Standard English needs more cuss words. What are there, like 20, not counting conjugations and some variants?
Oddly enough, our school library had a book titled something like "10,000 French Profanities." I tried to learn them, but I hadn't had any French classes at the time so I didn't get far. I hear Polish is good too especially since the language sounds well suited to it. I think we need to steal more profanity from other languages.
The southeast US may have some words people elsewhere haven't heard. Cooter, like on "Dukes of Hazzard," probably after cooter turtles, snapping turtles to most of you, who's heads sort of resemble the clitoris. However, I noticed it came up on The Daily Show, so I guess it has escaped. Sometimes just plain turtle is used.
Queer bait seemed to be one of my nick names in high school, seems to be for boys pretty enough to catch gays. I was proud of that one though I had little luck.
Pork as in "Porky's" the movie (set in Florida), means to fuck, probably is known outside of the south by now. It is related to "making bacon."
Some locals use the town name Narcossee as a swear word, as in "she let me dip my finger in her narcosee."
Hocky and dookey mean crap. I've heard dookey in eastern Canada means washcloth which lead to some interesting confusion for my friend visiting there. These are words for kids and religious people though.
I've heard cuntalegus used to describe one lesbian amputee using her leg stump on another woman. Hey, whatever floats her boat.
Sex and religion birth most cuss words, why not politics? I guess there is Bush, but why not more? They are all highly emotional subjects.
I halfway agree that Christians are picked on more than they deserve. However, Christian is a broad term. In the south, you are more likely to find fundamentalist Christians and they are a big part of why the south has its reputation. Although most of them mean well, it is increasingly difficult for me not to hate and mock them.
My own mother is a fundie (not senile, mentally ill, or dumb). Hours after hurricane Katrina struck she told me she was saddened that the storm hadn't totally destroyed New Orleans because it is such a sinful and evil place. She was quick to add that she didn't want any innocent people to get hurt though. She wanted God to go Sodom on their asses. Now that NO is gone she comes up with all sorts of ways to justify the Bush admin's criminal inaction and incompetence because Bush is a Christian.
I am gay. She thinks I am going to be eternally tortured in Hell by her God, yet she thinks her god is so damn wonderful she can't stop talking about him and going to church 3 times a week.
I since I used to be involved in her religion for many years, I have what I consider to be a pretty sound guess that most people at her church and churches like it (Assembly of God, Church of God, Southern Baptist), feel pretty much the same way. There is something seriously sick with Christian fundamentalism. Sickness is something to be defeated, IMNSHO. These people are every bit as disconnected from reality as drug addicts or cultists and it is a very sad waste of human potential.
I recognize the right to believe any kooky religion one wants or to take any drug one wants, but that doesn't mean I'm going to hide my feelings for the sake of being polite. Their beliefs are to be argued into oblivion before they kill more minds and ruin more lives.
That said, the media's mocking of them only makes matters worse. Fundies believe persecution is a sign that they are doing things right. (The thought of being martyred gives most a woody.) So the media's mockery just encourages them to do things increasingly more deserving of being mocked. Neat little meme.
...Estate Tax, which was specifically designed to keep an aristrocracy of worthless blueblood heirs from arising. It probably needs to be increased, and the top tax rate definitely needs to be jacked up.
What a load of puerile bullshit! What right do people have to own people? You are basically advocating human slavery to meet your political tastes.
I reluctantly admit to the need for at least some taxes, but to steal most of a man's life work is unconscionable. You did nothing to help my grandfather when he had to work in a chemical factory breathing asbestos fibers which later killed him. You weren't there when just weeks after having a massive heart attack he was woken by a calls demanding he come to work at 2 a.m. You did nothing, he worked. Yet, you and the rest of this country, through government, looted his savings against his will. Do you advocate stealing his money if he was a chemical engineer raking in the big bucks but not if he was just a blue collar worker? Either way, it was human life and you have no right to another's.
The laws we currently have, if enforced and guarded by the voters, are more than enough to prevent the ultra-wealthy from taking over the country.
And what's the "social norms" business you mention? Do you imagine some right to make sure rich people don't engage in homosexual acts? Must they obey your rules of etiquette at the dinner table? WTF?
I can't speak for the AL^3, but if I had said anything about "fighting the privatization of space" I would have meant the hysterical reaction some on/. have to space privatization. Rutan and others do have a long way to go before they have a truly useful system, but some here sound... threatened by any sign of progress. I'm not accusing you of that, but I suspect that may be part of what the original poster meant.
