It's been awhile since I've been in the program, but the idea is that racks with experiments come and go via Shuttle. With the demise of Shuttle, they'll bring smaller on-orbit replaceable units. Experiments on ISS have a longer lifetime than a lot of geeks' attention span, so they get lost in the background noise. Also, it's, well, science. Often, they're long-term experiments and have to be allowed to run during the course of the experiment, but don't require a lot of tweaking.
At the cost of space up there, they don't keep something around when another project could better use the space.
I worked at JSC on Space Station Freedom. I worked with Charlie Bolden and a host of other astronauts on several projects and flight experiments. I got to know how they think and who their minds tend to work. Congress is best at setting broad goals (but a single point in the Administration of the day is usually better), and figuring out how to pay for it. Unfortunately, Congress likes to meddle in things they don't understand (Yeah, John Glen was an exception there) and make demands that don't help the given program. I note with interest that there's a lot of Space Station Freedom that I can identify in ISS these days; so much for the Congress-mandated fresh start. The engineers won in the long run, because it was just the right thing to do. But, how much money and time did we waste redesigning, descoping and rescoping?
Charlie's an engineer, a retired General, and a retired Astronaut. He knows a fair bit about NASA and how things really work around the place. He's also not a stranger to politics, as once you rise in rank sufficiently, even the US military is politicized. I suspect he'll be able to play the game, but he could be run over by the pork-wagons. There's more of them than there are of him, and the combination of aerospace companies whose primary interest is profit, and NOT whatever NASA's mission is, and Congress-critters and their desire to support their contributors, is often a hard game to crack.
Congress didn't save ANY money in their attempts to micro- or over-manage Space Station. What makes them think they understand the, literally, rocket science needed to design the next man-rated launch system?
It's not cheap but the development lifecycle could well be shorter than for a secondary on an unmanned spacecraft. And, since it's VHF, I guess there's an outside chance that, instead of a dedicated antenna (which wouldn't be too hard) they could have piggybacked on the new (or the remaining old) ARISS antenna.
Packets in space isn't new by a long-shot and tracking in space isn't, really, either.
In general, it helps to know the time the image was taken. Then, using the vehicle's location, determined using Kepler's laws and the data known as Keplerian elements, you can describe the vehicle's position in orbit, and thus the sub-satellite point (place on the ground where the vehicle is directly overhead. During ascent, however, the keps are not, well, easily maintained, so a rather simpler non-linear model is employed to estimate where the vehicle is over the ground.
If you've a rough idea of the track, and access to GoogleEarth (even GoogleMaps but the reduced resolution hurts) you should be able to establish where they're over. Some areas in view from the vehicle are real easy to spot if you've the right perspective, while others aren't so easy.
Clouds can really screw up ad hoc location determination, too.
One problem here is the mechanical systems on wind turbines are a bit larger than the typical anemometer vane, so they also tend to exhibit more wear and degraded performance is likely to impede their ability to demonstrate a well-correlated wind velocity. One problem I'm working on is a good hub-height wind measurement and prediction system to correlate turbine power output with wind velocity to act as a status/fault monitor system. We could tell if the wind were in a particular range, but not really exactly what the real velocity was. There are folks in my community who would claim that if it's not good enough for the climate record, it shouldn't be collected. (and these are normally intelligent folk!)
There are some pluses and minuses to this approach. A micronet of this scale in an isolated area could provide some interesting data BUT the data would be skewed by proximity to the big whirling thingies which would induce a bit of turbulence. More to the point, there's history available. When an an automated vortex signature is detected, the wetware needs to know there's a wind farm in the area, and look at the history. A vortex signature that forms out of nothing right over the wind farm is likely a false positive (or so I'd assume initially) without some precursor indication of shear and vorticity. Recall that a tornado is a fairly complex event, and doesn't form without some warning signs (usually). IF it does form without warning, a replay of the doppler history can usually identify what you missed the first time.
