They have just as many studies saying that praying does help. Common sence says that since God is actually the Pizza Noid, that prayers by Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Jews etc wouldn't work. Only by sacrificing a pepperoni pizza by turning the closed box upside down while the cheese is still hot and gooey can influence the Powers that Be.
You say everything at certain orbit height is moving at the same speed. True enough, but not everything in orbit a certain distance from Earth is moving in the same *direction*. If I am moving North-South and you are moving East-West and we are in orbit moving x-hundred feet/sec then we can collide. *Our* debris will move out in many directions.
Suppose I blow up a sattelite and the bits all move out in a sphere, all accellerated by x. Then the bits that are blown behind the satellite at an angle, and which were not accellerated up or down could still be in the same orbit as the sattelite if their lateral accelleration matched their backwards accelleration they would still be moving at the same speed.
Missiles blasting satellites.... Shrapnel everywhere... So much for a ribbon elevator to space, or even for safely riding a rocket to orbit for the next few hundred years till the debris clears. So much for DirecTV, or Primestar and such for that period too. So much for any space anything really.
War WILL happen. All other laws are merely a thin veneer over the Law of the Jungle. It is the one law that will never be repealed. When there are competing interests, someone loses, and when someone loses in one arena, violence is and always will be the arena of last resort.
In the same way that landmines are frowned upon because they make large swaths of land permanently uninhabitable, and chemical weapons are frowned upon because regular ordinance is much less ghastly and just as effective militarily, destroying the space 'environment' by blowing sattelites to smithereens is also frowned upon.
However, when push comes to shove most anyone would rather stay alive than preserve the environment. Otherwise environmentalists would all kill themselves to help solve the earth's population problems. Only the powerful have the luxury of frowning upon atrocities.
In anticipation of the military need to take out sattelites, nations should develop cleaner ways to do this. A remote controlled robot armed with a big bag made of window screen could wrap communication sattelites in a sort of faraday cage putting them out of commission without shrapnel. Or attach a small rocket to them which would tow them them out of orbit. Once a country demonstrates sattelite destroying capability, a nation with non-shrapnel sattelite disabling capability has nothing to lose by selling this less environmentally destructive technology to that state - even if that state is a potential enemy.
I am going to buy 100 cds by different artists. Then I am going to carefully read the outside for any such legal notice about their right to terminate my license.
Then I am going to open each one and look for licenses. If I find a license inside the CD that I do not want to accept, I am going to demand a full refund at the store. I am within my rights because a consumer has the right to examine the merchandise before a sale is legally final. If I bring back the opened CDs they must give me my money back since the sale was not final until I could open the CD and read the license inside.
Actually I am not going to do this. I am too lazy. I will just hang out and let corporations take over until we are all stuck in a WAL*MART-World dystopia.
Wouldn't most any liquid rapidly boil away in the vacuum of space? They'd squirt the stuff out of the tube and it would be gone before they could apply it.
Maybe the phone company ( a monopoly and so averse to innovation ) should get off their ass and design a protocol that will let you add numbers to your own private blocked calls list. You could have a 'report call as spam' button on your phone like Yahoo email does which would enable you to share and take advantage of other people's blocked call lists.
If someone trying to sell me something makes my phone ring by typing it's number onto their keypad, even when my name is on a telemarketer do-not-call list, they are hacking. They have hacked into my phone to make it ring. No matter that the password to make it ring (phone number) is published in the phone-book, they are specifically NOT authorized to make my phone, which is my property, ring.
If the free speech amendment protects telemarketers, then it should also protect other forms of unauthorized access to machines and computers over the phone lines, and it should protect virus writers that spam everyone with their worm.
The first amendment doesn't protect someone from blasting loud music at 1:00 am, it doesn't let you shout FIRE in a crowded theatre ( unless there really is a fire ), it doesn't let you slander someone unless they are famous, and it doesn't let you advocate breaking other laws. Noise pollution via the phone lines is no different in principle than noise pollution eminating from a 12 foot tall amplifier next door. They are disturbing the peace.
