The projectile is traveling say 1000 feet per second ( let's say that the target is 500m away starting behind a long stone wall ), then the projectile explodes. To kill someone it just passed, it will have to fire lots of large fragments backward and down ( or backward and sideways - if person is standing around the corner of a building ) at at least 1000-2000 feet / second to be lethal.
The physics on this is tricky. To do this, you need to meet the "for every action, an opposite and equal reaction" law. This means something of equal mass will fly forward at ~ 3,000 ft/sec ( this is wasted material not being aimed at anything except unsuspecting persons in the distance ) . In the end, you are talking about a round with what? maybe 20 fragments ( to increase the odds of hitting something ) and each fragment will have to 1) fly fast enough to penetrate and ideally cause hydrostatic shock and 2) be heavy enough to do damage....
This thing is throwing a small anti-personnel grenade (similar to the kind people throw by hand, but smaller) and will be designed similarly.
A modern anti-personnel grenade weighing 132 g (like the XM25) will have something like 30 g of high explosive, 70 g of fragments (a very high explosive/fragment ratio) and will propel them at 5000-6000 ft/sec, a kinetic energy per gram perhaps 10 times what a combat round has at range. The fragments themselves probably only weigh around 50 milligrams so over 1000 of them will be sent out in all directions. This makes the grenade 100% lethal at 5-10 m from its burst point.
But here is the tricky thing - such tiny high velocity fragments slow down in air very fast. Much beyond 10 m they become too slow to do any damage (the size chosen is based on what the desired radius of safety is).
OTOH, a majority of ammunition fired from automatic weapons in combat is used in suppressing fire. I've heard an official figure of tens of thousands of rounds fired per confirmed kill. Even if a single 5.56mm is cheap, ten thousand of them ain't.
...
The situation is much worse than you suppose. The number is not in the tens of thousands - it is now in the hundreds of thousands. In WWII it was 15,000 per kill, in Vietnam 50,000, In Iraq/Afghanistan it is 300,000. At a cost of 30 cents per round (seems to be the going rate in lots of 1000) this is $90,000.
The XM25 round cost is only $35. Even if only one round in a 1000 causes a kill (given the lethality of the round, and the sophistication of the aiming system this is surely way too low), it is more cost effective than small arms ammo.
I find your story plausible, too, but the post in which you are responding is completely off base.... However, I do think the MSM has shown a decidedly one sided view of them... Same facts of life from two different perspectives. News reporting is no different, you get the same facts from a particular point of view, and what they choose to report and not report makes all the difference in the world.
On the other hand, Tea Party claims are typically aired without any examination of whether they are factual or not.
The MSM does not do a good job of reporting the news. It makes little effort to separate fact from non-fact and is happy to "balance" any quote with a counter-quote without examination as if they were equal. But this is quite different for having any sort of systematic bias.
If a systematic liberal bias actually existed it should be possible for research that withstands critical review to demonstrate it. 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 . The often cited recent study to support the claim of liberal media bias is the one of Groseclose and Milyo published in December 2005 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. 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.
"...US has punished users of waterboarding..."
I'd be curious to know of examples where the US prosecuted the waterboarders specifically for waterboarding.
I'm not being sarcastic, I'd seriously like to know some examples where this precedent was set.
I *personally* don't believe waterboarding rises (sinks?) to the level of torture, no more so than sleep denial or loud music....
Although it is often described as "simulated drowning" (by media faithfully following Bush Administration spin) water boarding is actual drowning - merely interrupted before the victim suffers irreparable harm.
Water boarding thus fails even the "Yoo standard" (carefully assembled to support Bush's desire to waterboard) which is that it is torture if the victim experiences "the threat of imminent death". It is similar to the use of interrupted hanging as an interrogation method.
That huge Fox News and Murdoch's global sister corps is "the left wing mainstream media"?
You Republicans are so insane that you think people believe such a crude and childish lie.
Let me enlighten you a bit about the American Right -- it has developed a closed culture in which the right wing platitudes carefully developed by what is now an immense propaganda industry with numerous right-wing billionaires and huge international corporations (Murdoch counts as both for example) -- are accepted as self-evident and eternal truths requiring no evidence whatsoever to support. If challenged on any point there is either flat disbelieving denial, or if a comeback is offered it is typically a single well-worn out-of-context apples-and-oranges factoid (which is often actually fictional - like Reagan's racist Cadillac welfare queen fantasy) that is drilled into the faithful.
