Falcon, we're both pretty much on the same page, I suspect. We want to move to energy production that doesn't impact the environment any more than necessary. You seem to be under the impression I am advocating coal, but my position is just the opposite - I'd prefer to shut down all the coal plants in operation tomorrow, and stop mining the stuff yesterday. Even a hundreds-of-years supply is not really sustainable, just not running out before we die, and we need to stop burning it all up.
Our difference comes from the way we're measuring the environmental impacts of the various options. Environmental impact of energy production comes from the waste emissions - "smoke" from coal plants, small amounts of very nasty radioactive stuff from nuclear, not much in the way of emissions from hydro, wind, solar, etc. I think that's the measure you're primarily or exclusively paying attention to. However, the environmental impact also comes from the resources you take out of the environment and the space you need to use to generate. That's where nuclear becomes a very attractive option.
Global warming is having a noticeable effect on our planet already, with melting polar ice and higher average temperatures (that my friends in Europe have definitely started to notice). That's measurable and visible change as a result of something on the order of one degree Celsius of delta. So to combat that, we put up huge wind farms; what happens when we've converted enough of the kinetic energy of the planet's airmass to reduce the average wind speed 1 km/h? Or wave farms; where are we when the tides don't rise and fall to the same extent? (They're the only thing holding up the moon!!!1! Kidding.) Or when we're redirecting enough solar energy to electricity that we start losing vegetation? Earth is a massively complicated balance of forces, and we've already f**ked with one variable enough to notice detrimental effects. I'm not keen to go playing with some others. Nuclear, on the other hand, won't still the tides, it won't slow the winds, it doesn't soak up the sun's radiation, and it won't release the CO2 that we now know from experience warms the earth.
...the wind potential off the Mid Atlantic comes to 330 [gigawatts]
Look at that another way - that's 330GW (but really a lot more, since windmills aren't 100% efficient) of energy getting taken out of the global airmass every year and put into our air conditioners and refrigerators. Nuclear takes that 330GW (again, more in reality) out of a fairly small amount of uranium or thorium.
Nuclear power has the smallest spatial footprint per unit of energy produced, as well. The Univ. of Delaware study you linked to (see, I click! I read! Feel the love, Falcon.) plans to generate 330GW of power annually - from 166,720 turbines floating on top of fifty thousand square miles of ocean. That's a wind farm roughly one-fifth the area of Texas, Mr President. The four nuclear generators listed for California in the DOE page you linked to, on the other hand, take up a total of 834 acres (~1.3 square miles) and provided 16% of California's power supply in 2004 with their 4GW total capacity (though they were not run to capacity). 330/4 = 82.5, so we'd need about 107 square miles of nuclear plants (relatively inefficient ones built in the mid-1980's, anyway) to generate 330GW of electricity that way. You could do that ten times over inside the King Ranch down here; I'm not inclined to slice that up into fractions of Texas as a whole, but it's obviously much smaller a required area.
Going by the University of Delaware study's numbers and the numbers in the DOE page, we can also calculate an energy output density of 330GW/50000 sq. mi. ~=.007 GW per square mile for wind generation, and 4GW/1.3 sq. mi. ~= 3.08 GW per square mile. Wind's footprint is 440 times larger than nuclear's per unit of energy produced.
Also, just a side note - the nuclear plants listed on the DOE page you linked
I have to agree with Grishnak, and disagree with falconwolf, about nuclear. You're right, Grishnak, we can do it better, but overall it's still the best bang for the buck (calculating the waste output, and handling of said waste output, into the buck) that we have. Anyway, I'm hopeful that when we do get around to building new reactors, they'll be of a more modern and efficient design than the ones running currently.
Sorry, Falcon, but solar, wind, wave, hydro and all the other renewables won't cut it at our current consumption levels (see the link at the end). I'm also opposed to all of those at nation-powering scales because they take energy directly out of the environment, instead of from nature's concentrated energy "stores" in carbon and nuclear fuels. That means that running them on the scale it would take to power us (I assume the inclusive, since you mention voting) greedy Americans would require soaking up a significant percentage of the light that hits the planet, or of the kinetic energy from the air or water around us. Maybe enough to noticeably change the climate, cool soil temperatures and kill plant life or slow the tides, as we scale up to generate everyone's power needs (and as power "needs" grow). A nearly-as-bad downside is the fact that the footprint for enough of a solar or wind farm to replace a coal plant means you're eating up many times more real estate with concrete and metal than the coal plant did, and I've no desire to pave the planet.
