in temerature will cuse massive political an social upheval, crop faliures, famine and war.
The pollution quota system proposed by the US will help with the climate problem! Wrong selling liscences to pollute and produce greenhouse gasses won't help. Only an over all reduction of greenhouse gasses will help. Nature does not care about Pollurtion liscenses any more than God respects absoulution certificates signed by the pope, you'll go to hell anyway!;)
So either we stuff a sock in the business lobbys mouth and make some relatively elementary changes to make energy consumption more efficient and industury and society more enviromentally friendly. Or we might be in for a long period of living in iglu's. And since I have been in an iglu I can tell you that you'll prefer to spend your lives in your cozy apartments.
5-12% increase in performance for 5-12% increase in price is optimal
5-12% increase in performance for 50% increase in price is still barely tolerable.
5-12% increase in performance for 100% or higher increase in price is unacceptable.
That is what engineers do for a living, compare performance to the cost of achieving that performance and choosing the solution that gives the most performance for the lowest price. The comparisons I made is the essence of good engineering.
I paid 1200 Deutsch Marks for my system: processor, motherboard, PC 133 ram and DVD drive. To make it DDR capable would have cost me about 850 Deutsch Marks ontop of that 1200 I paid for the PC133 based system assuming I bought the same amount of DDR ram as PC 100 ram (256 megs). That is an increase of 70% in total system price for a 5-12% total increase in performance. I might as well flush them 800 Deutsch Marks down the toilet or do something sensable like buy a monitor or something mildly insane like buying a Geforce 3 card.
Would you pay 70% more for a house that has is an extra 10% bigger?
Here in Germany we thought that too. A recent news report showed this to be a misconception. Shoppingcenters use cameras to monitor customers and employees, hotels put cameras in bathrooms and bedrooms. There have been instances of such footage of people undressing or having sex being sold on the net as porn material without their consent.
The problem is that most European countries do not have any clear regualtions about this. The bottom line is that there used to be a time you could shag your girlfriend behind a tree in a park without half a dosen perverts in uniform watching on a monitor. And selling it to a pornmongerer
Slashdot Mirror
Even them tunnels are partly unusable. At $ 100 mil a mile just one mile of reused tunnels could pay for an awful lot of things like Hospitals, Law enfocement and urban renovation with the money that is saved.
The real challenge in Engineering in not to replace the old with the new and then throw the old away. It is to find new uses for what other people throw away as junk. A fiend of my fathers has a business that recycles waste. Alot of people crack jokes about this guy and how he makes a living. Maybe it is because he drives an expensive top of the line Mercedes Benz and they dont??
If this New Yorker pull this off he will make a killing by underbidding alot of people that probalby consider themseves smarter than he is. I wish him good luck! This is a really cool idea.
Isn't there a nifty software package for linux called iproute2 that does more or less the same thing?
So what? Pack a cargo hold half full of lead, put the bomb in there and pack another half cargohold worth of lead on top of it. Then sail the thing into position off the US coast and sink it. After a sutable amount of time detonate your 30 kiloton nuclear warhead and let the 300 meter tidal wave do the rest.
Another variant might be what I suggested in my previous post only use a 767 cargo jet. Thousands of them come into the US every day as well.
How about this? Send 50 holy warriors each with a small easily hidden capsule full of to 50 major US cities. Once there they dump the stuff into the water supply.
The best defence against this is not High tech monitoring systems and "son of starwars" prestige projects that try to find the needle in the haystack. It is placing agents and infiltrators at the source of the trouble and keeping close tabs on everything the A-Bomb throwing troublemaker does. The trouble with the USA's ruling oligarchy is that it has come to believe that only satilites and hightech sensors are any use at spying. Which is also why they are so bloody suprised everytime a basic, "off the shelf" human spy equipped with only a couple of primitive MK.1 eyballs and some unsophisticated organic accoustic sensors, crawls up their arse and steals the A-Bomb serets they left lying around on the counter in the mess hall.
Da Rabbit!
Actually the US armed forces formed a special unit to test the security of their bases by attacking them. All the base commander was told was that it would happen in the next three months. Among this groups achievements was hijacking a nuclear submarine. Not suprizingly the team was booted out of the military because Egos in the Pentagon had benn deflated. If a US SSN can be hijacked smuggling a warhead into the US is peanuts.
