This guy is apparently Chairman of the board of TRUSTe which doesn't exactly have a stellar privacy record with Slashdot in the past as shown here and here though these transgressions were a while ago.
"Michael Turner, President and Senior Scholar, Information Policy Institute, New York, NY"
I think this is another think tank. Not sure where they stand politically. They are spot on with the Republican's on tort reform, have interests in oursourcing, credit reporting among others things.
This guy sounds pretty qualified though he is a big advocate of data warehousing, especially by the government:
"President and CEO of Barquin International. He is a former IBM executive and an internationally known expert in the field of knowledge management. Dr. Barquin co-founded and was the first President of the Data Warehousing Institute, the leading professional organization in the field. He also founded and heads the Computer Ethics Institute.
An electrical engineer and mathematician by training, Dr. Barquin has taught at MIT, the University of Maryland, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He edited the Prentice Hall series on Data Warehousing, co-edited two books on Knowledge Management in the public sector, and has published over 100 technical and management articles on information technology. He organized and chaired the E-Gov Knowledge Management conferences in 2000 and 2001, and has conducted executive seminars in electronic government and knowledge management for the Brookings Institution."
"J. Howard Beales, Associate Professor, The George Washington University, Arlington, VA"
Beale, sounds like a good choice. He headed the Consumer protection bureau of the FTC and blessed us with the "Do Not Call" list which rates him high in my book. Also is pretty keen on fighting spam.
Lance Hoffman, an academic, seems like a good choice though you would have to read some of his work to be sure.
"Joseph Alhadeff, Vice President and Chief Privacy Officer, Oracle Corporation, Washington, DC"
Excepting Oracle is one of the leading companies advocating development of massive all seeing, all powerful databases by the government to make us all "safe". They obviously have a conflict of interest because they make money from most of the big databases that are used to collect information about us and violate our privacy. They have been circling like sharks since 9/11 pushing agencies like Homeland Security to create national security databases using Oracle software.
"James W. Harper, Editor/Executive Director, Privacilla.org & Director of Information Policy Studies, Cato Institute, Washington, DC"
The Cato Institute is a Libertarian group which you might think is a plus for a data privacy committee but its main goal is to eliminate all barriers to profitability for big corporations. If there is profit in it they will see your data privacy down the river in a heartbeat. Its founder Charles Koch own Koch oil, a very big but somewhat obscure oil company with close ties to Bush/Cheney (like all big oil companies), and a notorious pollution record. They were facing massive pollution fines in the Clinton era but they all miraculously disappeared when Bush siezed power in 2000.
"Tara Lemmey, Chief Executive Officer, Lens Ventures, San Francisco, CA"
Don't know anything about this one but her mission statement is a trippy exercise in babbling buzzwords, but note especially "From information as property to information as profit" which sounds kind of bad idea for a data privacy committee. She was President of EFF at one time but it kind of sounds like she saw the light and is pursuing profit over freedom at this point:
"LENS brings you passionate, knowledgeable, insightful voices that weave context for the conversation of change. From the latest announcements in biotech to the current zeitgeist in national security. From information as property to information as profit. From the changing architectures of our urban landscape to the changing architectures of our global networks. Leaders from government, science, academia and industry converge and cross-pollinate a broad range of topics and disciplines to bring your audience a full spectrum view unlike any other."
"Paul Samuel Rosenzweig, Senior Legal Research Fellow, The Heritage Foundation, Washington, DC"
Heritage Foundation is another right wing think tank, and major Bush backer. If you want to see one reason the right is kicking the left's ass its all these very well heeled right wing think tanks that specialize in telling politicians and the media how to think.
"Joseph Leo, Vice President, SAIC, Vienna, VA"
They've starred several times on Slashdot recently. Someone stole a poorly secured computer with social security number for pretty much every employee who ever bought stock in the company.
They were also a key player in the FBI's trilogy project, to computerize the FBI's case files, which after $170 million dollars is most probably going to be scrapped because it was apparently useless.
All in all they are just a big government contractor and they do massive amounts of work for the Pentagon and intelligence agencies and as such probably tread on your privacy as much as Gator, and probably more insidiously.
"What's next, a security-obssessed government that makes us less secure?"
Reference the rhetoric from great Britain this week. They are in the run up to an election and Blair is fighting for his life. Blair apparently took some pages out of the Bush play book and it makes it so transparent when you see another government doing exactly the same thing the Republican's just did, stoke massive fear right before an election to win reelection.
- Tony Blair quotes: "Nothing must stand in the way of protecting the security of our people." - They are trying to ram through yet another variant of the Patriot act "The Bill introduces "control orders" which will enable the Home Secretary to stop terror suspects travelling or using phones and the internet - without the need for a trial.". It may allow indefinite home detention of anyone the Home Secretary unilaterally decides is a threat to security. - Before the House of Commons Blair said: Britain was facing "terrorism without limit" and "those considerations of national security have to come before civil liberties however important they are".
The cynics in the crowd suspect Blair's party is doing the same thing the Republican's did with he Patriot act to the Dems, they have to vote for it no matter how onerous it is or Blair's party will accuse them of being soft on terrorism. So either the party in power gets sweeping new powers or they make their opponents look weak and take a potential bath in the election.
Its amazing this works because me, given a clear choice, I'd vote for the party protecting my civil liberties over ineffective security laws.
It is standard practice to tag high risk companies with the scarlet letter 'E' which happened to SCO last Friday. It basicly means they are on probation and are on notice that they are going to be delisted from the Nasdaq, pending a series of hearings and appeals, and SCO stops violating Nasdaq and SEC regulations, which they did when they failed to file their 10-K on top and also failed to file it when their extension ran out:
From theStreet.com:
"SCO said it has not filed its 10-K because it is examining matters related to the issuance of common stock as part of its equity compensation plans."
You have to assume there must have been some really shady stock or options handed out to their executives, that are either so shady they are taking forever to untangle, or their accounting is in a shambles, or they turned out to be illegal and they are struggling to figure out a way to brush the mess under the rug.
Their parent company Canopy is in a complete shambles too so if the options involve Canopy its possible SCO can't figure out what happened since there was a mass executive firing at Canopy and law suits have been filed. Apparently Ray Noorda and his wife are suffering from old age and are no longer able to manage the day to day affairs of the company and their children and a couple sets of executives are engaged in a life or death battle to seize control of Canopy and destroying it in the process.
From watching the SCO litigation against Linux and the apparent pump and dump stock scam by Darl and company it was pretty apparent that SCO and Canopy had gone institutionally insane and proof that is in fact the case is now apparently surfacing.
SCOX stock is holding up remarkably well considering the numerous potential down sides of their current situation:
A. There may have been illegal or unethical copensation to someone B. or their accounting is in such a shambles they don't know who got what C. They might get delisted from the Nasdaq which means they will end up being traded over the counter or on the Pink Sheets which severely limits their liquidity(it will become very hard to dump any stock if you buy it). OTC and Pink Sheet stocks tend so be bought only by people who are making a long shot gamble(for example that SCO wins its case against IBM). D. They will probobably lose their case against IBM E. Their SCO Unix business is cratering as all of their established customer base is bailing on them, presumably to Linux, and no new customer is going to touch them with a ten foot cattle prod.
If you want something mentally challenging chess always works, and backgammon if you want something a little less challenging.
I use the KDE based knights GUI interface on top of gnuchess. It can also hook you up online with a plethora of chess clubs for online matches.
Should be no problem for a head mouse since its more thinking than interaction. Chess isn't for everyone though.
knights source and packages are at:
knights.sourceforge.net
Alpha Centauri is the king of turned based strategy games in my book. It does need some keyboard interaction, though being turned based you can take your time making moves. Other problem is the AI's are a little weak once you master the game and of course its Windows based and not free.
Same here, I was on Red Hat 8, didn't really see the value of going to RH9 since I build my own kernels and KDE(did really much like they way they butchered KDE in RH8 either). I think there was some binary compatiability issue that they used to justify jumping a major version to them to RH9 when it should have been 8.1 In hindsight it appears to me more like Red Hat need to put out a psuedo major release to milk revenue out of their old product line and old customers to bridge them over the traumatic jump to Enterprise and Fedora.
I bought one year of subscription update service for RH8 for my machines, not because I had to but it was convenient and back then I didn't mind sending a little money Red Hat's way to support them.
Of course they proceeded to end of life Red Hat 7, 8 and 9 within the space of a few months and the remainder of my subscription was essentially worthless and there was no good upgrade path other than pay an arm and a leg for Enterprise or risk Fedora and Fedora struck me as strategicly chaotic(i.e. whose in charge there?). There was zero chance of me paying them more money for enterprise after they'd just screwed me on my old subscription.
I had a long flame fest hear with a Red Hat employee whose login is Nailer last time Fudcon was posted on Slashdot.
One of his suggestions was I should have contacted Red Hat and expressed my displeasure and since I didn't I had no right to bitch. Well its always a customers right to bith, I also told him that was obviously pointless to complaint to Red Hat since it was a strategic decision on Red Hat's part to ax their loyal customer base, those who got them where they were, to focus on charging an arm and a leg for Enterprise support to big corporations and to maximize their profit margin. Since they IPO'ed its pretty obvious they started caring more for what Wall Street analysts think than loyal customers and the developer community.