So the big objection to coal power (which also pertains to combustion engines; cars) is that we're running out of the power source and there's not more we can get or make. The objection to combustion engines (which also pertains to coal power) is that when you run millions of the things, the air gets pretty filthy and they give off a lot of things like CO2 that nobody wants around (and then there's the limited-fuel-resources-from-few-suppliers drawback as well). With nuclear, there's abundant fuel basically anywhere, and which you can also fabricate with the right kind of reactor; fuel supply is approximately unlimited, so the objection is about the emissions. However, with only a few thousand nuclear plants, eventually, powering the US (not to be -centric, sorry folks, just an example) the emissions from a few large sources aren't nearly as unmanageable as with all those combustion engines running around and the maybe fifty thousand coal plants in operation - many small sources of waste emissions. The objection basically comes down to concern over how we can safely dispose of really nasty stuff. It's a genuine concern, but it's completely solvable from an engineering standpoint. The payoff is the best possible power/fuel ratio under current technology, meaning cheaper and more efficient energy without having to worry about supply going away or being used as leverage in an international spat.
I'm not, because Obama ain't magic. He's the best shot we have at a sane nation on 20 January, but he still has to play ball right now (and he still will when he's President, just to a lesser degree). It wasn't Republican pressure or even the election that meant he had to vote for this bill - it was Nancy Pelosi. Nate Silver at 538 gives a better analysis than I can:
If you don't want to click, here's the summary: Pelosi threw her weight behind this compromised bill, and she's been Obama's primary ally in the Democratic party. Snubbing her on this vote would have meant a much tougher fight to get meaningful health care reform passed. You might even call this his first political move in a presidential role.
About the only thing I agree with McCain on is that we need one heck of a lot more nuclear power plants. But our global diplomatic stance, Iraq (drawing down), Afghanistan (stepping it up), health care, taxes, net neutrality, education, Supreme Court nominations, transparency and information availability from government - all of these are why I'm voting for Obama. His FISA vote, while it's unfortunate that he had to do so, won't change my vote in November.
Yes, some do - and it's not a knock on Linux, either.
I work at a small webhost. We're 100% Linux, and have somewhere in the low hundreds of thousands of sites on about forty servers. I come across a compromised site about every other day, and those are the ones that are making themselves obvious - malicious javascript, form abuse, SQL injections, etc. Being on Linux servers has nothing to do with how secure the sites are. The users pick their own passwords and manage their own content, and the sites that get compromised usually do a poor job of one or both.
Bad passwords are the number-one problem. I check regularly and always find accounts using "password". I'm at a loss, frankly. Someone *will* guess your password if you're just going to be blindingly obvious with it. We've had to resort to blocking FTP for half of Africa, most of Asia, and a few spots in eastern Europe.
Second-ranked problem is poor code maintenance. Many hacked accounts are running PHP-based applications that haven't been patched or updated in three years. Yes, your b2evolution install from 2005 is vulnerable now. Back up your data and upgrade. You'll feel much better afterward, I promise =). Most of the PHP vulnerabilities can be (and are) prevented with mod_security, but the occasional user still figures out that they can add a SecFilterEngine Off line in.htaccess and the next thing you know they're sending their 50,000 closest friends information on a great pharmacy in Canada that ships ci4-L1ss right to your door.
What Linux does for us is keep these problems isolated to the user accounts. We've had exactly one box rooted in the last five years, which ain't perfect but ain't bad either, considering the number of attempts we attract. So, yes, run Linux and Apache, and keep them patched and locked down. Watch your logs. Keep good backups and know how to roll them back onto a server. But don't think that's going to keep your website safe from Turkish script kiddies.
I doubt if the average person could name everything that deserves to be remembered as true art. I would wager there is 'forgotten' true art that is today largely ignored even by critics and historians.
Should you see all the episodes of Buffy to 'get' it? Would you look at three square centimeters of a statue before dismissing it as crap? I appreciate that you may not find Buffy accessible at first viewing and not be motivated to continue. However, just because YOU don't like something doesn't automatically mean there is no argument for its status as something more than television filler material.
In other words, I think you've contradicted your own point that personal taste shouldn't enter much into the 'art or not' debate. Your only argument that Buffy isn't art is that you find it beyond crap. What objective reasons can you give that Buffy is not art?
