Yeah that is true, but that's the problem the private industry doesn't always want to provide the service. Most of these towns doing this are small podunk towns that won't see broadband within the next decade in any shape or form.
The privates shouldn't have any say in what people want to do locally especially when economic growth hinges on being able to provide some sort of broadband access these days.
It's like saying to the locals "no you can't have cars because Mobile doesn't want to put in a gas station in their town."
3d gaming? Wouldn't you like 2-4 monitors for a desktop or for video or photo editing (drooling at the thought.)
Everyone keeps getting caught up in the idea that you would have to use this with just one monitor. I see it's potential much like a raid controller. Sure you can have two drives run together twice as fast but you can also use it to control the drives individually and increase the number you have. I can run either 2-3 RAIDs with 4 IDE devices on my computer or control 10 IDE/SATA devices without the raid.
Run the cards together to get some screaming 3d performance or seperately to control a 4 monitor desktop array with absolutley loads of space to work on. I can't wait.
You obviously don't have much imagination if you can't think of a use of more than two video cards/monitors.
As a lover of flight sims I'll be first in line to buy a mother board that can support 10 video cards. Along with an array of cheap monitors I will finally have a wrap around view of the sim world. This can apply easily to any game.
First person shooters could finally have peripheral vision (one center and two on the sides) along with a inventory and map screen. Brings the grand total to five.
Driving games could finally have a true perspective instead of the stupid 3rd person or 1/3 screen in car view. So at least three monitors.
RTS resource monitors, sat view, and ground maps. Well that could become quite the array depending on how much you wanted covered. Say anywhere from 3-12 monitors.
Same for Massive Multiplayer Online Games. I could see a use without trying hard that would require at least six monitors.
You could double, tripple or even quadruple up on the number of required cards for any one monitor that would require higher end graphics. There are always those twisted monkeys that come up with graphics that won't run on any one GPU these days. For example those lovely to the horizon maps that show up in various games that add about 100meters of high detail every year. I see another scenario where people boost their systems performance by picking up cheaper versions of cards they own to keep their graphics improving without breaking the bank. (We can all remember when GF 2 cards cost $400 each, that'll buy you 50 of them these days.
Who could afford all this you ask? Well just about anyone these days. I've got a stack of 17inch CRT monitors in the garage I picked up for $5 a piece that are just begging to be used. With the advent of sub $100 video cards and CRT monitors, and the fact that not every output would have to be super hi rez. Perpheral views, 2d maps, and inventory lists would be just fine on something to the equivalent to a GeForce 4 MX ($32 new). You could seriously enhance your gaming machine for the price of one top of the line latest and the greatest video card from ATI/Nvidia.
So you keep your two monitor display, for me I'm going to check to see if the wiring in my computer room can handle the extra 10 monitors I plan on adding.
In the various places I've lived broadband access was based on either population density or compitition. If there was no compitition and a low population density then you saw no broadband, or it was very crapy expensive broadband.
I used to live in Rapid City South Dakota and you were quite lucky if you could get 56K connection typically it was only 28.8K due to the archaic POTS equipment and patchwork of new digital equipment. The typical answer to when are we going to get broad band was "next year" (Never). Then the power company looking to expand it's business took advantage of the fact that they owned the right of way (the power poles) to eveyone's home in North Dakota, South Dakota, Eastern Montana, Nebraska, and Minasota. For $100 a month they offer VOIP based phone, all calls on the network were local (really pissed off the local bells and the state (no fees/taxes for local and regular long distance), cable, and broad band. When the phone company tried to cut them off by refusing to sell them any more bandwidth, they just simply expanded their network beyond the reach of the telco and found someone in a different region who would.
Well suddenly "next year" became "now" since the cable company, the phone company, and the local crappy ISP didn't want to get shut out of their respective markets. The cable company and phone company tried to sue to stop them, but got nowhere so they were forced to put up or get out. Now Rapidy City locals have quite the collection of choices for their cable, phone, and ISP service.
