It doesn't work.

The hydrogen escapes through latex rubber balloons very quickly, in a couple of minutes the balloons collapse.

A parallel between the East German Stasi and the DEA comes to mind. Both felt you had no right to privacy, and that they had unlimited surveillance and enforcement powers. And the mission-statement for both organizations seemed to be to perpetuate their own power. as an end in itself.

I see some are chiming in here wondering why there is focus on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and not other cities fire bombed by the Allies.

Fair enough. The novelty of the weapon does not change the morality of the act.

However, a more apposite counterpoint to the fatalities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the 200,000 Chinese civilians dying each month at the hands of the Japanese government via its army in China, more than who died in the two atomic bombings combined. And then there were the contemporaneous actions of the Imperial Japanese Army in Vietnam, where it was in the process of organizing a tropical repeat of Stalin's Great Famine. In the summer of 1945 the IJA was busy confiscating all of the food from the Vietnamese in the areas it controlled. This was in effect sentencing some 7 million Vietnamese to a likely death by starvation during the winter-spring of 1945-1946. (The civilians of Japan were also doomed to a great famine during the winter-spring of 1945-1946, though not so through, and that due the choices of their own government.)

Indeed. In the days of physical media being the only way to get recorded music it was common for a band to release an album with two good tracks and the rest just filler, and anyone wanting the two good tracks was forced to pay the full album price. Toto IV stands out in my memory - two tremendous tracks (Rosanna and Africa) which are the first and last ones on the album, with dreck in between. I never heard anyone play the whole album (more than once).

Same strategy as cable "bundling" of stuff you want with lots more stuff you don't.

This being /. I should observe, to forestall replies pretending I am saying this is was always, or even usually the case, that there were many, many brilliant albums with nothing but great stuff - albums referred to as "classics".

As damning as your indictment of the music industry is, you still miss the worst aspect.

It forces the creative people to sign away the rights to their own creations. For nearly all musicians the label owns the music they produce - giving them the power to decide how little (never "how much") to pay the artists.

If you can record and release your own music you retain ownership of your own work.

And selling sheet music. Seriously. It was a big business when the only way to hear music in your home was to perform it yourself.

Two ACs arguing about the energy content of ocean currents vs energy content of nuclear weapons, with neither one putting up a single number to back themselves up. Tsk tsk.

Lets see: total world nuclear arsenal currently about 6400 megatons, or 2.7 x 10^18 J. Gulf stream volume 150 million cubic meters/sec at Newfoundland (1.5 x 10^11 kg/sec), speed 2 kt, or 4 m/sec. Kinetic power of stream = 1.2 x 10^12 J/sec. Number of seconds for the kinetic energy of the Gulf Stream to equal the nuclear arsenals = 2.25 million, or 26 days. Is that a "very long time"?

But wait, there's more! The heat transport of the Gulf Stream is 1.2 x 10^15 J/sec, a figure 1000 times larger than its kinetic energy, so the time for the Gulf Stream flow to transport a "world nuclear arsenal" worth of energy is only 2250 seconds, or 38 minutes.

Easy peasy. The government. Like in Europe and Japan. If the government is going to back the loans it should make them, and not force the student to pay vigorish to a middleman who contributes no value.

And the government has a clear vested long-term interest in promoting an educated population, in a way that no private entity, much less a profit-taking business, has.

So you are on-board with eliminating bankruptcy entirely for everyone, and limited liability corporations too, right?

I mean, what right do corporate executives have to borrow money, and not pay it back? Why aren't they liable as individuals for the debts they choose to incur while running the business?

No one should ever have any escape from debt! Bring back the work houses!

Any evidence to support his assertion?

The enormous 1930s Public Works Administration program was undertaken when the U.S. public debt/GDP ratio was at a (then) all time high.

The interstate highway system, that largest public works project in US history, was authorized in 1956 when the public debt/GDP ratio was 60%, just a bit lower than the 75% that will prevail over the next decade.

Large scale public construction project undertaken during a depressed economy, like now, lead to accelerated growth, and then sharply dropping debt ratios.

But your claim sounded plausible anyway. Truthiness is alive and well.

Page 5 of the proposal: "Tucked away inside each pylon, you could place two adjustable lateral (XY) dampers and one vertical (Z) damper. These would absorb the small length changes between pylons due to thermal changes, as well as long form subtle height changes. As land slowly settles to a new position over time, the damper neutral position can be adjusted accordingly".

Please read the darn proposal before claiming to see flaws in it.

In case of a major earthquake the system would have to shut down until they can be checked out, like other commuter rails systems (BART, etc.) have to.

Really? Then why don't existing commuter rail lines have these "required" security measures? They don't you know. You can stop an SUV on the tracks.

Do you realize that there is no "secure area" around railroad bridges or the rails themselves today? You can already drive a car full of fertilizer right up to existing passenger line bridges or the rails and detonate at will. Heck, you can just park the car on the rails and cause a massive collision disaster.

I believe he was asking how it applied to cars.

It is - but this study and the organization funding it is only posing as being concerned about the inequity of the poor subsidizing the rich. AGE is apparently a Koch funded mouthpiece which is greatly enamored with subsidizing Big Pharma with Medicare Part D.