You create a pervasive environment for zero tolerance to bullying. You have regular assemblies and show kids what's expected, what's allowable, and what's absolutely unacceptable. You let kids know that if they are caught persecuting one of their peers, that they are going to receive the most gruesome of punishments, and make that punishment public and humiliating. Let everyone in school know that there are avenues to deal with upsets, grievances, and frustration, and that attacking another child is not only going to make their lives unpleasant, they will in fact make themselves the social outcast. Then enforce the rules like gravity. Nobody has a problem with gravity because it's perfectly consistent. If you do that, and you screw up, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
Bullying is an accepted behavior in this country. The statistics are mind boggling... and for every pretty girl that commits suicide, and makes the evening news, there are thousands and thousands of boys and girls who are emotionally scarred for life while school administrators look the other way, and school mates treat the entire behavior as some kind of entertainment in the round. I've seen kid throw bricks at other kids, I heard about a boy who was dragged into a garage and had his chest burned with a hot steam iron. Nobody was punished, in fact, it was all treated as "Kids will be kids."
Until we implement a zero tolerance for this kind of behavior, the results will sadly be predictable. This behavior is not Okay, it's not acceptable, and that the school doesn't actively prevent it from happening leaves it liable for incredible damages. Maybe if we sue administrators, it will become in their best interest to make certain this behavior isn't tolerated.
The problems surrounding an aging satellite service?
Don't get me wrong, this has a lot of upside, it's just important we have a good idea what the down side is, how significant it is, and what the expected impact on American business and transportation will be.
My question is this "If you're producing Hydrogen... aren't you also producing Oxygen at the very same time?" So here you are creating a combustible gas mixture in a stiochiometrically perfect balance to go BOOM-POW!!! The gases are created together, you can't easily separate them. You need to pump this straight into a combustion chamber or fuel cell, because it's ready, willing, and able to off the instant it's created. It cannot be transported anywhere.
I would be more interested in seeing a contact lens with a photonic array embedding in it. Small crystal lasers fashioned into arrays such that they can cause a beam to be projected in virtually any direction through interference. Such an array could scan the retina and create a display with potentially higher resolution that any standard technology today, and would be the perfect heart of immersive visual virtual reality. That would be augmentation worth talking about.
However even these American components are made more and more by people with Indian or Chinese surnames, either here on HB1 visas or fresh out of college, and a bunch off that money will go back to their parent countries (especially if and when these folk take their know how and experience home to start businesses there.) All the while cutting the labor market for American Engineers in their own country... Again American business aborts Americans, in favor of pushing the profit margin.
Yes there were idiotic businesses launched that should never have been, but ultimately what popped the DotCom bubble was the profound and fundamental shift from our government promoting investment into high tech (the Clinton years) and the monumental shift to promoting investment first in energy (oil, gas, and coal... remember Dubya flew to his campaign stops on an Enron jet), then real estate, and ultimately war (Mr. Cheney said we there were no good targets in Afghanistan... where the terrorists were... no easy way to get the oil there) so instead we started a war of convenience for our fearless leaders!
In California, I remember rolling black outs reeking havoc with the business of the company I worked for in 2001. All while Enron screwed with the Western U.S. and milked California for 18 billion dollars. Sure during the 90s Tech probably got an unfair amount of Government support. However, since then, it hasn't got the support it needs or deserves. Worse, interesting technologies and possibilities were obliterated needlessly. We all lost out, so many of my friends left tech, because for nearly 4 years, there simply wasn't the level of requisite work available to support the engineers that had previously existed.
Since then, Wall Street seems wholly dedicated to make 90% of America unemployed and unemployable. As business is forced by design to increase the revenue (often by shaving the labor pool), more and more is being done by fewer and fewer people. The term is "Jobless Recovery", and it seems to be the new reality presented to us by our corporate handlers. A different future would demand a radical shift in the way we now do things. From my point of view, it's seriously worth considering.
Look at Haiti and Chili. The recent earthquake in Chili resulted in 1,000 dead. A terrible tragedy to be sure, but in Haiti, an earthquake 500 time smaller killed a quarter of a million people. The key difference is regulation. In Chili, there are strict regulations on building. In Haiti virtually none at all. The only people who cry out loudest to have regulations removed are the ones who want to benefit most by their being gone. The ones who most need to be regulated. It is naive to think that people are driven purely by positive motives, and our fore-fathers wisely placed as many barriers to tyrannies as they possibly could in our government. The tyrants have been quietly removing those barriers, and it is time we slapped them hard, and put those barriers and more back where they belong.
