If you follow the article's links to http://www.dynalifter.com/Old/Default.htm, you will notice that the thing is actually enough heavier than air that it's supposed to be able to withstand a 30 knot crosswind unloaded. The helium is used to make the thing light enough that the stubby wings can lift the monster plus its cargo.
The beast is supposed to be able to pay the freight by being more fuel efficient than a straight aircraft. Take this to a place with poor to non-existent roads and all of a sudden you've lowered the cost of freight transportation by a substantial amount. That's the concept anyway. We'll have to wait to see if the theory's a good model of reality.
Unfortunately, as best I understand it (IANAL), both A9 and Google are in breech of DMCA. This might actually be a blessing in disguise. The best cure for bad laws is for them to get enforced good and hard, and if Google were to get a judgement against them, I don't think it would be too long before the DMCA would be repealed or replaced with something reasonable.
You clearly missed the point stated in Justice O'Connor's dissent: namely, that if what the city of New London is planning to do with the land is a public use, it's pretty damned hard to imagine what isn't a public use. (It's actually the same problem as the marijuana ruling from a few weeks ago: if growing and using your own pot is interstate commerce (and therefore regulatable), it's hard to imagine what isn't interstate commerce.)
According to Orin Kerr of the Volokh Conspiracy, the provisions being struck down were part of the Reagan Era "Electronic Communications Privacy Act". Mr. Kerr writes that "To be fair, the Patriot Act did amend some language in this section; just not in a relevant way. As best I can tell, the court's decision does not rely on or even address anything in the Patriot Act."
I modified (4) from Romanians to Hungarians because
I couldn't think of any examples of famous Romanian mathematicians off the top of my head, while I've actually been lucky enough to meet Paul Erdos a couple of times, never mind remembering von Neumann or Bolyai or Bolzano.
That said, it does seem as if Eastern European countries have an awful lot of skilled mathematicians per capita.
I have a suspicion that Soviet Communism, with its combination of prestige for academics and an atrocious economic record, is about ideal for breeding mathematicians, because fewer good mathematical brains don't siphoned off to other fields of endeavor.
say the maximum domain has a length of 10 characters. Then there are 26 characters in the english language. That would only allow 26! domains = 403291461126605635584000000
Your calculation is wrong. Given a maximum length of 10 characters, a minimum length of 1 character, and 26 available characters, you would get 26^10 + 26^9 +... + 26^1 = (26^11 - 26^1) / (26 - 1) = 146813779479510 domains.
Now I'll no doubt be speedily corrected if wrong;-) but actually wasn't the push to retake Earth completely rushed due to Babylon 5 nearly being cancelled a year early?
It wasn't completely rushed: as noted elsewhere in this thread, had JMS (J. Michael Stracynski, the author) been planning on a fifth season, the fourth season would have ended with "Intersections in Real Time", which was the 5th-last episode of the season. (See the Lurker's Guide.) The fourth season actually stands up pretty well.
The more important effect was that the fifth season was probably the weakest of the series, with many threads intended to end in season 5 wrapped up in season 4 and many threads intended to start in season 4 being jettisoned and then having to be restarted in season 5 without much lead time.
Then the damn network turned around and renewed the show, the whole "cancellation" seeming nothing more than a !$&%! bargaining ploy.
The "damn network" didn't turn around and renew the show. Seasons 1 thru 4 were aired by the Prime Time Entertainment Network (PTEN), which collapsed. After some legal acrobatics, the cable network TNT bought up the rights to distribute Babylon 5 from this defunct entity, which is why B5 went from late night UHF broadcasts to cable.
Taking all that into consideration, I've thrown in with the english system curmudgeons. Why? For the same reason I'm in favor of driver's tests in 16 languages. Because being human ain't about being efficient, it's about communities.
Interestingly, this is only a short distance from the rationale used by the English "official language" crowd to demand that driver's tests be English-only: if people are allowed to use their own language, they don't have to join the American community.