Why in dog's name do you need a certification in something you've been doing for 20+ years? Could it be this guy's boss is an idiot?
The fact that you have master level skills is the only relevant thing, a piece of paper that takes much time and money to aquire is pointless. And the fact that you have job experience means that you don't need a piece of paper to 'break in'.
Whenever there is a skill that becomes valuable, it seems that companies crop up to bilk the already knowlegeable out of their hard earned cash by offering 'certifications' in it. While it is true that structured teaching can be valuable - some hand holding can make learning faster, it is by far not the only way to learn. Once the data in question has been assimilated, it's in there and deserves respect no matter how it was aquired.
You are right, money is always green no matter if you are buying ramen noodles or filet-mignon. However, if you are running a store that sells squirt guns and $1000 souped up TVs, then you would be better off ignoring the $1.50 squirt gun customer until the guy buying the TV is well satisfied. If two customers walk in to buy something, one with RFIDs tyeable to a substantial bank account and a stash of credit cards, and another with only $20,000.00 in cash, then the dude with the cash is going to be ignored when there is a choice between helping him or the customer broadcasting the radio frequency 'green aura'.
That might be an idea for a hair tonic, one full of counterfeit RFIDs from expensive items, just shampoo the RFIDs into your hair and feel like a million dollars. Testamony: I never got laid, I'd go on a date, and the wall-ads were all for toilet paper, cheap beer, 1-900 numbers, and canned food. Chicks all left me at the door and ignored my calls afterwards. Then I got Green Aura Shampoo.
Now all I have to do is walk down the street, and hot azz gold digging beyatches crowd around me. I get da nookie now on the first date - at their place! Still no second dates, but who cares, there's always more poontang where that came from - my bottle of Green Aura Shampoo.
They'll have a rfid wand for $99.00 at the spy shop. You can then pull apart your expensive new fleece with tweezers to get the 12 rfids they wove into the fabric out, and ex-lax to get rid of the ones you ate.
Re:Big Brother
on
NYT on RFID
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· Score: 2, Insightful
No, but it might be wise to keep a bill of sale if you sell your sofa later on to someone. If that person ends up dumping the couch in a ditch somewhere, and the cops can look up the RFID in the master credit/debit card database and get your name, you might need the bill of sale saying that Joe College Kid bought it from you, to prove that the cost of it's removal shouldn't be billed to you.
At least you won't have to register your couch with the DMV. You can always withdraw/use cash to remain anonymous, unless of course, the furniture store insists on photo ID for their records so they won't be liable for the couch's legal internment in a landfill later on.
When public toilets at the mall start offering me TUMS from the Rite-Aid next door when I leave ther remainder of my Taco Bell burrito in the bowl, then I'll know RFIDs have gone too far.
Hmm, a naturally wierd looking, naturally slow growing exotic tree... People who will make a BONZAI!!!!! out of them are people with tattoos of their butt with butt shaped tattoos on them tattooed on their butt...
Of course nothing could possibly make Jupiter turn into a star other than self replicating gray rectangles from Europa.
Having said that, I wonder how long it would take the reactor to get from Jupiter's outer atmosphere to somewhere near the core.
Another Idea: Suppose Jupiter were made of mostly Deuterium instead of Regular Olde Hydrogen. Would it be big enough to fuse then? Probably the heaviest elements of Jupiter are somewhere near the center of the planet, but might there be a layer of heavy hydrogen below the regular atmosphere? I doubt it since there are heavier things than hydrogen in the upper atmosphere, and because there are tons of storms to mix things up..
Also since the probe vaporized on hitting the atmosphere, there'd be nothing left of it.
I wonder if there is enough pressure, or how deep you would have to go into Jupiter to compress the reactor enough to make it go supercritical and explode like a nuke. I realize that the isotope used in the reactor is not the same one used by weapons. ( they use a less radioactive Pu isotope in bombz so that the Pu doesn't blow itself apart before it can fission completely ), but since Jupiter is a pretty big planet, there must be some huge pressures in there, maybe enough to make Pu 238, or is it Pu239, I can never remember explode.
