By excessive govt regulation I am talking about the mounds of paperwork required by a variety of different government agencies, none of whom coordinate with each other, in order to get approval to do anything.
Don't take this as being anti-environment, but the example of environmental impact assessments alone is enough to kill most projects that take up only a single location, let alone a rail or road project that will cut through maybe hundreds of different environmental regions....
First off, it is debatable whether U.S. regulations are actually more onerous than in other nations where fast rail actually get built given that supposedly anti-regulation, corporate friendly administrations been in charge 8 of the last 10 years, and 20 years out of the last 30. Nations outside of China have these sorts of regulations and agencies also (much, much worse in fact to hear Republicans talk about them) yet fast rail gets built there.
The absence of a government-orchestrated national scale project to provide the funds, coherent planning, and legal muscle as is seen in China, Japan, France, Germany, etc. is the most obvious reason nothing is happening in the U.S. Can you see the Republicans getting behind a project like this? It would have to be bipartisan to fly.
If you are deeply concerned about this lack of fast rail perhaps you should start promoting an active, constructive long-term government role in building up the United States infrastructure -- like other successful nations, and like the U.S. used to be able to do. The U.S. and its government don't have to fail. Believing that the Federal Government is (for some reason) doomed to failure makes that belief an inevitable reality.
... it could be fast rail if it weren't for the fact that excessive govt regulation [emphasis added] and problems getting right-of-way means that it will never happen...
Come again? Since every high speed rail system in the world has been built by using large government subsidies (just like the original U.S. transcontinental rail system), and usually at least a government partnership if not as an outright government-run project, how is "excessive government regulation" to blame for the lack of high speed rail? Note also that those rights-of-way can only be obtained only through the government exercising its right of eminent domain.
... Secondly, in the US doctors might make a lot of money, but in Israel (where I am from) and many other countries, the doctors' salary isn't so lucrative...
Funny story (IMHO) - in 1983 there was a doctors' strike in Israel complaining of the low wages - in U.S. currency they were $3600 for an intern and $6000 for an experienced doctor a year. That's right, that's what they were being paid - a specialist with 20 years experience was paid $6000 a year. But here in the U.S. the news media consistently reported the salaries precipitating the strike as $36,000 and $60,000 a year! News editors in the U.S. apparently could not believe the actual low salaries and multiplied them by ten to "fix" them!
Salaries are better now, but Israeli doctors don't get rich. The belief that doctors are or should normally be rich men is a peculiar characteristic of 20th Century U.S. medicine.
Personally I'd have to say the seventies were my favorite decade. I mean, look at all the major events that happened in the seventies: The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii, the construction of the Colosseum, Roman conquest of Wales, Syria, and Jerusalem, publication of Pliny's "Naturalis Historiae" - it was a busy time.
(This joke brought to you courtesy of an unhealthy preoccupation with MST3K)
Ah, you Eurocentrists are all alike. You forget that the 70s were the high point of Eastern Han rule with the ascendance of Emperor Zhang, that the first of the Three Kingdoms (Goguryeo) was founded in Korea, and the Saka Era was established in Western India when the Sakas defeated the dynasty of king Vikramaditya.
So you view decades by 01-10? and not 00-09? The first decade of 2010 ended one year ago.
There are different definitions of "decade" in common use and most people switch between them without much problem (or even awareness).
A system that consistently divides the entire Common Era into decades, centuries and millenia, and which assigns numerals to each century and millenia (but not decades), has the decade ending at the end of a year that ends in zero (2010 in this case), just the Twentieth Century ends at the end of the twentieth century year (2000).
But if people speak of a decade like "the twenties" or the "the thirties" they are talking about a different definition of "decade". "The twenties" spans 1920 to 1929, not 1921 to 1930. The difference in definition is apparent in the term itself. This popular designation system is independent from the secular numbering of the Common Era and simply denotes a convenient reference time period (just as someone might refer to "the Depression" as a chronological period instead of as an economic event).
