Blu-Ray isn't just about video quality. The audio is far superior than that of a DVD. The HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD formats are loss-less and sport way higher bit rates. Standard 5.1 DTS is 1.5Mbps at 20 bits with a 96Khz sampling rate (DVD). HD Master Audio (Blu-Ray) is 24.5 Mbps at 24 bits with a 196 Khz sampling rate across all 7 channels.
Most people don't have equipment that supports/decodes the new loss-less audio formats and they are missing half the advantage of Blu-Ray.
I see a HUGE difference between regular DVD's and BluRay, not just in video quality, but with the loss-less audio formats as well (HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD). I watch a BluRay movie on my sisters $900 HDTV from Costco with the sound coming out of the speakers and yeah, the difference isn't all that much better than a regular DVD. But if I play that same movie on my 52" LCD Bravia XBR4 with the sound going through my Denon 2808ci AVR utilizing HD Master Audio (or Dolby TruHD) and it's a whole new movie. Even my sister (who would NEVER admit to being wrong... especially to me) agrees. There is a HUGE difference.
I think people don't see the difference because one, the TV they have isn't the greatest (just because it's HDTV doesn't mean it's a good TV) and two, they use the internal speakers and/or don't have the capability to decode the new audio formats. BluRay isn't just about better video quality... and most people don't know that.
I think the bigger argument is most people don't want to spend $3,000+ on a good TV, $1000+ on a good AVR, and $1000+ on a good set of speakers to get the most from the BluRay technology. As prices come down, things may change. But to say BluRay technology isn't catching on because it doesn't look that much better than a standard DVD is rubbish. It's like saying today's video games suck because you're playing on a 13" amber CRT terminal screen.
Here's what I find odd, and perhaps it's my ignorance on the subject, but carbon dioxide makes up ~95% of the Martian atmosphere while water vapor only makes up 0.03%. I understand that it's too warm for dry ice to form, but is this also true if the dry ice is insulated beneath a few inches of Martian soil? The atmospheric surface pressure of Mars is about 1% that of Earth. Wouldn't the lack of atmospheric pressure reduce conduction further insulating the buried frozen substance? If the average surface temperature is -70F and dry ice stays solid at -109F, we're only talking about a delta of 39F. That doesn't seem like a whole heck of a lot to insulate against. Also, why is it white? Wouldn't it be mostly translucent if it were frozen water?
Now, I'm no NASA scientist or chemist and maybe someone here who is more knowledgeable than I could shed some light on my questions. It just seems to me that's it's more likely to be frozen carbon dioxide than frozen H2O.
I have a Top Secret clearance and it took about 9 months to process... even having started out with a Secret clearance.
But as the previous poster mentioned, when someone on our program gives notice, they work until the very last day. No permissions are revoked until they step foot off the AF base on their last day. In this time, they are tasked/requested to brain dump everything they can think of pertaining to their job. It's very unlikely someone would do something malicious on one our systems. Doing so would mean a very lengthy prison sentence. Even not cooperating would probably get you black listed from any other classified jobs within the company.
However... when someone is laid off, it's a different story. They are given the rest of the day once noticed plus the following day to collect their belongings and then they are escorted off base (they keep their clearance, but they loose their badges). Fortunately, the company I work for gives a person who has just been laid off 4 weeks of fully paid time to find another job within the company. They just have to sit at an unclassified location off-base that has access to email, internet and phone lines.
There's lot I like to do in my free time. Things I call hobbies. The problem is, if I had to do any one of them all day long 5 days a week, I'm not sure I'd like to do them as much as I do now. Most likely, I'd probably feel the same way about them as I do my job. I can't say I thouroughly enjoy my IT job (SAN, SysAdmin, Network Admin, Database Admin), but I don't hate it either, don't mind getting up in the morning and like you... it pays very well. The money is just too good, which allows me to do a lot of things I wouldn't be able to do should I become a forest ranger (my degree was in geology, go figure).