Why hasn't it happened yet?? It is also possible that an ICBM would go off on its own. Why has that not happened yet? Just because it has not happened yet does not mean it won't happen in the future. Maybe the worlds governments have just been sucsessful at stopping such attemts so far. All in all i don't see how it is practically possible to stop somebody from smuggling a warhead into the US. An even easyer coup would be to smuggle in Biological agents or highly toxic substances. If US customs can not stop cocaine from being smuggled in by the ton why should they find it easyer to locate a small box full of bioagents.
Da Rabbit!
Quite simply, the collective intelligence level is dropping so rapidly that it's becomingincreasingly difficult for producers to insult the intelligence of the American public....
<sarcasm>
GW, Bush Jr.is campaingning somewher in the US. He stops in some unnamed town to give a speach. At the end of his speach an inspired female voter yells at the top of her voice:
- Mr Bush, You'll get the vote of every thinking American!!"
Bush looks at the woman for a moment and then replies:
- "No, m'am that is not enaugh, I need a majority!"
</sarcasm>
The NMS wil have 0 practical value for preventing strikes on the US for a variety of reasons. You have allready adressed the proctical impossibility of finding a nuke smuggled into the US. Add to that:
The efficiency of this system will never reach 100%. The techincal difficaulties are too big.
Decoys, by launching decoys a system like the NMS which is osteniably designed to deal with smaller attacks can be overloaded.
It relies on ground stations without whom it is impotent and these stations are vulnerable.
The simple fact is that if anyone who manages to build a hand full of nukes would also have to build the ICBM's to carry them from the middle east to the US. Which is not easy, the project is impossible to hide, as are the launch sites. Then to strike at the US he would have to launch several ICBM's carrying decoys to hide his hand full of nukes from the NMS. This in turn requires detailed technical knowledge of the sensor arrays used by the NMS. Information which a Nuclear Banana Republic might not find to be partickularly easy to obtain. The effort involved even in just creating a launch system able to reach the USA is enormous never mind the ELINT/jamming/decoys required to assure success.
Charging a handfull of holy warriors with transporting it into the US in one of the millions of containers that enter that country every day is so much easyer. Just getting the thing into New York Harbour would be enaugh just sail it to the pier and detonate the thing.
The only way to prevent that is to search every vessel that comes into the USA's EEZ with a geiger counter. Which would in turn require the US not only to ratifyin UNLOS but also altering it to give the US the right to conduct boardings and forced searches in its EES. Which would in turn have the side effect of giving China the right to force down or even Shoot down US Elint aircraft in its EEZ.
MWUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Now what were we talking about?? Music?????
So why not just get together and form a website like slashdot for publishing scientific research. It could be run by an internnational organization, the UN for example. Add a searchable online library and that cuts out the publishers completely.
....public archives introduce errors into the articles, making them unreliable!....What if a g (microgram) suddenly becomes a mg (milligram)?
....various publishers are thinking about changing their business model: instead of billing readers, they plan to bill authors....f journal articles became freely available after a while, some libraries might stop subscribing to them.
How? aren't these articles submitted on electronic format allready? All that is needed is a simple conversion to HTML format. That has no more risk to it than the editing/typesetting done by the Scientific Journals.
Charging researchers is not a good idea. Alot of research is done on a shoestring budget and not everybody might be able to afford what a big time publisher regards as a few thousand dollar peanut fee.
If the researchpapers were released to a central archive after six months I rather doubt that people would stop subscribing. I for one would not like to be six months behind on cutting edge research.
A free and indipendent online archive would of course have the advantage of being completely up to date and not up to date minus six months.
Da Rabbit!
FCC?? Ssnort! That snould be FTC
Da Rabbit!
Sarcastic Rant: Where was the FCC when Microsoft cornered the OS, Internet browser and Office markets? Where was the FCC When Boeing swallowed and digested McDonell Douglas and became the only really signinficant manufacturer of airliners with a 80% world market share? Why is the European software industry dead? Why did the European Aircraft manufacturers allmost go the same way as the European Software industry?
Simple! For most of the latter half of the last century the US industriy became dominated by Mega corporations while the European industry remained fragmented. This enabled US corporations to out compete the Europeans until the latter finally figured out that the only way to compete with the US is to form equally large and equally slimy Megacorporations of their own.
