One thing that's surprised me is that nobody in the Third World has built something like a V-1 "buzz bomb". That's WWII technology, and it was a low-end technology back then, built from sheet metal. Just duplicating the V-1, adding a JATO bottle so you can use a short portable launch ramp, and adding a half-decent autopilot would provide a precision cruise missile capability at a low price. A low-end GPS plus a backup capability to revert to compass and time in case of jamming would work.
The government most certainly failed *because* both parties who run it are a bunch of money grubbing grab asses. But you want to know who's really at fault? The voter. Some how in some places, we collectively keep voting these bastards back in office.
Um, how are we at fault when we have a choice of voting for a candidate in bed with big oil or a candidate in bed with big media? Would you prefer that we alternate our special interest groups/corporate masters more frequently?
Am I the only one who looks at this and thinks we won't get smaller or more efficient cars, just ones that run on higher spec fuel? I don't think the CAFE laws as written say anything about octane or fuel type.
Whether it's 93 octane premium or diesel, either way there is more potential energy per gallon, and GM won't have to dump as many Aveos on the market to sell another Hummer.
A few posters mentioned emissions as a reason efficiency has gone down since the height of the last fuel bust (1980?) and while that's true to a degree, safety regs are a much larger one. Auto makers can't sell you the same 1500lb crackerbox on wheels they used to, it doesn't meet current federal safety standards.
I'm with the GP comment on this one - what's the ROI on the cost and the effort of upgrading an enterprise from XP to Win 7? I just don't see the motivation.
So with the site license program they can just keep adding licenses for a discontinued OS?
If that's the case I'd wager the only traction would be if new systems dropped driver support for XP at some point. The company won't care what gets shipped on their systems since they have to re-image them anyway.
What kind of ROI (return on investment)will upgrading bring? Seems MS had already succeeded in building a better mouse trap. No real reason to upgrade unlike its predecessors.
Well, Microsoft has already stopped mainstream support for XP, though I believe they'll continue supplying security patches for a few more years...
For one thing, it is time to put term limits on all elected federal offices. Secondly, we should have the right to elect at least a portion of the Supreme Court.
I'm not sure if term limits really help matters. One of the biggest problems in our government is that many politicians only truly consider short term consequences of their actions even when they claim to do otherwise.
If all of them are guaranteed to be out of office and doing something else in 8 years, it seems to me that this sort of behavior would only increase.
Given the constantly decreasing costs of electronics manufacture, even if not now, there will be a point where it becomes possible to constantly monitor large part of the population without extraordinary expenses.
This business has been going on since MS started moneyhatting developers to get a quick leg up on Sony's (at the time) deep roster of 1st party games (remember MS buying Bungie after Halo was first shown on a Mac?). It's not time to suddenly say it's turned to madness just because Sony's moves angers a few MS fanboys.
It's apparently only turned to madness when Sony does it. Never mind the fact that they've done it plenty of times before (Final Fantasy, GTA, Metal Gear, Ridge Racer, etc.)
All the current players are guilty of it, heck, I recall it going back to the NES, when Nintendo threatened to withhold the chips used to manufacture cartridges from developers who went multi-console.
As I said, they pretty much stop after a while. Yours depreciated at $1650 per year because it was still fairly new. If you start out at $3-5K, you have to really try hard to make it depreciate too much further. I moved last year and ended up buying a $800 truck to help with the remodeling. It still runs so I don't think it's depreciated any.
Your average new car costs very roughly $3000 a year in depreciation. It may be less if you have a cheap japanese model, and much more if you have a American SUV. A car is very expensive compared to taking trains when you factor in depreciation and insurance
That's a false assumption. Some people buy used cars, which pretty much stop depreciating after a while. You may pay a bit more in maintenance, but you'll make up that just in the cheaper insurance rates.
I'll occasionally take the train, but it just doesn't go where I need to go most of the time. Ergo I need a car, and I need insurance, so the only savings are gas + wear and tear. It would be great if we lived in Europe where mass transit was functional, but in many parts of the USA it just isn't.
