I pulled an F-150 out of a bog with my VW Rabbit. The damn things have the worst traction of any vehicle that I've ever driven (while the Rabbit had some of the best, exceeded only by our Sirocco). An F-150 can get stuck in four inches of snow if the back end isn't weighted down, I've seen it happen.
Chang'e-1, -2 and -3 **COMBINED** have cost about a billion dollars, or less than a dollar per Chinese citizen. The first two were orbiters/mappers, the third is the lander, all three have been complete successes so far. That war in Iraq that (IIRC) you were so enthusiastic about a few years ago? Cost of that is over $3,500 per US citizen. It was an utter failure.
Even if this was just propaganda I think the Chinese have gotten the better deal.
Really, they don't become cops because they like working with computers. I don't know of a single large metropolitan police department that actually has a computer crimes division, even here in Seattle.
I suggest you look up"nuclear winter" first, which alone is enough to finish off civilization. Setting off half the nuclear arsenals of Pakistan and India apparently would be enough to trigger a climactic disaster that civilization would be lucky to survive at the technological level of the Middle Ages. A full scale exchange between the US and the USSR would have been very likely to have put the finish to pretty much every vertebrate higher than rats.
Think about the destructive power of the Nagasaki bomb. Now multiply that by 1000 to get the output of a medium-sized ICBM warhead. Now multiply that by the 1000 or more warheads likely to be launched by each side in a 1980s nuclear war scenario. What do YOU think the outcome would have been?
Bullpuckey. Ash from the eruption of Mount Pinitubo, for example, caused a.5 degree temperature drop worldwide. All the climate scientists acknowledge that volcanoes are the second-largest emitters of CO2, after humans, and the second-largest generators of soot and ash, after humans. The amount of effect that they might have in a particular time period is predictable as an average, and is included in the standard climate models. If a Tambora-level event happens they'll need to change their models, but those events are rare enough that they can be safely ignored for now.
it wasn't until last year that science got the data on the antarctic ocean circulation was analyzed and discovered. Let alone it is one of, or the major influence on sea temp.
Well, since you can't even seem to make it into a coherent sentence I'm not surprised no one has managed to incorporate it into a coherent model yet. Are you trying to say that there is new data that hasn't yet been plugged into the models? Not surprising, there is new satellite data that pinpoints a couple of locations in Antarctica that are so cold that CO2 may even freeze. I doubt that information has been inserted into the models yet either. This isn't like World Of Warcraft, where you get a new weapon and all your fight characteristics are immediately updated. It takes time, and manpower, and funding.
No one except the producers of 'Waterworld' said you would be "under water" by now. Ocean levels have risen measurably, on the order of centimeters to millimeters depending on local conditions (no, 'sea level' is not the same everywhere).
One percent of glaciers? Where? Have you seen photos of Glacier National Park from 50 years ago, and today? Or the Alaskan glaciers? I travel in Peru frequently, and the difference between the glaciers of 1987 and today is appalling. The Cordillera Blanca near Huaraz is almost ice-free for the first time in (IIRC) 120,000 years. Our Kenyan friends say that the glacier on Kilimanjaro is almost gone. When my mother was in Switzerland the hotel had photos of the glacier that currently occupies the peak of the mountain, but which was within a couple of kilometers of the hotel when it was built.
Is it difficult to ignore all the evidence refuting your "global temperature not risen in the last 10 years" claim? I would think it must take a certain amount of effort.
In hurricane- and tornado-prone areas they're attaching the roof decking (plywood) to the trusses with screws, since the roof will be less likely to peel off in extreme winds. There are special screw guns available just for this application.
Remove the CO2, average temperature drops, H2O precipitates out of the atmosphere and freezes. This may be what happened during Earth's "ice ball" stage between the 'oxygen catastrophe' and the 'Cambrian explosion'.
Mars has a weak magnetic field, allowing the solar wind to strip away the upper atmosphere. The lower gravity also means that a much larger percentage of the atmosphere is extremely tenuous, to the point where random collisions between molecules can accelerate them to escape velocity. The much lower amount of solar radiation received allows for dramatic temperature drops in the polar regions, so CO2 and H2O precipitate out, lowering the greenhouse effect, causing global cooling, causing H2O to precipitate out in the lower latitudes, reducing the greenhouse effect further, sending the planet into a permanent 'ice ball' state.
