That's amazingly common at Fry's. Especially with their store-owned brand of motherboards (ECS I think?) which are cheap but terrible. Honest, ask a Fry's employee about the shelf full of boards with return stickers on them.
But plenty of other things get the same treatment - their entire stock of some item will consist of returns. I can only assume that's the Fry's equivalent of "clearance".
No, they're saying that the cloud of particles following Titan around in its orbit is larger that Saturn and rings. Titan orbits Saturn at about 1.2 million km, and Saturn's rings (and thus presumably the cloud) are about 150 thousand km in radius. So the could isn't surrounding Saturn, it's surrounding Titan and following Titan in its orbit.
Still pretty neat, there's a giant gas cloud as big as the planet orbiting it.
The purpose is not to provide a thorough rebuttle to Michael Moore's movie. The purpose is not to disprove Moore's conclusions. The purpose is to show a thesis of their own: "Moore presents things that are false or misleading to some degree". It's an existential proof; they only need to make one of their "deceits" stick in order to prove it. What they hope is that you'll accept one instance of "deceit", and then make the logical fallacy of concluding that therefore, everything Michael Moore says is false. Thus the shotgun style that throws whatever nitpick or counter-claim by vested interest at Moore it can, even saying he supports terrorists and hates our troops because he called the insurgents in Iraq revolutionaries.
Of course that's only going to work on those who want to disbelieve everything in the movie. It's interesting the facts that he's unable to dispute. The central half of the movie -- the part where Bush misleads the public into supporting a war based on known-to-be-faulty intelligence that distracts from fighting the actual terrorist threat of al Qaeda while pouring taxpayer money into Haliburton -- is essentially uncontested. What I considered the take-home message of F911 is left unchallenged: What is commonly thought of as Bush's greatest strength, his execution of the War on Terror, is actually his greatest weakness.
Just in case you were confused, this is about things like the Macromedia Flash plugin that lets you view Flash docs, not the "Flash Click to Play" extension of Firefox. Granted, having one without the other seems insane, but this article is only about the one.
Oh, well, that's obvious. Everyone knows batteries suck. If you recharge your fuel cell electrically (to crack H20) would that be an electric car? I'd call anything with an electric motor electric. Eh, semantics; who knows what they'll be called should they (whatever kind of alternative car it is) ever become popular.
You make good points regarding the likelyhood of major naval battles. Considering that many of our likely enemies that you could conceive such a battle with have nukes, that makes any large scale war unlikely. MAD did not die with the Cold War.
But you are wrong regarding technology. Just because we spend more on our military than anyone else doesn't mean no one else does advanced R&D. The working supercavitation torpedoes I refered to were developed by the Russians, and possibly have been sold to China. On the subject of military deployment capability, the U.S. has no peer. On the subject of military technology, we have plenty of peers.
A stealth sub with a supersonic torpedo -- do you really think this is a concept only the U.S. could produce? -- could pose a serious threat to a carrier.
You want to talk socio-economic disruption? That's the whole problem with huge carriers -- an incredible amount of resources poured into one platform that can be sunk for a tiny fraction of that price.
Good points. I don't think missles will be going anywhere, but a rail gun brings a lot to the table that missles don't.
Can a cruise missle hit a moving target? Certainly the target could move a lot farther in the time it takes the missle to get there than a rail gun round, but the rail gun isn't going to have the kind of guidance where it could track a rapidly moving object.
That's probably true. I wouldn't consider myself anywhere near qualified to write a book on UNIX history, but I know a damn spot more about the subject than Ken Brown.
The Battle of Midway was so important in this respect because the Japanese sent their carriers out front and their battleships to the back, while the US keep their carriers in the back and their battleships to the front. Guess who got the pounding?
Um, right. That's kind of what I was alluding to. Carriers are vulnerable, and if the enemy can take clear shots at them, then you can kiss it goodbye because it cannot evade.
Actually, it would take something the size of a nuke (or a lucky hit) to sink a carrier. Take a look at how many hits the Yorktown and Essex class ships took during WWII.
A nuke? Come on. Detonate a large enough torpedo underneath the center of the keel, and its own weight will crack it like a fortune cookie. If we can make shoulder-mounted anti-tank missles that aim for the top of the turret, we can surely make missles and torpedoes to aim for the weak parts of ships.
