It would also control some of the ridiculous cost spirals. Doctors have no idea how much treatment costs; I've asked how much a certain procedure might cost and I'm always met with a blank stare. All the doctors know is that they get a kickback from the lab/hospital/etc for ordering some test. They don't really care if it's necessary or useful.
Actually, the doctors order all the tests because if they don't, and the patient happens to have some disease that would've been detected by that test, they'll get sued for malpractice, and their malpractice insurance rates will go up, and/or they could lose their license to practice. Having universal health insurance wouldn't stop this, it would actually make it worse since the doctors would know the tests would be paid for. (Unless you put some bureaucrat in charge of deciding which tests are necessary, taking that decision out of the hands of the doctor who sees you.)
The only other ways to stop it are to tighten up the requirements to file a malpractice suit (which would make the lawyers unhappy), or for the government to provided some sort of universal malpractice insurance. But then you'd get the same arguments being raised for/against universal health insurance, but applied to rich doctors instead of poor people (e.g. bad doctors being allowed to continue practice). Personally I think getting people's opinions on both is a great way to detect whether they truly want to fix the health care system, or if they just have an agenda they want to push and have picked health care as their vehicle.
The fact remains that there's a lot of free energy out there.
It ain't free. In a 2005 accounting of global energy sources (PDF), all of the "free" energy sources are more expensive than coal in terms of $ per MWh. Wind cost about 1.5x as much as coal/gas/nuclear (the U.S. wind plant figures on page 55 look good simply because the U.S. rates wind plants with a 40 year lifespan, vs 20 years for the rest of the world). About $45/MWh for wind vs. about $30/MWh for coal and nuclear. Solar is a whopping 5x-10x as expensive per MWh.
The problem with the wind and solar is that they are very sparse. While their fuel costs are nil, to capture the same amount of energy as a coal plant produces, they require a much larger investment in infrastructure to gather up that sparse energy. Once you amortize the cost of that infrastructure across the plant's expected lifetime, the energy they produce ends up being more expensive than non-renewables. I'm sure the cost will come down eventually, but switching totally over to wind and solar right now would cause a shock to the global economy on par with the oil price increases in 2008. Hydro, geothermal, and biofuels (which is really using plants as your solar collectors) look like much better candidates long-term.
Around here in the US, you can actually buy "bat boxes" that come with instructions on finding the best location. You have to leave it up for a couple months, but eventually, bam, you've got your own personal furry little mosquito vacuum...and they are damned efficient at it.
But that turns the mosquito problem into a bat guano problem. Both figuratively and literally.
The theaters aren't the ones pushing it, the studios are. Right now the theaters hand all their revenue from movie ticket sales to the studios. They scrape by on food and drink sales. Since the studios are getting all the ticket money without actually owning or running any of the theaters, it creates a situation which can come up with bizarre ideas like this which have no regard for the practicalities of actually running a theater.
Bush's PR department was awesome. You just need to catch up with the times.
Bush's PR department was awful. He increased science funding more than any President in modern history, and yet a great majority of people think science research suffered under his administration. Yes there were certain specific high-profile research areas he killed (embryonic stem cells, the superconducting super collider, etc). And yes I despise how he tried to politicize the scientific process. But overall government funding for science research increased about 50% during his terms.
The trick is to cry that everyone's out to get you, and that they only report things in a one-sided manner, but then to make sure that your side is the only one reported. Remember when the Democrats were blocking things in Congress under his administration? How was that possible with a Republican majority?
Right, except the people you think were doing this weren't the ones doing it. It was the people pushing for embryonic stem cell research and the SSC who were doing it. And apparently succeeding since those two projects seem to characterize Bush's science policies in most people's minds, rather than the overall dollar amounts he directed towards scientific research in general.
So now we're almost ten years behind the rest of the world in discovering treatments with what amounts to a silver bullet that can actually replace dying tissues. That means that in the future, you'll have to import the treatments from other countries or fly there for treatment. Due to religion, America loses yet another manufacturing opportunity.
Only if you look at one small narrow area of research. As I already pointed out, funding for scientific research under Bush was massively increased. By your reasoning, that would mean we're far ahead of the rest of the world in lots of other areas. Concentrating attention on only a few areas where we're now behind is just politicking.
