There are some places you can send nuclear material. One company in particular that I'm aware of is Energy Solutions who operates a repository near Salt Lake City that takes in a fairly large amount of nuclear materials (like old x-ray machines, radiation suits of reactor workers, gloves from hospitals, and other similar stuff). There are other locations and companies too.
The problem as you've alluded to is "high level nuclear waste" from reactors, such as the proposed Yucca Mountain repository. Yes, the idea of such a facility has been shit canned and is a continued political football. Why anybody would object to building such a facility next to the Nevada Test Range is beyond my comprehension, but so be it. There are other potential locations, as well as reprocessing plants that could use spent fuel and convert it into useful by-products of various kinds and even fuel nuclear power plants for another 500 years or more just off of existing stockpiles.
As far as moving the fuel through residential neighborhoods, the material can be moved in small enough quantities and in strong enough containers that it would be far safer than moving petroleum to a neighborhood gasoline station. Those routinely move through residential neighborhoods, so what is the objection again?
I can't imagine anything more "geeky" or "stuff that matters" than talking about the effects of shutting down nuclear power around the world. Building nuclear power plants is the ultimate in nerd culture, where nuclear engineering used to be the hot college major that everybody with half a brain would try to enroll into and where you would find all of the math nerds who wanted to make money.
As for the consequences of nuclear power, it really doesn't matter what your political leanings might be, this is pretty interesting stuff and something that really does have a long-term impact upon human society. You might be at odds about the approach that should be taken and if shutting down all of these nuclear power plants is a good or bad thing to do, but it really matters to very ordinary people who receive the electrical power from these plants. It certainly has a major impact upon your day to day activities and your monthly utility bills, not to mention just about every other aspect of your daily life in the 21st Century.
That is also sort of the point of the article, that a bunch of people who should know better are missing an important story that is not currently a part of the national or international forum of ideas. It really does matter.
That somebody is likely going to be Planetary Resources, or some other similar company who is going to get involved with asteroid mining. I would suspect that when Rio Tinto gets involved is when you will see serious money being put on the line for asteroid mining (they make IBM seem like a small start-up company). Rio Tinto also has the cash reserves necessary to build a mining colony in space if necessary, and certainly have mining operations in some rather inhospitable locations around the world. Moving into space would be easy in comparison to some of their efforts.
While I'm impressed with Ceres as a world, and I'd agree that its water resources are something that would be worth using, there are sources of water which are much more accessible and can use solar-powered ion engines in the meantime. I would imagine that some Thorium reactors might also be used, but nuclear engineering in a microgravity environment is something that hasn't had much engineering development effort to perfect. Some pebble reactors and some other interesting designs might work, but it would take some effort to get them build and even designed in the first place. Nothing which breaks physics like an FTL ship, but it does require some real engineering in a completely different design domain. I'll also note that the Moon and possibly Mercury would be excellent places to obtain Uranium and Thorium, and there certainly would be some other potential sources for those materials with Apollo-class asteroids.
How many spacecraft have actually gone beyond the orbit of Mars? You can count them on two hands, out of tens of thousands of spacecraft that have been sent into space. Yes, unmanned spacecraft can reach the outer planets and have, but they are exceptional spacecraft that would need to be designed for that specific kind of a mission.
I'm just saying that for 99.9% of all spacecraft that will ever be built, it isn't a problem.
Technically, getting to LEO cheaply is a solved problem, at least on paper.
It really hasn't been an easily solved problem getting to LEO, technically speaking. There are some fanciful ideas and dreamers who come up with crazy things like space elevators or thermal-laser launch systems, but as a practical matter those haven't really been built for actual payloads.
There are a number of companies who are working on trying to find an actual solution to launch actual payloads on the cheap. The #1 thing that everybody (across the space hardware industry) is looking at right now is simply increasing the reuse of existing components instead of throwing millions of dollars worth of hardware away into the oceans of the Earth on every launch. There are dozens of different approaches to doing that, but it mostly boils down to people just trying one or two of those ideas and getting it done.
Ignore the AC idiot. He is really being a troll and are clueless about reality or the state of current technology. So much is happening in space that you really can't keep track of it all any more, even if you do that full time. I'm just talking new ideas and discoveries that merit entries in scientific journals, much less keeping track of launches and actual stuff that is happening in space.
Further out there is less solar energy for the solar cells but we can laser illuminate them.
