You are mistaken. If your opponent's intention is to conquer you, the VERY last thing he wants is for you to nuke his invading army, and his homeland. In that situation, possession of nuclear weapons DOES prevent an attack by conventional troops, by allowing you to maintain a far lower conventional troop strength.
By the same token, if he wants to conquer and rule you, the last thing he wants to do is attempt to nuke you into submission, since that wrecks all the nice farmland and factories and French farm girls he wants to conquer.
Read up on the troop strength of the old Soviet Union, and on the number of tanks they could field. If the Soviets had wanted to, they could have lined up, North-South, along the old Iron Curtain, across ALL of Europe, and headed West. There was never any doubt in anyone's mind, on either side of the Iron Curtain, that they wanted to do it. The West did not (and does not, even today) have anything even remotely resembling the conventional troop strength necessary to stop such an assault.
If you believe they didn't want to do it, review the history of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, during the period between World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall. For that matter, review the history of the Berlin Wall.
There was just this one little problem. The Soviets knew that such an attack would trigger BOTH strategic nuclear counterattack against Moscow and Russia, *AND* tactical nuclear response against their skirmish line. The tactical nuclear response would have broken the attack, and the strategic response would have hurt them even worse than they got hurt in World War II. (While you're doing your troop strength homework, look up how many casualties the Soviets took during World War II, expressed as a fraction of their population. The number is, by Western standards, astonishingly high. Russia KNEW, during the 1960s, what kind of casualties they could take, survive, and recover from.)
This is why the West refused to sign up for the "No First Use" policy that the Soviets pushed. Without the option to escalate to nuclear weapons, the West had NO chance of stopping a conventional Soviet attack.
The Soviets also understood this. It is why they attempted to install ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons on Cuba, in the early days of the Kennedy Administration. It is what brought the world within a gnat's eyelash of World War III.
None of the above is fiction, none of it is speculation. I had the privilege several years ago of talking, over lunch at The Men's Club of Dallas, with a guy who turned out to be the only B-52 aircraft commander in the United States Air Force who didn't fly his airplane out to his Fail/Safe point that day. He and his crew had just landed from a training flight when the orders were given. As he and his crew were walking in, he met everyone else going out to their airplanes. He reported that every single one of them was white as a sheet: they all believed that This Was It.
You complain 'But the man kept hitting the "thumbs down" on each proposal. What kind of democracy is it when a dozen people on the internet support the ipod museum and all their suggestions get buried to the ground? I mean, why should any comment get buried?'
Answer, because that is the DEFINITION of democracy. In a democracy, if a majority of the voters decide to fsck you, you're fscked. If a small minority is allowed to rant, rave, and get their way, even though the majority don't agree with them, and votes against them, then what you have is, BY DEFINITION, as you should have learned in high school Civics class, not democracy. It might well be a Republic, in that it is generally democratic but goes out of its way to preserve minority rights. Or it might be oligarchy, or dictatorship, and the small minority in question happens to be the ruling party, or friendly with the ruling party, or paying off the ruling party, or supplying drugs to the ruling party, or performing sexual favors for the ruling party... You get the idea.
In democracy, there is NO SUCH THING as "minority rights". At most, there are TEMPORARY privileges granted by the majority du jour, subject to being withdrawn without notice by next week's majority du jour.
If you don't like the above hard truth, then maybe you should rethink your position on the desirability of democracy.
The Feds tried that a few years ago. They slapped a luxury tax on yachts.
The luxury tax did not bring in a single penny of tax revenues. The people who would have paid it noticed that the price on domestic yacht purchases had gone up. Some of them postponed or cancelled their planned purchases. Others went out of jurisdiction, and bought abroad.
The resulting downturn in domestic yacht purchases did, however, put quite a few boatyards out of business, and cause marinas to lay people off, putting those employees on unemployment, costing their States a lot of money, and erasing their tax contributions, to both the Feds and the state (and local) governments.
The luxury tax on yachts, far from bringing home the bacon, actually LOST money, for the Feds, the States, and the people who worked to make and maintain those yachts, and everyone who worked to supply those yacht workers.
Somebody mod this guy up for insight. Other people need to mod him down for not recognizing the insight.
If you build and deploy a system that can do a good job of defeating the Bad Guy's current threat arsenal, he has to upgrade his entire system, and that ain't gonna be cheap, even with e.g. Soviet gulag slave labor. In fact, it will probably cost him a lot more to design, produce, and deploy new missiles than it cost you to design, produce, and deploy the antimissile system that forced his upgrade cycle.