Also, Railguns suffer from a traditional problem with projectiles: lack of collateral damage.
Ah, very good point. Rail guns probably wouldn't be a good choice, then.
What I meant is that it is much smaller than cannons of comparable power -- of which there really aren't any. Being able to fit something with that much range and power on a destroyer is a big step forward.
A cruise missle isn't really that small -- currently they are fired only from destroyers and cruisers, or large submarines. Each missile is large, having to carry both the fuel and the warhead. While the rail gun itself is larger than a cruise missle and launcher, each rail round is much smaller and much safer since it isn't a mix of high explosives and rocket fuel waiting to be hit by enemy ordinance. And if its speed you want, then the limiting factor is mass, and you can get a lot more rounds for less mass with a rail gun.
I don't see what the distance to the target has to do with its value... Why spend half a million destroying a warehouse when you can use a comparitively free lump of metal?
All in all, I think rail guns are a vastly positive improvement in weapon mobility. I don't see missles as having any advantage, outside of extra range.
In any real conflict against a modern military, our carriers are going to be decorating the bottom of the ocean faster than you can say "What, they had rail guns too?"
Carriers are big floating target practice for the enemy. Already they have to drag with them a ridiculous entourage to detect and deter enemies outside of lethal range.
If you like, just imagine the U.S. attacking some other nation's navy and carriers... How many ways could we sink a target that size? Let's see... cruise missles, super-sonic torpedoes, and soon rail guns. Now there's a 250 mi radius circle around the carrier we need to keep clear.
We started to learn this in WWII, the last time carriers were involved in naval battles (to my knowledge). Carriers are too big, too expensive, and too easy to hit. Not that I'm defending the French's flaccid carrier fleet, but carrier size isn't what I'd use as penis surrogate when comparing navies.
Magnetic fields don't bleed that much... They fall of by an inverse square of distance, in other words, really quickly.
Yeah, just like an electric field i.e. radio.
They're putting a ton of energy into that field to fire the projectile. It should be easily detectable, though only for a short time so you'll have to be watching for it. Still, "gigantic EM bursts" and "stealth" are contradictory in this age.
But that's exactly what this is for... First, you survive hits better because your ammo won't explode. Second, this weapon -- with quite a bit more range/power than many larger weapon systems -- can fit on a destroyer instead of a huge battleship. It's a step in the right direction.
Thank you. Also, there are some theories that the burning was actually staged by the Nazi party itself to justify their actions.
I'm aware. While I don't think the theories have been proven, I count it as the most likely case, based on a simple fact: what could Polish terrorists have possibly gained from provoking Germany? That would be suicidal. Hitler is the only one who gained. A similar thought occured to me about 9/11 and the Taliban, but that was before I realized that al Qaeda stood to benefit hugely, and has. Unlike Poland, provoking us is exactly what they wanted to do.
One thing The World At War will teach most people with its first episode is that comparing Emperor Dubyah and his band of neo-fascists to Hitler and the Nazis is pretty ridiculous, even though it is sometimes tempting. Dubyah would never, for example, slaughter the entire citizenry of a town and destroy every building in it.
Quite true. What cheeses me is why some people think that means there's nothing to be learned from WWII. If we can't learn anything from history unless what's happening now is exactly like what happened then, we will learn nothing. History doesn't repeat, it only rhymes.
This is basically what the Axis did in WWII. It's also cropped up in fictional works like 1984, Aeon Flux, Equilibrium, etc.
Um, no. Hilter took power in Germany by leveraging nationalist and racist fervor, and working popular anger about unfair WW1 reparations treaties.
Um, yes. The burning of the Reichstag was a critical point in the rise of the Third Reich. A shocking, sudden terrorist action was used as a pretext for abolishing civil liberties provided by the Constitution of the Weimar Republic. All in the name of "defense of the Fatherland", you understand.
It is simply unacceptable that in a post-9/11, post-PATRIOT world that citizens of the U.S. would be unaware of how fear of terrorism can and has been used to strip people of their rights.
I can't blame NASA for all of this, however; we must also point at the money-fickle Congress. NASA has earned good marks with the thing they were allowed to pursue in good faith and budgeting, that being the interplanetary probes. We may as well relegate them to that so they can (to borrow that hated modern phrase) "concentrate on their core competency". I'd leap for actual joy if NASA was reduced to a "National Space Exploration Administration", which would design equipment, build probes, contract to have them launched, and then manage and track them with the DSN.