Solar energy production only really becomes an issue when you get beyond Mars.... about the orbit of Jupiter or so (perhaps a little closer to the Sun depending on your solar array size and efficiency). There is still a whole lot of Solar System much closer that can be used for all kinds of activities, including 99.9% of all satellites that are currently in use or for that matter have ever been used. Exploration of the outer Solar System definitely requires some alternate energy sources, but that isn't going to be anywhere near where these nanocube vehicles are going to be operating at.
One of the huge things that is being worked on right now is trying to refuel satellites where their propellant has been depleted. At the moment, even otherwise functioning satellites have to be shut down when that happens, so finding a propellant that is easy to transport and transfer can make a huge difference.... especially when those satellites cost billions of dollars just to build.
The Pacific Ocean is something very inconvenient for a spacecraft in Geo-synchronous orbit. In fact, it is much, much easier to grab something from the Moon or from an asteroid or comet than it is to get that same bucket of water from the Pacific Ocean. In fact, it would be easier and "cheaper" (assuming the infrastructure was in place) to mine the ice caps of Mars than it would be to get water from the Pacific Ocean.
The gravity well is something that is not just from science fiction, but something that has to do with real-life physics. Or are you one of those who thinks the Apollo Moon landings happened in a Burbank studio? I suppose NASA has never sent anything above the "sky" either, not even a communications satellite? Without real people doing real things in space, you would likely be dead. I'm not exaggerating.
The objections to that pipeline are mostly about the use of tar sands and possible oil spills. This would be a different animal. Of course there would be some opposition, but nothing like the pipeline.
P.S. Similar objections were raised about the Alaska pipeline (us old fogeys remember such stuff). It was still built, and probably built better because of the opposition. Who knew that the real problem would be sailing a ship into a reef.
The objections to the Keystone pipeline are simply because it is a convenient political target at the moment..... while dozens of other similar pipelines are being built and hundreds of others are currently in operation quietly with very little fuss. If there were oil spills, you would be hearing about it because it would be in the news..... news because it is an unusual thing to see happening. Yes, I know that there are pipeline spills which do happen, and they do get reported by main stream news media sources as well.
The Trans-Alaska Pipeline was also something that became a similar kind of political football. The people of Alaska don't complain now because every Alaskan citizen receives an annual paycheck coming from the government for oil royalties.
Terrorists go for planes as most people seem to view them as more "cool" than trains, and assume they carry richer passengers. Goodness knows why, and that could change.
I personally think that if terrorists went after the Autobahn or the U.S. Interstate Highway system, they would cause far more economic damage and possibly kill even more people.
The only thing is that I don't want to go through a TSA security check point each time I get onto a freeway on ramp. Sure enough, once any sort of terrorism activity happens on a transportation system like that, you will see people screaming to beef up security there.
And about that earthquake concern, they still built that rail line project in LA anyway, that's been beneficial to residents.
The not so highspeed rail project between Barstow and Fresno that will be the world's slowest "high speed rail system", while I'll admit is under construction, but the only benefit to residents so far in the area is to help reduce unemployment in the area in a fashion similar to the Parable of the Broken Window. There certainly is no reason to believe that the rail line will ever actually run and deliver passengers, and so far it hasn't delivered a single passenger between any two points.
Also, Musk's idea is to run inside a vacuum tube. A leak caused by an earthquake would let in air, which, if you hit it at 4000 mph, would be like hitting a brick wall.
I'm really curious about what details you happen to know about this hyperloop system. Are you a SpaceX or Tesla employee that has had a couple of cool ones with the boss to get him to spill his guts about the idea?
Otherwise, I don't think anybody but Musk has a bloody clue about how his system works. I've seen the interviews and public statements about the idea, but frankly neither this particular article nor any other shows anything other than another high-speed transport system. I'll agree that vacuum tube transport systems seem to fit the concept of hyperloops from the perspective of "this is the best thing that fits the idea", but all of that is pure guess work. There are other possibilities too, but the real point is that nobody has a clue.
It seems, based on some statements by Musk, that some actual engineering R&D work has gone into the idea (aka there might be some people at either Tesla and/or SpaceX that have helped Elon with some calculations and fleshing out the concept) but he certainly has made no public statements about the concept in any level of detail.... including even if there will be vacuum tubes involved in any part of the system. When asked explicitly if it was an underground vacuum tube system, Elon Musk even said "No".
