Someone might be naturally healthy, but the dumbass who ran the guy over with their humvee sadly wasn't informed of that. The scaffolding that fell on them wasn't informed either. The guy who prepared your hamburger with the same unwashed fingers he just wiped his ass with wasn't either, Mr. Healthy Guy.
Your problem is that you have no sense of your own mortality. The "I'm bulletproof" argument is one only put forth by idiots. You have no idea what will happen next. None whatsoever. It's all a matter of odds and happenstance. Your idea that the young and healthy people are going to pay for everyone else... our kids are paying a lot less money for a lot more insurance than we're getting... it just isn't so. In some states, young people can get by with just catastrophic. So please, drop the pretense.
And despite your presumption that you are "naturally healthy", eventually, the odds are very high that something will happen, and at that time you'll be expecting the rest of us to pay for it. We will. But you will too. Live with it. It's not really a bad thing, once you take reality into account.
Good recitation of the democrat party line talking points. You get a cookie.
More importantly, I got affordable insurance with excellent benefits, despite preexisting conditions.:)
You and yours, who don't bother to research what's actually going on, instead writing off the facts as "talking points", are now living in a world of butthurt. So sorry for your loss.
Prove it. Original cost and benefits and exact policy, your income, your state. Show us that we can't slot you right into the ACA at a reasonably similar cost and benefit.
Because so far, *everyone* who has made this claim just doesn't *want* to purchase insurance. Under the ACA, no one has to pay over 10% of their income. Period. If you failed to use the exchange and went galloping off to the local insurance broker, you may indeed be paying more, but that would be YOUR failure for not keeping yourself informed and for doing precisely the wrong thing, financially speaking.
If you had taken the trouble to be informed, instead of being glued to Faux Newz hysteria, you would have known approximately what your new insurance would be under the ACA, and you had almost *two years* to prepare yourself. Exact prices weren't known, but that ten percent limit was.
The only exception to this are those people who got fucked by their republican state legislatures when they refused the 3-year Medicaid expansion. Those people had a legitimate place under the ACA, and those state legislatures threw them under the bus. That's not a fault with the ACA, it's a fault with paid-off Koch-sucking republican sycophants.
People who refuse to buy insurance -- distinct from those who cannot -- will likely end up in the ER, running up huge bills, all of which end up coming out of everyone else's pockets anyway.
Millions of people have their insurance cancelled every year by insurance companies, sometimes while they are receiving treatment.
In some cases, the "lost" insurance had become illegal because it didn't provide the minimum required benefits. Better policies are available for those people.
Some people got those policies for less money, others got more benefits for the same, or more money. Those that pay more, probably got better insurance and won't have to declare bankruptcy if they get sick or are injured. They can carry their insurance from one job to another, so they aren't pinned like a dead butterfly to one employer. People with pre-existing conditions are now being treated, instead of being cast off like roadkill.
The only significant hole in the system is in states like Montana where the medicaid supplement was refused by the state legislature, and so people under specific income levels that were intended to be covered by medicaid, now aren't. If that's happened in your state, you can put the blame for that directly on your state legislators -- the republicans -- not on the ACA. Do something about it at election time.
As far as media coverage goes, almost every person they've tried to use as a "poster child" for "lost insurance" has been debunked. So many million can gain coverage, and there's barely a word about it. But a handful of people say they've lost coverage (which they can easily replace), and the media -- and you -- scream to high heaven. Then there was the bullshit about my insurance is now $xxx dollars a month and I can't afford it. Again, turns out these people were refusing to participate in the insurance exchange setup, and were basically being complete morons.
The states that participated in creating and operating the exchanges, instead of Koch-blocking the system as designed via the tools in the republican party whose only goal -- as they stated -- was to "see Obama fail", have had a much higher level of success. Again, blame your state legislature, specifically, the republicans.
So stop with the "insurance loss" meme. It's been dead for months. The ACA is doing ok for what it is, which is a baby step along the road to single payer.
Thorium seems like a terrific idea, but it doesn't mean uranium is being wasted as we use it up for power while we establish more sustainable energy technologies. Uranium's not like oil -- it doesn't present a whole lot of cases where it is used in large quantities.
If we don't achieve relatively inexpensive and reliable well-over-unity fusion, we aren't going anywhere really distant in numbers significant enough, or speeds high enough, to matter to anyone but the Guinness book of records.