AND, depending on how he chooses to upgrade his system, it may be a lot cheaper for you to upgrade your antimissile system to kill his new toys than it was for him to buy his new toys. If his missiles use new chaff and flare and weather balloon countermeasures, but have the same old maneuver capability, then you just have to upgrade your sensor processing and target discrimination, not your kill vehicles.
Read "The Strategy of Technology", by Kane, Possony, and Pournelle. It used to be a required text at all the service academies and the War College.
This is the message that Reagan delivered to Gorbachev at the summit, that eventually resulted in the Berlin Wall coming down.
No, CO2 mixed with ground water does NOT necessarily form carbonates and lock into place.
CO2 and water forms carbonic acid, which etches (dissolves) limestone, forming underwater caves and rivers. This is how phreatic (water-filled) caves are formed.
Depending on local conditions, you can get some impressive ones. Florida has an amazing assortment of water-filled caves. Wakulla Springs (south of Tallahassee FL) has a HUGE system, that has been extensively mapped by the Woodville Karst Plain Project http://www.wkpp.org/.
Mexico has an incredible system of water-filled caves, down around Akumal, just down the road from Cancun.
Full Disclosure: Friends of mine dove with the WKPP, doing the exploration.
Reaction 1: 6 CO2 + 6 H2O + energy (sunlight) ----------> C6H12O6 + 6 O2
(Note: Reaction 1 is catalyzed by chlorophyll, and there is a lot of other stuff going on.)
Reaction 2: C6H12O6 + 6 O2 --> 6 CO2 + 6 H2O + energy
What it means is that plants take in water and CO2 and make sugar (carbohydrates) and oxygen from it, while sugar (and other things) can be burned in oxygen, making carbon dioxide, water, and releasing some of the energy that went to make the sugar.
(Note: You can run reaction 2 with hydrocarbons (CmHn) instead of carbohydrates. You have to supply more oxygen per hydrocarbon molecule, to oxidize the hydrogen. At the same time, oxidizing the hydrogen also releases energy.)
This is called the "carbon cycle". It used to be taught in elementary school science class, and then again in more detail in high school biology and chemistry classes.
"Global warming" is Mother Nature's way of extending the growing cycle, allowing reaction 1 to convert more carbon dioxide and water into sugar and oxygen.
The above oversimplifies the processes involved, but does at least hint at explaining why burying carbon dioxide in the landfill is idiotic: you are burying valuable food and breathable oxygen.
The key is that it isn't just the recipient who signs for the Registered Mail piece.
EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO HANDLES IT signs for it, STARTING with the front desk clerk who accepted it from you.
Registered Mail NEVER gets tossed into a hopper or a basket, to sit unattended. It is ALWAYS either in someone's hands, and that someone has signed for it, or it is in a LOCKED storage container, and the storage container inventory sheet shows that it is in there. All of those signatures on transfer paperwork go to a centralized audit trail.
With a Registered Mail number, the piece can be traced, from the clerk who first accepted it, all the way through to the recipient, and God help the clerk whose name is last on the trail if he doesn't have it in his hands, or it isn't in the container that claims to contain it.
I've used Registered Mail several times, for pieces that HAD to get where they were going, and I HAD to be able to prove they got there. You know your life is getting complicated when you find yourself having to use Registered Mail for something.
Certified Mail is not reliable. It can get lost. It can go astray. It is not traceable.
IF it actually arrives at its destination, the return card comes back by normal mail handling. The return card can get lost. It can go astray. It is no more traceable than the original package was.
Use Registered Mail if you actually care whether the package gets there.
I'd send it on CDs, by Registered Mail, the same way defense contractors and government agencies send classified stuff, for the same reasons.
Yes, Registered Mail costs more. It is worth it. Registered Mail *EXISTS* for the sole purpose of shipping high-value items that MUST NOT GET LOST OR STOLEN. That is precisely what you have here.
And for those of you in the peanut gallery: Yes, I have done Registered Mail. Several times. It is a pain in the ass. The Postal Service thinks it is a pain in the ass, and will try really hard to talk you out of it. I usually have to say "Registered Mail" two or three times before they figure out that I really do know what I want. I have had Postal Service clerks ask if I knew the difference between Registered and Certified. They were always very disappointed when they discovered that I *DID* know the difference, could explain it to them, and wasn't about to back down.
If you are really paranoid, you send two packages, both by Registered Mail. One contains encrypted CDs. The other contains the decryption key. Or you split the data into two packages, that must be combined in a nonobvious way to reconstitute the data.
