Because you haven't run the numbers on the beam power density. The Microwave beam is wide, because it's trivial and cheap to make a huge ground antenna, and because agriculture can be carried out under the antenna. THe beam power density can be held down to just a few times noon sunlight power, and still deliver plenty of energy.
That way, both airplane and albatross are safe to transit the beam area.
I fail to understand why everyone thinks a project should be able to have a fixed timeline. It's dead easy to get fusion in a D-T plasma; it makes a good college level physics experiment, using a current induced pinch.
So the basic physics is understood. The engineering is not so. It takes a lot of effort, and a lot of knowledge, to turn a laboratory demo into an industrial process. Consider that it has taken a hundred years to learn to build refineries the way they are now, and improvement is still ongoing.
Worthwhile projects can take a long time, on a human scale. Plasma fusion is one of these projects, and may easily extend into the next century. That doesn't seem to me to be a good reason to give up. The USA is spending a trillion dollars on keeping bankers happy, surely they can spend a few lousy billion over the next twenty years on a possibly limitless energy source.
I understand why politicians think that a "project" should cough up results before the end of their elected term. The rest of us don't need to be that short sighted.
Let's see... We can't have nukes, because nuclear waste is dangerous for thousands of years and is produced in tonnes by reactors.
But "clean coal" is ok, because CO2 can be stored by deep well injection. And unlike nuclear waste, it's dangerous forever, and produced in millions of tonnes by power plants.
I guess sequestered CO2 is better than nuclear waste because giant clouds of killer gas are more "natural" than that awful "atom" stuff. After all, look at the area around Chernobyl, and compare it to the scenes around Lake Nyos.
Oh, and while we're at it, lets consider the number of coal miners killed each year. Too bad we can't ask them about "clean coal" technology.
Um, I wonder at your statistics to support the term "most people"... Some of us try, very hard, to avoid broad, sweeping generalizations, for example, "Most people are bigots."
Were I unemployed, I would still contribute to open source projects. The only thing I think would be worse than being jobless and broke would be being bored, jobless, and broke.
Absolutely. My 82 year old mother-in-law loves to correspond with friends and relatives. For the last seven years, she's been running Slackware, at first with fvwm2 and then with xfce. She has icons for mail, music, gpod, abiword, a file manager. Her system is set up to run chkroot periodically and email me the results. She lives 1200 miles away from me, so onsite service is not really an option.
We had some printing problems at first, but once the system was switched to CUPS, she's had no trouble at all. In point of fact, the only calls I get are things like "I can't get to my email" (ISP mail server down) and "How do I format a christmas card" (select template->card).
You are the analogy of an investor who wants a high-yield, low-risk, completely liquid instrument. The term is TANSTAAFL.
I maintain two (yes, two) USB external drives. Every couple of years, I migrate to a larger, or otherwise better medium. I use an incremental backup system (for me, cpio) that ends up keeping too much stuff, but at least I have the stuff I want if I need to get to it.
In a decade - in my case, four decades - one can accumulate a remarkable amount of crap, along with things one truly wants to save. I have a total of about 90 gig of actual data, plus a far larger amount of music and video, which I consider more or less disposable. It is not difficult, nor expensive, to purchase another external drive and copy the data. My oldest backup is on IBM 2314 disk pack, but the data still held on that disk is also present on my current backup, a WD 160G in a USB-1 enclosure. Sometime next year, I'll go to a 500 G drive in a USB-2 enclosure.
An important consideration is to periodically check to see that the data ostensibly held on a drive (or CD, or DVD) is actually readable. DVD/RW in particular has a tendency to get flakey over long periods of time, expecially if stored under adverse conditions (jammed in back of desk drawer, under sixteen pair of scissors, stapler, a box of pop-tarts, and four old coffee cups. I always keep my last few generations of backups, and if I find an unreadable datum, I make an effort to recover it from the previous backup.
While it may be stating the obvious, it's a Bad Idea (TM) to wait to back up data until you have a problem. I back up all of my data every week or two, and critical data, daily, without fail. Critical data is cached as a three-generation dataset (IBMese).
Good luck. There are no real solutions, just ways to cope.
