Err, no. Been watching Moonraker too many times lately?
Most of the original shuttle designs involved two-stage launchers where the first stage flew back to the launch site with wings. They did carry the second stage piggyback, for the most part, but they still flew like rockets the whole way up (vertical launch off a pad, rocket powered, etc). There have been a couple of "back-of-747" style proposals, but none were actually built.
He got modded up because tt would be far simpler for a terrorist group to simply obtain an already-built weapon than for them to get raw materials and build it themselves. All it takes is a sympathetic country willing to "lose" a weapon (North Korea? Iran?), the manpower and funds to bribe/kill enough people and steal one from a country with poor nuclear security (Pakistan?), or having the right people in place to capture them when a potentially-unstable country falls apart (again, Pakistan?).
You're assuming they're going to do it the hard way.
Yes, it has been a while... it was my high school job and I last worked a shift there in July 2002. I did get things mixed up, you're right.
I do remember marinol being a bitch to count, as pills go... little hard amber balls that bounced and skittered everywhere. I think premarin was like that, too.
Some good stories from those days, though (mainly crazy customers, like the guy who dropped trou to ask what the rash on his, er, groin was, or the lady with six fingers total who would throw tantrums and empty out the store)
As I remember it, the "controlled substances" were broken down into a couple different categories. Class IV drugs were things like percocet and other narcotic painkillers. They had some abuse potential but were still fairly common. You could get refills, but there were generally limits on quantity dispensed and (IIRC) you couldn't transfer them. These were stocked with the rest of the "regular" prescription drugs.
Class III drugs were more controlled for whatever reason. We still kept them stocked on the regular shelves too.
Class II drugs were the real heavy stuff, like methadone and adderall/ritalin. Those were kept locked up in a safe, and we had a continuing inventory sheet where we kept track of exactly how many were in stock. No refills on these suckers. I think this also included things like morphine and such that weren't stocked in a retail pharmacy but would be issued at a hospital, for example.
Class I drugs were illegal--cocaine, meth, pot, etc.
There were also special ones that got treated just like Class II (at least the locked-up and inventory part) because they had a high theft potential, like Viagra. That was a company policy, though, not an FDA/DEA requirement. I think there were also Class V drugs (can't remember what was special about them), and I think Class VI was "ordinary" prescription drugs.
You'd be amazed how many people would do things like claim their pills were "stolen" or try to change the quantity on the prescription. Usually it just took a phone call to the issuing doctor to confirm a bogus story before we called the cops. I helped take down a couple prescription fakers and a check fraud guy:)
Then, of course, are the people who hold such an overwhelming feeling of Catholic-style guilt about living in a technologically-advanced society that they believe everyone must make drastic sacrifices as punishment for our "sins". These are the ones who oppose "positive" solutions (new technologies and developments that reduce emissions/clean things up/run efficiently and allow us to maintain/grow our standard of living) for no real reason, blocking every proposal with a made-up "justification" and demanding sacrifices instead. The most extreme call for massive reductions in the human population and/or return to pre-industrial societies that they view as some kind of utopia.
There are also the ones who use the above to make digs at their political opponents, particularly highly technical societies. They're the ones pushing drastic measures on the US/Western Europe/Japan/Australia while letting China get off free.
And finally, it's pretty aggrevating to see so much emphasis put on how bad CO2 emissions are, while neglecting toxic chemical/particulate emissions, whose negative effects are far more immediate and proven. There are villages in China full of children with terrible mental impairments and physical deformities, but nobody seems to really care about that.
Frankly, I'd like to see a WWII-level effort to shift our (US) national infrastructure to the point where everything practical is run on electricity produced in zero-emissions plants (nuclear primarily, and solar/tidal/wind/etc where effective and practical). That includes rail transportation. Combustible fuels would be used primarily for things that needed them (ie, vehicles), and said fuels should be made from biomass wherever feasable (and without mandating one plant like corn), with petrolium drilling as a reserve only. Efficiency standards would also increase. It would be expensive for a little while, but the final standard of living would be better than before.
