Is someone going to actually compile the responses into statistics?
Might I suggest we make a poll of this? Ok, it's against our general polling philosophy of having meaningless polls, but do we have to be that dogmatic?
I also hate the crowds at firework shows. That's another rant.
Yeah, it's too bad we have to share the planet with other people!/sarcasm off
Seriously, no crowd, no fireworks. It's the crowd that makes the fireworks show feasible. The only fireworks you'll ever see if you live your life as a hermit are meteor showers and maybe the northern lights.
1) Functional climate control, with no "hot spots" or "cold spots". (had a co-worker who once measured the temperature of air blowing into her office at 62 degrees F)
2) Reasonable toilet accomodations. Information workers should not be required to operate a plunger while at work... Must be kept clean and fully functional with redundant fixtures.
3) Windows required - the glass kind. If not in all offices, at least in common areas that people have reasonable access to.
4) Meeting rooms with doors and blockable windows. Unfortunately, once in a while private conversations are necessary.
So theoretically, you can shoot these things farther than you can see on the horizon, if the velocity's high enough. Does this mean air support would be crucial in relaying information about targets below the horizon and that the naval ships can technically hit ships that have no way of retaliating.
Hitting the enemy while he cannot retaliate is the whole point.
Consider squad combat. You're in a squad of soldiers, walking down the road. You spot the enemy walking toward you. He/They have not noticed you. Do you a) wave and shout before firing to get his attention, so that he can retaliate; or b) duck into the bushes and wait for a really good shot?
Hitting while they can't retaliate is the whole point of artillery, air support, sniper rifles, foxholes, camaflauge, tanks, and every other piece of military hardware that exists. The point is to either increase your ability to hit/kill the enemy, or reduce his ability to hit/kill you. The prefered amount of increase is infinite (guarenteed kill) and the prefered amount of decrease is to zero (guarenteed miss/no kill).
There are control issues to be considered as well - nuclear weapons are a poor choice for most situations because they produce far too much collateral damage. But, all other things being equal, a longer range is an improvement to a weapon.
Perhaps you are obliquely suggesting a clause needs to be added to the Geneva Convention: "No military personel shall take action against an unaware opponent, or act while the opponent is unready, disabled, out of range, sleeping, eating, not in the mood, down for repair, on religious leave, or otherwise unready to fight, unless the said opponent is the United States, in which case no rules apply 'cause their evil imperial capitalist pigs who must be resisted at all costs."
...goes a long way towards keeping your company productive.
Besides, I'm guessing that a lot of those PHD's independent projects have something to do or might eventually be integrated into google (PHDs researching information retrieval, web page ranking algorithms, you name it).
Maybe, maybe not. This was also, famously, the strategy of Enron.
1) Get Top People.
2) Give them a lot of latitude.
3) Profit!!
Only, what actually happened was, well, not "Profit!!"
The Red Sox, at least claim that they have broken the curse by destroying (in spectacular fashion) the offending ball that ruined their World Series chances last year.
That was the Cubs. They blew up the foul ball that fan Bartman caught, preventing Alou from (possibly) making the catch.
I think the Cubs still have a goat to deal with though.
The Red Sox have done nothing, and are therefore still screwed - witness the A-Rod deal. The Yankees _may_ win, or not, but the Red Sox cannot. It just fate, man. Someone has to be the forever loser. Boston drew the black marble.
it would have been my goal to make the most wrong essay I could that would still generate a good grade from the system.
Which would be a success for the system, since to do this you would need exacting knowledge of English spelling and grammer. i.e. you would have learned quite a bit.
What I see as being problematic is kids learning to beat the system.
The whole point is to get the kids to "beat the system". It's otherwise known as learning. Produce some writing that meets certain criteria...
If your point is that the criteria are wrong, then we can change that. If the point is that "writing is something that can't be judged" then why have teachers grade it either? Just expose the kids and call it good - base the grade strictly upon attendance (since that is your measure of exposure). The only alternative to this is to have some performance metric - do ____ to demonstrate that you can write. Using a computer to measure ____ seems like an improvement, as a computer won't mark you down for race, religion, opinion, etc - things that tend to drive humans to have lower opinions of each other (and consequently can bias grading).
Not to be defensive, but I am not an aerospace engineer. I was summarizing the paper I was pointing to. Their claim was that it was the bending action that was causing the problems.
