Or the worst of all worlds for them, the judge could dismiss their claims with prejudice while letting the counterclaim stand. In that situation wouldn't the details of the dismissal be permitted to be introduced in the second suit?
In any case I would not want to be that lawyer. His employer would be on the hook in the counterclaim, but he must be facing sanctions, even disbarrment, individually.
IIRC, "microgravity" is due to tidal forces and it falls off as 1/R^3.
In something closer to English, imagine you're floating in the center of a falling elevator. The floor is slightly closer to the earth and therefore has a slightly higher gravitational attraction than you. The ceiling is slightly further from the earth and has a slightly lower gravitation attraction than you.
From your perspective as you fall, there's a slightly gravitational attraction to both floor and ceiling, with the effect becoming more pronounced as you approach either.
It's more complicated when you're moving and have to use orbital mechanics, but you get the same qualitative results.
IIRC, the tidal forces in earth orbit may a few thousandths of a 'g'. That's easily overwhelmed by air circulation, etc., so the astronauts probably don't even notice it. It can be enough to affect sensitive experiments.
Not to be dense, but does any manufacturer in the US still use english measurements? (Not consumer-facing products or places where legacy items are measured in english units.)
I believe car manufacturers switched to metric components years ago.
I'm sure aircraft manufacturers are also metric.
Consumer electronics? Considering that the last domestic manufacturer closed years ago I think it's a safe bet that it's entirely metric now.
Who are your professors? You're worried about graduating, they're worried about getting (or keeping) tenured positions. Who will be around to teach your final classes?
This shouldn't be your primary consideration, but it needs to be on the table.
Yes, but there are also some serious blogs that cover material that the MSM won't. Several obvious examples on the democratic side are Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo. These are sites that have covered real stories in depth long before the MSM picked them up... often then quoting them liberally without attribution.
How can you say that about journalists? PROFESSIONAL journalists, as they will quickly insist?
Obviously the bloggers have stolen the stories from the mainstream media, then traveled back in time so they could post the stories "first" and thus embarrass the MSM.
(Seriously, I'm sure that it's happening. But I wouldn't put some bloggers past copying material from other sources and then backdating it in an effort to make themselves look "connected".)
I've written a lot of comments, and most of it was useless. It helps when you're looking at the code itself, but you missed the larger context unless every comment was mindnumbingly detailed. That type of comment is a pain to write and essentially unmaintainable.
Javadoc (and similar well-supported systems) is godsend. You still want to have some comments within your code, but the real power is in the generated documents that give you the larger picture. It's not complete -- you still want to know the overall architecture and design -- but many days I would rather have empty Javadoc (with nothing but links to the classes used as parameters and results) than well-written but isolated comments within the code, especially if reasonably sane class and method names are used.
XDoclet takes this one step further. The comments don't just produce useful documentation, they produce useful configuration files and even related source code.
I believe the issue isn't using the library as daycare for very young children while the parents browse the stacks, it's the older children and young teens that are quite capable of using the computers but not yet ready for unrestricted access.
A concrete example of what I mean by "unrestricted access" would be the results of a search on "Iraq war pictures." Kids should get generic shots of tanks and soldiers, but not be confronted with children their own age who have been severely burned or had limbs blown off. Adults need to see that so they know the true cost of war.
Some people also bring up the idea that some perverts are looking at porn in the stacks and children could come across it, but as you pointed out younger children should be accompanied by an adult anyway.
You think it's a joke, but it's not. We need to balance interests and right now the only seat at the table is for the people who claim to speak for the children.
A lot of the time it comes down to a simple framing of the question. E.g., do we have unrestricted access in most of a public library, with a separate "kid-safe" space with restricted access? Or do we have restricted access in most of the library with unrestricted access (and books with a more adult content) in a separate "adult" area that's monitored by the librarians?
On the net, do we try to create a kid-safe internet with a new.xxx ghetto, or do we recognize that the internet already exists and create a new.kids domain?
I think the answers are clear... but in practice it's almost always the adult that is marginalized.
I had to read that several times to understand the point -- since I read it exactly backwards from the author's intent.
IP is strangling sovereignty. Not the government's sovereignty (which reserves for itself the right to ignore those "IP rights"), but an individual's sovereignty to control their own work.
