Yeah it'll turn out that your average clear contact paper will sufficiently block out the UV radiation such that the degradation doesn't occur, but your DVD laser will still be able to read the disc. We'll all be opening our craptastic temporary DVDs in a darkened room, slapping some clear sticker on the data side (cost: $0.37) and end up with a permanent DVD.
That I find truly interesting. In our culture's current enthusiasm for stuff like "The Passion" and equating "Muslim" with "Arab terrorist", I'd be surprised to see such a book faithfully made into film. Arthur C. Clarke represents such an agnostic image of God in Rama that for most of the series it appears completely atheist, even actively promoting that idea at times.
It's not the type of theme I'd expect a studio to gamble with in these times, but I would love to see that story told in images.
The same reason most car commercials are about performance and showing off instead of reliability and gas mileage; people are more convinced by flash than substance.
Most people buy bluetooth phones and don't know what to use it for, just that it's another thing they have.
One more reason that cell phone manufacturers need to focus on the big three (battery life, signal strength, ease of use) instead of mindless feature-creep.
It sounds silly if you say them in the this order. I think you answer your own gripe; cell phone manufacturers are interested in selling phones, not producing the One Great Cellphone to Save Humanity. Just as with car commercials, feature creep and showiness sell cell phones, not the boring old battery life or gas mileage.
Yes, you're quite right. And I did say that I'm confident that there is a lot of corruption in the Bush White House.
What I'm complaining about is this conspiracy theory nonsense that I keep reading from the Democratic party/voters. They'd have me believe that Bush is a completely incompetent moron who (disengage rational thought) is the mastermind behind the most nefarious and profitable corruption in world history. They continuously point to the glaring, embarrassing international goofs the White House makes while (disengage rational thought) the Bush administration is pulling off the most successful power grab in American history.
It's 4 years AFTER the fact and you STILL read people on Slashdot who think it's delightfully clever to say that Bush never "won" an election since he really "stole" it. Wha? Come again? *blink blink* Mine eyes have been made open to a new scandal! I think it's practically diagnosable paranoia if a person honestly believes that the presidential election, covered around the clock by half a dozen news agencies, considered by the Supreme Court, was "stolen". That doesn't mean I like how it turned out or that I think Bush should have won, or would have won if we had a complete re-do in December, but for fuck's sake, Gore ceded victory.
But only on Slashdot can we have mile long discussions about how file sharing isn't "stealing", yet we jerk each other off when somebody makes a "funny joke" about how Bush "stole" the 2000 election.
So anyhow, I'm not defending Bush or his administration in any respect. I am critical of the Democratic party/voters for being so damned suspicious and cynical that a reasonably intelligent swing voter couldn't possibly join the party with a clear conscience. What if I don't like Bush but I'm not so psycho that I imagine Bush as the ringleader of the Dark Army who is plotting to conquer Earth and turn it into a blackened wasteland of corruption and sin. Well, there's no political party for me, I'm just another independent voter.
Seriously, who said I liked Bill O'Reilly? Who said I support electronic voting machines? With all the insane nonsense coming out of the left, I can't even fathom how the 2004 election could be stolen. The left can't give away the election fast enough.
I don't doubt that a Bush did meet with the bin Ladens on 9/10 or 9/11. I don't doubt that the family was flown out of the country while all other planes were grounded - in retrospect I think it was a horrible decision but it probably made a lot of sense at the time.
And now the left concludes that this means that George W. Bush was the evil mastermind behind the terrorist attacks on 9/11 - or that he knew about them and let them happen - or that the Republicans are putting LSD in our drinking water. All three are equally reasonable.
Continue to paint American politics as "With us or against us." It's a losing strategy for a party that only gains voters when the Republican party loses them. Like I said, the Democratic party is going to be in trouble for many years until somebody with leadership ability finds a way to actually -win- something, like a voter or the confidence of the people. I'm voting for Kerry only because I want Bush out. My best case scenario would be Bush as a 1 term prez, Kerry as a 1 term prez, and McCain from 2008 to 2016.
