I'd like to see a few regionalized GTAs, especially one in the former Soviet capital about a year or two after the fall of the USSR when anything and everything was for sale (maybe it's still that way?). Maybe another one for Berlin during the height of the Cold War or Tokyo in the late 80s. In other words, huge metro areas like Vice City only larger and with more adventures behind them.
We're banging our heads against the wall, but it's just good advertising strategy. Hitler once said something to the effect that people are more likely to believe massive lies than much smaller ones. Microsoft security is much like swiss cheese or Iraqi buildings or the tax code for rich people: full of holes that aren't going to get fixed unless someone really does something drastic.
Nationalism also tends to be based on a particular personality. Using your German and Italian references, remember the "greater german" and "lesser german" ideals of unification. Gerater germans wanted to unite under the Austro-Hungarian government via the Hapsburg monarchs given their dynasty or under Frederick Wilhelm I of Prussia specifically because of the relative power and prestige. Particular rulers, and hence partcular governments, were involved in nationalist movements.
In Italy we see the same idea around 1830. Some called for a republic under the Pope, most called for a federation under the Kingdom of Sardinia (since he was the only significant king to grant basic liberties to his people via a constitution) and still others wondered if the Hapsburgs could unite Italy under their control. Specific governments were used as a means to create a nation. Most of the people who saw the situation and wanted a united country with freedom ended up leaving for the USA in both cases (especially in Germany).
Pan-arabian nationalism found a popular expression with the Ba'ath party starting in the late 50s and leading to the temporary unification of Egypt and Syria under the United Arab Republic. Saddam Hussein is a Ba'athist, so don't be surprised if this party fades into the twilight (at least officially) during the next few years. Again, a loyalty to a specific government being used to justify a new nation instead of vise versa.
Basque nationalists tend to be largely found in Spain and are merely seeking to restore their old country of Navrone (spelling?). Like those arab who look to restore the Caliphate (not all pan-arab nationalists seek that; Bin Laden does, Hussein does not), they are trying to restore something that previously existed but is no longer present. Any questions?
Turkey just approved entrance of their own forces into the northern areas of Iraq to secure their southern flank against possible insurgents. If the Kurds and Turks start going at it we're obligated to help the Turks even though the Kurds are our key to holding Northern Iraq. We gave weapons to both Turks and Kurds and now we have to try to diffuse that front while conquering the southern front. I have to wonder if Turkey did not allow US troops into their country because they had intended to invade northern Iraq all along, with or without US permission. Syria and Jordon have already expressed conern about the possibility of "resurrection of the Ottoman Empire" and are rattling sabers about military action if they don't back off. We have a new problem...or two...or three...
Several reasons why this isn't going to be a repeat of the Hindenburg:
1) the covering on the hindenburg was the source of the fire, not the hydrogen. The covering had material similar to ammonium nitrate and gunpowder, a disaster waiting to happen especially with the hydrogen on board.
2) these balloons use helium, not hydrogen. We banned He export to Germany so they used hydrogen to get off the ground.
3) the hindenburg was huge because of the sheer weight it had to compensate for. Kitchens, passengers, crew, cargo, etc. A 50-pound package doesn't need such a large balloon to lift it, so as long as it's within reason this could work out
4) our SchustenStaffel...er, department of homeland security wouldn't allow easily hijacked bags of explosive gas to run freely around. They'd be like a neon sign going "Untraceable Weapon Here! Fire and Forget! All evidence destroyed in the blast!!!"
5) finally, remember that the hindenburg was a target for sabotage, both because of the political ramifications of any positive relations between US and GER. If we'd remained neutral, France would be a German sycophant (ok, so not much changes there), Russia would be a slave country, and UK would be either a US fortress or a German satellite. Smaller helium-filled balloons like giant kiddie-party toys aren't so politically charged or easily destroyed, except my malicious little kids with BB guns and lax parents.
Certainly Google is a private company that can do as it damn well pleases. Yet it operates an international scope with several countries having their own laws on censorship that they feel must be obeyed for whatever reason. As long as the government tells people about the censorship, there's less of an argument than when a government claims to respect free speech outright then decieves its own people in practice. Note the author's example of stormfront.org, a site that would test the boundaries between free speech and incitive speech.