Beanstalks would give us access to our solar system; from there, there's both energy and reaction mass in sufficient quantity and relatively easy availability to enable easy shipping and annoying travel among the inner planets. Which would be awesome, but still far short of visiting, say, the Oort cloud, or say, Proxima Centaurus or Barnard's star. Even with very efficient fusion, we'd have to send pre-accellerated and very expensive fuel packages along the path before we took the trip in order to refuel the vehicle, and that's just to enable a one-way trip that would take years at a constant one G including turnover.
I agree with all your points, but you completely fail to address the parent's concern.
No, I fully addressed it, you just missed it. I repeat: No "continent" is threatened by any bomb, or any bomb detonated spot-on a nuclear plant. Period.
call it 50x the amount of material in the Hiroshima bomb
Ok, call it that. Fat Man, at a yield of about 16 kt, utilized a core of 141 lb of fissile material. 50x 16kt is 800 kt, or.8 megaton. Assuming the same efficiency (which is wrong, but you want it in Hiroshima equivalents, so...) 50x 141 lb is 7000 lbs of material. Keep in mind that we've had 600 megatons of blasts; this is.8 equivalent, sort of. Only low atmospheric blasts are comparable, because those are the ones with significant fallout. Anyway, your imaginary scenario comes to 0.0013 of the total already detonated (.8/600), but its more than that, because it's.8/(atmospheric blasts only, so mostly prior to 1964. Heck, tsar bomba alone was 50 mt.) So that's still a big number; the atmospheric results are hinted at here:
And yet, we face the bottom line: the bombs have been almost no problem, unless they were dropped on actual civilians and infrastructure, in which case they did what they're designed to do, which is kill everyone within the blast and to some extend shock radius, and utterly destroy the targeted infrastructure, relatively speaking. Sooner or later.
Fallout from bombs has also been almost no problem on the level of what we might call "continental concerns." This is not because bombs have only been detonated where fallout wouldn't land on people and livestock; it's because it gets spread far and wide and thin. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs are excellent examples because they were extremely dirty on every level; lousy efficiency on the one hand, and the entailing of a great deal of ground infrastructure into high altitude radioactive particulates. Right in the middle of highly populated Japan. Not one bomb, but two. And the result? Most deaths were on site or nearby -- pretty much directly related. The continent, excuse me, the moderately good sized island, kept on keeping on, and still does.
Interesting fact: Eiz Nomura was a fellow who survived the Hiroshima blast. He was 560 feet from ground zero. He was 47 at the time. He lived until he was 80. And he had the furthest to go in the most contaminated environment you could possibly imagine. Read his story some day if you want shiver for a while. No need to exaggerate. You do not want to be there when one of these goes off.
But what we're talking about here simply is not, no matter how you try and frame it, a "continent" level destructor based on fallout. Is it a good thing? No. I'm not telling you these are good things. All I'm telling you is that most of the rhetoric, and it is rhetoric, about fission and fusion weapons is just that -- not based on the facts, put forth in order to scare people in aid of some agenda which may, in fact, be an entirely worthy agenda -- but it's still hyperbole and misinformation almost from word one.
The main thing about nukes is you really don't want one dropped anywhere near you. You don't want one dropped on significant portions of your infrastructure (by which I do NOT mean one power plant.) They're really, really, really good at destroying things and killing anyone or anything even remotely near ground zero. And they do make a huge mess at/of the target site, much more so than conventional weapons. All true. But even assuming some massively bewildered person could manage to get or make (not bloody likely) one, and get it to a power plant, and set it off -- your continent would survive just fine, as would the majority of people on it. Unless, as I say, your definition of a continent is "very small island."
The core of the Fermi Paradox is that there does not appear to be any basic physical limitation
Energy budget. Material resources. Desire. Competing needs for resources, IOW there might be enough resources to explore star to star, if you compromise your society, but perhaps you're too smart to do that. Laws. Lifespans. Beliefs and religions and other bass-ackwards thinking. Etc.
Most things don't simply devolve to "possible, or not."
In free space, point to point, lasers. Within an atmosphere, signals, radio or otherwise, in cables. Why? Because that multiplies the spectrum enormously. The only reason to use radio in space past a certain point of technological advancement is for broadcast use. You'd have to postulate some reasons to broadcast to really make your point. I can't think of any, personally. The one case of advertising "we're here" seems to be potentially quite unsafe. Other than that, why would you do so once you had comm lasers in orbit, etc.?
Nature has been burning coal, lumber, peat, for millions of years, and this is observable in the atmosphere. Kinda hard to tell the difference at a 400+ ly remove.
