A rapier with a blooding groove could kill in one stroke. Although the English long bow was most of the reason suits of armor went away the rapier and foil also played a roll. Every suit of armor had weak points at the joints that a man in light leathers with a foil or rapier could exploit quite easily. In fact after the armored opponent made their first swing you would just need to step in and stick the foil into the gap under the arm or at the waist or the neck. The thin sharp point could penetrate the rib cage and even if it missed the heart or other vital organs you would be guaranteed enough internal bleeding to bring them down in a few minutes of exertion without even striking another blow.
A quick hand with a foil or rapier is far more deadly than a big bastard sword or other massive weapon because it will never land a blow.
My guess is the lawsuit actually brought to Cisco's attention that they had been hacked because he had access to information that was only available through Cisco. It's likely that his lawsuit is how the crime was discovered so I find no reason to be sympathetic to him. If you are going to break the law then sue someone using the information you obtained breaking the law you shouldn't be surprised if you are arrested for it.
Tensile strength of the material isn't what destroys homes in wind storms. It's the horizontal force applied by the wind which shears the structural material from it's fasteners (in this case the plywood shears the nails). For roofs there are two failure modes, either the roof decking has enough uplift to pull the roofing nails or the entire roof truss is sheared off the wall connections.
Having a material with ten times the tensile strength of steel isn't going to stop wind from tearing walls and roofs off unless it's used to make the nails.
There is more to a material than it's tensile strength. Failure modes, amount of plasticity before failure, compressive strength and many other factors are important.
For example, one of the reasons high strength concrete isn't used very often is that it's failure mode is instantaneous (rather dramatic too) rather than crumbly. As a result there is no warning when it fails whereas regular concrete begins to crumble and drop debris, a very visible and noticeable sign of failure allowing time to evacuate.
So when someone says X material is ten time stronger than steel the next question should be is what one way is better and in what other ways is it worse. Just as an example, steel has tremendous tensile and compressive strength. If this has no compressive strength it's uses are highly restricted
And every time this stupid discussion comes people spend all the time talking about why we should switch and not why we shouldn't.. The Imperial units used in the US are a barrier to entry to the US market by foreign manufacturers and producers. A single example: When we build bridges and buildings in the US the steel and measurements are produced in US Imperial units, even the steel shapes are specific to the US market because the measurements are in imperial. Producers of steel beams and components in foreign countries have steel mills that are calibrated to metric sizing and are unable to produce US steel shapes without a major retrofit to the mill. Although there are similar shapes and sizes they are different enough that it's not possible to us metric sizes. This keeps US steel manufacturing jobs in the US and is the primary reason Congress rolled back the metric initiative 3 years after it became mandatory.
People complain about US job losses, but you want to see the destruction and undercutting of thousands of US jobs by foreign producers then convert the US economy to metric. Imperial units keep countries like China from taking a 10 year plan of losses to destroy all US steel producers so they can take over the market and charge more later.
There is simply no reasonable reason to demand a mandatory switch. Products that are sold internationally are already in metric, most products are dual labeled. Everyone is free to sell products in whatever unit of measure they want. Frankly the government declaring the metric system the only valid form of measurement is well beyond the scope of federal authority. We should allow the market to decide, if you like metric measurements then simply refuse to buy products sold in Imperial units.
You think this is new? All the seizure laws were re-written during the war on drugs to allow blatant constitutional violations. We sold our rights away to incarcerate non violent users of consumable products, most plant based. This isn't new, and it's not going away, it took government 30 years to whittle away private property protections and they aren't going back.
Well according to his own words from the article he's pretty much at the point where money isn't even a concern because he has so much now. I remember reading something to the effect of Valve being able to run without profit for like 20 years. The best quote form the linked article is that Valve is more profitable per employee than even Google or MS.
Ever wonder why there is a 10-15F temperature shift in large older office buildings from one side of the building to the other? (particularly cubicle farms) It's because the HVAC system is improperly distributing and convectional airflow is restricted by the the layout. In a standard residential home the return plenum if it exists is restricted to the main rooms and hallways. Heat flow and return airflow occurs through the uninsulated interior walls/doors that leak like sieves.
