measure the best-ness of every single human - decide who gets to have children
Children cost money to raise. When the parent has no money, then the state has to step in and pay. If there were a system where people had to pay upfront for the costs of raising their children before they were conceived then it would introduce a financial control metric into the system. Being poor wouldn't necessarily be a problem -
there would be various providers offering you loans, and they would evaluate your ability to repay the loan before making it.
Sure, it isn't "fair" to people with no money that they can't have kids, but it also isn't "fair" that people with no money expect the rest of society to pay for their kids. If having a single child is important for society, then maybe the first one should be free, and you only pay after that. The bottom line is that if, at some point in the future, people don't self-regulate their fertility, and society can't afford a constantly expanding population, then the only societies that will prosper will be the ones that enforce regulations on fertility. Could you imagine China without One Child Per Couple? The population would have been approaching 2 billion by now. There are parts of Africa where overpopulation is already resulting in there being not enough land to support the people, and this is a driver of conflict and wars.
Physical size has very little to do with warfare these days, and even in the old days, smaller bodies were more biomechanically efficient and therefore better in many real world survival scenarios. The history of warfare and survival is littered with people who did amazing things living on survival rations (1000 cal/day).
This whole concept does remind me of some sci-fi book I once read, set in a future where nation states had broken down, and groups had genetically engineered to survive e.g. one group had by choice become all female, lesbians, and hence developed a society with less testosterone that was more peaceful and intellectual etc. Of course, they could still successfully defend themselves from outside threats.
"I completely agree with you that it is a very very small minority that thinks so (and I said that to Quentin). And I am specifically not thinking of Richard Stallman. I know that he is not against business. He is only for freedom. I have no issue with RMS; on the contrary I have huge respect for his consistent insistence on software freedom. I don't think the world gives him enough credit for that,"
It seems that Mickos said "some people think it's immoral to make a profit" when he actually meant "some people don't like particular open source business models that emphasize profit over the software project". The allegation from the article is that Eucalyptus refused to integrate source code modifications that had been developed at NASA for their open source product, instead insisting that NASA should buy a license for the closed source version of their product. This sounds a bit familiar, I remember similar comments being aimed at MySQL AB when they insisted that anybody using the MySQL client library had to purchase a commercial license or GPL their application, which was also a decision that, on the face of it, benefited the MySQL corporation more than its users.
1. That AntiSec was the only group to hack the card data
2. That AntiSec profited from this crime, either by committing the actual credit card fraud, or selling the card data to someone who did
3. That AntiSec is a monolithic group with a management structure that can command its minions to do/do not do/whatever with data they obtain therefore making the group responsible for the actions of an individual
You are assuming that, in the countries mentioned, "firing bad teachers" is the key to their success in education. In reality, I suspect that they do not fire many teachers at all.
Which is why they're making good money on the Apple market, right?
Are they? How much money are they making on the Apple market? How much of their time is spent supporting the Apple platform? How are other developers able to make money selling Android games if the platform is "unsustainable"? TFS says:
it spent about 20 percent of its time supporting the platform but only ever made five percent or less of the company's revenue
Why didn't they just reduce the amount of time they spent supporting the platform? What other platforms do they sell on? Why are Android users 5% of revenue? Why are they having these random issues that other developers don't seem to be having? Why do they claim to be "modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs" instead of using the standard APIs? Why are they walking users through failed installs instead of fixing the bugs in their installer? Why did they architect their game so that a 50MB download wasn't enough? Why do they insist that they can't modify their software to support more than that, even when Google is offering 4GB of free hosting? How come they claim that Android takes up 20% of their time, when in their own words "Battleheart was an effortless port (to Android)". Why does he diss Android when in an earlier blog post he said, "Being featured on the Android Market is similarly lucrative to being featured on iTunes: we saw almost a 300% sales increase this past weekend thanks to the feature on the store.... We're currently #16 on the top paid list for android. Assuming the charts are based strictly on volume, the same volume of sales roughly equates to the top 80-100 on iTunes's iPhone chart. Not bad..... Daily revenue from Battleheart on Android is fairly close, within 80%, of it's iOS counterpart at the moment. "..
How did this even make it to Slashdot? This blog (yes, blog) has 17 posts - ever! A blog with 17 posts in two years! Wow. And yet this is supposed to be some important, significant information source, which we can base our future decisions on. Yeah.
One last quote from the blog... "Edit: Just to be clear (since I'm getting more traffic than expected), my experience with Android has been overwhelmingly positive, and I have every intention of continuing to support the platform. " Hmmm.
the text gets sent using cheap data instead of expensive SMS.
Expensive SMS? Every tariff I've seen recently includes thousands of texts a month, bundled into the monthly fee. Maybe if you are on PAYG *and* can find a cheap data tariff *and* you already pay some expensive per-SMS fee, then it's might to be useful, but for the vast majority of people on contracts it will make absolutely no difference to their bills.
there is close to 0 public support for another war
Not true. Americans are sick of *some* wars; 75% of Americans support withdrawal from Afghanistan by Obama's timetable or earlier. But... 70% of Americans believe Iran already has nuclear weapons, and 58% of Americans say they support U.S. military attacks on Iran. The Young Turks: Can we stop a war with Iran?
5000 or so dead soldiers
6,300 U.S. soldiers killed, 46,000 U.S. soldiers wounded, estimated hundreds of thousands of civilian dead, and $3 trillion of public money given to "defense contractors".
