They're probably talking about the new (created within the last year by various manufacturers) 800-kV transformers (in other places 750kV is listed) that were made specifically for China's new electricity distribution projects. All prior transformer substations are rated somewhere south of 500kV.
That's a billion volts, into fantasy and beyond.
Well, first, these things are rated by their manufacturers at 800kV, which might be a conservative rating, for all we know they might be able to handle 1000kV right now, albeit with some risk, and second, since it won't be that big of a jump to go from 800kV to 1000kV (going from 500 to 800 was a relatively bigger jump), my response would have to be: "welcome to the future".:)
Here's a picture of one of them, made by Siemens. Those tiny figures you see in the bottom left of the picture aren't ants, they're humans! The thing is the size of a house!?!
Hmm, well according to NASA, a new solar cycle began at the start of last year, that was when the current solar minimum "bottomed out" so to speak.
So we've been coming out of solar minimum for more than a year now, with the expected increased activity to start showing up around 2012.
Its an 11 year cycle, so if NASA is right and the new one started in Jan. 2008, then the midpoint of the cycle, when solar maximum occurs, will be sometime in 2013.
You're right, I was in a hurry to fix my "mistake" and didn't realize that the NA was the parent of the NAS, I wrongly thought that they were separate entities, with the former just being the publisher of the report created by the latter.
"Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization's End"
Note that they don't say "the end of human life" or the "destruction of planet Earth", only the "end of civilization as we know it" and yes, that *is* possible in this case. See my response to a post above.
Well, "almost" is the key word here. Keep in mind that coronal mass ejections weren't even discovered until 1971, so the whole science of "geomagnetic storms", and their possible effects on us, is relatively new, never mind the recent discovery of a hole in Earth's magnetic shield (mentioned and linked to in TFA), that to is something the scientists never even suspected could exist. Add these things together, and it sounds to me like an update to that article on Wikipedia is imminent.:)
Neither is Europe sufficiently prepared. Responsibility for dealing with space weather issues is "very fragmented" in Europe, says Hapgood.
Europe's electricity grids, on the other hand, are highly interconnected and extremely vulnerable to cascading failures. In 2006, the routine switch-off of a small part of Germany's grid - to let a ship pass safely under high-voltage cables - caused a cascade power failure across western Europe. In France alone, five million people were left without electricity for two hours. "These systems are so complicated we don't fully understand the effects of twiddling at one place," Hapgood says. "Most of the time it's alright, but occasionally it will get you."
When I hear our need for resistors to limit the damage of massive solar flares uttered in the same sentence as "the whole 2012 thing", the credibility for anything either one of these guys says is gone as far as I'm concerned.
It is unfortunate that we have this coincidence between the Mayan Long Calendar "prediction" for 2012, and the fact that we're entering a Solar Maximum period (which will peak in 2012) with a gaping hole in our planet's magnetic shield and a civilization extremely dependent on an electrical infrastructure that is itself extremely vulnerable to the effects of a large geomagnetic storm.
I leave it up to you as to whether you should ignore the latter just because of the former.
I don't think they know what "science" is.
"They" in this case aren't scientists, and aren't pretending to be. Note however that "they", and TFA, are all referring to scientific reports from NASA and the US National Academy of Sciences to base their ideas on.
I don't know about you, but I *do* think that NASA and the US National Academy of Sciences know what "science" is.
I wouldn't exactly call it a doomsday scenario. These flares happen fairly often.
The NASA funded report that is linked to from TFA is talking about a "Coronal Mass Ejection" which is different from a solar flare, though they are sometimes both created by the same underlying event.
Basically a giant ball of high energy plasma (ionized gas) that is shot out of the Sun, sometimes reaching speeds of 1/3 that of light. Note that a fast CME would give us almost no warning time at all, even if we had detectors close enough to the Sun at the time to detect it. Detecting a CME is not as easy as noticing a solar flare, never mind the problem of determing how large/dangerous it is, then calculating whether or not its going to hit the Earth.
The last one to disrupt power was in March 1989...
A more relevant example would be the "1859 Solar Superstorm". This was a solar event that generated both a CME (that hit the Earth) and multiple solar flares. If an event like this happened *now*, with our extreme dependence on so many things electrical and electronic, it would be a first class catastrophe. That is not hype, although it would not be a "life-ending" kind of catastrophe, it could very well be a "life-as-we-know-it-now-ending" kind of catastrophe.
Note that a large CME could impact the Earth over several days, as the 1859 event did, so we are also talking about a potential *global* catastrophe, not a regional one.
