It's quite easy. Make sure that you have a defense contractor in every congressional district. Then you get to play the "jobs" card when someone tries to stop an idiotic waste of resources such as this.
Dwight Eisenhower must be turning in his grave now that the Military Industrial Complex that he warned of has come to pass.
Of course maybe if we hadn't had to come here to get away from the other f'd up countries it would have never been an issue, but hey, that's all right, continue to blame us for a GLOBAL problem.
So it's 17th century Europe's fault that 21st century America is an inefficient user of resources?
America, with 5% of the world's population, consumes about 25% of its resources. Reason? Single Use Zoning. The silly settlement pattern that puts housing neatly in one area, shopping in another, office space in another, and industry in another, and then forces people to drive between all these areas throughout the course of the day. Okay, it makes sense to zone off industry in certain cases where noise and pollution is an issue. But making it illegal to open a corner store in a residential area? No wonder so many journeys are made by car in the USA, bus journeys in that kind of sprawl take forever and mass transit gets a bad reputation (deservedly so). Induced traffic is another symptom of this problem - roads get wider, developers develop farther out to allow people to take advantage of the faster commute and lower property prices, roads get filled with cars belonging to these new commuters, and we're back to square one again with people demanding that the road gets widened even more!
As long as American settlement patterns are so screwed up, the problem will exist even if we aren't in a state of world peak oil. The problem is a hopeless addiction to petroleum that no magic wand nuclear power solution (mentioned by someone above) will be able to fix.
"What if the "lead driver" rides the brakes, thus smoking my brakes/warping my disks?"
This is a European proposal. People in Europe don't generally drive automatics, and they won't know what you're talking about when you say "ride the brakes."
For the benefit of anyone who has only ever driven manual, "riding the brakes" refers to the braking that is needed to even slightly reduce speed when driving an automatic. Releasing the throttle is usually enough to slow a manual car down, but for some reason automatics want to keep on going and need a bit more persuasion, hence more use of the brake pedal.
... the vast majority of free market types still support the idea of the government fulfilling the role of national defense to some degree.
No, they just don't think about it. That would interfere with the "all government is evil" mantra that has been drilled into their heads by corporate media interests.
deuterium is common in sea water. Tritium is somewhat active and has a half-life of 10 years, through beta decay. It's used, sealed in phosphor coated glass vials, for "self powered" illumination in watch dials, exit signs, gun sights, and so on.
My physics teacher in school once told me about someone that used to paint glow-in-the-dark material onto the hands of watches. He had a habit of cleaning his brush by licking it. He ended up with little tumors on his tongue.
Would that be the British people who pay a TV license to the BBC which is accused of being the broadcasting arm of the Labour party?
Oh the BBC does get accused of having a liberal bias from time to time, but there's nothing as blatant as, say, Bill "yell and scream when losing an argument before you cut off the guest's microphone" O'Reilly and Sean "Cut the Obama footage off in mid-sentence and claim he said the opposite of what he really said" Hannity.
Each Economist issue's official date range is from Saturday to the next Friday. In the UK print copies are dispatched late Thursday, for Friday delivery to retail outlets. Elsewhere, retail outlets and subscribers receive their copies on Friday or (more often) Saturday, depending on their location. The Economist Web site posts each week's new content by Friday morning, ahead of the official publication date.
Circulation for the newspaper, audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), was over 1.2 million for the first half of 2007.[38] Sales inside North America were around 54 percent of the total, with sales in the UK making up 14 percent of the total and continental Europe 19 percent. The Economist claims sales, both by subscription and on newsstands, in over 200 countries. Global sales have doubled since 1997. Of its American readers, two out of three make more than $100,000 a year.[39]
The Economist once boasted about its limited circulation. In the early 1990s it used the slogan "The Economist - not read by millions of people." "Never in the history of journalism has so much been read for so long by so few," wrote Geoffrey Crowther, a former editor.[40]
The Economist Newspaper Limited is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Economist Group. The publications of the group include the CFO brand family as well as the annual The World in..., the lifestyle quarterly Intelligent Life, European Voice, and Roll Call. Sir Evelyn Robert de Rothschild was Chairman of the company from 1972 to 1989.
