Teenagers are vastly more likely to be peer-influenced. If their friends are downloading, they will too, just like if their friends are listening to dippy singers or getting their eyebrows pierced. Similarly, their behavior is very easy to change -- many of them will stop doing things on request because they're not committed to the behavior, they're just doing whatever comes to mind. As people get older, they get increasingly set in their ways and increasingly persistent about their habits, whether it's downloading or driving without using turn signals or what have you.
It's pretty hard for people to accurately assess what they'd *actually* do in a hypothetical situation. We're very good at saying what we think we'd do, though, and saying that we're very sure that's what we'd do. I bet something more like 80% would *actually* stop their bittorrent habits if yelled at by their ISP... for a while, and then a new movie/song would come out, six months down the road, and a big chunk of them would go back to their old habits, and pretty soon it would ratchet back to where it was in the first place. I bet more than 70% of drivers say they'd stop speeding if they got pulled and got a verbal warning from a cop.
Depends on the aluminum frame: did you ever ride an old Vitus 979 or Alan? Not stiff. Stiffness is dependent on the modulus of elasticity and the cube of the tube diameter (basically.) Gary Klein figured out that large, thin-wall aluminum would allow you to build a frame that retained the stiffness of steel while lowering the weight, by vastly increasing the diameter of the tube. Since aluminum has a similar *specific* modulus of elasticity of steel (the modulus divided by the density) but has a lower density, it does well with this. Magnesium would be even better, and beryllium, which has an anomalously high specific modulus of elasticity, would be fabulous. (The only frames I've ever seen made of beryllium were done by the old American Bicycle Company and cost on the order of $20k each.)
Personally, I think the old Italian bikes had it right: soft fork, short stiff frame, so the fork soaks up the front wheel vibration, which is harsher than the rear wheel since it's in front of the center of mass. I love my Cannondale but after a couple hours I think I'm going to pee blood, while my old steel Gios is still comfortable after a 200 km ride.
I know that there exist special treatment plans for people who get pre-qualified -- a *terrible* idea, because whenever you establish a low-security access route people figure out how to exploit it, and then you have the nogoodniks in the 'trusted' category, making a bad situation worse. The Hilton thing could've been interesting, actually, because she was apparently going through security when her little fracas broke out: while going through airport security, she started taking off her clothes. *I* had hoped that it was a surrealist protest about the stupidity of airline security, but that's giving her wholly undeserved credit for intelligence, alas. (But wouldn't that be cool, if people just started stripping in protest?)
At the closest international airport, Denver International, there's a chunk of the parking garage that is inaccessible -- one part of one level walled off on all sides and access only through big, remote-controlled doors, and none of the elevators will stop at that level without a special key. I assume that's the rock-star parking lot, but I'm sure conspiracy freaks have something even better (since some of them think there's a whole underground government complex somewhere beneath DIA.)
I used the phrase 'tragedy of the commons' to describe this, once before, and was shouted down because at least one group of slashthink requires that there be a tangible resource before they admit the term.
As a result I've started thinking of it as being like a herd of deer being chased towards a cliff by a wolf. Each deer knows that if they all stopped, a maximum of one would be killed, and every deer knows that if they keep going they're all going to die... but nobody is willing to stop first.
The idea of a nonlocalized home is interesting. There's a lot of evidence to indicate that as communities get larger, people feel less need to be civil because there's less risk of repercussion. That matches well with your observation of the wealthy executive. I do wonder about the use of private planes, though -- this is sort of a side-fascination since I'm a pilot and tend to notice stories about airplanes. In the last two weeks I've found stories (through my girlfriend, who is a sort of papparazzi-enthusiast) about Paris Hilton and Angelina Jolie creating different types of crises on commercial flights. It surprised me that either of them would ever fly commercial. So I'm curious how extensive the jet-set lifestyle is: whether it's perceptual or actual.
I'd never thought about that aspect of ever-higher salaries. I thought that was mostly because everyone who is voting on increasing salaries is also getting higher salaries from other people doing the same thing -- an enormous groupthink -- but I really like your viewpoint, since it's much more direct and I think generally these feedback loops are pretty tight.