There is no such thing as a "parallel course" in orbit.
Read Bate, Mueller, & White, "Fundamentals of Astrodynamics", (Dover Books). (Caution: Math required.)
Imagine two coplanar circular rings, of very slightly different diameter, with a common center. They're concentric. Tilt one slightly with respect to the other, retaining the common centering. The rings now cross at two diametrically opposed points.
Those rings represent non-coplanar orbits. Objects traveling along the two orbits appear to be in parallel course at widest separation, then they start coming together, collide, and start moving apart again.
The cheap way to do rendezvous is get the two spacecraft onto the SAME orbit, with some separation, and then GRADUALLY maneuver one of them to bring it closer. It is extremely touchy work. (This is why Project Gemini spent so much time learning how to rendezvous the Gemini spacecraft with the Agena target: they had to be able to do rendezvous to do the Apollo moon landings.)
Read "Carrying the Fire", by Mike Collins, for some interesting insight into the problem. (Mike Collins was Apollo XI Command Module Pilot.)
OK, so it will cost somewhere between a quarter billion and half a billion to put it on an expendable.
Back around 1990, when Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) twisted NASA's arm to get them to disclose the actual costs, it turned out that a single Shuttle flight cost right around one billion dollars. That was some fifteen years ago. You can bet your second-best piggy bank that the costs have NOT gone down, given that the cost is determined PRIMARILY by the size of the standing army that must be paid whether the birds are flying or not.
So we would SAVE somewhere between half a billion and three quarters of a billion dollars by putting this thing on an expendable. Or more.
When it dies and rots on the ground, and the rains come, the CO2 combines with water to form carbonic acid, and leaches into the ground. It eventually finds limestone, and etches the limestone, forming underwater caves.
But if you are concerned about the CO2 getting back into the atmosphere, WHERE IT ORIGINALLY CAME FROM (recall that oil and coal started out life as plant matter, a long time ago), then plant redwood trees, in a "no harvest" forest. Redwood trees are capable of sequestering carbon for a very long time.
I'm waiting for the carbon freaks to discover that humans and animals exhale carbon dioxide, and propose a carbon tax on every living creature on the earth. This raises the question: what do you do with someone who can't pay their carbon taxes? Two possible answers come immediately to mind: 1) you kill him/her, 2) you sell him/her to someone who can and will pay his tax. (Note that #2 implies #1 for a carbon creator who doesn't sell on the carbon market.)
You balance the construction cost in year zero with the cost of fuel in the out years.
If your nuke plant costs four times as much to build, initially, but, over the life of the plant, it saves twenty times as much in fuel costs (numbers pulled at random out of poster's butt), you have saved a whole bundle of money by buying the more expensive plant.
Also, entirely too much of the cost of building nuclear power plants has been fighting totally frivolous bullcrap from enviro-whackos who wouldn't know what a void coefficient was if it tore their leg off.
Do not use Certified Mail, Return Receipt Requested. Certified mail gets exactly the same handling as normal uncertified First Class Mail. It may or may not get to the destination.
Registered Mail, on the other hand, WILL get there. Period. It has a complete audit trail attached, that can be traced, person by person, through EVERY person who handled the piece, through EVERY storage container it ever occupied. Each time the piece changes hands, the recipient is required to sign for it. If the last guy in the chain doesn't have it in his hands, or it isn't in the container he locked it in, he is in Deep Sh*t.
Registered Mail EXISTS to handle those things that MUST get there, that MUST NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES get lost in the mail. They do require you to state a value. If the value is high enough, they tack on fees for additional insurance - but the fees don't kick in until the value hits several thousand dollars, and they are still extremely low, indicating that the actual risk of loss is also extremely low.
I know all this because I've had to use Registered Mail several times. Severance paperwork, for just one example, is usually worth several thousand dollars. A Defensive Driving completion certificate successfully delivered prevents a local ticket mill jurisdiction from causing you SERIOUS headaches down the road. I had to slam-dunk a collections agency one year after a hospital royally screwed up their billing to the insurance company. You REALLY want these things to get there, and you REALLY want to be able to PROVE they got there.
If you actually took the time to write a paper letter, your Congresscritter now believes that there are approximately 100 constituents in his district who feels the way you do about this particular issue.
Elections have been decided on less than that. He knows this. He knows that, if you actually get sufficiently pissed off to mobilize those other 99 like-minded voters, he might LOSE in the primary next spring, or in the general election next fall, and actually have to go WORK for a living.
And NOTHING scares a Congresscritter more than the prospect of actually having to get a real job.