HBO did a documentary about the Schmata Business... Rags to Riches to Rags. In it, they talked about the how little by little, the clothing industry has been gutted. Americans now wear less than 3% of their clothing made from American manufacturers. The same can be said of almost every major industry in this country. The American rust belt speaks for itself. The slow demise of the family farm. The growing prison labor population. We are becoming the new Brazil. Our middle class hangs in taters. Our currency is becoming less valuable than the metal and paper it's stamped on. We've been used, abused, and bled dry by cynical people who have lost sight of any future but their own.
Buy American because your investing in ourselves. Buy local, because your tax dollars serve your own community. Eat local, because food grown where you live can be managed, watched, and the cost on society and the environment to transport it are astronomically less. We should invite the world to participate in our economy, but we need to get the balance of trade managed. Our quality of life in America is falling so fast it scares anyone with an IQ larger than a day of the month more than a hunting trip with Dick Cheney. It's time to put our people first, our future first, our society first. To hell with Lottery Thinking, and getting yours at the expense of the rest, it's time we stopped business as usual and started making some hard choices, about what kind of future would be worth living in.
There are new technologies in the offing that will change the equation dramatically. Winds above 10,000 ft are profoundly stronger than winds found on the ground where the existing windmills live. By building wind kites or lighter than air wind generators, it would be possible to produce several times the nations current energy requirements. We need to overhaul the grid anyway... this isn't just a good idea, the existing system is antiquated and prone to greater and greater failure. If we need to perform critical maintenance anyway, we should be planning for the next century, and implementing infrastructure that supports environmentally benign technology, as well as the best and most effective use of our environment. Wind is a good match to that future. Carbon/Paper super batteries are a good match for that future. Dozens of bright new technologies which are only now just coming out of the lab, will be a brilliant match for that future. We need to pull that future to us now and we need to invest in ourselves while there is something worth investing in.
Re:Reminds me of broadband internet in the beginni
on
Gas Wants To Kill the Wind
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· Score: 3, Insightful
What you say is lovely... and for the most part, I totally agree. Sadly, in this "The best Government Money Can Buy" American reality, do you actually believe there is any way to actually pass anything resembling intelligent, progressive, meaningful legislation, when any bill that hurts someone with deep enough pockets can simply be killed by investing in the right representatives?
Our nation has just gone through a fiscal melt-down, a financial disaster of epic magnitude. If you look, and have to look, because not a single news source is talking about it, but if you look, you will find that Wall street, the Nations Banks, and all those greedy buggers who almost sunk the country, are now back at it, business as usual, in fact, they're pushing bad paper and derivatives harder and faster than ever before. Making insane bonuses. Taking the hundreds of billions of dollars we gave them to prop up the banks, and spending it on an army of folks in DC, fixing the laws, and ensuring that they won't have to stop playing the games they've become addicted to. Nothing has changed, other than nobody is talking about the new escalation, of the rate at which bankers are now digging the hole we will all eventually have to lay down in.
If our government can't stop the simplest and most obvious case of fiscal rape from happening, knowing full well, that when the dust settles, and the looting and pillaging is done, there will be nothing left of this country. What makes you think for even a moment, that the men and women who populate our centers of government, have either the will or the moral fortitude required to make a sane energy policy?
It is time for us to separate Church and State once and for all, and that must include the Church of the All Mighty Dollar. We need to remove the bankers from our system of government. We will support business. We will empower an environment in which business can flourish, but to do so, we must take the power for business to determine the future of being human away once and for all. Just as a child must be managed or it will eat candy until it is sick, business' only purpose is to make profit, and if it has to do that over the bleached bones of the society in which it exists, it will ultimately do just that (and in far too many cases has), it is up to us, to guide and control business, make it perform our bidding and not the other way. We need to eliminate the entity called Corporation. It was an interesting experiment, but if nothing else, it has proven that human beings have neither the requisite intelligence nor dignity as a species to manage such an entities without doing serious harm to the world and the life in it (including ourselves.)
I'm all for wind power, above and beyond gas and coal. I'm for technology which converts wind into forms of energy that can be stored and used later (perhaps hydrogen.) We need to come up with new ways to power the future without at the same time destroying it. At the same time, we need to overhaul this government, and we need to start by taking back our communication, and keeping the corporations out of our government, or it will not go well for any of us.
