And I suspect that if that does happen, I would use Google the same way I currently use Yahoo -- only under extreme protest.
The only way Google can succeed is by remaining Google, everything else has already been tried and run into the ground.
The RF spectrum is for more than just cellphones
on
Spectrum as Property
·
· Score: 2, Informative
While the frequency allocation chart linked from the article was very nice in my high school physics book, this chart (beware: PDF) from the NTIA is much more informative.
As for the various notions of privatizing or opening up large swaths of the spectrum, it must be done very carefully, if at all, as there are too many users that absolutely must have clear channels to operate safely (aircraft navigation and communication come to mind), but at the same time do not have the financial resources to compete for even a small slice of their current frequency ranges.
Here are some
odds and probablities as compiled by the oddities who write The Edge for The Oregonian (Portland, OR newspaper). Short version: it is actually more likely that the Earth will be smacked by a large asteroid in your lifetime than you becoming a professional athelete.
And remember, before you try to beat the odds, make sure you can survive the odds beating you.
these guys work in the guidance and navigation laboratory at IIT, conveniently located down the hall from the wind tunnel lab where I work (hence my sig below). Beware though, designs such as this may inspire some sarcastic and mocking comments from the more machine shops techs who put it together for you.
Automotive / highway truck grade diesel has been low-sulphur for a long time. The high-sulphur fuel was used for heavy construction and logging equipment, mostly by operators of older equipment or who weren't smart enough to know that crappy fuel = higher maintainence costs. Recently, I think regulations were put in place banning high-sulphur diesel for use in land-based equipment/facilities.
The fuel used for large ships still has more in common with sludge / motor oil than what you get at the pump.
When you first start your car's engine, most of the oil is sitting at the bottom of the crankcase below the level of most moving parts. What little oil that always remains up near the piston rings and such will be more viscous, but it makes little difference.
However, the ion mobility (and thus peak current) are very strong functions of temperature. Specifically, the electorlyte density and viscosity increase, which increases the internal resistance of the battery significantly. And while lead-acid batteries have a almost constant no-load voltage for any temperature, the increase in resistance severly limits the current available to the starter. The normal resistance of a discharging battery is ~0.001 ohm, normal starting current for a medium car can be ~50-60 amps, any significant increase greatly reduces the effective voltage and current.
A block heater in the car's engine bay will help heat the whole bay, but mostly serves to reduce the wear and tear on the piston rings and bearing races that would otherwise occur while the cold oil heats up and gets sloshed around the inside of the engine. Since the oil is already warmed, it can get into the moving parts more quickly. Large engines (think ships) use oil heaters even on hot days to protect the rings and bearings
.
You do know that accepting credit cards has never been a cost-free process? The transaction processors typically lop 2-5% at least off the top of the purchase price, with some nominal minimum charge to process each transaction. This why some gas stations still have up old price boards with separate columns for cash and credit purchases and the local 7-11 has a $5 minimum if you want to use your plastic to pay.
Now all physical-stores just suck it up and charge the same regardless of payment method because the cost of accepting credit cards is balanced by the protection they offer the seller. At least for real-world transactions, once the processor's computer system approves the transaction, the seller is guaranteed to receive the money, barring cases of fraud. No bounced checks, no fake money, no spending money sorting/counting/depositing the money you took in (at the fast food place I once worked, labor costs to set up and count out the register tills probably amounted to 1.5% of the days gross sales + commercial banking fees). Its only on Ebay and similar services do some people think accepting payment should always be free.
Paypal exists to provide an equivalent service to individuals. Processing credit card payments and otherwise maintaining their service costs them money, which they recover by charging transaction fees to people who want to accept credit card payments (checking account only is still free). Don't bash Paypal when you should be bashing the credit card issuers/processors.
On my campus, the Statics 1 class has gone through three different textbooks in as many years (and stress = young's modulus * strain hasn't changed a whole lot in that time). Many other textbooks also seem to rotate editions every 2-2.5 years except for those few books you really want to keep.
