One system that works well, at least for me (as a buyer), is breaking it up into chapters. One of my favorite games on the iPhone is Toy Bot Diaries, which was fairly short, and cost $4, but was released with the expectation of more chapters later... which they recently released Toy Bot 2, again for $4.
In the end I can see myself paying upwards of $20 or $30, if they made that many chapters; in fact, I wouldn't feel ripped off if the chapters were quite a bit shorter, I feel like I get a lot of game out of it as it is... and, if you charge less for chapters, you dont get the feeling that your committing to something you're not sure you'll enjoy, making it an easy impulse buy. If it had been a much longer game at $10-$20 I would have been much more cautious about purchasing the first one.
In fact, I believe Hajji is actually a term for a Muslim who has participated in the Haj, the pilgramage to Mecca.
Of course, it has been taken by Americans in the area as a denigrating term, and some Americans have trouble distinguishing Indians from Arabs, and the existence of Indian Muslims (including Pakistan) makes it all the more complicated. But basically, in my mind, in this sense it was a racist term, made even more embarrassing by the fact that it showed a gross misunderstanding of basic geography of non-American peoples.
If you derive your equations of motion in a rotating reference frame, the Coriolis term pops right out, the same as centrifugal force does (see XKCD for details, search centrifugal force). The whole 'imaginary' force thing comes about because if you do it in an inertial frame, it doesn't exist. If you feel inclined for a bit of vector calculus, look up the kinematic transport theorem, which gives you the inertial derivative in a rotating frame.
However, the rotating frame isn't completely useless or 'imaginary'; for instance, the old sci-fi trick of spinning up the spaceship or space-station to simulate gravity works because the people are in that rotating frame, and from their point of view the centrifugal force does exist. The Coriolis term is of a lower order, so it has less of an effect, but it 'exists' in exactly the same way. In this case, since the Earth is rotating, and the elevator along with it, with it, the cross-terms caused by the rotation cause a very real force, with the associated strain and instability in the cable.
Also, if you look up how dry counties handle the same issue with alcohol, there was actually a supreme court ruling that given the ant-prohibition amendment, its unconstitutional to try and prevent people from carrying alcohol through the dry region. Furthermore, I don't think any dry county makes an effort to prevent people from bringing alcohol in for personal use, they simply ban selling it.
Of course there will be some inertia where some states will try and do exactly that, however, I tend to think that it would correct itself eventually.
Actually, I think that missile defense makes a lot more sense in this era. While it was certainly a destabilizing force in the cold war (in a maddeningly "War is Peace" kind of way,) the calculus changes completely when you're dealing with the asymmetric challenges of rogue states and the remote possibility of an non-state entity getting access to a few missiles. In the new case, MAD is in no way going to prevent them from launching, and wouldn't prevent us from using ours on them, due to the sheer difference in number.
Also, in a purely technical sense missile defense makes more sense with asymmetric threats, because theres no way such a system could shoot down half of Russia's arsenal flying at us, we'd have to have double or triple the number of interceptors, based on what I can tell of general precision. However, if its only one or two, or one that got fired off by accident, throwing multiple interceptors at it is totally worthwhile.
Really, I think the biggest risk is upsetting Russia with it, even though it really doesn't make sense because there's no way we could stop a barrage from them. But demagogues and presidents trying to look tough on the world stage won't necessarily approach it logically, at least not in public.
A theoretical asteroid can be of many different sizes. An Apophis sized impactor does have global implications (though its not extinction class); however, something like what exploded above Tunguska in the early 20th century could potentially be devastating within a single country but not have an effect outside of a limited region, like a bad earthquake.
And that is an interesting question, because unlike other natural disasters you know its coming and you can do something about it, but its expensive. So if you want to send a mitigation mission, do you make the other country pay for your expenses (assuming they dont have the technology to handle it themeselves), or is it an UN (or American, or Russian) act of charity even though in many ways its the problem of a single country. Or... do you just say hey, you better get people to move out of there, they should have a few years notice at least.
And... what if you change the trajectory just enough to make it hit somewhere else, whats the liability like for something like that? Of course, this is all presuming you can get the track down to a specific impact zone that far into the future, which believe me (I've been doing a bit of work on estimating Apophis' trajectory), is not an easy thing to do.
