The existence of the electromagnetic pulse has been known since the 1940's when nuclear weapons were being developed and tested. However, because of lack of data, the effects of an EMP were not fully known until 1962. At this time, the United States was conducting a series of high-altitude atmospheric tests, code named "Fishbowl." The nuclear explosion, "Starfish Prime," which was detonated in the Pacific Ocean 800 miles from Hawaii, caused an EMP that disrupted radio stations and electrical equipment throughout Hawaii. Consequently, in 1963, the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty to counter the considerable threat posed by EMPs. Unfortunately, the destructive potential of an EMP increases everyday as society becomes evermore technological because of an escalating dependence on electronics.
If I'm wrong, give me some citations or references and I'll be more than happy to review them - and if I'm proven wrong I'll admit that I was mis-informed, or that my information is out-of-date...or that I was dead-wrong.
The Navy wanted to trim costs by using off-the-shelf components, the operating system being one of them. The plan is to run pretty much the entire ship off of Windows, except, presumably (I hope) the reactor - last I heard Windows was explicitly prohibited from being used for reactor control because it wasn't a "real time" OS.
Time to dust off the clue by four - remember theYorktown?
Don't want to learn from history? Let's go straight to the source:
"The software will run the bulk of the command and control systems in the three "decision centers" being designed into the CVN-77s architecture" - Brian Roach, Lockheed Alliance manager for Microsoft Federal.
Since Bill Gates became the 2nd largest stockholder in Newport News Shipbuilding and guaranteed that the Ronald Reagan class of aircraft carrier will be Windows 2000 based, how does the Navy deal with this issue? Or have they addressed it at all? The last thing we need is for just one person in that population 5,000 floating city with malicious intentions to pop a rootkit into the mess that is navigation, fire control or general operations.
So we are left with two options:
a) Windows 2000 is impervious to rootkits, either off the shelf or through modifications unavailable to the general public
b) The US Navy is running an unsecurable OS for the most advanced surface ships in the world - with nuclear reactors to boot.
Look, dude, the issue is whether it is cheaper to provide services to people living closer together or farther apart.
No, the issue is whether it is more expensive to maintain a population density of 10194/sq km or a population density of 8.6/sq km.
The cost to build and maintain a road between house A, house B, and house C is far, far cheaper if those houses are separated by 10 feet versus separated by a mile.
True, if and only if the engineering was the same. Rural roads need not be built to anything even close to the same specs as a city road. New York -must- put all water and sewer lines directly under the street, shoehorning them in between all of the cabling, subway tunnels, pipes, conduit and who knows what else. The streets must be engineered to carry hundreds of thousands of cars, trucks and busses over massive voids filled with rushing, vibrating trains. In the rural area you can be served quite nicely by grading a strip of dirt.
Substitute "electricity" and "telephone" for the word "road" in the previous paragraph and you'll see that's it far, far cheaper to provide all three services to people who live close together.
In other words, you claim that Elko, NV needs the same robust electrical grid as Los Angeles? That wiring 100 farmhouses requires the same fault protection and manhours as stringing 100 apartments in a brick apartment complex? 100 toasters spread out across 10 square miles is a piece of cake - 100 toasters on a single circuit, on the other hand....
Does building an airport in Marquette require the same effort as JFK International, just divide by 1,000?
Because if you want to go that route, why don't you tell me how much more in taxes do the New Yorkers pay on their higher salaries than someone in Jupiter in the first place? New Yorkers are making a hell of a lot more money, so that means they're also paying a hell of lot more in income taxes.
Taxes are much higher in NYC than in, say, Buffalo. But this supports my point, not yours - they need more taxes in NYC because everything is more expensive.
Where is it cheaper and easier to tear up the street to repair a ruptured sewer: 5th Avenue, New York or 131st St in Strool, SD? Let's say they both receive grants from the Feds to cover the full cost. NYC has to pay their sewer workers higher wages because of the higher cost of living. Where does DC send the larger check?
