I wonder, why not just get rid of income tax altogether? To compensate, we'd have to raise the taxes on taxable goods and services, but it gives us a few benefits:
No more income tax returns to fill out in April!
Anyone using our infrastructure (roads to drive on, for example) get taxed when they make purchases, in part to make up for their use of the infrastructure.
Automatically scales with wealth...those who make lots of money will tend to buy more stuff than those who don't. All that extra stuff means they paid extra taxes. Those who don't make much money won't buy much so they aren't taxed as much.
Everyone will see their income increase since there will be less withheld pay.
This country operated just fine without an income tax once, I don't see why we can't try it again (that and I hate doing taxes each year).
Not quite true...SL-1 (the army's abortive attempt at developing a mobile reactor) killed 3 or 4 people when it become prompt-critical and exploded from a rapid increase in pressure due to the formation of steam in the coolant channels inside the pressure vessel. The power excursion was something on the order of 10,000 times the rated power. I saw another post on SL-1 somewhere in here, it had much more specific information.
Personally, I don't see how anyone can play FPS games on a console (wrt the controls). I've tried goldeneye (a couple years ago) and halo (more recently) and both of them just seemed to have very kludgy controls compared to the keyboard and mouse.
If you had players on computers play against players on consoles, who would win? I'd vote for the comp guys, but then again I'm pretty biased.
...of watching my friend playing winquake on kitty1.stanford.edu. He ran into a guy playing with an aimbot, so we decided to exact revenge.
We got his IP (really simple in that game!), and I cobbled together a little batch file to start 50 or so instances of ping (continuous, max byte size). We then "ping flooded" (both connections were dial-up, so it wasn't a big flood, but big enough) him and gave him a 5000 ping (while my friend, meanwhile had about a 20000-25000 ping). The guy caught on that something was up after a few minutes then got pissed, yelled at the obvious culprit and logged off. My one and only venture into the "land of the l33t h>x0r".
On a side note, that story impressed some friends and several weeks after it happened, once they finished setting up their LAN, they tried to see how hard it would be to slow down their network (100 mbps, really awesome back then) using that method. They did it eventually, but started running low on memory in the machine they were using (two many instances of ping!)
Make sure you keep enough juice flowing to have the little RAM bits remember whether they're ones or zeros....shouldn't draw too much power (since iirc, RAM states are kept through voltage, not current, so lots of voltage (relatively) with little current (absolute) means little power (P=VI). Unless things have changed dramatically since I took that class years and years ago.
I've also thought about that idea, and I think I had a good reason not to but I can't remember it anymore. Until I can remember this phantom thinger, I whole heartedly agree...some of the poorer candidates may complain that it puts the country in the hands of the rich, but it's better than what we have now.
Oh, somewhere in that barren land the water's running fast. The cells are growing somewhere, 'til something eats the last. And somewhere plans are thriving, with martians turning violent.
But there is no joy in JPL -- The Spirit has gone silent.
This could be pretty interesting, it should function as the first real step towards a manned mission to Mars, rather than just blowing hot air about the subject. We have to start somewhere.
The thing about games is if you make a game for bleeding edge hardware, few can play it. As it gets delayed, more and more people will have the hardware to play it well, until you reach a point where the game tech is too far behind to be worth releasing (Daikatana) at which point you either release it anyway or rewrite using a newer engine (Duke Nukem Forever).
Well sure...'absurd' I guess, disregarding one little detail: the shock and awe of Baghdad didn't really destroy the city, did it?
The shock and awe of today isn't flattening a large city. Shock and awe is merely that...bomb military targets with as much ferocity as you can while avoiding civilian casualties. The populace will see the effects of your bombs, and hopefully have no desire for any more to go off near them.
Shock and awe won't make everyone cower for terror, but it will make people pause for a second and think 'hey, why is this happening? Do I want this to happen? Can I do anything to prevent this from happening again and maybe killing me and my family?' What's so bad about that? Oh yeah! It first occured while neo-cons were in power so it must be an absolutely awful idea.
IMHO the first attempt was just a 'hey! let's do this quick and dirty' kinda thing. This time, with the moon being only a rest stop, there'll probably be much more testing and thought going into everything (assuming all of this gets off the ground....).
