"Can this algae spread out of control and produce tons of hydrogen a day worldwide?"
Now there's a Sci-fi story.
Mutant algae escapes to the wild, grows out of control. Oxygen level in Earth's atmosphere rises to 30%, causing huge out of control fires everywhere*. In the mean time, ocean levels start to drop as the hydrogen is being lost to space. Chaos everywhere.
* a standard problem in a college class in pyrometallurgy was to calculate the equilibrium temperature of a furnace at 21, 25, and 30 % oxygen in the combustion air. It makes a huge difference, mostly because you have less nitrogen carrying off the heat.
The 800 Mhz quicksilver (2002) did not have an L3 cache. The 933 and the dual 1 Ghz did. I wonder if that makes a big enough difference to explain the cutoff.
Also the original Quicksilver had a dual processor 800 Mhz version. (don't remember about the L3 on that machine) That should run Leopard just fine.
Typically, I skip generations of the OS unless I'm upgrading hardware anyway. If resolution independence is a no-show, then Leopard can wait. My dual G4 with Tiger is not over-taxed yet. Although if Apple put a couple of express card slots in the 24" iMac it would be very tempting.
"white males are born into an advantageous position"
That must explain why I had to join the Navy for 8 years to get the money for college.
That must also explain why my father did not graduate from high school.
And why his father died at 50, forcing Dad to take over the farm at 16, which is why he had to drop out of high school.
You are a dolt, or have a huge silver spoon in your mouth with attendant guilt, or are a blatant racist. I'm not sure which, and I'm not really interested in picking a category for you;
"The investors out there who will be losing money".
According to the bankruptcy filing there are only 402 stockholders. Not likely to be many from the mom and pop group in there. A few slow-witted mutual funds will get hit. Most of the stock was to the corporate officers. The suspicion for some time is that they were buying and selling it from each other to try to keep the price up over a dollar.
Actually I saw the report and the pictures of TMI while an undergrad at the U of Idaho. The bottom of the reactor was full of scrap iron (Ok fancy scrap alloys if you want to be picky.) The melted fuel was not at the bottom: It was higher in the reactor vessel.
The point everyone forgot is that heat rises. And the second point is that unlike water and ice, molten metal is less dense than the unmelted metal. Once the water boiled out, the fission stopped, and the decay heat wasn't enough to chew through all the non-fuel containing structure, which was sagging to the bottom of the fuel zone. So remains of the reactor stayed in the vessel.
Now, in Chernobyl, the graphite did not boil off, the reactor kept going well after it started to come apart, and, well, the heat still went up, carrying the reactor with it. That "Elephant's foot" was a portion of the melt that did go down, but in the end it stopped while still inside the building.
SL-1 went prompt-critical, blew it's control rods UP into the roof, and did not melt down either. Windscale also went up, not down.
Meltdowns probably do need to be designed against, but they look much less likely to occur than originally thought.
I used to live, camp and hike there. Water is not as scarce as you think, if you keep a level head and think about where to find it. And if he can still walk. It's also September, so the worst of the heat is past.
Landing the plane in a pilot-survivable way won't be too hard. Landing so that the plane is still airworthy, now that could be tough. Sagebrush is stronger than you think. Add in the rocks, divots, and general bumpyness, and the plane is probably scrap.
If he flew into clear-air turbulence that is often in the mountains, then the plane may have been de-winged, and that would be it. Or he got down drafted into a mountain. But those possibilities are pretty unlikely.
"We used clothes lines to hang and dry our clothes, not electric driers."
We still do use a clothes line, in the summer. In the winter, well, at 28 degrees F and a freezing fog, the usual December conditions here, your clothes will not be getting dry outdoors.
Scientific American had an article about containerized data centers; basically a server center built into a standard 20 foot shipping container. I was reading it while at the pool where my daughter was taking swimming lessons. And the thought di occur to me that hooking up the cooling system to the pool would be a great idea.
And of course in winter, all you would need around here is to open the doors, but since there is a school only 75 yards from the pool, it would not be hard to run the water over there.
People at all levels are so hard to get to spend Capital, but they'll flush Operating Expenses down the drain without a thought.
It sounds like they are maintaining capacity by adding plants. Nothing wrong with that. They are mining heat. The resource is replaceable, but replacement takes (geological) time.
I didn't know the earthquakes were that bad. They give me the willies. I grew up in Wisconsin, where the ground doesn't move.