Hmmm. A couple of thoughts. 1. The tornado isn't a pressure-equalization tool. Were that so, prediction would likely be a bit easier. 2. Yes, wind turbines do modify the landscape. More to the point they modify surface roughness, and research at the National Center for Atmospheric Research is looking at how these changes might affect local weather. It's not quantified yet, so useful conclusions are unlikely to be drawn at this early date.
Unfortunately, we're a few years away from phased-array radars being deployed much beyond your everyday Aegis cruiser... or Norman, Oklahoma (where the Radar Operations Center resides). Also, PA Radars (PAR's) will employ dual-polarization doppler technologies. Expect to see dual-polarization radars in widespread use, even in the TV stations, very soon, since we can do those as a rebuild or retrofit of existing installations. PAR will require replacing the dish and mount wholesale with expensive panels. I'm betting we'll end up using a single panel (or a pair) and continue to mechanically rotate them in azimuth, in the first deployments of PAR.
I tend to work in the atmospheric sciences, where, as one might guess we work with microphysical processes and thermodynamic data. I would second the recommendation that working from the original, authoritative publications would be a good approach. If you're well-versed in the field already, you're familiar with the seminal works. If you're not, your job is bigger than you realize, as programming for a scientific project is rarely just finding equations and re-coding them, or finding a database of physical constants and calling them. You've got to understand where in the domain in question they come into play and use appropriate equations and parameterizations.
Fortran, even Fortran-66, is rarely unreadable. However, it often is written like a short story in a local dialect. The author has a method and style, and you have to understand it, or at least become conversant with it, before reading and understanding the flow of the code occurs. I should point out that this is really not different from any other language. Fortran, however, has been maligned because its roots were not in object-basis. Fortran 90 and Fortran 95 both, however, comply with the OO paradigm. The inherent problem is, CS departments often don't teach Fortran, and their faculty will tell you how horrid it is. Why? Because their discipline is COMPUTER science, not, say, solid earth geophysics, and they're conversant with a number of languages.and feel they can pick the best one for the job. The geophysicist, on the other hand, spent his time learning how and why those pesky tectonic plates move around, something the computer scientist never really studied unless, maybe, he took a rocks-for-jocks class and got really interested. Rather than mastering C, C++, Java and C#, the geophysicist learned just enough Fortran to get his work done, and proceeded down a different path. Since Fortran ("FORmula TRANslation") was developed to help discipline scientists transform their equations to operable code, this really makes sense.
My first computer initiation was using Fortran (Fortran-II) on an IBM 1401 while I was still in junior high school. My first formal course in programming used SWIFT, BASIC and SNOBOL, over the course of a summer while in high school. Virtually every course in college I took (I was not a CS major, but could/should have been from my transcript) was in Fortran (plus a pair of assembly language courses) because the choices were Fortran, Cobol or assembly. Imagine, if you will, not having a "modern language around, and having to code decent I/O or even decent APIs with that choice.
C isn't IMNSHO, too complex for a first language, but the K&R book is too thin to use for a full semester.
Honestly, C is a good choice, for a basic programming intro (I question if teaching C# while requiring Visual Studio accomplishes as much), but there are good reasons to teach Fortran to students who are not likely to become life-long, hard-core coders.
Fortran has a large code base. It was designed for FORmula TRANslation. It's easy to teach someone how to code an equation in Fortran assuming they understand the equation in the first place. C isn't too hard, but also isn't as easy (except for the veteran C programmers out there who don't know Fortran).
A bunch of our grad students and post-docs have learned Fortran over the years with little formal training, and are doing decent things with it. They hardly remember their intro C classes. Some are pretty good with perl and Python, but they've picked these up along the way to do specific tasks.
To date, I don't know of any weather models that have been coded in Python. Until someone translates 750,000 lines of crufty Fortran to Python, and makes it run with the same (verifiable) results as the Fortran code, I'll remain skeptical that Python or one of the more modern languages has that much benefit over the "old age and treachery" model (Fortran).