How convenient. After 2001, 44% of Americans believed that the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi, and 70% of Americans believed Saddam did 9/11. In fact, not a single one of the hijackers were Iraqi, and secularist Hussein and Islamist bin Laden were known to hate each other. It was all a lie. Even now, after the whole argument has been completely discredited time and again, including by the CIA, 41% of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11. But now Iran did it, so we have to attack them.... omg..
I can't believe people are falling for this again...
Those who donated to the project prior to completion have to wait for their boards while the folk who order direct get them shipped first?
Why don't you let the people who donated comment instead of putting words in their mouths? How about this hypothesis: many donors saw a charity with a good idea, one that they liked and wanted to support, and they saw their donation as exactly that and nothing more - there was no guarantee that they would be first in line, and they didn't expect that there would be any such guarantee in the future. They just wanted to show their support for a cool project that had little financial backing.
When you donate to a charity, do you always expect to get something in return? Is that how you think the world works for everyone?
The news here really isn't the retailers that have signed up, it is the fact that the distribution model has now changed. The retailers are licensing the board designs and handing their own manufacturing, which means that the 10,000 order limit and months lead time will disappear, since both were limitations of the Pi Foundation not having enough money in the bank to finance large scale manufacturing.
There is absolutely no reason why other manufacturers can't license the designs, e.g. Foxconn could license it, make it in their factories, and ship direct into their existing shipping channels. Chinese factories can turn this out and ship direct on ebay. If the Pi Foundation is now ready to license to everyone (I presume the licenses with Farnell and RS are not exclusive) this is going to end up making the Pi available more widely and more cheaply than they could ever have done with their direct manufacturing model.
Seriously, look at ARM or any of the other electronics design companies, and then tell me that licensed manufacturing isn't going to work better. This one change to the business model will increased their capacity from 10,000 units every 8 weeks or so, up to whatever is financially viable for third party licensers to invest. It means their manufacturing capabilty can scale to demand, instead of being limited by the fixed amount of money they have in the bank.
None of the laws you cite are valid, because: Assange was not under the jurisdiction of the United States at the time. He can't commit treason against the U.S. in the same way that you can't commit treason against China. As far as I know there is no international law covering postal services - this is covered by cross-boder treaties like the 1874 Treaty of Bern, not the legal system. International law covers things like war and genocide, it does not cover privacy of communications. Revealing the identity of intelligence officers isn't an international law crime either, otherwise all those Americans who mirrored the MI6 agent list would have been prosecuted.
If the actions of Assange were a crime in the country that he was resident in at the time, then it is their responsibility to prosecure him, under their own laws. At the time of the release, legal commenters said that it would be very difficult to prosecute, because the leaks were in turn published by the New York Times: in effect, any action against Assange would also have to be an action against the NYT, which would bring up First Amendment issues. I also recall reading at the time that no U.S. newspaper has ever been prosecuted for publishing leaked information.
I think a better metric is the number of fatalities.
This ignores the amount of power generated per fatality. A better metric is "deaths per GWy (gigawatt-year)." There's a graph that compares by this metric, nuclear comes out well, oil is the worst.
The problem with nuclear isn't really the technology itself, it's the irresponsible people that run the plants. Here's a quote from that link:
The THORP
reprocessing facility at Sellafield, built in 1994 at a cost of £1.8 billion, had
a growing leak from a broken pipe from August 2004 to April 2005. Over
eight months, the leak let 85 000 litres of uranium-rich fluid flow into a
sump which was equipped with safety systems that were designed to detect
immediately any leak of as little as 15 litres. But the leak went undetected
because the operators hadn’t completed the checks that ensured
the safety systems were working; and the operators were in the habit of
ignoring safety alarms anyway.
The safety system came with belt and braces. Independent of the failed
safety alarms, routine safety-measurements of fluids in the sump should
have detected the abnormal presence of uranium within one month of the
start of the leak; but the operators often didn’t bother taking these routine
measurements, because they felt too busy; and when they did take mea-
surements that detected the abnormal presence of uranium in the sump
(on 28 August 2004, 26 November 2004, and 24 February 2005), no action
was taken.
By April 2005, 22 tons of uranium had leaked, but still none of the
leak-detection systems detected the leak. The leak was finally detected by
accountancy, when the bean-counters noticed that they were getting 10%
less uranium out than their clients claimed they’d put in! Thank goodness
this private company had a profit motive, hey? The criticism from theChief Inspector of Nuclear Installations was withering: “The Plant was
operated in a culture that seemed to allow instruments to operate in alarm
mode rather than questioning the alarm and rectifying the relevant fault.”
If we let private companies build new reactors, how can we ensure that
higher safety standards are adhered to? I don’t know.
Price could still be an issue; there's more up-front cost, and the need to replace the batteries every 10-15 years
Which isn't really the issue that people make it out to be. The "replacement rate" for cars is about 15 years anyway, and the embodied cost of making a new car every 15 years works out at 14 kWh per day (link) And if you do it right, then electric cars also solve the energy demand management problem. And electric vehicles are much more energy efficient than other vehicles, comparative graph
Do you really think that the Arabs living under bad governments needed someone to tell them that they had badly run corrupt governments
Strawman argument. The claimed effect of Wikileaks wasn't to "tell them how bad their government was", it was to "confirm" it. There is a difference between suspecting that your leaders are corrupt, and actually seeing classified intelligence reports from another country's diplomats detailing the exact corruption that is going on, and basically stating that your government operates more like the Mafia.
