Real Simple: They need a good computer culture to be able to assure the communications in order to procure FOOD, WATER and even manage to keep a Stable Govenment
Suggestion: How about these Iraqi guys just downloading the Linux (Like they haven't done it already!) There are plenty of EU and other world wide mirrors to avoid any US Restrictions
Your question is a valid one. A friend of mine used to annoy physics types by asking them what was the speed of gravity. Actually what you are asking is a very proper question regards the existence of the speed of light. Because if C is not a constant (E = mC^2) then you have to question the whole base of the formula.
The speed of light is well observed not to be a constant. The supposed experiment that determined the "Speed of Light" The Michelson-Morley Experiment (M-M) is flawed because it assumes that the light is traveling and reflected by the mirrors without interaction. Actually the light is absorbed and retransmitted. What is more the light was stepping in transmission through the air medium or more precisely through the Phase Conjugate field in the locality of the experiment. (This latter being important as it is affected even in "Space" because there is a media there as well) As such this experiment only measured the speed of the "Local Transmitter." This always would measure as a "Constant" because if conditions varied to alter the speed of the local tranmitter they would also alter the distances etc.
Fernbach of the University of Colorado pointed this out in the 1950's. He bluntly stated that Einstein was "Dead" and it would take the physics community at least 50 years to bury him. He also stated that the M-M experiment was the rought equal to sitting in an Airplane cabin with a pin wheel and noting that it was spinning assuming that one was measuring the speed of the plane.
Having the rather strange honor of being the one who in 1995 laid out to NASA the physics behind thunderstorms and lightning (Red Sprites and Blue Jets included) which is now the fairly well established theory, I will tell you that I concluded my explanations on Lightning with the rather strange statement that the time had come to publically ask for any proof that gravity existed! Don't mistake me for not knowing that things fall. The question is WHY! I pointed out that the processes in the weather indicated that there was a defineable process for Anti-Gravity and that there was now to date no evidence what so ever in Physics that Gravity as a force independent of other forces existed. That the entire force known as Gravity could be explained in the EM Field as a cross product of what would best be described as EM Pressure Differential. Essentially that Energy repelled matter. (Probably a phase change issue here)
I fully expect to hear from, in telling you this, some of the Physics Nuts who are like a religious cult unwilling to accept any new ideas and treating them as sacreligious acts. The problem with opening this discussion is that [1] the Dogmamatic Guys are really mean and [2] the facts don't support any of their activities.
NASA has conducted Anti-Gravity experiments and so have many other people all of which use the principals I described. Facts tend to support my theory.
The problem here is that the entire cosmological and other set of theories is laid on a foundation of G, C, and T. The problem is that G and C do not exist and T is a synthetic human construct having no reality what so ever. It is merely a mental tool to describe not a fact. Einstein was confronted with several strange facts if he abandoned G, C, and T. He was unwilling to accept them. The facts were in plain sight and he reported this!
Essentially we are left back with an old theory from Maxwell regarding the Ether. The problem was that at the time we did not know that phase conjugate reflection was the primary mode of energy transmission. It is in fact the structure of matter. It is why induction works. It is also why things fall. (They are pushed!) It fits with all the observed laws and frankly is quite obvious when one throws out the Einstein mistakes and M-M.
It is important also to understand the assumptions that were driving the M-M experiment and Einstein. The times showed a vast set of "Age of the Universe" theories which were tied to "science" because the anti-relig
Just have to add my "Amen" to the choir reports here. Welcome and don't ever forget why you came here!
I am married to a lady from the Philippines. When we were going to have a child she said that the child would be 1/2 Philippine and 1/2 American. I said NO!~ 100% American! American is a Race by IDEA not by blood. Besides, I come originally from 7 EU type races (all White skinned) but frankly I am a NATIVE AMERICAN. I was born here. That makes me as native as anybody! I resent as you do those who would Balkinize us.
Re:The main issue with XML is performance
on
Effective XML
·
· Score: 1
Having worked for more than 2 years on XML I would like to say a few things about it. It is a well demanded waste of time. The customers want it because somehow it is "Machine" and "Human Readable." Honestly it is neither. Humans don't think this way generally unless they are geeks or hackers. Machines hate this stuff. XML geometrically degrades in performance the larger the document you must use to extract information from is.
To speed this up XSLT and other methods such as DTD's were developed. The problem is that these destroy the reason for XML. XSLT and similar technologies take a document and do a Linear transform on the data for a "One Shot" view. This is fast but it honestly is only for viewing not for real "Using." DTD's are hopelessly rigid in their function.
The XML design expands data many times in band width. This requires a process expensive reduction mechanism at both ends of the process. We need Broad Band to use XML but if we sent a binary file we would hardly use the old dial up bandwidth. Even the tagging process stinks. It is either too free form to use or it is hopelessly rigid (DTD style). Yea XML sounds sexy but it really is a bad idea.
If we were to use tagged data, it would be better to use a pseudo xml where the top of the document defined the data tags with an numeric relationship and the rest of the document sent a set of number tags with the data.
Also if XML is to be functional we also need to see it reduced in complexity. To do this we need to either use Attributes a better way or we need to eliminate them. Similarly we need to knock out the "unparsed" CData segments and just make the data a tagged set. It needs either flattened this way or forgotten.
If XML is used to mine data or find something the original user did not laboriously design into it, the processing of it is horridly long. The choice is parse followed by recursive parse after parse or massive memory hogging. Otherwise you get out of XML ASAP!
Solar for example has massive problems including the Aluminum, Glass and other issues. In the end though, the issue of how to manage human energy sources needs to be viewed as one of global issues. Nuclear like it or not is going to produce more and more junk that the awful people of the world will divert to nasty uses. Keeping it around is waiting for them to do something bad.
The Solar option dies on one problem. Timing. Unless a good storage or transport mechanism can be made, it is hopeless. The conversion of Solar to Hydrogen is at best about 60% thermally efficient. That means store a lot of hydrogen.
Nuclear Power is much like Solar in that it does not throttle well. Maybe the pebble reactors throttle better. It too has the storage problem.
There is an alternative. We could go after connecting the Asian and North American Land mass by tunnel and thus connecting power grids, pipelines etc. This solves most of the Solar problems and does much good
Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed. An Axiom one may bet one's life on
I have a suggestion regards solving this that might be quite simple seems to me that a server should be billed bandwidth allocations similar to the way old time networks billed a user for his allocation of time. This billing should on Email be paid to an account of the Recipient. IE. More mail to me, I get more and the sender has to cough up if he spends. This would be insignificant in terms of an email say a US Cent a mail. Since I get points which would be recoverable if they got to be a lot say $10 or more. At the same time if I mailed out the cost to me would be same. So as long as I mailed minimal and get minimal I would have little or no change. The payment should be collectable either as cash or payment to my ISP to handle monthly charges.
In this way a person who used a limited amout of bandwidth for emails would probably have his service be free or even be occasionally paid for his service if he got lots of mail. At the same time if a user sent thousands of spams, he would shortly have to pay heavily or lose his service access.
This seems to be the best way to reduce spam while not stopping Email all together.
Just an Idea, think about it. Beats a Congress Critter getting his mits on my money.
I think that this deal also illustrates one of my prime peeves with Microsoft. Being a developer, if I buy the MSDN subscription to their development tools, I pay about $2,000 a year and then I must also pay about $10,000 for their latest and greatest data engine (Server). All well and good but they haul off to Asia to hire developers there were they supply the software to these (Pirates) guys and let them develop against me having paid essentially nothing for their platform. In many cases MS even bought their machines!
By supporting MS I wind up having hired the pirates to destroy my career. At least with this deal China and I are on an "Equal Footing" and they have to buy their machines and software at the same market I do!
For all those Microsoft nuts out there, this is the real issue regards Open Source that overrides all others. Yes it is great to have open source for many other reasons, but this puts the OS and development tools on a par value.
No longer do I as an American Pay full price for Software that I support a discount to for the rest of the world. No longer do I pay to destroy my own market. No longer do I hire the saboteaurs of my economy
Go get'em Sun! I hope you do well. It is about time China saw the light and maybe a few people here in the USA should see the light as well.
To be blunt an OS should be almost free. Development tools should be pretty cheap if not free as well. The reality is that the general use tools have become what the capitalists attempted to do with their "Free Trade" deals to labor. They have become commodities and they will trade at that level. Serves them right. You deal with the pirates and you get pirated. There cannot be a "Black Market" for Linux or a subsidy price for it because of the fact that when you buy Linux or Star Office or whatever, you pay for service, a thing MS has tried to destroy from the market.
When service becomes the product and not the OS we will get better software at better prices and developers will get paid! When it is selling an OS at extortion prices all we got was Bill Gates and Steve Balmer RICH. Stockholders got screwed as well as the programmers who built it. (Spare me the stories about the few thouand millionaires --> This isn't even noise level payments to what should have happened for the good people who were not lucky enough to be on of them.) What we got was "Selling the Blue Sky" a legal term for Stock Fraud.