Don't look now, but you already drink recycled urine. Stuff goes down the drain, to water treatment, to lake or ocean or golf course. At this point, it evaporates. The water vapor aggregates as clouds, the clouds produce rain. The rain ends up in reservoirs or aquifers, whence comes drinking water.
The cycle is just a little smaller in the space station.
What you say about ice cores and CO2 levels is accurate but incomplete. THe story isn't so simple. In point of fact, ice cores have shown that the atmospheric CO2 levels have been dropping steadily over time, essentially until the bottom of the last ice age, aboujt 11,000 years ago. Since that time, the CO2 levels have slowly risen until about 1800 AD or so, at which time human CO2 production became a significant additional planetary burden,
Prior to the ice ages, in the carboniferous period, planetary levels of CO2 were as high as 1500 parts per million, five times what they are today. One must consider that all that limestone and fossil fuel in the ground (or what used to be in the ground) came from this atmospheric carbon dioxide, over hundreds of millions of years. The CO2 levels reached a planetary minimum during the last series of ice ages. Whether the cooling was due to low CO2 levels, or the low CO2 levels were due to cooling is unresolved.
What is not arguable is that humans are adding to the atmospheric CO2 levels, and that during this microscopic period of geological time, global warming has become very fast indeed.
What is also not arguable is that prior to the ice ages, the planet was very much warmer than it is now, and very much warmer than ecological models predict for tne forseeable future. We're not treading on new ground here, we're retracing steps that occurred half a million years ago. The world is not coming to an end, at least, not yet.
Having said that, going back to a Permian climate would be exceptionally inconvenient to a few billion humans. At those times, the entire interior of the United states was a warm tropical inland sea. Somehow, I think the future residents of St. Louis might object to that. Siberia could become the rice bowl of civilization. From today's point of view, it would be bad, no doubt.
For better or worse, we (humanity) don't really have the option to go back to a small population of agrarians. I might point out that agriculture itself is very recent, only about 6,000 years old. We don't really get to "go back to nature" -- if you doubt this, take a trip to Cambodia.
The only option we have left is to take over engineeing of our planet. This will include finding ways to stop dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, but also includes things like building seawalls around New Orleans, and in the quite near future, a lot of other urban places, or relocating the entire place to higher locations. Ocean levels have varied by a thousand meters throughout history, and we aren't (yet) in a position to stop them.
The important thing to remember is that our planet is a "complex system" and that on such systems, one never, ever, gets to adjust just one knob. Everything interacts, and we must proceed cautiously so that our "fixes" don't end up causing more damage than leaving things alone.
There is a lot to be done, and predicting that the sky is falling isn't helpful. Pointing out that when a suburb of Los Angeles floods, it is due to increased oceanic evaporation caused by global warming is a lot more truthful, and in my opinion, more effective, than painting pictures of the end of the world.
Have you ever taken a civics class? Something that a president does may or may not be "illegal" -- the fact that Congress has decided it to be unlawful notwithstanding. In this country, there is this thing called "separation of powers" and in point of fact, the illegality or constitutionality of a presidential action or congressional mandate is decided by the judicial branch, and not by preferred political spin.
Do you really believe that what an elected president may choose to do in defiance of congress is as simple as quotng a city charter for a parking ticket?
It's not simple. It's not straightforward. If it were either, then presidents wouldn't do things that Congress doesn't like (wiretaps), and Congress wouldn't do things that otherwise sound very unconstitutional, like granting immunity to some (but not all) telecom companies.
This, my friend, is why the ACLU exists, and why the Supreme Court of the United States listens to arguments about constitutional issues.
As bothersome as these issues are, it beats tanks in the streets hands down.
Well, I'm not disagreeing in general with your comments, however...
Just a month ago, I spent three days gathering up enough pieces of Gnome 2.20.2 to make a clean compile on Slackware. There's nothing magic about it, but it is a daunting task for someone familiar with the software and may in fact be unachievable for someone who is a newbie.
It's nice to have a development team in place to sweat the details.
I respect Richard's opinions, but I think he lives in a fantasy world.