Finally, TFA also links to another recent NASA report about a huge hole just discovered in Earth's protective magnetic shield, so the important point to take away from TFA is that we are about to enter a period of Solar Maximum with a gaping hole in the only shield which protects us. Getting hit by a large CME now, with that hole in Earth's magnetic shield still present, would lead to a *really* bad day for humanity.
So, he has determined a doomsday scenario that his company can prevent for $150 million?
He didn't "create" the doomsday scenario involved here, others, including scientists, have been considering this problem for awhile now. Note that TFA has links to two scientific reports that are entirely unconnected with the MetaTech CEO, one is from NASA itself, and the other is published by the National Academies and was funded by NASA.
Also, contrary to the American non-historian's widely held view of World War I, we (the Americans) were terribly incompetent there, and basically embarrassed ourselves
[citation needed]
Well, if we qualified that "incompetence" to just the high command, or better yet changed the word to "preparedness", than the GP would unfortunately be right. Our soldiers who arrived in 1917 were woefully unprepared and untrained, including an absurd lack of basic war material. They had to borrow artillery from the French, tanks from the British, and most amazingly of all, a lot of our troops went into battle wearing British helmets!
As for our high command, they went in with the same military doctrine (massed frontal assaults) that the Allies had started with in 1914, but had wisely discarded by 1917.
None of this has anything to do with our soldiers' bravery or willingness to fight, of course. The Marines at Belleau Wood proved that, but I don't think the GP was referring to this.
from an evolutionary standpoint, sharing your wife with the tribe makes no sense whatsoever
Just because it doesn't make any sense to you or me, doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense to the evolutionary mechanism.:)
What you're calling "nonsensical" is exactly what Bonobo Chimps actually do.
Many people mistakenly try to give "evolution" some kind of "grand strategy", but in truth, evolution's only strategy is one of "throw everything and anything against the wall and see if any of it manages to stick".
Thanks for proving my point. Once again, victory is achieved by Americans with the French riding on our coat tails.
You are so fscking wrong, it's not even funny. Please do a littlereading before you continue making a fool of yourself...
For those who don't want to check the links:
1) The Battle of Yorktown would not even had occurred had not a French fleet defeated an English fleet to establish a blockade of the British forces trapped at Yorktown.
2) Even more significant, the army forces that assaulted the British at Yorktown included 5,500 French regulars.
I know the current popularity of jokes about French military prowess will not change any time soon, but it should never be forgotten by we Americans that the victory at the Battle of Yorktown, which directly lead to our victory in the Revolutionary War, was bought and paid for with French blood, in addition to our own.
It was some American whites who felt *guilt*. What *some* American blacks feel is not guilt, but *resentment*, but you're right in that its now become counter-productive to hold onto that resentment for this long.
Of course the guilty always get over their crimes long before their victims get over it, so I'm not at all surprised.
I was elected so I know better than [the guys who elected me]
A delicious irony lies in that sentence.:)
And the bitter tradegy is that it doesn't just apply to Germany, but everywhere that politicians/parties manipulate gullible/uninformed citizens for their vote.
I daresay that any information which has hit Wikileaks is 99.9% likely to previously already be known to any intelligence agencies which would be interested in it. All Wikileaks is doing is letting us see it also.
True, but please note that the GP was responding to a troll post about the American CIA, and Wikileaks of course was raided by German law enforcement, not the US CIA.
The CIA's mission is gathering foreign intelligence about threats to the US, they aren't interested in porn, they're interested in knowledge, and I suspect their normal response in a situation like this would be to keep monitoring a website, and/or try to infiltrate/crack it to gain even *more* info, rather than try to shut it down. Basically, the CIA is in the spying business, not the law enforcement business.
Security through obscurity is usually bad security.
There is a fine balance which needs to be maintained between secrecy which protects the public interest and secrecy which is against the public interest.
And when WW1 came, the people in German enclaves got very nervous.
:)
Actually, didn't they get nervous *twice*? During WW2, many of them had to look at what was being done to Japanese-Americans and wonder if they might be next...
Nice book links, thanks.
I see that the 4th paragraph of this is one is especially relevent here (it notes that the integration started to occur with the adults of the 2nd generation). Too bad I can't cut-n-paste here, but anyway as your links so aptly point out, this (difficult, time-consuming, and sometimes painful) story has largely been the same for every wave of immigrants to this country.
deploy a file system driver... and bundle it with flash player... It does not have to even integrate with flash but use the distribution mechanism to beat them at their own game
Bingo. If the FAT-LFN FS (FAT filesystem with long filename support) patents can't be invalidated, and aren't going to expire anytime soon, then I believe this idea will be the only permanent solution for the problem.