The Economist is a rare example of a printed paper that's still worth buying in print, and if they were to stop offering everything up for free on their website I honestly wouldn't have a problem with renewing my paid subscription. Quality writing, quality analysis that's still relevant even a few days after the event, and you don't have to wade through page after page of obtrusive advertising. It doesn't matter if it's a few days old, you can still give the reader an informed reading experience by explaining the background behind the news and what's likely to happen next according to reputable people who know their subject. The absence of partisan bombast makes it kinda refreshing too.
Ya know "objective reporting" is a myth. Prior to 1950 the Philadelphia Inquirer proudly trumpeted that it was pro-Republican. Many papers had the words directly in their names - "The Peoria Democrat".
And I see nothing wrong with that. Newspapers were invented as a way for the owner to express his views. If you didn't like those views, create a competing newspaper. That's what liberty and "free press" means... to say whatever you want to say, even if it's biased towards your own view.
Spot on. Newspapers in the UK and Ireland are still pretty open about what parties they support, they really nail their colours to the mast. If you want to win a British general election, you're on an uphill task if you don't have the tabloid press on your side.
Broadcast media is a bit different though. In the UK and Ireland people expect a certain amount of objectivity in the broadcast media. In the UK political parties cannot buy advertising time on TV, instead they each get the same amount of time allocated for "party political broadcasts" that are usually about ten minutes long before the main nightly news, and that's about it. The power of television is such that in the UK they prefer to make sure it's not open to political influence, which is why British people are a bit shocked when they turn on Fox News or MSNBC and see the blatant editorialising on the air.
Christians used "God" as an excuse to perpetrate some of the worst *atrocities* in history. The Crusades.
Don't know much about history, do you? The Crusades were in response to hundreds of years of Muslim invasions. The Middle East (which was Christian) was conquered by Muslims in the 7th Century AD. The Muslims invaded Europe in 711AD and sacked Rome in 846AD. Europe's Dark Age was dark because of Muslim slave raids destroyed Europe economy. You might want to read a biography of Miguel Cervantes (the author of Don Quixote)....he was held as a slave by Muslims for 5 years.
Rome's empire was invaded from the north too. Later when the Vikings emerged they plundered the continent into even darker times. Contrast that with the Muslims who settled for a while in southern Spain. They built cities with libraries, universities and theaters at a time when the Christians to the north were living in mud hut villages. They had a library in one city that contained more books than existed in the whole of contemporary France at the time, and that was one of about seventy libraries in that one city.
It was Islam that carried on the work of Classical Greek/Roman civilisation with so many developments in mathematics -- why do you think half the words in modern mathematical English are Arabic words?
Islam gets a bad press in today's world (deservedly so, IMHO, since it seems to predisposed to extremism) but let's not get too carried away with the version of history that was written by the victors. The Crusades were as much a political quest as a religious one. The perversions of the Muslims were the 'threat from WMDs' of their day.
That article makes no sense : an animal doesn't consume more natural resources than a car. If you give your dog the left overs from the table , instead of throwing it in the garbage can , i can't see it consume any natural resources . And after digestion , a dog fertilizes the soil , so the resources are giving back the ground . That the cycle of life , and it works much better than how a car works.
And when your pet dies , you burry it , or maybe burn it , etc , but it's remains also come back to the ground. Which will be the same of you eat your pet , but then it takes until you die to be completely returned to the soil.
My car consumes no resources either. I put gas in at the pump, and then burn it and return it to the atmosphere, thus recycling it. When its old it will eventually go to scrap and most of its parts will be directly recycled aswell. The rest will be buried in land fill, thus returning it to the ground from where it came.
It's a clever argument, but a pet's food intake and carbon output is part of the natural carbon cycle and is hence carbon neutral. During the life of your SUV, on the other hand, your vehicle is burning fossil fuels and putting carbon back into the atmosphere that had been taken out of it over a much longer period of time.
Get a dancer to chat to you for ages while she gives you the sales pitch so she can give you a dance. Hold her off as long as you can, milk the conversation long enough, don't compliment her until she's earned it, then get her number and arrange to meet her when her shift ends. But on no account do you let her give you a dance, play hard to get.
Ummm... we must have different definitions of abrupt.
Turn off the engine in any standard transmission vehicle I have driven and you slow quickly, but not abruptly... The engine makes a decent brake, but not a good one.
