The EV cars don't offer a lot of promise for replacing gas guzzling SUV's. The American consumer has spoken. The car companies need to chase down a way to make SUV's guzzle less gas.
The most immediate way to do that is borrowing concepts from the successful examples of hybrid cars that are out there today.
The next most immediate way to do that would logically be to use a hybrid turbo diesel / electric setup. But in the United States there is a strong stigma against diesel, even though they really are the stinky noisy black smoke belching garbage truck engines they were 25 years ago.
I used to own a 1959 Mercedes Benz 190D. That car sounded like a garbage truck, and woke all the neighbors up when it started. It was slow, and it smelled bad despite being in perfectly restored condition. That, my friends, is what most Americans think of when you say "diesel".
A friend of mine recently bought a brand new Volkwagen Jetta TDI and I must say diesel has come a long way, with a lot of props going to VW engineers. The TDI is quiet and smooth, odorless and relatively powerful. If I could get that in something made for taller men and larger families like a Crown Victoria I would be so happy.
The EV1 was a curiosity and a dead end. Range was short, charging options were very limited and there wasn't much promise for great improvements in the technology in the future. The car was relatively high maintenance (replace all the batteries every few years... wow that is expensive), and had to be parked somewhere with a specialized charging station because you can't fill up at the local Citgo. Also the range was impractical for most Americans who have a long commute to work and must make many side trips on the way home. It doesn't make sense for GM to continue dumping money into a dead end project. Let's see them move on aggressively to something more practical, please.
I haven't tried it. I imagine it would work but when they are cold they tend to take a few seconds to start up (when I say cold, I mean like 40 degrees (F) or less).
The fridge would probably be the very last place I put a CF, just because it is going to yield the least benefit (this is a light that is only ever on a few seconds at a time).
I think it is best to start with lights that are on the longest, and work your way down from there.
Ian, go to Home Depot and take another look at CF bulbs. Like I said, I've been using them for about 6 years now. 6 years ago they were very expensive, had large ballasts, cold color range, flickered when they started up, and of course wouldn't fit in any fixture.
The very cheapest ones that they sell at Home Depot today have only been around for about a year or two. They start right up without flickering, have a smaller ballast, they are relatively CHEAP ($7 for a three pack of bulbs on a sale day today, vs. $22 I paid for an individual bulb 6 years ago).
The 9 watt bulbs are probably smaller than your average 60 watt incandescent in external dimensions.
CF's fit great into lamps now. They also fit great into driveway lights, courtesy lights by the front door, etc. They also work very well in cieling fans.
As for brightness, I have a desk lamp that is rated for no more than a 45 watt bulb (incandescent) that now has a 27 watt CF bulb which is the functional equiv of a 100W incandescent. Very bright! Earlier on I was so smitten with the savings of CF bulbs that I was putting 27 watt bulbs everywhere. But now I use mostly ~15W bulbs because they are still plenty bright (just as bright as the bulbs they replace, usually) and because right now they are the cheapest. In more decorative fixtures that use multiple bulbs, or where space is tight (like you mention) I've been using the super compact 9W bulbs with great success. The 9W bulbs are a bit dim for general room lighting but most of the time that I use these, there are 3 to 5 bulbs in the single fixture anyway.
That said, you concerns have already been largely addressed by the industry. Get thee to Home Depot and try out the latest & greatest designs.
I can't believe I haven't seen it mentioned here yet (maybe I am browsing at too high a threshhold), but compact fluorescent lights are the current way to get the best bang for your buck in home lighting.
You get roughly a 4:1 amount of light per watt in a compact fluorescent as compared to a conventional incandescent bulb.
I recently went through my parents house replacing bulbs. I used mostly ~15 watt bulbs (60 watt equivilant) and in a couple of areas where really bright light was needed I used 27 watt bulbs (~100W equiv.)
