As soon as you use electricity for propulsion, you remove the requirement to get the energy from fossil fuels. It then becomes possible to get the energy from alternative sources.
Not only of the passengers, train, and endpoints/stations, but now you have to protect the entire track too. All it takes is some terrorist group with RPGs going around blowing up sections of track, causing train derailments.
How do you think the Europeans and Japanese have been getting by without terror attacks on their HST lines? Hint: It's something to do with foreign policy.
Do we know what the interest payments are going to be on that bond? California is going to have a day of reckoning if this taxophopbia goes on for much longer.
I remember reading a report that said that for the cost of the "stimulus checks" that the government wrote last spring (150billion), they could have built a 300+mph train from SF to Chicago, using 2 tracks, one for eastbound, one for westbound. Future projects would be cheaper, since that included wiggle room to iron out a few problems. so that's what, 5-6 hours from SF-Chicago, with all the legroom you could want, large bathrooms, dinner cars, etc? No more feeling like cattle, no more airport body cavity searches. Something 600-1000 people per train, trains leaving every hour or less.. My god that would clear up roads and airports.
I was just thinking about that yesterday. If we stimulated the economy by way of good old fashioned public works projects instead of just cutting checks for everyone, we'd leave a much more useful legacy to society than a few million houses with an extra plasma TV each. On the other hand I suppose it's good that people got a chance to pay down credit card bills and take some debt out of the system.
You do realize that GrumblyStuff is responding to the AC calling Ironix a troll?
He shoulda used the quote to give his post some context. The AC is as much to blame for not following the thread as GS is for not being clear enough in his post in case someone didn't read the thread.
so much for the new levels of openness and transparency that the Olympics were supposed to usher in
What? Who said that the Olympics were going to usher in new levels of openness and transparency? First I've heard of it. Last time I checked, the Olympics were intended to be a symbol of the end of China's isolation from world affairs, and a bit of bragging about what could be achieved by a Communist (in name only) dictatorship after a period of market reforms.
The presidential seat is merely a face that the world gets to see and blame. The real direction of the country come from the cabinet, the house, and unfortunately, the bench as of late.
Only if there's a President in that seat who shows a complete absence of leadership, is too clueless to read the reports put before him, and can't make informed decisions using the same process of reasoning that educated people have.
But voter fraud on the Democratic side will balance any voter fraud on the Republican side, so it's all OK. Back to the topic, for analysis I'll be tuning into The Daily Show and the Colbert Report.
That's actually the opposite of what many of us want. How about: just stop letting people immigrate into the U.S. as glorified indentured servants.
I've said it before: I'd love to have open borders for technical talent. I'm willing to compete with anyone in the world on technical ability. And, if they're better than me I guess I'll just have a chance to work for them when they start their own companies.
However, I don't want to take part in a race to the bottom of wages and benefits. And, that's what H1-B and similar programs are designed to do.
Do you not see the contradiction in what you're saying? Open borders would mean even MORE competition and an even faster 'race to the bottom' as you put it. The only way to stop wages going down as a result of more available labour would be to have a statutory minimum wage in the industry.
It's nature's way of telling a man to hurry up and settle down with a woman instead of being a playboy all his life. If you're still acting the playboy while your hairline is receding, the pressure's on to find a mate that you want to raise kids with. Hence, the baldness gene remains in the gene pool. That's my theory anyway.
I was reading about this kind of brain-sensing technology in Discover magazine. The next step is to replace the cybernetic limbs with stimulators that will activate the user's own muscles, so the whole thing will be essentially invisible on the outside, and a whole lot lighter. It's a way of getting signals out of the brain and into the muscles while bypassing the damaged spinal cord. Maybe a small amount of electrical power would be needed, but it'd be cool if they could tap into or reproduce the body's natural electrical impulses.
For years I swore that I'd never get a cell phone. I held out admirably until about 2003/04 or thereabouts, but I had to succumb. The reason was that everyone else had one, and social etiquette had moved on to the point where it was considered rude not to call in certain situations, not to return a call promptly, and social events were being organised and plans adjusted with such speed that it was all but impossible to be kept in the loop with a landline and payphones alone.
It's similar to how there are people who live in rural or suburban areas who would probably love to be able to live without a car, but a lot of the infrastructure and social norms that would have made that feasible in the past are no longer around.
Society expects you to be able to have personal mobility and instant availability for communication, and it works on the assumption that you do.