I'm an amateur nut with only about 2 grand of gear, but I'm also a just graduate college student;) I'll blow many more paychecks on boxes with knobs in the near future. One thing, though -
Your brain can process 2 channels of audio, thats why every modern recording format only has 2 channels. 5.1 is great for movies, but stupid for music.
The really odd thing, to me, is that surround sound (5, 6, 7, 8.1, etc.) "surrounds" you with the sound sources. Why in hell would a music CD want to do that? What a strange and foreign experience it would be to have a drummer behind you, a guitarist to your front left, and a piano player to your hard right! I guess trance, techno, and other wholly synthetic music genres could make use of it, but I've never been "surrounded" with sources of music except when I was the musician myself.
So yeah, an attempt to sell overpriced equipment sounds about right. The whole concept of surround sound music struck me like Smell-O-Vision right from the start.
Yeah right on. I've been reading about these for many months. I believe my DVD player is even DVD-A and SACD compatible, but I might be talking out of my hat on that. I do have a magazine in my bathroom right now that is at least six months old and has a six or seven page investigation into the two formats. I can't believe that CmdrTaco posted this and not Micheal.
Ya know, I followed your link, and the first blurb I read was the fact that on 9/10, George W. Bush was at a meeting with Osama bin Laden's brother. Seriously, WTF. bin Laden's family has publicly disowned him. What kind of moron does that website take me to be? Ted Kaczynski was turned in by his brother, surely we should put them both in jail, huh?
I read a little bit further and it seems that the site is mildly informative, but still falls to the same pits of idiocy that always keep me from supporting the Democratic party. That pit is the belief that I'm some uneducated moron eager to be stuffed full with half-assed propaganda.
Micheal Moore is a crackpot - I don't care what he has to say. Maybe he's right - but he's still a crackpot. He invalidates his message with his angle. He is the Democrat's Jerry Falwell. Falwell insists the world is 4000 years old, Moore insists that America is the great white satan. Pick your poison.
The Democratic party will be in serious trouble over the next couple of years, I think. They aren't winning votes as much as they're picking up the votes that the Republicans lose. I'll be voting against Bush (ie for Kerry) rather than honestly choosing Kerry for president. I only hope that McCain will run in 2008 - that is the guy I want as a leader. The Democratic party really needs to work at winning votes from people who aren't swayed by radical tripe that Moore spits out - and realize that Moore just reinforces the Loser's Party mindset. That is to say that Micheal Moore is the epitome of preaching to the choir. Anyone who gives him any credit couldn't possibly be lost to the Republican party, meanwhile anyone with any sense sees him for what he is. When I read some "informative" stuff about the corruption in the Bush administration - and I'm sure there is a lot of it - I always find this half-assed conspiracy shit that belongs on some schizophrenic's homepage, and if that's how the party tries to win votes, God help them.
And yeah, I know that these websites don't reflect the Democratic Party officially, but (to beat a dead horse) where is the leadership? Can't anybody publish a legitimate site without the propaganda targeted at highschool dropouts to provide some information? Micheal Moore is not information. Gossip columns about Bush meeting with people who openly and publicly disown Osama bin Laden is not information. John Stewart is roughly 1200% more effective at getting Kerry into the White House than ANYTHING I've seen the Democrats do in the last 18 months.
And all illness is caused by an imbalance of free radicals in your body, Tarot cards reveal your future, and websites that want to give you some free software just to help you out don't have malicious intentions.
Congratulations, you have discovered that once in awhile, truth is stranger than fiction. Claiming that skepticism is full of shit, however, is moronic.
I'm an INTJ and I double majored in CS and Mathematics like some others here. Lots of lame advice but the only good advice is "Get over yourself."
Like you I had a poor GPA in high school yet managed to do very well on the SATs and I killed the ACT. College was not really challenging, so I got two degrees instead of one. I slaughtered the GREs and could have gone to just about any graduate school in the nation. (Harvard sent me recruitment material all on their own; it was cute of them to try but I didn't even consider them for an instant because I hate the weather in the north.)
But my point is not to gloat.