I wish these gentlemen the best of luck with this and certaintly hope that the faculty in my department will give it a look. My heat transfer book was not terribly good, cost too much and had no resale value (so I kept it). This e-text certainly wins in one regard.
Several people here have pointed out that no rational (or even irrational) world leader would launch a WMD tipped ballistic missile against the US or its allies because they know that 30 minutes later their country would be reduced to radioactive ash by a small fraction of the US ICBM arsenal.
But despite the world-wide opinion (that we have worked hard to culitivate) that US enjoys inflicting death and destruction upon random people around the globe, we really do not. Espcially, we do not want to (again) convert mass numbers of perfectly innocent people into a toxic cloud just because they happened to be born in country run be some crazy dictator who is completely un-accountable to the people he/she rules.
For whatever reasons you want to name (morals, sense of fairness, whatever), the US would probably be very hard pressed to actually push the retaliation button if we knew the target country had already shot off everything they owned. OK, if all of London or LA was ashes, so would be whoever fired first. But suppose we weren't sure how much damage there really was, or it wasn't THAT big of a nuke, bio-bomb, etc. Would you still feel justified in wiping an entire country off the map? And if you wait more than a couple hours to judge the effects of attack, you basically lose the pure rage and will needed to retaliate en-masse. And no matter how bad the destruction of the hostile attack was, try explaining why that meant another 10 million random people needed to die when the history books are written, when the next election comes about, or when the inevitable attempts to lodge war crimes start? (respond to deliberate mass killing of civilians with the unfortunate killing of civilians in a poorer country? not allowed!)
So the net effect of this is that the US deterrent isn't is absolute as it was with the Russians. So if you are a pissed off dictator with nuke and a missile handy, why not take a role of the dice? You may well find yourself dying of old age rather than radiation posioning.
And that is why the US is very interested in developing ballistic missile defense systems, we can no longer depend on ourselves to provide the assured destruction needed to effectively deter everyone, and they are starting to realize it.
The ABL is designed for what they call 'boost phase intercept' ie: shoot the missile down while it is still climbing over its launch country. The advantages are that you are shooting at a big, slow (relatively speaking) missile booster rather than a very small, very fast warhead. So if you think someone might shoot a ICBM at you, you have the ABL fly in a big figure-8 pattern near their airspace. If they launch something, you can shoot it down before it gets anywhere near its target.
The 747-400F was chosen because it is big (the laser fuel takes up lots of space), has very long range/loiter time and has a reinforced load floor to support the weight of all the optics components. Cruise altitude will be close to 60,000 feet (18,000 meters) with on-station times near 12 hours. Thus only three airplanes are needed to maintain 24x7 coverage over a potential launch zone. The altitude was chosen to be above over 99% of observed clouds, so you always have a clean shot for the laser.
Keep in mind, if you buy a laptop in the US and take it back to the UK, good luck trying to get them to honor your warranty. And modern Dell laptops are not problem free. My Latitude D600 has an annoying bug in the power sub-system where it crashes in
As soon as I saw the first thing I thought of was Hyundai/Hynix and some of the other Enterprise Zone projects started in Oregon in the mid-late 1990's.
The Enterprise Zones were areas designated for industrial development that would receive special tax breaks for the first five years or so. It looked really good on paper, and politicians could say they were doing something about the high unemployment, which looked really good to them.
The two biggest projects were a CD-pressing plant owned by Sony in Springfield, OR and a DRAM plant owned by Hyundai in Eugene. Both were touted as creating lots of high paying jobs. Both actually were fairly good corporate citizens while times were good. A politically significant (~1000 total) jobs were created in the $9-10/hour range, though most of the engineering and management positions were filled by people brought in from out-of-state and out-of-country. A third company moved into supply packaging materials to Sony. Everyone was happy.