I paid Microsoft for the expensive development platform which they now don't support (V6.0)They packaged it saying it came with their SQL Server latest version free. What they did not tell me was that the version they gave out did not work with W2K or XP. I could buy that for another $7,000! I could go on and on. After spending over $6,000 getting up to stuff on their programming system, they wanted $2,000 a year from me! Of course if you had 500 seats of programmers the cost could be about $200 a seat! If you did the work in China, they might even provide you the seat and the machine. Does this tell anybody anything about the real reason MS is getting every day more and more in trouble!
To paint the picture for those who don't get it yet! It is a simple case of Microsoft having built its empire pirating and repackaging the hard work of individual programmers or small groups of programmers out there somewhere. They got too fat and too rich and told these people to go away. We did! Now they see Linux rising everywhere and they cannot figure out the facts. It is just this simple. If you bite the hand that feeds you, shortly you will go hungry.
This whole thing is a classic episode in stupidity. Sitting in Antarctica there is a lot of frozen stuff we could use, but we don't seem to have much interest in it. It would be much more practical to locate a bunch of Nuclear Reactors (Please no anti-nuke comments, This is a comparison not a suggestion) in Antarctica and move a lot of people there then to attempt much on the moon.
Going to the moon does have some practical value but it is pretty much limited to some communication and science research issues. It might function as a pretty good site for a "Space Station" which could not decay in orbit to quickly. It might also have some other values such as being able to throw large rocks at the earth to obliterate in non-nuclear blasts various offending sites on the earth. But I really don't see a lot of other reasons to go and base people there any time soon.
The water value was supposed to be to run a base and to make rocket fuel. Knowing the limitations of "Reaction" engines, I view them as simply inadequate for much use outside of near earth activity. Even for an expedition to Mars they are almost useless being as the speeds they achieve take us something like 9 months blasting there. Conversely the return breaking is nearly impossible! This is not proposing solutions which may exist. It is reporting the condition that exists.
I suppose that hope springs eternal in the NASA types but they forget that the real reason they existed was to push a Public Demonstration of US Technology in Ballistic Missiles in such a way as to preclude Nuclear Exchanges without actually shooting at somebody. The Lunar launches pretty much drove the point home. Now the world knows we can do what we want to do. The Saturn V rocket stands more as a phallic symbol than one of adventure and exploration. This by the way is why China and India are seeking Lunar Flights.
The reason is gone and so is the money. With the Space Shuttle showing up as an antiquated and dangerous means to go to space, we see NASA casting about false hopes to get the public excited about space flight.
I would suggest that the Russians have given the world the real use of space for the interim until we develop enough ability to go much further. That is TOURISM! Doubtless this has more prospects for launches and for upgrade of the technology etc than any thing else.
A concrete suggestion to NASA to get the public more excited in space flight would be to fire 80% of the Astronaut corps and replace them with students from age 16 to 22. I am quite sure we could get good healthy smart energetic young people who would give us better science and might even restore the exploration fever to space and give us real reasons to go! I am also quite sure that in doing so the teachers of America would be advocating and supporting the effort well because they might get one of their students to fly!
It also would make more sense to pay B. Ratan and the X-Prize team a very few million dollars than do what is being done. A few 10 or 15 million dollar grants or even prizes similar to the X-Prize would be really great in their effect. The great thing about such a prize is that it only pays for success.
The really awful thing here is the complete misunderstanding of energy that underlies this proposal. The assumption is that somehow the earth is short of energy. Frankly earth based solar energy has much more potential than any such system and would cost much less with far less problems
Regards the problems of solar they accrue primarily from the fact that solar energy does not fall on any one point of the earth at every moment and as such suffers from a timing problem. This is actually solved by a most unusual solution and one which has numerous reasons for it to be done.
If the USA, Canada and Russia were to develop a trans-global highway with electrical and energy pipelines, using a tunnel at the Beiring Straits to connect North America, Asia, Europe and Africa the value would be beyond imagination. Solar Advocates would find that this ends the objectionable issues regards Solar. The sun falls somewhere in the area affected by such a road at all times. The energy falling is much more than adequate for world needs.
This also upsets the Geopolitical balance in favor of the US, Canada and Russia. This yanks the US out of the Middle East. In of itself a worthwhile and laudable goal.
It causes China and the south east asians to have to come to terms as well. This is the world road to prosperity
But we need to dispense with the fools who run around thinking we are short on energy. It is like the rain in Alabama, it is plentiful but the distribution and timing have some difficulties.
The proposal to go off world for energy would cause problems with the world environment even more collossal than those by Nuclear Energy. We need to think a bit differently. There are more than adequate resources on the Earth. The issue is how do we manage them
These counter stats are just like the weather stats that you Eco-Nuts keep cranking up. You simply just don't get it. I could but never intend to provide counter sources as the Eco-Nuts have a gin ginning up all the numbers they want this being the whole Koyoto Problem (Phoney Numbers).
Please Note: When a US Industry burns coal it is recorded. In China or India most of it is not even reported to officials. They don't even have the mechanism to report it like we do. The Coal numbers do represent permitted mining levels under Koyoto. US consumption is usually Power Plants and their use is easily tracked. China it usually is in some small shop or home. NO REPORTS FOR YOUR BP Numbers!
Regards the Pacific Dead Zone, I really don't know why the Eco guys have never seen fit to see this disaster. They also ignored the one caused by banning DDT a few years ago when 1/2 Million People got Malaria in just 6 months from the loss of insect controls. Not being a fan of DDT I do respect the need to do things carefully. I don't know why they could not see in California the timber kills were reaching 100% in areas (See Dianne Feinstein's testimony recently US Senate) or allow the cutting of dead trees.
Please note that I am aware that the fight seems to be between one side of extremists vs another set of extremists on Forrest Issues in the USA. Not much sane or decent problem solving is going on with this happening. It was the Eco-Nuts in California who locked up the entire process of controlling and managing forrests. They view them as some short of "Religious Temple" or "Historic District" not to ever be changed rather than something that must be managed. Admitttedly the "Bushies" think that a forrest is to be cut NOW!
There seems to be a blind eye to what is going on in Asia. I have family there! I have friends who have family there.
A realistic rule but it would violate "Free Trade" would be for the USA to simply ban the import of significant amounts of any product which is produced in conditions not meeting our US EPA and other standards.Then for a fee allow us EPA officials to inspect the area regularly if the country has inadequate EPA type standards. This would close the revolving door on Pollution. It would also greately benefit those in the rest of the world.
Suppose for example that we applied US Fish and Game rules to the fish imported here. Suddenly the Asians and the South Americans would find their fish banned from our market until they established renewable management techniques. (Conservation not preservation) With US Pollution Controls their fish would have safe water. The production would rise and the people would prosper! Imagine that! We could quit sending soldiers to put out their poverty induced wars and start trading fairly and they would not have advantage over us to wipe out our controls!
Suppose just for a moment that we limited by US Ag standards the feeds of animals to prevent excess hormones (The US Standards are questionably weak) and antibiotics etc. This goes on and on.
Unfortunately the whole logic operatinal here is that the USA is the problem. As such we export industries and lose control on the pollution entirely.
This pollution control issue is much deeper than the Eco-Nuts are willing to see. For example the Asians and South Americans are generally not treating sewerage. There are exceptions but they are rare. If an area there treats sewerage it costs too much for the "Industrialists" and they leave. So the people have pollution in the water. Note: This is largely INDUSTRIAL Pollution I am talking about with sewerage. It does include Human waste but that is the easiest factor to clean up!
I really don't see why the Eco-Nuts don't get down to the table and start talking about what is really going on rather than some "Religious Belief" they picked up. The whole ecological situation is in grave danger. I could point to dozens of cases from the "Great Phosphate Flap" to "The 55 mph speed limit" where these pe
Obviously LBNL didn't even read China's totals for coal use or India's. They upped their production of coal from about 1 Billion Tons a year to nearly 5 Billion Tons a year in both countries n just 10 years. They also increased their consumption of Petrochemicals substantially as well.
The Petrochemical use has caused China to push into the Spratley Islands and elsewhere seeking energy. This is much of the tension in Southern Asia. If they were not demanding more and more as your numbers indicate, this would not be happening.
In short the Eco-Nuts at Berkley are not in touch with reality. The data on this believe it or not was contained in the Koyoto supporting documents for their permitted increases. and you can go look them up yourself. I have learned that the Liberal Leftists in the USA know no facts they will not bend and no website they will not put up to push them. I also know that even if I went to the Chinese themselves and reported their numbers directly to you, that somehow the Berkley numbers would prevail.
It isn't possible for China to maintain the growth or the output they have done without the increase. The massive trade surplus against the USA is an indicator of massive energy use. They are not pioneering some super efficient tech like domestic people are trying to do. Theirs is achived by a linear scaling of energy use. This means LINEAR Pollution. Besides if they were down, where did that "Asian Brown Cloud" materialize from. I suppose the USA exported it!?