In other words, this whole article is just a bunch of BS.
I suppose this prevents people from playing Facebook games with sports-related themes where FB avatar images and names show up on the screen or having those sports related games link to user profiles.
I can see how this might be of interest to the people who run Google-plus. I am trying to see how this is non-obvious though. It would really surprise me that there is no prior art.
This is being a troll. If you put Reagan into this position as being somebody who screwed up the country, you likely need to mention every President since Calvin Coolidge as having messed up the country so completely that it could even be said that the American Republic as it formerly existed is dead.
Of course you likely think Coolidge as a screw up too, but at least he paid down the national debt (not just reduced deficits) and cut 2/3rds of the federal government at the time into unemployment lines.... not that it made too many people unemployed by doing that. Even the War and Navy departments were quite small and only a fraction of the government even in proportion to what they are today.
Empty threats like sending people into labor camps and sterilizing people shows that you are also singularly incapable of becoming President, as you won't even understand the oath of office that you would be taking. Then again, I don't think any of those last dozen Presidents have kept their oaths either.
How many Development departments have a charge-back process? Where any off-contract work, any last-minute feature is charged to the sales department.
That sounds like a management issue to me. If those at the top don't know how to run a company and make money, they really shouldn't be in those positions.
The crazy idea that an engineering department can't make money is one of the most stupid things I've ever heard.... yet I've seen far too many companies who think that way.
This really takes a strong manager, and especially a CEO who can stand up to customers on stuff like this and especially stand up to the sales team saying "no, we won't do that". Any time there is a feature request after the "contract" is signed, it should cost the customer money. Usually it should cost that customer a whole lot of money. Keep in mind, any time there are changes like this, it really does cost the company as a whole quite a bit of money so by demanding that customers pay for those costs you are really asking for the customer to cover the cost of the product itself.
Indeed, if you are "pushing back" on management, you might even mention that it is their fiduciary responsibility to make sure that the customer pays for the things that cost the company money. That is one way to keep this kind of thing under control, as when it starts to cost the customer money they usually shut up.... or are willing to pony up a huge pile of money for things that really do matter to them. At that point, you have the option of either hiring more employees or at least reassigning people as necessary.
Yes, I know the old saying that adding programmers to a late project only makes it later. But you can take "other projects" off of developers who are running behind and do some things to at least help out. Or at least insist that the deadline needs to be pushed back plus some extra charges.
This isn't something that normally can be done by a mere grunt employee though. At best all you can do as an employee is to encourage this kind of behavior in your managers and hope they stand up on your behalf to those who don't give a damn about the pressures you are under. If you have a crappy manager, there isn't much hope other than quitting or trying to convince the CEO that your boss is worthless. That is a risky endeavor on multiple levels.
I also know that telling a customer they can't have something is risky in terms of possibly losing a contract. Sometimes you have to pick and choose, where I've seen some good managers tell a customer "no", that customer leaves, and then the customer comes crawling back begging to have the company's services again (when you should charge an even higher price). That is the ideal situation, where you are good enough that people will pay a premium for your services and are willing to at least treat you as an equal rather than shitting all over you. When the CEO lets the customer shit all over him, you should be aware that shit runs downhill and only gets worse as it moves down the food chain.
While I won't defend the "Defense of Marriage Act" as I thought it was a stupid law even when it was being passed, the motivation of its supporters at the time was that the "institution of marriage" was being watered down and they attempted to remind judges that the 1st amendment actually meant something.
What these people forgot was the words "congress shall pass no law", thinking that passing a law saying that a law shouldn't be passed isn't hypocrisy. Yes, that is a double negative, which is precisely the doublethink that went into that awful legislation in the first place.
Still, it was at least an attempt to try and keep the whole issue of gay marriage out of the federal level. That it ended up having the opposite effect only goes to show that the government should keep its dirty paws off of what is ultimately a religious issue and not a civil matter. That anybody with an internet connection and a mouse can become a member of clergy (and even that step isn't strictly needed) only goes to show that you can believe anything and find anybody to perform any ceremony you want between what ever people you want, including yourself alone.
I agree entirely, but the concept of marriage got hijacked by the state hundreds of years ago (to varying degrees, culminating in what we have today)—the "redefinition" happened long before we were born. Now, the government just allows the window-dressing of an optional religious ceremony (for those who desire it) in order to placate those who mistakenly believe modern marriage is a religious rite.