Then the economy went south. Hyundai canceled a planned expansion of its plant, went bankrupt, closed the plant for over a year while they upgraded the equipment after negoiating a multi-year extension to their tax-break package, then finally re-opened employing fewer people then before. When Sony couldn't get their tax-package enlarged and extended, they just up and left, as did the packaging company.
The final blow was when Komag, maker of hard-drive platters (and recipient of the smallest-subsidies) went bankrupt, sold-out its equipment and walked away from a once billion dollar facility that was one of the last plants making platters in the US (at least I think that is what the newspaper said).
The Enterprise Zone program is still on the books, but with a change in focus. Instead on trying to lure big companies to build big, they are rewarding smaller, more local companies who expand their operations. While companies like Sony received almost as much in tax breaks as they paid out in wages, the smaller firms generally receive tax breaks equal to 1-2 years wages for the additional jobs they create. The additional profits remain in the local economy and these local companies are less likely to up and walk away when the mood suits them. It doesn't make as good a press release, but is much more effective.
All in all, I hope Germany has better luck with AMD than Oregon did with its multi-nationals, but they should look at better ways to spend future tax-grant money.
Your car already has a convex mirror on the outside, opposite the driver. That is reason it has that "Warning: Objects..." message printed on it. For the inside mirror, a convex surface would cause more confusion than the extra viewing area is worth. Espcially given that most of the extra area will be blocked by the door frames/pillars and people's heads. Given the current legal climate, lawsuits would undoubtedly result.
You can buy add-on convex mirrors that stick-on to your existing exterior mirrors, and increasingly heavy-duty trucks and vans offer them as factory options with their towing packages. Also very common on buses, delivery-vehicles and semi-trucks.
While I don't know about the grain dispute, or the total number of times disputes have gone to court, Canada has not won everytime. The most recent ruling on the softwood lumber dispute was mostly in favor of the US. The court determined that Provincal governments were selling timber on public lands to lumber companies at below market value and that this constituted an illegal subsidy. The court did continue to disagree with the amount the tariff was set at (and I see to remember 33% being the highest, but that was a couple months ago).
Also, I think that US-CAN trade disputes are settled under NAFTA provisions, which are more restrictive than the WTO treaties with regard to tariff levels. China is currently a WTO member and is supposed to be phasing in tariff reductions by the 2005/2006 timeframe. Chinese imports to the US are currently charged a very low tariff rate due to the granting of 'Most Favored Nation' trading status by Congress. The imbalance is not so much that China unilaterally increased its rates, but rather that the US unilaterally reduced its rates.
I don't know how easy they are to find, but there are 3rd-party options (OR at least were) for replacing your stock DirecTV dish with a larger diameter unit (4+ feet in diameter). This would only be needed if you really want to watch TV no matter what the weather is like. My experience is that very heavy rain to blot out the signal. In fact, it performed very well through one of the worst snow storms in recent history in my home state of Oregon, or at least it did until the power went out.
I also remember there being radio transparent plastic domes available to protect ground mounted dishes from the wind. So were even made to look like a big rock to conceal the dish for the landscaping gurus.
There is really a lot of truth in this, but fails to underestimate just how general they can get.
General Motors largely sticks to cars, trucks and other assorted wheeled-type land vehicles, though during World War II, they mass-produced several models of aircraft for the Navy.
General Dynamics builds all kinds of different things, then sells them off to different companies: fighter jets, submarines, tanks, ICBMS, and other things related to making stuff go boom.
General Electic takes the boardest definition, getting involved with anything and everything that can produce, consume, transport, monitor, be monitored by, or be made with electricity: transformers, electric motors, generators, jet engines, aircraft leasing, finance, NBC, hostile takeover of small countries, etc. They do it all.
I take you have been laying in wait for years now, preparing your lines, knowing that there would come a day...
a day when Slashdot would combine Perl and haiku...
Because having two really massive objects, one of which is slowly losing is manuevering ability (while the other never had much to begin with), close enough together to be able to move between them is a really bad idea.