It is not possible to burn that much coal and not get the cloud or to avoid the CO2 emissions I said. In order for China to have decreased 36% in China they would have reduced their consumption which they did not. It is well known what Lawrene Berkeley is and how honest they are (NOT!). They are the center of the Eco-nuts. The situation was so bad recently that massive loss of life occurred from the increasingly horrid pollution. The number killed in India and China was in the thousands.
But as usual anything to keep the eyes off the reality that the underlying effort is to hobble theUSA and to be Anti-American rather than to solve the world problems. The basic thinking of the Eco-Nuts and their elitist patrons is that there is a "Fixed" pie and that US Prosperity must be contained for the remainder of the world to prosper. Unfortunately this never works as any efforts to hurt the USA also hurt the remainder of the world. Also it does nothing to fix any problems. It only creates them.
The real victory in the cold war was won because of the deliberate US Policy known as the "Green Revolution." While there were a lot of military games the real issue was peace freedom and prosperity all of which first had to have a full bowl of food.
The USA faced a situation after WW-2 where if we did not attend to the feeding of the world, this was all going to come apart. H. Wallace undertook using the US-TVA as backer and pattern the breeding of the various "Super" grains. Rice in the Manilia Research Station funded by the US-TVA and Wheat in Mexico (Also US-TVA) and much more bringing in the technology of food production to the world was the solution.
It has become so effective that the gangsters of the world have had to resort to the destruction of food supplies and etc just to try to stay in the game
Cut the Crap! This stuff about 3rd world countries not being able to affort to clean up their act belies the reality that they are selling themselves as an "Out" to the restrictions of the US and others. In reality much of the "Prosperity" of China at this moment is as a result of their attracting poluting industries from the west.
While the Environmentalist nuts have been hornswoggling the press and the politicos here in the west they have been quitely blinking at the massive pollution increases in the east. China and India have increased their Carbon Dioxide emissions a total exceeding total US Output by some 5 times(Each)! The south east asians have polluted the Pacific Ocean to the point where about 10% of it is DEAD and I have seen it flying over it!
These Eco-nuts go on saying that the only country to actually be cleaning up is the problem. The USA has stabilized its output of pollution and in some areas reduced it. This while increasing its population by almost 25% in the period!
If we continue to listen to such crap about 3rd world problems nothing is going to get cleaned up and we are all going to die in the mess. There are no limits on the pollution from India, China and much of the world under Koyoto. The industrialists will simply scoot out to the 3rd world and build their smoky dirty plants and ignore pollution controls unless we wake up. The problem is not the USA. The problem is elsewhere. But that is the whole problem with the Koyoto Treaty in the first place. It attempts to blame the USA and shut it down rather than deal with problems. This is of course justified by doctoring numbers and generally lying. Lies are so deep in Koyoto Treaty work that nobody is even looking at the real problems.
I have worked to get pollution cleaned up and in fact I worked for over 20 years to get the 2nd worst (Per EPA List at the time) pollution site in North America cleaned up. Not once in the period did I get the Sierra Club or Friends of the Earth or any of the other "Green" organizations to even turn their ear to the problem. This site had Nuclear and Chemical Weapons Contamination to the limit. Could the "Greens" even look? Not on your life! Have they turned and looked since the EPA listed the site... NO!
I think that people aught to look at what is going on. The Eco-nuts are not Eco at all. They are powered by Political Aims and internationally they are unified by "Anti-American" sentiments. They view the solution to be that of destruction of the USA rather than looking at their own areas. The China Coal burning as of now is approaching 5 Billion Tons a year and US consumption of coal has dropped to 0.7 Billion Tons from a high of 1.2 Billion Tons. The USA has rivers and streams recovering with new fish and much good going on. The Indians and Chinese are in grave danger of having their rivers and streams killed. The "Asian Brown Cloud" did not happen over Toledo Ohio and it didn't happen over Birmingham Alabama. Yes I can remember when these sites had such but the "Asian Brown Cloud" was this summer. America is the example for what to do to clean up not what is wrong.
Does anyone remember the "Acid Rain" issue. It turns out much of the evidence was of natural causes and not related to mankind. Worse yet the scrubbers actually caused Acid rain by bringing out the alkali ash and letting the acid gas go. The issue of "Acid Rain" was caused in most part (95% or more) due to the Terminal State of the Forrest in the East USA after its regrowth from low levels in the 1930's. The fully grown trees emit much acid. This is why the "Smoky Mountains" and the "Blue Ridge" were named and they were named before the industrial era.
The greatest CO2 emission in north America in 2003 was the fires in California and these owe to the Eco-Nuts who would not even let a DEAD tree be cut. They would not allow disease control or even controlled burns. The ecosystem of the forrest there is "Fire Dependent" and frankly needs regular burns. So 3400 homes burn
Starting at the top of your post: The pay of US Servicemen is not increasing. They are not even getting the normal "Tax Exempt" Hazardous Duty pay that should happen. Frankly we have military families going on welfare because the situation is so messed up.
The life insurance policy payments hardly compensate for the long term damage done to families etc. They are also irrelevant in terms of the US Economy as a whole.
The orders for Munitions etc have actually been miniscule and frankly yes they went to US Contractors but the orders for Uniforms went to China. The Orders for Tanks went to Lybia, and some East European States. The perportion of US purchases in the USA Made in USA in 2001 was about 60% of US Military budget. Now with the budget up by 100% the actual purchaces in the USA made in USA are down by more than 2/3. This includes your parts purchaces, food and even the hiring of "Allies." Yes the US Contractors got the work, but the Homeland Security Act ended the requirement that they be based in the USA any more and it also ended any "Made in USA" requirements. I think that the best illustration was last summer when President Bush was in St Louis in front of a paint up poster with lots of boxes labeled "Made in USA" on it. Behind the poster the boxes were all "Made in China."
The reality is that the Bush Administration is borrowing Americans into a deep hole while not even allowing the highly taxed Americans the privilage of working on the contracts. When a US Senator proposed that a 50% "Made in USA" total US DOD Purchaces requirement be set, Rumsfeld showed up on the Hill and told her that the US DOD could not operate with such a requirement.
Welcome to reality. There is only one thing Americans are going to get out of this war. POVERTY! Because our leaders are so disloyal to us that they will even prosecute US Soldiers for doing their job and because they are so disloyal that they will not even stand behind their own Generals on the issues and because they are so disloyal that they will not even assure Americans the work so that they can finance the war we are in deep trouble. Even the 7.2% growth number is a complete fiction. Actually the increase is almost entirely US DOD Purchases and shows up as "Growth" but actually almost none of the work was done in the USA and the number probably represents a substantial DECLINE. Furthermore; the US statistics have been cooked anyway. The numbers that tell what actually is going on have had their methodology changed such that they don't even represent the facts. For example: Wage growth in the USA appears to be good, but it does not represent a Per Capita against working people but includes many who are "Management" and when you increase a wage as HP just did for execs from 4.4 Million to 48 million in one year it looks like a lot of money went around, but actually over 1,000 were laid off.
Having worked on several elections, I honestly can say that we really need to be concerned about this issue. It would be so easy to software control the outcome of an election unless there are paper ballots
What should happen is that a touch screen ballot is filled out and completed by the voter, That a paper ballot (Complete for visual inspection) would be printed out with full optical scan ability and a random serial number. This ballot would then be fed into a second machine for scan reading. This way you have a electronic total and a paper scan total.
There would have to be a technique for voiding ballots even when printed out if the voter looks at the paper and denies it for any reason. But that ballot should have to be counted as a "Stricken" ballot and linked back to the original count to eliminate it by the number.
The importance of Human Controls in this cannot be avoided. The results of the electronic totals could be posted instantly to secured servers for duplicate reporting. The local totals must be kept as well. Finally the actual paper ballots should be taken under ARMED GUARD to a location for guarded storage and recount under appropriate cross checks.
I personally would automatically recount all elections. This would have to be done under observed conditions. Frankly I see no reason that a voter could not go into any polling place and get the appropriate ballot for his area. But if you do this, the controls will have to get tighter not easier.
I would institute the use of Indellible Ink on a finger to indicate one had finished voting as is done in much of the world. I would require the ballot to be smeared with the indellible ink from the finger to validate it as well.
Why doesn't someone on/. get the idea and come up with a GPL version of the software to do this!
This is pretty Simple: I as an American Citizen must mark up my wages 150% to pay the various taxes on my income etc. If I don't pay those taxes and still get the income, I could easily compete and live well in the "World Market."
Its a choice for my congress critter, he had better either cut my taxes to essentially zero and quit supporting the Governments and Economies of the rest of the world with my money (I can supply details for the arrogant around the world who will argue this point -- prefer to keep this short) or he will have to start making others who trade in my market pay equal or higher taxes than mine. Because the alternative is that I will go out of business and with that will go his tax money. With that will go the money for Defense, Schools, Roads, Bridges, The elderly etc. Its a pretty stark choice. Either quit financing the USA, either by crushing its economy or cutting taxes to zero, or make the internationalist pirates pay the royalty they owe when they trade here!
As to productivity, US workers are on average about 20 times more productive per hour than their corresponding foreign competition. The problem is OUT OF BUSINESS means not competing at all. The rest of the world is simply not aware of the high cost of US Defense and Social Costs.
