That was the previous cycle of SCO's 'pump the stock' strategy - the one where they sent out letters to all the addresses in their customer database inviting people to (in so many words) join the litigation queue.
IANAL but it sounds like your legal guys did the right thing. It was a fishing expedition pure and simple.
As you say the typical volume seems to be around the 20k mark, with some trades spiking up towards 40-50k.
That 100k+ trade is about half the typical daily volume over the last 30 days for SCOX. I note that there was a ~60k trade about 45 minutes earlier that didn't really shift the price, whereas the big trade seems to have bounced the overnight price up to around 16.50.
Looking at the subsequent day's trading however, it didn't really help very much - a small peak of volume in the first hour (selling into the bounce?), then thin trading through the day whilst the price fell from 16.25 to 15.80 and finishing off with a flurry of trades in the last 90 minutes that halted the slide in time for the close.
Stinks like a three-day-old fish if you ask me, but as someone upthread mentioned market regulators don't really bother with penny-stocks like SCOX.
With Pro and 2000, you can do this while the box is running normally. With XP Home you have to reboot into maintenance mode (I suppose you might be able to use the cacls command in XP Home). That difference becomes even more apparent when you have to track down which registry keys the game wants to be able to scribble on.
Abso-frikken-lutely. My g/f got an OEM XP Home box last weekend (don't shout guys - the quid pro quo for not going Mac was that I'm putting Mandrake on it next weekend and help her transition to the linux world) and I nearly burst a blood-vessel when I first ran into 'Simple File Sharing' and realised that MSoft had, in their infinite wisdom, taken the full file permissioning tools out of the GUI.
I mean, what were they thinking? The main point of having limited user accounts is to minimise the amount of time users spend as root and yet the only way different limited users can share files or apps under this brain dead scheme is to save them under 'Shared Documents'. Its bad enough (tho' unsuprising) that the default starting user is an admin account called 'Owner', but if a moderately clueful home user were to make a move towards securing their box then the lack of any deeper 'expert' support beyond this moronic starter level will drive them back to their bad old ways in a heartbeat. Strike one for MSoft's new emphasis on security.
Fortunately cacls does still work from the command line but it'll need a pretty front-end on it if my g/f is going to use it with any regularity. Has anyone done this already or will I have to roll my own?
Bulldog seems to be have one of the best higher speed pricing schemes; UKP34-58 for their various 2MB packages and with a 6MB package for UKP99 (if you're happy with being throttled back to 0.5MB during office hours).
Unfortunately their best packages are restricted to the London area and their after-sales service appears to be pretty dismal at present so in the end I've gone for Nildram's thirty quid 0.5MB basic package (~USD55 given the current low dollar).
The UK has the longest uninterrupted climate records in the world - Brits started keeping the records that underpin the Central England Temperature series back in 1659; 345 years and counting baby... yay us.
According to a Met Office press release back in December, 2003 was shaping up to be the fifth warmest year in the CET series. This was despite the year including the highest land temperature ever recorded in the UK (38.5 Celcius on the 10th August). So not only notably warm, but with large variability.
[Also according to the Met Office, global warming is an observable phenomenon and 'mainly due to human activities' but what does the world's oldest frikken' climatological institute know? People like Michael Crichton and Greg Easterbrook are much more significant sources of information for the climate change controversy.]
With 2003 coming in fifth, this would mean that seven out of Central England's ten warmest years since the death of Oliver Cromwell have happened in the fifteen years since I got my bachelor's degree from UCL. Of the top ten years, only one (1733 - the tenth warmest) occurred before 1949.
Some more numbers:
It was the third warmest year for the global surface temperature series (0.45 Celcius over the 1961-90 average) and also the third warmest year for the land temperatures series (0.64 Celcius over the 1961-90 average). All ten of the warmest global surface years have occurred since 1990 (this series only goes back to the mid C19th however).
It was the warmest summer on record for Central Europe (instrumental records go back to 1781, less reliable documentary records extend the series back to the beginning of the C16th).
Finally back to the Met Office again - they are predicting that global surface temperature will be 0.5 Celsius above trend in 2004 which would make it the second warmest year on record. There's a +/- 0.12 range on that number however so they reckon there's a 20% probability the actual number will be high enough to beat the current record holder (1998 since you ask).
An unmanned lunar orbiter would be worth doing. Last time, in the early 1960s, the US sent five orbiters, which used 70mm film, a chemical film processor, and a scanner to transmit the images back. So they only took 1654 images, and the imagery is only 60 meters per pixel. Putting a modern survellance camera in lunar orbit would get us 1m imagery of the whole moon, if not better. Maybe we'll find something worth checking out.
Ask and ye shall receive. The discovery of ice at the lunar poles seems to have reignited interest in the moon - worldwide there are lots of lunar missions at various stages of planning and execution:
SMART-1 (ESA) launched in September of last year but won't achieve lunar orbit until the end of 2005 because its primary mission is to flight test an ion engine. Once in orbit it will attempt to reconfirm the Clementine/Lunar Prospector detection of polar ice deposits, map the lunar surface to about 30m resolution and do a mineral assay using a more sophisticated IR spectrometer than the one on Clementine.
