I am a test pilot and one of the things we have to do with each new test article is perform an EMC/EMI/EMV test(the so called E-cubed testing) before the item ever flies (incidently this includes firmware upgrades to avionics). I can tell you that probably about 10% of the hardware we put into or most modern military aircraft do indeed have problems passing these tests - and these are items that are specificaly designed to meet the military's strict E-3 requirements. These components must be redsigned before testing can continue. Somehow I doubt that the makers of every electronic gadget out there, (music players, portable games, etc where profit margins can be razor this) are so diligent in their designs. Let me say this very clearly - I do this for a living and when it is my ass in coach and the flight attendant tells me to turn off my palm pilot, you better believe I do.
Oh, and if you ever see me on a plane, make sure you are sitting next to me - I will be the guy in the safest row of seats.
Excellent points, although I never intended to imply that there is any smoking gun linking earth's climate to solar activity (although I wouldn't be surprised either if one was discovered one day). My point was that solar phenomena do indeed alter the shape and characteristics of our atmosphere. If the upper reaches of the atmosphere are being effected by solar events, then it at least seems like an interesting research area to study the effects of such fluctuations on the climate. As you know, the earth's ionosphere has a predominant diurnal cylce, and less fequent fluctuations are associated with CMEs or less significant solar events. While these events happen with some regularity, they are very transient in nature. Perhaps we will have to wait for a sustained period of solar activity for such a solar-climate relation (if there is one) to be directly observed. Bottom line though - we simply don't know that the Sun only influences the Earth's climate solely via solar power output mechanism.
At the risk of being modded troll, people who think that humans are NOT contributing signifigantly to climate change need to get their heads out of their asses and realize that even if there is the smallest probability it is true, doing nothing could not be more irresponsible.
Dude, this is slashdot... you had us at "pumping millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere." I challenge you to find a single post that is anti-pollution/pro-Kyoto that has ever been modded as troll.
The whole "sunspots affecting temperature to the degree we're seeing recently" thing has always been rather suspect. It's not going to affect directly - radiant energy varies by only 0.1-0.2%. But perhaps indirect effects might be occurring
Yes and no, sunspot activity does have a direct effect on our weather, just not an intuitive one that has anything to do with fluxuations in solar radiation output. I took a graduate course in the near-earth space environment (really space weather) and the organization was quite insightful. We began discussing the interior of the sun, then moved outward to the sun's atmosphere (chromosphere and corona), and solar wind. You see, the solar wind interacts with the Earth's magnetosphere in very complex ways and in turn shapes the Earth's ionosphere - the effective "outer limit" of our atmosphere. As my professor lead off the course,... "You can't teach about the Earth's weather without starting with solar weather."
For what it is worth, I don't know if it is even a fair comparison to compare a 1.4 Pentium M to a 1.4 G4. The Pentium M significantly outperforms a Pentium 4 at the same clock speed although I don't know how a G4 compares to a P4. The wikipedia article claims that a 1.6 Ghz Pentium-M is closer to the equivalent of a 2.4 Ghz Pentium 4). I can personally vouch that my 1.3 Pentium M laptop performs numerical computation (solving large NLPs) faster than my 1.8 Ghz P4.
At least they minions are consistent... the prevailing opinion on another story today was that parents shouldn't have a right to know what their children are eating at school.
Either way Boeing seems to be going back to the Apollo with their design. Unless there's some impressive shit going on inside, I'm not impressed with their's either.
No offense, but what do you base this on? What exactly are your credentials? What you think a spacecraft should look like based on your vast sci/fi experience? Shouldn't there be a "IANARS" disclaimer in there somewhere? Perhaps these are both sound engineering solutions...
Well, the system would have to take into account the fact that tax rates change at the whims of the government, so the effective gross pay would change along with tax rates.
Excellent point.. this would be confusing not to mention frustrating (trying to plan financially when your pay would be adjusted continually with tax changes)
But the real danger is in creating a large pool of citizens whose vote determines tax rates, but who don't pay taxes. No good can come of that.
We are rapidly approaching that point anyway. According to this website, as many as 44% of the US population do not pay FIT anyway
I see your point, but is it really that much more complex to simply pay federal employees less, but have all their income be non-taxable? For instance, some of my allowances are not taxable and some of them are. Wouldn't making all my government pay be non-taxable be a simplification?