As to the Forigners or anyone posting on the list, it is no solution to economic troubles to bring another down to your level of misery. It is not good therefore to argue against another's wages or prosperity. It is wise to argue for your own but not at the expense of another!
Just for the Record, the shortage of Bike paths is pure foolishness by local idiots. The US Interstate Highway Trust fund puts 1.5% of its funding to this purpose under the "Kennedy Amendment" to it. This means that 90% of the funds come as a grant from the US Federal Government just to help you get to work on a bike etc. The only problem is that local IDIOT MORON politicos don't see that their 10% in gets back more before the construction is done.
If the State of Alabama for example were to put up 4,000 miles of such roads the outlay would be to the state less than $40 million. The Intake from construction revenues would more than cover the $40 million and it would represent the greatest tourist attraction and Industrial Growth technology they could build. New Hotels, Airports, Industry etc all from linking up the state. Live elsewhere? Same thing!
The success of River Walks and Bike Paths is amaizing. I was involved in getting a bike path build in Madison Alabama (100% local funds) years ago. It is now the richest part of town with the most money coming in to the Government. The reason homes and Business located there was the nice bike path! I ride on a trail in the area. It is always busy. Shortly It will be tied to a new school and much industrial Growth. When will people get it? This stuff makes sense!
One of the hottest parts of Clarksville Tn is its river walk. The Chattanooga Tn river walk is also such a success. Even the "Blue Bridge" in Chattanooga is such a success.
After careful consideration, I considered the difference and have found one very substantial one. The Republicans are EFFECTIVE. This makes them substantially more dangerous than the lying communistic Democrats. The Republicans are always complaining that the Democrats stop them but actually they have a considerable track record of making what they actually wanted to happen occur.
It should be noted here that there is no difference in policy or intent. They both work for their elitist (Royalist) corporate masters and dump on the ordinary American
I read the report. Bad Science. Bad sloppy calculations and clearly propaganda for the left that hates American Freedom and Prosperity.
It also belies the enormous quantities of this stuff out there. Not even their evolutionary time lines produce enough years and material to account for what has already been used at this guys calculation base rate.
Having worked for the State of Alabama Department of Revenue, Sales and Use Tax Division, I have an observation. It is too bad that the judge in this case never read the US Federal Tax Code or its Rulings. In Alabama our Sales Tax law was like the chapter of a book and all of the Rulings etc would have been another chapter. In total I suppose it might have made a small book (Very Thin) With the US Tax Code and its rulings approaching some 10,000 new pages a year and not even God could understand it, how on earth could any federal judge not avoid the obvious conclusion here that the Federal Tax Code could not be enforced as it was incomprehensible!
This actually goes to the root of the legal doctrine that "Ignorance of the Law is no excuse." This doctrine makes as its underlying assumption that any reasonable person should at least know that the law would regulate and or tax an activity based upon some basic human knowlege. I am forced to observe that most of the US Tax Code is so confusing that no rational person could be expected to anticipate it or otherwise even imagine that they should have to comply with it. For those who don't understand, the US Tax Code is so misunderstood that people actually think it applies to Income of US Citizens working a job. Actually the Law specifically states that the only parties to the US Income Tax are Foreign Nationals, and US Citizens working abroad. This has recently been ruled in court cases but naturally the Press and some others just don't quite get it. It is a mess.
Considerable info on this may be found by searching around here http://home.hiwaay.net/~becraft/ A lot more interesting stuff here too!
Having worked for the State of Alabama Department of Revenue, Sales and Use Tax Division, I might know a thing or two about this. The issue is NEXUS (Connection) and an issue of where the sale occurred.
Generally the Law has held that the location of purchase is the point of Delivery of Title to the object. This might seem to be that when you get something in the mail or by freight currier that it was sold to you when you picked it up. This is not so. The issue is where did it become yours. If you paid freight, the the item became yours when and where it was handed to the freight currier. (Free on Board[FOB]) If the freight is paid for by the Supplier then it becomes yours at your door unless you accept it as FOB at their dock. This is sometimes confusing to people.
The issue of collection of sales tax at the FOB point is generally one of the State in Question will not charge Sales Taxes on items shipped out of State because the item is for "Export." Please note that the definition of "State" is Nation just like Germany or France. We are 50 NATIONS not one. We are Federated. (Allies with a common control of foreign policy externally) The state where the goods come from generally likes to see lots more business and knows that if it taxes sales to outside, then it will lose business. The state receiving the goods is offended as it undercuts the taxed business base. This problem within the USA is a private low key war among the States.
The real solution is contained in the US Constitution where the Federation is empowered to resolve such matters under the power to regulate Interstate Commerce. This being one of the powers that Congress is doing its best to forget that it has, we suffer the problem of not having our tax bases of our various States protected by the Feds. I know that people don't like paying taxes, but we have to do so to support our government. This is undermining our Federation. It threatens our security.
Prior to the Internet Catalogue Sales did the same thing. Generally the cost of freight and such made the effect minor until the late 1960's. With the advent of large efficient Freight and communication services (including but no limited to the internet) we began to see serous problems. With the Advent of "Free Trade" (allowing non-federation States into the trade mix) this has become a serious threat to the existence of our States. 44 of the 50 US States are in serious financial problems due in no small part to this problem. The loss of the "Internet Ban" does little here. The real issue here is if the Federation will come in and do its job assuring that if one state drops its sales tax on mail order or internet order sales as "Export" goods, that the other state will get to pick up the "Inport" Status. The State of Alabama has a "Use" Tax. The "Use" tax taxes the use of an item if it did not pay sales tax. As such nobody in Alabama legally did not pay these taxes already.
Frankly the various US States need to stop this Low Key War on each other's tax base and start cooperation. The proper forum for the peace settlement is CONGRESS.
The problem of stopping the DOMESTIC US tax war will not alter the problem of the Extra-Federation tax war against the USA generally. That too needs to be addressed by the US Congress and most specifically by not writing Trade Deals which give the WTO or similar bodies power to stop us from dealing with this and by repealing NAFTA and GATT and USSFTA and USCFTA.
So long as one party is held to trade handicapped with a massive tax burden and his competition is free to do so without taxation, this constitutes de facto illegal status on the taxed party. His trade is fined and thus essentially illegal. This was recognized in the US Supreme Court Rulings of 1820 that prohibited taxation of Federal Institutions by States and of Churches by States. It was ruled that "The power to tax was the power to destroy."
The general demand of States for an end of this both domestically and externally, has been bra
This is classic. A new technology that probably would have molded along with some success. DOD steps in and assures it dominance in the market regardless of other similar use technologies.
For those who don't remember this is how that "Great Inventor" Bill Gates got a product he bought (DOS) relabeled (MS DOS)and finally (Windows) into Market Dominance. No it wasn't genious of Inventing, it was sales to the right guys and everything else died in the DOD Footprint! I know it will hurt those who believe Microsoft was a wonderful Inventive Group, but they have no such history. They just got a big hand from the US DOD. Free Enterprise had nothing to do with it.
I wish the computer techies and etc would wake up and figure out what the NY Guys are doing. This has nothing to do with the truth of the previous post. (It is a true and good post) The real issue is who is going to control what is going on and what is intended. No not in the IT department!
The Robber Barrons have showed up and are attempting to loot the American Economy by justifying outsourcing and such. What more can I say
I would say more! This document should be copied to your hard drive and spread out to the world
After reading about 85 of the 400+ pages, I believe that keeping MS is for the stupid only. The long and the short of it is that MS stuff will have to be migrated every few years to the latest expensive release from MS while Linux stuff seems to be adjusted better over time.
The first posters here don't have a clue as to the effects and circumstances of this. The purpose is not Autonomous Kill Vehicles though it might occur. Cruise Missiles etc already do this as does the Predator to one degree or another. The purpose here is to reduce the overhead cost on the army dramatically in hauling supplies etc over long distances with or without roads. To do this you need vehicles than can bypass disabled vehicles and overcome obstacles. They need to be free of drivers who get tired and eat up supplies.
The real effect here will be civilian. The project which like it or not will happen regardless of DARPA someday soon, is going to very nearly completely alter how we live.
To illustrate: suppose you are old blind and unable to drive. (It happens to the best of us) Now you will be able to go where you want without somebody driving you. Suppose you want to go to work but don't want to own a car? Mass Transit? No! you just get on your cell phone and call for a car. It arrives shortly and takes you where you want to go and without a driver. Freight? No more Truck Drivers and the wreaks from them being too tired. No more Taxi Drivers. Close most of the Hospitals because wreaks are not filling them up. Kids will not need parents to drive them somewhere.
There is very nearly nothing more profound than this race! It will reorganize our world. The issue here is how will we adapt. This isn't an esoteric question. We had better face it now.
For the Luddites amung us, give it up. Stopping DARPA will only give the technological edge to China. They will do the work. This is a very high amplification Technology. It Amplifies People a LOT. The issue as always will be the morals of those being Amplified, and will we allow this to cause others to be lost in the "noise."