Lunar-A (Japan) is scheduled for launch in September and will be deploying two instrumented impactors to assay the deep structure of the moon. It will also be mapping the lunar surface to about 30m resolution.
SELENE (Japan) is planned for 2005 and will be a heavy payload (2.5 metric tons) with a bunch of different instruments mounted on two orbiters and a propulsion/lander unit. It'll be doing detailed mapping and surveying for a year, then the lander module will be doing a soft landing proof-of-concept before a final two month study of the lunar gravitational field.
Then there are the longer term plans by China and India:
China is looking at a three phase project (orbiter, lander, returning lander) running over the 10 years to 2015 or so. The orbiter is currently being built and is expected to launch in 2006.
India has plans to launch an orbiter (Chandrayaan-1) in 2008 - roughly the same timeframe as Japan's SELENE-B mission (which is intended to be a lander/lunar rover project of some kind).
To start with these missions will probably duplicate stuff done by NASA/ESA/JAXA to a certain extent (more 30m resolution maps anyone?), which is the nature of the beast when (say it soft) a space race is in the offing - but there's always some value in repeating/confirming observations and the missions will be developing aerospace engineering capabilities and institutions in theses nations which will be necessary if space exploration is to be a truly international endeavour.
Finally both China and ESA have given tentative notice that manned missions to the moon might be on the cards for the 2020s, but those are highly aspirational at present.
Check out December's issue of Scientific American for a review of the findings from the recent probes and how they are feeding in to missions planned for the next few years. Space.com has a report from last autumns lunar science conference in Hawaii that covers a lot of this stuff as well.
I think you meant Belgium when you said The Netherlands. No idea if you're correct about the hospital workers thing, but since you can't get the country right then I think its fair to say I'm sceptical.
I think that's what they were hoping would happen - its the sort of thing that happens quite a lot and probably looked like a pretty good idea a year back.
Where they misjudged things is they decided to make their play right at the heart of IBM's "Embrace FOSS, Sell Integration Services" strategy and, whilst it would be cheaper in the short term for IBM to buy SCO out, by doing so they would be inviting every two-bit company with a failed business plan to try the same trick. Unsuprisingly IBM decided that it was better to scotch this tactic with extreme prejudice rather than pay Danegeld to scavengers and parasites for the next few decades.
This leaves Darl and the rest of the guys at Canopy with a bit of a problem; plan A has failed, which means they fall back on plan B - play for time, pump the shareprice and pull various dodgy 'financial engineering' stunts (cf the Vultus takeover) to squeeze as much cash out of the SCOX ship before it turns turtle and sinks under the horrendous barrage of legal fire from IBM and Redhat. This is a pretty risky game to play and might well attract unwelcome attention from the SEC (eventually) and lawsuits from outraged investors once the shattered hulk of SCOX hits the seabed; but since cutting their losses and folding at this late stage would crash SCOX overnight (triggering lawsuits and possible regulatory investigation) I think their judgement is that 'Damm the torpedoes, full speed ahead!' is actually safer for them.
Basically I reckon they are banking on being able to dance around the SEC and shareholder liability suits with lots of guff about "We thought we had a case", "Runaway judge", "IBM got the best law their money could buy" and similar sentiments. Whereas backing down now would be an admission that they didn't do their DD properly last year and make it a lot harder to dodge out from under the liability.
What trotski said - it wasn't an action film, it was a hammock; that is, it was an examination of a close-knit community slung between two action sequences.
The battles bookend the film and provide motivation/consequence, but the meat of the film is the hammock in between.
A more accurate description would be that these are militiamen reacting to a foreign occupying army.
The "Saddam Loyalist" type arguments come from those who's thinking is that anyone anti-US is pro-Saddam. To these people it's inconcievable that Iraqs can be both anti-Saddam and anti-US.
No doubt some of the resistance is both anti-Saddam and anti-US, but that covers a multitude of motivations; some will be anti-US because nationalist, some will be anti-US because religious, some will be anti-US because insulted/humiliated and some will be anti-US because opportunist. Finally of course some will be anti-US because they are (or were) pro-Saddam.
The big question is what kind of ratios we are talking about for these various categories and how these ratios are changing over time. I don't think there's any way we can get solid data to assess those questions (too many interested parties trying to put their view across) so you have to fall back on inference and supposition, which will probably say more about the assessor than it does about the situation on the ground.
You want sources for the draining of the southern Iraqi marshes? Googling on 'marsh', 'arab', 'drain and 'iraq' gets me 1130 hits. Number 1 is a Voice of America site and number 2 is an American University site, so I guess they fail your GWB/Rummy filter. Number 3 is an article by Robert Fisk however:
"The first time I saw the Marshes, just east of the Baghdad-Basra highway, the tourist guide was true to its words. For miles, thousands of reed huts stood on earth and papyrus islands, each inhabited by the descendants of the ancient Sumerians, a time warp of simplicity which, according to old Arabic scripts, may have begun with a devastating flood around AD620. The last time I went there, the women from one Marsh Arab village were prostituting themselves to lorry driversto make money for their impoverished families."
Its hosted on a website called Common Dreams which looks to be fairly left-leaning as far as I can see.