Depends on the halflife of the gasses...if you figure that the length of time it would take for gasses to reach a population...multiply that by 5 (5 halflives is considered the point at which something ceases to be radioactive (unless it decays into radioactive stuff)...add in a little extra time for safety and there you go...you have a floating gas cloud of nothing, OH NO!!!
In any case, even if we did send up a reactor and it did explode in the atmosphere, I'd be willing to bet my life (and yours) that the dispersal pattern of the radioactive parts would pretty much render the overall increase in radiation in a given area to a very slight amount. If you're worried about radiation zoomies hurting you, don't ever look at radiac. Radon and other natural sources would cause it to twitch pretty often (click....click....click...) and give you nightmares.
IAFSC (I am from SoCal), and honestly I don't really believe any predictions any more. I guess it was all that exposure to terrible warnings about how the San Andreas fault would slip in the 'next ten years' and cause a huge 9.0+ quake.
It's been a big issue for years (and years and years and decades) so most buildings have been retro-fitted to be able to survive large earthquakes. Your hypothetical high-rise would give you a nice roller-coaster ride...and that's about it. For the most part, I doubt any of these predictions would affect life too much (maybe some of the tourists would get skittish).
Well, professional in the sense that they get money for what they do. Amateur and professional don't necessarily indicate quality....professionals do the work for money or other gain, amateurs do the work for free because they like doing it.
This was in the article, they mentioned that the polio attempt took 3 years (for 7500 base pairs I believe) while phi X was created in only 2 weeks (containing 5000 base pairs).
Comparing apples to oranges. Mandating that one drives on one side of the road has nothing to do with the topic of mandating the use of one type of technology. If people could drive however they wanted, the roadways (and sidewalks!) would be a wholesale slaughter. How many people die because they use different types of cell phone tech? (ok, despite the cheapo exploding hand grenade type phones popping up which is more of a quality control issue).
Voltage one is good though, however is it a government mandated voltage? Or just industry standard (ie, de facto as opposed to de jure)?
I'm sorry, you must be confused. King George II lived in Germany and died on 25 Oct 1760 from a burst blood vessel. You should get current...I can understand being a few days behind the times, but 243 years?
Well, not *EVERYWHERE*. There's a little thing called the dead sea...6 times the salt content of the ocean. Nothing lives in it (except people who spend a relaxing day floating on the surface).
Both the airforce and the army tried building reactors (so far the marines are the only branch that haven't). The airforce one IIRC didn't get past the design phase for a few reasons: They couldn't provide enough shielding w/o excessive weight, and they couldn't ensure that if the plane were shot down there wouldn't be a massive amouunt of contamination. Be that as it may, those reactors were meant to fly huge bombers 24/7 arounnd the Soviet Union...they become moot with the advent of ICBMs.
Now the army reactor....it was a spectacular failure (ie, it failed spectacularly). One poor guy got pinned to the roof by a control rod! (They had been doing some repairs, and some genius decided to raise a control rod...startup rate went ballistic, water (I believe it was a water reactor) flashed to steam, and other very very bad things. When I was going through power school, it used to be the running joke as to why the army shouldn't run reactors. Anyway, their reactors were intended to power a forward deployed base. They'd just fly in the parts and flip the switch.
The reason these reactors are feasible for space i due to the fact that...it's space. There won't be any people around, so you only need to shield the instruments. Between that and the small size of the reactor (in terms of power), very little shielding is required.
FYI, a fission reactor was launched in '65 (http://spacescience.nasa.gov/missions/fissiontech safety.pdf)
--Jubedgy
Re:Soldiers aren't worth as much.
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 2, Informative
There's something called SGLI...Service Group Members Life Insurance. For ~$20/month, you get ~$250k coverage. That should pay for a nice little funeral (assuming you're announced KIA and not MIA).
It's not a million bucks, and you have to pay for it, but imho it's easily affordable and (more importantly) worth the expense.
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I wonder, why not just get rid of income tax altogether? To compensate, we'd have to raise the taxes on taxable goods and services, but it gives us a few benefits:
No more income tax returns to fill out in April!
Anyone using our infrastructure (roads to drive on, for example) get taxed when they make purchases, in part to make up for their use of the infrastructure.