California has almost 3 million illegals. That's almost 8% of the state's population who are not paying taxes, and it's part of the reason the state is $41 billion in the hole (the cost of illigal immigrants to California is $10.5 billion annually, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform). People who think it's "racist" to state that illegal immigrants generally don't pay taxes are full of shit and clearly don't have a clue as to what real racism is.
I'm pretty conservative when it comes to employment. I helped run a business so saw everything firsthand from the employer's POV, and on most issues I'm solidly on the employer's side. But what you say isn't exactly true. Illegals who are hired legally (i.e. they produce a fake Social Security card, and the business is none the wiser) pay income taxes - it's withheld from their paychecks even if they eventually never file a tax return. They also pay sales taxes since they have to buy stuff locally. It's only the illegals who are paid under the table in cash who aren't paying taxes, and that's more a problem of a corrupt business knowingly hiring illegals. As an honest employer who has to compete with their sub-minimum-wage and tax-less payroll, I shed no tears when the INS raids them.
Boeing did it, while Lockheed skipped that, producing the L-1011 as their wide-body, instead. It was never *quite* as good as the 747,
The L-1011 was a fantastic aircraft. In typical Lockheed style, it was overdesigned. It had four redundant hydraulic systems, allowing it to on a few occasions survive failures which have brought down Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas aircraft (which only have three). When the DC-10 engineers ran into a vibration problem in the cabin due to the tail-mounted engine above, they just added more noise insulation. The Lockheed engineers figured out what was causing it, and changed the plane's design to minimize it.
The problem was that in terms of capacity and performance it was nearly identical to the DC-10. The two aircraft split the market, making neither plane profitable. Since Lockheed had cushy military contracts to fall back on, they withdrew from the commercial airliner market.
and sort of disappeared after the airline deregulation, because the then-new Airbus was cheaper to buy and operate than old L-1011s.
The L-1011 and DC-10 were designed with three engines to comply with the FAA's restrictions for overseas flights. Twin engine planes like the A300 were required to stay within a certain distance to an airport at all times, in case of a single engine failure. This essentially limited twins to overland routes, while at the time the most lucrative routes were the international overseas routes. So Lockheed and Douglas designed their aircraft with three engines despite it being common knowledge that 2 engines is more efficient than 3, and the third tail-mounted engine being a general PITA when it came to maintenance. It wasn't until ETOPS certification began in the 1980s that twin engined planes began to fly most overseas routes. Which also coincides with the time the L-1011s and DC-10s in service began to be phased out.
b) because the entire plane of passengers just sat there and allowed it to happen.
Based on phone calls and pilot transmissions to ATC from the 9/11 planes, the hijackers killed at least one person on each plane with the box cutters to cow the other passengers and crew into inaction. Also, at the time, the recommended procedure for hijackings was to comply with their demands in the air, and negotiate when the plane landed at the destination or for refueling. The idea that hijackers would hijack a plane solely to crash it to kill the occupants and people on the ground was so unthinkable that the scenario had never even occurred to most people. You can't fight against that which you don't know will happen.
Actually the sleeve tends to make the passport stay partially open and act as a parabola, amplifying the signal from a distance.
I think that was an attempt at a funny. But the Passport card is a flat card like your driver's license or a credit card. It's designed to be more convenient to carry for people crossing the border by land or sea. People who do that tend to live near the border, so cross frequently, and a regular passport is kinda bulky to carry with you all the time. The passport card will fit in your wallet like all your other cards.
Patents have historically resulted in some area of technology being made "off limits" to further development for a couple decades, I believe that Against Intellectual Monopoly has a good account of this happening with the steam engine.
Best example is probably the Selden patent on the gasoline-powered automobile. In defending the patent, they tried to keep Ford out of the market. Ford won, and the rest as they say is history. If Ford had lost, a lot of his inventions we now take for granted (assembly line, interchangeable parts, etc.) wouldn't have been invented until much later.
In this particular case, Ford won the patent suit on the grounds that the specific implementation covered by the patent (a Brayton engine) was not the implementation used by Ford (an Otto engine). IMHO that's how the patent system should work. You should not be able to patent a general concept (e.g. a gasoline-powered automobile). You should only be able to patent a specific implementation. If someone else comes up with something that does the same thing but with a different implementation, it has to be allowed to compete with your invention so technology can progress. Otherwise you get patent trolls holding entire segments of industry hostage to their royalties and stunting technological progress.