Here in the US we have faced the same problem when Klan or other sites tried to get attention. If there are public decency laws are in place, how is it possible to both follow those laws (regardless of whether we think those laws are just or not) and provide free content? Should a whole country or region get a different search engine result based on its laws? In short, yes. To try and espouse American ideals to the planet doesn't work as the recent UN vote clearly shows. We don't have to agree with them, but they have a right to speak and vote regardless of what we think. Google has a responsibility as a multinational company to obey the laws of the countries it operates in, and given the legal right of people to sue internet companies according to the laws of their own country (Australia has a case like this), they damn well better learn what rules they need to play by.
It is somewhat loathsome that censorship be brought about, especially because the same rights used by the hatemongers to spread their intellectual bile is the same one I use to post here in disagreeance with their thoughts and, occasionally, the politics of the world at large. And anyone in the United States should also be guarding every right they have with vigilance given the blatant thirst for power of our current regime and their willingness to intrude on our rights and lives in the name of "security". Again, we should protect our rights here in the US and ensure that Google does the same by following the laws of other countries.
May the question of free speech and its legality in the face of "terrorism" never turn into a possible threat against the 1st amendment here in the US, lest we have to resort to the 2nd amendment to defend both...
Quit reading too much into the bloody code. The same thing goes against left-handed vs. right handed (sinister vs. dexterious), all sorts of people in the Bible, etc. If all you're going to do is fill in acronyms with things that would bolster your argument, find something better to do with your time. Have you considered taking your passionate energies and actually volunteering somewhere to directly make a difference or will you just continue to gripe?
You could treat the wood with a cyanide or strychnine derivative and seal it with urethane or major paint. The only insects that would be unaffected would be cockroaches and in-laws.
North Korea's major ICBM apparently uses a mix of gasoline and kerosine for most of it's propulsion except for a small solid motor on the uppermost stage. If impoverished North Korea can build and launch a missile 2500 km w/ a theoretical 1000 lb payload (exact stats are at http://www.fas.org, I'm referring to their 1998 test) using aluminum, gasoline, and kerosine, why not apply the same tech and launch your own satellites for much less money than anyone else charges? Hell, if you made a quality pod and did serious testing on it (or just buy one from Russia), you might just be able to get someone into space and back for very low cost...
Is it really worth hacking a damn weather satellite when you can turn on any news station or hit weather.com or wunderground.com and get global/regional/local conditions?
On the other hand it would be pretty cool if you could jury-rig a means of watching the Iraq-US battle via satellite or find a way to make a de facto spy satellite out of it...
My gripe is with the overpaid pilots of national airlines as they were reporting from local media here, particularly United airlines after it declared bankruptcy. Regional airlines can't afford that kind ot overpay, hence why I said they were loving this economy. AirTran, Braniff, JetBlue et. al don't seem to have this problem since they don't have the outlandish contracts. Thanks for the info on piloting aircraft. Best of luck to your friend.
Chirac answers to French oil interests like Bush answers to US oil interests. Remember, this was a country with a runoff between a bureaucratic worm (Chirac) and a fascist (Le Pen). The french people are not represented, only the Paris bureaucracy is. Germany and Russia are the other two largest investors in Iraqi oil fields, so they're trying to protect their own interests. Don't assume that the peace movement by these folks is for any high ideal, it's in their own self-interest.
Iraq, Congo, Somalia, Afghanistan, and several other conflicts arose when US-armed allies were let loose after the Cold War ended and we no longer needed them. Saddam was turned loose on Iran after their Islamic Revolution, to keep the Ayatollah from attacking the US directly (hostage taking is not an attack on US soil). This will come back to bite us for at least 20 more years, so keep that in mind when you watch the news.
We need to keep Iraq in one piece after the war. The south is oil-rich and wants to join Iran, the central area is the only solidly Iraqi territory, and the northern area is Kurd. These folks are like the Irish of 19th century America: treated like dirt, thought of as almost sub-human, and trying to get their own country. They want to carve a country from Northern Iraq, Eastern Turjey, and western Iran. They're militant, well-trained, and have the oil resources to cause trouble before being brought under control of allowed to get out of hand.