Richard has been at it for a lot of years, many more than Linus. He's been in the forefront of promoting Free Software for a long time, however... I might point out - being a little cynical - that prior to Linus' efforts, most people using computers and faced with this interview, would have simply said, "Richard Who?" Given all those years of relative nothing, I have to believe that Linus has something going, regardless of RMS comments.
It's kind of amusing to look at the history of FOSS, and a recurring theme has been that developers think that just because they have developed a complex piece of software over a long period of time (gcc comes to mind) that it's not open to being reimplimented in the future. If GPL3 becomes a thorn in would-be commercial users, there will be money available to replace it with something that's not so obnoxious.
In 1977, we (SWTPc) reimplimented libc for exactly that reason: Western Electric licensing provisions were obnoxious and restrictive. This is the very same reason that RMS and others undertook to reimpliment the Unix toolkit. It's not magic; it's just code, and like employees, there is no piece of code that can't be replaced.
I don't even begin to see why this is considered a significant item. There are already tens, if not hundreds, of automobile models I can't buy in the USofA.
My children are grown, and it's my wife and myself, and I'd like a commuter car. Specifically, I'd like to buy a VW Polo BlueMotion, a 2-door 1.4L diesel that gets 67 mpg. I use this example because it's concrete, but there are scads of such cars available to Europeans, to Japanese, in South America, even in Canada. And there are VW dealers on every other block, here in San Antonio.
So can I buy this VW? Heck no. The dealer thinks I need to buy a Jetta, which is "really a small car" (as compared to what, a Ford Excursion?) or maybe I should test drive a nice Toyota Tundra, c'mon, be a _MAN_...
Pfui. A pox on their houses.
I just can't wait for the price of gas to hit $5/gal. Good for 'em all.
I don't think it's germane to talk about either the RNC or DNC has having anything whatsoever to do with ideology. Both groups are about power, and ideology is just one of the tools that they use to extort votes from their adherents.
In my not-so-humble opinion, both groups are fully corrept and the United States could benefit greatly if we gave them swords (or suicide vests) and let them kill each other off. They are the modern-day national equivalent of the Bloods and Crips, and have nothing whatever to offer actual Americans.
In part, I tend towards Libertarianism, just because I've become so disillusioned with the corporate political process. For the past sixty years, our American system of government has become polluted by merchantilism and the oligarchy of megacorporations. Because of the way that our statutory systems permits literal interpretation of the rule sets (laws), the groups with the most lawyers have become adept at avoiding the intent of laws, and using the literal verbage of the law to commit immoral acts -- read Marx, of the few things he was right about, this corporate corruption leads the list.
Don't misunderstand my comments - corporations are not evil, per se, but because of the management structure and the lack of moral accountability brought on by a statutory legal system, boards of directors of otherwise perfectly reasonable people can corporately make decisions that lead to companies like Altria (Phillip-Morris) and Exxon (as in Valdez). Capitalism only works for the group when it is heavily encumbered against social crimes.
Einstein did not say that there cannot be a center of the universe.
What he did say is that for the purposes of measurement, there exists no privleged metric. All this says (All?!) is that there is no overall coordinate system that will be superior to all other coordinate systems.
If things started out as a big bang, on some scale, we will find a "center" of the universe. Is this an astronomy-shaking discovery? No. Maybe a tremor or two, for diehard relativeists. We already know that for specific purposes, there is often a preferred metric for computational or navigational purposes. Remember back in the Apollo program when the physics guys tried to explain that at a specific point, the coordinate system for the spacecraft shifted over from Terra-centric to Luna-centric, and the reporters looked at the "jog" in the plot and asked if the spacecraft would feel a "lurch" as it passed this point?
It's not nearly as big a deal as, say, whether Pluto is a "planet" or not. Pick a label, pin the sticker on the rock, except in this case, the rocks are superclusters of galaxies.
In point of fact, NASA has a spare toilet, that was built for testing on the Enterprize. What kind of bureaucratic B.S. is this? Now, Shuttle Bad, Everything Else Good? That's nuts. There are thousands of systems on our shuttle that are perfectly well designed, and the idea of throwing them away is as silly as, say, destroying the plans for the Saturn V booster at the end of the Apollo program.
