While you might be experiencing a moderate fare bump right now, historically fares have never been cheaper.
Depends on what time of year you fly. If you fly randomly during the year, your prices might really be lower. They make up for it by screwing everybody flying within a couple of weeks on either side of Thanksgiving and Christmas with fares that are, on average, more than three times what they were in the late 1990s, from what I've seen.
Ten years ago, I could fly back home from the SF Bay Area to Nashville or Memphis for... say $150 round trip. Maybe $250 on the high side. Even booking six full months in advance, it's hard to get under $300 each way. To get inexpensive flights or to get a free flight at bottom-mileage-tier rates, you had to fly out on the Monday or Tuesday of he week prior to Thanksgiving and fly back in December, then fly for Christmas no later than a week before Christmas and fly back almost a week after new years. And that's booking six months out.
In short, they've eliminated the low cost fares during the holiday season and cranked up all the low cost fares to some of their highest tier prices as though you bought a ticket a week beforehand, all because they know people will fly during those periods no mater how bad they make it for them.
Incidentally, I'm sick of the TSA bullshit. If I have to leave that early to get a decent rate and have to be subjected to a virtual strip search, then fuck all of them. I might as well take a train.
I would be okay with it under the following conditions:
The scanners must be designed to search for chemicals that don't belong in the human body, not for nonstandard shapes.
The scanners must penetrate the body fully so that they are actually effective against a terrorist with more than three brain cells.
The scanners must be designed in such a way that it is physically impossible to get anything APPROACHING a nude picture of the person, and physically impossible to see anything that would constitute private medical information as well.
Until then, you're massively invading my privacy without doing a damn thing to stop terrorism---something that should not be acceptable to anyone sensible. I guarantee you that this bullshit will stop the first time somebody releases a "Girls Gone Wild TSA Style" video showing a bunch of goons sitting around watching nude X-ray pics of hot women who walked through the scanners. And statistically speaking, it's only a matter of time before this happens and it turns into a public outcry the likes of which the government has not seen since Vietnam.
Yes but all capacitive styluses suck. They are those fat, soft, marker-like deals. That's not even mentioning the fact that a capacitive screen cannot truly measure pressure for sketching/drawing nor that a capacitive screen is just not as accurate (resolution of 1024x1024 compared to resistive's 4096x4096) and has a slower response time.
So why hasn't anyone built a combination capacitive/resistive touch screen? You know, switch to the capacitive approximation when you get a second touch or when the first touch fails to register on the resistive touch screen because of insufficient pressure....
Oh, wait. A quick Google search shows me that RIM already came up with the idea and patented it. (See why patents suck? If someone who has never built a touch screen in his life is presented with the same problem and comes up with the same answer, it's obvious....)
I think if I had a kid and this happened to him/her, when the judge found the 6-year-old competent to stand trial, I would have told my kid to tell the judge that he/she wanted to serve as his/her own attorney, just to fully paint the trial as the mockery that it is. There's clearly a line of reasonableness here, and this clearly crosses it. Yes, it's sad that the elderly lady died. It was also an accident caused by a child.
Further, I find it difficult to believe that a child of that age could have been so reckless (while on a bicycle with training wheels) and traveling at such a high speed that an adult should not have been able to look both ways and see the child coming far enough in advance to avoid getting hit. Therefore, I can't help but suspect that at least part of the fault is due to an absence of sufficient care by the elderly woman as well.
Either way, I hope this girl grows up to be politically powerful enough quickly enough to get this judge tossed out on his ass. I can't imagine this is what the elderly lady would have wanted, and her heirs should be ashamed of themselves.
Except that such an argument is excrement. RNA isolates and transcribes a single gene or a short sequence of genes all the time. That's how protein coding works.
What they mean is that isolating the gene and transcribing it into human-readable form does not occur in nature. In effect, the only thing they're really doing is observing such a DNA fragment, which really stretches the boundaries of common sense as patents go.
Further, N-hexane use is already banned in China for use as a solvent when cleaning LCD panels. Also, Wintek (the screen supplier for Apple, Nokia, and several other companies) claims that they have not used it since August of 2009. (Source: Engadget) In other words, this story seems to be more than a year behind. Sure, the effects can still be seen in much the same way that the effects of Chernobyl can still be seen, but that doesn't mean people are still actively being harmed as this story seems to imply.