I think that's the best idea for NASA I've ever heard. It's not a perfect record, but they have done great things with space probes. Vehicles are already privatized enough to not need NASA's direction, and in fact seems to be in a desperate race to show NASA up. The best thing the government may be able to do for space travel is finding out what is out there (and what's worth going to get).
Well, I think part of his point was that a biosphere large enough to support a human is going to be extremely massive, and mass equals fuel equals cost.
Why do you think it wouldn't scale linearly? Each added human/animal is that much more consumed O2 and water, meaning that much more plant matter to maintain equilibrium, all of which needs support by the other elements of the system.
The orignal poster may be confused about whether it happened during the special election for the recall or the normal election a few months later, (i think it was the second election, but i'm not sure either) but regardless you're just nitpicking.
Yeah, I didn't have time to go looking for the news articles myself. The important part, to me, is not which election, but the fact that the Californian voting commission (again, no time to look for the correct name) found the systems to have disenfranchised voters, and that Diebold was forced to admit that this was true.
So thanks for digging up the link. I'm quite sick of being called a conspiracy theorist for talking about things that are in the freakin news. But if there's anything I've learned in the past four years, it's a healthy respect for the power of ignorance.
The only thing that EVER kept voting even remotely fair was bi(or multi)-partisan supervision.
And there's the rub, isn't it? What's the bi-partisan supervision going to look like with one of these machines? Representatives of both parties stand there looking at the computer while the tech pushes the "count votes" button? Doesn't sound very useful to me.
Here's an observation: We know that in Florida Diebold machines gave Al Gore -15,000 votes. We know they screwed up in the California recall election, disenfranchising voters, and handing unusually high counts to minor candidates in counties far from their homes while the Lietenant Governor had substantially below his average. I'm not sure about the town where the vote totals were many times more than the actual population. We keep hearing about these machines screwing up. We have a company producing unverifiable machines -- and they know they are flawed but don't care -- and this company has close ties to the Republican party. Their machines have "oopsed" several times in favor of Republicans -- have they "oopsed" in favor of Democrats, or is this a one-way street of accidental errors?
Basically, my question is: What, exactly, is supposed to even this out?
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That's amazingly common at Fry's. Especially with their store-owned brand of motherboards (ECS I think?) which are cheap but terrible. Honest, ask a Fry's employee about the shelf full of boards with return stickers on them.
But plenty of other things get the same treatment - their entire stock of some item will consist of returns. I can only assume that's the Fry's equivalent of "clearance".
No, they're saying that the cloud of particles following Titan around in its orbit is larger that Saturn and rings. Titan orbits Saturn at about 1.2 million km, and Saturn's rings (and thus presumably the cloud) are about 150 thousand km in radius. So the could isn't surrounding Saturn, it's surrounding Titan and following Titan in its orbit.
Still pretty neat, there's a giant gas cloud as big as the planet orbiting it.
The purpose is not to provide a thorough rebuttle to Michael Moore's movie. The purpose is not to disprove Moore's conclusions. The purpose is to show a thesis of their own: "Moore presents things that are false or misleading to some degree". It's an existential proof; they only need to make one of their "deceits" stick in order to prove it. What they hope is that you'll accept one instance of "deceit", and then make the logical fallacy of concluding that therefore, everything Michael Moore says is false. Thus the shotgun style that throws whatever nitpick or counter-claim by vested interest at Moore it can, even saying he supports terrorists and hates our troops because he called the insurgents in Iraq revolutionaries.
Of course that's only going to work on those who want to disbelieve everything in the movie. It's interesting the facts that he's unable to dispute. The central half of the movie -- the part where Bush misleads the public into supporting a war based on known-to-be-faulty intelligence that distracts from fighting the actual terrorist threat of al Qaeda while pouring taxpayer money into Haliburton -- is essentially uncontested. What I considered the take-home message of F911 is left unchallenged: What is commonly thought of as Bush's greatest strength, his execution of the War on Terror, is actually his greatest weakness.
Just in case you were confused, this is about things like the Macromedia Flash plugin that lets you view Flash docs, not the "Flash Click to Play" extension of Firefox. Granted, having one without the other seems insane, but this article is only about the one.
