tvashtarkatena

First extrasolar vacation destination?

???!!! The fight's not about the Endangered Species Act...at all, but nice try to tea bagg-ize the issue. Also a fantasy non issue you either made up or parroted. What scarce mineral are you referring to? Wind turbines are made primarily from composites - petroleum. I think the mining rights for that have been secured for that already. The amount of oil needed to build, say, 3 million of them is negligible compared to our daily use of the stuff. The rest is just a standard generator - common materials (you'd need one anyway, wind powered or not). 'For every windmill you build you need to build a coal fired plant'. OOOOKEE DOKEE! That's almost as good a teabagger proposal as passing a balanced budget amendment that makes the tea bagger's own budget unconstitutional. Somehow you crackers always seem to work the 'mooching' idea into every topic I've noticed. "SOMEBODY, SOMEWHERE, IS SCREWING ME! I JUST KNOW IT!!!!" The 'live by the wind' comment...also awesomely stupid. The solution is a nationwide smart grid the balances intermittent with continuous supplies with demand. Some storage will undoubtedly be needed. The problem of designing transmission lines with enough capacity has been with us since day one. Intermittent power sources aren't new, nor are spikes in demand. Here's an update: Wind power doesn't 'have a future' - it's here know and growing very rapidly. It's also kind of telling that you failed to mention the most glaring economic issue with wind power....oh well. FAIL.

Yup. Our grid has three primary, relatively independent regions. One the them is 'Texas'. Good luck with that!

Hmmm...almost accurate. Cliff Claven to the rescue... Ion tails don't exactly point directly away from the sun, the ion particles themselves MOVE almost directly away from the sun with the solar wind (with the comet's velocity component thrown in at first). The ion trail bends just like the dust tail does, only the curvature is much slighter. Ionized particles leave the nucleus at near the speed of the solar wind - about a million mph, much faster than the comet's velocity of tens of thousands of mph. In addition, the visible portion of the ion tail is relatively short due to rapid dissipation - too short for this slight curvature to be noticeable. The dust trail doesn't go along the comet's path like a reverse airliner's contrail, as the above article claims (towards the direction of travel?...only if the comet is headed away from the sun, not towards). Dust particles fly off the nucleus as its ice sublimates, they are then blown away from the nucleus by by the solar wind in a vectored directly the combines the comet's and solar wind's velocity and direction. Not being ionized, however, dust particles leave the nucleus at much lower velocities that are much closer the comet's velocity. The dust tail can also be visible for millions of miles. For these two reasons, a dust tails tighter curvature is much more noticeable than for the ion tail. The comet's dust tail in the video is 'following' the nucleus because it's headed nearly directly towards the sun. If it had missed and swung around the sun in a tight elliptical orbit, the dust tail would have pointed more perpendicular to the comet's direction of travel, then more toward its direction of travel as it moved away from the sun. It's a vector thing.

Like any orbiting object, a comet is constantly changing direction - tail particles emitted sooner travel in a different direction then those emitted later. The effect is increased with elliptical orbits, because the coma is accelerating in addition to changing direction. If the comet were sitting still in space, or headed directly for the sun, the tail would point directly away from the sun in a straight line.

Now that's a Big Bang One celestial coincidence that made for some fine reality TV.

The WSJ reports that Rfucks MUST raise the debt ceiling to avert world-wide, entirely avoidable economic calamity, then spews on about how much negotiating leverage they have. LULZ.

Prosperity ends once the environment which produces is destroyed, as our fossil fuel based population is doing now. That shouldn't be too much 'reality' for most folks to get a grasp of. Deep geothermal will probably be in our future. It's almost unlimited. Eventually, exploration costs for fossils will exceed that for deep geo (do they now?), and we'll go there. The storage issue is minimized when transmission losses are minimized, which can be done with today's technologies by switching to DC long lines, higher tech transmission wires, changing transmission voltages, and smart grid systems. You can redo the whole country's grid for about $60 billion, a ridiculously low figure when you compare it to what we've blown via the Bush tax cuts and two failed wars - about $4 trillion. We need electric cars. Oil exploration is really bad for the environment - I invite anyone to visit the tar sands if you wish to dispute this point. The real damage is done we burn more energy (using cheaper nat gas) refining refining such sources into gasoline than we get from the gasoline - a double carbon emissions hit. I've heard some idiots claim electric cars will never measure up - apparently unaware that electric cars with ranges in the hundreds of miles were common just after the turn of the (20th) century - using shitty batteries, heavy materials, and no smarts. Yeah, not possible at all.... In the end, low carbon or carbon free energy sources are a political choice. So far, we've chosen to concentrate wealth to fewer folks and fight wars instead of doing the responsible, work ethic thing of keeping our house, and its energy needs, in order - using precisely the same kind of ignorance that some of the more verbose and vacuous poster exhibit right here. These folks cry 'sustainability will never happen!' for a variety of reasons limited by their skin deep knowledge, lack of imagination, and - the big reason, hatred of all things 'liberal'. Apparently, not destroying the environment we depend on is just another 'liberal' conspiracy or something. Whatev. Sustainability, by its very definition, is inevitable. It MUST happen. The only question is whether it will be forced on us by a really shitty environment or chosen by us before that happens. The DRILL DRILL DRILL folks would prefer to pass the buck to future generations and party on. That's a natural human tendency. Low rent, self centered, and ignorant, perhaps, but natural.