I'm 33. Have I thought about a career change? Not really. Uprooting the kids and moving the family isn't something I think about. I do shovel more money into my 401K and actively manage it so I can hopefully retire earlier (I'm not one to just dump money into a company 401K and be done with it). I also put money in a vacation fund to totally get away at least once a year for a two week vacation. Being able to afford to do the things I like to do, and the family likes to do, is very important and I'm very appreciative of this.
I don't know. Shipping hydrogen probably isn't all the more dangerous than ethanol. Ehtanol is some nasty sh*t in large quantities. Far more dangerous than gasoline. Obviously you can't use water on gasoline or ethanol fires, you have to use foam. Well, the foam used on gasoline fires doesn't work on grain-based ethanol fires. The ethanol flame burns right through the foam and conitnues to burn. To put out an ethanol fire you need an alchol-resistant polymer foam which is very expensive. Not many firestations are equiped to handle this sort of thing and as E85 becomes more popular, larger amount of ethanol are going to be shipped long haul.
Hydrogen on the other hand is very bouyant, disperses very quickly and won't puddle on the ground. If this article proves true and they can produce hydrogen that efficiently, shipping it is a moot point. Just produce the hydrogen on site and do away with the shipping all together.
This bird was a "dead stick" shortly after liftoff which means the fuel tank was full. I don't know much about hydrazine, but I've got to imagine if you heat it up, it's going to expand. Now re-entry temperatures are around 7000F. If you heat a fuel tank that is around 95% full of hydrazine to these temperatures, wouldn't the hydrazine turn to a gas, expand, and blow the tank apart anyway?
Which brings me to something else: do these satellites have some sort of self destruct mechanism?
Self-destruction in the sense that the satellite explodes into many peices isn't a good idea. Those little pieces travelling and thousands of miles per hour become lethal to other satellites. With who I work for, the Orbit Analysts have modeled scenarios in which an ASAT (anti-satellite missile) takes out a satellite and what affect it would have on other satellites. China recently tested their ASAT (link: http://www.space.com/news/070202_china_spacedebris.html) and it caused all sorts of anxiety even theough it was in low-orbit.
What was to stop, say, the Soviets or Chinese from going up and physically stealing a very expensive satellite that presumably contains technology/information we don't want them getting their hands on?
NORAD. They can track even the smallest peices of debris, down to the size of a 1 inch bolt. "The Mountain" is continous contact with our Orbit Anaylsts and alerts of possible collisions (near misses) due to space debris. In other words, you can't exactly sneak up on a satellite and steal it without being seen... at least, not yet.
I highly doubt you're even close to their "limit".
The 5% users accounting for 50% of the network traffic they refer to are downloading constantly at full throttle for days on end. Even if you downloaded a Linux ISO every day of the month, you won't come close to these guys. These abusers are downloading more than a Terabyte a month (about 33 Gigabytes a day, every day).
Personally, I agree with their plan. Perhaps this is a way for them not to oversell their bandwidth. They just need to advertise this so there are no questions for those who sign up for service. Print the limits and over-use fees clearly in the contract. Provide a way for users to check their usage. Perhaps give examples of how much bandwidth each pricing tier equates to so as not to scare of customers who don't quite understand how much 5GB is (eg; 500 MP3's a day @ 5MB each = 2.5GB).
If someone doesn't want their service, they can get something else. If that's their only option, then they can pay extra or limit their traffic to be within their budget.
At least now it will be clearly stated what the limits are and people won't be getting shutoff unexpectidly.
What I'm trying to get at is, don't be so pessimistic. This battery technology can and will be developed quickly. It's because we have few other practical options.
I'm actually surprised someone hasn't used techniques similiar to what the photographers of the Planet Earth series did to get some of their exceptional time-series shots. Plant a camera out there for a year, take a snapshot every minute (or use motion detection), collect weather data (humidity, dew point, temperature, evaportion rates, wind speed/dir) and corrolate that to the time-series snap shots.
For the Planet Earth series, scientists sat on the Antarctica continent for a full year. They also perched themsevles in a tree house in a tropical rain forest for more than 8 weeks.