Actually, maneuvering speed isn't "speed at which you can slam the controls around at will". It is actually the highest speed at which the aircraft cannot produce enough lift to overstress the airframe. In other words, solve (weight*Glimit) =.5*density*Va^2*wingarea*CLmax for Va. Note that Va decreases as the airplane gets lighter.
Their engines are designed to be as simple as possible, with as few moving parts as can be mustered, to minimize complexity and reduce failure rates. They are air-cooled. They use tie rods instead of cables. The engine's ignition system doesn't depend on the plane's electrical system, (they use magnetos, like your lawn mower) and there are two independent ignition systems so that if either fails, the other keeps the plane safely aloft. Rather than rely on complex sensors to provide optimal fuel mixtures, the mixture controls are handled manually.
Of course, all that modern 1930's technology also requires more maintenance than, say, a modern car engine, and is less efficient to boot (because of that manual mixture control and the usual practice of using a carburetor instead of fuel injection). The biggest reason we're still using engines like these is all of the product liability suits plaguing light airplanes. When you have a manufacturer get sued for $13 million because the owner/pilot deliberately flew into weather he was not trained for (and more to the point, specifically told and trained to avoid), that kind of discourages anyone from making investments in new technologies out of fear they'll get sued, too. We can (and do, on a regular basis) make engines for cars that are highly efficient and need nothing more than an occasional oil change to run for 100k miles. It's a shame we can't adopt some of those techniques for airplane engines.
Oh, and light airplanes have a safety record closer to motorcycles than regular cars.
The real problem with health care is that too many people willingly take on a car payment and exorbitant cell plan yet are offended they have to pay to take care of themselves. Too many put more effort in taking care of their cars than their own health.
Sums up my views pretty well. I have a hard time finding sympathy for people who claim they "can't afford basic health care" when they could obviously afford things like a computer, jewelry, a fancy cellphone, beer/liquor/cigarettes/recreational drugs, or designer clothes. Apparently they stopped teaching about needs vs. wants in elementary school or something, cause it seems to me that your first priorities should be providing for the basic necessities: water, food, shelter, healthcare. Only after those are taken care of can you start buying other things.
Conversely, if you can afford things like a new car, a cell phone, etc., then it would follow that you obviously have taken care of your basic needs first.
I don't have a problem with helping people out who truly need it. I do have a problem when that assistance is used to subsidize non-necessities. It's like seeing those people at the grocery store who use food stamps to feed their children, but then turn right around and buy cases of beer, cartons of cigarettes, etc., all the while yapping away on their iphone. I worked at a grocery store for a couple of years, and saw plenty of this.
When talking about orbital delivery*, air launch doesn't really offer too much. You gain a little propulsive efficiency due to the reduced backpressure, but a lot of that is eaten up from the additional mass required to handle horizontal storage/launch and the fuel for turning to vertical flight. Plus, you face pretty restrictive weight limits because of your launch aircraft. And on top of all that, launch vehicle costs don't scale very much with size; making a smaller rocket doesn't mean your development costs will drop proportionally.
The big advantage of air launch is flexibility. You aren't as restricted by weather conditions, since you can just fly somewhere with better weather and launch there. You don't have to worry about launching over populated areas, since you can fly over any part of the ocean you want. Launch-site restrictions on orbital inclination don't matter. And it's easier to be discreet with your launches/payloads than it is at a fixed site. And I would guess that it's easier to assemble and launch something small like this on very short notice than something with a lot of fixed infrastructure like a pad; you aren't limited to having all that stuff in one place, either. All of that is why the USAF is so keen on air-launched systems; it's not performance considerations driving things, but rather operational ones.
*If all you want to do is go suborbital, either for tourism or to, say, kill a satellite, the required energy is much less, making air launch more beneficial. There's a proposal floating around out there for a two-stage AMRAAM derivative for boost-phase ballistic missile interception (think SCUD killer). Someone on the program mentioned that, if you paired it with an F-22 (which flies higher and faster than other fighters), you could have a decent little low-orbit satellite killer. Not bad for a 350lb missile.