The thing I find most painful about the short-term profit drive is that there isn't any way I can think of to break it, because it's not about information asymmetry or poor education, it's just about everyone acting rationally to maximize their profits, so any attempt to fix it means you're asking people to reduce their profits, and as such is probably doomed. We're just stuck with this mindset, and as trading becomes faster and software takes over more and more of the trading functionality, it'll just get worse.
Because investors reward the promise of lowering prices by outsourcing, and investors reward the short-term profitability of a company that is seeing currently lower prices (and those same investors crucify the company later, when all the short-term decisions it has made to please them come back to bite it in the butt.)
Yes on the subject, no on the author: this article was written by Steven Jay Gould in "The Flamingo's Smile", if I'm remembering correctly. I don't have a copy at work and I can't remember the name of the guy who wrote the original essay, but Gould said the man thought it'd be the most monumental book of the century, since it would remove all dispute between evolutionists and creationists, and was so depressed when the book was *completely* ignored that he died soon thereafter. It was ignored because, as you say, evolutionists thought it was stupid, creationists thought it was deeply unsettling, and everyone universally came to the conclusion that if you took the book's idea to its logical extreme, the universe might have been created 15 minutes ago and us with our memories pre-created, and nobody would be able to tell. (Which, by the way, isn't actually different than what most young-earth creationists believe.)
While I agree with the sentiment of your question, I think the reality of a competitive market compels me to ask a related question: why would {Adobe, Norton, Microsoft, Apple} shelf {FrameMaker, Ghost, many other software packages} when they're for-profit companies?
The answer is: it's more profitable to purchase your competition early than to compete with them, and once having purchased them, it's more profitable to continue what you're doing, without competition, than to invest money into developing something. That's what makes a monopoly emerge from a competitive market.
We'll try that. That's what we do with vodka anyway.
White dog, short hair. My Chinese friend, on coming over, said "oh, that dog's not good eating." So, to be fair, the food choices could always be worse.
Although that brings up an interesting question: 500 years ago, Icelanders were going out in the North Sea in winter, taking their life in their hands, to hunt Greenland shark, which are poisonous, bringing them back, burying them until they'd decayed enough to not be poisonous anymore, and eating them for food. Yet, there are *millions* of puffins that are practically unafraid of humans, swarming all over the coast. Do puffins actually taste *that bad*? (I couldn't bring myself to eat a puffin because they're SO CUTE. I did try horse.)
A second question: how on Earth do men in Iceland concentrate, or get anything done at all, when the whole country seems to be swarming with beautiful women?
I wish I'd read this before I spent $200 buying brennivin in Reykjavik to bring home to friends so they could sample something interesting. I now have about $195 in "thanks but I think you can finish this off" returned gifts in the liquor cabinet and *I* am sure not going to drink that stuff. Truly lovely country, would be thrilled to live there, except y'all eat stuff my dog tries to roll in.
I'm about as far from being an RF engineer as possible, while still holding the title of electron-rassler. What we're making are switching power supply chips, so this is the control circuitry and FET that are switching into a big inductor and capacitor -- so there is some excitement past just resistive loads. But, still, we don't ever have the FET in between 'off' and 'on' for more than a nanosecond. I don't know anything about digital RF, but it's hard for me to imagine they can switch a big FET that fast, and if they're spending any time in the middle at all, they have a very serious heat dissipation problem. So, yeah, I agree -- it seems questionable at best. If they can do it, they've got some great engineers.
My company is putting 600mW through 9mm^2, (switched through on-die mosfets) so 2000mW through 25mm^2 is high but not actually delusional. However, that 9mm^2 is the actual die size, not the package size. I don't know which they're talking about. If they're shady about package size, they'll quote die size, but if they're actually quoting package size then they're a big step closer to delusional.
>maybe similar to how a Turbo or SuperCharger works, only rather than increasing the acceleration, the energy goes toward fuel economy.