Parking in gear only on any grade more than a slight slope and the car will creep down the hill. The steeper the hill, the faster it creeps.
Running out of gas does not kill power steering. As long as your transmission is still engaged and you're still moving forward, the engine is still turning over and the accessory belts are still moving (i.e. power steering pump is still active). Those systems stop working when your RPMs drop below idle RPM.
Er, if you run out of petrol then the engine DOESN'T keep turning over. It stops, and as long as the clutch is engaged you'll come to an abrupt halt. Ever parked a car in gear? It's as good as using the handbrake.
You mistakenly think Prop 13 is bad. All Prop 13 did is limit property tax to 2%.
No. You're wrong. Prop 13 did not just limit property tax to 2%. Prop 13 was a tax-busting initiative that laid the foundations of the fiscal mess that California's voters have now gotten themselves into. Prop 13 brought in a requirement for a two-thirds majority for any municipality or the state government to bring about a tax increase, effectively handing a veto to the anti-tax Republican minority who think that services can be provided for free.
Forgive me if I stopped reading at this point, but when you're only two sentences along and already you're dropping clangers like that, it doesn't bode well for the rest of your post.
Drupal might have been usable for what we were trying to do, but whatever the trick is I just couldn't find it in the limited time I had available to get the project done.
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It's quite easy. Make sure that you have a defense contractor in every congressional district. Then you get to play the "jobs" card when someone tries to stop an idiotic waste of resources such as this.
Dwight Eisenhower must be turning in his grave now that the Military Industrial Complex that he warned of has come to pass.
Err, that's exactly what I said.
Funny about Space 1999. the scariest thing I ever saw on TV as a kid was the monster in Dragon's Den. I used to have nightmares.
Seeing it years later, it was just a flashlight and foam rubber.
"Dragon's Domain," I think.
Yeah, you're right, it's the American's fault.
Of course maybe if we hadn't had to come here to get away from the other f'd up countries it would have never been an issue, but hey, that's all right, continue to blame us for a GLOBAL problem.
So it's 17th century Europe's fault that 21st century America is an inefficient user of resources?
America, with 5% of the world's population, consumes about 25% of its resources. Reason? Single Use Zoning. The silly settlement pattern that puts housing neatly in one area, shopping in another, office space in another, and industry in another, and then forces people to drive between all these areas throughout the course of the day. Okay, it makes sense to zone off industry in certain cases where noise and pollution is an issue. But making it illegal to open a corner store in a residential area? No wonder so many journeys are made by car in the USA, bus journeys in that kind of sprawl take forever and mass transit gets a bad reputation (deservedly so). Induced traffic is another symptom of this problem - roads get wider, developers develop farther out to allow people to take advantage of the faster commute and lower property prices, roads get filled with cars belonging to these new commuters, and we're back to square one again with people demanding that the road gets widened even more!
As long as American settlement patterns are so screwed up, the problem will exist even if we aren't in a state of world peak oil. The problem is a hopeless addiction to petroleum that no magic wand nuclear power solution (mentioned by someone above) will be able to fix.
"What if the "lead driver" rides the brakes, thus smoking my brakes/warping my disks?"
This is a European proposal. People in Europe don't generally drive automatics, and they won't know what you're talking about when you say "ride the brakes."
For the benefit of anyone who has only ever driven manual, "riding the brakes" refers to the braking that is needed to even slightly reduce speed when driving an automatic. Releasing the throttle is usually enough to slow a manual car down, but for some reason automatics want to keep on going and need a bit more persuasion, hence more use of the brake pedal.
... the vast majority of free market types still support the idea of the government fulfilling the role of national defense to some degree.
No, they just don't think about it. That would interfere with the "all government is evil" mantra that has been drilled into their heads by corporate media interests.
I'm from Tahiti so I might have missed something in the translation, but what is wrong with this planet?
You're absolutely right. You have missed something. We already know where this planet is and hence don't have to go looking for it.
Some photos from around Treese:
Chat
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3579757
Cave Ins
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3579725
I don't know what's uglier, the ground level photos or the satellite images.
deuterium is common in sea water. Tritium is somewhat active and has a half-life of 10 years, through beta decay. It's used, sealed in phosphor coated glass vials, for "self powered" illumination in watch dials, exit signs, gun sights, and so on.
