NOAA Weather Radio should be receivable anywhere in CONUS and there are decent radios to be had (that will activate automatically during severe weather events) for less than $50. Something worth considering.
As far as the asshats at TWC, have you considered going OTA-only or at least OTA for your local channels? If you're lucky you have a local station with a good weather operation that will go above and beyond the EAS reporting -- one of our local stations preempted NBC for the better part of an hour when we had a tornado earlier this year -- but even if they don't you'd still be assured of getting the EAS alerts.
Check out TV Fool and AntennaWeb as starting resources for determining if OTA reception is feasible from your location and what kind of antenna system you would need to make it happen. As an added bonus, you'll get a far better HD picture than anything Time Warner is sending down their pipe, they compress the hell out of their digital channels.
The EU isn't a country, it's a trade agreement. The UK and France have nuclear weapons, Germany has breakout capability, none of those countries are likely to place their capabilities in the hands of the bureaucrats in Brussels. They can't even agree on joint command of men with rifles, never mind nuclear forces....
The UK is essentially a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States in the event of a major nuclear conflict; the Royal Navy is even part of the American SIOP. Other NATO countries (Germany and Belgium) have access to American nuclear weapons under sharing agreements in the event of a major conflict, while France is also a member of NATO.
The main problem the Chinese have is their submarines are not silent enough to operate in areas where the US Navy has deep surveillance platforms deployed.
They don't need them to be quiet enough to operate in those areas when they have SLBMs that can reach the US mainland from port. The Chinese will do the same thing that the Soviet Union used to do and Russia still does; keep their boomers close to home, in heavily fortified/patrolled waters, just replace the Barents Sea with the Yellow Sea.
The Topol-M missile has a shorter range than the Minuteman III
Who cares? Can it reach New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc? They aren't aimed at Buenos Aires, they're aimed at American cities, and having a shorter range than Minuteman III isn't really relevant.
On the Chinese side the DF-31/A counts less than 30 by some estimates
Which is still enough to effectively destroy the United States as an economic and military power.
The real problem is the one you keep dancing around, namely China's lack of transparency, and the resulting arms race that will inevitably ensue if they aren't brought into the modern arms control framework. Japan is now having serious conversations about Article 9 of her Constitution, a topic that would have been taboo a generation ago, and something that should give anyone with knowledge of Asian history/geopolitics pause. The only thing holding them back is the Alliance with the United States, so effectively the only thing stopping an Asian arms race is the willingness of the American people to subsidize the defense of other countries. If you've been paying attention to American domestic politics you'll note that this willingness is eroding.
As for the Minuteman being outclassed by modern Russian ICBMs, so what if that's true?
There's no "if", the Russians have had better ICBMs than the United States for decades. The MX was a response to this, one that I personally think was misguided (who needs ICBMs when one has boomers, the Brits and the French have figured this out....) but there you go.
The point is, why are the Russians investing money in next generation delivery systems?
What would really be a problem for the US would be if the Russians started working on a Strategic Missile Defence to, say, defend themselves against the terrifying existential threat North Korean nuclear weapons pose.
North Korea doesn't pose an existential threat to the United States, but a North Korean missile capable of reaching Guam, Honolulu, Alaska, or the West Coast is a threat that can't be ignored. The point of missile defense is to give policymakers a choice other than "surrender to blackmail" or "glass them".
I'm not sure that the US has any IRBM or nuclear-armed cruise missiles left in deployment.
We gave up our IRBMs in the INF treaty, a treaty that is under threat because of China's growing missile arsenal, a point I've been trying to make throughout this discussion.
You declined to answer the question I posed previously, "Why shouldn't China be encouraged to join some of this framework and be more open with their intentions and capabilities?"
The new SSBNs will carry a Trident derivative, probably a slightly tweaked version of the D5 (as will the postulated replacement for the British SSBNs)
There is no "new SSBN"; the Ohio replacement has yet to receive R&D funding. Even if it got funding tomorrow, it'll be years before a design is ready to be constructed, then years after that before construction is completed, sea trials conducted, problems fixed, and new boats finally accepted into the fleet. I'm not sure what we're waiting for, the Ohios start to reach the end of their useful lives in the next decade.
there is nothing to be gained in spending 50 billion dollars to develop and produce missiles and warheads that would be only fractionally better than what they replace.