Sadly if our media is any measure at all, I believe our best and brightest are busy coming up with the better erection pill, and bigger and better economic models, to support people in betting, on the betting, on the betting, on the betting of whether or not the current bet's will make money.
You know I've heard this from people before, and it always amazes me that they don't get it. All you had to do, is do a Google search on "railguns and fussion", there are plenty of articles about the experimentation using railguns as a viable means of ignition. Of course if you need a citation, see below. As for bits of space debris, hitting the atmosphere at speeds of up to 60 miles per second (see persied or leonid meteor showers), they ablate, slow down, vaporize. They absolutely do become plasma and some of the larger pieces (bolides) explode with kiloton force. Read about the early nuclear test ban problems involving accidental false positives, caused by small nuclear sized explosions coming from meteorites with sufficient mass and momentum to cause fusion explosions. That and a quick look at the fireballs created by Shoemaker-Levy on Jupiter should put to rest and idea that meteors or comet can't cause a fusion reaction. The issue is simply one of velocity and momentum. A steel ball going 20 miles per second has both. Please be so good as the do the physics before making a knee-jerk assumption. Using E=1/2MV^2, I come up with a net kinetic energy of 14 million joules focused on a circular region less than an inch across. The entire collision takes place in less than a microsecond, and in that time the entire mass of the ball bearing is rendered into ionized plasma, as is a significant amount of the surface material of the target. The reason for raising incredible rare gases to hundreds of millions of degrees is to create an atomic velocity high enough to ensure that a signification number of collisions will occur in that rarefied gas to sustain a fusion reaction, fusion can occur at a much lower temperature. The incredibly hot dense soup of metal ions at the point of this impact are moving with incredible momentum, the material at the point of impact is hotter than the surface of the sun, hotter than lightening, fusion will certainly occur. Maybe not a huge amount, but some, and it will certainly make a very big mess of the target.
H. Kolm, Electromagnetic Accelerator Concepts, DOE Impact Fusion Workshop, Los Alamos , N.M. (Jul. 10-12, 1979), Available from NTIS, Springfield, Va. pp. 206-217 (1979)
Public schools are atrocious because the people in charge need a mass of workers just bright enough to do what they're told, certainly no brighter. A truly informed and enlightened electorate, would be difficult, maybe impossible to manage, and certainly, it would be most difficult to hold dominion over such a population. That is why the great mass of Americans isn't aware of what's happening. They swallow their predigested corporate sound bites, from the evening infotainment, and do precisely what they are told... we've been bought and sold for a very long time now.
We need to STRICTLY enforce the separation between church and state. We need to declare the Corporation, a religious movement of sorts, and remove it from having any contact whatsoever with our government. We need to strip our government down (clean out the beaurocracies, the courts, and dismantle the insanity that is now our executive branch) and put the checks and balances back in place. We need to teach Americans, to intelligently manage their own affairs, and stop looking for the government to fix their lives, because the more it does, the worse we all live. The government is there to take care of things that individual people cannot. That said, we need to take our lives back, and use the amazing new resources at our fingertips, to manage our liberty, our privacy, our dignity as human beings, and stop this steady erosion of all that we most require to live a life worth living.
Excuse me, that wasn't the terrorists... Hundreds of thousands of Americans protested in streets all over the nation, demanding Washington stop the action, think out a logic plan of response, and deal with a small group of criminals, who represented a small but violent organization, responsible for blowing up a group of buildings and killing several thousand people, in one city, in one state in this country. Instead, our government, and corporate friends of that government, saw this as an opportunity to whip the nation into a frenzy, shake a scary, scary Iraqi scarcrow at all of us, and go "booga, booga, booga!!!" The majority of good Americans, who have been trained since Kindergarten to trust and obey their government without so much as a single contemplative neuron firing, swallowed the WMD swill provided them without so much as a proper belch, and did as they were told. While these cynical, evil men sold out their country, the world at large, and for all intents and purposes, the foreseeable future. The mess we see today is that aftermath of the party these pigs had at our expense.