Finally, the UN is in no position to bark at the US. Article 73 of the UN Charter dictates that the rights of individuals may be suspended if they get in the way of the goals of the UN and no democracy allows one voter to stop a majority resolution. No one listens to them these days anyway, and it must be asked if the UN has become as obsolete as the League of Nations was by 1935 when Germany, Japan, and Italy had alreayd begun ignoring their demands. North Korea is watching, so if the UN is to deal with them at all, Saddam must be dealt with quickly, efficiently, and thoroughly as soon as possible.
So regardless of the bombs and stealth aircraft, our economy still sucks, we're paying money we don't have for problems we can't afford, and this foriegn adventure serves as much to distract from the domestic situation as to help the Iraqis.
Normally I agree except that the pilots unions are ruining the industry like they did steel and came close to doing in automobiles. Unions are great when working conditions are miserable and they serve a great role until they begin extorting money from employers based on what they think they can get. United had pilots gettin $300,000+ for 80 hours of work a month, Delta was reporting less extreme but similar cases, Pan AM, Eastern, Piedmont, and lots of other airlines got shut down by greedy union workers and nationalization would help put an end to this. At the very least the feds need to step in and regulate the industry for a while before airline service is only allowed between a handful of cities where the routes are that profitable. Granted, smaller airlines are loving every minute of this since they don't have the same scontracts and don't have that kind of overhead, but we need to shore up the jobs already in existence to prevent the current recession from getting any worse. Look at what the mostly non-college educated members of the longshoreman's union did out in the West Coast with their union: they make well over $100k/year and nearly choked stores for good over Christmas. If this happens to airlines, businesses would take a serious hit from the inability to travel. I also think we need a unified infrastructure where all of the airlines display what their fares are and where they fly to that's more comprehensive than expedia or orbitz, like what was in place back in the 70s where they did this at the counter instead of online.
Regardless, Farechaser should not tell its customers one thing then turn right around and do it themselves. Especially when they stand to make money doing so. Sure, it's legal, but that doesn't make it right. Personally I think they ought to nationalize most of the airlines given the current economic situation but that's not likely given the stockholders interests and the current administration.
There is a group trying to do this that claims to have formed their own nation on an old oil rig off of the UK. It is the "country" of Sealand, population of ~12, and it actually issues passports. I don't have the website, but Google does. The UK deems them a target for possible takeover since they were running questionable financial transaction through their servers, and they'll allow anything but child porn on their servers. I dunno about taking them over, but the idea is at least sound in theory: buy your own oil rig, with investor help, and do nothing but run huge anounts of servers on it for profit.
Here in the US we have lots of 9-5 parents who do not have the time or desire to intervene in their kid's lives as needed. A free Internet allows for graphic porn and worse, especially thru bulkmail at any major public e-mail domain. My own accounts are flooded with junkmail ranging from things illegal in some US states to things better left at the server they came from. Freedom has its prices, and many parents need to intervene more in what their kids are doing. Grnted, that is tough when both parents are working, but latchkey kids can just as easily unlock internet sites unintentionally. Governments are opportunistic creations that tend to centralize power at every opportunity, and here in the US you will find no better example. Post 9-11 there are groups here that have been advocating for deprivation of freedom of communication in order to prevent terrorism, prompting many of our mirror governments (similar to us but not necessarily our puppets; Australia, Canada, New Zealand, etc.) to advocate the same. I concur with you that to such freedom for security is too high a price to pay, but unfortunately the freedom to speak of such things is protected by the very freedoms they seek to revoke. Hopefully we can balance freedom with responsibility, but who knows.
We've been looking for alternate means of poewr for a while now, especially some with sources that can be used with resources readily available here in the USA. Given the sheer quantity of livestock being raised in the midwest, this could easily be used to reduce the coal being burned for power plants. Even more interestingly, it should be possible to take copious quantities of this shit and refine in into petroleum. That's right...oil from something other than Jurassic Park leftovers.
This could then be used to reduce intake of oil from the middle east, cut back on our support of wacko 3rd world regimes like Saudi Arabia, and cut our trade deficit in half rather quickly. Granted, under the current admin it won't happen since they don't own shares in too many farms, but who knows - Texas and Oklahoma could still become prime sources for oil, but for differnet reasons. gasoline would not be the only product; jet fuel, asphalt, plastics, and every other petroleum derivative would be cheaper and more readily available with this sort of massive domestic petroleum supply.