There were two fixtures in the hall that used a total of 600W of light originally and now use a total of 60W using compact fluorescent bulbs. The hall is still quite bright, but now use four 15 watt bulbs as opposed to eight 75 watt bulbs.
It doesn't take a math genius to see that these bulbs pay for themselves relatively quickly via savings in the electric bill. Not only that, but they last a long time. I've been using them for about six years and I've had only *one* bulb die in that timespan (that was a Philips if anyone wants to know).
Home Depot is selling them pretty cheaply right now. There is no excuse to not buy a pack and try them out. You are totally justified in spending the money for the bulbs up front and put them in now, knowing that if you annualize your costs you are actually saving money.
These bulbs cannot be used in dimmer type sockets, and other than the really small 9 watt models some of them have a hard time in very small enclosed fixtures.
You will realize the most immediate savings if you replace bulbs that are in use for extended periods, like driveway lights or hallway lights.
The distro has been dead for years, but I have yet to see a distro that is as easy to install as Corel Linux. IIRC, it prompted me maybe twice to make decisions about things, and had sensible defaults for the average user. If they had more fully exploited DHCP/DNS I think they could have gotten rid of one of those prompts (asking for a hostname).
Corel was, for all intents and purposes, a Debian for the average joe. I have yet to see any other distros approach the friendliness of it.
I have had success setting up OpenBSD with Postfix and RAV.
OpenBSD - Free operating system, similar to Linux if that's your primary exposure to UNIX-like environments. OpenBSD doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Linux, but on the flip side it doesn't have the baggage either. It is very well suited to setting up a secure server. The built in firewalling, IMHO, is one of the things that sets OpenBSD apart from all the others. It's a snap to firewall an OpenBSD server and there are plenty of example configs out there to get you started.
Postfix - Sorry, Sendmail just gives me fits. I don't want to have to have a reference in front of me while configuring my MTA. I know enough about SMTP to make intelligent decisions if my options are put in front of me in English. Postfix does this. Not to mention it is free, it is fast, it is secure and it is a drop-in replacement for Sendmail.
RAV - This is not free software, but it works very well with all of the software named above. RAV is an antivirus program that is called by Postfix. It's very fast, and very effective.
Since you're running a mailing list server, you might want to do some creative de-miming to further increase the effectiveness of your efforts. Other than GPG signatures, most MIME is unwanted anyway.
There is an obscure manufacturer of SPARC-based notebooks going by the name of Tadpole. These are marketed as portable Solaris systems but I'd bet some flavor of Linux will run on these (Aurora Linux comes to mind).
I'd like to cross-sign keys with some of the PGP "big kahunas". How hard is it to get one of them to sign your key? I tried asking ESR, because he lives relatively close to me, but I never got a response. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (Darwin)
It is taking several minutes per page to get anything off of Ace's Hardware right now. Guess that server wasn't built so well after all.
The sort of performance figures they are posting aren't very impressive at all, as evidenced by the current poor availability of their server.
If you're going to do something, do it right. Go to eBay and get a Sun E3500 for cheap and quit dicking around with bottom end workstations and feeding us a line of crap that it is somehow able to withstand the/. effect.
I'm an event videographer that has been doing this for most of 2002 now with a bone stock Apple Powerbook 800MHz "Titanium". Not only can I plug right into my 21" SVGA monitor for more real estate, I can also plug right into my TV set with the built in S-Video port so I can see exactly what the finished film will look like on TV.
IMHO, this story is not news (even if the PC world is finally catching on). This is my first Mac but I'm absolutely thrilled with it. I switched from Linux.
I have over 100 Macs in my personal collection and you don't see Wired making articles on me. I don't even really brag about the collection, except that this guy's claim to fame is really weak and I am sure there are people out there with bigger Mac collections than me.
Actually, a year ago I could have competed. Today it is still an impressively large collection of junk that I have yet to finish cataloguing. Most of mine came from public school & university cast-offs. I was able to sell a lot of it to buy other toys. Still can't walk in the basement, though. But when I can, I'll likely go to another auction and fill it again for $50 or so.