Geothermal is not a magic bullet, but it is a good tool to have in the box. In fact, a big problem with getting out of the fossil fuel economy is getting rid of that "one true fuel" mentality. It's going to take every sneaky trick in the book, and some we haven't written down yet to keep the lights on, the computers up, and the food moving.
Geothermal energy is not inexhaustible, at least not at a given location. The rock cools down. Waiting for it to reheat from conduction from the mantle is going to be a long wait.
The Geysers geothermal station in CA is losing output capacity. I don't even know if they are still on line.
Whether that 8 million dollar hole will pay off is a really good question. There are spots where the economics are favorable, and that is where the current plants are located.
You would think someone would slant drill under Mt St. Helens and tap that magma pocket. Not brave enough, I guess.
"however the lead and mercury content is also high"
Lead is worth good money. When I toured the Trail smelter it had a lead side and a zinc side. I'm not sure how much mercury there is in the electronic scrap, but it should be recoverable. And if you can collect it, all these compact fluorescent lights need it to work. So that will recycle too.
And don't forget the "enterprise" apps. To get rid of Windows where I work we need not just Office replaced, but OSI's PI System has to be ported over to Linux (or whatever), Emerson's Delta-V control system has to come over, the Yokogawa DCS has to come over (which ironically used to run on Unix, but they are now a Windows Certified Partner, which didn't stop them from losing a sale when Bill dropped the version of Frontpage which their data historian access system depended on, and they couldn't meet our evaluation requirements without it.)
We would also need Allen Bradley's and Modicon's PLC programming software to be ported over to Linux, Autocad (or something very similar), and Apollo root cause analysis software, and the ATR incident tracking system, as well as the 7i maintenance planning/inventory software, (web-based so it would easy except for the Active-X controls), our LIMS system, and I haven't even touched what the bean-counters in the corporate building might use.
We still have an AS-400, even though IS would love to replace it with SQL Server, but it apparently can't be replaced by only one SQL Server; it would need several, and that has saved it for now.
Getting Bill's virus-ware out of the system would take at least 20 years. It's not happening, as much as I would like it to. All the Linux community can do is convert the new startups, who are usually cash poor, to Linux from the start. As the new companies begin to grow, a market will develop that eventually will get the above list ported over, or create replacements for that software. Eventually the cost advantage of open source can win, but it will not be a fast transition.
"But one report says that the e-waste won't be recycled at all, but rather burned in a smelter."
But dropping it in a smelter is recycling. Junk goes in, refined metal comes out. Smelters do not run on solid fuel anymore, they can't grind up the circuit boards and feed them to the burners.
The organics will burn in the charge, the fiberglass will melt into the slag, the metals will dissolve into the melt.
I forgot how to separate the lead from the copper. (pyrometallurgy class was in 1988, and I went the hydrometallurgy route instead)
Now I'll have to look it up.
The pyro class took a field trip to Trail, neat place if you are into displays of brute power. Sometimes I miss mining. Phys met is so boring; did it corrode.005 in/yr, or 0.010? zzzzzz But it's what pays the bills.
A laptop provides an inferior keyboard, an inferior pointing device, an inferior screen, an inferior video card, inferior upgrade options, and a vastly inferior hard drive. In exchange you get a battery, a sort of built in UPS. That catches on fire. Or swells and bloats until it damages the keyboard. And get to pay extra for this over the desktop.
Marketing may think this a great trade, but I don't.
As an aside, I wonder if you can get a NiMH battery for a modern laptop. 30 minutes of UPS type power backup would be fine if you did have a laptop rooted to the desk.
"If you want your own Senators to represent your precious tracts of land, ask Olympia and DC to let you form your own state (e. g. Maine). "
That has been tried. The West-siders shot it down cold. It's odd that they keep complaining about how much we cost them, then they won't let us go. So I suspect the financial situation is either not as they (and you) claim, or they have other motives to keep us "dragging them down." Interesting aside, Congress must also approve the division of a state; I wonder how it would fare their?
"If you want your own Senators to represent your precious tracts of land.."
Senators represent people who live in an area, not land. You didn't say where you live, but Washington is divided by a mountain range creating two distinct climate zones. Therefore, the East and the West are very different in, well, everything. And one government and one set of rules does not seem to work very well when there is that big of a difference. What makes perfect sense in Seattle in ludicrous in , say, Lind. Seattle rams through the laws anyway, and then Lind ignores them. A workable solution until some Seattleite on vacation sees you blowing off the law and sics the cops on you. The fact you harmed no-one and nothing except the visitor's sensibilities helps at sentencing, but you are still guilty under the law.