Link number 4 which is an article hosted on the South Wales Worker's Education Association website (not a notable hotbed of neo-con thinking) which cites UN studies and includes some comparitive Landsat images:
"This section marshals the latest evidence of a tragedy developing in Iraq since the 1970s. The drainage of the wetlands that have been home to the Ma'dan or Marsh Arabs for 5,000 years."
Link 5 is an article on the US Institute of Peace website, but this is a congressionally funded federal agency so probably fails your GWB filter.
Link 6 is a page on a personal webpage of some bloke called Mike. I don't think he's a sock-puppet for GWB, indeed looking at the site index he seems to be fairly right-on sort of chap (albeit with unfortunate goth-ey tendencies back in the 80s). Here's the first sentence:
"These satellite photos reveal exactly how Saddam Hussein is systematically draining the marshes of southern Iraq, transforming a unique eco-system into a man-made desert and destroying the ancient home of the Ma'dan or Marsh Arabs."
Link 7 is a BBC website for children. Here's the text:
"There are about 250,000 of this Shia Muslim group, also called Madan, living in Iraq.
They originally lived in the marshes around the southern end of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
After the first Gulf War, they tried to overthrow Saddam. The Iraqi government stopped them.
Saddam's government decided to drain the marshes, which split up all the Madan. This removed their ability to threaten the old regime."
Link 8 is another personal webpage, this time for a Dutch doctoral student in mathematics. It has photos of a trip he took to Iraq as part of a delegation trying to overturn the sanctions that existed post-GW1, so I think its reasonable to conclude that he doesn't much care for GWB.
Link 9 is a State dept website, so probably fails your GWB-filter.
Link 10 is a Kuwaiti website, so they probably count as GWB's sock-puppets for you.
There you go. Five out of the 10 are probably tainted for you (although I note that only 1 is an overt propaganda site). If that ratio holds good for the rest of the links then you've got 560 more webpages you can read.
Well I suppose one answer is that the elevator could be a propulsion system of sorts, extend it beyond the geostationary point and anything that rides to the top of the cable would get a 'slingshot' boost simply by undocking. I'm not sure how usefully accurate such a system would be, however my gut feel is that it'd pack quite a punch when compared with current propulsion technologies.
However a more useful answer (and one implied by the grandparent but not spelled out) is that the cost to orbit for mass is so much lower with an elevator that even if we had to haul boatloads of chemical fuel this would be a feasible proposition for interplanetary missions in a way that is just flat-out impractical at present.
Having said that your request for better propulsion systems isn't without merit. Ion engines are already well understood and would be obvious candidates for non-time critical payloads (eg. a regular programme of logistical deliveries from earth orbit to mars orbit in advance of a manned mission) with nuclear rockets or even an ORION-like system for stuff where you need to be able to put out multiple-Gs for quick-but-inefficient orbital transfers.
The problem is that these latter technologies won't get beyond wild-eyed feasibility studies until you have a cheap, routine and (above all) low-risk route to orbit; which is what the space-elevator would be (assuming for a moment that such a thing can be built in the next couple of decades or so). Once a space elevator is in place then its a pretty sure bet that there would be a hugely increased demand for better propulsion technologies and this demand would inevitably drive innovation. Without an elevator there is no demand to speak of and huge obstacles to the widespread adoption of any propulsion advances that you might be able to develop given the current, pretty miserable, funding situation for space tech in general.
So if you accept the premise that an elevator is a feasible near-future achievement *any* research effort on propulsion (or other space techs) that might compete or cannabilise progress towards the elevator has to be rejected as short-sighted and irrelevant. An elevator changes the rules of the game so profoundly that going with anything else in the meantime is pretty dumb. Build the elevator first and then use current propulsion technologies for a few years to do some pretty mind-boggling (to our mass/cost-constrained eyes) things until the explosion of space tech advances initiated by a workable space elevator delivers the propulsion systems to do the really far out, mind-boggling things.
Of course if an elevator isn't actually feasible in the medium term then those 'dumb' research prioritisation decisions to look at alternatives start to appear a bit smarter...
Nope (as the upthread poster complaining about the Oxford Rd-Lime St service demonstrates) its mostly a daily commuter service problem. Now London and the SE is the 800lb gorilla when it comes to local commuter trains, but there are similar services and similar problems in the big regional conurbations like Birmingham and Manchester. I'm not sure what it is about the Yorkshire commuter services that allows them to dodge those problems - maybe usage density and lower overall train movements.
I have been doing a weekly commute between London and Cardiff on First Great Western for the last six months or so and the service, whilst nowhere near as smooth and glossy as the GNER train from Leeds I took a couple of weeks ago, is pretty decent. Trains run twice hourly and generally arrive within 10 minutes of their scheduled time outbound; inbound to London is less reliable, but even so being more than 20 minutes late is fairly unusual (maybe three times in the ~30 Friday afternoon trains I've taken).
That sort of service level could certainly be improved, but its perfectly adequate for my type of commuting (once per week and where I don't have to be in at work on the dot of nine o'clock first day of the week) and its nowhere near as bad as some of the nightmares I've had doing daily commutes in and around London.
Senators are part of congress, right? So he's a congressional representative. Instead of representing to the house of representatives he represents to the senate.
They are a west country/midlands dish originally I think. As you say a big (tennis ball or so) meatball, with seasoning and traditionally served with a slightly sweet oniony gravy.