Actually, my favorite, and I've taught from it is "The Fortran Coloring Book". It's not a bad intro text, a little whimsical, and covers all the basics pretty well.
While you can get some value from a review of forecasts and observations, prior to building a wind farm, they go in, and use instruments to get measurements of the wind at various potential turbine hub heights, say, 60m, 80m, 100m, 120m, 150m. The most common instrument is a SODAR (http://www.sodar.com/about_sodar.htm) or a tall tower ("met tower") where measurements can be taken. Surveys often last up to a full year prior to data reduction and a decision on whether to use a site or not.
Use of model-based prediction can allow for load-balancing with other generation technologies, and provide information on turbine performance and degradation.
Most of the wind energy companies feel their turbine output data are proprietary. They only share it with the government if they are required to. They're worried that, if they made that data public, a competitor would use it to site another wind farm that could cause them to lose business... or could go a little upstream of the prevailing wind and cause them to lose wind flow. They don't even want to make the exact locations of their turbines public (although it's real hard to hide a whole windfarm!).
The state of prediction in Europe isn't as good as you might think. Nor is it in corporate America. That's a big reason NCAR is getting involved. Several of us are working on how to make WRF or a similar weather model work to forecast at the appropriate heights where the turbine blades work. AND at the resolutions required.
One wind prediction company I'm aware of here claims to have resolutions as fine as 250m for the whole US. What I know of the model they're using, however, suggests that the model isn't stable at that high a resolution. Getting models to behave as we adapt them for new tasks isn't always easy...
Excellent question. And the short answer is, "Yes."
Modification to surface roughness is a consideration. Diminuation of down-stream wind velocities is a concern, and of interest, some of us are questioning how really big windfarms might qdversely affect or capability to forecast the weather as we do use surface roughness as an input into WRF. If we under-estimate surface roughness we can overestimate surface wind velocity, and see that mis-estimate propagate through the entire model. Recall, please, that the atmosphere is a complex thing to model (most gridded atmosphereic models are finite difference models with a PDE physics base rather than discreet solver solutions) so a single minor estimator error can cause some interesting later errors.
I expect DDR3 to come in real expensive in real sizes. I suspect the original poster for this subthread isn't giving us all the requirements, but I don't see 16GB in a home machine anytime soon (I'm still doing a lot of useful work with servers in 8GB). I'm partial to Linux and have done a lot with the nVidia hardware of late for 3d, recommend that for a solution. With Linux, requires the "tainted" nVidia drivers, but damn, does it scream.
Actually, the data are now likely to remain free for some period. NWS got a boost when Rick Santorum (R-PA) failed of reelection last time.
I'm not an NWS employee but I do work with them on several projects. I've been present when some of the private sector have called for NWS to stop giving away data, forecasats, etc., to the public... just as long as they kept giving it away for free to the private companies. This isn't right. It's just plain wrong.
I do participate in CWOP, and several of my projects benefit from MADIS. Both of these are really cool projects, and they really do help improve weather forecasting both by allowing more data for data assimilation, whereby we use real world observations to enhance the data for the models, AND by allowing for more data for forecast verifications. NWS would love to have the funding to place more weather stations under their direct control out there for these purposes. Congress has seen fit to not make that possible. MADIS is an example of of a stellar program to gather in data from a variety of sources, and then to process it to afford some indication of data quality based on neighbor-comparison, reasonableness and internal consistency. CWOP is a sign of citizens volunteering their data to allow a really good Federal Agency to do their jobs better.
Oh, and while I'm at it, NWS is one of the few agencies who compute and use real metrics for performance, including how well their forecasts perform. So many other agencies seem to create metrics designed to prove they simply know how to play the game. I've gotten to see the process surrounding how they look at storm-based warning evaluations, and the effort going into making sure the evaluations mean something, and that they represent what's really happening were eye-opening for me.