The only explanation I can come up with is that the bureaucracy at NASA doesn't want people to know how thoroughly they bungled perfectly good designs (can you say "Hubble") and so everything that was done in the past needs to be covered up by shredder. I suppose this is a reasonable reaction from Desk Jockys and Paper Monkeys.
In my own humble opinion, fire them all and start over. Take NASA apart at the seams and call it good riddance. Let DARPA and BMDO rise to take up the slack.
A space elevator is a Hard Project. I wonder that we have become a nation of Harvard MBA's, looking forward to payoff in the next couple of quarters, with a business plan that must not contain "we don't know yet."
Any project really worth doing is worth spending the time it takes to accomplish it. And any project worth doing is going to have setbacks, assumptions that were made that were wrong in the beginning. Does anyone here think that the Atlantic Clipper ships happened because a beancounter looked at a rowboat and said, "Let's make it bigger."
Let me say it again: A space elevator is a Hard Project. We don't have the technology, we may not even have the science at this point. Half a century ago, a very successful man said, "We can Learn what we Do Not Know." That man was Mao, and his visions singlehandedly changed the face of the planet. So, I for one, will put my money where my mouth is. LiftPort is attempting something that has never been done, and all of us have been or worked at places where "We've never done that," is considered a good reason not to try.
Even if LiftPort fails, they will have added to the body of knowledge. That alone is worth the effort.
And if you can't see that point, let me kindly suggest that you consider investing in a high return sub-prime mortgage fund. That, at least, you can understand.
Well, this is approximately equivalent to asking, "Who would be a good candidate for people who try to be rational and take all salient information into account."
Among the current field of Democrats and Republicans, I have to say, "No one." Emphatically.
Running for President these days has degenerated to the status of trying to be the leader of the Bloods or the Crips. The story is power, who has it, and who can get it. Sadly, it seems that every one of these candidates are busy serving their party, and not a single one gives a rats' tail about serving the public.
The closest we can come to a candidate who wanted to take a centrist position and accomplish something of use for the American People was Bill Clinton. He, at least, was willing to go against his party when he thought that doing so would serve the public. It remains to be seen whether or not Hillary can live up to this standard.
So, if you're a nerd, consider... Moving to India, where nerds are valued.
95% of Humanity is Homo simian, two steps up from hairless chimps. Civilization happened when the density of population became high enough that those of us who took a rational approach to our environment could get together and accomplish things. That doesn't change the simple fact that most humans do their utmost to not think about things, because it makes their heads hurt. Faith is a wonderful thing, it tells you everything you need to know. Have you visited your local temple and looked at The Law lately? Every step of life from birth to death and beyond is neatly laid out in explicit, detailed rules, so you never have to actually take a cogent approach to anything.
Consider the dark ages; a thousand years during which the Holy Mother Church held a sizeable fraction of humanity in her grasp, and condemned fifty generations to poverty, squalor, and disease, in the Name of God. We're seeing it again, as religious fanatics labor to set back the clock and retake the earth from those who doubt The Faith. The veneer of civilization as we know it is paper thin, and we must never forget that the barbarians are, as always, at the gate.
Well, since you've now got marketing research, they will most certainly tell you that by far the largest segment of the population consists of people who read their native language at or below a 9th grade level. And particularly in the USA, these peepull cant spell, eethur. So perhaps, in search of a wide demographic, you should simply take a clue from the tabloids, forget this geek stuff, forget being a source of information, and start having articles about who Brad Pitt is currently.. uh.. dating, and whether or not Tom Cruise is gay.
As a practicing chemist, I need to take exception to the characterization of octafluoropropane (perfluoropropane) as "toxic stuff." The very reason that such fluorocarbons hang around for a very long time is due to the strength of the fluorine-carbon bond and the extreme inertness of the molecules.
PFP may be many things, but "toxic stuff" it ain't.
Slashdot Mirror
Because you haven't run the numbers on the beam power density. The Microwave beam is wide, because it's trivial and cheap to make a huge ground antenna, and because agriculture can be carried out under the antenna. THe beam power density can be held down to just a few times noon sunlight power, and still deliver plenty of energy.