Earth has undergone several very dramatic global climate shifts. At one time the oceans worldwide were frozen and 90+% of all species went extinct. Global volcanic activity pumped enough CO2 into the atmosphere to melt the ice. At other times most of the planet was hot and damp and O2 levels were high enough that dragonflies with wingspans of half a meter existed. Climate changes over time, that's a given. No climatologist in the world will deny that simple fact. What is different this time is that we're causing enough of a change in the content of the atmosphere that rather than taking millenia for noticeable changes to appear we can measure the shift over a couple of decades.
The studio technicians were not allowed to smoke or drink coffee anywhere near the computers.
I'm surprised the Union didn't go on strike over that, especially during that time. Cigarettes and coffee were pretty much the only things they were allowed to consume while working.
When I started working at AAA's corporate office here in Washington they were still FedEx-ing boxes of 9-track tapes around the country to do data transfers in 1998. I made it a goal to get rid of the failing 9-track tape machine, and proceeded to contact vendors to arrange for alternative methods of data transfers. An awful lot of people at the other end of the phone had no idea what I was talking about. "Remember in the old science fiction movies, the big round tape reels that were on the computers? That's what we're sending you. Can we do this some other way?" That generally got me transferred to the right person.
By the time I left two years later we had managed to change everything over to direct modem transfers, encrypted email attachments, or a CD for the really large membership file that went to national headquarters. The last holdout was American Express, and if the tape machine hadn't finally given up the ghost we might not have changed them over at all. They just wanted us to send the text file to their FTP site. Unencrypted. Logging in as Anonymous with no password. Just dumped in a browsable folder labeled with our account number. Along with all the other unencrypted text files of other customers, all the same file layout.
Yeah, it worked, barely. Brought humanity to the brink of extinction, more than once. A former co-worker's father was on one of the negotiating teams during the Reagan years. Did you know that during that whole period Wolfowitz and Pearle were urging Reagan to invade East Germany, on the crackpot theory that a nuclear war in Europe was "winnable"? I'm still shocked that we survived.
Did you miss the part of the sentence that said "and then invade"?
The B-52, F-111, cruise missile, Abrams tank, intermediate range ballistic missile, stealth aircraft, stealth nuclear missile-carrying submarine, etc. are **not** defensive weapons. Your "common knowledge" was never actually that outside of the US.
Are you sure about 4 inches? I've only fired a few 16 gauge slugs (and most of those because they were getting old and we needed to get rid of them), but I seem to remember seeing a lot more drop than that.
My friends in Moscow do, vividly. Ronnie Raygun deliberately generated the impression internationally of being a bit unbalanced so that the Soviets would stay frightened. The US has never renounced First Use of nuclear weapons to this day (which the Soviets did decades ago), and still refuse to clarify the conditions under which they would consider launching. If you ever ride the Moscow subway, about 1/3 and 2/3 of the way down the (really, really long) descent to the platforms there are blast doors that can be closed, and the Soviets stored enough food and water to supply the population of the city for (IIRC) a month because they were so sure that the US would attack. If you look at the weaponry that the US developed during the Cold War you'll find that most of it was offensive rather than defensive.
Actually the 2nd Amendment was written in a deliberately vague manner because "the town hall cannon" was not an ornament at the time. Ports cities had cannon and rocket batteries to protect against pirates and Spaniards. Many merchantmen were better armed than many naval vessels. Frontier settlements had cannon, mortars and multi-barrel guns because of the threat of brigands and Indian uprisings. Larger cities have wide boulevards so that cannons could fire down them at looters and rioters. Even in the late 19th century my great great grandparents and their neighbors had to band together against the threat of Mormon raiders from Beaver Island.
So, don't think of it as the "right to bear arms for food-gathering purposes," because that wasn't the point. Nor was it "to maintain a free state," as that wasn't ever going to be the primary function of militias. In the case of an actual war the states would organize their own troops (as they did in 1812). It was the sort of "common sense" stipulation that made sense to the Founders in the cultural milleau they lived in.