It has become a secular religion on the right, a political cult.
Let me give a personal example. I am a leader in a youth organization (not the Boy Scouts), and on a recent camp-out heard one of the dads, surrounded by a host of youngsters, in a state of genuine fury denouncing Obama for "being the only American president to refuse to sign presidential letters of congratulations to new Eagle Scouts". This was an astonishing claim to me for many reasons (Obama was a scout himself, this is outstanding free publicity that no politician would turn down, I had never heard this from any news source, etc.) so I simply asked him where he heard this (in a casual tone of voice). The result was him turning his fury on me: how dare I question what he said! At first he said it was "everywhere" then eventually he told me that he was a scout master and could not get the letters for his Eagle Scouts. A few minutes of searching later turned up that this was a false claim circulating on the right - and the Boy Scouts own website had news releases about all the letters Obama had signed and information about submitting letter requests. A little later I learned that the Dad he was no scout master and so the claimed source of his knowledge was a lie.
Although I scrupulously avoid discussing politics with this group, had expressed no view at all about Obama, had never done anything but ask about where I could find out about this claim in a non-confrontational way, and had never even contradicted him (though I did email him the link to the BSA page about how to get the letters) , at a later gathering he made a public snarky remark about how we didn't agree on politics. Basically not instantly accepting any ridiculous assertion about Obama as Gospel proved I was an "unbeliever".
The point is - the believers don't bother to look at evidence, and take all right-wing cant as an article of faith. They not only don't realize what they say is a lie, they don't care, perhaps don't even believe that such a thing as a lie exists if it supports the right-wing world view. Even if "not factual" it is some sort of "deeper truth" (the scout master lie is probably rationalized on this basis - it was more important to convince me that his claim was true than to speak truthfully since he was serving a "higher truth").
I'd like to thank you on behalf of those of us who want to live forever...making room for the immortals if awfully kind of you.
Note that the average lifespan for an immortal will be about 3000 years just due to the existence of accidental death (assuming accident mortality remains the same), and of course preventing aging doesn't mean other medical disorders will not kill you. Currently we have two classes of processes systematically shortening our lives - aging, and the disease-inducing cumulative effects of life experience (diet, sun and radiation exposure, etc.). There is certainly an interrelationship in which aging aggravates adverse health effects and makes one more susceptible to illness of almost every kind, but eliminating aging does not eliminate all of the other causes of illness and death.
If we followed this argument earlier in the 20th century, much of the US would still not even have electricity service...
That is absolutely right. It was government intervention, and government subsidies that created rural electricification (and also brought in telephone service). The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was abolished in 1994 after having completed its task of extending these two services to all of rural America.
Ironically it is that same rural America, which is also currently being heavily subsidized by the more industrialized blue states, that is raging against "socialism".
If the Democrats really cared about improving the broadband situation, they'd have grown a sack, told people flat out that Socialism makes sense in a certain situations and that last-mile infrastructure is one of them.
Right! Unregulated big business naturally tends to monopolies and cartels where competition is extinguished. This happened in the Nineteenth Century Gilded Age, and just over 100 years later here we are The New Gilded Age awash with its new robber barons.
Don't forget the American Navy is part of the Government, which is always extremely inefficient in every thing they do.
Just curious. Can you provide any sort of study that would support this extremely broad assertion? I mean "always extremely inefficient in everything" must have tons studies actually supporting - comparative data measuring its inefficiency compared to other governments or organizations performing similar functions - especially since you are using it as the justification for your conclusions.
Or are you just taking this on faith - like a religion?
I suspect using nuclear power plants to make hydrogen, and fueling the great cargo vessels with that would make much more sense than mobile small nuclear reactors.
Small nitpick, wooden shipbuilding techniques before ~1800 required long pieces of wood for the strakes, and specifically curved pieces of wood for the scantlings. Shorter pieces worked too much at sea, making the ships hog and sag, and creating leaks. A typical third rate 72 gun ship of the line required over 5,000 old growth oak trees to build. Finally, thirty years was the service life discounting rebuilds, which could extend the life of a ship to double that, or more.
I have heard the theory that Britain wanted American wood for ships in other places before this. We have a type of oak, White Oak, that is particularly suited to shipbuilding due to its strength and resistance to splintering.
Right! Supplies of the sort of wood most desired for building large ships were scarce. Also don't forget timber for masts. Good mast timber for a very tall ship is rare. No ship building activity would cut down a forest - it just removes the choicest timber.