Wow,.. I hope you do this for a living... you are correct sir, I made a mistake. For the record, my taxable income was $59k (captial gains a whopping $200 or so). I had $16k withheld for FIT which was about $10k too much so I actually paid about $6k in FIT (I got the numbers backwards,.. and yes, I have adjusted my withholding.) Nice catch.
My point however was that service members do pay taxes which is sort of odd if you think about it... Since I am being paid by the government with other people's tax dollars, wouldn't it make more sense to just pay me less and then not collect taxes on my pay? Maybe this is an oversimplification, but isn't the governement collecting taxes on it's own tax revenue?
Let's see, I am an mid-level officer, so I think I actually get paid pretty well, certainly compared to the lower enlisted to do the real work of the military. I paid over $10,000 dollars in Federal Income Taxes last year, $3,600 in Social Security Taxes, and $860 in Medicare taxes. Fortunately, as an out-of-state California resident, I don't have to pay state taxes on my military wages (until I return to California). I get $180 a month to feed my family which covers about a third of my grocery bill, and my housing allowance is a few hundred dollars short of the median monthly home cost for my county. I suppose I could sign up for the 2-4 year waiting list for base housing to become available for the opportunity to loose my housing allowance and live on base in a 60 year old house that has had 20 families live in it with lead paint and black mold. I really don't want to sound like I am complaining, because I think I live comfortably - I just want to highlight the fact that we do pay taxes, spend money for food and utilities (and family medical/dental) and pay housing costs.
Our young enlisted with families are the ones who really have the challenges. An E-3 with 2 years of service makes a whopping $1300 a month (before taxes).
It is my understanding that all of the 9/11 terrorists had valid U.S. IDs (drivers licenses, mostly) and/or valid passports which had been scrutinized at the border. These IDs were all in their own names (though perhaps not in the name under which they were wanted).So far as I know, no one has suggested that they had obtained these IDs fraudulently
No one except, let's see... the 9-11 commission. Try reading it sometime. Here is a link to the search query for "fraudulent". It is freaking astounding. You are correct when you say that they did have valid documents on them, but the majority of these documents were indeed obtained fraudulently or had been fraudulently manipulated as well. For instance, many of the hijackers had had their passports fraudulently manipulated to conceal travel in and through Iran and Afghanistan, knowing full well that such travel histories would likely incur further scrutiny upon entry to the US or when applying for entry visas. I'll let you read the rest... the document manipulation capabilities of Al Qaeda were quite impressive.
There is also a middle ground... it is called Media Portal. As far as I can tell, it has the look and feel of MS Media Center Edition yet it is open source and free. Lots of customizable modules as well...
Yes, far in the future in someone else's administration. It's the cheapest promise you can make to promise that someone else will do something later on.
Nice theory, but the ball is already rolling on this one. NASA issued this RFP on March 1st (due May 2nd) for the CEV. The RFP clearly states that the third spiral of development will include long duration missions of length suitable for a manned Mars mission. Granted not much money will be spent until the contract is awarded, and this could just be a ploy to say "see... I told you it was too expensive" and bail... but this is more than any other administration has done (towards a Mars mission that is).
As to the Mars program actually getting done? Bush has been talking about going to Mars every year. Still nothing to show for it, as far as I can tell.
Look a little harder. NASA issued this RFP on March 1st (due May 2nd) for the CEV. The RFP clearly states that the third spiral of development will include long duration missions of length suitable for a manned Mars mission. I have no idea why this isn't being covered by the media as no one seems to know about it...
Agreed, they spend the bulk of the piece discussing the flack they get regarding creationism/ID issues for which there is no need for them to help "inform policy." Yet they suddenly shift gears and try to extend their argument to climate and missile defense.
While there is undoubtedly a concensus that global warming is a real issue, there still remains considerable doubt as too how serious a concern it is.
As for Scientific American's continued bashing of anti-missile defense - I have yet to see a scientific reason as to why the system "can not work". Keep in mind, this is the same magazine that scoffed at accounts of the Wright brothers first flight. I am inherently skeptical of any analysis of the capabilities of a military program where the current technical capabilities are classified.
I bought it, and it had an 18 label on it. Moral of the story - DON'T LET YOUR KIDS PLAY IT IF THEY'RE NOT INTELLIGENT, FREE THINKING INDIVIDUALS. Jesus!
If your kids were intelligent and free thinking individuals, why would they want to play GTA?