Even setting up an identical initial orbit (so that one always follows the other) is very difficult, but over time, variations in Earth's gravity, Lunar effects, solar storms, etc, will change the orbital motion of the two platforms differently. And unless one is always under positive control (like the Space Shuttle when approaching the ISS), the chance for a collision between two multi-ton objects 25,000 kph is very real.
Even if that could be managed, the area near the ISS would be bad for Hubble's mirror due to the gas/water/waste emissions from the station. And any common parts from the Hubble, at best there would be very few and only if designed into future craft, would not be worth the risk of trying to remove them from a freely floating platform or the cost of sending up a frame to dock Hubble to the ISS. In an enviroment where failure means at least the loss of a spacecraft, it is best to stick with massive planning efforts as long as we can, rather than try and cruft something together from aging parts in LEO.
One wonders why these literal rocket scientists didn't...
Because they are literal rocket scientists, if it is not a rocket (or space probe), they don't know what to do with it. Metaphorical rocket scientists are much more adaptable in that they can also deal with assorted flying machines and other fun widgets. Neither group is good at computer programming unless it is for data processing or paycheck enhancement purposes (see sig that I promise was there before I saw the article).
And a non-24hr watch has that 'ooh, shiny' thing going for it.
Well not that the US would consider it in anyway, the ICC treaty specifically bans prosecution for crimes comitted before its ratification date.
I won't even get started about your statement about world respect other than to say it went out the window long before we thumbed our noses at most of the world and invaded Iraq. That just made the world mad.
A few years ago they started popping up in malls across the country selling reasonably priced, reasonable quality, semi-original paintings. Of course, all the paintings were made in near-assembly line conditions in third-world countries. For a canvas of a given size, there would need to be a certain number of different elements (house, waterfall, big-leafy tree, etc). Each major element would be done by a person who could do it well and fast, so there would one guy to paint in a pretty waterfall, and then another to paint a quaint cottage next to it. Since lowly paid humans are still more adaptable than machines, US management could constantly adjust production to match what was selling (red cottage doors, not blue, and more leafy trees!!!). Similar operations exist to crank out still-life and other assorted painting types.
And don't forget, music is a creative process as well, but the US has had to go overseas for 40 years now to find some decent acts.
By using frequencies more prone to radio jamming equipment, the US military (and other suitably equipped forces) can completely blot out Galileo reception in a very localized area around a conflict zone. In the area where the jamming is in use, there would no useful signal at all. Outside of the jamming area, the signal and accuracy would be completely un-affected. Thus anyone with a big radio transmitter can deny service in a local area, but only the EU will have command and control of the satellites themselves. (And for those worried about equality, the GPS signal can also be jammed, but new GPS satellites transmit at higher power levels than earlier models, requiring bigger, noiser, easier to hunt and kill, jamming systems)
This compares to the current GPS system run by the US which is designed to be able to transmit deliberately wrong positioning information on uncoded channels. Coded channels still transmit full-accuracy data (better than the normal uncoded channels, mind you) that military-grade GPS receivers can monitor. However, for the signal downgrading to be effective, it has to be applied to most or all of the satellites above the visible horizon from the conflict zone. Or to downgrade the signal in Iraq, uncoded channels on a satellites providing coverage everywhere from New York to Toyko have to be downgraded. The system loses accuracy globally, but with the most severe effects in the intended region.
By being jam-able rather than downgrade-able, the Galileo system can perserve its civilian utility in times of war without giving either side a military advantage (unless the US and the EU decide to turn the trade wars up a notch). The GPS will probably remain the primary means of navigation for US and US-allied forces (who receive the Q-codes for the coded channels) for the forseeble future.
Has the MPAA been granted binding authority over all movie production studios by some law or contract I am not aware of?
If you run a small studio and don't like the ban, ignore it. If the big bosses get upset and boot you out, maybe you don't really want to be 'in' in the first place. If there is a contract problem, re-negoiate. Quit. Do anything but waste money and time by suing.