So what does this have to do with the topic of this thread? Simple! If a few big media corporations control all the most frequently used news mediums it is easyer to influence public opinion. A decentralized system of many indipendent Newspapers, Radiostations, TV-channels is an unpredictable animal, and Politicians do not like unpreditable things. The Vietnam war clearly demonstrated that the media is a powerful tool to infuence public opinion. So powerful it caused US foreign policy to change. Public opinion would in future be an all important factor. Not just in national politics but in world politics. Ever since Politicians in Democratic countries all over the world hav been looking for a (Democratic) way to aquire that greatest luxury of Dictators, Control over the media.
But how? Well, how do you normally gain control of a market now a days? You become the single biggest player on it, then you drive the competition off the market. Cases in point Microsoft and Boeing. And in case you think I am dumping on the US the US mobile phone industry is now under a similar attack by European Mobile phone giants like Deutsche Telekom. Shure, the US Congress is legislating to prevent it but if the Tele-Giants stay at it they will succeed where Microsoft, Boeing and others suceeded before them, and corner a fat profitable market. They learned from the best!
Rupert Rupert Murdoch demonstrated how this can be applied to the media. You lobby politicians to pass legislation to make consolidation of news and entertainment mediums in the hands of a few Media moguls easyer. First national control and then you take the act Gobal. If you manage that, then you and your clique of 4-5 that control 90% of what the public hears negotiate with governments. A very democratic way to control the media. And a method which into the bargain is comaptable with all the best traditions of Democracy and a free market system. People like Rupert Murdoch are the "Kingmakers" of the 20'th and probabley also the 21'st century! SMILE!! Get used to it!!!
MWUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
Uhummm.....
Darn LSD flashbacks!
Da Rabbit!
<sarcasm>
Let me guess, card carrying Republican, Picture of Joe McCarthy on the wall right next to the shotgun and gandpa's ole "Uppedy Nigga Lynching rope"?
</sarcasm>
Fanatiscism is the refuge of the intelectually under developed!
Yaaaaawn! You bore me!
Da Rabbit!
--- "Ok who left his pet Troll unteathered?? This is not funny anymore!" ---
<sarcasm>
Lets be realistic here! It is quite obvious Chinas whole space programs only aim is to "thump" the space shuttle. I can see the US newspaper hedlines now:
"US Space shuttle forced to land on Hainan Island by Chinese orbital space gunboat!"
</sarcasm>
On a more serious note I heard in the news the other day that ESA is going ahead with a Single Stage To Orbit launcher. The project manager even claimed it has guarenteed funding to see it through?!? I'd have thougt that would on its own be enaugh to heat things up under Baby Bush's ass??
Da Rabbit!
So in 30 years time when I visit my grandkids my grandson will drag me up to his room show me a cube full of green sludge and go:
See grandad that's my new PC! "Virtual Reality Doom 7" kicks ass on this baby! Lets do a deathmantch, Huh grandad! Pleeeease
Ok lets sum up you basic Techno Trance super hit...
.wav file join it N times until you have a several minutes of the same noises being repeated again and again. Then get some durnken slob to make bowel noises and add them to the sound track at regular intervals, PRESTO.. Thechno Trance....
Get a musical keyboard, hit the keys randomly to produce a 3 second collection of noises. Record the noises in a
It would explain Ronald Regan as well.... Unless he contracted MadCows disease.
Well at least they did not fuck up a simple conversion from meters to inches. DOOOOOOOOOOOH!
In 15 years shit is bound to happen on a pioneering space station designed to stay in orbit for 15 months and it is really amazing how well it went and how well the Russians dealt with it. Mir is arguably the greatest accomplishment in space so far greater than the Appollo missions and right up there with Hubble. Can you point to anyone who did better than Mir in the last 15 years with his space station? NASA perhaps? Oh... wait... Mir was the only Space Station in orbit after Skylab was scrapped. And darn it.. if it isn't the experiences with Mir that make the International Space Station possible in the first place! Dammn communists and their stupid ideas!
Space fungus...
Which explains the origins of Techno and Rap music! Brain eating space fungii...
What the writer of the top post on this thread misses completely is that none of this is certain..
:)
;)
Hehe.. That is precisely why we are all having this argument
Nothing on this subject can ever be certain, the timescale is too large. We can only put our stock in the explanation that agrees best with the most reliable data we have. And at the moment that is Milankovich or a variant there of. Which is why this debate will go on and on and on and on and on....