A problem with this view is that it really hasn't been that long since "the state" co-opted the religious ceremony you are talking about. It hasn't been a state-operated enterprise even in America for all that long, and it is people screwing around with things like income tax and creating thousands of exceptions in the tax code for social engineering that the need for homosexual people to even be involved was something to even consider. Those "hundreds of years" could really be boiled down to less than a hundred years at most. It was after the Woodrow Wilson administration (who signed in the current Internal Revenue Act) that started the slow process of pushing for marriage as a state-licensed enterprise.
In most of Europe, the church was "the state", as they were basically indistinguishable. Even now, most of the record keeping for when marriages happened is in churches, with only in the latter half of the 20th century that organizations like county governments or national governments even bothered to do that sort of record keeping. Heck, even birth certificates are a fairly new invention. For instance, I got my Social Security card by presenting my hospital certificate (at the time considered a valid form of ID and it wasn't that long ago either.) I could have presented my christening certificate as valid ID as well and it was an option at the time.
Don't think for a minute that the current state of affairs is how it has always been or that it is an ancient custom, because it isn't. As for if this encroachment by the government upon what should be religious affairs, it really goes back to having the government get involved in a whole bunch of things they never were involved with previously. If you look upon it over the course of a decade or so, you barely notice it, but this change has been huge and on the time scale of a lifetime it has changed substantially.
BTW, it used to be considered (again... until quite recently and it was definitely true at the beginning of the 20th century) that it didn't matter if you were recognized in a civil ceremony so much as if you were properly married by a religious leader. The civil ceremony was for crazy atheists and screw-ups who "did something" to piss off the local clergy. An affidavit from a local clergyman that you were married was more than sufficient to convince a judge that you were married, regardless of what the county clerk may have said about the topic.
The Congress. While not strictly a Department, it sure as shit is embarrassing.
By design. Congress is supposed to be slow, inefficient, and prone to never make decisions except in rare circumstances. That they've designed the rest of the federal government to be worse than Congress is more that they started with a bad model in the first place.
Is there any provision in the charter for adding/removing permanent security council members?
Yes, and it has happened. On Oct. 25, 1971, Taiwan was kicked out of the security council and replaced with the People's Republic of China.
Technically all that happened is that the "People's Republic of China" with the representatives from Beijing were recognized as the legitimate government and the "Republic of China" representatives from Taipei were ignored as merely provincial leaders (aka like a state governor's representative). It wasn't a real change of membership.
The Soviet Union has been pushing for this for some time, and when America gave in to the idea, the UK basically rubber stamping the US decision, it was up to France to make the final veto to make the change. France decided to side with the Soviet Union (not much of a surprise at that even) so the change happened. The rest of the General Assembly wasn't even going to object too strongly with all of the rest of the permanent members going along with this idea, and nobody was going to stand up to keeping the "Republic of China" as the "lawful" government of the whole of China.
The whole notion was that China was such a large country that it simply needed to be one of those big guys, and at the end of World War II the leadership of China was still up in the air with Chiang Kai-shek's government nominally still recognized as the official government of the whole country, even when they ended up retreating to Taiwan after a bloody civil war against the communists. I'll note that even today both Chinese governments claim to be the lawful government of the whole of China, both claiming that Taiwan is merely one of the provinces of the much larger country. That the "Republic of China" really only effectively controls Taiwan and that the "People's Republic of China" is powerless to act as a government on Taiwan or enforce laws there is irrelevant.
Essentially, all that happened in 1971 is that the UN finally recognized that a coup d'état took place in China and that the current government was in fact the communists. It wasn't really changing membership, but rather governments of one country or rather just recognizing the government of that country. It was also silly to recognize the government as the one only controlling 5% of the population of that country and ignoring the other 95%.
Slashdot Mirror
There are some places you can send nuclear material. One company in particular that I'm aware of is Energy Solutions who operates a repository near Salt Lake City that takes in a fairly large amount of nuclear materials (like old x-ray machines, radiation suits of reactor workers, gloves from hospitals, and other similar stuff). There are other locations and companies too.
