"Over 3,000 V-2s were launched as military rockets by the German Wehrmacht against Allied targets during the war, mostly London and later Antwerp. The attacks resulted in the death of an estimated 7,250 military personnel and civilians, while 12,000 forced labourers were killed producing the weapons.[9]"
"The German V-weapons (V-1 and V-2) cost $3 billion (wartime dollars) and was more costly than the Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb ($1.9 billion)."
kind of not... USSR had better rockets than the Germans even before the war; the V1-V2 were so bad you needed a city the size of London as a target to be able to hit anything; the famous "German rocketry" contributed more to the defeat of Germany than France, simply by taking resources that could have gone into submarines... US and USSR had better designed and better used rocketry (think of bazookas and katiushas, which could not hit a city 300 miles away, but did not try to do that since it was pretty much useless), while the Germans kept pumping money into somebody's pet projects that were more of a burden than a help... as if they fought the war to feed the companies that produced weaponry instead of fighting it to win. Most of the weapon systems they deployed in the second half of the war were technically impressive but fucking useless in the field, since, for example in the case of the heavy tanks, you also had to get the tank where it mattered, and if you could not get it there because the axles broke you had a very expensive piece of garbage, and the soviets could simply go around them instead of going head to head with the barely mobile monster of a tank.
I am tired of the "von xxx" myths... the Germans, even the exiles before the war, including Einstein, were not allowed anywhere near any significant development program until very late. The V1-V2 rockets don't look anything like the Mercury rockets, except the general stick-with-wings-at-one-end form.
I have two right now: one at Linode (a 512 with Debian, http://linode.com/ and one at Webfusion UK (http://www.webfusion.co.uk/virtual-private-servers/starter/ with Ubuntu)... with Linode is easier to manage your VPS, you can even have alternate images stored and load the one you need, with WF is easier to manage your sites, if you host sites...
They also some 25% unemployment, most of it camouflaged by one of the Hartz-es, complain that the standards of living are going down, sold their some of the industrial sector... and some of the banks, too... to the Russians and the Chinese, and their banks did not crash yet only because the Greeks did not declare bankruptcy.
Oh, and the health care is not all-inclusive since the 80s... their media blames the decline on the money spent on integrating East Germany, but the decline began some 10 years before that.
Spiegel was writing about whether Germany will enter recession or not as early as 2005...
find a German expat and ask him or her... might change your mind about the european paradise. You don't have a "German problem" in the US like you thought you had in the 1850s only because it's a lot harder to emigrate if the only training you have is fit for the 1950s, and wasted 3 years or more pretending to be an "apprentice carpenter" or "bread salesman" or something similar... There are two Germanies: a high tech corporate one that you see boozing in Thailand and the other, working dodgy jobs when not in a "retraining program", and blaming the dirty foreigners for everything.
About the 60%: http://www.oecd.org/document/45/0,3746,en_21571361_44315115_47822637_1_1_1_1,00.html... (this OECD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_for_Economic_Co-operation_and_Development ) and that is only the taxes paid directly, you have to add the other contributions that pay for the "free" health care etc. and who are not considered taxes, VAT, the fuel tax (0.85 USD per _litre_ , that is, roughly speaking 3.5 USD for a gallon only in taxes). Most of the money go on agricultural subsidies, "export compensations" (that is the EU word for dumping), infrastructure subsidies for companies etc.... and of course keeping the army of long term unemployed relatively healthy, fed, clothed and entertained with work training programs.
Germany had an average growth rate of under 2% during the last 30 years, compared with the over 3% for US, for example. The larger German corporations grew a lot more, but guess who paid for that... the 1% you complain in US is a lot smaller in EU.
a large part of those billions are just the subsidies, while the tax wedge in Germany is above 60%... meaning out of what an employers spends with an employee, more than 60% goes to taxes ; yes, sounds like a pretty good deal, but only if you're selling solar power equipment.
do not just ask them, have them build it from scratch... from choosing the software and hardware to cabling to setting up the computers themselves, with "authorized" professionals supervising them, if you're required by law to have "authorized" people do it.