That way, both airplane and albatross are safe to transit the beam area.
I fail to understand why everyone thinks a project should be able to have a fixed timeline. It's dead easy to get fusion in a D-T plasma; it makes a good college level physics experiment, using a current induced pinch.
So the basic physics is understood. The engineering is not so. It takes a lot of effort, and a lot of knowledge, to turn a laboratory demo into an industrial process. Consider that it has taken a hundred years to learn to build refineries the way they are now, and improvement is still ongoing.
Worthwhile projects can take a long time, on a human scale. Plasma fusion is one of these projects, and may easily extend into the next century. That doesn't seem to me to be a good reason to give up. The USA is spending a trillion dollars on keeping bankers happy, surely they can spend a few lousy billion over the next twenty years on a possibly limitless energy source.
I understand why politicians think that a "project" should cough up results before the end of their elected term. The rest of us don't need to be that short sighted.
Let's see... We can't have nukes, because nuclear waste is dangerous for thousands of years and is produced in tonnes by reactors.
But "clean coal" is ok, because CO2 can be stored by deep well injection. And unlike nuclear waste, it's dangerous forever, and produced in millions of tonnes by power plants.
I guess sequestered CO2 is better than nuclear waste because giant clouds of killer gas are more "natural" than that awful "atom" stuff. After all, look at the area around Chernobyl, and compare it to the scenes around Lake Nyos.
Oh, and while we're at it, lets consider the number of coal miners killed each year. Too bad we can't ask them about "clean coal" technology.
Um, I wonder at your statistics to support the term "most people" ... Some of us try, very hard, to avoid broad, sweeping generalizations, for example, "Most people are bigots."
Were I unemployed, I would still contribute to open source projects. The only thing I think would be worse than being jobless and broke would be being bored, jobless, and broke.
Absolutely. My 82 year old mother-in-law loves to correspond with friends and relatives. For the last seven years, she's been running Slackware, at first with fvwm2 and then with xfce. She has icons for mail, music, gpod, abiword, a file manager. Her system is set up to run chkroot periodically and email me the results. She lives 1200 miles away from me, so onsite service is not really an option.
We had some printing problems at first, but once the system was switched to CUPS, she's had no trouble at all. In point of fact, the only calls I get are things like "I can't get to my email" (ISP mail server down) and "How do I format a christmas card" (select template->card).
No viruses, no go-nuts-for-no-reason.
It's worked, well, for us.
You are the analogy of an investor who wants a high-yield, low-risk, completely liquid instrument. The term is TANSTAAFL.
I maintain two (yes, two) USB external drives. Every couple of years, I migrate to a larger, or otherwise better medium. I use an incremental backup system (for me, cpio) that ends up keeping too much stuff, but at least I have the stuff I want if I need to get to it.
In a decade - in my case, four decades - one can accumulate a remarkable amount of crap, along with things one truly wants to save. I have a total of about 90 gig of actual data, plus a far larger amount of music and video, which I consider more or less disposable. It is not difficult, nor expensive, to purchase another external drive and copy the data. My oldest backup is on IBM 2314 disk pack, but the data still held on that disk is also present on my current backup, a WD 160G in a USB-1 enclosure. Sometime next year, I'll go to a 500 G drive in a USB-2 enclosure.
An important consideration is to periodically check to see that the data ostensibly held on a drive (or CD, or DVD) is actually readable. DVD/RW in particular has a tendency to get flakey over long periods of time, expecially if stored under adverse conditions (jammed in back of desk drawer, under sixteen pair of scissors, stapler, a box of pop-tarts, and four old coffee cups. I always keep my last few generations of backups, and if I find an unreadable datum, I make an effort to recover it from the previous backup.
While it may be stating the obvious, it's a Bad Idea (TM) to wait to back up data until you have a problem. I back up all of my data every week or two, and critical data, daily, without fail. Critical data is cached as a three-generation dataset (IBMese).
Good luck. There are no real solutions, just ways to cope.
Don't look now, but you already drink recycled urine. Stuff goes down the drain, to water treatment, to lake or ocean or golf course. At this point, it evaporates. The water vapor aggregates as clouds, the clouds produce rain. The rain ends up in reservoirs or aquifers, whence comes drinking water.