Not being an aerospace engineer, I can't evaluate their claim. So, I appreciate your input. I did have some question about the 15-20% number, as G-loading on some combat aircraft routinely runs 5+, which would equate to 500%... but on the other hand I know NAS Fallon (current TopGun home) has retired some F-16s due to fatigue. So, I was sure that it _could_ happen. The why is a bit beyond me though. I have to believe what I read.:-(
Also, just because it's interesting, I live in Carson City, NV. The C-130 that went down did so about 30 miles south of here. It was based about 5 miles south of my home, or about 5 miles north of my work.
The story on that footage was that one of the local TV stations sent a crew down to the fire (it was threating the town of Coleville, but not real seriously, IIRC). The crew was just shooting random stuff, talking to locals, etc. They'd shoot the tankers as they'd drop, and since they were dropping right near town, they could practice shooting moving objects, make lots of attempts, and hopefully come away with some good file footage. Boy did they! And the cameraman really did a knockout job staying on-target and in focus. The NTSB had a great starting point for an investigation.
The firefighting, needless to say, went all to hell. The crashing plane narrowly missed the Coleville High School. No-one on the ground was hit, a minor miracle considering the plane essentially crashed in the middle of town. Doesn't look like it from the footage, I know. Coleville is a highway town - two blocks wide and two miles long, all stretched out on Hwy. 395.
Here's a little more general information about the industry
For those who are too lazy to click, existing airtankers apparently run from 800-3000 gallons.
AVWeb ran an article about "heavy airtankers" - used ex-Airforce/Navy C-130 and P-3s pressed into service as tankers. From this, we get a weight of 9.3lb/gallon for retardant, for those interested. For our 747, this would be 223,200lb, or 111.6 tons. The most interesting part of this paper is where they talk about the fatigue resulting from the rapid unloading of the aircraft. Apparently, this is the main cause of catastrophic wing failure. When you suddenly change the aircraft load by 15-20%, you get a definite bending action in the wings. Just like bending a paperclip, eventually this leads to failure.
The paper also briefly mentions the super-tanker idea (747 or DC10 based).
The other big concern is that the economic payback for larger aircraft is longer than for smaller aircraft. They were talking about the proposition being questionable with an $8 million acquistion cost. I don't think you could get an operation 747 for anything close to that...
I've heard of proposals like this before. For a while there, the FUSSR was trying to get interest up in Western countries to buy/lease IL-76's for similar duty. FUSSR aircraft might make more sense, they are notoriously inexpensive.
Thank god. What's the point of internet voting? If someone can't be arsed to walk 100 yards to vote, why do we want to know what they think -- they probably don't. We have proxy and postal votes for people who really can't make it to a polling station.
I don't know about your locale, but where I live (and most of the United States) people have the option of casting an "absentee ballot". This essentially amounts to voting by mail. You get a form from the registrar's office, fill it out, and mail it in before a specified date. Then, election day, your ballot is actually counted. (Thus fulfilling the constitutional requirement for elections to be held on a single day.)
Absentee ballots were originally intended to allow people who would not be in the vicinity of their homes on election day to vote anyhow. It has evolved into a tool for a substantial chunk of the electorate to vote from home.
Secure internet voting would be a logical replacement for absentee ballots.
Also, keep in mind that there really isn't much fraud protection in the existing system. Nothing stops you from registering your dog, getting an absentee ballot for him, and casting a vote in his name. When we're evaluating voting systems, keep that in mind. The present system is very insecure - it's ultimately reliant on people being honest. In places and times when people haven't been as honest, fraud has occurred. Yes, in the USA. Yes, in democratic strongholds like New York and Chicago. I don't know about LA, I think they are too laid back to cheat very much (as cheating does require _some_ effort.)
Arkin may or may not have done some decent science in this work. But it foremost sounds like an attempt to grab attention. And that isn't nice: it not just detracts from other good research, in the case of proclaiming an HIV cure, it has the potential to hurt people.
I agree. The worst thing that can happen is for people to begin thinking "They've cured AIDS", and change their behavior - throwing away condoms, sharing needles, becoming more promicuous, etc, when there is actually no cure.
Technological advances are going to drive the price point for this technology down ever further. In 10 years, should we be concerned if $5,000 in supplies and computing equipment allows this same feat to be accomplished?
I'm not too worried about this. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like you are suggesting that this might be used by terrorists to inflict damage on a world they don't like.