I don't think there's supposed to be offal in 'em although obviously commercial products will generally make use of the unmentionable bits left on the carcass after the expensive cuts have been taken.
In asia you'll generally not see floor or street numbers with 4 in them for the same reason. Its like office buildings in the US skipping 13 on the elevator panel.
Of course, with the quantity of superstition you get in Asia they also skip 13 (even though that's a European superstition - better safe than sorry, I guess) so the elevator panel for my apartment building in Jakarta skipped from 12 to 15.
Faggot is spelled with two g's whether you are using it as slang for a homosexual or to mean a bunch of firewood, so your joke doesn't really work.
In British english both faggot and niggardly are slightly old-fashioned, but they definitely aren't archaic. Anyone with a reasonably broad vocabulary would know what was meant and wouldn't take it as being homophobic or racist (they'd almost certainly know the US slang meaning for faggot as well, but would discount it unless the speaker was American or the context meant that there was a clear intention to use it to mean a gay man).
Of course Serbia/Serbians used to be Servia/Servians but the old spelling was felt to be a little too close to 'servile' back in 1914 when gallant little Serbia was an Entente ally.
Edwardian PC in action...
Regards
Luke
Wouldn't it be better to raise the standard of living for the rest of the world to "our" standard?
Americans constitute ~4% of the world's population and yet they consume approximately one quarter of global production. Thus to raise everyone up US living standards would require global production to increase six-fold, which isn't going to happen for quite a while even assuming that the planet could cope with such a thing.
Lets suppose we could wave a magic wand and do it tomorrow, this developmental scenario is positive-sum materially but status games are inherently zero-sum; so Americans would lose a bunch of 'positional goods' they currently get by virtue of being way-out-ahead top of the global heap.
This is basically what has happened in the UK over the last century and a half; we Brits are *much* richer, both individually and as a society, than we were in 1850 but back then our nation was king of the hill whereas now we have 'declined' to merely being one of the dozen or so regional powers dotted around in the shadow of the US colossus. This seems to nag at quite a few of my fellow Brits and I rather think you'd get a similar psychological hangover in the US if there was a sudden magical uplift this Xmas.
250 bucks a month for your electricity? That's...[mental arithmetic]... 750 quid a quarter which is about 10-times what I pay for electricity on a small place in London.
I know its humid as all getout in Louisiana, but you must be running a mondo AC unit there.
For the rest of it - I reckon you're burning about 1/3 of your hypothetical budget on personal transport, so that's the obvious place to make up most of your projected shortfall. Personally I'd also target your cable service, but then I've gone without a TV at home for the last couple of years.
A hundred bucks a week on food is hiding a bunch of fat (har har) as well. As a single guy then you can eat well on less than that if you're willing to be sensible about not buying prepackaged stuff and planning ahead a bit.
So yeah, I reckon you could live on $28k/year even counting a third off for taxes. You'd have to change your lifestyle but its entirely feasible.
You misread the previous poster. He said (its in the section you quoted) that *APHE* ammo was last used in WW2. IIRC that ammo used tungsten for a penetrator rather than DU. APHE has nothing to do with DU anti-tank shells other than both technologies are intended to destroy tanks.
As others have said modern anti-tank rounds are basically very fast, very dense crossbow bolts and achieve their killing effect via kinetic energy. By contrast APHE get to the same end-point (breaching a tank's hull) by creating an explosion on the outer surface of the tank - there are various different wrinkles regarding how this explosion translates into a hole through the armour, but the basic operating principal of APHE is fundamentally different to that governing kinetic rounds.
As others have also said DU is not nuclear waste, the 'depleted' part of DU refers to the fact that the more radioactive isotope (U238) has been removed leaving the less radioactive isotope (U235) behind. DU is the natural consequence of the enrichment process - you start with natural uranium (NU) and after running it through an enrichment process you are left with a small quantity of enriched uranium (EU) and a larger quantity of depleted uranium (DU).
Now EU is used as feedstock for nuclear reactors or to make the warheads for certain types of nuclear weapons, so DU is certainly a byproduct of the nuclear industry but it is not 'nuclear waste' as the term is generally used. It should also be pretty obvious that DU is actually less radioactive than either EU or NU - its still a bit radioactive (because U235 is an alpha emitter) and its still chemically toxic (as all heavy metals are). These attributes make the post-battle effects of DU munitions problematic, but the same can be said of pretty much any kind of war materiel. People still get hurt in northern France by munitions dating from the 1914-18 war for example.
Now I'll agree for the most part that Arctic ice is mostly under water, but there is a good segment that peeks above water as well. Actual volumes I don't happen to have access to, but needless to say there would likely be an effect on global sea level as a direct result of this ice sheet who you can see above sea level.
Nope this is incorrect. Ice floating in water displaces the same volume that it would occupy if it were a liquid. As it melts visualise it 'shrinking' until it sits in the blob of space that was previously full of the 8/9ths of the ice that lay below the surface.
More or less then the Antarctic ice sheet... it's difficult for me to say. Off hand i'd be agree with you just because I don't have any evidence such as how much ice there is in Antartica, nor am I aware how much of Antartica is actually presently above current sea level. For all I know, the Antartic could very well be mostly below current sea levels.