I'm pretty sure they're not looking to cancel everything related to space exploration, they're more likely to be looking at what cutting Ares 1, etc. and starting over from scratch, relying on COTS, etc. would be like. Of the 5 people on the NASA transition team I know a bit about two of them.
Lori Garver was the only reason Hillary had a defined space policy, was formerly Executive Director of the National Space Society, who keeps a focus on manned flight, and is a former administrator at NASA. George Whitesides is current Executive Director for NSS and is currently scheduled to go on one of the first Virgin Galactic flights. I don't know much about the others, but I'm pretty sure they're not just going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The problem is that the Ares/Orion program has some glaring faults, mostly having to do with the fact that its funded by congress. It was intended to be "shuttle-derived", but all the components had to be changed so much that they needed to be completely re-engineered; the solid boosters were extended to 5 sections which completely changed the combustion patterns leading to some problems discovered over the past year, the external tank was extended to 5.5 meters so it needed completely new tooling and design, and they've played musical engines so that the SSME is definitely not on the table anymore. So basically, the only way it's shuttle derived is that it looks enough like it to congress to make them think we're saving money on it. In fact, from my point of view, we're getting the worst of both worlds, with the costs of engineering a completely new solution, while tying ourselves down to old, rather arbitrary design constraints in the name of reusing old parts.
Then, you look at the specific problems, that Ares I is severely underpowered for anything but the most basic Orion capsule, that they're having to add more engines to the Ares V to get it up to spec, and that for the Michoud manufacturing plant (where they build the tanks) they're having to lay off most of the staff for two years, rebuild the entire plant because its not tall enough to support the 5.5 meter tank, and hope they can get the people back who have any kind of institutional knowledge... just to name the ones I'm most aware of.
My ideal solution would be to scrap Ares, look hard at Orion, consider a solution more like the Jupiter plan (truly shuttle-derived), or take a bit longer and design a completely new system from the ground up. As far as the manned space-flight gap, they have the COTS program. If Elon gets his second rocket right, it may be a shorter gap than we think... I'll admit its an 'if', but it can probably be done sooner than the 6-7 years before Orion is ready to go. As far as prolonging the shuttle, theres a reason it was set to go in 2010, and I dont think this changes that math. However, I'm just an armchair policy maker, so we'll see what the transition team decides.
Given what I've heard, arrival at launch site doesn't mean that its ready to launch, because a lot of the integration work is easiest to do at the cape. I think the biggest reason for setting that date and sticking to it, even if the date of the eventual launch slips, is that this way its putting up a big ad at the cape for the new administration and the transition team to say "Hey, remember us when you're figuring out the future," since (if everything goes as expected) they are the path of least resistance to filling the shuttle gap.
As long as they don't rush the actual launch it seems like a smart move to me.
Like I said, one reason is some people, particularly the government, prefer to buy domestic products when possible. The second thing is that ITAR restrictions make it easier to work with a US company without having to post armed guards and other nonsense (look up Bigelow's Aluminum Coffee Table). And while that may not be enough to make it a fantastic success at first, it should be enough to get it proven, at which point it will get more popular.
If its similarly priced and has the advantage of being American made, I think it has a shot, both in the sense of buy-American-ism and practical avoidance of ITAR issues... plus presumably prices will go down in time once they get the kinks out and a full production process going. In theory.
The website says the top of the BFTS ("Big Falcon Test Stand") is 235 feet high. Presumably this includes the blue "Stairway to Heaven" running up the side of the first stage, so I'd say the concrete stand is probably about 150 feet... having been up to the top I must say it's impressive, and a little scary. Fortunately theres an elevator up to the concrete platform, but only too steep stairs up to the top from there.
Also, while I love the company, I woudl say that they did just buy the site, including the test stand from another company that I can't remember the name of off the top of my head.
This test was the last major step before shipping it to the cape, so it seems the schedule on the website with delivery scheduled by Q408 is accurate. As far as when it launches... my WAG is by summer. From what I can tell getting it to the cape is largely a move to show the new administration "hey, remember us and COTS", so there may be a bit more work that has to be done on it.
Here's hoping the lessons from F1 carry over and there aren't new issues to discover.