Break out road and bridge maintenance costs. Now, compare these costs between the two cities by using the percentage of income paid by city residents in order to eliminate cost of living differences.
At issue is whether or not Western Washington is subsidizing Eastern Washington, and whether it is more expensive to maintain a large city or a small one. Ferraris cost more than Yugos - that the Ferrari owner spends 0.01% of his household income for 2005 on his car and the Yugo owner spends 90% of his income on his is irrelevant.
The individuals pay for the wells - usually without government help. Same thing with the propane tanks.
Yeah, and individuals in the cities pay for their city services as well, also usually without government help.
Let's go through the federal budget and see how many people living in large cities benefit from public subsidies for their water supply (all of them. Every single last one of them) and count up the checks that the government contributed to the well that services me. Do you think for one second that Las Vegas has paid for their own water supply? That's just silly.
I graduated in the middle of the desert, just south of the Mojave, with a class of 64. There were 500 people total in the school. You are limiting your observations to hicks who live miles and miles from each other. Well, those are not the only rural people. Rural also includes towns the size of 5,000.
You stated that all schools needed to have separate classrooms for each grade. And rural is rural, with more rural being more rural than others. Entirely irrelevant.
This is Slashdot, not some academic community. Google it yourself. I'm not here to teach you something obvious that you should already know.
I have presented my supporting evidence. I have no intention of looking up yours, especially when I don't believe it exists.
Rural areas have fewer transportation needs than cities which means the transportation costs are considerably lower. Fewer roads, fewer streetlights, fewer traffic lights, fewer collisions.
When you compare the total costs of a single town of 5,000 to another single town of 1,000,000, then and only then you are correct. However, if you break those costs out per person, then you are incorrect.
For the record, Jupiter, FL's per capita expenditures is just under $2,000/person. Detroit, MI's per capita expenditures come out somewhere in the neighborhood of $4,000/person. New York City's expenditures are somewhere around $6,000/person. How many cities spend more than $6,000/person per year, let alone how many cities with a population under 15,000? 10,000? 5,000?
And just to keep things focused, Seattle spends about $5,000/year for each of its 550,000ish residents while Spokane's 180,000 residents see less than half that spent on them ($2,300 for those playing at home).
Where are the economies of scale? I did the research and the numbers point to one conclusion: it is more expensive per person to run a large city than it is a small one.
The federal government gets most of its taxes from the large cities, because that's where the people making the most money live.
and
Again, the people living in the cities make more money than people living in the country. And thus, they also pay more in income taxes.
Perhaps a larger sum, but certainly not per capita. I guarantee that Barrington, IL has a higher contribution per capita than Detroit, Chicago or LA. And guess which cities see a greater outlay per capita?
But then you need people to drill the wells and service the pumps. Those people and their equipment cost money. And you probably need at least one in each of those towns of 5,000. So, that's at least an additional 200 people and their equipment you have to pay.
The individuals pay for the wells - usually without government help. Same thing with the propane tanks.
As for the fewer roads argument, that is just false. If you spread a million people into 200 towns of 5,000 people each with a distance of 30 miles between each town, then you are going to spend a fortune creating a network of roads to connect all these people together.
If you think you're right then crunch the numbers and see who has a greater density of taxpayer funded roads - Cody, WY or Atlanta, GA.
Argument B is also meaningless because each school needs separate rooms for each grade, regardless of whether they are rural or urban.
Are you sure about that? I've known people who had a graduating class size of six - they didn't have 12 separate rooms in their school. I, personally, in a suburban school in a soundly middle class neighborhood shared a classroom with 3rd and 4th graders.
Let's go back to the 5,000 people spread over 200 towns versus a million people in one city. That one city would probably have one district. Granted, that district is large, but it's relatively cheap per person due to economies of scale. Now, those 200 towns would likely each have their own districts. So, each town duplicates administration, buses, and facilities. And each town has to have more than it needs in order to accommodate any fluctuations in enrollment. So, not only are schools in those towns more expensive, but they are also more wasteful as well.
