Theoretically, in thermodynamics, the diesel engine cycle is a few percent less efficient than the gasoline engine cycle. It's something like 37 or 38% efficient versus 40% efficient. That's almost negligeable and doesn't include additional losses that might be incurred in the transmission or elsewhere. After all, the RPM of a gas engine is around 2 or 3 times that of a diesel. Also, it's a theoretical number that only a nonexistant perfect engine could obtained. In reality, neither a real diesel nor real gas engine will reach these efficiencies. However, they will never exceed them under any circumstances due to well understood and well tested fundamental physics.
While I agree with much of what you are saying, I disagree with your fundamental notion that health care doesn't increase the wealth of the country or have value. One is better off when one is healthy and when one is healthy, one can better contribute to society (by working their job).
Another point of the problem is that the US is a compassionate society and people help other people, regardless of those idiotic costly failed efforts of gov. to get into the charity business - and charity, does reduce the bottom line of how much better everyone else is. The less charity that there needs to be, the better off everyone will be. Of course there will always be a need for some going on.
The biggest problem with medical is the costs associated with gov. Law suit abuse is probably now the worst of it. This is where the gov. has failed to protect (or permitted ) the country to be subject to outrageous settlements, individuals and companies to be sued for no legitimate reason or even for fraudulent reasons. Such has driven up the cost of doing business in everything that touches the medical arena. One cannot build a medical electronic device without having every active component approved for medical use by their respective manufacturer, making things cost 10 times more than it should. No doctor can afford to go without medical malpractice insurance - and some good doctors cannot afford to practice even with the insurance. The tell-tale signs in a nearby city show it all as what were once buildings housing doctors offices now are vacant or have lawyer's offices in them. What used to be a vibrant Health care industry in a city suitable or even desirable for retirement, is a shell of its former self and there are problems with insufficient healthcare service.
Other gov. meddling has also driven up costs. It used to take about 500 million dollars to bring a new pill to market over almost 10 years. However, the pharmeceutical companies don't complain because the regulations keep the competition down and making 10% on a product that sells for billions puts more money to the bottom line than making 25% on millions. Of course for life saving medicines, the number of people that die awaiting new wonder drugs will significantly exceed the genuine fatalities encountered by drugs with only a partial fraction of the testing regimen required and the number of drugs for boutique diseases (relatively rare ones)will be small since there isn't enough of a market to justify the investment required.
Finally, there is the factor of health insurance paid for by third parties. While insurance is a mechanism to reduce risk of catestrohpic loss by spreading the risk and pooling the resource, it has gone nuts. The collusion between the insurance companies and gov., like that with the pharmeceuticals, has led to the benefit of the insurance companies rather than the public. Since people don't pay for their own health insurance - usually it's the gov. or their employer who pay - there is much less impetus to keep costs down. Also, it's not always very cost effective for an employee to go thru massive itemized bills looking for erroneous or flawed charges. Again, it's more profitable for insurance companies to make 10% of a $1000/mo. policy than to make 25% profit on a $110/mo. policy.
Of course the ripple effect from the insurance cost handling heads into the hospital realm where a bed for the night usually exceeds a suite at the hotel with room service. The inefficiency generated in the hospital with their bureaucratic expenses has made the costs rise as well and the insurance companies benefits in two ways. First, more people realize they need insurance, just in case they get sick. Second, high costs = higher monthly insurance costs to cover this out of pocket expense. And, of course, big gov. benefits because more people think they need it to help them when they get sick, even those who realize they need the almighty gov. because of the actions of almighty gov. What happens next is the reduction in costs by gov. by restricting services, including life saving ones - hence the problems tend to go away one by one as people die needlessly from treatable illness.
While I know the answer, I'm not sure whether anyone else would call it simple or not. Evidently, the egalitarian leftists turned into stalinists and statists somewhere over the last few years. There was an organized strategy change that went from assiting the dead in voting and busing in the winos and alzheimer's patients by the union volunteers to a more proactive one where there was an active effort which included attempts to disenfranchise the absentee military vote.
This new strategy continues after the election when these leftists (or stalinists - your choice for descriptive words) don't succeed in stuffing the ballot box sufficiently to win. It involves getting illegal aliens to vote and even using the power of gov. (when they have it) to legalize as many of these people as possible in time for the election. Note that this was fully documented a few years back in the contested situation of the house of representatives race in CA which put out incumbent Bob Dornan who lost by a margin of less than what was documented as the number of illegals discovered to be voting.
This is not merely a US phenomenon as it occurred in the Mexico election recently where the leftist candidate lost. According to one of my friends living in Mexico, the leftist candidate's forces were even giving out cocaine to 'people' to get them to go vote. And, when the candidate lost, he threatened to set up an alternative government. I believe similar (but not as blatant) things happened in the Australian election - but I don't recall any specifics at present.
Please note in the FL election of 2000, those dimpled chads so prevelent in the after election whining by the left were apparently artifacts of someone stuffing more than 2 or 3 ballots in the punch machine at one time. They are not the voting product of any rational individual's vote who were in full control of their faculties. Also note that anyone not capable of punching and of verifying that their ballot was indeed punched is not someone whose vote should be tallied in an effort to make a rational decision in the selection of new leadership.
It should be further noted that the problem counties in FL were primarily those under control of the party doing the complaining. One of the officials was discovered to have a mobile voting machine illegally which may have been the source of many dimpled chads.
Consider that a vote is as dangerous as a gun and mass votes are as dangerous as a WMD. In rational, competent hands none are threats. In the hands of those who are less than rational and competent, they are extremely deadly. Actually, votes in this case are far deadlier than guns or WMDs - measured by actual death tolls.
The advent of the voting machine comes from a combination of the left's demands for improving voting. The word 'improving', like the word 'truth' has a different meaning for the left. It means obfuscating the voting process so that 'corrective actions' can be taken (usually in the dead of night and behind closed doors) so as to further the leftist agenda. To this, add both well meaning doofuses unaware of the left's definitions who were trying to appease the 'public' and some who had vested interests in and ties to companies trying to peddle $10,000 solutions to $10 problems.
For manipulators, a voting machine, especially an electronic one, is a marvelous creation. It has no paper trail. The corruption can be totally destroyed with no residual evidence and it is not visible while in place. It's also quite intimidating to older and more feeble people who might want help.
In addition to these new plan factors, the leftists are pushing for voting rights for felons and for illegal aliens. Evidently, it helps their candidates to have more voters of low moral (criminal) character and for people here illegally who don't speak the language, typically don't have a vested interest in the country, and who haven't been here for long and who don't have much grasp of the political situation. Note that the ille
Assuming black holes exist, which is merely an assumption, and assuming that GR theory is correct, which is another assumption, then maybe micoscopic black holes exist. However going by GR, one must delve into the reality of the fact that time stops at the schwartzchild raduis according to the distance observer. In essence, that implies in the formation of such things that they never quite form during the lifetime of the universe. That's not that big a problem with large massive critters as they are still big and massive. Of course there are alternatives to such things, such as MECO, which is a mutually exclusive critter - only MECO or black holes can exist in the universe. Then again - maybe our universe is the innards of a black hole - as it seems that the schwartzchild radius for an object the assumed mass of the universe would be around 13.7 billion lightyears. Ooops
Technically, so are lyman alpha clouds and rogue planetoids. Dark matter means matter not directly observed - or not emitting light. Exotic dark matter is sexier to the public (and more demanding of research funds) than rather boring blobs of regular matter that aren't emitting light and hence, are not directly observable. That isn't to say that there might not be serious exotic dark matter, only that there may not be a need to invent it to explain what is observed. Sorta sounds like the reasons for the origins of Greek mythology, don't it.
eV is an amount of energy - about what is contained in the visible light photon. Good ole' E=mc^2 relates mass and energy. It is acceptable to say that a photon has mass, just not that it has no rest mass as a photon doesn't exist unless it's moving. It does have momentum - an imputed mass while it's traveling and according to different experiments done over the years, is affected by gravity. Light trying to climb from a gravity well will loose energy (shift towards the red) Light going into a gravity well will gain energy (shift blue).