That's all WAY too complicated. All you have to do is put extra hardware/firmware into a network card that checks for a specific magic byte sequence in an ICMP packet, then verifies a checksum of the rest of the packet, and if both check out, interprets the packet as a command to read or write the appropriate portion of memory (IIRC, the entire physical address space of the machine is accessible from a PCIe card, generally speaking) and transmit the data as needed in a properly formatted response packet. At that point, someone with knowledge of the protocol can 0wn the machine remotely no matter what OS they are running---forget merely reinstalling the same OS.
No, the U.S. and its allies outclass its enemies because of advanced fighter aircraft, cruise missiles, submarines, carriers, attack helicopters, and conventional munitions. A weapon that you're not willing to use cannot possibly be of any use. It is only the threat of using something that makes it relevant.
You're right that I had forgotten about Australia. In my defense, however, this was an attack on a country that was not fully independent from Britain at the time, and as such, it wasn't nearly as far removed from Europe as the U.S. was. Either way, the fact remains that the ground battles were predominantly European, and that was the point I was trying to make. In any significant war among powers that span the globe, there are always going to be fringe battles in places far removed from the bulk of the fighting.
I never said that the U.S. wasn't affected. It just wasn't affected enough to drag it into a war that was mostly happening halfway around the globe.
One could reasonably argue that World War I wasn't a world war even after the U.S. became involved. Everyone involved was basically fighting on a single continent with the exception of Japanese naval involvement, as far as I'm aware. (Russia is generally considered to be a European nation.) BTW, to be pedantic, the Germans didn't technically threaten to spread the war to the U.S., but rather threatened to spread it to the U.S. IF the U.S. got involved on the side of the British, which up until that direct threat, the U.S. was not planning to do.
World War II was somewhat more global in that there were two theaters of combat instead of one. However, one could easily argue that it was really two regional wars that happened to be started by allies. Officially WWII is defined as having begun with the German invasion of Poland. However, the Japanese war with China had been ongoing for several years prior to that point, and the spread of that conflict to other neighboring regions was still a regional conflict. Up until Japan went after a non-neighboring country (the U.S.), WWII consisted of a regional conflict in Europe and a regional conflict in Asia.
So basically the only thing other than the entrance of a non-Eurasian power into the mix that made either World War I or World War II a world war was the use of naval forces to attack ships at sea. However, this was characteristic of nearly every European war for centuries. It was spread across more of the globe due to greater worldwide trade, but it was still principally a case of European powers going after European ships. Either way, nuclear weapons are not a deterrent to ships at sea, as you can't hit a moving target with an ICBM. Further, the only countries that have large enough naval forces to pull off the sorts of things Germany did with their Navy are all large enough economic powers with strong enough ties to the other countries that such a war would be infeasible in this day and age.
What, then, was so global about World War I or World War II that makes it so fundamentally different from any number of other wars since then? The fact that Germany happened to be strong enough to pull off the victory, whereas Iraq lost its war with Iran? If Iraq had been a larger power and had successfully taken over Iran before taking over Kuwait, would that have been a world war then? If Iraq had been densely populated like Europe and had seen similar death tolls due to having more people to fight, would that have made it a world war? Where do you draw the line? My point is that at least where World War I is concerned, the distinction is completely arbitrary, and seems to largely hinge upon how big the country was that did the invading. And where World War II is concerned, it was only the fact that Japan and Germany had the ability to attack countries well outside of their neighborhoods that made the war interesting, and it was not until one of them actually did so (Japan bombing Pearl Harbor) that it became a truly unique war.
Either way, the point remains that the main thing that has prevented wars on the scale of WWI and WWII is globalization of markets, not any nuclear deterrent. Going to war with any major power would mean the destruction of the economies of all the nations involved, which inherently limits conflicts to small regional conflicts among smaller nations. It has squat to do with nuclear missiles. Nuclear weapons are only an effective deterrent between two powers of approximately equal magnitude---India versus Pakistan, the U.S. versus the U.S.S.R., and so on. In this day and age, the U.S. having nuclear missiles isn't really buying the U.S. much except for expensive upkeep and a bunch of prime terrorist targets, neither of which strikes me as a real benefit....
