Every election, people from out of state say, "AH!!! Diebold machines, must be corrupt!" And the sore losers demand a recount. I've participated in many of the recounts since 2004 at the legistlative office building Concord. Firstly, the machines we use in NH are not the push button types that are controversial. Here in NH, you get a ballot with those little circles in it that you mark with a pen, and the machine reads the marks. Ballots are kept for recount purposes. In my recount experiences, no election has changed its outcome by more than 35 votes, and typically thats because lazy morons were very sloppy in how they filled out their ballots, or marked multiple candidates. We go through every ballot, with a rep from each side of a race sitting in front of a ballot official who holds up each ballot, states what he reads it as, and you can challenge it or not. All the challenged ballots wind up getting agreed on by the secretary of state and a rep from each party as to what they mean.
The poor machines are doing the best they can, but you put a garbage ballot in, you get a garbage vote out.
I can answer this. I used to be a partner in a Seattle based business from 91-96, and a lifelong resident of NH, so I'm familiar with both locales. I'd say housing costs have not escalated quite as much as the Seattle area, and both were pretty par in the mid 90's. Depending on what part of the state you are in, you can find a 2000-2500 sq ft home for anywhere from $130k up to $350k. The southeast area near the seacoast has most of the high price real estate and most of the high tech. The northern tip of the state is pretty inexpensive but economically depressed in many areas in the north woods as the paper mills close down. There is a cluster of high tech and biomedical in the Lebanon-Hanover area (around Dartmouth College) on the western border.
We have probably the lowest unemployment rate in the country for most of the state. There are plenty of of high tech jobs in-state, while the commute to Boston from the southern border is less than an hour, so there are a lot of people who live in NH but work in Massachusetts. The only thing I'd caution people about is that being New England, high tech HR people seem more concerned about what degrees you have rather than what you actually know and can do, or even have done. So if you are a little light in that department, it would help to get as many certifications and such under your belt.
The original article needs to be corrected. In fact, the NH House did express disagreement with the REAL ID Act, they stated in the bill they voted for that they found the Act "is contrary and repugnant to Articles 1 through 10 of the New Hampshire constitution as well as Amendments 4 though 10 of the Constitution for the United States of America."
Imagine that: legislators who can still read a constitution... and agree with parts of it that don't just expand their own authority.
Signed: A Free State Project http://www.freestateproject.org/ member, living happily in NH, the #1 Most Livable State (Morgan Quinto Press).
"Necessity is the excuse for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of the tyrant and the creed of the slave." - William Pitt English statesman
Have you ever noticed how every place that tree-hugging I-feel-your-pain anti-gun it's-for-the-children pay-your-fair-share pinkos get declared a "gun free zone" winds up being the prime hunting grounds of mass murderers?
Think about that any time you get a hair up your bum that some place should be weapons free. Chances are that you are declaring the next combat area of the next war.
Boron gelled LH2 or boron gelled kerosene get much higher Isp. Data from various sources claims gains of 31-100 seconds when mixed with RP-1 and 100-150 seconds when mixed with chilled hydrogen, typically at a mix of 55% boron, in rocket engines, over and above the standard RP-1 and LH2 Isps. The french Onera ramjet missile program has a good page on these and other issues of hypersonic flight with exotic fuels and engines. Google it up.
If the orbiter is able to use any atmospheric oxygen in its combustion, then the Isp goes up considerably, since you don't need to count atmospheric oxygen burned in combustion as propellant mass, while still getting its benefits. Ramjets get between 1000-3000 sec Isp with kerosene, and 5000-7000 sec with LH2, with scramjets getting a little less at their higher velocity ranges. Boron slurried in kerosene boosts ramjet Isp by 50-100%. Pulse detonation engines, which are long rumored components of this system, operate from mach 0-3 at Isp 10-50% higher than ramjets, though thrust-to-weight ratios are generally considered rather poor. Also, if the orbiter used a duct around its rocket engine, making it a 'ram-ejector', this would offer some ramjet combustion as well as improve the thrust and Isp of the rocket itself.
Another trick to minimizing structural mass fraction requirements is high density fuels, as advocated by Dr. Bruce Dunn and Capt Mitchel Burnside Clapp (of Blackhorse fame). LH2 has terrible density, about.07 g/cc, while fuels like boron gelled kerosene, methyacetylene, cyclopropane, cubane, and many others have much higher density while still respectably middle to high Isp. This allows a smaller launch vehicle because you need smaller fuel tanks. As an example, if the Shuttle used kerosene, the hydrogen tank of the ET would be 1/5th the size to carry enough kerosene to get to orbit, thus the tank would not be taller than the shuttle, and we wouldn't have had the foam hitting the wing issue with Columbia.