I apologize, I guess I didn't make my point clearly enough. It is well within the town governments right and responsibility to set speed laws and enforce them within their city limits. My problem is when they abuse those laws for the primary purpose of revenue generation.
If the goal was public safety the officer would have noticed that I was slowing down as he clocked me, and continued to slow down to obey the speed limit of the town, respecting the laws put in place by the town in which I was a guest. While I was technically going faster than the speed limit, there's a reason why the speed limits are imposed a little outside of town, to allow people to slow down in time, and fulfill the public safety goals of those laws. It's not as though I were blazing down Main street at 70mph.
Again, I'm sorry, I never meant to imply I have no respect for the laws of a small town.
Unfortunately, there are situations when its not really about that... its small towns that have sudden speed drops and try to take advantage of it. Take the speed trap town I hit a couple of nights ago. The speed limit dropped from 70 to 55, I saw the sign as I was about to pass it (it was night, I didn't have my high-beams on), and began to slow down just as I passed into the zone. I didn't see the cop until I was in the middle of the town, at the proper speed limit (I think it was 35), when he turned on his lights and I noticed the car that had pulled out behind me was a cop.
He ticketed me for 15 over without any questions, no acknowledgement of the fact that I was in the process of obeying the limit, just didn't feel like slamming on the brakes, hurting my car and ruining my gas mileage. The fact that the 1-5mph over fine is $165, should be more than clear that this is not about public safety, but about trying to extract money from the people driving through. They finally put in a nicer convenience store that I was planning to stop at, not going to now... however, I think the $200 they made off the ticket is more than any loss of business the town as a whole will lose now. Also, though I don't recall exactly how the signs were arranged, I wouldn't be surprised if they set up the speed limit signs so that they were hard to see.
So yes, sometimes it is an issue of people needing to slow down, however, it isn't always... it's small towns using one of their biggest resources, the highways that go through them, to generate revenue at the expense of those traveling through.
The biggest problem I find is when they are in fact accountable to their nominal employers... the citizens of the shit-hole town you have to drive through. Where I live, what I'd classify as a large town (~60,000 people including students, I think), the police tend to look for excessive speeding, running red lights, and drunk driving... and except for the new red-light cameras that have been installed (the company that installs them takes a share of the profits and requires the yellow lights to be no longer than a certain period of time... I smell corruption), it all tends to be based largely on public safety... particularly on Friday/Saturday nights.
But.. I got pulled over driving through a small (maybe 1000 person) town this Friday night, as I was going from the 70 zone into the 55. By the time the cop flipped his lights I was going the speed limit of the town, I began to slow down as soon as I saw the speed limit sign, and there was no one on the road, it being midnight. By any reasonable expectation I was obeying the spirit of the law and was in no way a risk to public safety. But there was no leniency, I know fighting it in the town's court would be a waste of time, because it is primarily a source of revenue for the town. For further evidence, I give you their fine schedule: 1-5mph over the limit warrants a $165 fine, while my 15mph over is $195.
And they're not my cops, I can't hold them accountable for their abusive actions. This is Texas, which tends to reserve most things to the local governments, so there isn't much the state can do, and I'm not sure that's a good idea anyway. When driving anywhere from here, there is no way to avoid these kind of towns. I'm just not sure I see a good solution, beyond expecting people to be better than they are, or bringing down federal regulations which my gut tells me is almost always the wrong way.
Exactly. And some of us enjoy being able to take a small library that's the size of a single paperback with us when traveling. This is especially as a student who moves every 6 months or so. Also I really enjoy being able buy things at the mass market paperback price and not have to deal with holding it open when you get near the beginnings and ends: that's always annoyed me in bed and while eating.
The Kindle is surprisingly pleasant and convenient experience, at least for me. And again, it's not about the money. For some reason some others can't see that different folks have different requirements and desires, and there aren't one-size-fits-all solutions.
I'd say even more than the age of the code is that Google Apps is an entirely different model. While OO.o is usage-wise very similar to Word, storing and editing local files, Google Apps are entirely different and not something people are comfortable with.
I know for my own personal things, I'd much prefer to keep everything local (although I'm a LaTeX man myself), and I dont think Google Apps hosted on their servers will ever take over this functionality. However, as someone involved with a nation-wide non-profit organization composed of internet-savvy students (read: cannot travel often), its provided an invaluable tool for collaboratively working on documents and sharing information. This of course is based on the proviso that we desire our proceedings to be public and transparent, so the security concerns are non-existent.