Incidentally, when private launches become possible, NASA should pay COD. Simply giving money to the lowest bidder isn't capitalism or any other rational economic system.
Also, with the O-ring incident anyway, IIRC, the company that made them recommended against launch that day, but for political reasons NASA went ahead with the launch.
He hit below the belt about the shuttle astronauts. Perhaps he should sit on a big firecracker and light the fuse and see if he still thinks he has "the right stuff" as his balls go bouncing down the gutter.
I'll add our governments need to take fuel efficiency into account when designing roads. A major waste of fuel is the stop and go traffic caused by mistimed traffic lights. In a hundred mile radius of where I live, I know of only one city where it is possible to drive the speed limit and hit at most 1 traffic light per road. In the closest city, people usually hit about 8 out of 10 in a 3 mile stretch.
More pedestrian over or under passes would encourage more biking and walking when a major highway bisects a city.
Requiring parking lots to eliminate parts of the stupid 3' landscaping barriers between businesses would eliminate the need to jump out on the highway, accelerate to 40 and then brake to get to the next business.
Sacramento, California is an example of just such short-sightedness. The Sacramento River flood plains are catastrophically inundated every ten to fifteen years or so. Despite this fact, developers have been allowed to build there because they've bought and/or sued the city & county into letting them do whatever in the hell they want. The developers have also stifled the environmental and news reports as well as done their best to obscure the historical record because such information conflicts with their immediate profit interests. The result? Houses get flooded, families are ruined and the taxpayers are left with the responsibility.
Why be so authoritarian? If it wasn't for the damn fed's insuring people who build on flood plains and constantly bailing out insurance companies who made promises they can't keep, people would stop building in areas prone to flooding. Take some of the money now used to pay for flood damage and funnel it into a service to that home-buyers can call and get the straight dope about where they plan to move.
Since people built in NOLA with the understanding that the fedgov would bail them out in the case of a flood, they should get that money but with the understanding that they will never again be compensated for flood damage. Drain NOLA long enough to collect the bodies, do general cleanup and demolition, and move historical buildings to higher ground. Then return everything to the state we found it.
Why is it that every time private space flight comes up, a segment of the Slashdot crowd goes off with their knees jerking every which way about how it can't be done?
There isn't enough information available to us to say if Rutan's plan will work. Most people here, myself included, wouldn't know what to do with that information even if it were available. Those who try to show-off their intellectual prowess by debunking that nonexistent information look like fools.
The paranoid little cynic in my head keeps shouting that the government-is-God crowd is afraid that private enterprise will slaughter their sacred cow.
I don't know what I'm talking about, but I'd guess from an energy standpoint it is unlikely that a manmade petroleum making life form would get out of control. The nice thing about oil is it stores a lot of energy. If we enslave this life form for efficient oil production then I'd guess it would have less than usual energy left over to reproduce and put into its survival. It will probably have to be babied to live.
Now maybe if they gave it, or it evolved, the ability to use petroleum as a sort of fat for its own energy storage, it could be a little more dangerous?
I agree that it is a bad thing that subdivisions are chewing up the countryside. A mile from here an "ecological" community just went in, wiped out many square miles of wilderness and ranch land. The only good thing about it is the property value doubled here in 2 years and will probably double again next year.
One thing you maybe haven't considered though is human nature. Some people do fine in cities. I personally felt like a monkey crammed into a zoo cage when I had to live in cities or even suburbia. It makes me anxious and depressed to even pass through a major city. I can't stand the forced intimacy with strangers, the constant noise, the heat and the stench. Some people are energized by that, it wipes me out. It is a shame because I miss all the geeky and cultural things there are to do in cities.
I think the problem could be partially solved by including in cities more secluded outdoor areas complete with domesticated animals. (Commons?) And by making cities less butt ugly by generally greening them up.
Gee dude, haven't you seen "Snatch?" Hungry pigs will do the job better since they eat bones and all. Granted, they aren't as sexy as lions but they are easier and cheaper to procure.
I live about 24 Kilo-alligator-lengths from Kennedy. The intensity of the boom varies from landing to landing. On one occasion, the boom knocked pictures off the wall and may have cracked some plaster. It made me jump out of bed and look for the meteorite that seemed to have crashed through the roof.