I learned how to earn a salary in school and nothing more. In addition to breezing through school, I worked 50-65 hour weeks in the Tennessee summers doing 100% outdoor construction. You'll learn something about what to do with your life when you're drenched in sweat at 8:30am after loading 50 bags of cement onto a pickup truck. College won't teach you a damn thing about yourself. Until you sweat all day, go home when it's dark, literally have time to shit, shower, shave, sleep, and show up again at 7am sharp you simply can't really appreciate what an education means. And you can't really appreciate how infinitely un-fucking-special you are to this world.
My advice? If you're still sitting at home stroking yourself with how uniquely bright you are, you don't belong in college and you probably don't deserve to be there. "Get a job, sir," as Jeff Lebowski said. Not some sissy shit, either. Earn a dollar with your sweat and you'll know what it means to earn a dollar with your brains.
I suppose this might get called a flame but I mean every word of it and its intended to be beneficial of not glowing with positive emotions.
If I had a mod point I'd toss you one. For what it's worth, I use predicting the weather as an example of what distributed computing can accomplish that a single processor cannot. (I'm a computer science graduate.) In my experience, this example seems to "click" better than most others and gives people a good intuition about the advantages of large distributed computers.
Interesting. I've been living in Blacksburg for about a year now and must admit that the weather here is quite volatile.
When I lived in Tennessee I once saw a summer thunderstorm where the clouds doubled back on themselves. I was working construction at the time and we got to go home if it rained, so I spent a lot of time watching the clouds that day. Thick black clouds rushed in from the NE, but 20 minutes later they were all heading back toward the NE as the weather patterns typically did in that region.
I don't know if this storm created any tornadoes over the hilly terrain, but it was impressive to see clouds rolling over and change direction. The rain was so thick that it was really impossible to drive and there was no ambient sunlight - almost pitch black at 4:30pm. This is probably usual weather for some places but it was quite a sight in Tennessee.
NO ONE wants to launch a nuclear reactor into space in case the rocket blows up, as an explosion could set off a nuclear explosion too.
No, it could not. It takes incredibly specific and extreme conditions to start a nuclear explosions and it is therefore quite easy to avoid.
There is the kind we use on earth, which requires massive cooling (yes, not even the cold of mars would be enough). The second type is a radioactive reactor, which simply uses the radiation from a chunk of highly radioactive material for power.
Exactly how do these "kinds we use on earth" work if not by using a piece of radioactive material for power? Radioactive decay, whether in an earth bound reactor or in a satellite, creates heat which can be converted into electricity. On earth it drives gas turbines. I'm not entirely certain what system is used on a satellite, but there isn't some magic radiation powered satellite system. The radioactive decay creates electricity and you have an electric satellite - exactly the same principles used in the reactors "we use on earth".
You got that right. I'm quite convinced that "the electoral college is bad" is equivalent to saying "I nearly flunked out of calculus and got a liberal arts degree".
Without an electoral college, close to half the states (and their political interests) would be irrelavent to a presidential election. You would never see a candidate campaign in Vermont, Conneticut, Wyoming, North or South Dakota, Rhode Island, Montana, Maine, New Hampshire, Delaware, or a number of other low population states. The right to elect the president would be given basically in its entirety to California, New York, Michigan, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and Georgia. If you don't live in those states and you support dismantling the electoral college, you are either very bad at math or you are supporting an idea that destroys your vote's influence in federal politics.
Churchill said that the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter; the electoral college dialogue is an attempt by many people to mute their own voices in federal politics. What can I say? Churchill was right.
..And I'm not some Bush apologist for the 2000 election debacle. I just happen to be better than average at math and understand the function of the electoral college.
I left school in disguist halfway through my Master's. I was doing just fine, but the politics, beauracracy, and bullshit was WAY too deep for me to tolerate while paying tuition and rent on my own. I've spent too much time working in the real world to stomach that crap.
For me, grad school was like a job so crappy that I'd be hunting for another job, but it was costing me $15,000 per year instead of paying me $30,000 per year. So I put my money where my mouth was and found a job that pays $50,000 per year and Virginia Tech's computer science graduate school can suck my nuts. Wheee!