The Russians and Chinese don't see it that way. They're developing and deploying new ICBMs and SLBMs. The latter might make sense, the West was always ahead of both countries where SLBM technology is concerned, but why the former? Russia certainly has nothing to prove in the ICBM department, she has fielded weapons that outclass the Minuteman for decades now.
Just because China is big doesn't mean it's on the same scale as the US and Russia
The point is that nobody knows just how "big" China is, because they aren't transparent with their weapons production and deployment. The rest of the "Big Five" are, through public processes (budgetary debates in the West) and independent verification (the SALT framework, Open Skies, etc.). Why shouldn't China be encouraged to join some of this framework and be more open with their intentions and capabilities?
Why confine the conversation to ICBMs? They are the least destabilizing nuclear weapons delivery system. China's growing stockpile of short and intermediate range missiles are far more worrisome. They directly threaten our friends in Asia (Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Singapore, etc.), the Russians, and even American soil (Guam and the Marianas)
Russia has been making rumblings for a few years now about withdrawing from the INF treaty. A lot of analysts blame the US Missile Defense program for this, but there's a growing contingent that point the finger towards China's intermediate range forces:
"More ominous still is that China's missile buildup could result in the INF's demise. Moscow has already threatened to pull out if China does not sign the treaty. And, with its tactical fighter bases and surface ships increasingly vulnerable, the United States also may have no choice but to abrogate the treaty and deploy mobile land-based missiles - a capability much more difficult for China to attack - to places such as Japan; this could become the only way to deter Chinese aggression. The end of the INF would mean a missile arms race involving four great nuclear powers - India, China, Russia and the United States. Without sustained attention to China's missile force this frightening scenario is becoming more plausible."
China probably has about the same number of nuclear weapons as France or Britain
The "probably" part is what's worrisome. China simply doesn't operate as transparently as the United States or Russia with regards to nuclear weapons. We know exactly how many weapons the Russians have, how many are currently deployed, where most of them are deployed, etc. Ditto for France and the UK. The Russians know the same about us. Each side has the legal right to send inspectors to the other to verify what they are being told. None of this framework applies to China.
There doesn't seem to be any real necessity for a brand-new missile to replace the existing fleet other than as the existing hardware ages out
There's a necessity for a replacement of the Ohio class, something the Russians and Chinese are already doing....
If we simply stopped with the disarming there would be little need for expensive new technology
Nuclear materials have a half-life.... you can't take an unmaintained plutonium pit from the 1980s and expect it to function as designed thirty years later. Contamination from decay products will yield unpredictable results, ranging from a fissile (weapon fails to reach nuclear yield) to a significant increase in power (Castle Bravo is a good example)
The only way to control for this is to conduct weapons testing (a geopolitical non-starter) or to continue to produce new fissile materials with known quantities. Computer modeling can offset the need for testing to a certain extent but at the end of the day the only way to be certain that a weapon will work as designed is to test it and/or modernize the materials contained therein.
Israel is a regional player with limited abilities to upend the global geopolitical balance that has existed since the 80s. Geography and population will ensure that this is always the case. Not so with China; Russia's current expenditures on WMDs and rumblings about leaving the INF are driven in part by questions about China's intentions and the scope of her nuclear capability. Do you see Russia withdrawing from decades old arms control treaties as a result of anything that happening in Tel Aviv? Not likely.....
China needs to be brought into a modern arms control framework, preferably before a three sided Cold War breaks out. We don't need to "demand" it of her; it's simply a matter of geopolitical carrot and stick, the same as happened with the Soviet Union in the 70s and 80. The problem is that the existing framework either ignores China, or regards her as a smaller power, in the same league as the UK and France. She's not held to the same standards of transparency as the United States or Russia, and that really ought to worry the hell out of everyone.