The largest public school district in the country is New York, with just over 1 million students. The 100th largest is Cherry Creek 5 in Greenwood, Colorado with about 45,000. According to your economies of scale theory New York's annual expenditures of $11,000/student should be smaller than Cherry Creek 5's paltry-by-comparison $7,125/student, but it doesn't quite work out that way.
Theories are nice, but are you prepared to provide any hard numbers to support your assertions?
Cities, due to their density have much lower tranportation costs.
Rural areas have fewer transportation needs than cities which means the transportation costs are considerably lower. Fewer roads, fewer streetlights, fewer traffic lights, fewer collisions...
Who needs a larger police force - the 600,000 people in Washington, DC or the 600,000 people in North Dakota? Who has a greater need for firemen and paramedics - 900,000 people in San Jose or 900,000 people in Montana?
It is much cheaper, per person, to get water and gas services to a single apartment building than 100 rural farms, or even 100 suburban homes.
That's why farms use wells and propane.
Virtually anything done in a city is cheaper per person than it is in rural areas.
Municipal services? What is the cost per person of salaries of city employees alone in New York City vs the the metric for residents of Wyoming?
Urban taxes pay for the network of roads and highways that make suburbs possible.
Nope... ever see the tax rates of suburban houses spike to pay for the new influx?
Urban taxes pay the farm subsidizes.
Nope... federal.
Urban taxes pay for public transit outside of cities.
How many times have you caught the bus in rural Idaho?
Urban taxes pay for rural schools and hospitals.
Federal again. And local. And rural education is much cheaper than urban because:
a) the land for the schools is much cheaper
b) with fewer students you need smaller buildings - energy efficiency is easier to achieve
c) Not nearly as many administrators or lunchlady Dorris overhead
Basically, if an ISP can make good money off providing broadband service, why will it let a community body run such projects for free or cheap?
They are fighting tooth and nail to prevent the cities from providing this service: they don't want to provide the service themselves, but they don't want anybody else to provide the service, either. While the various companies involved aren't actually declaring a goal of ensuring that certain groups of people don't have broadband access, this is indeed the de facto result.
In many communities the local cable franchise has a codified monopoly for wired TV delivery systems, with the cables almost always running across public land for which they pay anywhere from nothing to a pittance. The cities explicitly exclude any other cable company from running cables across that same land which guarantees a monopoly for the cable company. In some areas a similar arrangement exists with landlines for the POTS: where I currently reside there is one and only one wired telephone service available because of an exclusive contract signed with the municipality. Apples to apples competition is excluded by law and the POTS company charges appropriately and refuses to upgrade their system in terms of quality or features - after 8 years they still flatly and explicitly refuse to provide DSL service here and "have no plans" to ever do so in the future.
When the county announced plans for a municipal wifi solution for all residents the POTSco (which also happens to be a major wireless carrier) quickly muttered something about how this is unfair because at some point in the future they may want to consider wireless broadband for the area (but they still "have no plans" to actually introduce the service here) and are fighting tooth and nail against the county's plan.
What is even more annoying is that within 10 miles of my current address they are actively engaged in the construction of various subdivisions that are collectively worth somewhere between.75 - 1.25 billion dollars. If the county had listened to people who knew better 10 years ago they would have require any new subdivision to bring fiber to the entry, then 1/3 of one of the largest counties of the state would have had fiber by now because if fiber is available across the street then it is trivial to make it available for you as well.
The problem is that there is no transparency in the process: how do you know that the judge who authorizes these wiretaps is an actual judge? IIRC the judge in question simply rubber stamps each and every wiretap request that comes before him and has only been known to deny a single tap (which happened to be related to 9-11 IIRC).