Slashdot Mirror
And I suspect that if that does happen, I would use Google the same way I currently use Yahoo -- only under extreme protest.
The only way Google can succeed is by remaining Google, everything else has already been tried and run into the ground.
While the frequency allocation chart linked from the article was very nice in my high school physics book, this chart (beware: PDF) from the NTIA is much more informative.
As for the various notions of privatizing or opening up large swaths of the spectrum, it must be done very carefully, if at all, as there are too many users that absolutely must have clear channels to operate safely (aircraft navigation and communication come to mind), but at the same time do not have the financial resources to compete for even a small slice of their current frequency ranges.
Here are some odds and probablities as compiled by the oddities who write The Edge for The Oregonian (Portland, OR newspaper). Short version: it is actually more likely that the Earth will be smacked by a large asteroid in your lifetime than you becoming a professional athelete.
And remember, before you try to beat the odds, make sure you can survive the odds beating you.
these guys work in the guidance and navigation laboratory at IIT, conveniently located down the hall from the wind tunnel lab where I work (hence my sig below). Beware though, designs such as this may inspire some sarcastic and mocking comments from the more machine shops techs who put it together for you.
Automotive / highway truck grade diesel has been low-sulphur for a long time. The high-sulphur fuel was used for heavy construction and logging equipment, mostly by operators of older equipment or who weren't smart enough to know that crappy fuel = higher maintainence costs. Recently, I think regulations were put in place banning high-sulphur diesel for use in land-based equipment/facilities.
The fuel used for large ships still has more in common with sludge / motor oil than what you get at the pump.
When you first start your car's engine, most of the oil is sitting at the bottom of the crankcase below the level of most moving parts. What little oil that always remains up near the piston rings and such will be more viscous, but it makes little difference.
However, the ion mobility (and thus peak current) are very strong functions of temperature. Specifically, the electorlyte density and viscosity increase, which increases the internal resistance of the battery significantly. And while lead-acid batteries have a almost constant no-load voltage for any temperature, the increase in resistance severly limits the current available to the starter. The normal resistance of a discharging battery is ~0.001 ohm, normal starting current for a medium car can be ~50-60 amps, any significant increase greatly reduces the effective voltage and current.
A block heater in the car's engine bay will help heat the whole bay, but mostly serves to reduce the wear and tear on the piston rings and bearing races that would otherwise occur while the cold oil heats up and gets sloshed around the inside of the engine. Since the oil is already warmed, it can get into the moving parts more quickly. Large engines (think ships) use oil heaters even on hot days to protect the rings and bearings
.
You do know that accepting credit cards has never been a cost-free process? The transaction processors typically lop 2-5% at least off the top of the purchase price, with some nominal minimum charge to process each transaction. This why some gas stations still have up old price boards with separate columns for cash and credit purchases and the local 7-11 has a $5 minimum if you want to use your plastic to pay.
Now all physical-stores just suck it up and charge the same regardless of payment method because the cost of accepting credit cards is balanced by the protection they offer the seller. At least for real-world transactions, once the processor's computer system approves the transaction, the seller is guaranteed to receive the money, barring cases of fraud. No bounced checks, no fake money, no spending money sorting/counting/depositing the money you took in (at the fast food place I once worked, labor costs to set up and count out the register tills probably amounted to 1.5% of the days gross sales + commercial banking fees). Its only on Ebay and similar services do some people think accepting payment should always be free.
Paypal exists to provide an equivalent service to individuals. Processing credit card payments and otherwise maintaining their service costs them money, which they recover by charging transaction fees to people who want to accept credit card payments (checking account only is still free). Don't bash Paypal when you should be bashing the credit card issuers/processors.
On my campus, the Statics 1 class has gone through three different textbooks in as many years (and stress = young's modulus * strain hasn't changed a whole lot in that time). Many other textbooks also seem to rotate editions every 2-2.5 years except for those few books you really want to keep.
