> > revenues of $9.2 billion. Now, if the company could just figure out how to > > put a door handle on its new $361 million F-22 fighter, its prospects would > > really soar.The part that amazes me about the new fighters is... fighters are, by their nature... disposable. 361 million dollars could buy a small country if you shopped hard.
I can see a few decades in the future, when we have the *ultimate* fighter, that does everything. We'll have three of them; two hangar queens undergoing continual refits and upgrades, and one operational aircraft that won't be allowed to fly because the EPA will be worried about the effect of aircraft on the ozone layer. At two hundred billion dollars apiece, no commander could risk actually flying one anyway.
And then we'll be invaded by Inuits out of Canada, who'll simply walk by all the high-tech defensive gear and wipe out our military with whalebone spears.
- G'Kar, Babylon 5, "And Now For a Word"
Thanks guys. It's hard for me to judge the automotive style machines. I come from a industrial machining background where a .375" depth of cut was a normal thing.Same here, but you need to take into account what you're machining. If you have a bandsaw big enough to slice up an old cylinder head, I guarantee eye-popping revelation. An ordinary SBC or SBF head is a thinwall iron Kleenex box with some posts connecting the top and bottom; lots of thin, unsupported area there. When you cut, you're traveling across the supported and unsupported areas and the head will warp if you cut too much at once, causing humps and valleys. Taking more, shallower cuts reduces the tendency to warp.
Automotive engine castings are as thin as it's practical to make them; that's why you have to use torque plates for some operations.
Back in the '70s small block Chevys were used in various mid-engine sports car classes. The (mostly European, I expect) chassis designers saw the Giant Lump O' Iron and immediately began using it as part of the chassis. The rear bulkhead would mount to the front of the block, and they'd bolt the rear suspension to a custom bellhousing casting. Voila! Efforts to tell them this was probably costing them 20-30hp were met with determined incomprehension. It is big! It is heavy! It must be quite rigid!
Every now and then I see something similar in custom motorcycle chassis. Bolt the headstock to the head, hinge the swingarm off the transmission, get rid of all that useless chassis structure! So clean! So elegant! Except the engine cases are cast aluminum, and no thicker than they have to be. One Mississippi pothole, and you'd have a two-piece engine...
"It's a pleasure to see you too, Mr. Allan. Where can I find captain Lochley? I should check in with her."
"She's busy, you can check in with me. Card. So what is it this time, Mr. Bester? Hunting out freedom-fighters, pulling wings off flies, annexing the Sudetenland?"
- Zack and Bester, Babylon 5, "The Corps is Mother, the Corps is Father"
There are three classification of people.
Yep, I think I can agree with that one!
I dont like it one bit.I don't like it one bit either.
I find it interesting that the "Communists" appear to have a better understanding of capitalism and the American economy than countless "experts" who operate and advise American businesses and the Fed. If we survive long enough for another generation of MBAs, we ought to be sending them to China instead of Harvard and Yale.
Meanwhile, if you've followed any of the stories of Chinese espionage, we're practically giving their spy apparatus everything they want on a silver platter.
If I was a Chinese, I'd be fiercely proud of my government for being so efficient and effective at doing its job. It is making China a better place every day, and improving the lives of its individual citizens. "One Nation, Two Systems" giving the Party the control of Communism, backed by the power of capitalism. Unemployment rates going down, income going up, an active space program, two dozen new nuclear reactors under construction, building canals, levees, bridges, a national highway system, colleges turning out engineers and mathematicians by the tens of thousands... and even better, it's making a bunch of stupid foreigners pay for much of it!
As an American, I'm somewhat less proud of my own government, which seems to be less efficient and less effective than the Chicoms, while rapidly becoming just as leftist and autocratic.
Look to the slow decline to mediocraty that Britian has gone through. While the very end of the Roman Empire came quickly. There was a couple hundred years of decline before the end came. The decline for the US started in the 1970s so we are well on our way. Most Western nations are on the same path. Expect the end to come with a wimper.There wasn't really a gradual decline. The end of the Age of Empires came about rapidly.
Things looked pretty good for the empires through WWI. Britain spanned the world, France had extensive holdings in Indochina and some in Africa, and even Germany had African colonies. Russia had absorbed most of its adjacent neighbors, China was pretty much as ever, Portugal had holdings in the Far East and Africa, and Japan was gearing up to carve out an empire of its own.