To make matters worse, there are probably secret legislation, rules and regulations that are followed but are classified and no never revealed. The de facto law (administrative rule that carries the weight of law to be precise) that requires photo identification to board a plane. This is the consequence of living under a government that claims soverign immunity from responsibility or even the need to justify its actions.
Section 505 of the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act makes modifications to this codified section of law which clearly allows the FBI to gather evidence on demand without a warrant.
This is what happens when one half of your company is fighting with (and suing) the other half: either decide to sell music and movies, decide to sell mp3 and DVD burners, or find something other than an arms race to struggle to create/defeat unbreakable protection schemes.
A very useful emergency gadget would be a pre-assembled crystal radio kit - connect to ground and you'd be able to hear AM broadcasts with no power or cranking required.
At home I bought Office 95, 97 and 2000 - mainly to keep up with the latest version of Outlook. Office XP offered nothing new so I sat that upgrade out. Then I found Firefox and got into that: when I bought the new system I never bothered to install Outlook because Firefox gave me everything I need without the insecurity and major hassles of Outlook Express. In other words, in my eyes MS failed to innovate and give me what I need so I gave them the boot. I now use three and only three MS products: XP (media center edition - not selected because that's what I wanted but because I wanted an Athlon 64 processor and at the time the system I wanted with the features I wanted at the price I wanted came with XP MCE), Streets & Trips (because that is what is used in the workplace, not because of a specific choice) and Rise of Nations.
Microsoft's business model is probably 90% intertial in nature - they don't seek to attract new customers but rely on the status quo to survive. Aside from games, what was the last MS product that was actually aimed at enticing people to switch because they were trying to be a serious competitor? Mappoint? Everything else is marketed as going with the flow, stick with the familiar, don't rock the boat, stay tried and true, etc.
Not that this can't be profitable - it will make gobs of money and MS is so large and cash-rich that they will probably never die. They don't innovate because they don't have to.
I can only wish: Speakeasy was checked and report that I'm too far away - "just over 3 miles". Just outside of Verizon's new wireless broadband service area so that's not an option.
I would jump at the opportunity to volunteer my yard the location for a low-powered neighborhood uplink to this service. Instead of expensive towers that provide access to everybody all at once and require various approval from the FCC and FAA (if the tower is tall enough) find people willing to host an uplink for a few square blocks. People like me. No matter which route I go -any- internet access will cost about $60 months - I either need to get a land line + DSL because nobody will provide DSL unless the line has an active phone number or I can get Comcast (and only Comcast because the local township granted them exclusive rights of service. If Google provides the equipment and the link I will be more than happy to ensure that my neighbors have another alternative for internet access.
Just wait until some punk kid jumps in, pushes all of the buttons then jumps back out again.
In other news, Lovers' Lane adult shops introduces the first sub-orbital all glass elevator for those interested in joining the mile high club, the two mile high club, the three mile high club... pilots of 747s and SR-71s have started to fight over who gets to navigate into the general area.
For quick touchups I use the free programpaint.net from Washington State University. Quick, simple, some power under the hood (it does layers!) and has more features than I know how to use.
I've downloaded GIMP... had no idea what to do with it so after a couple sessions of randomly pushing buttons left it sit to gather stray 0s and 1s that collect on my HDD much like the dust gathers on my Windows 95 MCP book.
A Davy Crockett isn't going to bring about nuclear winter: you get far more soot from building a skyscraper or a small forest fire.
As for "advanced" biological weapons, they don't have to be advanced. In days ancient people would wage war by flinging dead cows over the city wall by catapult.
Once upon a time the US Army developed an atomic artillery shell that could be fired from your standard 155mm Howitzer. I have heard rumors that authority to use atomic shells was (to be) vested in field commanders, possibly as low as the regiment level.
I personally drank a fifth of vodka then drove home and didn't crash into anything. Therefore anybody who says that drinking and driving can have adverse effects is flamebait/troll.