The photon will convey it's mass and momentum (taken from the emitter) and impart it to the object that absorbed it. According to the reference of the photon, it never existed - there was merely a connection made with an instantaneous energy transfer across 0 distance. If you think that is a bit wierd, don't delve further as there are no satisfying answers or understanding and that isn't even the beginning of the experimentally observable freakiness.
First off, pay attention to what is happening at your state level and the fed. level. There are rumblings here about the state becvoming upset over interoperability and the local new fad of 800mhz systems sprouting up. It's possible that our state may demand a return to vhf.
Second, don't scrap your vhf equipment. You'll doubtlessly need it for the next REAL emergency when the 800mhz system goes down. Even if it survives, it'll probably become so overloaded as to effectively be down.
As for having to purchase that 800mhz junk, maybe you can include its reimburse in the mutual aid charges the next time the city wants help. Otherwise, my condolences.
"Nobody was worried about hijackers doing suicide runs into skyscrapers before 9/11, and another successful attack would probably have to involve something that people just hadn't considered before, or had become lax against. "The things that we fear most are those which have already happened to us", I think that's fairly accurate."
Sort of true - there were some trying to get serious about the continuing onslaught of terrorism that went on throughout the 1990s including a foiled earlier attempt at a mass hijacking.
It is in nature far easier to believe in the reoccurance of something that has happened before than to believe something which has never happened before will happen.
911 was actually quite a failure from the 'hoped for' results, despite being successful as the most damaging attack. The enemy was attempting to decapitate our military and government in Washington while throwing our society and probably others into an economic crisis with the twin towers. Fortunately, the attack on Washington was far less successful with the Pentagon being a much larger and hardened target and with no airliner(s) left to hit whitehouse and the capitol building. Evidently, this idea came from the Tom Clancy novel written in the 90s.
Had it been the capitol building and the whitehouse rather than the pentagon and an open field, we would have potentially been in far more serious trouble assuming these were fully occupied factors not known to the hijackers for their timing selection.
Curious isn't it. People don't seem to be able to make the connection about fossil fuels, that is fuels that come from fossils. Those fossils were once living vegetation with high concentrations of carbon in them. Where did that carbon come from? Hint, plants absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen.
Hence, whenever we burn fossil fuels, we are merely putting back CO2 that was previously absorbed from the air - same sorta thing that happens in a lightning strike forrest fire. However, whenever you wet down a bag of sac-crete concrete mix to put up a fence post or build that slab, you're releasing CO2 that was trapped in the limestone a long time back, something that was essentially removed from the biosphere forever.
Of course CO2 is added to the atmosphere via volcanic action naturally. On occaisions, in rather serious amounts.
I recently watched a National Geographic program (Explorer?), on the apparent volatility of the climate as evidenced in the ice cores. Most of it was quite interesting with the presence of unstable equilibrium points and virtually instantaneous shifts in climate which occurred for reasons unknown and the fact that we are in a very unusual period of warmth which has lasted far longer than what appeared typical and that we were overdue for another serious bout of iceage.
Unfortunately, they then jumped to the conclusions with the presumption that man is causing global warming which might trigger some thing that might send us into an ice age. Of course, since global warming is a political issue supported by politicized science, they failed to mention the other possibilities - like maybe man is really causing global warming and it's keeping us out of the next ice age. After all, we are on borrowed time according to the core evidence and the reasons for the changes are unknown.
Also, the core shows significant variations in the CO2 level and the onslaught of warming and cooling without the supposed assistance of man so we know such things happen anyway and that there appears to be very serious natural sources of CO2 that periodically become injected into the atmosphere (or perhaps the plant life dies off and burns in a big way).
The point is - for reasons not yet known or perhaps even to be determined, we will undergo another iceage in a very rapid fashion (maybe a 10 year switch over). Man's contribution, if there really is any - like a dust mite's contribution to the weight of a whale, might shorten the time to the changeover or it might lengthen it. It should be a foregone conclusion to any rational being that man will not prevent it even if we might be able to temporarily delay it.
If you think man is the dominate biomass on the planet, forget it! We're not number1 or number 2 or even number 3. And what is dominant is very small with far higher metobolic rates than man and naturally exceed our propensity for technological pollution as well as inherent natural pollution.
Voting machines are not only expensive, they permit a 'cover of darkness' to hide the potential of massive fraud. The only way a society can have voting is absolute transparancy in the 'full light of day'. If the prize is great enough - and political control for corrupt politicians is one of the greatest - then there is the incentive to go after it.
The cure to voter/voting fraud is simple. Even the Iraquis have mastered some if not most of it. Those purple fingers they so proudly held up on their voting day is a very serious fraud deterrent and say the same thing that these stupid little worthless stickers with "I voted!" that one finds at the voting booth on election day. The other serious facet is the ability of the voter to verify that they have indeed cast a ballot for their desired candidates is another major facet - something that requires a human readable paper ballot - without which recounts are not possible. The rest is really 'openess' - the ability of the public to see and document (camcorders) that no serious irregularities are going on. Of course severe criminal penalities must be enforced to keep the fraud from overwhelming the observation and detection systems.
Unfortunately, the days of limited government where those in power had virtually no effect on the lives of the people is long gone. The power and wealth in government now is so great as to attract the very best of the corrupt scumbags our society has to offer.
Being well Trained in emcomm and having some inkling of military strategy, I must state that any communications requiring infrastructure is at serious risk of failure or attack. Also, newer technologies are at higher risk of failure due to their complexity. These are facts which are demonstrated in every serious disaster. The only thing for sure is that point to point communications that use no infrastructure can be established.
My own county and city's 800 MHz system failed only a few months ago in a minor weather disaster, one with no injuries and relatively little minor damage due to some F0-F1 tornadoes and high winds which uprooted trees. The sheriff's dept, police dept, public works, all except the fire department which had kept their 150mhz radios as a backup, were down, evidently due to a single point failure of a minor power outage at the tower with a failure of the backup generator. Since I was at the emergency operations center at the time, I was aware of the situation. My comment to the county EM was that such equipment wasn't supposed to fail until there was actually a real emergency.
In order to be cost effective, communications systems must be designed to minimize costs while performing adaquately during the 99% of the time where only normal communications are occuring. During an emergency, equipment is failing, people are missing (evacuating, taking care of family, stranded, or perhaps worse), and the need for additional communications capability is rising exponentially, overloading everything still available. Note that the differences between 911, Katrina, Rita, forest fires and earthquakes are essentially extent of damaged area, severity of damage and the duration of the disaster.
During such emergencies, skilled communicators become a very rare commodity. It requires skill and training to accurately convey information under emergency conditions. These are things that many first responders do not even have unless specifically trained with ongoing practice.
Another factor that becomes a problem is that unused equipment tends to develop problems. Batteries run down, connectors go flakey, capacitors deteriorate. Stockpiling equipment is unlikely to solve the problems, especially without the trained personel to man the equipment. Stockpiling sufficient quantites of trained employees would be so expensive as to bankrupt the whole society.
Newer technology is valuable only when it provides benefit, something beyond putting the salesman's kids through college. Virtually all things offer advantages and disadvantages under certain circumstances and seldom does one find only advantages. Older technology doesn't mean it is obsolete or even inferior in every circumstance.