If American baptists are fairly liberal and ecumenical, how do you explaing the Landover baptist church?
From their website: "We are a Bible believing, Fundamentalist, Independent Baptist Church." They are not only NOT affiliated with the American Baptists they are appantely not affiliated with any other churches, presumably being too radical even for the Southern Baptists. (By changing "American Baptists" to "American baptists" you were changing what the OP stated.)
If I'm in the market for rare earth metals, why would I buy from this US source?
It seems like the factors that drove them out in the first place still exist, no? They still have environmental regulations to deal with that the Chinese suppliers don't, they'll still have far higher labour costs than their Chinese competitors, and so on. So if China wants to drive the price back down and run them out of business, they can do so.
Shortly after acquiring their monopoly on rare earth supply China began demonstrating to the world how monopoly power can be used - raising prices at will, using supply as an economic/political weapon, etc. Companies and nations affected by these tactics (which are most users of rare earths outside of China) are not amused and will be willing to pay premiums for a reliable supply at predictable prices. Expect to see companies hedging their bets by entering long term contracts with MolyCorp even if they also continue to buy from China.
The infamous book deal. A year or so from now there will be a movie deal.
My respect the Assange is now gone.
With his legal problems, which are sure to grow if the U.S. government has any say in the matter, he will need a fortune for his defense. Note that despite no laws being broken the U.S. government has managed to shut down almost every mechanism for supporting Wikileaks, and will continue to try to shut off all means of making contributions (that are entirely legal to make).
He would have to have a legal deathwish, hoping to be destroyed by court proceedings, not to strike while the iron is hot to raise money. And, are you asserting that Assange does not have a story worth telling? Even those who disagree with Assange should want to hear what he has to say to make their judgment.
Rape doesn't mean violence. It means sex without consent. Your personal interpretation of the word and desire for a specific meaning is irrelevant...
If you Google the terms rape and "violence against women" together you get 4.75 million hits. The first regular listing returned in entitled: "Rape: Violence Against Women: Merck Manual Home Edition". On the web page you will read the following statement: Typically, rape is an expression of aggression, anger, or the need for power rather than sexually motivated. About half of women who are raped are physically injured.
The terms "rape" and "sexual violence" are very commonly associated, and formal distinctions between any sort of non-consensual sex and sexual assault are also very commonly ignored. Note the statistic above: "About half of women who are raped are physically injured." Such a statistic could not possibly be including cases of "the condom broke but he didn't stop", but only actual physical coercion or threats of violence. It treats the term "rape" as being virtually equivalent to "sexual assault" - i.e. an act of violence.
Note also the definitions offered by Dictionary.com (I show all of them):
1. the unlawful compelling of a woman through physical force or duress to have sexual intercourse.
2. any act of sexual intercourse that is forced upon a person.
3. statutory rape.
4. an act of plunder, violent seizure, or abuse; despoliation; violation: the rape of the countryside.
5. Archaic . the act of seizing and carrying off by force.
Except for 3., which is universally understood to include within it a class of sex acts that may be entirely consensual, each of these definitions specifies the use of force as a component of the definition. It is not true that "rape" in normal discourse simply means "sex without consent".
Can anyone explain this? I thought the space shuttle lifted off on hydrogen and oxygen. If the fuel is hydrogen and oxygen, the hydrochloric acid doesn't come from the fuel. What am I missing here? How would replacing hydrogen and oxygen with a new fuel that contains a new molecule be more environmentally friendly? How do we know that the properties of this molecule and the exhaust caused by it don't cause more environmental trouble than the exhaust of hydrogen and oxygen? Has anyone tested it?
Two Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs) help get the shuttle off the pad (and a joint failure in one of these destroyed the Challenger, killing seven astronauts). The SRBs burn synthetic rubber as fuel and ammonium perchlorate is the oxidizer. When ammonium perchlorate burns the chlorine emerges as HCl.
