This is best explained by analogy, and I will try to put it into a/. context. Here goes --
Professor Xavier (a.k.a. Jobs) once started a school for the gifted, called Apple Computer. There, he and his close associate, Beast (a.k.a. Woz), created a wondrous thing, the personal computer. Upon hearing about this thing, another mutant, Magneto (a.k.a. Gates), came to visit with his close associate, Sabretooth (a.k.a Ballmer), to find out more about Apple. Magneto wanted to plunder Apple but knew that Dr. Xavier had a mysterious 'reality distortion field' that could probe his mind. So Magneto took a special shell (called DOS) that kept Dr. Xavier from reading his mind (there was no point to reading Sabretooth's). Dr. Xavier thought that Magneto was fairly benign and agreed to supply Magneto with his new invention, the Mac. Magneto took the Mac back to his lair in Redmond, and invented 'Windows' (BTW, Sabretooth wanted to call it 'Doors').
Since that day, Dr. Xavier and Magneto would meet at trade shows and Davos, where Magneto would boast of how his mutant Windows had conquered the other OSes -- MVS, VMS, Unix, OS/2, and even the Mac OS. Then, one day Magneto left his helmet in his luggage on the way to Davos, and it was lost by United Airlines (how odd?^). Upon meeting Magneto at Davos, Dr. Xavier realized all the things that Magneto had been hiding from him. So, he cranked-up his reality distortion field to super-strength, entered Magneto's mind, and left thoughts of tax shelters, charities, and vaccines in his head, along with the 'brilliant idea' of turning Magneto's company, Microsoft, over to Sabretooth. And, to top it off, Microsoft would bite a chunk of Apple for $150 million plus promise to develop Microsoft Office for the Mac OS FOREVER.
With that, Magneto 'retired' to save the world from disease and left Microsoft in the hands of Sabretooth, who made Microsoft more profitable than ever AND more irrelevant than ever. The rest is history.
I'm sure you've considered the peripheral issues such as failover and security. Depending on your service, these can easily exceed the cost of your primary HW/SW implementation. Then there is SysOps vs DevOps, which costs can be another order of magnitude. Cloud tools and services can save a lot of money if you can manage them well and kill you if you can't. If you co-locate, consider the cost savings of local verses remote travel. It can pay to visit the people who run your hardware.
I am about to show my age, but once upon a time, news organizations were amongst the premier intelligence gathering organizations on Earth. No shit. Reporters could discover sources that foreign agents could never approach, keep secrets, and even upend a Presidency. Think of that. Now, they are just parts of conglomerates' entertainment divisions. So, what happened to the really good investigative journalists, who could dig diamonds from piles of crap? Well, some of them are at Stratfor.
Force choices onto the electorate and make those choices bad. Many will quickly grow cynical and weary, finally giving up on the process. That leaves the few to rule, using the 'elected leaders' as front men who can easily be replaced due to their lack of credibility. Of course, that would never happen here.
It would be almost certain that Ford would survive a movie nuke in a prop refrigerator. Union rules specify that prop 1940s refrigerators weigh enough to require an entire crew to move. It was probably made of depleted uranium. As for the nuke, it was no more than 450 teraflops due to FX budget constraints. It takes at least an petaflop to kill an A-list movie star, and that is contractually stipulated.
If anyone ever thought that any race, creed, color or religion has ever been discriminated against, then they are about to see a hatred that may remind them of all previous. Autopiloted autos are societies first hard look at sentient machines. I know, they are not AI's David or I, robot's Sonny. However, they will be self propelled and, initially, not too bright. They will be scammed in a major way, mostly fraudulent accident claims. Moreover, every livery driver will see them as more of a threat than illegal aliens. Expect war.
I know, it would be a radical departure from the traditional Teller-Ulam fission/fusion design and may not yield nearly as much bang, but a pure fusion bomb would be much cleaner. Everyone knows how important cleanliness is when starting a war. We could send drones with fusion bombs practically anywhere we suspected 'rouge' nations to be plotting WMDs. By nuking them with fusion, we could cleanly demonstrate just how dangerous such power is in the hand of those who might abuse it WITHOUT leaving behind any fissionable materials that may be traced back to us or cause 'collateral damage'. Definitely a 'win-win' for stopping nuclear proliferation and increasing jobs at home via the American military industrial complex. The only question, "How could you build such a tidy-bomb?" I see a patent opportunity.
Wow, I thought the SR-71 replaced the U-2 decades ago; and the SR-71 has been retired for years. Why can't the government just use Google Earth, Maps, etc? It would be a kudo for the 'do no evil' company. Serge could hire Bono to declare, "U-2 replaced by YouTube."