The cycle is just a little smaller in the space station.
Cough up? Uh... I thought it was the other way.
Chris,
What you say about ice cores and CO2 levels is accurate but incomplete. THe story isn't so simple. In point of fact, ice cores have shown that the atmospheric CO2 levels have been dropping steadily over time, essentially until the bottom of the last ice age, aboujt 11,000 years ago. Since that time, the CO2 levels have slowly risen until about 1800 AD or so, at which time human CO2 production became a significant additional planetary burden,
Prior to the ice ages, in the carboniferous period, planetary levels of CO2 were as high as 1500 parts per million, five times what they are today. One must consider that all that limestone and fossil fuel in the ground (or what used to be in the ground) came from this atmospheric carbon dioxide, over hundreds of millions of years. The CO2 levels reached a planetary minimum during the last series of ice ages. Whether the cooling was due to low CO2 levels, or the low CO2 levels were due to cooling is unresolved.
What is not arguable is that humans are adding to the atmospheric CO2 levels, and that during this microscopic period of geological time, global warming has become very fast indeed.
What is also not arguable is that prior to the ice ages, the planet was very much warmer than it is now, and very much warmer than ecological models predict for tne forseeable future. We're not treading on new ground here, we're retracing steps that occurred half a million years ago. The world is not coming to an end, at least, not yet.
Having said that, going back to a Permian climate would be exceptionally inconvenient to a few billion humans. At those times, the entire interior of the United states was a warm tropical inland sea. Somehow, I think the future residents of St. Louis might object to that. Siberia could become the rice bowl of civilization. From today's point of view, it would be bad, no doubt.
For better or worse, we (humanity) don't really have the option to go back to a small population of agrarians. I might point out that agriculture itself is very recent, only about 6,000 years old. We don't really get to "go back to nature" -- if you doubt this, take a trip to Cambodia.
The only option we have left is to take over engineeing of our planet. This will include finding ways to stop dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, but also includes things like building seawalls around New Orleans, and in the quite near future, a lot of other urban places, or relocating the entire place to higher locations. Ocean levels have varied by a thousand meters throughout history, and we aren't (yet) in a position to stop them.
The important thing to remember is that our planet is a "complex system" and that on such systems, one never, ever, gets to adjust just one knob. Everything interacts, and we must proceed cautiously so that our "fixes" don't end up causing more damage than leaving things alone.
There is a lot to be done, and predicting that the sky is falling isn't helpful. Pointing out that when a suburb of Los Angeles floods, it is due to increased oceanic evaporation caused by global warming is a lot more truthful, and in my opinion, more effective, than painting pictures of the end of the world.
-- Norm Reitzel
Illegal wiretapping program? Unconstitutionally granting immunity?
Have you ever taken a civics class? Something that a president does may or may not be "illegal" -- the fact that Congress has decided it to be unlawful notwithstanding. In this country, there is this thing called "separation of powers" and in point of fact, the illegality or constitutionality of a presidential action or congressional mandate is decided by the judicial branch, and not by preferred political spin.
Do you really believe that what an elected president may choose to do in defiance of congress is as simple as quotng a city charter for a parking ticket?
It's not simple. It's not straightforward. If it were either, then presidents wouldn't do things that Congress doesn't like (wiretaps), and Congress wouldn't do things that otherwise sound very unconstitutional, like granting immunity to some (but not all) telecom companies.
This, my friend, is why the ACLU exists, and why the Supreme Court of the United States listens to arguments about constitutional issues.
As bothersome as these issues are, it beats tanks in the streets hands down.
So, let me make sure that I have this correct. You went and got a BS in Computer Science, but you don't like writing programs?
Offhand... "Ding! Fries are Done! ..."
Well, I'm not disagreeing in general with your comments, however...
Just a month ago, I spent three days gathering up enough pieces of Gnome 2.20.2 to make a clean compile on Slackware. There's nothing magic about it, but it is a daunting task for someone familiar with the software and may in fact be unachievable for someone who is a newbie.