Today, how many people have lost their personal or business records because the data format is no longer supported? How many times has this been because the business that produced the software has gone out of business? Under the wonders of the DMCA, it's illegal for anyone to even attempt to recover the content since (AFAIK) the prohibitions never end even if the company providing access goes away.
In a few years, if a few dying industries have their way, it will be illegal for you to record your own child's 3rd birthday party. Oh, you can probably record it on some ancient equipment but all of the modern gear will scream out PIRATE! PIRATE! if you dare to attempt to copy it from the camcorder to some DVD discs to mail to relatives. Or if you and your classmates produce their own amateur movie for fun or to showcase your skills.
Not everyone takes this to the libertarian extreme, but the whole reason behind open standards is to fight the real, not just theoretical, loss of our own work without recourse. If somebody wants to make their own work dependent on another company's continued good will, that's their choice. But I've kept much of my own work in simple text files precisely because I want to be able to revisit them in twenty years.
In 1918, the young and healthy were dead by night
on
A Flu Pandemic?
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· Score: 5, Informative
Short subject line -- in the 1918 pandemic the young and healthy were often fine in the morning and dead by nightfall. Even in the more common situation where it took a few days to kill, it struck the young and healthy disproportionately harder.
The problem? An immune system has to be _reactive_. Your immune system has to develop sensitivity to the new virus and that takes some time. The usual flu strain isn't a problem since it's very similar to the strains we've already seen (in infection or innoculation) and our immune system can quickly respond. There's also a lot of natural selection going on over time -- a virus would rather see us miserable and contagious for a week than dead and non-contagious within a day.
But we have no natural immunity to an entirely new strain, and some can kill before our immune system can develop an effective response.
That's why older people faired better in 1918. They hadn't seen the same strain, but they had seen enough variety that they had a stronger initial response than their younger peers.
Okay, it's not "as large as Texas" but really, why go with such an unrealistic example? Assume something comparable to what has hit the earth in the past. Call it an asteroid 8km across, maybe 100-400 billion tons depending upon composition. That's still a lot of mass but you only need a modest amount of deflection.
Excuse me, smokers can force smokers to "escape"?
on
Safe Cigarettes?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
right to smoke wherever non-smoking people could ESCAPE the fumes if they wanted to...
You can't just slip that in - that's THE crux of the smoking bans. Somebody is going to be inconvienced, either smokers (forced to go outside or special smoking rooms) or non-smokers (forced to "escape" the fumes as you so quaintly phrased it).
These situations are not symmetrical. Smokers can still enjoy non-smoking venues. Smokers often report preferring non-smoking venues for several reasons - their non-smoking friends are more likely to join them, they can taste their own food better, they aren't tempted to light up themselves as smoke from an adjacent patron waffs by. Smokers who are quiting can't even go into smoking venues because of the last item. At worst they're inconvenienced for minutes every few hours.
Non-smokers, in contrast, don't have any choices. "Non-smoking areas" are a joke. If the smoke bothers us (and I've had to walk away from non-refundable admissions because the smoke caused my eyes to water within minutes) it's going to bother us the entire time we're there, not for a few minutes every few hours.
There's also the issue of fairness to the employees. It's easy for us to say that employees can always change jobs if they don't like dealing with smoke throughout the day, but back in the real world we know that people at this economic rung are often stuck in their job since they live from check to check and can't afford even a modest reduction in hours as the new guy.
Those are reasons for businesses to go smoke-free, is it a valid reason to make it mandatory? That's a non-trivial question -- if you think it's obviously not appropriate for the government to get involved ask yourself how you would feel if most restaurants were "white only" because the owners felt they would lose sales (from white patrons avoiding them) if they allowed non-whites to eat there. It's not an exact parallel but it demolishes the "owner uber alles" mindset.
Don't forget that much of that money was funneled back into research. Much of it was basic research that had no immediately obvious benefit but which often laid the groundwork for staggering improvements.
Can you say the transistor?
Can you say Unix?
On the scientific side, can you say "microwave background radiation"?
Plus countless other things that have slipped my mind at the moment.
One guess how much money is funneled into applied research today, much less basic research.