You gotta love tea bagger proposals so far: DEFICIT! (but don't cut the military or raise taxes, period) BALANCED BUDGET AMENDMENT! (which would make all Rfuck deficit proposals unconstitutional) HAVE THE IRS CHECK YOUR RAPE STATUS! (so you can get an abortion) HOLD ON THE DEBT CEILING SO WE CAN GROW THE ECONOMY (Now that' s an excellent way to get us out of this recession, a full blown, instant, worldwide depression). These fuckers are the saddest bunch of cuntryfried clowns I've ever seen in gobmint. It's the amateur hour that never ends; one stupidfucking idea after the next. They have absolutely no idea how to do the simplest aspects of their actual job...but they're pretty good at empty-windbag grandstanding for the cameras. Boehner looks as though he's pouring his Tanqueray on his corn flakes, now. I don't blame him for crying so much. Fortunately, it looks as though these buffoons are going to get their assholes re-bored with a chain saw in 2012. Fat lying bully-fuck from Jersey, anyone?

Presidents in recent history have relied on some form of Congressional approval for going to war. Bush was no exception, although he REALLY stretched the AUMF of 2001 and ran with it like no other prez before him. Remember, Congress writes the checks. That means the prez has to play by at least some rules, although he/she can get away with little actions for a short time. That makes this bill an important issue. The Rfucks are, as usual, completely fucking insane.

ummm....dood. were you, like, trying to take me seriously and stuff? don't you know the internet exists primarily to make jokes and post pictures of cute kitties? Hello? PORN.

Nope. Not everybody. Just folks like you. Everybody gets to post...which means that anybody gets to post. Shouldn't be too tough of a distinction for a guy in the know like you. PS...you can watch TV on the internet now.

and NSA monitoring (not to mention what happens abroad), and ISP and application provider 'throttling', and....

The innernutz is independent like public access TV is independent. We used to love watching the evangelical preacher with a light case of Down's Syndrome on that channel....

All that money dressed up and no where to go. But, can they raise BILLIONS AND BILLIONS????

yeah i think there is a real issue with the first question. first it was reported he had an ak 47, then his wife was armed, then no one was armed? truthfully, i haven't been following the story all that closely, but it seems there have been inconcistencies with the official narrative. I think the military is throwing Obama under the bus. The White House also said they watched the whole operation in visual real time and they released the photo of the WH meeting where everyone was watching. Then the military came out and said the operation was blacked out for 40 minutes during the most relevant part where Osama was killed. Woah, DOOD. Like, Smoking Gun n shit.

some kind of fruedian slip going on here, LOLZ!!! So Jim, or any of the others on this thread who believe the Orwell TV. Please give us a link to the evidence that proves that Osama was killed by the seals in Abbottabad. Kinda funny that you make a distinction between watching TV and spending your days on the innernutz.

Seems like 'post emptive' might apply here.

What ever happened to The Donald? He just.... ....evaporated, like.

Chomsky's gotta make a living, like everybody. He's got an audience, he puts out a product. Every once in a great while he manages to make a point, but most of his stuff might have well been generated by a Write Like Chomsky pseudo random word generator. I find him unreadable, but some of my friends enjoy his books. In the end, like Nader, he's a brand.

We've been planning this raid for 50 years!!!???? I'm even MORE impressed, now.

I'd recommend the Mt. Aspiring area, including that peak. Wanaka makes a decent base - there's a Dept of Natural Whatever there with maps, permits, etc. Chopper (find partners to go in on it with) or hike up to the Aspiring hut and spend a few days up there getting messed with by the keas. Hint: occasionally, you'll encounter a chopper or plane that is leaving the high country empty. While at the Aspiring hut you can monitor the flight traffic for this situ. They'll load up up for really cheap on the fly, no pun intended. That range has a lot of scrambles that can be soloed, a good hut system, several sheltered bivvy sites (big ass boulders...marked on their topos). The alpine rock is generally quartzite, which varies from OK to OMFG-I-NEED-TO-RUN-AWAY-NOW. Things to watch for are sand flies, keas (nice birds, but don't leave any gear unattended), and hook grass (hairy legs beware). The Aspiring area is kind of like the Cascade. Only the plants, animals, geology, weather, and people are different, everything else is pretty much the same. Marked trails tend to be somewhat rougher than here in spots, unless it's a Great Walk - then they're about 10 feet wide.

Chris-TIE! Chris-TIE! Rfuck donors are hunting down the Big Boy from Jersey. Jeb Bush aint' gonna run, though. Can not figure out why not....

Or, you could say "He IS dead...thanks, guys" to the gentlemen who trained for years at great personal sacrifice, then risked their asses to make it happen...and did an incredible job doing it, considering the helo crash, minimized harm to innocents and all. You might also thank Obama for making good an a very risky campaign promise. I'm as anti-war as it gets, but Christ, get real.

course, some threads are more target rich than others....