The problem as you've alluded to is "high level nuclear waste" from reactors, such as the proposed Yucca Mountain repository. Yes, the idea of such a facility has been shit canned and is a continued political football. Why anybody would object to building such a facility next to the Nevada Test Range is beyond my comprehension, but so be it. There are other potential locations, as well as reprocessing plants that could use spent fuel and convert it into useful by-products of various kinds and even fuel nuclear power plants for another 500 years or more just off of existing stockpiles.
As far as moving the fuel through residential neighborhoods, the material can be moved in small enough quantities and in strong enough containers that it would be far safer than moving petroleum to a neighborhood gasoline station. Those routinely move through residential neighborhoods, so what is the objection again?
The links are in the article, including links to other stuff not mentioned in the summary.
This is a case of RTFA
I can't imagine anything more "geeky" or "stuff that matters" than talking about the effects of shutting down nuclear power around the world. Building nuclear power plants is the ultimate in nerd culture, where nuclear engineering used to be the hot college major that everybody with half a brain would try to enroll into and where you would find all of the math nerds who wanted to make money.
As for the consequences of nuclear power, it really doesn't matter what your political leanings might be, this is pretty interesting stuff and something that really does have a long-term impact upon human society. You might be at odds about the approach that should be taken and if shutting down all of these nuclear power plants is a good or bad thing to do, but it really matters to very ordinary people who receive the electrical power from these plants. It certainly has a major impact upon your day to day activities and your monthly utility bills, not to mention just about every other aspect of your daily life in the 21st Century.
That is also sort of the point of the article, that a bunch of people who should know better are missing an important story that is not currently a part of the national or international forum of ideas. It really does matter.
That somebody is likely going to be Planetary Resources, or some other similar company who is going to get involved with asteroid mining. I would suspect that when Rio Tinto gets involved is when you will see serious money being put on the line for asteroid mining (they make IBM seem like a small start-up company). Rio Tinto also has the cash reserves necessary to build a mining colony in space if necessary, and certainly have mining operations in some rather inhospitable locations around the world. Moving into space would be easy in comparison to some of their efforts.
While I'm impressed with Ceres as a world, and I'd agree that its water resources are something that would be worth using, there are sources of water which are much more accessible and can use solar-powered ion engines in the meantime. I would imagine that some Thorium reactors might also be used, but nuclear engineering in a microgravity environment is something that hasn't had much engineering development effort to perfect. Some pebble reactors and some other interesting designs might work, but it would take some effort to get them build and even designed in the first place. Nothing which breaks physics like an FTL ship, but it does require some real engineering in a completely different design domain. I'll also note that the Moon and possibly Mercury would be excellent places to obtain Uranium and Thorium, and there certainly would be some other potential sources for those materials with Apollo-class asteroids.
How many spacecraft have actually gone beyond the orbit of Mars? You can count them on two hands, out of tens of thousands of spacecraft that have been sent into space. Yes, unmanned spacecraft can reach the outer planets and have, but they are exceptional spacecraft that would need to be designed for that specific kind of a mission.
I'm just saying that for 99.9% of all spacecraft that will ever be built, it isn't a problem.
Technically, getting to LEO cheaply is a solved problem, at least on paper.
It really hasn't been an easily solved problem getting to LEO, technically speaking. There are some fanciful ideas and dreamers who come up with crazy things like space elevators or thermal-laser launch systems, but as a practical matter those haven't really been built for actual payloads.
There are a number of companies who are working on trying to find an actual solution to launch actual payloads on the cheap. The #1 thing that everybody (across the space hardware industry) is looking at right now is simply increasing the reuse of existing components instead of throwing millions of dollars worth of hardware away into the oceans of the Earth on every launch. There are dozens of different approaches to doing that, but it mostly boils down to people just trying one or two of those ideas and getting it done.
Ignore the AC idiot. He is really being a troll and are clueless about reality or the state of current technology. So much is happening in space that you really can't keep track of it all any more, even if you do that full time. I'm just talking new ideas and discoveries that merit entries in scientific journals, much less keeping track of launches and actual stuff that is happening in space.
Further out there is less solar energy for the solar cells but we can laser illuminate them.
Solar energy production only really becomes an issue when you get beyond Mars.... about the orbit of Jupiter or so (perhaps a little closer to the Sun depending on your solar array size and efficiency). There is still a whole lot of Solar System much closer that can be used for all kinds of activities, including 99.9% of all satellites that are currently in use or for that matter have ever been used. Exploration of the outer Solar System definitely requires some alternate energy sources, but that isn't going to be anywhere near where these nanocube vehicles are going to be operating at.