Somebody clever will start offering a mail-in service for people to get eyeglass-quality anti-glare coatings applied to their Macbooks.
If you go to Best Buy or Office Depot or Frys or where ever and look at the glossy laptop displays, you'll notice that some are much more reflective than others. In particular, the high-end Sonys seem to have an anti-reflective coating that eliminates most of the reflections under typical indoor lighting. I didn't realize it at first (the Sony I bought 4 years ago was my first glossy screen). But I really noticed it when I replaced the Sony with a different laptop. The new one was like a mirror, and I could see everything behind me. With the Sony, I was only really bothered if I was wearing a white shirt and it was dark behind me.
You're close, but bricked really just means "you can't fix it, nor can the average layperson".
But in this case, anyone who managed to "brick" their drive is capable of "unbricking" it because the two procedures are exactly the same. The only reason it's considered "bricked" is because Seagate doesn't have a corrected firmware out yet which will let you "unbrick" it.
The law, which made it a crime for websites to allow children access to 'harmful' material, was declared a violation of the First Amendment because of existing elective filtering technologies and parental controls that are less restrictive to free speech than the 'ineffective' and 'overly broad' ban."
Does this mean that sometimes going part way down the slippery slope is actually the best protection against going further down the slippery slope? My head hurts...
Many of Sprint's plans have free roaming. If yours does and you're in an area with poor reception, try switching your phone to roaming only. Verizon is one of Sprint's roaming partners (so was Alltel, but Verizon bought them). So usually you can get a decent signal anywhere you could with the other carriers. If you don't switch to roaming-only, the phone tries to connect to a Sprint network even if its signal is almost nonexistent while the Verizon signal is strong.
Do NOT do this if you're near Canada or Mexico. If you end up roaming on an international network, you get to pay international rates. And getting it cleared up with Sprint's customer service could take forever.
The original CDMA services were rolled out by Sprint and Verizon using subcontractors to set up the towers. CDMA was relatively new and untested, so they relied on specs from Qualcomm to design those networks. The specs turned out to be rather optimistic. As a result the towers in certain older regions are spaced too far apart, leading to many areas with poor service. Verizon has been pretty good about moving or setting up new towers. Sprint has not. But if you can roam on Verizon's towers, the problem goes away.
Yes yes everyone knows how fantastic the ol' SERO plan is. It's a shame it's no longer available for people to sign up for, see: irrelevant.
Since the subject at hand is people leaving Sprint, and many of those people have SERO, it would seem quite relevant. I'm one of those people. I hardly ever call customer service so I almost never see Sprint's crappiness. I do however use the wireless Internet and free text extensively.
This is one of if not the best "green" energy solution I've run across. I first learned about it when doing cost calculations for HVAC systems for a new construction project in the low desert of California. By my calculations, in that location (hot summers, cold winters, large temperature shifts from day to night) it would've had a pay-back time of just 3 years, which is phenomenal. I don't understand why the environmental groups are not crowing about this to the extent they hype solar. It's available 24/7, does not require a clear view of the skies, has dramatically shorter pay-back time, is a low-tech solution which doesn't involve toxic manufacturing materials, is economical here and now instead of possibly in the future, and is viable over a much larger portion of the globe than solar. We should be putting them in almost every new house that's built.
You are part of the problem then. The American government and Constitution were founded on the idea that everyone has the same rights, whether they are citizens of the U.S. or not.
This is precisely why Gitmo exists. Prior to 9/11, the SCOTUS had decided that U.S. Constitutional protections apply to U.S. citizens anywhere, but to foreigners only on U.S. territory.
Guantanamo Bay is not U.S. soil. It is Cuban territory, on lease to the U.S. That's why Bush set up the prison camp there. By not holding the prisoners on U.S. soil, they don't fall under the umbrella of the U.S. Constitution's pesky protections, and we're "free" to hold them indefinitely without charges, and to use "creative" methods of extracting information from them.