No, the military is a federal responsibility. Road development (except the interestate), schools, police and other infrastructure things are a state responsibility.
Re:African Americans are overwhelmingly homophobic
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Marriage (and the expectation of procreation) between siblings poses a danger to society because of obvious genetic problems, which is why it was taboo for as long as people were capable of realizing this problem. Parent/child marriages, beyond this, have the problem that almost any instance would indicate abuse, which is within the governments ability to stop.
However, the banning of gay marriage is entirely a cultural concern, with people blocking it because they see it as uncomfortable, or they don't want their children to see it, or they say it reduces the meaning of their marriage. I'm pretty sure people made the exact same arguments regarding interracial marriage years ago.
And yes, it is society deciding what behaviors are acceptable, through the government. However, this does not mean that it is not homophobic or bigoted... its simply bigotry that a majority of society has decided is acceptable. Its ridiculous to imply that just because the majority of society decides something is acceptable or unacceptable means that its automatically proper and correct. Society has made a number of bad decisions in the past: segregation and slavery, the feudal system and the treatment of the Jews since the diaspora are a few that come to mind. Based on your views I would imagine you are pro-life (I am as well, for what difference it makes). Based on your argument, society has decided that abortion is good and acceptable, and that you should accept it.
It seems to me that one of the things the law and the governemnt are supposed to do is to protect the rights of the minority from the majority; the opposite of this is tyranny of the majority, which you seem to be advocating, and what the founding fathers meant to avoid in framing our government.
I'd appreciate something like that because I mostly prefer to listen to full albums, but I still have plenty of random single songs floating around in my library. I would love to be able to say I only want to see my albums.
Unfortunately, what I'm afraid of right now is that the Republican party, in the reorientation and retrospection that's bound to happen, will come to the conclusion that McCain lost the election rather than Palin. There's going to be a nasty battle for the party come the primaries next year... I see a number of champions for a return of the neo-cons and the religious right with Palin, Huckabee, and Romney. Bobby Jindal, I can see him becoming a big player but I'm not sure where he'll end up. But I dont see any strong leaders from the pragmatic, small government, strong but restrained military branch that I wish the party was... although the fact that McCain did win the primary gives me some hope.
SpaceShipOne has been proven to work, but thats not a very good argument, since it was never intended to scale up to an orbital vehicle. The difference in energy required for that flight and an orbital flight is about 1:10, meaning that an air-launch reduces the energy cost by ~50% for a sub-orbital flight rather than ~5% for an orbital flight, making it much more worthwhile. This is why Rutan did it this way, but I'm pretty sure if he's considering SS3 much right now, he'll go with a very different architecture.
Now, with all respect for Rob Zubrin, Mars Direct is an interesting idea, as are many of his other concepts... but they have yet to be hit with the cold hard facts of real engineering, where things start to go wrong. Given what the parent says about integration being the major cost, and this being the component Zubrin has the least experience with, I'd take it with a grain of salt.
And yes, I agree that solid's are a bad idea, but their use is more a historical artifact of the fact that the US is better at solids (we built lots of them for ICBM's). Notice how the Buran used liquid boosters, since the Russians were better with those. It doesn't mean that air-launch is necessarily better, the disadvantages make it a very hard thing to justify.
Its not even more wasteful to do a single-stage to orbit vehicle, with current specific-impulse propellants, around 450s for the SSME, its basically impossible.
Misses what I see as the most disturbing part of NCLB. Apparently, at least in elementary school, they can no longer have different levels for kids who are ahead, kids who are on level, and kids who are a little behind. This is bad for just about everyone. Those kids who should be accelerated are being held back (my sister was incredibly bored by school), while those who should be in the "slow" class are generally made to feel worse (yes, they'd feel bad initially being put in it, but from what I've heard, kids who belong there tend to thrive and enjoy themeselves more, and generally get a better education because they're not playing catch-up).
Of course, forcing more standardized tests, taking money from bad schools, etc. is fairly ridiculous too, but I really wish that issue would be fixed... our better yet, we could remember what federalism means.
