Don't know if this will get noticed or not, as this is has scrolled off the main page and is nearing the 'freeze' state.
First, let me apologize for 'getting personal.' Like to many of the semi-lurkers I read to many posts and then just spill it all out in one post, which leads to over-zealousness...and bad spelling. (slashdot should add a [Check Spelling] button, or include it in [Preview]) Psion did not deserve any animosity I gave off, it really being ment tword others.
Second, let me apologize for bad science. I was mostly going off the cuff, thinking that neither jd nor Psion was giving an acurate portrail, and in the end really messing up my science too.
Now, as to cover my rear: The AC that refers to me as Grasshopper obviously has a much better handle on dispersion of plutonium in the air. Leaving only that question of what was the warheads yeild to be. The Article states only that the bomb would have been at least as large as Hiroshima's, giving us a min, but no max. As that article also states two very important facts on determing the max, a) all reports apon it were destroyed in 1989, and the info in Reifall's head is classified, and b) in the article "its crater may have ruined the face of the 'man in the moon'." This would lead one to believe that magnitude of the warhead would have been considerable and perhaps embarssingly large. The 'man in the moon' not being a little feature needing a telescope to see, I feel justified in saying it would have been a BIG BOOM, not a little one. As to how much plutonium a 10 Mt versus a 100 Mt versus 1000 Mt blast would need, I don't know.
On with Psion: I am not "PC fear of nukuler teknology" as I believe highly in the irradiation of meat, vegetables, milk, etc., view nuclear power as at least on par with coal as far as damage, and believe that adoption of nuclear fission in space as that only way of near term exploration of the planets by human-kind. As for tangoing, I'm taking lessons. Marangai in just 9 weeks. As for working for Ames, I was a lowly janitor mostly, preparing samples for spectroscopy, but I offered that as a qualifier, that I had some experience in a) formal application of science b) knowledge of the science-government relation (which does have application to this case).
The rebutted rebutal points...this is great therapy...The location to the Moon is well known I will give. But hitting it is not as easy as too many believe. Launching from a rotating target and hitting a target 385,000 km away on 50's tech by radio would have been quite a feet. It was successfully done several times, but there were several spetacular misses by both the US and Russia. And this was not with the other superpower having a highly invested intrest in the rocket going astray. Which means flight computers with very little radio control to keep the Ruskies from vearing the rocket off course. And I stand by the using of Earth to throw it up into a lunar orbit since you want to use as little fuel as possible and are launching from a fixed location (kenedy/canaveral/area51) Get it up to low orbit, knock it into an eliptical and whip it at the moon. I'm not saying missing is likely, as unlikely as they could make it, but a miss could be very bad. Especially if they used a radio proximity fuse, the thing would go off when it got near enough anything with the density it was wired for.
As for coming back to roost at home, I was extremely wrong in saying it was 100 percent. You are correct in that it would be next to zero, that is if there were no mitigating circumstances, such as: The article clearly states that they had a specific location targeted, namely the edge. If the rocket was going to miss this target on the first try, they surely would have had it miss the moon entirely and go another earth orbit to try again. For the missing the moon and just going on and on, I find this very unlikely, as what would happen would this missle would join all the other odd-ball meteors and comets with an earth orbit intercepting path. It would eventually be back, to be determined by the precession ( i think thats the term). All the stable orbits are unlikely since the rocket has already been established into an orbit with two gravity points. And finally for being gravity assisted out to the oort or further, you know how much math went into getting cassini just out to jupiter? or is that saturn? Really all this is conjecture unless we know things like launch point, target point, earth in realtion to moon at time of launch, and finally what the flight plan was. With the pentagon admitting it falsifies the hit ratio of rockets in desertstorm and others, I have a very low tollerance for military tactical planning.
As for satellites using plutonium for power, this is usally measured in grams, Cassini being an exception to the rule. I believe the AC answers this more than completely, leaving only the question of how much plutonium. I can only hope I live long enough for this information to be declassified. Lets just leave it at ? with a side of what would this due to the upper atmosphere, it would not escape as it is way to heavy. Would it possibly act as some strange greenhouse or coldhouse catalyst? They mostly covered platinum as a catalyst, not much call for trans-uranic catalytic studies.
As to the size, I already stated why I think it would be large. And for the simple socialogical power they would want a yeild large enough that a person in a resonable sized city at night (light-pollution) would see with the naked eye. Most likely large enough that it could draw attention to itself. I have no idea how many lumen of a flash it would take to get 'light in dark' reaction, but that's why Sagan was brought in. ('Light in Dark' reaction in a natural nerological response of the eyes automatically focussing on a light in a dark environment, its cool.)
As to the size of circle to draw I refer again to 'its crater may have ruined the face of the 'man in the moon'.'
The fallout escape velocity stuff was just pointing out that almost all fallout would have ended up on the earth. No atmosphere on the moon to precipatate it there, leaving only the earth's and moon's gravity to clean it up. Which considering > 50 percent of the fallout would most likely be moving away from the moon at its escape velocity but not at the escape velocity of earth. This percentage has no actual factual basis as I have no knowledge of at what speed that fallout will be ejected, and this would in turn be heavily influenced by hitting the moon edge at the top/bottom, orbit, or counter-orbit. Considering we have found meteorites that are ejected from mars, this is not idle speculation.
I do concede (to many points, bad science on my part as I said) that contaiminating a planet is highly unlikely, it was that if nuking planets turned into a pissing contest, it would have been enevitable. As for how much damage is caused we only can make conjecture from Chernobyl, where consideably less than 1 tonne of material was ejected.
Please don't take anything overly personally, I will do the same for your comments. I was just frustrated at the usual IANAL stuff while every person who had mad a baking soda and vinegar volcano was spoutting off. Totally understandable as this is free speech, I was just trying to get people to recognize IANAP.
I like Verne's stuff, but I tend more tword the Niven end of the spectrum. I'll read "From the Earth to the Moon" if you read "Lucifer's Hammer"
Bleemcast! is going to be a whole other kettle of fish. With VirtualGameStation, you have to have a PC (be it Win9x/x86 or MacOS/PPC) and no person can honestly believe a person would purchase a >$500 system + $30 software to play games from a console that costs $99. Really no percievable overlap in markets. While with Bleemcast! you have Dreamcast which is a direct competitor with the PSX and PSX2. I believe Sony will take a whole other tack with this one. And considering all the previous cases on this subject (numerous Atari, Acorn, Apple II, etc. clone) that all ended in victory of Plaintiff. Only case for Bleemcast! I can think of is the compaq reverse engineering of the IBM PC Bios. But of course, I've been wrong at least 3 times today alone.