Yes, actually. T-Mobile was highly recommended and at the time I was buying, I was informed that there are no T-Mobile vendors within 200 miles. (I have since found out that there is one in town, oh well.) I'm also not terribly excited about cell phones.. If I get one that remembers phone numbers and functions as a phone, I'll be happy, therefore trying one out before I bought it wasn't that important.
I hear ya, but just this weekend I was talking with a friend and wishing that some notoriously sleazy industries would be regulated a little more fairly. I'm not talking about being forced to compete with a government industry, as was done with electricity in the US, but to just clean up some of the sleaziness.
I'm in the process of getting a cell phone for the first time (I've been a college student who enjoys being unreachable) and am also to a big city. I'm trying to order a phone, have it delivered to me, but have it activated with the big city area code and so on. I ordered from a1wireless.com, but they couldn't verify my address. That's odd, because the USPS can, the electric company can, the cable company can, and the bank can. The guy I spoke with about this was a pain in the ass so I told him to cancel the order. He said that it would be done, but I have yet to receive any email from the company that the order was cancelled. I half expect to be billed for a phone that I never receive.
So I shopped around and found a completely different company. Different website, different deals, different name, different "sales pitch" regarding their phones. So I gave them a shot and ordered a phone. This was about 3 hours after I placed the first order. Here's the really sleazy part..
I was unhappy with the customer support at the first company and I wanted to take my business to one of their rivals. I thought that I had done so.. but my second order number is about 300 higher than my first one, ie the order number at one company was (fake) 423501 and my second order number with a "rival" company was 423811. This could be a coincidence, but I strongly suspect that I'll be dealing with the same bad customer support on Tuesday.
It is a sleazy industry. They must make more money by scamming their customers than providing the advertised service. My girlfriend's provider (SunCom) refuses to provide an itemized bill. They just send her a total and expect her to pay it - or pay the ~$150 early cancellation fee. I called SunCom myself and very politely did everything I could to get an itemized bill. After 30 minutes, the woman told me, "After the first bill has been sent to the customer, it contains proprietary information on our computers and therefore we cannot print an itemized bill and send it out, so sorry." I'm not a dope, I don't believe that nonsense, but the fact is that I could get blood from a stone before I could get an itemized bill from SunCom.
If some government somewhere wants to regulate these assholes and enforce a little truth in advertising, I'm all for it. A free market doesn't work well when there's an industrial scam going on, and that's what the cell phone providers have.
None of them has ever told me anything other than what I've said here: most Americans truly do believe that Britain is a violent society, where people live in constant fear of personal violence.
Ok, fair enough. You talked to some Americans and that's what they told you.
I am an American and I've talked to probably 10,000 Americans in my life. I have never, NEVER heard anybody voice the opinion that Britain is a "criminal paradise". That's typically how we'd describe Compton (LA), parts of New Jersey, parts of D.C., and parts of NYC.
I did once hear that gangs in France are just as deadly as gangs in America, per capita, except that they bludgeon people to death rather than shoot them. I don't have a clue if that's even remotely correct, but it was presented as a bit of social information about gang violence.
And despite what American movies would have you believe, it's actually not too common for American police officers to be murdered. Many are accidentially struck by cars. As another poster mentioned, the penalties for even shooting at a cop are so disproportionately strict (and rightly so) that it actually IS a deterrent.
You're exactly right, and this is what passes for insight these days. Just see how many people you can find who consider America's foreign policy as imperialism a mundane fact, and then it's so controversial that America pushes its foreign agenda on other nations. What's next? Sure, water freezes, but GOOD GOD DID YOU KNOW THAT ICE IS WATER?!!!OMG!!
They ignored a order. Thats telling enough.They willfully made a bad decision.
This has already been explained.
They were following orders to defend themselves if they perceived that they were under fire.
The intel officers who identify targets for the pilots do not have authority to give orders to the pilots. There were no orders which were disobeyed. The pilots made a very bad judgement call, but their orders explicitly left that judgement in the hands of the pilots.
I do encourage you to examine the incident a little more carefully.