You say that as if the U.S. would want to join the EU for some reason.
The EU is a political case of Penis Envy, in which the member states of the EU wish to have an economy on the scale of the US but I'm afraid you quite missed out on many of the things that make us a great nation.
If this were true, I'd have seen it on CNN or MSNBC tonight. First of all it is very rare for an Internal Combustion Engine, even a hot rod, to hit such speeds. Secondly, the range is highly unlikely for any electric car right now, especially one with a top speed so questionably high.
Finally, this thing is a stretch limo. Having owned & restored 2 limos, I know that they are like sherman tanks to drive compared to the original cars that they were stretched from. The weight alone of this car would prevent it from having the sort of range claimed.
Until such lofty claims are verified by a trusted source, the Slashdot editors shouldn't be so gullible and eager to publish on their front page.
Like a lot of other/.'ers, I switched to OS X from Linux. Oh, I still do work quite a lot with Linux, but my primary computer is now an Apple Powerbook G4 "Titanium" 800MHz. It's what I'm using now to surf/., and what I use professionally for my work (*NIX consulting and videography work).
While it is far from perfect, the desktop environment works better for me than any of the X11 desktops. Gnome was especially painful. There are some real differences to get used to, but once you are used to it you appreciate it.
There is enough UNIX in OS X to keep me happy. I've got MySQL, Apache and PHP running on here. Perl is also installed by default. (MySQL was added later). The networking stuff is awesome, and this is how a portable is SUPPOSED to work. I know you've heard it all before, but this thing "just works".
You finished off here with something that must be addressed. While the US Government shares in the responsibility for creating the monsters known as Osama Bin Laden and Sadam Hussein, the American citizens (including myself) do not share in this responsibility. The government kept these shadowy ops secret from us, even after the fact, because the government knew that the citizens wouldn't approve.
Iraq as a state is largely Britain's fault. Iraq is a contrived state with arbitrary borders, and is not based on historical borders or anything. No wonder Tony Blair was in such a rush to GWB's side to help clean up the mess that both governments helped to make in the first place.
If the oil companies didn't exercise so much control in politics, we'd probably all be on clean renewable fuels by now and no one would care about what was going on in the Middle East.
The U.S. military is already making use of unmanned spy planes to get a view of the other side of a battlefield before committing troops.
However, these are not supersonic planes so they can be heard before they are seen.
There is a lot to be said for the concept of a short/medium range unmanned aircraft that makes almost no sound until it is on top of you, and has a very small radar signature (if it even flies high enough to be seen). When you don't have to carry 200 lbs of pilot and the extra weight of the plane needed to safely carry that pilot you can extend the range quite a bit. 200 miles round trip would be very doable and very useful. The whole aircraft could fit in the bed of a pickup truck and be assembled and ready to fly in minutes.
Total cost of the aircraft could be a fraction of what manned aircraft cost. Maintenance would be much cheaper. They could be refeuled cleanly in the field, without the need to ship feul in (attractive target for NME!).
The U.S. military has shown a heightened interest in unmanned and autonomous aircraft in recent years. I would not be in the least bit surprised if the results of this experiment contribute greatly to the sorts of aircraft we use in battle ten to twenty years from now.
I think the average American, whether they were alive or not back then, doesn't really have a concept of the gravity of the two bombs we dropped. This is due in large part to the difference in journalism between then and now. You didn't have as many crazy journalists like Geraldo Rivera who would go right into the face of danger with a camera crew to bring Americans into the battlefront. Americans, then and now, have no concept of the level of destruction that was unleashed that day.