I wish these gentlemen the best of luck with this and certaintly hope that the faculty in my department will give it a look. My heat transfer book was not terribly good, cost too much and had no resale value (so I kept it). This e-text certainly wins in one regard.
Several people here have pointed out that no rational (or even irrational) world leader would launch a WMD tipped ballistic missile against the US or its allies because they know that 30 minutes later their country would be reduced to radioactive ash by a small fraction of the US ICBM arsenal.
But despite the world-wide opinion (that we have worked hard to culitivate) that US enjoys inflicting death and destruction upon random people around the globe, we really do not. Espcially, we do not want to (again) convert mass numbers of perfectly innocent people into a toxic cloud just because they happened to be born in country run be some crazy dictator who is completely un-accountable to the people he/she rules.
For whatever reasons you want to name (morals, sense of fairness, whatever), the US would probably be very hard pressed to actually push the retaliation button if we knew the target country had already shot off everything they owned. OK, if all of London or LA was ashes, so would be whoever fired first. But suppose we weren't sure how much damage there really was, or it wasn't THAT big of a nuke, bio-bomb, etc. Would you still feel justified in wiping an entire country off the map? And if you wait more than a couple hours to judge the effects of attack, you basically lose the pure rage and will needed to retaliate en-masse. And no matter how bad the destruction of the hostile attack was, try explaining why that meant another 10 million random people needed to die when the history books are written, when the next election comes about, or when the inevitable attempts to lodge war crimes start? (respond to deliberate mass killing of civilians with the unfortunate killing of civilians in a poorer country? not allowed!)
So the net effect of this is that the US deterrent isn't is absolute as it was with the Russians. So if you are a pissed off dictator with nuke and a missile handy, why not take a role of the dice? You may well find yourself dying of old age rather than radiation posioning.
And that is why the US is very interested in developing ballistic missile defense systems, we can no longer depend on ourselves to provide the assured destruction needed to effectively deter everyone, and they are starting to realize it.
The ABL is designed for what they call 'boost phase intercept' ie: shoot the missile down while it is still climbing over its launch country. The advantages are that you are shooting at a big, slow (relatively speaking) missile booster rather than a very small, very fast warhead. So if you think someone might shoot a ICBM at you, you have the ABL fly in a big figure-8 pattern near their airspace. If they launch something, you can shoot it down before it gets anywhere near its target.
The 747-400F was chosen because it is big (the laser fuel takes up lots of space), has very long range/loiter time and has a reinforced load floor to support the weight of all the optics components. Cruise altitude will be close to 60,000 feet (18,000 meters) with on-station times near 12 hours. Thus only three airplanes are needed to maintain 24x7 coverage over a potential launch zone. The altitude was chosen to be above over 99% of observed clouds, so you always have a clean shot for the laser.
I want one with white-walled tires and a vacumm tube array strapped across the hood.
They can keep the cowboy clothes.
Keep in mind, if you buy a laptop in the US and take it back to the UK, good luck trying to get them to honor your warranty. And modern Dell laptops are not problem free. My Latitude D600 has an annoying bug in the power sub-system where it crashes in
Tell that to the Chicago Transit Authority bus I saw driving on the sidewalk tonight.
As soon as I saw the first thing I thought of was Hyundai/Hynix and some of the other Enterprise Zone projects started in Oregon in the mid-late 1990's.
The Enterprise Zones were areas designated for industrial development that would receive special tax breaks for the first five years or so. It looked really good on paper, and politicians could say they were doing something about the high unemployment, which looked really good to them.
The two biggest projects were a CD-pressing plant owned by Sony in Springfield, OR and a DRAM plant owned by Hyundai in Eugene. Both were touted as creating lots of high paying jobs. Both actually were fairly good corporate citizens while times were good. A politically significant (~1000 total) jobs were created in the $9-10/hour range, though most of the engineering and management positions were filled by people brought in from out-of-state and out-of-country. A third company moved into supply packaging materials to Sony. Everyone was happy.