Automatically scales with wealth...those who make lots of money will tend to buy more stuff than those who don't. All that extra stuff means they paid extra taxes. Those who don't make much money won't buy much so they aren't taxed as much.
Everyone will see their income increase since there will be less withheld pay.
This country operated just fine without an income tax once, I don't see why we can't try it again (that and I hate doing taxes each year).
Not quite true...SL-1 (the army's abortive attempt at developing a mobile reactor) killed 3 or 4 people when it become prompt-critical and exploded from a rapid increase in pressure due to the formation of steam in the coolant channels inside the pressure vessel. The power excursion was something on the order of 10,000 times the rated power. I saw another post on SL-1 somewhere in here, it had much more specific information.
Personally, I don't see how anyone can play FPS games on a console (wrt the controls). I've tried goldeneye (a couple years ago) and halo (more recently) and both of them just seemed to have very kludgy controls compared to the keyboard and mouse.
If you had players on computers play against players on consoles, who would win? I'd vote for the comp guys, but then again I'm pretty biased.
...of watching my friend playing winquake on kitty1.stanford.edu. He ran into a guy playing with an aimbot, so we decided to exact revenge.
We got his IP (really simple in that game!), and I cobbled together a little batch file to start 50 or so instances of ping (continuous, max byte size). We then "ping flooded" (both connections were dial-up, so it wasn't a big flood, but big enough) him and gave him a 5000 ping (while my friend, meanwhile had about a 20000-25000 ping). The guy caught on that something was up after a few minutes then got pissed, yelled at the obvious culprit and logged off. My one and only venture into the "land of the l33t h>x0r".
On a side note, that story impressed some friends and several weeks after it happened, once they finished setting up their LAN, they tried to see how hard it would be to slow down their network (100 mbps, really awesome back then) using that method. They did it eventually, but started running low on memory in the machine they were using (two many instances of ping!)
Make sure you keep enough juice flowing to have the little RAM bits remember whether they're ones or zeros....shouldn't draw too much power (since iirc, RAM states are kept through voltage, not current, so lots of voltage (relatively) with little current (absolute) means little power (P=VI). Unless things have changed dramatically since I took that class years and years ago.
I've also thought about that idea, and I think I had a good reason not to but I can't remember it anymore. Until I can remember this phantom thinger, I whole heartedly agree...some of the poorer candidates may complain that it puts the country in the hands of the rich, but it's better than what we have now.
Oh, somewhere in that barren land the water's running fast.
The cells are growing somewhere, 'til something eats the last.
And somewhere plans are thriving, with martians turning violent.
But there is no joy in JPL --
The Spirit has gone silent.
(for now).
So...is that a beowulf cluster of mice or what???
This could be pretty interesting, it should function as the first real step towards a manned mission to Mars, rather than just blowing hot air about the subject. We have to start somewhere.
The thing about games is if you make a game for bleeding edge hardware, few can play it. As it gets delayed, more and more people will have the hardware to play it well, until you reach a point where the game tech is too far behind to be worth releasing (Daikatana) at which point you either release it anyway or rewrite using a newer engine (Duke Nukem Forever).
Well sure...'absurd' I guess, disregarding one little detail: the shock and awe of Baghdad didn't really destroy the city, did it?
The shock and awe of today isn't flattening a large city. Shock and awe is merely that...bomb military targets with as much ferocity as you can while avoiding civilian casualties. The populace will see the effects of your bombs, and hopefully have no desire for any more to go off near them.
Shock and awe won't make everyone cower for terror, but it will make people pause for a second and think 'hey, why is this happening? Do I want this to happen? Can I do anything to prevent this from happening again and maybe killing me and my family?' What's so bad about that? Oh yeah! It first occured while neo-cons were in power so it must be an absolutely awful idea.
IMHO the first attempt was just a 'hey! let's do this quick and dirty' kinda thing. This time, with the moon being only a rest stop, there'll probably be much more testing and thought going into everything (assuming all of this gets off the ground....).
Depends on the halflife of the gasses...if you figure that the length of time it would take for gasses to reach a population...multiply that by 5 (5 halflives is considered the point at which something ceases to be radioactive (unless it decays into radioactive stuff)...add in a little extra time for safety and there you go...you have a floating gas cloud of nothing, OH NO!!!