Forests were being denuded at this time - but it wasn't due to ship building. It was charcoal making to fuel the first blast furnaces of the industrial revolution. The furnaces didn't care what type of timber was used.
The last generations of commercial sailing ships were usually made of iron, just like the steam driven kind. Consider the Star of India, launched in 1863 and sailed commercially until 1926, now berthed in San Diego: http://www.sdmaritime.org/star-of-india/.
Replacing hourly wage untrained rent-a-cops at security checkpoints, with employed professionals with actual management, was a good idea. Before 9/11 airport security was designed to be cheap and not impede the paying passengers. Having training, standards, etc. was a real step up.
Then things began going horribly, horribly wrong.
It is fundamentally impossible to keep every conceivable bomb or potential "weapon" off every plane. There are already gaping security holes (unscreened cargo from abroad, all those goods brought in for sale at the little airport shops, etc., etc.) that are completely unaddressed. Body cavity bombs have already been used and the naked videos and grope sessions won't detect them.
We need someone with some sense running this show. Instead we have Michael Cherthoff.
Did you see this story from the beginning of the year: http://www.infowars.com/chertoff-linked-to-body-scanner-manufacturer/ ? Cherthoff, while serving as a key government official, also runs a private consulting company one of whose clients is - the body scanner manufacturer.
Again we see the government being used as a means to stuff the pockets of well-connected, while your tax sollars are sued to physically abuse you for no benefit.
I
I've been trying to confirm this for years, because hey, I could have remembered it wrong, but decades-old back issues of Aviation Week are still not online in searchable form.
Even if you had a Lexis-Nexis subscription you would not be able to find this information - their database of AWST only goes back to 1975, and the contract was awarded before this. You'll have to go to an actual library and look at the indexes and news pages. If you can pinpoint the contract year then you'll only 50 issues or so to look at.
Now how much of that $287 billion was paid by the top 1% of income earners. Sure, THEY are paying way more than they receive in services.
Okay, I'll bite.
What is the correct tax rate for the rich then so that they only pay for the service they actually receive? How do you calculate this number?
If you can't make a supportable estimate then you are blowing smoke when you imply the rich are "over taxed". Note the simple existence of a progressive tax system in which those who have more pay more (the rule everywhere in the world - ours is one of least progressive) does not demonstrate this supposed "over-taxing".
Recall that without a strong state-level economic infrastructure (roads, water, power, law enforcement, educated work force, etc., etc.) it is impossible for businesses and the individuals the own them (outright or through stock) to be successful.
On pg. 8 you will see that California has one of the most favorable business tax receipt vs business benefiting expenditures in the nation. If education expenses are entirely excluded then only 5 states do better than California, and if half of education costs are allocated to the business support column (educated workforce and all) then California's spending ratio is actually in businesses' FAVOR (a ratio of 0.97).
But to extend that to the entire state, including the poor who vote Democrat?? It's ridiculous.
So why is it reasonable to treat the rich as an exploited demographic group and not a state? "Ridiculous" is not an argument. The point is some states are subsdidizing the economies of other states. That is a fact.
The right approach is to eliminate the TSA (and all of its regulations) and let the airlines and airports be responsible for their own security. As private companies, they have an interest in finding ways to guarantee security without humiliating their customers.
...
How short memories are.
Have you any recollection of what airport security was like before 9/11 when airlines and airports were responsible for their own security? They hired cheap paid-by-the-hour security guards from temporary services. The security "checks" were a joke most places. This was very convenient for passengers though - they could zip right through the "checks" - which satisfied the airports and airlines desire for keeping the customers happy (and coming back) and keeping costs low.
But - what about that "guarantee security" thing? Well - airlines and airports know that they can never "guarantee security" (that's a meaningless political promise - not an actionable objective) so they look at costs and benefits. The chances of a bombing/hijacking were always very low so the direct financial risk is small, and airlines and airports are not typically stigmatized by in-flight terror acts that involve them (who boycotts the airlines or airports used in 9/11?). So there is negligible interest in providing significant security against this threat. This is one reason we have governments and regulations - hard nosed financial calculations by privately owned and operated businesses only occasionally translate into good public policy.
Having spent some time researching this story years ago - here is the bottom line.
What Kennedy said was the only correct way to say what he intended to say - there was literally no error at all in any way.