Your suggestion of insulating the walls to keep certain rooms off the HVAC chain could work but it would require fully sealing the rooms, but the bigger issue is that it would require some very complicated registers and automated temperature controls along with sensors and a full plenum to every room. That type of design is limited to commercial construction because of the costs. It simply doesn't make sense to put 10K into insulating you interior walls when you would then need to spend an additional 10-20K on building and HVAC improvements to make the system functional. If you want the insulation put it in your exterior walls where it will buy you ten times the energy and HVAC savings.
As I said, people don't insulate interior walls unless it's for noise reasons. There is an very valid reason to use noise insulation, particularly on bathrooms because modern ventilation fans in bathrooms are damn near silent. You can't even buy noisy ones anymore.
No. Most interior walls are not insulated unless you specifically added it to your building plan. It's not code, it fucks up the HVAC system and provides no benefit other than sound attenuation. It's becoming more common to insulate the bathroom for the noise insulation properties but it's absolutely NOT common to insulate interior walls. I sincerely doubt that even if you house plans did call out for interior insulation that it would even be installed. It's so far outside the norm that the insulators would probably think it's a mistake even if they noticed (which they wouldn't because they don't insulate interior walls).
L4D and L4D2 made more than half-life did even with the much longer sales time line for half life. You need to consider that L4D and L4D2 were smash hits on the console as well as PC selling over a million copies on EACH platform. L4D2 pre-orders exceeded any valve sales record in their history and has been in the top 10 sales on Steam for a year after launch. Half Life while a top PC game can't match the sales of a game offered on console as well as PC platforms where sales records are set on both platforms.
Roll in Portal bringing in nearly 40% female gamers and opening an entire marketing segment that Valve had never sold into and you get the picture on why Half Life was essentially abandoned in favor of the bigger money makers. Portal2 appears to be another smash hit based on the advertising campaign they are pushing on it. They've got a multi-million dollar campaign going on cable channels where if you watch TV for more than an hour on certain channels you will see a Portal2 commercial.
Don't get me wrong, I liked Half-Life but if you followed the launch numbers and listened to the developer commentary on some of the games (portal) you would know why they abandoned their previously most successful franchise. I've no doubt whatsoever that Valve will expand the Half-Life series at some point in the future, but it's going to take a while so they can push out the games that make more money. I'd actually expect L4D3 before we see another Half Life game.
It's the whole reason Amazon's service has been so popular. A pay as you go for only the services you need that you can fully customize. What VMWare is doing is offering an abstraction layer that allows you to do essentially the same thing at any data provider. This should make it possible to have an Amazon type service at every data center which will drive down costs and help everyone in the industry.
Watt is a time based measurement. Your $5 assumption assumes the cost is spread over 1 year using the MWh number quoted. Power plants have life cycles in the 30-50 year range (ie. most are designed for 30 and survive much longer).
There is a significant difference between birds dieing running into things and birds dieing because they were coated in oil. For one thing the type of birds being killed are significantly different. For another we can't stop birds from flying into objects and killing themselves (if they didn't fly into a turbine they'd probably fly into a tree), we can stop birds from landing in oil spills caused by people.
Very different scenarios, very different causes and very different mortality rates. They shouldn't be treated the same.
Do you have any idea how big the Mohave is? You could fit several European countries in it. It's not even the largest, just the one with (IIRC) the lowest rainfall and cloud cover with bonus points for being the closest to the major CA population centers.
We have about 6 deserts in the US that could fit dozens of facilities this size with a minimal wildlife impact (they spread the concentric circles of mirrors out by about triple the mirror size). In fact I wouldn't be surprised if we could build mirror farms like this in rural deserts and end up with an area the size of France covered in mirrors. People really fail to grasp just how big the American southwest is.