My physics teacher in school once told me about someone that used to paint glow-in-the-dark material onto the hands of watches. He had a habit of cleaning his brush by licking it. He ended up with little tumors on his tongue.
Would that be the British people who pay a TV license to the BBC which is accused of being the broadcasting arm of the Labour party?
Oh the BBC does get accused of having a liberal bias from time to time, but there's nothing as blatant as, say, Bill "yell and scream when losing an argument before you cut off the guest's microphone" O'Reilly and Sean "Cut the Obama footage off in mid-sentence and claim he said the opposite of what he really said" Hannity.
From wiki:
Each Economist issue's official date range is from Saturday to the next Friday. In the UK print copies are dispatched late Thursday, for Friday delivery to retail outlets. Elsewhere, retail outlets and subscribers receive their copies on Friday or (more often) Saturday, depending on their location. The Economist Web site posts each week's new content by Friday morning, ahead of the official publication date.
Circulation for the newspaper, audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), was over 1.2 million for the first half of 2007.[38] Sales inside North America were around 54 percent of the total, with sales in the UK making up 14 percent of the total and continental Europe 19 percent. The Economist claims sales, both by subscription and on newsstands, in over 200 countries. Global sales have doubled since 1997. Of its American readers, two out of three make more than $100,000 a year.[39]
The Economist once boasted about its limited circulation. In the early 1990s it used the slogan "The Economist - not read by millions of people." "Never in the history of journalism has so much been read for so long by so few," wrote Geoffrey Crowther, a former editor.[40]
The Economist Newspaper Limited is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Economist Group. The publications of the group include the CFO brand family as well as the annual The World in..., the lifestyle quarterly Intelligent Life, European Voice, and Roll Call. Sir Evelyn Robert de Rothschild was Chairman of the company from 1972 to 1989.
The Economist is a rare example of a printed paper that's still worth buying in print, and if they were to stop offering everything up for free on their website I honestly wouldn't have a problem with renewing my paid subscription. Quality writing, quality analysis that's still relevant even a few days after the event, and you don't have to wade through page after page of obtrusive advertising. It doesn't matter if it's a few days old, you can still give the reader an informed reading experience by explaining the background behind the news and what's likely to happen next according to reputable people who know their subject. The absence of partisan bombast makes it kinda refreshing too.
Ya know "objective reporting" is a myth. Prior to 1950 the Philadelphia Inquirer proudly trumpeted that it was pro-Republican. Many papers had the words directly in their names - "The Peoria Democrat".
And I see nothing wrong with that. Newspapers were invented as a way for the owner to express his views. If you didn't like those views, create a competing newspaper. That's what liberty and "free press" means... to say whatever you want to say, even if it's biased towards your own view.
Spot on. Newspapers in the UK and Ireland are still pretty open about what parties they support, they really nail their colours to the mast. If you want to win a British general election, you're on an uphill task if you don't have the tabloid press on your side.
Broadcast media is a bit different though. In the UK and Ireland people expect a certain amount of objectivity in the broadcast media. In the UK political parties cannot buy advertising time on TV, instead they each get the same amount of time allocated for "party political broadcasts" that are usually about ten minutes long before the main nightly news, and that's about it. The power of television is such that in the UK they prefer to make sure it's not open to political influence, which is why British people are a bit shocked when they turn on Fox News or MSNBC and see the blatant editorialising on the air.
I live in the bay area and the only big newspaper around here is the Mercury News.
San Francisco Chronicle?
What's worse, the smartest of these make it to the top of the food chain, then take out all of this amassed anger on society.
What's all this about?
Christians used "God" as an excuse to perpetrate some of the worst *atrocities* in history. The Crusades.
Don't know much about history, do you? The Crusades were in response to hundreds of years of Muslim invasions. The Middle East (which was Christian) was conquered by Muslims in the 7th Century AD. The Muslims invaded Europe in 711AD and sacked Rome in 846AD. Europe's Dark Age was dark because of Muslim slave raids destroyed Europe economy. You might want to read a biography of Miguel Cervantes (the author of Don Quixote)....he was held as a slave by Muslims for 5 years.