But German, like all other languages, has ambiguous syntax and constructs - ESPECIALLY - when you mix colloquialisms into formal language. Interpreting Kennedy as saying "I am a jelly doughnut" is not a serious criticism of what he said, it is instead a rather weak and juvenile Germany joke. The joke is actually based on a colloquialism from other parts of Germany (in Berlin they didn't call the confections Berliners - only non-Berliners did).
Treating this childish joke as if it was a serious criticism is an urban legend in English.
You clearly have not read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. (I believe it was Restaurant.)... I suggest you bow your head and accept that you have been judged on your geekdom, and found lacking.
Ah Grasshopper, you forget the Original Radio Show Rule. If your knowledge of HGTTG is from listening to the original radio show (like me) which preceded the novels then all is excused.
Basically, take a laptop with an easy to swap hard drive. Swap in a new drive, with a clean image, and no access credentials except to a temporary dropbox account for emergency mail and/or working set.
Now if you are intercepted, there is no data TO capture, and you can remove all but hardware/bios trojans by a wipe and reinstall.
As a bonus, you can just take out the drive, hand it to customs, and let them have fun with it.
International corporations are already doing something quite similar to this. You carry an empty laptop with you - and download an encrypted "project package" at your destination to install any special software, and any data you need. You encrypt and upload your product data (if you need to bring it back at all) and run a program that wipes the laptop before return.
But of course spies, criminals and terrorists would never think of doing this.
... How long will it be before we find ourselves in a police state and start asking ourselves "How did we let this happen?".
Two questions here: "how long" and "how did it happen". You answered the second pretty well yourself. For this first - I'd say "zero time" we are already there. It can get worse (even in Stalinist Russia things could always get worse) but we are there now.
I wonder how the Founders would have dealt with a world in which a single hand-carried device could wipe out a city?...
Essentially none of the increasingly intrusive measures and powers of our "security state" (which seems to give little actual security...) can be justified on the ground that portable nuclear weapons can be built by a sufficiently sophisticated nuclear weapon state.
Even the most portable nuclear device ever built would require a very heavy, very thick suitcase to transport and would be a glaring anomaly from almost any criterion. The most casual examination would expose that it is a really odd object needing further examination.
It is possible to transport as "a bomb in the marijuana bale" (a good reason to legalize?) as it used to be phrased, or in shielded shipping containers, but x-ray strip searches, intimate feel-ups, laptop searches, secret unappealable, uncorrectable no-fly lists, etc. have nothing whatsoever to do with this.
Eh, if it's the Federal government I know, the government probably bought the entire super computer and abandoned it when it broke down a couple years later. Also, since they didn't get any help installing it, it took them months to get it working.
Jeez... ignorant government bashing is all the rage. A far more accurate picture is one in which computer systems have been kept in operation far beyond their normal lifespan in private enterprise.
There are two general reasons for this.
First, the often unique requirements of military and aerospace applications make "updating" systems very costly and time-consuming by nature and so long as the requirements are met no changes are made until supporting the system further becomes impossible.
Second, most government IT operations run on a shoestring. Budgets for hardware updates are very hard to come by. For example congress has often attempted to cripple IRS operations by denying funding to its IT - there is just such an effort underway at this very moment (see this WSJ article: http://tinyurl.com/29n7qyp). The computer systems used for air traffic safety are decades out of date. The epic software update project disasters you hear tell of are typically due to IT systems that have gotten so far out of date that reasonable migration paths do not exist and the system has furthermore grown into bewildering warrens of outdated systems each housing irreplaceable data and functionality. Reasonable, dependable on-going budgets for IT ops -- you know, like with a business -- would avoid these problems. However it is the party supposedly believing "that governmment should be run like a business" that seems ever eager to starve its operations for the funds to run efficiently.
That's actually not so clear - most recent common ancestor of us all lived most likely in historical times...
I am acquainted with the study that came up with this conclusion a couple of years ago - and it is valid only if its population models are correct. For the most part they are probably pretty good, but they ignore entirely the existence of ancient isolated populations that have even today pure bloodlines among them. Australian aborigines, upland New Guinea natives, Amazonian Indian bands, and some Hopi, Andamanese islanders, etc. These pure bloodlines probably have no common ancestor since the population founding 13,000 to 40,000 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
The projectile is traveling say 1000 feet per second ( let's say that the target is 500m away starting behind a long stone wall ), then the projectile explodes. To kill someone it just passed, it will have to fire lots of large fragments backward and down ( or backward and sideways - if person is standing around the corner of a building ) at at least 1000-2000 feet / second to be lethal.