"If you think eastern Washington can figure out a working state constitution, let alone fund the workings of the government it'd create, more power to you."
Well, gee, you're right. No one has EVER written a State constitution before... Oh wait, This argument is beneath response, with 50 examples of prior art.
I disagree with your assessment of the purpose of the Electoral College, but it is a worthy topic for discussion. In my view It wouldn't exist unless the Founding Fathers actually were worried about the more populous states running over the smaller ones.
As for your last point, where to stop does pose a good question. I would point out that geography sets some limits that are not likely to change a lot over time. See Joel Gerreau's "The Nine Nations of North America." Eastern WA is in the Empty Quarter, and Western WA is in Ectopia. It was obvious then (1981) they are different places. North Idaho and Southern Idaho (yes that is how they refer to themselves, I used to live there too, in both sections at different times) are always yelling at each other too. They are connected by one road that both sides refer to as "the goat trail". Should they be two states? Maybe, maybe not. In the end it should be their decision.
If Rhode Island is considered "sufficiently different" from MA to warrant being it's own state, then why not Eastern and Western WA? You can look out the window and tell which one you are in; can you say the same for RI and MA? (honest question, never been there)
"Why, I ask? Are politicians getting worse or do we just hear about it more often today"
Look up William Harding and Teapot Dome. Then Tamany Hall. They aren't much worse today than they ever were. Power always attracts scum. And eventually it corrupts even the honest.
We hear more about it today than we used too, when only the really big scandals made the papers.
I remember my Dad raving on about what a corrupt SOB LBJ turned out to be, which really offended him because he had fallen for the "GoldWater will get you nuked" commercial back in '64. He said Nixon was a saint compared to Johnson. I don't know eactly why, as I was paying more attention to Mighty Mouse at that time. But he hated LBJ with a deep passion, and alleged corruption was why.
"Or are you now going to argue that Alaska should have more members of Congress than California?"
Well, arguably they should have more Senators than Rhode Island. Humboldt County Nevada (I used to live there) is larger than Massachusetts. It should have it's own two senators too.
Or, even better, take RI, Connecticut, and MA, and roll them up into one state for Senate purposes. Combine Delaware with Maryland, and maybe NJ with PA, (have to look at the area numbers.) And split Alaska into two or three states, given it's size. That would fix a lot of inequities.
If you want to make me really happy, then create Districts for the Senators, so we don't have the problem we have in Washinton state. Both Senators are from Seattle. Now Cantwell actually can find the East Side and is not completely hopeless at representing the issues here, but Murray only interests in the East Side are cheap food, cheap labor, and cheap, high quality vacations.
Give me the above, and I'll let you kill off the Electoral College.
And remember we are supposed to avoid a Tyranny of the Majority, which is what you get with pure majority rule.
A plan we had to treat wastewater with an RO unit failed only because some sulfate-reducing bacteria kept fouling the membranes. Six days and they were completely slimed. So a slimer killing virus sounds like a great idea. And safer than crossing proton streams too:-)
This should also be very useful for seawater RO units. At least there is a potential for a better method of slime control.
"Farmers depend on lots of low-cost seasonal labor to get their harvest picked."
Even though I am not Mexican, and a US citizen, I was one of those low-cost seasonal laborers when in my teens. Cucumbers were my specialty. Believe me, that work sucks; Backbreaking, hot, miserable, endless, and not much to show for it at the end of the day. And I had a home to go back to, and dinner waiting for me when I got there, so I had it better than the current crop of immigrants. It's about time the ag-bots went into production. I want to see lots of the little things in John Deere green, or Case red, or Kubota orange. I don't care which.
Here in Washington State, the Mexicans don't even want to do farm work anymore; they can get better jobs doing other things like construction. So the low-end of the agricultural labor force is starting to go away on its own. We'll need these ag-bots sooner rather than later.
And if Monsanto tries to sabotage this, I really hope John Deere hitches their biggest and best to Monsanto's pretty research lab and pulls it to pieces. That said, I doubt Monsanto would get in the way of this, as herbicides for broadleaf plants are too non-selective. You can't kill the Canadian thistles without also killing the strawberries. You can kill the grass and leave the strawberries (Thank you Select!) But the thistles, and pigweeds, and dandelions all can hide untouched in the strawberry patch.