The courts have been chipping away at this - the initial SCOTUS decision probably should have said U.S. jurisdiction, rather than U.S. territory, to avoid creating this loophole. But it's been slow going. So as distasteful as the OP's opinion may be, it is consistent with the current SCOTUS stance on the matter.
On the subject of these wiretaps, the Constitution was written at a time when people abroad could not interact in real-time with people in the U.S. So it's hard to say how the Constitution applies in this situation because it was penned at a time when the situation would never have even occurred to the people authoring it. So the decision on whether it's legal or not has to up to the courts. You obviously have your opinion on it, and the OP has his. Neither is "right" under our system of law until our court system validates it.
Silicon Valley is practically desert. They have hot summers and cold winters. Heat pumps don't work well at those extremes because they use the air as a heat sink/source. If most of his power bill is heating/cooling, he should look into a geothermal heat pump. Those use the ground as a heat sink/source. The ground about 10-20 feet down stays around 55F pretty much year round, allowing the heat pump to operate efficiently all year.
I priced one for a new construction in a semi-desert region, and the payback time would have been just 3 years. In such areas, they represent a much better investment for your money than solar, even with the year-round cloudless skies.
Funny, but it's a long time between ordering one of these planes and having it come into service. The current 747s used as Air Force One were ordered early in Reagan's term. They didn't enter service until the middle of Bush41's term. Obama is unlikely to ever fly in this new plane.
I'll add that the primary form of stress on airframes is the cabin pressurization each time it flies at altitude. Unlike steel, aluminum does not have a regime where it does not suffer metal fatigue. That is, with steel, if you make it a certain strength, you can subject it to cyclical stress loads an infinite amount of times and it will still hold. But with aluminum, each cycle weakens it (fatigues the metal) no matter how strong you make it, and it eventually fails.
Each time you pressurize the cabin, that subjects the aluminum skin to one cycle. Enough cycles and the aluminumwillfail. Modern passenger aircraft are typically designed to last several tens of thousands of such pressurization cycles. Once they reach the design limit, the airframes are retired and chopped up to discourage anyone who might get the not-so-bright idea of returning one of these airframes into service.
The U.S. already catches enough flak for its military spending. I think the President would want to arrive on a distinctly civilian-looking plane just for the PR.
The A340 is also 4-engined, albeit smaller than a 747. It's a beautiful plane, but the 777 is mopping the floor with it in the market. 2 engines is more efficient than 4.
Yeah, I don't understand why people are surprised by this. The Democratic party has always been pro-Hollywood, just like the Republican party has always been pro-business. People spend way too much energy badmouthing the opposing party, and not enough towards cleaning up the party they support. The vast majority of people I meet seem to equate criticizing their party with supporting the opposition, which is just silly. Your duty as a citizen does not stop at supporting the party of your choice; it extends to making sure your voice is heard so that they change to better represent your views.
As much as I dislike scientology, if Diskkeeper is a private company, they can hire whomever they want using whatever methods they want. Your freedom to associate and do business with whom you wish is one of the most fundamental rights not listed in the Bill of Rights. If I own my own company and want to hire only people who can recite the Jabberwocky from memory, or are missing one finger, or are/aren't black/white/Chinese/family members, I can. If you are operating independently, the law cannot force you to conduct business with someone whom you don't wish to conduct business. Things like the Equal Opportunity Employer requirements only apply if the company is accepting government contracts, or if they're voluntarily following EEOC guidelines.
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Actually, the doctors order all the tests because if they don't, and the patient happens to have some disease that would've been detected by that test, they'll get sued for malpractice, and their malpractice insurance rates will go up, and/or they could lose their license to practice. Having universal health insurance wouldn't stop this, it would actually make it worse since the doctors would know the tests would be paid for. (Unless you put some bureaucrat in charge of deciding which tests are necessary, taking that decision out of the hands of the doctor who sees you.)
The only other ways to stop it are to tighten up the requirements to file a malpractice suit (which would make the lawyers unhappy), or for the government to provided some sort of universal malpractice insurance. But then you'd get the same arguments being raised for/against universal health insurance, but applied to rich doctors instead of poor people (e.g. bad doctors being allowed to continue practice). Personally I think getting people's opinions on both is a great way to detect whether they truly want to fix the health care system, or if they just have an agenda they want to push and have picked health care as their vehicle.