The Tsar's reign collapsed under the economic and social pressure of the Great War, and Alexander Kerensky and his Mensheviks took control of the countryin February 1917, only to be overthrown in October by Vladimir Ulyanov and his Bolsheviks.
Ulyanov pushed an ideology based on the writings of Karl Marx, modified by his decades as a rabble-rouser and socialist in Europe. Over in Italy, Benito Mussolini and his Fascists simply ignored King Victor Emmanuel and ran the country as they pleased. Out of the chaos of postwar Weimar Germany, various industrialists gave their political and monetary support to the National Socialist German Worker's Party and its inexplicably charismatic leader.
The Age of Ideologies was born.
To back up a bit, wars used to be much smaller affairs, held for simpler reasons. For example, Wilhelm I of Prussia and various Germanic allies declared war on France. There were a lot of little reasons that amounted to little more than convenient excuses; the real reason was money. France basically ransomed itself from the Germans for five billion francs.
Wilhelm II inherited a more-or-less unified Germany, and looked around for something to help cement his armies and population into a more cohesive whole. Plus he could use some more of that French gold. His armies marched south in 1914.
That was the start of the Great War, what we now call World War I. Fighting stopped with the Armistice in 1918. The various nations rearmed until 1939... but Russia, Italy, Spain, and Germany were no longer kingdoms or empires, they were ideologies run by dictators. Not quite a religion, not quite a government as things were considered back then, the ideologies spanned multiple nations and were aggressively proselyizing.
Some historians consider the Great War to have run from 1914 to 1945, with "First" and "Second" merely to indicate which phase they're talking about. Having done a bunch of reading on the subject, I agree. You could make a strong argument that the Cold War was merely an extension of the Great War. You could justifiably lump the Age of Ideologies and the Great War together; the first starting in 1917, the second in 1914, and both ending with the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1991.
Fascism is stone dead. Soviet-style Communism survives in North Korea. Cuba is a simple dictatorship nowadays, and the Chinese are well along in their morph from Communism to a simple power oligarchy.
The dimunition of the British Empire, theoretically a victor in the Great War, is (greatly simplifying here) primarily due to socialism and the failure to integrate the Empire into a political whole. The old colonial government system worked well enough in a pre-industrial age, creaked along with bits falling off in the Iron Age, and simply fell apart in the technological boom after WWII. Plus, Britain was nearly bankrupt after WWII; only some *very* fancy footwork kept them afloat after the war... and the benefits of the Marshall Plan weren't extended to America's allies.
4" PVC is way cheaper - 1/4 the cost - of 6", at least locally.
I did a bunch of digging in the back yard last year. Hit a mystery water line with a trencher. The city guys came out with their metal detectors and found several copper lines, all under pressure.
It just took them a few minutes to map out the whole back yard. I could see them pause in the areas where I'd filled some low spots with old engine blocks and cylinder heads.
If "they" ever decided to do a full search, they'd have any stash with any metal in it dug up before they had the handcuffs on.
"Yes, that is precisely the point. The Kha'Ri felt that if anything happened to you, the book of G'Kar would never see the light of day, so they .. liberated it."
"Liberated it?"
"We took it home. Those that read it were very moved by it and they made some copies."
"Copies?!"
"Just a few, .. for their friends. A few more, .. later few more copies."
"How many?!"
"That's hard to say, exactly. There was some confusion when it went to the printers."
"Printers?! I've only been gone for a month, Ta'Lon, there can't be that many copies floating around this quickly. How many?"
"Five or six .. hundred .. thousand."
"What?" "I've been told that it will out-sold the book of G'Quan. .. Congratulations, citizen G'Kar. You are now a religious icon."
- G'Kar and Ta'Lon, Babylon 5, "The Ragged Edge"
"If that happens, I give you my word that I will personally kill you."
"This is supposed to put my mind at ease?"
"I'm a warrior. It's what I have to give. You and I both have our burdens to bear, G'Kar. I will carry mine, .. if you will carry yours."
- G'Kar and Ta'Lon, Babylon 5, "The Ragged Edge"
> > and I have YET to see anything even remotely reliable enough to > > warrant moving away from DVD's.It's not reliablility as much as availability. Any streaming proposal depends on... a stream. The urban hutch-dwellers who keep blithering about this have no clue that free broadband isn't available everywhere, and never will be.