In any case, even if we did send up a reactor and it did explode in the atmosphere, I'd be willing to bet my life (and yours) that the dispersal pattern of the radioactive parts would pretty much render the overall increase in radiation in a given area to a very slight amount. If you're worried about radiation zoomies hurting you, don't ever look at radiac. Radon and other natural sources would cause it to twitch pretty often (click....click....click...) and give you nightmares.
IAFSC (I am from SoCal), and honestly I don't really believe any predictions any more. I guess it was all that exposure to terrible warnings about how the San Andreas fault would slip in the 'next ten years' and cause a huge 9.0+ quake.
It's been a big issue for years (and years and years and decades) so most buildings have been retro-fitted to be able to survive large earthquakes. Your hypothetical high-rise would give you a nice roller-coaster ride...and that's about it. For the most part, I doubt any of these predictions would affect life too much (maybe some of the tourists would get skittish).
Well, professional in the sense that they get money for what they do. Amateur and professional don't necessarily indicate quality....professionals do the work for money or other gain, amateurs do the work for free because they like doing it.
This was in the article, they mentioned that the polio attempt took 3 years (for 7500 base pairs I believe) while phi X was created in only 2 weeks (containing 5000 base pairs).
Comparing apples to oranges. Mandating that one drives on one side of the road has nothing to do with the topic of mandating the use of one type of technology. If people could drive however they wanted, the roadways (and sidewalks!) would be a wholesale slaughter. How many people die because they use different types of cell phone tech? (ok, despite the cheapo exploding hand grenade type phones popping up which is more of a quality control issue).
Voltage one is good though, however is it a government mandated voltage? Or just industry standard (ie, de facto as opposed to de jure)?
Oops, haha...so THAT'S why navy has me on reactors and not lasers!! my bad.
Yeah, for a laser POINTER maybe, but we're talking 100KW of energy that needs to be deflected. All of those tiny photons have some mass, remember.
--Reid
I'm sorry, you must be confused. King George II lived in Germany and died on 25 Oct 1760 from a burst blood vessel. You should get current...I can understand being a few days behind the times, but 243 years?
--Jubedgy
Well, not *EVERYWHERE*. There's a little thing called the dead sea...6 times the salt content of the ocean. Nothing lives in it (except people who spend a relaxing day floating on the surface).
http://www.extremescience.com/DeadSea.htm
--Jubedgy
RTG has been around much, much longer than Cassini.
http://spacescience.nasa.gov/missions/MMRTG.pdf
Whoa there...it's only a design study, they're not gonna build the thing!
--Jubedgy
Both the airforce and the army tried building reactors (so far the marines are the only branch that haven't). The airforce one IIRC didn't get past the design phase for a few reasons: They couldn't provide enough shielding w/o excessive weight, and they couldn't ensure that if the plane were shot down there wouldn't be a massive amouunt of contamination. Be that as it may, those reactors were meant to fly huge bombers 24/7 arounnd the Soviet Union...they become moot with the advent of ICBMs.
Now the army reactor....it was a spectacular failure (ie, it failed spectacularly). One poor guy got pinned to the roof by a control rod! (They had been doing some repairs, and some genius decided to raise a control rod...startup rate went ballistic, water (I believe it was a water reactor) flashed to steam, and other very very bad things. When I was going through power school, it used to be the running joke as to why the army shouldn't run reactors. Anyway, their reactors were intended to power a forward deployed base. They'd just fly in the parts and flip the switch.
SL-1 (army) link: http://www.radiationworks.com/sl1reactor.htm
The reason these reactors are feasible for space i due to the fact that...it's space. There won't be any people around, so you only need to shield the instruments. Between that and the small size of the reactor (in terms of power), very little shielding is required.
--Jubedgy
FYI, a fission reactor was launched in '65 (http://spacescience.nasa.gov/missions/fissiontech safety.pdf)
--Jubedgy
There's something called SGLI...Service Group Members Life Insurance. For ~$20/month, you get ~$250k coverage. That should pay for a nice little funeral (assuming you're announced KIA and not MIA).
It's not a million bucks, and you have to pay for it, but imho it's easily affordable and (more importantly) worth the expense.