You're riding in the wrong place. Get south, preferably into the Hill Country around Austin / San Antonio and points west. Twistiest roads in the state, and some of the best riding in the nation. There's a nice ride out to Bandera, Highway 16 between there and Kerrville I believe. Also check out Lime Creek Road on the northwest side of Austin, bordering the northeast shore of Lake Travis. Just don't plan to ride anywhere west of I-35 after dark. The deer are all over the place, almost any time of year.
Hell, get down to Big Bend. It's a long, straight ride, but some beautiful twisties in the park and wonderful wilderness besides. Even down where I am, in the Brazos Valley, there are some legendary patches of pavement. If you get down here, try 166 between College Station and Caldwell or 3090 east of Navasota. The national forest around Hunstville is great as well.
Closer to you, you could try taking I-20 west to Weatherford, then south on 171, which loops around the west side of Ft. Worth waaay out there. Connecting to 171 is 51, which goes down to Granbury and then on to some really nice curves before ending at US 67. If you get on 377 heading to Ft. Worth in Granbury, you can soon turn south (or maybe east) onto 4, which goes to Cleburne. Okay roads, and I'm suggesting the less-crowded routes, but as you've observed, there's not much worth riding in the D/FW area.
To take full advantage, get out to a good bookstore and buy The Roads of Texas (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0940672642/qid=1039674600/sr=2-2/ref=sr_2_2/103-2226368-0823 856) (ISBN 0-940672-64-2). The best dang map of the state a biker could find. Excruciating detail, paved vs unpaved clearly marked, and if it were laid out as a flat map, the state would measure about 17 by 23 feet. Yes, I calculated this once, when I was planning to devote a room in the house to doing so. I don't have a big enough room.
Texas doesn't have Californa's mountains, but we've got roads every bit as twisty. Don't refute me until you've ridden Lime Creek Road. I've had it personally certified by a California sportbike rider, and it's not the only twisty by far. You just need to ride a day or so out of D/FW to find them =). Get out of that area (and any other of our big cities) and you'll find the drivers are much saner as well. I'm not saying you won't want the helmet - I never ride without mine, either. But when you find Texas Scenic Road 390 (from Independence to Burton, with a detour to the Bluebell ice cream factory in Brenham for free samples) or you're out on 336 north of Leakey following an old cattle trail through the West Texas hills, you'll be as happy as you've ever been to be on two wheels.
I've been trying lately to convert entirely to Linux for my desktop system, and one of my sticking points is that XNews is only available for Windows.
This ties in to this story because the author of XNews, Luu Tran, has cited Windows' accomodation of his severe visual impairment and Linux' lack thereof as the reason he has taken no interest in porting to Linux. Perhaps he'll check out G2 after hearing this news.
I agree with both points, with one caveat about frats. At my school, frats were not big with the students and had trouble keeping enough members. We had enought dorm space for about 10,000 of the students and a large military program that attracted most of those who needed the all-male camraderie type of thing. Bonfire was also a popular fraternity replacement (guessed where I went to school yet?)
However, the service fraternities always did well. I'm opposed to the idea of strictly social fraternities, but I'd encourage people to join service frats, whose membership fees are mostly paid in community service hours, or special-interest frats (music fraternities come to mind). There are plenty of social organizations that accomplish something as well as forge friendships, and most are free.
Basically, don't get suckered in to paying good money to hang out with a bunch of guys and party. Plenty of cool people will do that with you for free.
And as much as I liked the much-mentioned Frank Miller series that had Bats whipping Superman's butt, I must agree with you.
My favorite evidence of Superman's speedy brain was in an old Radioshack promotional comic book I picked up in the early 1980's. It posed a division problem involving large integers to Superman and the almighty TRS-80. Superman could solve the problem in his head and write the solution on a chalkboard in the time between pressing enter on the TRS-80's keyboard and the appearance of the result on the monitor.
Could Batman defeat the great and powerful TRS-80?
Most of the cast's bad voices were essential to the premise of that episode! I'm tired of most people not understanding that, even some of the cast members.
Look, in real life, if you bust out singing, who wants to listen? Unless you're unusually good, nobody. You're probably a poor or mediocre singer, as am I and are most people.
So, in order for the characters to believably be under the influence of a song-and-dance causing demon, they should sing just as well as the average person, with few exceptions.