Wow, glad we don't see many stories on brain surgery, as we would have armchair neuroscientists crawling out of the woodwork. But get a good rocket science post and here comes 'Midvale School for the Gifted' students to the rescue.Here a few counterpoints.
P2 - To quote Psion: "some of your other speculations just don't work." Your speculation on high profile being some type of defense is a led zepplin. Don't you know that every single one of the rockets launched containing 'animal test subjects' was just a cover for spy cameras??? They were incredibly high profile missions, while doing extreme covert intelligence gathering. Do you actually believe Rusia would believe the US if it had broadcast: 'Live tonight! 250 Mton Warhead to be detonated on Moon at 9pm eastern!' Hell no, that would just give worldwide coverage of Moscow disappearing at 5am local, after a convienant error in guidence, all on live TV and radio. Handilly neutralizing every single enemy of the US, and probably every ally too.
As for turning back, why the Tachy's Bronze Nose would you allow the US to get first strike? If I'm a Russian General, I send in one lone plane equiped with a small nuke to take that baby out on the pad. You go in low, under radar, drop your small nuke and climb at 45 degrees like hell's gate is opening behind you, cause it is. Thsu you avoid radar going in, and will be invisble in the EMP wake on the ay out, maybe even the crew survives long enough to get medals back in Moscow. "Glory to you comrade!"
As for stupid stunts perpatrated on NATO, my favorite was a 'leaked' film reel from Yugoslavia that perported to show Russian agents recovering several filing cabinents full of Nazi agents dosiers that infiltrated the Allies. Scared NATO into doing some extreme spring cleaning, all for naught.
P3 - As for the miscaculation of the position of large celestial objects, actaully small solar-system objects, ask NASA what the current record for on target hits is. The Moon is big, but not so big when you consider it is farther away than you think, and moving at a good clip. You don't so much aim, as throw yourself in the path of Moon.
For the chances to it coming back to the Earth if it missed the Moon, this is almost 100 percent. To keep the rocket from having to carry 100 times the fuel, or arrive at the Moon in 2-3 years, they would launch in into a trajectory that that takes advantage of the Earth's orbit. This would unfortunetly make a miss orbit back to the Earth. And while it may take awhile (1-1,000 years) it will eventually come back home.
As for dissabling the explosive, I would personally hope it would still detonate. A large nuke is bad, but the gamma would be quickly gone and other than first kill, we would only have to worry about fallout and residual radiation. If the warhead instead burns up in re-entry, then you would have a large west-east cload of plutonium in the upper atmosphere along the equator, just where the gulf stream, el nino, and all the biggies are. There'd be a good chance of tremendious killoff from inhaled plutonium, with centuries for it to filter out of the atmosphere.
It would take awhile for the nuke to reach the Moon, as in several days, so most likely the self-destruct mechanism would be very complex for the time to prevent the Russians or others from prematurely detonating it. You would have every ham-radio with a diretional antenna pointed at it, sending every signal they can think of. As for rates of self-destruct failure, I once again refer you to the offices of NASA for statistics.
For the method of detonation, it would probably be a variant of the radar based proximinty (sp?) fuse used in WW2. As for going for a air or land detonation I can't guess, air does more damage, but a land explosion would probably show up better at Earth.
P4 - Most of this paragraph is rebutted above. But please recall, an explosion visable on the Moon from the Earth would be the same if reversed; Visible on the Earth from the Moon. Nasty.
P5 - What a frigin euro-american centric view of the world. Draw a 100 mile radius circle on the Earth with the centerpoint a random location and you have a pretty good chance of hitting something important to someone. How bout we go share a coconut on Bikini Island? Would you stand idly around while a guy on your block used a howitzer and accidentally blew up the empty lot next to you? Even though you don't have the firepower, you could surely gather everyon else in the neighborhood and kick his ass.
P6 - For figuring the 'fallout escape velocity' a lot would have eventually rained down on Earth, remember you only have to put a piece of fallout into an orbit around the Moon of about a quarter of the distance to the Earth for the Earth's gravity to be greater and draw it back here. It has recently come to general acceptance that a lot more materail is ejected into outerspace after a meteor collision, and the Moon does't have any atmosphere to slow particlates down.
P7 - As for contamination of planets, it doesn't take much plutonium suspended in an atmosphere to render it contaminated. Earth is funny in that it has had all this great volcanic and tectonic activity to refine many things like uranium into usable ores. More than enough to pollute all the inner system planets, and perhaps most of the outer system ones also. Luckily for us most off the uranium is locked up in pitch-blend and other ores that won't leach it out easily.
P8 - When the enevitable mistake did occur, in a back and forth pissing match of this magnitude, the losed would of course blame failure on the other, claiming they had be sabotaged. And finally as for accelerating the space program through bigger rockets, it would be far more likely to decrease the wieght of warheads while increasing the yeild of them. This is far cheaper than building a bigger rocket to launch double warheads of the current yeild.
Finally credentials, since I labeled this IANAP, i'm a college junior in physics and computer science and I have worked for a year at AMES Labs previously. Plus I read a large swath through SF. Take my rebuttal for what you think it is worth.
Here comes some ongoing ideas for software law reform:
a) All software sold for profit must include a listing of any and all features implemented in the software. b) If the software is found to not live up to this listing (i.e. CoolAPI#42 compliant) upgrades that forfill this claim must be delivered for free and in a timely manner. c) A full refund of the software price must be given if damages are proven to occur due to incomplete implementation of features outlined in aforementioned listing.
This would help go a long way to better documentation, no more gouging for bug fixes, a decrease in vaporware, and make my cat not stink and my breath minty fresh.
Very good point, but I believe M.Pe1rxq was pointing out that suffixing democracy with any noun or adjective indicatates the group that gets equal votes. Thus Corporate Democracy gets equal votes for corporations. We really aren't a Democracy (notice no preceeding modifiers) and there are so very few cases that when there is, it is usually called a True Democracy. This being since Democracy has been watered down and worshipped so much to lose its meaning.
We (USofAers) live in live a Constitutional Democratic Republic, lots of modifiers there. Really the problem is corporations were meant to always be less than a full citizen, but have moved thier standing to be more than a citizen. This 'super citizenship' they now enjoy is totally against the idea of CDR (gotta love that abbrev.) The first step I would like taken, is for Corporations to be knocked down to citizen level.