50 meters? Maybe if you're using a slug and aiming really, really high, otherwise you'd better wait until your opponent is a frack of a lot closer than that if you're going to use a shotgun. Buck shot at 40 meters will just piss someone off it you hit them in the face, and not do any real damage otherwise.
By 1949 they were facing a considerably scarier enemy than the Germans, and right up until the fall of the Soviet Union they were quite worried that the US would nuke and then invade them. Not a fear born by paranoia as much as by the regular pronouncements of politicians and generals in the US and NATO nations.
To your first sentence I would add the word "yet". He's a lame duck with three more years, if invading Myanmar or Fiji would get him brownie points with the PTB for an after-presidency position on the Halliburton or Carlyle Group boards I would be shocked if it didn't happen. You don't have a meteoric rise in Chicago politics without proving your ability to take a bribe and stay bought.
Shrub didn't directly order killing Americans, but didn't show any hesitation to approving drone attacks where US citizens were known to be and didn't seem to have any problem when they died.
Plus something that's mostly metal, fairly solidly built, and masses 390 kilos is not going to burn up completely on its way to the ground. Even though it will almost certainly not hit anyone the bad press is something that NASA still has to worry about.
When aren't the Italians talking about revolution? The south of Europe isn't having problems because of the European Union, they're having economic issues for the same reason most of the US is; the New York banksters.
Most of Europe has abandoned local currencies for the Euro, which is pretty much an irreversible process. Many of their economies could not have survived the last decade if their currencies had still been susceptible to the predation of currency speculators like George Soros and the slime at Bank of America and CitiCorp. Think Portugal and Spain have problems now? Imagine what it would have been like if this were two decades ago, when Soros took advantage of a weak British position to crash the British pound and destroy the country's economy. The Euro is probably the only thing that saved most of the weaker European countries from further economic attack and total collapse, and their leaders are quite aware of that.
Slashdot Mirror
I pulled an F-150 out of a bog with my VW Rabbit. The damn things have the worst traction of any vehicle that I've ever driven (while the Rabbit had some of the best, exceeded only by our Sirocco). An F-150 can get stuck in four inches of snow if the back end isn't weighted down, I've seen it happen.
The Van Allen Belts deflect the worst of the radiation, without them the ISS would not be habitable for very long.
Nice idea, but the Libertarians won't allow it. After all, they can't "prove" that the government is a failure until they first make it fail.
Chang'e-1, -2 and -3 **COMBINED** have cost about a billion dollars, or less than a dollar per Chinese citizen. The first two were orbiters/mappers, the third is the lander, all three have been complete successes so far. That war in Iraq that (IIRC) you were so enthusiastic about a few years ago? Cost of that is over $3,500 per US citizen. It was an utter failure.
Even if this was just propaganda I think the Chinese have gotten the better deal.
Those are mostly operating below the Van Allen belts, aren't they? There's no such protection on the moon.
Really, they don't become cops because they like working with computers. I don't know of a single large metropolitan police department that actually has a computer crimes division, even here in Seattle.
I suggest you look up"nuclear winter" first, which alone is enough to finish off civilization. Setting off half the nuclear arsenals of Pakistan and India apparently would be enough to trigger a climactic disaster that civilization would be lucky to survive at the technological level of the Middle Ages. A full scale exchange between the US and the USSR would have been very likely to have put the finish to pretty much every vertebrate higher than rats.
Think about the destructive power of the Nagasaki bomb. Now multiply that by 1000 to get the output of a medium-sized ICBM warhead. Now multiply that by the 1000 or more warheads likely to be launched by each side in a 1980s nuclear war scenario. What do YOU think the outcome would have been?
Bullpuckey. Ash from the eruption of Mount Pinitubo, for example, caused a .5 degree temperature drop worldwide. All the climate scientists acknowledge that volcanoes are the second-largest emitters of CO2, after humans, and the second-largest generators of soot and ash, after humans. The amount of effect that they might have in a particular time period is predictable as an average, and is included in the standard climate models. If a Tambora-level event happens they'll need to change their models, but those events are rare enough that they can be safely ignored for now.
it wasn't until last year that science got the data on the antarctic ocean circulation was analyzed and discovered. Let alone it is one of, or the major influence on sea temp.