Oh, well, that's obvious. Everyone knows batteries suck. If you recharge your fuel cell electrically (to crack H20) would that be an electric car?
I'd call anything with an electric motor electric. Eh, semantics; who knows what they'll be called should they (whatever kind of alternative car it is) ever become popular.
You make good points regarding the likelyhood of major naval battles. Considering that many of our likely enemies that you could conceive such a battle with have nukes, that makes any large scale war unlikely. MAD did not die with the Cold War.
But you are wrong regarding technology. Just because we spend more on our military than anyone else doesn't mean no one else does advanced R&D. The working supercavitation torpedoes I refered to were developed by the Russians, and possibly have been sold to China. On the subject of military deployment capability, the U.S. has no peer. On the subject of military technology, we have plenty of peers.
A stealth sub with a supersonic torpedo -- do you really think this is a concept only the U.S. could produce? -- could pose a serious threat to a carrier.
You want to talk socio-economic disruption? That's the whole problem with huge carriers -- an incredible amount of resources poured into one platform that can be sunk for a tiny fraction of that price.
Good points. I don't think missles will be going anywhere, but a rail gun brings a lot to the table that missles don't.
Can a cruise missle hit a moving target? Certainly the target could move a lot farther in the time it takes the missle to get there than a rail gun round, but the rail gun isn't going to have the kind of guidance where it could track a rapidly moving object.
That's probably true. I wouldn't consider myself anywhere near qualified to write a book on UNIX history, but I know a damn spot more about the subject than Ken Brown.
I knew I'd seen that link before.
I still wouldn't give a shit.
you'd get a +1 informative.
The Battle of Midway was so important in this respect because the Japanese sent their carriers out front and their battleships to the back, while the US keep their carriers in the back and their battleships to the front. Guess who got the pounding?
Um, right. That's kind of what I was alluding to. Carriers are vulnerable, and if the enemy can take clear shots at them, then you can kiss it goodbye because it cannot evade.
Actually, it would take something the size of a nuke (or a lucky hit) to sink a carrier. Take a look at how many hits the Yorktown and Essex class ships took during WWII.
A nuke? Come on. Detonate a large enough torpedo underneath the center of the keel, and its own weight will crack it like a fortune cookie. If we can make shoulder-mounted anti-tank missles that aim for the top of the turret, we can surely make missles and torpedoes to aim for the weak parts of ships.
Also, Railguns suffer from a traditional problem with projectiles: lack of collateral damage.
Ah, very good point. Rail guns probably wouldn't be a good choice, then.
Oh, I'm sure they already know and are planning for it.
But for your sake, enjoy a link.
What I meant is that it is much smaller than cannons of comparable power -- of which there really aren't any. Being able to fit something with that much range and power on a destroyer is a big step forward.
A cruise missle isn't really that small -- currently they are fired only from destroyers and cruisers, or large submarines. Each missile is large, having to carry both the fuel and the warhead. While the rail gun itself is larger than a cruise missle and launcher, each rail round is much smaller and much safer since it isn't a mix of high explosives and rocket fuel waiting to be hit by enemy ordinance. And if its speed you want, then the limiting factor is mass, and you can get a lot more rounds for less mass with a rail gun.
I don't see what the distance to the target has to do with its value... Why spend half a million destroying a warehouse when you can use a comparitively free lump of metal?
All in all, I think rail guns are a vastly positive improvement in weapon mobility. I don't see missles as having any advantage, outside of extra range.
In any real conflict against a modern military, our carriers are going to be decorating the bottom of the ocean faster than you can say "What, they had rail guns too?"
Carriers are big floating target practice for the enemy. Already they have to drag with them a ridiculous entourage to detect and deter enemies outside of lethal range.
If you like, just imagine the U.S. attacking some other nation's navy and carriers... How many ways could we sink a target that size? Let's see... cruise missles, super-sonic torpedoes, and soon rail guns. Now there's a 250 mi radius circle around the carrier we need to keep clear.
We started to learn this in WWII, the last time carriers were involved in naval battles (to my knowledge). Carriers are too big, too expensive, and too easy to hit. Not that I'm defending the French's flaccid carrier fleet, but carrier size isn't what I'd use as penis surrogate when comparing navies.
Magnetic fields don't bleed that much... They fall of by an inverse square of distance, in other words, really quickly.
Yeah, just like an electric field i.e. radio.