Aircraft engines used to do something similar to this, called turbocompounding -- recovering mechanical energy from the exhaust by attaching an exhaust-driven turbine to the driveshaft. It was used in a lot of military piston-powered aircraft, back when such things existed, and reached its apex in the Nomad engine built by Napier, that was a diesel engine with a turbocompound heat extraction setup to get more energy from the exhaust stream, and exit ductwork to derive thrust from the little power still left in the exhaust stream.
This isn't really about "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" as much as it's about a large number of companies, which are each individually saying "if we invest money to fix this, it will impact our short-term profitability compared to other companies which aren't fixing it, so we're not going to do it." Everybody's making the decision they think they have to make to stay competitive, and, as a group, they all move in lock-step towards a major problem. I don't disagree with your summary: it will cost way more than if they addressed things earlier. But nobody can afford to do that unless everyone does it at the same time, and nobody's going to unilaterally take a chance on that. The classical solution to this is government regulation.
>That's pretty much how I feel about journalism these days. I'm not sure what brought it about, whether it is who owns the mass media or government, but no longer are there worthwhile reports about what is important.
I have the nervous feeling that the reason for this is that they're writing what sells, and the general public is too scared of the world to *want* to hear what's really happening. Concentrating on the stupid, irrelevant stuff is comforting, simply because it doesn't matter. Much like gay marriage or flag burning, which is what politicians spend their time arguing about, media talk about celebrities, because the American public doesn't want to think about the tough, scary problems our nation is facing.
The Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem posited three different stages in a planet's early space-faring history: the first junk in orbit; so much junk in orbit that it was impossible to launch through the debris; and enough time that the computer and robotic equipment in the junk managed to get organized and start building an orbital civilization independent and competitive with the planetary life below. Obviously I think the last one's a stretch, but it's a fun idea.
Alas, they're merely English written with different letters. Now if archaeologists found people actually using Old Norse or Anglo-Saxon on a day-to-day basis in the modern US, that'd shake things up.
We can go further: I got so inspired by my little hobby that I changed the default font on my computer -- an Amiga, because you could DO that on them -- so it booted up in runic. That's a whole different type of archaeology, looking at what sort of software and data people were working with at different times.
Very computer-centric, and more particularly, very 1970-1985-computer-centric. How about: making wooden wheels, for cars or carts? Drilling holes in stone with a hammer and a stardrill? Repacking plumbing/steam gasket seals? Installing/maintaining lead/oakum plumbing? Relashing valve pushrods or regrinding valve seats with a file? Filing threads? Making nails with a hammer and a header? Making wrought iron? Making aluminum without electricity? Forming lumber with a froe, an adze, and a two-man saw? Tanning leather?
And some of the items, I just flat-out disagree with: making a fire by striking two pieces of flint together? That *doesn't work*. You strike a piece of steel against flint, which throws sparks because the steel is cut by the flint and showers off bits of hot steel. Flint doesn't burn.
When I was in school, there was this incredibly annoying guy who sat right beside me and just wrote down whatever I wrote. I've since realized he probably just had really bad glasses and couldn't *see* what the teacher was writing, but it was very irritating because he was a pushy, socially inept jerk. Soooo I learned Anglo-Saxon runes. I can write as quickly in a runic transliteration as I can in English block letters, and it made my notebooks look *beautiful*. I have three years' physics, biochemistry, and organic chemistry notebooks in solid runes, interspersed with drawings of chemical structures and the like.
The only drag was when a cute girl would ask if she could have a xerox copy of my notes...
>I will stop kids from smoking crack in my living room, but if I don't notice it, it's still their bad, not mine.
Wow. Have you missed the part where the DEA routinely seizes houses and cars if there's any *indication* they were used for drug-related crimes, regardless of whether the owner was the person involved in committing the crime? Did you not notice when they passed laws saying that people who organize events where drugs are used are held personally, criminally liable for drug-related offenses? Whether you're right or wrong, ethically, in your statement, the US drug laws very strongly indicate that if you don't notice it, it's both their *and* your bad, and you'll end up in the same amount of trouble they're in.
