At least, not in general. Most states only cover about 60% of the costs of building and maintaining roads through user fees (gas taxes, tolls, registration fees). The rest is subsidized from general revenue. In VA, it's killing us - the money from general revenue isn't there anymore, so VDOT has an enormous backlog of repair work that just isn't getting done.
but that road use tax money should be spend on roads, but is instead diverted to other needs.
That is ridiculous. The problem isn't that gas taxes, etc, are being diverted to other uses - it's that general revenue is being diverted to building and maintaining roads. Per the University of Iowa: "On average, states raise 38% of their road funds from fuel taxes and 22% from vehicle registration fees." So only about 60% of the cost of roads comes from actual user fees. The rest is subsidized from general revenue.
... I tend to agree that it's rather ludicrous for Argentina to be pressing a claim to these islands, when the only inhabitants since the dawn of time have been British. But the story about Thatcher threatening to nuke Buenos Aires is almost certainly bogus. It's a third hand quote that makes almost no sense - she was going to blackmail France by threatening to nuke Argentina? WTF? It would be like trying to blackmail the US by threatening to nuke Malaysia. This whole thing is based on a guy who's trying to profit from his connection with Mitterrand, and needs some sizzle to sell his book. Another hint: if you read about it in Newsmax, better take it with a grain of salt.
An Exocet is not a very big missile. If they had hit her, they might have prevented flight operations on Invincible for a while, but I seriously doubt she would have sunk.
Per the link, Thatcher told Mitterrand that unless he provided "codes to disable the Exocet", she was going to nuke Buenos Aires. Ok, two things 1) does anyone think that Mitterrand's response would have been anything other than "So what?" Threatening to nuke a third party to whom France has no particular connection does not strike me as particularly effective blackmail. Especially considering that it would have made Thatcher look like a mass murderer. Even if she had said this, which I doubt, it would have been an obvious and not very effective bluff. 2) Is there any evidence at all that export versions of Exocet even HAD "kill codes"? I doubt this too. You'd have to send them over the air, you'd have very little time to do it, and if the Argentines so much as ever opened up a missile and examined it, they'd have found a mysterious radio system inside the missile.
However, if your goal is to indiscriminatingly kill people it is very easy to do with off the shelf components, if you are so inclined.
Probably true. But it's even EASIER to just build a big bomb in a truck and just drive it up to your target. Very few buildings are hardened against this kind of thing. The point is that it's sort of unlikely for a terrorist to go to the trouble to build a homemade cruise missile (or whatever) when you can make a kamikaze weapon that's more effective and cheaper. This implies (at least to me) that there's still some use in making military grade hardware difficult and expensive to obtain - if building homemade cruise missiles suddenly became cheap and easy, then it would become nearly impossible to defend buildings like US Embassies overseas.
Sad to say, NASA, for the most part has become another government bureaucracy.
NASA has always been "another government bureaucracy". The difference between the 60's and now: in the 60's, we had 1) a clear goal to aim for, and 2) sufficient funding to achieve the goal. In recent years we've had neither of these things... and that's not NASA's fault, it's the fault of Congress and the President.
And regarding the space elevator: the laughter has died down, and been replaced with... nothing. That's because there's nothing to talk about. We still don't have the technology to produce carbon nanofibers in anything like the lengths that would be required to build it. Nor do we know if other technical obstacles to building one can be overcome. Nor do we have even the slightest idea what it would cost (and won't until we solve the first two issues). And if you don't know the cost, you can't evaluate whether it's more cost effective than just using rockets. All of which means there's no basis to proceed with a project.
The upper stage was unpowered - it was just dead weight that was meant to simulate the mass, moment, strength, etc; of the real first stage. It wasn't meant to do anything but essentially fall off the booster at the end of the flight.
A cyberterror event like a power or communications failure could result in hundreds of deaths, but there's nothing to focus on.
What's more, it probably wouldn't even become APPARENT that the event was caused by a "terrorist" until long after the fact. That really limits the utility of this kind of thing from the "terrorist's" standpoint - it's hard to terrorize people when they don't even realize you've done something.
Isn't it true that the main threat from the Chinese, et al, is industrial espionage? I find it very, very difficult to believe that it's even possible to do things like bring down power plants, screw around with dams, etc, over the internet.
Air traffic control and power grids are inherently networked operations.
"Networked" != "accessible via the internet". While it's possible to break into some of these kinds of networks, it generally requires 1) physical access to a terminal (for wired networks) or 2) at least physical proximity to the system (for wireless networks).
I think it's highly, highly unlikely that bad guys in China or Pakistan or whatever are going to be able to break into systems controlling big, dangerous infrastructure like this. Your worst threat (as always) is almost certainly the disgruntled employee or former employee.