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One system that works well, at least for me (as a buyer), is breaking it up into chapters. One of my favorite games on the iPhone is Toy Bot Diaries, which was fairly short, and cost $4, but was released with the expectation of more chapters later... which they recently released Toy Bot 2, again for $4.
In the end I can see myself paying upwards of $20 or $30, if they made that many chapters; in fact, I wouldn't feel ripped off if the chapters were quite a bit shorter, I feel like I get a lot of game out of it as it is... and, if you charge less for chapters, you dont get the feeling that your committing to something you're not sure you'll enjoy, making it an easy impulse buy. If it had been a much longer game at $10-$20 I would have been much more cautious about purchasing the first one.
In fact, I believe Hajji is actually a term for a Muslim who has participated in the Haj, the pilgramage to Mecca.
Of course, it has been taken by Americans in the area as a denigrating term, and some Americans have trouble distinguishing Indians from Arabs, and the existence of Indian Muslims (including Pakistan) makes it all the more complicated. But basically, in my mind, in this sense it was a racist term, made even more embarrassing by the fact that it showed a gross misunderstanding of basic geography of non-American peoples.
If you derive your equations of motion in a rotating reference frame, the Coriolis term pops right out, the same as centrifugal force does (see XKCD for details, search centrifugal force). The whole 'imaginary' force thing comes about because if you do it in an inertial frame, it doesn't exist. If you feel inclined for a bit of vector calculus, look up the kinematic transport theorem, which gives you the inertial derivative in a rotating frame.
However, the rotating frame isn't completely useless or 'imaginary'; for instance, the old sci-fi trick of spinning up the spaceship or space-station to simulate gravity works because the people are in that rotating frame, and from their point of view the centrifugal force does exist. The Coriolis term is of a lower order, so it has less of an effect, but it 'exists' in exactly the same way. In this case, since the Earth is rotating, and the elevator along with it, with it, the cross-terms caused by the rotation cause a very real force, with the associated strain and instability in the cable.
Also, if you look up how dry counties handle the same issue with alcohol, there was actually a supreme court ruling that given the ant-prohibition amendment, its unconstitutional to try and prevent people from carrying alcohol through the dry region. Furthermore, I don't think any dry county makes an effort to prevent people from bringing alcohol in for personal use, they simply ban selling it.
Of course there will be some inertia where some states will try and do exactly that, however, I tend to think that it would correct itself eventually.
West Texas is now at 80... let me tell you, its much appreciated, theres a whole lot of nothing between Junction and El Paso on I-10.
Actually, I think that missile defense makes a lot more sense in this era. While it was certainly a destabilizing force in the cold war (in a maddeningly "War is Peace" kind of way,) the calculus changes completely when you're dealing with the asymmetric challenges of rogue states and the remote possibility of an non-state entity getting access to a few missiles. In the new case, MAD is in no way going to prevent them from launching, and wouldn't prevent us from using ours on them, due to the sheer difference in number.
Also, in a purely technical sense missile defense makes more sense with asymmetric threats, because theres no way such a system could shoot down half of Russia's arsenal flying at us, we'd have to have double or triple the number of interceptors, based on what I can tell of general precision. However, if its only one or two, or one that got fired off by accident, throwing multiple interceptors at it is totally worthwhile.
Really, I think the biggest risk is upsetting Russia with it, even though it really doesn't make sense because there's no way we could stop a barrage from them. But demagogues and presidents trying to look tough on the world stage won't necessarily approach it logically, at least not in public.
A theoretical asteroid can be of many different sizes. An Apophis sized impactor does have global implications (though its not extinction class); however, something like what exploded above Tunguska in the early 20th century could potentially be devastating within a single country but not have an effect outside of a limited region, like a bad earthquake.
And that is an interesting question, because unlike other natural disasters you know its coming and you can do something about it, but its expensive. So if you want to send a mitigation mission, do you make the other country pay for your expenses (assuming they dont have the technology to handle it themeselves), or is it an UN (or American, or Russian) act of charity even though in many ways its the problem of a single country. Or... do you just say hey, you better get people to move out of there, they should have a few years notice at least.
And... what if you change the trajectory just enough to make it hit somewhere else, whats the liability like for something like that? Of course, this is all presuming you can get the track down to a specific impact zone that far into the future, which believe me (I've been doing a bit of work on estimating Apophis' trajectory), is not an easy thing to do.