Not that it would matter. Shoemaker Levy hardly made a spot on Jupiter, what would a measily Nuke do?
Supposing you built it at the North Pole, anything at the top would still feel gravity from earth. The only reason astronaughts in orbit are weightless is because orbiting space ships are in free-fall. They are falling freely but are kept up by centrifugal force. If you wanted to orbit the earth from a tower at the north pole you would have to go from zero to orbital velocity using much energy before you fell into the atmosphere. Also since the northern polar ice is melting, your tower would sink into the ocean in about 100 years at the north pole.
I know of someone, hehe, that grabbed a marker from the tray under one of those plastic whiteboards and wrote in big letters: PERMANENT MARKER!. Then he looked at the marker he wrote it with - OMG! It WAS a permanent marker. This person I know of was very glad nobody was in the room to witness this aparently malicious, but truely accidental vandalism. The person discreetly left the room and 'booked it'.
Who wouldn't want to light one off in the desert at night on the 4th of July wearing sunglasses and tanning lotion, sitting on a lawn chair with their honey and a 30 pack of beer?
There's lots of stuff more radioactive than U235 and Pu239, there's Pu238 ( I could have the atomic wights wrong for Pu ) that they use to power space probes. It's much more radioactive than the stuff they use in bombs. U235 is less radioactive than Pu 239. The cesium they use to irradiate food is even more radioactive than the Pu they use in space probes. But you couldn't make a bomb with it. It is so radioactive that you couldn't hold a critical mass of it together long enough for it all to chain-react and blow up.
If you want a nuclear boom, you need something that chain-reacts at critical mass slowly enough to stay together and make an efficient boom. U235 is the easiest thing anyone has found to make explode nuclearly. Shoot a U235 bullet into a slightly subcritical U235 nugget and kaboom.
Pu239 is harder to detonate. You need to wrap it in precise explosives. An amateur would get caught testing the boom boom stuff, and would prollly mess it up anyway.
Pu239 is prolly easier to come by than U235, but harder to blow up. Uranium ore can be mined by the amateur in most states and is easy to separate into the unenriched metal. This is not even illegal.
An amateur could teach themselves how to make a lil' reactor out of unenriched uranium and get their Pu239. It would help them to know what they are doing to get it to produce the most Pu239. ( making reactors is illegal - don't do it )
But an amateur will prolly never get a Pu239 bomb to detonate. They'd just get an embarrasing fizzle.
Better for them to use U235. It takes over 100 lbs of unenriched uranium to make one pound of U235 ( enriching uranium is illegal - don't do it ). Back in the day, enrichment was more of a pain in the butt, but now, I believe it is within the reach of a determined amateur. Aside from gas diffusion, the famous method of enrichment of olde, ( zeolites might make this easier nowadays, I dunno ) there is a method using dye lasers to selectively ionize U235 and then seperate it using an electric field. The lazers you need are big and expensive and it takes expertise to use them though.
There is one technique that seems within the realm of possibility for a garage fudderer. Like the Xenon Ion Drives NASA uses, unenriched uranium could be ionized and fired directionally. ( maybe an el-cheapo lazer that is not selective would work for ionizing ). If they built a vaccuum chamber around it, and had a target for the uranium atoms and an electric field to steer the uranium atoms, the most easily steered uranium atoms would be the U235. Maybe they could make a cascade of such things out of some old television sets and let them run for a few years to get the enriched metal.
Then they could threaten to blow up an uninabited section of desert in which no endangered spiecies live, and the army would clear hikers etc from the dangerous area around the test site for them. They might call the newspapers too, so there is a big crowd around to watch. They wouldn't want to be the only one there, it would be suspicious. Plus the party atmosphere might be seen as a plus.
Even though it is in the realm of possibility and would be very cool to see, don't do it. It is illegal, and you will probably die from radiation poisoning if you mess with nucular stuff. Plus it would take up all your time and money leaving you living in a junkyard with no friends and family, and a lousy job that you just have to pay for 'supplies'. You would start to become lonely and bitter and a bit crazy. If you ever did get your bomb finished you'd have no honey to drink beer with at the detonation. You might decide to use it on a more populated area in jealous spite. I might live there. I don't want to get blown up. So don't try to make a bomb. You would be happier and healthier and less likely to be in jail pursuing other more mundane things.