Would the revolution have happend without Facebook? Possibly - Berlin Wall fell long before people commonly had access to email. But does that mean that Facebook wasn't a factor? Obviously not: the fact that something was possible without X (where X is Facebook, Wikileaks etc.) does not mean that X was not a factor in this particular case.
Nobody is claiming that the Arab Spring happened because of Wikileaks, or because of Facebook or the internet. What people are claiming is that these things were contributing factors. Amnesty International named Wikileaks, the Internet, technology and journalism as being catalysts of the Arab Spring It's also worth pointing out that Qaddafi accused Wikileaks of being behind the Arab Spring in Tunisia, so it's not as if it's only Wikileaks supporters who saw Wikileaks as being a factor. Julian Assange has said Wikileaks played a role, but was not the major factor in the Arab Spring:
He said WikiLeaks had ''played a significant role'' in the uprisings sweeping the Arab world by publishing secret documents about those countries' authoritarian regimes, but the site was not the major factor in the movements.
''It does look like we played a significant role in it. That said, the tinder of the Middle East was drying,'' he said, crediting the internet and satellite TV stations like al-Jazeera with major roles in the uprisings.
There’s been a lot of speculation, notably in the U.S., over the role social media played in the Tunisian revolution (it sure feels nice to say those two words.)
Wikileaks may have played a minor atmospheric rule in baring to the whole world what was whispered about the Ben Ali regime’s corruption, showing that US diplomats were aghast at the mafia nature of his regime.
Social media, from Twitter and Facebook to video upload sites, were crucial in spreading the word about what happened in a country where the press was tightly muzzled. It generated tremendous amounts of solidarity in the Arab world in beyond. But it’s just a means of communication, not a driver in itself.
At the end of the day, Tunisians took the streets because they had enough. They risked getting shot and beaten with no guarantee of success. And it’s likely that if they hadn’t heard about events around their country through Twitter and Facebook, they would have heard it by telephone.
Most (all?) universities have a union to represent the needs of the students. Get them to raise the issue and it's likely to be a lot more effective than one man's personal protest.
oil has many substitutes, since we have centuries of fossil fuel supply, there will not be peak of fossil fuel.
Fossil fuels are a finite resource. There is no way there can not be a peak. Hubbert "concluded that no finite resource could sustain exponential growth. At some point, the rate of extraction will have to peak and then decline until the resource is exhausted."
Many countries have already experienced fossil fuel production peaks. The UK hit peak coal in 1913. Since then, production has fallen from 287m tons to 15m tons today. The same thing will eventually happen to China and all of the other coal producing nations. Fossil fuels are a finite resource; there are no new fossil fuels.
natural gas from fraking alone satisfies all energy needs for the next 150 years.
I doubt it. The average American consumes about 250 kWh per day. Natural gas accounts for something like 20% of that. Also, energy need is not constant, it will grow over the next 150 years because the population will grow. You can't just take total potential supply and divide it by the existing consumption, when demand is constantly rising.
Where does this 150 year figure come from anyway? The last time someone claimed 100 years, it turned out to be bogus:
By the same logic, you can claim to be a multibillionaire, including all your "probable, possible, and speculative resources."
Assuming that the United States continues to use about 24 tcf per annum, then, only an 11-year supply of natural gas is certain. The other 89 years' worth has not yet been shown to exist or to be recoverable.
Even that comparably modest estimate of 11 years’ supply may be optimistic. Those 273 tcf are located in reserves that are undrilled, but are adjacent to drilled tracts where gas has been produced. Due to large lateral differences in the geology of shale plays, production can vary considerably from adjacent wells.
If and only if we can create an efficient means of power storage
We already have one: Pumped storage. The existing pumped storage systems are 75% efficient, and scientists think they can make future ones that are 90%+ efficient. You don't even need land: "Thinking further outside the box, one could imagine getting away from
lakes and reservoirs, putting half of the facility in an underground cham-
ber. A pumped-storage chamber one kilometre below London has been
mooted."
The amount of vegetable matter that you need to produce the massive amounts of oil that humans use, would take up all the worlds arable land,leaving us nowhere to produce food for the every expanding population.
For comparison, world oil consumption is 80 million barrels
per day, which, shared between six billion people, is 23 kWh/d/p. So even
if all of Africa were covered with jatropha plantations, the power produced
would be only one third of world oil consumption.
The only thing that seems potentially viable is algae grown in water enriched with co2 captured from industrial plants. But obviously that requires some advanced carbon capture technology. It would also require land, though not as much as other biofuel ideas.
What about algae?
Algae are just plants, so everything I’ve said so far applies to algae. Slimy
underwater plants are no more efficient at photosynthesis than their ter-
restrial cousins. But there is one trick that I haven’t discussed, which is standard practice in the algae-to-biodiesel community: they grow their
algae in water heavily enriched with carbon dioxide, which might be col-
lected from power stations or other industrial facilities. It takes much less
effort for plants to photosynthesize if the carbon dioxide has already been
concentrated for them.
In a sunny spot in America, in ponds fed with
concentrated CO2 (concentrated to 10%), Ron Putt of Auburn University
says that algae can grow at 30 g per square metre per day, producing 0.01
litres of biodiesel per square metre per day. This corresponds to a power
per unit pond area of 4 W/m2 – similar to the Bavaria photovoltaic farm.
If you wanted to drive a typical car (doing 12 km per litre) a distance of
50 km per day, then you’d need 420 square metres of algae-ponds just to
power your car; for comparison, the area of the UK per person is 4000
square metres, of which 69 m2 is water (figure 6.8).
