When Robert Kennedy was shot months before the 68 elections, the Dems scrambled to get another candidate (Humphrey) on the line, while the Reps launched a "Law and order" campaign that led their candidate (Nixon) to the White House with only an 0.7% advantage in the popular vote.
So my own guess for the October Surprise 2004 is that Kerry gets shot, Bush gets re-appointed, SNAFU all over.
I've worked in a 120,000-employee corporation in 2002, and almost every single person I met there actually had a clue. There was no political bullshit, we had clear objectives and reasonable timelines, the only hassle was that it'd take a few days to get specific software and hardware.
A colleague of mine worked for a subsidy of IBM last year, and told me it was the same way there, no bullshit, no slacking and no sloppiness, of course that makes only two small examples, but that's just to say such generalizations are bad overall.
As someone with a strong interest in energy-efficient, environmentally-sound house building techniques, this is a fantastic way to both rise awareness of current possibilities for reducing dramatically electricity bills (though the house could have used some grey water system combined with tanks for rainwater, and a seperate sewage treatment and containment system.
The guided tour pages are a treasure of information, especially the one on the exterior design, which introduces nice construction materials and other very neat gadgets.
I read a lot of Dilbert and don't see why he would be all that thrilled about energy efficiency and all the other mumbojumbo.
That's because he's an engineer, and a genius one at that, and because, in the long run, this "mumbojumbo" is what matters the most. You can rearrange the interior when you feel like it, you can add toys, furniture, whatever, but you're not going to change the orientation or insulation of the whole house once it's built.
And don't forget 1/100 the atmospheric pressure. Woops.
Planes on Mars have to fly ten times the speed they'd fly on Earth to get the same lift. And forget about turning, with that much inertia relative to the 1/3ed lift, you're not getting anywhere except straight ahead. Fast. Very very fast. The only way to land is to use those cables and arresting gear already used on carriers with fighters, except on Mars the plane is going 400 knots instead of 200, in the best case.
... on how much DVDs cost where you live ! Here they are about 5 or 6 times the price of a ticket (30 euros compared to 5 or 6 euros at most cinemas). Can you say overpriced ? That's why my collection of DVDs can be counted on a single-digit.
I still go to the movies, especially since they built that huge multiplex to replace the two smaller cinemas. The main difference is that I'm more demanding of the whole experience : I generally pick a morning session during work days of the second or third week after release, so that there are about 4 or 5 other spectators besides me in the room.
Another advantage of reduced audience, in addition to the total silence during the movie, is that you can just go to the other spectators and discuss the movie with them afterwards.
... you're actually living in a "You are the hero" book;) There's nothing stopping anyone from participating in the uppcoming adventure of commercial space travel.
This newly born industry needs talents to bloom. Ask yourself what you can do to help.
I'm a french citizen, and would hate to see the US Constitution, one of the most important texts of the last few centuries, become meaningless.
As a freedom-loving person, I think the desacration of the principles upon which your country is built would be a crime against mankind as a whole, in very much the same way I consider local genocides happening in various countries other than my own to be a shame in the face of the whole international community.
So, yes, the 2004 US Presidential Election matters to the rest of the world, and not just because of phony economic competition concerns or meaningless (on the larger scale) political preferences.
Soooo, instead of a team of oil drillers, we need to send a team of building painters ?
The object is 3 miles in (average) diameter, that's one heck of a surface to paint. And one frigging bucketful of paint too, which in turn means quite a mass of paint. Wouldn't it make more sense to just throw the equivalent of the mass of paint required at the asteroid to drive it slightly off course ?
During the summer I generally go spend some time (up to two months, generally three weeks) away from cities and all internet accesses. The only thing I miss then, is the quick and convenient access to detailed information about any subject, so instead I go to the closest public library.
The daily comics, blogs, news, discussion forums, I don't miss at all, even though I tend to spend hours on them.
If there was a large enough protest vote then maybe the Democrats and Republicans would wake up.
I doubt it unfortunately. A large protest vote for a third party would only provide an incentive for both Republican and Democrat parties to further tweak the electoral system (using excuses like, say, the Diebold debacle and Florida 2000/2004 debacles and the many 50-50 results) into an even more locked state.
What is needed is a large number of electoral wins for small libertarian candidates. That would have an immediate effect on the lives on many people.
