I can't wait for you to explain me what exactly were strikes against Iraq and Afghanistan about.
I'm sorry - I didn't realize that Afghanistan or Iraq were part of Russia's sovereign territory.
Also, would you consider a missile launch silo as an offensive or defensive system?
If the missile is designed to shoot down attacking missiles or airplanes and has no offensive capability, it is defensive in nature. If it can drop a nuclear warhead on Moscow, it's pretty clearly offensive.
How can you be stupid is beyond me.
I just realized that I felt the need to respond to another comment of yours in this thread. It is pretty clear that you are just full of blind hatred for the US, which probably makes you think that other people can't possibly have valid opinions that might paint the US in a more benign light.
Lying is not a concern for people who kill other people.
Lying is not sufficient to keep a conspiracy intact. You need to suppress the tendency of people with big egos to brag. You need to suppress the tendency of people in government to cover their ass. You need to get everyone involved to trust one another. You need to keep everyone involved out of any compromising position that might cause them to bail (spying, trouble with law enforcement, etc). The more people involved with the lie, the harder this all becomes.
This place has always attracted the conspiracy-minded. I think that there are more high-IQ people here than average, and high-IQ people like to find patterns. There is also a high correlation between paranoid schizophrenia and IQ. Conspiracy theories are really just grand pattern-finding exercises.
Of course, no one espousing these theories can explain to me how the government manages to keep a secret.
I'll add that having a single machine for backups is very convenient. I have a FreeBSD ZFS machine in the basement, and I run CrashPlan on it as well as netatalk so it can pretend to be a Time Capsule. Whenever I fix a friend/relative's computer I make them install CrashPlan on their own computer and point them to my server. Sure it uses some of my drive space up, but it saves me hours (days?) of time when their machine dies.
As you point out, all that digital crap sure adds up - and I have a fair amount of ill-gotten media as well. It's really nice to just tell SabNZBd to just download each episode of your favorite show and not have to worry about cleaning up the space right away.
Agreed. Do this for fun, not for anything practical - I mean, there are USB thumbdrives larger than your 100GB drive!
Pair the drives up to match them as closely as is possible so that you have 5 redundant mirrors. More realistically, you'll only have space or sata hookups for 4 pairs.
Anyway, use FreeBSD and zfs to pair them up and then combine the 4 or 5 pairs into a single pool. As the drives die or as you acquire bigger drives, you can hook up an additional drive and use the "zpool replace" command to swap out the smaller/dead drives.
Two caveats: 1. The size of each mirror is limited to the smallest drive. This might waste space if your drives don't match up well. 2. You can grow the pool by as many mirrors as you want, but you can never shrink the pool! Or, rather, the support for shrinking pools isn't there yet - maybe never is a strong word.
ZFS is fun to play with, and so is FreeBSD as I have discovered.
Very true, but he didn't build them or finance their construction. And when it came time to build his own towers, he went with three 70-80 floor office complexes and gave up the mixed residential tower and the 100-floor terrorist magnet:)
I'm not saying that the WTC was a boondoggle or anything, just that in purely economic terms, it was taller than is optimal. Look at the other NYC buildings that have gone up recently: Bank of America Tower, 1,200 ft , 54 floors New York Times Building, 1,046 ft, 52 floors Beekman Tower, 876 ft, 76 floors (residential) Trump World Tower, 861 ft, 72 floors (residential) CitySpire Center, 814 ft, 75 floors (residential) Condé Nast Building, 809 ft, 48 floors Bloomberg Tower, 806 ft, 54 floors One Worldwide Plaza, 778 ft, 50 floors Carnegie Hall Tower, 757 ft, 60 floors Bear Stearns (LOL!), 755 ft, 47 floors AXA Center, 752 ft, 54 floors Time Warner Center (twin towers), 750 ft, 55 floors Goldman Sachs, 749 ft, 44 floors 60 Wall Street, 745 ft, 55 floors American Express Tower, 739ft 51 floors
There are many more, but my point is that most office buildings from the last 30 years or so in NYC are not anywhere near 100 floors (half that, actually) - and most of these are in Midtown where the rents are higher and the office space more scarce. The only towers with more than 60 floors are residential.