Tonight on 60 Minutes, there was a story, about a planes being flown by Blackwater. The planes flown by Blackwater had developed a reputation for being piloted by folks who were carelessness, reckless, unprofessional, and dangerously under-skilled. One of these planes crashed into a mountain in Afghanistan. A witness, mentioned that while speaking with the CEO of the company, the man in charge was utterly dumbfounded... he said "Did you listen to the black box recorder? The idiot flight crew was screwing around, joking about TV shows, then WHAM, flew straight into a mountain." The widow of an Officer being transported and who died in the crash, began proceedings to sue Blackwater... Blackwater never even said we're sorry. Whoops, it seems we screwed the pooch??? What they did do, was tell her, "Because we're contracted by the government, we are the government, therefore you can't sue us." Then they said "Since the accident happened in Afghanistan, you have to deal with us under Afghani law (which states business owners can't be held liable for gross negligence.) Then finally they said "There is no evidence that we did anything wrong, and in fact it was the Army Officer on the plane who was responsible for the crash... he must have done something to precipitate the disaster." Since then there have been more incidents of near disasters, and just this week, the Army awarded Blackwater with new and extended flight contracts. If this doesn't tell you the whole damn thing sucks like a Dyson Upright Vacuum, you are heavily medicated, or have serious perceptual limitations.
Railguns are amazing things... You just have to be careful not to vaporize your projectile. It was calculated that if they could get a one ounce steel ball bearing up to a speed of 20 miles per second, it would cause a fusion reaction on impact with relatively stationery object. I was working in a large industrial machine in late the 70s, I was down in the power section of a massive ring roller. The thing occupied four stories, one above ground and three stories underground, at the very bottom floor was the power system. There were three huge copper bus bars that fed into a massive 2000 amp, 1760 volt three phase breaker switch. We were working electronic and hydraulic systems, and had the false floor pulled up, and some hydraulic mechanic dropped an 8 inch adjustable wrench across the bus bars. There was a mind numbing BOOM, accompanied by a blue green flash you could almost see through the back of your head, and when the dust and debris settled, there was a quarter inch of roasted wrench sticking out of the concrete ceiling. This place was noted for really exciting industrial accidents.
So somewhere between the grotesque acts of a self involved egomaniac, and the presumption by our government, that we are all crooks and thieves desperately looking for new and inventive ways to shirk our responsibilities as citizens, there is plenty of blame to go around. The laws precipitating this tragedy represent the kind of close minded, distrustful, survivalistic thinking that has lead this nation to the very brink of financial collapse, global despotism, and the obliteration of the U.S. middle class. The reporting of this sad incident by our attention deficit, corporate controlled media, seems utterly unable to deal with any thought more complex than the 30 second sound bite, designed to peddle the party line... i.e. anyone who doesn't do precisely what our corporate owners tells us to do, is a terrorist. By this thinking Ganghi was terrorist, Martin Luther King was a terrorist, Nelson Mandela is a terrorist, and our founding fathers were terrorists one and all. Humanity does not grow or achieve greatness by towing the party line. Any party line.
Screw them... Find a happy, lucrative, vertical market... claim you business is widget polishing (or whatever), and that your software engineering solution is just an adjunct to your primary business. Mayhaps sprinkle a little diversification in your project, just to keep the audit-drones guessing, add a couple part-time contractors from Mesopotamia at $3/hr. just to nail down any wiggly bits about you being the only employee, and VOILA', cakewalk all the way to the IRS auditor's office smiling, while you bill your clients with impunity!
Point is, do what other corporations do. Work the system. Before you incorporate, sit down with your business lawyer, figure out where the holes in the law are, place you business squarely in the hole (a good sized legal hole should leave you plenty of wiggle room), PUBLICLY MAKE THAT HOLE A PART OF YOUR BUSINESS PLAN, AND LET THE IRS KNOW IN ADVANCE... do all this above board in plain view (transparency is your friend), and let the guys in the government KNOW beyond a shadow of a doubt, you're operating in good faith, in fact, get to know your local IRS Office, Your Federal Small Business Office, and Your State Small Business resources. Get on a first name basis with all these guys, and make certain you have friend inside the system backing you rather than folks who you will need to plan on having all in one place 10 years from now, so you can crash your plane into them.
You don't have to love them (though that wouldn't hurt), and you don't have to think it's fair (especially when it ain't)... but only a fool sits around cursing the unfairness of gravity. Figure it out, and let the X-Games commence.
Slashdot Mirror
Big deal, his girlfriend's a toaster... Hello!!! It's slashdot...
Please be so kind as to add a vacuum gauge to the Guardian Angel, so I can at least tell in advance how much it's sucking on any given day...