I don't like the advertising of major drugs but it does serve a purpose in helping educate those with issues even if it snags all the hypochondriacs as well. But side effects exist for every drug. Even with the major medical studies required to get a drug approved it's not until you release a drug into the full population of people that some side effects will be discovered. That's a fact and it's the reason the FDA requires several dozen post approval studies of the general population.
But I do have a serious issue with people not understanding that every single drug you take will have side effects. It's a fact that every drug has side effects. Every single drug is nothing more than a poison that has a certain effect that's desired and several dozen that aren't. There isn't some magical pill out there that will make all your problems go away without side effects. It's a failure of our education system that people actually believe this is possible. It's a failure of our medical system that this isn't explained to those that don't understand.
Drug makers should be exempt from any lawsuit targeting a drug that's being used per the FDA approval requirements. On the flip side, any drug maker that promotes (even in private to doctors) a drug for off label use they should be liable to lawsuits from every affected party. We have to stop all this bullshit. If the FDA approved it, and the warning labels are per FDA guidelines the patient is the responsible party, not the drug maker and not the doctors. As an individual you are responsible for every chemical you put in your body. The only way you can claim liability to a secondary party is if the drug is being administered without your consent.
Wanna know the best part of the Vioxx scandal? There were rumors that one of the generic makers was going to start producing Vioxx again when the patent expired. The very next day Merck started a bunch of FUD saying they would start selling Vioxx again, even went on all the major news programs talking about it. Did they? Nope. Did they keep the rumors up till the generic maker dropped their plans? Yep.
Yes and dividing prime 1 by itself 1 gives 1 and conversely dividing the prime 1 by 1 gives itself 1. Just like dividing the prime 7 by itself 7 gives 1 and diving the prime 7 by 1 gives itself 7. All prime numbers are divisible by themselves and 1, that's the definition of prime. 1 is a prime number.
May I point out that in medical studies where double blind studies are common they are typically the last step in the evaluation and the final proof. Early studies and experiments are much more basic and elementary than the final stage three double blind study. The problem is that the public perceives that the phase three clinical trial is the only science involved where in fact its the last in more than a dozen experiments ranging from rough computer models to early laboratory studies in rats all the way up to the final double blind human studies.
The way your post reads is that science is some secret society where only those who play by certain rules are allowed to call themselves scientists. The reality is that anyone using the scientific method to learn about the natural world is a scientist. Now the value of that science and the scientist to the community IS a factor of the esteem they earn by their colleagues. Don't fall for the right wing anti-science rhetoric which your post is filled with.
Name recognition won't be their problem. Gamestop and the retail stores have always been in the pocket of the major game publishers like EA and Ubisoft. Yes they had disputes with them over resale of used games but otherwise they bowed to their wishes. Impulse will be changed, it will get some nice draconian DRM installed and all it's advantages against Steam will be destroyed. With the few advantages gone the company will die quickly. The game publishers will see to this even though that won't be their intent. In fact they might even convince a few publishers to dump steam to their detriment.
After about a year or two the company will die under it's own dead weight. Impulse hasn't been very successful and I have no doubt that adding all the DRM GameStop is sure to add will only hasten it's demise. Steam has been successful precisely because it's not run by EA or Ubisoft. It's run by a developer who understands what gamers want and what rights they are willing to trade for certain benefits. GameStop will run Impulse just like EA and Ubisoft tell them to and it will be as spectacular a failure as any other attempt by them.
There is some aid in the Israel agreements, but it's a factor of the camp David accords with Egypt. Both nations are handed loads of cash each year for not fighting. The majority of the US support for Israel is in the form of loans backed by the US government to the government of Israel. The US banking sector makes a mint on those loans as Israel's never missed payment and with interest rates approximately 2-3% above the prime rate the US banks that make the loans make a TON of profit on those loans. It's been estimated that total profits have exceeded several hundred billion dollars. As the banks have essentially no risk with the US government guarantee and still get to charge above market interest rates it should be understandable why the banks support continuing the arrangement.