A Shame We Don't Have More Fine Examples Like You
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The Corporate Republic
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Now M.Abdera please go back and logically analyze your reponse to the AC post. Please inform me and all those who read this thread how your are not espousing the very views that the AC was pointing out.
From what I can tell, you have only 2 examples against the ACLU, both actually supporting the AC's hypothesis that the ACLU strictly follows it charter. Example one being a direct infringment on a person's right to travel from state to state. The other example being the right to discriminate through a convuluted scheme of 'school vouchers.' These both seem to be excellant points in favor of the AC's argument, while being rather pointless on your part, as with the second example showing that a majority, almost 2/3, of the house voted against a 'liberty' I believe you were wanting. Obviously the ACLU must be emensely powerful to sway such a large swath of the assembly, a feat many very powerful lobbying firms would love to enjoy, or most thought it was a very bad idea. Draw your conclusions, but at least keep them within the limits of the facts.
Hit every target hard.
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Silicon Hell
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No offense, but what a load of bull. Just because any particular offeneder isn't the worst of the pack should not exclude it from being responsible. Should we give AIDs a break since cancer is still the number one killer? Should we not pursue bank robbers till we have solved all murders? This is just a really specious argument. Cars are targets in many enviromental articles. Do you think that slashdot should have also included links to articles about car pollution and car manufacturing pollution? Then we could call this Slashdot/RoadWeek, just like the CNN/Time thing on Sunday nights.
Points for this article being here and being relevant. a) this is a site catering to techgeeks and Silicon Valley is a psuedo-mecca of geekdom b) it concerns the production of the A#1 item that links most stories here, computers. c) the audience actually has a chance of making a differnce in this situation. d) if the audience decides to not make a differnce, it is more well informed about the moral situation it is perpetuating. e) this is an excellent topic for discussion and scrolling through the posts you find many links to further information
So, in conclusion, let me say; recycle all the computers and computer parts you can. They caused a lot of pollution to make, get as much use out of them as possible. Be concious of EnergyStar and other enviromental pluses when deciding on a computer. Saving the world through Open Source is great, lets also be able to say we kept the water clean, the air breathable, and never have to tell our grandchildren 'reindeer are not just the mythical steed of CorporateSanta, but once were real animals.'
There really is no reason for this fungus called sponsorship. For about 2,000 to 3,000 years it was considered good to donate to the arts and not reshape them around the sponsor. Yes, arts would reflect who paid for them (family crest, intials, mottos and other symbols worked into the piece of art) but it wasn't driven by the 'for profit' mentallity. Personally, it is not 'free' in either the beer or the speech sense if it displays a sponsorship message. I really think as time goes on, we should have more 'free' philanthrope, not more sponsorship.
It's crap like this that really makes me hate corporate america and corupt governments. Personally, I went down to the Cinemark and asked for how long they were going to be showing 'The Beach'. They said they didn't know. I replied that I wouldn't be seeing any movies there till it had left. As Cinemark owns all 3 theatres here, guess I'll be catching up on my movie rental. Anyone else have any semi-clever ideas for getting your point across?
RF: Were back, our friend here has just used his 50/50 life line, eliminating BSD and MacOS, leaving behind A)Linux and D)Windows2000. What is your answer?
BG: I'll go with D) Windows2000
RF: Are you sure, the crowd sure doesn't
BG: Yes Regis, that is my final answer
RF: Are you sure? your answer has 65000+ things wrong with it
BG: Yes, Windows 2000 is my final answer
RF: I'm sorry but.....*whisper*(Hmmm? what? who bought disney/abc?)*/whisper*.....THAT IS ABSOLUTELY CORRECT!!!!
BG: ho hum
RF: You win a million dollars, what are you going to do with it?
BG: Why, buy another senator, or perhaps that GWBush I've had my eye on.
RF: Here's your check. That's a lot of zeroes
BG: What the frick? Where's the novelty oversized check? This looks like a regular check.....*grumble*....
10 dis-proofs... or less: (all of these are greatly simplified as I don't want to reread 20+ books)
A) "As far as I can see" == perceptual limitation variable: You as an information bearing automaton have a finite (or fixed infinite) amount of storage and processing power. Most of this is being used to run yourself. Thus you physically cannot have enough resources left over to wholly concieve of another of your class.
B) Indistinguishability != the same. A sphere filled with water and a sphere filled with gasoline may be indistingquishable in the dark, but they are not the same. Do not confuse a limitation of perceptional accuaty and comparibility with equating. You will have several million twins, triplets, etc. P.O.ed.
C) Unsubstatiniated "Apparently" : please list source for this external verification.
D) As for "a very large deterministic system in a chaotic environment" It falls when you point out two things. The deterministic system must itself be a "chaotic environment" as the individual is always a piece of its environment. "To obsever is to influence, and to be influenced" Professor Klemke. Second, I admit I didn't read all the book and BSed on the test.
E) A far better model of "consciousness" is the imaginary numbers models. Just as in the real world the sqaure root of -1 pops up, mathematics leaves open the door to an infinite number of these imaginary numbers. You can thus say JonKatz internal universe, consciousness, runs on sqrt(1), sqrt(-1), and sqrt(JohnKatz). Sqrt(JonKatz) being a number that doesn't exist in the real universe, can't even be manipulated therein. This thus gives an easy test for "consciousness", does this system provably contain a mathmatics that doesn't exist in the real world? Easy test, very, very hard to prove.
F) My favorite, Yes, I will emphatically, and catagorically make the blanket statement that the human mind can't be emulated by a deterministic machine. The only device created thus far to emulate a human mind is the universe, and as you've already said that's a chaotic environment. It can be shown that as the limit of the accuracy of the emulation approaches == the mind it is emulating, the complexity of the system == universe. This does take an exhaustive proof. Proof that an single, isolated bit can not encode more information than a bit. Proof that an un-isolated system can not be emulated, you just have to keep moving out the boundaries till you get an isolated system. Proof that you would need all the information in the universe to run the system.
So yes, there is a system for emulating a mind, the universe. No, you've already defined the universe as a chaotic environment, not a deterministic system.