Stop with the flames. It makes you look ignorant. [..] The pilots chose to attack. I doubt it's because of training, it's lack of proper dicipline in those pilots.
Riiight... I'm ignorant, but you're telling me that these highly trained, experienced, extremely trusted fighter pilots from the best equipped, best funded, and largest air force on the planet just flipped out one day and willfully attacked Candians so they could get a higher score. But I look ignorant... Keep telling yourself that.
You're right, they were punished. I meant that they were not severely punished, and truth be told, being grounded for a few weeks after a friendly fire incident could be considered understandable down time perhaps moreso than punishment.
They were not taking on direct fire because they were not beign fired at, they could have flown away, rifle fire is not good at downing a retreatinf jet. But they wanted to score up a few more kills to stamp on their wings so they KILLED 4 servicemen.
The pilots thought they were being fired at with some type of 20 year old rocket system. I don't recall the details, but I did follow the investigation a little bit. It is definitely true that the pilots were probably not in a life or death situation themselves, but I reiterate my point about the other pilots in the force. Telling the other pilots that they -MUST- wait until their life is significantly threatened before they can return fire would probably bring about the early retirement of many pilots.
In addition, I've got to say your analysis of the situation is incredibly lacking. You suggest that they saw the gun fire, asked for confirmation, get the response "These are allied troops", and then said, "Dur hur hur, let's kill them anyway," believing that they would become heroes for scoring more kills. If you seriously believe that could even remotely be slightly similar to what actually happened, I have foolishly entered into a discussion with a person lacking reason.
Slashdot Mirror
~Not at all serious, no need to point out flaws.
It's not the type of theme I'd expect a studio to gamble with in these times, but I would love to see that story told in images.
Most people buy bluetooth phones and don't know what to use it for, just that it's another thing they have.
One more reason that cell phone manufacturers need to focus on the big three (battery life, signal strength, ease of use) instead of mindless feature-creep.
It sounds silly if you say them in the this order. I think you answer your own gripe; cell phone manufacturers are interested in selling phones, not producing the One Great Cellphone to Save Humanity. Just as with car commercials, feature creep and showiness sell cell phones, not the boring old battery life or gas mileage.
What I'm complaining about is this conspiracy theory nonsense that I keep reading from the Democratic party/voters. They'd have me believe that Bush is a completely incompetent moron who (disengage rational thought) is the mastermind behind the most nefarious and profitable corruption in world history. They continuously point to the glaring, embarrassing international goofs the White House makes while (disengage rational thought) the Bush administration is pulling off the most successful power grab in American history.
It's 4 years AFTER the fact and you STILL read people on Slashdot who think it's delightfully clever to say that Bush never "won" an election since he really "stole" it. Wha? Come again? *blink blink* Mine eyes have been made open to a new scandal! I think it's practically diagnosable paranoia if a person honestly believes that the presidential election, covered around the clock by half a dozen news agencies, considered by the Supreme Court, was "stolen". That doesn't mean I like how it turned out or that I think Bush should have won, or would have won if we had a complete re-do in December, but for fuck's sake, Gore ceded victory.
But only on Slashdot can we have mile long discussions about how file sharing isn't "stealing", yet we jerk each other off when somebody makes a "funny joke" about how Bush "stole" the 2000 election.
So anyhow, I'm not defending Bush or his administration in any respect. I am critical of the Democratic party/voters for being so damned suspicious and cynical that a reasonably intelligent swing voter couldn't possibly join the party with a clear conscience. What if I don't like Bush but I'm not so psycho that I imagine Bush as the ringleader of the Dark Army who is plotting to conquer Earth and turn it into a blackened wasteland of corruption and sin. Well, there's no political party for me, I'm just another independent voter.
I don't doubt that a Bush did meet with the bin Ladens on 9/10 or 9/11. I don't doubt that the family was flown out of the country while all other planes were grounded - in retrospect I think it was a horrible decision but it probably made a lot of sense at the time.
And now the left concludes that this means that George W. Bush was the evil mastermind behind the terrorist attacks on 9/11 - or that he knew about them and let them happen - or that the Republicans are putting LSD in our drinking water. All three are equally reasonable.