Iraq had some things that US leaders were uncomfortable with, therefore they deserve to be invaded.
Actually, the decision process went more like this: 1) Iraq deserves to be invaded. 2) How can we justify invading them? 3)I know, let's say they have nukes!
Yes, the book is dumb. But what's even dumber is putting out strawman statements like this. Of course, the book isn't advocating "killing and eating all the animals". It's about getting rid of our pets. "Pets" != "all animals".
... but on the other hand, if we 1) ate less meat as a whole, and got rid of our dogs, we'd solve both the problem of resource consumption by the dogs and what to do about the offal. There wouldn't be as much. Or 2) if we ate the same amount of meat as before, we could cook the offal into liquid fuel - it's being done with turkey guts in North Carolina or somewhere. Yeah, I know - realistically, dogs are the least of our problems.
1) Lightbulbs: what on earth are you talking about? No one is coming into your house and demanding that you replace STILL WORKING incandescents. They're just not going to be making them any more. And that's because CFLs really, no kidding, do save energy and money over their lifetime. LEDs I'm sure will be great... when they become widely available... which they aren't yet.
2) Grocery bags. The replacement of paper bags with plastic had nothing to do with being "green" and everything to do with the fact that it cost the grocery stores less to supply them. And if you don't like the sturdy, for sale, "green bags"... don't buy them. The ordinary bags are still available everywhere I've shopped.
3) Solar hot water. Nothing to say here but [citation needed].
4) Water. Might come as a shock to you, but the places where you can put new reservoirs without serious economic impact are pretty limited. The people and businesses who own property within the proposed basin are going to be annoyed, for starters. But sure, we could do better with gray water recycling, etc. On the whole, I'm not sure what your point is here.
Final paragraph is probably the smartest - yes, population control is the real answer here. But in the meantime, here we all are... all 6.5B of us. I think we need do something in the meantime.
Finally, geez, rant much? I think it's rather ironic that someone who opens up his post being annoyed with people "losing their fucking minds" when environmentalism is mentioned... promptly loses his mind in the body of the post.
Note that animals don't thrive on CO2, and that fairly small shifts in the percentage of environmental CO2 cause nausea, confusion, and panic.
While I agree with the spirit of your post, CO2 concentrations have to be much, much higher than what we're talking about for toxic effects to become evident. We're worried about atmospheric CO2 concentrations in the hundreds of PPM range. You need concentrations as high as 1 or 2 percent before you can even notice any toxic effects. But overall, yes - atmospheric CO2 is a big problem.
All I can figure is that they are doing it for the shock value.
You nailed there. If they were really interested in helping people reduce their carbon footprint, they'd recommend things like: getting a smaller car and driving it less. Getting a smaller house and making sure it's very well insulated. Upgrade heating and cooling systems to high-efficiency models. Eating less meat (especially feedlot fed beef and pork). That kind of thing. But that wouldn't create any "buzz", would it.
Your dog does not give back in fertilizer all the extra energy used to get that food on your plate.
Not to mention that 1) approximately 99.99999 percent of all dog waste is either landfilled or just left lying on the ground and 2) dog waste is not suitable for use as manure, as it can carry parasites and other disease organisms that would contaminate human food.
I'm not a big fan of the whole "let's just eat our dogs" thing either, but some of the criticisms of it are kinda dumb.
everyone seems to forgetting the impact of all the supplements that they have to take, because the human body is evolved as an omnivore and thus needs various things we cannot get from a vegetable diet.
IANAV (I am not a vegan/vegetarian). But this is a bit much. About the only nutrient you really can't get in sufficient quantity from a vegan diet is B12. And I'm pretty sure you could provide a lifetime supply of B12 to the entire planet for the environmental cost of a single year's consumption of meat.
One of the sillier posts I've seen on Slashdot in a while. Developing a new drug requires doing many, many trials to see which compounds might work, then doing many, many more trials to make sure they don't actually kill the patient or induce intolerable side effects. The end result is a proven process to create a drug that you can be reasonably sure is safe and effective. Copying this drug just means implementing the already proven process. How could this not be cheaper? If it wasn't, there'd be no generic drug industry.
Look, I'm no big fan of the patent system in the US, but making uninformed statements like this are doing nothing to help the situation.
... and I think it supports my theory as well as it does yours. The Mississippi facility isn't built yet, so you'd have all the costs associated with building a new factory. The Thiokol facility is already more or less paid for. Sure, Orrin Hatch probably went to some effort to retain the work, but don't forget that Mississippi has senators too.
Great post. Just curious. Is there some actual physical reason you can think of preventing them from making SRM's in Florida so they could make them any size? I'm assuming the actual answer is Orrin Hatch, extremely powerful Senator from Utah, will kill any program where the SRM's aren't built in Utah and is probably supporting Ares precisely because it is keeping jobs in his state, even if its a horrible engineering choice.