Please don’t forget that
it’s essential to feed these ponds with concentrated carbon dioxide. So this
technology would be limited both by land area – how much of the UK we
could turn into algal ponds – and by the availability of concentrated CO2,
the capture of which would have an energy cost (a topic discussed in Chap-
ters 23 and 31). Let’s check the limit imposed by the concentrated CO2. To
grow 30 g of algae per m2 per day would require at least 60 g of CO2 per
m2 per day (because the CO2 molecule has more mass per carbon atom
than the molecules in algae).
If all the CO2 from all UK power stations
were captured (roughly 212 tons per year per person), it could service 230
square metres per person of the algal ponds described above – roughly 6%
of the country. This area would deliver biodiesel with a power of 24 kWh
per day per person, assuming that the numbers for sunny America apply
here.
A plausible vision? Perhaps on one tenth of that scale? I’ll leave it to
you to decide.
Or rather, they don't consider that the subsidiary that sold the trademark to Apple's shell company had the authorisation to sell the Chinese rights, despite the parent being party to, and signing, the deal.
This is not the argument in the U.S. case, which appears to be based on whether Apple fraudulently obtained the trademark by using a fictitious company. I have no idea how the courts in California treat something like that - techcrunch.com says "If true, this is a fairly serious offense, and Apple’s ownership of the trademark could be overturned." source
I suspect Apple knew what they were doing. They are trying to deal with two huge problems:
1) Apple is a high-end consumer company, like with PCs they initially do rather well, but over time they end up fighting an ecosystem of other manufacturers who are constantly undercutting them and eroding their market share. That's capitalism, but as Apple won't join the fight for the low-end, they cede it to others. And over time, the low-end gets good enough for most people, and Apple's market share drops to single figures.
2) Apple had no worthwhile patents on the actual technology of the iPhone, which was already invented by 2007 (design patents don't count). Mobile browsers, email, etc. had already been done for many years, and all of the hardware was licensed and patented by others.
Apple's response to 1) was to go on the offensive, and try to use the handful of patents they did have which could be applied to smart phones, and use those patents to shut out competitive products (Android being the prime competitor). Apple's response to 2) is to argue that their patents from the last few years are the equal of those mobile patents that other companies have acquired in the last 20 years. i.e. if you want to make a modern smart phone, then you will need to do a deal to license Apple's patents, regardless of how many other patents you have. Apple can then try to use the license terms to negate the advantage of its competitors multi-decade mobile patent portfolios.
It is an interesting approach, they are playing for keeps in a very high value market. The worst case scenario for them is that they end up with global market share in the single digits, as happened with desktop computers, and their current strategy reflects this overriding concern. At best, they kill Android and regain their 90%+ of the smartphone market. What will probably happen is something in the middle of those two extremes.
The situation is a bit more complex than that. Saudi Arabia is run by the House of Saud, a monarchistic dictatorship, who have backed the dictators in the Arab Spring including the sending of troops and tanks to Bahrain to brutally suppress protests there. They are also accused of assassinating the leaders of their own protests. And some of the upper parts of the monarchy, and parts of Saudi Intelligence, are accused of backing terrorism, see The Kingdom and the Towers:
In support of his claim that Saudi Arabia supported terrorism, Khilewi spoke of an episode relevant to the first, 1993, attempt to bring down the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. “A Saudi citizen carrying a Saudi diplomatic passport,” he said, “gave money to Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the World Trade Center bombing,” when the al-Qaeda terrorist was in the Philippines. The Saudi relationship with Yousef, the defector claimed, “is secret and goes through Saudi intelligence.”
When Khalifa returned to Saudi Arabia, in 1995—following detention in the United States and subsequent acquittal on terrorism charges in Jordan—he was, according to C.I.A. bin Laden chief Michael Scheuer, met by a limousine and a welcome home from “a high-ranking official.” A Philippine newspaper would suggest that the official had been Prince Sultan, then a deputy prime minister and minister of defense and aviation, today the heir to the Saudi throne.
In sworn statements after 9/11, former Taliban intelligence chief Mohammed Khaksar said that in 1998 Prince Turki, chief of Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Department (G.I.D.), sealed a deal under which bin Laden agreed not to attack Saudi targets. In return, Saudi Arabia would provide funds and material assistance to the Taliban, not demand bin Laden’s extradition, and not bring pressure to close down al-Qaeda training camps. Saudi businesses, meanwhile, would ensure that money also flowed directly to bin Laden.
No transaction fees, but cash is constantly devalued by inflation. It's like a hidden ~4% annual fee. If you worked out the total amount the average person spends in cash per year, and the total number of transactions, then you could figure out the effective "transaction fee" of inflation.
I'd argue that cash still exists for the basic reason that no government has yet introduced an effective replacement. And without government backing, any new standard is unlikely to become nationally accepted. Transaction fees alone can not be the reason - even if debit card transactions were no fee (which they already appear to be to the purchaser) people would still use cash, because it requires no extra equipment, no cards, is accepted everywhere, and transactions are often faster (bars that trialled ecash cards found that the overall process was slower).
Slashdot Mirror
measure the best-ness of every single human - decide who gets to have children
Children cost money to raise. When the parent has no money, then the state has to step in and pay. If there were a system where people had to pay upfront for the costs of raising their children before they were conceived then it would introduce a financial control metric into the system. Being poor wouldn't necessarily be a problem - there would be various providers offering you loans, and they would evaluate your ability to repay the loan before making it.