95% leased is one statistic. It doesn't tell you what the return on investment was on the building. You need to know what the cost of the building was, what the finance costs were, what the historical vacancy rate was, whether the rent was enough to warrant the added expense of the extra height and added expense of extra maintenance and the loss of floor space due to needing more elevators and stairwells.
I'm with you in principle, but my internet bill is the same whether I attach cable or not, so I get cable. Stupid, and it's just basic cable, but that's Comcast for ya'.
Except that the old towers were too big and most of the other WTC buildings were only 9 floors. There is a sweet spot that the new buildings hit (except the new too-tall tower). But at least now there is only one mistake instead of two.
It's notable that the owner of the lease (Silverstein) was willing to give up the tower. He also gave up the rights to tower 5 which was supposed to be at least partially residential. So he kept 2 WTC at 88 floors and 3.1 million sq. ft., 3 WTC at 80 floors and 2.8 million sq. ft., and 4 WTC at 72 floors and 2.5 million sq. ft.
Anyway, the sweet spot for a commercial high-rise in NYC seems to be around 70-80 floors... there is no sense in making them higher and no sense in making them lower when talking in purely economic terms. I don't mind a little dick waving - I think big buildings are pretty damn cool. But at the same time, I don't see a reason to repeat a mistake that was made in the 60s just to make some statement.
The wider you make it for a given length, the more power it'll take to hit to top speed, increasing exponentially IIRC.
Yes, you bring up a good point about speed. I was kind of assuming that this thing would be a cruise liner and not an ocean liner. They can put some regular-old marine diesels in it wherever they have room. It probably doesn't need to do 27+ knots like an ocean liner - maybe 20+ like a cruise liner. The Queen Mary 2 has diesels augmented with gas turbines for when they need more speed. Ocean liners use a lot more steel in their construction, too - so that's another place to save money and bulk.
You've got the memories of all the people who died next door
I know people who work in the buildings next to and near the site who worked there on 9/11. To say they are a bit traumatized is true, but they don't think ghosts are going to get them while they are at work.
I'm really curious to know how much occupancy they have lined up and whether the rates reflect any of this.
And of course they were 30 years old at the time of the attacks.
They were probably under-built, but as you say they held up pretty well given the circumstances.
4 WTC, not so much.
Now let's talk aesthetics. I know they are considered sacred... but man, they really were ugly. I never liked those buildings - I even preferentially went up to the top of the Empire State building when I visited NYC. They did a heroic job of hedging them in with pretty buildings to make the overall skyline interesting, and they were very distinctive... but I have no urge to rebuild them:)
Even the original Titanic had a fake smokestack. A modern ship would only need a single funnel. It simply wouldn't make sense to route the exhaust through 4 funnels when a single one would suffice - especially since even the original ship had a decorative funnel.
The new tower is roughly the same size and dimensions as the old North Tower. The roofline is exactly the same and the footprint is exactly the same. The main differences asthetically are the antenna is now an architectural spire, the building is glass-clad, and the corners have a facet that tapers upward. Structurally, the base is made from reinforced concrete, the stairwells and elevator shafts are surrounded by a couple of feet of concrete instead of drywall, and the structure is a bit more redundant with a reinforced concrete core. The fireproofing is still spray-on, so still not up to 1930s standards there:)
Give it the same general shape and layout. Keep the iconic grand ballroom. Give it fake smokestacks.
But under water, give it a bulbous hull. Bow thrusters. Weld the thing together. Naturally, give it a proper rudder:)
Inside the ship, use the huge space freed up by the change in propulsion technology and the lack of demand for "steerage" to do more traditional cruise-ship things. Cabins should look old, but be brought up to modern standards... perhaps keep a few historically accurate for people who want such things.
They will probably want to make it a little bigger - the Titanic was big for it's day, but much smaller (about 1/3 the size in tonnage) of the Queen Mary 2. Mainly, it was too narrow - under 100 feet at it's widest. Queen Mary 2 is almost 150 feet wide. I think they could fatten it without giving up too much aesthetically. More room for lifeboats:)
That IMHO is what the music business looks like without music companies.
I'm comfortable with that...
Clips4sale or Lifetime Television is what the movie business would like without the studios.
No Transformers movie??? LOL, I think our society would survive...