Not sure that was the intention actually; the main reason was that 1940s engineering couldn't build a combustion chamber that could withstand the heat of reaction between pure alcohol and LOx, and diluting the alcohol lowered the temperature (The actual chamber they used on the V2 was a massive, seat-of-the-pants, fudge anyhow). Lowering the carbon content of the fuel will have improved Isp certainly, but I don't believe that is why they made the choice.
"Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space" by Willy Ley, 1968, p. 598:
"The fuel of the V-2 was ordinary ethyl alcohol... to which enough water had been added to bring its strength down to 75 percent by volume. The reason for the addition of the water was the following:... The combustion products of burning ethyl alcohol are CO2 and H2O, and of course the CO2 molecule is by far the heavier. By adding water to the alcohol the proportion of water molecules in the exhaust is increased and its molecular weight depressed. This addition also decreases the temperature but at a lesser rate. The mixture ratio used is the optimal mixture for this purpose."
According to Ley the alcohol water mixture is optimized for the maximum thrust with the temperature reduction an additional benefit. The reduction is temperature is only 160 K, not a make-or-break for the combustion chamber design, but any thrust enhancement increases the weight of payload hitting the target disproportionately. The V-2 combustion chamber was a break-through design using active cooling (both regenerative and film) - it basically invented liquid fuel rocketry as we know it - and with it handling the high temperature of combustion was a solved problem. Reducing the temperature gives you more leeway in you design space which is good - but they did not need the reduction to make a working V-2.
By the rocket equation, mass fraction is determined by velocity and exhaust velocity is driven two things; the mass of the molecules being put out and the pressure/temperature of the combustion chamber. The latter is limited, as once you get to about 100 atmospheres and 3000K you start to run out of materials to make the combustion chamber out of. Thus, molecule mass is the real driving factor - which is why despite the truly horrific engineering problems it entails, liquid hydrogen is a highly valued rocket fuel.
In fact, because molecular mass is so important, H2/O2 rockets are run fuel rich, sacrificing some combustion efficiency in order to leave some unburned hydrogen in the exhaust and reduce its average molecular mass.
...
Similarly the Germans improved the performance of the alcohol-LOX fueled V2 by adding inert water to the alcohol. By reducing the average molecular weight of the exhaust it improved the thrust even though it reduced the energy in the fuel.
May be the whole idea of unlimited access was never realistic...
Okay, forget "unlimited access".
I'd settle at this point for broadband speeds that match Japan, or South Korea, or Finland, or France, or the Netherlands, or Portugal, or Norway, or Poland, or Canada (for those of you who claim the U.S. is too big for good broadband), or Austria, or Belgium, or Iceland, or...
The U.S. is also beaten in price by 10 other nations, Japan pays one quarter what we do on average.
I keep hearing that "since most of us do not have multiple options for broadband" but is this true? There are 5 different places to get bandwidth in my area and I live in central Illinois.
The government doesn't solve problems. It relishes control...
Well, if we are playing "proof by anecdote" I live in a densely populated Southern California area and I have exactly one option for a broadband provider - Charter. No one else will provide BB service to my house. Maybe Verizon FiOS someday, but they won't make any promises.
Well pro-corporate right wingers. You've won again. Since Obama is turning out to be a pretty solid Republican president, do you think you can now lay off that whole Kenyan Socialist bullshit, please?
Naw. They've learned that the harder they pound him, the farther he will bend over to accommodate.
Other issues the Libertarian Purist ignores: the lines don't run over their own private property.
They run over public lands, and ALSO other people's private property for which the government granted easements without compensation to the owner. If property rights are supreme then those easements don't exist and land owners can demand removal or extort whatever fees they deem suitable to leave them in place. And of course the government can regulate anything on government land.
Interstate Commerce Clause. The ability to regulate interstate commerce is an enumerated power in the U.S. Constitution. Congress absolutely has the right to regulate how ISPs and backbones operate.