But on the flip side, we were responding to a threat that was only somewhat less insidious than the one we face today. At least back then, we were fighting against an enemy state and not some shadowy faceless & borderless organization like Al Queda. And they were primarily going after military targets, unlike the cowards we are fighting today. Those differences elevate WWII Japan to a slightly higher level of respect as an adversary, which doesn't say much for the respect I had for them. Remember, they attacked without declaring war on us first.
I'll only briefly mention that I hold a minority opinion in this country, and state that our president at the time was a traitor for having known of this attack before it happened and he did nothing about it in order to suit his own political ends.
The Japanese were trying to take over our sovereign nation. That threat alone warrants any necessary retaliatory or preventative force.
The Japanese were too dumb to surrender, long after most other nations would have. They were putting their children and elderly in harms way because they had lost pretty much all of their able bodied young men. They engaged in cowardly suicide bombing, which totally changes the face of warfare. How do you defend against an enemy who intends to die in order to take out hundreds of your comrades?
The nukes we dropped served several purposes.
1. Show the Japanese we weren't kidding, and that they had better surrender. They didn't understand the first time so we said it again a few days later.
2. Show the fascists in Europe that we weren't kidding, and we would happily wipe them off the map before engaging in another week of war with them. I think this was probably more of a bluff than anything. The idea of dropping a nuke on the European motherland probably wouldn't have gone over well with most Americans back then if they understood the scale of the destructive force being unleashed. The president knew this.
3. Americans in WWII had a very low opinion of the Japanese. Much much worse than their opinion of the Germans. Indeed, my own grandfather who served in the Pacific Fleet back then cusses whenever he sees anything Japanese, and carries in his wallet a photograph of a Japanese soldier that he killed near Okinawa. While there has been a lot of healing between the older generation of Germans and Americans, there hasn't been a lot of healing with the Japanese in that age group. Thankfully the younger generations have looked beyond the differences of our grandparents (or even great grandparents now).
In any case, dropping the bomb was done well within international law and the protocols of war. What happened at the WTC was a pure act of terrorism, launched by a faceless enemy, outside of the rules of war. It was a cowardly act, consistent with the spineless nature of the Al Queda.
Personally, I think the U.S. should put a bullet in Sadam and then pull out of the region 100%. No more support for Israel. No troops in Saudia Arabia. Stop buying their oil. Let them kill each other if that is what they want. We are far enough along now that we could redirect that money into implementing a massive change in our energy sources, and cut our dependence on petroleum products to a fraction of what we currently consume. That would ultimately solve the Middle East problem.
This is great. Could inspire some other restomods
on
Quake 3 2600 Adventure
·
· Score: 1
In the automotive hobby, a restomod is taking an antique car and putting a modern fuel injected computer controlled drivetrain in it. It sounds a lot like what we're doing here. Putting the modern Quake 3 engine on a classic gameplay.
I'd love to see some other classic games go this route. Metroid, anyone?
There is a huge difference between the death toll at the WTC and the death toll in India during the big earthquake. The earthquake was a natural act. This doesn't make it a good thing by any measure, but you cannot hold a person or group responsible for the death toll.
The WTC attack, while having a much lower death toll (but still a staggering figure) was a cold and calculated attack against innocent victims. This was a senseless act of mass murder, and individual people can be held totally accountable for the death toll.
Natural disasters are tragedies, too. But they are part of nature's cycle. The WTC attacks were anything but natural. Try to keep things in proper perspective.
it accelerated faster then any car you can buy from ford right now.
I have to challenge you on this. Show me an EV that accelerates faster than the Ford SVT Cobra. If there were such an EV, all the kids would want one.
20 to 40 mile range?
If I even got to work, I couldn't get home.
Fact of life, living in North Carolina, it will take you a long drive to go from here to there.
Just going to town to get stamps at the post office is a 20 mile drive.
Slashdot Mirror
The EV cars don't offer a lot of promise for replacing gas guzzling SUV's. The American consumer has spoken. The car companies need to chase down a way to make SUV's guzzle less gas.