While it could be true that Orrin Hatch forced construction in Utah, I tend to doubt it. I think it's much more likely that the infrastructure to produce huge rocket motors is mostly concentrated with Thiokol, and their plant happens to be in Utah. You could build such motors in Florida... but you'd have to build a new rocket motor factory there first, which would be a pretty big cost.
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At least, not in general. Most states only cover about 60% of the costs of building and maintaining roads through user fees (gas taxes, tolls, registration fees). The rest is subsidized from general revenue. In VA, it's killing us - the money from general revenue isn't there anymore, so VDOT has an enormous backlog of repair work that just isn't getting done.
That is ridiculous. The problem isn't that gas taxes, etc, are being diverted to other uses - it's that general revenue is being diverted to building and maintaining roads. Per the University of Iowa: "On average, states raise 38% of their road funds from fuel taxes and 22% from vehicle registration fees." So only about 60% of the cost of roads comes from actual user fees. The rest is subsidized from general revenue.
... I tend to agree that it's rather ludicrous for Argentina to be pressing a claim to these islands, when the only inhabitants since the dawn of time have been British. But the story about Thatcher threatening to nuke Buenos Aires is almost certainly bogus. It's a third hand quote that makes almost no sense - she was going to blackmail France by threatening to nuke Argentina? WTF? It would be like trying to blackmail the US by threatening to nuke Malaysia. This whole thing is based on a guy who's trying to profit from his connection with Mitterrand, and needs some sizzle to sell his book. Another hint: if you read about it in Newsmax, better take it with a grain of salt.
An Exocet is not a very big missile. If they had hit her, they might have prevented flight operations on Invincible for a while, but I seriously doubt she would have sunk.
Per the link, Thatcher told Mitterrand that unless he provided "codes to disable the Exocet", she was going to nuke Buenos Aires. Ok, two things 1) does anyone think that Mitterrand's response would have been anything other than "So what?" Threatening to nuke a third party to whom France has no particular connection does not strike me as particularly effective blackmail. Especially considering that it would have made Thatcher look like a mass murderer. Even if she had said this, which I doubt, it would have been an obvious and not very effective bluff. 2) Is there any evidence at all that export versions of Exocet even HAD "kill codes"? I doubt this too. You'd have to send them over the air, you'd have very little time to do it, and if the Argentines so much as ever opened up a missile and examined it, they'd have found a mysterious radio system inside the missile.
I think the linked argument is probably BS.
Probably true. But it's even EASIER to just build a big bomb in a truck and just drive it up to your target. Very few buildings are hardened against this kind of thing. The point is that it's sort of unlikely for a terrorist to go to the trouble to build a homemade cruise missile (or whatever) when you can make a kamikaze weapon that's more effective and cheaper. This implies (at least to me) that there's still some use in making military grade hardware difficult and expensive to obtain - if building homemade cruise missiles suddenly became cheap and easy, then it would become nearly impossible to defend buildings like US Embassies overseas.
NASA has always been "another government bureaucracy". The difference between the 60's and now: in the 60's, we had 1) a clear goal to aim for, and 2) sufficient funding to achieve the goal. In recent years we've had neither of these things... and that's not NASA's fault, it's the fault of Congress and the President.
And regarding the space elevator: the laughter has died down, and been replaced with... nothing. That's because there's nothing to talk about. We still don't have the technology to produce carbon nanofibers in anything like the lengths that would be required to build it. Nor do we know if other technical obstacles to building one can be overcome. Nor do we have even the slightest idea what it would cost (and won't until we solve the first two issues). And if you don't know the cost, you can't evaluate whether it's more cost effective than just using rockets. All of which means there's no basis to proceed with a project.
The upper stage was unpowered - it was just dead weight that was meant to simulate the mass, moment, strength, etc; of the real first stage. It wasn't meant to do anything but essentially fall off the booster at the end of the flight.
Why is this a troll? Pointing out an area where Windows is actually superior to something else shouldn't get modded down.
What's more, it probably wouldn't even become APPARENT that the event was caused by a "terrorist" until long after the fact. That really limits the utility of this kind of thing from the "terrorist's" standpoint - it's hard to terrorize people when they don't even realize you've done something.
Isn't it true that the main threat from the Chinese, et al, is industrial espionage? I find it very, very difficult to believe that it's even possible to do things like bring down power plants, screw around with dams, etc, over the internet.
"Networked" != "accessible via the internet". While it's possible to break into some of these kinds of networks, it generally requires 1) physical access to a terminal (for wired networks) or 2) at least physical proximity to the system (for wireless networks).