Continue to paint American politics as "With us or against us." It's a losing strategy for a party that only gains voters when the Republican party loses them. Like I said, the Democratic party is going to be in trouble for many years until somebody with leadership ability finds a way to actually -win- something, like a voter or the confidence of the people. I'm voting for Kerry only because I want Bush out. My best case scenario would be Bush as a 1 term prez, Kerry as a 1 term prez, and McCain from 2008 to 2016.
Your brain can process 2 channels of audio, thats why every modern recording format only has 2 channels. 5.1 is great for movies, but stupid for music.
The really odd thing, to me, is that surround sound (5, 6, 7, 8.1, etc.) "surrounds" you with the sound sources. Why in hell would a music CD want to do that? What a strange and foreign experience it would be to have a drummer behind you, a guitarist to your front left, and a piano player to your hard right! I guess trance, techno, and other wholly synthetic music genres could make use of it, but I've never been "surrounded" with sources of music except when I was the musician myself.
So yeah, an attempt to sell overpriced equipment sounds about right. The whole concept of surround sound music struck me like Smell-O-Vision right from the start.
Yeah right on. I've been reading about these for many months. I believe my DVD player is even DVD-A and SACD compatible, but I might be talking out of my hat on that. I do have a magazine in my bathroom right now that is at least six months old and has a six or seven page investigation into the two formats. I can't believe that CmdrTaco posted this and not Micheal.
I read a little bit further and it seems that the site is mildly informative, but still falls to the same pits of idiocy that always keep me from supporting the Democratic party. That pit is the belief that I'm some uneducated moron eager to be stuffed full with half-assed propaganda.
Micheal Moore is a crackpot - I don't care what he has to say. Maybe he's right - but he's still a crackpot. He invalidates his message with his angle. He is the Democrat's Jerry Falwell. Falwell insists the world is 4000 years old, Moore insists that America is the great white satan. Pick your poison.
The Democratic party will be in serious trouble over the next couple of years, I think. They aren't winning votes as much as they're picking up the votes that the Republicans lose. I'll be voting against Bush (ie for Kerry) rather than honestly choosing Kerry for president. I only hope that McCain will run in 2008 - that is the guy I want as a leader. The Democratic party really needs to work at winning votes from people who aren't swayed by radical tripe that Moore spits out - and realize that Moore just reinforces the Loser's Party mindset. That is to say that Micheal Moore is the epitome of preaching to the choir. Anyone who gives him any credit couldn't possibly be lost to the Republican party, meanwhile anyone with any sense sees him for what he is. When I read some "informative" stuff about the corruption in the Bush administration - and I'm sure there is a lot of it - I always find this half-assed conspiracy shit that belongs on some schizophrenic's homepage, and if that's how the party tries to win votes, God help them.
And yeah, I know that these websites don't reflect the Democratic Party officially, but (to beat a dead horse) where is the leadership? Can't anybody publish a legitimate site without the propaganda targeted at highschool dropouts to provide some information? Micheal Moore is not information. Gossip columns about Bush meeting with people who openly and publicly disown Osama bin Laden is not information. John Stewart is roughly 1200% more effective at getting Kerry into the White House than ANYTHING I've seen the Democrats do in the last 18 months.
Oh well, off-topic rant disengage!
Congratulations, you have discovered that once in awhile, truth is stranger than fiction. Claiming that skepticism is full of shit, however, is moronic.
Like you I had a poor GPA in high school yet managed to do very well on the SATs and I killed the ACT. College was not really challenging, so I got two degrees instead of one. I slaughtered the GREs and could have gone to just about any graduate school in the nation. (Harvard sent me recruitment material all on their own; it was cute of them to try but I didn't even consider them for an instant because I hate the weather in the north.)
But my point is not to gloat.
I learned how to earn a salary in school and nothing more. In addition to breezing through school, I worked 50-65 hour weeks in the Tennessee summers doing 100% outdoor construction. You'll learn something about what to do with your life when you're drenched in sweat at 8:30am after loading 50 bags of cement onto a pickup truck. College won't teach you a damn thing about yourself. Until you sweat all day, go home when it's dark, literally have time to shit, shower, shave, sleep, and show up again at 7am sharp you simply can't really appreciate what an education means. And you can't really appreciate how infinitely un-fucking-special you are to this world.