AKA it's a lot easier to take a spectrogram of a star than it is a planet. Size, radiance, etc.
Going to be a while before we have long enough baseline interferometry to be looking at other solar systems planets and saying authoritatively what was going on in their atmosphere hundreds of years ago (remember, 400 ly distance is 400 years delay for light to reach us, too.)
No. You're just talking about speed. To do what you're talking about takes energy, too, and no one has come up with a decent proposal that describes where that much energy would come from. We could probably come up with enough to get to a really near star (other than our own) if the entire planet got behind the idea and pushed like mad. But with no known payback, why would they?
The idea that it's just a matter of time is a bankrupt one right out the door.
If you want to call Alcatraz Island a continent, yeah. Otherwise, no.
Facts for you nuke hysteria types: So far, over two *thousand* nukes have been set off. On the ground. Over 500 in the atmosphere alone. In space. Under water. On the water. Underground. And, newsflash: No continents were lost. Many of these nukes were of considerable size; the Soviets had the record at 50 megatons in one shot, but that's not to say others weren't trying. Total nukage set off so far, about 600 megatons (conservatively.)
Face it: Nukes surely do make big bangs compared to conventional explosives, and blown open power plants tend to make good sized parks as everyone runs screaming (although note the wildlife seems to do ok, all things considered), but in reality, nothing much significant happens consequent to a single actual nuke or power plant failure. Certainly not in proportion to civilization in general. And certainly not at the scale of continents.
Another fact: There's more crap in the air you should be worried about from burning coal than there is from all man made nuclear activity, ever.
We now return you to your regular channel, "The Hysteria Show"
Making a sword or shield? What if it breaks in battle? Making a wagon wheel? What if it breaks down in the middle of nowhere? Making a horse harness? What if it fails pulling a carriage uphill? Making a chair? What if it fails when some person sits on it? Making a steak? What if it has a sharp bone sliver in it? Writing a control system? What if you miss something? THEN YOU FIX IT, that's all. Be as careful as you can of those things you can think of; ask for help so you have a chance to get more than a narrow view. But when something goes wrong, the "I should be totally safe, and I'm gunna sue ya" thing is a sickness, not a feature of a well functioning society.
All this "total safety, all the time" hysteria is really wearing. It's hurting us more than it's helping us.
A well lived life will entail risk, and probably lots of it. Not to mention non-optimum choices made for reasons you'll look back upon with utter confusion later. Or, you can live in a pillow-sided room eating only gruel that was sterilized by gamma rays. I know what I choose. Do your best, learn from your mistakes, remediate any that you can, and move on. If some crap you bought breaks, throw it out and replace it. If you got hurt, try to heal. End of story. The ethics are obvious. The smothering is insidious. But I think it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. There's far too much money in finger pointing. And we're just too stupid, collectively, to do anything about it. .
This study defines "rich people" as those making around $146000/year.
If you think about it, there's no control for expenses there, so it's not a very effective definition (I'm always kind of a amazed at the mindset in the US that tries to simplify things by drawing a numeric line in the sand, as if there were no other issues. And people put up with it. We need better schools.
I define "rich" as: wealthy enough to be living in a manner comfortable in every material way to the individual or family, and able to survive indefinitely in that state, or in an increasingly wealthy state without relying on income from, or charity of, others. Regardless of if one actually chooses to exist in that state, or not.
Not trying to force that definition on anyone else, but that's how I see it personally.
The transition was from a flawed, but still readily identifiable constitutional republic (not a democracy), to a corporate oligarchy.
This has never been a democracy, and furthermore, the constitution insists that the federal government guarantee each state a republican form of government, as in, a republic -- not a democracy. That's in article 4, section 4.
This is why representatives decide the actual matters, and voters don't, in the basic design.
Of course, now even the representatives don't decide -- nor judges -- if the legislation deals in any significant way with business interests. The only way the old system still operates even remotely the way it was designed to is when the issue(s) at hand a purely social ones. Even then, the bill of rights seems to be at the very bottom of any legislator's or judge's list of concerns.
Can't see any of this changing, though. The public is too uninformed, and short of completely revamping the school curriculums, they're going to remain that way.
Not nearly as good (or nearly as long.) No dead kids. One live and very stupid adult (ten hours), a lost cow. about 15 minutes, poor thing was stuck in a mudhole --- getting it out was a lot more challenging than finding it, and two dogs, one of which was seriously snakebit and down hard, but survived. They were both pretty hard to find. Size matters. And yes, this is all pretty new to me. Which is not to say it's not worthy. It's rewarding as all get out.