Right now every company that distributes a "plug-ready" storage device that comes formatted with a FAT-LFN FS on it has to pay an expensive MS tax, or risk getting sued. If a company that pays the ransom *also* puts Linux on the device to read & write this format, then technically they could be sued by the authors of that code (assuming they wanted to), *if* those authors knew who these companies were. We already know, from MS itself, that they have made such deals, under NDA, with companies, which allows those companies to remain anonymous.
Introducing a new FS "standard" (for small devices) into the world of Windows, free of MS patents, and as ubiquitous as, say, the Adobe Flash Player is, would be a permanent way of ending the MS tax.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure Adobe, specifically, would interested in trying, as AFAIK, they are primarily a software company, and don't make the kind of hardware devices we are talking about. What would be necessary, I think, is a consortium of hardware makers getting together, adopting an existing filesystem, making a Windows driver for it that is robust, stable, and ready for the typical Windows end-users out there, and then distributing the hell out of it. If they do the heavy lifting, *then* maybe they can get companies like Adobe, ones who are already doing mass distribution of commonly used Windows drivers & utilities, to help spread the new "standard", and *anyone* who has a device that needs this, could just slap this thing on their hardware's driver CD, with a label saying, in effect, "you must run the install CD first before using the device". Now that MS is targeting Adobe's own home-base with Silverlight, Adobe is not likely to be all that friendly towards MS anymore, and *probably* wouldn't mind helping out, as well as other major players, especially if it didn't require a lot of work on their part (just including it with whatever they're distributing now).
Would they (the hardware makers) be interested? I don't know, apparently most of them believe its just easier to pay the MS tax. So it might take a little help from some in the FOSS community to kickstart the idea, by taking an existing open filesystem that's free of patents, and doing some (or a lot) of the software engineering to make such a fast, free, stable, easy-to-use filesystem driver (and an installer for it) possible. As some have mentioned earlier however, the available ext2 driver on Windows is apparently not very stable (and do we *know* if its patent free?), so there doesn't appear to be a ready option already available, and none of the hardware makers that are now under MS's thumb, show any desire to try and fight back.
It might be a nice idea, or not, but the cynic in me thinks the most likely result will be that companies just continue to pay the MS tax (and those who also distribute Linux will do so anonymously, and just keep their heads down), until those FAT-LFN FS patents expire. The only question is, for how long?
the part where you claim our economy was booming 2 years ago
I said *world* economy, not just our own. So yes, taken all together, the *world* economy was booming then, although granted, in *our* economy some of that "booming" was happening for the wrong reasons, such as various shenanigans in the real-estate and financial markets, and too much available credit in general.
However, its only a matter of time before the world will get back to that level again, after all, as long as the world's population continues to rise, so, inevitably, will the world's economy. Aside from the usual short-term ups and downs, and barring disasters like world wars or global pandemics, the trend has always been upward (so far).
Huh? I'm as happy as a clam about the current situation myself. I'm not Estonian or Eastern European, so I don't have those bitter memories they have in my country's, or my own, recent past. I'm smug about it, maybe a tad too much, but certainly not bitter.
Your claim that Russia wants those states back is silly. Nobody in Russia wants them. I think people are more happy now that the government doesn't have to waste money on them.
Now who's being bitter?:)
You went to an awful lot of trouble to take and hold those countries, but now that you can't keep them, you say you don't want them? Yea, right.
it's a false sense of security
You could have fooled me. As soon as those Eastern Europeans got out from under Mother Russia's boot, what's the very first thing that they did? Oh right, they ran to NATO's door and yelled "We want in!". Maybe you should ask *them* about "false security".
Who is really safe with so many nuclear weapons all around?
Its worked exceedingly well for the *last* fifty odd years. As long as NATO has at least as many nukes as Russia, I don't see why it won't continue working for the next fifty, at least.
The difference in that the previous waves of immigrants tended to Anglicize their names, give their children "English" names, speak English in the home if possible, etc, to assimilate their children as quickly as possible.
What, like "Steinman", or "O'Connely"? Pick up a phone book of a large city sometime and look through it. Do you think the first German, Polish, or Italian immigrants spoke English? Little or none in the first generation. When they first arrived they often formed their own little settlements (or neighborhoods in the larger cities) that looked like they had been transplanted from Europe. You could walk down the main street of these places and LITERALLY not hear a lick of English.
You see, today's immigrants are just like those immigrants, and they're integrating at roughly the same speed, you just don't realize the long history of those early immigrants and how hard and long it was for them blend in, because you haven't bothered to educate yourself on our country's true colonial history, and our own education system has failed miserably in this regard.
