They've built a plant that uses plasma arcs to take sewage and garbage and convert it into energy with the resulting steam being used by another plant and the remaining hardened sludge used for roads.
Gotta love that.
Read the whole thing.
ABC's upcoming TV movie, "Path to 9/11" has some portions that are quite critical of the Clinton administration. One part in particular has Clinton and Democrats up in arms.
The part in question has to do with a missed opportunity to take out Bin Laden in the late 90s. In the unedited version of the movie, CIA agents request permission to capture Bin Laden. The agents are refused citing fear of accidentally killing him and the US being condemned internationally for "assasination" as well as risks to civilians.
The Clinton administration denies this ever happened. The CIA source used in the movie claims it definitely happened. Other CIA sources claim that it happened as well.
But the reality is, like many things, somewhere in between. The movie blames Sandy Berger and Madeline Albright but the CIA isn't sure who exactly killed the mission only that it came from the white house.
Or put another way, the left is unhappy about the details but wants everyone to ignore the general truth of the matter.
Most of our updates are essentially about adding new features. This is a bug fix update. 
We broke some of the selection code which affects the turn button turning green, keyboard control of ships, auto-select next ship, etc. To say I'm disappointed in us for letting such a boo-boo get in is an understatement.
So how did this happen?
It's convoluted but for aspiring developers worth the tale:
Several users on our forum have been asking that we make it so that when you click on a ship that is on guard or on sentry that it would not activate the ships (i.e. take them off guard or sentry). It was decided to go ahead and make that change even though the behavior was working as intended.
That change in turn affected all kinds of other things that one would not have thought it would affect with regards to ship selection. While not that severe of a problem, that isn't the point -- these updates are supposed to improve the game experience, not detract. Anyway, the bug slipped through and went into release.
I felt that the problem was significant enough to roll the dice and put out this new update on a Friday night. We've been playing with it all evening and we like the results. Hopefully it will solve the problem.
It's only available right now via Stardock Central. We'll get a stand alone installer going soon.
(it should be up by 2am EST 9/9/06).
Want to know how to get rich? I have the secret. It's very simple. Assuming at least average levels of ambition your income will ultimately be directly proportional to the wealth you generate in a given time period.
Easy right? Too simplistic? No, I'm being serious. The problem is that most people don't understand how to generate that wealth in the first place. It's not having a good idea. It's not your ability to inspire others. It's your ability to execute on what you want to get done combined with the thing you wanting to get done generating income.
One of the things I see time and time again at work and elsewhere is that people may have a good idea but they want someone else to actually roll up their sleeves and do it. I've complained before that I'm not outstanding at really specific, concrete thing. But I suppose that's really not the whole story. I think I'm pretty good at execution. I am willing to do what needs to be done to get the job done -- even if I'm doing menial things or things.
To use my own business as an example in a given day I might:
In other words, I try to be as self-sufficient as possible. I rarely let myself get stymied because I am waiting for someone else to do something. I delegate (increasingly) on things where me doing it myself would result in me not executing on something else that is more profitable. I used to personally send out the news items on our software to third party sites. I don't do that anymore usually. Not because it's not worth doing but because it took time away from doing other things that generate more revenue. It's still a very important thing, however.
The one thing I can't execute on that regularly frustrates me and is something I hope to address when I have more time is web development. I hate wanting a new website created that I am certain I could whip together both the layout, graphics, and SQL in an afternoon if I just knew how to do it but having to wait for others to do it. Drives me crazy. It's my biggest profesional weakness not knowing ASP.NET and SQL. But I digress.
The point being, if you want to be successful -- really successful -- you will have to teach yourself the skills in your job so that you can cut down the number of people you rely on to get your job done. If the widget your making is worth $1 million but you need 5 people to be involved to make the widget, then your value is diluted.
And often, increasing your value means learning how to do things that seem menial or "not worth your time" but in the bigger scheme of things, it's not just how good of a job you do, it's how good of a job you do per unit of time. And when you have to involve other people, you dilute yourself. You can mitigate that dilution to a degree if you make yourself an expert on executing your plans and goals via other people. But I think the best strategy is to do the things you can do yourself (and learn how to do as much as you can) and then learn how to get those you do rely on to execute what they have to do as fast as they can while maintaining the required quality levels.
A couple years ago I looked my nose down on gated communities. Bunch of scaredy cat snobs. Think they can hide from us commoners behind their gates and fences? Like they're too good for us?
My attitude has slowly been changing. I am coming to appreciate why some people choose to live in a gated community (some not most). Each year my activities on-line get more and more attention. Most of it's good. But not all of it. During the Starforce copy protection thing, I got some some scarey calls to my house. I don't know who they were from other than they had a foreign accent (I don't think they came from the Starforce people). I've had people occasoinally call my house on all kinds of issues simply because they could. And I have gotten some pretty occasional and sometimes quite specific threats. Each year, it gets a little bit more intense. I guess I should be happy that few people read my political rantings or else it would really get bad.
My point is, I'm a nobody. I'm a flea. A pissant. And if I am dealing with this kind of crap, I can't even imagine what celebrities, even minor ones, deal with. Not just movie stars but professional athletes, local TV personalities, etc. I could definitely see why they might want to have the security of a gated community. Sure, it won't keep the real crazies out, but it might keep the casual harassers away.
Anywya, just my 2 cents.
I've heard the term "conspicuous consumption" thrown around over the years but it's never properly defined. Because I like to label everything, just ask my critics, I'll label it: Conspicious consumption is when a person has something that is greater than 4X in size or value of what the typical American has.