One of the basic tenets of security is that you don't let ANY information leak. Knowing how many machines were sold is an unavoidable leak, but knowing how many were "excess capacity" combined with that number tells you how much computing power the NSA actually uses. Double seriously uncool. If the security manager is doing his job there's going to be a random, but substantial, number of excess machines but nobody outside of the agency will know how many.
Some classic examples of this in practice? One facility had color-coded badges that identified the area where an employee worked. This makes it easy to identify somebody out of place (unless they can get a fake badge, of course). Only problem was that the exit checkpoint was close to the public exit and most of the workers walked outside with their badges on. An agent could determine staffing levels by simply counting the badges on a public street. Associating the badges with projects is relatively easy down at the neighborhood bar. (You can't expect people to avoid talking about work at the "oh, so you're a machinist too?" level.) The solution was to move the exit checkpoint out of public sight and require workers to remove their badges.
Another classic example is secure communications lines. One of the most basic forms of traffic analysis is monitoring how much traffic (or "chatter") is occuring. If traffic jumps 200%, pay attention. The solution is to fill the gaps with encrypted noise, although that's sometimes impractical.
A variant of that is the notorious "Domino's Pizza" effect. How do you know something is up at the White House? The local Domino's is delivering more pizzas. There's enough transparency that this probably doesn't provide a much information that you couldn't get elsewhere, but it's an interesting footnote.
You don't just have to worry about something being classified incorrectly, you have to worry about bad players who deliberately make "mistakes" when declassifying hardware. That's not acceptable so you need to second- and triple-check everything, and that drives the cost way up since everyone must have the appropriate clearances, all of the paperwork is classified, etc.
The shuttle was sold as the primary launch vehicle for satellites, not just large ones. One mission could launch one large satellite, or several smaller satellites, or a smaller satellite with its own hefty booster. (Think interplanetary missions.)
All supposedly cheaper than using a disposable launcher.
This only works with incredibly unrealistic numbers. Weekly shuttle flights, quick and cheap turnaround that was completed within a few weeks. Costs so low that industry could rent shuttle time for industrial research, etc. Funny how it didn't work out that way. I think the Centaur (heavy duty boosters) were dropped long before Challenger, from safety concerns, and all satellite launches were dropped after Challenger.
Second, the shuttle was sold as a way to bring satellites safely back to earth. The theory was that it was cheaper to haul something back to earth, fix it, then launch it again than fix it in space or simply replace it entirely.
One small problem - it's only safe to bring a satellite back down to earth if it's dead (no more manuveuring propellant), but it's not considered safe to approach dead satellites. Catch-22.
I think a few satellites have been retrieved, e.g., some long-exposure research satellites used to identify suitable materials for future satellites, but only a handful.
Why don't we do this? Because much of our current leadership puts their own financial interests above our national interests. There's a lot of things that only make sense when you follow the money.
Did you know that Condi Rice, current Sec. of State, has an oil tanker named after her?
As for a massive effort... totally unnecessary. There's a well-proven technology for turning coal into refined petroleum products. Several countries have used this process when they had coal reserves but no gas reserves or imported oil due to trade embargos.
It's even cleaner than refining crude oil today.
The "downside" -- it's only cost-effective when the price of crude is over $35/barrel and a large-scale conversion facility will cost $1.5b. There's also the issue of building new pipelines into Montana and Wyoming. But that cost is really not that high for oil companies and only fools think crude prices will ever drop back to the ~20/barrel that fueled our economy for the last decade. Crude oil futures have been hanging around $50/barrel for years out.
Any rational person would look at these facts, the fragility of our coastal refineries, the rapid increase of demand by China and India (which will drive prices up - we may see $100/barrel within a few years) and the chaos that would follow the collapse of the Saudi regime. It's a no-brainer... yet only the Democratic governor of Montana is calling for it to be a national priority.
While individuals can make stupid mistakes, the real problem is in the system and managers are ultimately responsible.
As a simple example, take a web application. The web people believe (reasonably or not) that the form fields will be cleaned up by the backend people. How do they know what's dangerous anyway? The backend people believe (reasonably or not) that the data will be cleaned up by the web people. How do they know the various encoding schemes used, etc.
Then some **** adds a cross-scripting exploit and compromises sensitive information.