I'm pretty sure they're not looking to cancel everything related to space exploration, they're more likely to be looking at what cutting Ares 1, etc. and starting over from scratch, relying on COTS, etc. would be like. Of the 5 people on the NASA transition team I know a bit about two of them.
Lori Garver was the only reason Hillary had a defined space policy, was formerly Executive Director of the National Space Society, who keeps a focus on manned flight, and is a former administrator at NASA. George Whitesides is current Executive Director for NSS and is currently scheduled to go on one of the first Virgin Galactic flights. I don't know much about the others, but I'm pretty sure they're not just going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The problem is that the Ares/Orion program has some glaring faults, mostly having to do with the fact that its funded by congress. It was intended to be "shuttle-derived", but all the components had to be changed so much that they needed to be completely re-engineered; the solid boosters were extended to 5 sections which completely changed the combustion patterns leading to some problems discovered over the past year, the external tank was extended to 5.5 meters so it needed completely new tooling and design, and they've played musical engines so that the SSME is definitely not on the table anymore. So basically, the only way it's shuttle derived is that it looks enough like it to congress to make them think we're saving money on it. In fact, from my point of view, we're getting the worst of both worlds, with the costs of engineering a completely new solution, while tying ourselves down to old, rather arbitrary design constraints in the name of reusing old parts.
Then, you look at the specific problems, that Ares I is severely underpowered for anything but the most basic Orion capsule, that they're having to add more engines to the Ares V to get it up to spec, and that for the Michoud manufacturing plant (where they build the tanks) they're having to lay off most of the staff for two years, rebuild the entire plant because its not tall enough to support the 5.5 meter tank, and hope they can get the people back who have any kind of institutional knowledge... just to name the ones I'm most aware of.
My ideal solution would be to scrap Ares, look hard at Orion, consider a solution more like the Jupiter plan (truly shuttle-derived), or take a bit longer and design a completely new system from the ground up. As far as the manned space-flight gap, they have the COTS program. If Elon gets his second rocket right, it may be a shorter gap than we think... I'll admit its an 'if', but it can probably be done sooner than the 6-7 years before Orion is ready to go. As far as prolonging the shuttle, theres a reason it was set to go in 2010, and I dont think this changes that math. However, I'm just an armchair policy maker, so we'll see what the transition team decides.
Given what I've heard, arrival at launch site doesn't mean that its ready to launch, because a lot of the integration work is easiest to do at the cape. I think the biggest reason for setting that date and sticking to it, even if the date of the eventual launch slips, is that this way its putting up a big ad at the cape for the new administration and the transition team to say "Hey, remember us when you're figuring out the future," since (if everything goes as expected) they are the path of least resistance to filling the shuttle gap.
As long as they don't rush the actual launch it seems like a smart move to me.
Like I said, one reason is some people, particularly the government, prefer to buy domestic products when possible. The second thing is that ITAR restrictions make it easier to work with a US company without having to post armed guards and other nonsense (look up Bigelow's Aluminum Coffee Table). And while that may not be enough to make it a fantastic success at first, it should be enough to get it proven, at which point it will get more popular.
If its similarly priced and has the advantage of being American made, I think it has a shot, both in the sense of buy-American-ism and practical avoidance of ITAR issues... plus presumably prices will go down in time once they get the kinks out and a full production process going. In theory.
The website says the top of the BFTS ("Big Falcon Test Stand") is 235 feet high. Presumably this includes the blue "Stairway to Heaven" running up the side of the first stage, so I'd say the concrete stand is probably about 150 feet... having been up to the top I must say it's impressive, and a little scary. Fortunately theres an elevator up to the concrete platform, but only too steep stairs up to the top from there.
Also, while I love the company, I woudl say that they did just buy the site, including the test stand from another company that I can't remember the name of off the top of my head.
This test was the last major step before shipping it to the cape, so it seems the schedule on the website with delivery scheduled by Q408 is accurate. As far as when it launches... my WAG is by summer. From what I can tell getting it to the cape is largely a move to show the new administration "hey, remember us and COTS", so there may be a bit more work that has to be done on it.
Here's hoping the lessons from F1 carry over and there aren't new issues to discover.