If so, the problem with this is that for the really damaging stuff - airborne spread viruses - the damage would almost inveitably be worse in the third world than in the Western world.
Comparatively, we've got the doctors, hospitals, and support systems to reduce the severity of a plague. The third world doesn't. Also, Western lifestyles are generally less plague succeptable - we have generally larger personal spaces, which reduces contagion rates. The population is generally literate, and tends to believe authorities when they issue directives on health and safety. The third world, by contrast, live in larger family units, don't generally have good disease theory awareness, and are prone to relying on traditional beliefs and remedies that are unlikely to be effective against this kind of pandemic.
Inflicting a highly contagious disease might be a "reasonable" thing for a radical environmental group that believes the human population is wildly excessive. It might also work for a nilhist or apocaleptic group. But most groups really have a vision for planet Earth that includes most of their relatives still alive. For those groups, particularly those from undeveloped countries, wildly contagious biological weapons don't make sense.
Now, if you could target your virus at one particular race, then your on VERY dangerous ground. There are any number of racial conflict around the world that participants might be tempted to settle by wiping out the other side entirely.
Which means the human race may have just taken its first step into becoming irreversibly bound to our technology to continue our existence and evolution as a species.
I disagree.
1) Most of the human race IS NOT infected with HIV/AIDS. Talking about AIDS like it is the plague is overestimating it dramatically. AIDS simply isn't that infectious. For crying out loud, you have to exchange BLOOD or have sex with someone to get it, same as Ebola. The reason we don't have millions running around with Ebola is victims get symptoms/die right away (comparatively) and we QUARENTINE them. AIDS will never be as deadly as smallpox, diptheria, et.al. are/were. It's method of contagion is way too limiting.
2) There really is a substantial minority of the population that is monogamous (or celibate - consider \.). They are under almost no threat from AIDS. If the epidemic continues long enough, behaviors will change, or at least people exhibit non-monogamous behavior will be come more rare. Plain old evolution in action.
Assuming, of course, that we don't find a real cure/vaccine.
In short, you can imagine in a thousand years the human race having lost all technology for whatever reason - and still surviving. There might be much stronger taboos against non-monogamous behavior, and these ignorant future humans might have forgotten _WHY_ they have these taboos... but they won't be wiped out.
Actually, thinking cynically about it, you'd expect that after a while the local strong man would decide that the taboo wasn't working for him and he needed women more/more women than the geeky toolmaker did, so that taboo would have to become "toolmakers must be complete celibate, and chiefs must have all the women". Just human nature in action...
Unless all those strong men are genetically eliminated by the evolutionary effects of AIDS?? Finally, geeks rule!! (KIDDING!!! no, I don't want to see ANYONE die from AIDS, even jocks who deserve it.)
I think most consumers are aware of the extreem optimism of those numbers on any type of vehicle.
I disagree, sort of. When the EPA first started publishing numbers, their milage figures where hopelessly optimistic. My mom had a Pinto in that era. The car was supposed to get 28/36 or something like that. She never did better than about 25 under any conditions.
On the other hand, they have improved dramatically. My last three cars (over 14 years) have had actual milage *better* than the EPA estimates. For reference, I had two Mustangs and a WRX (current). The Mustangs where 17/24, and I normally got 20/25. A bit higher on really long trips. The Subaru is rated 20/28, IIRC, and I get 25 just driving around (mix of city and highway) and I've gotten just over 30MPG on long trips.
Some of this is driving style. I think I have a more economical driving style than most, in spite of my vehicle preferences. But you have to give some credit to the EPA for improving their numbers as well.
Of course, my motorcycle gets 65-70MPG just driving around. Milage _drops_ on long trips, probably because my speeds pick up and I add the luggage (=much larger cross-section). The combination drags me down to the 50MPG range.
Also, interestingly, the Mustangs got the same or better milage at relatively high speeds (80mph). I think this is because the engine runs more efficiently at these RPMs. In the 5.0 series Mustangs, 60mph~=1500RPM; 80mph~=2000RPM. The cars are actually faster in 4th gear than 5th, 5th gear doesn't allow the engine to develop enough horsepower to get past 130mph.
Actually, they can. They just *mostly* don't. It takes a strange set of circumstances to get a gas tank explosion, but it can happen.
