That it has. The current gen are impressive machines, as are the old ones, and kids love seeing them. It is like a Tonka truck dream come true, or as my 3 year old put it shaking with excitement "They have a super dump truck and a super super dump truck!" when he first saw the 100 ton and 240 ton truck up in Virginia, MN.

Thanks I will have to check that out, and probably dump a large number of hours into it. At least now I can put my OCDness with maps to good use instead of just mapping way too much of my home town, and trails in northern Minnesota.

I was just countering that somewhat implied point that they weren't using massive machine. At the time they were using the largest available but those don't hold a candle to the current monsters that are used in mining the largest ever removed ~220 cubic yards of material at a time. Or for an actual shovel instead of a dragline there are these electric monsters which I have seen similar ones in action.

Hey I can distinguish 24 colors as that is all my family could afford when I was a kid.

Well at the time they were using the most massive equipment available to the point that a whole new class of steam shovels was created specifically for the project. They were rail mounted 105 ton (US tons and that is the vehicle weight not capacity) steam shovels. You can see one of the 6 prototypes for the project here. It has a 2 1/2 cubic yard bucket instead of the original 5 cubic yard one (changed because the iron ore was substantially denser) and was also converted to crawler tracks to run in the iron mines of northern Minnesota but is the only remaining one of the prototypes. While this shovel never worked on the Panama Canal the only other surviving example of this type of shovel that may have is in much worse shape and exists in upstate new york. They were built on a 40' railroad box car which houses the boiler with an additional 8' added on to the back for a coal hopper with the boom and arm attached to the front.

Someone mod parent up.

While I agree that we do need a logically coherent set of laws and rulings that doesn't seem to be what we get.

Using your groups the actual numbers would be more like .00001% of the people on the list are in group C, .00002% of the people on the list are in group B, and the vast majority 99.99997 fall into group A (these number are at least within a couple of orders of magnitude of the actuals). This isn't a list of terrorists, but people with ties to terrorism with what ever criteria the rather incompetent government uses for defining ties to terrorists. I would be willing to bet it assumes 2 degrees of separation at least so you know someone who knows someone type of thing means you have ties to terrorism.

That assumes that the general probability of any random person has a 50% chance of having ties to a terrorist (I leave it to the reader to figure out what in the hell that actually means). In reality depending on how having ties to a terrorist is defined the list is either phenomenally accurate (nice tight definition where 80% of the general population meets the definition).

I believe the official line from the government is:

Not quite. Remember this is supposedly a DB of people with connections to terrorism which means you know someone who knows someone kind of thing. I am not sure how many degrees of separation one needs to not be considered to have connections to terrorism. I am surprised the number is as high as it is given the governments previous statements on such things, since I figured using their normal methods of classifying people they could have just loaded the U.S. Census Bureau DB and then claimed that only 0.001% had no connections.

Velvet gloves.

That seems to be the difference from my perspective.

For me it was because I couldn't get what I wanted from a prebuilt system unless I wanted to get more than needed in a lot of areas to get the high end stuff in the areas I actually needed all while spending a lot of money. The biggest thing I needed was a huge amount of ram (32GB), a couple of SSDs of OSes and some large capacity HDD for bulk storage, not doing gaming I didn't need a high end graphics card but some of the programs I use will make use of a better graphics card for the vector processing so putting in the middle of the road graphics card provided a huge boost. With a prebuilt system running Win7 pro with 32GB ram, and a bunch of hard drives puts you in shopping for a high end gamer rig or graphics/CAD workstation which all carry a heavy premium since they come with the high end processors, and video cards. So instead of the $3000+ I was finding for prebuilt systems I spent about $1200 for what I needed. Add in that a lot of the parts were chosen because of their higher quality and the rare instance where going up to a substantially better processor was cheaper (unlocked 3770 from a middle of the road locked i5 of the same gen) I ended up with a machine that should have a very long useful life at a reasonable value.

My previous machine was a middle of the road Athalon 64 X2 that was 6 years old when I finally replaced it since it no longer met my needs. Most of the parts are still chugging along as I went and upgraded a number of relatives computers and what didn't end up there or in my new machine got hauled off for recycling but that wasn't much beyond the case and power supply.

While the FBI has caught some terrorists the ones I keep hearing about all seemed to be surprisingly stupid, as it I am surprised they didn't choke on their own tongues. Also that is the FBI not the TSA who are about as worthless as tits on a bull.

As far as the TSA's ability to keep weapons off a plane they seem to suck at that given what I have brought through without trying like a 4" lock blade pocket knife with a nice heavy brass handle, an almost full box of 7.62x54r ammunition, about a dozen 12 gauge 3" shotgun shells (#2 steel magnum goose loads). The pocket knife has gone through several times and the ammo was in my coat pocket that went through the x-ray machine on different occasions. Then I send my open camera case through with the old all manual SLR film camera in it and it is time for an explosives wipe down.

Also from what I can tell it seems that I would have a better chance of winning back to back Powerball jackpots than having my luggage searched every time like it is. This is not an exaggeration either considering that over the last 10 years I have probably averaged about 1 flight a month (5 or 6 trips a year) and on every one of them my luggage has been searched, and I doubt they are searching 50% of all checked luggage but I used that number as it makes the math easy.

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