Then the economy went south. Hyundai canceled a planned expansion of its plant, went bankrupt, closed the plant for over a year while they upgraded the equipment after negoiating a multi-year extension to their tax-break package, then finally re-opened employing fewer people then before. When Sony couldn't get their tax-package enlarged and extended, they just up and left, as did the packaging company.
The final blow was when Komag, maker of hard-drive platters (and recipient of the smallest-subsidies) went bankrupt, sold-out its equipment and walked away from a once billion dollar facility that was one of the last plants making platters in the US (at least I think that is what the newspaper said).
The Enterprise Zone program is still on the books, but with a change in focus. Instead on trying to lure big companies to build big, they are rewarding smaller, more local companies who expand their operations. While companies like Sony received almost as much in tax breaks as they paid out in wages, the smaller firms generally receive tax breaks equal to 1-2 years wages for the additional jobs they create. The additional profits remain in the local economy and these local companies are less likely to up and walk away when the mood suits them. It doesn't make as good a press release, but is much more effective.
All in all, I hope Germany has better luck with AMD than Oregon did with its multi-nationals, but they should look at better ways to spend future tax-grant money.
Your car already has a convex mirror on the outside, opposite the driver. That is reason it has that "Warning: Objects ..." message printed on it. For the inside mirror, a convex surface would cause more confusion than the extra viewing area is worth. Espcially given that most of the extra area will be blocked by the door frames/pillars and people's heads. Given the current legal climate, lawsuits would undoubtedly result.
You can buy add-on convex mirrors that stick-on to your existing exterior mirrors, and increasingly heavy-duty trucks and vans offer them as factory options with their towing packages. Also very common on buses, delivery-vehicles and semi-trucks.
While I don't know about the grain dispute, or the total number of times disputes have gone to court, Canada has not won everytime. The most recent ruling on the softwood lumber dispute was mostly in favor of the US. The court determined that Provincal governments were selling timber on public lands to lumber companies at below market value and that this constituted an illegal subsidy. The court did continue to disagree with the amount the tariff was set at (and I see to remember 33% being the highest, but that was a couple months ago).
Also, I think that US-CAN trade disputes are settled under NAFTA provisions, which are more restrictive than the WTO treaties with regard to tariff levels. China is currently a WTO member and is supposed to be phasing in tariff reductions by the 2005/2006 timeframe. Chinese imports to the US are currently charged a very low tariff rate due to the granting of 'Most Favored Nation' trading status by Congress. The imbalance is not so much that China unilaterally increased its rates, but rather that the US unilaterally reduced its rates.
I also remember there being radio transparent plastic domes available to protect ground mounted dishes from the wind. So were even made to look like a big rock to conceal the dish for the landscaping gurus.
There is really a lot of truth in this, but fails to underestimate just how general they can get.
General Motors largely sticks to cars, trucks and other assorted wheeled-type land vehicles, though during World War II, they mass-produced several models of aircraft for the Navy.
General Dynamics builds all kinds of different things, then sells them off to different companies: fighter jets, submarines, tanks, ICBMS, and other things related to making stuff go boom.
General Electic takes the boardest definition, getting involved with anything and everything that can produce, consume, transport, monitor, be monitored by, or be made with electricity: transformers, electric motors, generators, jet engines, aircraft leasing, finance, NBC, hostile takeover of small countries, etc. They do it all.
I am waiting for Too General INC myself.
I take you have been laying in wait for years now, preparing your lines, knowing that there would come a day...
a day when Slashdot would combine Perl and haiku...
Revel in now 'cause it will never come again.
That is until next week when it gets duped.
Because having two really massive objects, one of which is slowly losing is manuevering ability (while the other never had much to begin with), close enough together to be able to move between them is a really bad idea.