The same occurred in my current town of California City (why do I keep moving to shithole USA towns?) DSL came in and then proved to be less profitable then they liked so they began to pull service with plans to cancel it completely. That is up until a retired IT guy signed up for a few T1 lines and set up a wireless network here in town and quickly took over this town and two more nearby and began to add more bandwidth. Well the phone company did an about face and expanded DSL service. Too little too late the local guy offers twice the bandwidth for half the price, doesn't require a phone line, and if you have a problem you just drive to the office and talk to him.
Competition is a wonderful thing. They need to shake up things by deregulating the cell, cable, and phone services even more.
At the time of my last video card purchase ATI was king 9800 pro and Nvidia was crap. Loud, slow, space heater anyone?
Of course I'm no fanboy of either, I had 3 Nvidia cards before that, and when the next upgrade is due I'll pick the best for the buck again.
This is what all gamers should do. It keeps both companies on their toes and keeps them from getting greedy and complacent. ATI's rollout of the 9800 and the big mutiny against Nvidia, pulled Nvidia's head out of their collective asses and forced them to put out a better product and we saw a nice healthy jump in hardware numbers instead of those little pathetic bump ups in horse power.
Actually fuel costs are right up there at the top along with water and food, but not in the cost of buying then, but in hauling them. Those three items make up something in the neighboorhood of 75% of the logistical loadout and get even more expensive when you have to airlift them in instead of by slow boat.
One of the other articles, either here or someplace else I read, about three other programs the first already undergoing field testing now is the recycling of water, not at the camp level but at the soldier level (ewwww he drank pee) in the field using new filter packs. A group of marines used them to stretch their water supply by a week (80% pee recovery) after being cut of in our current conflict.
The second which is still under developement is the collection of water from vehicle exhaust effectively cutting the bulk of the logistics need in half. Basically all your vehicles would have these units on them to condense and filter the water. Which would supply your troops directly in the field. Again making your troops more agile tactically since you can go farther and longer into the field without having to bring the extra water tankers.
The last is a new tent rain guard, the roof above the roof for those of you who are not familiar with the standard military tent, which is covered with 700watts of flexiable solar cells. Supposeably near industructable. (We'll see after they let some junior enlisted play with them.) During the day all the tents would provide for the needs of the tent city and some of the base cutting down the need for desiel for the generators as well as the number of generators that need to be brought in the first place.
So now they just need to get rid of bullets so we can be more environmentally friendly and of course murder our fell man cleaner, more effectively, and more humanly.
Driving is nothing like flying, well I take that back flying at your cruise altitude is alot like driving, though it's much closer to driving a boat on a lake. Which is why most of your accidents don't occur during cruise it's almost always within 5 miles of an airport during take off and landing.
Here's a few tidbits for you.
The fastest car represents some of the slowest speeds a small general aviation can fly. My little trainer Cesna can do 160mph.
Speed limits around airports is 200mph and outside is around 250mph in some airspaces congested areas. Otherwise the limit is just under the speed of sound. (over 600 mph though you have to be above a certain altitude).
You don't just dial in your favorite radio station and chill. Just to get out of the local area of my airport I have to talk to ground, then tower, then outbound, then approach. You also have to hop channels if you happen to fly through someone elses airspace and did I mention that there are no standard channels every airport is different hope you brought a airport guide with you. Oh did I forget that ATC talk like a bunch strung out meth freaks, so figuring out what they said can be fun especially when you are jockying with three other planes in the pattern trying to set up for a landing in the next 30 seconds.