It ain't free. In a 2005 accounting of global energy sources (PDF), all of the "free" energy sources are more expensive than coal in terms of $ per MWh. Wind cost about 1.5x as much as coal/gas/nuclear (the U.S. wind plant figures on page 55 look good simply because the U.S. rates wind plants with a 40 year lifespan, vs 20 years for the rest of the world). About $45/MWh for wind vs. about $30/MWh for coal and nuclear. Solar is a whopping 5x-10x as expensive per MWh.
The problem with the wind and solar is that they are very sparse. While their fuel costs are nil, to capture the same amount of energy as a coal plant produces, they require a much larger investment in infrastructure to gather up that sparse energy. Once you amortize the cost of that infrastructure across the plant's expected lifetime, the energy they produce ends up being more expensive than non-renewables. I'm sure the cost will come down eventually, but switching totally over to wind and solar right now would cause a shock to the global economy on par with the oil price increases in 2008. Hydro, geothermal, and biofuels (which is really using plants as your solar collectors) look like much better candidates long-term.
But that turns the mosquito problem into a bat guano problem. Both figuratively and literally.
The theaters aren't the ones pushing it, the studios are. Right now the theaters hand all their revenue from movie ticket sales to the studios. They scrape by on food and drink sales. Since the studios are getting all the ticket money without actually owning or running any of the theaters, it creates a situation which can come up with bizarre ideas like this which have no regard for the practicalities of actually running a theater.
Bush's PR department was awful. He increased science funding more than any President in modern history, and yet a great majority of people think science research suffered under his administration. Yes there were certain specific high-profile research areas he killed (embryonic stem cells, the superconducting super collider, etc). And yes I despise how he tried to politicize the scientific process. But overall government funding for science research increased about 50% during his terms.
Right, except the people you think were doing this weren't the ones doing it. It was the people pushing for embryonic stem cell research and the SSC who were doing it. And apparently succeeding since those two projects seem to characterize Bush's science policies in most people's minds, rather than the overall dollar amounts he directed towards scientific research in general.
Only if you look at one small narrow area of research. As I already pointed out, funding for scientific research under Bush was massively increased. By your reasoning, that would mean we're far ahead of the rest of the world in lots of other areas. Concentrating attention on only a few areas where we're now behind is just politicking.
I'm pretty conservative when it comes to employment. I helped run a business so saw everything firsthand from the employer's POV, and on most issues I'm solidly on the employer's side. But what you say isn't exactly true. Illegals who are hired legally (i.e. they produce a fake Social Security card, and the business is none the wiser) pay income taxes - it's withheld from their paychecks even if they eventually never file a tax return. They also pay sales taxes since they have to buy stuff locally. It's only the illegals who are paid under the table in cash who aren't paying taxes, and that's more a problem of a corrupt business knowingly hiring illegals. As an honest employer who has to compete with their sub-minimum-wage and tax-less payroll, I shed no tears when the INS raids them.
The L-1011 was a fantastic aircraft. In typical Lockheed style, it was overdesigned. It had four redundant hydraulic systems, allowing it to on a few occasions survive failures which have brought down Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas aircraft (which only have three). When the DC-10 engineers ran into a vibration problem in the cabin due to the tail-mounted engine above, they just added more noise insulation. The Lockheed engineers figured out what was causing it, and changed the plane's design to minimize it.
The problem was that in terms of capacity and performance it was nearly identical to the DC-10. The two aircraft split the market, making neither plane profitable. Since Lockheed had cushy military contracts to fall back on, they withdrew from the commercial airliner market.
The L-1011 and DC-10 were designed with three engines to comply with the FAA's restrictions for overseas flights. Twin engine planes like the A300 were required to stay within a certain distance to an airport at all times, in case of a single engine failure. This essentially limited twins to overland routes, while at the time the most lucrative routes were the international overseas routes. So Lockheed and Douglas designed their aircraft with three engines despite it being common knowledge that 2 engines is more efficient than 3, and the third tail-mounted engine being a general PITA when it came to maintenance. It wasn't until ETOPS certification began in the 1980s that twin engined planes began to fly most overseas routes. Which also coincides with the time the L-1011s and DC-10s in service began to be phased out.
