To put this in perspective, 5,000 sq. mi. is a square about 71 miles on a side. Compare this to the total area of the Gulf (615,000 sq. mi) and you'll see this "dead zone" occupies just 0.8% of the Gulf. Is this something that needs addressing? Absolutely. But it's not some horrific cauldron of death like the headline tries to make it out to be.
It seems that the launch site has been rather precisely determined. Perhaps you missed that memo.
And no matter how much evidence the US or Ukrainian government produces, no matter how detailed and annotated, Russia will dismiss it with a wave of a hand as fabricated, slanted, biased...whatever they want. They'll never admit responsibility.
What they need to do is to organize UN peacekeeper mission there, not wage proxy war with US.
Yes, because UN peacekeepers have such a long, sterling reputation on stopping stuff like this from happening.
But regardless, the UN will never do anything in this conflict. Russia holds a veto in the Security Council, and they will stop any such measures from ever happening.
Imagine long range trucking where the vehicle didn't need a driver and wasn't subject to driving limits. It would make trucking a lot more competitive against trains.
It would also make automated trucking a lot more competitive against human driven transport services...thus the unions will immediately be against it.
Wait...Blackberry? These guys are still in business?
And these are the people we want to trust making decisions about our healthcare?
They should just contact the NSA. I'm sure they've got copies.
I oppose the very idea of "professional entertainment", be it musicians, athletes, actors or games programmers.
Let me get this straight: you oppose all forms of compensated entertainment? So you consume no music, no movies, no fictional books, no games of any kind (electronic or otherwise), view no works of art...nothing at all? Or do you consume these things but just presume that people should never be paid for providing them to you?
I'm not about to shill for the copyright-manipulating media conglomerates, but IMO your viewpoint is either hopelessly extreme or ridiculously hypocritical. If people choose to entertain someone else, that effort has intrinsic value. Now exactly what that value might be is debatable and purely subjective based upon the value it has to those consuming said entertainment, but it surely has value to those who consume it, otherwise they wouldn't. You pay for people to fix your food at restaurants, or to build your computer components, or any number of other trades that require someone with a particular skill to perform a particular service. Why should entertainment alone be considered a pro bono profession?
"After my election I have more flexibility." -- Obama to Medvedev
And this, ladies and gents, is why the free market works when it's allowed to work unhampered by meddling from politicians. AT&T is a shit company. I hate their service and product offerings, but even more I hate their flippant attitude towards their customers. Along comes Google to kick them out of their complacency. If AT&T gets on the ball and delivers good service at good prices, it's good for me. If AT&T drops the ball and Google displaces them, it's good for me. Competition, folks. It's a win-win.
What? And destroy the current lucrative system of kickbacks, cronyism, and propping up otherwise unprofitable, unaffordable, unworkable systems and businesses? How will Senators and members ever get elected properly without the subtle system of bribes that currently grease the wheels of professional politics? Don't you know *anything* about how to get stuff done inside the Beltway?
Sheesh...you people need to get a grip and understand how power works in this country.
Isn't it funny how NASA -- the agency that for *decades* screamed that the shuttle's reusability was the *key* to why America should depend upon it for our *primary* launch platform -- is now willing to admit the whole "reusable" thing was crap and everybody *knew* it was crap. We'd have done far better to keep using things like Saturn V's.
Now I sincerely *hope* SpaceX has somehow learned from NASA's failure and perhaps *can* make the economics of a reusable engine work. One thing at least: if SpaceX *can't* make it work, you can be sure it can't just make up the difference with taxpayer money and call it a success. As a private enterprise, it can't.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence." -- Hanlon's Razor
But who would kill all the Martian spiders for these women? Hook up their TV and stereo? Change the oil in their Martian sand buggy?
The F-22 was inferior in almost every important metric to its competitor, the YF-23.
That's not entirely true, and I say that as fan of the YF-23. The F-22 was less stealthy but more maneuverable. The Air Force valued the latter somewhat more than the former at the time, and here we are today.
That said, the real farce was that Lockheed was allowed to submit *two* proposals. The first one clearly would have lost to the YF-23, so Lockheed was allowed to go back to the drawing board and submit a second...*after* the USAF told them what they needed to change in order to win over their hearts and minds. Northrop was given no such second chance.
Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. -- Steinbach