I apologize, I guess I didn't make my point clearly enough. It is well within the town governments right and responsibility to set speed laws and enforce them within their city limits. My problem is when they abuse those laws for the primary purpose of revenue generation.
If the goal was public safety the officer would have noticed that I was slowing down as he clocked me, and continued to slow down to obey the speed limit of the town, respecting the laws put in place by the town in which I was a guest. While I was technically going faster than the speed limit, there's a reason why the speed limits are imposed a little outside of town, to allow people to slow down in time, and fulfill the public safety goals of those laws. It's not as though I were blazing down Main street at 70mph.
Again, I'm sorry, I never meant to imply I have no respect for the laws of a small town.
Unfortunately, there are situations when its not really about that... its small towns that have sudden speed drops and try to take advantage of it. Take the speed trap town I hit a couple of nights ago. The speed limit dropped from 70 to 55, I saw the sign as I was about to pass it (it was night, I didn't have my high-beams on), and began to slow down just as I passed into the zone. I didn't see the cop until I was in the middle of the town, at the proper speed limit (I think it was 35), when he turned on his lights and I noticed the car that had pulled out behind me was a cop.
He ticketed me for 15 over without any questions, no acknowledgement of the fact that I was in the process of obeying the limit, just didn't feel like slamming on the brakes, hurting my car and ruining my gas mileage. The fact that the 1-5mph over fine is $165, should be more than clear that this is not about public safety, but about trying to extract money from the people driving through. They finally put in a nicer convenience store that I was planning to stop at, not going to now... however, I think the $200 they made off the ticket is more than any loss of business the town as a whole will lose now. Also, though I don't recall exactly how the signs were arranged, I wouldn't be surprised if they set up the speed limit signs so that they were hard to see.
So yes, sometimes it is an issue of people needing to slow down, however, it isn't always... it's small towns using one of their biggest resources, the highways that go through them, to generate revenue at the expense of those traveling through.
The biggest problem I find is when they are in fact accountable to their nominal employers... the citizens of the shit-hole town you have to drive through. Where I live, what I'd classify as a large town (~60,000 people including students, I think), the police tend to look for excessive speeding, running red lights, and drunk driving... and except for the new red-light cameras that have been installed (the company that installs them takes a share of the profits and requires the yellow lights to be no longer than a certain period of time... I smell corruption), it all tends to be based largely on public safety... particularly on Friday/Saturday nights. But.. I got pulled over driving through a small (maybe 1000 person) town this Friday night, as I was going from the 70 zone into the 55. By the time the cop flipped his lights I was going the speed limit of the town, I began to slow down as soon as I saw the speed limit sign, and there was no one on the road, it being midnight. By any reasonable expectation I was obeying the spirit of the law and was in no way a risk to public safety. But there was no leniency, I know fighting it in the town's court would be a waste of time, because it is primarily a source of revenue for the town. For further evidence, I give you their fine schedule: 1-5mph over the limit warrants a $165 fine, while my 15mph over is $195. And they're not my cops, I can't hold them accountable for their abusive actions. This is Texas, which tends to reserve most things to the local governments, so there isn't much the state can do, and I'm not sure that's a good idea anyway. When driving anywhere from here, there is no way to avoid these kind of towns. I'm just not sure I see a good solution, beyond expecting people to be better than they are, or bringing down federal regulations which my gut tells me is almost always the wrong way.
Exactly. And some of us enjoy being able to take a small library that's the size of a single paperback with us when traveling. This is especially as a student who moves every 6 months or so. Also I really enjoy being able buy things at the mass market paperback price and not have to deal with holding it open when you get near the beginnings and ends: that's always annoyed me in bed and while eating.
The Kindle is surprisingly pleasant and convenient experience, at least for me. And again, it's not about the money. For some reason some others can't see that different folks have different requirements and desires, and there aren't one-size-fits-all solutions.
I'd say even more than the age of the code is that Google Apps is an entirely different model. While OO.o is usage-wise very similar to Word, storing and editing local files, Google Apps are entirely different and not something people are comfortable with.