This does not solve the pollution problem, though. Burning coal, oil, or dung still gives off massive levels of CO2. This becomes a problem with respect to global warming and the potential backlash of global cooling while the planet readjusts. What we need are renewable energy technologies like cow power (Eat More Chicken Now for Cheaper Power Later!) while we work out the kinks on clean power sources like fusion and microwave/solar.
Hopefully someone is thinking along this wavelength and could use bacteria to turn Bessy's leftovers into black gold. That would probably be the hardest part of the process since raw petroleum isn't a uniform compound.
If this sort of technology is available to the everyday consumer, what sorts of gizmos do you think our governments are using for the counter-terrorist effort?
Oops. I forgot to make paragraphs out of the whole bloody thing yesterday AND put it in HTML instead of text. Thanks for cleaning it up and taking serious time to respond to the post, I'll be more careful in the future. Your point concerning researchers and teachers is well-taken, at my undergrad we had numerous profs that would be cool to work with but not to get lectures from, and vice versa. Those rare profs who can teach and research are often prevented from doing both due to time constraints, though every so often there are a handful that somehow pull it off (though I have yet to meet one who can do this and have a family to tend to sinc ethey often end up teaching extra sessions so late into the evening...). Thanks again and good luick with your students, note that if you're into building things Junkyard Wars is taking applicants as of a few days ago.
>Stroke = blockage of blood vessel in brain, kills of brain tissue, causes various bad things from blindness to death
>Vampire bat blood = anticoagulant, dissolves blood clot, blood gets to brain tissue, problem resolved
>If you want a crackpot story, look for the article in Pubmed (link below) dealing with the use of PCP derivatives to cure strokes, the protein should be called MK801
>http://www4.nlm.ncbi.nlm.gov
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to see a few regionalized GTAs, especially one in the former Soviet capital about a year or two after the fall of the USSR when anything and everything was for sale (maybe it's still that way?). Maybe another one for Berlin during the height of the Cold War or Tokyo in the late 80s. In other words, huge metro areas like Vice City only larger and with more adventures behind them.
We're banging our heads against the wall, but it's just good advertising strategy. Hitler once said something to the effect that people are more likely to believe massive lies than much smaller ones. Microsoft security is much like swiss cheese or Iraqi buildings or the tax code for rich people: full of holes that aren't going to get fixed unless someone really does something drastic.
Nationalism also tends to be based on a particular personality. Using your German and Italian references, remember the "greater german" and "lesser german" ideals of unification. Gerater germans wanted to unite under the Austro-Hungarian government via the Hapsburg monarchs given their dynasty or under Frederick Wilhelm I of Prussia specifically because of the relative power and prestige. Particular rulers, and hence partcular governments, were involved in nationalist movements. In Italy we see the same idea around 1830. Some called for a republic under the Pope, most called for a federation under the Kingdom of Sardinia (since he was the only significant king to grant basic liberties to his people via a constitution) and still others wondered if the Hapsburgs could unite Italy under their control. Specific governments were used as a means to create a nation. Most of the people who saw the situation and wanted a united country with freedom ended up leaving for the USA in both cases (especially in Germany). Pan-arabian nationalism found a popular expression with the Ba'ath party starting in the late 50s and leading to the temporary unification of Egypt and Syria under the United Arab Republic. Saddam Hussein is a Ba'athist, so don't be surprised if this party fades into the twilight (at least officially) during the next few years. Again, a loyalty to a specific government being used to justify a new nation instead of vise versa. Basque nationalists tend to be largely found in Spain and are merely seeking to restore their old country of Navrone (spelling?). Like those arab who look to restore the Caliphate (not all pan-arab nationalists seek that; Bin Laden does, Hussein does not), they are trying to restore something that previously existed but is no longer present. Any questions?