Although the original poster has a point, the fact is that Israel would suffer some severe financial problems if the US aid (development and military) along with the loans were blocked. Whether they could continue funding their massive military machine without the American dollar input is fairly debatable. Most of the official independent research indicates that without the US support (in particular the loans) Israels economy would likely suffocate under the massive military spending and that collapse would probably necessitate political changes. This is essentially because the loans are primarily used to fund economic development and sustain the trade surplus they have with other nations. Without the loans the economy would lose the cash flow that provides the backbone for the trade surpluses that pay for everything else.
The problem with the idea that if you somehow cut off the US dollars Israel will collapse is that even a cursory review of history will show that before the Camp David accords the US provided no support to Israel and they did fine. Before those accords they fought and won several wars against multiple enemies while being significantly outnumbered by every single opponent. In the first two wars every opponent outnumbered them 4-1 in manpower and 3 nations were grouped up against them at the same time and they still won.
Contrary to the uniformed people outside the US there are several very important reasons why the US supports Israel and why that support will be very hard to crack. In order of importance.
1. Fundamental Christians believe that Israel's existence is a precondition of the end of days. In addition the bible says that those nations/peoples that are standing with the people of Israel will be the victorious army and those on the side of God in Armageddon. As a result you would find it easier to convince a Fundie Christian that the spaghetti monster is real than convincing them that the US shouldn't support Israel. As the Fundie's currently have a grip on the Republican party and compose almost 30% of the voting public the chances of reducing or eliminating US support for Israel is very small.
2. Israel over the years has become deeply integrated into the US defense industrial complex. They control or are essential subcontractors to several major companies and do significant research into defense technology. They are key to several areas of US defense technology. As a result they have some pretty steep bargaining leverage with the US defense agencies by threatening to sell technology and assets to the Chinese and other nations the US considers potentially hostile.
3. Up until the Russian migration several years ago a significant portion of the people living in Israel actually had US citizenship. Before the massive Russian migration that percentage was around 20%, although I'm not sure what it is now I'm sure it's still above 5% (As an example Netanyahu actually had the opportunity to become a US citizen) . With that large of a percentage holding dual citizenship its difficult to abandon support particularly with the more than 6 million Jews in the US with family and friends in Israel.
4. Israel has made themselves an essential intelligence gathering asset to the US intell
Oh don't worry. These metering attempts are open to so many class action lawsuits in the long run it will cost them far more than they ever make. Lawsuits over accuracy, billing discrepancies, paying for incoming traffic, etc. They'll try to implementing it, get sued six ways to Sunday and eventually the whole thing will collapse with costs far exceeding the costs for flat rate service.
And you can buy 7 of the Intel processor systems for the price of a single Power7 system. A slight performance advantage for a single generation doesn't do you a damn bit of good when Intel is tick-tocking every 2 years while power refreshes every 5 and Intel is at least 1 process tech ahead of everyone else including IBM. In 6 months to a year the Intel processor will catch up and then exceed the Power, 5 years later IBM will leap ahead again. That is providing the trend keeps up and IBM doesn't abandon power entirely further down the road.
Architecture is irrelevant, the modern x86 isn't even x86 anymore except for the 2% of chip real estate devoted to decoding the incoming instructions and dispatching them to the internal architecture. That's all x86 is these days, a bloody abstraction layer.
There are several isotopes that are still classified that are usable in atomic weapons. The usefulness and in some cases the existence of these isotopoes in uranium, plutonium and other fissionable nuclei is still a closely guarded secret.
If you doubt, consider the effort and research in the hundreds of test weapons, and the existence of the primary fission/fusion munition in the 500mton range that weighs so little you can put 5 of them on a single ICBM. These kinds of yields aren't possible with the poor mans fission weapon of the gun type uranium or implosion plutonium bomb. The existence of these weapons is highly dependent on classified isotopes and weapon designs that maximize yield per pound and were developed over 30 years of testing and refinement.