It's nice to have a development team in place to sweat the details.
I respect Richard's opinions, but I think he lives in a fantasy world.
Richard has been at it for a lot of years, many more than Linus. He's been in the forefront of promoting Free Software for a long time, however... I might point out - being a little cynical - that prior to Linus' efforts, most people using computers and faced with this interview, would have simply said, "Richard Who?" Given all those years of relative nothing, I have to believe that Linus has something going, regardless of RMS comments.
It's kind of amusing to look at the history of FOSS, and a recurring theme has been that developers think that just because they have developed a complex piece of software over a long period of time (gcc comes to mind) that it's not open to being reimplimented in the future. If GPL3 becomes a thorn in would-be commercial users, there will be money available to replace it with something that's not so obnoxious.
In 1977, we (SWTPc) reimplimented libc for exactly that reason: Western Electric licensing provisions were obnoxious and restrictive. This is the very same reason that RMS and others undertook to reimpliment the Unix toolkit. It's not magic; it's just code, and like employees, there is no piece of code that can't be replaced.
I don't even begin to see why this is considered a significant item. There are already tens, if not hundreds, of automobile models I can't buy in the USofA.
My children are grown, and it's my wife and myself, and I'd like a commuter car. Specifically, I'd like to buy a VW Polo BlueMotion, a 2-door 1.4L diesel that gets 67 mpg. I use this example because it's concrete, but there are scads of such cars available to Europeans, to Japanese, in South America, even in Canada. And there are VW dealers on every other block, here in San Antonio.
So can I buy this VW? Heck no. The dealer thinks I need to buy a Jetta, which is "really a small car" (as compared to what, a Ford Excursion?) or maybe I should test drive a nice Toyota Tundra, c'mon, be a _MAN_...
Pfui. A pox on their houses.
I just can't wait for the price of gas to hit $5/gal. Good for 'em all.
I don't think it's germane to talk about either the RNC or DNC has having anything whatsoever to do with ideology. Both groups are about power, and ideology is just one of the tools that they use to extort votes from their adherents.
In my not-so-humble opinion, both groups are fully corrept and the United States could benefit greatly if we gave them swords (or suicide vests) and let them kill each other off. They are the modern-day national equivalent of the Bloods and Crips, and have nothing whatever to offer actual Americans.
In part, I tend towards Libertarianism, just because I've become so disillusioned with the corporate political process. For the past sixty years, our American system of government has become polluted by merchantilism and the oligarchy of megacorporations. Because of the way that our statutory systems permits literal interpretation of the rule sets (laws), the groups with the most lawyers have become adept at avoiding the intent of laws, and using the literal verbage of the law to commit immoral acts -- read Marx, of the few things he was right about, this corporate corruption leads the list.
Don't misunderstand my comments - corporations are not evil, per se, but because of the management structure and the lack of moral accountability brought on by a statutory legal system, boards of directors of otherwise perfectly reasonable people can corporately make decisions that lead to companies like Altria (Phillip-Morris) and Exxon (as in Valdez). Capitalism only works for the group when it is heavily encumbered against social crimes.
Einstein did not say that there cannot be a center of the universe.
What he did say is that for the purposes of measurement, there exists no privleged metric. All this says (All?!) is that there is no overall coordinate system that will be superior to all other coordinate systems.
If things started out as a big bang, on some scale, we will find a "center" of the universe. Is this an astronomy-shaking discovery? No. Maybe a tremor or two, for diehard relativeists. We already know that for specific purposes, there is often a preferred metric for computational or navigational purposes. Remember back in the Apollo program when the physics guys tried to explain that at a specific point, the coordinate system for the spacecraft shifted over from Terra-centric to Luna-centric, and the reporters looked at the "jog" in the plot and asked if the spacecraft would feel a "lurch" as it passed this point?
It's not nearly as big a deal as, say, whether Pluto is a "planet" or not. Pick a label, pin the sticker on the rock, except in this case, the rocks are superclusters of galaxies.