Quad's do not have the range, period.
You can cover a square km -- which is a *lot* of area -- perfectly with a pair of quads in rotation, regardless of terrain, with 99% uptime and plenty of reserves using some very simple procedures. Move 1km, repeat. It's reasonably efficient, and the search is much more fine grained -- it's almost impossible to miss something of reasonable size, those dogs notwithstanding. More below; see the other replies. I don't feel like explaining all this twice.
It is common sense, called glide.
You know what glide is? It's continuous motion, which loses detail, requires faster cameras for the same quality image (higher shutter speed, higher ISO), and raises the noise level in lower light. You know what glide requires? Height. You know what too much height does? Reduces detail. And that's not even all of the issues. You see, it's not that obvious after all. The task is to find, not just to fly long distances. When distance methodologies compromise seeing, as they tend to do, other options offer useful compromises.
You'd be a lot better off asking questions than you are pooh-poohing without knowing what you're talking about. Of course, this *is* slashdot, sigh.
They are only popular because they are mechanically simple WITH MODERN ELECTRONICS. You can not fly a quad without computer augmentation.
Yes, and? I didn't suggest attempting this with obsolete, unstable old hardware. I really don't see your point. Quads with camera mounts and "modern electronics" (meaning GPS, compass, active pitch control/tilt sensors, altimeter, rock solid XYZ hover with no control input, auto-return) start at about $470. They get even better from there. A trunk full of them is within the budget of almost any S/R group with the willingness to stand in intersections for a day or so with hats and signboards out. Or courtesy of one or two kind benefactors. First thing I did after flying my first one was pull my jaw off the ground and go right back and buy the rest they had in stock. Had to be done, really.
I can take one up, hover it, take a stable high resolution image, move it, take another stable high resolution image, etc. This means even when it's getting dark, I have better detail -- and lower noise -- because I don't have to have such fast exposures. Bring it back (no landing strip required), swap quads and go back out on the next radial, while the crew pops a new battery into the just-returned unit, repeat every ten-fifteen minutes or so, and keep doing that while the images are checked over carefully. Out on one radial, in on the next. Full circle till you repo to the next GPS indexed location. Works great.
Gimbals... the quad can spin in place. While hovering in an extremely stable manner, for that matter, or spinning/panning while working through any set of heights I choose. Be nice to just have a tilt control. More weight. It's really not seriously limiting, nothing like that yet. Should try it though. Tilting the quad itself isn't really possible without it moving, or at least, not the ones I'm using.
While the range/duration would be wonderful, fixed wing requires far too much for this area -- your seaplane is great in some ways, but there's no body of water around here worth talking about for the vast majority of the area. There's nowhere to land. Nowhere to take off. "Wet grass takeoff"? Grass? How about rocks and cactus and nasty, sticky sand? Kind of puts a crimp in fixed wing efforts. Quad simply doesn't care. Put it down (on a rock, on your 4x4 or snowmobile, or just open your hand), up it goes, and you're off and hunting.
Then there are the badlands. Even worse. Not only is there no water, nowhere to take off, nowhere to land, the bloody ground wants to break you -- it's unstable everywhere, either collapsing under you or falling on top of you. Which is part of why people get stuck out there in the first place (wish to heck they just wouldn't go.) With a FW, how do you work down a twisty arroyo that's too complex to follow at speed, and too deep to get a camera angle into because you can't stay over it long enough to make it count? I can just go there and drop right into it and work it right along at whatever rate is convenient. Success? Pop-up and strobe. Awesome.
Battery reload is not the critical issue when you can see better, navigate better, have a more stable platform, get looks into places like arroyos and caves and under-hangs and under trees and bushes that would otherwise completely block your view, and remain on station instead of having to fly by repeatedly when it's called for. You can hover and think instead of getting further from a point of interest with every moment. Battery reload is nothing. You bring em back, instantly take another one off, while that one is reloaded, charge packs as required, no problem. Preparation is key, of course -- but it certainly isn't a problem or even a challenge. You still get essentially 99% active search time without overlap -- or underlap. I throw a trunk in, grab my crew, and go.
Aerobatics... that's an interesting undertaking, but not relevant for my use. Although I've seen people do some crazy things with quads, my own interest is strictl
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Someone might be naturally healthy, but the dumbass who ran the guy over with their humvee sadly wasn't informed of that. The scaffolding that fell on them wasn't informed either. The guy who prepared your hamburger with the same unwashed fingers he just wiped his ass with wasn't either, Mr. Healthy Guy.
