If anyone is poisoned by "Space Nuttery", it's you. This isn't the only website where you seem to just sit and wait for these discussions so you can go off on your rant.
First, I had a grandfather who 'invented' all sorts of stuff. He was really enthusiastic about it, but it was all crap. Some of it was actually profitable with some clever marketing applied after he'd sold the rights for peanuts.
Second, I invented a rotary engine. Took me 20 years of thinking about it to get it right, too. It was one of those things that always bothered me since I first learned about the piston engine, the loss of all that energy to heating/cooling cycles and reversing piston direction. While my design is theoretically much more efficient that any Wankel, it still suffers from large seals. Oh, and just before I got serious about developing it, someone else came up with more or less the same design but THEY had a working prototype in the lab. Theirs also went nowhere.
If burning things remains important to powering vehicles in the future, I suspect it'll be micro turbines for base load and a battery system to augment it. Otherwise, we're going full electric.
Seabreacher isn't a sub, it's a speedboat that briefly bobs below the surface.
Also, I was calling people like ME an idiot! I'd buy a proper sub if it would go down 50', hold two people, and cost me less than a car... and if the wife let me.
Why aren't they using their skills to make small personal subs for the consumer market? There's lots of idiots out there who would love their own sub, but won't pay the 1/2 mil it takes to get a small one.
Then they'd have a nice, legit business to use as a cover for their drug subs, and could probably increase the quality and reduce the cost of them.
Never mind that, it'd be interesting to put an American sub to hunting these things for a month or so, and see how many they find. I'd bet zero, showing how cost effective a small fleet of these things, each running on batteries and carrying one or two missiles or torpedos, would be against pretty much anyone.
With rapid charge / discharge, it seems to me that residential installation of these batteries under the control of the power company would be ideal - when the grid is under used, your battery takes up the slack and draws juice to charge. When the grid is over used, your system can either supply local power (like quick charging your car) or supply power back into the local grid.
This would smooth out the power demand at the central generating stations.
Of course, I think we should also have community thorium reactors (and thought so before the recent publicity from the Chinese, BTW). Decentralize the power generation, increase redundancy in the grid.
There were THREE groups - the real world scientists, the mathematicians pulling their puppet strings, and the planet of psychics pulling THEIR strings. Oh, and a near-immortal psychic robot overseeing all three.
If he'd stopped at the first two, I'd only have to forgive the hyperspace hand-waving.
The functioning of a democracy as an enlightened entity more or less depends on the majority being willing to give up some of what they want when they COULD just outright take it from a selected minority.
The undercurrent is still there - it's not so long ago that being Jewish, black, Irish, Asian, Indian... err, 'non north-west European' was a significant issue for people. Not that it isn't still an issue with some in many places, or many in some places. I can see some democracies today that are on the verge of outlawing being Muslim (Germany, France).
I'm culturalist, not racist; I don't care what your ethnicity is, but I will tell you my culture is (generally) superior to many other cultures. However, even my attitudes can be used to choose an underclass to abuse.
I think Heinlein had it right... "Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something. Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let's play that over again, too. Who decides?"
Or, more simply, Douglas Adams... "People are a problem".
"At best they're coordinating things so that the employees can focus as much on production as possible."
Managers exist to ensure employees work cooperatively instead of chaotically following their own whims. Managers exist to ensure the cooperative work being performed is on track with corporate expectations. Managers exist to ensure that expectations are reasonable so that deliverables can actually be delivered. In a perfect world, they also do what they can to ensure the people they manage are happy, not just because that's better for the bottom line, but because they're decent human beings.
I mean, it's RIGHT THERE IN THE NAME - they 'manage' resources. They are useful and necessary on any sizeable task.
You missed that despite only purchasing a license to listen to each format, thou shalt not expect replacement media for free, nor shall thou backest up thine licensed music.
Since I've moved from tape to LP to CD, I've probably got triple listening rights to much of my collection. Of course, the tapes long ago wore out, and with the exception of my Star Wars and Beethoven my vinyl fell victim to poor storage and sunbeams, and the CDs died deaths of a thousand scratches.
I probably couldn't prove I actually own ANY of my digital music, unless my wife has the old media in a box somewhere. Now that I think of it, 20 of my mp3s are courtesy of a dl coupon that came with a couple of flash drives. Those ones I wouldn't even have a hope of proof.
"Our cameras aren't working" IS awfully suspicious... but it depends on the department. Those recording devices often require a lapel pin on the officer, which requires batteries. Did the cop forget to check the charge status?