You mean the Ottoman Empire getting involved in WWI? They're bordering the Mediterranean Sea. They might not be part of Europe (though Turkey is in the EU), but it's hardly a stretch to think of them as being part of the same basic region of the world, particularly given how narrow the Strait of Gibraltar is.
The point of nuclear weapons is to deter conflicts on the scale of the world wars from ever happening again, and so far they've done that admirably. They were never intended for the purpose of dealing with smaller scale outbreaks of violence even ones as large as the Iraq war.
No, they really haven't done the job admirably. WWI and WWII were almost entirely European wars. It wasn't until Japan attacked the U.S. that WWII became global by an stretch. Until then, it was just a regional conflict in Europe and a second one between Japan and China. Similarly, it wasn't until Germany tried to get Mexico to attack the United States that WWI became in any meaningful sense global. At that point in each war, the U.S. came in, kicked some ass, and ended it. I know that's an oversimplification, but a remarkable number of conflicts over the nears have been stomped into the ground by U.S. military intervention or the threat thereof.
Three things have deterred conflicts on the scale of world wars from ever happening again:
The U.S. and its allies vastly outclass every other country's military, and have shown a willingness to use that superiority while acting as the world's police force to kick countries out of other countries when they invade. World War I and II would both have ended much sooner had it not been for policies of appeasement by the U.S. and, in the case of WWII, Britain.
The U.S. and its allies vastly outclass every military ruled over by a nutjob dictator or a single-power "democracy".
The increase in trading around the world means that no country can feasibly eliminate its trade with a significant percentage of other countries.
The only thing nuclear weapons do is pose risk to the American public. The reality of the matter is that the U.S. will never use nuclear weapons again, and everyone knows it. An empty threat cannot a deterrent make. A weapon unused is a useless weapon, as they said in the movie Spies Like Us.
I assume you left out a word in that first sentence and meant to say "low enough" or "bad enough". And to a large extent, that's true. It's also true for most other industries. One of the biggest problems the U.S. has is its own success. On the one hand, you have communism where there's no incentive to do better because you don't get any more, so nothing gets done very well. On the other hand, you have pure capitalism, where the vast majority of people are slave labor to the people at the top, with only a few fields breaking the rules at any given time and providing a means to actually get ahead of the curve. So all the smart people flock to those fields, those fields achieve wonders, and nothing else gets done very well. What you really need is a system in which everyone in every field is rewarded equally for their achievements, which is, unfortunately, a hard system to design and sustain. For example, such a system precludes the existence of multi-million-dollar CEO salaries because nothing outside of the management field can possibly achieve similar levels. The problem with this, of course, is that somebody who does a wonderful job as a waitress can't feasibly be paid as much as somebody who does a wonderful job as a software engineer at a multi-million-dollar company because we can't afford to pay ten grand for a meal. And that's why economic systems are fundamentally inequitable by nature. Eventually, automation will render much of this moot, but in the short and medium term, it's a problem.
In the medium term, though, our society is going to be really screwed if we continue to pay teachers the salaries we pay them. But before we can pay teachers more, we have to have money to pay them with. This means that we either have to lower the number of teachers (which is already too low in many districts), raise taxes, or cut spending somewhere else. That's the harsh reality. We've built up a system of government that taxes and spends (Democrats) or borrows and spends (Republicans) right up to the very edge of its means, without saving for tough times, without any long-term thinking about the eventual costs associated with its choices, focused solely on what the bottom line will look like around election day when it matters to them, and that's bad for many, many reasons. We have to start by tearing down that system, one large swath at a time, cutting deeply but judiciously into government spending, and frankly, the only way to do that is to spend money.