Now, I want to be clear that I'm not advocating the total dissolution of copyright. I would be quite happy with shorter terms (perhaps along the lines of patent law). I'd be even happier with commercial-only copyright law. I was just musing about how wasteful the system is.
iUniverse where selling 200 copies of a book to very interested readers and the authors losing money is what the book business would look like without the publishers.
I kind of disagree here... there are already some very successful self-published authors selling ebooks. I think the publishers are in for a wild ride, copyright or no copyright.
My differences is I take the wider cultural context into account.
Yeah you are being to generous:)
The law will catch up.
I think it will, too. Unfortunately, I think it will only grow more complicated.
I'd like to have a better regulatory regime with regulators acting quickly in the public interest which is why I vote Dem.
I find that, in practice, both major parties behave exactly the same except on wedge issues. The most remarkable thing about "Hope and Change" is that the biggest "change" has been to implement the health care plan proposed by the Republicans in response to the Clinton health care plan! Hopefully we'll see Obama veto CISPA - that is something that Bush would've signed for sure:)
What we seem to desire is the cultural experience connected with music: fandom, celebrity worship... a proxy religion.
Yeah, well, I guess I'm not interested in supporting that:)
I like music (and books, movies, etc) and so I buy into the copyright system to provide them. But when I see how inefficient it is and all of the additional burden it places on society, I have to wonder if copyright is the right way to achieve these goals.
Though I have to admit that I'm two-faced on this issue - I think there should still be commercial copyright in some form. I just think that a "Joe Consumer" shouldn't need to be a JD in order to understand what he is and is not allowed to do with a product he bought from a store shelf.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the current circumstances I am against it.
I can't wait for you to explain me what exactly were strikes against Iraq and Afghanistan about.
I'm sorry - I didn't realize that Afghanistan or Iraq were part of Russia's sovereign territory.
Also, would you consider a missile launch silo as an offensive or defensive system?
If the missile is designed to shoot down attacking missiles or airplanes and has no offensive capability, it is defensive in nature. If it can drop a nuclear warhead on Moscow, it's pretty clearly offensive.
How can you be stupid is beyond me.
I just realized that I felt the need to respond to another comment of yours in this thread. It is pretty clear that you are just full of blind hatred for the US, which probably makes you think that other people can't possibly have valid opinions that might paint the US in a more benign light.
See what I did there?
Bought into anti-US propaganda?
Seriously - you can't see the difference between provoking someone and actually attacking them?
Not just conspiracy theorists but gamers.
In that case, the paranoia comes from the copious amounts of weed smoked :)
Lying is not a concern for people who kill other people.
Lying is not sufficient to keep a conspiracy intact. You need to suppress the tendency of people with big egos to brag. You need to suppress the tendency of people in government to cover their ass. You need to get everyone involved to trust one another. You need to keep everyone involved out of any compromising position that might cause them to bail (spying, trouble with law enforcement, etc). The more people involved with the lie, the harder this all becomes.
I probably should have added that there are idiots who have poor reading comprehension skills, as well.
This place has always attracted the conspiracy-minded. I think that there are more high-IQ people here than average, and high-IQ people like to find patterns. There is also a high correlation between paranoid schizophrenia and IQ. Conspiracy theories are really just grand pattern-finding exercises.
Of course, no one espousing these theories can explain to me how the government manages to keep a secret.
I'll add that having a single machine for backups is very convenient. I have a FreeBSD ZFS machine in the basement, and I run CrashPlan on it as well as netatalk so it can pretend to be a Time Capsule. Whenever I fix a friend/relative's computer I make them install CrashPlan on their own computer and point them to my server. Sure it uses some of my drive space up, but it saves me hours (days?) of time when their machine dies.
As you point out, all that digital crap sure adds up - and I have a fair amount of ill-gotten media as well. It's really nice to just tell SabNZBd to just download each episode of your favorite show and not have to worry about cleaning up the space right away.
Agreed. Do this for fun, not for anything practical - I mean, there are USB thumbdrives larger than your 100GB drive!
Pair the drives up to match them as closely as is possible so that you have 5 redundant mirrors. More realistically, you'll only have space or sata hookups for 4 pairs.