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A rapier with a blooding groove could kill in one stroke. Although the English long bow was most of the reason suits of armor went away the rapier and foil also played a roll. Every suit of armor had weak points at the joints that a man in light leathers with a foil or rapier could exploit quite easily. In fact after the armored opponent made their first swing you would just need to step in and stick the foil into the gap under the arm or at the waist or the neck. The thin sharp point could penetrate the rib cage and even if it missed the heart or other vital organs you would be guaranteed enough internal bleeding to bring them down in a few minutes of exertion without even striking another blow.
A quick hand with a foil or rapier is far more deadly than a big bastard sword or other massive weapon because it will never land a blow.
My guess is the lawsuit actually brought to Cisco's attention that they had been hacked because he had access to information that was only available through Cisco. It's likely that his lawsuit is how the crime was discovered so I find no reason to be sympathetic to him. If you are going to break the law then sue someone using the information you obtained breaking the law you shouldn't be surprised if you are arrested for it.
Tensile strength of the material isn't what destroys homes in wind storms. It's the horizontal force applied by the wind which shears the structural material from it's fasteners (in this case the plywood shears the nails). For roofs there are two failure modes, either the roof decking has enough uplift to pull the roofing nails or the entire roof truss is sheared off the wall connections.
Having a material with ten times the tensile strength of steel isn't going to stop wind from tearing walls and roofs off unless it's used to make the nails.
There is more to a material than it's tensile strength. Failure modes, amount of plasticity before failure, compressive strength and many other factors are important.
For example, one of the reasons high strength concrete isn't used very often is that it's failure mode is instantaneous (rather dramatic too) rather than crumbly. As a result there is no warning when it fails whereas regular concrete begins to crumble and drop debris, a very visible and noticeable sign of failure allowing time to evacuate.
So when someone says X material is ten time stronger than steel the next question should be is what one way is better and in what other ways is it worse. Just as an example, steel has tremendous tensile and compressive strength. If this has no compressive strength it's uses are highly restricted
And every time this stupid discussion comes people spend all the time talking about why we should switch and not why we shouldn't.. The Imperial units used in the US are a barrier to entry to the US market by foreign manufacturers and producers. A single example: When we build bridges and buildings in the US the steel and measurements are produced in US Imperial units, even the steel shapes are specific to the US market because the measurements are in imperial. Producers of steel beams and components in foreign countries have steel mills that are calibrated to metric sizing and are unable to produce US steel shapes without a major retrofit to the mill. Although there are similar shapes and sizes they are different enough that it's not possible to us metric sizes. This keeps US steel manufacturing jobs in the US and is the primary reason Congress rolled back the metric initiative 3 years after it became mandatory.
People complain about US job losses, but you want to see the destruction and undercutting of thousands of US jobs by foreign producers then convert the US economy to metric. Imperial units keep countries like China from taking a 10 year plan of losses to destroy all US steel producers so they can take over the market and charge more later.
There is simply no reasonable reason to demand a mandatory switch. Products that are sold internationally are already in metric, most products are dual labeled. Everyone is free to sell products in whatever unit of measure they want. Frankly the government declaring the metric system the only valid form of measurement is well beyond the scope of federal authority. We should allow the market to decide, if you like metric measurements then simply refuse to buy products sold in Imperial units.
You think this is new? All the seizure laws were re-written during the war on drugs to allow blatant constitutional violations. We sold our rights away to incarcerate non violent users of consumable products, most plant based. This isn't new, and it's not going away, it took government 30 years to whittle away private property protections and they aren't going back.
Well according to his own words from the article he's pretty much at the point where money isn't even a concern because he has so much now. I remember reading something to the effect of Valve being able to run without profit for like 20 years. The best quote form the linked article is that Valve is more profitable per employee than even Google or MS.
Ever wonder why there is a 10-15F temperature shift in large older office buildings from one side of the building to the other? (particularly cubicle farms) It's because the HVAC system is improperly distributing and convectional airflow is restricted by the the layout. In a standard residential home the return plenum if it exists is restricted to the main rooms and hallways. Heat flow and return airflow occurs through the uninsulated interior walls/doors that leak like sieves.