This not only reinforces the suspension of disbelief for the show, but plays off the long tradition of musicals, particularly movies, which normally dub over any less-than-stellar singing voice of an actor with the voice of a professional singer. That's fine for those movies, because they exist in their own little magical world which doesn't bat an eye at spontaneous song-and-dance numbers.
"Once More, With Feeling" intentionally pointed out the basic weirdness of the little musical parallel universe all those movies and plays inhabit. It's akin to Cervante's Don Quixote, which extrapolated the plots of popular romantic adventure novels of the day to find that in real life, such behavior would be odd, suicidal and insane (though very funny).
It wouldn't be such a hard policy. If a kid comes to a teacher / parent with a question along the lines of, 'what is religion?', the response could be something like, 'there are many, so-and-so is mine, here's an overview of several belief systems.' Modified of course for age-appropriateness.
Your point that the vast majority of the world population grows up with the faith of its family and immediate community was one of the big reasons I began to question the validity of my local favorite's claim to be the 'one true religion.' Surely, I thought, every religion makes this claim in its stronghold, and they cannot all be right. Is the eternal reward in the afterlife reserved for those who happen to grow up in just the right family and community? I think we'd all be happier and more rational beings if we came to our faiths, or none at all, individually and not because that's what mom and dad believed.
The Podkletnov effect suggests it may be possible to effectively reduce the mass of the ship, thereby reducing the overall energy needed for acceleration.
Gravity has NOTHING to do with mass...
endquoth
Gravity acts on mass, so it has something to do with it. But you're right, if Podkletnov's hypothesis is correct and he's blocking gravity, it's not much use for moving a starship, except maybe to launch from a gravity well.
However, I can't see that mass reduction has been ruled out. From the old Wired article:
(Podkletnov speaking) So we placed a ball-shaped magnet above the disc, attached to a balance. The balance behaved strangely. We substituted a nonmagnetic material, silicon, and still the balance was very strange. We found that any object above the disc lost some of its weight...
As far as I can tell, they measured the weight of the object. Weight is derived from mass and gravity. The effect, if it really happens, might be a result of blocked gravitational interaction between the object and Earth OR reduced mass of the object. I have no idea what's been done beyond this, so Podkletnov and his team may have investigated this further, but going on what I can figure out from the articles, either is possible. Though, between the two, I'd sooner believe gravity is blocked than mass disappears and reappears.
I am diligently monitoring/. for the dreaded news that @Home and Cox, my cable modem provider, have discontinued negotiations and I have lost service...
You should add the phrase "make no mistake about it" as well. He's backed off that one a bit, but in the first couple of weeks after September 11, there apparently were many mistakes being made about things that G.W. felt he had to straighten out =)
Don't know what kind on info you're looking for, but I've picked up some gossip over my years as a College Station resident and Aggie.
A friend who was doing a post-doc in chemistry here took me for a tour of his lab one night. In one of the rooms, high atop a storage cabinet, was a cardboard file box labelled "Cold Fusion," supposedly one of the last remaining pieces of evidence of the experiments conducted here to (dis)confirm Pons and Fleischmann's results.
Conversations years ago with an aerospace engineer and on a separate occasion with a nuclear engineer indicated that there were some interesting non-fusion things coming out of those experiments, but any and all research in that direction was squashed after the public ridicule and scientific stigma became so great.
We also had an unrelated incident in which one of the senior chemists, after a long and respected career, started soliciting funding for research into transmutation. He was convinced he could get the process working at a net profit (Pb + energy => enough Au to pay for the resources consumed plus a profit). He, er, retired before that got off the ground =)
But the ability to live forever would really give us the ability to choose when we die. Maybe people wouldn't want to live forever, but I personally would love to live several times the current average human life span, then get my affairs in order before ending my life in a manner of my own choosing.
Slashdot Mirror
Falcon, we're both pretty much on the same page, I suspect. We want to move to energy production that doesn't impact the environment any more than necessary. You seem to be under the impression I am advocating coal, but my position is just the opposite - I'd prefer to shut down all the coal plants in operation tomorrow, and stop mining the stuff yesterday. Even a hundreds-of-years supply is not really sustainable, just not running out before we die, and we need to stop burning it all up.
Our difference comes from the way we're measuring the environmental impacts of the various options. Environmental impact of energy production comes from the waste emissions - "smoke" from coal plants, small amounts of very nasty radioactive stuff from nuclear, not much in the way of emissions from hydro, wind, solar, etc. I think that's the measure you're primarily or exclusively paying attention to. However, the environmental impact also comes from the resources you take out of the environment and the space you need to use to generate. That's where nuclear becomes a very attractive option.