You have a great future here on /.
You create a pervasive environment for zero tolerance to bullying. You have regular assemblies and show kids what's expected, what's allowable, and what's absolutely unacceptable. You let kids know that if they are caught persecuting one of their peers, that they are going to receive the most gruesome of punishments, and make that punishment public and humiliating. Let everyone in school know that there are avenues to deal with upsets, grievances, and frustration, and that attacking another child is not only going to make their lives unpleasant, they will in fact make themselves the social outcast. Then enforce the rules like gravity. Nobody has a problem with gravity because it's perfectly consistent. If you do that, and you screw up, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
Bullying is an accepted behavior in this country. The statistics are mind boggling... and for every pretty girl that commits suicide, and makes the evening news, there are thousands and thousands of boys and girls who are emotionally scarred for life while school administrators look the other way, and school mates treat the entire behavior as some kind of entertainment in the round. I've seen kid throw bricks at other kids, I heard about a boy who was dragged into a garage and had his chest burned with a hot steam iron. Nobody was punished, in fact, it was all treated as "Kids will be kids."
Until we implement a zero tolerance for this kind of behavior, the results will sadly be predictable. This behavior is not Okay, it's not acceptable, and that the school doesn't actively prevent it from happening leaves it liable for incredible damages. Maybe if we sue administrators, it will become in their best interest to make certain this behavior isn't tolerated.
Because when you give high fructose corn syrup to a politician, he raises taxes...
So exactly how prone will this system be to;
Don't get me wrong, this has a lot of upside, it's just important we have a good idea what the down side is, how significant it is, and what the expected impact on American business and transportation will be.
My question is this "If you're producing Hydrogen... aren't you also producing Oxygen at the very same time?" So here you are creating a combustible gas mixture in a stiochiometrically perfect balance to go BOOM-POW!!! The gases are created together, you can't easily separate them. You need to pump this straight into a combustion chamber or fuel cell, because it's ready, willing, and able to off the instant it's created. It cannot be transported anywhere.
Au Contraire, I'm certain the /. readers have already taken this problem into their own hands...
I would be more interested in seeing a contact lens with a photonic array embedding in it. Small crystal lasers fashioned into arrays such that they can cause a beam to be projected in virtually any direction through interference. Such an array could scan the retina and create a display with potentially higher resolution that any standard technology today, and would be the perfect heart of immersive visual virtual reality. That would be augmentation worth talking about.
However even these American components are made more and more by people with Indian or Chinese surnames, either here on HB1 visas or fresh out of college, and a bunch off that money will go back to their parent countries (especially if and when these folk take their know how and experience home to start businesses there.) All the while cutting the labor market for American Engineers in their own country... Again American business aborts Americans, in favor of pushing the profit margin.
What part of "It's Slashdot"...
Yes there were idiotic businesses launched that should never have been, but ultimately what popped the DotCom bubble was the profound and fundamental shift from our government promoting investment into high tech (the Clinton years) and the monumental shift to promoting investment first in energy (oil, gas, and coal... remember Dubya flew to his campaign stops on an Enron jet), then real estate, and ultimately war (Mr. Cheney said we there were no good targets in Afghanistan... where the terrorists were... no easy way to get the oil there) so instead we started a war of convenience for our fearless leaders!
In California, I remember rolling black outs reeking havoc with the business of the company I worked for in 2001. All while Enron screwed with the Western U.S. and milked California for 18 billion dollars. Sure during the 90s Tech probably got an unfair amount of Government support. However, since then, it hasn't got the support it needs or deserves. Worse, interesting technologies and possibilities were obliterated needlessly. We all lost out, so many of my friends left tech, because for nearly 4 years, there simply wasn't the level of requisite work available to support the engineers that had previously existed.
Since then, Wall Street seems wholly dedicated to make 90% of America unemployed and unemployable. As business is forced by design to increase the revenue (often by shaving the labor pool), more and more is being done by fewer and fewer people. The term is "Jobless Recovery", and it seems to be the new reality presented to us by our corporate handlers. A different future would demand a radical shift in the way we now do things. From my point of view, it's seriously worth considering.