Even setting up an identical initial orbit (so that one always follows the other) is very difficult, but over time, variations in Earth's gravity, Lunar effects, solar storms, etc, will change the orbital motion of the two platforms differently. And unless one is always under positive control (like the Space Shuttle when approaching the ISS), the chance for a collision between two multi-ton objects 25,000 kph is very real.
Even if that could be managed, the area near the ISS would be bad for Hubble's mirror due to the gas/water/waste emissions from the station. And any common parts from the Hubble, at best there would be very few and only if designed into future craft, would not be worth the risk of trying to remove them from a freely floating platform or the cost of sending up a frame to dock Hubble to the ISS. In an enviroment where failure means at least the loss of a spacecraft, it is best to stick with massive planning efforts as long as we can, rather than try and cruft something together from aging parts in LEO.
One wonders why these literal rocket scientists didn't...
Because they are literal rocket scientists, if it is not a rocket (or space probe), they don't know what to do with it. Metaphorical rocket scientists are much more adaptable in that they can also deal with assorted flying machines and other fun widgets. Neither group is good at computer programming unless it is for data processing or paycheck enhancement purposes (see sig that I promise was there before I saw the article).
And a non-24hr watch has that 'ooh, shiny' thing going for it.
Well not that the US would consider it in anyway, the ICC treaty specifically bans prosecution for crimes comitted before its ratification date.
I won't even get started about your statement about world respect other than to say it went out the window long before we thumbed our noses at most of the world and invaded Iraq. That just made the world mad.
A few years ago they started popping up in malls across the country selling reasonably priced, reasonable quality, semi-original paintings. Of course, all the paintings were made in near-assembly line conditions in third-world countries. For a canvas of a given size, there would need to be a certain number of different elements (house, waterfall, big-leafy tree, etc). Each major element would be done by a person who could do it well and fast, so there would one guy to paint in a pretty waterfall, and then another to paint a quaint cottage next to it. Since lowly paid humans are still more adaptable than machines, US management could constantly adjust production to match what was selling (red cottage doors, not blue, and more leafy trees!!!). Similar operations exist to crank out still-life and other assorted painting types.
And don't forget, music is a creative process as well, but the US has had to go overseas for 40 years now to find some decent acts.
This about the ability to deny service.
By using frequencies more prone to radio jamming equipment, the US military (and other suitably equipped forces) can completely blot out Galileo reception in a very localized area around a conflict zone. In the area where the jamming is in use, there would no useful signal at all. Outside of the jamming area, the signal and accuracy would be completely un-affected. Thus anyone with a big radio transmitter can deny service in a local area, but only the EU will have command and control of the satellites themselves. (And for those worried about equality, the GPS signal can also be jammed, but new GPS satellites transmit at higher power levels than earlier models, requiring bigger, noiser, easier to hunt and kill, jamming systems)
This compares to the current GPS system run by the US which is designed to be able to transmit deliberately wrong positioning information on uncoded channels. Coded channels still transmit full-accuracy data (better than the normal uncoded channels, mind you) that military-grade GPS receivers can monitor. However, for the signal downgrading to be effective, it has to be applied to most or all of the satellites above the visible horizon from the conflict zone. Or to downgrade the signal in Iraq, uncoded channels on a satellites providing coverage everywhere from New York to Toyko have to be downgraded. The system loses accuracy globally, but with the most severe effects in the intended region.
By being jam-able rather than downgrade-able, the Galileo system can perserve its civilian utility in times of war without giving either side a military advantage (unless the US and the EU decide to turn the trade wars up a notch). The GPS will probably remain the primary means of navigation for US and US-allied forces (who receive the Q-codes for the coded channels) for the forseeble future.
Has the MPAA been granted binding authority over all movie production studios by some law or contract I am not aware of?
If you run a small studio and don't like the ban, ignore it. If the big bosses get upset and boot you out, maybe you don't really want to be 'in' in the first place. If there is a contract problem, re-negoiate. Quit. Do anything but waste money and time by suing.