Just try some of the history of German immigrants, as an example of what the rest were like coming in. Such as:
After two or three generations, German Americans adopted mainstream American customs--some of which they heavily influenced--and switched their language to English.
However, it goes on to point out that for many generations they remained bilingual, still speaking German in addition to English.
What you and the people who modded you up don't realize (or don't care), is that the early history of immigration wasn't any different from immigration today, and your reaction today is nothing new, because back then there were people saying exactly the same things as you are, about the immigrants then. EXACTLY the same "Why don't they act like Americans!" lunacy.
that you'd want to leave as much of the past behind, and embrace American culture
What the hell do you think "American culture" IS? Answer: an amalgamation and blending of *all* the cultures that immigrants to this country brought with them! At times in the 1800's there were northern cities that were 30%-40% German immigrants! Yea, they were coming in *that* fast, and because of that, some of their culture... became *ours*.
I know you don't want to believe this, but the real truth is that the way you *think* immigrants are supposed to act once they get here (dump their old language and culture and instantly become John Doe down the street) has simply *NEVER* BEEN TRUE. EVER.
If you're open-minded enough, please do yourself a favor, and do a little reading on the immigration story of this country. You'll obviously learn a thing or two, if you're willing.
It's true Estonian was occupied but Estonian was German ally in WW2.
Bullshit.
Estonia got raped first by the Soviets in '40, then raped by Germany from '41 to '43, then raped again by the Soviets in '44 and beyond. They were a tiny country caught between two fanatical behemoths. They didn't *want* to be "allied" to either one, and neither of their conquering masters ever treated them, or any of the other Baltic states, as a "friend". They weren't "allies" of either, they were *victims* of both.
After that war it was so natural
Ah yes, of course, might always makes right, doesn't it?
The Estonians could as well complain about the winter or rain.
Yes, strange isn't it, how people who are denied their freedom just always want to whine and complain about that? In fact, it seems to be an almost universal gripe. Silly them.
But you don't have to worry any more about those pesky Estonians, Ivan, they're safely in NATO now, as happy as clams, along with Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. Nothing to worry about anymore!
I don't see the logic of blasting space junk with lasers
The laser wouldn't be that powerful, just strong enough to give the object "a little push" that slows it down enough so that it falls back to Earth and burns up during reentry.
The fact the the US isn't building them is hugely disappointing.
Once you realize that the problem is not in building these solar plants, but how to *transmit* all that electricity *losslessly* (or nearly so) to where its *needed* then you'd understand why no one is doing it.
The fact that almost all power plants are built close to where their energy is needed should give you a hint as to the problem.
However, building them is pretty quick and easy.
There are only a few places in the Southwest where its economically sensible to do so, and its being done *there*. However, until we can solve the transmission loss issue, we'll need to use other options elsewhere.
Seriously, our energy problem is too great to be solved by any one "silver bullet", we're going to have to throw *every* idea we have at it, and then *hope* that thats enough.
Groups of people from anywhere in the world, mixed together in any numbers and proportions whatsoever, will eventually settle down as a harmonious society, appreciating--nay, celebrating!--their differences... which will of course soon disappear entirely.
You do realize that basically sums up quite accurately the first 150 years or so of the USA's history, don't you?
Seriously, calling the US a "nation of immigrants" is not something those evil multiculturalists just made up, its a freakin' fact. Wave after wave of immigrants from almost every continent at one time or another during the first century and beyond, at a rate that often exceeded the natural population increase in the main population. My favorite example: Newly arrived Irish immigrants being recruited into the Union Army during the Civil War, right off the *docks*.
And yes, by the 2nd or 3rd generation of immigrants, they do start to blend in and merge.
Geez man, if "Balkanization" really is the only end result of a "melting pot" experiment, why the heck is the United States of America still the fscking *United* States of America?
What happened in the Balkans happened because more than two centuries ago it became ground zero in a struggle between a half dozen authoritarian empires with naked ambitions and very little interest in giving the people there much in the way of freedom or quality of life. Ethnicity and Religion were simply tools used by cynical Emperors and Kings to manipulate the masses for their own ends. Once enough of that had happened, it became very hard for them to let go and move on.
anyone with at least half a functioning brain can see that it won't work
Oh yes, everyone can see that the US experiment was clearly an abject failure...
And people with much *more* than half a functioning brain got over this kind of zenophobia a long time ago and did move on.
Slashdot Mirror
Million kilovolt transformers?
They're probably talking about the new (created within the last year by various manufacturers) 800-kV transformers (in other places 750kV is listed) that were made specifically for China's new electricity distribution projects. All prior transformer substations are rated somewhere south of 500kV.