So there are a lot of options for producing much higher Isps or improving mass fraction, and thus improving payload to orbit.
Bad use of units here... plus a misunderestimation of the kwh household monthly usage. Electric water heaters are typically 3-6 kw, microwave ovens are 2-3 kw, ovens, heaters, lights, televisions, computers, washing machines, pretty soon you are reaching 20kw in peak usage in the evening. Average hourly usage is about 5 kw. Times 8760 hours/yr, or 43,800 kwh/houshold/yr. Times 8 million people, divided by 3 as the avg household size, you've got 118,000,000,000,000 watt-hours in yearly consumption.
However, a lightning strike does not last an hour. Lets say a second at most, if not less. With 3600 seconds per hour, your number goes up to about 40,000,000,000,000,000, or 40 petawatts as the annual NYC electric demand compressed into one second of electrical discharge.
According to NYC itself (http://www.nyc.gov/html/om/pdf/energy_task_force. pdf), its peak demand was over 11 gigawatts at one time in 2003. Public facility consumption was 1.1 gigawatts and 5,182,400 MWH. If we scale public MWH consumption to the rest of the city, its annual watt hour consumption is 51,824,000,000,000 or 51 terawatt hours, or just over twice what I estimated, but both are just guesses.
Now lets see what the real numbers are for lightning:
""An individual bolt can pack several hundred million volts at 10,000 amperes, one trillion watts, briefly burning up more electrical power than is being used in the entire United States. Monsters of one billion volts and over 100,000 amperes are not unknown." -
Mallette, Vincent. "Everything You Always Wanted To Know about Lightning -- But Were Too Shocked to Ask (yeah, we know!)"a.k.a. Algorithm, Inc. Lightning Page (lightning is your friend).
So, if we assume the biggest examples, to fit the Big Apple, a billion volts (this seems a bit too Saganesque for me, my own experience has lightning in the 20-200 million volt range) times 100kA comes out to 100 trillion watts. However, since lightning only lasts momentarily (again), we divide that by 3600 to get that number adjusted to watt hours (assuming a lightning's discharge lasts for one second). This gives us less than three million watt hours, or less than 30,000 kwh (versus 50-100 terawatt hours for NYC annual demand). Yo, lightning is pathetic, chump.
...sticking my organ in a desk drawer, then slamming it closed several times. The dopamine rush should last a few minutes, though make sure your office/cubical opening is closed/vacant to avoid UWE issues.
Now, I assume your engineering dept works on PCs, the art/graphics/advertising dept works on Macs, and the manufacturing dept works on some sort of big iron, while the IT dept works on linux boxes shelling into the big iron. Your executives all get their email printed for them, so you need massively reliable printers too.
Find somebody like gmail or yahoo who is willing to license their webmail interface and stay away from mail client applications.
I want to say this has been helpful this afternoon. Ran this while McAfee was freshly updated and some apparently dormant viruses popped up like rats fleeing a sinking ship. I've now deleted the non-McAfee and non-MS files it detected... the rootkits are typically hidden temp files. Deleting one's temp directories (then creating new ones) cleans them out quite well. Good reccomendation...
Contrary to claims, more degreed people voted for Bush than for Kerry. The only class of degreed people who voted for Kerry more than Bush were those with Masters degrees. Furthermore, most: business owners, military officers, and engineers voted for Bush (all successful, educated, and talented above average). You need to get over your urban superiority complex.
... In the 50s, when blue-collar workers actually represented the things you described you might have had a point. But now all you have is middle-of-nowhere towns, built on industries that have long-since been shipped oversees. Leaving a vacuum filled with people who's only source of income is to send their kids into the military....
Do I detect one more blue state denizen of a major metropolitan area who knows something between jack and squat about the 'red state' america he so easily disparages in a way that would be considered racist if he were talking about a minority? You apparently don't know anything about what you are saying, and the venom and hate you exude in saying it evinces someone who is a prime candidate for a hate group or for committing hate crime (but so long as you hate white people, it is apparently legal). It takes a lot of hate to tell someone you've never met that the world would be better off without them, and a lot of ignorance, too.
Such hate seems to me to leave you on the verge of psychosis, dangerously, even. I would suggest a 12 step program to get over the fact that you lost the last two presidential elections and help you cope with the fact that your opinions are politically obsolete. Repeat after me:
"Amorphous, asexual, aracial non-supernatural power, give me the strength to change my hate of others into constructive focus on my own failings, to accept the opinions and weaknesses of others who are being the imperfect human beings we all are, and the wisdom to recognise when I am too emotionally vested in a political issue because of the manipulative propaganda of political parties and groups that tell me they are working in my interest."