I'm surprised these large ships won't require a keel given the size of the sail and angle at which the a crosswind may blow. The keel would greatly prevent a sideways "drift". Are they countering this with rudder, and if so, wouldn't this slow the ship down?
The article content doesn't alarm me in the least bit. As a frequent flyer, I've been on flights where the flaps wouldn't retract all the way, we had to throttle up just before we were about to touch down, the cabin lost pressurization (slowly due to a luggage door not being properly closed), and way back in the day we hit wind shear which violently rolled the DC-10 a full 90 degrees for what seemed like an eternity. Not to mention the time when the luggage loading vehicle crashed into the side of the airplane or the fuel truck backed into the engine at the gate. There are lots of mishaps that happen daily, but overall the airline industry has a pretty good record.
To me, the more alarming aspect of this article is the choice to not make it public because it may affect commerical business. There shouldn't be a precidence set for withholding information from the public unless it involves national security.
Boiling water started coming out of the crater and particles of rock and cinders were found nearby.
Boiling water from a meteorite? Rock and cinders? That sounds a little odd. The meteorite was probably very small in size to make that hole (previous poster mentioned 30 inches). Hardly big enough to boil water for an extended period of time and produce molten rock.
This sounds more like the meteorite punch a hole into an underground hot spring or something and the noxious odor is perhaps the foul smell of sulfur, minerals, an other things in those types of environments. The landscape also looks very desolate, common in areas where there is thermal activity.
Instead of a geographical global limit, why can't Comcast throttle connection speeds instead of cutting customers off completely when they use "too much" bandwidth? I'm not a network guy so I don't know technically difficult that is, but this seems like a good way to not void their contract with the customers (providing "unlimited bandwidth" given your connection speed) while maintaining a useable network for all to use. In reality, the amount of bandwidth you use today doesn't affect another user tomorrow. So if someone is using 10Mbit/sec all night when hardly anyone else is online, why should it matter? It's how much bandwidth you use during peak usage times which would cause other users a degraded performance. This is why throttling would be better than saying "you used 150GB this month, we are disconnecting service" for using too much. For all we know, that person may have been downloading during non-peak times when the network was hardly being utilized (say from 10pm to 6am).
Bottom line is, there will always be a top 1% of bandwidth users. It seems more logical to throttle the heavy users than cut them off by declaring they crossed some imaginary limit that affected everyone on the netowrk when in fact they may not be the case at all.
I hold a TS clearance and it took 9 months for them to complete my background investigation.
Screening for "levers to blackkmail" actually makes it EASIER to blackmail someone first, by validating the whole "you can be blackmailed for this" experience, and second, by putting that information where it can be stolen by a mole
If they find something that can be used as leverage against you, then you won't get the clearance. That's the point. Not everyone gets a TS that applies. So if someone who holds a TS clearance had their background information exposed to a mole, there would be nothing there for them to leverage against you.
Nobody gives a shit if you're gay, lesbian, bi, or straight, or you cheated on your spouse, or you have debt, or you used illegal drugs, or you have a Britney Speares collection.
Other people might not give a shit if I cheated on my wife, but I would, and so would my wife and kids. So if someone came along and said "I want you to help me out otherwise I'm going to send these photos/letters to your wife" then you either comply and risk espionage/treason charges, or you say screw off, and potentially have your marriage wrecked. It puts the person in a position of compromise. So yeah. No on else gives a shit. But you sure would. And therefore the government does not and will not entrust their secrets with you given that you may be coerced into revealing sensitive information. And rightly so.
The drug and debt thing is of the same idea. If you are hooked on drugs but can't afford your habit, you may be so inclined to start selling secrets to feed the crave. Think it hasn't happened? They don't just pull these questions out of their asses. There's a reason they ask these them and deny you a clearance based on your answers. Again, the rest of the world could care less about how much debt you have. So what. Who cares. But again, this debt ridden person may run into a point where they will start loosing their house, car, and lifestyle if they don't pony up the payments. They too might be inclined to sell secrets to retain their lifestyle. Think that hasn't happened?