That's a billion volts, into fantasy and beyond.
Well, first, these things are rated by their manufacturers at 800kV, which might be a conservative rating, for all we know they might be able to handle 1000kV right now, albeit with some risk, and second, since it won't be that big of a jump to go from 800kV to 1000kV (going from 500 to 800 was a relatively bigger jump), my response would have to be: "welcome to the future". :)
Here's a picture of one of them, made by Siemens. Those tiny figures you see in the bottom left of the picture aren't ants, they're humans! The thing is the size of a house!?!
Hmm, well according to NASA, a new solar cycle began at the start of last year, that was when the current solar minimum "bottomed out" so to speak.
So we've been coming out of solar minimum for more than a year now, with the expected increased activity to start showing up around 2012.
Its an 11 year cycle, so if NASA is right and the new one started in Jan. 2008, then the midpoint of the cycle, when solar maximum occurs, will be sometime in 2013.
You're right, I was in a hurry to fix my "mistake" and didn't realize that the NA was the parent of the NAS, I wrongly thought that they were separate entities, with the former just being the publisher of the report created by the latter.
Oops, wrong link for "my response", it should be this one.
"Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization's End"
Note that they don't say "the end of human life" or the "destruction of planet Earth", only the "end of civilization as we know it" and yes, that *is* possible in this case. See my response to a post above.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risks_to_civilization,_humans_and_planet_Earth
This article covers almost everything.
Well, "almost" is the key word here. Keep in mind that coronal mass ejections weren't even discovered until 1971, so the whole science of "geomagnetic storms", and their possible effects on us, is relatively new, never mind the recent discovery of a hole in Earth's magnetic shield (mentioned and linked to in TFA), that to is something the scientists never even suspected could exist. Add these things together, and it sounds to me like an update to that article on Wikipedia is imminent. :)
As far as I know, the electrical grid in most of EU have always been protected against that.
Sure about that?
From the above link:
Neither is Europe sufficiently prepared. Responsibility for dealing with space weather issues is "very fragmented" in Europe, says Hapgood.
Europe's electricity grids, on the other hand, are highly interconnected and extremely vulnerable to cascading failures. In 2006, the routine switch-off of a small part of Germany's grid - to let a ship pass safely under high-voltage cables - caused a cascade power failure across western Europe. In France alone, five million people were left without electricity for two hours. "These systems are so complicated we don't fully understand the effects of twiddling at one place," Hapgood says. "Most of the time it's alright, but occasionally it will get you."
When I hear our need for resistors to limit the damage of massive solar flares uttered in the same sentence as "the whole 2012 thing", the credibility for anything either one of these guys says is gone as far as I'm concerned.
It is unfortunate that we have this coincidence between the Mayan Long Calendar "prediction" for 2012, and the fact that we're entering a Solar Maximum period (which will peak in 2012) with a gaping hole in our planet's magnetic shield and a civilization extremely dependent on an electrical infrastructure that is itself extremely vulnerable to the effects of a large geomagnetic storm.
I leave it up to you as to whether you should ignore the latter just because of the former.
I don't think they know what "science" is.
"They" in this case aren't scientists, and aren't pretending to be. Note however that "they", and TFA, are all referring to scientific reports from NASA and the US National Academy of Sciences to base their ideas on.
I don't know about you, but I *do* think that NASA and the US National Academy of Sciences know what "science" is.
I wouldn't exactly call it a doomsday scenario. These flares happen fairly often.
The NASA funded report that is linked to from TFA is talking about a "Coronal Mass Ejection" which is different from a solar flare, though they are sometimes both created by the same underlying event.
Basically a giant ball of high energy plasma (ionized gas) that is shot out of the Sun, sometimes reaching speeds of 1/3 that of light. Note that a fast CME would give us almost no warning time at all, even if we had detectors close enough to the Sun at the time to detect it. Detecting a CME is not as easy as noticing a solar flare, never mind the problem of determing how large/dangerous it is, then calculating whether or not its going to hit the Earth.
The last one to disrupt power was in March 1989 ...
A more relevant example would be the "1859 Solar Superstorm". This was a solar event that generated both a CME (that hit the Earth) and multiple solar flares. If an event like this happened *now*, with our extreme dependence on so many things electrical and electronic, it would be a first class catastrophe. That is not hype, although it would not be a "life-ending" kind of catastrophe, it could very well be a "life-as-we-know-it-now-ending" kind of catastrophe.
Note that a large CME could impact the Earth over several days, as the 1859 event did, so we are also talking about a potential *global* catastrophe, not a regional one.