He postulated that it would actually be healthful. I don't that frequency was ever mentioned, but I also recall that it was supposedly at the "resonant frequency of the earth." His concept was to give out free electrical power, that had health benefits.
In electricity's early years, this was not an uncommon claim by some. You can look here for some of the more silly examples. Even today we have crazy Japanese people using beds with huge electromagnets embedded in them (citation needed).
E.g., people want cars that can carry more than two skinny adults and a bag of peanuts. They're called SUVs. They carry more stuff and people more safely than tiny little cars.
Interestingly enough, they're only called SUVs because of CAFE laws getting passed in '75 following the Arab oil embargo. Before that we just bought big cars. Since SUVs and Minivans are classified as light trucks, they don't have to meet the same mileage standards...though I think this may have changed recently.
We also don't know what percentage of the netfix and blockbuster DVDs are damaged in transit, and any reporting of such numbers must be a function of the number of days in transit.
Another major point missing from this is that a DVD is essentially a MPEG-2 stream. If a few bits are unreadable, the disc still works. If it's a game disc, that's not the case.
So, all other things being equal, they should be seeing higher rates of damaged returns than a DVD rental company does. This != Favoritism.
I think you mean *deflation*.
Prices are currently dropping as are wages.
Um, I know wages are dropping. When unemployment is high they tend to do that. From what I have seen prices have actually gone up for a lot of goods categories. Volume discounting only happens when you can sell in large volumes.
Isn't that the truth? Secretary Gates wants to cancel the F-22 and cut our aircraft carrier fleet down so that we can focus on fighting insurgencies.
Well, from a strategic standpoint I think that makes good sense. The F-22 is great for air superiority missions (something we don't really need currently), but it's not that useful in it's other capacities. That and they're something like $200M apiece.
If we do end up fighting China we'll have bigger problems than a lack of planes, like the fact that large swathes of our infrastructure depend on factories in asia.
I guess I've just seen way too many 10 year old cars sitting in wrecking yards...and I've seen the dirty side of the recycling industry. Sure we put them into these nice shiny bins, but a lot of it ends up on the slow boat to China where it gets 'recycled' as in burned for it's metal content, since there are basically no environmental laws over there.
I've heard of some race cars having ceramic engines. Might be able to replace quite a few of the metal parts with ceramic materials? Although, I'm not sure that's really any better for the environment than metals.
Why do we even need to consider the ecological friendliness of car materials? I'm all for the environment, but it seems to me that what is most worthwhile is making things that last so any impact is amortized over time. As an added bonus, that means we'll still have something to drive after the robot apocalypse.
...on that note, steel is both shock resistant and repairable, ceramics are neither.
You can poison drinking water. LSD is pretty easy to make cheaply, and a single pound of it thrown into a public water system would cause mass insanity.
There are certainly other things you could poison the water supply with, but I don't think LSD would be terribly effective. IIRC It's quite sensitive to chlorine....but I digress.
Given that we have plenty of people who already hate us enough to blow stuff up, doing stuff in the future not to piss them off may not be effective, being as most of them are still killing one another over crap that happened hundreds of years ago.
This doesn't concern me in the slightest as long as they continue to follow the law and request a warrant to plant this trojan.
I thought St. Obama had already declared federal agencies could claim "sovereign immunity" (U.S. can never be sued for spying that violates federal surveillance statutes), or is this different since it involves planting something on their PC?
Honestly I think I'd be happier playing Twilight Princess with an ordinary gamepad, ala 'Cube, than with the Wiimote.
I rather expect that's true of many ported games on the wii. If the original designers were building games with a pad, shoehorning a new control scheme onto the game for the port usually ends badly.
It really is imperative that we do everything we can to cut down the number of nukes to as small a number as possible(I don't see why 10 nuclear weapons per world power isn't enough for effective deterrence), and guard them extremely closely.