The Mint developers have removed the engines from their cars and attached teams of mules. The next release to be known as Borax.
yeah, and the Gnome designers designed a car that has only one stick, nothing else, no weel, no pedals, no buttons no nothing, but a single stick... then you to take it to the freeway, and everything is fine until you get in an intersection and it starts to rain, and you need to steer, change gears and start the windshield wipers in the same time...
... that is not very uninformative: most EU15 countries finance the budget by getting dividents from state-owned companies or companies partially owned by the state (that is how Germany over 45% of GDP in govt. spending every year).... The statistics don't include the debt of those companies...
if there were any scarcity of IPv4 addresses the prices would be higher; maybe the addresses are only reserved by companies but not all used ? Yes, there "peak IP4v address space" will come, but we're not there yet.
in Rumania the real coverage is close to 100% (well, maybe up in the mountains in the middle of the forest you don't have access, but hardly anybody lives there). EDGE is dirt cheap and omnipresent ( example http://www.orange.ro/acoperire/ or one of the smaller providers http://www.zapp.ro/acoperire/... yes, true, the quality of the service is a bit exaggerated, you don't get 100% of the speed 100% of the time), G3 is cheaper than dial-up in Western Europe and available in all towns... you don't get internet only if you don't want to since a decent monthly fee will put you back the price of 5 cigarette packages, and a wireless connection + 1 modem will cost you the price of 10 cigarette packages, and second hand computers that can do Flash are available at under 150 Euros...
it doesn't account for the lack of articles in equally obscure languages, such as Hungarian or Greek
Those people might have jobs and not enough time to waste:)
Why waste time compiling an article in an "obscure" language very few people care about, when you can edit an article in English and show off to your friends , half of which don't speak your "obscure" language ?
the article is crap and eurostat is a joke; don't know about this "survey", but in other occasions they just poured in the same buckets data collected using different criteria... but I ranted enough about this already...
making conjectures about crap data is a waste of time
really ? for some reason I always thought Ukraine moved faster than us... maybe "Cossaks" is to blame:) , we don't have a successful native game company.
It used to be the same in Rumania until 2004-2005 but then we started building "neighborhood networks" not connected to the net, then pooled money to contract with some of the business ISPs... by 2007 Net access was dirt cheap and the corporate oligopolies got the message and lowered the prices.
a bit to the south of Ukraine my parents get T1 for the equivalent of 15USD/month and they're living in the bloody hills... radio link on top of a pole, UTP cable to the house... true that it stops working well during big storms and the dumb ISP load balances between two exit lines so it's hard to keep a browser session if the web server keeps track of IPs.
... bad infrastructure... bet you're posting over a copper wire that stops working when it rains, while I got 100Mb for 10USD over fiber in the poorly infrastructure-d Eastern Europe:)...
In my country lots of preemies survive to adulthood... I know one that was born at 6 months and last year had twins herself.
Last year there were a couple of scandals in UK about prematurely born babies being left to die without any attempt to care for them http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6156118/Premature-baby-dies-as-guidelines-say-he-was-born-too-early-to-save.html... in my country those MDs would have lost their right to practice medicine... ; as far as I know the same happens in almost every European country, and the "preemies" don't survive for long... same thing would happen with a normal baby, if left in the cold and not fed.
yes, I should also publish my proprietary cookie recipe, maybe I'm poisoning somebody... because the ingredients list that's on the label is useless unless you know exactly how it's cooked.
How about sending some of that polluted water to a lab and finding out yourself ?... oh, noes that would be wasted monies, right ? 'cause it's just water in there...
the "new" fracking method was used for almost 2 years, surely there wouldn't be difficult to get a sample and find out ?... but no, there is only methane in that water... maybe they are pumping methane underground ?
Eurostat is full of garbage: they mix data that was collected according to different rules, does not make sense to debate anything they publish.