Based on phone calls and pilot transmissions to ATC from the 9/11 planes, the hijackers killed at least one person on each plane with the box cutters to cow the other passengers and crew into inaction. Also, at the time, the recommended procedure for hijackings was to comply with their demands in the air, and negotiate when the plane landed at the destination or for refueling. The idea that hijackers would hijack a plane solely to crash it to kill the occupants and people on the ground was so unthinkable that the scenario had never even occurred to most people. You can't fight against that which you don't know will happen.
I think that was an attempt at a funny. But the Passport card is a flat card like your driver's license or a credit card. It's designed to be more convenient to carry for people crossing the border by land or sea. People who do that tend to live near the border, so cross frequently, and a regular passport is kinda bulky to carry with you all the time. The passport card will fit in your wallet like all your other cards.
Best example is probably the Selden patent on the gasoline-powered automobile. In defending the patent, they tried to keep Ford out of the market. Ford won, and the rest as they say is history. If Ford had lost, a lot of his inventions we now take for granted (assembly line, interchangeable parts, etc.) wouldn't have been invented until much later.
In this particular case, Ford won the patent suit on the grounds that the specific implementation covered by the patent (a Brayton engine) was not the implementation used by Ford (an Otto engine). IMHO that's how the patent system should work. You should not be able to patent a general concept (e.g. a gasoline-powered automobile). You should only be able to patent a specific implementation. If someone else comes up with something that does the same thing but with a different implementation, it has to be allowed to compete with your invention so technology can progress. Otherwise you get patent trolls holding entire segments of industry hostage to their royalties and stunting technological progress.
If you go to Best Buy or Office Depot or Frys or where ever and look at the glossy laptop displays, you'll notice that some are much more reflective than others. In particular, the high-end Sonys seem to have an anti-reflective coating that eliminates most of the reflections under typical indoor lighting. I didn't realize it at first (the Sony I bought 4 years ago was my first glossy screen). But I really noticed it when I replaced the Sony with a different laptop. The new one was like a mirror, and I could see everything behind me. With the Sony, I was only really bothered if I was wearing a white shirt and it was dark behind me.
But in this case, anyone who managed to "brick" their drive is capable of "unbricking" it because the two procedures are exactly the same. The only reason it's considered "bricked" is because Seagate doesn't have a corrected firmware out yet which will let you "unbrick" it.
Does this mean that sometimes going part way down the slippery slope is actually the best protection against going further down the slippery slope? My head hurts...
Many of Sprint's plans have free roaming. If yours does and you're in an area with poor reception, try switching your phone to roaming only. Verizon is one of Sprint's roaming partners (so was Alltel, but Verizon bought them). So usually you can get a decent signal anywhere you could with the other carriers. If you don't switch to roaming-only, the phone tries to connect to a Sprint network even if its signal is almost nonexistent while the Verizon signal is strong.
Do NOT do this if you're near Canada or Mexico. If you end up roaming on an international network, you get to pay international rates. And getting it cleared up with Sprint's customer service could take forever.
The original CDMA services were rolled out by Sprint and Verizon using subcontractors to set up the towers. CDMA was relatively new and untested, so they relied on specs from Qualcomm to design those networks. The specs turned out to be rather optimistic. As a result the towers in certain older regions are spaced too far apart, leading to many areas with poor service. Verizon has been pretty good about moving or setting up new towers. Sprint has not. But if you can roam on Verizon's towers, the problem goes away.
Since the subject at hand is people leaving Sprint, and many of those people have SERO, it would seem quite relevant. I'm one of those people. I hardly ever call customer service so I almost never see Sprint's crappiness. I do however use the wireless Internet and free text extensively.
It's a heckuva lot older than 20 years. The ancient Romans were using it to cool their homes. They even figured out a way to power it with solar power instead of a fan.
This is one of if not the best "green" energy solution I've run across. I first learned about it when doing cost calculations for HVAC systems for a new construction project in the low desert of California. By my calculations, in that location (hot summers, cold winters, large temperature shifts from day to night) it would've had a pay-back time of just 3 years, which is phenomenal. I don't understand why the environmental groups are not crowing about this to the extent they hype solar. It's available 24/7, does not require a clear view of the skies, has dramatically shorter pay-back time, is a low-tech solution which doesn't involve toxic manufacturing materials, is economical here and now instead of possibly in the future, and is viable over a much larger portion of the globe than solar. We should be putting them in almost every new house that's built.