The most immediate way to do that is borrowing concepts from the successful examples of hybrid cars that are out there today.
The next most immediate way to do that would logically be to use a hybrid turbo diesel / electric setup. But in the United States there is a strong stigma against diesel, even though they really are the stinky noisy black smoke belching garbage truck engines they were 25 years ago.
I used to own a 1959 Mercedes Benz 190D. That car sounded like a garbage truck, and woke all the neighbors up when it started. It was slow, and it smelled bad despite being in perfectly restored condition. That, my friends, is what most Americans think of when you say "diesel".
A friend of mine recently bought a brand new Volkwagen Jetta TDI and I must say diesel has come a long way, with a lot of props going to VW engineers. The TDI is quiet and smooth, odorless and relatively powerful. If I could get that in something made for taller men and larger families like a Crown Victoria I would be so happy.
The EV1 was a curiosity and a dead end. Range was short, charging options were very limited and there wasn't much promise for great improvements in the technology in the future. The car was relatively high maintenance (replace all the batteries every few years... wow that is expensive), and had to be parked somewhere with a specialized charging station because you can't fill up at the local Citgo. Also the range was impractical for most Americans who have a long commute to work and must make many side trips on the way home. It doesn't make sense for GM to continue dumping money into a dead end project. Let's see them move on aggressively to something more practical, please.
I haven't tried it. I imagine it would work but when they are cold they tend to take a few seconds to start up (when I say cold, I mean like 40 degrees (F) or less).
The fridge would probably be the very last place I put a CF, just because it is going to yield the least benefit (this is a light that is only ever on a few seconds at a time).
I think it is best to start with lights that are on the longest, and work your way down from there.
Ian, go to Home Depot and take another look at CF bulbs. Like I said, I've been using them for about 6 years now. 6 years ago they were very expensive, had large ballasts, cold color range, flickered when they started up, and of course wouldn't fit in any fixture.
The very cheapest ones that they sell at Home Depot today have only been around for about a year or two. They start right up without flickering, have a smaller ballast, they are relatively CHEAP ($7 for a three pack of bulbs on a sale day today, vs. $22 I paid for an individual bulb 6 years ago).
The 9 watt bulbs are probably smaller than your average 60 watt incandescent in external dimensions.
CF's fit great into lamps now. They also fit great into driveway lights, courtesy lights by the front door, etc. They also work very well in cieling fans.
As for brightness, I have a desk lamp that is rated for no more than a 45 watt bulb (incandescent) that now has a 27 watt CF bulb which is the functional equiv of a 100W incandescent. Very bright! Earlier on I was so smitten with the savings of CF bulbs that I was putting 27 watt bulbs everywhere. But now I use mostly ~15W bulbs because they are still plenty bright (just as bright as the bulbs they replace, usually) and because right now they are the cheapest. In more decorative fixtures that use multiple bulbs, or where space is tight (like you mention) I've been using the super compact 9W bulbs with great success. The 9W bulbs are a bit dim for general room lighting but most of the time that I use these, there are 3 to 5 bulbs in the single fixture anyway.
That said, you concerns have already been largely addressed by the industry. Get thee to Home Depot and try out the latest & greatest designs.
I can't believe I haven't seen it mentioned here yet (maybe I am browsing at too high a threshhold), but compact fluorescent lights are the current way to get the best bang for your buck in home lighting.
You get roughly a 4:1 amount of light per watt in a compact fluorescent as compared to a conventional incandescent bulb.
I recently went through my parents house replacing bulbs. I used mostly ~15 watt bulbs (60 watt equivilant) and in a couple of areas where really bright light was needed I used 27 watt bulbs (~100W equiv.)
There were two fixtures in the hall that used a total of 600W of light originally and now use a total of 60W using compact fluorescent bulbs. The hall is still quite bright, but now use four 15 watt bulbs as opposed to eight 75 watt bulbs.