Finally, TFA also links to another recent NASA report about a huge hole just discovered in Earth's protective magnetic shield, so the important point to take away from TFA is that we are about to enter a period of Solar Maximum with a gaping hole in the only shield which protects us. Getting hit by a large CME now, with that hole in Earth's magnetic shield still present, would lead to a *really* bad day for humanity.
Err,
National Academies == US National Academy of Sciences
Sorry.
So, he has determined a doomsday scenario that his company can prevent for $150 million?
He didn't "create" the doomsday scenario involved here, others, including scientists, have been considering this problem for awhile now. Note that TFA has links to two scientific reports that are entirely unconnected with the MetaTech CEO, one is from NASA itself, and the other is published by the National Academies and was funded by NASA.
Also, contrary to the American non-historian's widely held view of World War I, we (the Americans) were terribly incompetent there, and basically embarrassed ourselves
[citation needed]
Well, if we qualified that "incompetence" to just the high command, or better yet changed the word to "preparedness", than the GP would unfortunately be right. Our soldiers who arrived in 1917 were woefully unprepared and untrained, including an absurd lack of basic war material. They had to borrow artillery from the French, tanks from the British, and most amazingly of all, a lot of our troops went into battle wearing British helmets!
As for our high command, they went in with the same military doctrine (massed frontal assaults) that the Allies had started with in 1914, but had wisely discarded by 1917.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Expeditionary_Force
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I
None of this has anything to do with our soldiers' bravery or willingness to fight, of course. The Marines at Belleau Wood proved that, but I don't think the GP was referring to this.
from an evolutionary standpoint, sharing your wife with the tribe makes no sense whatsoever
Just because it doesn't make any sense to you or me, doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense to the evolutionary mechanism. :)
What you're calling "nonsensical" is exactly what Bonobo Chimps actually do.
Many people mistakenly try to give "evolution" some kind of "grand strategy", but in truth, evolution's only strategy is one of "throw everything and anything against the wall and see if any of it manages to stick".
Thanks for proving my point. Once again, victory is achieved by Americans with the French riding on our coat tails.
You are so fscking wrong, it's not even funny. Please do a little reading before you continue making a fool of yourself...
For those who don't want to check the links:
1) The Battle of Yorktown would not even had occurred had not a French fleet defeated an English fleet to establish a blockade of the British forces trapped at Yorktown.
2) Even more significant, the army forces that assaulted the British at Yorktown included 5,500 French regulars.
I know the current popularity of jokes about French military prowess will not change any time soon, but it should never be forgotten by we Americans that the victory at the Battle of Yorktown, which directly lead to our victory in the Revolutionary War, was bought and paid for with French blood, in addition to our own.
Guilt is not inherited, you know...
Tell that to American blacks.
It was some American whites who felt *guilt*. What *some* American blacks feel is not guilt, but *resentment*, but you're right in that its now become counter-productive to hold onto that resentment for this long.
Of course the guilty always get over their crimes long before their victims get over it, so I'm not at all surprised.
A delicious irony lies in that sentence. :)
And the bitter tradegy is that it doesn't just apply to Germany, but everywhere that politicians/parties manipulate gullible/uninformed citizens for their vote.
I daresay that any information which has hit Wikileaks is 99.9% likely to previously already be known to any intelligence agencies which would be interested in it. All Wikileaks is doing is letting us see it also.
True, but please note that the GP was responding to a troll post about the American CIA, and Wikileaks of course was raided by German law enforcement, not the US CIA.
The CIA's mission is gathering foreign intelligence about threats to the US, they aren't interested in porn, they're interested in knowledge, and I suspect their normal response in a situation like this would be to keep monitoring a website, and/or try to infiltrate/crack it to gain even *more* info, rather than try to shut it down. Basically, the CIA is in the spying business, not the law enforcement business.
Security through obscurity is usually bad security.
There is a fine balance which needs to be maintained between secrecy which protects the public interest and secrecy which is against the public interest.
Agreed.
And when WW1 came, the people in German enclaves got very nervous.
:)
Actually, didn't they get nervous *twice*? During WW2, many of them had to look at what was being done to Japanese-Americans and wonder if they might be next...
Nice book links, thanks.
I see that the 4th paragraph of this is one is especially relevent here (it notes that the integration started to occur with the adults of the 2nd generation). Too bad I can't cut-n-paste here, but anyway as your links so aptly point out, this (difficult, time-consuming, and sometimes painful) story has largely been the same for every wave of immigrants to this country.
deploy a file system driver ... and bundle it with flash player ... It does not have to even integrate with flash but use the distribution mechanism to beat them at their own game
Bingo. If the FAT-LFN FS (FAT filesystem with long filename support) patents can't be invalidated, and aren't going to expire anytime soon, then I believe this idea will be the only permanent solution for the problem.