The physics on this is tricky. To do this, you need to meet the "for every action, an opposite and equal reaction" law. This means something of equal mass will fly forward at ~ 3,000 ft/sec ( this is wasted material not being aimed at anything except unsuspecting persons in the distance ) . In the end, you are talking about a round with what? maybe 20 fragments ( to increase the odds of hitting something ) and each fragment will have to 1) fly fast enough to penetrate and ideally cause hydrostatic shock and 2) be heavy enough to do damage....
This thing is throwing a small anti-personnel grenade (similar to the kind people throw by hand, but smaller) and will be designed similarly.
A modern anti-personnel grenade weighing 132 g (like the XM25) will have something like 30 g of high explosive, 70 g of fragments (a very high explosive/fragment ratio) and will propel them at 5000-6000 ft/sec, a kinetic energy per gram perhaps 10 times what a combat round has at range. The fragments themselves probably only weigh around 50 milligrams so over 1000 of them will be sent out in all directions. This makes the grenade 100% lethal at 5-10 m from its burst point.
But here is the tricky thing - such tiny high velocity fragments slow down in air very fast. Much beyond 10 m they become too slow to do any damage (the size chosen is based on what the desired radius of safety is).
OTOH, a majority of ammunition fired from automatic weapons in combat is used in suppressing fire. I've heard an official figure of tens of thousands of rounds fired per confirmed kill. Even if a single 5.56mm is cheap, ten thousand of them ain't.
...
The situation is much worse than you suppose. The number is not in the tens of thousands - it is now in the hundreds of thousands. In WWII it was 15,000 per kill, in Vietnam 50,000, In Iraq/Afghanistan it is 300,000. At a cost of 30 cents per round (seems to be the going rate in lots of 1000) this is $90,000.
The XM25 round cost is only $35. Even if only one round in a 1000 causes a kill (given the lethality of the round, and the sophistication of the aiming system this is surely way too low), it is more cost effective than small arms ammo.
I find your story plausible, too, but the post in which you are responding is completely off base.... However, I do think the MSM has shown a decidedly one sided view of them... Same facts of life from two different perspectives. News reporting is no different, you get the same facts from a particular point of view, and what they choose to report and not report makes all the difference in the world.
On the other hand, Tea Party claims are typically aired without any examination of whether they are factual or not.
The MSM does not do a good job of reporting the news. It makes little effort to separate fact from non-fact and is happy to "balance" any quote with a counter-quote without examination as if they were equal. But this is quite different for having any sort of systematic bias.
If a systematic liberal bias actually existed it should be possible for research that withstands critical review to demonstrate it. 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 . The often cited recent study to support the claim of liberal media bias is the one of Groseclose and Milyo published in December 2005 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. 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.
Up to plus 5, then down to "Troll"!
However the scoring ends up, I have never been so pleased to be labelled a "Troll"!
"...US has punished users of waterboarding..." I'd be curious to know of examples where the US prosecuted the waterboarders specifically for waterboarding. I'm not being sarcastic, I'd seriously like to know some examples where this precedent was set.
I *personally* don't believe waterboarding rises (sinks?) to the level of torture, no more so than sleep denial or loud music....
Although it is often described as "simulated drowning" (by media faithfully following Bush Administration spin) water boarding is actual drowning - merely interrupted before the victim suffers irreparable harm.
Water boarding thus fails even the "Yoo standard" (carefully assembled to support Bush's desire to waterboard) which is that it is torture if the victim experiences "the threat of imminent death". It is similar to the use of interrupted hanging as an interrogation method.
That huge Fox News and Murdoch's global sister corps is "the left wing mainstream media"?
You Republicans are so insane that you think people believe such a crude and childish lie.
Let me enlighten you a bit about the American Right -- it has developed a closed culture in which the right wing platitudes carefully developed by what is now an immense propaganda industry with numerous right-wing billionaires and huge international corporations (Murdoch counts as both for example) -- are accepted as self-evident and eternal truths requiring no evidence whatsoever to support. If challenged on any point there is either flat disbelieving denial, or if a comeback is offered it is typically a single well-worn out-of-context apples-and-oranges factoid (which is often actually fictional - like Reagan's racist Cadillac welfare queen fantasy) that is drilled into the faithful.
It has become a secular religion on the right, a political cult.