Give proportional bonuses to manager-level personnel in the public sector for finding ways to cut costs without cutting services. Provide additional temporary jobs to aid in doing so, as needed. As soon as you implement such a system, you'll likely cut 20% out of your budget in the first year. Right now, the tendency at all levels of the government is to horde resources---to concentrate resources within each individual administrator's fiefdom, knowing that if they don't use it, they will lose it. And indeed, we see this in business, too---managers saying things like, "If they think you're working on something that they don't think is important, they'll say we have too many resources and cut our budget," a policy that only encourages people to disguise what they are working on from upper levels of management so that they can get done the things that need to get done. There are three differences, though. First, businesses periodically clean house, whereas government only does so up at the top (the elected officials). Second, businesses give bonuses for cutting costs. Third, (well-run) businesses do not generally cut the budgets of departments that do not use all of their budget. They reward it. Fix those last two things, and you might get away with not having to do the first.
For example, most government departments could be vastly improved in their efficiency by taking cumbersome tasks and throwing computers at the problem, yet many of these departments still use technology that borders on stone age, like passing Excel documents
Precisely! There are no cell towers in 1928, not to mention no technology capable of even remotely replicating one, so it couldn't be a cell phone. That's not to say it's not (possibly) some form of small communication device. But there's no clear image of what's in his/her/it's hand. Now if there was a Motorola or Nokia logo clearly visible, I'd be singing a different tune!
For that matter, there's not even any evidence that there was an actual conversation going on, either. That's what acting is about.
Besides, is it really so much of a stretch to believe that the idea of a phone without wires was not in people's minds in the late 1920s, almost two decades after the first commercial radio broadcast, two decades after the first wireless phone patent, and almost fifty years after the first wireless phone call?:-)
There were already radio phones on trains and aircraft by the mid-1920s. Granted, they were not handheld devices (except perhaps for the handset part), but it's naive to assume that the idea of a handheld radio phone was beyond the conception of people at that time. It merely was not practical yet with the technology available at the time, in much the same way as the ideas of force fields, antigravity, artificial gravity, tractor beams, FTL travel, and teleportation are not beyond our comprehension, but the technology needed to make them happen is decades away, if not centuries.
By this same standard, someone might look at the hardware in Star Trek and assume that somebody had traveled back in time with a Palm Pilot. By this same standard, perhaps somebody traveled back in time and brought the creator of Dick Tracy one of the new cell phone watches that just came out a couple of years ago, some sixty-plus years after the concept first appeared in those comics.
Ideas always lead feasibility by a fair margin. The only thing that defines commercial success these days is correctly gauging when an idea's time has finally come and applying for a patent. One should never assume that the lack of a working product at any given point in history means that nobody had thought of it at the time, for to do so is quite frequently in error.
Depends on where the fire is. Sure, you might not be able to extinguish a burning lithium battery fire, but you could darn well contain it if the fire occurs in the passenger compartment. If it occurs in the luggage compartment close to avionics, you're probably pretty f*cked.
Agreed. There's definitely a transition period, depending in large part on when people first got computers. For people like me, at 33, we're more like the generation that contains the twenty-somethings. For the ones who didn't get computers until high school or college, they're more like Gen X. That said, I don't think I know anybody my age who doesn't fit better with the younger crowd. By the time you get to people who are about 37 or so, you're well into the Gen X territory.
That said, I readily admit that I don't get the whole text messaging thing. It's not that I can't parse it---it's just a subtle variation on the dialect we used to use on 1200 baud BBSes in the 80s. I just don't get why anybody would willingly pay money to use it when it costs more for a few hundred bytes than for a few minutes of talk time.... I also don't get why so many young people seem to think ROFL, LOL, etc. are new.... Kids today....
Akamai works just fine with SSL. Akamai is not a transparent cache, but rather an explicit push cache in which a web administrator chooses content to host on Akamai, pushes the content to their servers, and modifies local content to point to the Akamai copy when it has been fully staged. Akamai has supported SSL for almost a decade now.
I've not commented on whether unions should be able to make campaign contributions. The topic is corporations.
Just to be pedantic here, most labor unions are legally corporations under 501(c)5. Similarly nonprofits under 501(c)3 are also corporations, as are political action committees under 527. You need to be a lot more specific than just "corporations" here. Maybe "for-profit corporations".