I've bought books that are downloadable for free from the Gutenburg Project because I can read them in bed and are easier on my eyes. A paperback costs 6 bucks. A e-book reader costs at least 50 bucks. Which would you leave on the floor in front of the toilet?
Authors need not be paranoid about publishing online. It will let lil' kids with $1.00 / week allowances read them online without a trip to the library, and someone that has never read one of the author's books decide if they like the story, but anyone that was going to buy the book still will, and it may cause someone who read the first chapter to become addicted enough to the story to buy the dead tree version to read the rest.
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They have just as many studies saying that praying does help. Common sence says that since God is actually the Pizza Noid, that prayers by Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Jews etc wouldn't work. Only by sacrificing a pepperoni pizza by turning the closed box upside down while the cheese is still hot and gooey can influence the Powers that Be.
Suppose I blow up a sattelite and the bits all move out in a sphere, all accellerated by x. Then the bits that are blown behind the satellite at an angle, and which were not accellerated up or down could still be in the same orbit as the sattelite if their lateral accelleration matched their backwards accelleration they would still be moving at the same speed.
War WILL happen. All other laws are merely a thin veneer over the Law of the Jungle. It is the one law that will never be repealed. When there are competing interests, someone loses, and when someone loses in one arena, violence is and always will be the arena of last resort.
In the same way that landmines are frowned upon because they make large swaths of land permanently uninhabitable, and chemical weapons are frowned upon because regular ordinance is much less ghastly and just as effective militarily, destroying the space 'environment' by blowing sattelites to smithereens is also frowned upon.
However, when push comes to shove most anyone would rather stay alive than preserve the environment. Otherwise environmentalists would all kill themselves to help solve the earth's population problems. Only the powerful have the luxury of frowning upon atrocities.
In anticipation of the military need to take out sattelites, nations should develop cleaner ways to do this. A remote controlled robot armed with a big bag made of window screen could wrap communication sattelites in a sort of faraday cage putting them out of commission without shrapnel. Or attach a small rocket to them which would tow them them out of orbit. Once a country demonstrates sattelite destroying capability, a nation with non-shrapnel sattelite disabling capability has nothing to lose by selling this less environmentally destructive technology to that state - even if that state is a potential enemy.
And in each cube, there is a different deathtrap...
Just imagining people's balls covered in permanent marker checkmarks from having their panels counted.
.... So we all live in a soccer ball... I was hoping for a Yellow Submarine...
Then I am going to open each one and look for licenses. If I find a license inside the CD that I do not want to accept, I am going to demand a full refund at the store. I am within my rights because a consumer has the right to examine the merchandise before a sale is legally final. If I bring back the opened CDs they must give me my money back since the sale was not final until I could open the CD and read the license inside.
Actually I am not going to do this. I am too lazy. I will just hang out and let corporations take over until we are all stuck in a WAL*MART-World dystopia.
Wouldn't most any liquid rapidly boil away in the vacuum of space? They'd squirt the stuff out of the tube and it would be gone before they could apply it.
Maybe the phone company ( a monopoly and so averse to innovation ) should get off their ass and design a protocol that will let you add numbers to your own private blocked calls list. You could have a 'report call as spam' button on your phone like Yahoo email does which would enable you to share and take advantage of other people's blocked call lists.
If the free speech amendment protects telemarketers, then it should also protect other forms of unauthorized access to machines and computers over the phone lines, and it should protect virus writers that spam everyone with their worm.
The first amendment doesn't protect someone from blasting loud music at 1:00 am, it doesn't let you shout FIRE in a crowded theatre ( unless there really is a fire ), it doesn't let you slander someone unless they are famous, and it doesn't let you advocate breaking other laws. Noise pollution via the phone lines is no different in principle than noise pollution eminating from a 12 foot tall amplifier next door. They are disturbing the peace.