Global warming is having a noticeable effect on our planet already, with melting polar ice and higher average temperatures (that my friends in Europe have definitely started to notice). That's measurable and visible change as a result of something on the order of one degree Celsius of delta. So to combat that, we put up huge wind farms; what happens when we've converted enough of the kinetic energy of the planet's airmass to reduce the average wind speed 1 km/h? Or wave farms; where are we when the tides don't rise and fall to the same extent? (They're the only thing holding up the moon!!!1! Kidding.) Or when we're redirecting enough solar energy to electricity that we start losing vegetation? Earth is a massively complicated balance of forces, and we've already f**ked with one variable enough to notice detrimental effects. I'm not keen to go playing with some others. Nuclear, on the other hand, won't still the tides, it won't slow the winds, it doesn't soak up the sun's radiation, and it won't release the CO2 that we now know from experience warms the earth.
Look at that another way - that's 330GW (but really a lot more, since windmills aren't 100% efficient) of energy getting taken out of the global airmass every year and put into our air conditioners and refrigerators. Nuclear takes that 330GW (again, more in reality) out of a fairly small amount of uranium or thorium.
Nuclear power has the smallest spatial footprint per unit of energy produced, as well. The Univ. of Delaware study you linked to (see, I click! I read! Feel the love, Falcon.) plans to generate 330GW of power annually - from 166,720 turbines floating on top of fifty thousand square miles of ocean. That's a wind farm roughly one-fifth the area of Texas, Mr President. The four nuclear generators listed for California in the DOE page you linked to, on the other hand, take up a total of 834 acres (~1.3 square miles) and provided 16% of California's power supply in 2004 with their 4GW total capacity (though they were not run to capacity). 330/4 = 82.5, so we'd need about 107 square miles of nuclear plants (relatively inefficient ones built in the mid-1980's, anyway) to generate 330GW of electricity that way. You could do that ten times over inside the King Ranch down here; I'm not inclined to slice that up into fractions of Texas as a whole, but it's obviously much smaller a required area.
Going by the University of Delaware study's numbers and the numbers in the DOE page, we can also calculate an energy output density of 330GW/50000 sq. mi. ~= .007 GW per square mile for wind generation, and 4GW/1.3 sq. mi. ~= 3.08 GW per square mile. Wind's footprint is 440 times larger than nuclear's per unit of energy produced.
Also, just a side note - the nuclear plants listed on the DOE page you linked
I have to agree with Grishnak, and disagree with falconwolf, about nuclear. You're right, Grishnak, we can do it better, but overall it's still the best bang for the buck (calculating the waste output, and handling of said waste output, into the buck) that we have. Anyway, I'm hopeful that when we do get around to building new reactors, they'll be of a more modern and efficient design than the ones running currently.
Sorry, Falcon, but solar, wind, wave, hydro and all the other renewables won't cut it at our current consumption levels (see the link at the end). I'm also opposed to all of those at nation-powering scales because they take energy directly out of the environment, instead of from nature's concentrated energy "stores" in carbon and nuclear fuels. That means that running them on the scale it would take to power us (I assume the inclusive, since you mention voting) greedy Americans would require soaking up a significant percentage of the light that hits the planet, or of the kinetic energy from the air or water around us. Maybe enough to noticeably change the climate, cool soil temperatures and kill plant life or slow the tides, as we scale up to generate everyone's power needs (and as power "needs" grow). A nearly-as-bad downside is the fact that the footprint for enough of a solar or wind farm to replace a coal plant means you're eating up many times more real estate with concrete and metal than the coal plant did, and I've no desire to pave the planet.
So the big objection to coal power (which also pertains to combustion engines; cars) is that we're running out of the power source and there's not more we can get or make. The objection to combustion engines (which also pertains to coal power) is that when you run millions of the things, the air gets pretty filthy and they give off a lot of things like CO2 that nobody wants around (and then there's the limited-fuel-resources-from-few-suppliers drawback as well). With nuclear, there's abundant fuel basically anywhere, and which you can also fabricate with the right kind of reactor; fuel supply is approximately unlimited, so the objection is about the emissions. However, with only a few thousand nuclear plants, eventually, powering the US (not to be -centric, sorry folks, just an example) the emissions from a few large sources aren't nearly as unmanageable as with all those combustion engines running around and the maybe fifty thousand coal plants in operation - many small sources of waste emissions. The objection basically comes down to concern over how we can safely dispose of really nasty stuff. It's a genuine concern, but it's completely solvable from an engineering standpoint. The payoff is the best possible power/fuel ratio under current technology, meaning cheaper and more efficient energy without having to worry about supply going away or being used as leverage in an international spat.