Sure, it isn't "fair" to people with no money that they can't have kids, but it also isn't "fair" that people with no money expect the rest of society to pay for their kids. If having a single child is important for society, then maybe the first one should be free, and you only pay after that. The bottom line is that if, at some point in the future, people don't self-regulate their fertility, and society can't afford a constantly expanding population, then the only societies that will prosper will be the ones that enforce regulations on fertility. Could you imagine China without One Child Per Couple? The population would have been approaching 2 billion by now. There are parts of Africa where overpopulation is already resulting in there being not enough land to support the people, and this is a driver of conflict and wars.
Physical size has very little to do with warfare these days, and even in the old days, smaller bodies were more biomechanically efficient and therefore better in many real world survival scenarios. The history of warfare and survival is littered with people who did amazing things living on survival rations (1000 cal/day).
This whole concept does remind me of some sci-fi book I once read, set in a future where nation states had broken down, and groups had genetically engineered to survive e.g. one group had by choice become all female, lesbians, and hence developed a society with less testosterone that was more peaceful and intellectual etc. Of course, they could still successfully defend themselves from outside threats.
The effort to perfect man into someone's ideal image has always resulted in mass death.
Or, you know, vaccines for polio and other crippling diseases, modern medicine, farming...
"I completely agree with you that it is a very very small minority that thinks so (and I said that to Quentin). And I am specifically not thinking of Richard Stallman. I know that he is not against business. He is only for freedom. I have no issue with RMS; on the contrary I have huge respect for his consistent insistence on software freedom. I don't think the world gives him enough credit for that,"
It seems that Mickos said "some people think it's immoral to make a profit" when he actually meant "some people don't like particular open source business models that emphasize profit over the software project". The allegation from the article is that Eucalyptus refused to integrate source code modifications that had been developed at NASA for their open source product, instead insisting that NASA should buy a license for the closed source version of their product. This sounds a bit familiar, I remember similar comments being aimed at MySQL AB when they insisted that anybody using the MySQL client library had to purchase a commercial license or GPL their application, which was also a decision that, on the face of it, benefited the MySQL corporation more than its users.
Not "leaked documents" or "liberated intelligence." Plain old fashioned credit card fraud.
You have made several possibly incorrect assumptions here:
1. That AntiSec was the only group to hack the card data
2. That AntiSec profited from this crime, either by committing the actual credit card fraud, or selling the card data to someone who did
3. That AntiSec is a monolithic group with a management structure that can command its minions to do/do not do/whatever with data they obtain therefore making the group responsible for the actions of an individual
You are assuming that, in the countries mentioned, "firing bad teachers" is the key to their success in education. In reality, I suspect that they do not fire many teachers at all.
Which is why they're making good money on the Apple market, right?
Are they? How much money are they making on the Apple market? How much of their time is spent supporting the Apple platform? How are other developers able to make money selling Android games if the platform is "unsustainable"? TFS says:
it spent about 20 percent of its time supporting the platform but only ever made five percent or less of the company's revenue
Why didn't they just reduce the amount of time they spent supporting the platform? What other platforms do they sell on? Why are Android users 5% of revenue? Why are they having these random issues that other developers don't seem to be having? Why do they claim to be "modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs" instead of using the standard APIs? Why are they walking users through failed installs instead of fixing the bugs in their installer? Why did they architect their game so that a 50MB download wasn't enough? Why do they insist that they can't modify their software to support more than that, even when Google is offering 4GB of free hosting? How come they claim that Android takes up 20% of their time, when in their own words "Battleheart was an effortless port (to Android)". Why does he diss Android when in an earlier blog post he said, "Being featured on the Android Market is similarly lucrative to being featured on iTunes: we saw almost a 300% sales increase this past weekend thanks to the feature on the store.... We're currently #16 on the top paid list for android. Assuming the charts are based strictly on volume, the same volume of sales roughly equates to the top 80-100 on iTunes's iPhone chart. Not bad..... Daily revenue from Battleheart on Android is fairly close, within 80%, of it's iOS counterpart at the moment. "..
How did this even make it to Slashdot? This blog (yes, blog) has 17 posts - ever! A blog with 17 posts in two years! Wow. And yet this is supposed to be some important, significant information source, which we can base our future decisions on. Yeah.
One last quote from the blog... "Edit: Just to be clear (since I'm getting more traffic than expected), my experience with Android has been overwhelmingly positive, and I have every intention of continuing to support the platform. " Hmmm.
the text gets sent using cheap data instead of expensive SMS.
Expensive SMS? Every tariff I've seen recently includes thousands of texts a month, bundled into the monthly fee. Maybe if you are on PAYG *and* can find a cheap data tariff *and* you already pay some expensive per-SMS fee, then it's might to be useful, but for the vast majority of people on contracts it will make absolutely no difference to their bills.
Iran has funded all kinds of terrorism in the world
And how many democracies has the U.S. government overthrown? How many dictators supported? How many civilian airliners shot down? How many scientists murdered?
People in glass houses....
there is close to 0 public support for another war
Not true. Americans are sick of *some* wars; 75% of Americans support withdrawal from Afghanistan by Obama's timetable or earlier. But... 70% of Americans believe Iran already has nuclear weapons, and 58% of Americans say they support U.S. military attacks on Iran. The Young Turks: Can we stop a war with Iran?