It had PEEK and POKE... what else do you need :-)
Look at Haiti and Chili. The recent earthquake in Chili resulted in 1,000 dead. A terrible tragedy to be sure, but in Haiti, an earthquake 500 time smaller killed a quarter of a million people. The key difference is regulation. In Chili, there are strict regulations on building. In Haiti virtually none at all. The only people who cry out loudest to have regulations removed are the ones who want to benefit most by their being gone. The ones who most need to be regulated. It is naive to think that people are driven purely by positive motives, and our fore-fathers wisely placed as many barriers to tyrannies as they possibly could in our government. The tyrants have been quietly removing those barriers, and it is time we slapped them hard, and put those barriers and more back where they belong.
HBO did a documentary about the Schmata Business... Rags to Riches to Rags. In it, they talked about the how little by little, the clothing industry has been gutted. Americans now wear less than 3% of their clothing made from American manufacturers. The same can be said of almost every major industry in this country. The American rust belt speaks for itself. The slow demise of the family farm. The growing prison labor population. We are becoming the new Brazil. Our middle class hangs in taters. Our currency is becoming less valuable than the metal and paper it's stamped on. We've been used, abused, and bled dry by cynical people who have lost sight of any future but their own.
Buy American because your investing in ourselves. Buy local, because your tax dollars serve your own community. Eat local, because food grown where you live can be managed, watched, and the cost on society and the environment to transport it are astronomically less. We should invite the world to participate in our economy, but we need to get the balance of trade managed. Our quality of life in America is falling so fast it scares anyone with an IQ larger than a day of the month more than a hunting trip with Dick Cheney. It's time to put our people first, our future first, our society first. To hell with Lottery Thinking, and getting yours at the expense of the rest, it's time we stopped business as usual and started making some hard choices, about what kind of future would be worth living in.
There are new technologies in the offing that will change the equation dramatically. Winds above 10,000 ft are profoundly stronger than winds found on the ground where the existing windmills live. By building wind kites or lighter than air wind generators, it would be possible to produce several times the nations current energy requirements. We need to overhaul the grid anyway... this isn't just a good idea, the existing system is antiquated and prone to greater and greater failure. If we need to perform critical maintenance anyway, we should be planning for the next century, and implementing infrastructure that supports environmentally benign technology, as well as the best and most effective use of our environment. Wind is a good match to that future. Carbon/Paper super batteries are a good match for that future. Dozens of bright new technologies which are only now just coming out of the lab, will be a brilliant match for that future. We need to pull that future to us now and we need to invest in ourselves while there is something worth investing in.
What you say is lovely... and for the most part, I totally agree. Sadly, in this "The best Government Money Can Buy" American reality, do you actually believe there is any way to actually pass anything resembling intelligent, progressive, meaningful legislation, when any bill that hurts someone with deep enough pockets can simply be killed by investing in the right representatives?
Our nation has just gone through a fiscal melt-down, a financial disaster of epic magnitude. If you look, and have to look, because not a single news source is talking about it, but if you look, you will find that Wall street, the Nations Banks, and all those greedy buggers who almost sunk the country, are now back at it, business as usual, in fact, they're pushing bad paper and derivatives harder and faster than ever before. Making insane bonuses. Taking the hundreds of billions of dollars we gave them to prop up the banks, and spending it on an army of folks in DC, fixing the laws, and ensuring that they won't have to stop playing the games they've become addicted to. Nothing has changed, other than nobody is talking about the new escalation, of the rate at which bankers are now digging the hole we will all eventually have to lay down in.
If our government can't stop the simplest and most obvious case of fiscal rape from happening, knowing full well, that when the dust settles, and the looting and pillaging is done, there will be nothing left of this country. What makes you think for even a moment, that the men and women who populate our centers of government, have either the will or the moral fortitude required to make a sane energy policy?
It is time for us to separate Church and State once and for all, and that must include the Church of the All Mighty Dollar. We need to remove the bankers from our system of government. We will support business. We will empower an environment in which business can flourish, but to do so, we must take the power for business to determine the future of being human away once and for all. Just as a child must be managed or it will eat candy until it is sick, business' only purpose is to make profit, and if it has to do that over the bleached bones of the society in which it exists, it will ultimately do just that (and in far too many cases has), it is up to us, to guide and control business, make it perform our bidding and not the other way. We need to eliminate the entity called Corporation. It was an interesting experiment, but if nothing else, it has proven that human beings have neither the requisite intelligence nor dignity as a species to manage such an entities without doing serious harm to the world and the life in it (including ourselves.)
