Your fingerprint data is most assuredly in there. DOD hasn't rolled out the systems that can read your fingerprint and compare it to what's on the card... yet... but the day is coming.
During the Civil War, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus. He sicced the militia on dissenters. He instituted a blockade. He expended funds for the purchase of weapons. And he did all these things without congressional approval.
Right. All the same stuff we're doing today - sending people to GTMO without trial. Forcing dissenters into fenced "free speech zones". Expending money appropriated for Afghanistan operations on preparations to attack Iraq (before Congress passed its Iraq resolution).
During WWII, some US citizens (most notably Japanese, also Italians,...) were taken from their homelands and kept in internment camps for years. Reparations have been paid; lessons have been learned (don't believe me? well, you don't see Muslims being interned now; in fact Middle Eastern folks aren't even allowed to be profiled in airport baggage check lines).
Right. Jose Padilla, a US citizen who's been "interned" in a brig in South Carolina for over a year based on nothing more than some remarks he's alleged to have made about a dirty bomb, doesn't count. The US born guy from Louisiana (sorry, I forget his name) that they threw in GTMO, then deported to Jordan (because he also held a passport there) - he doesn't count either.
Your argument that things don't get worse over time, is, well, going bad.
We managed to make it through 50 years of cold war, facing nuclear Armageddon every day, without needing to give up our civil liberties. I don't see why we need to sacrifice them now to fend off a few thousand guys living in caves in Waziristan.
It's funny that we now live in a time where we worry more about Bic poking bunnies in the eye with pens than harvesting fetuses for so-called research.
This isn't a strawman, it's more like a straw-giant. No one has EVER proposed "harvesting fetuses" for their stem cells. What HAS been proposed is taking stem cells from discarded embryos at the blastocyst stage, left over from in vitro fertilizations, that will NEVER be implanted. These embryos are doomed anyway, so there's no point in denying society of the research benefits involved in using them.
Since the oil companies are holding the patents on most of these viable alternatives, however, I won't hold my breath.
I hear this a lot, and frankly, it doesn't make much sense. There's no such thing as a pure oil company. There are, however, many energy companies. They know as well as anyone else that a) oil is a finite resource and b) there's a demand for green energy. You can bet that any "oil company" that is sitting on alternative energy technology is going to get its lunch eaten by competitors.
Seriously. Our energy problems are complex, and there's no one magic bullet that will solve them. Hybrid vehicles should definitely be part of the mix.
Hey, here's an idea, put them in space and microwave the energy back to us. Nuclear reactors have no business on inhabited planets.
Anyone who advocates doing ANY kind of industrial operation in space needs to figure out a way it can be made profitable. There is simply NO WAY that you can put a nuclear plant in orbit and have it produce AFFORDABLE energy.
Besides, opponents of nuclear energy get hot and bothered about sending up tiny reactors aboard spacecraft that aren't even going to stay in orbit! How will you ever get the public to accept a reactor that eventually will need to be deorbited?
It's expressed by the saying - "fusion power is 20 years away - and always will be". We just don't have the technology to build fusion power plants, and won't for the immediate future... but we're experiencing problems related to conventional plants NOW.
Too many people are too scared of another 3-mile island or Chernobyl. Fusion plants would be much safer.
Umm, won't Greenpeace, et al, say the same thing about fusion plants that they say about fission plants? They both involve that scary radiation stuff.
This is not a very good way to frame this question, because nothing is truly safe. It's not truly safe to drive to work in the morning, for example, because there's a relatively high risk that you'll be killed in an auto accident. But it's not truly safe to lie in bed either, because you could get hit by a meteorite, or more likely, suffer from health problems related to lack of exercise. Nothing is "truly safe".
A better question to ask: is the expected net cost/benefit operating nuclear plants better or worse than the expected value cost/benefit from operating conventional plants? The risks of nuclear energy include improper waste disposal and radiation release due to nuclear plant malfunctions. The risks of conventional energy include global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions, increased illness due to other pollutant emissions, economic harm due to trade deficits with oil producing countries, and possibly, terrorist attacks funded by oil revenues.
The risks involved in waste disposal and plant malfunction can be mitigated - think vitrification of waste and fail-safe reactor designs. Some of the risks of conventional plants can also be mitigated - think carbon sequestration, higher efficiency plants, and increased domestic production of oil. These mitigation measures also have costs, both economic and other. The question is which option produces the required quantity of energy at the lost cost in economic and environmental terms. Safety is one of the costs.
... the reason for the mishap was human error. Particularly in the case of VINCENNES, if the crew had attended to the data the ship was providing, they would not have shot down the airliner.