Slashdot Mirror
Real Simple: They need a good computer culture to be able to assure the communications in order to procure FOOD, WATER and even manage to keep a Stable Govenment
Suggestion: How about these Iraqi guys just downloading the Linux (Like they haven't done it already!) There are plenty of EU and other world wide mirrors to avoid any US Restrictions
Your question is a valid one. A friend of mine used to annoy physics types by asking them what was the speed of gravity. Actually what you are asking is a very proper question regards the existence of the speed of light. Because if C is not a constant (E = mC^2) then you have to question the whole base of the formula.
The speed of light is well observed not to be a constant. The supposed experiment that determined the "Speed of Light" The Michelson-Morley Experiment (M-M) is flawed because it assumes that the light is traveling and reflected by the mirrors without interaction. Actually the light is absorbed and retransmitted. What is more the light was stepping in transmission through the air medium or more precisely through the Phase Conjugate field in the locality of the experiment. (This latter being important as it is affected even in "Space" because there is a media there as well) As such this experiment only measured the speed of the "Local Transmitter." This always would measure as a "Constant" because if conditions varied to alter the speed of the local tranmitter they would also alter the distances etc.
Fernbach of the University of Colorado pointed this out in the 1950's. He bluntly stated that Einstein was "Dead" and it would take the physics community at least 50 years to bury him. He also stated that the M-M experiment was the rought equal to sitting in an Airplane cabin with a pin wheel and noting that it was spinning assuming that one was measuring the speed of the plane.
Having the rather strange honor of being the one who in 1995 laid out to NASA the physics behind thunderstorms and lightning (Red Sprites and Blue Jets included) which is now the fairly well established theory, I will tell you that I concluded my explanations on Lightning with the rather strange statement that the time had come to publically ask for any proof that gravity existed! Don't mistake me for not knowing that things fall. The question is WHY! I pointed out that the processes in the weather indicated that there was a defineable process for Anti-Gravity and that there was now to date no evidence what so ever in Physics that Gravity as a force independent of other forces existed. That the entire force known as Gravity could be explained in the EM Field as a cross product of what would best be described as EM Pressure Differential. Essentially that Energy repelled matter. (Probably a phase change issue here)
I fully expect to hear from, in telling you this, some of the Physics Nuts who are like a religious cult unwilling to accept any new ideas and treating them as sacreligious acts. The problem with opening this discussion is that [1] the Dogmamatic Guys are really mean and [2] the facts don't support any of their activities.
NASA has conducted Anti-Gravity experiments and so have many other people all of which use the principals I described. Facts tend to support my theory.
The problem here is that the entire cosmological and other set of theories is laid on a foundation of G, C, and T. The problem is that G and C do not exist and T is a synthetic human construct having no reality what so ever. It is merely a mental tool to describe not a fact. Einstein was confronted with several strange facts if he abandoned G, C, and T. He was unwilling to accept them. The facts were in plain sight and he reported this!
Essentially we are left back with an old theory from Maxwell regarding the Ether. The problem was that at the time we did not know that phase conjugate reflection was the primary mode of energy transmission. It is in fact the structure of matter. It is why induction works. It is also why things fall. (They are pushed!) It fits with all the observed laws and frankly is quite obvious when one throws out the Einstein mistakes and M-M.
It is important also to understand the assumptions that were driving the M-M experiment and Einstein. The times showed a vast set of "Age of the Universe" theories which were tied to "science" because the anti-relig
Just have to add my "Amen" to the choir reports here. Welcome and don't ever forget why you came here!
I am married to a lady from the Philippines. When we were going to have a child she said that the child would be 1/2 Philippine and 1/2 American. I said NO!~ 100% American! American is a Race by IDEA not by blood. Besides, I come originally from 7 EU type races (all White skinned) but frankly I am a NATIVE AMERICAN. I was born here. That makes me as native as anybody! I resent as you do those who would Balkinize us.
Having worked for more than 2 years on XML I would like to say a few things about it. It is a well demanded waste of time. The customers want it because somehow it is "Machine" and "Human Readable." Honestly it is neither. Humans don't think this way generally unless they are geeks or hackers. Machines hate this stuff. XML geometrically degrades in performance the larger the document you must use to extract information from is.
To speed this up XSLT and other methods such as DTD's were developed. The problem is that these destroy the reason for XML. XSLT and similar technologies take a document and do a Linear transform on the data for a "One Shot" view. This is fast but it honestly is only for viewing not for real "Using." DTD's are hopelessly rigid in their function.
The XML design expands data many times in band width. This requires a process expensive reduction mechanism at both ends of the process. We need Broad Band to use XML but if we sent a binary file we would hardly use the old dial up bandwidth. Even the tagging process stinks. It is either too free form to use or it is hopelessly rigid (DTD style). Yea XML sounds sexy but it really is a bad idea.
If we were to use tagged data, it would be better to use a pseudo xml where the top of the document defined the data tags with an numeric relationship and the rest of the document sent a set of number tags with the data.
Also if XML is to be functional we also need to see it reduced in complexity. To do this we need to either use Attributes a better way or we need to eliminate them. Similarly we need to knock out the "unparsed" CData segments and just make the data a tagged set. It needs either flattened this way or forgotten.
If XML is used to mine data or find something the original user did not laboriously design into it, the processing of it is horridly long. The choice is parse followed by recursive parse after parse or massive memory hogging. Otherwise you get out of XML ASAP!
Nuclear is great compared to many other options
Solar for example has massive problems including the Aluminum, Glass and other issues. In the end though, the issue of how to manage human energy sources needs to be viewed as one of global issues. Nuclear like it or not is going to produce more and more junk that the awful people of the world will divert to nasty uses. Keeping it around is waiting for them to do something bad.
The Solar option dies on one problem. Timing. Unless a good storage or transport mechanism can be made, it is hopeless. The conversion of Solar to Hydrogen is at best about 60% thermally efficient. That means store a lot of hydrogen.
Nuclear Power is much like Solar in that it does not throttle well. Maybe the pebble reactors throttle better. It too has the storage problem.
There is an alternative. We could go after connecting the Asian and North American Land mass by tunnel and thus connecting power grids, pipelines etc. This solves most of the Solar problems and does much good
Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed. An Axiom one may bet one's life on
I have a suggestion regards solving this that might be quite simple seems to me that a server should be billed bandwidth allocations similar to the way old time networks billed a user for his allocation of time. This billing should on Email be paid to an account of the Recipient. IE. More mail to me, I get more and the sender has to cough up if he spends. This would be insignificant in terms of an email say a US Cent a mail. Since I get points which would be recoverable if they got to be a lot say $10 or more. At the same time if I mailed out the cost to me would be same. So as long as I mailed minimal and get minimal I would have little or no change. The payment should be collectable either as cash or payment to my ISP to handle monthly charges.
In this way a person who used a limited amout of bandwidth for emails would probably have his service be free or even be occasionally paid for his service if he got lots of mail. At the same time if a user sent thousands of spams, he would shortly have to pay heavily or lose his service access.
This seems to be the best way to reduce spam while not stopping Email all together.
Just an Idea, think about it. Beats a Congress Critter getting his mits on my money.
Excellent post
I think that this deal also illustrates one of my prime peeves with Microsoft. Being a developer, if I buy the MSDN subscription to their development tools, I pay about $2,000 a year and then I must also pay about $10,000 for their latest and greatest data engine (Server). All well and good but they haul off to Asia to hire developers there were they supply the software to these (Pirates) guys and let them develop against me having paid essentially nothing for their platform. In many cases MS even bought their machines!
By supporting MS I wind up having hired the pirates to destroy my career. At least with this deal China and I are on an "Equal Footing" and they have to buy their machines and software at the same market I do!
For all those Microsoft nuts out there, this is the real issue regards Open Source that overrides all others. Yes it is great to have open source for many other reasons, but this puts the OS and development tools on a par value.
No longer do I as an American Pay full price for Software that I support a discount to for the rest of the world. No longer do I pay to destroy my own market. No longer do I hire the saboteaurs of my economy
Go get'em Sun! I hope you do well. It is about time China saw the light and maybe a few people here in the USA should see the light as well.
To be blunt an OS should be almost free. Development tools should be pretty cheap if not free as well. The reality is that the general use tools have become what the capitalists attempted to do with their "Free Trade" deals to labor. They have become commodities and they will trade at that level. Serves them right. You deal with the pirates and you get pirated. There cannot be a "Black Market" for Linux or a subsidy price for it because of the fact that when you buy Linux or Star Office or whatever, you pay for service, a thing MS has tried to destroy from the market.
When service becomes the product and not the OS we will get better software at better prices and developers will get paid! When it is selling an OS at extortion prices all we got was Bill Gates and Steve Balmer RICH. Stockholders got screwed as well as the programmers who built it. (Spare me the stories about the few thouand millionaires --> This isn't even noise level payments to what should have happened for the good people who were not lucky enough to be on of them.) What we got was "Selling the Blue Sky" a legal term for Stock Fraud.