The biggie is a fire external to the gas tank, when the tank is sealed shut. You get a hot tank, which vaporizes (some of) the gas - but the mix inside the tank is too rich to explode. Eventually, with enough heat, the tank will tear/leak/unseal, at which point you get a rapid spread of the pressurized/vaporized fuel, mixing with atmospheric O2. BOOM!
Granted, even then it isn't going to be very bomb-like. It's a much lower speed "explosion". And, as noted, it is pretty rare that a car fire will burn long enough to heat up the tank enough to cause this - most auto fires occur in urban areas, and fire departments are right on top of them. Also, the "tank sealed" is a bit rare too -most of them aren't quite that air tight - a rubber gasket or something will burn through and the gas will leak out and burn in a non-explosive manner. So, it takes a wreck, with peculiar damage to the vehical and a fire, and a slow response by the fire suppression people to have a chance of explosion.
Or a Hollywood stunt team...:-)
As far as the battery acid, I'd be less worried about it exploding (low/no risk) and more worried about it simply burning and producing very nasty fumes. Or simply looking all innocent and harmless lying there on the ground, till some poor dog walks through it...
If for no other reason than that he's riding this "contraption" without a shirt! I can understand wearing a leather jacket, or hell even a t-shirt - but to go topless on something like that takes serious balls...
It's Burning Man. He is very conservatively dressed for this venue. I mean, he has *some* clothing on...
Funny part is snail mail has the same bugs and I don't hear anybody yelling "Snail mail must die!"
No, it doesn't. I don't receive ANY porn come-ons via USPS. I get lots via e-mail.
I am not and never have been a subscriber or user of porn. I don't want it, and find it offensive. I certainly hope both my company and ISP adopt a more authenticatable mail protocol.
Frankly, I do not see great value in anonimity. If you seriously think John Ashcroft is going to get you for speaking your mind, you're smoking too much pot. Or your suggesting killing the president or something that you SHOULD be investigated for.
I think you're applying the law incorrectly. We are, after all, allowed to legally tape that which we hear on the radio. As pointed out by another poster, the Russians are essentially running a high bandwidth radio station. Give them a call (via their convinient website) and they'll play the song of your choice, on a channel convienent to you, at a time of your choosing. It's essentially up to you to "record" it - that is, save a copy to disk.
I mean, is it illegal to listen to Russian radio?
Is it illegal to tape what you hear?
If not, then the only illegality here would be if the Russian's were violating their licence by playing music to order - something the RIAA is nervous and restrictive about in the US...
More importantly, has anybody tried this? I found it many months ago, but I am loath to send my credit card data to a semi-shady Russian site, and I am worried that credit card records could be used to go after people who used the site when it (inevitably) gets shut down eventually. What do people think?
My credit card company will generate one-time-use credit card numbers for me through their web site - I imagine many other banks do the same. This addresses the "shady Russian site" issue. I suspect you could still be tracked down by the RIAA though.
Most of the 1000cc sportbikes on the market today will do a nice 140+ mph quarter mile, top out at 180+ mph, and corner better than anything short of an indy car for around $10k.
Until you add a tiny bit of sand or gravel (or paint with water on it) to the road...
I'm sympathetic, really. I have a bike. It's not a crotch rocket, but it's still way faster than my WRX up to about 90mph. As long as the road is clean. $^#&, I hate sand on the road!
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Might I suggest we make a poll of this? Ok, it's against our general polling philosophy of having meaningless polls, but do we have to be that dogmatic?
Yeah, it's too bad we have to share the planet with other people! /sarcasm off
Seriously, no crowd, no fireworks. It's the crowd that makes the fireworks show feasible. The only fireworks you'll ever see if you live your life as a hermit are meteor showers and maybe the northern lights.
2) Reasonable toilet accomodations. Information workers should not be required to operate a plunger while at work... Must be kept clean and fully functional with redundant fixtures.
3) Windows required - the glass kind. If not in all offices, at least in common areas that people have reasonable access to.
4) Meeting rooms with doors and blockable windows. Unfortunately, once in a while private conversations are necessary.
Hitting the enemy while he cannot retaliate is the whole point.
Consider squad combat. You're in a squad of soldiers, walking down the road. You spot the enemy walking toward you. He/They have not noticed you. Do you a) wave and shout before firing to get his attention, so that he can retaliate; or b) duck into the bushes and wait for a really good shot?