I looked at the link, and I have to say that the theory that military people use "nucular" on purpose is pretty baseless. I was in the military for many, many years, including a few years when I was read into some SIOP related stuff, plus some time when I worked with nuclear (powered) submarine folks - so I had some occasion to talk about nuclear/nucular related matters. There wasn't any correlation between the pronunciation and the topic ("nucular bombs" vs. "nuclear reactors"). Some people said "nucular" because that was the way they said it, and some said "nuclear" because that was their favorite pronunciation.
Basing this entire speculation on a conversation that a guy had with a single "nucular" scientist (whom I suspect was joking) is pretty far-fetched.
I just brewed one and didn't have this problem at all. The beer was a very dark, Guiness-like stout with a pot of strong coffee added to the fermenter. The head was thick enough to cut with a knife - just as you would expect without coffee.
I think your results probably depend on how you brew your coffee.
I was actually thinking about shipping oil and gasoline out there.:) Use bottled oxygen and use IC engines for transportation. That's a sure way to fill up the atmosphere with CO2.
All in all, I agree that Gmail is superior to Hotmail, but I take issue with a couple of your statements:
Hotmail's interface is cluttered
And Gmail's isn't? The "compose mail" link is on the left hand side under the Gmail logo. The "contacts" "settings" "help", etc, links are on the right at the very top. "Archive" and "Report Spam" controls are buttons (as opposed to links, like the other controls) in yet a third line sort of in the middle of the page. And "more actions" is a drop down list to the right of Archive controls. The much vaunted "search mail" function is yet another line in the display.
It gets worse inside the individual mails. Reading a mail that you want to reply to? You have to click "more options" near the "from" addressee, which pops open the mail header, which in turn contains the "reply" and "forward" controls.
And of course, most of these controls are actually Javascript links (nowadays, so is Hotmail), so your status bar tells you nothing about where you might be going when you click them, and you're SOL if you don't use Javascript.
it's [Hotmail] limited to IE
That comes as a great surprise to me, as I used Hotmail under Mozilla 1.7 not 15 minutes ago.
Don't get me wrong. I'm in the process of completely replacing Hotmail with Gmail. But saying that Gmail has a better interface is patently false.
... and maintain them, which encourages fuel-inefficient car and truck transportation, which increases demand for fossil fuels, which helps keep prices up.
If individual motorists/trucking companies had to pay to maintain the roads, passenger-miles and cargo-miles would drop significantly, and oil prices would drop too.
Building a Moon-mine would also lower the cost of both powersats and elevator from a materials and technology, and of course the mine would be cheaper to start with prefab parts coming up an elevator and cheaper to build with powersats having already proven a lot of the technology.
Where "cheaper" == "still really, really expensive", and in fact, a lot more expensive than mining on earth.
"0.1 Iraq wars" = $20 billion. If you think we can get a moon mine started for that... you're smoking something.
That took about two minutes of googling. When you consider that people getting extradited isn't usually considered big news, even two examples is pretty good for a cursory search.
Not that you were particularly interested in facts getting in the way of your ranting.
There are private enterprises which try to get to space in a way that is economically viable.
Name one.
In the years since the X-Prize has been offered, no company has even made an attempt at it (although Scaled Composites and others are making preparations, I seriously doubt that winning the prize will offset the expenditures needed to get there).
The reason private companies aren't going to space: there's no money in it.
I wasn't talking about manned probes. I was talking about an infrastructure to make unmanned probes cheaper. You can't build an energy collection station in space without a human there to mine the materials and build it. And you can't collect the energy for an AC probe without that energy.
If you think that launching probes from a space-based probe factory/launch facility is going to be cheaper than just building/launching them from earth, you need to think some more about the economics of that:
Probe launched from earth: 100kg or so needs to get out of earth's gravity well. We already have the factories, etc, needed to build them.
Probe launched from space-based fab: millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of kg of capital equipment, people, etc, needs to get out of earth's gravity well, then make its way to the asteroid belt.
And after spending all that money, now you're at the same point the earth based probe project is. Now you can start actually building your probe. And why do you say that the marginal costs of building probes in space will be cheaper? You still have to do all the same things you have to do to build a probe on earth... except you have to do it in a vacuum.
The key to the problem is antimatter. We're nowhere near close to being able to produce enough for an interstellar mission, but the Sun provides enough energy to make it possible.
100% pure pie-in-the-sky. Even if we could magically tap huge amounts of solar power, where do you put the antimatter once you've created it? And once you have it, so what?
It takes energy to create the things we use. That energy comes from oil, coal, and uranium. It takes energy to obtain those materials. We already are feeling pressure on the first two, and the third one would begin to dry up as soon as we use it in earnest. Honestly, I do believe that nuclear power could last longer than a century, but people have testified before congress that the opposite is true. Fine. Then lets go get more materials, shall we?