I don't think that is their focus. There are already far too many dollars in circulation as it is today, partly why the dollar is down 40% against the Euro, gold, etc. They need to take dollars off the market, not put them on.
The mint stopped making them because they don't have to make any more for a while. The coins are so much more durable than federal reserve notes that they don't need to issue so many every year. It's why susan b's are still in circulation decades after they stopped being made. Steel alloy coins are dandy tools.
well, no, not exactly. I use both all the time because my office for the past year had two vending machines, one for soda and one for candy, plus a change making machine. The change machine would break 1, 2, 5, 10, and 20 dollar bills and provide susan b's or squaws. I know they are big at a lot of places where people use vending machines and need change.
Despite that, I do still run into people who are surprised when I pay them in a dollar coin.
Now, if you want to have real fun, try paying someone with a NORFED $10 coin. A buddy of mine did that all around town one week after buying a few thousand bucks in NORFED coins.
He finally received a phone call from somone purporting to be a Secret Service Agent. He replied, "Yeah, right, who is this?" and hung up.
The guy called back and said, "DON'T HANG UP. I am Agent so and so of the US Secret Service and I want to talk about your silver coins."
"Really? Do you have a problem with NORFED?"
"No."
"Do you have a problem with Bernard Von Nothaus?" [the founder of NORFED]
"No, not at all, I just want to make sure you aren't telling anybody that these are coins issued by the US government or the Federal Reserve."
"OF COURSE, I'd NEVER say that! These coins are actually worth something!"
"What do you mean?"
he went into an explaination of the difference between full reserve currency and fractional reserve debt-backed money....
Secret Service guy said, "I'll tell you one thing, these are the most beautiful coins I've ever seen..."
One more apologia: oh, yes, "its okay what China does because China is traditionally tyrannical"
Clue: Most of the world has traditionally been tyrannical. The point is that some people try to make it less tyrannical and some people apologize for the tyrants. Which side are YOU on?
What China does is *immaterial*. What Hitler did is immaterial. What Pol Pot did is immaterial. The United States is doing these things NOW. That is ALL that matters. Any noise to the contrary is just to try to distract you.
The only reason it is immaterial is because you know those governments aren't going to do anything when you protest them. China doesn't give a damn what you think as they pass authorizations to use force against Taiwan, and as they rehearse an invasion of Taiwan with Russia. Idiots like you are going to be protesting the US the day that China waltzes into Taiwan, kills and rapes millions, and idiots like you are still going to apologize for it. Go back to your stalinist cooperatives, bub, we're not buying.
If you don't think that a person's money belongs to them rather than 'all the poor people'. You are a socialist, pure and simple. That ain't redneck, bub, that's just American.
I am embarrassed to know that there are still socialists like you in this country who still don't get that all rights are property rights, and intent on trolling your propaganda into any venue.
Mod parent down.
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Every election, people from out of state say, "AH!!! Diebold machines, must be corrupt!" And the sore losers demand a recount. I've participated in many of the recounts since 2004 at the legistlative office building Concord. Firstly, the machines we use in NH are not the push button types that are controversial. Here in NH, you get a ballot with those little circles in it that you mark with a pen, and the machine reads the marks. Ballots are kept for recount purposes. In my recount experiences, no election has changed its outcome by more than 35 votes, and typically thats because lazy morons were very sloppy in how they filled out their ballots, or marked multiple candidates. We go through every ballot, with a rep from each side of a race sitting in front of a ballot official who holds up each ballot, states what he reads it as, and you can challenge it or not. All the challenged ballots wind up getting agreed on by the secretary of state and a rep from each party as to what they mean. The poor machines are doing the best they can, but you put a garbage ballot in, you get a garbage vote out.
They were the guys who fought the Kzinti, suppressed technology, and hide the evidence of the Pak Protectors.
I can answer this. I used to be a partner in a Seattle based business from 91-96, and a lifelong resident of NH, so I'm familiar with both locales. I'd say housing costs have not escalated quite as much as the Seattle area, and both were pretty par in the mid 90's. Depending on what part of the state you are in, you can find a 2000-2500 sq ft home for anywhere from $130k up to $350k. The southeast area near the seacoast has most of the high price real estate and most of the high tech. The northern tip of the state is pretty inexpensive but economically depressed in many areas in the north woods as the paper mills close down. There is a cluster of high tech and biomedical in the Lebanon-Hanover area (around Dartmouth College) on the western border. We have probably the lowest unemployment rate in the country for most of the state. There are plenty of of high tech jobs in-state, while the commute to Boston from the southern border is less than an hour, so there are a lot of people who live in NH but work in Massachusetts. The only thing I'd caution people about is that being New England, high tech HR people seem more concerned about what degrees you have rather than what you actually know and can do, or even have done. So if you are a little light in that department, it would help to get as many certifications and such under your belt.