Right now every company that distributes a "plug-ready" storage device that comes formatted with a FAT-LFN FS on it has to pay an expensive MS tax, or risk getting sued. If a company that pays the ransom *also* puts Linux on the device to read & write this format, then technically they could be sued by the authors of that code (assuming they wanted to), *if* those authors knew who these companies were. We already know, from MS itself, that they have made such deals, under NDA, with companies, which allows those companies to remain anonymous.
Introducing a new FS "standard" (for small devices) into the world of Windows, free of MS patents, and as ubiquitous as, say, the Adobe Flash Player is, would be a permanent way of ending the MS tax.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure Adobe, specifically, would interested in trying, as AFAIK, they are primarily a software company, and don't make the kind of hardware devices we are talking about. What would be necessary, I think, is a consortium of hardware makers getting together, adopting an existing filesystem, making a Windows driver for it that is robust, stable, and ready for the typical Windows end-users out there, and then distributing the hell out of it. If they do the heavy lifting, *then* maybe they can get companies like Adobe, ones who are already doing mass distribution of commonly used Windows drivers & utilities, to help spread the new "standard", and *anyone* who has a device that needs this, could just slap this thing on their hardware's driver CD, with a label saying, in effect, "you must run the install CD first before using the device". Now that MS is targeting Adobe's own home-base with Silverlight, Adobe is not likely to be all that friendly towards MS anymore, and *probably* wouldn't mind helping out, as well as other major players, especially if it didn't require a lot of work on their part (just including it with whatever they're distributing now).
Would they (the hardware makers) be interested? I don't know, apparently most of them believe its just easier to pay the MS tax. So it might take a little help from some in the FOSS community to kickstart the idea, by taking an existing open filesystem that's free of patents, and doing some (or a lot) of the software engineering to make such a fast, free, stable, easy-to-use filesystem driver (and an installer for it) possible. As some have mentioned earlier however, the available ext2 driver on Windows is apparently not very stable (and do we *know* if its patent free?), so there doesn't appear to be a ready option already available, and none of the hardware makers that are now under MS's thumb, show any desire to try and fight back.
It might be a nice idea, or not, but the cynic in me thinks the most likely result will be that companies just continue to pay the MS tax (and those who also distribute Linux will do so anonymously, and just keep their heads down), until those FAT-LFN FS patents expire. The only question is, for how long?
the part where you claim our economy was booming 2 years ago
I said *world* economy, not just our own. So yes, taken all together, the *world* economy was booming then, although granted, in *our* economy some of that "booming" was happening for the wrong reasons, such as various shenanigans in the real-estate and financial markets, and too much available credit in general.
However, its only a matter of time before the world will get back to that level again, after all, as long as the world's population continues to rise, so, inevitably, will the world's economy. Aside from the usual short-term ups and downs, and barring disasters like world wars or global pandemics, the trend has always been upward (so far).
Don't be so bitter.
Huh? I'm as happy as a clam about the current situation myself. I'm not Estonian or Eastern European, so I don't have those bitter memories they have in my country's, or my own, recent past. I'm smug about it, maybe a tad too much, but certainly not bitter.
Your claim that Russia wants those states back is silly. Nobody in Russia wants them. I think people are more happy now that the government doesn't have to waste money on them.
Now who's being bitter? :)
You went to an awful lot of trouble to take and hold those countries, but now that you can't keep them, you say you don't want them? Yea, right.
it's a false sense of security
You could have fooled me. As soon as those Eastern Europeans got out from under Mother Russia's boot, what's the very first thing that they did? Oh right, they ran to NATO's door and yelled "We want in!". Maybe you should ask *them* about "false security".
Who is really safe with so many nuclear weapons all around?
Its worked exceedingly well for the *last* fifty odd years. As long as NATO has at least as many nukes as Russia, I don't see why it won't continue working for the next fifty, at least.
The difference in that the previous waves of immigrants tended to Anglicize their names, give their children "English" names, speak English in the home if possible, etc, to assimilate their children as quickly as possible.
What, like "Steinman", or "O'Connely"? Pick up a phone book of a large city sometime and look through it. Do you think the first German, Polish, or Italian immigrants spoke English? Little or none in the first generation. When they first arrived they often formed their own little settlements (or neighborhoods in the larger cities) that looked like they had been transplanted from Europe. You could walk down the main street of these places and LITERALLY not hear a lick of English.