I paid Microsoft for the expensive development platform which they now don't support (V6.0)They packaged it saying it came with their SQL Server latest version free. What they did not tell me was that the version they gave out did not work with W2K or XP. I could buy that for another $7,000! I could go on and on. After spending over $6,000 getting up to stuff on their programming system, they wanted $2,000 a year from me! Of course if you had 500 seats of programmers the cost could be about $200 a seat! If you did the work in China, they might even provide you the seat and the machine. Does this tell anybody anything about the real reason MS is getting every day more and more in trouble!
To paint the picture for those who don't get it yet! It is a simple case of Microsoft having built its empire pirating and repackaging the hard work of individual programmers or small groups of programmers out there somewhere. They got too fat and too rich and told these people to go away. We did! Now they see Linux rising everywhere and they cannot figure out the facts. It is just this simple. If you bite the hand that feeds you, shortly you will go hungry.
This whole thing is a classic episode in stupidity. Sitting in Antarctica there is a lot of frozen stuff we could use, but we don't seem to have much interest in it. It would be much more practical to locate a bunch of Nuclear Reactors (Please no anti-nuke comments, This is a comparison not a suggestion) in Antarctica and move a lot of people there then to attempt much on the moon.
Going to the moon does have some practical value but it is pretty much limited to some communication and science research issues. It might function as a pretty good site for a "Space Station" which could not decay in orbit to quickly. It might also have some other values such as being able to throw large rocks at the earth to obliterate in non-nuclear blasts various offending sites on the earth. But I really don't see a lot of other reasons to go and base people there any time soon.
The water value was supposed to be to run a base and to make rocket fuel. Knowing the limitations of "Reaction" engines, I view them as simply inadequate for much use outside of near earth activity. Even for an expedition to Mars they are almost useless being as the speeds they achieve take us something like 9 months blasting there. Conversely the return breaking is nearly impossible! This is not proposing solutions which may exist. It is reporting the condition that exists.
I suppose that hope springs eternal in the NASA types but they forget that the real reason they existed was to push a Public Demonstration of US Technology in Ballistic Missiles in such a way as to preclude Nuclear Exchanges without actually shooting at somebody. The Lunar launches pretty much drove the point home. Now the world knows we can do what we want to do. The Saturn V rocket stands more as a phallic symbol than one of adventure and exploration. This by the way is why China and India are seeking Lunar Flights.
The reason is gone and so is the money. With the Space Shuttle showing up as an antiquated and dangerous means to go to space, we see NASA casting about false hopes to get the public excited about space flight.
I would suggest that the Russians have given the world the real use of space for the interim until we develop enough ability to go much further. That is TOURISM! Doubtless this has more prospects for launches and for upgrade of the technology etc than any thing else.
A concrete suggestion to NASA to get the public more excited in space flight would be to fire 80% of the Astronaut corps and replace them with students from age 16 to 22. I am quite sure we could get good healthy smart energetic young people who would give us better science and might even restore the exploration fever to space and give us real reasons to go! I am also quite sure that in doing so the teachers of America would be advocating and supporting the effort well because they might get one of their students to fly!
It also would make more sense to pay B. Ratan and the X-Prize team a very few million dollars than do what is being done. A few 10 or 15 million dollar grants or even prizes similar to the X-Prize would be really great in their effect. The great thing about such a prize is that it only pays for success.
I agree with the previous post generally
The really awful thing here is the complete misunderstanding of energy that underlies this proposal. The assumption is that somehow the earth is short of energy. Frankly earth based solar energy has much more potential than any such system and would cost much less with far less problems
Regards the problems of solar they accrue primarily from the fact that solar energy does not fall on any one point of the earth at every moment and as such suffers from a timing problem. This is actually solved by a most unusual solution and one which has numerous reasons for it to be done.
If the USA, Canada and Russia were to develop a trans-global highway with electrical and energy pipelines, using a tunnel at the Beiring Straits to connect North America, Asia, Europe and Africa the value would be beyond imagination. Solar Advocates would find that this ends the objectionable issues regards Solar. The sun falls somewhere in the area affected by such a road at all times. The energy falling is much more than adequate for world needs.
This also upsets the Geopolitical balance in favor of the US, Canada and Russia. This yanks the US out of the Middle East. In of itself a worthwhile and laudable goal.
It causes China and the south east asians to have to come to terms as well. This is the world road to prosperity
But we need to dispense with the fools who run around thinking we are short on energy. It is like the rain in Alabama, it is plentiful but the distribution and timing have some difficulties.
The proposal to go off world for energy would cause problems with the world environment even more collossal than those by Nuclear Energy. We need to think a bit differently. There are more than adequate resources on the Earth. The issue is how do we manage them
These counter stats are just like the weather stats that you Eco-Nuts keep cranking up. You simply just don't get it. I could but never intend to provide counter sources as the Eco-Nuts have a gin ginning up all the numbers they want this being the whole Koyoto Problem (Phoney Numbers).
Please Note: When a US Industry burns coal it is recorded. In China or India most of it is not even reported to officials. They don't even have the mechanism to report it like we do. The Coal numbers do represent permitted mining levels under Koyoto. US consumption is usually Power Plants and their use is easily tracked. China it usually is in some small shop or home. NO REPORTS FOR YOUR BP Numbers!
Regards the Pacific Dead Zone, I really don't know why the Eco guys have never seen fit to see this disaster. They also ignored the one caused by banning DDT a few years ago when 1/2 Million People got Malaria in just 6 months from the loss of insect controls. Not being a fan of DDT I do respect the need to do things carefully. I don't know why they could not see in California the timber kills were reaching 100% in areas (See Dianne Feinstein's testimony recently US Senate) or allow the cutting of dead trees.
Please note that I am aware that the fight seems to be between one side of extremists vs another set of extremists on Forrest Issues in the USA. Not much sane or decent problem solving is going on with this happening. It was the Eco-Nuts in California who locked up the entire process of controlling and managing forrests. They view them as some short of "Religious Temple" or "Historic District" not to ever be changed rather than something that must be managed. Admitttedly the "Bushies" think that a forrest is to be cut NOW!
There seems to be a blind eye to what is going on in Asia. I have family there! I have friends who have family there.
A realistic rule but it would violate "Free Trade" would be for the USA to simply ban the import of significant amounts of any product which is produced in conditions not meeting our US EPA and other standards.Then for a fee allow us EPA officials to inspect the area regularly if the country has inadequate EPA type standards. This would close the revolving door on Pollution. It would also greately benefit those in the rest of the world.
Suppose for example that we applied US Fish and Game rules to the fish imported here. Suddenly the Asians and the South Americans would find their fish banned from our market until they established renewable management techniques. (Conservation not preservation) With US Pollution Controls their fish would have safe water. The production would rise and the people would prosper! Imagine that! We could quit sending soldiers to put out their poverty induced wars and start trading fairly and they would not have advantage over us to wipe out our controls!
Suppose just for a moment that we limited by US Ag standards the feeds of animals to prevent excess hormones (The US Standards are questionably weak) and antibiotics etc. This goes on and on.
Unfortunately the whole logic operatinal here is that the USA is the problem. As such we export industries and lose control on the pollution entirely.
This pollution control issue is much deeper than the Eco-Nuts are willing to see. For example the Asians and South Americans are generally not treating sewerage. There are exceptions but they are rare. If an area there treats sewerage it costs too much for the "Industrialists" and they leave. So the people have pollution in the water. Note: This is largely INDUSTRIAL Pollution I am talking about with sewerage. It does include Human waste but that is the easiest factor to clean up!
I really don't see why the Eco-Nuts don't get down to the table and start talking about what is really going on rather than some "Religious Belief" they picked up. The whole ecological situation is in grave danger. I could point to dozens of cases from the "Great Phosphate Flap" to "The 55 mph speed limit" where these pe
Obviously LBNL didn't even read China's totals for coal use or India's. They upped their production of coal from about 1 Billion Tons a year to nearly 5 Billion Tons a year in both countries n just 10 years. They also increased their consumption of Petrochemicals substantially as well.
The Petrochemical use has caused China to push into the Spratley Islands and elsewhere seeking energy. This is much of the tension in Southern Asia. If they were not demanding more and more as your numbers indicate, this would not be happening.
In short the Eco-Nuts at Berkley are not in touch with reality. The data on this believe it or not was contained in the Koyoto supporting documents for their permitted increases. and you can go look them up yourself. I have learned that the Liberal Leftists in the USA know no facts they will not bend and no website they will not put up to push them. I also know that even if I went to the Chinese themselves and reported their numbers directly to you, that somehow the Berkley numbers would prevail.
It isn't possible for China to maintain the growth or the output they have done without the increase. The massive trade surplus against the USA is an indicator of massive energy use. They are not pioneering some super efficient tech like domestic people are trying to do. Theirs is achived by a linear scaling of energy use. This means LINEAR Pollution. Besides if they were down, where did that "Asian Brown Cloud" materialize from. I suppose the USA exported it!?
It is not possible to burn that much coal and not get the cloud or to avoid the CO2 emissions I said. In order for China to have decreased 36% in China they would have reduced their consumption which they did not. It is well known what Lawrene Berkeley is and how honest they are (NOT!). They are the center of the Eco-nuts. The situation was so bad recently that massive loss of life occurred from the increasingly horrid pollution. The number killed in India and China was in the thousands.