They may be praying that Microsoft will buy them. They appear to be in the process of imploding.
Their last 10-K contained a couple of zingers.
"As of the date of the filing of this Report, the Company does not have sufficient funds available to fund its operations, invest in additional resources for growth and repay its debt obligations. Therefore, the Company needs to raise additional funds through selling securities, obtaining loans or increase sales. The Company's inability to raise such funds or renegotiate the terms of its existing debt will significantly jeopardize its ability to continue operations."
"The Company has incurred significant losses from operations for the year ended December 31, 2006. In addition, the Company had a working capital deficit of approximately $10.3 million at December 31, 2006. The foregoing raises substantial doubt about the Company's ability to continue as a going concern. Management's plans include seeking additional capital and/or debt financing. There is no guarantee that additional capital and/or debt financing will be available when and to the extent required, or that if available, it will be on terms acceptable to the Company. The accompanying financial statements do not include any adjustments that might result from the outcome of this uncertainty. Our auditors have included a going-concern paragraph to their audit report."
If you were at the University of Texas at Austin, in the 1970s, as I was, you remember the never-ending stream of Iranian Students Association protests. A small minority of them wore hoods to conceal their faces from SAVAK; most didn't.
If you were in Harvard Square in the 1980s, as I was one week, you saw Iranian student protests then as well. The one guy I talked with was not wearing a hood. (I asked him if the people of Tehran prayed behind the Ayatollah. He didn't know. If you know about Islam, and Iranians, you know why this is an important question.)
The difference between UT Austin in the 1970s and Harvard Square in the 1980s was the government they were protesting against. Everything else was the same.
In 2003, I had the opportunity to be a student at UT Austin again. I found myself missing the ISA protests: they were amusing theater.
The key point is that they weren't THAT afraid of the Big Bad Government Guys, then or now.
Sen. John McCain United States Senate 241 Russell Senate Ofc. Bldg. Washington, DC 20510
1 SnailMail letter == 10 phone calls == 100 emails
Paper mail means that The Folks Back Home are REALLY upset about something. It is EASY to dash off an email. It takes a little more work to make a phone call. You actually have to WORK to type (or write longhand) a letter, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, and drop it in the mailbox.
Polonium-210 has, as someone else said, a half-life of 138 days. That means that, if you start on day 1 with 1 gram of Po-210, on day 139 you have 500 milligrams of Po-210 and 500 milligrams of decay products (in this case, Pb-206, (lead) which is stable). On day 277, you have 250 mg of Po-210 and 750 mg of Pb-206. On day 415, you have 125 mg of Po-210 and 875 mg of lead. And so on...
Mistakes happen. When they happen, and you get into one of those "We show this bill was not paid" "I paid it" "We don't see it" loops, or "We show it was paid late" "I paid it on time" loops, it is a lot more effective to send them the traditional photocopy of both sides of the cancelled check that PROVES that they received it, on such-and-such date, they deposited it to their bank on such-and-such date, and my bank received it through the clearinghouse on such-and-such date.
Business has had hundreds of years to develop business processes for handling checks, to cover all the requirements of all the players, to keep everyone honest and make sure everyone does in fact get paid. The electronic systems are still in their infancy.
More to the point, the courts know what checks are. When you send the vendor a copy of the cancelled check, you are implicitly threatening him with a lawsuit which he WILL lose, as opposed to a suit that he MIGHT win.
Actually, morphine is not addictive, IF the dosage is matched to the pain relief requirement.
A friend of mine, a nurse, was trained in hospice protocol. When another friend was hospitalized for near-terminal cancer, and placed on IV morphine, I asked him about it. My concern was that the hospital was running large doses, basically not worrying about addiction. He explained to me that it was not addictive, if the patient really needed it for pain control.
Some years later, I got to confirm this for myself. I've had both hips replaced, and the initial pain control was with intravenous morphine. Switching off of it to pain pills, then tapering the pain pills, was not a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Worse.
"The Blob", starring a very young Steve McQueen.
You are mistaken. If your opponent's intention is to conquer you, the VERY last thing he wants is for you to nuke his invading army, and his homeland. In that situation, possession of nuclear weapons DOES prevent an attack by conventional troops, by allowing you to maintain a far lower conventional troop strength.
By the same token, if he wants to conquer and rule you, the last thing he wants to do is attempt to nuke you into submission, since that wrecks all the nice farmland and factories and French farm girls he wants to conquer.