I only got 2 hours of sleep last night because, in part, I kept worrying about it jolting me awake. I'm not complaining but I may be if it were a daily occurrence because I don't think it is the sort of thing I'd ever get used to hearing. It wouldn't make any difference if it boomed with a British or French accent.
How about making the outer shell slightly larger and putting the foam inside? How about forgetting the foam and ventilating the volume between the pressurized tanks and the shell with very dry warm air so that the outside isn't cool enough to grow ice. Or shower it it with hot water seconds before liftoff. Or shower it with anti-freeze? Or paint it with something slick and then vibrate it just before launch (or rely on the vibrations caused by launch) to knock off the ice. Since air probably flows smoothly over it, why not put a big air duct over the beanie cap to blow dried air smoothly down the tank so the humid air can't get to it. That's just 15 seconds of thought, I could go on for hours.
The problem is there are many variables I don't know about. How much would making the tank bigger affect how the shuttle is attached to the tank. How much dry air would it take to add enough heat to keep the skin from getting cold and how much would that heat affect the cryogenic gasses? Would hot water thermally stress the skin to the breaking point? Is it feasible to blow enough air over it to keep it dry?
It is a complex problem but almost certainly not an impossible one to solve. The 1 Gigabuck price tag on the current "solution" is almost certainly ludicrous, but that's government. I think it is worth fixing though. 1:100 odds of death isn't something you just ignore when you are aware of the specific problem and a reasonable solution most likely exists.
The real thing to do though is to fast track a shuttle replacement. Since I was just a little kid, I've gone outside and watched every shuttle launch. I'll miss it because it is wonderful to behold. But it is time to move beyond 1960's technology and apply what we've learned from the shuttle. The main key to success, IMO, is letting engineers be engineers and keeping non-engineers (politicians, bureaucrats etc) out of it.
A man bombs innocents in a tube station.....is he a fanatic? A highly educated American bombs innocents in a dirt poor village....is he a fanatic?
Your comparison is fundamentally flawed. The people who bombed the tube intended to kill innocent people. Americans don't intend to kill innocent people in the current wars. In fact we spend a great deal of money on technology trying to avoid it.
That said, we stupidly followed the chimpanzee currently occupying the White House into a war which stands very little if any chance of curtailing terrorism but stands a good chance at escalating it. What's more it comes at the cost of surrendering the very core of what I used to love about my country--freedom. The error is one of ignorance, stupidity, fear and blind patriotism not a desire to murder good people for political and religious gain.
I've never been a music geek, but after hearing the 9th today, I think that may change.
It is true, you have to listen to the whole thing. This was the first time I've ever done so and I can't begin to explain what a difference it makes to hear it all together in the intended order. I never really understood before that a symphony creates its own vocabulary and language as it progresses so by the end it says all sorts of things that I can't put into words.
I feel as if I've been somehow raped but in a good way. It keeps making me think of the myth where Zeus becomes an eagle and snatches Ganymede away to Mount Olympus to be his lover and cupbearer. I see it as Zeus making the boy into a god, but at a price. That's the 9th to me, Beethoven dug his talons into me, and for an hour I became a god in Beethoven's heaven and experienced joy so profound it hurt like hell. It was a truly mind altering experience.
English is the problem. Make English spelling phonetically based and consistent so that we don't have to waste valuable time learning all the inconsistencies and the poor spelling problem would be almost entirely fixed. Some people seem to enjoy learning pseudo-random letter sequences (Englishly spelled words (yes, I like to make new adverbs)) and then bitching at everyone else who doesn't share their fascination with boring minutia.
Grammar could also use improvement but not as desperately. Perhaps if we didn't have to waste so much time in school on spelling, we'd have more time to learn proper grammar.
I think it was Thomas Jefferson who proposed following the French system, where a group of intelligent people write ever improving standards for what is acceptable English. Several other languages have similar groups. I think it would make English a more powerful and clear language.
The students I've known who have worked for the University of South Florida often had to go without pay for several weeks at a time because of incompetent officials in charge of pay kept getting tangled in red tape. The idiots in charge didn't care if students couldn't make rent, car payments, or even eat much besides Raman noodles. It was always a sort of "Oops, their bad, so sorry. Who is next in line?" This sort of thing seemed to happen every month or two over a period of several years. Sometimes good professors would end up lending their own money to the students.
Perhaps 36M Americans don't get enough food. However, this isn't due to a lack of money for the food. The welfare system ensures everyone can have enough to eat.