My female significant other, is a psych/english major, which means she takes lots of wierd but useless classes. One of her 200 level courses began with a 20 min. segment of video tape showing a "average man of the street" (i.e. this individual had no mental problems of clinical worth) being asked questions about his life, work, etc. Then the class was told that the full tape was given to undergrads, grads, psychologist, psycharitists (sp?) and they were asked to try and diagnos if he had any mental illness or what not. It was found that there was a high correlation between years education in psychology and the number/amount/severity of mental illness diagnosised in the videoed man. With most of the psycharitists (sp?) diagnosing multiple problems and the undergrads mostly giving him a clean bill of health. The performers of the study wrote it up and published it somewhere, much to the chagrin of the well educated psychology degreee holder. Lastly the class was warned not to be looking for what they wanted to find, or they would more than likely find it wether or not it was there.
Which finally gets to my point, that the Surgeon General studied hundreds of extremely psych-educated studies all looking for mental illness in the general populace. I would be extremely leary of the conclusions without strict review of the sampling process and what-not.
"THIS PUBLICATION IS THE KEY TO INCREASING SPEED OF TECHNOLOGY PROGRESS. Without the patent system this publication would not take place."
Where is the incentive to improve on a published, patented idea/technique? You can gain no monetary income since it is patented by another. In fact, your impovement will be added onto thier own for thier profit.
I really do want to know where is the incentive to improve on a published, patented idea/technique?
It was nothing personel, I was mostly using your comment as a strawman to focus my thoughts. The "If it ain't Scottish, it's Crap" is Mike Myers from several Saturday Night Live skits. No harm no foul? I'm mostly scottish, with some english and dutch thrown in. Never thrown a kaber, but I have worn a kilt;) On looking back I really rip into your comment, no harm intended.
As far as I can tell I at no point advocate piracy - the binary is freely downloadable, they are assuming you are going to use it with the data on the CD and not just send it to dev/null. Which is what I say to do. Several Times, from different IPs.
And if I was advocting piracy I would be in excellant company, did you know Ghandi making salt from ocean water was an act of piracy, stealing from the British Commonwealth thier rightfull salt tax? And for the US of Aers out there, I should not have to mention the Boston Tea Party. Now I am advoacting dressing up as a Penguin and tossing Windows EULAs in the drink if you are asking.
So don't pirate, legally go acquire the binary and let it take up space or launch it into space, I don't care. It's FREE, as in FREE BEER!, Chug till your hearts content.
Registration cards are like valentines...you really care how many you get, but you never go showing around what's written on them.
Do you think GT will tell LucasArts or Bungie or HasbroInteractive how many cards they got saying "I love linux and bought this Win9x game to actually play it under linux." Yah right, and when i bought X-COM (1,2,and 3) to play under VirtualPC on MacOS, I told MicroProse that, I don't think they passed it on to any other companies. No, LucasArts and Bungie and HasbroInteractive will look at the box sales and say, the Win9x market for this genre is strong, lets make some money.
Registration cards are crap, at least as far as swaying what platform. They are just pleasantly worlded consumer porfiling, to be sold if the price is right.
If your so all fired pumped up to do you duty, wait awhile for the MacOS port, buy that box. That's one less sale for Gates, One more sale for MacOS, and One more sale (if you fill out that precious registration card) for Linux.
Meanwhile I'm downloading the Linux Binary from 7 different IPs, Eat My Mind Flame Win9Xers.
Actually, from my understanding of the game sellers market this is actually, possibly a positive message. Did you know that up until this year every hybrid Win9x/MacOS game sold was counted as a PC sell by all the major stat people, even the stores themselves. Now hybrids have thier own catagory. I own 5 hybrid discs and not one has touched an x86 and yet all data that gets compiled and shoved down my gullet says "Thanks for purchasing five more Win9x games." Oh, you may say, fill out the reg card. I did. Game companies never use those for sale volume numbers, way to unreliable. I basically screwed myself over. Not only did I increase the numbers for Win9x by 5, I basically decreased the sales of my OS of Choice by 5. Ain't that a kick in the pants and a trouser full of fish.
So I say, DON'T! DON'T BUY THE Win9x BOX, it will only increase the percieved purchases by Gates drones. Do donwload at least once the binary for Linux. You will be stealing from the Win9x crowd. Tim Sweeney of Epic will be able to say, "You sold this many boxes, and there were this many downloads for linux, that means 3% (or 7% or 20% or 35%) of the sales were really for linux. Better include them on the CD next time, they might not be so generous."
To Repeat
Don't buy Win9x box Download Linux binary Cackle as percived sales are re-adjusted
As Scrouge McDuck says, "Work smarter, not harder."
And I repeat: "What is this crap?" I have linux running on 3 machines and bsd on 2, ppc and 68k repectively. I don't have a single x86 boxen running Linux. Does that make me one of "the wee people". Do I make you laugh. How bout i make you laugh this way:
I make the kick ass Linux break out and conquer all the desktops drown m$ in its own vomit killer app. And i only release the PPC binary shouting at the top of my lungs "Step right up and buy the definitive LINUX DESKTOP APP, no others need apply." How you gonna like them apples. It runs on Linux (PPC that is) and you can't have it. You want it bad, so bad you can taste it. But I already have a Linux version, why should I recompile for x86?
Second - non-Portable code is crap - only exceptions being tweaking, hand crafted/loved assembly, and drivers. If it ain't Scottish, it's Crap!
You seemed to miss the meat of this article, that a minority (**** 3% ****) was being ignored, made second class, being black balled, then you turn right around and do this very thing, non x86 is not significant. We are Significant even if we aren't a majority.
I'm pretty sure there will be no trouble manuevering around rocks as the average winter wheat field has zero. Thus leading one to the assumption that a few must have negative numbers of rocks to balance out those few with positive numbers of rocks. This assumption is actually true.
Sorry. Wheat fields tend to be relatively flat with clods of dirt being the exception. Based on the picture and the fact that the box is 45cm square (assuption - this is 45cm X 45cm, not 45cm^2 as the arm would appear 3x longer in the picture) the wheels have a diameter of about 20cm which could travel nicely over the average winter wheat field.
So thus ends the McNeily Nightly Agra-Business Report. G'Night
Mr(s). Guidence Counselor - "Timmy, this program here, Mosaic, says you will become a homicidal maniac by age 17. Well mister, this is going in your permanent record."
Slashdot Mirror
Don't know if this will get noticed or not, as this is has scrolled off the main page and is nearing the 'freeze' state.
First, let me apologize for 'getting personal.' Like to many of the semi-lurkers I read to many posts and then just spill it all out in one post, which leads to over-zealousness...and bad spelling. (slashdot should add a [Check Spelling] button, or include it in [Preview]) Psion did not deserve any animosity I gave off, it really being ment tword others.