Your problem is that you have no sense of your own mortality. The "I'm bulletproof" argument is one only put forth by idiots. You have no idea what will happen next. None whatsoever. It's all a matter of odds and happenstance. Your idea that the young and healthy people are going to pay for everyone else... our kids are paying a lot less money for a lot more insurance than we're getting... it just isn't so. In some states, young people can get by with just catastrophic. So please, drop the pretense.
And despite your presumption that you are "naturally healthy", eventually, the odds are very high that something will happen, and at that time you'll be expecting the rest of us to pay for it. We will. But you will too. Live with it. It's not really a bad thing, once you take reality into account.
More importantly, I got affordable insurance with excellent benefits, despite preexisting conditions. :)
You and yours, who don't bother to research what's actually going on, instead writing off the facts as "talking points", are now living in a world of butthurt. So sorry for your loss.
Prove it. Original cost and benefits and exact policy, your income, your state. Show us that we can't slot you right into the ACA at a reasonably similar cost and benefit.
Because so far, *everyone* who has made this claim just doesn't *want* to purchase insurance. Under the ACA, no one has to pay over 10% of their income. Period. If you failed to use the exchange and went galloping off to the local insurance broker, you may indeed be paying more, but that would be YOUR failure for not keeping yourself informed and for doing precisely the wrong thing, financially speaking.
If you had taken the trouble to be informed, instead of being glued to Faux Newz hysteria, you would have known approximately what your new insurance would be under the ACA, and you had almost *two years* to prepare yourself. Exact prices weren't known, but that ten percent limit was.
The only exception to this are those people who got fucked by their republican state legislatures when they refused the 3-year Medicaid expansion. Those people had a legitimate place under the ACA, and those state legislatures threw them under the bus. That's not a fault with the ACA, it's a fault with paid-off Koch-sucking republican sycophants.
People who refuse to buy insurance -- distinct from those who cannot -- will likely end up in the ER, running up huge bills, all of which end up coming out of everyone else's pockets anyway.
Millions of people have their insurance cancelled every year by insurance companies, sometimes while they are receiving treatment.
In some cases, the "lost" insurance had become illegal because it didn't provide the minimum required benefits. Better policies are available for those people.
Some people got those policies for less money, others got more benefits for the same, or more money. Those that pay more, probably got better insurance and won't have to declare bankruptcy if they get sick or are injured. They can carry their insurance from one job to another, so they aren't pinned like a dead butterfly to one employer. People with pre-existing conditions are now being treated, instead of being cast off like roadkill.
The only significant hole in the system is in states like Montana where the medicaid supplement was refused by the state legislature, and so people under specific income levels that were intended to be covered by medicaid, now aren't. If that's happened in your state, you can put the blame for that directly on your state legislators -- the republicans -- not on the ACA. Do something about it at election time.
As far as media coverage goes, almost every person they've tried to use as a "poster child" for "lost insurance" has been debunked. So many million can gain coverage, and there's barely a word about it. But a handful of people say they've lost coverage (which they can easily replace), and the media -- and you -- scream to high heaven. Then there was the bullshit about my insurance is now $xxx dollars a month and I can't afford it. Again, turns out these people were refusing to participate in the insurance exchange setup, and were basically being complete morons.
The states that participated in creating and operating the exchanges, instead of Koch-blocking the system as designed via the tools in the republican party whose only goal -- as they stated -- was to "see Obama fail", have had a much higher level of success. Again, blame your state legislature, specifically, the republicans.
So stop with the "insurance loss" meme. It's been dead for months. The ACA is doing ok for what it is, which is a baby step along the road to single payer.
You haven't met *my* aunt flo. :)
Nice catch. MY bad.
Thorium seems like a terrific idea, but it doesn't mean uranium is being wasted as we use it up for power while we establish more sustainable energy technologies. Uranium's not like oil -- it doesn't present a whole lot of cases where it is used in large quantities.
If we don't achieve relatively inexpensive and reliable well-over-unity fusion, we aren't going anywhere really distant in numbers significant enough, or speeds high enough, to matter to anyone but the Guinness book of records.