Anyway, use FreeBSD and zfs to pair them up and then combine the 4 or 5 pairs into a single pool. As the drives die or as you acquire bigger drives, you can hook up an additional drive and use the "zpool replace" command to swap out the smaller/dead drives.
Two caveats:
1. The size of each mirror is limited to the smallest drive. This might waste space if your drives don't match up well.
2. You can grow the pool by as many mirrors as you want, but you can never shrink the pool! Or, rather, the support for shrinking pools isn't there yet - maybe never is a strong word.
ZFS is fun to play with, and so is FreeBSD as I have discovered.
Very true, but he didn't build them or finance their construction. And when it came time to build his own towers, he went with three 70-80 floor office complexes and gave up the mixed residential tower and the 100-floor terrorist magnet :)
I'm not saying that the WTC was a boondoggle or anything, just that in purely economic terms, it was taller than is optimal. Look at the other NYC buildings that have gone up recently:
Bank of America Tower, 1,200 ft , 54 floors
New York Times Building, 1,046 ft, 52 floors
Beekman Tower, 876 ft, 76 floors (residential)
Trump World Tower, 861 ft, 72 floors (residential)
CitySpire Center, 814 ft, 75 floors (residential)
Condé Nast Building, 809 ft, 48 floors
Bloomberg Tower, 806 ft, 54 floors
One Worldwide Plaza, 778 ft, 50 floors
Carnegie Hall Tower, 757 ft, 60 floors
Bear Stearns (LOL!), 755 ft, 47 floors
AXA Center, 752 ft, 54 floors
Time Warner Center (twin towers), 750 ft, 55 floors
Goldman Sachs, 749 ft, 44 floors
60 Wall Street, 745 ft, 55 floors
American Express Tower, 739ft 51 floors
There are many more, but my point is that most office buildings from the last 30 years or so in NYC are not anywhere near 100 floors (half that, actually) - and most of these are in Midtown where the rents are higher and the office space more scarce. The only towers with more than 60 floors are residential.
95% leased is one statistic. It doesn't tell you what the return on investment was on the building. You need to know what the cost of the building was, what the finance costs were, what the historical vacancy rate was, whether the rent was enough to warrant the added expense of the extra height and added expense of extra maintenance and the loss of floor space due to needing more elevators and stairwells.
Others die at 40 and leave 12 children of different women.
Who has succeeded biologically?
It rather depends on what happens to those children.
I'm with you in principle, but my internet bill is the same whether I attach cable or not, so I get cable. Stupid, and it's just basic cable, but that's Comcast for ya'.
Except that the old towers were too big and most of the other WTC buildings were only 9 floors. There is a sweet spot that the new buildings hit (except the new too-tall tower). But at least now there is only one mistake instead of two.
It's notable that the owner of the lease (Silverstein) was willing to give up the tower. He also gave up the rights to tower 5 which was supposed to be at least partially residential. So he kept 2 WTC at 88 floors and 3.1 million sq. ft., 3 WTC at 80 floors and 2.8 million sq. ft., and 4 WTC at 72 floors and 2.5 million sq. ft.
Anyway, the sweet spot for a commercial high-rise in NYC seems to be around 70-80 floors... there is no sense in making them higher and no sense in making them lower when talking in purely economic terms. I don't mind a little dick waving - I think big buildings are pretty damn cool. But at the same time, I don't see a reason to repeat a mistake that was made in the 60s just to make some statement.
The wider you make it for a given length, the more power it'll take to hit to top speed, increasing exponentially IIRC.
Yes, you bring up a good point about speed. I was kind of assuming that this thing would be a cruise liner and not an ocean liner. They can put some regular-old marine diesels in it wherever they have room. It probably doesn't need to do 27+ knots like an ocean liner - maybe 20+ like a cruise liner. The Queen Mary 2 has diesels augmented with gas turbines for when they need more speed. Ocean liners use a lot more steel in their construction, too - so that's another place to save money and bulk.
The total office space is comparable, though.
Old WTC complex had about 13.4 million sq ft of office space. The new WTC complex will have 14 million sq ft of office space.
You've got the memories of all the people who died next door
I know people who work in the buildings next to and near the site who worked there on 9/11. To say they are a bit traumatized is true, but they don't think ghosts are going to get them while they are at work.