Nailer also suggested I should go begging to Red Hat Marketing/Sales and maybe they would give me a deal on an Enterprise upgrade, well again there is zero chance of me rewarding Red Hat with more money after they'd just unilaterally stuck a knife in my current subscription and forced me to abandon my current setup.
Nailer also gave me this never ending speil about how the Enterprise and Fedora marketing strategy made perfect sense and it was my problem for not seeing the wisdom in it. Feh!
Needless to say I just voted with my feet and migrated everything to Gentoo and never looked back. I wouldn't use Red Hat now if it was the last distribution on earth. Turns out I prefer compiling from source with Gentoo versus the old RPM mess anyway.
When Red Hat execs got rich on their IPO and slaved themselves to Wall Street they lost track of something really basic, yes they need to be profitable but they benefited mightily from open source developers and their original customer base and they made their IPO possible in the first place. Pissing off your user and developer community, and selling them out in favor of Wall Street analysts is an especially stupid strategy in the Linux world.
Red Hat completely trashed their brand and the loyalty they had for their distribution. They should have fine tuned out the problems in their strategy instead of introducing a huge discontinuity which pushed loyal customers to bailing on them.
CO2 is already pumped into oil fields to force oil out of old wells, its quite precious. I assume they can't use air because the oxygen would presumably create a danger of explosions and underground fires, though I don't know for sure.
They drill wells to tap underground CO2 deposits in the Four Corners and there is a rather long CO2 pipeline, built at substantial expense, from there to old West Texas oil fields.
You could in theory pump 100 billion tons of CO2 in to depleted U.S. oil fields which is 18 years worth of CO2 emmissions in the U.S. It might be possible to to do the same in underground coal mines,and use the CO2 to push out Methane to be used for example to make more Hydrogen and CO2.
They are apparently working on molecular filters to scrub CO2 out of the smoke stacks of coal fired power plants though it sounds a bit far fetched to me.
All this is kind of a short term fix though, and I'd agree its postponing rather than solving our energy and Greenhouse gas problems.
I believe you can drive in the carpool lane in Californita if you own a Hybrid. Hybrid's aren't exactly THE answer for fossil fuel dependency and green house gasses but they sure make a lot more sense at the moment than driving gas guzzlers or trying to create a Hydrogen economy using fossil fuels to produce the Hydrogen and at great expense to tax payers. Hybrid's mostly just need to get the sticker price down.
If the Bush administration were actually serious about reducing dependence on fossil fuels they would just push Detroit to raise MPG rating on their vehicles. Adding a couple extra miles per gallon to all vehicles sold in the U.S. and the world is going to save more oil and pollution than any Hydrogen initiative is going to yield for decades. Why don't we? Well obviously because oil companies don't want more fuel efficient vehicles, and Detroit's profit margins are great on gas guzzlers, though high gas prices is putting a drag on their sales lately. The oil companies are making staggering amounts of money on the status quo at the moment, with oil tight enough that they can set gas prices at a level where they are making massive amounts of money, especially as long as all the oil companies collude to inflate prices. Exxon/Mobile is raking in record profits at the moment and just passed GE as the worlds biggest company with a market cap of $383 billion.vs. $379 billion.
You just need to look at Exxon's stock to see they are way happy with the status quo, short oil supplies, growing demand and no viable alternatives in sight.
"You'd have to be a moron or have a vested interest in fossil fuel to produce hydrogen from natural gas."
We are talking about the Bush administration here, enough said:) They make their policies on idealogical grounds, and to enrich their friends, not based on sound science or economics.
A rationale for the Bush administration is most probably due to "Clean Coal" being one of their policy initiatives to the point of a mantra. I wager they are willing to run a ridiculously wasteful program to use Coal in an environmentally friendly was and use that as propaganda to redirect attention from the massive down sides of strip mining, the filth spewing from older coal fired power plants without modern, expensive pollution controls, and the still massive CO2 emissions from modern power plants which eliminate some other pollutants but don't do anything about CO2. You can't do anything about CO2 from coal unless you bank it and at present banking is only feasible using it for Hydrogen production, not burning it.
As long as the U.S. government pumps enough of our tax dollars in to it to make it profitable for the gas and coal companies I'm sure they will be glad to do it. Subsidies are usually insane, witness farm subsidies and ethanol production but people do profit mightily from them at tax payer expense. They only serve a useful purpose if they kick start an industry that will be profitable and self sustaining once the ball is rolling. I'd say that is doubtful with Little George's Hydrogen initiative as currently designed.
"Second, natural gas is methane. It is worse to try and "crack" methane and convert it into carbon and hydrogen than it is to use other sources of hydrogen"
Not sure you are entirely on the mark either friend. There is a big down side to it but the Bush Hydrogen initiative is in fact completely dependent on fossil fuels, coal and natural gas to produce the Hydrogen in the near to mid term at least.
Here is a the DOE's own page which spells it out, Bush's plan is COMPLETELY focused on producing Hydrogen from fossil fuels in the near to mid term, in particular from natural gas and coal.
Producing Hydrogen from natural gas is, I believe the cheapest method possible, on anything resembling a large scale, at the moment though not sure how Hydrolysis compares.
$0.65 per kilo - Steam reforming(natural gas) $0.80-$1.20 per kilo - Off gas clean up $2.40-$3.60 per kilo - Electrolysis
Producing Hydrogen from natural gas is "worse" in the sense that it produces CO2, a green house gas we would rather not be producing, though its possible to bank the CO2, pump it underground, for example in to old oil fields where its already used at great expense to increase their yield. Carbon sequestration is the DOE's only rationale for using this method of Hydrogen production. If you don't bank the CO2 the fossil fuel based Hydrogen economy would be a massive contributor to greenhouse gases and it would never fly as environmentally friendly.
Hydrogen really isn't any kind of good solution unless its produced from Electrolysis AND then only if the electricity is coming from a non fossil fuel source like Hydro, Nuclear, Wind or Solar. It sure doesn't make sense to burn coal or natural gas to produce electricity to use in Electrolysis to make Hydrogen and pretend its a clean energy source.
At the moment I would be inclined so say the Hydrogen push IS a Bush administration scam to pump subsidies in to their rich friends in the fossil fuels business because that is where all most of the Hydrogen is coming from. In fact I suspect the major objective is to provide his friends in the coal industry an alternative market. If so then that would make Hydrogen produced from coal the centerpiece of the plan and the whole objective of it.
From the paper above:
Steam Reforming
Steam reforming is a chemical process that makes hydrogen from a mixture of water and a source of hydrocarbons; usually a fossil fuel. The most common source is natural gas, which consists primarily of methane. When steam and methane are combined at a high pressure and temperature, a chemical reaction converts them into hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The potential energy content of the hydrogen produced is actually higher than that of the natural gas consumed. However, a significant amount of energy is required to operate the reformer, so the overall efficiency is typically only about 65 percent. Hydrogen produced by this technique can cost as little as $0.65 per kilogram. This process is not the best method for creating hydrogen because it uses a lot of energy to operate and the efficiency level is low. There is also another drawback to steam reforming, according to the Department of Energy. It has concluded that "substantial emissions can be generated when hydrogen is produced from certain energy sources", namely fossil fuels.
Off-Gas Clean Up
Another technique for producing hydrogen is off-gas clean up. Off-gas clean up is the process that utilizes the high concentrations of hydrogen in the waste streams of various industries. Collecting and purifying these gases is often cost-effective, with costs typically ranging between $0.80 and $1.20 per kilogram. Most off-gas hydrogen is used on-site by the industry that produces it. Industries that could utilize off-gas clean up include
Was reading this interesting article today on the extent to which military recruiters are invading high schools and community colleges.
Anyone still in school who can confirm this is what's its like today?
- Military recruiters in the lunch room on a daily basis - Guest military speakers in classrooms - Army and Marine recruiting ads mandatory viewing in classrooms - Recruiters telling kids to stay out of college and go in to the military instead because then college is free and you will be able to get jobs once you get out of the military and not if you go straight to college. - Do recruiters disproportionately target the poor and minorties
That has to be great for American competitiveness and the economy when your own government is trying to dissuade kids from going to college in order to prop up sagging recruitment.
Rumsefeld and General Meyers(Chairman Joint Chiefs) were in front of Congress this week and grilled about the fact that the Army and Marin reserves and guard are now officially missing their recruiting goals. Meyers rationalized one reason is because the Army and Marines were doing such a good job of retaining soldiers there aren't veterans going in to the guard and reserves. I think he forgot to mention a prime retention tool is stop loss which prevents people from leaving the military when their enlistment is over.
Meyers other proposed solution was hire even more recruiters to hunt down young people and trick them in to the military.
It will be interesting, if the Bush administration will have to either:
- Start bailing on Iraq - Refrain from starting new wars in Syria and Iran - Restart the draft and commit political suicide - If they do restart the draft what kind of dodges will they provide for rich, white kids like George W. had in the Air National Guard, trained at great expense to be a pilot and no chance of ever seeing combat and for the most part didn't even report for duty.