Harvest that!
The fact that you have master level skills is the only relevant thing, a piece of paper that takes much time and money to aquire is pointless. And the fact that you have job experience means that you don't need a piece of paper to 'break in'.
Whenever there is a skill that becomes valuable, it seems that companies crop up to bilk the already knowlegeable out of their hard earned cash by offering 'certifications' in it. While it is true that structured teaching can be valuable - some hand holding can make learning faster, it is by far not the only way to learn. Once the data in question has been assimilated, it's in there and deserves respect no matter how it was aquired.
I can hear the ice click against the plastic sides, and he fizz in my drink. 66 sloshing ounces of Diet Coke!
Megabytes and megabytes of Publisher's Clearing House Ad Junk to download! I hope this comes with a 'Report as SPAM' button.
YOUR anus is a Gas Giant maybe... He who smelt it dealt it I always say..
That might be an idea for a hair tonic, one full of counterfeit RFIDs from expensive items, just shampoo the RFIDs into your hair and feel like a million dollars. Testamony: I never got laid, I'd go on a date, and the wall-ads were all for toilet paper, cheap beer, 1-900 numbers, and canned food. Chicks all left me at the door and ignored my calls afterwards. Then I got Green Aura Shampoo. Now all I have to do is walk down the street, and hot azz gold digging beyatches crowd around me. I get da nookie now on the first date - at their place! Still no second dates, but who cares, there's always more poontang where that came from - my bottle of Green Aura Shampoo.
They'll have a rfid wand for $99.00 at the spy shop. You can then pull apart your expensive new fleece with tweezers to get the 12 rfids they wove into the fabric out, and ex-lax to get rid of the ones you ate.
At least you won't have to register your couch with the DMV. You can always withdraw/use cash to remain anonymous, unless of course, the furniture store insists on photo ID for their records so they won't be liable for the couch's legal internment in a landfill later on.
When public toilets at the mall start offering me TUMS from the Rite-Aid next door when I leave ther remainder of my Taco Bell burrito in the bowl, then I'll know RFIDs have gone too far.
Hmm, a naturally wierd looking, naturally slow growing exotic tree... People who will make a BONZAI!!!!! out of them are people with tattoos of their butt with butt shaped tattoos on them tattooed on their butt...
"Squeak Squeak Squeak." Translation: "You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile."
Having said that, I wonder how long it would take the reactor to get from Jupiter's outer atmosphere to somewhere near the core.
Another Idea: Suppose Jupiter were made of mostly Deuterium instead of Regular Olde Hydrogen. Would it be big enough to fuse then? Probably the heaviest elements of Jupiter are somewhere near the center of the planet, but might there be a layer of heavy hydrogen below the regular atmosphere? I doubt it since there are heavier things than hydrogen in the upper atmosphere, and because there are tons of storms to mix things up..
Also since the probe vaporized on hitting the atmosphere, there'd be nothing left of it.
I wonder if there is enough pressure, or how deep you would have to go into Jupiter to compress the reactor enough to make it go supercritical and explode like a nuke. I realize that the isotope used in the reactor is not the same one used by weapons. ( they use a less radioactive Pu isotope in bombz so that the Pu doesn't blow itself apart before it can fission completely ), but since Jupiter is a pretty big planet, there must be some huge pressures in there, maybe enough to make Pu 238, or is it Pu239, I can never remember explode.
Not that it would matter. Shoemaker Levy hardly made a spot on Jupiter, what would a measily Nuke do?
Supposing you built it at the North Pole, anything at the top would still feel gravity from earth. The only reason astronaughts in orbit are weightless is because orbiting space ships are in free-fall. They are falling freely but are kept up by centrifugal force. If you wanted to orbit the earth from a tower at the north pole you would have to go from zero to orbital velocity using much energy before you fell into the atmosphere. Also since the northern polar ice is melting, your tower would sink into the ocean in about 100 years at the north pole.