Until we are all sitting in a circle around a fire in an iglu on top of a 2km icecap, still arguing... or will it be a straw hut in the crocodile infested N-Norvegian Everglades?
cheers
Da Rabbit!
Given the rampant bias of today's journalists, especially when it comes to PC topics like global warming, I don't think this counts for much. I also note that you say "reputable" Journalists. Does this mean good ol' boy establishment journalists who always spout the party line?
Don't make the mistake of assuming that just because somthing is PC it is by default a malicious lie. Not all journalists are sensationalists. When I say Reputable journalists I mean they were willing to submit their findings to be critisized in a public forum. They made a documentary where took the list and simply checked every name and tried to verify the claim of the petitions originators that all these men were "eminent climate researchers" this turned out to be a false claim. Only a small minority of the signitories to the petition were qualified to make such a claim. What the petition's originators basically did was hold a conference and have all the guests sign a petition, then they claimed they (the guests of the conference) were all "climate experts". This is easy to check and the results of the investigation were pretty hard to argue with.
On point 3 and 4 you seemd to be suggesting (or perhaps formulated your staements slightly ambiguously?) that because the temperatures for 7500 of the last 10000 years were warmer than today the whole possibility of rapid global cooling triggered by warm weather is humbug. If you take a look at the analysis results of the two teams that drilled throug the Greenland glacier you would see that such warm periods do certainly happen but are not the norm they are the exception and have been that for at least the last 125.000 years and they ended rapidly.
Entirely true! McCarthy's statement, so prominently featured in SlashDot...
I won't argue with you on the subject McCarthy's lapse of scientific professionalism. On that point I agree with you completely, he made statements that he was unable to back up with data. I was trying to make the point that McCarthy or not the volume of ice of the N-Polar ice cap is smaller on average than it has been previously. True this is hard to prove directly, what is irrefutable however and can be easily measured is that the average salinity or the N-Arctic ocean has decreased measurably. The fresh water needed to decrease the oceans salininty can only come form two sources, increased rainfall or melting polar ice. The data documenting this did not originate form Mr. McCarthy.
cheers
Da Rabbit!
Post #352 raises a good question. How does this reduce emissions. The fact is that it is not the Banana republics fo S-America or the Coco-bean states of Africa that account for 80% of the harmful emmissions. It is N-Amerca, Russia, China, and Europe. Of these parties only the Chinese are really beginning to wake up to the reality of pollution management and the Europeans (the EU to be precise not all Europeans by a long shot) are sticking to the pollution reduction accords made and signed but not ratified by most countries at envirometal conferences in Rio and Kyoto.
This whole Quota system is a strange scheme designed to convince people that they reduce a problem can profiting from doing it without actually doing anything other than trading papers for money. It cleverly disguises the fact that it will not reduce over all pollution levels. Which is really what it all boils down to.
How about this? The US.Govt sells drug smuggling liscenses that can be traded freely on the stockmarket. This will have the dual effect of reducing the over all drugconsumption in the US and it will enable us to fight drugsmuggling more effectively.
See the logic? It makes sense don't it? Kind of like a "Thigh Master" exercise device. You can loose all your ugly fat by exercising 20 minutes every day, never breaking a sweat while you do it and without cutting down on your consumtion of: Greasy burgers, pizzas, cream cakes, Coca Cola, Icecream......
I think the US Marines sum it up best;
No pain, no gain!
By the same logic why not sell liscenses to sell drugs, steal, rape murder or molest children?
....
That will enable us to afford better equipped policeforces to fight these crimes while reducing the overall frequency of such crimes being committed
Or will it?
Rebuttals to the points raised in post #188:
1.That petition has been taken apart by several reputable Journalists and found to have been signed by alot less people than that. And that most of them were not Scientists qualified to make such an radical statement on global warming.
2. I can only refer you to recent research results reached by European scientists studying ice core samples from the Greenland glacier. Results that have been confirmed by a US team that made a similar core sample on the Greenland glacier.
3. Not true there have been numerous "mini iceages" or cold periods that have segnificantly influenced human history. One of them is thought to have contributed to teh fall of the Roman Empire.