"...allows soldiers to track colleague's locations on the battlefield"
What could possibly go wrong?
While equipping soliders with any kind of emitter or tracking system has some level of risk, recall that in virtually every conflict 10-14% of all casualties are "friendly fire" incidents. Knowing where your friends are can cut this down.
BTW as the Salon article recounts in recent years in Iraw and Afghanistan the U.S. military is now claiming freindly fire casualty rates of under 1%. Frankly no one believes this number, as there is no explanation for how this astonishing reduction from a stubborn persistent phenomenon that has persisted throughout all of Twentieth Century combat was achieved. The Pat Tillman case, a friendly fire fatality that was hidden through lying, suggests the probable method currently in use to drive down the numbers. One that did not rely on deception (of the American public) would be preferable.
BTW, these same "camel jockeys" also have been monitoring unencrypted transmissions from our "high tech" reconnaisance drones. Admittedly that's not an incredible feat, but it shows they aren't completely ignorant and clueless.
Your trolling-foo is weak young padawan.
Indeed. It has been widely noted that there are a striking number of militant Islamists who are engineers, often trained in the the West.
The U.S. deploys highly skilled personnel with the soldiers of Afghanistan and Iraq to train them and give them technical support. The Islamists do exactly the same thing; and with backing from the Saudis (not officially, but as Wikileaks shows the Saudi government had not shut off the money tap either), they also have a lot of money. Any piece of equipment you can buy might well end up in the hands of "camel jockeys" on the battlefield if not today, then maybe next week.
An iPhone can survive whatever you need it to you just choose the right case from the 10,000 or more available options. There are only 3 iPhone form factors no matter what kind of case you want, it already exists.
It occurred to me that the military might be putting them in their own ruggedized cases - a trivial development item for the DOD.
It means the creation of a formal cartel that can exercise control over who is able to compete in the software industry. Members of the cartel, which also have vast armies of lawyers, will be able to effectively shut down any competing firm at will with crushing patent litigation, if the threat alone is not sufficient to do it. This is a cartel of legal rights, i.e. it monopolizes and entirely artificial "good", and thus exist purely through its influence of legislative and judicial processes.
Not only that, but if you look at the actual study, even non-FOX News viewers believe a lot of crazy stuff, and it's more indicative the personal biases and beliefs of people who choose to watch FOX News, not that FOX News "makes you stupid".
"All of the news outlets except Fox News Special Report received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. Moreover, by one of our measures all but three of these media outlets (Special Report, the Drudge Report, and ABCs World News Tonight) were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than to the median member of the House of Representatives. One of our measures found that the Drudge Report is the most centrist of all media outlets in our sample. Our other measure found that Fox News Special Report is the most centrist."
...
Ah yes, the (in)famous Groseclose and Milyo study. This study is notable for its highly idiosyncratic classification of what was liberal and conservative - the most liberal media outlet was the Wall Street Journal, the NRA was considered a liberal organization, the ACLU was a conservative one. In general defensible research supporting a claim that a systematic liberal bias exists seems absent.
Yes - this is where it is headed. Squeezing workers closer and closer together is inefficient, they rub shoulders, make noise, and generally distract each other. And then there is all that wasted vertical space.
The answer is the Office Pod (designed in Japan, made in China). Upon arriving at the office you step into your personal office pod, which is then sealed and lifted into place in the huge three-dimensional Pod Lattice. Break and restroom facilities will be efficiently used since you will be moved to the appropriate area and discharged from your cubicle at your scheduled time (and break and bathroom time is kept strictly regulated for maximum efficiency).
Workers, especially younger workers, will actually enjoy becoming a Pod Worker. Honest.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd rather be called a Nigger than a Slave.
Possibly the only profound tweet ever twittered.
By excessive govt regulation I am talking about the mounds of paperwork required by a variety of different government agencies, none of whom coordinate with each other, in order to get approval to do anything.