Most of their data is crap. For example, a few years ago Eurostat put the percentage of internet users in Iceland at 97%, which would have included some 4000 toddlers. The data sent by Iceland to Eurostat probably meant that 97% of the population live in an area with internet access, which does make sense. Another examples: urban/rural are defined differently in each country but reported as being the same (most UK towns under 10k would be counted as villages in Rumania, for example), broadband is reported differently, infant mortality is reported by each country differently (for example, US and a few of EU countries report a live birth if the child has a pulse _or_ moves independently, while most of the EU reports preemies under a certain weight or height or age as "lost pregnancy", no matter how long do the children live after birth so those children don't get into the "infant mortality" numbers) etc. etc. etc.
graduating from highschool would help... should learn what pollutants can be found in rocks in the earth science/geology class ; volcanic rocks are pretty dangerous, though sedimentary rocks can be mean, too, especially when there is gas or oil.
there should be no reason whatsoever why they can't tell us exactly what they're using for fluid.
yes, there is a reason: accounting and persuading the competition to search for the magic fracking liquid.
I grew up in a region where gas is high... deeper water wells had only stinking water, and the gas burned but not explosively since there was not much gas. There were test wells dug during the '80s but no extraction because it's near a border and since nobody knows how much gas is in there it was difficult to negotiate how much each country should extract. Now the rights were bought by BP both sides of the borders and extraction began.
400 miles to the south there was petroleum in the wells; before the it became important it used to lower property values: no use for the bloody gunk except by letting it evaporate and using the residues as lubricants.
Anybody who imagines that the gas or the oil were perfectly sealed underground and the eveel coprorations broke the seal and unleashed pollution on innocents should also try creationism, will find it satisfactory. If the "innocent victims" were complaning about sulphur hexafluoride or any other dagerous chemical being found in the water after fracking started I would have believed that there might be a problem. Complaining about finding methane and blaming it on the eveel coprorations without any other proof stinks worse than raw petroleum.
Companies go to great lengths to keep the sludge ingredient list a secret because there is no secret: it's water. There are pollutants enough in the rock.
the US government already has a bunch small nuclear power plants, had them for 50+ years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nautilus_(SSN-571) and they're pretty well tested. Russia, France and UK have them too.
Slashdot Mirror
according to the article you linked to:
"Over 3,000 V-2s were launched as military rockets by the German Wehrmacht against Allied targets during the war, mostly London and later Antwerp. The attacks resulted in the death of an estimated 7,250 military personnel and civilians, while 12,000 forced labourers were killed producing the weapons.[9]"
"The German V-weapons (V-1 and V-2) cost $3 billion (wartime dollars) and was more costly than the Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb ($1.9 billion)."
V-1 was a little bit more effective, though ...
kind of not ... USSR had better rockets than the Germans even before the war; the V1-V2 were so bad you needed a city the size of London as a target to be able to hit anything; the famous "German rocketry" contributed more to the defeat of Germany than France, simply by taking resources that could have gone into submarines ... US and USSR had better designed and better used rocketry (think of bazookas and katiushas, which could not hit a city 300 miles away, but did not try to do that since it was pretty much useless), while the Germans kept pumping money into somebody's pet projects that were more of a burden than a help ... as if they fought the war to feed the companies that produced weaponry instead of fighting it to win. Most of the weapon systems they deployed in the second half of the war were technically impressive but fucking useless in the field, since, for example in the case of the heavy tanks, you also had to get the tank where it mattered, and if you could not get it there because the axles broke you had a very expensive piece of garbage, and the soviets could simply go around them instead of going head to head with the barely mobile monster of a tank.
I am tired of the "von xxx" myths ... the Germans, even the exiles before the war, including Einstein, were not allowed anywhere near any significant development program until very late. The V1-V2 rockets don't look anything like the Mercury rockets, except the general stick-with-wings-at-one-end form.
I have two right now: one at Linode (a 512 with Debian, http://linode.com/ and one at Webfusion UK (http://www.webfusion.co.uk/virtual-private-servers/starter/ with Ubuntu) ... with Linode is easier to manage your VPS, you can even have alternate images stored and load the one you need, with WF is easier to manage your sites, if you host sites ...
They also some 25% unemployment, most of it camouflaged by one of the Hartz-es, complain that the standards of living are going down, sold their some of the industrial sector ... and some of the banks, too ... to the Russians and the Chinese, and their banks did not crash yet only because the Greeks did not declare bankruptcy.
Oh, and the health care is not all-inclusive since the 80s ... their media blames the decline on the money spent on integrating East Germany, but the decline began some 10 years before that.