Random memory, a movie with Tom Selleck, runaway robots in a cornfield, and some sort of evil assassin spider robot. I hope they put a good kill switch on these 'bots. (If no wi-fi, then shutdown all motors, start distress beep?)
"Yes, this is among the first steps Microsoft is taking to ensure a viable product in the future."
It's a shame they didn't figure it out before they blew all that monay on Vista.
Operating systems are a commodity, with a marginal price of $0. The most sellable thing about them is the "fit and finish" of the mating of a given OS to the hardware. The second most salable thing is the fine tuning of the OS to the actual task requirements. Apple knows this, and Sun has also figured it out (hence Open Solaris). HP could do the same at any time by custom fitting their own brand of Linux to their hardware. IBM is trying a general purpose approach, in that they will fit and tune any Linux to any hardware (though they favor Redhat at the moment.)
If Bill is figuring this out, then we'll see Vista boxes direct from M$, for the same price as Apple boxes. And they will actually work properly for once.
The other route that Bill could go with less short term risk is to let the Mac Business Unit port over ALL MS software. Project, Visio, Access (or at least the front end), everything. And at the same time, start the Linux Business Unit with the same mission. Open Office and Gnumeric and such may eventually be able to take down MS Office, but there is a lot of custom business software that is not attractive to OSS, and costs too much to do one company at a time. That is where M$ needs to go eventually. It's not a glamorous market, but it's steady. Just ask IBM.
It's easy money they are leaving on the table. Even worse, although Bill seems to have forgotten, leaving business needs unattended on another platform leaves an opening for new competition. Afterall, since neither Word Perfect nor Lotus were interested in the Mac (both did either no ports at all or a half-assed one, then abandoned it) M$ had a protected environment to get Word and Excel working before they had to compete with "the big boys" when Windows came out.
Slashdot Mirror
"Can this algae spread out of control and produce tons of hydrogen a day worldwide?"
Now there's a Sci-fi story.
Mutant algae escapes to the wild, grows out of control. Oxygen level in Earth's atmosphere rises to 30%, causing huge out of control fires everywhere*. In the mean time, ocean levels start to drop as the hydrogen is being lost to space. Chaos everywhere.
* a standard problem in a college class in pyrometallurgy was to calculate the equilibrium temperature of a furnace at 21, 25, and 30 % oxygen in the combustion air. It makes a huge difference, mostly because you have less nitrogen carrying off the heat.
The 800 Mhz quicksilver (2002) did not have an L3 cache. The 933 and the dual 1 Ghz did. I wonder if that makes a big enough difference to explain the cutoff.
Also the original Quicksilver had a dual processor 800 Mhz version. (don't remember about the L3 on that machine) That should run Leopard just fine.
Typically, I skip generations of the OS unless I'm upgrading hardware anyway. If resolution independence is a no-show, then Leopard can wait. My dual G4 with Tiger is not over-taxed yet. Although if Apple put a couple of express card slots in the 24" iMac it would be very tempting.
"white males are born into an advantageous position"
That must explain why I had to join the Navy for 8 years to get the money for college.
That must also explain why my father did not graduate from high school.
And why his father died at 50, forcing Dad to take over the farm at 16, which is why he had to drop out of high school.
You are a dolt, or have a huge silver spoon in your mouth with attendant guilt, or are a blatant racist. I'm not sure which, and I'm not really interested in picking a category for you;
"The investors out there who will be losing money".
According to the bankruptcy filing there are only 402 stockholders. Not likely to be many from the mom and pop group in there.
A few slow-witted mutual funds will get hit. Most of the stock was to the corporate officers. The suspicion for some time is that they were buying and selling it from each other to try to keep the price up over a dollar.
Lid is on, (Aug 10) check
coffin in grave (Sep 7) check
cement truck starts pouring (due Sept 17)
Nazgul pee on grave (time to be decided)
I think we are pretty much done.
Actually I saw the report and the pictures of TMI while an undergrad at the U of Idaho. The bottom of the reactor was full of scrap iron (Ok fancy scrap alloys if you want to be picky.) The melted fuel was not at the bottom: It was higher in the reactor vessel.
The point everyone forgot is that heat rises. And the second point is that unlike water and ice, molten metal is less dense than the unmelted metal. Once the water boiled out, the fission stopped, and the decay heat wasn't enough to chew through all the non-fuel containing structure, which was sagging to the bottom of the fuel zone. So remains of the reactor stayed in the vessel.