5000 or so dead soldiers
6,300 U.S. soldiers killed, 46,000 U.S. soldiers wounded, estimated hundreds of thousands of civilian dead, and $3 trillion of public money given to "defense contractors".
And now Iran is being blamed for 9/11: U.S. District Court Rules Iran Behind 9/11 Attacks (December 23rd 2011)
How convenient. After 2001, 44% of Americans believed that the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi, and 70% of Americans believed Saddam did 9/11. In fact, not a single one of the hijackers were Iraqi, and secularist Hussein and Islamist bin Laden were known to hate each other. It was all a lie. Even now, after the whole argument has been completely discredited time and again, including by the CIA, 41% of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11. But now Iran did it, so we have to attack them.... omg..
I can't believe people are falling for this again...
Those who donated to the project prior to completion have to wait for their boards while the folk who order direct get them shipped first?
Why don't you let the people who donated comment instead of putting words in their mouths? How about this hypothesis: many donors saw a charity with a good idea, one that they liked and wanted to support, and they saw their donation as exactly that and nothing more - there was no guarantee that they would be first in line, and they didn't expect that there would be any such guarantee in the future. They just wanted to show their support for a cool project that had little financial backing.
When you donate to a charity, do you always expect to get something in return? Is that how you think the world works for everyone?
The news here really isn't the retailers that have signed up, it is the fact that the distribution model has now changed. The retailers are licensing the board designs and handing their own manufacturing, which means that the 10,000 order limit and months lead time will disappear, since both were limitations of the Pi Foundation not having enough money in the bank to finance large scale manufacturing.
There is absolutely no reason why other manufacturers can't license the designs, e.g. Foxconn could license it, make it in their factories, and ship direct into their existing shipping channels. Chinese factories can turn this out and ship direct on ebay. If the Pi Foundation is now ready to license to everyone (I presume the licenses with Farnell and RS are not exclusive) this is going to end up making the Pi available more widely and more cheaply than they could ever have done with their direct manufacturing model.
Seriously, look at ARM or any of the other electronics design companies, and then tell me that licensed manufacturing isn't going to work better. This one change to the business model will increased their capacity from 10,000 units every 8 weeks or so, up to whatever is financially viable for third party licensers to invest. It means their manufacturing capabilty can scale to demand, instead of being limited by the fixed amount of money they have in the bank.
None of the laws you cite are valid, because: Assange was not under the jurisdiction of the United States at the time. He can't commit treason against the U.S. in the same way that you can't commit treason against China. As far as I know there is no international law covering postal services - this is covered by cross-boder treaties like the 1874 Treaty of Bern, not the legal system. International law covers things like war and genocide, it does not cover privacy of communications. Revealing the identity of intelligence officers isn't an international law crime either, otherwise all those Americans who mirrored the MI6 agent list would have been prosecuted.
If the actions of Assange were a crime in the country that he was resident in at the time, then it is their responsibility to prosecure him, under their own laws. At the time of the release, legal commenters said that it would be very difficult to prosecute, because the leaks were in turn published by the New York Times: in effect, any action against Assange would also have to be an action against the NYT, which would bring up First Amendment issues. I also recall reading at the time that no U.S. newspaper has ever been prosecuted for publishing leaked information.
I think a better metric is the number of fatalities.
This ignores the amount of power generated per fatality. A better metric is "deaths per GWy (gigawatt-year)." There's a graph that compares by this metric, nuclear comes out well, oil is the worst.
The problem with nuclear isn't really the technology itself, it's the irresponsible people that run the plants. Here's a quote from that link:
The THORP reprocessing facility at Sellafield, built in 1994 at a cost of £1.8 billion, had a growing leak from a broken pipe from August 2004 to April 2005. Over eight months, the leak let 85 000 litres of uranium-rich fluid flow into a sump which was equipped with safety systems that were designed to detect immediately any leak of as little as 15 litres. But the leak went undetected because the operators hadn’t completed the checks that ensured the safety systems were working; and the operators were in the habit of ignoring safety alarms anyway.
The safety system came with belt and braces. Independent of the failed safety alarms, routine safety-measurements of fluids in the sump should have detected the abnormal presence of uranium within one month of the start of the leak; but the operators often didn’t bother taking these routine measurements, because they felt too busy; and when they did take mea- surements that detected the abnormal presence of uranium in the sump (on 28 August 2004, 26 November 2004, and 24 February 2005), no action was taken.
By April 2005, 22 tons of uranium had leaked, but still none of the leak-detection systems detected the leak. The leak was finally detected by accountancy, when the bean-counters noticed that they were getting 10% less uranium out than their clients claimed they’d put in! Thank goodness this private company had a profit motive, hey? The criticism from theChief Inspector of Nuclear Installations was withering: “The Plant was operated in a culture that seemed to allow instruments to operate in alarm mode rather than questioning the alarm and rectifying the relevant fault.”
If we let private companies build new reactors, how can we ensure that higher safety standards are adhered to? I don’t know.
Price could still be an issue; there's more up-front cost, and the need to replace the batteries every 10-15 years
Which isn't really the issue that people make it out to be. The "replacement rate" for cars is about 15 years anyway, and the embodied cost of making a new car every 15 years works out at 14 kWh per day (link) And if you do it right, then electric cars also solve the energy demand management problem. And electric vehicles are much more energy efficient than other vehicles, comparative graph
Do you really think that the Arabs living under bad governments needed someone to tell them that they had badly run corrupt governments
Strawman argument. The claimed effect of Wikileaks wasn't to "tell them how bad their government was", it was to "confirm" it. There is a difference between suspecting that your leaders are corrupt, and actually seeing classified intelligence reports from another country's diplomats detailing the exact corruption that is going on, and basically stating that your government operates more like the Mafia.