Let me give a personal example. I am a leader in a youth organization (not the Boy Scouts), and on a recent camp-out heard one of the dads, surrounded by a host of youngsters, in a state of genuine fury denouncing Obama for "being the only American president to refuse to sign presidential letters of congratulations to new Eagle Scouts". This was an astonishing claim to me for many reasons (Obama was a scout himself, this is outstanding free publicity that no politician would turn down, I had never heard this from any news source, etc.) so I simply asked him where he heard this (in a casual tone of voice). The result was him turning his fury on me: how dare I question what he said! At first he said it was "everywhere" then eventually he told me that he was a scout master and could not get the letters for his Eagle Scouts. A few minutes of searching later turned up that this was a false claim circulating on the right - and the Boy Scouts own website had news releases about all the letters Obama had signed and information about submitting letter requests. A little later I learned that the Dad he was no scout master and so the claimed source of his knowledge was a lie.
Although I scrupulously avoid discussing politics with this group, had expressed no view at all about Obama, had never done anything but ask about where I could find out about this claim in a non-confrontational way, and had never even contradicted him (though I did email him the link to the BSA page about how to get the letters) , at a later gathering he made a public snarky remark about how we didn't agree on politics. Basically not instantly accepting any ridiculous assertion about Obama as Gospel proved I was an "unbeliever".
The point is - the believers don't bother to look at evidence, and take all right-wing cant as an article of faith. They not only don't realize what they say is a lie, they don't care, perhaps don't even believe that such a thing as a lie exists if it supports the right-wing world view. Even if "not factual" it is some sort of "deeper truth" (the scout master lie is probably rationalized on this basis - it was more important to convince me that his claim was true than to speak truthfully since he was serving a "higher truth").
I'd like to thank you on behalf of those of us who want to live forever...making room for the immortals if awfully kind of you.
Note that the average lifespan for an immortal will be about 3000 years just due to the existence of accidental death (assuming accident mortality remains the same), and of course preventing aging doesn't mean other medical disorders will not kill you. Currently we have two classes of processes systematically shortening our lives - aging, and the disease-inducing cumulative effects of life experience (diet, sun and radiation exposure, etc.). There is certainly an interrelationship in which aging aggravates adverse health effects and makes one more susceptible to illness of almost every kind, but eliminating aging does not eliminate all of the other causes of illness and death.
If we followed this argument earlier in the 20th century, much of the US would still not even have electricity service...
That is absolutely right. It was government intervention, and government subsidies that created rural electricification (and also brought in telephone service). The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was abolished in 1994 after having completed its task of extending these two services to all of rural America.
Ironically it is that same rural America, which is also currently being heavily subsidized by the more industrialized blue states, that is raging against "socialism".
If the Democrats really cared about improving the broadband situation, they'd have grown a sack, told people flat out that Socialism makes sense in a certain situations and that last-mile infrastructure is one of them.
Right! Unregulated big business naturally tends to monopolies and cartels where competition is extinguished. This happened in the Nineteenth Century Gilded Age, and just over 100 years later here we are The New Gilded Age awash with its new robber barons.
Don't forget the American Navy is part of the Government, which is always extremely inefficient in every thing they do.
Just curious. Can you provide any sort of study that would support this extremely broad assertion? I mean "always extremely inefficient in everything" must have tons studies actually supporting - comparative data measuring its inefficiency compared to other governments or organizations performing similar functions - especially since you are using it as the justification for your conclusions.
Or are you just taking this on faith - like a religion?
I suspect using nuclear power plants to make hydrogen, and fueling the great cargo vessels with that would make much more sense than mobile small nuclear reactors.
Small nitpick, wooden shipbuilding techniques before ~1800 required long pieces of wood for the strakes, and specifically curved pieces of wood for the scantlings. Shorter pieces worked too much at sea, making the ships hog and sag, and creating leaks. A typical third rate 72 gun ship of the line required over 5,000 old growth oak trees to build. Finally, thirty years was the service life discounting rebuilds, which could extend the life of a ship to double that, or more.
I have heard the theory that Britain wanted American wood for ships in other places before this. We have a type of oak, White Oak, that is particularly suited to shipbuilding due to its strength and resistance to splintering.
Right! Supplies of the sort of wood most desired for building large ships were scarce. Also don't forget timber for masts. Good mast timber for a very tall ship is rare. No ship building activity would cut down a forest - it just removes the choicest timber.
Forests were being denuded at this time - but it wasn't due to ship building. It was charcoal making to fuel the first blast furnaces of the industrial revolution. The furnaces didn't care what type of timber was used.