There are no traffic lanes or signs when airborn so other traffic can come from any direction as well as above or below you and to boot is very difficult to spot. That's always comforting to know when you have up to a 500mph closing speed. Note small aircaft are almost impossible to spot when they are coming straight at you beyond about 3 miles. That gives you about 60 seconds to spot then avoid at just a 200mph closing speed at 3 miles
Speaking of weather a 40mph cross wind may make your arm tired on the way to work in car, but it makes it impossible to land in a plane, and could mean setting it down in a field if you don't have enough gas to make it to a different airport. Getting blown around during a rain storm in a car is easy to manage, at altitude in a light aircraft it is strong enough to flip you upside down, or push you down into the ground. Also without special instrument training the typical pilot loses control of their aircraft after about 7-10 minutes of flying into heavy weather.
If you drive to slow in your car you annoy the drivers behind you. You fly to slow in a plane and it falls out of the sky
Other than the occassional deer, stopped car, or kid running into the streets (worth 5 points) the road is relatively free of things to run into. Flying on the other hand has pesky things like mountains, towers, electrical lines, trees, birds, and other man made goods smack dab in the middle of the "road" and may or may not be marked with lights or on a map.
Basically unlike a car, if things get hairy there is no pulling over for a breather nor can you just stop when someone gets in your way, or when the weather turns to shit. There is also the little bit of joy that if you do get in an accident, that is if you survive it, the FAA may pull your license (a basic pilot license runs you about $5000 a comercial rating starts at $30,000) if you are found to be negligent.
Also if they held drivers to the same level of competence to obtain a drivers license as they do for pilot's flying license, then half of the general public would never be allowed to drive at all. Eighty percent of the remaining amount would only be allowed to drive a 50hp compact but only if it was a nice clear sunny day.
Want safe driving habits for better insurance rates? No problem.
Need to make the police you are on the other end of town? Child's play.
Plan on taking a long lunch in the company truck on company time? A snap.
Want your wife to think you are bowling with the fellas rather than over at her sister's throwing it in her ass? Consider it done.
Sure they can mandate to the aviation world pilots don't want to loose their expensive certifications and companies without those certifications are out of business, so exactly how are they going to bully the general public into it, and how are they going to check millions of cars cheaply enough to make it worthwhile. The car mod and hacker crowd will have a work around available within a month of this being mandatory that will mislead the authorities. As far as the GPS goes how hard is it going to be to rap the antenna in shielding? Poof no more signal, no more tracking.
Actually their point was to be able to use the materials from the moon to build things in earth orbit without the big cost of boosting them all from the Earth's surface. Sure you would still have to bring things up from Earth but if you could cut the amount with lunar materials by say 50-75% that would be a very health savings.
The space elevator is a wonderful idea, but I'd rather them give it a go on the moon first where it would cost us 10's of billions and be attached to a larger lunar mission instead of 100's of billions it would cost us in earth orbit.
Ever the ones that are full of it Hockey (shit). California already collects 16 billion a year off of motorists, 18 cents a gallon, but the funny thing is they only spend about 4.4 billion of it on roads and transportation. So exactly what is the problem here?
Boo hoo we don't have enough money we need more for the roads.
It's like a kid coming home from school complaining he didn't have enough money for lunch to his parents, but they come to find out instead of buying lunch, he is spending his lunch money on comic books instead.
Who cares if its expense, while I say let's the thing deorbit and move on, it does present an interesting engineering challenge. If they do manage to repair the thing with robots, the accomplishment is not that the Hubble is working again, but the fact that they did it with robots. That fact will give them more options and a big boost to the more ambitious missions that are on the boards as well as increase the capabilities for smaller onse since we can fire off robots into orbit without worrying about having to ground the fleet everytime one crashes.
Baaaahhhhh, I quit. I'm too tired if I'm posting this crap.
**Note I usually post crap, but usually a much higher quality level of crap than this. Usually has complete sentences and everything. Spell cheker is optional though.
You obviously didn't watch Real Genius. "You could vaporize a human target from space...."
.
"And in other news today a strange phenomina occurred for the seventh straight day in other parts of the world as another 4 leaders of countries known to support terrorism spontaneously combusted as well as several ultra liberal members of the Hollywood who were in those countries to show their support...when asked for comment the President just shrugged his shoulders and winked at the camera.