One of the huge things that is being worked on right now is trying to refuel satellites where their propellant has been depleted. At the moment, even otherwise functioning satellites have to be shut down when that happens, so finding a propellant that is easy to transport and transfer can make a huge difference.... especially when those satellites cost billions of dollars just to build.
The Pacific Ocean is something very inconvenient for a spacecraft in Geo-synchronous orbit. In fact, it is much, much easier to grab something from the Moon or from an asteroid or comet than it is to get that same bucket of water from the Pacific Ocean. In fact, it would be easier and "cheaper" (assuming the infrastructure was in place) to mine the ice caps of Mars than it would be to get water from the Pacific Ocean.
A really good diagram that shows some delta-v budgets for moving stuff around the solar system can be found here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Delta-Vs_for_inner_Solar_System.svg
The gravity well is something that is not just from science fiction, but something that has to do with real-life physics. Or are you one of those who thinks the Apollo Moon landings happened in a Burbank studio? I suppose NASA has never sent anything above the "sky" either, not even a communications satellite? Without real people doing real things in space, you would likely be dead. I'm not exaggerating.
The objections to that pipeline are mostly about the use of tar sands and possible oil spills. This would be a different animal. Of course there would be some opposition, but nothing like the pipeline.
P.S. Similar objections were raised about the Alaska pipeline (us old fogeys remember such stuff). It was still built, and probably built better because of the opposition. Who knew that the real problem would be sailing a ship into a reef.
The objections to the Keystone pipeline are simply because it is a convenient political target at the moment..... while dozens of other similar pipelines are being built and hundreds of others are currently in operation quietly with very little fuss. If there were oil spills, you would be hearing about it because it would be in the news..... news because it is an unusual thing to see happening. Yes, I know that there are pipeline spills which do happen, and they do get reported by main stream news media sources as well.
The Trans-Alaska Pipeline was also something that became a similar kind of political football. The people of Alaska don't complain now because every Alaskan citizen receives an annual paycheck coming from the government for oil royalties.
Terrorists go for planes as most people seem to view them as more "cool" than trains, and assume they carry richer passengers. Goodness knows why, and that could change.
I personally think that if terrorists went after the Autobahn or the U.S. Interstate Highway system, they would cause far more economic damage and possibly kill even more people.
The only thing is that I don't want to go through a TSA security check point each time I get onto a freeway on ramp. Sure enough, once any sort of terrorism activity happens on a transportation system like that, you will see people screaming to beef up security there.
And about that earthquake concern, they still built that rail line project in LA anyway, that's been beneficial to residents.
The not so highspeed rail project between Barstow and Fresno that will be the world's slowest "high speed rail system", while I'll admit is under construction, but the only benefit to residents so far in the area is to help reduce unemployment in the area in a fashion similar to the Parable of the Broken Window. There certainly is no reason to believe that the rail line will ever actually run and deliver passengers, and so far it hasn't delivered a single passenger between any two points.
Also, Musk's idea is to run inside a vacuum tube. A leak caused by an earthquake would let in air, which, if you hit it at 4000 mph, would be like hitting a brick wall.
I'm really curious about what details you happen to know about this hyperloop system. Are you a SpaceX or Tesla employee that has had a couple of cool ones with the boss to get him to spill his guts about the idea?
Otherwise, I don't think anybody but Musk has a bloody clue about how his system works. I've seen the interviews and public statements about the idea, but frankly neither this particular article nor any other shows anything other than another high-speed transport system. I'll agree that vacuum tube transport systems seem to fit the concept of hyperloops from the perspective of "this is the best thing that fits the idea", but all of that is pure guess work. There are other possibilities too, but the real point is that nobody has a clue.
It seems, based on some statements by Musk, that some actual engineering R&D work has gone into the idea (aka there might be some people at either Tesla and/or SpaceX that have helped Elon with some calculations and fleshing out the concept) but he certainly has made no public statements about the concept in any level of detail.... including even if there will be vacuum tubes involved in any part of the system. When asked explicitly if it was an underground vacuum tube system, Elon Musk even said "No".
In other words, this whole article is just a bunch of BS.
I suppose this prevents people from playing Facebook games with sports-related themes where FB avatar images and names show up on the screen or having those sports related games link to user profiles.