The last generations of commercial sailing ships were usually made of iron, just like the steam driven kind. Consider the Star of India, launched in 1863 and sailed commercially until 1926, now berthed in San Diego: http://www.sdmaritime.org/star-of-india/ .
Replacing hourly wage untrained rent-a-cops at security checkpoints, with employed professionals with actual management, was a good idea. Before 9/11 airport security was designed to be cheap and not impede the paying passengers. Having training, standards, etc. was a real step up.
Then things began going horribly, horribly wrong.
It is fundamentally impossible to keep every conceivable bomb or potential "weapon" off every plane. There are already gaping security holes (unscreened cargo from abroad, all those goods brought in for sale at the little airport shops, etc., etc.) that are completely unaddressed. Body cavity bombs have already been used and the naked videos and grope sessions won't detect them.
We need someone with some sense running this show. Instead we have Michael Cherthoff.
Did you see this story from the beginning of the year: http://www.infowars.com/chertoff-linked-to-body-scanner-manufacturer/ ? Cherthoff, while serving as a key government official, also runs a private consulting company one of whose clients is - the body scanner manufacturer.
Again we see the government being used as a means to stuff the pockets of well-connected, while your tax sollars are sued to physically abuse you for no benefit.
I I've been trying to confirm this for years, because hey, I could have remembered it wrong, but decades-old back issues of Aviation Week are still not online in searchable form.
Even if you had a Lexis-Nexis subscription you would not be able to find this information - their database of AWST only goes back to 1975, and the contract was awarded before this. You'll have to go to an actual library and look at the indexes and news pages. If you can pinpoint the contract year then you'll only 50 issues or so to look at.
Now how much of that $287 billion was paid by the top 1% of income earners. Sure, THEY are paying way more than they receive in services.
Okay, I'll bite.
What is the correct tax rate for the rich then so that they only pay for the service they actually receive? How do you calculate this number?
If you can't make a supportable estimate then you are blowing smoke when you imply the rich are "over taxed". Note the simple existence of a progressive tax system in which those who have more pay more (the rule everywhere in the world - ours is one of least progressive) does not demonstrate this supposed "over-taxing".
Recall that without a strong state-level economic infrastructure (roads, water, power, law enforcement, educated work force, etc., etc.) it is impossible for businesses and the individuals the own them (outright or through stock) to be successful.
A nice actual study of this issue for businesses which is updated annually is the one by Ernst & Young: http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/Total-state-and-local-business-taxes-March-2010/$FILE/Total-state-and-local-business-taxes-March-2010.pdf
On pg. 8 you will see that California has one of the most favorable business tax receipt vs business benefiting expenditures in the nation. If education expenses are entirely excluded then only 5 states do better than California, and if half of education costs are allocated to the business support column (educated workforce and all) then California's spending ratio is actually in businesses' FAVOR (a ratio of 0.97).
But to extend that to the entire state, including the poor who vote Democrat?? It's ridiculous.
So why is it reasonable to treat the rich as an exploited demographic group and not a state? "Ridiculous" is not an argument. The point is some states are subsdidizing the economies of other states. That is a fact.
Billionaire Leona Helmsely: "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes."
Only the "little people" are inconvenienced by the law.
...
The right approach is to eliminate the TSA (and all of its regulations) and let the airlines and airports be responsible for their own security. As private companies, they have an interest in finding ways to guarantee security without humiliating their customers.
...
How short memories are.
Have you any recollection of what airport security was like before 9/11 when airlines and airports were responsible for their own security? They hired cheap paid-by-the-hour security guards from temporary services. The security "checks" were a joke most places. This was very convenient for passengers though - they could zip right through the "checks" - which satisfied the airports and airlines desire for keeping the customers happy (and coming back) and keeping costs low.
But - what about that "guarantee security" thing? Well - airlines and airports know that they can never "guarantee security" (that's a meaningless political promise - not an actionable objective) so they look at costs and benefits. The chances of a bombing/hijacking were always very low so the direct financial risk is small, and airlines and airports are not typically stigmatized by in-flight terror acts that involve them (who boycotts the airlines or airports used in 9/11?). So there is negligible interest in providing significant security against this threat. This is one reason we have governments and regulations - hard nosed financial calculations by privately owned and operated businesses only occasionally translate into good public policy.
you are a Jelly-Filled Doughnut?