Well, since you can't even seem to make it into a coherent sentence I'm not surprised no one has managed to incorporate it into a coherent model yet. Are you trying to say that there is new data that hasn't yet been plugged into the models? Not surprising, there is new satellite data that pinpoints a couple of locations in Antarctica that are so cold that CO2 may even freeze. I doubt that information has been inserted into the models yet either. This isn't like World Of Warcraft, where you get a new weapon and all your fight characteristics are immediately updated. It takes time, and manpower, and funding.
No one except the producers of 'Waterworld' said you would be "under water" by now. Ocean levels have risen measurably, on the order of centimeters to millimeters depending on local conditions (no, 'sea level' is not the same everywhere).
One percent of glaciers? Where? Have you seen photos of Glacier National Park from 50 years ago, and today? Or the Alaskan glaciers? I travel in Peru frequently, and the difference between the glaciers of 1987 and today is appalling. The Cordillera Blanca near Huaraz is almost ice-free for the first time in (IIRC) 120,000 years. Our Kenyan friends say that the glacier on Kilimanjaro is almost gone. When my mother was in Switzerland the hotel had photos of the glacier that currently occupies the peak of the mountain, but which was within a couple of kilometers of the hotel when it was built.
Is it difficult to ignore all the evidence refuting your "global temperature not risen in the last 10 years" claim? I would think it must take a certain amount of effort.
In hurricane- and tornado-prone areas they're attaching the roof decking (plywood) to the trusses with screws, since the roof will be less likely to peel off in extreme winds. There are special screw guns available just for this application.
Remove the CO2, average temperature drops, H2O precipitates out of the atmosphere and freezes. This may be what happened during Earth's "ice ball" stage between the 'oxygen catastrophe' and the 'Cambrian explosion'.
Mars has a weak magnetic field, allowing the solar wind to strip away the upper atmosphere. The lower gravity also means that a much larger percentage of the atmosphere is extremely tenuous, to the point where random collisions between molecules can accelerate them to escape velocity. The much lower amount of solar radiation received allows for dramatic temperature drops in the polar regions, so CO2 and H2O precipitate out, lowering the greenhouse effect, causing global cooling, causing H2O to precipitate out in the lower latitudes, reducing the greenhouse effect further, sending the planet into a permanent 'ice ball' state.
Earth has undergone several very dramatic global climate shifts. At one time the oceans worldwide were frozen and 90+% of all species went extinct. Global volcanic activity pumped enough CO2 into the atmosphere to melt the ice. At other times most of the planet was hot and damp and O2 levels were high enough that dragonflies with wingspans of half a meter existed. Climate changes over time, that's a given. No climatologist in the world will deny that simple fact. What is different this time is that we're causing enough of a change in the content of the atmosphere that rather than taking millenia for noticeable changes to appear we can measure the shift over a couple of decades.
The studio technicians were not allowed to smoke or drink coffee anywhere near the computers.
I'm surprised the Union didn't go on strike over that, especially during that time. Cigarettes and coffee were pretty much the only things they were allowed to consume while working.
When I started working at AAA's corporate office here in Washington they were still FedEx-ing boxes of 9-track tapes around the country to do data transfers in 1998. I made it a goal to get rid of the failing 9-track tape machine, and proceeded to contact vendors to arrange for alternative methods of data transfers. An awful lot of people at the other end of the phone had no idea what I was talking about. "Remember in the old science fiction movies, the big round tape reels that were on the computers? That's what we're sending you. Can we do this some other way?" That generally got me transferred to the right person.
By the time I left two years later we had managed to change everything over to direct modem transfers, encrypted email attachments, or a CD for the really large membership file that went to national headquarters. The last holdout was American Express, and if the tape machine hadn't finally given up the ghost we might not have changed them over at all. They just wanted us to send the text file to their FTP site. Unencrypted. Logging in as Anonymous with no password. Just dumped in a browsable folder labeled with our account number. Along with all the other unencrypted text files of other customers, all the same file layout.