But as usual anything to keep the eyes off the reality that the underlying effort is to hobble theUSA and to be Anti-American rather than to solve the world problems. The basic thinking of the Eco-Nuts and their elitist patrons is that there is a "Fixed" pie and that US Prosperity must be contained for the remainder of the world to prosper. Unfortunately this never works as any efforts to hurt the USA also hurt the remainder of the world. Also it does nothing to fix any problems. It only creates them.
First Love this post MOD IT UP!
The real victory in the cold war was won because of the deliberate US Policy known as the "Green Revolution." While there were a lot of military games the real issue was peace freedom and prosperity all of which first had to have a full bowl of food.
The USA faced a situation after WW-2 where if we did not attend to the feeding of the world, this was all going to come apart. H. Wallace undertook using the US-TVA as backer and pattern the breeding of the various "Super" grains. Rice in the Manilia Research Station funded by the US-TVA and Wheat in Mexico (Also US-TVA) and much more bringing in the technology of food production to the world was the solution.
It has become so effective that the gangsters of the world have had to resort to the destruction of food supplies and etc just to try to stay in the game
Cut the Crap! This stuff about 3rd world countries not being able to affort to clean up their act belies the reality that they are selling themselves as an "Out" to the restrictions of the US and others. In reality much of the "Prosperity" of China at this moment is as a result of their attracting poluting industries from the west.
While the Environmentalist nuts have been hornswoggling the press and the politicos here in the west they have been quitely blinking at the massive pollution increases in the east. China and India have increased their Carbon Dioxide emissions a total exceeding total US Output by some 5 times(Each)! The south east asians have polluted the Pacific Ocean to the point where about 10% of it is DEAD and I have seen it flying over it!
These Eco-nuts go on saying that the only country to actually be cleaning up is the problem. The USA has stabilized its output of pollution and in some areas reduced it. This while increasing its population by almost 25% in the period!
If we continue to listen to such crap about 3rd world problems nothing is going to get cleaned up and we are all going to die in the mess. There are no limits on the pollution from India, China and much of the world under Koyoto. The industrialists will simply scoot out to the 3rd world and build their smoky dirty plants and ignore pollution controls unless we wake up. The problem is not the USA. The problem is elsewhere. But that is the whole problem with the Koyoto Treaty in the first place. It attempts to blame the USA and shut it down rather than deal with problems. This is of course justified by doctoring numbers and generally lying. Lies are so deep in Koyoto Treaty work that nobody is even looking at the real problems.
I have worked to get pollution cleaned up and in fact I worked for over 20 years to get the 2nd worst (Per EPA List at the time) pollution site in North America cleaned up. Not once in the period did I get the Sierra Club or Friends of the Earth or any of the other "Green" organizations to even turn their ear to the problem. This site had Nuclear and Chemical Weapons Contamination to the limit. Could the "Greens" even look? Not on your life! Have they turned and looked since the EPA listed the site... NO!
I think that people aught to look at what is going on. The Eco-nuts are not Eco at all. They are powered by Political Aims and internationally they are unified by "Anti-American" sentiments. They view the solution to be that of destruction of the USA rather than looking at their own areas. The China Coal burning as of now is approaching 5 Billion Tons a year and US consumption of coal has dropped to 0.7 Billion Tons from a high of 1.2 Billion Tons. The USA has rivers and streams recovering with new fish and much good going on. The Indians and Chinese are in grave danger of having their rivers and streams killed. The "Asian Brown Cloud" did not happen over Toledo Ohio and it didn't happen over Birmingham Alabama. Yes I can remember when these sites had such but the "Asian Brown Cloud" was this summer. America is the example for what to do to clean up not what is wrong.
Does anyone remember the "Acid Rain" issue. It turns out much of the evidence was of natural causes and not related to mankind. Worse yet the scrubbers actually caused Acid rain by bringing out the alkali ash and letting the acid gas go. The issue of "Acid Rain" was caused in most part (95% or more) due to the Terminal State of the Forrest in the East USA after its regrowth from low levels in the 1930's. The fully grown trees emit much acid. This is why the "Smoky Mountains" and the "Blue Ridge" were named and they were named before the industrial era.
The greatest CO2 emission in north America in 2003 was the fires in California and these owe to the Eco-Nuts who would not even let a DEAD tree be cut. They would not allow disease control or even controlled burns. The ecosystem of the forrest there is "Fire Dependent" and frankly needs regular burns. So 3400 homes burn
Starting at the top of your post: The pay of US Servicemen is not increasing. They are not even getting the normal "Tax Exempt" Hazardous Duty pay that should happen. Frankly we have military families going on welfare because the situation is so messed up.
The life insurance policy payments hardly compensate for the long term damage done to families etc. They are also irrelevant in terms of the US Economy as a whole.
The orders for Munitions etc have actually been miniscule and frankly yes they went to US Contractors but the orders for Uniforms went to China. The Orders for Tanks went to Lybia, and some East European States. The perportion of US purchases in the USA Made in USA in 2001 was about 60% of US Military budget. Now with the budget up by 100% the actual purchaces in the USA made in USA are down by more than 2/3. This includes your parts purchaces, food and even the hiring of "Allies." Yes the US Contractors got the work, but the Homeland Security Act ended the requirement that they be based in the USA any more and it also ended any "Made in USA" requirements. I think that the best illustration was last summer when President Bush was in St Louis in front of a paint up poster with lots of boxes labeled "Made in USA" on it. Behind the poster the boxes were all "Made in China."
The reality is that the Bush Administration is borrowing Americans into a deep hole while not even allowing the highly taxed Americans the privilage of working on the contracts. When a US Senator proposed that a 50% "Made in USA" total US DOD Purchaces requirement be set, Rumsfeld showed up on the Hill and told her that the US DOD could not operate with such a requirement.
Welcome to reality. There is only one thing Americans are going to get out of this war. POVERTY! Because our leaders are so disloyal to us that they will even prosecute US Soldiers for doing their job and because they are so disloyal that they will not even stand behind their own Generals on the issues and because they are so disloyal that they will not even assure Americans the work so that they can finance the war we are in deep trouble. Even the 7.2% growth number is a complete fiction. Actually the increase is almost entirely US DOD Purchases and shows up as "Growth" but actually almost none of the work was done in the USA and the number probably represents a substantial DECLINE. Furthermore; the US statistics have been cooked anyway. The numbers that tell what actually is going on have had their methodology changed such that they don't even represent the facts. For example: Wage growth in the USA appears to be good, but it does not represent a Per Capita against working people but includes many who are "Management" and when you increase a wage as HP just did for execs from 4.4 Million to 48 million in one year it looks like a lot of money went around, but actually over 1,000 were laid off.
Having worked on several elections, I honestly can say that we really need to be concerned about this issue. It would be so easy to software control the outcome of an election unless there are paper ballots
What should happen is that a touch screen ballot is filled out and completed by the voter, That a paper ballot (Complete for visual inspection) would be printed out with full optical scan ability and a random serial number. This ballot would then be fed into a second machine for scan reading. This way you have a electronic total and a paper scan total.
There would have to be a technique for voiding ballots even when printed out if the voter looks at the paper and denies it for any reason. But that ballot should have to be counted as a "Stricken" ballot and linked back to the original count to eliminate it by the number.
The importance of Human Controls in this cannot be avoided. The results of the electronic totals could be posted instantly to secured servers for duplicate reporting. The local totals must be kept as well. Finally the actual paper ballots should be taken under ARMED GUARD to a location for guarded storage and recount under appropriate cross checks.
I personally would automatically recount all elections. This would have to be done under observed conditions. Frankly I see no reason that a voter could not go into any polling place and get the appropriate ballot for his area. But if you do this, the controls will have to get tighter not easier.
I would institute the use of Indellible Ink on a finger to indicate one had finished voting as is done in much of the world. I would require the ballot to be smeared with the indellible ink from the finger to validate it as well.
Why doesn't someone on /. get the idea and come up with a GPL version of the software to do this!
This is pretty Simple: I as an American Citizen must mark up my wages 150% to pay the various taxes on my income etc. If I don't pay those taxes and still get the income, I could easily compete and live well in the "World Market."
Its a choice for my congress critter, he had better either cut my taxes to essentially zero and quit supporting the Governments and Economies of the rest of the world with my money (I can supply details for the arrogant around the world who will argue this point -- prefer to keep this short) or he will have to start making others who trade in my market pay equal or higher taxes than mine. Because the alternative is that I will go out of business and with that will go his tax money. With that will go the money for Defense, Schools, Roads, Bridges, The elderly etc. Its a pretty stark choice. Either quit financing the USA, either by crushing its economy or cutting taxes to zero, or make the internationalist pirates pay the royalty they owe when they trade here!
As to productivity, US workers are on average about 20 times more productive per hour than their corresponding foreign competition. The problem is OUT OF BUSINESS means not competing at all. The rest of the world is simply not aware of the high cost of US Defense and Social Costs.