Would the revolution have happend without Facebook? Possibly - Berlin Wall fell long before people commonly had access to email. But does that mean that Facebook wasn't a factor? Obviously not: the fact that something was possible without X (where X is Facebook, Wikileaks etc.) does not mean that X was not a factor in this particular case.
Nobody is claiming that the Arab Spring happened because of Wikileaks, or because of Facebook or the internet. What people are claiming is that these things were contributing factors. Amnesty International named Wikileaks, the Internet, technology and journalism as being catalysts of the Arab Spring It's also worth pointing out that Qaddafi accused Wikileaks of being behind the Arab Spring in Tunisia, so it's not as if it's only Wikileaks supporters who saw Wikileaks as being a factor. Julian Assange has said Wikileaks played a role, but was not the major factor in the Arab Spring:
He said WikiLeaks had ''played a significant role'' in the uprisings sweeping the Arab world by publishing secret documents about those countries' authoritarian regimes, but the site was not the major factor in the movements.
''It does look like we played a significant role in it. That said, the tinder of the Middle East was drying,'' he said, crediting the internet and satellite TV stations like al-Jazeera with major roles in the uprisings.
Even those who reject the Wikileaks factor do admit it "may have played a minor atmospheric rule":
There’s been a lot of speculation, notably in the U.S., over the role social media played in the Tunisian revolution (it sure feels nice to say those two words.)
Wikileaks may have played a minor atmospheric rule in baring to the whole world what was whispered about the Ben Ali regime’s corruption, showing that US diplomats were aghast at the mafia nature of his regime.
Social media, from Twitter and Facebook to video upload sites, were crucial in spreading the word about what happened in a country where the press was tightly muzzled. It generated tremendous amounts of solidarity in the Arab world in beyond. But it’s just a means of communication, not a driver in itself.
At the end of the day, Tunisians took the streets because they had enough. They risked getting shot and beaten with no guarantee of success. And it’s likely that if they hadn’t heard about events around their country through Twitter and Facebook, they would have heard it by telephone.
Most (all?) universities have a union to represent the needs of the students. Get them to raise the issue and it's likely to be a lot more effective than one man's personal protest.
oil has many substitutes, since we have centuries of fossil fuel supply, there will not be peak of fossil fuel.
Fossil fuels are a finite resource. There is no way there can not be a peak. Hubbert "concluded that no finite resource could sustain exponential growth. At some point, the rate of extraction will have to peak and then decline until the resource is exhausted."
Many countries have already experienced fossil fuel production peaks. The UK hit peak coal in 1913. Since then, production has fallen from 287m tons to 15m tons today. The same thing will eventually happen to China and all of the other coal producing nations. Fossil fuels are a finite resource; there are no new fossil fuels.
natural gas from fraking alone satisfies all energy needs for the next 150 years.
I doubt it. The average American consumes about 250 kWh per day. Natural gas accounts for something like 20% of that. Also, energy need is not constant, it will grow over the next 150 years because the population will grow. You can't just take total potential supply and divide it by the existing consumption, when demand is constantly rising.
Where does this 150 year figure come from anyway? The last time someone claimed 100 years, it turned out to be bogus:
By the same logic, you can claim to be a multibillionaire, including all your "probable, possible, and speculative resources."
Assuming that the United States continues to use about 24 tcf per annum, then, only an 11-year supply of natural gas is certain. The other 89 years' worth has not yet been shown to exist or to be recoverable.
Even that comparably modest estimate of 11 years’ supply may be optimistic. Those 273 tcf are located in reserves that are undrilled, but are adjacent to drilled tracts where gas has been produced. Due to large lateral differences in the geology of shale plays, production can vary considerably from adjacent wells.
If and only if we can create an efficient means of power storage
We already have one: Pumped storage. The existing pumped storage systems are 75% efficient, and scientists think they can make future ones that are 90%+ efficient. You don't even need land: "Thinking further outside the box, one could imagine getting away from lakes and reservoirs, putting half of the facility in an underground cham- ber. A pumped-storage chamber one kilometre below London has been mooted."
The amount of vegetable matter that you need to produce the massive amounts of oil that humans use, would take up all the worlds arable land,leaving us nowhere to produce food for the every expanding population.
Indeed. Sustainable energy without the hot air contains the figures. It doesn't look good even for the "promising" plants:
For comparison, world oil consumption is 80 million barrels per day, which, shared between six billion people, is 23 kWh/d/p. So even if all of Africa were covered with jatropha plantations, the power produced would be only one third of world oil consumption.
The only thing that seems potentially viable is algae grown in water enriched with co2 captured from industrial plants. But obviously that requires some advanced carbon capture technology. It would also require land, though not as much as other biofuel ideas.
What about algae?
Algae are just plants, so everything I’ve said so far applies to algae. Slimy underwater plants are no more efficient at photosynthesis than their ter- restrial cousins. But there is one trick that I haven’t discussed, which is standard practice in the algae-to-biodiesel community: they grow their algae in water heavily enriched with carbon dioxide, which might be col- lected from power stations or other industrial facilities. It takes much less effort for plants to photosynthesize if the carbon dioxide has already been concentrated for them.