No experience is required, and local positions, e.g., city council member, do not require large campaign budgets. Go to your local democrat/republican party chair and find out what's available. Then go to some prominent business people and let them know that you can be bought. The rest should be easy (except the part when you have to bend over and take it from your donors).
It is likely that automation will produce vehicles that will perform better than human-driven cars, trucks, and buses. That would certainly result in fewer accidents, reduced congestion, and MUCH lower costs. In there lies the rub. Since the major cost component of commercial transportation is 'the driver', automation would put tens of millions of people out of work just in the United States. For example, with a fleet of smaller, electric vehicle, the entire bus system of a city could be replaced. Rides would cost on par with bus tickets, and service would be 'on demand' like taxi service without the tips. Many people would choose not to own a car if a 'chauffeur driven' vehicle were readily available 'for hire'. Commuting would be transformed, and rush hour traffic would become manageable, reducing construction for road expansion. Car sales would plummet, as would gasoline sales and body shop service. Cars and trucks could run coast to coast with only fuel stops; so could trains, reducing motel and restaurant revenues. These are just a few examples of the seachange.
Every taxi, limo, bus, and truck driver will band together to stop this. Auto manufacturers, construction firms, and oil companies, fearing a drop in revenues, will join them. Lobbyist will fill every waiting room in Congress to ram 'drivers' rights' legislation. Their effort will make the RIAA look like kids watching Sesame Street.
Why not panic? If the glaciers melt and the oceans rise, then over a billion coastal people will be displaced, the food supply will be severely disrupted, and a large portion of our population will die off by drowning, overcrowding, or starvation. Then there are the land and water wars. We could lose 70% of our people, and civilization could be stalled for centuries.
. . . he's right. What if there is life on Venus, but unlike ours? What if there is a lot of it? Would we, perhaps, be better off ignoring it? Seriously, are we ready for such a discovery? It may sound silly, but I think there is a large segment of the human population who couldn't deal with it.
I love gall (the other kind, not bile). Dodd has gall for standing up to America and admitting who he really worked for, bravo! While others shrink away and obfuscate, Chris comes forward and cuts to the chase. I suspect he never plans to run again for public office (except the presidency, of course). With his connections in Congress and the White House, there is no chance of any legal reprisal. Kudos for standing up and telling the truth about who gets their way in Washington.
Now, when is somebody going to admit that the entire two-party system is rigged? Chris, you're on a roll; here's your chance.
They have been moving to IPv6 for some time -- http://www.ipv6.org.au/09ipv6summit/talks/OrcunTezel.pdf. Since China uses the same types of routers and DNS servers as the rest of the world (many of them copied), it could not efficiently use the 4,294,967,296 address space as a huge NAT'd network. It would be far easier to use IPv6, which can identify each node by region, city, organization, domain, even by a MAC address. IPv6 is a great way to run a country-wide Internet. Once they are done, China will be the network model for every multi-national corporation and most governments.
Eventually, pharmacology will focus on the use of indigenous microorganisms for treatment of most human ailments. It may not seem obvious now, but once the patents start churning out, it will become as plain as the snot-filled, puss-covered nose on your face.
Word up! If Microsoft really wanted to take over this market, they'd take the phone out of their superphone and just make it super. Seriously, imagine a device you could use just like a phone but without the carrier (e.g., AT&T, Verizon, Vodaphone). Not just some WiFi/Skype thing, but a 5G, video call, LEO satellite, wireless system with global coverage and no 'pay per second' or 'pay per bit' usage charges. Call it a "Microsoft fucks the carriers." That would sell BILLIONS.
. . . then you don't need it. America has been undergoing an awakening over the past decade, discovering that it doesn't need a lot of things, like a middle class or IT. It also doesn't need a fast food industry or Viagra, but that's another post. Corporate America, which has become the new first class, has discovered they don't need Americans -- from manual laborers to retail clerks to discovery lawyers. Soon they will discover that they don't need America. Downsizing, a popular term of the last century, is now the national motto. There are now only three areas of employment in America with a future -- (1) morticians, (2) tax preparers for the rich, and (3) military personnel (we need somebody to keep the nukes fresh). Everybody else should consider a career as an illegal alien in China.