Unions are, for the most part, involuntary groupings formed based on employment or occupation, having no political purpose behind them. No, "collective bargaining" is not a political purpose, it is a commercial one.
And that's why, at least in most states, unions are required by law to allow you to opt out of paying all union dues except the portion that directly contributes to its expenses in collective bargaining. To the extent that this is the case, any political contributions made by a union are to a large extent determined by the consent of its members, unlike a corporation's contributions, which are only determined by the consent of its board members.
And as someone else pointed out above, there are at least two more:
The Colonialism-Interference-Isolationism spectrum
Punishment vs. rehabilitation
Neither of these is likely to be a hot button political issue at the national level except when somebody does something catastrophically stupid like going into Vietnam or Iraq, but still, they represent distinct differences in opinion. And while we're at it, I might as well add:
Death penalty vs. life imprisonment
That's a particularly interesting one because both liberals and conservatives are deeply divided on this issue. It's not enough to say whether you're in favor of choosing life or allowing others to choose to take a life. You must say whether that applies to everyone or only to fetuses that have committed no crime yet. So we're up to seven politically independent dimensions so far, and counting.
There are far more than two degrees. I tend to want fiscal conservatism in terms of government spending (which does not mean "cut everything", but rather "fund responsibly"), social liberalism in terms of personal freedoms, but increased restriction of corporations, and no deregulation. Put another way, in my view, personal freedom applies to a person acting as a person. As soon as you have the corporate veil protecting you from personal responsibility for your actions, the corporation should cease to have those same rights.
Here are a few of the higher level axes, each of which contains several areas that fall under it.
Individual freedom vs. strict government control
Domestic spying vs. not
Abortion rights vs. not
Regulations on drugs, alcohol, etc. vs. not
Regulations on whether you can work on Sundays or not
Government spending vs. government saving
Spending on arts vs. not
Spending on defense vs. not
Spending on education vs. not
Spending on social programs vs. not
Socialism/government-run corporations vs. capitalism
Government-run corporations that can't help being monopolies vs. not
Government-run essential services vs. private
Social security vs. private investment
Other corporations
Government control over corporations
Trust busting vs. trusting the market
Limitations on collusion vs. trusting the market
Product safety vs. laissez faire
Consumer rights laws and warranty laws vs. laissez faire
Trade tariffs vs. free imports
Taxation of foreign income vs. not
And those are just some of the many areas that people disagree about. And although many people will have the same leaning about most of the things in each of the larger groups, that still gives you a minimum of four political axes instead of just one or even two.
It's more than that. At least for the past few years, people with higher levels of education have leaned more heavily towards the left, while people with less education have leaned more heavily towards the right. (Source: chronicle.com) Since Silicon Valley companies employ highly educated people almost exclusively, you would expect them to lean to the left.
Further, computer geeks in general tend to lean even further towards the left because their skeptical nature makes them much less capable of accepting any strict literal interpretation of theology that conflicts with their observations. This tends to mean that there are fewer members of conservative faiths, and that even among those who are members of traditionally conservative Christian groups, they tend to be a good bit to the left of their faith's average member.
And they disclaim any rumors that one of the patrons escaped through a window and is now involved in a manhunt all over the city. In other news, the body of the museum's curator was found dead, having written "Call Robert Langdon" in his own blood.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the trip to Mars required extra bits on your body....
Depends on what time of year you fly. If you fly randomly during the year, your prices might really be lower. They make up for it by screwing everybody flying within a couple of weeks on either side of Thanksgiving and Christmas with fares that are, on average, more than three times what they were in the late 1990s, from what I've seen.
Ten years ago, I could fly back home from the SF Bay Area to Nashville or Memphis for... say $150 round trip. Maybe $250 on the high side. Even booking six full months in advance, it's hard to get under $300 each way. To get inexpensive flights or to get a free flight at bottom-mileage-tier rates, you had to fly out on the Monday or Tuesday of he week prior to Thanksgiving and fly back in December, then fly for Christmas no later than a week before Christmas and fly back almost a week after new years. And that's booking six months out.
In short, they've eliminated the low cost fares during the holiday season and cranked up all the low cost fares to some of their highest tier prices as though you bought a ticket a week beforehand, all because they know people will fly during those periods no mater how bad they make it for them.