A small portable handle held laser is more than enough to temporarily blind a person or at least "shine the light" in his eyes so he can't see. If this thing had been fired at him, there would have been very little left of the pilot much less the aircraft.
Yep the administration would be driving Porches instead of Lexas for perks. The LA school system already gets billions, yet they manage to do very little with it except piss it away.
Damn flubbed the math again that's two slashdot posts in a row! Oh yeah I went to public school duh!
Well actually that's about right for a CA school system. They'll spend 1/4 of the money on doing a study on how to best spend the money, spend an eighth on actually hiring someone, and the last quarter on how it effects their mandator test results, and the rest quarter for raises for the upper management.
That won't protect it from the laser they are using, besides exactly how long do you think a mirror finish is going to last when suddenly material it is coating is pumped up to say 5000+'C? Many metals start to burn at those temperatures.
Check out the discovery channel they've got a show on the smaller ground based version of this thing that would fit on a truck. It's quite an eye opener as too how much power is being thrown around.
Sounds good on paper, but the problem is that maintaining good relations with other countries requires both countries to be sane to start off with and this world has been in short supply of those for the length of human history. Also the past "good relations" of recent history ended once all the bribes, I meen foreign aid got cut off to all the petty tyrants and other 3rd world ass whipes of the world
The problem with the borders is a PC issue, the same people that hate every new weapon system also don't like our previous policy of actually shooting people trying to cross the border illegally. Why do you think the Army no longer is in charge of guarding it?
There are over 70 schools in the Oakland school system 20 million dollars would barely hire an extra janitor per school a year.
"True our students can barely read and write and over a third of them don't speak English, but hey look at that toilet shine!"
That's much more important than say improving our base knowledge and creating new high tech fields as well as military capabilty.
A better place to start is to string up school administrators by their budgets and take away all of their CEO paychecks and perks. It'll be amazing how many hundreds of millions of dollars a year will be freed up.
Not only no but hell no. Not even in my wildest dreams would I ever think that. Actually it would be nice to simply have access to some of the nicer things such as IM and the extra bandwidth a system upgrade would bring without worring about the few 100,000 hack attempts the main firewall gets every day.
Anyone who thinks the military is as cool and ultramodern as on tv and the movies is an idiot. Let me put it in a more proper persective for you.
Palm/retnal scanners...nope...
Ultra fast internet connections, nope.
Top of the line computers...sure....from 1998. Fiber optic networks...nope...coax and 10bT baby!
Instant file recovery and easy to use multi department integrated data basses...in your dreams buddy.
Super geek wunderman IT guys that maintain and protect our networks....hahahahahahahahahahhahaha..tears..haha hahahahahahahahahaha...tears.... Let's put it this way I got an email the other day asking me whether or not I had submitted my paperwork to have the email account I've been using for the last 5 years.
Neeto torpeedo technical orders with revolving 3D diagrams of equipment and buildings with intergrated sensors that can be controlled remotely on a really cool laptop/palmtop....err no. Bust out the TO books and get a wagon...yes I said a wagon we use them to carry tools and the 30lbs of books we need to do our work.
Sealed room containing an alien body...that one is true...well ok to be honest it's made out of rubber but it is in a SAR access only area... is that good enough?
An all powerfull multi-branch force combining sentient software/hardware matrix that will destroy the world by taking over all the weapons in the military. No but I do have to run Adaware everday to clean off all the crap from people surfing the net and playing flash games on government computers to keep it from crashing when I check my email. Not quite as scary as Skynet, but it does annoy the piss out of me.
That's the cool thing, if all you need to increase cell coverage in your area is to put a WiFi remote antena on your roof, with bandwidth limits for roamers of course, and all you need to jump on the WiFi cell service is a piece of hardware, ie a phone, then 80% of the POTS and cell service in covered cities goes "POOF" and is no more.