For example, cell phones are just radios that are easy to use, if you've got a good cellphone system and plenty of money to waste on minutes. They are extremely low power and very small and portable. In serious emergencies situations, where most or all of the cell phone infrastructure is gone and there is no power to recharge their batteries, these modern creations are totally useless whereas a world war II antique army walkie talkie would actually be usable.
If you thought 911 was a disaster, just wait until the terrorists decide to do an orchestrated attack against New York City's water and sewage treatment facilities.
I'd rather see pluto promoted to be a binary planet with charon. After all, we don't have other ones around. A good criteria to distinguish moon - planet from binary would be whether the center of gravity of the pair resides inside the planet or between moon and planet surfaces.
As for pluto's orbit not being unique - it only goes a little into neptune's - mighta been perturbed a while back rather than a birth defect. After all, it's got its own orbit for the most part and isn't all that eccentric.
Calling pluto a planet or not is really a judgement call and since it has been for 60 yrs one should leave well enough alone.
as for the bush haters - i feel a bit sorry for y'all - it's just gotta be hard to become acustomed to the realization that you're dumber than someone you think is really stupid.
Religion and science have much more in common. Both require faith, however derived. Both have a basis in observation and interpretation. Both have their a' priori assumptions.
At the bottom, one can assume there is God or, one can assume there is no God. In the middle, one can assume god is an advanced space alien who terraformed the earth and genetically engineered earth based life. Ultimately, there are those who believe and there are those who don't know (agnostics). Athiests are merely yet more of the group who believe (that there is no God).
It is not possible to disprove that there is no God. Ultimately, one can only show that they are not, or at most, that God is not what they think He should be.
As for the dark matter, it is possible that there variations of matter which have never been observed by man. Most of what is seen in the popular press seems to be hype to enhance the status and bank accounts of those who promote it.
Whether dark matter (and energy) exists as something exotic or not is still a serious question. If dark matter exists in the quantities assumed, it's still possible that it might be normal matter which isn't absorbing or emitting sufficient light to be seen by us.
Currently, the suspected density of matter in the universe, including estimates for 'exotic' dark matter is the equivalent of about 6 hydrogen atoms per cubic meter.
Contrary to popular opinion, if black holes exist, the density of the matter it takes to form them depends on how much matter is involved and for a universe that is the size and mass of the one we think we live in, the size of the black hole turns out to be around 13.7 billion light years across. Such occurances rarely are coincidences.
The point is that there are usually a number of alternatives competing for position in science. The more exotic these are, the more they capture the imagination of people, and oftimes, the research grants. Let's face it, another Mars probe will probably do no better in TV ratings on the NASA cable channel than will the Star trek reruns a few channels down the dial.
I will look forward to hearing about this new press release. I think it will be interesting in some manner or another. However, since the press release infers that dark matter is something exotic and fundamentally different from normal matter, I'm pretty sure that the interesting part will be associated with being a gambit for funding and fame more than the announcement of something new and fundamental that changes our concepts forever.
I can still remember clinton horning in on NASAs public press pronouncement of life on Mars a number of years back. It seems a decade later that all their evidence has been shown that it is just as likely to be non life processes. Hence, it's back to the drawing board on that one. Is there, was there life on Mars - it still remains to be determined.
Of the curiousities of science, two are most interesting. First, the search for answers inevitably leads to more questions that need answering. Second, we periodically reach a point where it seems all is known except to add a few more bits of accuracy to the measurements - just before the lid blows off and we discover that momma nature wasn't who we thought she was at all.
perhaps there is a fundamental and serious difference between citizen and subject.
as for a reset button for the federal gov. - there already is - actually there's even a law against it - It's called the constitution interpreted as written - another set of laws being ignored by the politic elite because it doesn't suit their purposes.
I wonder if they ever fixed their optimization problem that they injected around c++ 4.0 and refused to address after 4.5. The one with the for() loop that insisted on stomping the Base Pointer register with the final loop value when it was held only as a register. That caused lots of instabilities in early windows programs that were never found.
"I think that if you scale for population, the US carte--I mean, government, meanly falls near the mean, man. Governments are all composed of people. People are flawed and only 'good' when they think they're under observation. There isn't much evidence that the US is excessively worse off than, say, China. Unfortunately, since the New Deal and the Great Society, US citizens are increasingly comfortable with abdicating their rights and responsibilities to the nanny state. Some sort of libertarian revolution is required, but I don't hold forth great hope: "
Look at the actual dollars spent (mostly wasted) and the duplication of efforts and management. No other economy in the world produces enough (per capita)to sustain our government and still feed its people. While one can look at trends to see that even we cannot keep it up forever, a cripling blow to our economy could potentially make it more of an immediate problem.
why is it better? People cannot verify what is inside the machine running as the program.
I can stand around a polling place and watch the paper ballots go into locked cans. I can see if those cans are tampered with during the day. I can follow or escort those cans to the central counting office and I can watch people process them. What I cannot do and do not need to do is watch people filling them out in the voting booth - where evidently there is a concern over machines being rebooted and reprogrammed via a flash module. Transparency is the only way to thwart corruption.
A technical failure in one of these overpriced electronic monstrosities could cause the loss of many voter's efforts. A technical failure in a number 2 pencil is easily recognizable by anyone whose vote should be allowed to count and can be dealt with immediately. Please note that stoned druggies, alzheimers victims and the dead are not actually capable of making voting decisions and are merely tools of corruption.
Given sufficient incentive, there are many who are capable of creating fake voting programs that will appear like the real thing which can be inserted with internal collusion from some of those managing the voting process which would not be necessarily apparent to observers.
All those dimpled chads in Florida were most likely caused by trying to put several ballots in the machine at once. Either that or by people who weren't capable of understanding that they were at a polling place and were voting.
Rot grows underneath, out of sight. Nothing is further from view than flash memory. This stupid BS of using voting machines is a plan for corruption and control of the voting process.
The ONLY way honest voting can be ensured is if the actual ballot cast can be checked by the balloter. And that is only part of the solution because fraudulent voting is probably the greater issue - where people are coming in with multiple id's and voting numerous times. Here, shedding light on the subject (like making video records to catch those voting multiple times - followed by criminal prosecutions of those caught)is the only way. That simple purple thumb trick done in Iraq would be vehemently opposed here in the US (and probably permanently put the democrats out of power - at least those democrats who haven't been pretending to be republicans).
As for legislating for us, a properly operating government as envisioned by our founders would have little to no effect on the majority of people. It's been a very long time now that the quip: "No one's life, liberty or property is safe when congress is in session" became a true statement.
While it should be apparent to a thinking individual that most of our societal problems today are caused by government, it's not so obvious as to how much that government is under control of elected officials or of unelected bureaucrats and minions acting in their own self interests.
Unlike the rest of the world, we are faced with a monumental problem. The prosperity achieved in our country has permitted a leviathon government so huge that it could not possibly occur anywhere else in the world because nowhere else has the resources to create such a monster. It is perhaps the first brainless multicellular creature composed of intellegent beings ever to exist, a life form of its own bent on growing and consuming.
Congrats on figuring a few things out, 30 years late is better than not at all. '1984' was ahead of schedule, not 22 yrs behind. Although orwell got some things right, by no means were they correct.
Also, it was the preparation of the people that had to occur first. Hence most missed it entirely. In firefighting and disaster management, sometimes doing nothing is the best of all possible alternatives. That concept itself no longer exists in the general populace when it comes to government involvement. People often understand how poor the job is done by government in regard to Indian Affairs medicine on reservations and even the US Post Office disaster, but there is a total disconnect when it comes to understanding that of all organizations that exist in a society, government is the most wasteful and incompentent of them all and is guaranteed to be the worst choice for involvement.