My advice? If you're still sitting at home stroking yourself with how uniquely bright you are, you don't belong in college and you probably don't deserve to be there. "Get a job, sir," as Jeff Lebowski said. Not some sissy shit, either. Earn a dollar with your sweat and you'll know what it means to earn a dollar with your brains.
I suppose this might get called a flame but I mean every word of it and its intended to be beneficial of not glowing with positive emotions.
If I had a mod point I'd toss you one. For what it's worth, I use predicting the weather as an example of what distributed computing can accomplish that a single processor cannot. (I'm a computer science graduate.) In my experience, this example seems to "click" better than most others and gives people a good intuition about the advantages of large distributed computers.
When I lived in Tennessee I once saw a summer thunderstorm where the clouds doubled back on themselves. I was working construction at the time and we got to go home if it rained, so I spent a lot of time watching the clouds that day. Thick black clouds rushed in from the NE, but 20 minutes later they were all heading back toward the NE as the weather patterns typically did in that region.
I don't know if this storm created any tornadoes over the hilly terrain, but it was impressive to see clouds rolling over and change direction. The rain was so thick that it was really impossible to drive and there was no ambient sunlight - almost pitch black at 4:30pm. This is probably usual weather for some places but it was quite a sight in Tennessee.
No, it could not. It takes incredibly specific and extreme conditions to start a nuclear explosions and it is therefore quite easy to avoid.
There is the kind we use on earth, which requires massive cooling (yes, not even the cold of mars would be enough). The second type is a radioactive reactor, which simply uses the radiation from a chunk of highly radioactive material for power.
Exactly how do these "kinds we use on earth" work if not by using a piece of radioactive material for power? Radioactive decay, whether in an earth bound reactor or in a satellite, creates heat which can be converted into electricity. On earth it drives gas turbines. I'm not entirely certain what system is used on a satellite, but there isn't some magic radiation powered satellite system. The radioactive decay creates electricity and you have an electric satellite - exactly the same principles used in the reactors "we use on earth".
Without an electoral college, close to half the states (and their political interests) would be irrelavent to a presidential election. You would never see a candidate campaign in Vermont, Conneticut, Wyoming, North or South Dakota, Rhode Island, Montana, Maine, New Hampshire, Delaware, or a number of other low population states. The right to elect the president would be given basically in its entirety to California, New York, Michigan, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and Georgia. If you don't live in those states and you support dismantling the electoral college, you are either very bad at math or you are supporting an idea that destroys your vote's influence in federal politics.
Churchill said that the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter; the electoral college dialogue is an attempt by many people to mute their own voices in federal politics. What can I say? Churchill was right.
I spelled "disgust" like 4 times before deciding that "disguist" was correct... shame on me, I guess.
I left school in disguist halfway through my Master's. I was doing just fine, but the politics, beauracracy, and bullshit was WAY too deep for me to tolerate while paying tuition and rent on my own. I've spent too much time working in the real world to stomach that crap.
For me, grad school was like a job so crappy that I'd be hunting for another job, but it was costing me $15,000 per year instead of paying me $30,000 per year. So I put my money where my mouth was and found a job that pays $50,000 per year and Virginia Tech's computer science graduate school can suck my nuts. Wheee!
Yes, actually. T-Mobile was highly recommended and at the time I was buying, I was informed that there are no T-Mobile vendors within 200 miles. (I have since found out that there is one in town, oh well.) I'm also not terribly excited about cell phones.. If I get one that remembers phone numbers and functions as a phone, I'll be happy, therefore trying one out before I bought it wasn't that important.