It doesn't take a short (per se) -- the rotating wheels of the model train continually make-and-break contact with the rails because of surface oxides, and, more fundamentally, that you have a rolling electrical contact. Every model train I played with when I was a kid exuded the smell of ozone. We'd use rags soaked in isopropyl alcohol to clean off the tracks on N-gauge railroads because the contact problems were much worse and would cause trains to stop, while big Lionel O-gauge railroads were comparatively immune -- they still sparked a lot, but they'd keep running because of their greater weight. If you ran trains at night you could see the sparks flickering, especially, in the case of Lionel O-gauge trains, from the center rail when the electrical pickup was a sliding contact rather than a rolling one. To this day, the smell of ozone and isopropyl alcohol makes me feel like I'm about 6 years old.
Ozone could well be formed by the much higher radiation levels seen in outer space, much the way that ozone is formed in the upper layers of the Earth's atmosphere. All you need is enough energy to strip oxygen molecules in half, and the resulting radicals will merge with adjacent oxygen molecules to form ozone. Same thing happens in/near any electric motor (which is why you should keep your bicycle tires/tubes stored well away from the freezer in the garage, because the local higher ozone concentration will destroy the rubber) or any source of ionizing radiation, even just intense UV.
I submitted this as a story when AW&ST originally broke the story but it as rejected. I was/am fascinated by the idea that we might've had an entire space program, with astronauts working out there on a regular basis, that is basically unknown to the public. It seems pretty unlikely but there's a lot of material to support the idea.
>NY-LA is 5x as long, and has the freaking Rocky Mountains in the way.
Go through Wyoming, like the original transcontinental railway did: two high points just over 2000 meters, with a max grade of about 1.2% on either one. You don't have to go through Colorado unless you really like digging tunnels.
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Teenagers are vastly more likely to be peer-influenced. If their friends are downloading, they will too, just like if their friends are listening to dippy singers or getting their eyebrows pierced. Similarly, their behavior is very easy to change -- many of them will stop doing things on request because they're not committed to the behavior, they're just doing whatever comes to mind. As people get older, they get increasingly set in their ways and increasingly persistent about their habits, whether it's downloading or driving without using turn signals or what have you.
It's pretty hard for people to accurately assess what they'd *actually* do in a hypothetical situation. We're very good at saying what we think we'd do, though, and saying that we're very sure that's what we'd do. I bet something more like 80% would *actually* stop their bittorrent habits if yelled at by their ISP... for a while, and then a new movie/song would come out, six months down the road, and a big chunk of them would go back to their old habits, and pretty soon it would ratchet back to where it was in the first place. I bet more than 70% of drivers say they'd stop speeding if they got pulled and got a verbal warning from a cop.
Depends on the aluminum frame: did you ever ride an old Vitus 979 or Alan? Not stiff.
Stiffness is dependent on the modulus of elasticity and the cube of the tube diameter (basically.) Gary Klein figured out that large, thin-wall aluminum would allow you to build a frame that retained the stiffness of steel while lowering the weight, by vastly increasing the diameter of the tube. Since aluminum has a similar *specific* modulus of elasticity of steel (the modulus divided by the density) but has a lower density, it does well with this. Magnesium would be even better, and beryllium, which has an anomalously high specific modulus of elasticity, would be fabulous. (The only frames I've ever seen made of beryllium were done by the old American Bicycle Company and cost on the order of $20k each.)
Personally, I think the old Italian bikes had it right: soft fork, short stiff frame, so the fork soaks up the front wheel vibration, which is harsher than the rear wheel since it's in front of the center of mass. I love my Cannondale but after a couple hours I think I'm going to pee blood, while my old steel Gios is still comfortable after a 200 km ride.
I know that there exist special treatment plans for people who get pre-qualified -- a *terrible* idea, because whenever you establish a low-security access route people figure out how to exploit it, and then you have the nogoodniks in the 'trusted' category, making a bad situation worse.