Second, let me apologize for bad science. I was mostly going off the cuff, thinking that neither jd nor Psion was giving an acurate portrail, and in the end really messing up my science too.
Now, as to cover my rear: The AC that refers to me as Grasshopper obviously has a much better handle on dispersion of plutonium in the air. Leaving only that question of what was the warheads yeild to be. The Article states only that the bomb would have been at least as large as Hiroshima's, giving us a min, but no max. As that article also states two very important facts on determing the max, a) all reports apon it were destroyed in 1989, and the info in Reifall's head is classified, and b) in the article "its crater may have ruined the face of the 'man in the moon'." This would lead one to believe that magnitude of the warhead would have been considerable and perhaps embarssingly large. The 'man in the moon' not being a little feature needing a telescope to see, I feel justified in saying it would have been a BIG BOOM, not a little one. As to how much plutonium a 10 Mt versus a 100 Mt versus 1000 Mt blast would need, I don't know.
On with Psion: I am not "PC fear of nukuler teknology" as I believe highly in the irradiation of meat, vegetables, milk, etc., view nuclear power as at least on par with coal as far as damage, and believe that adoption of nuclear fission in space as that only way of near term exploration of the planets by human-kind. As for tangoing, I'm taking lessons. Marangai in just 9 weeks. As for working for Ames, I was a lowly janitor mostly, preparing samples for spectroscopy, but I offered that as a qualifier, that I had some experience in a) formal application of science b) knowledge of the science-government relation (which does have application to this case).
The rebutted rebutal points...this is great therapy...The location to the Moon is well known I will give. But hitting it is not as easy as too many believe. Launching from a rotating target and hitting a target 385,000 km away on 50's tech by radio would have been quite a feet. It was successfully done several times, but there were several spetacular misses by both the US and Russia. And this was not with the other superpower having a highly invested intrest in the rocket going astray. Which means flight computers with very little radio control to keep the Ruskies from vearing the rocket off course. And I stand by the using of Earth to throw it up into a lunar orbit since you want to use as little fuel as possible and are launching from a fixed location (kenedy/canaveral/area51) Get it up to low orbit, knock it into an eliptical and whip it at the moon. I'm not saying missing is likely, as unlikely as they could make it, but a miss could be very bad. Especially if they used a radio proximity fuse, the thing would go off when it got near enough anything with the density it was wired for.
As for coming back to roost at home, I was extremely wrong in saying it was 100 percent. You are correct in that it would be next to zero, that is if there were no mitigating circumstances, such as: The article clearly states that they had a specific location targeted, namely the edge. If the rocket was going to miss this target on the first try, they surely would have had it miss the moon entirely and go another earth orbit to try again. For the missing the moon and just going on and on, I find this very unlikely, as what would happen would this missle would join all the other odd-ball meteors and comets with an earth orbit intercepting path. It would eventually be back, to be determined by the precession ( i think thats the term). All the stable orbits are unlikely since the rocket has already been established into an orbit with two gravity points. And finally for being gravity assisted out to the oort or further, you know how much math went into getting cassini just out to jupiter? or is that saturn? Really all this is conjecture unless we know things like launch point, target point, earth in realtion to moon at time of launch, and finally what the flight plan was. With the pentagon admitting it falsifies the hit ratio of rockets in desertstorm and others, I have a very low tollerance for military tactical planning.
As for satellites using plutonium for power, this is usally measured in grams, Cassini being an exception to the rule. I believe the AC answers this more than completely, leaving only the question of how much plutonium. I can only hope I live long enough for this information to be declassified. Lets just leave it at ? with a side of what would this due to the upper atmosphere, it would not escape as it is way to heavy. Would it possibly act as some strange greenhouse or coldhouse catalyst? They mostly covered platinum as a catalyst, not much call for trans-uranic catalytic studies.
As to the size, I already stated why I think it would be large. And for the simple socialogical power they would want a yeild large enough that a person in a resonable sized city at night (light-pollution) would see with the naked eye. Most likely large enough that it could draw attention to itself. I have no idea how many lumen of a flash it would take to get 'light in dark' reaction, but that's why Sagan was brought in. ('Light in Dark' reaction in a natural nerological response of the eyes automatically focussing on a light in a dark environment, its cool.)
As to the size of circle to draw I refer again to 'its crater may have ruined the face of the 'man in the moon'.'
The fallout escape velocity stuff was just pointing out that almost all fallout would have ended up on the earth. No atmosphere on the moon to precipatate it there, leaving only the earth's and moon's gravity to clean it up. Which considering > 50 percent of the fallout would most likely be moving away from the moon at its escape velocity but not at the escape velocity of earth. This percentage has no actual factual basis as I have no knowledge of at what speed that fallout will be ejected, and this would in turn be heavily influenced by hitting the moon edge at the top/bottom, orbit, or counter-orbit. Considering we have found meteorites that are ejected from mars, this is not idle speculation.
I do concede (to many points, bad science on my part as I said) that contaiminating a planet is highly unlikely, it was that if nuking planets turned into a pissing contest, it would have been enevitable. As for how much damage is caused we only can make conjecture from Chernobyl, where consideably less than 1 tonne of material was ejected.
Please don't take anything overly personally, I will do the same for your comments. I was just frustrated at the usual IANAL stuff while every person who had mad a baking soda and vinegar volcano was spoutting off. Totally understandable as this is free speech, I was just trying to get people to recognize IANAP.
I like Verne's stuff, but I tend more tword the Niven end of the spectrum. I'll read "From the Earth to the Moon" if you read "Lucifer's Hammer"
Bleemcast! is going to be a whole other kettle of fish. With VirtualGameStation, you have to have a PC (be it Win9x/x86 or MacOS/PPC) and no person can honestly believe a person would purchase a >$500 system + $30 software to play games from a console that costs $99. Really no percievable overlap in markets. While with Bleemcast! you have Dreamcast which is a direct competitor with the PSX and PSX2. I believe Sony will take a whole other tack with this one. And considering all the previous cases on this subject (numerous Atari, Acorn, Apple II, etc. clone) that all ended in victory of Plaintiff. Only case for Bleemcast! I can think of is the compaq reverse engineering of the IBM PC Bios. But of course, I've been wrong at least 3 times today alone.
Wow, glad we don't see many stories on brain surgery, as we would have armchair neuroscientists crawling out of the woodwork. But get a good rocket science post and here comes 'Midvale School for the Gifted' students to the rescue.Here a few counterpoints.