1984 (a date based on 1948 with the swapping of two numbers) has come and gone. The shreds of liberty are still around but are being slowly removed one by one. The bloated gov. we have now is already far beyond the size that it could exist with anywhere else due to the massive prosperity our former lack of gov. permitted.
Perhaps an amusing observation is that even the term 'liberal' as classically defined no longer refers to the system of thought but rather to the opposite extreme - that of raising gov. to the level of a religion that must be worshipped.
Note the exceptionally high price for a toy car and also that there is no mention of the time required to charge the car with 4 minutes of run time.
What really irks me is that with one exception, hydrogen is not a fuel (source of energy), but rather it is a means of storing energy. The exception being that it can be acquired from oil and gas - those evillllll energy sources that are supposedly running out. As for energy storage, hydrogen has one benefit - light weight. The rest of its attributes are problems, some of which - like storage requirements, tend to negate its one benefit. Seems like I recall that hydrogen in the air is explosive from concentrations of 3 or 4% up to well over 90%, far beyond the range of most other materials.
A real question arises as to how does the 'example' fuel cell car compare to a lithium ion rechargeable battery powered car with solar panel recharger? I don't think this even produces significant amounts of water coming out a tail pipe. And, considering that water vapor is a more significant greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide can we assume that its contribution would not be significant?
The reason why fuel cells haven't taken off for vehicular traffic is that they are far more costly than other alternatives. That is the reason why there's such a cry for government to come in to support it. If it were a feasible solution, there would be no need for that. So, if there is serious gov. support applied, better alternatives will be pushed aside, at least for a while, in favor of that gov. supplied money which will distort the marketplace for the duration of its continued presence.
I still love that california gov. mandate about 10% electric cars by 20?? established shortly before it became evident there wasn't enough electric power generation/supply available to meet the existing needs of the state, much less for significant increases to power a whole new usage market of electric cars.
momma nature always gets her way in the end.
Who'd have thunk the pork king of seward's folly would woulda understood the internet that well. He probably believes al gore invented it - hence the (evidently, pneumatic) tubes. I suspect he's quite familiar with that technology. My fav. is still Sheila Jackson Lee of houston asking the NASA people once if the mars rover could be driven over and take a picture of the flag the astronauts planted back during the Apollo missions.
Actually, I'm not sure if these people are sub-literate - or merely about average for non-technical people. Unfortunately, it appears that their financial and economic literacy is so poor, it makes these political hacks appear like scientific geniuses. Centralized authoritarian, socialistic big gov. crap is worse than being a serious member of the flat earth society nowadays. Despite that, it looks like about half the country and most of the world has fallen for that charade. No wonder the nigerian scam internet artists keep trying and trying and trying.
Only if their retro socks are held up with garter belts. I'm sure the truth in advertising laws dictated the nature of those idiotic commercials. I'm sure they're all quite adept at doing the 'robot'? and listening to teckno music.
I bet those new style vw bugs are autotransmissions as I doubt their geek squad have the wherewithall to manipulate a manual stick shift.
Actually, I used blank lines separation between the paragraphs. I guess it defaulted to html or something and left them out of the final post. Good luck reading it.
Co2 is one of many 'greenhouse gases' h2o vapor being the most important by far. Our happy little equilibrium is anything but an equilibrium. Quite obviously these are what are referred to as relative minimums in the curves because they would be totally unstable otherwise.
I have presented two basic points. First, there is two little understanding of the processes and interactions to even know for sure if there is warming going on or if there is cooling going on or if there is either, regardless of human presence on earth being a contributing factor or not. Second, politicized science is nothing but pseudo science and even the supposed facts produced by such endeavours are not to be trusted as the purpose is to force a political agenda rather than to increase the knowledge base. Hell, even the nonpolitically related science field has more petty school yard conformity going on than the typical high school.
Another point I thought I made earlier was that it was proposed we scatter coal dust on a massive scale to melt the icecaps back to save us from global cooling. This was only a few years ago, by the same people who are now crying global warming. They were arguing then that it was too great a risk and by the time we found out for sure, it would be too late to do anything about it, yada yada yada - same B.S. as now except now it's warming rather than cooling. And, to what extent their hair-brained scheme might have an effect, it would be devastating now - according to these same people.
If you look at the proposed solutions - like that kyoto accord abomination, you'll notice that it seriously impacts only those countries that have implemented pollution controls but would not affect those third world places that pollute far more per person and have no resources to clean them up. If one attributes a serious lack of intellect to its proponents, one might then attribute the problems (which are far greater than the theoretical benefits promised) that will be caused by it to that of unintended consequences. However, while they are dumb, they aren't that dumb but they assume the populace is and that they can get away with their intended agenda.
Enjoy the illusion that global disasters are either preventable or at least can be overcome by man's power and intellect, if only man would act soon to those alarmist voices spreading the word yet again. You won't find the real ones at the cinema with Bruce Willis or Arnie the governator saving the day just in the nick of time.
The earth is not a static system. It is constantly changing and is subject on occaisions to forces that are unimaginable in power. This atmosphere is at least the 2nd one this planet has had. The moon appears to have been formed from earth debris caused by an impact with an object the size of mars that almost totally destroyed the earth. We live on a ball of molten materials with a small insulating shell, not unlike the skin of a tomato. The earth still gives off more heat than it receives from the sun.
The sun is a variable star with varies on all time scales. In the few hundred years we've been seriously observing it there have been rather few things going on with it. We've discovered an 11 year sunspot cycle which seems to go on - except in the 1750s - 1800s where there was no sunspots present - and the Thames river in London froze over in the harsh winters. The sun periodically puts out coronal mass ejections, CMEs. Were one to have occurred during the apollo moon missions, the astronauts would have been fried. Although the ISS is well inside the earth's magnetic field, they have an inner room to go to when threatened by one. Were one to occur on the upper side of the statistical estimates of sizes believed to occur, it could fry our electric grid transformers, leaving parts of our country and many parts of the world without electrical power for years - as well as frying even rather hardened satellites and ground based equipment. This doesn't include the expectations that the earth's magnetic field is dropping rapidly towards a flip
numerically? - it's almost incalculable. You've got to use something closer to gain some sort of equivalence. They outweigh us in biomass by about 4000 pounds per human, termites alone are estimated to be 2000 pounds per human. Now consider metobolic rates - small critters are many many times the metobolic rate of larger ones eating (I think as much as ) several times their own weight every day and burping / farting co2 and methane in substantial quantities. Considering that of the 6billion or so people, the vast majority contribute rather small amounts of technological based polution, although the lact of economic prosperity means that their naturally generated pollution doesn't tend to be taken care of in an environmentally friendly fashion. To correctly estimate the nature of such one must convert the technologically generated but unremediated pollution to terms equivalent to the per person natural pollution.
I suppose for the quick and dirty comparison - if one assumes that termites were the only consideration and if termites eat 10x their own mass in food - converting say 50% to methane and co2 and pollutants - then the equivalent technological mass per person would be about 50 times the mass of the average human - which might be guessed at 100 pounds. I don't think you can come up with 5000 pounds of hydrocarbon daily usage average by everyone on earth. And that is assuming no remediation or pollution control efforts. To make matters worse, this only accounts for about half the insects - and guess what! - Insects aren't # 1 either.
I'm still waiting for people to start to comprehend that if there's global warming going on here, on Mars, on Jupiter and on Saturn that maybe it's because of the increased solar activity and output being that mankind only has some bit of a presence on only one of those orbs.