Don't take this as being anti-environment, but the example of environmental impact assessments alone is enough to kill most projects that take up only a single location, let alone a rail or road project that will cut through maybe hundreds of different environmental regions....
First off, it is debatable whether U.S. regulations are actually more onerous than in other nations where fast rail actually get built given that supposedly anti-regulation, corporate friendly administrations been in charge 8 of the last 10 years, and 20 years out of the last 30. Nations outside of China have these sorts of regulations and agencies also (much, much worse in fact to hear Republicans talk about them) yet fast rail gets built there.
The absence of a government-orchestrated national scale project to provide the funds, coherent planning, and legal muscle as is seen in China, Japan, France, Germany, etc. is the most obvious reason nothing is happening in the U.S. Can you see the Republicans getting behind a project like this? It would have to be bipartisan to fly.
If you are deeply concerned about this lack of fast rail perhaps you should start promoting an active, constructive long-term government role in building up the United States infrastructure -- like other successful nations, and like the U.S. used to be able to do. The U.S. and its government don't have to fail. Believing that the Federal Government is (for some reason) doomed to failure makes that belief an inevitable reality.
... it could be fast rail if it weren't for the fact that excessive govt regulation [emphasis added] and problems getting right-of-way means that it will never happen...
Come again? Since every high speed rail system in the world has been built by using large government subsidies (just like the original U.S. transcontinental rail system), and usually at least a government partnership if not as an outright government-run project, how is "excessive government regulation" to blame for the lack of high speed rail? Note also that those rights-of-way can only be obtained only through the government exercising its right of eminent domain.
... Secondly, in the US doctors might make a lot of money, but in Israel (where I am from) and many other countries, the doctors' salary isn't so lucrative...
Funny story (IMHO) - in 1983 there was a doctors' strike in Israel complaining of the low wages - in U.S. currency they were $3600 for an intern and $6000 for an experienced doctor a year. That's right, that's what they were being paid - a specialist with 20 years experience was paid $6000 a year. But here in the U.S. the news media consistently reported the salaries precipitating the strike as $36,000 and $60,000 a year! News editors in the U.S. apparently could not believe the actual low salaries and multiplied them by ten to "fix" them!
Salaries are better now, but Israeli doctors don't get rich. The belief that doctors are or should normally be rich men is a peculiar characteristic of 20th Century U.S. medicine.
...
Personally I'd have to say the seventies were my favorite decade. I mean, look at all the major events that happened in the seventies: The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii, the construction of the Colosseum, Roman conquest of Wales, Syria, and Jerusalem, publication of Pliny's "Naturalis Historiae" - it was a busy time.
(This joke brought to you courtesy of an unhealthy preoccupation with MST3K)
Ah, you Eurocentrists are all alike. You forget that the 70s were the high point of Eastern Han rule with the ascendance of Emperor Zhang, that the first of the Three Kingdoms (Goguryeo) was founded in Korea, and the Saka Era was established in Western India when the Sakas defeated the dynasty of king Vikramaditya.
So you view decades by 01-10? and not 00-09? The first decade of 2010 ended one year ago.
There are different definitions of "decade" in common use and most people switch between them without much problem (or even awareness).
A system that consistently divides the entire Common Era into decades, centuries and millenia, and which assigns numerals to each century and millenia (but not decades), has the decade ending at the end of a year that ends in zero (2010 in this case), just the Twentieth Century ends at the end of the twentieth century year (2000).
But if people speak of a decade like "the twenties" or the "the thirties" they are talking about a different definition of "decade". "The twenties" spans 1920 to 1929, not 1921 to 1930. The difference in definition is apparent in the term itself. This popular designation system is independent from the secular numbering of the Common Era and simply denotes a convenient reference time period (just as someone might refer to "the Depression" as a chronological period instead of as an economic event).
If American baptists are fairly liberal and ecumenical, how do you explaing the Landover baptist church?