P2 - To quote Psion: "some of your other speculations just don't work." Your speculation on high profile being some type of defense is a led zepplin. Don't you know that every single one of the rockets launched containing 'animal test subjects' was just a cover for spy cameras??? They were incredibly high profile missions, while doing extreme covert intelligence gathering. Do you actually believe Rusia would believe the US if it had broadcast: 'Live tonight! 250 Mton Warhead to be detonated on Moon at 9pm eastern!' Hell no, that would just give worldwide coverage of Moscow disappearing at 5am local, after a convienant error in guidence, all on live TV and radio. Handilly neutralizing every single enemy of the US, and probably every ally too.
As for turning back, why the Tachy's Bronze Nose would you allow the US to get first strike? If I'm a Russian General, I send in one lone plane equiped with a small nuke to take that baby out on the pad. You go in low, under radar, drop your small nuke and climb at 45 degrees like hell's gate is opening behind you, cause it is. Thsu you avoid radar going in, and will be invisble in the EMP wake on the ay out, maybe even the crew survives long enough to get medals back in Moscow. "Glory to you comrade!"
As for stupid stunts perpatrated on NATO, my favorite was a 'leaked' film reel from Yugoslavia that perported to show Russian agents recovering several filing cabinents full of Nazi agents dosiers that infiltrated the Allies. Scared NATO into doing some extreme spring cleaning, all for naught.
P3 - As for the miscaculation of the position of large celestial objects, actaully small solar-system objects, ask NASA what the current record for on target hits is. The Moon is big, but not so big when you consider it is farther away than you think, and moving at a good clip. You don't so much aim, as throw yourself in the path of Moon.
For the chances to it coming back to the Earth if it missed the Moon, this is almost 100 percent. To keep the rocket from having to carry 100 times the fuel, or arrive at the Moon in 2-3 years, they would launch in into a trajectory that that takes advantage of the Earth's orbit. This would unfortunetly make a miss orbit back to the Earth. And while it may take awhile (1-1,000 years) it will eventually come back home.
As for dissabling the explosive, I would personally hope it would still detonate. A large nuke is bad, but the gamma would be quickly gone and other than first kill, we would only have to worry about fallout and residual radiation. If the warhead instead burns up in re-entry, then you would have a large west-east cload of plutonium in the upper atmosphere along the equator, just where the gulf stream, el nino, and all the biggies are. There'd be a good chance of tremendious killoff from inhaled plutonium, with centuries for it to filter out of the atmosphere.
It would take awhile for the nuke to reach the Moon, as in several days, so most likely the self-destruct mechanism would be very complex for the time to prevent the Russians or others from prematurely detonating it. You would have every ham-radio with a diretional antenna pointed at it, sending every signal they can think of. As for rates of self-destruct failure, I once again refer you to the offices of NASA for statistics.
For the method of detonation, it would probably be a variant of the radar based proximinty (sp?) fuse used in WW2. As for going for a air or land detonation I can't guess, air does more damage, but a land explosion would probably show up better at Earth.
P4 - Most of this paragraph is rebutted above. But please recall, an explosion visable on the Moon from the Earth would be the same if reversed; Visible on the Earth from the Moon. Nasty.
P5 - What a frigin euro-american centric view of the world. Draw a 100 mile radius circle on the Earth with the centerpoint a random location and you have a pretty good chance of hitting something important to someone. How bout we go share a coconut on Bikini Island? Would you stand idly around while a guy on your block used a howitzer and accidentally blew up the empty lot next to you? Even though you don't have the firepower, you could surely gather everyon else in the neighborhood and kick his ass.
P6 - For figuring the 'fallout escape velocity' a lot would have eventually rained down on Earth, remember you only have to put a piece of fallout into an orbit around the Moon of about a quarter of the distance to the Earth for the Earth's gravity to be greater and draw it back here. It has recently come to general acceptance that a lot more materail is ejected into outerspace after a meteor collision, and the Moon does't have any atmosphere to slow particlates down.
P7 - As for contamination of planets, it doesn't take much plutonium suspended in an atmosphere to render it contaminated. Earth is funny in that it has had all this great volcanic and tectonic activity to refine many things like uranium into usable ores. More than enough to pollute all the inner system planets, and perhaps most of the outer system ones also. Luckily for us most off the uranium is locked up in pitch-blend and other ores that won't leach it out easily.
P8 - When the enevitable mistake did occur, in a back and forth pissing match of this magnitude, the losed would of course blame failure on the other, claiming they had be sabotaged. And finally as for accelerating the space program through bigger rockets, it would be far more likely to decrease the wieght of warheads while increasing the yeild of them. This is far cheaper than building a bigger rocket to launch double warheads of the current yeild.
Finally credentials, since I labeled this IANAP, i'm a college junior in physics and computer science and I have worked for a year at AMES Labs previously. Plus I read a large swath through SF. Take my rebuttal for what you think it is worth.
Please inform me as to what needs to be done to the JS Prefs to re-enable the offsite image blocking.
Here comes some ongoing ideas for software law reform:
a) All software sold for profit must include a listing of any and all features implemented in the software.
b) If the software is found to not live up to this listing (i.e. CoolAPI#42 compliant) upgrades that forfill this claim must be delivered for free and in a timely manner.
c) A full refund of the software price must be given if damages are proven to occur due to incomplete implementation of features outlined in aforementioned listing.
This would help go a long way to better documentation, no more gouging for bug fixes, a decrease in vaporware, and make my cat not stink and my breath minty fresh.
Very good point, but I believe M.Pe1rxq was pointing out that suffixing democracy with any noun or adjective indicatates the group that gets equal votes. Thus Corporate Democracy gets equal votes for corporations. We really aren't a Democracy (notice no preceeding modifiers) and there are so very few cases that when there is, it is usually called a True Democracy. This being since Democracy has been watered down and worshipped so much to lose its meaning.
We (USofAers) live in live a Constitutional Democratic Republic, lots of modifiers there. Really the problem is corporations were meant to always be less than a full citizen, but have moved thier standing to be more than a citizen. This 'super citizenship' they now enjoy is totally against the idea of CDR (gotta love that abbrev.) The first step I would like taken, is for Corporations to be knocked down to citizen level.
Now M.Abdera please go back and logically analyze your reponse to the AC post. Please inform me and all those who read this thread how your are not espousing the very views that the AC was pointing out.