The antarctic continent is dry land ie. above sea level. Indeed a significant part of the antarctic landform is a high plateau - Scott and Amundsen had to climb up through mountains on the way to the south pole. IIRC the antarctic icecap is on the order of kilometers deep, which means that if it melts then there would be a significant effect upon global sea levels.
There is a similar landbased icecap in the arctic however on Greenland (also on the order of kilometers deep). This too would have a significant effect upon global sea levels if it melted.
I imagine that ice forms on various other arctic islands (Baffin, Spitzbergen etc) would also contribute to a sea level rise, but the 800lb gorillas for icemelt-fuelled sea level rise are the Antarctic plateau and Greenland.
Slashdot Mirror
That was the previous cycle of SCO's 'pump the stock' strategy - the one where they sent out letters to all the addresses in their customer database inviting people to (in so many words) join the litigation queue.
IANAL but it sounds like your legal guys did the right thing. It was a fishing expedition pure and simple.
Regards
Luke
As you say the typical volume seems to be around the 20k mark, with some trades spiking up towards 40-50k.
That 100k+ trade is about half the typical daily volume over the last 30 days for SCOX. I note that there was a ~60k trade about 45 minutes earlier that didn't really shift the price, whereas the big trade seems to have bounced the overnight price up to around 16.50.
Looking at the subsequent day's trading however, it didn't really help very much - a small peak of volume in the first hour (selling into the bounce?), then thin trading through the day whilst the price fell from 16.25 to 15.80 and finishing off with a flurry of trades in the last 90 minutes that halted the slide in time for the close.
Stinks like a three-day-old fish if you ask me, but as someone upthread mentioned market regulators don't really bother with penny-stocks like SCOX.
Regards
Luke
Because IBM doesn't distribute Linux?
Abso-frikken-lutely. My g/f got an OEM XP Home box last weekend (don't shout guys - the quid pro quo for not going Mac was that I'm putting Mandrake on it next weekend and help her transition to the linux world) and I nearly burst a blood-vessel when I first ran into 'Simple File Sharing' and realised that MSoft had, in their infinite wisdom, taken the full file permissioning tools out of the GUI.
I mean, what were they thinking? The main point of having limited user accounts is to minimise the amount of time users spend as root and yet the only way different limited users can share files or apps under this brain dead scheme is to save them under 'Shared Documents'. Its bad enough (tho' unsuprising) that the default starting user is an admin account called 'Owner', but if a moderately clueful home user were to make a move towards securing their box then the lack of any deeper 'expert' support beyond this moronic starter level will drive them back to their bad old ways in a heartbeat. Strike one for MSoft's new emphasis on security.
Fortunately cacls does still work from the command line but it'll need a pretty front-end on it if my g/f is going to use it with any regularity. Has anyone done this already or will I have to roll my own?
Regards Luke
Bulldog seems to be have one of the best higher speed pricing schemes; UKP34-58 for their various 2MB packages and with a 6MB package for UKP99 (if you're happy with being throttled back to 0.5MB during office hours).
Unfortunately their best packages are restricted to the London area and their after-sales service appears to be pretty dismal at present so in the end I've gone for Nildram's thirty quid 0.5MB basic package (~USD55 given the current low dollar).
It should be activating next week, which is nice.
Regards
Luke
Regards Luke
The UK has the longest uninterrupted climate records in the world - Brits started keeping the records that underpin the Central England Temperature series back in 1659; 345 years and counting baby... yay us.
According to a Met Office press release back in December, 2003 was shaping up to be the fifth warmest year in the CET series. This was despite the year including the highest land temperature ever recorded in the UK (38.5 Celcius on the 10th August). So not only notably warm, but with large variability.
[Also according to the Met Office, global warming is an observable phenomenon and 'mainly due to human activities' but what does the world's oldest frikken' climatological institute know? People like Michael Crichton and Greg Easterbrook are much more significant sources of information for the climate change controversy.]
With 2003 coming in fifth, this would mean that seven out of Central England's ten warmest years since the death of Oliver Cromwell have happened in the fifteen years since I got my bachelor's degree from UCL. Of the top ten years, only one (1733 - the tenth warmest) occurred before 1949.
Some more numbers:
It was the third warmest year for the global surface temperature series (0.45 Celcius over the 1961-90 average) and also the third warmest year for the land temperatures series (0.64 Celcius over the 1961-90 average). All ten of the warmest global surface years have occurred since 1990 (this series only goes back to the mid C19th however).
It was the warmest summer on record for Central Europe (instrumental records go back to 1781, less reliable documentary records extend the series back to the beginning of the C16th).
Finally back to the Met Office again - they are predicting that global surface temperature will be 0.5 Celsius above trend in 2004 which would make it the second warmest year on record. There's a +/- 0.12 range on that number however so they reckon there's a 20% probability the actual number will be high enough to beat the current record holder (1998 since you ask).
Regards
Luke
Ask and ye shall receive. The discovery of ice at the lunar poles seems to have reignited interest in the moon - worldwide there are lots of lunar missions at various stages of planning and execution:
SMART-1 (ESA) launched in September of last year but won't achieve lunar orbit until the end of 2005 because its primary mission is to flight test an ion engine. Once in orbit it will attempt to reconfirm the Clementine/Lunar Prospector detection of polar ice deposits, map the lunar surface to about 30m resolution and do a mineral assay using a more sophisticated IR spectrometer than the one on Clementine.