Part of the other problem with NASP is that it was intended to run air-breathing engines all the way up to Mach 25 (essentially, all the way to orbit). Not only is it really f'ing hard to make an airbreathing engine that still produces positive thrust at that speed (due to temperature and pressure rises from slowing the incoming air down for combustion), but running said engine also requires you to be down lower, where heating becomes a bigger issue. Most of the more recent scramjet-powered launch vehicle proposals use rockets for the final acceleration (from around Mach 8-12 up to orbital velocity).
Are you actually a pilot, or do you just play one on TV?
Barrel rolls are 1G maneuvers. A "normal" roll down the axis of the airplane is an aileron roll. This would probably cause injury to those not sitting down with their seat belts on, and those who are hit by the unseated, but won't cause the plane to crash as long as the pilots don't overstress the airframe during the recovery. A snap roll is something else; it's a more violent maneuver that's more complicated than an aileron roll, and one that would likely break the airplane.
Your "analysis" of Airbus FBW systems is entirely off-base. Fly-by-wire is not some fuzzy-logic computer that tries to think about what you want vs. what it wants to do; rather, such systems have known, hard, rigidly-defined limits. They may have pitch and roll angle limits (as you allude to) in addition to other ones, but essentially they are just feedback controllers, not much more complicated than the PID ones we all remember from our controls theory classes.
I don't know how well this would apply to other languages, but imagine if someone took English and wrote it purely phonetically.
Yu myt wynd up with sumthing riten lik this, wich cud ezily thro of a leter frekwense analisis, uspeshule if yu hav vareashinz in pronunseashin for diferent reginz.
Why are you getting antibiotics, which kill bacteria, when colds are caused by a virus? The antibiotics aren't going to help; if anything, you're just wasting up the doctor's time, your time, amd your money, and contributing to the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Damn right... not only is venison leaner than beef, but it's also free range, organic, and local! And it gets people more involved in their food, making them realize where it comes from (ie, not the grocery store).
A couple of deer will fill a freezer with enough meat for a year. And it makes for very good chili:)
There's a reason the Constitution was written to be strictly adhered to and hard to change, and it wasn't because it was deemed perfect and correct through all time. Instead, it was done to make sure that major structural changes and such couldn't just be changed on a whim, with a slight passing majority, and also to make it much harder for a tyrranical government to change things and keep itself in power. The process for amending it is quite clear, and requires large majorities of Congress and the states as an "are you really sure you want to do this?" check.
The thing is, the Constitution is the highest law in the land. If you start just ignoring parts of it because they're inconvenient or you don't like them, where does that end? You can't go writing regular laws and insisting on strict obedience, but then say "ignore the Constitution, it doesn't matter"; after all, what purpose would it really serve if you could just ignore it whenever you felt like it? If you don't like part of the Constitution, then you change it by the established amendment process. You don't just say "screw that, I'm doing what I want".
Actually, hydrogen has very good energy density by mass (the best of any chemical fuel). By volume, it's very poor. That's why you see hydrogen used as a fuel for rockets (where mass matters much more than volume), but not aircraft. A commercial airliner running on hydrogen would require a huge insulated tank that would add lots of weight and drag; you can't just tuck the fuel into the wings like you can with jet-A. It may become usable for small aircraft, but I don't think you'll see it used for anything larger (except maybe super-high-altitude UAVs and exotic hypersonic vehicles).
However, I do agree that biomass-based synthetic fuels will be far more prevalent in the future. Assuming we don't try to force the use of inefficient food crops for production through heavy-handed government and lobbyist actions (coughcorncough), and instead focus on using mroe efficient plants, algae, and leftover/waste biomass, it will likely work out. I know that there are already a few promising replacements for piston-engine avgas and diesel and jet fuel under development, and I think such things are a far better investment of funds for several reasons. They are essentially carbon-neutral once applied on a large scale, they eliminate strategic and economic dependence on politically volatile nation-state cartel members, and they are essentially "drop-in" replacements for current fuels, allowing current infrastructure to be used and changed over much more cheaply than drastic changes.
Damn fucking right. I never understood how something could be such a fundamental right that it's enshrined in the very blueprint of the government as something to never be violated... but it's ok for the states to violate it. If it's a fundamental right that can't be violated by the federal government, why should the states be able to do so?