Clearly you don't know anyone who is actually in education. My parents have been in the education field for nearly 60 years combined. They know how things work and saw this law as the worthless piece of crap it is. (See my rant, linked above, to read more.)
Actually, my mom is a semi-retired elementary school teacher with about 35 years of experience and my wife has about 8 years of exprience teaching 2-4th grade (she is currently staying at home with our young son and will *not* be going back to teaching). I also routinely helped out with my wife's class (about half a day per week) ro so. So actually, I also have quite a bit of exposure to at least elementary education in this country. I've seen the mailings from the Californ ia Teacher's Association telling them exactly how to vote in elections (straight Dem ticket every time). I hear them complain about parents and administrators - the real problems with our school systems.
The Federal Government really has no business telling my local school district how to operate itself.
On this we agree... however, NCLB doesn't force a state to do *anything*. It merely makes them accountable if they want to continue to receive federal funds. People want to know that their tax dollars are being used effectively.
Slashdot is somewhat unique in that there are such a large number of foreign readers who have very well informed and intelligent opinions about the politics of a government other than their own. While it is tempting to say "mind your own business" like another poster, I realize that American politics is the world's concern given that the US is at the moment the economic and military super-power.
The viewpoint seems typical of how foreigners view Americans. You list dozens of ways in which our country (I'm an American) is "broken" and then allude to a conspiracy of the American media to protect the right-wing politicians of this country from the negative side-effects of their evil policies. You (and many others like you) seem to conclude that Americans are just idiots whose time is nearing an end...
Let me let you in on a little secret: Americans are quite aware of everything you think they ignorant of. Everyone knows about Guantanamo Bay and Iraqi prisoner abuse. Everyone knows that thousands of civilians have died in the Iraq war and that popular opinion of US abroad is in the toilet. Everyone knows that our school system could use some improvement (more on that later) and that everyone knows that the Patriot Act in some ways compromised civil liberties for security. Everyone knows that Bush's attendance record in the ANG was spotty and that Oh, and everyone knows that Republicans want to overturn Roe vs. Wade and prefer archaic sex education.
In short, Americans are well aware of all the issues that you seem concerned with, yet about half of them (myself included) disagree with you on just about every point. Did you ever stop to think that just possibly, it could be you foreigners who aren't getting a complete and unbiased representation of the issues as the pertain to American politics? Just a thought. I get my news from a variety of sources ranging in ideology from DailyKos and NPR to yes, Fox News. I am 100% confident that I have heard every shred of information that you have heard about American (and then some) yet I have come up opposite views. The selectiveness of the media abroad would explain a lot of your opinions, but there are plenty of Americans who feel the same way as you so there must be other factors as well. Obviously the culture plays a huge part in this as it is culture and morality and weight the importance of different facts to when forming a viewpoint. For instance, everyone I know thinks the actions of a handful of prison guards at Abu Ghraib were abhorrent - but that they were not more representative of Americans as a whole than the act of the 19 hijackers were representative of the Muslim world as a whole.
While I would love to waste my evening challenging each of your opinions point-by-point, I have a few pressing house chores so I choose just one: your comments about our educations system.
education: something which is fundamentally broken in the US (unless you have money) and which the government is in no hurry to fix ('no child left behind' is just making matters worse)
I don't know what you think No Child Left Behind actually does,... but there were virtually no critics of the law until the run-up to this last election. The states taking federal money for education for years with next to zero accountability. NCLB demands that the states actually demonstrate that federal funds are being spent well, by requiring student assessments, improving the quality of teachers and that school systems use "scientifically based research" for teaching methods. You show me any other federal program that doles out billions of dollars but doesn't require any sort of proof that the money is being used effectively. Schools that under perform are given increased funding.
Lots of people are resisting this law for a number of reasons. Obviously, poor performing teachers and administrators don't want to be assessed for fear of being (rightly) put out
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and if you ever see me on a plane, make sure you are sitting next to me - I will be the guy in the safest row of seats.
two words
Excellent points, although I never intended to imply that there is any smoking gun linking earth's climate to solar activity (although I wouldn't be surprised either if one was discovered one day). My point was that solar phenomena do indeed alter the shape and characteristics of our atmosphere. If the upper reaches of the atmosphere are being effected by solar events, then it at least seems like an interesting research area to study the effects of such fluctuations on the climate. As you know, the earth's ionosphere has a predominant diurnal cylce, and less fequent fluctuations are associated with CMEs or less significant solar events. While these events happen with some regularity, they are very transient in nature. Perhaps we will have to wait for a sustained period of solar activity for such a solar-climate relation (if there is one) to be directly observed. Bottom line though - we simply don't know that the Sun only influences the Earth's climate solely via solar power output mechanism.