Rome's empire was invaded from the north too. Later when the Vikings emerged they plundered the continent into even darker times. Contrast that with the Muslims who settled for a while in southern Spain. They built cities with libraries, universities and theaters at a time when the Christians to the north were living in mud hut villages. They had a library in one city that contained more books than existed in the whole of contemporary France at the time, and that was one of about seventy libraries in that one city.
It was Islam that carried on the work of Classical Greek/Roman civilisation with so many developments in mathematics -- why do you think half the words in modern mathematical English are Arabic words?
Islam gets a bad press in today's world (deservedly so, IMHO, since it seems to predisposed to extremism) but let's not get too carried away with the version of history that was written by the victors. The Crusades were as much a political quest as a religious one. The perversions of the Muslims were the 'threat from WMDs' of their day.
That article makes no sense : an animal doesn't consume more natural resources than a car.
If you give your dog the left overs from the table , instead of throwing it in the garbage can , i can't see it consume any natural resources . And after digestion , a dog fertilizes the soil , so the resources are giving back the ground . That the cycle of life , and it works much better than how a car works.
And when your pet dies , you burry it , or maybe burn it , etc , but it's remains also come back to the ground.
Which will be the same of you eat your pet , but then it takes until you die to be completely returned to the soil.
My car consumes no resources either. I put gas in at the pump, and then burn it and return it to the atmosphere, thus recycling it. When its old it will eventually go to scrap and most of its parts will be directly recycled aswell. The rest will be buried in land fill, thus returning it to the ground from where it came.
It's a clever argument, but a pet's food intake and carbon output is part of the natural carbon cycle and is hence carbon neutral. During the life of your SUV, on the other hand, your vehicle is burning fossil fuels and putting carbon back into the atmosphere that had been taken out of it over a much longer period of time.
Get a dancer to chat to you for ages while she gives you the sales pitch so she can give you a dance. Hold her off as long as you can, milk the conversation long enough, don't compliment her until she's earned it, then get her number and arrange to meet her when her shift ends. But on no account do you let her give you a dance, play hard to get.
Again a great idea implemented poorly.
Give people some privacy ffs! Having your shit posted all over the Internet is lame.
Ever since cameras became small, cheap, and embedded in every phone, "privacy" is a thing of the past. Further reading: Google Abu Ghraib.
Ummm... we must have different definitions of abrupt.
Turn off the engine in any standard transmission vehicle I have driven and you slow quickly, but not abruptly... The engine makes a decent brake, but not a good one.
Parking in gear only on any grade more than a slight slope and the car will creep down the hill. The steeper the hill, the faster it creeps.
What? Have you actually seen this happen?
Running out of gas does not kill power steering. As long as your transmission is still engaged and you're still moving forward, the engine is still turning over and the accessory belts are still moving (i.e. power steering pump is still active). Those systems stop working when your RPMs drop below idle RPM.
Er, if you run out of petrol then the engine DOESN'T keep turning over. It stops, and as long as the clutch is engaged you'll come to an abrupt halt. Ever parked a car in gear? It's as good as using the handbrake.
It provides a nice readable display, and more importantly doesn't make me open my wallet to buy a separate gadget.
Meh. I've tried reading books on my iPhone and it's just too small to be a comfortable read. Plus the battery life sucks.
You mistakenly think Prop 13 is bad. All Prop 13 did is limit property tax to 2%.
No. You're wrong. Prop 13 did not just limit property tax to 2%. Prop 13 was a tax-busting initiative that laid the foundations of the fiscal mess that California's voters have now gotten themselves into. Prop 13 brought in a requirement for a two-thirds majority for any municipality or the state government to bring about a tax increase, effectively handing a veto to the anti-tax Republican minority who think that services can be provided for free.
Forgive me if I stopped reading at this point, but when you're only two sentences along and already you're dropping clangers like that, it doesn't bode well for the rest of your post.
I don't know what IYO means.
Drupal might have been usable for what we were trying to do, but whatever the trick is I just couldn't find it in the limited time I had available to get the project done.
isn't the voltage across ultracapacitors really large with a large charge? if that cap explodes, i could see it being very very bad.
also what about times when the bus doesn't need to pick up or drop of passengers? just stop the bus anyways?
Don't they stop for traffic lights anyway? Don't see how much difference that'd make.