Besides the immediate implication of the McDonald case, I really hope USSC overthrows Slaughterhouse and the stupid idea of incorporation. The 14th seems pretty damn clear to me; the entire Bill of Rights (every one of them) applies just as much at the state level as it does the federal. It's a no-brainer.
I'd say the American attitude seems to be more like "let's not worry about maintaining it, it works right now" and "why maintain it? We'll replace it when it's broken". Well, that and politicians' reluctance to commit to anything that extends beyond their term of office.
In other words, most of us tend to suck at thinking much beyond the next paycheck, much less multi-year periods.
Yeah, because a handful of missiles can stop an all-out strike...
The biggest benefit of missile defense isn't in full-scale attacks, but in limited ones or cases of accidental/rogue launches. Rather than make a decision in 15 minutes to either sit helplessly and either watch the warheads land on your cities, or launch in retaliation and spark a chain reaction of everyone launching, you have the ability to shoot down that handful of missiles, then get on the red phone/hotline for a big "WTF?!" and maybe defuse the situation.
Remember, the US had an operationalABM system in the mid-70s. The Russians still have one, and it is believed that some of their long-range SAM systems also have a terminal ABM capability. Incidentally, the Patriot system was deliberately restricted in capability (particularly in the software) to hinder its ABM capability.
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Err, no. Been watching Moonraker too many times lately?
Most of the original shuttle designs involved two-stage launchers where the first stage flew back to the launch site with wings. They did carry the second stage piggyback, for the most part, but they still flew like rockets the whole way up (vertical launch off a pad, rocket powered, etc). There have been a couple of "back-of-747" style proposals, but none were actually built.
Very good book on the subject: http://www.amazon.com/Space-Shuttle-National-Transportation-Missions/dp/0963397451
The rest of SpaceX and Orbital only engage in sub-orbital flight
That's funny, because I distinctly remember SpaceX putting a payload in orbit recently, with many more flights planned.
Orbital has been doing, well, orbital missions for a long time. See Pegasus, Minotaur, Taurus, etc.
He got modded up because tt would be far simpler for a terrorist group to simply obtain an already-built weapon than for them to get raw materials and build it themselves. All it takes is a sympathetic country willing to "lose" a weapon (North Korea? Iran?), the manpower and funds to bribe/kill enough people and steal one from a country with poor nuclear security (Pakistan?), or having the right people in place to capture them when a potentially-unstable country falls apart (again, Pakistan?).
You're assuming they're going to do it the hard way.
I like that analogy. But where would a physician's assistant (PA) fall under there? Or is that about the same thing as a nurse practicioner?
Why is it that out of the 4 calls I've made to Lenovo that I've gotten 2 "Atlantans" with heavy Indian accents? Interesting.
There are quite a few people of Indian descent in Atlanta (and especially at Georgia Tech). Maybe they're hiring college students?
Yes, it has been a while... it was my high school job and I last worked a shift there in July 2002. I did get things mixed up, you're right.
I do remember marinol being a bitch to count, as pills go... little hard amber balls that bounced and skittered everywhere. I think premarin was like that, too.
Some good stories from those days, though (mainly crazy customers, like the guy who dropped trou to ask what the rash on his, er, groin was, or the lady with six fingers total who would throw tantrums and empty out the store)
Disclaimer: I worked in a pharmacy for a while.
As I remember it, the "controlled substances" were broken down into a couple different categories. Class IV drugs were things like percocet and other narcotic painkillers. They had some abuse potential but were still fairly common. You could get refills, but there were generally limits on quantity dispensed and (IIRC) you couldn't transfer them. These were stocked with the rest of the "regular" prescription drugs.
Class III drugs were more controlled for whatever reason. We still kept them stocked on the regular shelves too.
Class II drugs were the real heavy stuff, like methadone and adderall/ritalin. Those were kept locked up in a safe, and we had a continuing inventory sheet where we kept track of exactly how many were in stock. No refills on these suckers. I think this also included things like morphine and such that weren't stocked in a retail pharmacy but would be issued at a hospital, for example.