Probably should write a long post about the goal of the military to use video games and simulations to train children to be soldiers and to desensitize them to the consequences of being in a war where people are being killed and you might be killed. Computers are god to the military for that. Has anyone seen a video simulation or game showing dogs eating dead bodies and dragging of limbs, or maybe dead women and children, or people burned half way to charcoal. We really need more of that in video games, actual war footage so kids learn that war is not clean, tidy and heroic. Its brutal, ugly and horrific and lots of innocent people die. If you are a pilot it might not entirely register when you drop bombs you are killing people, often innocent people, but if you end up in the Army and Marines, you may be killing people close up, and one of two things will probably happen:
- You will regret it for the rest of your life - You will start liking it and start doing it at every opportunity, and not be very discriminating in who you kill. In Vietnam it was apparently common for some people in this class to start taking pictures of their kills, building scrapbooks so they could revel in their handwork later.
I'd spend more time concentrating in efficiently heating and or cooling your house.
If you live someplace with cold winters...
Lots of well insulated south facing windows with eaves that overhang just the right amount so the windows are mostly in the shade from the eaves in the summer when the Sun is overheard but catch tons of sun in the winter when the Sun is lower on the horizon.
Then put remote controlled motors on the curtains so that they automaticly open and close for optimal heat in the winter(all closed at night and open to the east in the morning to the south midday and to the west in the afternoon) and for optimal light and minimal heat in the summer(close the curtains on the east windows in the morning and the west windows in the afternoon when the sun is shining in them, and then open them for light when the Sun isn't shining on them.
If the house is well insulated and you don't open the front door(or have a small entryway with two doors, to much you wont need much heat during the day in the winter. If you want to sink more money in to it you could probably bank some heat in water tanks or such and use them to keep the house warmer at night too.
Passive solar aside, do plenty of research and find a very good digital thermostat and efficient heating, air conditioning system. You also want to be able to program it so it automaticly minimizes energy consumption during times you are always out of the house(at work or school), or in bed, and warms up the house just before you get up or cools it down just before you get home from work in the summer.
"It's not so much that they pick weak candidates, but that they run incredibly weak, hamstrung, castrated campaigns"
Nope. The cause of a weak campaign is a weak candidate. If he is so gutless he can't run a good campaign it is 100% his fault, he is the chief executive of the campaign.
Its kind of obvious Dean would have had guts to run a serious campaign, he probably would have been destroyed by Rove and the media, and would have lost too but at least it wouldn't have been as pathetic as Kerry. There was a delightfully complex set of forces that set out to destroy Dean just before Iowa and they were successful. I'm sure it included some Democratic fat cats, party bosses and insiders who were ticked at Dean for circumventing them, it included the media who for whatever reason decided to destroy him. It included Dean himself who stuck his foot in his mouth. I wouldn't be surprised if it included Karl Rove, he probably in fact did fear Dean because he had a backbone and an organization which no other Dem candidates did.
"1) increase minimum wage by x amount"
That will get you the votes of progressives who are stuck voting for the Dems anyway or throwing away their votes on Nader, and people who actually work for a minimum wage, students, illegal aliens, high school dropouts, ex-cons, etc. and believe it or not almost none of them vote. You will be sure to lose the vote of anyone who employs people who work for minimum wage, i.e. restaurants, bars etc. It is a noble goal but you wont win an election on it. Its something a liberal would do after winning an election if he could get the votes in Congress.
"2) increase troop pay and benefits"
Don't think that is a viable issue for a Democrat to run on. Only people that care are those in the miliary and their families. The enlisted men either vote Democratic already or are probably hawks and firmly Republican, officer corp is very Republican. I doubt its going to swing any votes and is going to cost you an arm an a leg. Jacking up veteran's benefits might win you some votes at a high price, but you might still lose them because Dems are painted as soft on the military. I imagine if you won and actually made sure soldiers actually had armor on their humvees and trucks they might vote to reelect you overwhelmingly. Just promising it in a campaign would go in one ear and out the other. Republicans have been promising it for years and still not delivered.
"3) $150 billion for infrastructure (creates jobs and gets rid of pot holes "
Well I'll give you that spending it on infrastructure is better than wasting it in Iraq but your not going to win a lot of votes with it. First off its socialism and the money is mostly going to disappear in to the pockets of corrupt construction companies, unionized labor, and mafia controlled concrete companies. Look at it this way, $150 billion would pay for about ten iterations of Boston's "Big Dig". When all the money was gone you would be skewered for all the fraud, waste and abuse just like the "Big Dig" was.
"4) increase REAL domestic security, not just hassle guys named Mohammed at airports"
Easy to say, nearly impossible to do. Terrorists and insurgents always have the advantage because they can pick the soft spots. Unless you turn the U.S. in to a totalitarian police state its unlikely you are going to ever actually increase security. Israel is a tiny place with a oppressive security presence and they still can't stop attacks, especially suicide attacks. Maybe you could win some votes but you are just going to waste the money in a different direction than the Republicans.
"5) redo the Bush tax package, and make a cut on payroll taxes this time."
Well that one would be popular until Medicare, Social Security and unemployment run out of money. I'd agree it is criminal to be raking in surpluses from payroll taxes while Congress and the President redirect them in to defraying the deficits from tax cuts for the rich. In theory the su
If you look at the Boeing CEV web page I think you will find their design is remarkably the same as everything Apollo did 40 years ago. The Crew Control Module is going to be a cramped conical capsule almost exactly like Apollo's from the picture. Their proposed Delta IV booster is going to be exceptionally weak compared to Saturn V or a derivative of the Shuttle stack. Its not clear but I think they are going to have to do two or more launches and dock the pieces in orbit to get them to the Moon and back. The lunar landar is pretty similar to LEM except its got an inflatible top on it. They don't seem to have any plans for surface habitats other than their lander which kind of looks like its for very short stays.
Obviously you can put new computers in it and take advantage of material advances, etc but I think if this is actually what they build you might find you are disappointed comparing it to 40 year old Apollo technology, especially the booster.
I also wager their lunar missions are going to end up remarkably like Apollo, fly three people, stay for a week, fly home, and after 1 or 2 of them people are going to ask what exactly we are wasting all the money for, because we really don't have any particularly good reason to spend billions to put people on the moon other than to do geology or prestige nostalgia. You might justify it if you harvest Helium isotopes for fusion reactors, or water if there is any, or lunar dirt for shielding but I wager it will end up like most NASA manned missions, something you do for its own sake as you desperately try to figure out a reason to justify it.
Now if they were really going to Mars that would be exciting but Boeing's early concepts aren't even remotely realistic for a multi year mission to Mars. A Mars vehicle is completely different from an LEO and lunar vehicle. I really doubt you will reuse much of anything. In Boeings concept they are using the same conical capsule for the Crew Command Module and man that would be cramped for a two year mission. There is an inflatable habitat referenced but its not clear that that will be habitable in transit or that anything will be shielded enough to protect against radiation on a long duration space mission. Most space profiles have a habitat inside a water tank and are using water for some shielding, plus you need a LOT of water anyway for a multiyear mission. A Mars ship should be more like a small space station, with toilets, showers, kitchen, exercise gear, substantial shielding, with some hefty cargo capacity and an even heftier propulsion, unless you want to torture the astronauts for a couple of years. What Boeing has there looks like something they threw together to justify their modular approach though I doubt it would work to use LEO/Lunar components for a trip to Mars.
I love the Daily show but.... I unfortunately I understand why I love it, and all the rest of the Blue state'ers probably do too. Its the only American news show, or even fake news show, that people who aren't right wing wackos can watch since Bush assumed his throne, since 9/11 and especially since Bush got reelected. The Daily Show's popularity is almost directly corellated to the rise of Fox News and George W. We all fled to it to escape reality. Some people maybe fled to CNN or ABC but they all turned in to pale echos of Fox News, shameless flag waving after 9/11, their insane rush to war in Iraq, so we had to flee them too so we all landed on the Daily Show. When I tune in CNN I can barely tell it from Fox lately, except maybe Fox has more hard news.
So we were all happily watching Jon Stewart, havin' a good laugh, and figuring the nightmare would be over in November. America would come to its senses and put a pathetic excuse for a Democrat in the White House, lesser of two evils ya know. He would suck but nothing could be as bad as George W.
Two problems developed:
- While were off escaping from reality, the Christian fundamentalists, the neocons, the hawks, Karl Rove and the rest played a deadly serious game to stay in power at all costs, they played hard ball and they won, while we were all off pretending Jon could just poke fun at them, everyone would see he was right and there was no way they could win. BUSHES REELECTION IS ALL JON'S FAULT....WAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH.
- Somehow the Democratic party nominated the absolute most pathetic candidate they could find, if you went looking for the absolute most pathetic candidate to nominate for President you couldn't have found anybody worse.
So at this point we are trapped, we have only three options:
A. Stop watching television or at least the news B. Watch the Daily show and have a half hour respite from the insanity that has siezed hold of America. Unfortunately its just escapism, pretending that if Jon makes a joke out of something horrible the White House did today that its must not be so bad, well unfortunately it still is. C. Watch the network news and just lose it, and start yelling at the TV,
"How can you people be so stupid" "How did you all fall for that" "He is lieing, can't you tell he is lieing, he is really obviously lieing, how did you fall for that" "When did CNN U.S. get bought out by Fox News?
