"if you were in any doubt how deep inside the political system the system of contributions have allowed incumbents to insert their hands, take a look at what happened when the Republican Study Committee released a paper pointing out some of the problems with current copyright regime. The debate was stifled within 24 hours. And just for good measure, Rep Marsha Blackburn, whose district abuts Nashville and who received more money from the music industry than any other Republican congressional candidate, apparently had the author of the study, Derek Khanna, fired. Sure, debate around policy is important, but it's clearly not as important as raising campaign funds.
On the other hand it's not working for me unless I use a proxy, so I assume BT are doing something to prevent me reaching it.
A visa is a document that entitles you to cross the border,
Strictly speaking a visa is a document that helps you present yourself to an immigration officer at the border. There's a presumption that he/she will let you cross the border, but no entitlement.
Actually what's more refreshing is that for a change, a foreign court was granted jurisdiction in America, rather than the other way around. And no-one got to be deported in the process!
i dunno, throwing in a few deportees in the other direction might help bring about a sense of proportion about the merits of copyright law uber alles.
Or setup a separate ARPA-owned network that no one can access except DOD employees.
This exists, it's called the SIPRnet. You can only access it from secure workstations in secure facilities, and in theory all the network hardware is also secure, etc., etc.
AFAIK, the only recent SIPRnet compromise was Bradley Manning, and that was more of a social exploit than a technical one.
The only reason the UN was even minimally effective was because it provided a venue for the nuclear powers -- who almost exclusively make up the Security Council -- to hash out problems diplomatically. Without the constant threat of nuclear war to bring those parties to the table, literally and figuratively, there's no reason to think that the UN would have been any more effective than the League of Nations.
And the League, as you'll recall, was also set up in the aftermath of a staggeringly destructive war, by a great number of very committed people, and it couldn't and didn't do the job. In other words, the memory of the utter hell that was the Great War wasn't enough, even among people who had lived through it, to keep the peace through diplomatic methods alone. However, the threat of total global annihilation has kept things in check for more than three generations now.
Given how close the Cold War came to going 'hot' even with nuclear weapons making it into a no-win situation, it's laughable to suggest that we wouldn't have gone there in their absence -- when either side could have talked themselves into believing that they could have obtained a real advantage by fighting.
The horrors of conventional war have never been enough to keep people from deluding themselves into thinking that it can be won (because, bluntly, it can be); nuclear war is unique in that it is quite obvious that there can be no winner, and it is to everyone's advantage to avoid, all the time.
Entirely plausible that the place where the Al is smelted isn't the same place it's worked into finished products... but letting it cool down would just waste huge amounts of energy, since it would then have to be reheated.
In Homestead, PA, there used to be an iron smelter on one side of the river and a steel foundry on the other. They'd smelt the iron and pour it directly out of the blast furnaces into waiting rail cars, then haul it over a bridge to the other side, still molten hot, where it would be made into steel. I'm not sure why they didn't put both facilities on the same side of the river... but I assume it must have been something to do with a shortage of riverfront property on either side causing the split.
This all ended in the late 70s, but I've talked to locals who said that it caused quite a show; the rail cars had open tops and you could see the glowing iron inside as the cars went across the bridge. (The bridge, incidentally, still exists; most of the factory infrastructure is gone.)
Agree with the first part but disagree with the second.
If you get your license and join a local club, and you're not totally unpleasant to be around, my experience is that you'll probably find someone willing to loan you (or just give you outright) enough gear to get started. My local club has an assortment of starter gear that they lend out to new hams, on a sort of indefinite 'gentlemans agreement' that once you get your own rig set up you'll return it to the club or pass it along to another new Ham. There's always someone willing to lend expensive stuff that you only need to use occasionally, too, like TDRs or antenna analyzers.
I'd definitely recommend that anyone new to the hobby join a local club -- if possible more than one, or at least 'shop around' a little and find one that has other members that match your interests. It can dramatically decrease the cost of getting set up.
BLISS is ignorance.