I can see how this might be of interest to the people who run Google-plus. I am trying to see how this is non-obvious though. It would really surprise me that there is no prior art.
You obviously didn't read a single thing written by eric, and simultaneously invoked the Godwin principle. Way to go!
In other words it's images of athletes linked in a particular way to via a social network.
Haven't porn sites been doing this already for years?
Their definitions of "athletes", "playing field" and "player positions" are just a bit different . . .
That is just another sport played on (usually) an indoor field. Why else do you think Sports Illustrated puts out their swimsuit issue?
This is being a troll. If you put Reagan into this position as being somebody who screwed up the country, you likely need to mention every President since Calvin Coolidge as having messed up the country so completely that it could even be said that the American Republic as it formerly existed is dead.
Of course you likely think Coolidge as a screw up too, but at least he paid down the national debt (not just reduced deficits) and cut 2/3rds of the federal government at the time into unemployment lines.... not that it made too many people unemployed by doing that. Even the War and Navy departments were quite small and only a fraction of the government even in proportion to what they are today.
Empty threats like sending people into labor camps and sterilizing people shows that you are also singularly incapable of becoming President, as you won't even understand the oath of office that you would be taking. Then again, I don't think any of those last dozen Presidents have kept their oaths either.
I was shocked to read the CIA operates a prison in Romania.
They just took over the prison being operated formerly by the USSR. Sounds about right with the current government.
How many Development departments have a charge-back process? Where any off-contract work, any last-minute feature is charged to the sales department.
That sounds like a management issue to me. If those at the top don't know how to run a company and make money, they really shouldn't be in those positions.
The crazy idea that an engineering department can't make money is one of the most stupid things I've ever heard.... yet I've seen far too many companies who think that way.
This really takes a strong manager, and especially a CEO who can stand up to customers on stuff like this and especially stand up to the sales team saying "no, we won't do that". Any time there is a feature request after the "contract" is signed, it should cost the customer money. Usually it should cost that customer a whole lot of money. Keep in mind, any time there are changes like this, it really does cost the company as a whole quite a bit of money so by demanding that customers pay for those costs you are really asking for the customer to cover the cost of the product itself.
Indeed, if you are "pushing back" on management, you might even mention that it is their fiduciary responsibility to make sure that the customer pays for the things that cost the company money. That is one way to keep this kind of thing under control, as when it starts to cost the customer money they usually shut up.... or are willing to pony up a huge pile of money for things that really do matter to them. At that point, you have the option of either hiring more employees or at least reassigning people as necessary.
Yes, I know the old saying that adding programmers to a late project only makes it later. But you can take "other projects" off of developers who are running behind and do some things to at least help out. Or at least insist that the deadline needs to be pushed back plus some extra charges.
This isn't something that normally can be done by a mere grunt employee though. At best all you can do as an employee is to encourage this kind of behavior in your managers and hope they stand up on your behalf to those who don't give a damn about the pressures you are under. If you have a crappy manager, there isn't much hope other than quitting or trying to convince the CEO that your boss is worthless. That is a risky endeavor on multiple levels.
I also know that telling a customer they can't have something is risky in terms of possibly losing a contract. Sometimes you have to pick and choose, where I've seen some good managers tell a customer "no", that customer leaves, and then the customer comes crawling back begging to have the company's services again (when you should charge an even higher price). That is the ideal situation, where you are good enough that people will pay a premium for your services and are willing to at least treat you as an equal rather than shitting all over you. When the CEO lets the customer shit all over him, you should be aware that shit runs downhill and only gets worse as it moves down the food chain.
It depends. Is said sailor drunk during acceptable hours, such as the evening, or is it early in the morning?
At this point in time, are you sure of the gender or even gender preference of the said sailor?
While I won't defend the "Defense of Marriage Act" as I thought it was a stupid law even when it was being passed, the motivation of its supporters at the time was that the "institution of marriage" was being watered down and they attempted to remind judges that the 1st amendment actually meant something.
What these people forgot was the words "congress shall pass no law", thinking that passing a law saying that a law shouldn't be passed isn't hypocrisy. Yes, that is a double negative, which is precisely the doublethink that went into that awful legislation in the first place.