From their website: "We are a Bible believing, Fundamentalist, Independent Baptist Church." They are not only NOT affiliated with the American Baptists they are appantely not affiliated with any other churches, presumably being too radical even for the Southern Baptists. (By changing "American Baptists" to "American baptists" you were changing what the OP stated.)
If I'm in the market for rare earth metals, why would I buy from this US source?
It seems like the factors that drove them out in the first place still exist, no? They still have environmental regulations to deal with that the Chinese suppliers don't, they'll still have far higher labour costs than their Chinese competitors, and so on. So if China wants to drive the price back down and run them out of business, they can do so.
Shortly after acquiring their monopoly on rare earth supply China began demonstrating to the world how monopoly power can be used - raising prices at will, using supply as an economic/political weapon, etc. Companies and nations affected by these tactics (which are most users of rare earths outside of China) are not amused and will be willing to pay premiums for a reliable supply at predictable prices. Expect to see companies hedging their bets by entering long term contracts with MolyCorp even if they also continue to buy from China.
The infamous book deal. A year or so from now there will be a movie deal.
My respect the Assange is now gone.
With his legal problems, which are sure to grow if the U.S. government has any say in the matter, he will need a fortune for his defense. Note that despite no laws being broken the U.S. government has managed to shut down almost every mechanism for supporting Wikileaks, and will continue to try to shut off all means of making contributions (that are entirely legal to make).
He would have to have a legal deathwish, hoping to be destroyed by court proceedings, not to strike while the iron is hot to raise money. And, are you asserting that Assange does not have a story worth telling? Even those who disagree with Assange should want to hear what he has to say to make their judgment.
Rape doesn't mean violence. It means sex without consent. Your personal interpretation of the word and desire for a specific meaning is irrelevant...
If you Google the terms rape and "violence against women" together you get 4.75 million hits. The first regular listing returned in entitled: "Rape: Violence Against Women: Merck Manual Home Edition". On the web page you will read the following statement: Typically, rape is an expression of aggression, anger, or the need for power rather than sexually motivated. About half of women who are raped are physically injured.
The terms "rape" and "sexual violence" are very commonly associated, and formal distinctions between any sort of non-consensual sex and sexual assault are also very commonly ignored. Note the statistic above: "About half of women who are raped are physically injured." Such a statistic could not possibly be including cases of "the condom broke but he didn't stop", but only actual physical coercion or threats of violence. It treats the term "rape" as being virtually equivalent to "sexual assault" - i.e. an act of violence.
Note also the definitions offered by Dictionary.com (I show all of them):
1. the unlawful compelling of a woman through physical force or duress to have sexual intercourse.
2. any act of sexual intercourse that is forced upon a person.
3. statutory rape.
4. an act of plunder, violent seizure, or abuse; despoliation; violation: the rape of the countryside.
5. Archaic . the act of seizing and carrying off by force.
Except for 3., which is universally understood to include within it a class of sex acts that may be entirely consensual, each of these definitions specifies the use of force as a component of the definition. It is not true that "rape" in normal discourse simply means "sex without consent".
Can anyone explain this? I thought the space shuttle lifted off on hydrogen and oxygen. If the fuel is hydrogen and oxygen, the hydrochloric acid doesn't come from the fuel. What am I missing here? How would replacing hydrogen and oxygen with a new fuel that contains a new molecule be more environmentally friendly? How do we know that the properties of this molecule and the exhaust caused by it don't cause more environmental trouble than the exhaust of hydrogen and oxygen? Has anyone tested it?
Two Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs) help get the shuttle off the pad (and a joint failure in one of these destroyed the Challenger, killing seven astronauts). The SRBs burn synthetic rubber as fuel and ammonium perchlorate is the oxidizer. When ammonium perchlorate burns the chlorine emerges as HCl.
Not sure that was the intention actually; the main reason was that 1940s engineering couldn't build a combustion chamber that could withstand the heat of reaction between pure alcohol and LOx, and diluting the alcohol lowered the temperature (The actual chamber they used on the V2 was a massive, seat-of-the-pants, fudge anyhow). Lowering the carbon content of the fuel will have improved Isp certainly, but I don't believe that is why they made the choice.
"Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space" by Willy Ley, 1968, p. 598:
"The fuel of the V-2 was ordinary ethyl alcohol... to which enough water had been added to bring its strength down to 75 percent by volume. The reason for the addition of the water was the following: ... The combustion products of burning ethyl alcohol are CO2 and H2O, and of course the CO2 molecule is by far the heavier. By adding water to the alcohol the proportion of water molecules in the exhaust is increased and its molecular weight depressed. This addition also decreases the temperature but at a lesser rate. The mixture ratio used is the optimal mixture for this purpose."
According to Ley the alcohol water mixture is optimized for the maximum thrust with the temperature reduction an additional benefit. The reduction is temperature is only 160 K, not a make-or-break for the combustion chamber design, but any thrust enhancement increases the weight of payload hitting the target disproportionately. The V-2 combustion chamber was a break-through design using active cooling (both regenerative and film) - it basically invented liquid fuel rocketry as we know it - and with it handling the high temperature of combustion was a solved problem. Reducing the temperature gives you more leeway in you design space which is good - but they did not need the reduction to make a working V-2.
By the rocket equation, mass fraction is determined by velocity and exhaust velocity is driven two things; the mass of the molecules being put out and the pressure/temperature of the combustion chamber. The latter is limited, as once you get to about 100 atmospheres and 3000K you start to run out of materials to make the combustion chamber out of. Thus, molecule mass is the real driving factor - which is why despite the truly horrific engineering problems it entails, liquid hydrogen is a highly valued rocket fuel.
In fact, because molecular mass is so important, H2/O2 rockets are run fuel rich, sacrificing some combustion efficiency in order to leave some unburned hydrogen in the exhaust and reduce its average molecular mass.
...
Similarly the Germans improved the performance of the alcohol-LOX fueled V2 by adding inert water to the alcohol. By reducing the average molecular weight of the exhaust it improved the thrust even though it reduced the energy in the fuel.
May be the whole idea of unlimited access was never realistic...
Okay, forget "unlimited access".
I'd settle at this point for broadband speeds that match Japan, or South Korea, or Finland, or France, or the Netherlands, or Portugal, or Norway, or Poland, or Canada (for those of you who claim the U.S. is too big for good broadband), or Austria, or Belgium, or Iceland, or ...
The U.S. is also beaten in price by 10 other nations, Japan pays one quarter what we do on average.
I keep hearing that "since most of us do not have multiple options for broadband" but is this true? There are 5 different places to get bandwidth in my area and I live in central Illinois.
The government doesn't solve problems. It relishes control...
Well, if we are playing "proof by anecdote" I live in a densely populated Southern California area and I have exactly one option for a broadband provider - Charter. No one else will provide BB service to my house. Maybe Verizon FiOS someday, but they won't make any promises.
What are the nationwide stats?
Well pro-corporate right wingers. You've won again. Since Obama is turning out to be a pretty solid Republican president, do you think you can now lay off that whole Kenyan Socialist bullshit, please?
Naw. They've learned that the harder they pound him, the farther he will bend over to accommodate.
Other issues the Libertarian Purist ignores: the lines don't run over their own private property.
They run over public lands, and ALSO other people's private property for which the government granted easements without compensation to the owner. If property rights are supreme then those easements don't exist and land owners can demand removal or extort whatever fees they deem suitable to leave them in place. And of course the government can regulate anything on government land.
Interstate Commerce Clause. The ability to regulate interstate commerce is an enumerated power in the U.S. Constitution. Congress absolutely has the right to regulate how ISPs and backbones operate.
"...allows soldiers to track colleague's locations on the battlefield" What could possibly go wrong?
While equipping soliders with any kind of emitter or tracking system has some level of risk, recall that in virtually every conflict 10-14% of all casualties are "friendly fire" incidents. Knowing where your friends are can cut this down.