Imagine that: legislators who can still read a constitution... and agree with parts of it that don't just expand their own authority.
Signed: A Free State Project http://www.freestateproject.org/ member, living happily in NH, the #1 Most Livable State (Morgan Quinto Press).
"Necessity is the excuse for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of the tyrant and the creed of the slave." - William Pitt English statesman
Think about that any time you get a hair up your bum that some place should be weapons free. Chances are that you are declaring the next combat area of the next war.
If the orbiter is able to use any atmospheric oxygen in its combustion, then the Isp goes up considerably, since you don't need to count atmospheric oxygen burned in combustion as propellant mass, while still getting its benefits. Ramjets get between 1000-3000 sec Isp with kerosene, and 5000-7000 sec with LH2, with scramjets getting a little less at their higher velocity ranges. Boron slurried in kerosene boosts ramjet Isp by 50-100%. Pulse detonation engines, which are long rumored components of this system, operate from mach 0-3 at Isp 10-50% higher than ramjets, though thrust-to-weight ratios are generally considered rather poor. Also, if the orbiter used a duct around its rocket engine, making it a 'ram-ejector', this would offer some ramjet combustion as well as improve the thrust and Isp of the rocket itself.
Another trick to minimizing structural mass fraction requirements is high density fuels, as advocated by Dr. Bruce Dunn and Capt Mitchel Burnside Clapp (of Blackhorse fame). LH2 has terrible density, about
So there are a lot of options for producing much higher Isps or improving mass fraction, and thus improving payload to orbit.
Bad use of units here... plus a misunderestimation of the kwh household monthly usage. Electric water heaters are typically 3-6 kw, microwave ovens are 2-3 kw, ovens, heaters, lights, televisions, computers, washing machines, pretty soon you are reaching 20kw in peak usage in the evening. Average hourly usage is about 5 kw. Times 8760 hours/yr, or 43,800 kwh/houshold/yr. Times 8 million people, divided by 3 as the avg household size, you've got 118,000,000,000,000 watt-hours in yearly consumption. However, a lightning strike does not last an hour. Lets say a second at most, if not less. With 3600 seconds per hour, your number goes up to about 40,000,000,000,000,000, or 40 petawatts as the annual NYC electric demand compressed into one second of electrical discharge. According to NYC itself (http://www.nyc.gov/html/om/pdf/energy_task_force. pdf), its peak demand was over 11 gigawatts at one time in 2003. Public facility consumption was 1.1 gigawatts and 5,182,400 MWH. If we scale public MWH consumption to the rest of the city, its annual watt hour consumption is 51,824,000,000,000 or 51 terawatt hours, or just over twice what I estimated, but both are just guesses.
Now lets see what the real numbers are for lightning:
""An individual bolt can pack several hundred million volts at 10,000 amperes, one trillion watts, briefly burning up more electrical power than is being used in the entire United States. Monsters of one billion volts and over 100,000 amperes are not unknown." -
Mallette, Vincent. "Everything You Always Wanted To Know about Lightning -- But Were Too Shocked to Ask (yeah, we know!)"a.k.a. Algorithm, Inc. Lightning Page (lightning is your friend).
So, if we assume the biggest examples, to fit the Big Apple, a billion volts (this seems a bit too Saganesque for me, my own experience has lightning in the 20-200 million volt range) times 100kA comes out to 100 trillion watts. However, since lightning only lasts momentarily (again), we divide that by 3600 to get that number adjusted to watt hours (assuming a lightning's discharge lasts for one second). This gives us less than three million watt hours, or less than 30,000 kwh (versus 50-100 terawatt hours for NYC annual demand). Yo, lightning is pathetic, chump.
...sticking my organ in a desk drawer, then slamming it closed several times. The dopamine rush should last a few minutes, though make sure your office/cubical opening is closed/vacant to avoid UWE issues. Now, I assume your engineering dept works on PCs, the art/graphics/advertising dept works on Macs, and the manufacturing dept works on some sort of big iron, while the IT dept works on linux boxes shelling into the big iron. Your executives all get their email printed for them, so you need massively reliable printers too. Find somebody like gmail or yahoo who is willing to license their webmail interface and stay away from mail client applications.