.... while the US, UK, and France haven't fielded new warheads or delivery systems since the 90s. Russia has deployed new ICBMs, a whole new class of SSBN, she just tested an "ICBM" that may well be a IRBM in disguise (running afoul of the INF in the process), and nobody is quite sure what China is up to with her nuclear arsenal. The latter bit is particularly troubling, at least with the Russians there's a diplomatic framework in place for each side to verify what the other has. The size of China's arsenal and her deployed delivery systems is a huge geopolitical question mark.
The West needs to maintain a credible deterrence force; this means modern warheads and delivery systems. At the same time, we really ought to be making an effort to bring China into a disarmament and verification diplomatic framework, the kind we've had with the Russians for decades. It baffles me that none of our leaders talk about China when discussing nuclear weapons policy.
And the whole crap would have continued a few years later again.
Not likely. The existence of nuclear weapons prevents World War III from happening. That wouldn't have changed if Hitler had been taken out and WW2 ended earlier. Absent the pressures of total war they might have taken longer to be developed but it still would have happened. Deterrence works, even with madmen like Hitler, as evidenced by his refusal to employ chemical weapons. Ditto in the Pacific, the Japanese used them in China, a country that couldn't respond in kind, but declined to use them against the Allies that could.
but on reflection, what Snowden has done was controlled, targeted and highly effective
Is that why he leaked national security secrets that have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with domestic American civil liberties?
Whatever one may think of the NSA, spying on foreign countries/actors is perfectly legitimate, it raises no Constitutional questions, and IMHO there was no valid to leak ANYTHING about NSA's foreign SIGINT programs. The damage that Mr. Snowden has done to the American intelligence community is incalculable and WILL cost lives going forward.
If he had limited himself to leaking information about their domestic activities I might have a different opinion of him, but I'm having a hard time seeing how leaking information about NSA's operations against China (just to pick one, there are others...) is anything but providing aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States.
If you're not attentive enough to notice the police car within visual range then you aren't attentive enough to be behind the wheel, IMHO, regardless of whether you're spending the red light texting, drinking your coffee, changing the radio station, etc. A properly aware driver knows what's going on around him.
Neither of those substances are overly dangerous or radioactive. It's the stuff with shorter half lives that you have to worry about. It decays faster, and pound-for-pound will release a greater amount of radioactivity in a shorter time scale.
PU-238 has a half life of 87.7 years. It will be cold and inert thousands of years before entering another star system.
What do you bury them with? Fossil fuel powered construction equipment? That's a bit like driving 10 miles to the recycling center with a six pack of soda cans because you don't have curb side pickup.;)
Which of course, raises the question, why couldn't you just bloody SAY "31 Gigawatts" instead of tangling yourself in this foofaral of extraneous time units that you didn't even get right?
The watt is a measurement of power. The kilowatt-hour is a measurement of energy. 31 Gigawatts on its own is meaningless. That incandescent light bulb in your closet is rated for 100 watts, does that tell you how much it cost you to operate last month? The power consumption is useless without knowing how long the device was turned on, and it's easier to say "That light bulb consumed 15kWh last month" than to say "That 100 watt light bulb was turned on for 150 hours last month."
Does the DoD have evidence that data can be recovered from a zeroed drive?
Modern hard drives identify bad sectors on the physical media and remap them in a way that is transparent to the operating system. Wiping the HD with/dev/zero will not zero out these sectors, because the OS does not see them, and the HD will not touch them once they're marked bad. If they contained confidential data prior to being marked bad then that data may well be recoverable. It's a huge long shot, but nation-states have the time and resources to chase such long shots.
Physical destruction is really the only way to be sure. Encrypting the drive from the get-go is the next best thing, since any bad sectors will contain encrypted data, though with the cheap price of drives these days you may just as well destroy it when you're done with it.
Your right to a handheld explosive-powered projectile launcher is not natural.
It is a right, but it does not come directly from being a human.
Sure it does. Human beings have been possessing the cutting edge weaponry of the day since the very first Homo sapiens picked up a rock and bashed in his neighbors head. Possession of weaponry is the quintessential natural law right. It can't even effectively be taken away in highly controlled environments, just ask the poor SOB who just got shanked in the prison shower.