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Theoretically, in thermodynamics, the diesel engine cycle is a few percent less efficient than the gasoline engine cycle. It's something like 37 or 38% efficient versus 40% efficient. That's almost negligeable and doesn't include additional losses that might be incurred in the transmission or elsewhere. After all, the RPM of a gas engine is around 2 or 3 times that of a diesel. Also, it's a theoretical number that only a nonexistant perfect engine could obtained. In reality, neither a real diesel nor real gas engine will reach these efficiencies. However, they will never exceed them under any circumstances due to well understood and well tested fundamental physics.
While I agree with much of what you are saying, I disagree with your fundamental notion that health care doesn't increase the wealth of the country or have value. One is better off when one is healthy and when one is healthy, one can better contribute to society (by working their job).
Another point of the problem is that the US is a compassionate society and people help other people, regardless of those idiotic costly failed efforts of gov. to get into the charity business - and charity, does reduce the bottom line of how much better everyone else is. The less charity that there needs to be, the better off everyone will be. Of course there will always be a need for some going on.
The biggest problem with medical is the costs associated with gov. Law suit abuse is probably now the worst of it. This is where the gov. has failed to protect (or permitted ) the country to be subject to outrageous settlements, individuals and companies to be sued for no legitimate reason or even for fraudulent reasons. Such has driven up the cost of doing business in everything that touches the medical arena. One cannot build a medical electronic device without having every active component approved for medical use by their respective manufacturer, making things cost 10 times more than it should. No doctor can afford to go without medical malpractice insurance - and some good doctors cannot afford to practice even with the insurance. The tell-tale signs in a nearby city show it all as what were once buildings housing doctors offices now are vacant or have lawyer's offices in them. What used to be a vibrant Health care industry in a city suitable or even desirable for retirement, is a shell of its former self and there are problems with insufficient healthcare service.
Other gov. meddling has also driven up costs. It used to take about 500 million dollars to bring a new pill to market over almost 10 years. However, the pharmeceutical companies don't complain because the regulations keep the competition down and making 10% on a product that sells for billions puts more money to the bottom line than making 25% on millions. Of course for life saving medicines, the number of people that die awaiting new wonder drugs will significantly exceed the genuine fatalities encountered by drugs with only a partial fraction of the testing regimen required and the number of drugs for boutique diseases (relatively rare ones)will be small since there isn't enough of a market to justify the investment required.
Finally, there is the factor of health insurance paid for by third parties. While insurance is a mechanism to reduce risk of catestrohpic loss by spreading the risk and pooling the resource, it has gone nuts. The collusion between the insurance companies and gov., like that with the pharmeceuticals, has led to the benefit of the insurance companies rather than the public. Since people don't pay for their own health insurance - usually it's the gov. or their employer who pay - there is much less impetus to keep costs down. Also, it's not always very cost effective for an employee to go thru massive itemized bills looking for erroneous or flawed charges. Again, it's more profitable for insurance companies to make 10% of a $1000/mo. policy than to make 25% profit on a $110/mo. policy.
Of course the ripple effect from the insurance cost handling heads into the hospital realm where a bed for the night usually exceeds a suite at the hotel with room service. The inefficiency generated in the hospital with their bureaucratic expenses has made the costs rise as well and the insurance companies benefits in two ways. First, more people realize they need insurance, just in case they get sick. Second, high costs = higher monthly insurance costs to cover this out of pocket expense. And, of course, big gov. benefits because more people think they need it to help them when they get sick, even those who realize they need the almighty gov. because of the actions of almighty gov. What happens next is the reduction in costs by gov. by restricting services, including life saving ones - hence the problems tend to go away one by one as people die needlessly from treatable illness.
While I know the answer, I'm not sure whether anyone else would call it simple or not. Evidently, the egalitarian leftists turned into stalinists and statists somewhere over the last few years.
There was an organized strategy change that went from assiting the dead in voting and busing in the winos and alzheimer's patients by the union volunteers to a more proactive one where there was an active effort which included attempts to disenfranchise the absentee military vote.
This new strategy continues after the election when these leftists (or stalinists - your choice for descriptive words) don't succeed in stuffing the ballot box sufficiently to win. It involves getting illegal aliens to vote and even using the power of gov. (when they have it) to legalize as many of these people as possible in time for the election. Note that this was fully documented a few years back in the contested situation of the house of representatives race in CA which put out incumbent Bob Dornan who lost by a margin of less than what was documented as the number of illegals discovered to be voting.
This is not merely a US phenomenon as it occurred in the Mexico election recently where the leftist candidate lost. According to one of my friends living in Mexico, the leftist candidate's forces were even giving out cocaine to 'people' to get them to go vote. And, when the candidate lost, he threatened to set up an alternative government. I believe similar (but not as blatant) things happened in the Australian election - but I don't recall any specifics at present.
Please note in the FL election of 2000, those dimpled chads so prevelent in the after election whining by the left were apparently artifacts of someone stuffing more than 2 or 3 ballots in the punch machine at one time. They are not the voting product of any rational individual's vote who were in full control of their faculties. Also note that anyone not capable of punching and of verifying that their ballot was indeed punched is not someone whose vote should be tallied in an effort to make a rational decision in the selection of new leadership.
It should be further noted that the problem counties in FL were primarily those under control of the party doing the complaining. One of the officials was discovered to have a mobile voting machine illegally which may have been the source of many dimpled chads.
Consider that a vote is as dangerous as a gun and mass votes are as dangerous as a WMD. In rational, competent hands none are threats. In the hands of those who are less than rational and competent, they are extremely deadly. Actually, votes in this case are far deadlier than guns or WMDs - measured by actual death tolls.
The advent of the voting machine comes from a combination of the left's demands for improving voting. The word 'improving', like the word 'truth' has a different meaning for the left. It means obfuscating the voting process so that 'corrective actions' can be taken (usually in the dead of night and behind closed doors) so as to further the leftist agenda. To this, add both well meaning doofuses unaware of the left's definitions who were trying to appease the 'public' and some who had vested interests in and ties to companies trying to peddle $10,000 solutions to $10 problems.
For manipulators, a voting machine, especially an electronic one, is a marvelous creation. It has no paper trail. The corruption can be totally destroyed with no residual evidence and it is not visible while in place. It's also quite intimidating to older and more feeble people who might want help.
In addition to these new plan factors, the leftists are pushing for voting rights for felons and for illegal aliens. Evidently, it helps their candidates to have more voters of low moral (criminal) character and for people here illegally who don't speak the language, typically don't have a vested interest in the country, and who haven't been here for long and who don't have much grasp of the political situation. Note that the ille
Assuming black holes exist, which is merely an assumption, and assuming that GR theory is correct, which is another assumption, then maybe micoscopic black holes exist. However going by GR, one must delve into the reality of the fact that time stops at the schwartzchild raduis according to the distance observer. In essence, that implies in the formation of such things that they never quite form during the lifetime of the universe. That's not that big a problem with large massive critters as they are still big and massive. Of course there are alternatives to such things, such as MECO, which is a mutually exclusive critter - only MECO or black holes can exist in the universe. Then again - maybe our universe is the innards of a black hole - as it seems that the schwartzchild radius for an object the assumed mass of the universe would be around 13.7 billion lightyears. Ooops
Technically, so are lyman alpha clouds and rogue planetoids. Dark matter means matter not directly observed - or not emitting light. Exotic dark matter is sexier to the public (and more demanding of research funds) than rather boring blobs of regular matter that aren't emitting light and hence, are not directly observable. That isn't to say that there might not be serious exotic dark matter, only that there may not be a need to invent it to explain what is observed. Sorta sounds like the reasons for the origins of Greek mythology, don't it.
eV is an amount of energy - about what is contained in the visible light photon. Good ole' E=mc^2 relates mass and energy. It is acceptable to say that a photon has mass, just not that it has no rest mass as a photon doesn't exist unless it's moving. It does have momentum - an imputed mass while it's traveling and according to different experiments done over the years, is affected by gravity. Light trying to climb from a gravity well will loose energy (shift towards the red) Light going into a gravity well will gain energy (shift blue).