Judging by the experience posted, it looks like some people are holding back on the social networking thing and finding it difficult because of peer pressure pushing them into it. Interesting how society forces a body to conform.
... actually it's not offtopic since it refers to a tag on this story - but why are all the stories now being tagged 'story?' What's it going to be next? Tagging them with 'words?'
You can age Whiskey in a bottle? I thought it stopped aging as soon as it goes into a glass container. It's one of the differences between itself and wine.
There's something hard to reconcile about the reviewer's obvious awe and the fact that the book was written by someone who thinks doing meaningful scientific data analysis in Excel is a good idea.
Care to expand on why you think you can't do 'meaningful scientific data analysis in Excel?' Are you one of these people who 'reviews' books without actually reading them?
I don't know about how email lobbying works, but I've been involved in lobbying campaigns before. When you call a representative's office, you tell them you're for or against the bill in question and say which way you want them to vote on it. The operator say "OK, I'll let him know." They then count the number of people calling in on either side of the issue, and pass that info on to the representative. Of course you can't send bribes by phone, so whether or not this is effective is open to debate.
I think it's interesting that what is normally a dry subject is generating so much public interest. I'm glad to see the American public sitting up and taking notice of important things for a change instead of just vegetating in front of reality TV and celebrity gossip while politicians try to take money out of the public's pockets to cover their own failure to properly regulate the finance industry. Maybe there's hope for American democracy yet.
I wouldn't say 'woefully.' I demonstrated that I had related skills in the field, that I had an ability to pick up the necessary specific skills, and they liked my attitude better than other more experienced people who applied. And I worked there quite happily for a year until I got a better offer somewhere else. Was a great springboard on to better things.
It was the picture of the smaller device used in their modeling that led me to think in terms of barriers and walls and stuff. I'm just thinking that if a wave were tall enough, then artificially shallow water is going to make the wave even higher if there's enough energy behind it, so the artificial islands would probably need to be quite some distance away to be able to take the energy out of a tsunami. I wonder what kind of ecological impact it would have too, disrupting habitats and all that.
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As soon as you use electricity for propulsion, you remove the requirement to get the energy from fossil fuels. It then becomes possible to get the energy from alternative sources.
Not only of the passengers, train, and endpoints/stations, but now you have to protect the entire track too. All it takes is some terrorist group with RPGs going around blowing up sections of track, causing train derailments.
How do you think the Europeans and Japanese have been getting by without terror attacks on their HST lines? Hint: It's something to do with foreign policy.
Do we know what the interest payments are going to be on that bond? California is going to have a day of reckoning if this taxophopbia goes on for much longer.
I remember reading a report that said that for the cost of the "stimulus checks" that the government wrote last spring (150billion), they could have built a 300+mph train from SF to Chicago, using 2 tracks, one for eastbound, one for westbound. Future projects would be cheaper, since that included wiggle room to iron out a few problems. so that's what, 5-6 hours from SF-Chicago, with all the legroom you could want, large bathrooms, dinner cars, etc? No more feeling like cattle, no more airport body cavity searches. Something 600-1000 people per train, trains leaving every hour or less.. My god that would clear up roads and airports.
I was just thinking about that yesterday. If we stimulated the economy by way of good old fashioned public works projects instead of just cutting checks for everyone, we'd leave a much more useful legacy to society than a few million houses with an extra plasma TV each. On the other hand I suppose it's good that people got a chance to pay down credit card bills and take some debt out of the system.
You do realize that GrumblyStuff is responding to the AC calling Ironix a troll?
He shoulda used the quote to give his post some context. The AC is as much to blame for not following the thread as GS is for not being clear enough in his post in case someone didn't read the thread.
What? Who said that the Olympics were going to usher in new levels of openness and transparency? First I've heard of it. Last time I checked, the Olympics were intended to be a symbol of the end of China's isolation from world affairs, and a bit of bragging about what could be achieved by a Communist (in name only) dictatorship after a period of market reforms.
Only if there's a President in that seat who shows a complete absence of leadership, is too clueless to read the reports put before him, and can't make informed decisions using the same process of reasoning that educated people have.
But voter fraud on the Democratic side will balance any voter fraud on the Republican side, so it's all OK. Back to the topic, for analysis I'll be tuning into The Daily Show and the Colbert Report.
That's actually the opposite of what many of us want. How about: just stop letting people immigrate into the U.S. as glorified indentured servants.
I've said it before: I'd love to have open borders for technical talent. I'm willing to compete with anyone in the world on technical ability. And, if they're better than me I guess I'll just have a chance to work for them when they start their own companies.