It doesn't take a math genius to see that these bulbs pay for themselves relatively quickly via savings in the electric bill. Not only that, but they last a long time. I've been using them for about six years and I've had only *one* bulb die in that timespan (that was a Philips if anyone wants to know).
Home Depot is selling them pretty cheaply right now. There is no excuse to not buy a pack and try them out. You are totally justified in spending the money for the bulbs up front and put them in now, knowing that if you annualize your costs you are actually saving money.
These bulbs cannot be used in dimmer type sockets, and other than the really small 9 watt models some of them have a hard time in very small enclosed fixtures.
You will realize the most immediate savings if you replace bulbs that are in use for extended periods, like driveway lights or hallway lights.
...how do I turn this thing off???
The distro has been dead for years, but I have yet to see a distro that is as easy to install as Corel Linux. IIRC, it prompted me maybe twice to make decisions about things, and had sensible defaults for the average user. If they had more fully exploited DHCP/DNS I think they could have gotten rid of one of those prompts (asking for a hostname).
Corel was, for all intents and purposes, a Debian for the average joe. I have yet to see any other distros approach the friendliness of it.
I have had success setting up OpenBSD with Postfix and RAV.
OpenBSD - Free operating system, similar to Linux if that's your primary exposure to UNIX-like environments. OpenBSD doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Linux, but on the flip side it doesn't have the baggage either. It is very well suited to setting up a secure server. The built in firewalling, IMHO, is one of the things that sets OpenBSD apart from all the others. It's a snap to firewall an OpenBSD server and there are plenty of example configs out there to get you started.
Postfix - Sorry, Sendmail just gives me fits. I don't want to have to have a reference in front of me while configuring my MTA. I know enough about SMTP to make intelligent decisions if my options are put in front of me in English. Postfix does this. Not to mention it is free, it is fast, it is secure and it is a drop-in replacement for Sendmail.
RAV - This is not free software, but it works very well with all of the software named above. RAV is an antivirus program that is called by Postfix. It's very fast, and very effective.
Since you're running a mailing list server, you might want to do some creative de-miming to further increase the effectiveness of your efforts. Other than GPG signatures, most MIME is unwanted anyway.
There is an obscure manufacturer of SPARC-based notebooks going by the name of Tadpole. These are marketed as portable Solaris systems but I'd bet some flavor of Linux will run on these (Aurora Linux comes to mind).
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
8 oc 4A0iJtaQCgkv/P
- ----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Hash: SHA1
I'd like to cross-sign keys with some of the PGP "big kahunas". How hard is it to get one of them to sign your key? I tried asking ESR, because he lives relatively close to me, but I never got a response.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (Darwin)
iD8DBQE+PdfrYPuF4Zq9lvYRAkNAAKDEWv1yWVbBDR0u+//
dxAdtu3cSRcoANVuO9tB/uE=
=Lea7
It is taking several minutes per page to get anything off of Ace's Hardware right now. Guess that server wasn't built so well after all.
/. effect.
The sort of performance figures they are posting aren't very impressive at all, as evidenced by the current poor availability of their server.
If you're going to do something, do it right. Go to eBay and get a Sun E3500 for cheap and quit dicking around with bottom end workstations and feeding us a line of crap that it is somehow able to withstand the
I'm an event videographer that has been doing this for most of 2002 now with a bone stock Apple Powerbook 800MHz "Titanium". Not only can I plug right into my 21" SVGA monitor for more real estate, I can also plug right into my TV set with the built in S-Video port so I can see exactly what the finished film will look like on TV.
IMHO, this story is not news (even if the PC world is finally catching on). This is my first Mac but I'm absolutely thrilled with it. I switched from Linux.
I have over 100 Macs in my personal collection and you don't see Wired making articles on me. I don't even really brag about the collection, except that this guy's claim to fame is really weak and I am sure there are people out there with bigger Mac collections than me.