Beanstalks would give us access to our solar system; from there, there's both energy and reaction mass in sufficient quantity and relatively easy availability to enable easy shipping and annoying travel among the inner planets. Which would be awesome, but still far short of visiting, say, the Oort cloud, or say, Proxima Centaurus or Barnard's star. Even with very efficient fusion, we'd have to send pre-accellerated and very expensive fuel packages along the path before we took the trip in order to refuel the vehicle, and that's just to enable a one-way trip that would take years at a constant one G including turnover.
Barring some very new science, that is.
No, I fully addressed it, you just missed it. I repeat: No "continent" is threatened by any bomb, or any bomb detonated spot-on a nuclear plant. Period.
Ok, call it that. Fat Man, at a yield of about 16 kt, utilized a core of 141 lb of fissile material. 50x 16kt is 800 kt, or .8 megaton. Assuming the same efficiency (which is wrong, but you want it in Hiroshima equivalents, so...) 50x 141 lb is 7000 lbs of material. Keep in mind that we've had 600 megatons of blasts; this is .8 equivalent, sort of. Only low atmospheric blasts are comparable, because those are the ones with significant fallout. Anyway, your imaginary scenario comes to 0.0013 of the total already detonated (.8/600), but its more than that, because it's .8/(atmospheric blasts only, so mostly prior to 1964. Heck, tsar bomba alone was 50 mt.) So that's still a big number; the atmospheric results are hinted at here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
And yet, we face the bottom line: the bombs have been almost no problem, unless they were dropped on actual civilians and infrastructure, in which case they did what they're designed to do, which is kill everyone within the blast and to some extend shock radius, and utterly destroy the targeted infrastructure, relatively speaking. Sooner or later.
Fallout from bombs has also been almost no problem on the level of what we might call "continental concerns." This is not because bombs have only been detonated where fallout wouldn't land on people and livestock; it's because it gets spread far and wide and thin. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs are excellent examples because they were extremely dirty on every level; lousy efficiency on the one hand, and the entailing of a great deal of ground infrastructure into high altitude radioactive particulates. Right in the middle of highly populated Japan. Not one bomb, but two. And the result? Most deaths were on site or nearby -- pretty much directly related. The continent, excuse me, the moderately good sized island, kept on keeping on, and still does.
Interesting fact: Eiz Nomura was a fellow who survived the Hiroshima blast. He was 560 feet from ground zero. He was 47 at the time. He lived until he was 80. And he had the furthest to go in the most contaminated environment you could possibly imagine. Read his story some day if you want shiver for a while. No need to exaggerate. You do not want to be there when one of these goes off.
But what we're talking about here simply is not, no matter how you try and frame it, a "continent" level destructor based on fallout. Is it a good thing? No. I'm not telling you these are good things. All I'm telling you is that most of the rhetoric, and it is rhetoric, about fission and fusion weapons is just that -- not based on the facts, put forth in order to scare people in aid of some agenda which may, in fact, be an entirely worthy agenda -- but it's still hyperbole and misinformation almost from word one.
The main thing about nukes is you really don't want one dropped anywhere near you. You don't want one dropped on significant portions of your infrastructure (by which I do NOT mean one power plant.) They're really, really, really good at destroying things and killing anyone or anything even remotely near ground zero. And they do make a huge mess at/of the target site, much more so than conventional weapons. All true. But even assuming some massively bewildered person could manage to get or make (not bloody likely) one, and get it to a power plant, and set it off -- your continent would survive just fine, as would the majority of people on it. Unless, as I say, your definition of a continent is "very small island."
So I reiterate: No.
Energy budget. Material resources. Desire. Competing needs for resources, IOW there might be enough resources to explore star to star, if you compromise your society, but perhaps you're too smart to do that. Laws. Lifespans. Beliefs and religions and other bass-ackwards thinking. Etc.
Most things don't simply devolve to "possible, or not."
In free space, point to point, lasers. Within an atmosphere, signals, radio or otherwise, in cables. Why? Because that multiplies the spectrum enormously. The only reason to use radio in space past a certain point of technological advancement is for broadcast use. You'd have to postulate some reasons to broadcast to really make your point. I can't think of any, personally. The one case of advertising "we're here" seems to be potentially quite unsafe. Other than that, why would you do so once you had comm lasers in orbit, etc.?
Nature has been burning coal, lumber, peat, for millions of years, and this is observable in the atmosphere. Kinda hard to tell the difference at a 400+ ly remove.
AKA it's a lot easier to take a spectrogram of a star than it is a planet. Size, radiance, etc.
Going to be a while before we have long enough baseline interferometry to be looking at other solar systems planets and saying authoritatively what was going on in their atmosphere hundreds of years ago (remember, 400 ly distance is 400 years delay for light to reach us, too.)