Read up on the troop strength of the old Soviet Union, and on the number of tanks they could field. If the Soviets had wanted to, they could have lined up, North-South, along the old Iron Curtain, across ALL of Europe, and headed West. There was never any doubt in anyone's mind, on either side of the Iron Curtain, that they wanted to do it. The West did not (and does not, even today) have anything even remotely resembling the conventional troop strength necessary to stop such an assault.
If you believe they didn't want to do it, review the history of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, during the period between World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall. For that matter, review the history of the Berlin Wall.
There was just this one little problem. The Soviets knew that such an attack would trigger BOTH strategic nuclear counterattack against Moscow and Russia, *AND* tactical nuclear response against their skirmish line. The tactical nuclear response would have broken the attack, and the strategic response would have hurt them even worse than they got hurt in World War II. (While you're doing your troop strength homework, look up how many casualties the Soviets took during World War II, expressed as a fraction of their population. The number is, by Western standards, astonishingly high. Russia KNEW, during the 1960s, what kind of casualties they could take, survive, and recover from.)
This is why the West refused to sign up for the "No First Use" policy that the Soviets pushed. Without the option to escalate to nuclear weapons, the West had NO chance of stopping a conventional Soviet attack.
The Soviets also understood this. It is why they attempted to install ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons on Cuba, in the early days of the Kennedy Administration. It is what brought the world within a gnat's eyelash of World War III.
None of the above is fiction, none of it is speculation. I had the privilege several years ago of talking, over lunch at The Men's Club of Dallas, with a guy who turned out to be the only B-52 aircraft commander in the United States Air Force who didn't fly his airplane out to his Fail/Safe point that day. He and his crew had just landed from a training flight when the orders were given. As he and his crew were walking in, he met everyone else going out to their airplanes. He reported that every single one of them was white as a sheet: they all believed that This Was It.
You complain 'But the man kept hitting the "thumbs down" on each proposal. What kind of democracy is it when a dozen people on the internet support the ipod museum and all their suggestions get buried to the ground? I mean, why should any comment get buried?'
Answer, because that is the DEFINITION of democracy. In a democracy, if a majority of the voters decide to fsck you, you're fscked. If a small minority is allowed to rant, rave, and get their way, even though the majority don't agree with them, and votes against them, then what you have is, BY DEFINITION, as you should have learned in high school Civics class, not democracy. It might well be a Republic, in that it is generally democratic but goes out of its way to preserve minority rights. Or it might be oligarchy, or dictatorship, and the small minority in question happens to be the ruling party, or friendly with the ruling party, or paying off the ruling party, or supplying drugs to the ruling party, or performing sexual favors for the ruling party... You get the idea.
In democracy, there is NO SUCH THING as "minority rights". At most, there are TEMPORARY privileges granted by the majority du jour, subject to being withdrawn without notice by next week's majority du jour.
If you don't like the above hard truth, then maybe you should rethink your position on the desirability of democracy.
The Feds tried that a few years ago. They slapped a luxury tax on yachts.
The luxury tax did not bring in a single penny of tax revenues. The people who would have paid it noticed that the price on domestic yacht purchases had gone up. Some of them postponed or cancelled their planned purchases. Others went out of jurisdiction, and bought abroad.
The resulting downturn in domestic yacht purchases did, however, put quite a few boatyards out of business, and cause marinas to lay people off, putting those employees on unemployment, costing their States a lot of money, and erasing their tax contributions, to both the Feds and the state (and local) governments.
The luxury tax on yachts, far from bringing home the bacon, actually LOST money, for the Feds, the States, and the people who worked to make and maintain those yachts, and everyone who worked to supply those yacht workers.
Somebody mod this guy up for insight. Other people need to mod him down for not recognizing the insight.
If you build and deploy a system that can do a good job of defeating the Bad Guy's current threat arsenal, he has to upgrade his entire system, and that ain't gonna be cheap, even with e.g. Soviet gulag slave labor. In fact, it will probably cost him a lot more to design, produce, and deploy new missiles than it cost you to design, produce, and deploy the antimissile system that forced his upgrade cycle.
AND, depending on how he chooses to upgrade his system, it may be a lot cheaper for you to upgrade your antimissile system to kill his new toys than it was for him to buy his new toys. If his missiles use new chaff and flare and weather balloon countermeasures, but have the same old maneuver capability, then you just have to upgrade your sensor processing and target discrimination, not your kill vehicles.
Read "The Strategy of Technology", by Kane, Possony, and Pournelle. It used to be a required text at all the service academies and the War College.