The photon will convey it's mass and momentum (taken from the emitter) and impart it to the object that absorbed it. According to the reference of the photon, it never existed - there was merely a connection made with an instantaneous energy transfer across 0 distance. If you think that is a bit wierd, don't delve further as there are no satisfying answers or understanding and that isn't even the beginning of the experimentally observable freakiness.
First off, pay attention to what is happening at your state level and the fed. level. There are rumblings here about the state becvoming upset over interoperability and the local new fad of 800mhz systems sprouting up. It's possible that our state may demand a return to vhf.
Second, don't scrap your vhf equipment. You'll doubtlessly need it for the next REAL emergency when the 800mhz system goes down. Even if it survives, it'll probably become so overloaded as to effectively be down.
As for having to purchase that 800mhz junk, maybe you can include its reimburse in the mutual aid charges the next time the city wants help. Otherwise, my condolences.
"Nobody was worried about hijackers doing suicide runs into skyscrapers before 9/11, and another successful attack would probably have to involve something that people just hadn't considered before, or had become lax against. "The things that we fear most are those which have already happened to us", I think that's fairly accurate."
Sort of true - there were some trying to get serious about the continuing onslaught of terrorism that went on throughout the 1990s including a foiled earlier attempt at a mass hijacking.
It is in nature far easier to believe in the reoccurance of something that has happened before than to believe something which has never happened before will happen.
911 was actually quite a failure from the 'hoped for' results, despite being successful as the most damaging attack. The enemy was attempting to decapitate our military and government in Washington while throwing our society and probably others into an economic crisis with the twin towers. Fortunately, the attack on Washington was far less successful with the Pentagon being a much larger and hardened target and with no airliner(s) left to hit whitehouse and the capitol building. Evidently, this idea came from the Tom Clancy novel written in the 90s.
Had it been the capitol building and the whitehouse rather than the pentagon and an open field, we would have potentially been in far more serious trouble assuming these were fully occupied factors not known to the hijackers for their timing selection.
Curious isn't it. People don't seem to be able to make the connection about fossil fuels, that is fuels that come from fossils. Those fossils were once living vegetation with high concentrations of carbon in them. Where did that carbon come from? Hint, plants absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen.
Hence, whenever we burn fossil fuels, we are merely putting back CO2 that was previously absorbed from the air - same sorta thing that happens in a lightning strike forrest fire. However, whenever you wet down a bag of sac-crete concrete mix to put up a fence post or build that slab, you're releasing CO2 that was trapped in the limestone a long time back, something that was essentially removed from the biosphere forever.
Of course CO2 is added to the atmosphere via volcanic action naturally. On occaisions, in rather serious amounts.
I recently watched a National Geographic program (Explorer?), on the apparent volatility of the climate as evidenced in the ice cores. Most of it was quite interesting with the presence of unstable equilibrium points and virtually instantaneous shifts in climate which occurred for reasons unknown and the fact that we are in a very unusual period of warmth which has lasted far longer than what appeared typical and that we were overdue for another serious bout of iceage.
Unfortunately, they then jumped to the conclusions with the presumption that man is causing global warming which might trigger some thing that might send us into an ice age. Of course, since global warming is a political issue supported by politicized science, they failed to mention the other possibilities - like maybe man is really causing global warming and it's keeping us out of the next ice age. After all, we are on borrowed time according to the core evidence and the reasons for the changes are unknown.
Also, the core shows significant variations in the CO2 level and the onslaught of warming and cooling without the supposed assistance of man so we know such things happen anyway and that there appears to be very serious natural sources of CO2 that periodically become injected into the atmosphere (or perhaps the plant life dies off and burns in a big way).
The point is - for reasons not yet known or perhaps even to be determined, we will undergo another iceage in a very rapid fashion (maybe a 10 year switch over). Man's contribution, if there really is any - like a dust mite's contribution to the weight of a whale, might shorten the time to the changeover or it might lengthen it. It should be a foregone conclusion to any rational being that man will not prevent it even if we might be able to temporarily delay it.
If you think man is the dominate biomass on the planet, forget it! We're not number1 or number 2 or even number 3. And what is dominant is very small with far higher metobolic rates than man and naturally exceed our propensity for technological pollution as well as inherent natural pollution.
Voting machines are not only expensive, they permit a 'cover of darkness' to hide the potential of massive fraud. The only way a society can have voting is absolute transparancy in the 'full light of day'. If the prize is great enough - and political control for corrupt politicians is one of the greatest - then there is the incentive to go after it. The cure to voter/voting fraud is simple. Even the Iraquis have mastered some if not most of it. Those purple fingers they so proudly held up on their voting day is a very serious fraud deterrent and say the same thing that these stupid little worthless stickers with "I voted!" that one finds at the voting booth on election day. The other serious facet is the ability of the voter to verify that they have indeed cast a ballot for their desired candidates is another major facet - something that requires a human readable paper ballot - without which recounts are not possible. The rest is really 'openess' - the ability of the public to see and document (camcorders) that no serious irregularities are going on. Of course severe criminal penalities must be enforced to keep the fraud from overwhelming the observation and detection systems. Unfortunately, the days of limited government where those in power had virtually no effect on the lives of the people is long gone. The power and wealth in government now is so great as to attract the very best of the corrupt scumbags our society has to offer.
Being well Trained in emcomm and having some inkling of military strategy, I must state that any communications requiring infrastructure is at serious risk of failure or attack. Also, newer technologies are at higher risk of failure due to their complexity. These are facts which are demonstrated in every serious disaster. The only thing for sure is that point to point communications that use no infrastructure can be established.
My own county and city's 800 MHz system failed only a few months ago in a minor weather disaster, one with no injuries and relatively little minor damage due to some F0-F1 tornadoes and high winds which uprooted trees. The sheriff's dept, police dept, public works, all except the fire department which had kept their 150mhz radios as a backup, were down, evidently due to a single point failure of a minor power outage at the tower with a failure of the backup generator. Since I was at the emergency operations center at the time, I was aware of the situation. My comment to the county EM was that such equipment wasn't supposed to fail until there was actually a real emergency.
In order to be cost effective, communications systems must be designed to minimize costs while performing adaquately during the 99% of the time where only normal communications are occuring. During an emergency, equipment is failing, people are missing (evacuating, taking care of family, stranded, or perhaps worse), and the need for additional communications capability is rising exponentially, overloading everything still available. Note that the differences between 911, Katrina, Rita, forest fires and earthquakes are essentially extent of damaged area, severity of damage and the duration of the disaster.
During such emergencies, skilled communicators become a very rare commodity. It requires skill and training to accurately convey information under emergency conditions. These are things that many first responders do not even have unless specifically trained with ongoing practice.
Another factor that becomes a problem is that unused equipment tends to develop problems. Batteries run down, connectors go flakey, capacitors deteriorate. Stockpiling equipment is unlikely to solve the problems, especially without the trained personel to man the equipment. Stockpiling sufficient quantites of trained employees would be so expensive as to bankrupt the whole society.
Newer technology is valuable only when it provides benefit, something beyond putting the salesman's kids through college. Virtually all things offer advantages and disadvantages under certain circumstances and seldom does one find only advantages. Older technology doesn't mean it is obsolete or even inferior in every circumstance.