Who's responsible, the developers or the managers? Even if the developers are paranoid, what about the errors introduced as everyone tries to handle conditions outside of their sphere of knowledge? What about the new security flaws introduced by that?
I'm serious. Having a local print and file server is fine. I ran a mail and web server at home for several years.
But I eventually said screw it - I was always a little uncomfortable leaving that equipment on 24/7 when I was nowhere around. It's one thing to take off for the day, but are you really comfortable leaving it on during a two-week trip?
When you leave consumer grade equipment running 24/7 for years you will encounter problems. I've had several disks fail, once trying to tear itself apart. Fortunately I never had a PS fire.
Then there's the separate issue of connectivity. Sometimes the cable modem would disconnect for no reason whatsoever. It's not hard to cycle, but you have to be there to cycle it.
Bottom line - I would look at virtual hosting at an ISP. I have a $25/month virtual system at <URL:http://tummy.com/>. It looks like my own dedicated system and I can run whatever servers I want - I have complete control. But I don't have to worry about the hardware or connectivity.
I haven't been keeping up with the research but aren't there also modes where you have a shorter detached cable that's rotating? Think of an "I" with a hefty mass in the center. It rotates and, gosh, the velocity at the tip is close to zero as it brushes the surface. Think of a car's tires.
In this case you could climb the cable to the middle and be dropped in orbit, or hang on for half a rotation and be thrown completely out of the gravity well.
25 years ago (gah!) I really freaked out my boss because I made a big production of turning my back to him as he typed the root password. I turned back and told him what he just typed.
It wasn't anything fancy, just familiarity with the sound that keyboard made and the usual pauses as fingers move to various keys.
I also used to be able to tell you what number was dialed from the touchtones.
P.S. a college friend said that he would occasionally talk to others in morse code after a long duty shift when he was in the military. Forget the nonsense in the introductory material - anyone who really knows morse code and knows it fast hears it as words. It's not hard to take the final step and speak it like you hear it.
Slashdot Mirror
Or the worst of all worlds for them, the judge could dismiss their claims with prejudice while letting the counterclaim stand. In that situation wouldn't the details of the dismissal be permitted to be introduced in the second suit?
In any case I would not want to be that lawyer. His employer would be on the hook in the counterclaim, but he must be facing sanctions, even disbarrment, individually.
IIRC, "microgravity" is due to tidal forces and it falls off as 1/R^3.
In something closer to English, imagine you're floating in the center of a falling elevator. The floor is slightly closer to the earth and therefore has a slightly higher gravitational attraction than you. The ceiling is slightly further from the earth and has a slightly lower gravitation attraction than you.
From your perspective as you fall, there's a slightly gravitational attraction to both floor and ceiling, with the effect becoming more pronounced as you approach either.
It's more complicated when you're moving and have to use orbital mechanics, but you get the same qualitative results.
IIRC, the tidal forces in earth orbit may a few thousandths of a 'g'. That's easily overwhelmed by air circulation, etc., so the astronauts probably don't even notice it. It can be enough to affect sensitive experiments.
Not to be dense, but does any manufacturer in the US still use english measurements? (Not consumer-facing products or places where legacy items are measured in english units.)
I believe car manufacturers switched to metric components years ago.
I'm sure aircraft manufacturers are also metric.
Consumer electronics? Considering that the last domestic manufacturer closed years ago I think it's a safe bet that it's entirely metric now.
Other industries?
Last Tango in Paris was originally 'X', certainly due to the depiction of anal sex.
Midnight Cowboy, as mentioned above, was also originally 'X'. Certainly due to the depiction of homosexual acts.
Today I think both have been re-released as 'R'. Possibly without any changes.
Who are your professors? You're worried about graduating, they're worried about getting (or keeping) tenured positions. Who will be around to teach your final classes?
This shouldn't be your primary consideration, but it needs to be on the table.
Yes, but there are also some serious blogs that cover material that the MSM won't. Several obvious examples on the democratic side are Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo. These are sites that have covered real stories in depth long before the MSM picked them up... often then quoting them liberally without attribution.
How can you say that about journalists? PROFESSIONAL journalists, as they will quickly insist?
Obviously the bloggers have stolen the stories from the mainstream media, then traveled back in time so they could post the stories "first" and thus embarrass the MSM.