However, I don't want to take part in a race to the bottom of wages and benefits. And, that's what H1-B and similar programs are designed to do.
Do you not see the contradiction in what you're saying? Open borders would mean even MORE competition and an even faster 'race to the bottom' as you put it. The only way to stop wages going down as a result of more available labour would be to have a statutory minimum wage in the industry.
Say it can save time by having logs of how to fix stuff vs having to google the same stuff over and over.
But then your logs will get so big that you'll have to buy a google search engine to search through all your logs.
It's nature's way of telling a man to hurry up and settle down with a woman instead of being a playboy all his life. If you're still acting the playboy while your hairline is receding, the pressure's on to find a mate that you want to raise kids with. Hence, the baldness gene remains in the gene pool. That's my theory anyway.
(No funny mods please, I'm being serious.)
I was reading about this kind of brain-sensing technology in Discover magazine. The next step is to replace the cybernetic limbs with stimulators that will activate the user's own muscles, so the whole thing will be essentially invisible on the outside, and a whole lot lighter. It's a way of getting signals out of the brain and into the muscles while bypassing the damaged spinal cord. Maybe a small amount of electrical power would be needed, but it'd be cool if they could tap into or reproduce the body's natural electrical impulses.
For years I swore that I'd never get a cell phone. I held out admirably until about 2003/04 or thereabouts, but I had to succumb. The reason was that everyone else had one, and social etiquette had moved on to the point where it was considered rude not to call in certain situations, not to return a call promptly, and social events were being organised and plans adjusted with such speed that it was all but impossible to be kept in the loop with a landline and payphones alone.
It's similar to how there are people who live in rural or suburban areas who would probably love to be able to live without a car, but a lot of the infrastructure and social norms that would have made that feasible in the past are no longer around.
Society expects you to be able to have personal mobility and instant availability for communication, and it works on the assumption that you do.
Judging by the experience posted, it looks like some people are holding back on the social networking thing and finding it difficult because of peer pressure pushing them into it. Interesting how society forces a body to conform.
... actually it's not offtopic since it refers to a tag on this story - but why are all the stories now being tagged 'story?' What's it going to be next? Tagging them with 'words?'
Don't listen to him! Point it at McCain! I want to see the comedy playing out when Palin gets in as President!
When it gets the nod of a French winemaker or a vintner from California I'll be a little more intrigued.
Global warming will probably give English winemakers some credibility in years to come. (No 'funny' mod points please, I'm being serious.)
You can age Whiskey in a bottle? I thought it stopped aging as soon as it goes into a glass container. It's one of the differences between itself and wine.
The continent formally known as Africa?
Last time I checked (and it has been a while)
How long is a 'while?'
There's something hard to reconcile about the reviewer's obvious awe and the fact that the book was written by someone who thinks doing meaningful scientific data analysis in Excel is a good idea.
Care to expand on why you think you can't do 'meaningful scientific data analysis in Excel?' Are you one of these people who 'reviews' books without actually reading them?
The documentary 'No End In Sight' says it could cost over a trillion bucks.
I don't know about how email lobbying works, but I've been involved in lobbying campaigns before. When you call a representative's office, you tell them you're for or against the bill in question and say which way you want them to vote on it. The operator say "OK, I'll let him know." They then count the number of people calling in on either side of the issue, and pass that info on to the representative. Of course you can't send bribes by phone, so whether or not this is effective is open to debate.
I think it's interesting that what is normally a dry subject is generating so much public interest. I'm glad to see the American public sitting up and taking notice of important things for a change instead of just vegetating in front of reality TV and celebrity gossip while politicians try to take money out of the public's pockets to cover their own failure to properly regulate the finance industry. Maybe there's hope for American democracy yet.
As my Dad often said, go into a bookie's and you'll see five windows for paying them but only one window for paying out.
I wouldn't say 'woefully.' I demonstrated that I had related skills in the field, that I had an ability to pick up the necessary specific skills, and they liked my attitude better than other more experienced people who applied. And I worked there quite happily for a year until I got a better offer somewhere else. Was a great springboard on to better things.
It was the picture of the smaller device used in their modeling that led me to think in terms of barriers and walls and stuff. I'm just thinking that if a wave were tall enough, then artificially shallow water is going to make the wave even higher if there's enough energy behind it, so the artificial islands would probably need to be quite some distance away to be able to take the energy out of a tsunami. I wonder what kind of ecological impact it would have too, disrupting habitats and all that.