Actually, a year ago I could have competed. Today it is still an impressively large collection of junk that I have yet to finish cataloguing. Most of mine came from public school & university cast-offs. I was able to sell a lot of it to buy other toys. Still can't walk in the basement, though. But when I can, I'll likely go to another auction and fill it again for $50 or so.
You say that as if the U.S. would want to join the EU for some reason.
The EU is a political case of Penis Envy, in which the member states of the EU wish to have an economy on the scale of the US but I'm afraid you quite missed out on many of the things that make us a great nation.
If this were true, I'd have seen it on CNN or MSNBC tonight. First of all it is very rare for an Internal Combustion Engine, even a hot rod, to hit such speeds. Secondly, the range is highly unlikely for any electric car right now, especially one with a top speed so questionably high.
Finally, this thing is a stretch limo. Having owned & restored 2 limos, I know that they are like sherman tanks to drive compared to the original cars that they were stretched from. The weight alone of this car would prevent it from having the sort of range claimed.
Until such lofty claims are verified by a trusted source, the Slashdot editors shouldn't be so gullible and eager to publish on their front page.
Like a lot of other /.'ers, I switched to OS X from Linux. Oh, I still do work quite a lot with Linux, but my primary computer is now an Apple Powerbook G4 "Titanium" 800MHz. It's what I'm using now to surf /., and what I use professionally for my work (*NIX consulting and videography work).
While it is far from perfect, the desktop environment works better for me than any of the X11 desktops. Gnome was especially painful. There are some real differences to get used to, but once you are used to it you appreciate it.
There is enough UNIX in OS X to keep me happy. I've got MySQL, Apache and PHP running on here. Perl is also installed by default. (MySQL was added later). The networking stuff is awesome, and this is how a portable is SUPPOSED to work. I know you've heard it all before, but this thing "just works".
Now if only Cinelerra ran on OS X natively...
You finished off here with something that must be addressed. While the US Government shares in the responsibility for creating the monsters known as Osama Bin Laden and Sadam Hussein, the American citizens (including myself) do not share in this responsibility. The government kept these shadowy ops secret from us, even after the fact, because the government knew that the citizens wouldn't approve.
Iraq as a state is largely Britain's fault. Iraq is a contrived state with arbitrary borders, and is not based on historical borders or anything. No wonder Tony Blair was in such a rush to GWB's side to help clean up the mess that both governments helped to make in the first place.
If the oil companies didn't exercise so much control in politics, we'd probably all be on clean renewable fuels by now and no one would care about what was going on in the Middle East.
The U.S. military is already making use of unmanned spy planes to get a view of the other side of a battlefield before committing troops. However, these are not supersonic planes so they can be heard before they are seen. There is a lot to be said for the concept of a short/medium range unmanned aircraft that makes almost no sound until it is on top of you, and has a very small radar signature (if it even flies high enough to be seen). When you don't have to carry 200 lbs of pilot and the extra weight of the plane needed to safely carry that pilot you can extend the range quite a bit. 200 miles round trip would be very doable and very useful. The whole aircraft could fit in the bed of a pickup truck and be assembled and ready to fly in minutes. Total cost of the aircraft could be a fraction of what manned aircraft cost. Maintenance would be much cheaper. They could be refeuled cleanly in the field, without the need to ship feul in (attractive target for NME!). The U.S. military has shown a heightened interest in unmanned and autonomous aircraft in recent years. I would not be in the least bit surprised if the results of this experiment contribute greatly to the sorts of aircraft we use in battle ten to twenty years from now.
I keep trying to get in and while the server allows me to log in, as soon as I join #farscape the server drops my connection.
You've got to be kidding me. It can't even handle being a web browser without periodically locking up.
Again, try to keep things in perspective.
I think the average American, whether they were alive or not back then, doesn't really have a concept of the gravity of the two bombs we dropped. This is due in large part to the difference in journalism between then and now. You didn't have as many crazy journalists like Geraldo Rivera who would go right into the face of danger with a camera crew to bring Americans into the battlefront. Americans, then and now, have no concept of the level of destruction that was unleashed that day.