Turkey just approved entrance of their own forces into the northern areas of Iraq to secure their southern flank against possible insurgents. If the Kurds and Turks start going at it we're obligated to help the Turks even though the Kurds are our key to holding Northern Iraq. We gave weapons to both Turks and Kurds and now we have to try to diffuse that front while conquering the southern front. I have to wonder if Turkey did not allow US troops into their country because they had intended to invade northern Iraq all along, with or without US permission. Syria and Jordon have already expressed conern about the possibility of "resurrection of the Ottoman Empire" and are rattling sabers about military action if they don't back off. We have a new problem...or two...or three...
Several reasons why this isn't going to be a repeat of the Hindenburg:
1) the covering on the hindenburg was the source of the fire, not the hydrogen. The covering had material similar to ammonium nitrate and gunpowder, a disaster waiting to happen especially with the hydrogen on board.
2) these balloons use helium, not hydrogen. We banned He export to Germany so they used hydrogen to get off the ground.
3) the hindenburg was huge because of the sheer weight it had to compensate for. Kitchens, passengers, crew, cargo, etc. A 50-pound package doesn't need such a large balloon to lift it, so as long as it's within reason this could work out
4) our SchustenStaffel...er, department of homeland security wouldn't allow easily hijacked bags of explosive gas to run freely around. They'd be like a neon sign going "Untraceable Weapon Here! Fire and Forget! All evidence destroyed in the blast!!!"
5) finally, remember that the hindenburg was a target for sabotage, both because of the political ramifications of any positive relations between US and GER. If we'd remained neutral, France would be a German sycophant (ok, so not much changes there), Russia would be a slave country, and UK would be either a US fortress or a German satellite. Smaller helium-filled balloons like giant kiddie-party toys aren't so politically charged or easily destroyed, except my malicious little kids with BB guns and lax parents.
Now he can just be the worm in the Apple leadership...
Certainly Google is a private company that can do as it damn well pleases. Yet it operates an international scope with several countries having their own laws on censorship that they feel must be obeyed for whatever reason. As long as the government tells people about the censorship, there's less of an argument than when a government claims to respect free speech outright then decieves its own people in practice. Note the author's example of stormfront.org, a site that would test the boundaries between free speech and incitive speech.
Here in the US we have faced the same problem when Klan or other sites tried to get attention. If there are public decency laws are in place, how is it possible to both follow those laws (regardless of whether we think those laws are just or not) and provide free content? Should a whole country or region get a different search engine result based on its laws? In short, yes. To try and espouse American ideals to the planet doesn't work as the recent UN vote clearly shows. We don't have to agree with them, but they have a right to speak and vote regardless of what we think. Google has a responsibility as a multinational company to obey the laws of the countries it operates in, and given the legal right of people to sue internet companies according to the laws of their own country (Australia has a case like this), they damn well better learn what rules they need to play by.
It is somewhat loathsome that censorship be brought about, especially because the same rights used by the hatemongers to spread their intellectual bile is the same one I use to post here in disagreeance with their thoughts and, occasionally, the politics of the world at large. And anyone in the United States should also be guarding every right they have with vigilance given the blatant thirst for power of our current regime and their willingness to intrude on our rights and lives in the name of "security". Again, we should protect our rights here in the US and ensure that Google does the same by following the laws of other countries.
May the question of free speech and its legality in the face of "terrorism" never turn into a possible threat against the 1st amendment here in the US, lest we have to resort to the 2nd amendment to defend both...
Quit reading too much into the bloody code. The same thing goes against left-handed vs. right handed (sinister vs. dexterious), all sorts of people in the Bible, etc. If all you're going to do is fill in acronyms with things that would bolster your argument, find something better to do with your time. Have you considered taking your passionate energies and actually volunteering somewhere to directly make a difference or will you just continue to gripe?
You could treat the wood with a cyanide or strychnine derivative and seal it with urethane or major paint. The only insects that would be unaffected would be cockroaches and in-laws.
North Korea's major ICBM apparently uses a mix of gasoline and kerosine for most of it's propulsion except for a small solid motor on the uppermost stage. If impoverished North Korea can build and launch a missile 2500 km w/ a theoretical 1000 lb payload (exact stats are at http://www.fas.org, I'm referring to their 1998 test) using aluminum, gasoline, and kerosine, why not apply the same tech and launch your own satellites for much less money than anyone else charges? Hell, if you made a quality pod and did serious testing on it (or just buy one from Russia), you might just be able to get someone into space and back for very low cost...