I'm in the process of getting a cell phone for the first time (I've been a college student who enjoys being unreachable) and am also to a big city. I'm trying to order a phone, have it delivered to me, but have it activated with the big city area code and so on. I ordered from a1wireless.com, but they couldn't verify my address. That's odd, because the USPS can, the electric company can, the cable company can, and the bank can. The guy I spoke with about this was a pain in the ass so I told him to cancel the order. He said that it would be done, but I have yet to receive any email from the company that the order was cancelled. I half expect to be billed for a phone that I never receive.
So I shopped around and found a completely different company. Different website, different deals, different name, different "sales pitch" regarding their phones. So I gave them a shot and ordered a phone. This was about 3 hours after I placed the first order. Here's the really sleazy part..
I was unhappy with the customer support at the first company and I wanted to take my business to one of their rivals. I thought that I had done so.. but my second order number is about 300 higher than my first one, ie the order number at one company was (fake) 423501 and my second order number with a "rival" company was 423811. This could be a coincidence, but I strongly suspect that I'll be dealing with the same bad customer support on Tuesday.
It is a sleazy industry. They must make more money by scamming their customers than providing the advertised service. My girlfriend's provider (SunCom) refuses to provide an itemized bill. They just send her a total and expect her to pay it - or pay the ~$150 early cancellation fee. I called SunCom myself and very politely did everything I could to get an itemized bill. After 30 minutes, the woman told me, "After the first bill has been sent to the customer, it contains proprietary information on our computers and therefore we cannot print an itemized bill and send it out, so sorry." I'm not a dope, I don't believe that nonsense, but the fact is that I could get blood from a stone before I could get an itemized bill from SunCom.
If some government somewhere wants to regulate these assholes and enforce a little truth in advertising, I'm all for it. A free market doesn't work well when there's an industrial scam going on, and that's what the cell phone providers have.
Read this far down and this is definitely the best advice yet.
Ok, fair enough. You talked to some Americans and that's what they told you.
I am an American and I've talked to probably 10,000 Americans in my life. I have never, NEVER heard anybody voice the opinion that Britain is a "criminal paradise". That's typically how we'd describe Compton (LA), parts of New Jersey, parts of D.C., and parts of NYC.
I did once hear that gangs in France are just as deadly as gangs in America, per capita, except that they bludgeon people to death rather than shoot them. I don't have a clue if that's even remotely correct, but it was presented as a bit of social information about gang violence.
And despite what American movies would have you believe, it's actually not too common for American police officers to be murdered. Many are accidentially struck by cars. As another poster mentioned, the penalties for even shooting at a cop are so disproportionately strict (and rightly so) that it actually IS a deterrent.
You're exactly right, and this is what passes for insight these days. Just see how many people you can find who consider America's foreign policy as imperialism a mundane fact, and then it's so controversial that America pushes its foreign agenda on other nations. What's next? Sure, water freezes, but GOOD GOD DID YOU KNOW THAT ICE IS WATER?!!!OMG!!
This has already been explained.
They were following orders to defend themselves if they perceived that they were under fire.
The intel officers who identify targets for the pilots do not have authority to give orders to the pilots. There were no orders which were disobeyed. The pilots made a very bad judgement call, but their orders explicitly left that judgement in the hands of the pilots.
I do encourage you to examine the incident a little more carefully.
Riiight... I'm ignorant, but you're telling me that these highly trained, experienced, extremely trusted fighter pilots from the best equipped, best funded, and largest air force on the planet just flipped out one day and willfully attacked Candians so they could get a higher score. But I look ignorant... Keep telling yourself that.
Thanks for posting.
The pilots thought they were being fired at with some type of 20 year old rocket system. I don't recall the details, but I did follow the investigation a little bit. It is definitely true that the pilots were probably not in a life or death situation themselves, but I reiterate my point about the other pilots in the force. Telling the other pilots that they -MUST- wait until their life is significantly threatened before they can return fire would probably bring about the early retirement of many pilots.
In addition, I've got to say your analysis of the situation is incredibly lacking. You suggest that they saw the gun fire, asked for confirmation, get the response "These are allied troops", and then said, "Dur hur hur, let's kill them anyway," believing that they would become heroes for scoring more kills. If you seriously believe that could even remotely be slightly similar to what actually happened, I have foolishly entered into a discussion with a person lacking reason.