The Hilton thing could've been interesting, actually, because she was apparently going through security when her little fracas broke out: while going through airport security, she started taking off her clothes. *I* had hoped that it was a surrealist protest about the stupidity of airline security, but that's giving her wholly undeserved credit for intelligence, alas. (But wouldn't that be cool, if people just started stripping in protest?)
At the closest international airport, Denver International, there's a chunk of the parking garage that is inaccessible -- one part of one level walled off on all sides and access only through big, remote-controlled doors, and none of the elevators will stop at that level without a special key. I assume that's the rock-star parking lot, but I'm sure conspiracy freaks have something even better (since some of them think there's a whole underground government complex somewhere beneath DIA.)
I used the phrase 'tragedy of the commons' to describe this, once before, and was shouted down because at least one group of slashthink requires that there be a tangible resource before they admit the term.
As a result I've started thinking of it as being like a herd of deer being chased towards a cliff by a wolf. Each deer knows that if they all stopped, a maximum of one would be killed, and every deer knows that if they keep going they're all going to die... but nobody is willing to stop first.
The idea of a nonlocalized home is interesting. There's a lot of evidence to indicate that as communities get larger, people feel less need to be civil because there's less risk of repercussion. That matches well with your observation of the wealthy executive. I do wonder about the use of private planes, though -- this is sort of a side-fascination since I'm a pilot and tend to notice stories about airplanes. In the last two weeks I've found stories (through my girlfriend, who is a sort of papparazzi-enthusiast) about Paris Hilton and Angelina Jolie creating different types of crises on commercial flights. It surprised me that either of them would ever fly commercial. So I'm curious how extensive the jet-set lifestyle is: whether it's perceptual or actual.
I'd never thought about that aspect of ever-higher salaries. I thought that was mostly because everyone who is voting on increasing salaries is also getting higher salaries from other people doing the same thing -- an enormous groupthink -- but I really like your viewpoint, since it's much more direct and I think generally these feedback loops are pretty tight.
The thing I find most painful about the short-term profit drive is that there isn't any way I can think of to break it, because it's not about information asymmetry or poor education, it's just about everyone acting rationally to maximize their profits, so any attempt to fix it means you're asking people to reduce their profits, and as such is probably doomed. We're just stuck with this mindset, and as trading becomes faster and software takes over more and more of the trading functionality, it'll just get worse.
Because investors reward the promise of lowering prices by outsourcing, and investors reward the short-term profitability of a company that is seeing currently lower prices (and those same investors crucify the company later, when all the short-term decisions it has made to please them come back to bite it in the butt.)
Aieeee! Referentially trounced! I'll have to get/read that.
Yes on the subject, no on the author: this article was written by Steven Jay Gould in "The Flamingo's Smile", if I'm remembering correctly. I don't have a copy at work and I can't remember the name of the guy who wrote the original essay, but Gould said the man thought it'd be the most monumental book of the century, since it would remove all dispute between evolutionists and creationists, and was so depressed when the book was *completely* ignored that he died soon thereafter. It was ignored because, as you say, evolutionists thought it was stupid, creationists thought it was deeply unsettling, and everyone universally came to the conclusion that if you took the book's idea to its logical extreme, the universe might have been created 15 minutes ago and us with our memories pre-created, and nobody would be able to tell. (Which, by the way, isn't actually different than what most young-earth creationists believe.)
While I agree with the sentiment of your question, I think the reality of a competitive market compels me to ask a related question: why would {Adobe, Norton, Microsoft, Apple} shelf {FrameMaker, Ghost, many other software packages} when they're for-profit companies?
The answer is: it's more profitable to purchase your competition early than to compete with them, and once having purchased them, it's more profitable to continue what you're doing, without competition, than to invest money into developing something. That's what makes a monopoly emerge from a competitive market.
You complain about finding porn where you're not expecting it, then you type:
>I have had similar results on filtered pubic access connections.
I think I've found your problem...
We'll try that. That's what we do with vodka anyway.
White dog, short hair. My Chinese friend, on coming over, said "oh, that dog's not good eating." So, to be fair, the food choices could always be worse.