Well, so far I haven't asked folks how to solve the systems associated with numerical weather analysis, but still read slashdot. Lots of good information sneaks through despite the troll level!
I find some of your "facts" interesting, if not completely verifiable.
Last I checked, I'm not exactly a leftie, but I criticize Bush (although NOT the office of the POTUS), I find Oliphant funny... or sometimes simply laughable; and I find the lack of information leaks in this administration curious and somewhat alarming.
I find the decisions by the various editors to not post the strip silly on their faces, and unsupportable. I also recognize that this strip will likely result in someone's issuance of a fatwa and/or a call for jihad (if the words confuse you, we've plenty of folks on here who can help with an explanation), and from that perspective, they could really be opening their employees to potential harm.
And, for what it's worth, I found Rumsfeld's version of how to wage war orthoginal to the realities of securing an armed populace and securing peace (Phase 4 is the usual intent of our military campaigns, rather than something to be dismissed; ask Bob Gates). I find Gonzales less than forthright and possessing of some interesting interpretations of constitutional law and I often wonder why a writ of mandamus hasn't been issued in some of the more obvious rulings by lower courts. I worry about the abrogation of our civil liberties. And I find McConnell a voice of reason: At least we know where he stands and what he thinks. And he does think.
I worry that we're hanging folks like Petraeus out to twist in the wind, and where our next generation of military leaders will come from. And if they're now going to even listen to their civilian bosses after the way their predecessors got screwed so badly.
SO: Call me a flaming liberal if you wish but be prepared for the flashback. "Libertarian" might be closer to the fact, but I doubt that's in your working vocabulary.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been awhile since I've been in the program, but the idea is that racks with experiments come and go via Shuttle. With the demise of Shuttle, they'll bring smaller on-orbit replaceable units. Experiments on ISS have a longer lifetime than a lot of geeks' attention span, so they get lost in the background noise. Also, it's, well, science. Often, they're long-term experiments and have to be allowed to run during the course of the experiment, but don't require a lot of tweaking.
At the cost of space up there, they don't keep something around when another project could better use the space.
FInd something that needs writing. Write it. Debug it. Test it and debug it again.
Disclaimer: I am now a project manager. You can slow down the disease but you can't stop it.
Don't worry, Congress will see that there's no confusion.
I worked at JSC on Space Station Freedom. I worked with Charlie Bolden and a host of other astronauts on several projects and flight experiments. I got to know how they think and who their minds tend to work. Congress is best at setting broad goals (but a single point in the Administration of the day is usually better), and figuring out how to pay for it. Unfortunately, Congress likes to meddle in things they don't understand (Yeah, John Glen was an exception there) and make demands that don't help the given program. I note with interest that there's a lot of Space Station Freedom that I can identify in ISS these days; so much for the Congress-mandated fresh start. The engineers won in the long run, because it was just the right thing to do. But, how much money and time did we waste redesigning, descoping and rescoping?
Charlie's an engineer, a retired General, and a retired Astronaut. He knows a fair bit about NASA and how things really work around the place. He's also not a stranger to politics, as once you rise in rank sufficiently, even the US military is politicized. I suspect he'll be able to play the game, but he could be run over by the pork-wagons. There's more of them than there are of him, and the combination of aerospace companies whose primary interest is profit, and NOT whatever NASA's mission is, and Congress-critters and their desire to support their contributors, is often a hard game to crack.
Congress didn't save ANY money in their attempts to micro- or over-manage Space Station. What makes them think they understand the, literally, rocket science needed to design the next man-rated launch system?
A product-based search engine that has yet to produce a single useful search result for me.
It's not cheap but the development lifecycle could well be shorter than for a secondary on an unmanned spacecraft. And, since it's VHF, I guess there's an outside chance that, instead of a dedicated antenna (which wouldn't be too hard) they could have piggybacked on the new (or the remaining old) ARISS antenna.