From what I can tell, you have only 2 examples against the ACLU, both actually supporting the AC's hypothesis that the ACLU strictly follows it charter. Example one being a direct infringment on a person's right to travel from state to state. The other example being the right to discriminate through a convuluted scheme of 'school vouchers.' These both seem to be excellant points in favor of the AC's argument, while being rather pointless on your part, as with the second example showing that a majority, almost 2/3, of the house voted against a 'liberty' I believe you were wanting. Obviously the ACLU must be emensely powerful to sway such a large swath of the assembly, a feat many very powerful lobbying firms would love to enjoy, or most thought it was a very bad idea. Draw your conclusions, but at least keep them within the limits of the facts.
No offense, but what a load of bull. Just because any particular offeneder isn't the worst of the pack should not exclude it from being responsible. Should we give AIDs a break since cancer is still the number one killer? Should we not pursue bank robbers till we have solved all murders? This is just a really specious argument. Cars are targets in many enviromental articles. Do you think that slashdot should have also included links to articles about car pollution and car manufacturing pollution? Then we could call this Slashdot/RoadWeek, just like the CNN/Time thing on Sunday nights.
Points for this article being here and being relevant.
a) this is a site catering to techgeeks and Silicon Valley is a psuedo-mecca of geekdom
b) it concerns the production of the A#1 item that links most stories here, computers.
c) the audience actually has a chance of making a differnce in this situation.
d) if the audience decides to not make a differnce, it is more well informed about the moral situation it is perpetuating.
e) this is an excellent topic for discussion and scrolling through the posts you find many links to further information
So, in conclusion, let me say; recycle all the computers and computer parts you can. They caused a lot of pollution to make, get as much use out of them as possible. Be concious of EnergyStar and other enviromental pluses when deciding on a computer. Saving the world through Open Source is great, lets also be able to say we kept the water clean, the air breathable, and never have to tell our grandchildren 'reindeer are not just the mythical steed of CorporateSanta, but once were real animals.'
There really is no reason for this fungus called sponsorship. For about 2,000 to 3,000 years it was considered good to donate to the arts and not reshape them around the sponsor. Yes, arts would reflect who paid for them (family crest, intials, mottos and other symbols worked into the piece of art) but it wasn't driven by the 'for profit' mentallity. Personally, it is not 'free' in either the beer or the speech sense if it displays a sponsorship message. I really think as time goes on, we should have more 'free' philanthrope, not more sponsorship.
Just a quick rant...
Capitilism is only 'good' as time approaches infinity.
Democracy is 50 million little YESes and NOes a day, not once every four years.
This should really be nipped in the bud right now, and it has, according to the person who originally coded the messages.
We know latin today, and thus eqyptian and many other languages and knowledge, thanks to religious zeal.
/rant
It's crap like this that really makes me hate corporate america and corupt governments. Personally, I went down to the Cinemark and asked for how long they were going to be showing 'The Beach'. They said they didn't know. I replied that I wouldn't be seeing any movies there till it had left. As Cinemark owns all 3 theatres here, guess I'll be catching up on my movie rental. Anyone else have any semi-clever ideas for getting your point across?
-END COMMERCIAL-
RF: Were back, our friend here has just used his 50/50 life line, eliminating BSD and MacOS, leaving behind A)Linux and D)Windows2000. What is your answer?
BG: I'll go with D) Windows2000
RF: Are you sure, the crowd sure doesn't
BG: Yes Regis, that is my final answer
RF: Are you sure? your answer has 65000+ things wrong with it
BG: Yes, Windows 2000 is my final answer
RF: I'm sorry but.....*whisper*(Hmmm? what? who bought disney/abc?)*/whisper*.....THAT IS ABSOLUTELY CORRECT!!!!
BG: ho hum
RF: You win a million dollars, what are you going to do with it?
BG: Why, buy another senator, or perhaps that GWBush I've had my eye on.
RF: Here's your check. That's a lot of zeroes
BG: What the frick? Where's the novelty oversized check? This looks like a regular check.....*grumble*....
-COMMERCIAL-
10 dis-proofs... or less: (all of these are greatly simplified as I don't want to reread 20+ books)
A) "As far as I can see" == perceptual limitation variable: You as an information bearing automaton have a finite (or fixed infinite) amount of storage and processing power. Most of this is being used to run yourself. Thus you physically cannot have enough resources left over to wholly concieve of another of your class.
B) Indistinguishability != the same. A sphere filled with water and a sphere filled with gasoline may be indistingquishable in the dark, but they are not the same. Do not confuse a limitation of perceptional accuaty and comparibility with equating. You will have several million twins, triplets, etc. P.O.ed.
C) Unsubstatiniated "Apparently" : please list source for this external verification.
D) As for "a very large deterministic system in a chaotic environment" It falls when you point out two things. The deterministic system must itself be a "chaotic environment" as the individual is always a piece of its environment. "To obsever is to influence, and to be influenced" Professor Klemke. Second, I admit I didn't read all the book and BSed on the test.
E) A far better model of "consciousness" is the imaginary numbers models. Just as in the real world the sqaure root of -1 pops up, mathematics leaves open the door to an infinite number of these imaginary numbers. You can thus say JonKatz internal universe, consciousness, runs on sqrt(1), sqrt(-1), and sqrt(JohnKatz). Sqrt(JonKatz) being a number that doesn't exist in the real universe, can't even be manipulated therein. This thus gives an easy test for "consciousness", does this system provably contain a mathmatics that doesn't exist in the real world? Easy test, very, very hard to prove.
F) My favorite, Yes, I will emphatically, and catagorically make the blanket statement that the human mind can't be emulated by a deterministic machine. The only device created thus far to emulate a human mind is the universe, and as you've already said that's a chaotic environment. It can be shown that as the limit of the accuracy of the emulation approaches == the mind it is emulating, the complexity of the system == universe. This does take an exhaustive proof. Proof that an single, isolated bit can not encode more information than a bit. Proof that an un-isolated system can not be emulated, you just have to keep moving out the boundaries till you get an isolated system. Proof that you would need all the information in the universe to run the system.
So yes, there is a system for emulating a mind, the universe. No, you've already defined the universe as a chaotic environment, not a deterministic system.