Although that brings up an interesting question: 500 years ago, Icelanders were going out in the North Sea in winter, taking their life in their hands, to hunt Greenland shark, which are poisonous, bringing them back, burying them until they'd decayed enough to not be poisonous anymore, and eating them for food. Yet, there are *millions* of puffins that are practically unafraid of humans, swarming all over the coast. Do puffins actually taste *that bad*? (I couldn't bring myself to eat a puffin because they're SO CUTE. I did try horse.)
A second question: how on Earth do men in Iceland concentrate, or get anything done at all, when the whole country seems to be swarming with beautiful women?
I wish I'd read this before I spent $200 buying brennivin in Reykjavik to bring home to friends so they could sample something interesting. I now have about $195 in "thanks but I think you can finish this off" returned gifts in the liquor cabinet and *I* am sure not going to drink that stuff.
Truly lovely country, would be thrilled to live there, except y'all eat stuff my dog tries to roll in.
I'm about as far from being an RF engineer as possible, while still holding the title of electron-rassler.
What we're making are switching power supply chips, so this is the control circuitry and FET that are switching into a big inductor and capacitor -- so there is some excitement past just resistive loads. But, still, we don't ever have the FET in between 'off' and 'on' for more than a nanosecond. I don't know anything about digital RF, but it's hard for me to imagine they can switch a big FET that fast, and if they're spending any time in the middle at all, they have a very serious heat dissipation problem. So, yeah, I agree -- it seems questionable at best. If they can do it, they've got some great engineers.
My company is putting 600mW through 9mm^2, (switched through on-die mosfets) so 2000mW through 25mm^2 is high but not actually delusional. However, that 9mm^2 is the actual die size, not the package size. I don't know which they're talking about. If they're shady about package size, they'll quote die size, but if they're actually quoting package size then they're a big step closer to delusional.
>maybe similar to how a Turbo or SuperCharger works, only rather than increasing the acceleration, the energy goes toward fuel economy.
Aircraft engines used to do something similar to this, called turbocompounding -- recovering mechanical energy from the exhaust by attaching an exhaust-driven turbine to the driveshaft. It was used in a lot of military piston-powered aircraft, back when such things existed, and reached its apex in the Nomad engine built by Napier, that was a diesel engine with a turbocompound heat extraction setup to get more energy from the exhaust stream, and exit ductwork to derive thrust from the little power still left in the exhaust stream.
This isn't really about "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" as much as it's about a large number of companies, which are each individually saying "if we invest money to fix this, it will impact our short-term profitability compared to other companies which aren't fixing it, so we're not going to do it."
Everybody's making the decision they think they have to make to stay competitive, and, as a group, they all move in lock-step towards a major problem. I don't disagree with your summary: it will cost way more than if they addressed things earlier. But nobody can afford to do that unless everyone does it at the same time, and nobody's going to unilaterally take a chance on that.
The classical solution to this is government regulation.
>That's pretty much how I feel about journalism these days. I'm not sure what brought it about, whether it is who owns the mass media or government, but no longer are there worthwhile reports about what is important.
I have the nervous feeling that the reason for this is that they're writing what sells, and the general public is too scared of the world to *want* to hear what's really happening. Concentrating on the stupid, irrelevant stuff is comforting, simply because it doesn't matter. Much like gay marriage or flag burning, which is what politicians spend their time arguing about, media talk about celebrities, because the American public doesn't want to think about the tough, scary problems our nation is facing.
The Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem posited three different stages in a planet's early space-faring history: the first junk in orbit; so much junk in orbit that it was impossible to launch through the debris; and enough time that the computer and robotic equipment in the junk managed to get organized and start building an orbital civilization independent and competitive with the planetary life below. Obviously I think the last one's a stretch, but it's a fun idea.
Alas, they're merely English written with different letters. Now if archaeologists found people actually using Old Norse or Anglo-Saxon on a day-to-day basis in the modern US, that'd shake things up.
We can go further: I got so inspired by my little hobby that I changed the default font on my computer -- an Amiga, because you could DO that on them -- so it booted up in runic. That's a whole different type of archaeology, looking at what sort of software and data people were working with at different times.