As to the Forigners or anyone posting on the list, it is no solution to economic troubles to bring another down to your level of misery. It is not good therefore to argue against another's wages or prosperity. It is wise to argue for your own but not at the expense of another!
Just for the Record, the shortage of Bike paths is pure foolishness by local idiots. The US Interstate Highway Trust fund puts 1.5% of its funding to this purpose under the "Kennedy Amendment" to it. This means that 90% of the funds come as a grant from the US Federal Government just to help you get to work on a bike etc. The only problem is that local IDIOT MORON politicos don't see that their 10% in gets back more before the construction is done.
If the State of Alabama for example were to put up 4,000 miles of such roads the outlay would be to the state less than $40 million. The Intake from construction revenues would more than cover the $40 million and it would represent the greatest tourist attraction and Industrial Growth technology they could build. New Hotels, Airports, Industry etc all from linking up the state. Live elsewhere? Same thing!
The success of River Walks and Bike Paths is amaizing. I was involved in getting a bike path build in Madison Alabama (100% local funds) years ago. It is now the richest part of town with the most money coming in to the Government. The reason homes and Business located there was the nice bike path! I ride on a trail in the area. It is always busy. Shortly It will be tied to a new school and much industrial Growth. When will people get it? This stuff makes sense!
One of the hottest parts of Clarksville Tn is its river walk. The Chattanooga Tn river walk is also such a success. Even the "Blue Bridge" in Chattanooga is such a success.
After careful consideration, I considered the difference and have found one very substantial one. The Republicans are EFFECTIVE. This makes them substantially more dangerous than the lying communistic Democrats. The Republicans are always complaining that the Democrats stop them but actually they have a considerable track record of making what they actually wanted to happen occur.
It should be noted here that there is no difference in policy or intent. They both work for their elitist (Royalist) corporate masters and dump on the ordinary American
I read the report. Bad Science. Bad sloppy calculations and clearly propaganda for the left that hates American Freedom and Prosperity.
It also belies the enormous quantities of this stuff out there. Not even their evolutionary time lines produce enough years and material to account for what has already been used at this guys calculation base rate.
Having worked for the State of Alabama Department of Revenue, Sales and Use Tax Division, I have an observation. It is too bad that the judge in this case never read the US Federal Tax Code or its Rulings. In Alabama our Sales Tax law was like the chapter of a book and all of the Rulings etc would have been another chapter. In total I suppose it might have made a small book (Very Thin) With the US Tax Code and its rulings approaching some 10,000 new pages a year and not even God could understand it, how on earth could any federal judge not avoid the obvious conclusion here that the Federal Tax Code could not be enforced as it was incomprehensible!
This actually goes to the root of the legal doctrine that "Ignorance of the Law is no excuse." This doctrine makes as its underlying assumption that any reasonable person should at least know that the law would regulate and or tax an activity based upon some basic human knowlege. I am forced to observe that most of the US Tax Code is so confusing that no rational person could be expected to anticipate it or otherwise even imagine that they should have to comply with it. For those who don't understand, the US Tax Code is so misunderstood that people actually think it applies to Income of US Citizens working a job. Actually the Law specifically states that the only parties to the US Income Tax are Foreign Nationals, and US Citizens working abroad. This has recently been ruled in court cases but naturally the Press and some others just don't quite get it. It is a mess.
Considerable info on this may be found by searching around here http://home.hiwaay.net/~becraft/ A lot more interesting stuff here too!Having worked for the State of Alabama Department of Revenue, Sales and Use Tax Division, I might know a thing or two about this. The issue is NEXUS (Connection) and an issue of where the sale occurred.
Generally the Law has held that the location of purchase is the point of Delivery of Title to the object. This might seem to be that when you get something in the mail or by freight currier that it was sold to you when you picked it up. This is not so. The issue is where did it become yours. If you paid freight, the the item became yours when and where it was handed to the freight currier. (Free on Board[FOB]) If the freight is paid for by the Supplier then it becomes yours at your door unless you accept it as FOB at their dock. This is sometimes confusing to people.
The issue of collection of sales tax at the FOB point is generally one of the State in Question will not charge Sales Taxes on items shipped out of State because the item is for "Export." Please note that the definition of "State" is Nation just like Germany or France. We are 50 NATIONS not one. We are Federated. (Allies with a common control of foreign policy externally) The state where the goods come from generally likes to see lots more business and knows that if it taxes sales to outside, then it will lose business. The state receiving the goods is offended as it undercuts the taxed business base. This problem within the USA is a private low key war among the States.
The real solution is contained in the US Constitution where the Federation is empowered to resolve such matters under the power to regulate Interstate Commerce. This being one of the powers that Congress is doing its best to forget that it has, we suffer the problem of not having our tax bases of our various States protected by the Feds. I know that people don't like paying taxes, but we have to do so to support our government. This is undermining our Federation. It threatens our security.
Prior to the Internet Catalogue Sales did the same thing. Generally the cost of freight and such made the effect minor until the late 1960's. With the advent of large efficient Freight and communication services (including but no limited to the internet) we began to see serous problems. With the Advent of "Free Trade" (allowing non-federation States into the trade mix) this has become a serious threat to the existence of our States. 44 of the 50 US States are in serious financial problems due in no small part to this problem. The loss of the "Internet Ban" does little here. The real issue here is if the Federation will come in and do its job assuring that if one state drops its sales tax on mail order or internet order sales as "Export" goods, that the other state will get to pick up the "Inport" Status. The State of Alabama has a "Use" Tax. The "Use" tax taxes the use of an item if it did not pay sales tax. As such nobody in Alabama legally did not pay these taxes already.
Frankly the various US States need to stop this Low Key War on each other's tax base and start cooperation. The proper forum for the peace settlement is CONGRESS.
The problem of stopping the DOMESTIC US tax war will not alter the problem of the Extra-Federation tax war against the USA generally. That too needs to be addressed by the US Congress and most specifically by not writing Trade Deals which give the WTO or similar bodies power to stop us from dealing with this and by repealing NAFTA and GATT and USSFTA and USCFTA.
So long as one party is held to trade handicapped with a massive tax burden and his competition is free to do so without taxation, this constitutes de facto illegal status on the taxed party. His trade is fined and thus essentially illegal. This was recognized in the US Supreme Court Rulings of 1820 that prohibited taxation of Federal Institutions by States and of Churches by States. It was ruled that "The power to tax was the power to destroy."
The general demand of States for an end of this both domestically and externally, has been bra
This is classic. A new technology that probably would have molded along with some success. DOD steps in and assures it dominance in the market regardless of other similar use technologies.
For those who don't remember this is how that "Great Inventor" Bill Gates got a product he bought (DOS) relabeled (MS DOS)and finally (Windows) into Market Dominance. No it wasn't genious of Inventing, it was sales to the right guys and everything else died in the DOD Footprint! I know it will hurt those who believe Microsoft was a wonderful Inventive Group, but they have no such history. They just got a big hand from the US DOD. Free Enterprise had nothing to do with it.
I wish the computer techies and etc would wake up and figure out what the NY Guys are doing. This has nothing to do with the truth of the previous post. (It is a true and good post) The real issue is who is going to control what is going on and what is intended. No not in the IT department!
The Robber Barrons have showed up and are attempting to loot the American Economy by justifying outsourcing and such. What more can I say
I would say more! This document should be copied to your hard drive and spread out to the world
After reading about 85 of the 400+ pages, I believe that keeping MS is for the stupid only. The long and the short of it is that MS stuff will have to be migrated every few years to the latest expensive release from MS while Linux stuff seems to be adjusted better over time.Serve this one to your politicians!
The first posters here don't have a clue as to the effects and circumstances of this. The purpose is not Autonomous Kill Vehicles though it might occur. Cruise Missiles etc already do this as does the Predator to one degree or another. The purpose here is to reduce the overhead cost on the army dramatically in hauling supplies etc over long distances with or without roads. To do this you need vehicles than can bypass disabled vehicles and overcome obstacles. They need to be free of drivers who get tired and eat up supplies.
The real effect here will be civilian. The project which like it or not will happen regardless of DARPA someday soon, is going to very nearly completely alter how we live.
To illustrate: suppose you are old blind and unable to drive. (It happens to the best of us) Now you will be able to go where you want without somebody driving you. Suppose you want to go to work but don't want to own a car? Mass Transit? No! you just get on your cell phone and call for a car. It arrives shortly and takes you where you want to go and without a driver. Freight? No more Truck Drivers and the wreaks from them being too tired. No more Taxi Drivers. Close most of the Hospitals because wreaks are not filling them up. Kids will not need parents to drive them somewhere.
There is very nearly nothing more profound than this race! It will reorganize our world. The issue here is how will we adapt. This isn't an esoteric question. We had better face it now.
For the Luddites amung us, give it up. Stopping DARPA will only give the technological edge to China. They will do the work. This is a very high amplification Technology. It Amplifies People a LOT. The issue as always will be the morals of those being Amplified, and will we allow this to cause others to be lost in the "noise."