Denying corporations the same rights as individuals is not the same as denying them all rights. And it's not the same as "effectively ban"ning them either.
Puh-lease. Your interpretation of Libertarianism is so wrong it made me choke.
Libertarianism is all about individual liberties and responsibilities, the operative word being individual.
But now in Libertarian utopia, any agreement between consenting adults is legal.
Under Libertarianism corporations are not "consenting adults" and don't have the same rights as individuals. Besides, how do you explain the current trend of corporatic lobbying and privacy intrusion in the US, given the increasingly authoritarian US administration ? Oh, that's right, these two phenomenons are unrelated...
a clever seller can can trap the consumer, either by inducing him to sign an agreement or by selling encumbered technology which in the long term subjugates the consumer to the seller....and you're back to the monopoly step. Maybe this economy needs more antitrust-law enforcement, or less monopoly-granting regulations ?
As for content distribution monopolies, copyright law grants them. You cannot legally compete with the copyright holder in distributing his work (unless he approves).
By content-distribution monopoly, I meant that there is one cartel that holds the market. There are innumerable authors of intellectual work, but virtually one entity (they are five, but behave like one) that holds the copyrights of the majority of these works. That's the root of the problem.
France has a pretty much similar system, done differently: there are two rounds of votes in Presidential Elections, the first determines which two candidates will be on the ballot on the second round, and the second determines the winner of this two.
It lets the majority decide which remaining candidate they would rather go with. For example in last presidential elections the right-wing and far-right-wing candidates won first round (at the astonishment of many people). The second round was a landslide for the right-wing candidate, because almost all of the left-leaning voters consider him the lesser evil.
If that's what's available at Staples and OfficeMax, yes. Nobody is going to go out of his way to find special "unencumbered" paper, probably at a higher price.... if you're the only one who can offer me high-speed access.
That's why Libertarians are generally opposed to monopolies and view competition as an essential mechanism of society. If this one store sells paper encumbered with silly "licensing agreement clauses", and this other store sell the same paper without the clauses, which do you buy ?
Low prices come from economy of scale, which comes from serving the majority. Imposing restrictions doesn't bother the majority at all. A tiny minority that demands the unencumbered version will have to pay much higher prices, even in a Libertarian utopia where that unencumbered version is legal.
What is the commercial incentive that would make "encumbered" versions of products the norm ? I can only think of intellectual property frenzy, and it's a consequence of a content distribution monopoly and of government intervention, which are both going against Libertarianism. The truth is that trends like the Broadcast flag and copy-protection scheme and DRM (perfect examples of the "encumbered" view described by Badnarik, IMO) have emerged despite the pull of competition and market rules.
Im not switching to dialup to improve my freedom.
You don't value your freedom much, I guess ? Transpose the same situation in China, let's say you can get Government-sponsored (and regulated) broadband, or unmonitored dialup. Changes the deal quite a bit, doesn't it ? Plus what's stopping you from using both (apart from the cost) ? As long as the "encumberement" of a product doesn't bring a real financial incentive to the seller or the client, the loss of competitiveness will bring it down eventually.
The Australian ballot is important in order to have a secret ballot. In the age of party-printed ballots (where you would put the party's ballot into the box), you could be observed putting a ballot that was clearly belonging to one party or another into the box.
And that's why, here in this european country I live in, voters take more than one ballot (usually they take all one of each candidate), then go to the booth. There's a bin at their disposal for unused ballots. And noone can see which ballot(s) they put in the envelope.
Bringing your own ballot would do, too, as would taking a blank one and writing a name on it.
The thing I can't help but wonder, is why if these are so effecient, is why there isn't one under the hood?
That's because of low power-to-weight ratio, because they take time to start up, and because they run at a constant, low RPM.
They are used a lot as power generators, on boats for example.
But that could change some day. There is this company that tries to manufacture and market an aviation Stirling engine. And I'm working on a very low weight, variable-RPM Stirling engine based on this concept of an improved rotating internal combustion engine.
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When Robert Kennedy was shot months before the 68 elections, the Dems scrambled to get another candidate (Humphrey) on the line, while the Reps launched a "Law and order" campaign that led their candidate (Nixon) to the White House with only an 0.7% advantage in the popular vote.
So my own guess for the October Surprise 2004 is that Kerry gets shot, Bush gets re-appointed, SNAFU all over.