(Seriously, I'm sure that it's happening. But I wouldn't put some bloggers past copying material from other sources and then backdating it in an effort to make themselves look "connected".)
I've written a lot of comments, and most of it was useless. It helps when you're looking at the code itself, but you missed the larger context unless every comment was mindnumbingly detailed. That type of comment is a pain to write and essentially unmaintainable.
Javadoc (and similar well-supported systems) is godsend. You still want to have some comments within your code, but the real power is in the generated documents that give you the larger picture. It's not complete -- you still want to know the overall architecture and design -- but many days I would rather have empty Javadoc (with nothing but links to the classes used as parameters and results) than well-written but isolated comments within the code, especially if reasonably sane class and method names are used.
XDoclet takes this one step further. The comments don't just produce useful documentation, they produce useful configuration files and even related source code.
I believe the issue isn't using the library as daycare for very young children while the parents browse the stacks, it's the older children and young teens that are quite capable of using the computers but not yet ready for unrestricted access.
A concrete example of what I mean by "unrestricted access" would be the results of a search on "Iraq war pictures." Kids should get generic shots of tanks and soldiers, but not be confronted with children their own age who have been severely burned or had limbs blown off. Adults need to see that so they know the true cost of war.
Some people also bring up the idea that some perverts are looking at porn in the stacks and children could come across it, but as you pointed out younger children should be accompanied by an adult anyway.
You think it's a joke, but it's not. We need to balance interests and right now the only seat at the table is for the people who claim to speak for the children.
.xxx ghetto, or do we recognize that the internet already exists and create a new .kids domain?
A lot of the time it comes down to a simple framing of the question. E.g., do we have unrestricted access in most of a public library, with a separate "kid-safe" space with restricted access? Or do we have restricted access in most of the library with unrestricted access (and books with a more adult content) in a separate "adult" area that's monitored by the librarians?
On the net, do we try to create a kid-safe internet with a new
I think the answers are clear... but in practice it's almost always the adult that is marginalized.
I had to read that several times to understand the point -- since I read it exactly backwards from the author's intent.
IP is strangling sovereignty. Not the government's sovereignty (which reserves for itself the right to ignore those "IP rights"), but an individual's sovereignty to control their own work.
Today, how many people have lost their personal or business records because the data format is no longer supported? How many times has this been because the business that produced the software has gone out of business? Under the wonders of the DMCA, it's illegal for anyone to even attempt to recover the content since (AFAIK) the prohibitions never end even if the company providing access goes away.
In a few years, if a few dying industries have their way, it will be illegal for you to record your own child's 3rd birthday party. Oh, you can probably record it on some ancient equipment but all of the modern gear will scream out PIRATE! PIRATE! if you dare to attempt to copy it from the camcorder to some DVD discs to mail to relatives. Or if you and your classmates produce their own amateur movie for fun or to showcase your skills.
Not everyone takes this to the libertarian extreme, but the whole reason behind open standards is to fight the real, not just theoretical, loss of our own work without recourse. If somebody wants to make their own work dependent on another company's continued good will, that's their choice. But I've kept much of my own work in simple text files precisely because I want to be able to revisit them in twenty years.
Short subject line -- in the 1918 pandemic the young and healthy were often fine in the morning and dead by nightfall. Even in the more common situation where it took a few days to kill, it struck the young and healthy disproportionately harder.
The problem? An immune system has to be _reactive_. Your immune system has to develop sensitivity to the new virus and that takes some time. The usual flu strain isn't a problem since it's very similar to the strains we've already seen (in infection or innoculation) and our immune system can quickly respond. There's also a lot of natural selection going on over time -- a virus would rather see us miserable and contagious for a week than dead and non-contagious within a day.
But we have no natural immunity to an entirely new strain, and some can kill before our immune system can develop an effective response.
That's why older people faired better in 1918. They hadn't seen the same strain, but they had seen enough variety that they had a stronger initial response than their younger peers.
Okay, it's not "as large as Texas" but really, why go with such an unrealistic example? Assume something comparable to what has hit the earth in the past. Call it an asteroid 8km across, maybe 100-400 billion tons depending upon composition. That's still a lot of mass but you only need a modest amount of deflection.
right to smoke wherever non-smoking people could ESCAPE the fumes if they wanted to...