Now, in Chernobyl, the graphite did not boil off, the reactor kept going well after it started to come apart, and, well, the heat still went up, carrying the reactor with it. That "Elephant's foot" was a portion of the melt that did go down, but in the end it stopped while still inside the building.
SL-1 went prompt-critical, blew it's control rods UP into the roof, and did not melt down either. Windscale also went up, not down.
Meltdowns probably do need to be designed against, but they look much less likely to occur than originally thought.
I used to live, camp and hike there. Water is not as scarce as you think, if you keep a level head and think about where to find it. And if he can still walk. It's also September, so the worst of the heat is past.
Landing the plane in a pilot-survivable way won't be too hard. Landing so that the plane is still airworthy, now that could be tough. Sagebrush is stronger than you think. Add in the rocks, divots, and general bumpyness, and the plane is probably scrap.
If he flew into clear-air turbulence that is often in the mountains, then the plane may have been de-winged, and that would be it. Or he got down drafted into a mountain. But those possibilities are pretty unlikely.
We'll have to wait and see.
and old battlewagons..., and if memory serves, a lot of auxilliaries.
http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-038.htm
"We used clothes lines to hang and dry our clothes, not electric driers." We still do use a clothes line, in the summer. In the winter, well, at 28 degrees F and a freezing fog, the usual December conditions here, your clothes will not be getting dry outdoors.
"When did hydroelectric become a non-renewable source ?"
Since Greenpeace and the Sierra Club have pronounced them unclean.
They prefer cold water fish like trout and salmon, and not warm water fish like bass and perch.
So where is the pool on the date for SCO to file bankruptcy?
That is the only question left.
Scientific American had an article about containerized data centers; basically a server center built into a standard 20 foot shipping container. I was reading it while at the pool where my daughter was taking swimming lessons. And the thought di occur to me that hooking up the cooling system to the pool would be a great idea.
And of course in winter, all you would need around here is to open the doors, but since there is a school only 75 yards from the pool, it would not be hard to run the water over there.
People at all levels are so hard to get to spend Capital, but they'll flush Operating Expenses down the drain without a thought.
found a link:
http://www.wind-works.org/articles/Geysers.html
It sounds like they are maintaining capacity by adding plants. Nothing wrong with that. They are mining heat. The resource is replaceable, but replacement takes (geological) time.
I didn't know the earthquakes were that bad. They give me the willies. I grew up in Wisconsin, where the ground doesn't move.
Geothermal is not a magic bullet, but it is a good tool to have in the box. In fact, a big problem with getting out of the fossil fuel economy is getting rid of that "one true fuel" mentality. It's going to take every sneaky trick in the book, and some we haven't written down yet to keep the lights on, the computers up, and the food moving.
Geothermal energy is not inexhaustible, at least not at a given location. The rock cools down. Waiting for it to reheat from conduction from the mantle is going to be a long wait.
The Geysers geothermal station in CA is losing output capacity. I don't even know if they are still on line.
Whether that 8 million dollar hole will pay off is a really good question. There are spots where the economics are favorable, and that is where the current plants are located.
You would think someone would slant drill under Mt St. Helens and tap that magma pocket. Not brave enough, I guess.
"however the lead and mercury content is also high"
Lead is worth good money. When I toured the Trail smelter it had a lead side and a zinc side. I'm not sure how much mercury there is in the electronic scrap, but it should be recoverable. And if you can collect it, all these compact fluorescent lights need it to work. So that will recycle too.
And don't forget the "enterprise" apps. To get rid of Windows where I work we need not just Office replaced, but OSI's PI System has to be ported over to Linux (or whatever), Emerson's Delta-V control system has to come over, the Yokogawa DCS has to come over (which ironically used to run on Unix, but they are now a Windows Certified Partner, which didn't stop them from losing a sale when Bill dropped the version of Frontpage which their data historian access system depended on, and they couldn't meet our evaluation requirements without it.)
We would also need Allen Bradley's and Modicon's PLC programming software to be ported over to Linux, Autocad (or something very similar), and Apollo root cause analysis software, and the ATR incident tracking system, as well as the 7i maintenance planning/inventory software, (web-based so it would easy except for the Active-X controls), our LIMS system, and I haven't even touched what the bean-counters in the corporate building might use.
We still have an AS-400, even though IS would love to replace it with SQL Server, but it apparently can't be replaced by only one SQL Server; it would need several, and that has saved it for now.