Two words. Breeder reactor. And as I point out in another post, there's no more energy in space than there is here - there's no oil, no coal, and no more uranium up there than there is here. And locating, extracting, and returning it to earth would be unimaginably expensive.
We don't need the entire Sun's output. I'm sure you're bright enough to realize that tapping even a tenth of a percent of that would be a HUGE amount of power.
And how do you propose to tap it? And why is tapping it in space better than tapping it at the earth's surface?
A common meme on Slashdot is that it's a shame that private industry hasn't taken over the space program. But the usual reason given - that NASA won't let private industry take part - is incorrect. The reason private industry isn't in space is that there's no money in it. Until that changes, we'll do nothing but probes - and no one ever comes up with an idea for making it profitable.
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds like a great plan, but where do I find a free service that lets you do POP? Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail don't. Sean
... thinking. How else do you explain a Bush re-election?
Sean
Your fingerprint data is most assuredly in there. DOD hasn't rolled out the systems that can read your fingerprint and compare it to what's on the card... yet... but the day is coming.
Sean
Right. All the same stuff we're doing today - sending people to GTMO without trial. Forcing dissenters into fenced "free speech zones". Expending money appropriated for Afghanistan operations on preparations to attack Iraq (before Congress passed its Iraq resolution).
Right. Jose Padilla, a US citizen who's been "interned" in a brig in South Carolina for over a year based on nothing more than some remarks he's alleged to have made about a dirty bomb, doesn't count. The US born guy from Louisiana (sorry, I forget his name) that they threw in GTMO, then deported to Jordan (because he also held a passport there) - he doesn't count either.
Your argument that things don't get worse over time, is, well, going bad.
We managed to make it through 50 years of cold war, facing nuclear Armageddon every day, without needing to give up our civil liberties. I don't see why we need to sacrifice them now to fend off a few thousand guys living in caves in Waziristan.
Sean
... washing your face. Just a thought.
Sean
This isn't a strawman, it's more like a straw-giant. No one has EVER proposed "harvesting fetuses" for their stem cells. What HAS been proposed is taking stem cells from discarded embryos at the blastocyst stage, left over from in vitro fertilizations, that will NEVER be implanted. These embryos are doomed anyway, so there's no point in denying society of the research benefits involved in using them.
Sean
Is that some extractive of flour? I suspect you meant to say "fluoride".
Sean
I hear this a lot, and frankly, it doesn't make much sense. There's no such thing as a pure oil company. There are, however, many energy companies. They know as well as anyone else that a) oil is a finite resource and b) there's a demand for green energy. You can bet that any "oil company" that is sitting on alternative energy technology is going to get its lunch eaten by competitors.
Sean
Seriously. Our energy problems are complex, and there's no one magic bullet that will solve them. Hybrid vehicles should definitely be part of the mix.
Sean
Anyone who advocates doing ANY kind of industrial operation in space needs to figure out a way it can be made profitable. There is simply NO WAY that you can put a nuclear plant in orbit and have it produce AFFORDABLE energy.
Besides, opponents of nuclear energy get hot and bothered about sending up tiny reactors aboard spacecraft that aren't even going to stay in orbit! How will you ever get the public to accept a reactor that eventually will need to be deorbited?
Sean
It's expressed by the saying - "fusion power is 20 years away - and always will be". We just don't have the technology to build fusion power plants, and won't for the immediate future... but we're experiencing problems related to conventional plants NOW.
Umm, won't Greenpeace, et al, say the same thing about fusion plants that they say about fission plants? They both involve that scary radiation stuff.
Sean
IAASE (I am a safety engineer).
This is not a very good way to frame this question, because nothing is truly safe. It's not truly safe to drive to work in the morning, for example, because there's a relatively high risk that you'll be killed in an auto accident. But it's not truly safe to lie in bed either, because you could get hit by a meteorite, or more likely, suffer from health problems related to lack of exercise. Nothing is "truly safe".
A better question to ask: is the expected net cost/benefit operating nuclear plants better or worse than the expected value cost/benefit from operating conventional plants? The risks of nuclear energy include improper waste disposal and radiation release due to nuclear plant malfunctions. The risks of conventional energy include global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions, increased illness due to other pollutant emissions, economic harm due to trade deficits with oil producing countries, and possibly, terrorist attacks funded by oil revenues.
The risks involved in waste disposal and plant malfunction can be mitigated - think vitrification of waste and fail-safe reactor designs. Some of the risks of conventional plants can also be mitigated - think carbon sequestration, higher efficiency plants, and increased domestic production of oil. These mitigation measures also have costs, both economic and other. The question is which option produces the required quantity of energy at the lost cost in economic and environmental terms. Safety is one of the costs.
Sean
Breeder reactor. There is a nearly infinite supply of U-238 that could be turned into plutonium for this purpose.