Hitting while they can't retaliate is the whole point of artillery, air support, sniper rifles, foxholes, camaflauge, tanks, and every other piece of military hardware that exists. The point is to either increase your ability to hit/kill the enemy, or reduce his ability to hit/kill you. The prefered amount of increase is infinite (guarenteed kill) and the prefered amount of decrease is to zero (guarenteed miss/no kill).
There are control issues to be considered as well - nuclear weapons are a poor choice for most situations because they produce far too much collateral damage. But, all other things being equal, a longer range is an improvement to a weapon.
Perhaps you are obliquely suggesting a clause needs to be added to the Geneva Convention: "No military personel shall take action against an unaware opponent, or act while the opponent is unready, disabled, out of range, sleeping, eating, not in the mood, down for repair, on religious leave, or otherwise unready to fight, unless the said opponent is the United States, in which case no rules apply 'cause their evil imperial capitalist pigs who must be resisted at all costs."
That and a little capitalization and punctuation work...
Unless the goal was feeding the fish.
Besides, I'm guessing that a lot of those PHD's independent projects have something to do or might eventually be integrated into google (PHDs researching information retrieval, web page ranking algorithms, you name it).
Maybe, maybe not. This was also, famously, the strategy of Enron.
1) Get Top People.
2) Give them a lot of latitude.
3) Profit!!
Only, what actually happened was, well, not "Profit!!"
That was the Cubs. They blew up the foul ball that fan Bartman caught, preventing Alou from (possibly) making the catch.
I think the Cubs still have a goat to deal with though.
The Red Sox have done nothing, and are therefore still screwed - witness the A-Rod deal. The Yankees _may_ win, or not, but the Red Sox cannot. It just fate, man. Someone has to be the forever loser. Boston drew the black marble.
it would have been my goal to make the most wrong essay I could that would still generate a good grade from the system. Which would be a success for the system, since to do this you would need exacting knowledge of English spelling and grammer. i.e. you would have learned quite a bit.
The whole point is to get the kids to "beat the system". It's otherwise known as learning. Produce some writing that meets certain criteria...
If your point is that the criteria are wrong, then we can change that. If the point is that "writing is something that can't be judged" then why have teachers grade it either? Just expose the kids and call it good - base the grade strictly upon attendance (since that is your measure of exposure). The only alternative to this is to have some performance metric - do ____ to demonstrate that you can write. Using a computer to measure ____ seems like an improvement, as a computer won't mark you down for race, religion, opinion, etc - things that tend to drive humans to have lower opinions of each other (and consequently can bias grading).
I did not know that. Thanks for informing me.
Yeah, I guess I should have added a smiley or something. Or my sense of humor is just tooo dry.
Problem with this is that it may actually encourage people to lay mines, so as to cause lawyers to be consumed in the de-mining process...
Not to be defensive, but I am not an aerospace engineer. I was summarizing the paper I was pointing to. Their claim was that it was the bending action that was causing the problems.
Not being an aerospace engineer, I can't evaluate their claim. So, I appreciate your input. I did have some question about the 15-20% number, as G-loading on some combat aircraft routinely runs 5+, which would equate to 500%... but on the other hand I know NAS Fallon (current TopGun home) has retired some F-16s due to fatigue. So, I was sure that it _could_ happen. The why is a bit beyond me though. I have to believe what I read. :-(
Also, just because it's interesting, I live in Carson City, NV. The C-130 that went down did so about 30 miles south of here. It was based about 5 miles south of my home, or about 5 miles north of my work.
The story on that footage was that one of the local TV stations sent a crew down to the fire (it was threating the town of Coleville, but not real seriously, IIRC). The crew was just shooting random stuff, talking to locals, etc. They'd shoot the tankers as they'd drop, and since they were dropping right near town, they could practice shooting moving objects, make lots of attempts, and hopefully come away with some good file footage. Boy did they! And the cameraman really did a knockout job staying on-target and in focus. The NTSB had a great starting point for an investigation.
The firefighting, needless to say, went all to hell. The crashing plane narrowly missed the Coleville High School. No-one on the ground was hit, a minor miracle considering the plane essentially crashed in the middle of town. Doesn't look like it from the footage, I know. Coleville is a highway town - two blocks wide and two miles long, all stretched out on Hwy. 395.