No. You're just talking about speed. To do what you're talking about takes energy, too, and no one has come up with a decent proposal that describes where that much energy would come from. We could probably come up with enough to get to a really near star (other than our own) if the entire planet got behind the idea and pushed like mad. But with no known payback, why would they?
The idea that it's just a matter of time is a bankrupt one right out the door.
I mean, a little is useful for medicine, but other than that, what would you have us save it for?
If you want to call Alcatraz Island a continent, yeah. Otherwise, no.
Facts for you nuke hysteria types: So far, over two *thousand* nukes have been set off. On the ground. Over 500 in the atmosphere alone. In space. Under water. On the water. Underground. And, newsflash: No continents were lost. Many of these nukes were of considerable size; the Soviets had the record at 50 megatons in one shot, but that's not to say others weren't trying. Total nukage set off so far, about 600 megatons (conservatively.)
Face it: Nukes surely do make big bangs compared to conventional explosives, and blown open power plants tend to make good sized parks as everyone runs screaming (although note the wildlife seems to do ok, all things considered), but in reality, nothing much significant happens consequent to a single actual nuke or power plant failure. Certainly not in proportion to civilization in general. And certainly not at the scale of continents.
Another fact: There's more crap in the air you should be worried about from burning coal than there is from all man made nuclear activity, ever.
We now return you to your regular channel, "The Hysteria Show"
Making a sword or shield? What if it breaks in battle? Making a wagon wheel? What if it breaks down in the middle of nowhere? Making a horse harness? What if it fails pulling a carriage uphill? Making a chair? What if it fails when some person sits on it? Making a steak? What if it has a sharp bone sliver in it? Writing a control system? What if you miss something? THEN YOU FIX IT, that's all. Be as careful as you can of those things you can think of; ask for help so you have a chance to get more than a narrow view. But when something goes wrong, the "I should be totally safe, and I'm gunna sue ya" thing is a sickness, not a feature of a well functioning society.
All this "total safety, all the time" hysteria is really wearing. It's hurting us more than it's helping us.
A well lived life will entail risk, and probably lots of it. Not to mention non-optimum choices made for reasons you'll look back upon with utter confusion later. Or, you can live in a pillow-sided room eating only gruel that was sterilized by gamma rays. I know what I choose. Do your best, learn from your mistakes, remediate any that you can, and move on. If some crap you bought breaks, throw it out and replace it. If you got hurt, try to heal. End of story. The ethics are obvious. The smothering is insidious. But I think it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. There's far too much money in finger pointing. And we're just too stupid, collectively, to do anything about it.
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Rouge waves, typhoons, collisions with tankers, vulnerability to warships, aircraft, submarines.
But hey. It's cool that a tsunami won't screw it up.
I think you are feeling very confused: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
You actually live in something *better* than a direct democracy.
A direct democracy enjoys no constitutional guarantees of rights. It's strictly majority rule.
Right this way sir... here's some bread, we hope you enjoy the circus.
If you think about it, there's no control for expenses there, so it's not a very effective definition (I'm always kind of a amazed at the mindset in the US that tries to simplify things by drawing a numeric line in the sand, as if there were no other issues. And people put up with it. We need better schools.
I define "rich" as: wealthy enough to be living in a manner comfortable in every material way to the individual or family, and able to survive indefinitely in that state, or in an increasingly wealthy state without relying on income from, or charity of, others. Regardless of if one actually chooses to exist in that state, or not.
Not trying to force that definition on anyone else, but that's how I see it personally.
I recommend antibiotics.
The transition was from a flawed, but still readily identifiable constitutional republic (not a democracy), to a corporate oligarchy.
This has never been a democracy, and furthermore, the constitution insists that the federal government guarantee each state a republican form of government, as in, a republic -- not a democracy. That's in article 4, section 4.
This is why representatives decide the actual matters, and voters don't, in the basic design.
Of course, now even the representatives don't decide -- nor judges -- if the legislation deals in any significant way with business interests. The only way the old system still operates even remotely the way it was designed to is when the issue(s) at hand a purely social ones. Even then, the bill of rights seems to be at the very bottom of any legislator's or judge's list of concerns.
Can't see any of this changing, though. The public is too uninformed, and short of completely revamping the school curriculums, they're going to remain that way.
Guess I should have been a little more explicit. I meant, as distinguished from one that required another object impact. Just an original ring system.
...a collapsed ring system?