DRM is the least of the problems with this game. They took what is inherently a single player game and turned it into social networking garbage. The online only model deprives you of the ability to play Sim City on the train, airplane, or litany of other unconnected places where you might want to play by yourself to pass the time. It deprives you of the ability to save your game, blow the city to hell with disasters, and resume playing afterwards. People might laugh at this, but that has been a huge part of the Sim City experience since the very first release in 1989. The servers don't speak to each other, so if you create a game on server A and have to use Server B tomorrow you can't play the city you spent hours creating. All of this is a huge problem, and that's without taking into account the DRM and completely inadequate server infrastructure.
The server model doesn't even make financial sense for EA -- ongoing expense for a one-time sale -- unless of course they intend to turn this game into a bunch of downloadable content where they "add" features (that have existed since Sim City 2000, i.e., subways and large maps) every few months for $20 a pop. This is almost certainly their plan, because it's the only way the server model can work without becoming a money pit.
I have played this game since I was ten years old and got the SNES version for Christmas. My sister and I used to spend hours in the public library playing Sim City 2000 before we had our first PC, saving our games on 5.25" floppy disks so we could play again tomorrow. I met many of my online friends -- most of whom I still communicate with -- through an old Majordomo mailing list that I found in a book about Sim City 2000. Hell, Sim City 2000 got me online in the first place. I learned how to make my own scenarios with nothing more than a hex editor and patience. I ignored the eye candy and stupid crossovers with The Sims in Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4 because they were at least smart enough to improve upon the underlying simulation model and keep it true to the franchise.
Disappointment does not begin to describe my feelings about this game, which was the first video game I've shelled out my coin for in five years. No, I'm not a pirate, I've just lost interest in gaming in general as I've aged, but this one had me genuinely excited in spite of my concerns about the online model and DRM. Guess I should have known better. I was one of the lucky ones, got a effortless (except for waiting two hours in chat queue) refund without any argument even though I bought it from Origin. Saved me the hassle of doing a credit card charge back, which is something I would highly recommend for anyone who can't get a refund through other channels. Vote with your wallet, it's the only thing EA understands.
I have the misfortune of living at ground zero for an ongoing wind farm build. 24/7 truck traffic, massive clouds of dust, hour plus highway shutdowns while they move their superloads, obnoxious subcontractors that ignore traffic laws, etc, etc. Then there's the ecological impact -- acres upon acres of wooded hilltops have been deforested. I truly had no idea how obnoxious it was until Google Earth got updated images. Take a look at some before and after photos of a large wind farm and see for yourself how bad it is.
All of this might be worth it if wind energy scaled the same as nuclear, or could provide the same power density, but both of those are utterly impossible. You'll never match nuclear reactions for power density, and the footprint of a nuclear power plant is no larger than that of any other modern industrial concern.
Everything in life is a tradeoff, but having lived near Three Mile Island, and now living in the midst of a wind farm, I'd take the former any day of the week. You simply didn't know TMI was there, unless you happened to have cause to drive by it. Contrast that to dozens of wind turbines, visible for miles around, along with the obnoxiousness of their build process.
Nuclear and low impact hydro are the way to go for base load. Natural gas, along with wind, and solar for the peak load.
What's involved in that verification process? Here in New York, all I'm allowed to do as a poll-worker is ask you for your address and signature. If the address you give doesn't match the address on file you can't vote. In theory we can challenge you if the signature doesn't match but that never happens. Signatures change over time, and we are hardly handwriting experts. There is essentially no mechanism in place to keep people from voting under your name, which is a double whammy because you lose your vote even as they get to cast multiple ones.
Democrats don't like voter ID laws, because they feel (with some justification) that their base is less likely to have ID and more likely to be burdened by the process of obtaining it. I'm not sure what the solution is, but we need something that's more secure than what's currently in place across much of the country.
Slashdot Mirror
NOAA Weather Radio should be receivable anywhere in CONUS and there are decent radios to be had (that will activate automatically during severe weather events) for less than $50. Something worth considering.