That's pretty much all I did during the run up to the Iraq war. It was driving the family nuts everytime the news came on and I started yelling they are lieing about the WMD's and about the ties to Al Qaida, the RPV's spraying American cities with Anthrax and Saring, and about the "mushroom cloud", just so they can sucker Congress, the networks and the American people in to backing a war no one in their right mind would have backed otherwise.
Its what I do lately when I see John Negroponte getting appointed head of this new monster of a national intelligence agency and all these politicians drooling as they praise him as a great diplomat and statesman, and all these 9/11 families and 9/11 commission, god bless them, naively giving the right wing the cover they needed to create this monster that makes the KGB look puny, the right wing all the while acting reluctant about it as they salivate about going back to the good old day of the '50's and '60's when the CIA was an out of control rogue agency toppling elected government after elected government.
This is John "Death Squads are Us" Negroponte who was ambassador to Honduras during the Contra part of Iran Contra and the reign of terror of the CIA trained Battalion 3-16 whose specialty was torture and summary executions.
He has numerous times, under oath said he was unaware of any human rights abuses in Honduras while he was there though death squads tortured hundreds, if not thousands of people, he was briefed on it, he knew about, he
Did anyone just yell at George to sit down and shut the fuck up?
In fairness I loved THX-1138 though the ending is pretty weak. It appears that before he started work on the prequels the state must have compelled him to resume taking his full dose of meds.
Nice sentiment but not very realistic. If you close down ChoicePoint you would pretty much have to go after Equifax, Experian(formerly TRW), and Trans Union. In case you don't know the name these are America's big three credit bureaus, where Choicpoint is more ID, criminal record, and financial records rolled in to one. It appears pretty much anyone can form a corporation and start collecting your personal data, thats what all four of these companies did.
Why do they exist, because other corporations want and need the data they have on you and will pay for it, that includes potential employers and landlords, banks, car dealers, real estate brokers, etc. etc.
You can't stop all this information tracking without eviscerating employment screening, loans, credit cards, etc. I'd be all for it personally but there are trillions of dollars of big business that rely on these companies and they would scream bloody murder if you tried to shut them all down.
Choicepoint in particular probably experienced a boom after 9/11. The rampant paranoia that ensued multiplied by an order of magnitude the number of employment ID and criminal background checks employers conduct on prospective employees. Chances are if you are applying for a job with a company of any size their HR department is getting a COMPLETE run down on you form Choicepoint or someone like them, every criminal offense, how good you are at paying your bills, bankruptcies, loan history etc. Chances are they know every gory detail of your entire life, before you get an offer letter.
In case you didn't know Choicepoint sucks up every court document in every state so they probably have a more detailed criminal history on everyone than state or federal governments.
Its not entirely clear what the benefit is of having 3 different agencies scoring your credit plus Choicepoint, it just increases the likelihood of data compromise, and if there is an error in your credit report you pretty much have to correct it in all 3 places at your expense. But again any company can form to do this and all they have to do is collect data, market themselves and gain momentum where enough people use their service and you can have 4 or 10 agencies like this.
There is some regulation of credit bureaus, though I'm not sure Choicepoint falls under it, they should.
You could propose that only the Federal government should hold all this data but it doesn't really help because this whole system is predicated on allowing pretty much any business who wants it to request this information about you before they hire you or give you credit.
You in fact have no privacy and haven't had for a while. Until the Federal government converts your Social Security number to a true encrypted digital signature with some minimal security, i.e. a password only you know to validate its yours, EVERYONE is a sitting duck for identity theft in the network era.
Excepting the lawyers are the only ones who usually profit in most class action suits so it should read:
3. Lawyers Profit!!
George W. did just sign some kind of class action lawsuit "reform" bill. Not clear to me if it makes things better or worse, though it probably depends on who you are. The Republican's do hate lawyers since they overwhelmingly vote for and contribute to the Democrats, so I think they did cap the extent to which the lawyers can plunder the settlement and send checks for 38 cents to all the people in the class.
At the sime time I think they made it much more difficult to file class action suits, because the Republicans also hate people who sue America's fine corporations, even when they are guilty of criminal negligence or fraud.
"You do realize this is a Marxist argument, right?"
Yes the civil service is completely socialist. You would have thought the Bush crowd would have been slashing civil service jobs at every turn based on their empty campaign rhetoric about hating socialism but in fact government based employment has been sky rocketing under the Bush administration thanks to things like the TSA and the Dept. of Homeland security. There was a time last year and year before fully half of the new jobs being created were government jobs.
Government contracting tends to be more Fascist than pure Socialist. Its a big intrusive government intervening in the free markets in a massive way by harnessing private corporations to do the work. Pretty sure that is the definition of economics under Fascism. In true Socialism all the work is done by the state for the state and there are no private companies involved.
The Pentagon, with well over a half trillion dollar budget is now one of the largest socialist/fascist economies in the world.
There is irony that NASA for example has taken on most of the characteristics of a corrupt Soviet politburo while the Russian Space Agency is quite lean, mean and entrepenuerial by comparison. For example they fly tourists to space for cash while NASA flies politicians into space to secure more state funding.
"It would be a text channel, with some files transfer capabilities, etc."
It would be somewhat bandwidthed challenged, probably no blazing fiber optics but it would HTML based just like the current Internet. In urban areas you probably could put together some high bandwidth fiber trunks.
With newer version of 802.11/Wimax I'm not so sure that you might manage some pretty good bandwidth on wireless.
It would tend to be more local and community oriented since it would take a lot of hops to make it to the other side of the country so the latency would be murder. Not sure that wouldn't be all bad since it might build up local communities, interaction and involvement which is sorely lacking in most places these days.
It would also promote local mirroring of the most interesting content. You could transfer it on CD's and snail mail and put it on a local mirror to cut down on the long distance hauls.
It is illegal to give outright bribes to politicians and civil servants but the laws are easy to skirtl
In particular, there isn't anything really illegal about taking lucrative payoffs to politcians after they retire from government service which is the payoff of choice at the moment, its called the revolving door from government to the private sector and in some cases like Dick Cheney back in to government and then in 2008 back to the private sector.
I vaguely recall in the late 80's, it might have been illegal for civil servants, not sure about politicians, to take jobs in the private sector with companies they dealt with when in government service. I'm pretty sure it was overturned shortly after it was passed because it ended the gravy train of working in government for a relatively low wage, throwing business to the private sector and then taking a lucrative job in that same private sector. Not sure but I think Dick Cheney in fact led the charge to reopen the revolving door, at least in defense contracting, and he of course took advantage of that very revolving door to go from Defense secretary to Halliburton CEO which made him a multimillionaire. Halliburton's KBR wins billion and billions of dollars of sole source contracts for the army and has since Vietnam. Dick Cheney also lead the push to contract out vast amounts of work from the military to contractors, like food service, fuel supply and transport, etc. Its a just a coinkydink all the work he outsourced to contractors went to KBR, the company he took over as soon as he left office. It stinks, he stinks. Halliburton was caught engaged in blatant profiteering in Iraq in both fuel contracts and catering to the military.
Darlene Druyun is another case study in the revolving door. As the Air Force's lead procurement office she steered a 20+ billion contract to Boeing for 767 tankers and then took a lucrative position as a Boeing exec right after. It was so blatant people in Congress like John McCain screamed bloody murder and Boeing was pressured to fire her and the CEO who presided over the massive corruption but this punishment was the exception not the rule. Lockheed and Boeing's executive ranks are loaded with retired Generals, civil servants and politicians.
You apparently have no grasp of how government contractors and civil servants work. Here is a hint.... the pay is the same.
If you are a civil servent filling this admin job its nearly impossible to fire you so you have absolutely no incentive to tear your hair out worrying about securing your systems. You punch in, you go through the motions, you punch out, and when you put in 20 years or so you retire with a handsome pension.
If you are a contractor you are working for a company whose only goals are to:
A. Win the contract with award winning prose about what a great job you will do
B. Once you win the contract you hire a small army of warm bodies whose one purpose in life is to put in billable hours which the company in turns bills to the government with a nice profit margin tacked on, and to buy and resell hardware and software to the government with a nice profit margin tacked on. There is NEVER any penalty in government contracting for failure. The worst thing that can happen is the project is canceled and your contract ends and you go bid for new ones. or when the term of the contract expires they might award it to another contractor and you go bid for new ones. Many of the warm bodies working for the contractor on the way out just go work for the new contractor and nothing actually changes except the name on the paychecks.
There is only occasionally incentive payments for success and those are just gravy, nice to have, but not if it means you have to expend a lot of money and effort to actually do a good job.
In many spectacular failures involving government contractors the project will suffer massive cost overruns and schedule slips and the agency will just keep pouring ever more money at the contractor, and in to their profit margin, in the hopes they will eventually pull it through. In effect the contractor is rewarded for failure with more years of revenue.
"Yeah, doesn't matter what else he's got to say, he tried to make W. look bad."
Making George W. look bad doesn't require any effort. He does it himself pretty much anytime he opens his mouth when there isn't a teleprompter telling him what to say.
Now if Clark tried to make George W. look bad and failed that would be a point of concern about Clark's competence....
Slashdot Mirror
"Richard Purcell, Chief Executive Officer, Corporate Privacy Group, Nordland, WA"
This guy is apparently Chairman of the board of TRUSTe which doesn't exactly have a stellar privacy record with Slashdot in the past as shown here and here though these transgressions were a while ago.
