If you're refering to the HMS Illustrious, which is the last of a set of three, as being about the same size as the Izumo, then you have a point. The Illustrious is 22,000 tons and the Izumo, 27,000 (full load). The Illustrious did act as an aircraft carrier while the British still had Harriers, but those are gone and it's helicopters and marines for her now. On the other hand, the "next British carrier class which is sized for 36 JSFs" is the Queen Elizabeth class. The latest estimate of the displacement on those ships is 70,600 tons. Not really in the same league as the Izumo, is it?

On the other hand, if Japan buys F35B planes (the VTOL ones) then I bet they could be landing and taking off of the Izumo's flight deck really quickly.

Gareth

Save as pdf. Print the pdf. Where's the problem?

I'm no fan of monopoly.

-Gareth

Grafton Elliot Smith and and William James Perry did.

-Gareth

Have you considered this: things that make no financial sense may make no financial sense because of the way that accountants arbitrarily add in only a few of the costs of the existing technologies. The rest, like the cost of sick days from polluted air, high building maintenance or replacement costs because of acid rain, the contribution towards the costs of global warming, these are all called "externalities" and not considered. Add in those, and some of the alternative sources of energy might have a lower cost than the traditional ones. If not, then do the comparison after the R&D for the alternative energy sources is paid off. For example, I was reading Flibe Energy's estimate that the thorium-liquid salt reactor they want to mass produce will cost $100 million to develop. On the other hand, once it's developed, many of the (pollution, scarcity, radioactive waste processing and storage, high cost of manufacture) issues of other forms of energy production will virtually go away. I note that business may not fund this because it provides no short-term financial return, so they're going after military funding. It's also government money in the form of military funding that's keeping Polywell research alive.

-Gareth

How the current owners of land came by it does not bear scrutiny _anywhere_. See: Conquistadores, American wars against the Indians, etc. The best we can do is accept the current state of play and remedy the worst inequities to a degree.

-Gareth

Half of parliament and all of the provincial parliaments, actually. And Canada has _never_ had unanimity in a constitutional matter since 1867, when unanimity created the country itself. Anyway, here's what the Constitution Act (1982) says on the matter.

It's not a big point, but I'll bite. She's capable of smiling.

-Gareth

The speed of light in a vacuum or in a Bose-Einstein condensate? There's a big difference :-)

-Gareth

So does Larry Niven, darn it. (And you don't want to mess with someone who's on speaking terms with tnuctipun).

-Gareth

Yes, yes it is. A boycott is simply a personal choice writ large. I can refuse to patronize a restaurant because it's not kosher, or because it's dirty, or I had a dirty look from the waiter, or it once mistreated a friend of mine. I haven't made the choice to boycott Card, although it's been a while since I've read him, and my reaction to his books is very uneven. If I choose to not buy his work, though, and other people make that choice, there's not much to be said unless you're willing to argue against choice. I believe that Mr. Card would agree.

-Gareth

AppleWorks put the basics (word processor, database, spreadsheet) into a sweet little integrated program. A ton of extensions and other modules came from third parties. (Hello, Beagle Bros!) so that you could do graphics MacPaint style, play with fonts, do page layout, etc. etc. It was a Apple's best-selling program, despite almost no marketing and development, well past the introduction of the Mac. All this, and ease of use. (Press "Esc" to get to the full-screen menus. Make a selection or press "Esc" to return to your work).

All integrated programs of the time, including Microsoft Works, ended up with "Works" in the name because of this program's success.

-Gareth

Some points I do agree with here, but

why have an X-Prize for thorium reactors when you can just (apparently) build reactors to the CANDU pattern and put thorium in them?

rather than just free education at the university, do what the Swedes do: if you get good grades in high school, the first year at university is paid for. Get good grades in that, and the second year is paid for, and so on.

the "everybody in the army" and "everybody has a gun" parts might make sense in an American cultural context, but I don't get it. As Weber said (and I paraphrase) the whole point of a state is that it has a monopoly on the use of force. No tool that is designed to do significant bodily harm is "just a tool."

-Gareth

One switch in the privacy settings and the "advertisements" are gone.

Gallium (not the element) is making a huge improvement in the display on my oldish main computer. I'm really liking QQ.

-Gareth

I can't say that I like "Zen and the Art" because it's famous. I don't know anyone else who's read it, actually. But...let's start with this: you can't say that the book is a novel, or an autobiography, or a travel book, or a book of philosophy, because it's all of them and none. It has the story arcs of

1. a man with amnesia making contact with his past,
2. a man alienated from his emotions who learns to love again
3. a man trying to make contact with a son who may or may not be losing his sanity
4. a man trying to understand two friends who are travelling with him
5. a man trying to understand discoveries about philosophical problems that had obsessed him before he lost his memories.

Let's put it this way, it is interesting in many of the same ways as "Lord of Light," and is at least as complex.

-Gareth

When I first read "Voyage from Yesteryear," I did enjoy it, but I'm convinced that it is just a high-tech version of Eric Frank Russell's story "And Then There Were None." The relationship is closer than that between the movie "Avatar" and Poul Anderson's "Call Me Joe," and that is a pretty darn close similarity in itself.

H.G. Wells' "Shape of Things to Come" Ursula Le Guin's "The Dispossessed" are two others in the Utopian genre that had a big effect on me.

Including other genres, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and the Heinlein juveniles shaped me.

-Gareth