WRONG
Having spent some time researching this story years ago - here is the bottom line.
What Kennedy said was the only correct way to say what he intended to say - there was literally no error at all in any way.
But German, like all other languages, has ambiguous syntax and constructs - ESPECIALLY - when you mix colloquialisms into formal language. Interpreting Kennedy as saying "I am a jelly doughnut" is not a serious criticism of what he said, it is instead a rather weak and juvenile Germany joke. The joke is actually based on a colloquialism from other parts of Germany (in Berlin they didn't call the confections Berliners - only non-Berliners did).
Treating this childish joke as if it was a serious criticism is an urban legend in English.
You clearly have not read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. (I believe it was Restaurant.) ... I suggest you bow your head and accept that you have been judged on your geekdom, and found lacking.
Ah Grasshopper, you forget the Original Radio Show Rule. If your knowledge of HGTTG is from listening to the original radio show (like me) which preceded the novels then all is excused.
Basically, take a laptop with an easy to swap hard drive. Swap in a new drive, with a clean image, and no access credentials except to a temporary dropbox account for emergency mail and/or working set.
Now if you are intercepted, there is no data TO capture, and you can remove all but hardware/bios trojans by a wipe and reinstall.
As a bonus, you can just take out the drive, hand it to customs, and let them have fun with it.
International corporations are already doing something quite similar to this. You carry an empty laptop with you - and download an encrypted "project package" at your destination to install any special software, and any data you need. You encrypt and upload your product data (if you need to bring it back at all) and run a program that wipes the laptop before return.
But of course spies, criminals and terrorists would never think of doing this.
... How long will it be before we find ourselves in a police state and start asking ourselves "How did we let this happen?".
Two questions here: "how long" and "how did it happen". You answered the second pretty well yourself. For this first - I'd say "zero time" we are already there. It can get worse (even in Stalinist Russia things could always get worse) but we are there now.
I wonder how the Founders would have dealt with a world in which a single hand-carried device could wipe out a city?...
Essentially none of the increasingly intrusive measures and powers of our "security state" (which seems to give little actual security...) can be justified on the ground that portable nuclear weapons can be built by a sufficiently sophisticated nuclear weapon state.
Even the most portable nuclear device ever built would require a very heavy, very thick suitcase to transport and would be a glaring anomaly from almost any criterion. The most casual examination would expose that it is a really odd object needing further examination.
It is possible to transport as "a bomb in the marijuana bale" (a good reason to legalize?) as it used to be phrased, or in shielded shipping containers, but x-ray strip searches, intimate feel-ups, laptop searches, secret unappealable, uncorrectable no-fly lists, etc. have nothing whatsoever to do with this.
Eh, if it's the Federal government I know, the government probably bought the entire super computer and abandoned it when it broke down a couple years later. Also, since they didn't get any help installing it, it took them months to get it working.
Jeez... ignorant government bashing is all the rage. A far more accurate picture is one in which computer systems have been kept in operation far beyond their normal lifespan in private enterprise.
There are two general reasons for this.
First, the often unique requirements of military and aerospace applications make "updating" systems very costly and time-consuming by nature and so long as the requirements are met no changes are made until supporting the system further becomes impossible.
Second, most government IT operations run on a shoestring. Budgets for hardware updates are very hard to come by. For example congress has often attempted to cripple IRS operations by denying funding to its IT - there is just such an effort underway at this very moment (see this WSJ article: http://tinyurl.com/29n7qyp). The computer systems used for air traffic safety are decades out of date. The epic software update project disasters you hear tell of are typically due to IT systems that have gotten so far out of date that reasonable migration paths do not exist and the system has furthermore grown into bewildering warrens of outdated systems each housing irreplaceable data and functionality. Reasonable, dependable on-going budgets for IT ops -- you know, like with a business -- would avoid these problems. However it is the party supposedly believing "that governmment should be run like a business" that seems ever eager to starve its operations for the funds to run efficiently.
...
That's actually not so clear - most recent common ancestor of us all lived most likely in historical times...
I am acquainted with the study that came up with this conclusion a couple of years ago - and it is valid only if its population models are correct. For the most part they are probably pretty good, but they ignore entirely the existence of ancient isolated populations that have even today pure bloodlines among them. Australian aborigines, upland New Guinea natives, Amazonian Indian bands, and some Hopi, Andamanese islanders, etc. These pure bloodlines probably have no common ancestor since the population founding 13,000 to 40,000 years ago.