Packets in space isn't new by a long-shot and tracking in space isn't, really, either.
Less a problem on-orbit.
I didn't think Fox carried anything that couldn't be blamed on the Democrats?
In general, it helps to know the time the image was taken. Then, using the vehicle's location, determined using Kepler's laws and the data known as Keplerian elements, you can describe the vehicle's position in orbit, and thus the sub-satellite point (place on the ground where the vehicle is directly overhead. During ascent, however, the keps are not, well, easily maintained, so a rather simpler non-linear model is employed to estimate where the vehicle is over the ground.
If you've a rough idea of the track, and access to GoogleEarth (even GoogleMaps but the reduced resolution hurts) you should be able to establish where they're over. Some areas in view from the vehicle are real easy to spot if you've the right perspective, while others aren't so easy.
Clouds can really screw up ad hoc location determination, too.
One problem here is the mechanical systems on wind turbines are a bit larger than the typical anemometer vane, so they also tend to exhibit more wear and degraded performance is likely to impede their ability to demonstrate a well-correlated wind velocity. One problem I'm working on is a good hub-height wind measurement and prediction system to correlate turbine power output with wind velocity to act as a status/fault monitor system. We could tell if the wind were in a particular range, but not really exactly what the real velocity was. There are folks in my community who would claim that if it's not good enough for the climate record, it shouldn't be collected. (and these are normally intelligent folk!)
There are some pluses and minuses to this approach. A micronet of this scale in an isolated area could provide some interesting data BUT the data would be skewed by proximity to the big whirling thingies which would induce a bit of turbulence. More to the point, there's history available. When an an automated vortex signature is detected, the wetware needs to know there's a wind farm in the area, and look at the history. A vortex signature that forms out of nothing right over the wind farm is likely a false positive (or so I'd assume initially) without some precursor indication of shear and vorticity. Recall that a tornado is a fairly complex event, and doesn't form without some warning signs (usually). IF it does form without warning, a replay of the doppler history can usually identify what you missed the first time.
Hmmm. A couple of thoughts.
1. The tornado isn't a pressure-equalization tool. Were that so, prediction would likely be a bit easier.
2. Yes, wind turbines do modify the landscape. More to the point they modify surface roughness, and research at the National Center for Atmospheric Research is looking at how these changes might affect local weather. It's not quantified yet, so useful conclusions are unlikely to be drawn at this early date.
Unfortunately, we're a few years away from phased-array radars being deployed much beyond your everyday Aegis cruiser... or Norman, Oklahoma (where the Radar Operations Center resides). Also, PA Radars (PAR's) will employ dual-polarization doppler technologies. Expect to see dual-polarization radars in widespread use, even in the TV stations, very soon, since we can do those as a rebuild or retrofit of existing installations. PAR will require replacing the dish and mount wholesale with expensive panels. I'm betting we'll end up using a single panel (or a pair) and continue to mechanically rotate them in azimuth, in the first deployments of PAR.
I tend to work in the atmospheric sciences, where, as one might guess we work with microphysical processes and thermodynamic data. I would second the recommendation that working from the original, authoritative publications would be a good approach. If you're well-versed in the field already, you're familiar with the seminal works. If you're not, your job is bigger than you realize, as programming for a scientific project is rarely just finding equations and re-coding them, or finding a database of physical constants and calling them. You've got to understand where in the domain in question they come into play and use appropriate equations and parameterizations.