As far as the asshats at TWC, have you considered going OTA-only or at least OTA for your local channels? If you're lucky you have a local station with a good weather operation that will go above and beyond the EAS reporting -- one of our local stations preempted NBC for the better part of an hour when we had a tornado earlier this year -- but even if they don't you'd still be assured of getting the EAS alerts.
Check out TV Fool and AntennaWeb as starting resources for determining if OTA reception is feasible from your location and what kind of antenna system you would need to make it happen. As an added bonus, you'll get a far better HD picture than anything Time Warner is sending down their pipe, they compress the hell out of their digital channels.
The EU isn't a country, it's a trade agreement. The UK and France have nuclear weapons, Germany has breakout capability, none of those countries are likely to place their capabilities in the hands of the bureaucrats in Brussels. They can't even agree on joint command of men with rifles, never mind nuclear forces....
The UK is essentially a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States in the event of a major nuclear conflict; the Royal Navy is even part of the American SIOP. Other NATO countries (Germany and Belgium) have access to American nuclear weapons under sharing agreements in the event of a major conflict, while France is also a member of NATO.
The main problem the Chinese have is their submarines are not silent enough to operate in areas where the US Navy has deep surveillance platforms deployed.
They don't need them to be quiet enough to operate in those areas when they have SLBMs that can reach the US mainland from port. The Chinese will do the same thing that the Soviet Union used to do and Russia still does; keep their boomers close to home, in heavily fortified/patrolled waters, just replace the Barents Sea with the Yellow Sea.
The Topol-M missile has a shorter range than the Minuteman III
Who cares? Can it reach New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc? They aren't aimed at Buenos Aires, they're aimed at American cities, and having a shorter range than Minuteman III isn't really relevant.
On the Chinese side the DF-31/A counts less than 30 by some estimates
Which is still enough to effectively destroy the United States as an economic and military power.
The real problem is the one you keep dancing around, namely China's lack of transparency, and the resulting arms race that will inevitably ensue if they aren't brought into the modern arms control framework. Japan is now having serious conversations about Article 9 of her Constitution, a topic that would have been taboo a generation ago, and something that should give anyone with knowledge of Asian history/geopolitics pause. The only thing holding them back is the Alliance with the United States, so effectively the only thing stopping an Asian arms race is the willingness of the American people to subsidize the defense of other countries. If you've been paying attention to American domestic politics you'll note that this willingness is eroding.
As for the Minuteman being outclassed by modern Russian ICBMs, so what if that's true?
There's no "if", the Russians have had better ICBMs than the United States for decades. The MX was a response to this, one that I personally think was misguided (who needs ICBMs when one has boomers, the Brits and the French have figured this out....) but there you go.
The point is, why are the Russians investing money in next generation delivery systems?
What would really be a problem for the US would be if the Russians started working on a Strategic Missile Defence to, say, defend themselves against the terrifying existential threat North Korean nuclear weapons pose.
North Korea doesn't pose an existential threat to the United States, but a North Korean missile capable of reaching Guam, Honolulu, Alaska, or the West Coast is a threat that can't be ignored. The point of missile defense is to give policymakers a choice other than "surrender to blackmail" or "glass them".
I'm not sure that the US has any IRBM or nuclear-armed cruise missiles left in deployment.
We gave up our IRBMs in the INF treaty, a treaty that is under threat because of China's growing missile arsenal, a point I've been trying to make throughout this discussion.
You declined to answer the question I posed previously, "Why shouldn't China be encouraged to join some of this framework and be more open with their intentions and capabilities?"
The new SSBNs will carry a Trident derivative, probably a slightly tweaked version of the D5 (as will the postulated replacement for the British SSBNs)
There is no "new SSBN"; the Ohio replacement has yet to receive R&D funding. Even if it got funding tomorrow, it'll be years before a design is ready to be constructed, then years after that before construction is completed, sea trials conducted, problems fixed, and new boats finally accepted into the fleet. I'm not sure what we're waiting for, the Ohios start to reach the end of their useful lives in the next decade.
there is nothing to be gained in spending 50 billion dollars to develop and produce missiles and warheads that would be only fractionally better than what they replace.
