th3ranger

I kinda have to wonder why a ship of that size would be built in on the ground? wouldn't it be built in orbit? or on the moon? I guess with the kind of energy output they are capable of it might not matter but still.

I can't recommend Ringworld by Niven enough. Awesome novel.

I don't think anyone has said it but that totally looks like the speedboats from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Ark. Nice!

I have that license plate! : )

That link is dead so if anyone can find it anywhere a new link would be great!

I think that thanks to the likes of NASA, humanity is far behind in space flight than where it could be. Let me demonstrate this: In the 40 or so years of government sponsored space flight almost no further progress has been made in human (or otherwise) spaceflight. If space travel had advanced at the same rate that aviation did you should be able to buy a cheap commercial ticket to mars! Instead, It costs much the same price to put a pound of mass into orbit today as it did in the 1960's! Fortunately, the private space industry is starting to take off, mainly because there will be no alternative after the shuttles are retired. ISS will still have to be supplied, and some enterprising business people are starting to realize this, I quote: Space X is not the only company planning private space flights: So as you can see, NASA, like all government ventures, is doing a terrible job. Until recently, NASA's failure rate was deplorable. Private industry, if it is not taxed to death by Obama, is about to unleash a space travel revolution. There are literally solid gold asteroids in the asteroid belt (or at least there is no reason there shouldn't be.) It has been proven that Mars has more carbon in it's crust than Earth. Why is that significant? DIAMONDS. BIG ONES. There is very great wealth out there to be taken, even in our own solar system, that could easily recoup the costs of getting up there. These considerations will never occur to a government agency, only a for-profit company. Or for that matter any other useful discoveries. The trickle that has come out of NASA is pathetic compared to the cost of maintaining the agency.

I kinda doubt if this is serious. Would the Fed allow such a thing? Obama is spineless. Strange. Second Civil War? Difficult to imagine.

Ok so here is the link to the story. Greenhouse gases are now a form of pollution, enforceable with the Clean Air Act. Now, if you do any activity that puts out CO2 you are polluting. Yay! I am polluting right now by being alive! I'm thinking this is very very bad. This is a law that cannot be enforced 100%. So I suppose that this law will be the kind of one that is a "suggestion" and its not that "serious"...If you would just cooperate, Mr.Reardon, and give me my bribe, this would all go so much more smoothly. Unless this can be declared unconstitutional, the USA is DONE FOR!

*slaps forehead* I really should have mentioned that this has absolutely nothing to do using hafnium as a control rod. I know this. It absorbs neutrons. I know what hafnium the element is. This is some sort of way to make hafnium, when excited by soft X-rays, produce many times the applied energy in the form of released gamma rays. . Way to not read any of the links. You did not search "hafnium reactor" which yields very few results that are related to what I am talking about.

I have heard a quote from a Cato podcast as follows: This is from I think Benjamin Friedman, Research Fellow in Defense and Homeland Security, Cato Institute. Link WTF??? I was intrigued, knowing a substantial amount about regular fission reactions myself to hear something mentioned in passing about a new type of nuclear reaction involving a neutron absorber! I searched on the internet at google, and nothing came up. only one search result even mention hafnium in such a reactor/bomb context. WTF? Either this is not real, or almost no one knows about it, or no one is being allowed to speak about it or something. Eventually, I found this broken link: http://www.utdallas.edu/research/qua...eseg3.htm#CONC Why broken? don't know, but as with many web addresses that don't work, I shortened it until I got a valid address. This led me here. Strangely, there does not seem to be any references what-so-ever to this hafnium reaction. I have no idea what made me wonder if one of the pictures was a link now, but I hovered my mouse over one (the top right hand picture that has a picture and caption that are completely unrelated.) and eureka! Jackpot! I found a treasure trove of information that I am still reading. Does anyone know anything about this? Is this a real nuclear reaction? Can hafnium really be weaponized?

One more additional detail, he said Ayn Rand as ann rand.... someone needs to correct him, lol. When I heard this yesterday I could not believe my ears. I defiantly winced when he mentioned god after all that. I also noticed that he tempers his god statement by saying "or whatever." It makes me think now more that ever that he tacked that on and doesn't really believe it, he just says it because he feels he has to for the majority of his audience and really is an atheist. I don't know. It is a fact that there are probably a lot of public figures that hide this.

many pictures of construction in progress here: http://www.burjdubai.com/

no. 'nuff said.

The MPAA and the RIAA have spent years and millions if not billions trying to stop piracy. I don't think there is anything that can be done about it. Ayn Rand's works are also on http://thepiratebay.org/ and also on any number of other torrent trackers. A quick search there shows perhaps maybe 100-200 people downloading various Ayn Rand works. This is unfortunate, that ARI will not get a single dime, but the fact that some people are interested at all is probably a good thing. Perhaps they will buy real copies when they realize how wrong this is. Perhaps they will buy every Objectivist book they can get their hands on!

It literally used google to come up with the best search results. Why shouldn't I just use google?

If he read it at all, he probably refused on purpose to understand what the book is about, it's a condemnation of everything he believes. He "blanked out." It is always interesting to see Oism presented in so specifically a twisted way. You can practically hear echoes of the parts that he or whoever told him about the book disagreed with the most and refused to understand at all. Leave it to leftists to turn Atlas Shrugged into a book about class warfare. For them, all of society is stratified into groups of race, gender, income, etc.. What a sad way to live.

The whole reason anyone bothered to explore at all was that there was alot of missing area that was completely unknown. I'm not sure but I think it was known about what the circumference of the earth was, in fact the greeks had many guesses. (some were close to being right) Columbus sailed knowing either he would find previously unknown land/India, Indonesia, or a eastern passage to India. Whatever it was, even then they knew that the greater the risk in a business venture, the greater the reward. Extremely large fortunes aren't made by being ultra-timid and conservative. Yeah. =>

I've noticed this often as well (rush sounding objectivist and then blowing it minutes later with "the world was created 5000 years ago?"). I've suspected for years that he only throws those things in to please his listeners because he know so many are religious. Within the same hour he said something about evolution and mention a phrase like "millions of years ago" then say something about god. Strange. Either he is an something like an objectivist and he believes in god still or he has no idea what he is talking about and just mixes it all up so everyone hears things they like.