Communication services in dense areas becomes communial and would be self upgrading and expanding as time went on. Now if they could get the whole "Lillypad Concept" for WiFi to work we could do the same with the internet and circumvent most of the need for an ISP.
let's try this again. Passed Dif Eq but still can't do basic math to save my life DOH!
.6kwh a day x 365 days a year x 1,038,000 new homes / [assuming 100kwh per person a month electric requirements * 12 months]. So roughly enough electrical power for 180,000 people or around 47,000 homes occupied by 4 people. Obviously that changes drastically with location (heating, cooling, etc)
Actually you are looking at it wrong. Yes a 100watt panel would add about.6kwh a day (6 hours of max panel ratting is averal in SW US), the same as if you ran a single 100watt light bulb for six hours.
Using an inerti system, no batteries puts it back out on the grid,.6kwh mulitiplied by 1,038,000 (number of new homes built in 2003 in the US) ends up being 227,322,000kwh being generated. A pretty heafty amount though still small in the grand scale of things. It's only enough power for about 2,000,000 people. Of course the real goal would be to force adoption sooner and drive prices down and output up. Once the price of say a 3000 watt system (about what a family of 4 would need and have a surplus) drops below $10,000 would you be able to ramp up the requirements and get to the point where we could cover all homes in the US and start supplementing industry requirements.
Actually the solar factor of the whole deal would be the least expensive portion of it. Rebuilding the enegry grid to be able to collect and control output from millions of sources efficiently and safely would require some severe revamping.
Slashdot Mirror
The privates shouldn't have any say in what people want to do locally especially when economic growth hinges on being able to provide some sort of broadband access these days.
It's like saying to the locals "no you can't have cars because Mobile doesn't want to put in a gas station in their town."
Everyone keeps getting caught up in the idea that you would have to use this with just one monitor. I see it's potential much like a raid controller. Sure you can have two drives run together twice as fast but you can also use it to control the drives individually and increase the number you have. I can run either 2-3 RAIDs with 4 IDE devices on my computer or control 10 IDE/SATA devices without the raid.
Run the cards together to get some screaming 3d performance or seperately to control a 4 monitor desktop array with absolutley loads of space to work on. I can't wait.
As a lover of flight sims I'll be first in line to buy a mother board that can support 10 video cards. Along with an array of cheap monitors I will finally have a wrap around view of the sim world. This can apply easily to any game.
First person shooters could finally have peripheral vision (one center and two on the sides) along with a inventory and map screen. Brings the grand total to five.
Driving games could finally have a true perspective instead of the stupid 3rd person or 1/3 screen in car view. So at least three monitors.
RTS resource monitors, sat view, and ground maps. Well that could become quite the array depending on how much you wanted covered. Say anywhere from 3-12 monitors.
Same for Massive Multiplayer Online Games. I could see a use without trying hard that would require at least six monitors.
You could double, tripple or even quadruple up on the number of required cards for any one monitor that would require higher end graphics. There are always those twisted monkeys that come up with graphics that won't run on any one GPU these days. For example those lovely to the horizon maps that show up in various games that add about 100meters of high detail every year. I see another scenario where people boost their systems performance by picking up cheaper versions of cards they own to keep their graphics improving without breaking the bank. (We can all remember when GF 2 cards cost $400 each, that'll buy you 50 of them these days.
Who could afford all this you ask? Well just about anyone these days. I've got a stack of 17inch CRT monitors in the garage I picked up for $5 a piece that are just begging to be used. With the advent of sub $100 video cards and CRT monitors, and the fact that not every output would have to be super hi rez. Perpheral views, 2d maps, and inventory lists would be just fine on something to the equivalent to a GeForce 4 MX ($32 new). You could seriously enhance your gaming machine for the price of one top of the line latest and the greatest video card from ATI/Nvidia.
So you keep your two monitor display, for me I'm going to check to see if the wiring in my computer room can handle the extra 10 monitors I plan on adding.