Is it really worth hacking a damn weather satellite when you can turn on any news station or hit weather.com or wunderground.com and get global/regional/local conditions?
On the other hand it would be pretty cool if you could jury-rig a means of watching the Iraq-US battle via satellite or find a way to make a de facto spy satellite out of it...
They had fungus growing on Mir's hull before it crashed into the Pacific, that's gotta be comparable to the atmosphere on Mars
My gripe is with the overpaid pilots of national airlines as they were reporting from local media here, particularly United airlines after it declared bankruptcy. Regional airlines can't afford that kind ot overpay, hence why I said they were loving this economy. AirTran, Braniff, JetBlue et. al don't seem to have this problem since they don't have the outlandish contracts. Thanks for the info on piloting aircraft. Best of luck to your friend.
Chirac answers to French oil interests like Bush answers to US oil interests. Remember, this was a country with a runoff between a bureaucratic worm (Chirac) and a fascist (Le Pen). The french people are not represented, only the Paris bureaucracy is. Germany and Russia are the other two largest investors in Iraqi oil fields, so they're trying to protect their own interests. Don't assume that the peace movement by these folks is for any high ideal, it's in their own self-interest.
Iraq, Congo, Somalia, Afghanistan, and several other conflicts arose when US-armed allies were let loose after the Cold War ended and we no longer needed them. Saddam was turned loose on Iran after their Islamic Revolution, to keep the Ayatollah from attacking the US directly (hostage taking is not an attack on US soil). This will come back to bite us for at least 20 more years, so keep that in mind when you watch the news.
We need to keep Iraq in one piece after the war. The south is oil-rich and wants to join Iran, the central area is the only solidly Iraqi territory, and the northern area is Kurd. These folks are like the Irish of 19th century America: treated like dirt, thought of as almost sub-human, and trying to get their own country. They want to carve a country from Northern Iraq, Eastern Turjey, and western Iran. They're militant, well-trained, and have the oil resources to cause trouble before being brought under control of allowed to get out of hand.
Finally, the UN is in no position to bark at the US. Article 73 of the UN Charter dictates that the rights of individuals may be suspended if they get in the way of the goals of the UN and no democracy allows one voter to stop a majority resolution. No one listens to them these days anyway, and it must be asked if the UN has become as obsolete as the League of Nations was by 1935 when Germany, Japan, and Italy had alreayd begun ignoring their demands. North Korea is watching, so if the UN is to deal with them at all, Saddam must be dealt with quickly, efficiently, and thoroughly as soon as possible.
So regardless of the bombs and stealth aircraft, our economy still sucks, we're paying money we don't have for problems we can't afford, and this foriegn adventure serves as much to distract from the domestic situation as to help the Iraqis.
Normally I agree except that the pilots unions are ruining the industry like they did steel and came close to doing in automobiles. Unions are great when working conditions are miserable and they serve a great role until they begin extorting money from employers based on what they think they can get. United had pilots gettin $300,000+ for 80 hours of work a month, Delta was reporting less extreme but similar cases, Pan AM, Eastern, Piedmont, and lots of other airlines got shut down by greedy union workers and nationalization would help put an end to this. At the very least the feds need to step in and regulate the industry for a while before airline service is only allowed between a handful of cities where the routes are that profitable. Granted, smaller airlines are loving every minute of this since they don't have the same scontracts and don't have that kind of overhead, but we need to shore up the jobs already in existence to prevent the current recession from getting any worse. Look at what the mostly non-college educated members of the longshoreman's union did out in the West Coast with their union: they make well over $100k /year and nearly choked stores for good over Christmas. If this happens to airlines, businesses would take a serious hit from the inability to travel. I also think we need a unified infrastructure where all of the airlines display what their fares are and where they fly to that's more comprehensive than expedia or orbitz, like what was in place back in the 70s where they did this at the counter instead of online.
Regardless, Farechaser should not tell its customers one thing then turn right around and do it themselves. Especially when they stand to make money doing so. Sure, it's legal, but that doesn't make it right. Personally I think they ought to nationalize most of the airlines given the current economic situation but that's not likely given the stockholders interests and the current administration.