You see, today's immigrants are just like those immigrants, and they're integrating at roughly the same speed, you just don't realize the long history of those early immigrants and how hard and long it was for them blend in, because you haven't bothered to educate yourself on our country's true colonial history, and our own education system has failed miserably in this regard.
Just try some of the history of German immigrants, as an example of what the rest were like coming in. Such as:
After two or three generations, German Americans adopted mainstream American customs--some of which they heavily influenced--and switched their language to English.
However, it goes on to point out that for many generations they remained bilingual, still speaking German in addition to English.
What you and the people who modded you up don't realize (or don't care), is that the early history of immigration wasn't any different from immigration today, and your reaction today is nothing new, because back then there were people saying exactly the same things as you are, about the immigrants then. EXACTLY the same "Why don't they act like Americans!" lunacy.
that you'd want to leave as much of the past behind, and embrace American culture
What the hell do you think "American culture" IS? Answer: an amalgamation and blending of *all* the cultures that immigrants to this country brought with them! At times in the 1800's there were northern cities that were 30%-40% German immigrants! Yea, they were coming in *that* fast, and because of that, some of their culture... became *ours*.
I know you don't want to believe this, but the real truth is that the way you *think* immigrants are supposed to act once they get here (dump their old language and culture and instantly become John Doe down the street) has simply *NEVER* BEEN TRUE. EVER.
If you're open-minded enough, please do yourself a favor, and do a little reading on the immigration story of this country. You'll obviously learn a thing or two, if you're willing.
It's true Estonian was occupied but Estonian was German ally in WW2.
Bullshit.
Estonia got raped first by the Soviets in '40, then raped by Germany from '41 to '43, then raped again by the Soviets in '44 and beyond. They were a tiny country caught between two fanatical behemoths. They didn't *want* to be "allied" to either one, and neither of their conquering masters ever treated them, or any of the other Baltic states, as a "friend". They weren't "allies" of either, they were *victims* of both.
After that war it was so natural
Ah yes, of course, might always makes right, doesn't it?
The Estonians could as well complain about the winter or rain.
Yes, strange isn't it, how people who are denied their freedom just always want to whine and complain about that? In fact, it seems to be an almost universal gripe. Silly them.
But you don't have to worry any more about those pesky Estonians, Ivan, they're safely in NATO now, as happy as clams, along with Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. Nothing to worry about anymore!
PS: So sorry, but no, you can't have them back.
I don't see the logic of blasting space junk with lasers
The laser wouldn't be that powerful, just strong enough to give the object "a little push" that slows it down enough so that it falls back to Earth and burns up during reentry.
laughable.
Indeed.
The fact the the US isn't building them is hugely disappointing.
Once you realize that the problem is not in building these solar plants, but how to *transmit* all that electricity *losslessly* (or nearly so) to where its *needed* then you'd understand why no one is doing it.
The fact that almost all power plants are built close to where their energy is needed should give you a hint as to the problem.
However, building them is pretty quick and easy.
There are only a few places in the Southwest where its economically sensible to do so, and its being done *there*. However, until we can solve the transmission loss issue, we'll need to use other options elsewhere.
Seriously, our energy problem is too great to be solved by any one "silver bullet", we're going to have to throw *every* idea we have at it, and then *hope* that thats enough.
Groups of people from anywhere in the world, mixed together in any numbers and proportions whatsoever, will eventually settle down as a harmonious society, appreciating--nay, celebrating!--their differences... which will of course soon disappear entirely.
You do realize that basically sums up quite accurately the first 150 years or so of the USA's history, don't you?
Seriously, calling the US a "nation of immigrants" is not something those evil multiculturalists just made up, its a freakin' fact. Wave after wave of immigrants from almost every continent at one time or another during the first century and beyond, at a rate that often exceeded the natural population increase in the main population. My favorite example: Newly arrived Irish immigrants being recruited into the Union Army during the Civil War, right off the *docks*.
And yes, by the 2nd or 3rd generation of immigrants, they do start to blend in and merge.
Geez man, if "Balkanization" really is the only end result of a "melting pot" experiment, why the heck is the United States of America still the fscking *United* States of America?
What happened in the Balkans happened because more than two centuries ago it became ground zero in a struggle between a half dozen authoritarian empires with naked ambitions and very little interest in giving the people there much in the way of freedom or quality of life. Ethnicity and Religion were simply tools used by cynical Emperors and Kings to manipulate the masses for their own ends. Once enough of that had happened, it became very hard for them to let go and move on.
anyone with at least half a functioning brain can see that it won't work
Oh yes, everyone can see that the US experiment was clearly an abject failure...
And people with much *more* than half a functioning brain got over this kind of zenophobia a long time ago and did move on.