AVWeb ran an article about "heavy airtankers" - used ex-Airforce/Navy C-130 and P-3s pressed into service as tankers. From this, we get a weight of 9.3lb/gallon for retardant, for those interested. For our 747, this would be 223,200lb, or 111.6 tons. The most interesting part of this paper is where they talk about the fatigue resulting from the rapid unloading of the aircraft. Apparently, this is the main cause of catastrophic wing failure. When you suddenly change the aircraft load by 15-20%, you get a definite bending action in the wings. Just like bending a paperclip, eventually this leads to failure.
The paper also briefly mentions the super-tanker idea (747 or DC10 based).
The other big concern is that the economic payback for larger aircraft is longer than for smaller aircraft. They were talking about the proposition being questionable with an $8 million acquistion cost. I don't think you could get an operation 747 for anything close to that...
I've heard of proposals like this before. For a while there, the FUSSR was trying to get interest up in Western countries to buy/lease IL-76's for similar duty. FUSSR aircraft might make more sense, they are notoriously inexpensive.
I don't know about your locale, but where I live (and most of the United States) people have the option of casting an "absentee ballot". This essentially amounts to voting by mail. You get a form from the registrar's office, fill it out, and mail it in before a specified date. Then, election day, your ballot is actually counted. (Thus fulfilling the constitutional requirement for elections to be held on a single day.)
Absentee ballots were originally intended to allow people who would not be in the vicinity of their homes on election day to vote anyhow. It has evolved into a tool for a substantial chunk of the electorate to vote from home.
Secure internet voting would be a logical replacement for absentee ballots.
Also, keep in mind that there really isn't much fraud protection in the existing system. Nothing stops you from registering your dog, getting an absentee ballot for him, and casting a vote in his name. When we're evaluating voting systems, keep that in mind. The present system is very insecure - it's ultimately reliant on people being honest. In places and times when people haven't been as honest, fraud has occurred. Yes, in the USA. Yes, in democratic strongholds like New York and Chicago. I don't know about LA, I think they are too laid back to cheat very much (as cheating does require _some_ effort.)
I agree. The worst thing that can happen is for people to begin thinking "They've cured AIDS", and change their behavior - throwing away condoms, sharing needles, becoming more promicuous, etc, when there is actually no cure.
I'm not too worried about this. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like you are suggesting that this might be used by terrorists to inflict damage on a world they don't like.
If so, the problem with this is that for the really damaging stuff - airborne spread viruses - the damage would almost inveitably be worse in the third world than in the Western world.
Comparatively, we've got the doctors, hospitals, and support systems to reduce the severity of a plague. The third world doesn't. Also, Western lifestyles are generally less plague succeptable - we have generally larger personal spaces, which reduces contagion rates. The population is generally literate, and tends to believe authorities when they issue directives on health and safety. The third world, by contrast, live in larger family units, don't generally have good disease theory awareness, and are prone to relying on traditional beliefs and remedies that are unlikely to be effective against this kind of pandemic.
Inflicting a highly contagious disease might be a "reasonable" thing for a radical environmental group that believes the human population is wildly excessive. It might also work for a nilhist or apocaleptic group. But most groups really have a vision for planet Earth that includes most of their relatives still alive. For those groups, particularly those from undeveloped countries, wildly contagious biological weapons don't make sense.
Now, if you could target your virus at one particular race, then your on VERY dangerous ground. There are any number of racial conflict around the world that participants might be tempted to settle by wiping out the other side entirely.
I disagree.
1) Most of the human race IS NOT infected with HIV/AIDS. Talking about AIDS like it is the plague is overestimating it dramatically. AIDS simply isn't that infectious. For crying out loud, you have to exchange BLOOD or have sex with someone to get it, same as Ebola. The reason we don't have millions running around with Ebola is victims get symptoms/die right away (comparatively) and we QUARENTINE them. AIDS will never be as deadly as smallpox, diptheria, et.al. are/were. It's method of contagion is way too limiting.
2) There really is a substantial minority of the population that is monogamous (or celibate - consider \.). They are under almost no threat from AIDS. If the epidemic continues long enough, behaviors will change, or at least people exhibit non-monogamous behavior will be come more rare. Plain old evolution in action.
Assuming, of course, that we don't find a real cure/vaccine.
In short, you can imagine in a thousand years the human race having lost all technology for whatever reason - and still surviving. There might be much stronger taboos against non-monogamous behavior, and these ignorant future humans might have forgotten _WHY_ they have these taboos... but they won't be wiped out.