Class I drugs were illegal--cocaine, meth, pot, etc.
There were also special ones that got treated just like Class II (at least the locked-up and inventory part) because they had a high theft potential, like Viagra. That was a company policy, though, not an FDA/DEA requirement. I think there were also Class V drugs (can't remember what was special about them), and I think Class VI was "ordinary" prescription drugs.
You'd be amazed how many people would do things like claim their pills were "stolen" or try to change the quantity on the prescription. Usually it just took a phone call to the issuing doctor to confirm a bogus story before we called the cops. I helped take down a couple prescription fakers and a check fraud guy :)
Then, of course, are the people who hold such an overwhelming feeling of Catholic-style guilt about living in a technologically-advanced society that they believe everyone must make drastic sacrifices as punishment for our "sins". These are the ones who oppose "positive" solutions (new technologies and developments that reduce emissions/clean things up/run efficiently and allow us to maintain/grow our standard of living) for no real reason, blocking every proposal with a made-up "justification" and demanding sacrifices instead. The most extreme call for massive reductions in the human population and/or return to pre-industrial societies that they view as some kind of utopia.
There are also the ones who use the above to make digs at their political opponents, particularly highly technical societies. They're the ones pushing drastic measures on the US/Western Europe/Japan/Australia while letting China get off free.
And finally, it's pretty aggrevating to see so much emphasis put on how bad CO2 emissions are, while neglecting toxic chemical/particulate emissions, whose negative effects are far more immediate and proven. There are villages in China full of children with terrible mental impairments and physical deformities, but nobody seems to really care about that.
Frankly, I'd like to see a WWII-level effort to shift our (US) national infrastructure to the point where everything practical is run on electricity produced in zero-emissions plants (nuclear primarily, and solar/tidal/wind/etc where effective and practical). That includes rail transportation. Combustible fuels would be used primarily for things that needed them (ie, vehicles), and said fuels should be made from biomass wherever feasable (and without mandating one plant like corn), with petrolium drilling as a reserve only. Efficiency standards would also increase. It would be expensive for a little while, but the final standard of living would be better than before.
Actually, maneuvering speed isn't "speed at which you can slam the controls around at will". It is actually the highest speed at which the aircraft cannot produce enough lift to overstress the airframe. In other words, solve (weight*Glimit) = .5*density*Va^2*wingarea*CLmax for Va. Note that Va decreases as the airplane gets lighter.
Another engineer and private pilot here...
Their engines are designed to be as simple as possible, with as few moving parts as can be mustered, to minimize complexity and reduce failure rates. They are air-cooled. They use tie rods instead of cables. The engine's ignition system doesn't depend on the plane's electrical system, (they use magnetos, like your lawn mower) and there are two independent ignition systems so that if either fails, the other keeps the plane safely aloft. Rather than rely on complex sensors to provide optimal fuel mixtures, the mixture controls are handled manually.
Of course, all that modern 1930's technology also requires more maintenance than, say, a modern car engine, and is less efficient to boot (because of that manual mixture control and the usual practice of using a carburetor instead of fuel injection). The biggest reason we're still using engines like these is all of the product liability suits plaguing light airplanes. When you have a manufacturer get sued for $13 million because the owner/pilot deliberately flew into weather he was not trained for (and more to the point, specifically told and trained to avoid), that kind of discourages anyone from making investments in new technologies out of fear they'll get sued, too. We can (and do, on a regular basis) make engines for cars that are highly efficient and need nothing more than an occasional oil change to run for 100k miles. It's a shame we can't adopt some of those techniques for airplane engines.
Oh, and light airplanes have a safety record closer to motorcycles than regular cars.
The real problem with health care is that too many people willingly take on a car payment and exorbitant cell plan yet are offended they have to pay to take care of themselves. Too many put more effort in taking care of their cars than their own health.
Sums up my views pretty well. I have a hard time finding sympathy for people who claim they "can't afford basic health care" when they could obviously afford things like a computer, jewelry, a fancy cellphone, beer/liquor/cigarettes/recreational drugs, or designer clothes. Apparently they stopped teaching about needs vs. wants in elementary school or something, cause it seems to me that your first priorities should be providing for the basic necessities: water, food, shelter, healthcare. Only after those are taken care of can you start buying other things.