I used to live in Rapid City South Dakota and you were quite lucky if you could get 56K connection typically it was only 28.8K due to the archaic POTS equipment and patchwork of new digital equipment. The typical answer to when are we going to get broad band was "next year" (Never). Then the power company looking to expand it's business took advantage of the fact that they owned the right of way (the power poles) to eveyone's home in North Dakota, South Dakota, Eastern Montana, Nebraska, and Minasota. For $100 a month they offer VOIP based phone, all calls on the network were local (really pissed off the local bells and the state (no fees/taxes for local and regular long distance), cable, and broad band. When the phone company tried to cut them off by refusing to sell them any more bandwidth, they just simply expanded their network beyond the reach of the telco and found someone in a different region who would.
Well suddenly "next year" became "now" since the cable company, the phone company, and the local crappy ISP didn't want to get shut out of their respective markets. The cable company and phone company tried to sue to stop them, but got nowhere so they were forced to put up or get out. Now Rapidy City locals have quite the collection of choices for their cable, phone, and ISP service.
The same occurred in my current town of California City (why do I keep moving to shithole USA towns?) DSL came in and then proved to be less profitable then they liked so they began to pull service with plans to cancel it completely. That is up until a retired IT guy signed up for a few T1 lines and set up a wireless network here in town and quickly took over this town and two more nearby and began to add more bandwidth. Well the phone company did an about face and expanded DSL service. Too little too late the local guy offers twice the bandwidth for half the price, doesn't require a phone line, and if you have a problem you just drive to the office and talk to him.
Competition is a wonderful thing. They need to shake up things by deregulating the cell, cable, and phone services even more.
Of course I'm no fanboy of either, I had 3 Nvidia cards before that, and when the next upgrade is due I'll pick the best for the buck again.
This is what all gamers should do. It keeps both companies on their toes and keeps them from getting greedy and complacent. ATI's rollout of the 9800 and the big mutiny against Nvidia, pulled Nvidia's head out of their collective asses and forced them to put out a better product and we saw a nice healthy jump in hardware numbers instead of those little pathetic bump ups in horse power.
One of the other articles, either here or someplace else I read, about three other programs the first already undergoing field testing now is the recycling of water, not at the camp level but at the soldier level (ewwww he drank pee) in the field using new filter packs. A group of marines used them to stretch their water supply by a week (80% pee recovery) after being cut of in our current conflict.
The second which is still under developement is the collection of water from vehicle exhaust effectively cutting the bulk of the logistics need in half. Basically all your vehicles would have these units on them to condense and filter the water. Which would supply your troops directly in the field. Again making your troops more agile tactically since you can go farther and longer into the field without having to bring the extra water tankers.
The last is a new tent rain guard, the roof above the roof for those of you who are not familiar with the standard military tent, which is covered with 700watts of flexiable solar cells. Supposeably near industructable. (We'll see after they let some junior enlisted play with them.) During the day all the tents would provide for the needs of the tent city and some of the base cutting down the need for desiel for the generators as well as the number of generators that need to be brought in the first place.
So now they just need to get rid of bullets so we can be more environmentally friendly and of course murder our fell man cleaner, more effectively, and more humanly.
"Set phasers to disco"
Driving is nothing like flying, well I take that back flying at your cruise altitude is alot like driving, though it's much closer to driving a boat on a lake. Which is why most of your accidents don't occur during cruise it's almost always within 5 miles of an airport during take off and landing.
Here's a few tidbits for you.
The fastest car represents some of the slowest speeds a small general aviation can fly. My little trainer Cesna can do 160mph.
Speed limits around airports is 200mph and outside is around 250mph in some airspaces congested areas. Otherwise the limit is just under the speed of sound. (over 600 mph though you have to be above a certain altitude).