Enough of my ramblings, though. Pay attention to http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/20/mackay_on_carbon_free_uk/ this guy's numbers.
I'm not, because Obama ain't magic. He's the best shot we have at a sane nation on 20 January, but he still has to play ball right now (and he still will when he's President, just to a lesser degree). It wasn't Republican pressure or even the election that meant he had to vote for this bill - it was Nancy Pelosi. Nate Silver at 538 gives a better analysis than I can:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/06/large-majority-of-swing-district.html
If you don't want to click, here's the summary: Pelosi threw her weight behind this compromised bill, and she's been Obama's primary ally in the Democratic party. Snubbing her on this vote would have meant a much tougher fight to get meaningful health care reform passed. You might even call this his first political move in a presidential role.
About the only thing I agree with McCain on is that we need one heck of a lot more nuclear power plants. But our global diplomatic stance, Iraq (drawing down), Afghanistan (stepping it up), health care, taxes, net neutrality, education, Supreme Court nominations, transparency and information availability from government - all of these are why I'm voting for Obama. His FISA vote, while it's unfortunate that he had to do so, won't change my vote in November.
Yes, some do - and it's not a knock on Linux, either.
I work at a small webhost. We're 100% Linux, and have somewhere in the low hundreds of thousands of sites on about forty servers. I come across a compromised site about every other day, and those are the ones that are making themselves obvious - malicious javascript, form abuse, SQL injections, etc. Being on Linux servers has nothing to do with how secure the sites are. The users pick their own passwords and manage their own content, and the sites that get compromised usually do a poor job of one or both.
Bad passwords are the number-one problem. I check regularly and always find accounts using "password". I'm at a loss, frankly. Someone *will* guess your password if you're just going to be blindingly obvious with it. We've had to resort to blocking FTP for half of Africa, most of Asia, and a few spots in eastern Europe.
Second-ranked problem is poor code maintenance. Many hacked accounts are running PHP-based applications that haven't been patched or updated in three years. Yes, your b2evolution install from 2005 is vulnerable now. Back up your data and upgrade. You'll feel much better afterward, I promise =). Most of the PHP vulnerabilities can be (and are) prevented with mod_security, but the occasional user still figures out that they can add a SecFilterEngine Off line in .htaccess and the next thing you know they're sending their 50,000 closest friends information on a great pharmacy in Canada that ships ci4-L1ss right to your door.
What Linux does for us is keep these problems isolated to the user accounts. We've had exactly one box rooted in the last five years, which ain't perfect but ain't bad either, considering the number of attempts we attract. So, yes, run Linux and Apache, and keep them patched and locked down. Watch your logs. Keep good backups and know how to roll them back onto a server. But don't think that's going to keep your website safe from Turkish script kiddies.
[Homer]
Did you know that so-called 'volunteers' don't even get *PAID*?
[/Homer]
So the way around that would be for the other states to let Nevada pay to vet the machines, then just buy the same machines.
I doubt if the average person could name everything that deserves to be remembered as true art. I would wager there is 'forgotten' true art that is today largely ignored even by critics and historians.
Should you see all the episodes of Buffy to 'get' it? Would you look at three square centimeters of a statue before dismissing it as crap? I appreciate that you may not find Buffy accessible at first viewing and not be motivated to continue. However, just because YOU don't like something doesn't automatically mean there is no argument for its status as something more than television filler material.
In other words, I think you've contradicted your own point that personal taste shouldn't enter much into the 'art or not' debate. Your only argument that Buffy isn't art is that you find it beyond crap. What objective reasons can you give that Buffy is not art?
You're riding in the wrong place. Get south, preferably into the Hill Country around Austin / San Antonio and points west. Twistiest roads in the state, and some of the best riding in the nation. There's a nice ride out to Bandera, Highway 16 between there and Kerrville I believe. Also check out Lime Creek Road on the northwest side of Austin, bordering the northeast shore of Lake Travis. Just don't plan to ride anywhere west of I-35 after dark. The deer are all over the place, almost any time of year.