Is the camera itself broken, and they have an underfunded IT department that isn't monitoring the stuff closely... so they don't find out its broken until a discovery request can't be met?
Give 'em two strikes before getting out the pitchforks, is all I'm saying.
I'm in a similar boat - I listen to the radio if one of my coworkers puts it on, otherwise I very rarely listen to my 70s and 80s stuff that I probably purchased more than 20 years ago (though have since digitized, of course).
Basically, fuck them. With rusty barbed wire. Rectally.
What's it going to do to Mars' climate - ie will it be a net improvement?
If you're tossing mass at Mars, I'd start by partially emptying the asteroid belt to up it to Earth mass before I started on the Oort cloud for ice, though it might be easier to strip ice from elsewhere.
Anyway, that kind of engineering requires so much more energy than setting up a some large tin cans with self-contained habitats it's not worth it outside a daydream.
1) Drop a reactor on Mars 2) Drop a robot tractor on Mars 3) Drop a fuel generator on Mars, use the tractor to pull it to the reactor 4) Drop a greenhouse on Mars, use the tractor to pull it to the reactor 5) Drop a crew habitat on Mars, use the tractor to pull it to the reactor 6) Deliver humans to Mars once steps 1-5 have been done successfully
Hopefully, we'll have some form of nuclear propulsion by the time we're ready for step 6, which would kind of ruin the need for step 3.
For extra coin, you could get sponsors - the Duracell reactor, Apple iTractor, DuPont Fuel Generator, Monsanto Greenhouse, Hilton Habitat, and put a Nike swoosh on the crew rocket - "Just Do It".
Canada, with 10% of the U.S.A.'s population, lined up right against the border and overwhelmed by their southern neighbour's television, music, and economics... well, we tend to like differentiating ourself whenever possible.
You can go 'to the Americas' which would mean North, South, and Central America... That'd be a bit of a trip.
'America' singular is generally taken to mean the United States of America only and to include Canada in that instead of mentioning it separately would be likely be taken either as a sign of your ignorance or an insult, depending. Mind you, I mean 'ignorance' in the literal sense, not as a slight.
I'd love to see an interstellar probe, the best humanity can build with today's technology, sent to round the nearest star and return.
The goal should be to have to make it back to earth within a human lifetime, which should be either just barely possible (~80yrs) or easily possible (~40yrs) depending on the current state of a few of the more advanced propulsion technologies that have actually had some practical testing done in the lab.
IF the 'reality' of the last two movies turns out to be yet another layer of the onion, cool. If not, not so cool.
The underlying truth of the man-machine war could remain, but the other stupid stuff could be written off as simply being the way a particular simulation was set up.
Hell - have Neo find out there are a hundred layers of simulation, and you could turn it into a Saturday morning cartoon series where every week he escapes another level.
Don't be a fool. The Americans have done plenty of evil, evil things. I'd still rather have been an American than Soviet, or Chinese citizen when I was growing up. Hell, add in pretty much any Central American, Southeast Asian, or African nation as well.
And this comes from someone who lives in America's hat with all the anti-American baggage that implies.
Bell already owns the majority of pipe in Ontario, and they deliberately restrict pipe for end users of the ISPs that lease bandwidth from them. It's done entirely to make Bell's half-assed service look better.
I've noticed Google getting less and less effective all the time. I do a search, and 3/4 of the sites are 'fake' results that send me to ad pages with their own (totally useless) search results.
On important searches, I often spend 10-15 minutes tuning my query to help eliminate those sites so I can get to the real results.
Hey, Google - here's a free idea for you... do domain lookups on all your listings, and adjust PageRank based on who registers the domains. That should work for a few months before they start taking care to register each new domain with unique contact information.
Honestly, I haven't really missed the card since I cancelled it (shortly after the Wikileaks/MasterCard issue popped up).
I may just not bother to replace it for some time, if ever. Debit's pretty handy, and it's the same money anyway (if you're like me and pay off your credit card right away).
For any big purchase, I have a line of credit with much better terms than any credit card I've heard of.
I suppose there will be an issue if I ever use PayPal again... oh, wait, they're evil too.
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If anyone is poisoned by "Space Nuttery", it's you. This isn't the only website where you seem to just sit and wait for these discussions so you can go off on your rant.
Get a freaking life.
Two things;
First, I had a grandfather who 'invented' all sorts of stuff. He was really enthusiastic about it, but it was all crap. Some of it was actually profitable with some clever marketing applied after he'd sold the rights for peanuts.