My guess is these people are pissed that they have to have backgrond checks because in all likelihood, they are hiding something which means they will loose their job if they are denied a clearance.
The internet has increased my efficiency as an IT professional like 100 times over compared to 15 years ago. Most of the time I'm surfing the net at work, I'm learning new technical stuff that is keeping me up to speed, something my employer will most likely benefit from. It might not be related to my immediate job at hand, but the time I "waste" surfing the web now is time saved when I apply that knowledge gained at a later date. In my opinion, if the job is getting done on time and meets expectation, what's it matter?
THX cert means little if your speakers/TV aren't also in a room that is THX certified. Unless you are a serious audiophile, it's like having heated car seats when you live in Florida. Cool feature, but not worth an extra $500 when you will probably never use it (hear the difference).
The smaller HD is a bummer, but if the units are as easy to upgrade as the older units were, it's easy to image/re-image onto a larger HD.
So, upgrade the HD in the Lite and the only "functionality" you give up over the Standard is the THX logo.
Uranium prices have risen about 10-fold in the last 4 years, already up $41 or 57% since the end of December
In the last 5 years the spot prices for Uranium have gone from $15/lb to $120/lb. This has to do with supply and demand as well as a change in the source of Uranium transitioning from dismantled nuclear warheads to uranium ore. Problem is, uranium ore is hard to come by, is a limited resource just as oil, and we don't have the resources to extract large quantities from the earth because we've never needed to do so, until now.
Just a guess, but $250m will only cover the cost of building a second JWST. Launching it will cost another ~$500m in fuel, rocket assembly, and ground support infrastructure/personel.
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If this cloaking device doesn't require a source of power, implying that it's "always on" ... how would you find it?
Blu-Ray isn't just about video quality. The audio is far superior than that of a DVD. The HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD formats are loss-less and sport way higher bit rates. Standard 5.1 DTS is 1.5Mbps at 20 bits with a 96Khz sampling rate (DVD). HD Master Audio (Blu-Ray) is 24.5 Mbps at 24 bits with a 196 Khz sampling rate across all 7 channels.
Most people don't have equipment that supports/decodes the new loss-less audio formats and they are missing half the advantage of Blu-Ray.
I see a HUGE difference between regular DVD's and BluRay, not just in video quality, but with the loss-less audio formats as well (HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD). I watch a BluRay movie on my sisters $900 HDTV from Costco with the sound coming out of the speakers and yeah, the difference isn't all that much better than a regular DVD. But if I play that same movie on my 52" LCD Bravia XBR4 with the sound going through my Denon 2808ci AVR utilizing HD Master Audio (or Dolby TruHD) and it's a whole new movie. Even my sister (who would NEVER admit to being wrong ... especially to me) agrees. There is a HUGE difference.
... and most people don't know that.
I think people don't see the difference because one, the TV they have isn't the greatest (just because it's HDTV doesn't mean it's a good TV) and two, they use the internal speakers and/or don't have the capability to decode the new audio formats. BluRay isn't just about better video quality
I think the bigger argument is most people don't want to spend $3,000+ on a good TV, $1000+ on a good AVR, and $1000+ on a good set of speakers to get the most from the BluRay technology. As prices come down, things may change. But to say BluRay technology isn't catching on because it doesn't look that much better than a standard DVD is rubbish. It's like saying today's video games suck because you're playing on a 13" amber CRT terminal screen.
Here's what I find odd, and perhaps it's my ignorance on the subject, but carbon dioxide makes up ~95% of the Martian atmosphere while water vapor only makes up 0.03%. I understand that it's too warm for dry ice to form, but is this also true if the dry ice is insulated beneath a few inches of Martian soil? The atmospheric surface pressure of Mars is about 1% that of Earth. Wouldn't the lack of atmospheric pressure reduce conduction further insulating the buried frozen substance? If the average surface temperature is -70F and dry ice stays solid at -109F, we're only talking about a delta of 39F. That doesn't seem like a whole heck of a lot to insulate against. Also, why is it white? Wouldn't it be mostly translucent if it were frozen water?