I can pop my "Heavy Metal" DVD into a player on Tuamotu, or the North Pole, or the Space Shuttle, and it will work just fine.
A few years ago I mentioned seeing the Epic of Gilgamesh go by in rec.audiobooks.mp3. Six thousand years old, recovered and pieced together from several partial copies stamped into clay tablets. Even paper can last a few thousand years in proper circumstances. But when your "stream" stops.. it's all over.
>> >> about this have no clue that free broadband isn't available everywhere, >> >> and never will be. > > Free? It use as hell isn't free here.Why, Larry, in net.wanker.land, open wireless access points are everywhere, as many as you want. At least, that's what they claim.
-- (Dean Collins)
It has long annoyed me that there's no equivalent "close" command for the CD. Since Unix commands often contain their reciprocals, I searched "man eject" until I found the -T argument would close the drive.
vi ~/.bashrc alias close='eject -T' ZZThere. I feel much better now...
- General Lefcourt, Babylon 5, "Endgame"
> Bottom line, if you have something in your car you don't want the police > to scrutinize, you should put it in a lockable box or portable safe. > They need warrants to open those.Not in Arkansas, good buddy. One of the last acts of the Clinton era was a vehicle code revision including "implied consent", where, by voluntarily choosing to operate a motor vehicle on Arkansas public roads, you similarly consent to personal and vehicular search by any law enforcement official, no warrant or probable cause required.
You *do* know that once they trash your car looking for whatever, they're not liable for any damages (which are likely to be substantial), but you also owe them for towing and storage, for the privilege of doing your part for society, right?
> The amount of cash that guy had on him was just too big a prize to pass up.To be sure. That one screams "profit motive", just like the various asset seizure laws.
Heck, I worry about profit motive now that so many prisons are renting out their inmates to telemarketers and bill collectors; courts used to be reluctant to put people in jail because it cost money. Now prisoners can *make* money, at least prisoners who can read, write, and make themselves understood in English. People like us, for example.
> > I don't recall any farm animals being able to speak, and say, > > "hey, let's do it."Dolphins can't speak, but John Lilly reported that both male and female dolphins in captivity were downright aggressive about seeking sex with humans.
> > The problem is that the death > > industry is largely divvied up by old family (and race-based) morticians. > > Not easy to get involved unless you're born into it.A company called Roller seems to have bought out most of the small independent funeral homes in central Arkansas; their signs have replaced the old ones all over the place.
If you're starting from scratch, you'd probably have to just get a building and equipment and grease the various hospitals and rest homes for some business.
The local places all advertise for high end. I don't know how much "no expense spared" business they get in an area like this. "Ron's Discount Mortuary" has a nice ring to it...
> > The political class can be kept around to decide what to do with the money > > we choose to give them; for this, I'd suggest Condorcet or Approval voting > > in place of simple plurality. Or perhaps Borda. I'm uncertain as to > > which is best.The more complex the system, the easier it is to subvert. As an example, the electoral college system, which failed big time in 2000 and 1960, just in recent memory.
I don't really mind the idea of the political class. I don't want to be bothered with voting on every detail of trash pickup, water treatment budgets, yadda yadda. I'm happy to pay a reasonable sum for the slimeballs to take care of that for me. I just want to limit their power to go off and do major things that affect me, without me having any control over it.
> > That's why I lean toward direct democracy. I fear the tyranny of the > > majority, however; to this end, I would propose that 90% be required to > > pass a law or tax rather than 51%, and that it be 90% of the actual > > electorate. Anyone who fails to vote should be considered a "No."Politicians, make that the entranched governmental structure, don't like ideas like that *at all*. That would remove some of their power to legislate and tax, and that's what their power *is*. They'll never willingly give it up.
Plus, I'm not so sure that direct democracy is that great of an idea either. Like the man said, "You know how dumb the average person is? Well, half of them are dumber than that!" That's the sort of thing that finally rotted the Roman Republic, when the proletariat discovered they could vote themselves a welfare state.
The founders of this country limited voting rights to a subclass of theoretically responsible persons; over the years, I've come to believe they had the right idea. Otherwise, you wind up with two Welfare recipients voting more entitlement money out of your pocket.