Lunar-A (Japan) is scheduled for launch in September and will be deploying two instrumented impactors to assay the deep structure of the moon. It will also be mapping the lunar surface to about 30m resolution.
SELENE (Japan) is planned for 2005 and will be a heavy payload (2.5 metric tons) with a bunch of different instruments mounted on two orbiters and a propulsion/lander unit. It'll be doing detailed mapping and surveying for a year, then the lander module will be doing a soft landing proof-of-concept before a final two month study of the lunar gravitational field.
Then there are the longer term plans by China and India:
China is looking at a three phase project (orbiter, lander, returning lander) running over the 10 years to 2015 or so. The orbiter is currently being built and is expected to launch in 2006.
India has plans to launch an orbiter (Chandrayaan-1) in 2008 - roughly the same timeframe as Japan's SELENE-B mission (which is intended to be a lander/lunar rover project of some kind).
To start with these missions will probably duplicate stuff done by NASA/ESA/JAXA to a certain extent (more 30m resolution maps anyone?), which is the nature of the beast when (say it soft) a space race is in the offing - but there's always some value in repeating/confirming observations and the missions will be developing aerospace engineering capabilities and institutions in theses nations which will be necessary if space exploration is to be a truly international endeavour.
Finally both China and ESA have given tentative notice that manned missions to the moon might be on the cards for the 2020s, but those are highly aspirational at present.
Check out December's issue of Scientific American for a review of the findings from the recent probes and how they are feeding in to missions planned for the next few years. Space.com has a report from last autumns lunar science conference in Hawaii that covers a lot of this stuff as well.
Regards Luke
I think you meant Belgium when you said The Netherlands. No idea if you're correct about the hospital workers thing, but since you can't get the country right then I think its fair to say I'm sceptical.
Regards
Luke
I think that's what they were hoping would happen - its the sort of thing that happens quite a lot and probably looked like a pretty good idea a year back.
Where they misjudged things is they decided to make their play right at the heart of IBM's "Embrace FOSS, Sell Integration Services" strategy and, whilst it would be cheaper in the short term for IBM to buy SCO out, by doing so they would be inviting every two-bit company with a failed business plan to try the same trick. Unsuprisingly IBM decided that it was better to scotch this tactic with extreme prejudice rather than pay Danegeld to scavengers and parasites for the next few decades.
This leaves Darl and the rest of the guys at Canopy with a bit of a problem; plan A has failed, which means they fall back on plan B - play for time, pump the shareprice and pull various dodgy 'financial engineering' stunts (cf the Vultus takeover) to squeeze as much cash out of the SCOX ship before it turns turtle and sinks under the horrendous barrage of legal fire from IBM and Redhat. This is a pretty risky game to play and might well attract unwelcome attention from the SEC (eventually) and lawsuits from outraged investors once the shattered hulk of SCOX hits the seabed; but since cutting their losses and folding at this late stage would crash SCOX overnight (triggering lawsuits and possible regulatory investigation) I think their judgement is that 'Damm the torpedoes, full speed ahead!' is actually safer for them.
Basically I reckon they are banking on being able to dance around the SEC and shareholder liability suits with lots of guff about "We thought we had a case", "Runaway judge", "IBM got the best law their money could buy" and similar sentiments. Whereas backing down now would be an admission that they didn't do their DD properly last year and make it a lot harder to dodge out from under the liability.
Regards
Luke
What trotski said - it wasn't an action film, it was a hammock; that is, it was an examination of a close-knit community slung between two action sequences.
The battles bookend the film and provide motivation/consequence, but the meat of the film is the hammock in between.
Regards
Luke
No doubt some of the resistance is both anti-Saddam and anti-US, but that covers a multitude of motivations; some will be anti-US because nationalist, some will be anti-US because religious, some will be anti-US because insulted/humiliated and some will be anti-US because opportunist. Finally of course some will be anti-US because they are (or were) pro-Saddam.
The big question is what kind of ratios we are talking about for these various categories and how these ratios are changing over time. I don't think there's any way we can get solid data to assess those questions (too many interested parties trying to put their view across) so you have to fall back on inference and supposition, which will probably say more about the assessor than it does about the situation on the ground.
Regards Luke
You want sources for the draining of the southern Iraqi marshes? Googling on 'marsh', 'arab', 'drain and 'iraq' gets me 1130 hits. Number 1 is a Voice of America site and number 2 is an American University site, so I guess they fail your GWB/Rummy filter. Number 3 is an article by Robert Fisk however:
"The first time I saw the Marshes, just east of the Baghdad-Basra highway, the tourist guide was true to its words. For miles, thousands of reed huts stood on earth and papyrus islands, each inhabited by the descendants of the ancient Sumerians, a time warp of simplicity which, according to old Arabic scripts, may have begun with a devastating flood around AD620. The last time I went there, the women from one Marsh Arab village were prostituting themselves to lorry driversto make money for their impoverished families."
Its hosted on a website called Common Dreams which looks to be fairly left-leaning as far as I can see.