This is the message that Reagan delivered to Gorbachev at the summit, that eventually resulted in the Berlin Wall coming down.
No, CO2 mixed with ground water does NOT necessarily form carbonates and lock into place.
CO2 and water forms carbonic acid, which etches (dissolves) limestone, forming underwater caves and rivers. This is how phreatic (water-filled) caves are formed.
Depending on local conditions, you can get some impressive ones. Florida has an amazing assortment of water-filled caves. Wakulla Springs (south of Tallahassee FL) has a HUGE system, that has been extensively mapped by the Woodville Karst Plain Project http://www.wkpp.org/.
Mexico has an incredible system of water-filled caves, down around Akumal, just down the road from Cancun.
Full Disclosure: Friends of mine dove with the WKPP, doing the exploration.
Reaction 1: 6 CO2 + 6 H2O + energy (sunlight) ----------> C6H12O6 + 6 O2
(Note: Reaction 1 is catalyzed by chlorophyll, and there is a lot of other stuff going on.)
Reaction 2: C6H12O6 + 6 O2 --> 6 CO2 + 6 H2O + energy
What it means is that plants take in water and CO2 and make sugar (carbohydrates) and oxygen from it, while sugar (and other things) can be burned in oxygen, making carbon dioxide, water, and releasing some of the energy that went to make the sugar.
(Note: You can run reaction 2 with hydrocarbons (CmHn) instead of carbohydrates. You have to supply more oxygen per hydrocarbon molecule, to oxidize the hydrogen. At the same time, oxidizing the hydrogen also releases energy.)
This is called the "carbon cycle". It used to be taught in elementary school science class, and then again in more detail in high school biology and chemistry classes.
"Global warming" is Mother Nature's way of extending the growing cycle, allowing reaction 1 to convert more carbon dioxide and water into sugar and oxygen.
The above oversimplifies the processes involved, but does at least hint at explaining why burying carbon dioxide in the landfill is idiotic: you are burying valuable food and breathable oxygen.
The key is that it isn't just the recipient who signs for the Registered Mail piece.
EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO HANDLES IT signs for it, STARTING with the front desk clerk who accepted it from you.
Registered Mail NEVER gets tossed into a hopper or a basket, to sit unattended. It is ALWAYS either in someone's hands, and that someone has signed for it, or it is in a LOCKED storage container, and the storage container inventory sheet shows that it is in there. All of those signatures on transfer paperwork go to a centralized audit trail.
With a Registered Mail number, the piece can be traced, from the clerk who first accepted it, all the way through to the recipient, and God help the clerk whose name is last on the trail if he doesn't have it in his hands, or it isn't in the container that claims to contain it.
I've used Registered Mail several times, for pieces that HAD to get where they were going, and I HAD to be able to prove they got there. You know your life is getting complicated when you find yourself having to use Registered Mail for something.
Certified Mail is not reliable. It can get lost. It can go astray. It is not traceable.
IF it actually arrives at its destination, the return card comes back by normal mail handling. The return card can get lost. It can go astray. It is no more traceable than the original package was.
Use Registered Mail if you actually care whether the package gets there.
I'd send it on CDs, by Registered Mail, the same way defense contractors and government agencies send classified stuff, for the same reasons.
Yes, Registered Mail costs more. It is worth it. Registered Mail *EXISTS* for the sole purpose of shipping high-value items that MUST NOT GET LOST OR STOLEN. That is precisely what you have here.
And for those of you in the peanut gallery: Yes, I have done Registered Mail. Several times. It is a pain in the ass. The Postal Service thinks it is a pain in the ass, and will try really hard to talk you out of it. I usually have to say "Registered Mail" two or three times before they figure out that I really do know what I want. I have had Postal Service clerks ask if I knew the difference between Registered and Certified. They were always very disappointed when they discovered that I *DID* know the difference, could explain it to them, and wasn't about to back down.
If you are really paranoid, you send two packages, both by Registered Mail. One contains encrypted CDs. The other contains the decryption key. Or you split the data into two packages, that must be combined in a nonobvious way to reconstitute the data.
But the KEY to the transfer is Registered Mail.
Joachim also chose to work a much harder problem than you did.
You worked with the symbolic cyphertexts. He worked with raw baseband audio from the radio receiver, complete with noise.
You knew this, of course, because you RTFA.
Very risky, actually.
The antinuke protest people flooding your neighborhood would make it very hard for you to go to work in the morning.
There is no such thing as a "parallel course" in orbit.
Read Bate, Mueller, & White, "Fundamentals of Astrodynamics", (Dover Books). (Caution: Math required.)