4. The Viking settlements in Greenland were destroyed by a rapid climate change that resulted in significantly colder weather than today. Before that time it was possible to grow corn and other plants in Iceland that do not reach maturity in that country any more due to cold weather. Archeological evidence shows that farmers in the region abruptly stopped growing grain as the Greenland settlements collapsed. The weather was warmer than to day when Greenland was settled.
5. Partly true. While we have no way of knowing if the ice melting though is a normal situatio at the N-Pole it is a recorded fact that the N-Polar ice cap is progressively thinning. This results in salininty of the water in the N-Atlantic decreasing with potentially disaterous results for the Gulf-Current.
Global warming was a fad, it has now become a fact. There are no "so called proofs" for global warming just cold hard data that documents it.
respectfully
Da Rabbit!
How? Well the increased heating causes melting of the polar caps and increased rain fall, partickularly in the critical area of the Atlantic south of Iceland where the Gulf current heavy with warm salty water sinks to form a current that flows along the ocean floor into the Indian ocean where the current rises to the surface again. This system is called the "Great Conveyor" due to its similarity to a conveyor belt in a factory.
So why should we care about increased rainfall in the ocean around Iceland and holes melting into the N-polar ice cap.?
The reason we should care is that if the salty water in this area is dilluted the "Great Conveyor" will be cut. This means that the critical area where the Gulf current sinks moves south or the conveyor is cut alltogether.
What is the result of this development?
The Gulf current and its warm water is what makes large tracts of Europe and N-America habitable. So if the gulf current moves south we get a nasty cold period, a mini Ice age. If the Conveyor is cut we get a full blown ice age.
Contrary to popular opinion climatic changes do not happen sloooooowly they happen fast. We could see a the climate in say S-England change from what it is now to a type of climate that is common in N-Norway today within a human life time. This exact thing has happened before, the last time it happened was about 10.500 years ago when climatic conditions in S-England changed within 50-60 years to sub arctic conditions and remained htat way for over a thousand years.
Popular myths:
Climate changes happen slowly over hundreds of years! Wrong it changes fast and the changes are ill-predicteble.
The Global warming will cancel out the ice age! Wrong it causes the ice age.
I live far from the ocean and way south I should not worry! Wrong you should. All human kind should worry. A drop in temerature will cuse massive political an social upheval, crop faliures, famine and war.
The pollution quota system proposed by the US will help with the climate problem! Wrong selling liscences to pollute and produce greenhouse gasses won't help. Only an over all reduction of greenhouse gasses will help. Nature does not care about Pollurtion liscenses any more than God respects absoulution certificates signed by the pope, you'll go to hell anyway! ;)
So either we stuff a sock in the business lobbys mouth and make some relatively elementary changes to make energy consumption more efficient and industury and society more enviromentally friendly. Or we might be in for a long period of living in iglu's. And since I have been in an iglu I can tell you that you'll prefer to spend your lives in your cozy apartments.
5-12% increase in performance for 5-12% increase in price is optimal
5-12% increase in performance for 50% increase in price is still barely tolerable.
5-12% increase in performance for 100% or higher increase in price is unacceptable.
That is what engineers do for a living, compare performance to the cost of achieving that performance and choosing the solution that gives the most performance for the lowest price. The comparisons I made is the essence of good engineering.
I paid 1200 Deutsch Marks for my system: processor, motherboard, PC 133 ram and DVD drive. To make it DDR capable would have cost me about 850 Deutsch Marks ontop of that 1200 I paid for the PC133 based system assuming I bought the same amount of DDR ram as PC 100 ram (256 megs). That is an increase of 70% in total system price for a 5-12% total increase in performance. I might as well flush them 800 Deutsch Marks down the toilet or do something sensable like buy a monitor or something mildly insane like buying a Geforce 3 card.
Would you pay 70% more for a house that has is an extra 10% bigger?
Do you know that for a fact??
Here in Germany we thought that too. A recent news report showed this to be a misconception. Shoppingcenters use cameras to monitor customers and employees, hotels put cameras in bathrooms and bedrooms. There have been instances of such footage of people undressing or having sex being sold on the net as porn material without their consent.
The problem is that most European countries do not have any clear regualtions about this. The bottom line is that there used to be a time you could shag your girlfriend behind a tree in a park without half a dosen perverts in uniform watching on a monitor. And selling it to a pornmongerer