"Michael Turner, President and Senior Scholar, Information Policy Institute, New York, NY"
I think this is another think tank. Not sure where they stand politically. They are spot on with the Republican's on tort reform, have interests in oursourcing, credit reporting among others things.
"Ramon Barquin, President, Barquin International, Bethesda, MD"
This guy sounds pretty qualified though he is a big advocate of data warehousing, especially by the government:
"President and CEO of Barquin International. He is a former IBM executive and an internationally known expert in the field of knowledge management. Dr. Barquin co-founded and was the first President of the Data Warehousing Institute, the leading professional organization in the field. He also founded and heads the Computer Ethics Institute.
An electrical engineer and mathematician by training, Dr. Barquin has taught at MIT, the University of Maryland, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He edited the Prentice Hall series on Data Warehousing, co-edited two books on Knowledge Management in the public sector, and has published over 100 technical and management articles on information technology. He organized and chaired the E-Gov Knowledge Management conferences in 2000 and 2001, and has conducted executive seminars in electronic government and knowledge management for the Brookings Institution."
"J. Howard Beales, Associate Professor, The George Washington University, Arlington, VA"
Beale, sounds like a good choice. He headed the Consumer protection bureau of the FTC and blessed us with the "Do Not Call" list which rates him high in my book. Also is pretty keen on fighting spam.
Lance Hoffman, an academic, seems like a good choice though you would have to read some of his work to be sure.
"Joseph Alhadeff, Vice President and Chief Privacy Officer, Oracle Corporation, Washington, DC"
Excepting Oracle is one of the leading companies advocating development of massive all seeing, all powerful databases by the government to make us all "safe". They obviously have a conflict of interest because they make money from most of the big databases that are used to collect information about us and violate our privacy. They have been circling like sharks since 9/11 pushing agencies like Homeland Security to create national security databases using Oracle software.
"James W. Harper, Editor/Executive Director, Privacilla.org & Director of Information Policy Studies, Cato Institute, Washington, DC"
The Cato Institute is a Libertarian group which you might think is a plus for a data privacy committee but its main goal is to eliminate all barriers to profitability for big corporations. If there is profit in it they will see your data privacy down the river in a heartbeat. Its founder Charles Koch own Koch oil, a very big but somewhat obscure oil company with close ties to Bush/Cheney (like all big oil companies), and a notorious pollution record. They were facing massive pollution fines in the Clinton era but they all miraculously disappeared when Bush siezed power in 2000.
"Tara Lemmey, Chief Executive Officer, Lens Ventures, San Francisco, CA"
Don't know anything about this one but her mission statement is a trippy exercise in babbling buzzwords, but note especially "From information as property to information as profit" which sounds kind of bad idea for a data privacy committee. She was President of EFF at one time but it kind of sounds like she saw the light and is pursuing profit over freedom at this point:
"LENS brings you passionate, knowledgeable, insightful voices that weave context for the conversation of change. From the latest announcements in biotech to the current zeitgeist in national security. From information as property to information as profit. From the changing architectures of our urban landscape to the changing architectures of our global networks. Leaders from government, science, academia and industry converge and cross-pollinate a broad range of topics and disciplines to bring your audience a full spectrum view unlike any other."
"Paul Samuel Rosenzweig, Senior Legal Research Fellow, The Heritage Foundation, Washington, DC"
Heritage Foundation is another right wing think tank, and major Bush backer. If you want to see one reason the right is kicking the left's ass its all these very well heeled right wing think tanks that specialize in telling politicians and the media how to think.
"Joseph Leo, Vice President, SAIC, Vienna, VA"
They've starred several times on Slashdot recently. Someone stole a poorly secured computer with social security number for pretty much every employee who ever bought stock in the company.
They were also a key player in the FBI's trilogy project, to computerize the FBI's case files, which after $170 million dollars is most probably going to be scrapped because it was apparently useless.
All in all they are just a big government contractor and they do massive amounts of work for the Pentagon and intelligence agencies and as such probably tread on your privacy as much as Gator, and probably more insidiously.
Think they are a playe rin electronic voting too.
"What's next, a security-obssessed government that makes us less secure?"
Reference the rhetoric from great Britain this week. They are in the run up to an election and Blair is fighting for his life. Blair apparently took some pages out of the Bush play book and it makes it so transparent when you see another government doing exactly the same thing the Republican's just did, stoke massive fear right before an election to win reelection.
- Tony Blair quotes: "Nothing must stand in the way of protecting the security of our people."
- They are trying to ram through yet another variant of the Patriot act "The Bill introduces "control orders" which will enable the Home Secretary to stop terror suspects travelling or using phones and the internet - without the need for a trial.". It may allow indefinite home detention of anyone the Home Secretary unilaterally decides is a threat to security.
- Before the House of Commons Blair said: Britain was facing "terrorism without limit" and "those considerations of national security have to come before civil liberties however important they are".
The cynics in the crowd suspect Blair's party is doing the same thing the Republican's did with he Patriot act to the Dems, they have to vote for it no matter how onerous it is or Blair's party will accuse them of being soft on terrorism. So either the party in power gets sweeping new powers or they make their opponents look weak and take a potential bath in the election.
Its amazing this works because me, given a clear choice, I'd vote for the party protecting my civil liberties over ineffective security laws.
It isn't confusing and SCOX isn't someone else.
It is standard practice to tag high risk companies with the scarlet letter 'E' which happened to SCO last Friday. It basicly means they are on probation and are on notice that they are going to be delisted from the Nasdaq, pending a series of hearings and appeals, and SCO stops violating Nasdaq and SEC regulations, which they did when they failed to file their 10-K on top and also failed to file it when their extension ran out:
From theStreet.com:
"SCO said it has not filed its 10-K because it is examining matters related to the issuance of common stock as part of its equity compensation plans."
You have to assume there must have been some really shady stock or options handed out to their executives, that are either so shady they are taking forever to untangle, or their accounting is in a shambles, or they turned out to be illegal and they are struggling to figure out a way to brush the mess under the rug.
Their parent company Canopy is in a complete shambles too so if the options involve Canopy its possible SCO can't figure out what happened since there was a mass executive firing at Canopy and law suits have been filed. Apparently Ray Noorda and his wife are suffering from old age and are no longer able to manage the day to day affairs of the company and their children and a couple sets of executives are engaged in a life or death battle to seize control of Canopy and destroying it in the process.
From watching the SCO litigation against Linux and the apparent pump and dump stock scam by Darl and company it was pretty apparent that SCO and Canopy had gone institutionally insane and proof that is in fact the case is now apparently surfacing.
SCOX stock is holding up remarkably well considering the numerous potential down sides of their current situation:
A. There may have been illegal or unethical copensation to someone
B. or their accounting is in such a shambles they don't know who got what
C. They might get delisted from the Nasdaq which means they will end up being traded over the counter or on the Pink Sheets which severely limits their liquidity(it will become very hard to dump any stock if you buy it). OTC and Pink Sheet stocks tend so be bought only by people who are making a long shot gamble(for example that SCO wins its case against IBM).
D. They will probobably lose their case against IBM
E. Their SCO Unix business is cratering as all of their established customer base is bailing on them, presumably to Linux, and no new customer is going to touch them with a ten foot cattle prod.
If you want something mentally challenging chess always works, and backgammon if you want something a little less challenging.
I use the KDE based knights GUI interface on top of gnuchess. It can also hook you up online with a plethora of chess clubs for online matches.
Should be no problem for a head mouse since its more thinking than interaction. Chess isn't for everyone though.
knights source and packages are at:
knights.sourceforge.net
Alpha Centauri is the king of turned based strategy games in my book. It does need some keyboard interaction, though being turned based you can take your time making moves. Other problem is the AI's are a little weak once you master the game and of course its Windows based and not free.
Same here, I was on Red Hat 8, didn't really see the value of going to RH9 since I build my own kernels and KDE(did really much like they way they butchered KDE in RH8 either). I think there was some binary compatiability issue that they used to justify jumping a major version to them to RH9 when it should have been 8.1 In hindsight it appears to me more like Red Hat need to put out a psuedo major release to milk revenue out of their old product line and old customers to bridge them over the traumatic jump to Enterprise and Fedora.
I bought one year of subscription update service for RH8 for my machines, not because I had to but it was convenient and back then I didn't mind sending a little money Red Hat's way to support them.
Of course they proceeded to end of life Red Hat 7, 8 and 9 within the space of a few months and the remainder of my subscription was essentially worthless and there was no good upgrade path other than pay an arm and a leg for Enterprise or risk Fedora and Fedora struck me as strategicly chaotic(i.e. whose in charge there?). There was zero chance of me paying them more money for enterprise after they'd just screwed me on my old subscription.
I had a long flame fest hear with a Red Hat employee whose login is Nailer last time Fudcon was posted on Slashdot.
One of his suggestions was I should have contacted Red Hat and expressed my displeasure and since I didn't I had no right to bitch. Well its always a customers right to bith, I also told him that was obviously pointless to complaint to Red Hat since it was a strategic decision on Red Hat's part to ax their loyal customer base, those who got them where they were, to focus on charging an arm and a leg for Enterprise support to big corporations and to maximize their profit margin. Since they IPO'ed its pretty obvious they started caring more for what Wall Street analysts think than loyal customers and the developer community.