The Russians and Chinese don't see it that way. They're developing and deploying new ICBMs and SLBMs. The latter might make sense, the West was always ahead of both countries where SLBM technology is concerned, but why the former? Russia certainly has nothing to prove in the ICBM department, she has fielded weapons that outclass the Minuteman for decades now.
Just because China is big doesn't mean it's on the same scale as the US and Russia
The point is that nobody knows just how "big" China is, because they aren't transparent with their weapons production and deployment. The rest of the "Big Five" are, through public processes (budgetary debates in the West) and independent verification (the SALT framework, Open Skies, etc.). Why shouldn't China be encouraged to join some of this framework and be more open with their intentions and capabilities?
Why confine the conversation to ICBMs? They are the least destabilizing nuclear weapons delivery system. China's growing stockpile of short and intermediate range missiles are far more worrisome. They directly threaten our friends in Asia (Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Singapore, etc.), the Russians, and even American soil (Guam and the Marianas)
Russia has been making rumblings for a few years now about withdrawing from the INF treaty. A lot of analysts blame the US Missile Defense program for this, but there's a growing contingent that point the finger towards China's intermediate range forces:
"More ominous still is that China's missile buildup could result in the INF's demise. Moscow has already threatened to pull out if China does not sign the treaty. And, with its tactical fighter bases and surface ships increasingly vulnerable, the United States also may have no choice but to abrogate the treaty and deploy mobile land-based missiles - a capability much more difficult for China to attack - to places such as Japan; this could become the only way to deter Chinese aggression. The end of the INF would mean a missile arms race involving four great nuclear powers - India, China, Russia and the United States. Without sustained attention to China's missile force this frightening scenario is becoming more plausible."
China probably has about the same number of nuclear weapons as France or Britain
The "probably" part is what's worrisome. China simply doesn't operate as transparently as the United States or Russia with regards to nuclear weapons. We know exactly how many weapons the Russians have, how many are currently deployed, where most of them are deployed, etc. Ditto for France and the UK. The Russians know the same about us. Each side has the legal right to send inspectors to the other to verify what they are being told. None of this framework applies to China.
There doesn't seem to be any real necessity for a brand-new missile to replace the existing fleet other than as the existing hardware ages out
There's a necessity for a replacement of the Ohio class, something the Russians and Chinese are already doing....
If we simply stopped with the disarming there would be little need for expensive new technology
Nuclear materials have a half-life.... you can't take an unmaintained plutonium pit from the 1980s and expect it to function as designed thirty years later. Contamination from decay products will yield unpredictable results, ranging from a fissile (weapon fails to reach nuclear yield) to a significant increase in power (Castle Bravo is a good example)
The only way to control for this is to conduct weapons testing (a geopolitical non-starter) or to continue to produce new fissile materials with known quantities. Computer modeling can offset the need for testing to a certain extent but at the end of the day the only way to be certain that a weapon will work as designed is to test it and/or modernize the materials contained therein.
Israel is a regional player with limited abilities to upend the global geopolitical balance that has existed since the 80s. Geography and population will ensure that this is always the case. Not so with China; Russia's current expenditures on WMDs and rumblings about leaving the INF are driven in part by questions about China's intentions and the scope of her nuclear capability. Do you see Russia withdrawing from decades old arms control treaties as a result of anything that happening in Tel Aviv? Not likely.....
China needs to be brought into a modern arms control framework, preferably before a three sided Cold War breaks out. We don't need to "demand" it of her; it's simply a matter of geopolitical carrot and stick, the same as happened with the Soviet Union in the 70s and 80. The problem is that the existing framework either ignores China, or regards her as a smaller power, in the same league as the UK and France. She's not held to the same standards of transparency as the United States or Russia, and that really ought to worry the hell out of everyone.
.... while the US, UK, and France haven't fielded new warheads or delivery systems since the 90s. Russia has deployed new ICBMs, a whole new class of SSBN, she just tested an "ICBM" that may well be a IRBM in disguise (running afoul of the INF in the process), and nobody is quite sure what China is up to with her nuclear arsenal. The latter bit is particularly troubling, at least with the Russians there's a diplomatic framework in place for each side to verify what the other has. The size of China's arsenal and her deployed delivery systems is a huge geopolitical question mark.