Dude, this is slashdot... you had us at "pumping millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere." I challenge you to find a single post that is anti-pollution/pro-Kyoto that has ever been modded as troll.
Yes and no, sunspot activity does have a direct effect on our weather, just not an intuitive one that has anything to do with fluxuations in solar radiation output. I took a graduate course in the near-earth space environment (really space weather) and the organization was quite insightful. We began discussing the interior of the sun, then moved outward to the sun's atmosphere (chromosphere and corona), and solar wind. You see, the solar wind interacts with the Earth's magnetosphere in very complex ways and in turn shapes the Earth's ionosphere - the effective "outer limit" of our atmosphere. As my professor lead off the course,... "You can't teach about the Earth's weather without starting with solar weather."
For what it is worth, I don't know if it is even a fair comparison to compare a 1.4 Pentium M to a 1.4 G4. The Pentium M significantly outperforms a Pentium 4 at the same clock speed although I don't know how a G4 compares to a P4. The wikipedia article claims that a 1.6 Ghz Pentium-M is closer to the equivalent of a 2.4 Ghz Pentium 4). I can personally vouch that my 1.3 Pentium M laptop performs numerical computation (solving large NLPs) faster than my 1.8 Ghz P4.
At least they minions are consistent... the prevailing opinion on another story today was that parents shouldn't have a right to know what their children are eating at school.
No offense, but what do you base this on? What exactly are your credentials? What you think a spacecraft should look like based on your vast sci/fi experience? Shouldn't there be a "IANARS" disclaimer in there somewhere? Perhaps these are both sound engineering solutions...
Excellent point.. this would be confusing not to mention frustrating (trying to plan financially when your pay would be adjusted continually with tax changes)
But the real danger is in creating a large pool of citizens whose vote determines tax rates, but who don't pay taxes. No good can come of that.
We are rapidly approaching that point anyway. According to this website, as many as 44% of the US population do not pay FIT anyway
I see your point, but is it really that much more complex to simply pay federal employees less, but have all their income be non-taxable? For instance, some of my allowances are not taxable and some of them are. Wouldn't making all my government pay be non-taxable be a simplification?
My point however was that service members do pay taxes which is sort of odd if you think about it... Since I am being paid by the government with other people's tax dollars, wouldn't it make more sense to just pay me less and then not collect taxes on my pay? Maybe this is an oversimplification, but isn't the governement collecting taxes on it's own tax revenue?
Our young enlisted with families are the ones who really have the challenges. An E-3 with 2 years of service makes a whopping $1300 a month (before taxes).
No one except, let's see... the 9-11 commission. Try reading it sometime. Here is a link to the search query for "fraudulent". It is freaking astounding. You are correct when you say that they did have valid documents on them, but the majority of these documents were indeed obtained fraudulently or had been fraudulently manipulated as well. For instance, many of the hijackers had had their passports fraudulently manipulated to conceal travel in and through Iran and Afghanistan, knowing full well that such travel histories would likely incur further scrutiny upon entry to the US or when applying for entry visas. I'll let you read the rest... the document manipulation capabilities of Al Qaeda were quite impressive.
Think the fact that your brother-in-law was installing a 6-year-old operating system had anything to do with it?
There is also a middle ground... it is called Media Portal. As far as I can tell, it has the look and feel of MS Media Center Edition yet it is open source and free. Lots of customizable modules as well...
Why use a UAV when you can just walk amoung the protesters and take pictures. Besides... it is quite entertaining to sane people.
Link to video.
Nice theory, but the ball is already rolling on this one. NASA issued this RFP on March 1st (due May 2nd) for the CEV. The RFP clearly states that the third spiral of development will include long duration missions of length suitable for a manned Mars mission. Granted not much money will be spent until the contract is awarded, and this could just be a ploy to say "see... I told you it was too expensive" and bail... but this is more than any other administration has done (towards a Mars mission that is).
Look a little harder. NASA issued this RFP on March 1st (due May 2nd) for the CEV. The RFP clearly states that the third spiral of development will include long duration missions of length suitable for a manned Mars mission. I have no idea why this isn't being covered by the media as no one seems to know about it...