You don't just dial in your favorite radio station and chill. Just to get out of the local area of my airport I have to talk to ground, then tower, then outbound, then approach. You also have to hop channels if you happen to fly through someone elses airspace and did I mention that there are no standard channels every airport is different hope you brought a airport guide with you. Oh did I forget that ATC talk like a bunch strung out meth freaks, so figuring out what they said can be fun especially when you are jockying with three other planes in the pattern trying to set up for a landing in the next 30 seconds.
There are no traffic lanes or signs when airborn so other traffic can come from any direction as well as above or below you and to boot is very difficult to spot. That's always comforting to know when you have up to a 500mph closing speed. Note small aircaft are almost impossible to spot when they are coming straight at you beyond about 3 miles. That gives you about 60 seconds to spot then avoid at just a 200mph closing speed at 3 miles
Speaking of weather a 40mph cross wind may make your arm tired on the way to work in car, but it makes it impossible to land in a plane, and could mean setting it down in a field if you don't have enough gas to make it to a different airport. Getting blown around during a rain storm in a car is easy to manage, at altitude in a light aircraft it is strong enough to flip you upside down, or push you down into the ground. Also without special instrument training the typical pilot loses control of their aircraft after about 7-10 minutes of flying into heavy weather.
If you drive to slow in your car you annoy the drivers behind you. You fly to slow in a plane and it falls out of the sky
Other than the occassional deer, stopped car, or kid running into the streets (worth 5 points) the road is relatively free of things to run into. Flying on the other hand has pesky things like mountains, towers, electrical lines, trees, birds, and other man made goods smack dab in the middle of the "road" and may or may not be marked with lights or on a map.
Basically unlike a car, if things get hairy there is no pulling over for a breather nor can you just stop when someone gets in your way, or when the weather turns to shit. There is also the little bit of joy that if you do get in an accident, that is if you survive it, the FAA may pull your license (a basic pilot license runs you about $5000 a comercial rating starts at $30,000) if you are found to be negligent.
Also if they held drivers to the same level of competence to obtain a drivers license as they do for pilot's flying license, then half of the general public would never be allowed to drive at all. Eighty percent of the remaining amount would only be allowed to drive a 50hp compact but only if it was a nice clear sunny day.
Want safe driving habits for better insurance rates? No problem.
Need to make the police you are on the other end of town? Child's play.
Plan on taking a long lunch in the company truck on company time? A snap.
Want your wife to think you are bowling with the fellas rather than over at her sister's throwing it in her ass? Consider it done.
Sure they can mandate to the aviation world pilots don't want to loose their expensive certifications and companies without those certifications are out of business, so exactly how are they going to bully the general public into it, and how are they going to check millions of cars cheaply enough to make it worthwhile. The car mod and hacker crowd will have a work around available within a month of this being mandatory that will mislead the authorities. As far as the GPS goes how hard is it going to be to rap the antenna in shielding? Poof no more signal, no more tracking.
The space elevator is a wonderful idea, but I'd rather them give it a go on the moon first where it would cost us 10's of billions and be attached to a larger lunar mission instead of 100's of billions it would cost us in earth orbit.
I hope not.
Ever the ones that are full of it Hockey (shit). California already collects 16 billion a year off of motorists, 18 cents a gallon, but the funny thing is they only spend about 4.4 billion of it on roads and transportation. So exactly what is the problem here?
Boo hoo we don't have enough money we need more for the roads.
It's like a kid coming home from school complaining he didn't have enough money for lunch to his parents, but they come to find out instead of buying lunch, he is spending his lunch money on comic books instead.
Who cares if its expense, while I say let's the thing deorbit and move on, it does present an interesting engineering challenge. If they do manage to repair the thing with robots, the accomplishment is not that the Hubble is working again, but the fact that they did it with robots. That fact will give them more options and a big boost to the more ambitious missions that are on the boards as well as increase the capabilities for smaller onse since we can fire off robots into orbit without worrying about having to ground the fleet everytime one crashes.