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If you follow the article's links to http://www.dynalifter.com/Old/Default.htm, you will notice that the thing is actually enough heavier than air that it's supposed to be able to withstand a 30 knot crosswind unloaded. The helium is used to make the thing light enough that the stubby wings can lift the monster plus its cargo. The beast is supposed to be able to pay the freight by being more fuel efficient than a straight aircraft. Take this to a place with poor to non-existent roads and all of a sudden you've lowered the cost of freight transportation by a substantial amount. That's the concept anyway. We'll have to wait to see if the theory's a good model of reality.
Um, Hastert is Speaker of the House. He's a Representative (albeit the most powerful Representative), not a Senator.
Unfortunately, as best I understand it (IANAL), both A9 and Google are in breech of DMCA. This might actually be a blessing in disguise. The best cure for bad laws is for them to get enforced good and hard, and if Google were to get a judgement against them, I don't think it would be too long before the DMCA would be repealed or replaced with something reasonable.
You clearly missed the point stated in Justice O'Connor's dissent: namely, that if what the city of New London is planning to do with the land is a public use, it's pretty damned hard to imagine what isn't a public use. (It's actually the same problem as the marijuana ruling from a few weeks ago: if growing and using your own pot is interstate commerce (and therefore regulatable), it's hard to imagine what isn't interstate commerce.)
According to Orin Kerr of the Volokh Conspiracy, the provisions being struck down were part of the Reagan Era "Electronic Communications Privacy Act". Mr. Kerr writes that "To be fair, the Patriot Act did amend some language in this section; just not in a relevant way. As best I can tell, the court's decision does not rely on or even address anything in the Patriot Act."
I modified (4) from Romanians to Hungarians because I couldn't think of any examples of famous Romanian mathematicians off the top of my head, while I've actually been lucky enough to meet Paul Erdos a couple of times, never mind remembering von Neumann or Bolyai or Bolzano.
That said, it does seem as if Eastern European countries have an awful lot of skilled mathematicians per capita. I have a suspicion that Soviet Communism, with its combination of prestige for academics and an atrocious economic record, is about ideal for breeding mathematicians, because fewer good mathematical brains don't siphoned off to other fields of endeavor.
say the maximum domain has a length of 10 characters. Then there are 26 characters in the english language. That would only allow 26! domains = 403291461126605635584000000
Your calculation is wrong. Given a maximum length of 10 characters, a minimum length of 1 character, and 26 available characters, you would get 26^10 + 26^9 + ... + 26^1 = (26^11 - 26^1) / (26 - 1) = 146813779479510 domains.
Now I'll no doubt be speedily corrected if wrong ;-) but actually wasn't the push to retake Earth completely rushed due to Babylon 5 nearly being cancelled a year early?
It wasn't completely rushed: as noted elsewhere in this thread, had JMS (J. Michael Stracynski, the author) been planning on a fifth season, the fourth season would have ended with "Intersections in Real Time", which was the 5th-last episode of the season. (See the Lurker's Guide.) The fourth season actually stands up pretty well.
The more important effect was that the fifth season was probably the weakest of the series, with many threads intended to end in season 5 wrapped up in season 4 and many threads intended to start in season 4 being jettisoned and then having to be restarted in season 5 without much lead time.
Then the damn network turned around and renewed the show, the whole "cancellation" seeming nothing more than a !$&%! bargaining ploy.
The "damn network" didn't turn around and renew the show. Seasons 1 thru 4 were aired by the Prime Time Entertainment Network (PTEN), which collapsed. After some legal acrobatics, the cable network TNT bought up the rights to distribute Babylon 5 from this defunct entity, which is why B5 went from late night UHF broadcasts to cable.
- A standard explosion, with chunks of planet flying by
- A burst of light which vaporizes the planet
- Getting hit by the cue-ball in a game of galactic billiards
Using IE 6, refreshing did work to see differing intros, but the randomizer does often go on runs of the same intro.