Link number 4 which is an article hosted on the South Wales Worker's Education Association website (not a notable hotbed of neo-con thinking) which cites UN studies and includes some comparitive Landsat images:
"This section marshals the latest evidence of a tragedy developing in Iraq since the 1970s. The drainage of the wetlands that have been home to the Ma'dan or Marsh Arabs for 5,000 years."
Link 5 is an article on the US Institute of Peace website, but this is a congressionally funded federal agency so probably fails your GWB filter.
Link 6 is a page on a personal webpage of some bloke called Mike. I don't think he's a sock-puppet for GWB, indeed looking at the site index he seems to be fairly right-on sort of chap (albeit with unfortunate goth-ey tendencies back in the 80s). Here's the first sentence:
"These satellite photos reveal exactly how Saddam Hussein is systematically draining the marshes of southern Iraq, transforming a unique eco-system into a man-made desert and destroying the ancient home of the Ma'dan or Marsh Arabs."
Link 7 is a BBC website for children. Here's the text:
"There are about 250,000 of this Shia Muslim group, also called Madan, living in Iraq. They originally lived in the marshes around the southern end of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
After the first Gulf War, they tried to overthrow Saddam. The Iraqi government stopped them.
Saddam's government decided to drain the marshes, which split up all the Madan. This removed their ability to threaten the old regime."
Link 8 is another personal webpage, this time for a Dutch doctoral student in mathematics. It has photos of a trip he took to Iraq as part of a delegation trying to overturn the sanctions that existed post-GW1, so I think its reasonable to conclude that he doesn't much care for GWB.
Link 9 is a State dept website, so probably fails your GWB-filter.
Link 10 is a Kuwaiti website, so they probably count as GWB's sock-puppets for you.
There you go. Five out of the 10 are probably tainted for you (although I note that only 1 is an overt propaganda site). If that ratio holds good for the rest of the links then you've got 560 more webpages you can read.
Regards Luke
PS Dunno why the l
Well I suppose one answer is that the elevator could be a propulsion system of sorts, extend it beyond the geostationary point and anything that rides to the top of the cable would get a 'slingshot' boost simply by undocking. I'm not sure how usefully accurate such a system would be, however my gut feel is that it'd pack quite a punch when compared with current propulsion technologies.
However a more useful answer (and one implied by the grandparent but not spelled out) is that the cost to orbit for mass is so much lower with an elevator that even if we had to haul boatloads of chemical fuel this would be a feasible proposition for interplanetary missions in a way that is just flat-out impractical at present.
Having said that your request for better propulsion systems isn't without merit. Ion engines are already well understood and would be obvious candidates for non-time critical payloads (eg. a regular programme of logistical deliveries from earth orbit to mars orbit in advance of a manned mission) with nuclear rockets or even an ORION-like system for stuff where you need to be able to put out multiple-Gs for quick-but-inefficient orbital transfers.
The problem is that these latter technologies won't get beyond wild-eyed feasibility studies until you have a cheap, routine and (above all) low-risk route to orbit; which is what the space-elevator would be (assuming for a moment that such a thing can be built in the next couple of decades or so). Once a space elevator is in place then its a pretty sure bet that there would be a hugely increased demand for better propulsion technologies and this demand would inevitably drive innovation. Without an elevator there is no demand to speak of and huge obstacles to the widespread adoption of any propulsion advances that you might be able to develop given the current, pretty miserable, funding situation for space tech in general.
So if you accept the premise that an elevator is a feasible near-future achievement *any* research effort on propulsion (or other space techs) that might compete or cannabilise progress towards the elevator has to be rejected as short-sighted and irrelevant. An elevator changes the rules of the game so profoundly that going with anything else in the meantime is pretty dumb. Build the elevator first and then use current propulsion technologies for a few years to do some pretty mind-boggling (to our mass/cost-constrained eyes) things until the explosion of space tech advances initiated by a workable space elevator delivers the propulsion systems to do the really far out, mind-boggling things.
Of course if an elevator isn't actually feasible in the medium term then those 'dumb' research prioritisation decisions to look at alternatives start to appear a bit smarter...
Regards
Luke
Nope (as the upthread poster complaining about the Oxford Rd-Lime St service demonstrates) its mostly a daily commuter service problem. Now London and the SE is the 800lb gorilla when it comes to local commuter trains, but there are similar services and similar problems in the big regional conurbations like Birmingham and Manchester. I'm not sure what it is about the Yorkshire commuter services that allows them to dodge those problems - maybe usage density and lower overall train movements.
I have been doing a weekly commute between London and Cardiff on First Great Western for the last six months or so and the service, whilst nowhere near as smooth and glossy as the GNER train from Leeds I took a couple of weeks ago, is pretty decent. Trains run twice hourly and generally arrive within 10 minutes of their scheduled time outbound; inbound to London is less reliable, but even so being more than 20 minutes late is fairly unusual (maybe three times in the ~30 Friday afternoon trains I've taken).
That sort of service level could certainly be improved, but its perfectly adequate for my type of commuting (once per week and where I don't have to be in at work on the dot of nine o'clock first day of the week) and its nowhere near as bad as some of the nightmares I've had doing daily commutes in and around London.
Regards
Luke
Senators are part of congress, right? So he's a congressional representative. Instead of representing to the house of representatives he represents to the senate.