You can't just slip that in - that's THE crux of the smoking bans. Somebody is going to be inconvienced, either smokers (forced to go outside or special smoking rooms) or non-smokers (forced to "escape" the fumes as you so quaintly phrased it).
These situations are not symmetrical. Smokers can still enjoy non-smoking venues. Smokers often report preferring non-smoking venues for several reasons - their non-smoking friends are more likely to join them, they can taste their own food better, they aren't tempted to light up themselves as smoke from an adjacent patron waffs by. Smokers who are quiting can't even go into smoking venues because of the last item. At worst they're inconvenienced for minutes every few hours.
Non-smokers, in contrast, don't have any choices. "Non-smoking areas" are a joke. If the smoke bothers us (and I've had to walk away from non-refundable admissions because the smoke caused my eyes to water within minutes) it's going to bother us the entire time we're there, not for a few minutes every few hours.
There's also the issue of fairness to the employees. It's easy for us to say that employees can always change jobs if they don't like dealing with smoke throughout the day, but back in the real world we know that people at this economic rung are often stuck in their job since they live from check to check and can't afford even a modest reduction in hours as the new guy.
Those are reasons for businesses to go smoke-free, is it a valid reason to make it mandatory? That's a non-trivial question -- if you think it's obviously not appropriate for the government to get involved ask yourself how you would feel if most restaurants were "white only" because the owners felt they would lose sales (from white patrons avoiding them) if they allowed non-whites to eat there. It's not an exact parallel but it demolishes the "owner uber alles" mindset.
Don't forget that much of that money was funneled back into research. Much of it was basic research that had no immediately obvious benefit but which often laid the groundwork for staggering improvements.
Can you say the transistor?
Can you say Unix?
On the scientific side, can you say "microwave background radiation"?
Plus countless other things that have slipped my mind at the moment.
One guess how much money is funneled into applied research today, much less basic research.
One of the basic tenets of security is that you don't let ANY information leak. Knowing how many machines were sold is an unavoidable leak, but knowing how many were "excess capacity" combined with that number tells you how much computing power the NSA actually uses. Double seriously uncool. If the security manager is doing his job there's going to be a random, but substantial, number of excess machines but nobody outside of the agency will know how many.
Some classic examples of this in practice? One facility had color-coded badges that identified the area where an employee worked. This makes it easy to identify somebody out of place (unless they can get a fake badge, of course). Only problem was that the exit checkpoint was close to the public exit and most of the workers walked outside with their badges on. An agent could determine staffing levels by simply counting the badges on a public street. Associating the badges with projects is relatively easy down at the neighborhood bar. (You can't expect people to avoid talking about work at the "oh, so you're a machinist too?" level.) The solution was to move the exit checkpoint out of public sight and require workers to remove their badges.
Another classic example is secure communications lines. One of the most basic forms of traffic analysis is monitoring how much traffic (or "chatter") is occuring. If traffic jumps 200%, pay attention. The solution is to fill the gaps with encrypted noise, although that's sometimes impractical.
A variant of that is the notorious "Domino's Pizza" effect. How do you know something is up at the White House? The local Domino's is delivering more pizzas. There's enough transparency that this probably doesn't provide a much information that you couldn't get elsewhere, but it's an interesting footnote.
You don't just have to worry about something being classified incorrectly, you have to worry about bad players who deliberately make "mistakes" when declassifying hardware. That's not acceptable so you need to second- and triple-check everything, and that drives the cost way up since everyone must have the appropriate clearances, all of the paperwork is classified, etc.
Some other points --
The shuttle was sold as the primary launch vehicle for satellites, not just large ones. One mission could launch one large satellite, or several smaller satellites, or a smaller satellite with its own hefty booster. (Think interplanetary missions.)
All supposedly cheaper than using a disposable launcher.
This only works with incredibly unrealistic numbers. Weekly shuttle flights, quick and cheap turnaround that was completed within a few weeks. Costs so low that industry could rent shuttle time for industrial research, etc. Funny how it didn't work out that way. I think the Centaur (heavy duty boosters) were dropped long before Challenger, from safety concerns, and all satellite launches were dropped after Challenger.