I know for my own personal things, I'd much prefer to keep everything local (although I'm a LaTeX man myself), and I dont think Google Apps hosted on their servers will ever take over this functionality. However, as someone involved with a nation-wide non-profit organization composed of internet-savvy students (read: cannot travel often), its provided an invaluable tool for collaboratively working on documents and sharing information. This of course is based on the proviso that we desire our proceedings to be public and transparent, so the security concerns are non-existent.
No, the military is a federal responsibility. Road development (except the interestate), schools, police and other infrastructure things are a state responsibility.
Marriage (and the expectation of procreation) between siblings poses a danger to society because of obvious genetic problems, which is why it was taboo for as long as people were capable of realizing this problem. Parent/child marriages, beyond this, have the problem that almost any instance would indicate abuse, which is within the governments ability to stop.
However, the banning of gay marriage is entirely a cultural concern, with people blocking it because they see it as uncomfortable, or they don't want their children to see it, or they say it reduces the meaning of their marriage. I'm pretty sure people made the exact same arguments regarding interracial marriage years ago.
And yes, it is society deciding what behaviors are acceptable, through the government. However, this does not mean that it is not homophobic or bigoted... its simply bigotry that a majority of society has decided is acceptable. Its ridiculous to imply that just because the majority of society decides something is acceptable or unacceptable means that its automatically proper and correct. Society has made a number of bad decisions in the past: segregation and slavery, the feudal system and the treatment of the Jews since the diaspora are a few that come to mind. Based on your views I would imagine you are pro-life (I am as well, for what difference it makes). Based on your argument, society has decided that abortion is good and acceptable, and that you should accept it.
It seems to me that one of the things the law and the governemnt are supposed to do is to protect the rights of the minority from the majority; the opposite of this is tyranny of the majority, which you seem to be advocating, and what the founding fathers meant to avoid in framing our government.
I'd appreciate something like that because I mostly prefer to listen to full albums, but I still have plenty of random single songs floating around in my library. I would love to be able to say I only want to see my albums.
Unfortunately, what I'm afraid of right now is that the Republican party, in the reorientation and retrospection that's bound to happen, will come to the conclusion that McCain lost the election rather than Palin. There's going to be a nasty battle for the party come the primaries next year... I see a number of champions for a return of the neo-cons and the religious right with Palin, Huckabee, and Romney. Bobby Jindal, I can see him becoming a big player but I'm not sure where he'll end up. But I dont see any strong leaders from the pragmatic, small government, strong but restrained military branch that I wish the party was... although the fact that McCain did win the primary gives me some hope.
SpaceShipOne has been proven to work, but thats not a very good argument, since it was never intended to scale up to an orbital vehicle. The difference in energy required for that flight and an orbital flight is about 1:10, meaning that an air-launch reduces the energy cost by ~50% for a sub-orbital flight rather than ~5% for an orbital flight, making it much more worthwhile. This is why Rutan did it this way, but I'm pretty sure if he's considering SS3 much right now, he'll go with a very different architecture.
Now, with all respect for Rob Zubrin, Mars Direct is an interesting idea, as are many of his other concepts... but they have yet to be hit with the cold hard facts of real engineering, where things start to go wrong. Given what the parent says about integration being the major cost, and this being the component Zubrin has the least experience with, I'd take it with a grain of salt.
And yes, I agree that solid's are a bad idea, but their use is more a historical artifact of the fact that the US is better at solids (we built lots of them for ICBM's). Notice how the Buran used liquid boosters, since the Russians were better with those. It doesn't mean that air-launch is necessarily better, the disadvantages make it a very hard thing to justify.
Its not even more wasteful to do a single-stage to orbit vehicle, with current specific-impulse propellants, around 450s for the SSME, its basically impossible.
Misses what I see as the most disturbing part of NCLB. Apparently, at least in elementary school, they can no longer have different levels for kids who are ahead, kids who are on level, and kids who are a little behind. This is bad for just about everyone. Those kids who should be accelerated are being held back (my sister was incredibly bored by school), while those who should be in the "slow" class are generally made to feel worse (yes, they'd feel bad initially being put in it, but from what I've heard, kids who belong there tend to thrive and enjoy themeselves more, and generally get a better education because they're not playing catch-up).
Of course, forcing more standardized tests, taking money from bad schools, etc. is fairly ridiculous too, but I really wish that issue would be fixed... our better yet, we could remember what federalism means.