**Note I usually post crap, but usually a much higher quality level of crap than this. Usually has complete sentences and everything. Spell cheker is optional though.
. "And in other news today a strange phenomina occurred for the seventh straight day in other parts of the world as another 4 leaders of countries known to support terrorism spontaneously combusted as well as several ultra liberal members of the Hollywood who were in those countries to show their support...when asked for comment the President just shrugged his shoulders and winked at the camera.
A small portable handle held laser is more than enough to temporarily blind a person or at least "shine the light" in his eyes so he can't see. If this thing had been fired at him, there would have been very little left of the pilot much less the aircraft.
Yep the administration would be driving Porches instead of Lexas for perks. The LA school system already gets billions, yet they manage to do very little with it except piss it away.
Well actually that's about right for a CA school system. They'll spend 1/4 of the money on doing a study on how to best spend the money, spend an eighth on actually hiring someone, and the last quarter on how it effects their mandator test results, and the rest quarter for raises for the upper management.
Check out the discovery channel they've got a show on the smaller ground based version of this thing that would fit on a truck. It's quite an eye opener as too how much power is being thrown around.
The problem with the borders is a PC issue, the same people that hate every new weapon system also don't like our previous policy of actually shooting people trying to cross the border illegally. Why do you think the Army no longer is in charge of guarding it?
"True our students can barely read and write and over a third of them don't speak English, but hey look at that toilet shine!"
That's much more important than say improving our base knowledge and creating new high tech fields as well as military capabilty.
A better place to start is to string up school administrators by their budgets and take away all of their CEO paychecks and perks. It'll be amazing how many hundreds of millions of dollars a year will be freed up.
Anyone who thinks the military is as cool and ultramodern as on tv and the movies is an idiot. Let me put it in a more proper persective for you.
Palm/retnal scanners...nope...a hahahahahahahahahaha...tears.... Let's put it this way I got an email the other day asking me whether or not I had submitted my paperwork to have the email account I've been using for the last 5 years.
Ultra fast internet connections, nope.
Top of the line computers...sure....from 1998. Fiber optic networks...nope...coax and 10bT baby!
Instant file recovery and easy to use multi department integrated data basses...in your dreams buddy.
Super geek wunderman IT guys that maintain and protect our networks....hahahahahahahahahahhahaha..tears..hah
Neeto torpeedo technical orders with revolving 3D diagrams of equipment and buildings with intergrated sensors that can be controlled remotely on a really cool laptop/palmtop....err no. Bust out the TO books and get a wagon...yes I said a wagon we use them to carry tools and the 30lbs of books we need to do our work.
Sealed room containing an alien body...that one is true...well ok to be honest it's made out of rubber but it is in a SAR access only area... is that good enough?
An all powerfull multi-branch force combining sentient software/hardware matrix that will destroy the world by taking over all the weapons in the military. No but I do have to run Adaware everday to clean off all the crap from people surfing the net and playing flash games on government computers to keep it from crashing when I check my email. Not quite as scary as Skynet, but it does annoy the piss out of me.
Communication services in dense areas becomes communial and would be self upgrading and expanding as time went on. Now if they could get the whole "Lillypad Concept" for WiFi to work we could do the same with the internet and circumvent most of the need for an ISP.
Using an inerti system, no batteries puts it back out on the grid, .6kwh mulitiplied by 1,038,000 (number of new homes built in 2003 in the US) ends up being 227,322,000kwh being generated. A pretty heafty amount though still small in the grand scale of things. It's only enough power for about 2,000,000 people. Of course the real goal would be to force adoption sooner and drive prices down and output up. Once the price of say a 3000 watt system (about what a family of 4 would need and have a surplus) drops below $10,000 would you be able to ramp up the requirements and get to the point where we could cover all homes in the US and start supplementing industry requirements.
Actually the solar factor of the whole deal would be the least expensive portion of it. Rebuilding the enegry grid to be able to collect and control output from millions of sources efficiently and safely would require some severe revamping.