Nailer also suggested I should go begging to Red Hat Marketing/Sales and maybe they would give me a deal on an Enterprise upgrade, well again there is zero chance of me rewarding Red Hat with more money after they'd just unilaterally stuck a knife in my current subscription and forced me to abandon my current setup.
Nailer also gave me this never ending speil about how the Enterprise and Fedora marketing strategy made perfect sense and it was my problem for not seeing the wisdom in it. Feh!
Needless to say I just voted with my feet and migrated everything to Gentoo and never looked back. I wouldn't use Red Hat now if it was the last distribution on earth. Turns out I prefer compiling from source with Gentoo versus the old RPM mess anyway.
When Red Hat execs got rich on their IPO and slaved themselves to Wall Street they lost track of something really basic, yes they need to be profitable but they benefited mightily from open source developers and their original customer base and they made their IPO possible in the first place. Pissing off your user and developer community, and selling them out in favor of Wall Street analysts is an especially stupid strategy in the Linux world.
Red Hat completely trashed their brand and the loyalty they had for their distribution. They should have fine tuned out the problems in their strategy instead of introducing a huge discontinuity which pushed loyal customers to bailing on them.
CO2 is already pumped into oil fields to force oil out of old wells, its quite precious. I assume they can't use air because the oxygen would presumably create a danger of explosions and underground fires, though I don't know for sure.
They drill wells to tap underground CO2 deposits in the Four Corners and there is a rather long CO2 pipeline, built at substantial expense, from there to old West Texas oil fields.
You could in theory pump 100 billion tons of CO2 in to depleted U.S. oil fields which is 18 years worth of CO2 emmissions in the U.S. It might be possible to to do the same in underground coal mines,and use the CO2 to push out Methane to be used for example to make more Hydrogen and CO2.
They are apparently working on molecular filters to scrub CO2 out of the smoke stacks of coal fired power plants though it sounds a bit far fetched to me.
All this is kind of a short term fix though, and I'd agree its postponing rather than solving our energy and Greenhouse gas problems.
I believe you can drive in the carpool lane in Californita if you own a Hybrid. Hybrid's aren't exactly THE answer for fossil fuel dependency and green house gasses but they sure make a lot more sense at the moment than driving gas guzzlers or trying to create a Hydrogen economy using fossil fuels to produce the Hydrogen and at great expense to tax payers. Hybrid's mostly just need to get the sticker price down.
.vs. $379 billion.
If the Bush administration were actually serious about reducing dependence on fossil fuels they would just push Detroit to raise MPG rating on their vehicles. Adding a couple extra miles per gallon to all vehicles sold in the U.S. and the world is going to save more oil and pollution than any Hydrogen initiative is going to yield for decades. Why don't we? Well obviously because oil companies don't want more fuel efficient vehicles, and Detroit's profit margins are great on gas guzzlers, though high gas prices is putting a drag on their sales lately. The oil companies are making staggering amounts of money on the status quo at the moment, with oil tight enough that they can set gas prices at a level where they are making massive amounts of money, especially as long as all the oil companies collude to inflate prices. Exxon/Mobile is raking in record profits at the moment and just passed GE as the worlds biggest company with a market cap of $383 billion
You just need to look at Exxon's stock to see they are way happy with the status quo, short oil supplies, growing demand and no viable alternatives in sight.
"You'd have to be a moron or have a vested interest in fossil fuel to produce hydrogen from natural gas."
:) They make their policies on idealogical grounds, and to enrich their friends, not based on sound science or economics.
We are talking about the Bush administration here, enough said
A rationale for the Bush administration is most probably due to "Clean Coal" being one of their policy initiatives to the point of a mantra. I wager they are willing to run a ridiculously wasteful program to use Coal in an environmentally friendly was and use that as propaganda to redirect attention from the massive down sides of strip mining, the filth spewing from older coal fired power plants without modern, expensive pollution controls, and the still massive CO2 emissions from modern power plants which eliminate some other pollutants but don't do anything about CO2. You can't do anything about CO2 from coal unless you bank it and at present banking is only feasible using it for Hydrogen production, not burning it.
As long as the U.S. government pumps enough of our tax dollars in to it to make it profitable for the gas and coal companies I'm sure they will be glad to do it. Subsidies are usually insane, witness farm subsidies and ethanol production but people do profit mightily from them at tax payer expense. They only serve a useful purpose if they kick start an industry that will be profitable and self sustaining once the ball is rolling. I'd say that is doubtful with Little George's Hydrogen initiative as currently designed.
"Second, natural gas is methane. It is worse to try and "crack" methane and convert it into carbon and hydrogen than it is to use other sources of hydrogen"
Not sure you are entirely on the mark either friend. There is a big down side to it but the Bush Hydrogen initiative is in fact completely dependent on fossil fuels, coal and natural gas to produce the Hydrogen in the near to mid term at least.
A pretty good paper on the methods of producing Hydrogen.
Here is a the DOE's own page which spells it out, Bush's plan is COMPLETELY focused on producing Hydrogen from fossil fuels in the near to mid term, in particular from natural gas and coal.
Producing Hydrogen from natural gas is, I believe the cheapest method possible, on anything resembling a large scale, at the moment though not sure how Hydrolysis compares.
$0.65 per kilo - Steam reforming(natural gas)
$0.80-$1.20 per kilo - Off gas clean up
$2.40-$3.60 per kilo - Electrolysis
Producing Hydrogen from natural gas is "worse" in the sense that it produces CO2, a green house gas we would rather not be producing, though its possible to bank the CO2, pump it underground, for example in to old oil fields where its already used at great expense to increase their yield. Carbon sequestration is the DOE's only rationale for using this method of Hydrogen production. If you don't bank the CO2 the fossil fuel based Hydrogen economy would be a massive contributor to greenhouse gases and it would never fly as environmentally friendly.
Hydrogen really isn't any kind of good solution unless its produced from Electrolysis AND then only if the electricity is coming from a non fossil fuel source like Hydro, Nuclear, Wind or Solar. It sure doesn't make sense to burn coal or natural gas to produce electricity to use in Electrolysis to make Hydrogen and pretend its a clean energy source.
At the moment I would be inclined so say the Hydrogen push IS a Bush administration scam to pump subsidies in to their rich friends in the fossil fuels business because that is where all most of the Hydrogen is coming from. In fact I suspect the major objective is to provide his friends in the coal industry an alternative market. If so then that would make Hydrogen produced from coal the centerpiece of the plan and the whole objective of it.
From the paper above:
Steam Reforming
Steam reforming is a chemical process that makes hydrogen from a mixture of water and a source of hydrocarbons; usually a fossil fuel. The most common source is natural gas, which consists primarily of methane. When steam and methane are combined at a high pressure and temperature, a chemical reaction converts them into hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The potential energy content of the hydrogen produced is actually higher than that of the natural gas consumed. However, a significant amount of energy is required to operate the reformer, so the overall efficiency is typically only about 65 percent. Hydrogen produced by this technique can cost as little as $0.65 per kilogram. This process is not the best method for creating hydrogen because it uses a lot of energy to operate and the efficiency level is low. There is also another drawback to steam reforming, according to the Department of Energy. It has concluded that "substantial emissions can be generated when hydrogen is produced from certain energy sources", namely fossil fuels.
Off-Gas Clean Up
Another technique for producing hydrogen is off-gas clean up. Off-gas clean up is the process that utilizes the high concentrations of hydrogen in the waste streams of various industries. Collecting and purifying these gases is often cost-effective, with costs typically ranging between $0.80 and $1.20 per kilogram. Most off-gas hydrogen is used on-site by the industry that produces it. Industries that could utilize off-gas clean up include
Was reading this interesting article today on the extent to which military recruiters are invading high schools and community colleges.
Anyone still in school who can confirm this is what's its like today?
- Military recruiters in the lunch room on a daily basis
- Guest military speakers in classrooms
- Army and Marine recruiting ads mandatory viewing in classrooms
- Recruiters telling kids to stay out of college and go in to the military instead because then college is free and you will be able to get jobs once you get out of the military and not if you go straight to college.
- Do recruiters disproportionately target the poor and minorties
That has to be great for American competitiveness and the economy when your own government is trying to dissuade kids from going to college in order to prop up sagging recruitment.
Rumsefeld and General Meyers(Chairman Joint Chiefs) were in front of Congress this week and grilled about the fact that the Army and Marin reserves and guard are now officially missing their recruiting goals. Meyers rationalized one reason is because the Army and Marines were doing such a good job of retaining soldiers there aren't veterans going in to the guard and reserves. I think he forgot to mention a prime retention tool is stop loss which prevents people from leaving the military when their enlistment is over.
Meyers other proposed solution was hire even more recruiters to hunt down young people and trick them in to the military.
It will be interesting, if the Bush administration will have to either:
- Start bailing on Iraq
- Refrain from starting new wars in Syria and Iran
- Restart the draft and commit political suicide
- If they do restart the draft what kind of dodges will they provide for rich, white kids like George W. had in the Air National Guard, trained at great expense to be a pilot and no chance of ever seeing combat and for the most part didn't even report for duty.