Imagine two coplanar circular rings, of very slightly different diameter, with a common center. They're concentric. Tilt one slightly with respect to the other, retaining the common centering. The rings now cross at two diametrically opposed points.
Those rings represent non-coplanar orbits. Objects traveling along the two orbits appear to be in parallel course at widest separation, then they start coming together, collide, and start moving apart again.
The cheap way to do rendezvous is get the two spacecraft onto the SAME orbit, with some separation, and then GRADUALLY maneuver one of them to bring it closer. It is extremely touchy work. (This is why Project Gemini spent so much time learning how to rendezvous the Gemini spacecraft with the Agena target: they had to be able to do rendezvous to do the Apollo moon landings.)
Read "Carrying the Fire", by Mike Collins, for some interesting insight into the problem. (Mike Collins was Apollo XI Command Module Pilot.)
OK, so it will cost somewhere between a quarter billion and half a billion to put it on an expendable.
Back around 1990, when Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) twisted NASA's arm to get them to disclose the actual costs, it turned out that a single Shuttle flight cost right around one billion dollars. That was some fifteen years ago. You can bet your second-best piggy bank that the costs have NOT gone down, given that the cost is determined PRIMARILY by the size of the standing army that must be paid whether the birds are flying or not.
So we would SAVE somewhere between half a billion and three quarters of a billion dollars by putting this thing on an expendable. Or more.
Actually, no.
When it dies and rots on the ground, and the rains come, the CO2 combines with water to form carbonic acid, and leaches into the ground. It eventually finds limestone, and etches the limestone, forming underwater caves.
But if you are concerned about the CO2 getting back into the atmosphere, WHERE IT ORIGINALLY CAME FROM (recall that oil and coal started out life as plant matter, a long time ago), then plant redwood trees, in a "no harvest" forest. Redwood trees are capable of sequestering carbon for a very long time.
I'm waiting for the carbon freaks to discover that humans and animals exhale carbon dioxide, and propose a carbon tax on every living creature on the earth. This raises the question: what do you do with someone who can't pay their carbon taxes? Two possible answers come immediately to mind: 1) you kill him/her, 2) you sell him/her to someone who can and will pay his tax. (Note that #2 implies #1 for a carbon creator who doesn't sell on the carbon market.)
Coping with existing CO2 is *NOT* a problem.
Plant crops, and let the miracle of photosynthesis work for you.
And DON'T burn the resulting food, the way the corn-based ethanol idiots want you to.
No, not necessarily.
You balance the construction cost in year zero with the cost of fuel in the out years.
If your nuke plant costs four times as much to build, initially, but, over the life of the plant, it saves twenty times as much in fuel costs (numbers pulled at random out of poster's butt), you have saved a whole bundle of money by buying the more expensive plant.
Also, entirely too much of the cost of building nuclear power plants has been fighting totally frivolous bullcrap from enviro-whackos who wouldn't know what a void coefficient was if it tore their leg off.
One minor, but important, quibble.
Do not use Certified Mail, Return Receipt Requested. Certified mail gets exactly the same handling as normal uncertified First Class Mail. It may or may not get to the destination.
Registered Mail, on the other hand, WILL get there. Period. It has a complete audit trail attached, that can be traced, person by person, through EVERY person who handled the piece, through EVERY storage container it ever occupied. Each time the piece changes hands, the recipient is required to sign for it. If the last guy in the chain doesn't have it in his hands, or it isn't in the container he locked it in, he is in Deep Sh*t.
Registered Mail EXISTS to handle those things that MUST get there, that MUST NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES get lost in the mail. They do require you to state a value. If the value is high enough, they tack on fees for additional insurance - but the fees don't kick in until the value hits several thousand dollars, and they are still extremely low, indicating that the actual risk of loss is also extremely low.
I know all this because I've had to use Registered Mail several times. Severance paperwork, for just one example, is usually worth several thousand dollars. A Defensive Driving completion certificate successfully delivered prevents a local ticket mill jurisdiction from causing you SERIOUS headaches down the road. I had to slam-dunk a collections agency one year after a hospital royally screwed up their billing to the insurance company. You REALLY want these things to get there, and you REALLY want to be able to PROVE they got there.
Actually, it DOES make a difference.
If you actually took the time to write a paper letter, your Congresscritter now believes that there are approximately 100 constituents in his district who feels the way you do about this particular issue.
Elections have been decided on less than that. He knows this. He knows that, if you actually get sufficiently pissed off to mobilize those other 99 like-minded voters, he might LOSE in the primary next spring, or in the general election next fall, and actually have to go WORK for a living.