I'm all for wind power, above and beyond gas and coal. I'm for technology which converts wind into forms of energy that can be stored and used later (perhaps hydrogen.) We need to come up with new ways to power the future without at the same time destroying it. At the same time, we need to overhaul this government, and we need to start by taking back our communication, and keeping the corporations out of our government, or it will not go well for any of us.
Sadly if our media is any measure at all, I believe our best and brightest are busy coming up with the better erection pill, and bigger and better economic models, to support people in betting, on the betting, on the betting, on the betting of whether or not the current bet's will make money.
You know I've heard this from people before, and it always amazes me that they don't get it. All you had to do, is do a Google search on "railguns and fussion", there are plenty of articles about the experimentation using railguns as a viable means of ignition. Of course if you need a citation, see below. As for bits of space debris, hitting the atmosphere at speeds of up to 60 miles per second (see persied or leonid meteor showers), they ablate, slow down, vaporize. They absolutely do become plasma and some of the larger pieces (bolides) explode with kiloton force. Read about the early nuclear test ban problems involving accidental false positives, caused by small nuclear sized explosions coming from meteorites with sufficient mass and momentum to cause fusion explosions. That and a quick look at the fireballs created by Shoemaker-Levy on Jupiter should put to rest and idea that meteors or comet can't cause a fusion reaction. The issue is simply one of velocity and momentum. A steel ball going 20 miles per second has both. Please be so good as the do the physics before making a knee-jerk assumption. Using E=1/2MV^2, I come up with a net kinetic energy of 14 million joules focused on a circular region less than an inch across. The entire collision takes place in less than a microsecond, and in that time the entire mass of the ball bearing is rendered into ionized plasma, as is a significant amount of the surface material of the target. The reason for raising incredible rare gases to hundreds of millions of degrees is to create an atomic velocity high enough to ensure that a signification number of collisions will occur in that rarefied gas to sustain a fusion reaction, fusion can occur at a much lower temperature. The incredibly hot dense soup of metal ions at the point of this impact are moving with incredible momentum, the material at the point of impact is hotter than the surface of the sun, hotter than lightening, fusion will certainly occur. Maybe not a huge amount, but some, and it will certainly make a very big mess of the target.
H. Kolm, Electromagnetic Accelerator Concepts, DOE Impact Fusion Workshop, Los Alamos , N.M. (Jul. 10-12, 1979), Available from NTIS, Springfield, Va. pp. 206-217 (1979)
Public schools are atrocious because the people in charge need a mass of workers just bright enough to do what they're told, certainly no brighter. A truly informed and enlightened electorate, would be difficult, maybe impossible to manage, and certainly, it would be most difficult to hold dominion over such a population. That is why the great mass of Americans isn't aware of what's happening. They swallow their predigested corporate sound bites, from the evening infotainment, and do precisely what they are told... we've been bought and sold for a very long time now.
We need to STRICTLY enforce the separation between church and state. We need to declare the Corporation, a religious movement of sorts, and remove it from having any contact whatsoever with our government. We need to strip our government down (clean out the beaurocracies, the courts, and dismantle the insanity that is now our executive branch) and put the checks and balances back in place. We need to teach Americans, to intelligently manage their own affairs, and stop looking for the government to fix their lives, because the more it does, the worse we all live. The government is there to take care of things that individual people cannot. That said, we need to take our lives back, and use the amazing new resources at our fingertips, to manage our liberty, our privacy, our dignity as human beings, and stop this steady erosion of all that we most require to live a life worth living.
Excuse me, that wasn't the terrorists... Hundreds of thousands of Americans protested in streets all over the nation, demanding Washington stop the action, think out a logic plan of response, and deal with a small group of criminals, who represented a small but violent organization, responsible for blowing up a group of buildings and killing several thousand people, in one city, in one state in this country. Instead, our government, and corporate friends of that government, saw this as an opportunity to whip the nation into a frenzy, shake a scary, scary Iraqi scarcrow at all of us, and go "booga, booga, booga!!!" The majority of good Americans, who have been trained since Kindergarten to trust and obey their government without so much as a single contemplative neuron firing, swallowed the WMD swill provided them without so much as a proper belch, and did as they were told. While these cynical, evil men sold out their country, the world at large, and for all intents and purposes, the foreseeable future. The mess we see today is that aftermath of the party these pigs had at our expense.