I think it's highly, highly unlikely that bad guys in China or Pakistan or whatever are going to be able to break into systems controlling big, dangerous infrastructure like this. Your worst threat (as always) is almost certainly the disgruntled employee or former employee.
Actually, the decision process went more like this: 1) Iraq deserves to be invaded. 2) How can we justify invading them? 3)I know, let's say they have nukes!
Oh, yeah, and 4) profit (for oil companies).
Yes, the book is dumb. But what's even dumber is putting out strawman statements like this. Of course, the book isn't advocating "killing and eating all the animals". It's about getting rid of our pets. "Pets" != "all animals".
... but on the other hand, if we 1) ate less meat as a whole, and got rid of our dogs, we'd solve both the problem of resource consumption by the dogs and what to do about the offal. There wouldn't be as much. Or 2) if we ate the same amount of meat as before, we could cook the offal into liquid fuel - it's being done with turkey guts in North Carolina or somewhere. Yeah, I know - realistically, dogs are the least of our problems.
Ok, show your work. Where are the references to these supposed quotes? *drums fingers*...
1) Lightbulbs: what on earth are you talking about? No one is coming into your house and demanding that you replace STILL WORKING incandescents. They're just not going to be making them any more. And that's because CFLs really, no kidding, do save energy and money over their lifetime. LEDs I'm sure will be great... when they become widely available... which they aren't yet. 2) Grocery bags. The replacement of paper bags with plastic had nothing to do with being "green" and everything to do with the fact that it cost the grocery stores less to supply them. And if you don't like the sturdy, for sale, "green bags"... don't buy them. The ordinary bags are still available everywhere I've shopped. 3) Solar hot water. Nothing to say here but [citation needed]. 4) Water. Might come as a shock to you, but the places where you can put new reservoirs without serious economic impact are pretty limited. The people and businesses who own property within the proposed basin are going to be annoyed, for starters. But sure, we could do better with gray water recycling, etc. On the whole, I'm not sure what your point is here.
Final paragraph is probably the smartest - yes, population control is the real answer here. But in the meantime, here we all are... all 6.5B of us. I think we need do something in the meantime.
Finally, geez, rant much? I think it's rather ironic that someone who opens up his post being annoyed with people "losing their fucking minds" when environmentalism is mentioned... promptly loses his mind in the body of the post.
While I agree with the spirit of your post, CO2 concentrations have to be much, much higher than what we're talking about for toxic effects to become evident. We're worried about atmospheric CO2 concentrations in the hundreds of PPM range. You need concentrations as high as 1 or 2 percent before you can even notice any toxic effects. But overall, yes - atmospheric CO2 is a big problem.
You nailed there. If they were really interested in helping people reduce their carbon footprint, they'd recommend things like: getting a smaller car and driving it less. Getting a smaller house and making sure it's very well insulated. Upgrade heating and cooling systems to high-efficiency models. Eating less meat (especially feedlot fed beef and pork). That kind of thing. But that wouldn't create any "buzz", would it.
Not to mention that 1) approximately 99.99999 percent of all dog waste is either landfilled or just left lying on the ground and 2) dog waste is not suitable for use as manure, as it can carry parasites and other disease organisms that would contaminate human food.
I'm not a big fan of the whole "let's just eat our dogs" thing either, but some of the criticisms of it are kinda dumb.
IANAV (I am not a vegan/vegetarian). But this is a bit much. About the only nutrient you really can't get in sufficient quantity from a vegan diet is B12. And I'm pretty sure you could provide a lifetime supply of B12 to the entire planet for the environmental cost of a single year's consumption of meat.
One of the sillier posts I've seen on Slashdot in a while. Developing a new drug requires doing many, many trials to see which compounds might work, then doing many, many more trials to make sure they don't actually kill the patient or induce intolerable side effects. The end result is a proven process to create a drug that you can be reasonably sure is safe and effective. Copying this drug just means implementing the already proven process. How could this not be cheaper? If it wasn't, there'd be no generic drug industry.
Look, I'm no big fan of the patent system in the US, but making uninformed statements like this are doing nothing to help the situation.
... and I think it supports my theory as well as it does yours. The Mississippi facility isn't built yet, so you'd have all the costs associated with building a new factory. The Thiokol facility is already more or less paid for. Sure, Orrin Hatch probably went to some effort to retain the work, but don't forget that Mississippi has senators too.
While it could be true that Orrin Hatch forced construction in Utah, I tend to doubt it. I think it's much more likely that the infrastructure to produce huge rocket motors is mostly concentrated with Thiokol, and their plant happens to be in Utah. You could build such motors in Florida... but you'd have to build a new rocket motor factory there first, which would be a pretty big cost.
Private space launch companies would like to treat space debris as an externality, and they will if given a chance.