I wonder if this is the same plague that is eroding the quality of slashdot posts...
While there is undoubtedly a concensus that global warming is a real issue, there still remains considerable doubt as too how serious a concern it is.
As for Scientific American's continued bashing of anti-missile defense - I have yet to see a scientific reason as to why the system "can not work". Keep in mind, this is the same magazine that scoffed at accounts of the Wright brothers first flight. I am inherently skeptical of any analysis of the capabilities of a military program where the current technical capabilities are classified.
If your kids were intelligent and free thinking individuals, why would they want to play GTA?
Clearly you don't know anyone who is actually in education. My parents have been in the education field for nearly 60 years combined. They know how things work and saw this law as the worthless piece of crap it is. (See my rant, linked above, to read more.)
Actually, my mom is a semi-retired elementary school teacher with about 35 years of experience and my wife has about 8 years of exprience teaching 2-4th grade (she is currently staying at home with our young son and will *not* be going back to teaching). I also routinely helped out with my wife's class (about half a day per week) ro so. So actually, I also have quite a bit of exposure to at least elementary education in this country. I've seen the mailings from the Californ ia Teacher's Association telling them exactly how to vote in elections (straight Dem ticket every time). I hear them complain about parents and administrators - the real problems with our school systems.
The Federal Government really has no business telling my local school district how to operate itself.
On this we agree... however, NCLB doesn't force a state to do *anything*. It merely makes them accountable if they want to continue to receive federal funds. People want to know that their tax dollars are being used effectively.
The viewpoint seems typical of how foreigners view Americans. You list dozens of ways in which our country (I'm an American) is "broken" and then allude to a conspiracy of the American media to protect the right-wing politicians of this country from the negative side-effects of their evil policies. You (and many others like you) seem to conclude that Americans are just idiots whose time is nearing an end...
Let me let you in on a little secret: Americans are quite aware of everything you think they ignorant of. Everyone knows about Guantanamo Bay and Iraqi prisoner abuse. Everyone knows that thousands of civilians have died in the Iraq war and that popular opinion of US abroad is in the toilet. Everyone knows that our school system could use some improvement (more on that later) and that everyone knows that the Patriot Act in some ways compromised civil liberties for security. Everyone knows that Bush's attendance record in the ANG was spotty and that Oh, and everyone knows that Republicans want to overturn Roe vs. Wade and prefer archaic sex education.
In short, Americans are well aware of all the issues that you seem concerned with, yet about half of them (myself included) disagree with you on just about every point. Did you ever stop to think that just possibly, it could be you foreigners who aren't getting a complete and unbiased representation of the issues as the pertain to American politics? Just a thought. I get my news from a variety of sources ranging in ideology from DailyKos and NPR to yes, Fox News. I am 100% confident that I have heard every shred of information that you have heard about American (and then some) yet I have come up opposite views. The selectiveness of the media abroad would explain a lot of your opinions, but there are plenty of Americans who feel the same way as you so there must be other factors as well. Obviously the culture plays a huge part in this as it is culture and morality and weight the importance of different facts to when forming a viewpoint. For instance, everyone I know thinks the actions of a handful of prison guards at Abu Ghraib were abhorrent - but that they were not more representative of Americans as a whole than the act of the 19 hijackers were representative of the Muslim world as a whole.
While I would love to waste my evening challenging each of your opinions point-by-point, I have a few pressing house chores so I choose just one: your comments about our educations system.
education: something which is fundamentally broken in the US (unless you have money) and which the government is in no hurry to fix ('no child left behind' is just making matters worse)
I don't know what you think No Child Left Behind actually does,... but there were virtually no critics of the law until the run-up to this last election. The states taking federal money for education for years with next to zero accountability. NCLB demands that the states actually demonstrate that federal funds are being spent well, by requiring student assessments, improving the quality of teachers and that school systems use "scientifically based research" for teaching methods. You show me any other federal program that doles out billions of dollars but doesn't require any sort of proof that the money is being used effectively. Schools that under perform are given increased funding.
Lots of people are resisting this law for a number of reasons. Obviously, poor performing teachers and administrators don't want to be assessed for fear of being (rightly) put out
Nice post... I read it once,.. then read it again with the music from Team America in the background..."America... Fuck yeah!!! la la la..."