BTW as the Salon article recounts in recent years in Iraw and Afghanistan the U.S. military is now claiming freindly fire casualty rates of under 1%. Frankly no one believes this number, as there is no explanation for how this astonishing reduction from a stubborn persistent phenomenon that has persisted throughout all of Twentieth Century combat was achieved. The Pat Tillman case, a friendly fire fatality that was hidden through lying, suggests the probable method currently in use to drive down the numbers. One that did not rely on deception (of the American public) would be preferable.
BTW, these same "camel jockeys" also have been monitoring unencrypted transmissions from our "high tech" reconnaisance drones. Admittedly that's not an incredible feat, but it shows they aren't completely ignorant and clueless.
Your trolling-foo is weak young padawan.
Indeed. It has been widely noted that there are a striking number of militant Islamists who are engineers, often trained in the the West.
The U.S. deploys highly skilled personnel with the soldiers of Afghanistan and Iraq to train them and give them technical support. The Islamists do exactly the same thing; and with backing from the Saudis (not officially, but as Wikileaks shows the Saudi government had not shut off the money tap either), they also have a lot of money. Any piece of equipment you can buy might well end up in the hands of "camel jockeys" on the battlefield if not today, then maybe next week.
>
An iPhone can survive whatever you need it to you just choose the right case from the 10,000 or more available options. There are only 3 iPhone form factors no matter what kind of case you want, it already exists.
It occurred to me that the military might be putting them in their own ruggedized cases - a trivial development item for the DOD.
It means the creation of a formal cartel that can exercise control over who is able to compete in the software industry. Members of the cartel, which also have vast armies of lawyers, will be able to effectively shut down any competing firm at will with crushing patent litigation, if the threat alone is not sufficient to do it. This is a cartel of legal rights, i.e. it monopolizes and entirely artificial "good", and thus exist purely through its influence of legislative and judicial processes.
Wish I had points myself.
Not only that, but if you look at the actual study, even non-FOX News viewers believe a lot of crazy stuff, and it's more indicative the personal biases and beliefs of people who choose to watch FOX News, not that FOX News "makes you stupid".
You might find this study an interesting read.
Notable:
"All of the news outlets except Fox News Special Report received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. Moreover, by one of our measures all but three of these media outlets (Special Report, the Drudge Report, and ABCs World News Tonight) were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than to the median member of the House of Representatives. One of our measures found that the Drudge Report is the most centrist of all media outlets in our sample. Our other measure found that Fox News Special Report is the most centrist."
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Ah yes, the (in)famous Groseclose and Milyo study. This study is notable for its highly idiosyncratic classification of what was liberal and conservative - the most liberal media outlet was the Wall Street Journal, the NRA was considered a liberal organization, the ACLU was a conservative one. In general defensible research supporting a claim that a systematic liberal bias exists seems absent.
The largest study attempting to address this (a meta-analysis of dozens of studies spanning decades) found no systematic bias: http://faculty.chass.ncsu.edu/cobb/p_courses/ps411/assigned%20readings/dalessio_meta%20analyses%20media%20bias.pdf .
Yes - this is where it is headed. Squeezing workers closer and closer together is inefficient, they rub shoulders, make noise, and generally distract each other. And then there is all that wasted vertical space.
The answer is the Office Pod (designed in Japan, made in China). Upon arriving at the office you step into your personal office pod, which is then sealed and lifted into place in the huge three-dimensional Pod Lattice. Break and restroom facilities will be efficiently used since you will be moved to the appropriate area and discharged from your cubicle at your scheduled time (and break and bathroom time is kept strictly regulated for maximum efficiency).
Workers, especially younger workers, will actually enjoy becoming a Pod Worker. Honest.
I've had this idea for a while - why not exploit the third dimension. Bunk desks - they're the answer!
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Or you could just divide the entire floor horizontally. Remember the "half-a-floor" office in Being John Malkovich?