The government's War on Drugs, improper care for the mentally ill, and welfare system that often encourages dumb behavior (such as having many kids to receive more money or poorly timed withdraw of benefits upon re-employment) promotes poverty.
Dumb choices such as buying Twinkies and soda pop rather than meat and milk causes the poor nutrition. Trading food stamps for recreational drugs is another choice that leads to bad diet.
"[W]hen a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental--men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... [A]ll the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre--the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
* H.L. Mencken
* Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1920
Sound familiar? Mencken also said:
Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule--and both commonly succeed, and are right... The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.
Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed--and hence clamorous to be led to safety--by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Others even before him said pretty much the same stuff. I'd look it up but I'm about to lose power due to a storm.
I played with growing algea for oil last year. We used human urine and some cow dung as fertilizer, and a small fish aquarium pump to inject CO2 from the air. I can't find my records right now, but IIRC, it was fairly easy to grow the algea. The main problem I had was figuring out how to get the oil separated from the algea. Do you know of any online articles that describe that process?
One little aside I've since read is that some algea can fix nitrogen like legumes do. A byproduct of the process may be decent compost or maybe even cattle feed.
Why not make the door for the airplane pilot bullet proof and locked from the inside. That alone would have stopped 9-11. Secondly armed guards should be on all public plains in case of crazy guy trying to kill everyone.
Because the purpose of these security measures isn't actually to make people safe, it is to make people feel safe and happy with government. Image matters more to Americans than does substance. The more of a pain in the ass they can make airport security, the greater your sacrifice, the more real the illusion and the safer Joe Sixpack feels and the more likely he is to vote for and go along with the current administration. Okay, so maybe I haven't hit the nail square on the head, but it is my best guess as to why it is being done so stupidly.
Even with no new measures, do you really think a 9-11 style hijacking could work again any time soon? IMO, if a terrorist pulls a box cutter, that guy is going to have a dozen passengers subduing him in nothing flat. (Didn't something like this happen to the "shoe bomber?" There would possibly be only minor injuries. The reason it worked before was that everyone expected to come out of it alive if they did nothing.
I'm an American but I can honestly say that this does not make me proud to be an American; it makes me proud to be a member of the human species, as does your decency.
Religion played a big part in the fall of Rome. Perhaps much more of that great civilization would have survived had it not been for the Christians. In the name of censoring for God, they paid monks to chisel the 'naughty bits' off works of art, destroyed beautiful pagan temples and otherwise defaced and destroyed the local maxima of culture and science. At that time, at least in West, Rome was the high point of human accomplishment.
I believe that to judge someone or something one must take motives into account. The monk was trying to spread the Christian virus. That he accidentally saved a work of Archimedes doesn't make him or his religion good. Do we call drunk drivers good people if they accidentally run over bad people?
If I thought the monk wrote over it to save it then I wouldn't think he was a total bastard. I see little chance that he had such good intentions. It was simply a fortunate coincidence.
First, the Feds already had the data and the power to stop the 9-11 murderers. They failed and people died. Claiming to need these ID cards and the like is, IMO, a way of diverting attention away from that failure. The ID system is also a way for them to aquire more power over us.
Trusting government is about as sensible as trusting Jackson to take good care of your little boy during a sleepover at Neverland Ranch. It would probably be easier to name all the laws the government hasn't abused than those it has. A couple of decades ago, when I was a kid watching movies about Nazis and Communists it seemed silly to even think that someday an American would ask to see my freaking travel papers. That particular horror seems likely to happen now.
Government abuses power. Take eminent domain, the law that allows government to take land from an individual in exchange for fair market value for the "general good." A lady near my city voluntarily sold off hundreds of acres of her land for a city backed housing development. She kept 20 acres for herself. After the development went in, the city suddenly remembered that they had to build a school for all the kids in the development. The lady with the land said, too bad, should have thought of that before you filled up all that land with houses. The city took the rest of her land by force. They offered to name the school after the lady's family which had lived there for generations but she told them where to shove the offer. The same city is in the process of stealing my friend's friend's house at below market value. When these types of issues came up at a city manager's meeting, they stopped the public access video feed. That is how wonderful and trustworthy government is. The Feds only seem to be a little more sophisticated at cover-ups.
Also, these sorts of ID cards tend to get abused by everyone. My community college used our social security number as our school ID number. During registration we were supposed to recite the number several times to various clerks. I could easily hear everyone recite their name, number and some other personal data which could be used for identity theft. When I peaceably refused to give my number but continued to insist upon being registered with a randomly chosen number, they threatened to call security to have me removed.