Let's play a game with that:
The typical American car now costs around $25,000. A $100,000 car seems really over the the top to a lot of people. The typical American new home is 2,500 square foot. A 10,000 square foot home seems ridiculous. A typical wedding costs $10,000 day. A $40,000 wedding seems excessive. You get the idea.
Why is the 4X important in this discussion? That brings us to the second part -- the difference between the richest people and the middle class is determined almost purely by the amount of regulation there is in the economy. The more the government regulates the economy, the less of a gap there is. The upside is that we can get endless reports of how the system is "fairer". The downside is that the overall standard of living we all enjoy grows at a slower rate because the mega producers in the economy are disincented from doing what they do best.
Right now, the economy is less regulated than it was 10 years ago so the gap is growing. But in the United States, since Reagan the economy has been much less regulated which means the gap between the middle class and the richest 5% is pretty significant. How significant? According to the IRS the top 1% average over $1.1 million per year (pre-tax). The next 4% average $210,000 per year. Leaving the average American household earning around $40,000 per year.
See the problem yet? If conspicuous consumption is spending 4X what the typical American has on something and the top 5% are earning 5X or more than the average American then you are going to have people who are merely spending the same ratio as everyone else on things behaving conspiciously.
So why is that a problem? Because the people who really get upset about conspicious consumption are usually the ones who make class wafare arguments or demand much higher taxes on that top 5%.
For example, one leftist blogger put it like this (from here):
I'm enough of a believer in CPI bias to want to say "real compensation for male nonsupervisory workers has stagnated since 1973"--I think it has grown, but only very slowly, and much less rapidly than productivity.
On the other hand, I'm enough of a touchy-feey sociology-lover to believe that a good chunk of the utility the rich derive from their conspicuous consumption is transferred to them from the poor: the happiness America's working poor and middle class derive from the compensation distribution--given their compensation, the compensation of the rich, and the lifestyles of the rich and famous--seems to me to be certainly less than that of their counterparts back in 1973.
Note the premise: That the wealth that the top 5% have is essentially stolen -- transffered to them -- from the poor. That's right, the bottom half of the populatoin are the ones really generating that wealth and the top 5% are just taking it from them. Which, to anyone with any understanding of the economy, is utter nonsense. Anyone who thinks that economics is a zero-sum game is clueless. Joe Rich Guy's wealth does not hurt Bob poor guy.
But if that's not explicit enough, he then writes:
"The easiest and most important thing the government can do to neutralize the adverse consequences of rising inequality is to make the tax system more progressive, not less. A reality-based government would react to growing pretax inequality by taxing the rich more, and subsidizing the poor more (through policies like the EITC) as well. "
This is a total perversion of what the founding fathers had in mind. It is not the role of government to re-distribute wealth. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Not only would such a policy be immoral in my view, it would be damaging to future generations. As we enjoy our various luxuries today whether it be computers, the Internet, movies on demand, much higher quality housing per square foot and per cost, etc. one should ask oneself where those benefits came from. Who came up with it? It doesn't take a historian to note that the biggest improvements in the way we live have come when taxation was relatively low. People are much better at spending their own money than a government agency.
The minute a person starts to think that there is something morally wrong with one guy having a big house or fancy car or private jet or whatever and another guy "only" having one TV -- and not HDTV and living in "only" a 1500 square foot house is the minute they've given up on the American dream.
Once you give up on the American dream, you might as well start thinking like that guy who followed up his post with:
I wrote that one reason that America's rich today live the expensive and ostentatious lifestyles they do (rather than spending much more money on charity, or philanthropy) is that it is a way of making other people feel small and unhappy...
Which is about as logical as saying that the motivation for a middle class person to buy a new home is to make homeless people feel small and unhappy. Class envy is a venomous thing in a free society. Let us hope that it never becomes too widespread. The citizens of Soviet Russia got a good taste of what happens when class envy takes over.
As part of my regular polling research for The Political Machine 2008, I have come to the conclusion that the Republicans are going to lose control of the House of Representatives in November and barely hold on to the Senate. And you know what I think of that? HAH! Serves them right.
The congressional Republicans don't represent the values or principles of their constituents as far as I'm concerned. Worse, they haven't even managed to accomplish anything in the past 2 years. Go ahead, list out what they've done in the past 2 years. I'll wait.
Done? Yea, that's right. Nothing. They've done nothing. It's truly a sad state of affairs. Let's do the check list of things they could have done that would have saved their rear ends:
If these guys were in the private sector, they'd been fired a long time ago. Now voters will get to throw them out in November. Sure, the Democrats may be no better and maybe even worse. But saying the other guy is worse is not going to be enough to bring out Republican voters in an off-year election.
I got into a debate with some friends of mine over the NSA wiretapping program. There is a great deal of question over whether the program is legal or not. They felt it was illegal, I think it may be legal but that not enough information has been presented.
For example, there is apparently a lot of misconception over who is being targeted. They said that the program included targeting Americans where both parties were in the United States.
However, the facts, as we know them presently is that the program is designed for cases where one party is not in the United States. However, because of the nature of cell phones, there have apparently been a handful of cases where both parties were in the US. But that is not the intent of the program. This was reported in the New York Times in December of 2005.
Some people have probably noticed that I don't blog as much on politics. That's because right now, so much of it boils down to Bush-haters vs. non-Bush-haters. And at that point, there's not much to discuss. I will discuss the principles of taxation or universal health care or minimum wage laws or other things where things can be debated. But I have no patience at all for debating things that really about interpreting a law or whether something was good or not. Even the war in Iraq, hey you don't think we should have gone, that's fine. I am glad we went and don't think things are going badly relatively speaking. We don't have to agree on that but there's no point in arguing it because it's so subjective.