Your suggestion of insulating the walls to keep certain rooms off the HVAC chain could work but it would require fully sealing the rooms, but the bigger issue is that it would require some very complicated registers and automated temperature controls along with sensors and a full plenum to every room. That type of design is limited to commercial construction because of the costs. It simply doesn't make sense to put 10K into insulating you interior walls when you would then need to spend an additional 10-20K on building and HVAC improvements to make the system functional. If you want the insulation put it in your exterior walls where it will buy you ten times the energy and HVAC savings.
As I said, people don't insulate interior walls unless it's for noise reasons. There is an very valid reason to use noise insulation, particularly on bathrooms because modern ventilation fans in bathrooms are damn near silent. You can't even buy noisy ones anymore.
No. Most interior walls are not insulated unless you specifically added it to your building plan. It's not code, it fucks up the HVAC system and provides no benefit other than sound attenuation. It's becoming more common to insulate the bathroom for the noise insulation properties but it's absolutely NOT common to insulate interior walls. I sincerely doubt that even if you house plans did call out for interior insulation that it would even be installed. It's so far outside the norm that the insulators would probably think it's a mistake even if they noticed (which they wouldn't because they don't insulate interior walls).
Forbes profiles Gabe a few months ago. He's apparently a billionaire now. I believe he's the first game developer to achieve that level of income.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0228/technology-gabe-newell-videogames-valve-online-mayhem.html
L4D and L4D2 made more than half-life did even with the much longer sales time line for half life. You need to consider that L4D and L4D2 were smash hits on the console as well as PC selling over a million copies on EACH platform. L4D2 pre-orders exceeded any valve sales record in their history and has been in the top 10 sales on Steam for a year after launch. Half Life while a top PC game can't match the sales of a game offered on console as well as PC platforms where sales records are set on both platforms.
Roll in Portal bringing in nearly 40% female gamers and opening an entire marketing segment that Valve had never sold into and you get the picture on why Half Life was essentially abandoned in favor of the bigger money makers. Portal2 appears to be another smash hit based on the advertising campaign they are pushing on it. They've got a multi-million dollar campaign going on cable channels where if you watch TV for more than an hour on certain channels you will see a Portal2 commercial.
Don't get me wrong, I liked Half-Life but if you followed the launch numbers and listened to the developer commentary on some of the games (portal) you would know why they abandoned their previously most successful franchise. I've no doubt whatsoever that Valve will expand the Half-Life series at some point in the future, but it's going to take a while so they can push out the games that make more money. I'd actually expect L4D3 before we see another Half Life game.
It's the whole reason Amazon's service has been so popular. A pay as you go for only the services you need that you can fully customize. What VMWare is doing is offering an abstraction layer that allows you to do essentially the same thing at any data provider. This should make it possible to have an Amazon type service at every data center which will drive down costs and help everyone in the industry.
Also VMWare will make some money on it no doubt.
Watt is a time based measurement. Your $5 assumption assumes the cost is spread over 1 year using the MWh number quoted. Power plants have life cycles in the 30-50 year range (ie. most are designed for 30 and survive much longer).
There is a significant difference between birds dieing running into things and birds dieing because they were coated in oil. For one thing the type of birds being killed are significantly different. For another we can't stop birds from flying into objects and killing themselves (if they didn't fly into a turbine they'd probably fly into a tree), we can stop birds from landing in oil spills caused by people.
Very different scenarios, very different causes and very different mortality rates. They shouldn't be treated the same.
Do you have any idea how big the Mohave is? You could fit several European countries in it. It's not even the largest, just the one with (IIRC) the lowest rainfall and cloud cover with bonus points for being the closest to the major CA population centers.
We have about 6 deserts in the US that could fit dozens of facilities this size with a minimal wildlife impact (they spread the concentric circles of mirrors out by about triple the mirror size). In fact I wouldn't be surprised if we could build mirror farms like this in rural deserts and end up with an area the size of France covered in mirrors. People really fail to grasp just how big the American southwest is.