I find it easy to imagine something like this happening in a few years when I try to buy potato chips without carrying my RFID card. As I understand it, grocery stores track what you buy through "loyalty cards" and this info is sometimes shared with the government because supposidly terrorists have predictable buying habits. Watch for it to become law that Uncle Sam needs to know for homeland security how much hemorhoid cream you use. Will you bend over for that one too?
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Standard English needs more cuss words. What are there, like 20, not counting conjugations and some variants?
Oddly enough, our school library had a book titled something like "10,000 French Profanities." I tried to learn them, but I hadn't had any French classes at the time so I didn't get far. I hear Polish is good too especially since the language sounds well suited to it. I think we need to steal more profanity from other languages.
The southeast US may have some words people elsewhere haven't heard. Cooter, like on "Dukes of Hazzard," probably after cooter turtles, snapping turtles to most of you, who's heads sort of resemble the clitoris. However, I noticed it came up on The Daily Show, so I guess it has escaped. Sometimes just plain turtle is used.
Queer bait seemed to be one of my nick names in high school, seems to be for boys pretty enough to catch gays. I was proud of that one though I had little luck.
Pork as in "Porky's" the movie (set in Florida), means to fuck, probably is known outside of the south by now. It is related to "making bacon."
Some locals use the town name Narcossee as a swear word, as in "she let me dip my finger in her narcosee."
Hocky and dookey mean crap. I've heard dookey in eastern Canada means washcloth which lead to some interesting confusion for my friend visiting there. These are words for kids and religious people though.
I've heard cuntalegus used to describe one lesbian amputee using her leg stump on another woman. Hey, whatever floats her boat.
Sex and religion birth most cuss words, why not politics? I guess there is Bush, but why not more? They are all highly emotional subjects.
I halfway agree that Christians are picked on more than they deserve. However, Christian is a broad term. In the south, you are more likely to find fundamentalist Christians and they are a big part of why the south has its reputation. Although most of them mean well, it is increasingly difficult for me not to hate and mock them.
My own mother is a fundie (not senile, mentally ill, or dumb). Hours after hurricane Katrina struck she told me she was saddened that the storm hadn't totally destroyed New Orleans because it is such a sinful and evil place. She was quick to add that she didn't want any innocent people to get hurt though. She wanted God to go Sodom on their asses. Now that NO is gone she comes up with all sorts of ways to justify the Bush admin's criminal inaction and incompetence because Bush is a Christian.
I am gay. She thinks I am going to be eternally tortured in Hell by her God, yet she thinks her god is so damn wonderful she can't stop talking about him and going to church 3 times a week.
I since I used to be involved in her religion for many years, I have what I consider to be a pretty sound guess that most people at her church and churches like it (Assembly of God, Church of God, Southern Baptist), feel pretty much the same way. There is something seriously sick with Christian fundamentalism. Sickness is something to be defeated, IMNSHO. These people are every bit as disconnected from reality as drug addicts or cultists and it is a very sad waste of human potential.
I recognize the right to believe any kooky religion one wants or to take any drug one wants, but that doesn't mean I'm going to hide my feelings for the sake of being polite. Their beliefs are to be argued into oblivion before they kill more minds and ruin more lives.
That said, the media's mocking of them only makes matters worse. Fundies believe persecution is a sign that they are doing things right. (The thought of being martyred gives most a woody.) So the media's mockery just encourages them to do things increasingly more deserving of being mocked. Neat little meme.
What a load of puerile bullshit! What right do people have to own people? You are basically advocating human slavery to meet your political tastes.
I reluctantly admit to the need for at least some taxes, but to steal most of a man's life work is unconscionable. You did nothing to help my grandfather when he had to work in a chemical factory breathing asbestos fibers which later killed him. You weren't there when just weeks after having a massive heart attack he was woken by a calls demanding he come to work at 2 a.m. You did nothing, he worked. Yet, you and the rest of this country, through government, looted his savings against his will. Do you advocate stealing his money if he was a chemical engineer raking in the big bucks but not if he was just a blue collar worker? Either way, it was human life and you have no right to another's.
The laws we currently have, if enforced and guarded by the voters, are more than enough to prevent the ultra-wealthy from taking over the country.
And what's the "social norms" business you mention? Do you imagine some right to make sure rich people don't engage in homosexual acts? Must they obey your rules of etiquette at the dinner table? WTF?