Now, I'm no NASA scientist or chemist and maybe someone here who is more knowledgeable than I could shed some light on my questions. It just seems to me that's it's more likely to be frozen carbon dioxide than frozen H2O.
True.
... even having started out with a Secret clearance.
... when someone is laid off, it's a different story. They are given the rest of the day once noticed plus the following day to collect their belongings and then they are escorted off base (they keep their clearance, but they loose their badges). Fortunately, the company I work for gives a person who has just been laid off 4 weeks of fully paid time to find another job within the company. They just have to sit at an unclassified location off-base that has access to email, internet and phone lines.
I have a Top Secret clearance and it took about 9 months to process
But as the previous poster mentioned, when someone on our program gives notice, they work until the very last day. No permissions are revoked until they step foot off the AF base on their last day. In this time, they are tasked/requested to brain dump everything they can think of pertaining to their job. It's very unlikely someone would do something malicious on one our systems. Doing so would mean a very lengthy prison sentence. Even not cooperating would probably get you black listed from any other classified jobs within the company.
However
There's lot I like to do in my free time. Things I call hobbies. The problem is, if I had to do any one of them all day long 5 days a week, I'm not sure I'd like to do them as much as I do now. Most likely, I'd probably feel the same way about them as I do my job. I can't say I thouroughly enjoy my IT job (SAN, SysAdmin, Network Admin, Database Admin), but I don't hate it either, don't mind getting up in the morning and like you ... it pays very well. The money is just too good, which allows me to do a lot of things I wouldn't be able to do should I become a forest ranger (my degree was in geology, go figure).
I'm 33. Have I thought about a career change? Not really. Uprooting the kids and moving the family isn't something I think about. I do shovel more money into my 401K and actively manage it so I can hopefully retire earlier (I'm not one to just dump money into a company 401K and be done with it). I also put money in a vacation fund to totally get away at least once a year for a two week vacation. Being able to afford to do the things I like to do, and the family likes to do, is very important and I'm very appreciative of this.
I don't know. Shipping hydrogen probably isn't all the more dangerous than ethanol. Ehtanol is some nasty sh*t in large quantities. Far more dangerous than gasoline. Obviously you can't use water on gasoline or ethanol fires, you have to use foam. Well, the foam used on gasoline fires doesn't work on grain-based ethanol fires. The ethanol flame burns right through the foam and conitnues to burn. To put out an ethanol fire you need an alchol-resistant polymer foam which is very expensive. Not many firestations are equiped to handle this sort of thing and as E85 becomes more popular, larger amount of ethanol are going to be shipped long haul.
Hydrogen on the other hand is very bouyant, disperses very quickly and won't puddle on the ground. If this article proves true and they can produce hydrogen that efficiently, shipping it is a moot point. Just produce the hydrogen on site and do away with the shipping all together.
This bird was a "dead stick" shortly after liftoff which means the fuel tank was full. I don't know much about hydrazine, but I've got to imagine if you heat it up, it's going to expand. Now re-entry temperatures are around 7000F. If you heat a fuel tank that is around 95% full of hydrazine to these temperatures, wouldn't the hydrazine turn to a gas, expand, and blow the tank apart anyway?
http://celestrak.com/events/Xichang-ASAT4.wmv
Good model of the debris field caused by the China ASAT test. As you mention, "stuff" doesn't just fly everywhere.
Before you go trolling, at least get your there, their, and they're down. Basic grammar goes a lot way to helping your "argument".
Ouch, that's embarrassing.
Self-destruction in the sense that the satellite explodes into many peices isn't a good idea. Those little pieces travelling and thousands of miles per hour become lethal to other satellites. With who I work for, the Orbit Analysts have modeled scenarios in which an ASAT (anti-satellite missile) takes out a satellite and what affect it would have on other satellites. China recently tested their ASAT (link: http://www.space.com/news/070202_china_spacedebris.html) and it caused all sorts of anxiety even theough it was in low-orbit.