Maybe you should respect her wishes and leave her alone. It's people like you that are very likely the reason she's quiting.
I don't like the advertising of major drugs but it does serve a purpose in helping educate those with issues even if it snags all the hypochondriacs as well. But side effects exist for every drug. Even with the major medical studies required to get a drug approved it's not until you release a drug into the full population of people that some side effects will be discovered. That's a fact and it's the reason the FDA requires several dozen post approval studies of the general population.
But I do have a serious issue with people not understanding that every single drug you take will have side effects. It's a fact that every drug has side effects. Every single drug is nothing more than a poison that has a certain effect that's desired and several dozen that aren't. There isn't some magical pill out there that will make all your problems go away without side effects. It's a failure of our education system that people actually believe this is possible. It's a failure of our medical system that this isn't explained to those that don't understand.
Drug makers should be exempt from any lawsuit targeting a drug that's being used per the FDA approval requirements. On the flip side, any drug maker that promotes (even in private to doctors) a drug for off label use they should be liable to lawsuits from every affected party. We have to stop all this bullshit. If the FDA approved it, and the warning labels are per FDA guidelines the patient is the responsible party, not the drug maker and not the doctors. As an individual you are responsible for every chemical you put in your body. The only way you can claim liability to a secondary party is if the drug is being administered without your consent.
Wanna know the best part of the Vioxx scandal? There were rumors that one of the generic makers was going to start producing Vioxx again when the patent expired. The very next day Merck started a bunch of FUD saying they would start selling Vioxx again, even went on all the major news programs talking about it. Did they? Nope. Did they keep the rumors up till the generic maker dropped their plans? Yep.
Yes and dividing prime 1 by itself 1 gives 1 and conversely dividing the prime 1 by 1 gives itself 1. Just like dividing the prime 7 by itself 7 gives 1 and diving the prime 7 by 1 gives itself 7. All prime numbers are divisible by themselves and 1, that's the definition of prime. 1 is a prime number.
May I point out that in medical studies where double blind studies are common they are typically the last step in the evaluation and the final proof. Early studies and experiments are much more basic and elementary than the final stage three double blind study. The problem is that the public perceives that the phase three clinical trial is the only science involved where in fact its the last in more than a dozen experiments ranging from rough computer models to early laboratory studies in rats all the way up to the final double blind human studies.
The way your post reads is that science is some secret society where only those who play by certain rules are allowed to call themselves scientists. The reality is that anyone using the scientific method to learn about the natural world is a scientist. Now the value of that science and the scientist to the community IS a factor of the esteem they earn by their colleagues. Don't fall for the right wing anti-science rhetoric which your post is filled with.
Name recognition won't be their problem. Gamestop and the retail stores have always been in the pocket of the major game publishers like EA and Ubisoft. Yes they had disputes with them over resale of used games but otherwise they bowed to their wishes. Impulse will be changed, it will get some nice draconian DRM installed and all it's advantages against Steam will be destroyed. With the few advantages gone the company will die quickly. The game publishers will see to this even though that won't be their intent. In fact they might even convince a few publishers to dump steam to their detriment.
After about a year or two the company will die under it's own dead weight. Impulse hasn't been very successful and I have no doubt that adding all the DRM GameStop is sure to add will only hasten it's demise. Steam has been successful precisely because it's not run by EA or Ubisoft. It's run by a developer who understands what gamers want and what rights they are willing to trade for certain benefits. GameStop will run Impulse just like EA and Ubisoft tell them to and it will be as spectacular a failure as any other attempt by them.
There is some aid in the Israel agreements, but it's a factor of the camp David accords with Egypt. Both nations are handed loads of cash each year for not fighting. The majority of the US support for Israel is in the form of loans backed by the US government to the government of Israel. The US banking sector makes a mint on those loans as Israel's never missed payment and with interest rates approximately 2-3% above the prime rate the US banks that make the loans make a TON of profit on those loans. It's been estimated that total profits have exceeded several hundred billion dollars. As the banks have essentially no risk with the US government guarantee and still get to charge above market interest rates it should be understandable why the banks support continuing the arrangement.