For example, cell phones are just radios that are easy to use, if you've got a good cellphone system and plenty of money to waste on minutes. They are extremely low power and very small and portable. In serious emergencies situations, where most or all of the cell phone infrastructure is gone and there is no power to recharge their batteries, these modern creations are totally useless whereas a world war II antique army walkie talkie would actually be usable.
If you thought 911 was a disaster, just wait until the terrorists decide to do an orchestrated attack against New York City's water and sewage treatment facilities.
Personally,
I'd rather see pluto promoted to be a binary planet with charon. After all, we don't have other ones around. A good criteria to distinguish moon - planet from binary would be whether the center of gravity of the pair resides inside the planet or between moon and planet surfaces.
As for pluto's orbit not being unique - it only goes a little into neptune's - mighta been perturbed a while back rather than a birth defect. After all, it's got its own orbit for the most part and isn't all that eccentric.
Calling pluto a planet or not is really a judgement call and since it has been for 60 yrs one should leave well enough alone.
as for the bush haters - i feel a bit sorry for y'all - it's just gotta be hard to become acustomed to the realization that you're dumber than someone you think is really stupid.
Religion and science have much more in common. Both require faith, however derived. Both have a basis in observation and interpretation. Both have their a' priori assumptions.
At the bottom, one can assume there is God or, one can assume there is no God. In the middle, one can assume god is an advanced space alien who terraformed the earth and genetically engineered earth based life. Ultimately, there are those who believe and there are those who don't know (agnostics). Athiests are merely yet more of the group who believe (that there is no God).
It is not possible to disprove that there is no God. Ultimately, one can only show that they are not, or at most, that God is not what they think He should be.
As for the dark matter, it is possible that there variations of matter which have never been observed by man. Most of what is seen in the popular press seems to be hype to enhance the status and bank accounts of those who promote it.
Whether dark matter (and energy) exists as something exotic or not is still a serious question. If dark matter exists in the quantities assumed, it's still possible that it might be normal matter which isn't absorbing or emitting sufficient light to be seen by us.
Currently, the suspected density of matter in the universe, including estimates for 'exotic' dark matter is the equivalent of about 6 hydrogen atoms per cubic meter.
Contrary to popular opinion, if black holes exist, the density of the matter it takes to form them depends on how much matter is involved and for a universe that is the size and mass of the one we think we live in, the size of the black hole turns out to be around 13.7 billion light years across. Such occurances rarely are coincidences.
The point is that there are usually a number of alternatives competing for position in science. The more exotic these are, the more they capture the imagination of people, and oftimes, the research grants. Let's face it, another Mars probe will probably do no better in TV ratings on the NASA cable channel than will the Star trek reruns a few channels down the dial.
I will look forward to hearing about this new press release. I think it will be interesting in some manner or another. However, since the press release infers that dark matter is something exotic and fundamentally different from normal matter, I'm pretty sure that the interesting part will be associated with being a gambit for funding and fame more than the announcement of something new and fundamental that changes our concepts forever.
I can still remember clinton horning in on NASAs public press pronouncement of life on Mars a number of years back. It seems a decade later that all their evidence has been shown that it is just as likely to be non life processes. Hence, it's back to the drawing board on that one. Is there, was there life on Mars - it still remains to be determined.
Of the curiousities of science, two are most interesting. First, the search for answers inevitably leads to more questions that need answering. Second, we periodically reach a point where it seems all is known except to add a few more bits of accuracy to the measurements - just before the lid blows off and we discover that momma nature wasn't who we thought she was at all.
perhaps there is a fundamental and serious difference between citizen and subject.
as for a reset button for the federal gov. - there already is - actually there's even a law against it - It's called the constitution interpreted as written - another set of laws being ignored by the politic elite because it doesn't suit their purposes.
Gee,
I wonder if they ever fixed their optimization problem that they injected around c++ 4.0 and refused to address after 4.5. The one with the for() loop that insisted on stomping the Base Pointer register with the final loop value when it was held only as a register. That caused lots of instabilities in early windows programs that were never found.
"I think that if you scale for population, the US carte--I mean, government, meanly falls near the mean, man.
Governments are all composed of people. People are flawed and only 'good' when they think they're under observation. There isn't much evidence that the US is excessively worse off than, say, China.
Unfortunately, since the New Deal and the Great Society, US citizens are increasingly comfortable with abdicating their rights and responsibilities to the nanny state.
Some sort of libertarian revolution is required, but I don't hold forth great hope: "
Look at the actual dollars spent (mostly wasted) and the duplication of efforts and management. No other economy in the world produces enough (per capita)to sustain our government and still feed its people. While one can look at trends to see that even we cannot keep it up forever, a cripling blow to our economy could potentially make it more of an immediate problem.
why is it better? People cannot verify what is inside the machine running as the program.
I can stand around a polling place and watch the paper ballots go into locked cans. I can see if those cans are tampered with during the day. I can follow or escort those cans to the central counting office and I can watch people process them. What I cannot do and do not need to do is watch people filling them out in the voting booth - where evidently there is a concern over machines being rebooted and reprogrammed via a flash module. Transparency is the only way to thwart corruption.
A technical failure in one of these overpriced electronic monstrosities could cause the loss of many voter's efforts. A technical failure in a number 2 pencil is easily recognizable by anyone whose vote should be allowed to count and can be dealt with immediately. Please note that stoned druggies, alzheimers victims and the dead are not actually capable of making voting decisions and are merely tools of corruption.
Given sufficient incentive, there are many who are capable of creating fake voting programs that will appear like the real thing which can be inserted with internal collusion from some of those managing the voting process which would not be necessarily apparent to observers.
All those dimpled chads in Florida were most likely caused by trying to put several ballots in the machine at once. Either that or by people who weren't capable of understanding that they were at a polling place and were voting.
Rot grows underneath, out of sight. Nothing is further from view than flash memory. This stupid BS of using voting machines is a plan for corruption and control of the voting process.
The ONLY way honest voting can be ensured is if the actual ballot cast can be checked by the balloter. And that is only part of the solution because fraudulent voting is probably the greater issue - where people are coming in with multiple id's and voting numerous times. Here, shedding light on the subject (like making video records to catch those voting multiple times - followed by criminal prosecutions of those caught)is the only way. That simple purple thumb trick done in Iraq would be vehemently opposed here in the US (and probably permanently put the democrats out of power - at least those democrats who haven't been pretending to be republicans).
As for legislating for us, a properly operating government as envisioned by our founders would have little to no effect on the majority of people. It's been a very long time now that the quip: "No one's life, liberty or property is safe when congress is in session" became a true statement.
While it should be apparent to a thinking individual that most of our societal problems today are caused by government, it's not so obvious as to how much that government is under control of elected officials or of unelected bureaucrats and minions acting in their own self interests.
Unlike the rest of the world, we are faced with a monumental problem. The prosperity achieved in our country has permitted a leviathon government so huge that it could not possibly occur anywhere else in the world because nowhere else has the resources to create such a monster. It is perhaps the first brainless multicellular creature composed of intellegent beings ever to exist, a life form of its own bent on growing and consuming.
Congrats on figuring a few things out, 30 years late is better than not at all. '1984' was ahead of schedule, not 22 yrs behind. Although orwell got some things right, by no means were they correct.
Also, it was the preparation of the people that had to occur first. Hence most missed it entirely. In firefighting and disaster management, sometimes doing nothing is the best of all possible alternatives. That concept itself no longer exists in the general populace when it comes to government involvement. People often understand how poor the job is done by government in regard to Indian Affairs medicine on reservations and even the US Post Office disaster, but there is a total disconnect when it comes to understanding that of all organizations that exist in a society, government is the most wasteful and incompentent of them all and is guaranteed to be the worst choice for involvement.