Sean
... to point out that Bush is a big supporter of fossil fuels? It's indisputably true. Sean
... the reason for the mishap was human error. Particularly in the case of VINCENNES, if the crew had attended to the data the ship was providing, they would not have shot down the airliner.
Sean
I looked at the link, and I have to say that the theory that military people use "nucular" on purpose is pretty baseless. I was in the military for many, many years, including a few years when I was read into some SIOP related stuff, plus some time when I worked with nuclear (powered) submarine folks - so I had some occasion to talk about nuclear/nucular related matters. There wasn't any correlation between the pronunciation and the topic ("nucular bombs" vs. "nuclear reactors"). Some people said "nucular" because that was the way they said it, and some said "nuclear" because that was their favorite pronunciation.
Basing this entire speculation on a conversation that a guy had with a single "nucular" scientist (whom I suspect was joking) is pretty far-fetched.
Sean
I just brewed one and didn't have this problem at all. The beer was a very dark, Guiness-like stout with a pot of strong coffee added to the fermenter. The head was thick enough to cut with a knife - just as you would expect without coffee.
I think your results probably depend on how you brew your coffee.
Sean
... "you must be new here" remark.
Sean
Are we still talking about Mars here? Because Mars' atmosphere is already 95% CO2.
Sean
All in all, I agree that Gmail is superior to Hotmail, but I take issue with a couple of your statements:
And Gmail's isn't? The "compose mail" link is on the left hand side under the Gmail logo. The "contacts" "settings" "help", etc, links are on the right at the very top. "Archive" and "Report Spam" controls are buttons (as opposed to links, like the other controls) in yet a third line sort of in the middle of the page. And "more actions" is a drop down list to the right of Archive controls. The much vaunted "search mail" function is yet another line in the display.
It gets worse inside the individual mails. Reading a mail that you want to reply to? You have to click "more options" near the "from" addressee, which pops open the mail header, which in turn contains the "reply" and "forward" controls.
And of course, most of these controls are actually Javascript links (nowadays, so is Hotmail), so your status bar tells you nothing about where you might be going when you click them, and you're SOL if you don't use Javascript.
That comes as a great surprise to me, as I used Hotmail under Mozilla 1.7 not 15 minutes ago.
Don't get me wrong. I'm in the process of completely replacing Hotmail with Gmail. But saying that Gmail has a better interface is patently false.
Sean
... and maintain them, which encourages fuel-inefficient car and truck transportation, which increases demand for fossil fuels, which helps keep prices up.
If individual motorists/trucking companies had to pay to maintain the roads, passenger-miles and cargo-miles would drop significantly, and oil prices would drop too.
Sean
Where "cheaper" == "still really, really expensive", and in fact, a lot more expensive than mining on earth.
"0.1 Iraq wars" = $20 billion. If you think we can get a moon mine started for that... you're smoking something.
Sean
A couple examples:
to Canada to Costa RicaThat took about two minutes of googling. When you consider that people getting extradited isn't usually considered big news, even two examples is pretty good for a cursory search.
Not that you were particularly interested in facts getting in the way of your ranting.
Sean
Name one.
In the years since the X-Prize has been offered, no company has even made an attempt at it (although Scaled Composites and others are making preparations, I seriously doubt that winning the prize will offset the expenditures needed to get there).
The reason private companies aren't going to space: there's no money in it.
Sean
If you think that launching probes from a space-based probe factory/launch facility is going to be cheaper than just building/launching them from earth, you need to think some more about the economics of that:
Probe launched from earth: 100kg or so needs to get out of earth's gravity well. We already have the factories, etc, needed to build them.
Probe launched from space-based fab: millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of kg of capital equipment, people, etc, needs to get out of earth's gravity well, then make its way to the asteroid belt.
And after spending all that money, now you're at the same point the earth based probe project is. Now you can start actually building your probe. And why do you say that the marginal costs of building probes in space will be cheaper? You still have to do all the same things you have to do to build a probe on earth... except you have to do it in a vacuum.
100% pure pie-in-the-sky. Even if we could magically tap huge amounts of solar power, where do you put the antimatter once you've created it? And once you have it, so what?
Two words. Breeder reactor. And as I point out in another post, there's no more energy in space than there is here - there's no oil, no coal, and no more uranium up there than there is here. And locating, extracting, and returning it to earth would be unimaginably expensive.
And how do you propose to tap it? And why is tapping it in space better than tapping it at the earth's surface?
A common meme on Slashdot is that it's a shame that private industry hasn't taken over the space program. But the usual reason given - that NASA won't let private industry take part - is incorrect. The reason private industry isn't in space is that there's no money in it. Until that changes, we'll do nothing but probes - and no one ever comes up with an idea for making it profitable.
Sean