No? How about:
I personally thought that Gigli was the most masterful screenplay ever written and was personally touched more deeply than any cinematic masterpiece the world has ever known. Anybody who conducts a study on whether or not it was a popular movie is flamebait/troll
You have presented one single, solitary, biased anecdote and stated that your personal results apply equally to everybody across the board with no variations. Do you really not see a problem with this? Anybody who disagrees with you must receive -1? Newsflash: studies and metastudies aren't always going to validate myopia. Smoking causes cancer, but we still find the occasional 6 pack a day smoker who lives well into their 90s. Does this mean that anybody who publishes a study showing links between cancer and tobacco should be modded down? In your world, apparently.
The reviewer is not clucking his tongue at you, nor is the author wagging her finger at what you do in your own private room. It appears to be saying "there are negatives and not just 100% harmless fun as some people would claim". Nothing else.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's start out with:
Don't forget to review the US Army Corps of Engineers.
You can google and wiki more on your own.
How about:
Or improving interoperability among sensors, advanced communications systems, high-performance ship network connectivity, aircraft control systems, and other electronics on the ship.
The Navy wanted to trim costs by using off-the-shelf components, the operating system being one of them. The plan is to run pretty much the entire ship off of Windows, except, presumably (I hope) the reactor - last I heard Windows was explicitly prohibited from being used for reactor control because it wasn't a "real time" OS.
Don't want to learn from history? Let's go straight to the source:
So we are left with two options:
a) Windows 2000 is impervious to rootkits, either off the shelf or through modifications unavailable to the general public
b) The US Navy is running an unsecurable OS for the most advanced surface ships in the world - with nuclear reactors to boot.
No, the issue is whether it is more expensive to maintain a population density of 10194/sq km or a population density of 8.6/sq km.
True, if and only if the engineering was the same. Rural roads need not be built to anything even close to the same specs as a city road. New York -must- put all water and sewer lines directly under the street, shoehorning them in between all of the cabling, subway tunnels, pipes, conduit and who knows what else. The streets must be engineered to carry hundreds of thousands of cars, trucks and busses over massive voids filled with rushing, vibrating trains. In the rural area you can be served quite nicely by grading a strip of dirt.
In other words, you claim that Elko, NV needs the same robust electrical grid as Los Angeles? That wiring 100 farmhouses requires the same fault protection and manhours as stringing 100 apartments in a brick apartment complex? 100 toasters spread out across 10 square miles is a piece of cake - 100 toasters on a single circuit, on the other hand....
Does building an airport in Marquette require the same effort as JFK International, just divide by 1,000?
Taxes are much higher in NYC than in, say, Buffalo. But this supports my point, not yours - they need more taxes in NYC because everything is more expensive.
Where is it cheaper and easier to tear up the street to repair a ruptured sewer: 5th Avenue, New York or 131st St in Strool, SD? Let's say they both receive grants from the Feds to cover the full cost. NYC has to pay their sewer workers higher wages because of the higher cost of living. Where does DC send the larger check?
At issue is whether or not Western Washington is subsidizing Eastern Washington, and whether it is more expensive to maintain a large city or a small one. Ferraris cost more than Yugos - that the Ferrari owner spends 0.01% of his household income for 2005 on his car and the Yugo owner spends 90% of his income on his is irrelevant.
Let's go through the federal budget and see how many people living in large cities benefit from public subsidies for their water supply (all of them. Every single last one of them) and count up the checks that the government contributed to the well that services me. Do you think for one second that Las Vegas has paid for their own water supply? That's just silly.
You stated that all schools needed to have separate classrooms for each grade. And rural is rural, with more rural being more rural than others. Entirely irrelevant.
I have presented my supporting evidence. I have no intention of looking up yours, especially when I don't believe it exists.