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This is best explained by analogy, and I will try to put it into a /. context. Here goes --
Professor Xavier (a.k.a. Jobs) once started a school for the gifted, called Apple Computer. There, he and his close associate, Beast (a.k.a. Woz), created a wondrous thing, the personal computer. Upon hearing about this thing, another mutant, Magneto (a.k.a. Gates), came to visit with his close associate, Sabretooth (a.k.a Ballmer), to find out more about Apple. Magneto wanted to plunder Apple but knew that Dr. Xavier had a mysterious 'reality distortion field' that could probe his mind. So Magneto took a special shell (called DOS) that kept Dr. Xavier from reading his mind (there was no point to reading Sabretooth's). Dr. Xavier thought that Magneto was fairly benign and agreed to supply Magneto with his new invention, the Mac. Magneto took the Mac back to his lair in Redmond, and invented 'Windows' (BTW, Sabretooth wanted to call it 'Doors').
Since that day, Dr. Xavier and Magneto would meet at trade shows and Davos, where Magneto would boast of how his mutant Windows had conquered the other OSes -- MVS, VMS, Unix, OS/2, and even the Mac OS. Then, one day Magneto left his helmet in his luggage on the way to Davos, and it was lost by United Airlines (how odd?^). Upon meeting Magneto at Davos, Dr. Xavier realized all the things that Magneto had been hiding from him. So, he cranked-up his reality distortion field to super-strength, entered Magneto's mind, and left thoughts of tax shelters, charities, and vaccines in his head, along with the 'brilliant idea' of turning Magneto's company, Microsoft, over to Sabretooth. And, to top it off, Microsoft would bite a chunk of Apple for $150 million plus promise to develop Microsoft Office for the Mac OS FOREVER.
With that, Magneto 'retired' to save the world from disease and left Microsoft in the hands of Sabretooth, who made Microsoft more profitable than ever AND more irrelevant than ever. The rest is history.
THE END
Apologies to Stan Lee
OK, how about these quacks at the CDC -- http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm ??
. . . but short on facts, see http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/01/12/1813202/the-future-of-hi-tech-auto-theft for something more geek-worthy.
More people die or are injured due to 'accidents' in America's hospitals than on America's roads - http://www.naturalnews.com/023892_hospital_hospitals_health.html .
I'm sure you've considered the peripheral issues such as failover and security. Depending on your service, these can easily exceed the cost of your primary HW/SW implementation. Then there is SysOps vs DevOps, which costs can be another order of magnitude. Cloud tools and services can save a lot of money if you can manage them well and kill you if you can't. If you co-locate, consider the cost savings of local verses remote travel. It can pay to visit the people who run your hardware.
I am about to show my age, but once upon a time, news organizations were amongst the premier intelligence gathering organizations on Earth. No shit. Reporters could discover sources that foreign agents could never approach, keep secrets, and even upend a Presidency. Think of that. Now, they are just parts of conglomerates' entertainment divisions. So, what happened to the really good investigative journalists, who could dig diamonds from piles of crap? Well, some of them are at Stratfor.
Force choices onto the electorate and make those choices bad. Many will quickly grow cynical and weary, finally giving up on the process. That leaves the few to rule, using the 'elected leaders' as front men who can easily be replaced due to their lack of credibility. Of course, that would never happen here.
Anyone who has ever rebuilt an automobile engine could have guessed this.
It would be almost certain that Ford would survive a movie nuke in a prop refrigerator. Union rules specify that prop 1940s refrigerators weigh enough to require an entire crew to move. It was probably made of depleted uranium. As for the nuke, it was no more than 450 teraflops due to FX budget constraints. It takes at least an petaflop to kill an A-list movie star, and that is contractually stipulated.
If anyone ever thought that any race, creed, color or religion has ever been discriminated against, then they are about to see a hatred that may remind them of all previous. Autopiloted autos are societies first hard look at sentient machines. I know, they are not AI's David or I, robot's Sonny. However, they will be self propelled and, initially, not too bright. They will be scammed in a major way, mostly fraudulent accident claims. Moreover, every livery driver will see them as more of a threat than illegal aliens. Expect war.
I know, it would be a radical departure from the traditional Teller-Ulam fission/fusion design and may not yield nearly as much bang, but a pure fusion bomb would be much cleaner. Everyone knows how important cleanliness is when starting a war. We could send drones with fusion bombs practically anywhere we suspected 'rouge' nations to be plotting WMDs. By nuking them with fusion, we could cleanly demonstrate just how dangerous such power is in the hand of those who might abuse it WITHOUT leaving behind any fissionable materials that may be traced back to us or cause 'collateral damage'. Definitely a 'win-win' for stopping nuclear proliferation and increasing jobs at home via the American military industrial complex. The only question, "How could you build such a tidy-bomb?" I see a patent opportunity.
That is either radically cool or a forewarning of doom for our society, probably both.
Wow, I thought the SR-71 replaced the U-2 decades ago; and the SR-71 has been retired for years. Why can't the government just use Google Earth, Maps, etc? It would be a kudo for the 'do no evil' company. Serge could hire Bono to declare, "U-2 replaced by YouTube."