Second, I invented a rotary engine. Took me 20 years of thinking about it to get it right, too. It was one of those things that always bothered me since I first learned about the piston engine, the loss of all that energy to heating/cooling cycles and reversing piston direction. While my design is theoretically much more efficient that any Wankel, it still suffers from large seals. Oh, and just before I got serious about developing it, someone else came up with more or less the same design but THEY had a working prototype in the lab. Theirs also went nowhere.
If burning things remains important to powering vehicles in the future, I suspect it'll be micro turbines for base load and a battery system to augment it. Otherwise, we're going full electric.
Seabreacher isn't a sub, it's a speedboat that briefly bobs below the surface.
Also, I was calling people like ME an idiot! I'd buy a proper sub if it would go down 50', hold two people, and cost me less than a car... and if the wife let me.
Why aren't they using their skills to make small personal subs for the consumer market? There's lots of idiots out there who would love their own sub, but won't pay the 1/2 mil it takes to get a small one.
Then they'd have a nice, legit business to use as a cover for their drug subs, and could probably increase the quality and reduce the cost of them.
Never mind that, it'd be interesting to put an American sub to hunting these things for a month or so, and see how many they find. I'd bet zero, showing how cost effective a small fleet of these things, each running on batteries and carrying one or two missiles or torpedos, would be against pretty much anyone.
If you install a system in your house that will deplete the battery below the minimum you need... you bought the wrong system.
With rapid charge / discharge, it seems to me that residential installation of these batteries under the control of the power company would be ideal - when the grid is under used, your battery takes up the slack and draws juice to charge. When the grid is over used, your system can either supply local power (like quick charging your car) or supply power back into the local grid.
This would smooth out the power demand at the central generating stations.
Of course, I think we should also have community thorium reactors (and thought so before the recent publicity from the Chinese, BTW). Decentralize the power generation, increase redundancy in the grid.
There were THREE groups - the real world scientists, the mathematicians pulling their puppet strings, and the planet of psychics pulling THEIR strings. Oh, and a near-immortal psychic robot overseeing all three.
If he'd stopped at the first two, I'd only have to forgive the hyperspace hand-waving.
The functioning of a democracy as an enlightened entity more or less depends on the majority being willing to give up some of what they want when they COULD just outright take it from a selected minority.
The undercurrent is still there - it's not so long ago that being Jewish, black, Irish, Asian, Indian... err, 'non north-west European' was a significant issue for people. Not that it isn't still an issue with some in many places, or many in some places. I can see some democracies today that are on the verge of outlawing being Muslim (Germany, France).
I'm culturalist, not racist; I don't care what your ethnicity is, but I will tell you my culture is (generally) superior to many other cultures. However, even my attitudes can be used to choose an underclass to abuse.
I think Heinlein had it right... "Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something.
Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let's play that over again, too. Who decides?"
Or, more simply, Douglas Adams... "People are a problem".
"At best they're coordinating things so that the employees can focus as much on production as possible."
Managers exist to ensure employees work cooperatively instead of chaotically following their own whims. Managers exist to ensure the cooperative work being performed is on track with corporate expectations. Managers exist to ensure that expectations are reasonable so that deliverables can actually be delivered. In a perfect world, they also do what they can to ensure the people they manage are happy, not just because that's better for the bottom line, but because they're decent human beings.
I mean, it's RIGHT THERE IN THE NAME - they 'manage' resources. They are useful and necessary on any sizeable task.
Perhaps you'd get some success if you advise you only work on computers for women who are performing a sexual act upon you.
Sure, it's not as fulfilling, but you get SOMETHING.
You missed that despite only purchasing a license to listen to each format, thou shalt not expect replacement media for free, nor shall thou backest up thine licensed music.
Since I've moved from tape to LP to CD, I've probably got triple listening rights to much of my collection. Of course, the tapes long ago wore out, and with the exception of my Star Wars and Beethoven my vinyl fell victim to poor storage and sunbeams, and the CDs died deaths of a thousand scratches.
I probably couldn't prove I actually own ANY of my digital music, unless my wife has the old media in a box somewhere. Now that I think of it, 20 of my mp3s are courtesy of a dl coupon that came with a couple of flash drives. Those ones I wouldn't even have a hope of proof.
I revert to my rusty barbed wire position.