Tonight on 60 Minutes, there was a story, about a planes being flown by Blackwater. The planes flown by Blackwater had developed a reputation for being piloted by folks who were carelessness, reckless, unprofessional, and dangerously under-skilled. One of these planes crashed into a mountain in Afghanistan. A witness, mentioned that while speaking with the CEO of the company, the man in charge was utterly dumbfounded... he said "Did you listen to the black box recorder? The idiot flight crew was screwing around, joking about TV shows, then WHAM, flew straight into a mountain." The widow of an Officer being transported and who died in the crash, began proceedings to sue Blackwater... Blackwater never even said we're sorry. Whoops, it seems we screwed the pooch??? What they did do, was tell her, "Because we're contracted by the government, we are the government, therefore you can't sue us." Then they said "Since the accident happened in Afghanistan, you have to deal with us under Afghani law (which states business owners can't be held liable for gross negligence.) Then finally they said "There is no evidence that we did anything wrong, and in fact it was the Army Officer on the plane who was responsible for the crash... he must have done something to precipitate the disaster." Since then there have been more incidents of near disasters, and just this week, the Army awarded Blackwater with new and extended flight contracts. If this doesn't tell you the whole damn thing sucks like a Dyson Upright Vacuum, you are heavily medicated, or have serious perceptual limitations.
Railguns are amazing things... You just have to be careful not to vaporize your projectile. It was calculated that if they could get a one ounce steel ball bearing up to a speed of 20 miles per second, it would cause a fusion reaction on impact with relatively stationery object. I was working in a large industrial machine in late the 70s, I was down in the power section of a massive ring roller. The thing occupied four stories, one above ground and three stories underground, at the very bottom floor was the power system. There were three huge copper bus bars that fed into a massive 2000 amp, 1760 volt three phase breaker switch. We were working electronic and hydraulic systems, and had the false floor pulled up, and some hydraulic mechanic dropped an 8 inch adjustable wrench across the bus bars. There was a mind numbing BOOM, accompanied by a blue green flash you could almost see through the back of your head, and when the dust and debris settled, there was a quarter inch of roasted wrench sticking out of the concrete ceiling. This place was noted for really exciting industrial accidents.
So somewhere between the grotesque acts of a self involved egomaniac, and the presumption by our government, that we are all crooks and thieves desperately looking for new and inventive ways to shirk our responsibilities as citizens, there is plenty of blame to go around. The laws precipitating this tragedy represent the kind of close minded, distrustful, survivalistic thinking that has lead this nation to the very brink of financial collapse, global despotism, and the obliteration of the U.S. middle class. The reporting of this sad incident by our attention deficit, corporate controlled media, seems utterly unable to deal with any thought more complex than the 30 second sound bite, designed to peddle the party line... i.e. anyone who doesn't do precisely what our corporate owners tells us to do, is a terrorist. By this thinking Ganghi was terrorist, Martin Luther King was a terrorist, Nelson Mandela is a terrorist, and our founding fathers were terrorists one and all. Humanity does not grow or achieve greatness by towing the party line. Any party line.
Screw them... Find a happy, lucrative, vertical market... claim you business is widget polishing (or whatever), and that your software engineering solution is just an adjunct to your primary business. Mayhaps sprinkle a little diversification in your project, just to keep the audit-drones guessing, add a couple part-time contractors from Mesopotamia at $3/hr. just to nail down any wiggly bits about you being the only employee, and VOILA', cakewalk all the way to the IRS auditor's office smiling, while you bill your clients with impunity!
Point is, do what other corporations do. Work the system. Before you incorporate, sit down with your business lawyer, figure out where the holes in the law are, place you business squarely in the hole (a good sized legal hole should leave you plenty of wiggle room), PUBLICLY MAKE THAT HOLE A PART OF YOUR BUSINESS PLAN, AND LET THE IRS KNOW IN ADVANCE... do all this above board in plain view (transparency is your friend), and let the guys in the government KNOW beyond a shadow of a doubt, you're operating in good faith, in fact, get to know your local IRS Office, Your Federal Small Business Office, and Your State Small Business resources. Get on a first name basis with all these guys, and make certain you have friend inside the system backing you rather than folks who you will need to plan on having all in one place 10 years from now, so you can crash your plane into them.
You don't have to love them (though that wouldn't hurt), and you don't have to think it's fair (especially when it ain't)... but only a fool sits around cursing the unfairness of gravity. Figure it out, and let the X-Games commence.