Second, the shuttle was sold as a way to bring satellites safely back to earth. The theory was that it was cheaper to haul something back to earth, fix it, then launch it again than fix it in space or simply replace it entirely.
One small problem - it's only safe to bring a satellite back down to earth if it's dead (no more manuveuring propellant), but it's not considered safe to approach dead satellites. Catch-22.
I think a few satellites have been retrieved, e.g., some long-exposure research satellites used to identify suitable materials for future satellites, but only a handful.
Why don't we do this? Because much of our current leadership puts their own financial interests above our national interests. There's a lot of things that only make sense when you follow the money.
Did you know that Condi Rice, current Sec. of State, has an oil tanker named after her?
As for a massive effort... totally unnecessary. There's a well-proven technology for turning coal into refined petroleum products. Several countries have used this process when they had coal reserves but no gas reserves or imported oil due to trade embargos.
It's even cleaner than refining crude oil today.
The "downside" -- it's only cost-effective when the price of crude is over $35/barrel and a large-scale conversion facility will cost $1.5b. There's also the issue of building new pipelines into Montana and Wyoming. But that cost is really not that high for oil companies and only fools think crude prices will ever drop back to the ~20/barrel that fueled our economy for the last decade. Crude oil futures have been hanging around $50/barrel for years out.
Any rational person would look at these facts, the fragility of our coastal refineries, the rapid increase of demand by China and India (which will drive prices up - we may see $100/barrel within a few years) and the chaos that would follow the collapse of the Saudi regime. It's a no-brainer... yet only the Democratic governor of Montana is calling for it to be a national priority.
Also Hitler.
You beat me to it.
For reference "UC" is California (UCLA for the LA campus, UCSD for the San Diego campus, you get the idea.)
"UConn" is the University of Connecticut.
"CU" is the University of Colorado, "DU" is the University of Denver.
This sounds pendantic but searches for "UC" will bring up the wrong universities.
While individuals can make stupid mistakes, the real problem is in the system and managers are ultimately responsible.
As a simple example, take a web application. The web people believe (reasonably or not) that the form fields will be cleaned up by the backend people. How do they know what's dangerous anyway? The backend people believe (reasonably or not) that the data will be cleaned up by the web people. How do they know the various encoding schemes used, etc.
Then some **** adds a cross-scripting exploit and compromises sensitive information.
Who's responsible, the developers or the managers? Even if the developers are paranoid, what about the errors introduced as everyone tries to handle conditions outside of their sphere of knowledge? What about the new security flaws introduced by that?
Why run your web server at home?
I'm serious. Having a local print and file server is fine. I ran a mail and web server at home for several years.
But I eventually said screw it - I was always a little uncomfortable leaving that equipment on 24/7 when I was nowhere around. It's one thing to take off for the day, but are you really comfortable leaving it on during a two-week trip?
When you leave consumer grade equipment running 24/7 for years you will encounter problems. I've had several disks fail, once trying to tear itself apart. Fortunately I never had a PS fire.
Then there's the separate issue of connectivity. Sometimes the cable modem would disconnect for no reason whatsoever. It's not hard to cycle, but you have to be there to cycle it.
Bottom line - I would look at virtual hosting at an ISP. I have a $25/month virtual system at <URL:http://tummy.com/>. It looks like my own dedicated system and I can run whatever servers I want - I have complete control. But I don't have to worry about the hardware or connectivity.
I haven't been keeping up with the research but aren't there also modes where you have a shorter detached cable that's rotating? Think of an "I" with a hefty mass in the center. It rotates and, gosh, the velocity at the tip is close to zero as it brushes the surface. Think of a car's tires.
In this case you could climb the cable to the middle and be dropped in orbit, or hang on for half a rotation and be thrown completely out of the gravity well.
25 years ago (gah!) I really freaked out my boss because I made a big production of turning my back to him as he typed the root password. I turned back and told him what he just typed.
It wasn't anything fancy, just familiarity with the sound that keyboard made and the usual pauses as fingers move to various keys.
I also used to be able to tell you what number was dialed from the touchtones.
P.S. a college friend said that he would occasionally talk to others in morse code after a long duty shift when he was in the military. Forget the nonsense in the introductory material - anyone who really knows morse code and knows it fast hears it as words. It's not hard to take the final step and speak it like you hear it.