Conversely, if you can afford things like a new car, a cell phone, etc., then it would follow that you obviously have taken care of your basic needs first.
I don't have a problem with helping people out who truly need it. I do have a problem when that assistance is used to subsidize non-necessities. It's like seeing those people at the grocery store who use food stamps to feed their children, but then turn right around and buy cases of beer, cartons of cigarettes, etc., all the while yapping away on their iphone. I worked at a grocery store for a couple of years, and saw plenty of this.
You take an empty tank, weigh it, fill it with helium, and weigh it again. The difference in weight is the helium.
Or, you obtain some in a container of known volume, measure the temperature and pressure, and convert to mass using basic high-school chemistry.
Or, chill it until it turns to liquid, pour it in a cup, and put it on a scale.
Further methods are left as an exercise to the reader.
When talking about orbital delivery*, air launch doesn't really offer too much. You gain a little propulsive efficiency due to the reduced backpressure, but a lot of that is eaten up from the additional mass required to handle horizontal storage/launch and the fuel for turning to vertical flight. Plus, you face pretty restrictive weight limits because of your launch aircraft. And on top of all that, launch vehicle costs don't scale very much with size; making a smaller rocket doesn't mean your development costs will drop proportionally.
The big advantage of air launch is flexibility. You aren't as restricted by weather conditions, since you can just fly somewhere with better weather and launch there. You don't have to worry about launching over populated areas, since you can fly over any part of the ocean you want. Launch-site restrictions on orbital inclination don't matter. And it's easier to be discreet with your launches/payloads than it is at a fixed site. And I would guess that it's easier to assemble and launch something small like this on very short notice than something with a lot of fixed infrastructure like a pad; you aren't limited to having all that stuff in one place, either. All of that is why the USAF is so keen on air-launched systems; it's not performance considerations driving things, but rather operational ones.
*If all you want to do is go suborbital, either for tourism or to, say, kill a satellite, the required energy is much less, making air launch more beneficial. There's a proposal floating around out there for a two-stage AMRAAM derivative for boost-phase ballistic missile interception (think SCUD killer). Someone on the program mentioned that, if you paired it with an F-22 (which flies higher and faster than other fighters), you could have a decent little low-orbit satellite killer. Not bad for a 350lb missile.
Part of the other problem with NASP is that it was intended to run air-breathing engines all the way up to Mach 25 (essentially, all the way to orbit). Not only is it really f'ing hard to make an airbreathing engine that still produces positive thrust at that speed (due to temperature and pressure rises from slowing the incoming air down for combustion), but running said engine also requires you to be down lower, where heating becomes a bigger issue. Most of the more recent scramjet-powered launch vehicle proposals use rockets for the final acceleration (from around Mach 8-12 up to orbital velocity).
Pegasus is one of the most expensive rockets in the market per pound of payload.
FTFY.
Are you actually a pilot, or do you just play one on TV?
Barrel rolls are 1G maneuvers. A "normal" roll down the axis of the airplane is an aileron roll. This would probably cause injury to those not sitting down with their seat belts on, and those who are hit by the unseated, but won't cause the plane to crash as long as the pilots don't overstress the airframe during the recovery. A snap roll is something else; it's a more violent maneuver that's more complicated than an aileron roll, and one that would likely break the airplane.
Your "analysis" of Airbus FBW systems is entirely off-base. Fly-by-wire is not some fuzzy-logic computer that tries to think about what you want vs. what it wants to do; rather, such systems have known, hard, rigidly-defined limits. They may have pitch and roll angle limits (as you allude to) in addition to other ones, but essentially they are just feedback controllers, not much more complicated than the PID ones we all remember from our controls theory classes.
I don't know how well this would apply to other languages, but imagine if someone took English and wrote it purely phonetically.
Yu myt wynd up with sumthing riten lik this, wich cud ezily thro of a leter frekwense analisis, uspeshule if yu hav vareashinz in pronunseashin for diferent reginz.