Yeah, it worked, barely. Brought humanity to the brink of extinction, more than once. A former co-worker's father was on one of the negotiating teams during the Reagan years. Did you know that during that whole period Wolfowitz and Pearle were urging Reagan to invade East Germany, on the crackpot theory that a nuclear war in Europe was "winnable"? I'm still shocked that we survived.
Did you miss the part of the sentence that said "and then invade"?
The B-52, F-111, cruise missile, Abrams tank, intermediate range ballistic missile, stealth aircraft, stealth nuclear missile-carrying submarine, etc. are **not** defensive weapons. Your "common knowledge" was never actually that outside of the US.
Are you sure about 4 inches? I've only fired a few 16 gauge slugs (and most of those because they were getting old and we needed to get rid of them), but I seem to remember seeing a lot more drop than that.
My friends in Moscow do, vividly. Ronnie Raygun deliberately generated the impression internationally of being a bit unbalanced so that the Soviets would stay frightened. The US has never renounced First Use of nuclear weapons to this day (which the Soviets did decades ago), and still refuse to clarify the conditions under which they would consider launching. If you ever ride the Moscow subway, about 1/3 and 2/3 of the way down the (really, really long) descent to the platforms there are blast doors that can be closed, and the Soviets stored enough food and water to supply the population of the city for (IIRC) a month because they were so sure that the US would attack. If you look at the weaponry that the US developed during the Cold War you'll find that most of it was offensive rather than defensive.
Actually the 2nd Amendment was written in a deliberately vague manner because "the town hall cannon" was not an ornament at the time. Ports cities had cannon and rocket batteries to protect against pirates and Spaniards. Many merchantmen were better armed than many naval vessels. Frontier settlements had cannon, mortars and multi-barrel guns because of the threat of brigands and Indian uprisings. Larger cities have wide boulevards so that cannons could fire down them at looters and rioters. Even in the late 19th century my great great grandparents and their neighbors had to band together against the threat of Mormon raiders from Beaver Island.
So, don't think of it as the "right to bear arms for food-gathering purposes," because that wasn't the point. Nor was it "to maintain a free state," as that wasn't ever going to be the primary function of militias. In the case of an actual war the states would organize their own troops (as they did in 1812). It was the sort of "common sense" stipulation that made sense to the Founders in the cultural milleau they lived in.
50 meters? Maybe if you're using a slug and aiming really, really high, otherwise you'd better wait until your opponent is a frack of a lot closer than that if you're going to use a shotgun. Buck shot at 40 meters will just piss someone off it you hit them in the face, and not do any real damage otherwise.
By 1949 they were facing a considerably scarier enemy than the Germans, and right up until the fall of the Soviet Union they were quite worried that the US would nuke and then invade them. Not a fear born by paranoia as much as by the regular pronouncements of politicians and generals in the US and NATO nations.
To your first sentence I would add the word "yet". He's a lame duck with three more years, if invading Myanmar or Fiji would get him brownie points with the PTB for an after-presidency position on the Halliburton or Carlyle Group boards I would be shocked if it didn't happen. You don't have a meteoric rise in Chicago politics without proving your ability to take a bribe and stay bought.
Shrub didn't directly order killing Americans, but didn't show any hesitation to approving drone attacks where US citizens were known to be and didn't seem to have any problem when they died.
True enough, but it's an ammonia refrigeration unit, there's only so much lightening that you can do to something like that.
Plus something that's mostly metal, fairly solidly built, and masses 390 kilos is not going to burn up completely on its way to the ground. Even though it will almost certainly not hit anyone the bad press is something that NASA still has to worry about.
When aren't the Italians talking about revolution? The south of Europe isn't having problems because of the European Union, they're having economic issues for the same reason most of the US is; the New York banksters.
Most of Europe has abandoned local currencies for the Euro, which is pretty much an irreversible process. Many of their economies could not have survived the last decade if their currencies had still been susceptible to the predation of currency speculators like George Soros and the slime at Bank of America and CitiCorp. Think Portugal and Spain have problems now? Imagine what it would have been like if this were two decades ago, when Soros took advantage of a weak British position to crash the British pound and destroy the country's economy. The Euro is probably the only thing that saved most of the weaker European countries from further economic attack and total collapse, and their leaders are quite aware of that.