My female significant other, is a psych/english major, which means she takes lots of wierd but useless classes. One of her 200 level courses began with a 20 min. segment of video tape showing a "average man of the street" (i.e. this individual had no mental problems of clinical worth) being asked questions about his life, work, etc. Then the class was told that the full tape was given to undergrads, grads, psychologist, psycharitists (sp?) and they were asked to try and diagnos if he had any mental illness or what not. It was found that there was a high correlation between years education in psychology and the number/amount/severity of mental illness diagnosised in the videoed man. With most of the psycharitists (sp?) diagnosing multiple problems and the undergrads mostly giving him a clean bill of health. The performers of the study wrote it up and published it somewhere, much to the chagrin of the well educated psychology degreee holder. Lastly the class was warned not to be looking for what they wanted to find, or they would more than likely find it wether or not it was there.
Which finally gets to my point, that the Surgeon General studied hundreds of extremely psych-educated studies all looking for mental illness in the general populace. I would be extremely leary of the conclusions without strict review of the sampling process and what-not.
"THIS PUBLICATION IS THE KEY TO INCREASING SPEED OF TECHNOLOGY PROGRESS. Without the patent system this publication would not take place."
Where is the incentive to improve on a published, patented idea/technique? You can gain no monetary income since it is patented by another. In fact, your impovement will be added onto thier own for thier profit.
I really do want to know where is the incentive to improve on a published, patented idea/technique?
It was nothing personel, I was mostly using your comment as a strawman to focus my thoughts. The "If it ain't Scottish, it's Crap" is Mike Myers from several Saturday Night Live skits. No harm no foul? I'm mostly scottish, with some english and dutch thrown in. Never thrown a kaber, but I have worn a kilt ;) On looking back I really rip into your comment, no harm intended.
As far as I can tell I at no point advocate piracy - the binary is freely downloadable, they are assuming you are going to use it with the data on the CD and not just send it to dev/null. Which is what I say to do. Several Times, from different IPs.
And if I was advocting piracy I would be in excellant company, did you know Ghandi making salt from ocean water was an act of piracy, stealing from the British Commonwealth thier rightfull salt tax? And for the US of Aers out there, I should not have to mention the Boston Tea Party. Now I am advoacting dressing up as a Penguin and tossing Windows EULAs in the drink if you are asking.
So don't pirate, legally go acquire the binary and let it take up space or launch it into space, I don't care. It's FREE, as in FREE BEER!, Chug till your hearts content.
Registration cards are like valentines...you really care how many you get, but you never go showing around what's written on them.
Do you think GT will tell LucasArts or Bungie or HasbroInteractive how many cards they got saying "I love linux and bought this Win9x game to actually play it under linux." Yah right, and when i bought X-COM (1,2,and 3) to play under VirtualPC on MacOS, I told MicroProse that, I don't think they passed it on to any other companies. No, LucasArts and Bungie and HasbroInteractive will look at the box sales and say, the Win9x market for this genre is strong, lets make some money.
Registration cards are crap, at least as far as swaying what platform. They are just pleasantly worlded consumer porfiling, to be sold if the price is right.
If your so all fired pumped up to do you duty, wait awhile for the MacOS port, buy that box. That's one less sale for Gates, One more sale for MacOS, and One more sale (if you fill out that precious registration card) for Linux.
Meanwhile I'm downloading the Linux Binary from 7 different IPs, Eat My Mind Flame Win9Xers.
I like giving my messages catchy titles....
Actually, from my understanding of the game sellers market this is actually, possibly a positive message. Did you know that up until this year every hybrid Win9x/MacOS game sold was counted as a PC sell by all the major stat people, even the stores themselves. Now hybrids have thier own catagory. I own 5 hybrid discs and not one has touched an x86 and yet all data that gets compiled and shoved down my gullet says "Thanks for purchasing five more Win9x games." Oh, you may say, fill out the reg card. I did. Game companies never use those for sale volume numbers, way to unreliable. I basically screwed myself over. Not only did I increase the numbers for Win9x by 5, I basically decreased the sales of my OS of Choice by 5. Ain't that a kick in the pants and a trouser full of fish.
So I say, DON'T! DON'T BUY THE Win9x BOX, it will only increase the percieved purchases by Gates drones. Do donwload at least once the binary for Linux. You will be stealing from the Win9x crowd. Tim Sweeney of Epic will be able to say, "You sold this many boxes, and there were this many downloads for linux, that means 3% (or 7% or 20% or 35%) of the sales were really for linux. Better include them on the CD next time, they might not be so generous."
To Repeat
Don't buy Win9x box
Download Linux binary
Cackle as percived sales are re-adjusted
As Scrouge McDuck says, "Work smarter, not harder."
A question twords the future, will "For Linux" mean for Linux/i386 [The Platform] or will it mean for Linux [The OS]? Which would you rather it imply?
And I repeat: "What is this crap?" I have linux running on 3 machines and bsd on 2, ppc and 68k repectively. I don't have a single x86 boxen running Linux. Does that make me one of "the wee people". Do I make you laugh. How bout i make you laugh this way:
I make the kick ass Linux break out and conquer all the desktops drown m$ in its own vomit killer app. And i only release the PPC binary shouting at the top of my lungs "Step right up and buy the definitive LINUX DESKTOP APP, no others need apply." How you gonna like them apples. It runs on Linux (PPC that is) and you can't have it. You want it bad, so bad you can taste it. But I already have a Linux version, why should I recompile for x86?
Second - non-Portable code is crap - only exceptions being tweaking, hand crafted/loved assembly, and drivers. If it ain't Scottish, it's Crap!
You seemed to miss the meat of this article, that a minority (**** 3% ****) was being ignored, made second class, being black balled, then you turn right around and do this very thing, non x86 is not significant. We are Significant even if we aren't a majority.
my rant, I now conclude:
Everyone matters.
I'm pretty sure there will be no trouble manuevering around rocks as the average winter wheat field has zero. Thus leading one to the assumption that a few must have negative numbers of rocks to balance out those few with positive numbers of rocks. This assumption is actually true.
Sorry. Wheat fields tend to be relatively flat with clods of dirt being the exception. Based on the picture and the fact that the box is 45cm square (assuption - this is 45cm X 45cm, not 45cm^2 as the arm would appear 3x longer in the picture) the wheels have a diameter of about 20cm which could travel nicely over the average winter wheat field.
So thus ends the McNeily Nightly Agra-Business Report. G'Night
Why yes I do. Thank you so very much for asking.
Mr(s). Guidence Counselor - "Timmy, this program here, Mosaic, says you will become a homicidal maniac by age 17. Well mister, this is going in your permanent record."
Too much Tom Clancy rots your brain, and all I did was read the back covers of three books.