I'm really curious to know how much occupancy they have lined up and whether the rates reflect any of this.
I just read that it is 50% leased right now.
Almost 11 years to build a building. Nuts.
Yeah, we should do things in a hurry and without plan or democratic process.
"you can't attack us without destroying one of your own holy places"
Ah, but was it a Sunni or a Shia mosque?
That probably wouldn't have worked... :)
And of course they were 30 years old at the time of the attacks.
They were probably under-built, but as you say they held up pretty well given the circumstances.
4 WTC, not so much.
Now let's talk aesthetics. I know they are considered sacred... but man, they really were ugly. I never liked those buildings - I even preferentially went up to the top of the Empire State building when I visited NYC. They did a heroic job of hedging them in with pretty buildings to make the overall skyline interesting, and they were very distinctive... but I have no urge to rebuild them :)
Even the original Titanic had a fake smokestack. A modern ship would only need a single funnel. It simply wouldn't make sense to route the exhaust through 4 funnels when a single one would suffice - especially since even the original ship had a decorative funnel.
The new tower is roughly the same size and dimensions as the old North Tower. The roofline is exactly the same and the footprint is exactly the same. The main differences asthetically are the antenna is now an architectural spire, the building is glass-clad, and the corners have a facet that tapers upward. Structurally, the base is made from reinforced concrete, the stairwells and elevator shafts are surrounded by a couple of feet of concrete instead of drywall, and the structure is a bit more redundant with a reinforced concrete core. The fireproofing is still spray-on, so still not up to 1930s standards there :)
I think he means aesthetically...
Give it the same general shape and layout. Keep the iconic grand ballroom. Give it fake smokestacks.
But under water, give it a bulbous hull. Bow thrusters. Weld the thing together. Naturally, give it a proper rudder :)
Inside the ship, use the huge space freed up by the change in propulsion technology and the lack of demand for "steerage" to do more traditional cruise-ship things. Cabins should look old, but be brought up to modern standards... perhaps keep a few historically accurate for people who want such things.
They will probably want to make it a little bigger - the Titanic was big for it's day, but much smaller (about 1/3 the size in tonnage) of the Queen Mary 2. Mainly, it was too narrow - under 100 feet at it's widest. Queen Mary 2 is almost 150 feet wide. I think they could fatten it without giving up too much aesthetically. More room for lifeboats :)
That IMHO is what the music business looks like without music companies.
I'm comfortable with that...
Clips4sale or Lifetime Television is what the movie business would like without the studios.
No Transformers movie??? LOL, I think our society would survive...
Now, I want to be clear that I'm not advocating the total dissolution of copyright. I would be quite happy with shorter terms (perhaps along the lines of patent law). I'd be even happier with commercial-only copyright law. I was just musing about how wasteful the system is.
iUniverse where selling 200 copies of a book to very interested readers and the authors losing money is what the book business would look like without the publishers.
I kind of disagree here... there are already some very successful self-published authors selling ebooks. I think the publishers are in for a wild ride, copyright or no copyright.
My differences is I take the wider cultural context into account.
Yeah you are being to generous :)
The law will catch up.
I think it will, too. Unfortunately, I think it will only grow more complicated.
I'd like to have a better regulatory regime with regulators acting quickly in the public interest which is why I vote Dem.
I find that, in practice, both major parties behave exactly the same except on wedge issues. The most remarkable thing about "Hope and Change" is that the biggest "change" has been to implement the health care plan proposed by the Republicans in response to the Clinton health care plan! Hopefully we'll see Obama veto CISPA - that is something that Bush would've signed for sure :)
What we seem to desire is the cultural experience connected with music: fandom, celebrity worship... a proxy religion.
Yeah, well, I guess I'm not interested in supporting that :)
I like music (and books, movies, etc) and so I buy into the copyright system to provide them. But when I see how inefficient it is and all of the additional burden it places on society, I have to wonder if copyright is the right way to achieve these goals.
Though I have to admit that I'm two-faced on this issue - I think there should still be commercial copyright in some form. I just think that a "Joe Consumer" shouldn't need to be a JD in order to understand what he is and is not allowed to do with a product he bought from a store shelf.