I can't speak for the AL^3, but if I had said anything about "fighting the privatization of space" I would have meant the hysterical reaction some on /. have to space privatization. Rutan and others do have a long way to go before they have a truly useful system, but some here sound... threatened by any sign of progress. I'm not accusing you of that, but I suspect that may be part of what the original poster meant.
Incidentally, when private launches become possible, NASA should pay COD. Simply giving money to the lowest bidder isn't capitalism or any other rational economic system.
Also, with the O-ring incident anyway, IIRC, the company that made them recommended against launch that day, but for political reasons NASA went ahead with the launch.
He hit below the belt about the shuttle astronauts. Perhaps he should sit on a big firecracker and light the fuse and see if he still thinks he has "the right stuff" as his balls go bouncing down the gutter.
I'll add our governments need to take fuel efficiency into account when designing roads. A major waste of fuel is the stop and go traffic caused by mistimed traffic lights. In a hundred mile radius of where I live, I know of only one city where it is possible to drive the speed limit and hit at most 1 traffic light per road. In the closest city, people usually hit about 8 out of 10 in a 3 mile stretch.
More pedestrian over or under passes would encourage more biking and walking when a major highway bisects a city.
Requiring parking lots to eliminate parts of the stupid 3' landscaping barriers between businesses would eliminate the need to jump out on the highway, accelerate to 40 and then brake to get to the next business.
Why be so authoritarian? If it wasn't for the damn fed's insuring people who build on flood plains and constantly bailing out insurance companies who made promises they can't keep, people would stop building in areas prone to flooding. Take some of the money now used to pay for flood damage and funnel it into a service to that home-buyers can call and get the straight dope about where they plan to move.
Since people built in NOLA with the understanding that the fedgov would bail them out in the case of a flood, they should get that money but with the understanding that they will never again be compensated for flood damage. Drain NOLA long enough to collect the bodies, do general cleanup and demolition, and move historical buildings to higher ground. Then return everything to the state we found it.
Why is it that every time private space flight comes up, a segment of the Slashdot crowd goes off with their knees jerking every which way about how it can't be done?
There isn't enough information available to us to say if Rutan's plan will work. Most people here, myself included, wouldn't know what to do with that information even if it were available. Those who try to show-off their intellectual prowess by debunking that nonexistent information look like fools.
The paranoid little cynic in my head keeps shouting that the government-is-God crowd is afraid that private enterprise will slaughter their sacred cow.
There is no known God.
I don't know what I'm talking about, but I'd guess from an energy standpoint it is unlikely that a manmade petroleum making life form would get out of control. The nice thing about oil is it stores a lot of energy. If we enslave this life form for efficient oil production then I'd guess it would have less than usual energy left over to reproduce and put into its survival. It will probably have to be babied to live.
Now maybe if they gave it, or it evolved, the ability to use petroleum as a sort of fat for its own energy storage, it could be a little more dangerous?
I agree that it is a bad thing that subdivisions are chewing up the countryside. A mile from here an "ecological" community just went in, wiped out many square miles of wilderness and ranch land. The only good thing about it is the property value doubled here in 2 years and will probably double again next year.
One thing you maybe haven't considered though is human nature. Some people do fine in cities. I personally felt like a monkey crammed into a zoo cage when I had to live in cities or even suburbia. It makes me anxious and depressed to even pass through a major city. I can't stand the forced intimacy with strangers, the constant noise, the heat and the stench. Some people are energized by that, it wipes me out. It is a shame because I miss all the geeky and cultural things there are to do in cities.
I think the problem could be partially solved by including in cities more secluded outdoor areas complete with domesticated animals. (Commons?) And by making cities less butt ugly by generally greening them up.
Gee dude, haven't you seen "Snatch?" Hungry pigs will do the job better since they eat bones and all. Granted, they aren't as sexy as lions but they are easier and cheaper to procure.
I live about 24 Kilo-alligator-lengths from Kennedy. The intensity of the boom varies from landing to landing. On one occasion, the boom knocked pictures off the wall and may have cracked some plaster. It made me jump out of bed and look for the meteorite that seemed to have crashed through the roof.
I only got 2 hours of sleep last night because, in part, I kept worrying about it jolting me awake. I'm not complaining but I may be if it were a daily occurrence because I don't think it is the sort of thing I'd ever get used to hearing. It wouldn't make any difference if it boomed with a British or French accent.