In point of fact, NASA has a spare toilet, that was built for testing on the Enterprize. What kind of bureaucratic B.S. is this? Now, Shuttle Bad, Everything Else Good? That's nuts. There are thousands of systems on our shuttle that are perfectly well designed, and the idea of throwing them away is as silly as, say, destroying the plans for the Saturn V booster at the end of the Apollo program.
The only explanation I can come up with is that the bureaucracy at NASA doesn't want people to know how thoroughly they bungled perfectly good designs (can you say "Hubble") and so everything that was done in the past needs to be covered up by shredder. I suppose this is a reasonable reaction from Desk Jockys and Paper Monkeys.
In my own humble opinion, fire them all and start over. Take NASA apart at the seams and call it good riddance. Let DARPA and BMDO rise to take up the slack.
Or just hire the Russians.
A space elevator is a Hard Project. I wonder that we have become a nation of Harvard MBA's, looking forward to payoff in the next couple of quarters, with a business plan that must not contain "we don't know yet."
Any project really worth doing is worth spending the time it takes to accomplish it. And any project worth doing is going to have setbacks, assumptions that were made that were wrong in the beginning. Does anyone here think that the Atlantic Clipper ships happened because a beancounter looked at a rowboat and said, "Let's make it bigger."
Let me say it again: A space elevator is a Hard Project. We don't have the technology, we may not even have the science at this point. Half a century ago, a very successful man said, "We can Learn what we Do Not Know." That man was Mao, and his visions singlehandedly changed the face of the planet. So, I for one, will put my money where my mouth is. LiftPort is attempting something that has never been done, and all of us have been or worked at places where "We've never done that," is considered a good reason not to try.
Even if LiftPort fails, they will have added to the body of knowledge. That alone is worth the effort.
And if you can't see that point, let me kindly suggest that you consider investing in a high return sub-prime mortgage fund. That, at least, you can understand.
Well, this is approximately equivalent to asking, "Who would be a good candidate for people who try to be rational and take all salient information into account."
Among the current field of Democrats and Republicans, I have to say, "No one." Emphatically.
Running for President these days has degenerated to the status of trying to be the leader of the Bloods or the Crips. The story is power, who has it, and who can get it. Sadly, it seems that every one of these candidates are busy serving their party, and not a single one gives a rats' tail about serving the public.
The closest we can come to a candidate who wanted to take a centrist position and accomplish something of use for the American People was Bill Clinton. He, at least, was willing to go against his party when he thought that doing so would serve the public. It remains to be seen whether or not Hillary can live up to this standard.
So, if you're a nerd, consider... Moving to India, where nerds are valued.
What you mean "us", White Man?
95% of Humanity is Homo simian, two steps up from hairless chimps. Civilization happened when the density of population became high enough that those of us who took a rational approach to our environment could get together and accomplish things. That doesn't change the simple fact that most humans do their utmost to not think about things, because it makes their heads hurt. Faith is a wonderful thing, it tells you everything you need to know. Have you visited your local temple and looked at The Law lately? Every step of life from birth to death and beyond is neatly laid out in explicit, detailed rules, so you never have to actually take a cogent approach to anything.
Consider the dark ages; a thousand years during which the Holy Mother Church held a sizeable fraction of humanity in her grasp, and condemned fifty generations to poverty, squalor, and disease, in the Name of God. We're seeing it again, as religious fanatics labor to set back the clock and retake the earth from those who doubt The Faith. The veneer of civilization as we know it is paper thin, and we must never forget that the barbarians are, as always, at the gate.
Well, since you've now got marketing research, they will most certainly tell you that by far the largest segment of the population consists of people who read their native language at or below a 9th grade level. And particularly in the USA, these peepull cant spell, eethur. So perhaps, in search of a wide demographic, you should simply take a clue from the tabloids, forget this geek stuff, forget being a source of information, and start having articles about who Brad Pitt is currently.. uh.. dating, and whether or not Tom Cruise is gay.
"God is Watching us... From a Distance."
As a practicing chemist, I need to take exception to the characterization of octafluoropropane (perfluoropropane) as "toxic stuff." The very reason that such fluorocarbons hang around for a very long time is due to the strength of the fluorine-carbon bond and the extreme inertness of the molecules.
PFP may be many things, but "toxic stuff" it ain't.