Not nearly as good (or nearly as long.) No dead kids. One live and very stupid adult (ten hours), a lost cow. about 15 minutes, poor thing was stuck in a mudhole --- getting it out was a lot more challenging than finding it, and two dogs, one of which was seriously snakebit and down hard, but survived. They were both pretty hard to find. Size matters. And yes, this is all pretty new to me. Which is not to say it's not worthy. It's rewarding as all get out.
You can cover a square km -- which is a *lot* of area -- perfectly with a pair of quads in rotation, regardless of terrain, with 99% uptime and plenty of reserves using some very simple procedures. Move 1km, repeat. It's reasonably efficient, and the search is much more fine grained -- it's almost impossible to miss something of reasonable size, those dogs notwithstanding. More below; see the other replies. I don't feel like explaining all this twice.
You know what glide is? It's continuous motion, which loses detail, requires faster cameras for the same quality image (higher shutter speed, higher ISO), and raises the noise level in lower light. You know what glide requires? Height. You know what too much height does? Reduces detail. And that's not even all of the issues. You see, it's not that obvious after all. The task is to find, not just to fly long distances. When distance methodologies compromise seeing, as they tend to do, other options offer useful compromises.
You'd be a lot better off asking questions than you are pooh-poohing without knowing what you're talking about. Of course, this *is* slashdot, sigh.
Yes, and? I didn't suggest attempting this with obsolete, unstable old hardware. I really don't see your point. Quads with camera mounts and "modern electronics" (meaning GPS, compass, active pitch control/tilt sensors, altimeter, rock solid XYZ hover with no control input, auto-return) start at about $470. They get even better from there. A trunk full of them is within the budget of almost any S/R group with the willingness to stand in intersections for a day or so with hats and signboards out. Or courtesy of one or two kind benefactors. First thing I did after flying my first one was pull my jaw off the ground and go right back and buy the rest they had in stock. Had to be done, really.
I can take one up, hover it, take a stable high resolution image, move it, take another stable high resolution image, etc. This means even when it's getting dark, I have better detail -- and lower noise -- because I don't have to have such fast exposures. Bring it back (no landing strip required), swap quads and go back out on the next radial, while the crew pops a new battery into the just-returned unit, repeat every ten-fifteen minutes or so, and keep doing that while the images are checked over carefully. Out on one radial, in on the next. Full circle till you repo to the next GPS indexed location. Works great.
Gimbals... the quad can spin in place. While hovering in an extremely stable manner, for that matter, or spinning/panning while working through any set of heights I choose. Be nice to just have a tilt control. More weight. It's really not seriously limiting, nothing like that yet. Should try it though. Tilting the quad itself isn't really possible without it moving, or at least, not the ones I'm using.
While the range/duration would be wonderful, fixed wing requires far too much for this area -- your seaplane is great in some ways, but there's no body of water around here worth talking about for the vast majority of the area. There's nowhere to land. Nowhere to take off. "Wet grass takeoff"? Grass? How about rocks and cactus and nasty, sticky sand? Kind of puts a crimp in fixed wing efforts. Quad simply doesn't care. Put it down (on a rock, on your 4x4 or snowmobile, or just open your hand), up it goes, and you're off and hunting.
Then there are the badlands. Even worse. Not only is there no water, nowhere to take off, nowhere to land, the bloody ground wants to break you -- it's unstable everywhere, either collapsing under you or falling on top of you. Which is part of why people get stuck out there in the first place (wish to heck they just wouldn't go.) With a FW, how do you work down a twisty arroyo that's too complex to follow at speed, and too deep to get a camera angle into because you can't stay over it long enough to make it count? I can just go there and drop right into it and work it right along at whatever rate is convenient. Success? Pop-up and strobe. Awesome.
Battery reload is not the critical issue when you can see better, navigate better, have a more stable platform, get looks into places like arroyos and caves and under-hangs and under trees and bushes that would otherwise completely block your view, and remain on station instead of having to fly by repeatedly when it's called for. You can hover and think instead of getting further from a point of interest with every moment. Battery reload is nothing. You bring em back, instantly take another one off, while that one is reloaded, charge packs as required, no problem. Preparation is key, of course -- but it certainly isn't a problem or even a challenge. You still get essentially 99% active search time without overlap -- or underlap. I throw a trunk in, grab my crew, and go.
Aerobatics... that's an interesting undertaking, but not relevant for my use. Although I've seen people do some crazy things with quads, my own interest is strictl