Spiegel was writing about whether Germany will enter recession or not as early as 2005 ...
find a German expat and ask him or her ... might change your mind about the european paradise. You don't have a "German problem" in the US like you thought you had in the 1850s only because it's a lot harder to emigrate if the only training you have is fit for the 1950s, and wasted 3 years or more pretending to be an "apprentice carpenter" or "bread salesman" or something similar ... There are two Germanies: a high tech corporate one that you see boozing in Thailand and the other, working dodgy jobs when not in a "retraining program", and blaming the dirty foreigners for everything.
About the 60%: http://www.oecd.org/document/45/0,3746,en_21571361_44315115_47822637_1_1_1_1,00.html ... (this OECD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_for_Economic_Co-operation_and_Development ) and that is only the taxes paid directly, you have to add the other contributions that pay for the "free" health care etc. and who are not considered taxes, VAT, the fuel tax (0.85 USD per _litre_ , that is, roughly speaking 3.5 USD for a gallon only in taxes). Most of the money go on agricultural subsidies, "export compensations" (that is the EU word for dumping), infrastructure subsidies for companies etc. ... and of course keeping the army of long term unemployed relatively healthy, fed, clothed and entertained with work training programs.
Germany had an average growth rate of under 2% during the last 30 years, compared with the over 3% for US, for example. The larger German corporations grew a lot more, but guess who paid for that ... the 1% you complain in US is a lot smaller in EU.
a large part of those billions are just the subsidies, while the tax wedge in Germany is above 60% ... meaning out of what an employers spends with an employee, more than 60% goes to taxes ; yes, sounds like a pretty good deal, but only if you're selling solar power equipment.
do not just ask them, have them build it from scratch ... from choosing the software and hardware to cabling to setting up the computers themselves, with "authorized" professionals supervising them, if you're required by law to have "authorized" people do it.
yes, have embraced solar power, are spending tens of billions Euro every year, and have under 5% of their consumption supplied from renewables ...
The Mint developers have removed the engines from their cars and attached teams of mules. The next release to be known as Borax.
yeah, and the Gnome designers designed a car that has only one stick, nothing else, no weel, no pedals, no buttons no nothing, but a single stick ... then you to take it to the freeway, and everything is fine until you get in an intersection and it starts to rain, and you need to steer, change gears and start the windshield wipers in the same time ...
if there were any scarcity of IPv4 addresses the prices would be higher; maybe the addresses are only reserved by companies but not all used ? Yes, there "peak IP4v address space" will come, but we're not there yet.
somehow I feel like it's 1992 all over again, and we're debating MacOS vs. DOS/Windows 3.1, and MacOS is winning the debate ...
I'm still charged 1€ per month for an extra IP address ... don't think Europe is running out of addresses any time soon
get the Internet out to everyone
the internet is already out to everyone in Europe, the article and the Eurostat reports are crap
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Romania ... the data is from 2007
in Rumania the real coverage is close to 100% (well, maybe up in the mountains in the middle of the forest you don't have access, but hardly anybody lives there). EDGE is dirt cheap and omnipresent ( example http://www.orange.ro/acoperire/ or one of the smaller providers http://www.zapp.ro/acoperire/ ... yes, true, the quality of the service is a bit exaggerated, you don't get 100% of the speed 100% of the time), G3 is cheaper than dial-up in Western Europe and available in all towns ... you don't get internet only if you don't want to since a decent monthly fee will put you back the price of 5 cigarette packages, and a wireless connection + 1 modem will cost you the price of 10 cigarette packages, and second hand computers that can do Flash are available at under 150 Euros ...
it doesn't account for the lack of articles in equally obscure languages, such as Hungarian or Greek
Those people might have jobs and not enough time to waste :)
Why waste time compiling an article in an "obscure" language very few people care about, when you can edit an article in English and show off to your friends , half of which don't speak your "obscure" language ?
the article is crap and eurostat is a joke; don't know about this "survey", but in other occasions they just poured in the same buckets data collected using different criteria ... but I ranted enough about this already ...
making conjectures about crap data is a waste of time
you can get 1Mb/s-5Mb/s internet for about 20 dollars per month.
you mean 10 or 50 Mb/s
really ? for some reason I always thought Ukraine moved faster than us ... maybe "Cossaks" is to blame :) , we don't have a successful native game company.