Fortran, even Fortran-66, is rarely unreadable. However, it often is written like a short story in a local dialect. The author has a method and style, and you have to understand it, or at least become conversant with it, before reading and understanding the flow of the code occurs. I should point out that this is really not different from any other language. Fortran, however, has been maligned because its roots were not in object-basis. Fortran 90 and Fortran 95 both, however, comply with the OO paradigm. The inherent problem is, CS departments often don't teach Fortran, and their faculty will tell you how horrid it is. Why? Because their discipline is COMPUTER science, not, say, solid earth geophysics, and they're conversant with a number of languages.and feel they can pick the best one for the job. The geophysicist, on the other hand, spent his time learning how and why those pesky tectonic plates move around, something the computer scientist never really studied unless, maybe, he took a rocks-for-jocks class and got really interested. Rather than mastering C, C++, Java and C#, the geophysicist learned just enough Fortran to get his work done, and proceeded down a different path. Since Fortran ("FORmula TRANslation") was developed to help discipline scientists transform their equations to operable code, this really makes sense.
My first computer initiation was using Fortran (Fortran-II) on an IBM 1401 while I was still in junior high school. My first formal course in programming used SWIFT, BASIC and SNOBOL, over the course of a summer while in high school. Virtually every course in college I took (I was not a CS major, but could/should have been from my transcript) was in Fortran (plus a pair of assembly language courses) because the choices were Fortran, Cobol or assembly. Imagine, if you will, not having a "modern language around, and having to code decent I/O or even decent APIs with that choice.
C isn't IMNSHO, too complex for a first language, but the K&R book is too thin to use for a full semester.
Honestly, C is a good choice, for a basic programming intro (I question if teaching C# while requiring Visual Studio accomplishes as much), but there are good reasons to teach Fortran to students who are not likely to become life-long, hard-core coders.
Fortran has a large code base. It was designed for FORmula TRANslation. It's easy to teach someone how to code an equation in Fortran assuming they understand the equation in the first place. C isn't too hard, but also isn't as easy (except for the veteran C programmers out there who don't know Fortran).
A bunch of our grad students and post-docs have learned Fortran over the years with little formal training, and are doing decent things with it. They hardly remember their intro C classes. Some are pretty good with perl and Python, but they've picked these up along the way to do specific tasks.
To date, I don't know of any weather models that have been coded in Python. Until someone translates 750,000 lines of crufty Fortran to Python, and makes it run with the same (verifiable) results as the Fortran code, I'll remain skeptical that Python or one of the more modern languages has that much benefit over the "old age and treachery" model (Fortran).
Actually, my favorite, and I've taught from it is "The Fortran Coloring Book". It's not a bad intro text, a little whimsical, and covers all the basics pretty well.
While you can get some value from a review of forecasts and observations, prior to building a wind farm, they go in, and use instruments to get measurements of the wind at various potential turbine hub heights, say, 60m, 80m, 100m, 120m, 150m. The most common instrument is a SODAR (http://www.sodar.com/about_sodar.htm) or a tall tower ("met tower") where measurements can be taken. Surveys often last up to a full year prior to data reduction and a decision on whether to use a site or not.
Use of model-based prediction can allow for load-balancing with other generation technologies, and provide information on turbine performance and degradation.
Most of the wind energy companies feel their turbine output data are proprietary. They only share it with the government if they are required to. They're worried that, if they made that data public, a competitor would use it to site another wind farm that could cause them to lose business... or could go a little upstream of the prevailing wind and cause them to lose wind flow. They don't even want to make the exact locations of their turbines public (although it's real hard to hide a whole windfarm!).
The state of prediction in Europe isn't as good as you might think. Nor is it in corporate America. That's a big reason NCAR is getting involved. Several of us are working on how to make WRF or a similar weather model work to forecast at the appropriate heights where the turbine blades work. AND at the resolutions required.
One wind prediction company I'm aware of here claims to have resolutions as fine as 250m for the whole US. What I know of the model they're using, however, suggests that the model isn't stable at that high a resolution. Getting models to behave as we adapt them for new tasks isn't always easy...
Excellent question. And the short answer is, "Yes."