You seem to be under the misconception that stealing nukes is the only way wackjob organizations can get them. I'll admit this was high tech stuff back in 1945, but it's now the year 2009. It's largely a question of cost.
Sure, they may not be able to make a small warhead, but something that will fit in a cargo ship? No problem really. Globally we've already refined tons of fissionable material and a bomb only needs a few kilograms.
We're already paying out more in services than is sustainable based on current tax revenue.
Now infrastructure and road costs, I'll go along with that. A ton of our infrastructure dates back to the 1960's and it's no longer aging very gracefully.
In a nutshell, if you're borrowing money it should have value for the people who will have to pay it back. Infrastructure qualifies, new cars and social cushions for the boomers, banks and anyone else looking for handouts don't.
Some of us want to have social services, jobs, roads, infrastructure, etc... And don't find spending for these to be wasteful. Some of us don't find these important at all.
"This regulation in Europe brings us in-line with similar dramatic stands already been made throughout the rest of the world on the use of non energy efficient lighting. Australia have declared to phase out incandescent light bulbs before 2010, replacing them with energy saving bulbs. Canada have announced they will ban the sale of incandescent bulbs in 2012. Similarly the state of California has passed the law to ban the sale of incandescent bulbs in 2012, interestingly called "How Many Legislators Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb Act". While the rest of the United States of America plans to phase out the 100 watt bulb by 2012 and then the 40 watt bulb by 2014.
Having to replace the most common fixture in my house to accommodate CF lights will offset much of the savings.
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If they want a V1, why not just buy one ready made from N.Korea, Egypt, Syria, etc.?
Of course, for the price of one of those they can buy an awful lot of fertilizer and diesel fuel.
Um, how are we at fault when we have a choice of voting for a candidate in bed with big oil or a candidate in bed with big media? Would you prefer that we alternate our special interest groups/corporate masters more frequently?
Am I the only one who looks at this and thinks we won't get smaller or more efficient cars, just ones that run on higher spec fuel? I don't think the CAFE laws as written say anything about octane or fuel type.
Whether it's 93 octane premium or diesel, either way there is more potential energy per gallon, and GM won't have to dump as many Aveos on the market to sell another Hummer.
A few posters mentioned emissions as a reason efficiency has gone down since the height of the last fuel bust (1980?) and while that's true to a degree, safety regs are a much larger one. Auto makers can't sell you the same 1500lb crackerbox on wheels they used to, it doesn't meet current federal safety standards.
So with the site license program they can just keep adding licenses for a discontinued OS?
If that's the case I'd wager the only traction would be if new systems dropped driver support for XP at some point. The company won't care what gets shipped on their systems since they have to re-image them anyway.
Well, Microsoft has already stopped mainstream support for XP, though I believe they'll continue supplying security patches for a few more years...
Cool, now all we have to do is replace all of those Zeus inspired god images with lemurs and we'll be good to go.
I'm not sure if term limits really help matters. One of the biggest problems in our government is that many politicians only truly consider short term consequences of their actions even when they claim to do otherwise.
If all of them are guaranteed to be out of office and doing something else in 8 years, it seems to me that this sort of behavior would only increase.
You mean like OnStar(GM), BMW Assist(BMW), TeleAid(Mercedes) or Lexus Link(Toyota)?
And of course there is the ubiquitous cellular phone...
It's apparently only turned to madness when Sony does it. Never mind the fact that they've done it plenty of times before (Final Fantasy, GTA, Metal Gear, Ridge Racer, etc.)
All the current players are guilty of it, heck, I recall it going back to the NES, when Nintendo threatened to withhold the chips used to manufacture cartridges from developers who went multi-console.
As I said, they pretty much stop after a while. Yours depreciated at $1650 per year because it was still fairly new. If you start out at $3-5K, you have to really try hard to make it depreciate too much further. I moved last year and ended up buying a $800 truck to help with the remodeling. It still runs so I don't think it's depreciated any.
That's a false assumption. Some people buy used cars, which pretty much stop depreciating after a while. You may pay a bit more in maintenance, but you'll make up that just in the cheaper insurance rates.