No experience is required, and local positions, e.g., city council member, do not require large campaign budgets. Go to your local democrat/republican party chair and find out what's available. Then go to some prominent business people and let them know that you can be bought. The rest should be easy (except the part when you have to bend over and take it from your donors).
It is likely that automation will produce vehicles that will perform better than human-driven cars, trucks, and buses. That would certainly result in fewer accidents, reduced congestion, and MUCH lower costs. In there lies the rub. Since the major cost component of commercial transportation is 'the driver', automation would put tens of millions of people out of work just in the United States. For example, with a fleet of smaller, electric vehicle, the entire bus system of a city could be replaced. Rides would cost on par with bus tickets, and service would be 'on demand' like taxi service without the tips. Many people would choose not to own a car if a 'chauffeur driven' vehicle were readily available 'for hire'. Commuting would be transformed, and rush hour traffic would become manageable, reducing construction for road expansion. Car sales would plummet, as would gasoline sales and body shop service. Cars and trucks could run coast to coast with only fuel stops; so could trains, reducing motel and restaurant revenues. These are just a few examples of the seachange.
Every taxi, limo, bus, and truck driver will band together to stop this. Auto manufacturers, construction firms, and oil companies, fearing a drop in revenues, will join them. Lobbyist will fill every waiting room in Congress to ram 'drivers' rights' legislation. Their effort will make the RIAA look like kids watching Sesame Street.
. . . on 'giving ebooks away for free' comes out.
Why not panic? If the glaciers melt and the oceans rise, then over a billion coastal people will be displaced, the food supply will be severely disrupted, and a large portion of our population will die off by drowning, overcrowding, or starvation. Then there are the land and water wars. We could lose 70% of our people, and civilization could be stalled for centuries.
Is that a bad thing?
. . . he's right. What if there is life on Venus, but unlike ours? What if there is a lot of it? Would we, perhaps, be better off ignoring it? Seriously, are we ready for such a discovery? It may sound silly, but I think there is a large segment of the human population who couldn't deal with it.
I love gall (the other kind, not bile). Dodd has gall for standing up to America and admitting who he really worked for, bravo! While others shrink away and obfuscate, Chris comes forward and cuts to the chase. I suspect he never plans to run again for public office (except the presidency, of course). With his connections in Congress and the White House, there is no chance of any legal reprisal. Kudos for standing up and telling the truth about who gets their way in Washington.
Now, when is somebody going to admit that the entire two-party system is rigged? Chris, you're on a roll; here's your chance.
The post is misleading; there is no Eastman Kodak. Kodak filed for bankruptcy. Eastman is doing fine - http://www.eastman.com./ They split in 1990.
They have been moving to IPv6 for some time -- http://www.ipv6.org.au/09ipv6summit/talks/OrcunTezel.pdf. Since China uses the same types of routers and DNS servers as the rest of the world (many of them copied), it could not efficiently use the 4,294,967,296 address space as a huge NAT'd network. It would be far easier to use IPv6, which can identify each node by region, city, organization, domain, even by a MAC address. IPv6 is a great way to run a country-wide Internet. Once they are done, China will be the network model for every multi-national corporation and most governments.
Eventually, pharmacology will focus on the use of indigenous microorganisms for treatment of most human ailments. It may not seem obvious now, but once the patents start churning out, it will become as plain as the snot-filled, puss-covered nose on your face.
I am writing a patent for taking portions of a day to slack off. The calendar will display all kinds of bullshit excuses, including writing a patent.
Word up! If Microsoft really wanted to take over this market, they'd take the phone out of their superphone and just make it super. Seriously, imagine a device you could use just like a phone but without the carrier (e.g., AT&T, Verizon, Vodaphone). Not just some WiFi/Skype thing, but a 5G, video call, LEO satellite, wireless system with global coverage and no 'pay per second' or 'pay per bit' usage charges. Call it a "Microsoft fucks the carriers." That would sell BILLIONS.
. . . then you don't need it. America has been undergoing an awakening over the past decade, discovering that it doesn't need a lot of things, like a middle class or IT. It also doesn't need a fast food industry or Viagra, but that's another post. Corporate America, which has become the new first class, has discovered they don't need Americans -- from manual laborers to retail clerks to discovery lawyers. Soon they will discover that they don't need America. Downsizing, a popular term of the last century, is now the national motto. There are now only three areas of employment in America with a future -- (1) morticians, (2) tax preparers for the rich, and (3) military personnel (we need somebody to keep the nukes fresh). Everybody else should consider a career as an illegal alien in China.