The West needs to maintain a credible deterrence force; this means modern warheads and delivery systems. At the same time, we really ought to be making an effort to bring China into a disarmament and verification diplomatic framework, the kind we've had with the Russians for decades. It baffles me that none of our leaders talk about China when discussing nuclear weapons policy.
And the whole crap would have continued a few years later again.
Not likely. The existence of nuclear weapons prevents World War III from happening. That wouldn't have changed if Hitler had been taken out and WW2 ended earlier. Absent the pressures of total war they might have taken longer to be developed but it still would have happened. Deterrence works, even with madmen like Hitler, as evidenced by his refusal to employ chemical weapons. Ditto in the Pacific, the Japanese used them in China, a country that couldn't respond in kind, but declined to use them against the Allies that could.
but on reflection, what Snowden has done was controlled, targeted and highly effective
Is that why he leaked national security secrets that have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with domestic American civil liberties?
Whatever one may think of the NSA, spying on foreign countries/actors is perfectly legitimate, it raises no Constitutional questions, and IMHO there was no valid to leak ANYTHING about NSA's foreign SIGINT programs. The damage that Mr. Snowden has done to the American intelligence community is incalculable and WILL cost lives going forward.
If he had limited himself to leaking information about their domestic activities I might have a different opinion of him, but I'm having a hard time seeing how leaking information about NSA's operations against China (just to pick one, there are others...) is anything but providing aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States.
If you're not attentive enough to notice the police car within visual range then you aren't attentive enough to be behind the wheel, IMHO, regardless of whether you're spending the red light texting, drinking your coffee, changing the radio station, etc. A properly aware driver knows what's going on around him.
If history is any indication they'll go bananas:
(B)uild
(a)bsoletely
(n)othing
(a)nywhere
(n)ear
(a)anything
Gunblade
Neither of those substances are overly dangerous or radioactive. It's the stuff with shorter half lives that you have to worry about. It decays faster, and pound-for-pound will release a greater amount of radioactivity in a shorter time scale.
PU-238 has a half life of 87.7 years. It will be cold and inert thousands of years before entering another star system.
This is how we mount our EZ-Pass transponders. You can even request new ones for free from your EZ-Pass online account.
What do you bury them with? Fossil fuel powered construction equipment? That's a bit like driving 10 miles to the recycling center with a six pack of soda cans because you don't have curb side pickup. ;)
Not when the trees die and release virtually all of that carbon back into the atmosphere as they decompose.
Which of course, raises the question, why couldn't you just bloody SAY "31 Gigawatts" instead of tangling yourself in this foofaral of extraneous time units that you didn't even get right?
The watt is a measurement of power. The kilowatt-hour is a measurement of energy. 31 Gigawatts on its own is meaningless. That incandescent light bulb in your closet is rated for 100 watts, does that tell you how much it cost you to operate last month? The power consumption is useless without knowing how long the device was turned on, and it's easier to say "That light bulb consumed 15kWh last month" than to say "That 100 watt light bulb was turned on for 150 hours last month."
Does the DoD have evidence that data can be recovered from a zeroed drive?
Modern hard drives identify bad sectors on the physical media and remap them in a way that is transparent to the operating system. Wiping the HD with /dev/zero will not zero out these sectors, because the OS does not see them, and the HD will not touch them once they're marked bad. If they contained confidential data prior to being marked bad then that data may well be recoverable. It's a huge long shot, but nation-states have the time and resources to chase such long shots.
Physical destruction is really the only way to be sure. Encrypting the drive from the get-go is the next best thing, since any bad sectors will contain encrypted data, though with the cheap price of drives these days you may just as well destroy it when you're done with it.
Your right to a handheld explosive-powered projectile launcher is not natural.
It is a right, but it does not come directly from being a human.