Probably should write a long post about the goal of the military to use video games and simulations to train children to be soldiers and to desensitize them to the consequences of being in a war where people are being killed and you might be killed. Computers are god to the military for that. Has anyone seen a video simulation or game showing dogs eating dead bodies and dragging of limbs, or maybe dead women and children, or people burned half way to charcoal. We really need more of that in video games, actual war footage so kids learn that war is not clean, tidy and heroic. Its brutal, ugly and horrific and lots of innocent people die. If you are a pilot it might not entirely register when you drop bombs you are killing people, often innocent people, but if you end up in the Army and Marines, you may be killing people close up, and one of two things will probably happen:
- You will regret it for the rest of your life
- You will start liking it and start doing it at every opportunity, and not be very discriminating in who you kill. In Vietnam it was apparently common for some people in this class to start taking pictures of their kills, building scrapbooks so they could revel in their handwork later.
I'd spend more time concentrating in efficiently heating and or cooling your house.
If you live someplace with cold winters...
Lots of well insulated south facing windows with eaves that overhang just the right amount so the windows are mostly in the shade from the eaves in the summer when the Sun is overheard but catch tons of sun in the winter when the Sun is lower on the horizon.
Then put remote controlled motors on the curtains so that they automaticly open and close for optimal heat in the winter(all closed at night and open to the east in the morning to the south midday and to the west in the afternoon) and for optimal light and minimal heat in the summer(close the curtains on the east windows in the morning and the west windows in the afternoon when the sun is shining in them, and then open them for light when the Sun isn't shining on them.
If the house is well insulated and you don't open the front door(or have a small entryway with two doors, to much you wont need much heat during the day in the winter. If you want to sink more money in to it you could probably bank some heat in water tanks or such and use them to keep the house warmer at night too.
Passive solar aside, do plenty of research and find a very good digital thermostat and efficient heating, air conditioning system. You also want to be able to program it so it automaticly minimizes energy consumption during times you are always out of the house(at work or school), or in bed, and warms up the house just before you get up or cools it down just before you get home from work in the summer.
"It's not so much that they pick weak candidates, but that they run incredibly weak, hamstrung, castrated campaigns"
Nope. The cause of a weak campaign is a weak candidate. If he is so gutless he can't run a good campaign it is 100% his fault, he is the chief executive of the campaign.
Its kind of obvious Dean would have had guts to run a serious campaign, he probably would have been destroyed by Rove and the media, and would have lost too but at least it wouldn't have been as pathetic as Kerry. There was a delightfully complex set of forces that set out to destroy Dean just before Iowa and they were successful. I'm sure it included some Democratic fat cats, party bosses and insiders who were ticked at Dean for circumventing them, it included the media who for whatever reason decided to destroy him. It included Dean himself who stuck his foot in his mouth. I wouldn't be surprised if it included Karl Rove, he probably in fact did fear Dean because he had a backbone and an organization which no other Dem candidates did.
"1) increase minimum wage by x amount"
That will get you the votes of progressives who are stuck voting for the Dems anyway or throwing away their votes on Nader, and people who actually work for a minimum wage, students, illegal aliens, high school dropouts, ex-cons, etc. and believe it or not almost none of them vote. You will be sure to lose the vote of anyone who employs people who work for minimum wage, i.e. restaurants, bars etc. It is a noble goal but you wont win an election on it. Its something a liberal would do after winning an election if he could get the votes in Congress.
"2) increase troop pay and benefits"
Don't think that is a viable issue for a Democrat to run on. Only people that care are those in the miliary and their families. The enlisted men either vote Democratic already or are probably hawks and firmly Republican, officer corp is very Republican. I doubt its going to swing any votes and is going to cost you an arm an a leg. Jacking up veteran's benefits might win you some votes at a high price, but you might still lose them because Dems are painted as soft on the military. I imagine if you won and actually made sure soldiers actually had armor on their humvees and trucks they might vote to reelect you overwhelmingly. Just promising it in a campaign would go in one ear and out the other. Republicans have been promising it for years and still not delivered.
"3) $150 billion for infrastructure (creates jobs and gets rid of pot holes "
Well I'll give you that spending it on infrastructure is better than wasting it in Iraq but your not going to win a lot of votes with it. First off its socialism and the money is mostly going to disappear in to the pockets of corrupt construction companies, unionized labor, and mafia controlled concrete companies. Look at it this way, $150 billion would pay for about ten iterations of Boston's "Big Dig". When all the money was gone you would be skewered for all the fraud, waste and abuse just like the "Big Dig" was.
"4) increase REAL domestic security, not just hassle guys named Mohammed at airports"
Easy to say, nearly impossible to do. Terrorists and insurgents always have the advantage because they can pick the soft spots. Unless you turn the U.S. in to a totalitarian police state its unlikely you are going to ever actually increase security. Israel is a tiny place with a oppressive security presence and they still can't stop attacks, especially suicide attacks. Maybe you could win some votes but you are just going to waste the money in a different direction than the Republicans.
"5) redo the Bush tax package, and make a cut on payroll taxes this time."
Well that one would be popular until Medicare, Social Security and unemployment run out of money. I'd agree it is criminal to be raking in surpluses from payroll taxes while Congress and the President redirect them in to defraying the deficits from tax cuts for the rich. In theory the su
The Boeing CEV concept page.
The Wikipedia CEV page
If you look at the Boeing CEV web page I think you will find their design is remarkably the same as everything Apollo did 40 years ago. The Crew Control Module is going to be a cramped conical capsule almost exactly like Apollo's from the picture. Their proposed Delta IV booster is going to be exceptionally weak compared to Saturn V or a derivative of the Shuttle stack. Its not clear but I think they are going to have to do two or more launches and dock the pieces in orbit to get them to the Moon and back. The lunar landar is pretty similar to LEM except its got an inflatible top on it. They don't seem to have any plans for surface habitats other than their lander which kind of looks like its for very short stays.
Obviously you can put new computers in it and take advantage of material advances, etc but I think if this is actually what they build you might find you are disappointed comparing it to 40 year old Apollo technology, especially the booster.
I also wager their lunar missions are going to end up remarkably like Apollo, fly three people, stay for a week, fly home, and after 1 or 2 of them people are going to ask what exactly we are wasting all the money for, because we really don't have any particularly good reason to spend billions to put people on the moon other than to do geology or prestige nostalgia. You might justify it if you harvest Helium isotopes for fusion reactors, or water if there is any, or lunar dirt for shielding but I wager it will end up like most NASA manned missions, something you do for its own sake as you desperately try to figure out a reason to justify it.
Now if they were really going to Mars that would be exciting but Boeing's early concepts aren't even remotely realistic for a multi year mission to Mars. A Mars vehicle is completely different from an LEO and lunar vehicle. I really doubt you will reuse much of anything. In Boeings concept they are using the same conical capsule for the Crew Command Module and man that would be cramped for a two year mission. There is an inflatable habitat referenced but its not clear that that will be habitable in transit or that anything will be shielded enough to protect against radiation on a long duration space mission. Most space profiles have a habitat inside a water tank and are using water for some shielding, plus you need a LOT of water anyway for a multiyear mission. A Mars ship should be more like a small space station, with toilets, showers, kitchen, exercise gear, substantial shielding, with some hefty cargo capacity and an even heftier propulsion, unless you want to torture the astronauts for a couple of years. What Boeing has there looks like something they threw together to justify their modular approach though I doubt it would work to use LEO/Lunar components for a trip to Mars.
I love the Daily show but.... I unfortunately I understand why I love it, and all the rest of the Blue state'ers probably do too. Its the only American news show, or even fake news show, that people who aren't right wing wackos can watch since Bush assumed his throne, since 9/11 and especially since Bush got reelected. The Daily Show's popularity is almost directly corellated to the rise of Fox News and George W. We all fled to it to escape reality. Some people maybe fled to CNN or ABC but they all turned in to pale echos of Fox News, shameless flag waving after 9/11, their insane rush to war in Iraq, so we had to flee them too so we all landed on the Daily Show. When I tune in CNN I can barely tell it from Fox lately, except maybe Fox has more hard news.
So we were all happily watching Jon Stewart, havin' a good laugh, and figuring the nightmare would be over in November. America would come to its senses and put a pathetic excuse for a Democrat in the White House, lesser of two evils ya know. He would suck but nothing could be as bad as George W.
Two problems developed:
- While were off escaping from reality, the Christian fundamentalists, the neocons, the hawks, Karl Rove and the rest played a deadly serious game to stay in power at all costs, they played hard ball and they won, while we were all off pretending Jon could just poke fun at them, everyone would see he was right and there was no way they could win. BUSHES REELECTION IS ALL JON'S FAULT....WAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH.
- Somehow the Democratic party nominated the absolute most pathetic candidate they could find, if you went looking for the absolute most pathetic candidate to nominate for President you couldn't have found anybody worse.
So at this point we are trapped, we have only three options:
A. Stop watching television or at least the news
B. Watch the Daily show and have a half hour respite from the insanity that has siezed hold of America. Unfortunately its just escapism, pretending that if Jon makes a joke out of something horrible the White House did today that its must not be so bad, well unfortunately it still is.
C. Watch the network news and just lose it, and start yelling at the TV,
"How can you people be so stupid"
"How did you all fall for that"
"He is lieing, can't you tell he is lieing, he is really obviously lieing, how did you fall for that"
"When did CNN U.S. get bought out by Fox News?