2 /qid=1039674600/sr=2-2/ref=sr_2_2/103-2226368-0823 856) (ISBN 0-940672-64-2). The best dang map of the state a biker could find. Excruciating detail, paved vs unpaved clearly marked, and if it were laid out as a flat map, the state would measure about 17 by 23 feet. Yes, I calculated this once, when I was planning to devote a room in the house to doing so. I don't have a big enough room.
Hell, get down to Big Bend. It's a long, straight ride, but some beautiful twisties in the park and wonderful wilderness besides. Even down where I am, in the Brazos Valley, there are some legendary patches of pavement. If you get down here, try 166 between College Station and Caldwell or 3090 east of Navasota. The national forest around Hunstville is great as well.
Closer to you, you could try taking I-20 west to Weatherford, then south on 171, which loops around the west side of Ft. Worth waaay out there. Connecting to 171 is 51, which goes down to Granbury and then on to some really nice curves before ending at US 67. If you get on 377 heading to Ft. Worth in Granbury, you can soon turn south (or maybe east) onto 4, which goes to Cleburne. Okay roads, and I'm suggesting the less-crowded routes, but as you've observed, there's not much worth riding in the D/FW area.
To take full advantage, get out to a good bookstore and buy The Roads of Texas (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/094067264
Texas doesn't have Californa's mountains, but we've got roads every bit as twisty. Don't refute me until you've ridden Lime Creek Road. I've had it personally certified by a California sportbike rider, and it's not the only twisty by far. You just need to ride a day or so out of D/FW to find them =). Get out of that area (and any other of our big cities) and you'll find the drivers are much saner as well. I'm not saying you won't want the helmet - I never ride without mine, either. But when you find Texas Scenic Road 390 (from Independence to Burton, with a detour to the Bluebell ice cream factory in Brenham for free samples) or you're out on 336 north of Leakey following an old cattle trail through the West Texas hills, you'll be as happy as you've ever been to be on two wheels.
I've been trying lately to convert entirely to Linux for my desktop system, and one of my sticking points is that XNews is only available for Windows.
This ties in to this story because the author of XNews, Luu Tran, has cited Windows' accomodation of his severe visual impairment and Linux' lack thereof as the reason he has taken no interest in porting to Linux. Perhaps he'll check out G2 after hearing this news.
I agree with both points, with one caveat about frats. At my school, frats were not big with the students and had trouble keeping enough members. We had enought dorm space for about 10,000 of the students and a large military program that attracted most of those who needed the all-male camraderie type of thing. Bonfire was also a popular fraternity replacement (guessed where I went to school yet?)
However, the service fraternities always did well. I'm opposed to the idea of strictly social fraternities, but I'd encourage people to join service frats, whose membership fees are mostly paid in community service hours, or special-interest frats (music fraternities come to mind). There are plenty of social organizations that accomplish something as well as forge friendships, and most are free.
Basically, don't get suckered in to paying good money to hang out with a bunch of guys and party. Plenty of cool people will do that with you for free.
"The main focus of the event is multiplayer gaming, but there will also be other activities, such as paintball."
Isn't paintball a multiplayer game? Would be boring in single-player mode...
Oh, sorry. The answer is 'no.'
And as much as I liked the much-mentioned Frank Miller series that had Bats whipping Superman's butt, I must agree with you.
My favorite evidence of Superman's speedy brain was in an old Radioshack promotional comic book I picked up in the early 1980's. It posed a division problem involving large integers to Superman and the almighty TRS-80. Superman could solve the problem in his head and write the solution on a chalkboard in the time between pressing enter on the TRS-80's keyboard and the appearance of the result on the monitor.
Could Batman defeat the great and powerful TRS-80?
Could he?
Just to clarify, UNT is not part of the UT system. See the list here.
Most of the cast's bad voices were essential to the premise of that episode! I'm tired of most people not understanding that, even some of the cast members.
Look, in real life, if you bust out singing, who wants to listen? Unless you're unusually good, nobody. You're probably a poor or mediocre singer, as am I and are most people.
So, in order for the characters to believably be under the influence of a song-and-dance causing demon, they should sing just as well as the average person, with few exceptions.