Sure it does. Human beings have been possessing the cutting edge weaponry of the day since the very first Homo sapiens picked up a rock and bashed in his neighbors head. Possession of weaponry is the quintessential natural law right. It can't even effectively be taken away in highly controlled environments, just ask the poor SOB who just got shanked in the prison shower.
DRM is the least of the problems with this game. They took what is inherently a single player game and turned it into social networking garbage. The online only model deprives you of the ability to play Sim City on the train, airplane, or litany of other unconnected places where you might want to play by yourself to pass the time. It deprives you of the ability to save your game, blow the city to hell with disasters, and resume playing afterwards. People might laugh at this, but that has been a huge part of the Sim City experience since the very first release in 1989. The servers don't speak to each other, so if you create a game on server A and have to use Server B tomorrow you can't play the city you spent hours creating. All of this is a huge problem, and that's without taking into account the DRM and completely inadequate server infrastructure.
The server model doesn't even make financial sense for EA -- ongoing expense for a one-time sale -- unless of course they intend to turn this game into a bunch of downloadable content where they "add" features (that have existed since Sim City 2000, i.e., subways and large maps) every few months for $20 a pop. This is almost certainly their plan, because it's the only way the server model can work without becoming a money pit.
I have played this game since I was ten years old and got the SNES version for Christmas. My sister and I used to spend hours in the public library playing Sim City 2000 before we had our first PC, saving our games on 5.25" floppy disks so we could play again tomorrow. I met many of my online friends -- most of whom I still communicate with -- through an old Majordomo mailing list that I found in a book about Sim City 2000. Hell, Sim City 2000 got me online in the first place. I learned how to make my own scenarios with nothing more than a hex editor and patience. I ignored the eye candy and stupid crossovers with The Sims in Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4 because they were at least smart enough to improve upon the underlying simulation model and keep it true to the franchise.
Disappointment does not begin to describe my feelings about this game, which was the first video game I've shelled out my coin for in five years. No, I'm not a pirate, I've just lost interest in gaming in general as I've aged, but this one had me genuinely excited in spite of my concerns about the online model and DRM. Guess I should have known better. I was one of the lucky ones, got a effortless (except for waiting two hours in chat queue) refund without any argument even though I bought it from Origin. Saved me the hassle of doing a credit card charge back, which is something I would highly recommend for anyone who can't get a refund through other channels. Vote with your wallet, it's the only thing EA understands.
I have the misfortune of living at ground zero for an ongoing wind farm build. 24/7 truck traffic, massive clouds of dust, hour plus highway shutdowns while they move their superloads, obnoxious subcontractors that ignore traffic laws, etc, etc. Then there's the ecological impact -- acres upon acres of wooded hilltops have been deforested. I truly had no idea how obnoxious it was until Google Earth got updated images. Take a look at some before and after photos of a large wind farm and see for yourself how bad it is.
All of this might be worth it if wind energy scaled the same as nuclear, or could provide the same power density, but both of those are utterly impossible. You'll never match nuclear reactions for power density, and the footprint of a nuclear power plant is no larger than that of any other modern industrial concern.
Everything in life is a tradeoff, but having lived near Three Mile Island, and now living in the midst of a wind farm, I'd take the former any day of the week. You simply didn't know TMI was there, unless you happened to have cause to drive by it. Contrast that to dozens of wind turbines, visible for miles around, along with the obnoxiousness of their build process.
Nuclear and low impact hydro are the way to go for base load. Natural gas, along with wind, and solar for the peak load.
Verify who I am and sign for a paper ballot.
What's involved in that verification process? Here in New York, all I'm allowed to do as a poll-worker is ask you for your address and signature. If the address you give doesn't match the address on file you can't vote. In theory we can challenge you if the signature doesn't match but that never happens. Signatures change over time, and we are hardly handwriting experts. There is essentially no mechanism in place to keep people from voting under your name, which is a double whammy because you lose your vote even as they get to cast multiple ones.
Democrats don't like voter ID laws, because they feel (with some justification) that their base is less likely to have ID and more likely to be burdened by the process of obtaining it. I'm not sure what the solution is, but we need something that's more secure than what's currently in place across much of the country.