Modification to surface roughness is a consideration. Diminuation of down-stream wind velocities is a concern, and of interest, some of us are questioning how really big windfarms might qdversely affect or capability to forecast the weather as we do use surface roughness as an input into WRF. If we under-estimate surface roughness we can overestimate surface wind velocity, and see that mis-estimate propagate through the entire model. Recall, please, that the atmosphere is a complex thing to model (most gridded atmosphereic models are finite difference models with a PDE physics base rather than discreet solver solutions) so a single minor estimator error can cause some interesting later errors.
I expect DDR3 to come in real expensive in real sizes. I suspect the original poster for this subthread isn't giving us all the requirements, but I don't see 16GB in a home machine anytime soon (I'm still doing a lot of useful work with servers in 8GB). I'm partial to Linux and have done a lot with the nVidia hardware of late for 3d, recommend that for a solution. With Linux, requires the "tainted" nVidia drivers, but damn, does it scream.
Actually, the data are now likely to remain free for some period. NWS got a boost when Rick Santorum (R-PA) failed of reelection last time.
I'm not an NWS employee but I do work with them on several projects. I've been present when some of the private sector have called for NWS to stop giving away data, forecasats, etc., to the public... just as long as they kept giving it away for free to the private companies. This isn't right. It's just plain wrong.
I do participate in CWOP, and several of my projects benefit from MADIS. Both of these are really cool projects, and they really do help improve weather forecasting both by allowing more data for data assimilation, whereby we use real world observations to enhance the data for the models, AND by allowing for more data for forecast verifications. NWS would love to have the funding to place more weather stations under their direct control out there for these purposes. Congress has seen fit to not make that possible. MADIS is an example of of a stellar program to gather in data from a variety of sources, and then to process it to afford some indication of data quality based on neighbor-comparison, reasonableness and internal consistency. CWOP is a sign of citizens volunteering their data to allow a really good Federal Agency to do their jobs better.
Oh, and while I'm at it, NWS is one of the few agencies who compute and use real metrics for performance, including how well their forecasts perform. So many other agencies seem to create metrics designed to prove they simply know how to play the game. I've gotten to see the process surrounding how they look at storm-based warning evaluations, and the effort going into making sure the evaluations mean something, and that they represent what's really happening were eye-opening for me.
Yeah, they are doing it right.
Well, so far I haven't asked folks how to solve the systems associated with numerical weather analysis, but still read slashdot. Lots of good information sneaks through despite the troll level!
I find some of your "facts" interesting, if not completely verifiable.
Last I checked, I'm not exactly a leftie, but I criticize Bush (although NOT the office of the POTUS), I find Oliphant funny... or sometimes simply laughable; and I find the lack of information leaks in this administration curious and somewhat alarming.
I find the decisions by the various editors to not post the strip silly on their faces, and unsupportable. I also recognize that this strip will likely result in someone's issuance of a fatwa and/or a call for jihad (if the words confuse you, we've plenty of folks on here who can help with an explanation), and from that perspective, they could really be opening their employees to potential harm.
And, for what it's worth, I found Rumsfeld's version of how to wage war orthoginal to the realities of securing an armed populace and securing peace (Phase 4 is the usual intent of our military campaigns, rather than something to be dismissed; ask Bob Gates). I find Gonzales less than forthright and possessing of some interesting interpretations of constitutional law and I often wonder why a writ of mandamus hasn't been issued in some of the more obvious rulings by lower courts. I worry about the abrogation of our civil liberties. And I find McConnell a voice of reason: At least we know where he stands and what he thinks. And he does think.
I worry that we're hanging folks like Petraeus out to twist in the wind, and where our next generation of military leaders will come from. And if they're now going to even listen to their civilian bosses after the way their predecessors got screwed so badly.
SO: Call me a flaming liberal if you wish but be prepared for the flashback. "Libertarian" might be closer to the fact, but I doubt that's in your working vocabulary.
Care to insult anyone else?
Rumor has it that this will be a Power7 machine. Whatever that is. Power6 has just been released to testing.