I'll occasionally take the train, but it just doesn't go where I need to go most of the time. Ergo I need a car, and I need insurance, so the only savings are gas + wear and tear. It would be great if we lived in Europe where mass transit was functional, but in many parts of the USA it just isn't.
In electricity's early years, this was not an uncommon claim by some. You can look here for some of the more silly examples. Even today we have crazy Japanese people using beds with huge electromagnets embedded in them (citation needed).
Interestingly enough, they're only called SUVs because of CAFE laws getting passed in '75 following the Arab oil embargo. Before that we just bought big cars. Since SUVs and Minivans are classified as light trucks, they don't have to meet the same mileage standards...though I think this may have changed recently.
Another major point missing from this is that a DVD is essentially a MPEG-2 stream. If a few bits are unreadable, the disc still works. If it's a game disc, that's not the case.
So, all other things being equal, they should be seeing higher rates of damaged returns than a DVD rental company does. This != Favoritism.
Um, I know wages are dropping. When unemployment is high they tend to do that. From what I have seen prices have actually gone up for a lot of goods categories. Volume discounting only happens when you can sell in large volumes.
Well, from a strategic standpoint I think that makes good sense. The F-22 is great for air superiority missions (something we don't really need currently), but it's not that useful in it's other capacities. That and they're something like $200M apiece.
If we do end up fighting China we'll have bigger problems than a lack of planes, like the fact that large swathes of our infrastructure depend on factories in asia.
I guess I've just seen way too many 10 year old cars sitting in wrecking yards...and I've seen the dirty side of the recycling industry. Sure we put them into these nice shiny bins, but a lot of it ends up on the slow boat to China where it gets 'recycled' as in burned for it's metal content, since there are basically no environmental laws over there.
Why do we even need to consider the ecological friendliness of car materials? I'm all for the environment, but it seems to me that what is most worthwhile is making things that last so any impact is amortized over time. As an added bonus, that means we'll still have something to drive after the robot apocalypse.
...on that note, steel is both shock resistant and repairable, ceramics are neither.
There are certainly other things you could poison the water supply with, but I don't think LSD would be terribly effective. IIRC It's quite sensitive to chlorine. ...but I digress.
Given that we have plenty of people who already hate us enough to blow stuff up, doing stuff in the future not to piss them off may not be effective, being as most of them are still killing one another over crap that happened hundreds of years ago.
I thought St. Obama had already declared federal agencies could claim "sovereign immunity" (U.S. can never be sued for spying that violates federal surveillance statutes), or is this different since it involves planting something on their PC?
I rather expect that's true of many ported games on the wii. If the original designers were building games with a pad, shoehorning a new control scheme onto the game for the port usually ends badly.
You seem to be under the misconception that stealing nukes is the only way wackjob organizations can get them. I'll admit this was high tech stuff back in 1945, but it's now the year 2009. It's largely a question of cost.
Sure, they may not be able to make a small warhead, but something that will fit in a cargo ship? No problem really. Globally we've already refined tons of fissionable material and a bomb only needs a few kilograms.
Now infrastructure and road costs, I'll go along with that. A ton of our infrastructure dates back to the 1960's and it's no longer aging very gracefully.
In a nutshell, if you're borrowing money it should have value for the people who will have to pay it back. Infrastructure qualifies, new cars and social cushions for the boomers, banks and anyone else looking for handouts don't.
http://www.ableduk.com/incandescent_ban.html
"This regulation in Europe brings us in-line with similar dramatic stands already been made throughout the rest of the world on the use of non energy efficient lighting. Australia have declared to phase out incandescent light bulbs before 2010, replacing them with energy saving bulbs. Canada have announced they will ban the sale of incandescent bulbs in 2012. Similarly the state of California has passed the law to ban the sale of incandescent bulbs in 2012, interestingly called "How Many Legislators Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb Act". While the rest of the United States of America plans to phase out the 100 watt bulb by 2012 and then the 40 watt bulb by 2014.