1984 (a date based on 1948 with the swapping of two numbers) has come and gone. The shreds of liberty are still around but are being slowly removed one by one. The bloated gov. we have now is already far beyond the size that it could exist with anywhere else due to the massive prosperity our former lack of gov. permitted.
Perhaps an amusing observation is that even the term 'liberal' as classically defined no longer refers to the system of thought but rather to the opposite extreme - that of raising gov. to the level of a religion that must be worshipped.
Pleasant dreams.
Note the exceptionally high price for a toy car and also that there is no mention of the time required to charge the car with 4 minutes of run time. What really irks me is that with one exception, hydrogen is not a fuel (source of energy), but rather it is a means of storing energy. The exception being that it can be acquired from oil and gas - those evillllll energy sources that are supposedly running out. As for energy storage, hydrogen has one benefit - light weight. The rest of its attributes are problems, some of which - like storage requirements, tend to negate its one benefit. Seems like I recall that hydrogen in the air is explosive from concentrations of 3 or 4% up to well over 90%, far beyond the range of most other materials. A real question arises as to how does the 'example' fuel cell car compare to a lithium ion rechargeable battery powered car with solar panel recharger? I don't think this even produces significant amounts of water coming out a tail pipe. And, considering that water vapor is a more significant greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide can we assume that its contribution would not be significant? The reason why fuel cells haven't taken off for vehicular traffic is that they are far more costly than other alternatives. That is the reason why there's such a cry for government to come in to support it. If it were a feasible solution, there would be no need for that. So, if there is serious gov. support applied, better alternatives will be pushed aside, at least for a while, in favor of that gov. supplied money which will distort the marketplace for the duration of its continued presence. I still love that california gov. mandate about 10% electric cars by 20?? established shortly before it became evident there wasn't enough electric power generation/supply available to meet the existing needs of the state, much less for significant increases to power a whole new usage market of electric cars. momma nature always gets her way in the end.
Who'd have thunk the pork king of seward's folly would woulda understood the internet that well. He probably believes al gore invented it - hence the (evidently, pneumatic) tubes. I suspect he's quite familiar with that technology. My fav. is still Sheila Jackson Lee of houston asking the NASA people once if the mars rover could be driven over and take a picture of the flag the astronauts planted back during the Apollo missions.
Actually, I'm not sure if these people are sub-literate - or merely about average for non-technical people. Unfortunately, it appears that their financial and economic literacy is so poor, it makes these political hacks appear like scientific geniuses. Centralized authoritarian, socialistic big gov. crap is worse than being a serious member of the flat earth society nowadays. Despite that, it looks like about half the country and most of the world has fallen for that charade. No wonder the nigerian scam internet artists keep trying and trying and trying.
Support?
Only if their retro socks are held up with garter belts. I'm sure the truth in advertising laws dictated the nature of those idiotic commercials. I'm sure they're all quite adept at doing the 'robot'? and listening to teckno music.
I bet those new style vw bugs are autotransmissions as I doubt their geek squad have the wherewithall to manipulate a manual stick shift.
Actually, I used blank lines separation between the paragraphs. I guess it defaulted to html or something and left them out of the final post. Good luck reading it.
Co2 is one of many 'greenhouse gases' h2o vapor being the most important by far. Our happy little equilibrium is anything but an equilibrium. Quite obviously these are what are referred to as relative minimums in the curves because they would be totally unstable otherwise. I have presented two basic points. First, there is two little understanding of the processes and interactions to even know for sure if there is warming going on or if there is cooling going on or if there is either, regardless of human presence on earth being a contributing factor or not. Second, politicized science is nothing but pseudo science and even the supposed facts produced by such endeavours are not to be trusted as the purpose is to force a political agenda rather than to increase the knowledge base. Hell, even the nonpolitically related science field has more petty school yard conformity going on than the typical high school. Another point I thought I made earlier was that it was proposed we scatter coal dust on a massive scale to melt the icecaps back to save us from global cooling. This was only a few years ago, by the same people who are now crying global warming. They were arguing then that it was too great a risk and by the time we found out for sure, it would be too late to do anything about it, yada yada yada - same B.S. as now except now it's warming rather than cooling. And, to what extent their hair-brained scheme might have an effect, it would be devastating now - according to these same people. If you look at the proposed solutions - like that kyoto accord abomination, you'll notice that it seriously impacts only those countries that have implemented pollution controls but would not affect those third world places that pollute far more per person and have no resources to clean them up. If one attributes a serious lack of intellect to its proponents, one might then attribute the problems (which are far greater than the theoretical benefits promised) that will be caused by it to that of unintended consequences. However, while they are dumb, they aren't that dumb but they assume the populace is and that they can get away with their intended agenda. Enjoy the illusion that global disasters are either preventable or at least can be overcome by man's power and intellect, if only man would act soon to those alarmist voices spreading the word yet again. You won't find the real ones at the cinema with Bruce Willis or Arnie the governator saving the day just in the nick of time. The earth is not a static system. It is constantly changing and is subject on occaisions to forces that are unimaginable in power. This atmosphere is at least the 2nd one this planet has had. The moon appears to have been formed from earth debris caused by an impact with an object the size of mars that almost totally destroyed the earth. We live on a ball of molten materials with a small insulating shell, not unlike the skin of a tomato. The earth still gives off more heat than it receives from the sun. The sun is a variable star with varies on all time scales. In the few hundred years we've been seriously observing it there have been rather few things going on with it. We've discovered an 11 year sunspot cycle which seems to go on - except in the 1750s - 1800s where there was no sunspots present - and the Thames river in London froze over in the harsh winters. The sun periodically puts out coronal mass ejections, CMEs. Were one to have occurred during the apollo moon missions, the astronauts would have been fried. Although the ISS is well inside the earth's magnetic field, they have an inner room to go to when threatened by one. Were one to occur on the upper side of the statistical estimates of sizes believed to occur, it could fry our electric grid transformers, leaving parts of our country and many parts of the world without electrical power for years - as well as frying even rather hardened satellites and ground based equipment. This doesn't include the expectations that the earth's magnetic field is dropping rapidly towards a flip
numerically? - it's almost incalculable. You've got to use something closer to gain some sort of equivalence. They outweigh us in biomass by about 4000 pounds per human, termites alone are estimated to be 2000 pounds per human. Now consider metobolic rates - small critters are many many times the metobolic rate of larger ones eating (I think as much as ) several times their own weight every day and burping / farting co2 and methane in substantial quantities. Considering that of the 6billion or so people, the vast majority contribute rather small amounts of technological based polution, although the lact of economic prosperity means that their naturally generated pollution doesn't tend to be taken care of in an environmentally friendly fashion. To correctly estimate the nature of such one must convert the technologically generated but unremediated pollution to terms equivalent to the per person natural pollution. I suppose for the quick and dirty comparison - if one assumes that termites were the only consideration and if termites eat 10x their own mass in food - converting say 50% to methane and co2 and pollutants - then the equivalent technological mass per person would be about 50 times the mass of the average human - which might be guessed at 100 pounds. I don't think you can come up with 5000 pounds of hydrocarbon daily usage average by everyone on earth. And that is assuming no remediation or pollution control efforts. To make matters worse, this only accounts for about half the insects - and guess what! - Insects aren't # 1 either. I'm still waiting for people to start to comprehend that if there's global warming going on here, on Mars, on Jupiter and on Saturn that maybe it's because of the increased solar activity and output being that mankind only has some bit of a presence on only one of those orbs.