This not only reinforces the suspension of disbelief for the show, but plays off the long tradition of musicals, particularly movies, which normally dub over any less-than-stellar singing voice of an actor with the voice of a professional singer. That's fine for those movies, because they exist in their own little magical world which doesn't bat an eye at spontaneous song-and-dance numbers.
"Once More, With Feeling" intentionally pointed out the basic weirdness of the little musical parallel universe all those movies and plays inhabit. It's akin to Cervante's Don Quixote, which extrapolated the plots of popular romantic adventure novels of the day to find that in real life, such behavior would be odd, suicidal and insane (though very funny).
I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said, "Stop! Don't do it!"
"Why shouldn't I?" he said.
I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!"
He said, "Like what?"
I said, "Well, are you religious or atheist?"
He said, "Religious."
I said, "Me too! Are you Christian or Buddhist?"
He said, "Christian."
I said, "Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?"
He said, "Protestant."
I said, "Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?"
He said, "Baptist!"
I said, "Wow! Me too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?"
He said, "Baptist Church of God!"
I said, "Me too! Are you Original Baptist Church of God or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?"
He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God!"
I said, "Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?"
He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915!"
I said, "Die, heretic scum!" and pushed him off.
-- Emo Phillips
It wouldn't be such a hard policy. If a kid comes to a teacher / parent with a question along the lines of, 'what is religion?', the response could be something like, 'there are many, so-and-so is mine, here's an overview of several belief systems.' Modified of course for age-appropriateness.
Your point that the vast majority of the world population grows up with the faith of its family and immediate community was one of the big reasons I began to question the validity of my local favorite's claim to be the 'one true religion.' Surely, I thought, every religion makes this claim in its stronghold, and they cannot all be right. Is the eternal reward in the afterlife reserved for those who happen to grow up in just the right family and community? I think we'd all be happier and more rational beings if we came to our faiths, or none at all, individually and not because that's what mom and dad believed.
quoth Phiu-x: I also think its because Texas is the US biggest state
..endquoth
Whoop! Damn straight. Alaska doesn't really count & we're bigger than the rest. I like these Canadians.
Gravity acts on mass, so it has something to do with it. But you're right, if Podkletnov's hypothesis is correct and he's blocking gravity, it's not much use for moving a starship, except maybe to launch from a gravity well.
However, I can't see that mass reduction has been ruled out. From the old Wired article:
As far as I can tell, they measured the weight of the object. Weight is derived from mass and gravity. The effect, if it really happens, might be a result of blocked gravitational interaction between the object and Earth OR reduced mass of the object. I have no idea what's been done beyond this, so Podkletnov and his team may have investigated this further, but going on what I can figure out from the articles, either is possible. Though, between the two, I'd sooner believe gravity is blocked than mass disappears and reappears.
Jake96
** :)
Also they gave every 7th grader in maine an ibook this year, and those kids usually go down with one punch.
**
Thanks a lot, spooky. I just got my ass kicked by a 7th grader.
Hear, hear! I very much enjoyed Planescape: Torment, and my holiday present to myself will be enough play time to get through Baldur's Gate 2.
I am diligently monitoring /. for the dreaded news that @Home and Cox, my cable modem provider, have discontinued negotiations and I have lost service...
You should add the phrase "make no mistake about it" as well. He's backed off that one a bit, but in the first couple of weeks after September 11, there apparently were many mistakes being made about things that G.W. felt he had to straighten out =)
Don't know what kind on info you're looking for, but I've picked up some gossip over my years as a College Station resident and Aggie.
A friend who was doing a post-doc in chemistry here took me for a tour of his lab one night. In one of the rooms, high atop a storage cabinet, was a cardboard file box labelled "Cold Fusion," supposedly one of the last remaining pieces of evidence of the experiments conducted here to (dis)confirm Pons and Fleischmann's results.
Conversations years ago with an aerospace engineer and on a separate occasion with a nuclear engineer indicated that there were some interesting non-fusion things coming out of those experiments, but any and all research in that direction was squashed after the public ridicule and scientific stigma became so great.
We also had an unrelated incident in which one of the senior chemists, after a long and respected career, started soliciting funding for research into transmutation. He was convinced he could get the process working at a net profit (Pb + energy => enough Au to pay for the resources consumed plus a profit). He, er, retired before that got off the ground =)
But the ability to live forever would really give us the ability to choose when we die. Maybe people wouldn't want to live forever, but I personally would love to live several times the current average human life span, then get my affairs in order before ending my life in a manner of my own choosing.