This is precisely why Gitmo exists. Prior to 9/11, the SCOTUS had decided that U.S. Constitutional protections apply to U.S. citizens anywhere, but to foreigners only on U.S. territory.
Guantanamo Bay is not U.S. soil. It is Cuban territory, on lease to the U.S. That's why Bush set up the prison camp there. By not holding the prisoners on U.S. soil, they don't fall under the umbrella of the U.S. Constitution's pesky protections, and we're "free" to hold them indefinitely without charges, and to use "creative" methods of extracting information from them.
The courts have been chipping away at this - the initial SCOTUS decision probably should have said U.S. jurisdiction, rather than U.S. territory, to avoid creating this loophole. But it's been slow going. So as distasteful as the OP's opinion may be, it is consistent with the current SCOTUS stance on the matter.
On the subject of these wiretaps, the Constitution was written at a time when people abroad could not interact in real-time with people in the U.S. So it's hard to say how the Constitution applies in this situation because it was penned at a time when the situation would never have even occurred to the people authoring it. So the decision on whether it's legal or not has to up to the courts. You obviously have your opinion on it, and the OP has his. Neither is "right" under our system of law until our court system validates it.
Silicon Valley is practically desert. They have hot summers and cold winters. Heat pumps don't work well at those extremes because they use the air as a heat sink/source. If most of his power bill is heating/cooling, he should look into a geothermal heat pump. Those use the ground as a heat sink/source. The ground about 10-20 feet down stays around 55F pretty much year round, allowing the heat pump to operate efficiently all year.
I priced one for a new construction in a semi-desert region, and the payback time would have been just 3 years. In such areas, they represent a much better investment for your money than solar, even with the year-round cloudless skies.
Funny, but it's a long time between ordering one of these planes and having it come into service. The current 747s used as Air Force One were ordered early in Reagan's term. They didn't enter service until the middle of Bush41's term. Obama is unlikely to ever fly in this new plane.
I'll add that the primary form of stress on airframes is the cabin pressurization each time it flies at altitude. Unlike steel, aluminum does not have a regime where it does not suffer metal fatigue. That is, with steel, if you make it a certain strength, you can subject it to cyclical stress loads an infinite amount of times and it will still hold. But with aluminum, each cycle weakens it (fatigues the metal) no matter how strong you make it, and it eventually fails.
Each time you pressurize the cabin, that subjects the aluminum skin to one cycle. Enough cycles and the aluminum will fail. Modern passenger aircraft are typically designed to last several tens of thousands of such pressurization cycles. Once they reach the design limit, the airframes are retired and chopped up to discourage anyone who might get the not-so-bright idea of returning one of these airframes into service.
The U.S. already catches enough flak for its military spending. I think the President would want to arrive on a distinctly civilian-looking plane just for the PR.
The A340 is also 4-engined, albeit smaller than a 747. It's a beautiful plane, but the 777 is mopping the floor with it in the market. 2 engines is more efficient than 4.
Yeah, I don't understand why people are surprised by this. The Democratic party has always been pro-Hollywood, just like the Republican party has always been pro-business. People spend way too much energy badmouthing the opposing party, and not enough towards cleaning up the party they support. The vast majority of people I meet seem to equate criticizing their party with supporting the opposition, which is just silly. Your duty as a citizen does not stop at supporting the party of your choice; it extends to making sure your voice is heard so that they change to better represent your views.
As much as I dislike scientology, if Diskkeeper is a private company, they can hire whomever they want using whatever methods they want. Your freedom to associate and do business with whom you wish is one of the most fundamental rights not listed in the Bill of Rights. If I own my own company and want to hire only people who can recite the Jabberwocky from memory, or are missing one finger, or are/aren't black/white/Chinese/family members, I can. If you are operating independently, the law cannot force you to conduct business with someone whom you don't wish to conduct business. Things like the Equal Opportunity Employer requirements only apply if the company is accepting government contracts, or if they're voluntarily following EEOC guidelines.