It used to be the same in Rumania until 2004-2005 but then we started building "neighborhood networks" not connected to the net, then pooled money to contract with some of the business ISPs ... by 2007 Net access was dirt cheap and the corporate oligopolies got the message and lowered the prices.
a bit to the south of Ukraine my parents get T1 for the equivalent of 15USD/month and they're living in the bloody hills ... radio link on top of a pole, UTP cable to the house ... true that it stops working well during big storms and the dumb ISP load balances between two exit lines so it's hard to keep a browser session if the web server keeps track of IPs.
In my country lots of preemies survive to adulthood ... I know one that was born at 6 months and last year had twins herself.
Last year there were a couple of scandals in UK about prematurely born babies being left to die without any attempt to care for them http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6156118/Premature-baby-dies-as-guidelines-say-he-was-born-too-early-to-save.html ... in my country those MDs would have lost their right to practice medicine ... ; as far as I know the same happens in almost every European country, and the "preemies" don't survive for long ... same thing would happen with a normal baby, if left in the cold and not fed.
yes, I should also publish my proprietary cookie recipe, maybe I'm poisoning somebody ... because the ingredients list that's on the label is useless unless you know exactly how it's cooked.
How about sending some of that polluted water to a lab and finding out yourself ? ... oh, noes that would be wasted monies, right ? 'cause it's just water in there ...
the "new" fracking method was used for almost 2 years, surely there wouldn't be difficult to get a sample and find out ? ... but no, there is only methane in that water ... maybe they are pumping methane underground ?
should not eve bother to give up :)
Eurostat is full of garbage: they mix data that was collected according to different rules, does not make sense to debate anything they publish.
Most of their data is crap. For example, a few years ago Eurostat put the percentage of internet users in Iceland at 97%, which would have included some 4000 toddlers. The data sent by Iceland to Eurostat probably meant that 97% of the population live in an area with internet access, which does make sense. Another examples: urban/rural are defined differently in each country but reported as being the same (most UK towns under 10k would be counted as villages in Rumania, for example), broadband is reported differently, infant mortality is reported by each country differently (for example, US and a few of EU countries report a live birth if the child has a pulse _or_ moves independently, while most of the EU reports preemies under a certain weight or height or age as "lost pregnancy", no matter how long do the children live after birth so those children don't get into the "infant mortality" numbers) etc. etc. etc.
graduating from highschool would help ... should learn what pollutants can be found in rocks in the earth science/geology class ; volcanic rocks are pretty dangerous, though sedimentary rocks can be mean, too, especially when there is gas or oil.
there should be no reason whatsoever why they can't tell us exactly what they're using for fluid.
yes, there is a reason: accounting and persuading the competition to search for the magic fracking liquid.
I grew up in a region where gas is high ... deeper water wells had only stinking water, and the gas burned but not explosively since there was not much gas. There were test wells dug during the '80s but no extraction because it's near a border and since nobody knows how much gas is in there it was difficult to negotiate how much each country should extract. Now the rights were bought by BP both sides of the borders and extraction began.
400 miles to the south there was petroleum in the wells; before the it became important it used to lower property values: no use for the bloody gunk except by letting it evaporate and using the residues as lubricants.
Anybody who imagines that the gas or the oil were perfectly sealed underground and the eveel coprorations broke the seal and unleashed pollution on innocents should also try creationism, will find it satisfactory. If the "innocent victims" were complaning about sulphur hexafluoride or any other dagerous chemical being found in the water after fracking started I would have believed that there might be a problem. Complaining about finding methane and blaming it on the eveel coprorations without any other proof stinks worse than raw petroleum.
Yes, that was an "ad hominem".
Companies go to great lengths to keep the sludge ingredient list a secret because there is no secret: it's water. There are pollutants enough in the rock.
the US government already has a bunch small nuclear power plants, had them for 50+ years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nautilus_(SSN-571) and they're pretty well tested. Russia, France and UK have them too.