Not every corporation.
I've worked in a 120,000-employee corporation in 2002, and almost every single person I met there actually had a clue. There was no political bullshit, we had clear objectives and reasonable timelines, the only hassle was that it'd take a few days to get specific software and hardware.
A colleague of mine worked for a subsidy of IBM last year, and told me it was the same way there, no bullshit, no slacking and no sloppiness, of course that makes only two small examples, but that's just to say such generalizations are bad overall.
As someone with a strong interest in energy-efficient, environmentally-sound house building techniques, this is a fantastic way to both rise awareness of current possibilities for reducing dramatically electricity bills (though the house could have used some grey water system combined with tanks for rainwater, and a seperate sewage treatment and containment system.
The guided tour pages are a treasure of information, especially the one on the exterior design, which introduces nice construction materials and other very neat gadgets.
I read a lot of Dilbert and don't see why he would be all that thrilled about energy efficiency and all the other mumbojumbo.
That's because he's an engineer, and a genius one at that, and because, in the long run, this "mumbojumbo" is what matters the most. You can rearrange the interior when you feel like it, you can add toys, furniture, whatever, but you're not going to change the orientation or insulation of the whole house once it's built.
And don't forget 1/100 the atmospheric pressure. Woops.
Planes on Mars have to fly ten times the speed they'd fly on Earth to get the same lift. And forget about turning, with that much inertia relative to the 1/3ed lift, you're not getting anywhere except straight ahead. Fast. Very very fast. The only way to land is to use those cables and arresting gear already used on carriers with fighters, except on Mars the plane is going 400 knots instead of 200, in the best case.
... on how much DVDs cost where you live ! Here they are about 5 or 6 times the price of a ticket (30 euros compared to 5 or 6 euros at most cinemas). Can you say overpriced ? That's why my collection of DVDs can be counted on a single-digit.
I still go to the movies, especially since they built that huge multiplex to replace the two smaller cinemas. The main difference is that I'm more demanding of the whole experience : I generally pick a morning session during work days of the second or third week after release, so that there are about 4 or 5 other spectators besides me in the room.
Another advantage of reduced audience, in addition to the total silence during the movie, is that you can just go to the other spectators and discuss the movie with them afterwards.
You also get 6 days of space-training, get to fly in the mothership and watch a launch from very close, fly a simulator, etc...
... you're actually living in a "You are the hero" book ;) There's nothing stopping anyone from participating in the uppcoming adventure of commercial space travel.
This newly born industry needs talents to bloom. Ask yourself what you can do to help.
I'm a french citizen, and would hate to see the US Constitution, one of the most important texts of the last few centuries, become meaningless.
As a freedom-loving person, I think the desacration of the principles upon which your country is built would be a crime against mankind as a whole, in very much the same way I consider local genocides happening in various countries other than my own to be a shame in the face of the whole international community.
So, yes, the 2004 US Presidential Election matters to the rest of the world, and not just because of phony economic competition concerns or meaningless (on the larger scale) political preferences.
Soooo, instead of a team of oil drillers, we need to send a team of building painters ?
The object is 3 miles in (average) diameter, that's one heck of a surface to paint. And one frigging bucketful of paint too, which in turn means quite a mass of paint. Wouldn't it make more sense to just throw the equivalent of the mass of paint required at the asteroid to drive it slightly off course ?
And we get rid of him on the same occasion ! Two birds with one stone.
Hydrogen bonds are caused by Van der Waals forces, they make things interesting in physics too (gecko adherence, for a start).
During the summer I generally go spend some time (up to two months, generally three weeks) away from cities and all internet accesses. The only thing I miss then, is the quick and convenient access to detailed information about any subject, so instead I go to the closest public library.
The daily comics, blogs, news, discussion forums, I don't miss at all, even though I tend to spend hours on them.
If there was a large enough protest vote then maybe the Democrats and Republicans would wake up.
I doubt it unfortunately. A large protest vote for a third party would only provide an incentive for both Republican and Democrat parties to further tweak the electoral system (using excuses like, say, the Diebold debacle and Florida 2000/2004 debacles and the many 50-50 results) into an even more locked state.
What is needed is a large number of electoral wins for small libertarian candidates. That would have an immediate effect on the lives on many people.
Punctuation Police !