"Our cameras aren't working" IS awfully suspicious... but it depends on the department. Those recording devices often require a lapel pin on the officer, which requires batteries. Did the cop forget to check the charge status?
Is the camera itself broken, and they have an underfunded IT department that isn't monitoring the stuff closely... so they don't find out its broken until a discovery request can't be met?
Give 'em two strikes before getting out the pitchforks, is all I'm saying.
I'm in a similar boat - I listen to the radio if one of my coworkers puts it on, otherwise I very rarely listen to my 70s and 80s stuff that I probably purchased more than 20 years ago (though have since digitized, of course).
Basically, fuck them. With rusty barbed wire. Rectally.
Err... how many comets?
What's it going to do to Mars' climate - ie will it be a net improvement?
If you're tossing mass at Mars, I'd start by partially emptying the asteroid belt to up it to Earth mass before I started on the Oort cloud for ice, though it might be easier to strip ice from elsewhere.
Anyway, that kind of engineering requires so much more energy than setting up a some large tin cans with self-contained habitats it's not worth it outside a daydream.
1) Drop a reactor on Mars
2) Drop a robot tractor on Mars
3) Drop a fuel generator on Mars, use the tractor to pull it to the reactor
4) Drop a greenhouse on Mars, use the tractor to pull it to the reactor
5) Drop a crew habitat on Mars, use the tractor to pull it to the reactor
6) Deliver humans to Mars once steps 1-5 have been done successfully
Hopefully, we'll have some form of nuclear propulsion by the time we're ready for step 6, which would kind of ruin the need for step 3.
For extra coin, you could get sponsors - the Duracell reactor, Apple iTractor, DuPont Fuel Generator, Monsanto Greenhouse, Hilton Habitat, and put a Nike swoosh on the crew rocket - "Just Do It".
Canada, with 10% of the U.S.A.'s population, lined up right against the border and overwhelmed by their southern neighbour's television, music, and economics... well, we tend to like differentiating ourself whenever possible.
You can go 'to the Americas' which would mean North, South, and Central America... That'd be a bit of a trip.
'America' singular is generally taken to mean the United States of America only and to include Canada in that instead of mentioning it separately would be likely be taken either as a sign of your ignorance or an insult, depending. Mind you, I mean 'ignorance' in the literal sense, not as a slight.
I'd love to see an interstellar probe, the best humanity can build with today's technology, sent to round the nearest star and return.
The goal should be to have to make it back to earth within a human lifetime, which should be either just barely possible (~80yrs) or easily possible (~40yrs) depending on the current state of a few of the more advanced propulsion technologies that have actually had some practical testing done in the lab.
IF the 'reality' of the last two movies turns out to be yet another layer of the onion, cool. If not, not so cool.
The underlying truth of the man-machine war could remain, but the other stupid stuff could be written off as simply being the way a particular simulation was set up.
Hell - have Neo find out there are a hundred layers of simulation, and you could turn it into a Saturday morning cartoon series where every week he escapes another level.
Don't be a fool. The Americans have done plenty of evil, evil things. I'd still rather have been an American than Soviet, or Chinese citizen when I was growing up. Hell, add in pretty much any Central American, Southeast Asian, or African nation as well.
And this comes from someone who lives in America's hat with all the anti-American baggage that implies.
Bell already owns the majority of pipe in Ontario, and they deliberately restrict pipe for end users of the ISPs that lease bandwidth from them. It's done entirely to make Bell's half-assed service look better.
I've noticed Google getting less and less effective all the time. I do a search, and 3/4 of the sites are 'fake' results that send me to ad pages with their own (totally useless) search results.
On important searches, I often spend 10-15 minutes tuning my query to help eliminate those sites so I can get to the real results.
Hey, Google - here's a free idea for you... do domain lookups on all your listings, and adjust PageRank based on who registers the domains. That should work for a few months before they start taking care to register each new domain with unique contact information.
Wikileaks is an illegal business?
Err - debit works in most places, and as far as I know bank-issued traveller's cheques work everywhere else.
When I've travelled in the past, the first thing I've done is take the credit cards OUT of my wallet.
Honestly, I haven't really missed the card since I cancelled it (shortly after the Wikileaks/MasterCard issue popped up).
I may just not bother to replace it for some time, if ever. Debit's pretty handy, and it's the same money anyway (if you're like me and pay off your credit card right away).
For any big purchase, I have a line of credit with much better terms than any credit card I've heard of.
I suppose there will be an issue if I ever use PayPal again... oh, wait, they're evil too.