"I have a cold, gimme some antibiotics"
Why are you getting antibiotics, which kill bacteria, when colds are caused by a virus? The antibiotics aren't going to help; if anything, you're just wasting up the doctor's time, your time, amd your money, and contributing to the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Damn right... not only is venison leaner than beef, but it's also free range, organic, and local! And it gets people more involved in their food, making them realize where it comes from (ie, not the grocery store).
A couple of deer will fill a freezer with enough meat for a year. And it makes for very good chili :)
There's a reason the Constitution was written to be strictly adhered to and hard to change, and it wasn't because it was deemed perfect and correct through all time. Instead, it was done to make sure that major structural changes and such couldn't just be changed on a whim, with a slight passing majority, and also to make it much harder for a tyrranical government to change things and keep itself in power. The process for amending it is quite clear, and requires large majorities of Congress and the states as an "are you really sure you want to do this?" check.
The thing is, the Constitution is the highest law in the land. If you start just ignoring parts of it because they're inconvenient or you don't like them, where does that end? You can't go writing regular laws and insisting on strict obedience, but then say "ignore the Constitution, it doesn't matter"; after all, what purpose would it really serve if you could just ignore it whenever you felt like it? If you don't like part of the Constitution, then you change it by the established amendment process. You don't just say "screw that, I'm doing what I want".
Actually, hydrogen has very good energy density by mass (the best of any chemical fuel). By volume, it's very poor. That's why you see hydrogen used as a fuel for rockets (where mass matters much more than volume), but not aircraft. A commercial airliner running on hydrogen would require a huge insulated tank that would add lots of weight and drag; you can't just tuck the fuel into the wings like you can with jet-A. It may become usable for small aircraft, but I don't think you'll see it used for anything larger (except maybe super-high-altitude UAVs and exotic hypersonic vehicles).
However, I do agree that biomass-based synthetic fuels will be far more prevalent in the future. Assuming we don't try to force the use of inefficient food crops for production through heavy-handed government and lobbyist actions (coughcorncough), and instead focus on using mroe efficient plants, algae, and leftover/waste biomass, it will likely work out. I know that there are already a few promising replacements for piston-engine avgas and diesel and jet fuel under development, and I think such things are a far better investment of funds for several reasons. They are essentially carbon-neutral once applied on a large scale, they eliminate strategic and economic dependence on politically volatile nation-state cartel members, and they are essentially "drop-in" replacements for current fuels, allowing current infrastructure to be used and changed over much more cheaply than drastic changes.
Damn fucking right. I never understood how something could be such a fundamental right that it's enshrined in the very blueprint of the government as something to never be violated... but it's ok for the states to violate it. If it's a fundamental right that can't be violated by the federal government, why should the states be able to do so?
Besides the immediate implication of the McDonald case, I really hope USSC overthrows Slaughterhouse and the stupid idea of incorporation. The 14th seems pretty damn clear to me; the entire Bill of Rights (every one of them) applies just as much at the state level as it does the federal. It's a no-brainer.
I'd say the American attitude seems to be more like "let's not worry about maintaining it, it works right now" and "why maintain it? We'll replace it when it's broken". Well, that and politicians' reluctance to commit to anything that extends beyond their term of office.
In other words, most of us tend to suck at thinking much beyond the next paycheck, much less multi-year periods.
I did something like that in 2002 for an economics project in high school. Only had three "episodes" and you could download them as mp3s.
Yeah, because a handful of missiles can stop an all-out strike...
The biggest benefit of missile defense isn't in full-scale attacks, but in limited ones or cases of accidental/rogue launches. Rather than make a decision in 15 minutes to either sit helplessly and either watch the warheads land on your cities, or launch in retaliation and spark a chain reaction of everyone launching, you have the ability to shoot down that handful of missiles, then get on the red phone/hotline for a big "WTF?!" and maybe defuse the situation.
Remember, the US had an operational ABM system in the mid-70s. The Russians still have one, and it is believed that some of their long-range SAM systems also have a terminal ABM capability. Incidentally, the Patriot system was deliberately restricted in capability (particularly in the software) to hinder its ABM capability.