They're putting a ton of energy into that field to fire the projectile. It should be easily detectable, though only for a short time so you'll have to be watching for it. Still, "gigantic EM bursts" and "stealth" are contradictory in this age.
But that's exactly what this is for... First, you survive hits better because your ammo won't explode. Second, this weapon -- with quite a bit more range/power than many larger weapon systems -- can fit on a destroyer instead of a huge battleship. It's a step in the right direction.
Thank you. Also, there are some theories that the burning was actually staged by the Nazi party itself to justify their actions.
I'm aware. While I don't think the theories have been proven, I count it as the most likely case, based on a simple fact: what could Polish terrorists have possibly gained from provoking Germany? That would be suicidal. Hitler is the only one who gained. A similar thought occured to me about 9/11 and the Taliban, but that was before I realized that al Qaeda stood to benefit hugely, and has. Unlike Poland, provoking us is exactly what they wanted to do.
One thing The World At War will teach most people with its first episode is that comparing Emperor Dubyah and his band of neo-fascists to Hitler and the Nazis is pretty ridiculous, even though it is sometimes tempting. Dubyah would never, for example, slaughter the entire citizenry of a town and destroy every building in it.
Quite true. What cheeses me is why some people think that means there's nothing to be learned from WWII. If we can't learn anything from history unless what's happening now is exactly like what happened then, we will learn nothing. History doesn't repeat, it only rhymes.
This is basically what the Axis did in WWII. It's also cropped up in fictional works like 1984, Aeon Flux, Equilibrium, etc.
Um, no. Hilter took power in Germany by leveraging nationalist and racist fervor, and working popular anger about unfair WW1 reparations treaties.
Um, yes. The burning of the Reichstag was a critical point in the rise of the Third Reich. A shocking, sudden terrorist action was used as a pretext for abolishing civil liberties provided by the Constitution of the Weimar Republic. All in the name of "defense of the Fatherland", you understand.
It is simply unacceptable that in a post-9/11, post-PATRIOT world that citizens of the U.S. would be unaware of how fear of terrorism can and has been used to strip people of their rights.
You know, most professors would have been able to handle a correction... He probably would have appreciated it.
I think that's the best idea for NASA I've ever heard. It's not a perfect record, but they have done great things with space probes. Vehicles are already privatized enough to not need NASA's direction, and in fact seems to be in a desperate race to show NASA up. The best thing the government may be able to do for space travel is finding out what is out there (and what's worth going to get).
Well, I think part of his point was that a biosphere large enough to support a human is going to be extremely massive, and mass equals fuel equals cost.
Why do you think it wouldn't scale linearly? Each added human/animal is that much more consumed O2 and water, meaning that much more plant matter to maintain equilibrium, all of which needs support by the other elements of the system.
Is your dog non-lethal? Do you have a website?
The orignal poster may be confused about whether it happened during the special election for the recall or the normal election a few months later, (i think it was the second election, but i'm not sure either) but regardless you're just nitpicking.
Yeah, I didn't have time to go looking for the news articles myself. The important part, to me, is not which election, but the fact that the Californian voting commission (again, no time to look for the correct name) found the systems to have disenfranchised voters, and that Diebold was forced to admit that this was true.
So thanks for digging up the link. I'm quite sick of being called a conspiracy theorist for talking about things that are in the freakin news. But if there's anything I've learned in the past four years, it's a healthy respect for the power of ignorance.
The only thing that EVER kept voting even remotely fair was bi(or multi)-partisan supervision.
And there's the rub, isn't it? What's the bi-partisan supervision going to look like with one of these machines? Representatives of both parties stand there looking at the computer while the tech pushes the "count votes" button? Doesn't sound very useful to me.
Here's an observation: We know that in Florida Diebold machines gave Al Gore -15,000 votes. We know they screwed up in the California recall election, disenfranchising voters, and handing unusually high counts to minor candidates in counties far from their homes while the Lietenant Governor had substantially below his average. I'm not sure about the town where the vote totals were many times more than the actual population. We keep hearing about these machines screwing up. We have a company producing unverifiable machines -- and they know they are flawed but don't care -- and this company has close ties to the Republican party. Their machines have "oopsed" several times in favor of Republicans -- have they "oopsed" in favor of Democrats, or is this a one-way street of accidental errors?
Basically, my question is: What, exactly, is supposed to even this out?