But on the flip side, we were responding to a threat that was only somewhat less insidious than the one we face today. At least back then, we were fighting against an enemy state and not some shadowy faceless & borderless organization like Al Queda. And they were primarily going after military targets, unlike the cowards we are fighting today. Those differences elevate WWII Japan to a slightly higher level of respect as an adversary, which doesn't say much for the respect I had for them. Remember, they attacked without declaring war on us first.
I'll only briefly mention that I hold a minority opinion in this country, and state that our president at the time was a traitor for having known of this attack before it happened and he did nothing about it in order to suit his own political ends.
The Japanese were trying to take over our sovereign nation. That threat alone warrants any necessary retaliatory or preventative force.
The Japanese were too dumb to surrender, long after most other nations would have. They were putting their children and elderly in harms way because they had lost pretty much all of their able bodied young men. They engaged in cowardly suicide bombing, which totally changes the face of warfare. How do you defend against an enemy who intends to die in order to take out hundreds of your comrades?
The nukes we dropped served several purposes.
1. Show the Japanese we weren't kidding, and that they had better surrender. They didn't understand the first time so we said it again a few days later.
2. Show the fascists in Europe that we weren't kidding, and we would happily wipe them off the map before engaging in another week of war with them. I think this was probably more of a bluff than anything. The idea of dropping a nuke on the European motherland probably wouldn't have gone over well with most Americans back then if they understood the scale of the destructive force being unleashed. The president knew this.
3. Americans in WWII had a very low opinion of the Japanese. Much much worse than their opinion of the Germans. Indeed, my own grandfather who served in the Pacific Fleet back then cusses whenever he sees anything Japanese, and carries in his wallet a photograph of a Japanese soldier that he killed near Okinawa. While there has been a lot of healing between the older generation of Germans and Americans, there hasn't been a lot of healing with the Japanese in that age group. Thankfully the younger generations have looked beyond the differences of our grandparents (or even great grandparents now).
In any case, dropping the bomb was done well within international law and the protocols of war. What happened at the WTC was a pure act of terrorism, launched by a faceless enemy, outside of the rules of war. It was a cowardly act, consistent with the spineless nature of the Al Queda.
Personally, I think the U.S. should put a bullet in Sadam and then pull out of the region 100%. No more support for Israel. No troops in Saudia Arabia. Stop buying their oil. Let them kill each other if that is what they want. We are far enough along now that we could redirect that money into implementing a massive change in our energy sources, and cut our dependence on petroleum products to a fraction of what we currently consume. That would ultimately solve the Middle East problem.
In the automotive hobby, a restomod is taking an antique car and putting a modern fuel injected computer controlled drivetrain in it. It sounds a lot like what we're doing here. Putting the modern Quake 3 engine on a classic gameplay. I'd love to see some other classic games go this route. Metroid, anyone?
There is a huge difference between the death toll at the WTC and the death toll in India during the big earthquake. The earthquake was a natural act. This doesn't make it a good thing by any measure, but you cannot hold a person or group responsible for the death toll. The WTC attack, while having a much lower death toll (but still a staggering figure) was a cold and calculated attack against innocent victims. This was a senseless act of mass murder, and individual people can be held totally accountable for the death toll. Natural disasters are tragedies, too. But they are part of nature's cycle. The WTC attacks were anything but natural. Try to keep things in proper perspective.
it accelerated faster then any car you can buy from ford right now. I have to challenge you on this. Show me an EV that accelerates faster than the Ford SVT Cobra. If there were such an EV, all the kids would want one.
20 to 40 mile range? If I even got to work, I couldn't get home. Fact of life, living in North Carolina, it will take you a long drive to go from here to there. Just going to town to get stamps at the post office is a 20 mile drive.