I'm pretty sure today's full-size trucks are usually close to 5000 pounds. Yes, the small pickups are lighter, but most people drive the full-size ones, at least where I live. Ford's new F150 does succeed in shaving some weight off with an aluminum body, but it still is about 4000 pounds for the lightest model.

http://gas2.org/2014/10/08/201...

That's because, back in those days, politics weren't remotely as polarized in most places in the country (except maybe the South, where they hated Republicans because of the Civil War; that didn't turn around until the 1970s).

Yep, buses really are horrible for a lot of reasons. They're great if you really can pack them full and have a lot of people from one place to another place, such as with a touring coach, but for intracity transport they suck. That's why we should be building SkyTran instead.

soon all the cars on the road will be electric and with just a gas tax there will be little money to maintain roads and they will, over time, become impassible

BS. Even if everyone drove an EV there, how is all the cargo going to get around? There's no such thing as an electric tractor-trailer, and those are the vehicles doing all the damage to the roads.

Raise the diesel tax, or better yet raise the commercial vehicle taxes.

The Tesla model S is over 4000 pounds last I heard. It's quite heavy for a passenger car.

However, compared to a pickup truck or a Hummer, it's not that bad.

And compared to a tractor-trailer, it's nothing.

If they actually cared about which vehicles damaged roads the most, they'd just leave the gas tax in place, dump this per-mile idea, and jack up the tax on diesel-powered semis. Passenger cars really don't affect roads much at all; it's the big trucks that do all the damage.

You mean Phobos and Deimos are also made of cheese?

And how exactly do you propose to lock a dish onto a single satellite when they're moving around like that? Or is the idea to have enough of them out there that you don't need to lock onto a single bird, just have one in range?

Either way, it sounds expensive. Launching 7000 satellites isn't cheap, plus you have to have them reboosted constantly (500 mi is not a very high orbit, though it's better than the ISS) somehow. Unless they think they're going to get a ton of subscribers (and their system will actually be able to handle them all), it's not going to be economically feasible. Remember, they tried almost exactly this not that long ago with the Iridium satellite-phone system. It was a complete failure, and while it's still in use, the company that built and launched the satellites went out of business and it all had to be sold to another company for pennies on the dollar; they kept it going because their start-up costs were so low and they didn't have much of an investment to recoup. That doesn't sound like a good business plan to me. The only commercial satellite services that have been successful have been ones using GEO satellites, like DirecTV, since you can just launch one or two satellites and get coverage of the whole USA and not have to worry about boosting or replacing it frequently. GPS has been successful, but it wasn't commercial at all (the government does it for military purposes; we're just all benefiting from it), and even it only has a few dozen satellites.

Way to not tell the whole story. The Chinese were arrogant and insisted that they didn't need anything the British could trade with. This is the same arrogance that started China down the road to 150 years of tragedy. They insisted on cash payment for everything, and the foreigners could go fuck themselves because they weren't racially equal to the Chinese. The product the British ended up with was opium, but could have been anything that they had a surplus of. To pretend that the Chinese gave a single shit about their commoners - LOL. They didn't, any more than today's rulers give a shit about their people. The Chinese didn't make it illegal because they were caring and sharing, they made it illegal because they thought they didn't need anything from the outside world and thought Chinese products were inherently superior because they were Chinese.

And then the war started, and China discovered real fast that it wasn't up to modern standards. Fun fact: the British didn't even want Hong Kong, they wanted Zhoushan (at the time, an important port south of Shanghai). The negotiator screwed up and got a barren island instead of a busy city, and today Zhoushan is a small town that never went anywhere.

Nope! The Reichstag fire was set by a crazy Dutchman. Read William Shirer, he walks through the still smoking building with Goering and Goebbels and watches them talk to Hitler about it.

Now, both kinds of socialists (national and communist) definitely took full advantage of the incident afterwards. But the Reichstag fire was not a fabrication.

"You must all know half a dozen people at least who are no use in this world, who are more trouble than they are worth. Just put them there and say Sir, or Madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can't justify your existence, if you're not pulling your weight, and since you won't, if you're not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we can not use the organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can't be of very much use to yourself."

-- George Bernard Shaw, communist

We already have satellite internet. Go to hughesnet.com and check it out for yourself.

The problem with it is that the ping times are terrible. There's nothing that can be done about that unless you figure out how to communicate faster-than-light, because radio waves take a certain amount of time to travel to a geosynchronous satellite and back. You could stick satellites in lower orbits, but then they won't stay there long without boosting, and more importantly, you can't fix a satellite dish on them because they're constantly moving across the sky, just like the ISS does. Only GEO orbits allow you to fix a dish on a satellite and not need to move it.

How did he violate his oath? He was supposed to uphold the US Constitution, is he not? His state's anti-gay law was unconstitutional, so he had every right to refuse to enforce it.

If his state passed a law banning Catholicism, do you think he should be bound to enforce that one too, even though it's obviously and clearly in violation of the First Amendment?

Empirical evidence demonstrates that it took only a finite number of monkeys a finite period of time to "randomly" produce the works of Shakespeare.

Yeah, but aren't the search engine ads also less obtrusive, like usually on the side where they're obvious that they're ads? That makes them easy to ignore (and doubly so, since they aren't graphical with flashing colors and shit like that which draws your eye to it).

I'm not saying they're perfect by any means, but compared to most advertising these days, it's a giant step up IMO.