For the record, Jupiter, FL's per capita expenditures is just under $2,000/person. Detroit, MI's per capita expenditures come out somewhere in the neighborhood of $4,000/person. New York City's expenditures are somewhere around $6,000/person. How many cities spend more than $6,000/person per year, let alone how many cities with a population under 15,000? 10,000? 5,000?
And just to keep things focused, Seattle spends about $5,000/year for each of its 550,000ish residents while Spokane's 180,000 residents see less than half that spent on them ($2,300 for those playing at home).
Where are the economies of scale? I did the research and the numbers point to one conclusion: it is more expensive per person to run a large city than it is a small one.
and
Perhaps a larger sum, but certainly not per capita. I guarantee that Barrington, IL has a higher contribution per capita than Detroit, Chicago or LA. And guess which cities see a greater outlay per capita?
The individuals pay for the wells - usually without government help. Same thing with the propane tanks.
If you think you're right then crunch the numbers and see who has a greater density of taxpayer funded roads - Cody, WY or Atlanta, GA.
Are you sure about that? I've known people who had a graduating class size of six - they didn't have 12 separate rooms in their school. I, personally, in a suburban school in a soundly middle class neighborhood shared a classroom with 3rd and 4th graders.
The largest public school district in the country is New York, with just over 1 million students. The 100th largest is Cherry Creek 5 in Greenwood, Colorado with about 45,000. According to your economies of scale theory New York's annual expenditures of $11,000/student should be smaller than Cherry Creek 5's paltry-by-comparison $7,125/student, but it doesn't quite work out that way.
Theories are nice, but are you prepared to provide any hard numbers to support your assertions?
Rural areas have fewer transportation needs than cities which means the transportation costs are considerably lower. Fewer roads, fewer streetlights, fewer traffic lights, fewer collisions...
Who needs a larger police force - the 600,000 people in Washington, DC or the 600,000 people in North Dakota? Who has a greater need for firemen and paramedics - 900,000 people in San Jose or 900,000 people in Montana?
That's why farms use wells and propane.
Municipal services? What is the cost per person of salaries of city employees alone in New York City vs the the metric for residents of Wyoming?
Nope... ever see the tax rates of suburban houses spike to pay for the new influx?
Nope... federal.
How many times have you caught the bus in rural Idaho?
Federal again. And local. And rural education is much cheaper than urban because:
a) the land for the schools is much cheaper
b) with fewer students you need smaller buildings - energy efficiency is easier to achieve
c) Not nearly as many administrators or lunchlady Dorris overhead
They are fighting tooth and nail to prevent the cities from providing this service: they don't want to provide the service themselves, but they don't want anybody else to provide the service, either. While the various companies involved aren't actually declaring a goal of ensuring that certain groups of people don't have broadband access, this is indeed the de facto result.
In many communities the local cable franchise has a codified monopoly for wired TV delivery systems, with the cables almost always running across public land for which they pay anywhere from nothing to a pittance. The cities explicitly exclude any other cable company from running cables across that same land which guarantees a monopoly for the cable company. In some areas a similar arrangement exists with landlines for the POTS: where I currently reside there is one and only one wired telephone service available because of an exclusive contract signed with the municipality. Apples to apples competition is excluded by law and the POTS company charges appropriately and refuses to upgrade their system in terms of quality or features - after 8 years they still flatly and explicitly refuse to provide DSL service here and "have no plans" to ever do so in the future.
When the county announced plans for a municipal wifi solution for all residents the POTSco (which also happens to be a major wireless carrier) quickly muttered something about how this is unfair because at some point in the future they may want to consider wireless broadband for the area (but they still "have no plans" to actually introduce the service here) and are fighting tooth and nail against the county's plan.
What is even more annoying is that within 10 miles of my current address they are actively engaged in the construction of various subdivisions that are collectively worth somewhere between .75 - 1.25 billion dollars. If the county had listened to people who knew better 10 years ago they would have require any new subdivision to bring fiber to the entry, then 1/3 of one of the largest counties of the state would have had fiber by now because if fiber is available across the street then it is trivial to make it available for you as well.