I want to say this has been helpful this afternoon. Ran this while McAfee was freshly updated and some apparently dormant viruses popped up like rats fleeing a sinking ship. I've now deleted the non-McAfee and non-MS files it detected... the rootkits are typically hidden temp files. Deleting one's temp directories (then creating new ones) cleans them out quite well. Good reccomendation...
"Getch yer stinkin' rootkit offa me, you damned dirty hacker!"
Where is the "I for one welcome our rootkit overlords"? Or the "ALL YOUR ROOT ARE BELONG TO US"?
Contrary to claims, more degreed people voted for Bush than for Kerry. The only class of degreed people who voted for Kerry more than Bush were those with Masters degrees. Furthermore, most: business owners, military officers, and engineers voted for Bush (all successful, educated, and talented above average). You need to get over your urban superiority complex.
Do I detect one more blue state denizen of a major metropolitan area who knows something between jack and squat about the 'red state' america he so easily disparages in a way that would be considered racist if he were talking about a minority? You apparently don't know anything about what you are saying, and the venom and hate you exude in saying it evinces someone who is a prime candidate for a hate group or for committing hate crime (but so long as you hate white people, it is apparently legal). It takes a lot of hate to tell someone you've never met that the world would be better off without them, and a lot of ignorance, too.
Such hate seems to me to leave you on the verge of psychosis, dangerously, even. I would suggest a 12 step program to get over the fact that you lost the last two presidential elections and help you cope with the fact that your opinions are politically obsolete. Repeat after me:
"Amorphous, asexual, aracial non-supernatural power, give me the strength to change my hate of others into constructive focus on my own failings, to accept the opinions and weaknesses of others who are being the imperfect human beings we all are, and the wisdom to recognise when I am too emotionally vested in a political issue because of the manipulative propaganda of political parties and groups that tell me they are working in my interest."
I don't think that is their focus. There are already far too many dollars in circulation as it is today, partly why the dollar is down 40% against the Euro, gold, etc. They need to take dollars off the market, not put them on.
The mint stopped making them because they don't have to make any more for a while. The coins are so much more durable than federal reserve notes that they don't need to issue so many every year. It's why susan b's are still in circulation decades after they stopped being made. Steel alloy coins are dandy tools.
Despite that, I do still run into people who are surprised when I pay them in a dollar coin.
Now, if you want to have real fun, try paying someone with a NORFED $10 coin. A buddy of mine did that all around town one week after buying a few thousand bucks in NORFED coins.
He finally received a phone call from somone purporting to be a Secret Service Agent. He replied, "Yeah, right, who is this?" and hung up.
The guy called back and said, "DON'T HANG UP. I am Agent so and so of the US Secret Service and I want to talk about your silver coins."
"Really? Do you have a problem with NORFED?"
"No."
"Do you have a problem with Bernard Von Nothaus?" [the founder of NORFED]
"No, not at all, I just want to make sure you aren't telling anybody that these are coins issued by the US government or the Federal Reserve."
"OF COURSE, I'd NEVER say that! These coins are actually worth something!"
"What do you mean?"
he went into an explaination of the difference between full reserve currency and fractional reserve debt-backed money....
Secret Service guy said, "I'll tell you one thing, these are the most beautiful coins I've ever seen..."
Clue: Most of the world has traditionally been tyrannical. The point is that some people try to make it less tyrannical and some people apologize for the tyrants. Which side are YOU on?
What China does is *immaterial*. What Hitler did is immaterial. What Pol Pot did is immaterial. The United States is doing these things NOW. That is ALL that matters. Any noise to the contrary is just to try to distract you.
The only reason it is immaterial is because you know those governments aren't going to do anything when you protest them. China doesn't give a damn what you think as they pass authorizations to use force against Taiwan, and as they rehearse an invasion of Taiwan with Russia. Idiots like you are going to be protesting the US the day that China waltzes into Taiwan, kills and rapes millions, and idiots like you are still going to apologize for it. Go back to your stalinist cooperatives, bub, we're not buying.
If I had a buck for every crypto-commie that said RMS is a genius.... I'd be Bill Gates.
Hmmm, time for a new business plan...
If you don't think that a person's money belongs to them rather than 'all the poor people'. You are a socialist, pure and simple. That ain't redneck, bub, that's just American.
I am embarrassed to know that there are still socialists like you in this country who still don't get that all rights are property rights, and intent on trolling your propaganda into any venue. Mod parent down.
Gee, maybe he's still working for them, given the mod-down I got above... ;)
I'm available for the position, and my name is Michael, so you don't even need to change the name on the door....