I first learned of this last night via Borepatch.
The analysis.
The Chicago Sun-Times.
Their article says, "Illinois is the only state with an outright prohibition on concealed carry," but the law bans all carry, not just concealed.
If you're a hunter, out in the field and hunting for game with a license, then you can carry a loaded gun. Otherwise, it's a felony.
Or, rather, it was.
...okay, there's a six-month stay on the ruling, meaning the Illinois Politburo has until mid-June to do something about it. While they can write another law prohibiting the carrying of firearms, that one would probably get struck down even faster.
Expect the new law to be "may issue" and the conditions to be draconian--but at least Illinois will no longer be less free than Massachusetts or Canada.
I don't give a rip for concealed carry. I want open carry. I want to be able to strap a firearm to my hip and walk around in public with the thing in plain sight. Why?
Because it makes liberals' heads go all 'splody.
Finally Illinois is going to be dragged, kicking and screaming, out of the lefty fantasy that making weapons illegal will prevent violence.
Og.
JayG.
Rich.
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Yes and no. Yes, you can chemically seperate U-233 from the fuel in a thorium reactor.
No it's not quite as easy as the report would suggest.
Here's the problem: U-233 is not the kind of thing you want to have laying around in industrial quantities. It's nastier than U-235 is, which is itself not really much of a picnic.
"The processing of just 3,200 pounds of raw thorium metal would yield 18 pounds of uranium-233." "Raw thorium metal" meaning thorium that's been smelted from ore...and extracting 18 pounds of impurities from almost two tons of metal is not exactly as trivial an exercise as that statement would make it seem.
Look: there's no way to use nuclear power that does not contain some risk of "nuclear proliferation". A nuclear bomb is just a way of speeding up nuclear decay so that it all happens at once; a nuclear power reactor is the same thing at a much slower pace.
Like any truly useful tool, it comes with a set of hazards. Just saying, "We can't use that because it's TOO DANGEROUS" is both foolish and insufficient protection from those hazards.
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Nokia's CEO is a pointy-haired moron. And the Osborne Effect happens all over again. And the Nokia debacle is even mentioned in that last link.
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Too late. The time for this warning was in 2010 and 2011, not now:
If Republicans cave in now, when it really counts, next time you will be weaker, because your conservative base will be outraged. Many who worked hard to elect you in the past will never lift a finger for you again.It "really counted" in 2011, when they gave us a $120 billion reduction in the rate of growth and insulated themselves from having to vote for more debt ceiling hikes.
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North Korea can now hit any spot on the planet with a nuclear weapon. Sleep tight!
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Union teachers who staged a sick-out for the children are not very good teachers. 7% can read at grade level? Seven percent?
On the other hand, I do think it's the job of parents to teach their kids to read. Don't just sit 'em in front of the TV and let them play video games until their eyes bug out. Sit down with them and an age-appropriate book and teach them to read. Make sure to have plenty of books around the house; let them see you reading, and have all kinds of stuff on hand for them to read. Let them read comics as well as novels.
The greatest inventions are writing, the printing press, and the computer. All three make information easily accessible to anyone who can read. Reading is probably the most important skill you can teach your children; why on Earth would you leave such a vital task up to a lowbrow government union baby?
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Sending a rocket into a ballistic space trajectory using model rocket engines is impractical, but barely possible. Forget hitting orbit, though.
Black powder just doesn't have a good enough specific impulse, and model rocket engines don't contain enough of it.
He is right when he says you can get huge-ass motors, but he's also right when he says that an O or P engine is in fact a rocket engine, not a model rocket engine. And those big ones use a composite propellant identical to what's used in the Space Shuttle's Solid Rocket Boosters: HTPB and ammonium perchlorate, with a leavening of aluminum powder as a burn-rate modifier.
You can get reloadable model rocket motors which use composite propellant, too. I used one, once--a 24 mm reloadable with a D12 fuel slug--and it roasted my very nice Phoenix missile model. It got perhaps 25 feet in the air, and then WHUMPH flames shot out of the wrong end and it stopped dead in the air before falling back to Earth. The entire internal structure of the model was gone; the body tube collapsed as I ran up to where it had fallen and the paint was blistered. I had, to put it mildly, not loaded the casing correctly; the failure mode was almost exactly the same as for Challenger: an o-ring failed. *sigh*
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And so here we are again with the home-brewed Garfield Without Garfield. Yesterday's was, by the way, the Thanksgiving strip. Here's the next one:
Heh.