In a sunny spot in America, in ponds fed with concentrated CO2 (concentrated to 10%), Ron Putt of Auburn University says that algae can grow at 30 g per square metre per day, producing 0.01 litres of biodiesel per square metre per day. This corresponds to a power per unit pond area of 4 W/m2 – similar to the Bavaria photovoltaic farm.
If you wanted to drive a typical car (doing 12 km per litre) a distance of 50 km per day, then you’d need 420 square metres of algae-ponds just to power your car; for comparison, the area of the UK per person is 4000 square metres, of which 69 m2 is water (figure 6.8).
Please don’t forget that it’s essential to feed these ponds with concentrated carbon dioxide. So this technology would be limited both by land area – how much of the UK we could turn into algal ponds – and by the availability of concentrated CO2, the capture of which would have an energy cost (a topic discussed in Chap- ters 23 and 31). Let’s check the limit imposed by the concentrated CO2. To grow 30 g of algae per m2 per day would require at least 60 g of CO2 per m2 per day (because the CO2 molecule has more mass per carbon atom than the molecules in algae).
If all the CO2 from all UK power stations were captured (roughly 212 tons per year per person), it could service 230 square metres per person of the algal ponds described above – roughly 6% of the country. This area would deliver biodiesel with a power of 24 kWh per day per person, assuming that the numbers for sunny America apply here.
A plausible vision? Perhaps on one tenth of that scale? I’ll leave it to you to decide.
Or rather, they don't consider that the subsidiary that sold the trademark to Apple's shell company had the authorisation to sell the Chinese rights, despite the parent being party to, and signing, the deal.
This is not the argument in the U.S. case, which appears to be based on whether Apple fraudulently obtained the trademark by using a fictitious company. I have no idea how the courts in California treat something like that - techcrunch.com says "If true, this is a fairly serious offense, and Apple’s ownership of the trademark could be overturned." source
I suspect Apple knew what they were doing. They are trying to deal with two huge problems:
1) Apple is a high-end consumer company, like with PCs they initially do rather well, but over time they end up fighting an ecosystem of other manufacturers who are constantly undercutting them and eroding their market share. That's capitalism, but as Apple won't join the fight for the low-end, they cede it to others. And over time, the low-end gets good enough for most people, and Apple's market share drops to single figures.
2) Apple had no worthwhile patents on the actual technology of the iPhone, which was already invented by 2007 (design patents don't count). Mobile browsers, email, etc. had already been done for many years, and all of the hardware was licensed and patented by others.
Apple's response to 1) was to go on the offensive, and try to use the handful of patents they did have which could be applied to smart phones, and use those patents to shut out competitive products (Android being the prime competitor). Apple's response to 2) is to argue that their patents from the last few years are the equal of those mobile patents that other companies have acquired in the last 20 years. i.e. if you want to make a modern smart phone, then you will need to do a deal to license Apple's patents, regardless of how many other patents you have. Apple can then try to use the license terms to negate the advantage of its competitors multi-decade mobile patent portfolios.
It is an interesting approach, they are playing for keeps in a very high value market. The worst case scenario for them is that they end up with global market share in the single digits, as happened with desktop computers, and their current strategy reflects this overriding concern. At best, they kill Android and regain their 90%+ of the smartphone market. What will probably happen is something in the middle of those two extremes.
The situation is a bit more complex than that. Saudi Arabia is run by the House of Saud, a monarchistic dictatorship, who have backed the dictators in the Arab Spring including the sending of troops and tanks to Bahrain to brutally suppress protests there. They are also accused of assassinating the leaders of their own protests. And some of the upper parts of the monarchy, and parts of Saudi Intelligence, are accused of backing terrorism, see The Kingdom and the Towers:
In support of his claim that Saudi Arabia supported terrorism, Khilewi spoke of an episode relevant to the first, 1993, attempt to bring down the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. “A Saudi citizen carrying a Saudi diplomatic passport,” he said, “gave money to Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the World Trade Center bombing,” when the al-Qaeda terrorist was in the Philippines. The Saudi relationship with Yousef, the defector claimed, “is secret and goes through Saudi intelligence.”
When Khalifa returned to Saudi Arabia, in 1995—following detention in the United States and subsequent acquittal on terrorism charges in Jordan—he was, according to C.I.A. bin Laden chief Michael Scheuer, met by a limousine and a welcome home from “a high-ranking official.” A Philippine newspaper would suggest that the official had been Prince Sultan, then a deputy prime minister and minister of defense and aviation, today the heir to the Saudi throne.
In sworn statements after 9/11, former Taliban intelligence chief Mohammed Khaksar said that in 1998 Prince Turki, chief of Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Department (G.I.D.), sealed a deal under which bin Laden agreed not to attack Saudi targets. In return, Saudi Arabia would provide funds and material assistance to the Taliban, not demand bin Laden’s extradition, and not bring pressure to close down al-Qaeda training camps. Saudi businesses, meanwhile, would ensure that money also flowed directly to bin Laden.
No transaction fees, but cash is constantly devalued by inflation. It's like a hidden ~4% annual fee. If you worked out the total amount the average person spends in cash per year, and the total number of transactions, then you could figure out the effective "transaction fee" of inflation.
I'd argue that cash still exists for the basic reason that no government has yet introduced an effective replacement. And without government backing, any new standard is unlikely to become nationally accepted. Transaction fees alone can not be the reason - even if debit card transactions were no fee (which they already appear to be to the purchaser) people would still use cash, because it requires no extra equipment, no cards, is accepted everywhere, and transactions are often faster (bars that trialled ecash cards found that the overall process was slower).