There is a group trying to do this that claims to have formed their own nation on an old oil rig off of the UK. It is the "country" of Sealand, population of ~12, and it actually issues passports. I don't have the website, but Google does. The UK deems them a target for possible takeover since they were running questionable financial transaction through their servers, and they'll allow anything but child porn on their servers. I dunno about taking them over, but the idea is at least sound in theory: buy your own oil rig, with investor help, and do nothing but run huge anounts of servers on it for profit.
Here in the US we have lots of 9-5 parents who do not have the time or desire to intervene in their kid's lives as needed. A free Internet allows for graphic porn and worse, especially thru bulkmail at any major public e-mail domain. My own accounts are flooded with junkmail ranging from things illegal in some US states to things better left at the server they came from. Freedom has its prices, and many parents need to intervene more in what their kids are doing. Grnted, that is tough when both parents are working, but latchkey kids can just as easily unlock internet sites unintentionally. Governments are opportunistic creations that tend to centralize power at every opportunity, and here in the US you will find no better example. Post 9-11 there are groups here that have been advocating for deprivation of freedom of communication in order to prevent terrorism, prompting many of our mirror governments (similar to us but not necessarily our puppets; Australia, Canada, New Zealand, etc.) to advocate the same. I concur with you that to such freedom for security is too high a price to pay, but unfortunately the freedom to speak of such things is protected by the very freedoms they seek to revoke. Hopefully we can balance freedom with responsibility, but who knows.
The third world wackos are the ones funding terrorism...cut off their funding and lots of terrorists will have much fewer resources to use.
We've been looking for alternate means of poewr for a while now, especially some with sources that can be used with resources readily available here in the USA. Given the sheer quantity of livestock being raised in the midwest, this could easily be used to reduce the coal being burned for power plants. Even more interestingly, it should be possible to take copious quantities of this shit and refine in into petroleum. That's right...oil from something other than Jurassic Park leftovers.
This could then be used to reduce intake of oil from the middle east, cut back on our support of wacko 3rd world regimes like Saudi Arabia, and cut our trade deficit in half rather quickly. Granted, under the current admin it won't happen since they don't own shares in too many farms, but who knows - Texas and Oklahoma could still become prime sources for oil, but for differnet reasons. gasoline would not be the only product; jet fuel, asphalt, plastics, and every other petroleum derivative would be cheaper and more readily available with this sort of massive domestic petroleum supply.
This does not solve the pollution problem, though. Burning coal, oil, or dung still gives off massive levels of CO2. This becomes a problem with respect to global warming and the potential backlash of global cooling while the planet readjusts. What we need are renewable energy technologies like cow power (Eat More Chicken Now for Cheaper Power Later!) while we work out the kinks on clean power sources like fusion and microwave/solar.
Hopefully someone is thinking along this wavelength and could use bacteria to turn Bessy's leftovers into black gold. That would probably be the hardest part of the process since raw petroleum isn't a uniform compound.
If this sort of technology is available to the everyday consumer, what sorts of gizmos do you think our governments are using for the counter-terrorist effort?
Tech support is busy right now...please leave a message and we'll get back to you...
As soon as Google finds out about the site plus the time needed to call their laywers.
Oops. I forgot to make paragraphs out of the whole bloody thing yesterday AND put it in HTML instead of text. Thanks for cleaning it up and taking serious time to respond to the post, I'll be more careful in the future. Your point concerning researchers and teachers is well-taken, at my undergrad we had numerous profs that would be cool to work with but not to get lectures from, and vice versa. Those rare profs who can teach and research are often prevented from doing both due to time constraints, though every so often there are a handful that somehow pull it off (though I have yet to meet one who can do this and have a family to tend to sinc ethey often end up teaching extra sessions so late into the evening...). Thanks again and good luick with your students, note that if you're into building things Junkyard Wars is taking applicants as of a few days ago.
>Stroke = blockage of blood vessel in brain, kills of brain tissue, causes various bad things from blindness to death >Vampire bat blood = anticoagulant, dissolves blood clot, blood gets to brain tissue, problem resolved >If you want a crackpot story, look for the article in Pubmed (link below) dealing with the use of PCP derivatives to cure strokes, the protein should be called MK801 >http://www4.nlm.ncbi.nlm.gov