Actually, thinking cynically about it, you'd expect that after a while the local strong man would decide that the taboo wasn't working for him and he needed women more/more women than the geeky toolmaker did, so that taboo would have to become "toolmakers must be complete celibate, and chiefs must have all the women". Just human nature in action...
Unless all those strong men are genetically eliminated by the evolutionary effects of AIDS?? Finally, geeks rule!! (KIDDING!!! no, I don't want to see ANYONE die from AIDS, even jocks who deserve it.)
I disagree, sort of. When the EPA first started publishing numbers, their milage figures where hopelessly optimistic. My mom had a Pinto in that era. The car was supposed to get 28/36 or something like that. She never did better than about 25 under any conditions.
On the other hand, they have improved dramatically. My last three cars (over 14 years) have had actual milage *better* than the EPA estimates. For reference, I had two Mustangs and a WRX (current). The Mustangs where 17/24, and I normally got 20/25. A bit higher on really long trips. The Subaru is rated 20/28, IIRC, and I get 25 just driving around (mix of city and highway) and I've gotten just over 30MPG on long trips.
Some of this is driving style. I think I have a more economical driving style than most, in spite of my vehicle preferences. But you have to give some credit to the EPA for improving their numbers as well.
Of course, my motorcycle gets 65-70MPG just driving around. Milage _drops_ on long trips, probably because my speeds pick up and I add the luggage (=much larger cross-section). The combination drags me down to the 50MPG range.
Also, interestingly, the Mustangs got the same or better milage at relatively high speeds (80mph). I think this is because the engine runs more efficiently at these RPMs. In the 5.0 series Mustangs, 60mph~=1500RPM; 80mph~=2000RPM. The cars are actually faster in 4th gear than 5th, 5th gear doesn't allow the engine to develop enough horsepower to get past 130mph.
Actually, they can. They just *mostly* don't. It takes a strange set of circumstances to get a gas tank explosion, but it can happen.
The biggie is a fire external to the gas tank, when the tank is sealed shut. You get a hot tank, which vaporizes (some of) the gas - but the mix inside the tank is too rich to explode. Eventually, with enough heat, the tank will tear/leak/unseal, at which point you get a rapid spread of the pressurized/vaporized fuel, mixing with atmospheric O2. BOOM!
Granted, even then it isn't going to be very bomb-like. It's a much lower speed "explosion". And, as noted, it is pretty rare that a car fire will burn long enough to heat up the tank enough to cause this - most auto fires occur in urban areas, and fire departments are right on top of them. Also, the "tank sealed" is a bit rare too -most of them aren't quite that air tight - a rubber gasket or something will burn through and the gas will leak out and burn in a non-explosive manner. So, it takes a wreck, with peculiar damage to the vehical and a fire, and a slow response by the fire suppression people to have a chance of explosion.
Or a Hollywood stunt team... :-)
As far as the battery acid, I'd be less worried about it exploding (low/no risk) and more worried about it simply burning and producing very nasty fumes. Or simply looking all innocent and harmless lying there on the ground, till some poor dog walks through it...
It's Burning Man. He is very conservatively dressed for this venue. I mean, he has *some* clothing on...
No, it doesn't. I don't receive ANY porn come-ons via USPS. I get lots via e-mail.
I am not and never have been a subscriber or user of porn. I don't want it, and find it offensive. I certainly hope both my company and ISP adopt a more authenticatable mail protocol.
Frankly, I do not see great value in anonimity. If you seriously think John Ashcroft is going to get you for speaking your mind, you're smoking too much pot. Or your suggesting killing the president or something that you SHOULD be investigated for.
I mean, is it illegal to listen to Russian radio?
Is it illegal to tape what you hear?
If not, then the only illegality here would be if the Russian's were violating their licence by playing music to order - something the RIAA is nervous and restrictive about in the US...
My credit card company will generate one-time-use credit card numbers for me through their web site - I imagine many other banks do the same. This addresses the "shady Russian site" issue. I suspect you could still be tracked down by the RIAA though.
Until you add a tiny bit of sand or gravel (or paint with water on it) to the road...
I'm sympathetic, really. I have a bike. It's not a crotch rocket, but it's still way faster than my WRX up to about 90mph. As long as the road is clean. $^#&, I hate sand on the road!