Regards
Luke
Mmmmm Braiiins....
They are a west country/midlands dish originally I think. As you say a big (tennis ball or so) meatball, with seasoning and traditionally served with a slightly sweet oniony gravy.
I don't think there's supposed to be offal in 'em although obviously commercial products will generally make use of the unmentionable bits left on the carcass after the expensive cuts have been taken.
Regards
Luke
In asia you'll generally not see floor or street numbers with 4 in them for the same reason. Its like office buildings in the US skipping 13 on the elevator panel.
Of course, with the quantity of superstition you get in Asia they also skip 13 (even though that's a European superstition - better safe than sorry, I guess) so the elevator panel for my apartment building in Jakarta skipped from 12 to 15.
Regards
Luke
Faggot is spelled with two g's whether you are using it as slang for a homosexual or to mean a bunch of firewood, so your joke doesn't really work.
In British english both faggot and niggardly are slightly old-fashioned, but they definitely aren't archaic. Anyone with a reasonably broad vocabulary would know what was meant and wouldn't take it as being homophobic or racist (they'd almost certainly know the US slang meaning for faggot as well, but would discount it unless the speaker was American or the context meant that there was a clear intention to use it to mean a gay man).
Regards
Luke
Of course Serbia/Serbians used to be Servia/Servians but the old spelling was felt to be a little too close to 'servile' back in 1914 when gallant little Serbia was an Entente ally. Edwardian PC in action... Regards Luke
Americans constitute ~4% of the world's population and yet they consume approximately one quarter of global production. Thus to raise everyone up US living standards would require global production to increase six-fold, which isn't going to happen for quite a while even assuming that the planet could cope with such a thing.
Lets suppose we could wave a magic wand and do it tomorrow, this developmental scenario is positive-sum materially but status games are inherently zero-sum; so Americans would lose a bunch of 'positional goods' they currently get by virtue of being way-out-ahead top of the global heap.
This is basically what has happened in the UK over the last century and a half; we Brits are *much* richer, both individually and as a society, than we were in 1850 but back then our nation was king of the hill whereas now we have 'declined' to merely being one of the dozen or so regional powers dotted around in the shadow of the US colossus. This seems to nag at quite a few of my fellow Brits and I rather think you'd get a similar psychological hangover in the US if there was a sudden magical uplift this Xmas.
Regards
Luke
250 bucks a month for your electricity? That's...[mental arithmetic]... 750 quid a quarter which is about 10-times what I pay for electricity on a small place in London.
I know its humid as all getout in Louisiana, but you must be running a mondo AC unit there.
For the rest of it - I reckon you're burning about 1/3 of your hypothetical budget on personal transport, so that's the obvious place to make up most of your projected shortfall. Personally I'd also target your cable service, but then I've gone without a TV at home for the last couple of years.
A hundred bucks a week on food is hiding a bunch of fat (har har) as well. As a single guy then you can eat well on less than that if you're willing to be sensible about not buying prepackaged stuff and planning ahead a bit.
So yeah, I reckon you could live on $28k/year even counting a third off for taxes. You'd have to change your lifestyle but its entirely feasible.
Regards
Luke
You misread the previous poster. He said (its in the section you quoted) that *APHE* ammo was last used in WW2. IIRC that ammo used tungsten for a penetrator rather than DU. APHE has nothing to do with DU anti-tank shells other than both technologies are intended to destroy tanks.
As others have said modern anti-tank rounds are basically very fast, very dense crossbow bolts and achieve their killing effect via kinetic energy. By contrast APHE get to the same end-point (breaching a tank's hull) by creating an explosion on the outer surface of the tank - there are various different wrinkles regarding how this explosion translates into a hole through the armour, but the basic operating principal of APHE is fundamentally different to that governing kinetic rounds.
As others have also said DU is not nuclear waste, the 'depleted' part of DU refers to the fact that the more radioactive isotope (U238) has been removed leaving the less radioactive isotope (U235) behind. DU is the natural consequence of the enrichment process - you start with natural uranium (NU) and after running it through an enrichment process you are left with a small quantity of enriched uranium (EU) and a larger quantity of depleted uranium (DU).
Now EU is used as feedstock for nuclear reactors or to make the warheads for certain types of nuclear weapons, so DU is certainly a byproduct of the nuclear industry but it is not 'nuclear waste' as the term is generally used. It should also be pretty obvious that DU is actually less radioactive than either EU or NU - its still a bit radioactive (because U235 is an alpha emitter) and its still chemically toxic (as all heavy metals are). These attributes make the post-battle effects of DU munitions problematic, but the same can be said of pretty much any kind of war materiel. People still get hurt in northern France by munitions dating from the 1914-18 war for example.
Regards
Luke
You might have seen him in 'Mystery Men' a couple of years ago. He played Tony P.
Regards
Luke
There is a similar landbased icecap in the arctic however on Greenland (also on the order of kilometers deep). This too would have a significant effect upon global sea levels if it melted.
I imagine that ice forms on various other arctic islands (Baffin, Spitzbergen etc) would also contribute to a sea level rise, but the 800lb gorillas for icemelt-fuelled sea level rise are the Antarctic plateau and Greenland.
Regards
Luke