Although the original poster has a point, the fact is that Israel would suffer some severe financial problems if the US aid (development and military) along with the loans were blocked. Whether they could continue funding their massive military machine without the American dollar input is fairly debatable. Most of the official independent research indicates that without the US support (in particular the loans) Israels economy would likely suffocate under the massive military spending and that collapse would probably necessitate political changes. This is essentially because the loans are primarily used to fund economic development and sustain the trade surplus they have with other nations. Without the loans the economy would lose the cash flow that provides the backbone for the trade surpluses that pay for everything else.
The problem with the idea that if you somehow cut off the US dollars Israel will collapse is that even a cursory review of history will show that before the Camp David accords the US provided no support to Israel and they did fine. Before those accords they fought and won several wars against multiple enemies while being significantly outnumbered by every single opponent. In the first two wars every opponent outnumbered them 4-1 in manpower and 3 nations were grouped up against them at the same time and they still won.
Contrary to the uniformed people outside the US there are several very important reasons why the US supports Israel and why that support will be very hard to crack. In order of importance.
1. Fundamental Christians believe that Israel's existence is a precondition of the end of days. In addition the bible says that those nations/peoples that are standing with the people of Israel will be the victorious army and those on the side of God in Armageddon. As a result you would find it easier to convince a Fundie Christian that the spaghetti monster is real than convincing them that the US shouldn't support Israel. As the Fundie's currently have a grip on the Republican party and compose almost 30% of the voting public the chances of reducing or eliminating US support for Israel is very small.
2. Israel over the years has become deeply integrated into the US defense industrial complex. They control or are essential subcontractors to several major companies and do significant research into defense technology. They are key to several areas of US defense technology. As a result they have some pretty steep bargaining leverage with the US defense agencies by threatening to sell technology and assets to the Chinese and other nations the US considers potentially hostile.
3. Up until the Russian migration several years ago a significant portion of the people living in Israel actually had US citizenship. Before the massive Russian migration that percentage was around 20%, although I'm not sure what it is now I'm sure it's still above 5% (As an example Netanyahu actually had the opportunity to become a US citizen) . With that large of a percentage holding dual citizenship its difficult to abandon support particularly with the more than 6 million Jews in the US with family and friends in Israel.
4. Israel has made themselves an essential intelligence gathering asset to the US intell
Oh don't worry. These metering attempts are open to so many class action lawsuits in the long run it will cost them far more than they ever make. Lawsuits over accuracy, billing discrepancies, paying for incoming traffic, etc. They'll try to implementing it, get sued six ways to Sunday and eventually the whole thing will collapse with costs far exceeding the costs for flat rate service.
And you can buy 7 of the Intel processor systems for the price of a single Power7 system. A slight performance advantage for a single generation doesn't do you a damn bit of good when Intel is tick-tocking every 2 years while power refreshes every 5 and Intel is at least 1 process tech ahead of everyone else including IBM. In 6 months to a year the Intel processor will catch up and then exceed the Power, 5 years later IBM will leap ahead again. That is providing the trend keeps up and IBM doesn't abandon power entirely further down the road.
Architecture is irrelevant, the modern x86 isn't even x86 anymore except for the 2% of chip real estate devoted to decoding the incoming instructions and dispatching them to the internal architecture. That's all x86 is these days, a bloody abstraction layer.
There are several isotopes that are still classified that are usable in atomic weapons. The usefulness and in some cases the existence of these isotopoes in uranium, plutonium and other fissionable nuclei is still a closely guarded secret.
If you doubt, consider the effort and research in the hundreds of test weapons, and the existence of the primary fission/fusion munition in the 500mton range that weighs so little you can put 5 of them on a single ICBM. These kinds of yields aren't possible with the poor mans fission weapon of the gun type uranium or implosion plutonium bomb. The existence of these weapons is highly dependent on classified isotopes and weapon designs that maximize yield per pound and were developed over 30 years of testing and refinement.