Getting Bill's virus-ware out of the system would take at least 20 years. It's not happening, as much as I would like it to. All the Linux community can do is convert the new startups, who are usually cash poor, to Linux from the start. As the new companies begin to grow, a market will develop that eventually will get the above list ported over, or create replacements for that software. Eventually the cost advantage of open source can win, but it will not be a fast transition.
"But one report says that the e-waste won't be recycled at all, but rather burned in a smelter."
.005 in/yr, or 0.010? zzzzzz But it's what pays the bills.
But dropping it in a smelter is recycling. Junk goes in, refined metal comes out. Smelters do not run on solid fuel anymore, they can't grind up the circuit boards and feed them to the burners.
The organics will burn in the charge, the fiberglass will melt into the slag, the metals will dissolve into the melt.
I forgot how to separate the lead from the copper. (pyrometallurgy class was in 1988, and I went the hydrometallurgy route instead)
Now I'll have to look it up.
The pyro class took a field trip to Trail, neat place if you are into displays of brute power. Sometimes I miss mining. Phys met is so boring; did it corrode
A laptop provides an inferior keyboard, an inferior pointing device, an inferior screen, an inferior video card, inferior upgrade options, and a vastly inferior hard drive. In exchange you get a battery, a sort of built in UPS. That catches on fire. Or swells and bloats until it damages the keyboard. And get to pay extra for this over the desktop.
Marketing may think this a great trade, but I don't.
As an aside, I wonder if you can get a NiMH battery for a modern laptop. 30 minutes of UPS type power backup would be fine if you did have a laptop rooted to the desk.
"If you want your own Senators to represent your precious tracts of land, ask Olympia and DC to let you form your own state (e. g. Maine). "
That has been tried. The West-siders shot it down cold. It's odd that they keep complaining about how much we cost them, then they won't let us go. So I suspect the financial situation is either not as they (and you) claim, or they have other motives to keep us "dragging them down." Interesting aside, Congress must also approve the division of a state; I wonder how it would fare their?
"If you want your own Senators to represent your precious tracts of land.."
Senators represent people who live in an area, not land. You didn't say where you live, but Washington is divided by a mountain range creating two distinct climate zones. Therefore, the East and the West are very different in, well, everything. And one government and one set of rules does not seem to work very well when there is that big of a difference. What makes perfect sense in Seattle in ludicrous in , say, Lind. Seattle rams through the laws anyway, and then Lind ignores them. A workable solution until some Seattleite on vacation sees you blowing off the law and sics the cops on you. The fact you harmed no-one and nothing except the visitor's sensibilities helps at sentencing, but you are still guilty under the law.
"If you think eastern Washington can figure out a working state constitution, let alone fund the workings of the government it'd create, more power to you."
Well, gee, you're right. No one has EVER written a State constitution before... Oh wait, This argument is beneath response, with 50 examples of prior art.
I disagree with your assessment of the purpose of the Electoral College, but it is a worthy topic for discussion. In my view It wouldn't exist unless the Founding Fathers actually were worried about the more populous states running over the smaller ones.
As for your last point, where to stop does pose a good question. I would point out that geography sets some limits that are not likely to change a lot over time. See Joel Gerreau's "The Nine Nations of North America." Eastern WA is in the Empty Quarter, and Western WA is in Ectopia. It was obvious then (1981) they are different places. North Idaho and Southern Idaho (yes that is how they refer to themselves, I used to live there too, in both sections at different times) are always yelling at each other too. They are connected by one road that both sides refer to as "the goat trail". Should they be two states? Maybe, maybe not. In the end it should be their decision.
If Rhode Island is considered "sufficiently different" from MA to warrant being it's own state, then why not Eastern and Western WA? You can look out the window and tell which one you are in; can you say the same for RI and MA? (honest question, never been there)
"Why, I ask? Are politicians getting worse or do we just hear about it more often today"
Look up William Harding and Teapot Dome. Then Tamany Hall. They aren't much worse today than they ever were. Power always attracts scum. And eventually it corrupts even the honest.
We hear more about it today than we used too, when only the really big scandals made the papers.
I remember my Dad raving on about what a corrupt SOB LBJ turned out to be, which really offended him because he had fallen for the "GoldWater will get you nuked" commercial back in '64. He said Nixon was a saint compared to Johnson. I don't know eactly why, as I was paying more attention to Mighty Mouse at that time. But he hated LBJ with a deep passion, and alleged corruption was why.