> > This is used to good effect in some places already. Various places > > require a certain percentage of voter turnout and/or supermajority > > approval (usually 60%) for school bond issues, property tax hikes, etc.Not any place I've been, but I'm heartily in favor of the idea!
> > More seriously...I'm cynical about the democratic process.Historically, democracy seems to be an unstable thing. The Republic of Rome made it work the longest, perhaps because they were a little more honest - Roman politicians bought their votes directly. You'd go to the polls, and you'd have to decide between the guy who promised to throw a three-day all-you-can-drink block party, the guy who was going to finance a new acqueduct out of his own pocket (most Roman public works were paid for by personal funds as election bribes), or the guy who'd just slip you a couple of denarii in cash, right there at the polls.
Politicians still do that in the USA, but they've learned how to use your own money to bribe you, while slipping plenty in their own pockets too. Who says there's no such thing as progress?
> > There is no > > functional method to punish politicians for breaking campaign promises. > > You can't sue them for false advertising. Recall is extremely difficult. > > And once they're in, they have the incumbency advantage.That too.
> > A politician is the ultimate egoist: he or she will say whatever is > > necessary to get elected.It's the same sort of popularity contest that elects Homecoming queens in high school. And about as meaningful.
Watching "Dollar Billy" Clinton's about-face on issues when he ran for President instead of governor was quite educational. It was about as radical as Lenin's rejection of everything he'd ever stood for when he saw the chance to grab the brass ring away from Kerensky.
This one is by Jacques Delarue, 1964, translated from French. The title was apparantly chosen for marketing purposes; in fact, the book is an extremely detailed history of Nazi Germany told from the perspective of the NSDAP's control of the various police organizations in the Reich and its conquered territories. The Usual Sources are quite good at explaining what happened at various times, but often fail to even conjecture as to *why*. Delarue not only used original source material, but managed to interview quite a few of the principals, some while awaiting execution shortly after the war.
The RSHA as described by Delarue is practically indistinguishable from Stalin's NKVD. The powers the Homeland Security goons were gifted with are very similar, and note the most widely touted justification for both the RSHA and NKVD was "to combat terrorism..."
>> One more question. Were there any memorable problems you >> encountered while getting this dual head setup going?I had to do a bunch of fiddling with the xf86config file, but it wasn't a major thing. Most newer distributions will find and configure dual monitors on installation.
>> And why? Jeez, I get confused enough by just one monitor ;) Fortunately it's not a CRT ;)Two monitors only makes you want three... and then there are the virtual desktops.
I *still* have stacks of overlapping windows. On virtual 1, I have a konsole with three sessions, Konqueror with a dozen tabs, Thunderbird, and the player part of XMMS on the left. On the right, I have a konsole with three sessions, gkrellm, the playlist window of XMMS, the Pan newsreader (main and download list windows), and there's always a copy of KWrite open. That's my default desktop.
Virtual 2 has Firefox and any other stuff, like a konsole with tail -f /var/messages, Win4Lin running a virtualized copy of Windows 98, or programming tools.
Of course, I can use kaffeine or mplayer and watch a movie while still having at least one full screen to work in.
Like you, I didn't see much use in dual monitors - and I'd run both VGA and monochrome monitors under DESQview. It was handy, but when I moved to Windows I wasn't heartbroken by the loss. Then my 21" Mitsubishi Diamond Scan finally bit the dust after 15 years (I paid almost $1700 for it in 1991, and it was a hell of a deal; a grey market import $500 below the going rate) and an ordinary 15" monitor was like going half-blind by comparison. Now I have two 18" LCDs, and I've been pining for one of those new wide-screen monitors to go between them...
>> Once upon a time SuSE was a good and decent distro.The sad thing is, SuSE's main claim to fame was excellent documentation. They told you what you needed to do to make it work, or fix it when it didn't, instead of being an impenetrable mass of notes and man pages.
Novell is determined to hammer that into the ground. There's documentation, and lots of documentation, and being simply bombed out by the mass of crap on Novell's web site. They must've hired every out-of-work tech writer in Utah and chained them to their word processors. Now there's so much documentation it's not worth sorting though the mass.
Novell's thorough excision of all useful video and audio playback capability was the final straw, though. If I wanted to go through a major rework and hackery just to play an mpeg, I'd be running Linux From Scratch, not Novell.