Still, it was at least an attempt to try and keep the whole issue of gay marriage out of the federal level. That it ended up having the opposite effect only goes to show that the government should keep its dirty paws off of what is ultimately a religious issue and not a civil matter. That anybody with an internet connection and a mouse can become a member of clergy (and even that step isn't strictly needed) only goes to show that you can believe anything and find anybody to perform any ceremony you want between what ever people you want, including yourself alone.
I agree entirely, but the concept of marriage got hijacked by the state hundreds of years ago (to varying degrees, culminating in what we have today)—the "redefinition" happened long before we were born. Now, the government just allows the window-dressing of an optional religious ceremony (for those who desire it) in order to placate those who mistakenly believe modern marriage is a religious rite.
A problem with this view is that it really hasn't been that long since "the state" co-opted the religious ceremony you are talking about. It hasn't been a state-operated enterprise even in America for all that long, and it is people screwing around with things like income tax and creating thousands of exceptions in the tax code for social engineering that the need for homosexual people to even be involved was something to even consider. Those "hundreds of years" could really be boiled down to less than a hundred years at most. It was after the Woodrow Wilson administration (who signed in the current Internal Revenue Act) that started the slow process of pushing for marriage as a state-licensed enterprise.
In most of Europe, the church was "the state", as they were basically indistinguishable. Even now, most of the record keeping for when marriages happened is in churches, with only in the latter half of the 20th century that organizations like county governments or national governments even bothered to do that sort of record keeping. Heck, even birth certificates are a fairly new invention. For instance, I got my Social Security card by presenting my hospital certificate (at the time considered a valid form of ID and it wasn't that long ago either.) I could have presented my christening certificate as valid ID as well and it was an option at the time.
Don't think for a minute that the current state of affairs is how it has always been or that it is an ancient custom, because it isn't. As for if this encroachment by the government upon what should be religious affairs, it really goes back to having the government get involved in a whole bunch of things they never were involved with previously. If you look upon it over the course of a decade or so, you barely notice it, but this change has been huge and on the time scale of a lifetime it has changed substantially.
BTW, it used to be considered (again... until quite recently and it was definitely true at the beginning of the 20th century) that it didn't matter if you were recognized in a civil ceremony so much as if you were properly married by a religious leader. The civil ceremony was for crazy atheists and screw-ups who "did something" to piss off the local clergy. An affidavit from a local clergyman that you were married was more than sufficient to convince a judge that you were married, regardless of what the county clerk may have said about the topic.
The Congress. While not strictly a Department, it sure as shit is embarrassing.
By design. Congress is supposed to be slow, inefficient, and prone to never make decisions except in rare circumstances. That they've designed the rest of the federal government to be worse than Congress is more that they started with a bad model in the first place.
Is there any provision in the charter for adding/removing permanent security council members?
Yes, and it has happened. On Oct. 25, 1971, Taiwan was kicked out of the security council and replaced with the People's Republic of China.
Technically all that happened is that the "People's Republic of China" with the representatives from Beijing were recognized as the legitimate government and the "Republic of China" representatives from Taipei were ignored as merely provincial leaders (aka like a state governor's representative). It wasn't a real change of membership.
The Soviet Union has been pushing for this for some time, and when America gave in to the idea, the UK basically rubber stamping the US decision, it was up to France to make the final veto to make the change. France decided to side with the Soviet Union (not much of a surprise at that even) so the change happened. The rest of the General Assembly wasn't even going to object too strongly with all of the rest of the permanent members going along with this idea, and nobody was going to stand up to keeping the "Republic of China" as the "lawful" government of the whole of China.
The whole notion was that China was such a large country that it simply needed to be one of those big guys, and at the end of World War II the leadership of China was still up in the air with Chiang Kai-shek's government nominally still recognized as the official government of the whole country, even when they ended up retreating to Taiwan after a bloody civil war against the communists. I'll note that even today both Chinese governments claim to be the lawful government of the whole of China, both claiming that Taiwan is merely one of the provinces of the much larger country. That the "Republic of China" really only effectively controls Taiwan and that the "People's Republic of China" is powerless to act as a government on Taiwan or enforce laws there is irrelevant.
Essentially, all that happened in 1971 is that the UN finally recognized that a coup d'état took place in China and that the current government was in fact the communists. It wasn't really changing membership, but rather governments of one country or rather just recognizing the government of that country. It was also silly to recognize the government as the one only controlling 5% of the population of that country and ignoring the other 95%.