How about making the outer shell slightly larger and putting the foam inside? How about forgetting the foam and ventilating the volume between the pressurized tanks and the shell with very dry warm air so that the outside isn't cool enough to grow ice. Or shower it it with hot water seconds before liftoff. Or shower it with anti-freeze? Or paint it with something slick and then vibrate it just before launch (or rely on the vibrations caused by launch) to knock off the ice. Since air probably flows smoothly over it, why not put a big air duct over the beanie cap to blow dried air smoothly down the tank so the humid air can't get to it. That's just 15 seconds of thought, I could go on for hours.
The problem is there are many variables I don't know about. How much would making the tank bigger affect how the shuttle is attached to the tank. How much dry air would it take to add enough heat to keep the skin from getting cold and how much would that heat affect the cryogenic gasses? Would hot water thermally stress the skin to the breaking point? Is it feasible to blow enough air over it to keep it dry?
It is a complex problem but almost certainly not an impossible one to solve. The 1 Gigabuck price tag on the current "solution" is almost certainly ludicrous, but that's government. I think it is worth fixing though. 1:100 odds of death isn't something you just ignore when you are aware of the specific problem and a reasonable solution most likely exists.
The real thing to do though is to fast track a shuttle replacement. Since I was just a little kid, I've gone outside and watched every shuttle launch. I'll miss it because it is wonderful to behold. But it is time to move beyond 1960's technology and apply what we've learned from the shuttle. The main key to success, IMO, is letting engineers be engineers and keeping non-engineers (politicians, bureaucrats etc) out of it.
Interesting. TFA calls it a "diesel additive." Any idea why it would be a poor fuel on its own?
Your comparison is fundamentally flawed. The people who bombed the tube intended to kill innocent people. Americans don't intend to kill innocent people in the current wars. In fact we spend a great deal of money on technology trying to avoid it.
That said, we stupidly followed the chimpanzee currently occupying the White House into a war which stands very little if any chance of curtailing terrorism but stands a good chance at escalating it. What's more it comes at the cost of surrendering the very core of what I used to love about my country--freedom. The error is one of ignorance, stupidity, fear and blind patriotism not a desire to murder good people for political and religious gain.
My thoughts are with those of you in London.
I've never been a music geek, but after hearing the 9th today, I think that may change.
It is true, you have to listen to the whole thing. This was the first time I've ever done so and I can't begin to explain what a difference it makes to hear it all together in the intended order. I never really understood before that a symphony creates its own vocabulary and language as it progresses so by the end it says all sorts of things that I can't put into words.
I feel as if I've been somehow raped but in a good way. It keeps making me think of the myth where Zeus becomes an eagle and snatches Ganymede away to Mount Olympus to be his lover and cupbearer. I see it as Zeus making the boy into a god, but at a price. That's the 9th to me, Beethoven dug his talons into me, and for an hour I became a god in Beethoven's heaven and experienced joy so profound it hurt like hell. It was a truly mind altering experience.
English is the problem. Make English spelling phonetically based and consistent so that we don't have to waste valuable time learning all the inconsistencies and the poor spelling problem would be almost entirely fixed. Some people seem to enjoy learning pseudo-random letter sequences (Englishly spelled words (yes, I like to make new adverbs)) and then bitching at everyone else who doesn't share their fascination with boring minutia.
Grammar could also use improvement but not as desperately. Perhaps if we didn't have to waste so much time in school on spelling, we'd have more time to learn proper grammar.
I think it was Thomas Jefferson who proposed following the French system, where a group of intelligent people write ever improving standards for what is acceptable English. Several other languages have similar groups. I think it would make English a more powerful and clear language.
The students I've known who have worked for the University of South Florida often had to go without pay for several weeks at a time because of incompetent officials in charge of pay kept getting tangled in red tape. The idiots in charge didn't care if students couldn't make rent, car payments, or even eat much besides Raman noodles. It was always a sort of "Oops, their bad, so sorry. Who is next in line?" This sort of thing seemed to happen every month or two over a period of several years. Sometimes good professors would end up lending their own money to the students.
Hopefully your gig will go better.
Perhaps 36M Americans don't get enough food. However, this isn't due to a lack of money for the food. The welfare system ensures everyone can have enough to eat.
The government's War on Drugs, improper care for the mentally ill, and welfare system that often encourages dumb behavior (such as having many kids to receive more money or poorly timed withdraw of benefits upon re-employment) promotes poverty.