> Which is all fine and dandy for schmucks who just want to sit on their > high horses and work with application frameworks that have been > written for them, never bothering to look under the hood.Basically, it has just created a higher level of "user."
-- (Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic)
I came across a complete set of UFO the other day and snapped it up. I've always been an SF fan, and this was something I'd never seen enough of to form an opinion.
I'm halfway through now, and it's both more and less than I expected. It ran one season - 1970. All I can say about that was... WOW! The DVDs are razor sharp; they must have been made off film. I can't tell if they've been digitally enhanced, but they're razor sharp. It's a Gerry Anderson show, so lots of the props are models. Nowadays with cheap CGI they're nothing to brag about, but in 1970 they would have been expensive state of the art effects. It was set in Britain in 1980; close enough that they could use a few "futuristic" props and fashions and fill in the rest with ordinary stuff.
I'm at Episode 10 now. I've been letting them play in a window on the right-side monitor. In the context of a 40-year-old TV show they're impressive... but the stories are sluggish, weakly plotted, and have little continuity between episodes.
The backstory is that Earth is being periodically visited by UFOs. An entire secret organization has been created to stop them - an underground command center under a film studio, a Moonbase with interceptor spacecraft, a flying submarine, odd bits of kit stashed worldwide. But the back-backstory simply doesn't exist - in the first episode we find the UFOs are piloted by modified Earth humans. We're not told what the UFOs have done to require such stringent measures to intercept and destroy them. We don't know why Moonbase always picks them up moving at some significant fraction of the speed of light, yet they always come close enough to the Moon for rockets to intercept them. We don't know why SHADO must be kept secret. Even though it's secret, it somehow manages to have its characters commute regularly to Moonbase - and it only takes twelve hours to get there, according to one episode. And they have faster-than-light communications to Moonbase - no speed-of-light lag.
It's hard to warm up to any of the characters, who all seem to be shallow assholes or carboard props. Straker and his lieutenants have the kind of "leadership skills" that make people think of rolling grenades into their tent some quiet night.
Among all this, there are long periods when nothing much happens, and even the best of the episodes creaks arthritically to its closing credits.
From what I've found online this was apparent even then; enough that season 2 became a whole different series - "Space: 1999." Which had most of the same problems. To be honest, Anderson got all that firmly in hand by the time he did "The New Captain Scarlet" 25 years later.
I don't know *why* plots were such a problem. The Brits were certainly familiar enough with SF. And I don't know why they were so disconnected. The series reminds me of a pretty girl all dressed up with no place to go.
There are a few stock shows of the parking lot of the Harlington-Straker studio. It mostly has the same cars parked there, sometimes in different places. Often a red Corvette... and almost always, a silver Jensen Interceptor, which is one of my favorite vehicles.
Taggart: Ditto!
Hedley Lamarr: "Ditto"? "Ditto," you provincial putz?!
--"Blazing Saddles"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63377-If tobacco gets too expensive, I predict some people will grow their own... and it's not even illegal. Yet.
My grandmother used to have a cigarette rolling machine. You just put a stack of papers on one side, filled the hopper with tobacco, and turned the crank. Every complete revolution, a finished cigarette rolled out. I played with that thing for hours as a kid.
Lots of tobacco still comes from tiny four or five acre farms; my father-in-law grew it until he died in '91. It may eventually become more profitable for the farmers to sell their product to someone besides RJ Reynolds.
> > Off the top of my head, _Starship Troopers_I never quite saw the justification for all the furor over Starship Troopers.
I'm reading a 1907 history of Rome, and in 400 BC only Romans who had done their military service could vote, so it's hardly a new idea.
The book on Rome is interesting. It's almost a hundred years old, and it's translated from German. The author was a subject of the Second Reich, under Holy Roman Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II, and his take on the political development of Rome is heavily slanted toward a constitutional patriarchate, sort of.
The political layout of pre-Republic Rome was eerily similar to that of the Soviet Union. The USSR's official structure was of "soviets", or councils, by village, factory, or precinct. Representation in old Rome was virtually identical. However, the Supreme Soviet was nearly powerless, since the Communist Party had managed to take real power. In ancient Rome, the same basic thing happened, except it was the landed gentry who formed their own political power bloc.
--G'Kar, The Hour of the Wolf
In the People's Democratic Republic of California, it would mean that you spoke both Spanglish and Ebonic.