Incidentally, I'm sick of the TSA bullshit. If I have to leave that early to get a decent rate and have to be subjected to a virtual strip search, then fuck all of them. I might as well take a train.
I would be okay with it under the following conditions:
Until then, you're massively invading my privacy without doing a damn thing to stop terrorism---something that should not be acceptable to anyone sensible. I guarantee you that this bullshit will stop the first time somebody releases a "Girls Gone Wild TSA Style" video showing a bunch of goons sitting around watching nude X-ray pics of hot women who walked through the scanners. And statistically speaking, it's only a matter of time before this happens and it turns into a public outcry the likes of which the government has not seen since Vietnam.
So why hasn't anyone built a combination capacitive/resistive touch screen? You know, switch to the capacitive approximation when you get a second touch or when the first touch fails to register on the resistive touch screen because of insufficient pressure....
Oh, wait. A quick Google search shows me that RIM already came up with the idea and patented it. (See why patents suck? If someone who has never built a touch screen in his life is presented with the same problem and comes up with the same answer, it's obvious....)
I think if I had a kid and this happened to him/her, when the judge found the 6-year-old competent to stand trial, I would have told my kid to tell the judge that he/she wanted to serve as his/her own attorney, just to fully paint the trial as the mockery that it is. There's clearly a line of reasonableness here, and this clearly crosses it. Yes, it's sad that the elderly lady died. It was also an accident caused by a child.
Further, I find it difficult to believe that a child of that age could have been so reckless (while on a bicycle with training wheels) and traveling at such a high speed that an adult should not have been able to look both ways and see the child coming far enough in advance to avoid getting hit. Therefore, I can't help but suspect that at least part of the fault is due to an absence of sufficient care by the elderly woman as well.
Either way, I hope this girl grows up to be politically powerful enough quickly enough to get this judge tossed out on his ass. I can't imagine this is what the elderly lady would have wanted, and her heirs should be ashamed of themselves.
Sure. My corn field has sex with frogs all the time. Doesn't everybody's?
Except that such an argument is excrement. RNA isolates and transcribes a single gene or a short sequence of genes all the time. That's how protein coding works.
What they mean is that isolating the gene and transcribing it into human-readable form does not occur in nature. In effect, the only thing they're really doing is observing such a DNA fragment, which really stretches the boundaries of common sense as patents go.
Further, N-hexane use is already banned in China for use as a solvent when cleaning LCD panels. Also, Wintek (the screen supplier for Apple, Nokia, and several other companies) claims that they have not used it since August of 2009. (Source: Engadget) In other words, this story seems to be more than a year behind. Sure, the effects can still be seen in much the same way that the effects of Chernobyl can still be seen, but that doesn't mean people are still actively being harmed as this story seems to imply.
That's all WAY too complicated. All you have to do is put extra hardware/firmware into a network card that checks for a specific magic byte sequence in an ICMP packet, then verifies a checksum of the rest of the packet, and if both check out, interprets the packet as a command to read or write the appropriate portion of memory (IIRC, the entire physical address space of the machine is accessible from a PCIe card, generally speaking) and transmit the data as needed in a properly formatted response packet. At that point, someone with knowledge of the protocol can 0wn the machine remotely no matter what OS they are running---forget merely reinstalling the same OS.
Australia gained independence in many steps. The first of those steps was in 1901. The last was in 1986.
No, the U.S. and its allies outclass its enemies because of advanced fighter aircraft, cruise missiles, submarines, carriers, attack helicopters, and conventional munitions. A weapon that you're not willing to use cannot possibly be of any use. It is only the threat of using something that makes it relevant.
You're right that I had forgotten about Australia. In my defense, however, this was an attack on a country that was not fully independent from Britain at the time, and as such, it wasn't nearly as far removed from Europe as the U.S. was. Either way, the fact remains that the ground battles were predominantly European, and that was the point I was trying to make. In any significant war among powers that span the globe, there are always going to be fringe battles in places far removed from the bulk of the fighting.
I never said that the U.S. wasn't affected. It just wasn't affected enough to drag it into a war that was mostly happening halfway around the globe.