What was to stop, say, the Soviets or Chinese from going up and physically stealing a very expensive satellite that presumably contains technology/information we don't want them getting their hands on?
... at least, not yet.
NORAD. They can track even the smallest peices of debris, down to the size of a 1 inch bolt. "The Mountain" is continous contact with our Orbit Anaylsts and alerts of possible collisions (near misses) due to space debris. In other words, you can't exactly sneak up on a satellite and steal it without being seen
I highly doubt you're even close to their "limit".
The 5% users accounting for 50% of the network traffic they refer to are downloading constantly at full throttle for days on end. Even if you downloaded a Linux ISO every day of the month, you won't come close to these guys. These abusers are downloading more than a Terabyte a month (about 33 Gigabytes a day, every day).
Personally, I agree with their plan. Perhaps this is a way for them not to oversell their bandwidth. They just need to advertise this so there are no questions for those who sign up for service. Print the limits and over-use fees clearly in the contract. Provide a way for users to check their usage. Perhaps give examples of how much bandwidth each pricing tier equates to so as not to scare of customers who don't quite understand how much 5GB is (eg; 500 MP3's a day @ 5MB each = 2.5GB).
If someone doesn't want their service, they can get something else. If that's their only option, then they can pay extra or limit their traffic to be within their budget.
At least now it will be clearly stated what the limits are and people won't be getting shutoff unexpectidly.
What I'm trying to get at is, don't be so pessimistic. This battery technology can and will be developed quickly. It's because we have few other practical options.
Necessity breeds innovation.
I'm actually surprised someone hasn't used techniques similiar to what the photographers of the Planet Earth series did to get some of their exceptional time-series shots. Plant a camera out there for a year, take a snapshot every minute (or use motion detection), collect weather data (humidity, dew point, temperature, evaportion rates, wind speed/dir) and corrolate that to the time-series snap shots.
For the Planet Earth series, scientists sat on the Antarctica continent for a full year. They also perched themsevles in a tree house in a tropical rain forest for more than 8 weeks.
I'm surprised these large ships won't require a keel given the size of the sail and angle at which the a crosswind may blow. The keel would greatly prevent a sideways "drift". Are they countering this with rudder, and if so, wouldn't this slow the ship down?
Does anyone have any idea why this comet has suddenly got so much brighter?
Global warming.
The article content doesn't alarm me in the least bit. As a frequent flyer, I've been on flights where the flaps wouldn't retract all the way, we had to throttle up just before we were about to touch down, the cabin lost pressurization (slowly due to a luggage door not being properly closed), and way back in the day we hit wind shear which violently rolled the DC-10 a full 90 degrees for what seemed like an eternity. Not to mention the time when the luggage loading vehicle crashed into the side of the airplane or the fuel truck backed into the engine at the gate. There are lots of mishaps that happen daily, but overall the airline industry has a pretty good record.
To me, the more alarming aspect of this article is the choice to not make it public because it may affect commerical business. There shouldn't be a precidence set for withholding information from the public unless it involves national security.
I wonder who is more productive; the guy who takes 15 minute smoke breaks 5x a day or the guy who takes 10 or 15 minute power naps 2x a day?
Boiling water started coming out of the crater and particles of rock and cinders were found nearby.
Boiling water from a meteorite? Rock and cinders? That sounds a little odd. The meteorite was probably very small in size to make that hole (previous poster mentioned 30 inches). Hardly big enough to boil water for an extended period of time and produce molten rock.
This sounds more like the meteorite punch a hole into an underground hot spring or something and the noxious odor is perhaps the foul smell of sulfur, minerals, an other things in those types of environments. The landscape also looks very desolate, common in areas where there is thermal activity.