And NOTHING scares a Congresscritter more than the prospect of actually having to get a real job.
They may be praying that Microsoft will buy them. They appear to be in the process of imploding.
a meset.aspx?FilingID=5107317&Type=HTML for more information.
Their last 10-K contained a couple of zingers.
"As of the date of the filing of this Report, the Company does not have sufficient funds available to fund its operations, invest in additional resources for growth and repay its debt obligations. Therefore, the Company needs to raise additional funds through selling securities, obtaining loans or increase sales. The Company's inability to raise such funds or renegotiate the terms of its existing debt will significantly jeopardize its ability to continue operations."
"The Company has incurred significant losses from operations for the year ended December 31, 2006. In addition, the Company had a working capital deficit of approximately $10.3 million at December 31, 2006. The foregoing raises substantial doubt about the Company's ability to continue as a going concern. Management's plans include seeking additional capital and/or debt financing. There is no guarantee that additional capital and/or debt financing will be available when and to the extent required, or that if available, it will be on terms acceptable to the Company. The accompanying financial statements do not include any adjustments that might result from the outcome of this uncertainty. Our auditors have included a going-concern paragraph to their audit report."
The entire 10-K makes for interesting reading.
See http://yahoo.brand.edgar-online.com/fetchFilingFr
If you were at the University of Texas at Austin, in the 1970s, as I was, you remember the never-ending stream of Iranian Students Association protests. A small minority of them wore hoods to conceal their faces from SAVAK; most didn't.
If you were in Harvard Square in the 1980s, as I was one week, you saw Iranian student protests then as well. The one guy I talked with was not wearing a hood. (I asked him if the people of Tehran prayed behind the Ayatollah. He didn't know. If you know about Islam, and Iranians, you know why this is an important question.)
The difference between UT Austin in the 1970s and Harvard Square in the 1980s was the government they were protesting against. Everything else was the same.
In 2003, I had the opportunity to be a student at UT Austin again. I found myself missing the ISA protests: they were amusing theater.
The key point is that they weren't THAT afraid of the Big Bad Government Guys, then or now.
More to the point:
Sen. John McCain
United States Senate
241 Russell Senate Ofc. Bldg.
Washington, DC 20510
1 SnailMail letter == 10 phone calls == 100 emails
Paper mail means that The Folks Back Home are REALLY upset about something. It is EASY to dash off an email. It takes a little more work to make a phone call. You actually have to WORK to type (or write longhand) a letter, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, and drop it in the mailbox.
Polonium-210 has, as someone else said, a half-life of 138 days. That means that, if you start on day 1 with 1 gram of Po-210, on day 139 you have 500 milligrams of Po-210 and 500 milligrams of decay products (in this case, Pb-206, (lead) which is stable). On day 277, you have 250 mg of Po-210 and 750 mg of Pb-206. On day 415, you have 125 mg of Po-210 and 875 mg of lead. And so on...
e xt/Po/key.html
Here's a useful reference.
http://www.webelements.com/webelements/elements/t
So I would consider it an extremely safe bet that the Po-210 was manufactured within the last year, probably within the last three months.
Well, here's the issue.
Mistakes happen. When they happen, and you get into one of those "We show this bill was not paid" "I paid it" "We don't see it" loops, or "We show it was paid late" "I paid it on time" loops, it is a lot more effective to send them the traditional photocopy of both sides of the cancelled check that PROVES that they received it, on such-and-such date, they deposited it to their bank on such-and-such date, and my bank received it through the clearinghouse on such-and-such date.
Business has had hundreds of years to develop business processes for handling checks, to cover all the requirements of all the players, to keep everyone honest and make sure everyone does in fact get paid. The electronic systems are still in their infancy.
More to the point, the courts know what checks are. When you send the vendor a copy of the cancelled check, you are implicitly threatening him with a lawsuit which he WILL lose, as opposed to a suit that he MIGHT win.
Actually, morphine is not addictive, IF the dosage is matched to the pain relief requirement.
A friend of mine, a nurse, was trained in hospice protocol. When another friend was hospitalized for near-terminal cancer, and placed on IV morphine, I asked him about it. My concern was that the hospital was running large doses, basically not worrying about addiction. He explained to me that it was not addictive, if the patient really needed it for pain control.
Some years later, I got to confirm this for myself. I've had both hips replaced, and the initial pain control was with intravenous morphine. Switching off of it to pain pills, then tapering the pain pills, was not a problem.