To make matters worse, there are probably secret legislation, rules and regulations that are followed but are classified and no never revealed. The de facto law (administrative rule that carries the weight of law to be precise) that requires photo identification to board a plane. This is the consequence of living under a government that claims soverign immunity from responsibility or even the need to justify its actions.
Section 505 of the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act makes modifications to this codified section of law which clearly allows the FBI to gather evidence on demand without a warrant.
This is what happens when one half of your company is fighting with (and suing) the other half: either decide to sell music and movies, decide to sell mp3 and DVD burners, or find something other than an arms race to struggle to create/defeat unbreakable protection schemes.
A very useful emergency gadget would be a pre-assembled crystal radio kit - connect to ground and you'd be able to hear AM broadcasts with no power or cranking required.
Microsoft's business model is probably 90% intertial in nature - they don't seek to attract new customers but rely on the status quo to survive. Aside from games, what was the last MS product that was actually aimed at enticing people to switch because they were trying to be a serious competitor? Mappoint? Everything else is marketed as going with the flow, stick with the familiar, don't rock the boat, stay tried and true, etc.
Not that this can't be profitable - it will make gobs of money and MS is so large and cash-rich that they will probably never die. They don't innovate because they don't have to.
$13/month? Is that before all of the taxes, universal service fee, 911 surcharge and whatnot?
I can only wish: Speakeasy was checked and report that I'm too far away - "just over 3 miles". Just outside of Verizon's new wireless broadband service area so that's not an option.
I would jump at the opportunity to volunteer my yard the location for a low-powered neighborhood uplink to this service. Instead of expensive towers that provide access to everybody all at once and require various approval from the FCC and FAA (if the tower is tall enough) find people willing to host an uplink for a few square blocks. People like me. No matter which route I go -any- internet access will cost about $60 months - I either need to get a land line + DSL because nobody will provide DSL unless the line has an active phone number or I can get Comcast (and only Comcast because the local township granted them exclusive rights of service. If Google provides the equipment and the link I will be more than happy to ensure that my neighbors have another alternative for internet access.
In other news, Lovers' Lane adult shops introduces the first sub-orbital all glass elevator for those interested in joining the mile high club, the two mile high club, the three mile high club... pilots of 747s and SR-71s have started to fight over who gets to navigate into the general area.
I've downloaded GIMP... had no idea what to do with it so after a couple sessions of randomly pushing buttons left it sit to gather stray 0s and 1s that collect on my HDD much like the dust gathers on my Windows 95 MCP book.
As for "advanced" biological weapons, they don't have to be advanced. In days ancient people would wage war by flinging dead cows over the city wall by catapult.
Totally Rediculous Information Very Ingeniously Applied factoid: Atomic Annie appeared in the President Eisenhower's inaugural parade.
Once upon a time the US Army developed an atomic artillery shell that could be fired from your standard 155mm Howitzer. I have heard rumors that authority to use atomic shells was (to be) vested in field commanders, possibly as low as the regiment level.
Not always. San Andreas is a transform fault - no subduction involved. See http://jersey.uoregon.edu/~mstrick/AskGeoMan/geoQu erry22.html
No? How about:
You have presented one single, solitary, biased anecdote and stated that your personal results apply equally to everybody across the board with no variations. Do you really not see a problem with this? Anybody who disagrees with you must receive -1? Newsflash: studies and metastudies aren't always going to validate myopia. Smoking causes cancer, but we still find the occasional 6 pack a day smoker who lives well into their 90s. Does this mean that anybody who publishes a study showing links between cancer and tobacco should be modded down? In your world, apparently.
The reviewer is not clucking his tongue at you, nor is the author wagging her finger at what you do in your own private room. It appears to be saying "there are negatives and not just 100% harmless fun as some people would claim". Nothing else.