Instead of a geographical global limit, why can't Comcast throttle connection speeds instead of cutting customers off completely when they use "too much" bandwidth? I'm not a network guy so I don't know technically difficult that is, but this seems like a good way to not void their contract with the customers (providing "unlimited bandwidth" given your connection speed) while maintaining a useable network for all to use. In reality, the amount of bandwidth you use today doesn't affect another user tomorrow. So if someone is using 10Mbit/sec all night when hardly anyone else is online, why should it matter? It's how much bandwidth you use during peak usage times which would cause other users a degraded performance. This is why throttling would be better than saying "you used 150GB this month, we are disconnecting service" for using too much. For all we know, that person may have been downloading during non-peak times when the network was hardly being utilized (say from 10pm to 6am).
Bottom line is, there will always be a top 1% of bandwidth users. It seems more logical to throttle the heavy users than cut them off by declaring they crossed some imaginary limit that affected everyone on the netowrk when in fact they may not be the case at all.
I hold a TS clearance and it took 9 months for them to complete my background investigation.
Screening for "levers to blackkmail" actually makes it EASIER to blackmail someone first, by validating the whole "you can be blackmailed for this" experience, and second, by putting that information where it can be stolen by a mole
If they find something that can be used as leverage against you, then you won't get the clearance. That's the point. Not everyone gets a TS that applies. So if someone who holds a TS clearance had their background information exposed to a mole, there would be nothing there for them to leverage against you.
Nobody gives a shit if you're gay, lesbian, bi, or straight, or you cheated on your spouse, or you have debt, or you used illegal drugs, or you have a Britney Speares collection.
Other people might not give a shit if I cheated on my wife, but I would, and so would my wife and kids. So if someone came along and said "I want you to help me out otherwise I'm going to send these photos/letters to your wife" then you either comply and risk espionage/treason charges, or you say screw off, and potentially have your marriage wrecked. It puts the person in a position of compromise. So yeah. No on else gives a shit. But you sure would. And therefore the government does not and will not entrust their secrets with you given that you may be coerced into revealing sensitive information. And rightly so.
The drug and debt thing is of the same idea. If you are hooked on drugs but can't afford your habit, you may be so inclined to start selling secrets to feed the crave. Think it hasn't happened? They don't just pull these questions out of their asses. There's a reason they ask these them and deny you a clearance based on your answers. Again, the rest of the world could care less about how much debt you have. So what. Who cares. But again, this debt ridden person may run into a point where they will start loosing their house, car, and lifestyle if they don't pony up the payments. They too might be inclined to sell secrets to retain their lifestyle. Think that hasn't happened?
My guess is these people are pissed that they have to have backgrond checks because in all likelihood, they are hiding something which means they will loose their job if they are denied a clearance.
Absolutely.
The internet has increased my efficiency as an IT professional like 100 times over compared to 15 years ago. Most of the time I'm surfing the net at work, I'm learning new technical stuff that is keeping me up to speed, something my employer will most likely benefit from. It might not be related to my immediate job at hand, but the time I "waste" surfing the web now is time saved when I apply that knowledge gained at a later date. In my opinion, if the job is getting done on time and meets expectation, what's it matter?
THX cert means little if your speakers/TV aren't also in a room that is THX certified. Unless you are a serious audiophile, it's like having heated car seats when you live in Florida. Cool feature, but not worth an extra $500 when you will probably never use it (hear the difference).
The smaller HD is a bummer, but if the units are as easy to upgrade as the older units were, it's easy to image/re-image onto a larger HD.
So, upgrade the HD in the Lite and the only "functionality" you give up over the Standard is the THX logo.
In the last 5 years the spot prices for Uranium have gone from $15/lb to $120/lb. This has to do with supply and demand as well as a change in the source of Uranium transitioning from dismantled nuclear warheads to uranium ore. Problem is, uranium ore is hard to come by, is a limited resource just as oil, and we don't have the resources to extract large quantities from the earth because we've never needed to do so, until now.
(link: http://www.resourceinvestor.com/pebble.asp?relid=
Nuclear isn't the answer yet. It could be with hybrid reactors.
Just a guess, but $250m will only cover the cost of building a second JWST. Launching it will cost another ~$500m in fuel, rocket assembly, and ground support infrastructure/personel.