That's pretty much all I did during the run up to the Iraq war. It was driving the family nuts everytime the news came on and I started yelling they are lieing about the WMD's and about the ties to Al Qaida, the RPV's spraying American cities with Anthrax and Saring, and about the "mushroom cloud", just so they can sucker Congress, the networks and the American people in to backing a war no one in their right mind would have backed otherwise.
Its what I do lately when I see John Negroponte getting appointed head of this new monster of a national intelligence agency and all these politicians drooling as they praise him as a great diplomat and statesman, and all these 9/11 families and 9/11 commission, god bless them, naively giving the right wing the cover they needed to create this monster that makes the KGB look puny, the right wing all the while acting reluctant about it as they salivate about going back to the good old day of the '50's and '60's when the CIA was an out of control rogue agency toppling elected government after elected government.
This is John "Death Squads are Us" Negroponte who was ambassador to Honduras during the Contra part of Iran Contra and the reign of terror of the CIA trained Battalion 3-16 whose specialty was torture and summary executions.
He has numerous times, under oath said he was unaware of any human rights abuses in Honduras while he was there though death squads tortured hundreds, if not thousands of people, he was briefed on it, he knew about, he
Where did you see it, Marin County?
Did anyone just yell at George to sit down and shut the fuck up?
In fairness I loved THX-1138 though the ending is pretty weak. It appears that before he started work on the prequels the state must have compelled him to resume taking his full dose of meds.
Nice sentiment but not very realistic. If you close down ChoicePoint you would pretty much have to go after Equifax, Experian(formerly TRW), and Trans Union. In case you don't know the name these are America's big three credit bureaus, where Choicpoint is more ID, criminal record, and financial records rolled in to one. It appears pretty much anyone can form a corporation and start collecting your personal data, thats what all four of these companies did.
Why do they exist, because other corporations want and need the data they have on you and will pay for it, that includes potential employers and landlords, banks, car dealers, real estate brokers, etc. etc.
You can't stop all this information tracking without eviscerating employment screening, loans, credit cards, etc. I'd be all for it personally but there are trillions of dollars of big business that rely on these companies and they would scream bloody murder if you tried to shut them all down.
Choicepoint in particular probably experienced a boom after 9/11. The rampant paranoia that ensued multiplied by an order of magnitude the number of employment ID and criminal background checks employers conduct on prospective employees. Chances are if you are applying for a job with a company of any size their HR department is getting a COMPLETE run down on you form Choicepoint or someone like them, every criminal offense, how good you are at paying your bills, bankruptcies, loan history etc. Chances are they know every gory detail of your entire life, before you get an offer letter.
In case you didn't know Choicepoint sucks up every court document in every state so they probably have a more detailed criminal history on everyone than state or federal governments.
Its not entirely clear what the benefit is of having 3 different agencies scoring your credit plus Choicepoint, it just increases the likelihood of data compromise, and if there is an error in your credit report you pretty much have to correct it in all 3 places at your expense. But again any company can form to do this and all they have to do is collect data, market themselves and gain momentum where enough people use their service and you can have 4 or 10 agencies like this.
There is some regulation of credit bureaus, though I'm not sure Choicepoint falls under it, they should.
You could propose that only the Federal government should hold all this data but it doesn't really help because this whole system is predicated on allowing pretty much any business who wants it to request this information about you before they hire you or give you credit.
You in fact have no privacy and haven't had for a while. Until the Federal government converts your Social Security number to a true encrypted digital signature with some minimal security, i.e. a password only you know to validate its yours, EVERYONE is a sitting duck for identity theft in the network era.
Excepting the lawyers are the only ones who usually profit in most class action suits so it should read:
3. Lawyers Profit!!
George W. did just sign some kind of class action lawsuit "reform" bill. Not clear to me if it makes things better or worse, though it probably depends on who you are. The Republican's do hate lawyers since they overwhelmingly vote for and contribute to the Democrats, so I think they did cap the extent to which the lawyers can plunder the settlement and send checks for 38 cents to all the people in the class.
At the sime time I think they made it much more difficult to file class action suits, because the Republicans also hate people who sue America's fine corporations, even when they are guilty of criminal negligence or fraud.
"You do realize this is a Marxist argument, right?"
Yes the civil service is completely socialist. You would have thought the Bush crowd would have been slashing civil service jobs at every turn based on their empty campaign rhetoric about hating socialism but in fact government based employment has been sky rocketing under the Bush administration thanks to things like the TSA and the Dept. of Homeland security. There was a time last year and year before fully half of the new jobs being created were government jobs.
Government contracting tends to be more Fascist than pure Socialist. Its a big intrusive government intervening in the free markets in a massive way by harnessing private corporations to do the work. Pretty sure that is the definition of economics under Fascism. In true Socialism all the work is done by the state for the state and there are no private companies involved.
The Pentagon, with well over a half trillion dollar budget is now one of the largest socialist/fascist economies in the world.
There is irony that NASA for example has taken on most of the characteristics of a corrupt Soviet politburo while the Russian Space Agency is quite lean, mean and entrepenuerial by comparison. For example they fly tourists to space for cash while NASA flies politicians into space to secure more state funding.
"It would be a text channel, with some files transfer capabilities, etc."
It would be somewhat bandwidthed challenged, probably no blazing fiber optics but it would HTML based just like the current Internet. In urban areas you probably could put together some high bandwidth fiber trunks.
With newer version of 802.11/Wimax I'm not so sure that you might manage some pretty good bandwidth on wireless.
It would tend to be more local and community oriented since it would take a lot of hops to make it to the other side of the country so the latency would be murder. Not sure that wouldn't be all bad since it might build up local communities, interaction and involvement which is sorely lacking in most places these days.
It would also promote local mirroring of the most interesting content. You could transfer it on CD's and snail mail and put it on a local mirror to cut down on the long distance hauls.
It is illegal to give outright bribes to politicians and civil servants but the laws are easy to skirtl
In particular, there isn't anything really illegal about taking lucrative payoffs to politcians after they retire from government service which is the payoff of choice at the moment, its called the revolving door from government to the private sector and in some cases like Dick Cheney back in to government and then in 2008 back to the private sector.
I vaguely recall in the late 80's, it might have been illegal for civil servants, not sure about politicians, to take jobs in the private sector with companies they dealt with when in government service. I'm pretty sure it was overturned shortly after it was passed because it ended the gravy train of working in government for a relatively low wage, throwing business to the private sector and then taking a lucrative job in that same private sector. Not sure but I think Dick Cheney in fact led the charge to reopen the revolving door, at least in defense contracting, and he of course took advantage of that very revolving door to go from Defense secretary to Halliburton CEO which made him a multimillionaire. Halliburton's KBR wins billion and billions of dollars of sole source contracts for the army and has since Vietnam. Dick Cheney also lead the push to contract out vast amounts of work from the military to contractors, like food service, fuel supply and transport, etc. Its a just a coinkydink all the work he outsourced to contractors went to KBR, the company he took over as soon as he left office. It stinks, he stinks. Halliburton was caught engaged in blatant profiteering in Iraq in both fuel contracts and catering to the military.
Darlene Druyun is another case study in the revolving door. As the Air Force's lead procurement office she steered a 20+ billion contract to Boeing for 767 tankers and then took a lucrative position as a Boeing exec right after. It was so blatant people in Congress like John McCain screamed bloody murder and Boeing was pressured to fire her and the CEO who presided over the massive corruption but this punishment was the exception not the rule. Lockheed and Boeing's executive ranks are loaded with retired Generals, civil servants and politicians.
You apparently have no grasp of how government contractors and civil servants work. Here is a hint .... the pay is the same.
If you are a civil servent filling this admin job its nearly impossible to fire you so you have absolutely no incentive to tear your hair out worrying about securing your systems. You punch in, you go through the motions, you punch out, and when you put in 20 years or so you retire with a handsome pension.
If you are a contractor you are working for a company whose only goals are to:
A. Win the contract with award winning prose about what a great job you will do
B. Once you win the contract you hire a small army of warm bodies whose one purpose in life is to put in billable hours which the company in turns bills to the government with a nice profit margin tacked on, and to buy and resell hardware and software to the government with a nice profit margin tacked on. There is NEVER any penalty in government contracting for failure. The worst thing that can happen is the project is canceled and your contract ends and you go bid for new ones. or when the term of the contract expires they might award it to another contractor and you go bid for new ones. Many of the warm bodies working for the contractor on the way out just go work for the new contractor and nothing actually changes except the name on the paychecks.
There is only occasionally incentive payments for success and those are just gravy, nice to have, but not if it means you have to expend a lot of money and effort to actually do a good job.
In many spectacular failures involving government contractors the project will suffer massive cost overruns and schedule slips and the agency will just keep pouring ever more money at the contractor, and in to their profit margin, in the hopes they will eventually pull it through. In effect the contractor is rewarded for failure with more years of revenue.
"Yeah, doesn't matter what else he's got to say, he tried to make W. look bad."
....
Making George W. look bad doesn't require any effort. He does it himself pretty much anytime he opens his mouth when there isn't a teleprompter telling him what to say.
Now if Clark tried to make George W. look bad and failed that would be a point of concern about Clark's competence