I know of someone, hehe, that grabbed a marker from the tray under one of those plastic whiteboards and wrote in big letters: PERMANENT MARKER!. Then he looked at the marker he wrote it with - OMG! It WAS a permanent marker. This person I know of was very glad nobody was in the room to witness this aparently malicious, but truely accidental vandalism. The person discreetly left the room and 'booked it'.
There's lots of stuff more radioactive than U235 and Pu239, there's Pu238 ( I could have the atomic wights wrong for Pu ) that they use to power space probes. It's much more radioactive than the stuff they use in bombs. U235 is less radioactive than Pu 239. The cesium they use to irradiate food is even more radioactive than the Pu they use in space probes. But you couldn't make a bomb with it. It is so radioactive that you couldn't hold a critical mass of it together long enough for it all to chain-react and blow up.
If you want a nuclear boom, you need something that chain-reacts at critical mass slowly enough to stay together and make an efficient boom. U235 is the easiest thing anyone has found to make explode nuclearly. Shoot a U235 bullet into a slightly subcritical U235 nugget and kaboom.
Pu239 is harder to detonate. You need to wrap it in precise explosives. An amateur would get caught testing the boom boom stuff, and would prollly mess it up anyway.
Pu239 is prolly easier to come by than U235, but harder to blow up. Uranium ore can be mined by the amateur in most states and is easy to separate into the unenriched metal. This is not even illegal.
An amateur could teach themselves how to make a lil' reactor out of unenriched uranium and get their Pu239. It would help them to know what they are doing to get it to produce the most Pu239. ( making reactors is illegal - don't do it )
But an amateur will prolly never get a Pu239 bomb to detonate. They'd just get an embarrasing fizzle.
Better for them to use U235. It takes over 100 lbs of unenriched uranium to make one pound of U235 ( enriching uranium is illegal - don't do it ). Back in the day, enrichment was more of a pain in the butt, but now, I believe it is within the reach of a determined amateur. Aside from gas diffusion, the famous method of enrichment of olde, ( zeolites might make this easier nowadays, I dunno ) there is a method using dye lasers to selectively ionize U235 and then seperate it using an electric field. The lazers you need are big and expensive and it takes expertise to use them though.
There is one technique that seems within the realm of possibility for a garage fudderer. Like the Xenon Ion Drives NASA uses, unenriched uranium could be ionized and fired directionally. ( maybe an el-cheapo lazer that is not selective would work for ionizing ). If they built a vaccuum chamber around it, and had a target for the uranium atoms and an electric field to steer the uranium atoms, the most easily steered uranium atoms would be the U235. Maybe they could make a cascade of such things out of some old television sets and let them run for a few years to get the enriched metal.
Then they could threaten to blow up an uninabited section of desert in which no endangered spiecies live, and the army would clear hikers etc from the dangerous area around the test site for them. They might call the newspapers too, so there is a big crowd around to watch. They wouldn't want to be the only one there, it would be suspicious. Plus the party atmosphere might be seen as a plus.
Even though it is in the realm of possibility and would be very cool to see, don't do it. It is illegal, and you will probably die from radiation poisoning if you mess with nucular stuff. Plus it would take up all your time and money leaving you living in a junkyard with no friends and family, and a lousy job that you just have to pay for 'supplies'. You would start to become lonely and bitter and a bit crazy. If you ever did get your bomb finished you'd have no honey to drink beer with at the detonation. You might decide to use it on a more populated area in jealous spite. I might live there. I don't want to get blown up. So don't try to make a bomb. You would be happier and healthier and less likely to be in jail pursuing other more mundane things.
I've bought books that are downloadable for free from the Gutenburg Project because I can read them in bed and are easier on my eyes. A paperback costs 6 bucks. A e-book reader costs at least 50 bucks. Which would you leave on the floor in front of the toilet?
Authors need not be paranoid about publishing online. It will let lil' kids with $1.00 / week allowances read them online without a trip to the library, and someone that has never read one of the author's books decide if they like the story, but anyone that was going to buy the book still will, and it may cause someone who read the first chapter to become addicted enough to the story to buy the dead tree version to read the rest.