Very computer-centric, and more particularly, very 1970-1985-computer-centric.
How about: making wooden wheels, for cars or carts?
Drilling holes in stone with a hammer and a stardrill?
Repacking plumbing/steam gasket seals?
Installing/maintaining lead/oakum plumbing?
Relashing valve pushrods or regrinding valve seats with a file?
Filing threads?
Making nails with a hammer and a header?
Making wrought iron?
Making aluminum without electricity?
Forming lumber with a froe, an adze, and a two-man saw?
Tanning leather?
And some of the items, I just flat-out disagree with: making a fire by striking two pieces of flint together? That *doesn't work*. You strike a piece of steel against flint, which throws sparks because the steel is cut by the flint and showers off bits of hot steel. Flint doesn't burn.
When I was in school, there was this incredibly annoying guy who sat right beside me and just wrote down whatever I wrote. I've since realized he probably just had really bad glasses and couldn't *see* what the teacher was writing, but it was very irritating because he was a pushy, socially inept jerk.
Soooo I learned Anglo-Saxon runes.
I can write as quickly in a runic transliteration as I can in English block letters, and it made my notebooks look *beautiful*. I have three years' physics, biochemistry, and organic chemistry notebooks in solid runes, interspersed with drawings of chemical structures and the like.
The only drag was when a cute girl would ask if she could have a xerox copy of my notes...
>I will stop kids from smoking crack in my living room, but if I don't notice it, it's still their bad, not mine.
Wow. Have you missed the part where the DEA routinely seizes houses and cars if there's any *indication* they were used for drug-related crimes, regardless of whether the owner was the person involved in committing the crime? Did you not notice when they passed laws saying that people who organize events where drugs are used are held personally, criminally liable for drug-related offenses? Whether you're right or wrong, ethically, in your statement, the US drug laws very strongly indicate that if you don't notice it, it's both their *and* your bad, and you'll end up in the same amount of trouble they're in.
It doesn't take a short (per se) -- the rotating wheels of the model train continually make-and-break contact with the rails because of surface oxides, and, more fundamentally, that you have a rolling electrical contact. Every model train I played with when I was a kid exuded the smell of ozone. We'd use rags soaked in isopropyl alcohol to clean off the tracks on N-gauge railroads because the contact problems were much worse and would cause trains to stop, while big Lionel O-gauge railroads were comparatively immune -- they still sparked a lot, but they'd keep running because of their greater weight. If you ran trains at night you could see the sparks flickering, especially, in the case of Lionel O-gauge trains, from the center rail when the electrical pickup was a sliding contact rather than a rolling one. To this day, the smell of ozone and isopropyl alcohol makes me feel like I'm about 6 years old.
Ozone could well be formed by the much higher radiation levels seen in outer space, much the way that ozone is formed in the upper layers of the Earth's atmosphere. All you need is enough energy to strip oxygen molecules in half, and the resulting radicals will merge with adjacent oxygen molecules to form ozone. Same thing happens in/near any electric motor (which is why you should keep your bicycle tires/tubes stored well away from the freezer in the garage, because the local higher ozone concentration will destroy the rubber) or any source of ionizing radiation, even just intense UV.
There is speculation that the US had a military space program called Blackstar, that used a high-speed bomber to launch small orbital vehicles similar to the National Aerospace Plane -- although this would be considered two-stage-to-orbit.
What Aviation Week & Space Tech has to say about it, claiming an modified XB-70 was used as the launch vehicle.
Another, more whackjob, account.
I submitted this as a story when AW&ST originally broke the story but it as rejected. I was/am fascinated by the idea that we might've had an entire space program, with astronauts working out there on a regular basis, that is basically unknown to the public. It seems pretty unlikely but there's a lot of material to support the idea.
>NY-LA is 5x as long, and has the freaking Rocky Mountains in the way.
Go through Wyoming, like the original transcontinental railway did: two high points just over 2000 meters, with a max grade of about 1.2% on either one. You don't have to go through Colorado unless you really like digging tunnels.