Dumb choices such as buying Twinkies and soda pop rather than meat and milk causes the poor nutrition. Trading food stamps for recreational drugs is another choice that leads to bad diet.
Sound familiar? Mencken also said:
Others even before him said pretty much the same stuff. I'd look it up but I'm about to lose power due to a storm.
I played with growing algea for oil last year. We used human urine and some cow dung as fertilizer, and a small fish aquarium pump to inject CO2 from the air. I can't find my records right now, but IIRC, it was fairly easy to grow the algea. The main problem I had was figuring out how to get the oil separated from the algea. Do you know of any online articles that describe that process? One little aside I've since read is that some algea can fix nitrogen like legumes do. A byproduct of the process may be decent compost or maybe even cattle feed.
Because the purpose of these security measures isn't actually to make people safe, it is to make people feel safe and happy with government. Image matters more to Americans than does substance. The more of a pain in the ass they can make airport security, the greater your sacrifice, the more real the illusion and the safer Joe Sixpack feels and the more likely he is to vote for and go along with the current administration. Okay, so maybe I haven't hit the nail square on the head, but it is my best guess as to why it is being done so stupidly.
Even with no new measures, do you really think a 9-11 style hijacking could work again any time soon? IMO, if a terrorist pulls a box cutter, that guy is going to have a dozen passengers subduing him in nothing flat. (Didn't something like this happen to the "shoe bomber?" There would possibly be only minor injuries. The reason it worked before was that everyone expected to come out of it alive if they did nothing.
I'm an American but I can honestly say that this does not make me proud to be an American; it makes me proud to be a member of the human species, as does your decency.
Religion played a big part in the fall of Rome. Perhaps much more of that great civilization would have survived had it not been for the Christians. In the name of censoring for God, they paid monks to chisel the 'naughty bits' off works of art, destroyed beautiful pagan temples and otherwise defaced and destroyed the local maxima of culture and science. At that time, at least in West, Rome was the high point of human accomplishment.
Here is some rather biased support for what I say about Christianity's role in destroying knowlege and setting us back a thousand years. Figure out for yourself how much of it is true.
I believe that to judge someone or something one must take motives into account. The monk was trying to spread the Christian virus. That he accidentally saved a work of Archimedes doesn't make him or his religion good. Do we call drunk drivers good people if they accidentally run over bad people?
If I thought the monk wrote over it to save it then I wouldn't think he was a total bastard. I see little chance that he had such good intentions. It was simply a fortunate coincidence.
First, the Feds already had the data and the power to stop the 9-11 murderers. They failed and people died. Claiming to need these ID cards and the like is, IMO, a way of diverting attention away from that failure. The ID system is also a way for them to aquire more power over us.
Trusting government is about as sensible as trusting Jackson to take good care of your little boy during a sleepover at Neverland Ranch. It would probably be easier to name all the laws the government hasn't abused than those it has. A couple of decades ago, when I was a kid watching movies about Nazis and Communists it seemed silly to even think that someday an American would ask to see my freaking travel papers. That particular horror seems likely to happen now.
Government abuses power. Take eminent domain, the law that allows government to take land from an individual in exchange for fair market value for the "general good." A lady near my city voluntarily sold off hundreds of acres of her land for a city backed housing development. She kept 20 acres for herself. After the development went in, the city suddenly remembered that they had to build a school for all the kids in the development. The lady with the land said, too bad, should have thought of that before you filled up all that land with houses. The city took the rest of her land by force. They offered to name the school after the lady's family which had lived there for generations but she told them where to shove the offer. The same city is in the process of stealing my friend's friend's house at below market value. When these types of issues came up at a city manager's meeting, they stopped the public access video feed. That is how wonderful and trustworthy government is. The Feds only seem to be a little more sophisticated at cover-ups.
Also, these sorts of ID cards tend to get abused by everyone. My community college used our social security number as our school ID number. During registration we were supposed to recite the number several times to various clerks. I could easily hear everyone recite their name, number and some other personal data which could be used for identity theft. When I peaceably refused to give my number but continued to insist upon being registered with a randomly chosen number, they threatened to call security to have me removed.
I find it easy to imagine something like this happening in a few years when I try to buy potato chips without carrying my RFID card. As I understand it, grocery stores track what you buy through "loyalty cards" and this info is sometimes shared with the government because supposidly terrorists have predictable buying habits. Watch for it to become law that Uncle Sam needs to know for homeland security how much hemorhoid cream you use. Will you bend over for that one too?