"Or are you now going to argue that Alaska should have more members of Congress than California?"
Well, arguably they should have more Senators than Rhode Island. Humboldt County Nevada (I used to live there) is larger than Massachusetts. It should have it's own two senators too.
Or, even better, take RI, Connecticut, and MA, and roll them up into one state for Senate purposes. Combine Delaware with Maryland, and maybe NJ with PA, (have to look at the area numbers.) And split Alaska into two or three states, given it's size. That would fix a lot of inequities.
If you want to make me really happy, then create Districts for the Senators, so we don't have the problem we have in Washinton state. Both Senators are from Seattle. Now Cantwell actually can find the East Side and is not completely hopeless at representing the issues here, but Murray only interests in the East Side are cheap food, cheap labor, and cheap, high quality vacations.
Give me the above, and I'll let you kill off the Electoral College.
And remember we are supposed to avoid a Tyranny of the Majority, which is what you get with pure majority rule.
A plan we had to treat wastewater with an RO unit failed only because some sulfate-reducing bacteria kept fouling the membranes. Six days and they were completely slimed. So a slimer killing virus sounds like a great idea. And safer than crossing proton streams too :-)
This should also be very useful for seawater RO units. At least there is a potential for a better method of slime control.
Hope it works!
"Farmers depend on lots of low-cost seasonal labor to get their harvest picked."
Even though I am not Mexican, and a US citizen, I was one of those low-cost seasonal laborers when in my teens. Cucumbers were my specialty. Believe me, that work sucks; Backbreaking, hot, miserable, endless, and not much to show for it at the end of the day. And I had a home to go back to, and dinner waiting for me when I got there, so I had it better than the current crop of immigrants. It's about time the ag-bots went into production. I want to see lots of the little things in John Deere green, or Case red, or Kubota orange. I don't care which.
Here in Washington State, the Mexicans don't even want to do farm work anymore; they can get better jobs doing other things like construction. So the low-end of the agricultural labor force is starting to go away on its own. We'll need these ag-bots sooner rather than later.
And if Monsanto tries to sabotage this, I really hope John Deere hitches their biggest and best to Monsanto's pretty research lab and pulls it to pieces. That said, I doubt Monsanto would get in the way of this, as herbicides for broadleaf plants are too non-selective. You can't kill the Canadian thistles without also killing the strawberries. You can kill the grass and leave the strawberries (Thank you Select!) But the thistles, and pigweeds, and dandelions all can hide untouched in the strawberry patch.
Random memory, a movie with Tom Selleck, runaway robots in a cornfield, and some sort of evil assassin spider robot. I hope they put a good kill switch on these 'bots. (If no wi-fi, then shutdown all motors, start distress beep?)
"And I just assumed they'd steal my money."
Ironic isn't it. The "pirates" are more honest than the corporations supposedly being harmed.
"Yes, this is among the first steps Microsoft is taking to ensure a viable product in the future."
It's a shame they didn't figure it out before they blew all that monay on Vista.
Operating systems are a commodity, with a marginal price of $0. The most sellable thing about them is the "fit and finish" of the mating of a given OS to the hardware. The second most salable thing is the fine tuning of the OS to the actual task requirements. Apple knows this, and Sun has also figured it out (hence Open Solaris). HP could do the same at any time by custom fitting their own brand of Linux to their hardware. IBM is trying a general purpose approach, in that they will fit and tune any Linux to any hardware (though they favor Redhat at the moment.)
If Bill is figuring this out, then we'll see Vista boxes direct from M$, for the same price as Apple boxes. And they will actually work properly for once.
The other route that Bill could go with less short term risk is to let the Mac Business Unit port over ALL MS software. Project, Visio, Access (or at least the front end), everything. And at the same time, start the Linux Business Unit with the same mission. Open Office and Gnumeric and such may eventually be able to take down MS Office, but there is a lot of custom business software that is not attractive to OSS, and costs too much to do one company at a time. That is where M$ needs to go eventually. It's not a glamorous market, but it's steady. Just ask IBM.
It's easy money they are leaving on the table. Even worse, although Bill seems to have forgotten, leaving business needs unattended on another platform leaves an opening for new competition. Afterall, since neither Word Perfect nor Lotus were interested in the Mac (both did either no ports at all or a half-assed one, then abandoned it) M$ had a protected environment to get Word and Excel working before they had to compete with "the big boys" when Windows came out.