Put your hands off the keyboard, and lie down slowly, NOW !
Fine, I'll fly my Mehve instead.
Straw man fallacy.
Denying corporations the same rights as individuals is not the same as denying them all rights. And it's not the same as "effectively ban"ning them either.
Puh-lease. Your interpretation of Libertarianism is so wrong it made me choke.
Libertarianism is all about individual liberties and responsibilities, the operative word being individual.
But now in Libertarian utopia, any agreement between consenting adults is legal.
Under Libertarianism corporations are not "consenting adults" and don't have the same rights as individuals. Besides, how do you explain the current trend of corporatic lobbying and privacy intrusion in the US, given the increasingly authoritarian US administration ? Oh, that's right, these two phenomenons are unrelated...
a clever seller can can trap the consumer, either by inducing him to sign an agreement or by selling encumbered technology which in the long term subjugates the consumer to the seller. ...and you're back to the monopoly step. Maybe this economy needs more antitrust-law enforcement, or less monopoly-granting regulations ?
As for content distribution monopolies, copyright law grants them. You cannot legally compete with the copyright holder in distributing his work (unless he approves).
By content-distribution monopoly, I meant that there is one cartel that holds the market. There are innumerable authors of intellectual work, but virtually one entity (they are five, but behave like one) that holds the copyrights of the majority of these works. That's the root of the problem.
France has a pretty much similar system, done differently: there are two rounds of votes in Presidential Elections, the first determines which two candidates will be on the ballot on the second round, and the second determines the winner of this two.
It lets the majority decide which remaining candidate they would rather go with. For example in last presidential elections the right-wing and far-right-wing candidates won first round (at the astonishment of many people). The second round was a landslide for the right-wing candidate, because almost all of the left-leaning voters consider him the lesser evil.
If that's what's available at Staples and OfficeMax, yes. Nobody is going to go out of his way to find special "unencumbered" paper, probably at a higher price.... if you're the only one who can offer me high-speed access.
That's why Libertarians are generally opposed to monopolies and view competition as an essential mechanism of society. If this one store sells paper encumbered with silly "licensing agreement clauses", and this other store sell the same paper without the clauses, which do you buy ?
Low prices come from economy of scale, which comes from serving the majority. Imposing restrictions doesn't bother the majority at all. A tiny minority that demands the unencumbered version will have to pay much higher prices, even in a Libertarian utopia where that unencumbered version is legal.
What is the commercial incentive that would make "encumbered" versions of products the norm ? I can only think of intellectual property frenzy, and it's a consequence of a content distribution monopoly and of government intervention, which are both going against Libertarianism. The truth is that trends like the Broadcast flag and copy-protection scheme and DRM (perfect examples of the "encumbered" view described by Badnarik, IMO) have emerged despite the pull of competition and market rules.
Im not switching to dialup to improve my freedom.
You don't value your freedom much, I guess ? Transpose the same situation in China, let's say you can get Government-sponsored (and regulated) broadband, or unmonitored dialup. Changes the deal quite a bit, doesn't it ? Plus what's stopping you from using both (apart from the cost) ? As long as the "encumberement" of a product doesn't bring a real financial incentive to the seller or the client, the loss of competitiveness will bring it down eventually.
The Australian ballot is important in order to have a secret ballot. In the age of party-printed ballots (where you would put the party's ballot into the box), you could be observed putting a ballot that was clearly belonging to one party or another into the box.
And that's why, here in this european country I live in, voters take more than one ballot (usually they take all one of each candidate), then go to the booth. There's a bin at their disposal for unused ballots. And noone can see which ballot(s) they put in the envelope.
Bringing your own ballot would do, too, as would taking a blank one and writing a name on it.
Unfortunately, it allows things like the genocide going on in Sudan right this minute to continue.
Check my sig, think, and weep.
The thing I can't help but wonder, is why if these are so effecient, is why there isn't one under the hood?
That's because of low power-to-weight ratio, because they take time to start up, and because they run at a constant, low RPM.
They are used a lot as power generators, on boats for example.
But that could change some day. There is this company that tries to manufacture and market an aviation Stirling engine. And I'm working on a very low weight, variable-RPM Stirling engine based on this concept of an improved rotating internal combustion engine.
Besides, the "official" sign language was invented pretty much the same way, IIRC.