One could reasonably argue that World War I wasn't a world war even after the U.S. became involved. Everyone involved was basically fighting on a single continent with the exception of Japanese naval involvement, as far as I'm aware. (Russia is generally considered to be a European nation.) BTW, to be pedantic, the Germans didn't technically threaten to spread the war to the U.S., but rather threatened to spread it to the U.S. IF the U.S. got involved on the side of the British, which up until that direct threat, the U.S. was not planning to do.
World War II was somewhat more global in that there were two theaters of combat instead of one. However, one could easily argue that it was really two regional wars that happened to be started by allies. Officially WWII is defined as having begun with the German invasion of Poland. However, the Japanese war with China had been ongoing for several years prior to that point, and the spread of that conflict to other neighboring regions was still a regional conflict. Up until Japan went after a non-neighboring country (the U.S.), WWII consisted of a regional conflict in Europe and a regional conflict in Asia.
So basically the only thing other than the entrance of a non-Eurasian power into the mix that made either World War I or World War II a world war was the use of naval forces to attack ships at sea. However, this was characteristic of nearly every European war for centuries. It was spread across more of the globe due to greater worldwide trade, but it was still principally a case of European powers going after European ships. Either way, nuclear weapons are not a deterrent to ships at sea, as you can't hit a moving target with an ICBM. Further, the only countries that have large enough naval forces to pull off the sorts of things Germany did with their Navy are all large enough economic powers with strong enough ties to the other countries that such a war would be infeasible in this day and age.
What, then, was so global about World War I or World War II that makes it so fundamentally different from any number of other wars since then? The fact that Germany happened to be strong enough to pull off the victory, whereas Iraq lost its war with Iran? If Iraq had been a larger power and had successfully taken over Iran before taking over Kuwait, would that have been a world war then? If Iraq had been densely populated like Europe and had seen similar death tolls due to having more people to fight, would that have made it a world war? Where do you draw the line? My point is that at least where World War I is concerned, the distinction is completely arbitrary, and seems to largely hinge upon how big the country was that did the invading. And where World War II is concerned, it was only the fact that Japan and Germany had the ability to attack countries well outside of their neighborhoods that made the war interesting, and it was not until one of them actually did so (Japan bombing Pearl Harbor) that it became a truly unique war.
Either way, the point remains that the main thing that has prevented wars on the scale of WWI and WWII is globalization of markets, not any nuclear deterrent. Going to war with any major power would mean the destruction of the economies of all the nations involved, which inherently limits conflicts to small regional conflicts among smaller nations. It has squat to do with nuclear missiles. Nuclear weapons are only an effective deterrent between two powers of approximately equal magnitude---India versus Pakistan, the U.S. versus the U.S.S.R., and so on. In this day and age, the U.S. having nuclear missiles isn't really buying the U.S. much except for expensive upkeep and a bunch of prime terrorist targets, neither of which strikes me as a real benefit....
You mean the Ottoman Empire getting involved in WWI? They're bordering the Mediterranean Sea. They might not be part of Europe (though Turkey is in the EU), but it's hardly a stretch to think of them as being part of the same basic region of the world, particularly given how narrow the Strait of Gibraltar is.
No, they really haven't done the job admirably. WWI and WWII were almost entirely European wars. It wasn't until Japan attacked the U.S. that WWII became global by an stretch. Until then, it was just a regional conflict in Europe and a second one between Japan and China. Similarly, it wasn't until Germany tried to get Mexico to attack the United States that WWI became in any meaningful sense global. At that point in each war, the U.S. came in, kicked some ass, and ended it. I know that's an oversimplification, but a remarkable number of conflicts over the nears have been stomped into the ground by U.S. military intervention or the threat thereof.
Three things have deterred conflicts on the scale of world wars from ever happening again:
The only thing nuclear weapons do is pose risk to the American public. The reality of the matter is that the U.S. will never use nuclear weapons again, and everyone knows it. An empty threat cannot a deterrent make. A weapon unused is a useless weapon, as they said in the movie Spies Like Us.
I assume you left out a word in that first sentence and meant to say "low enough" or "bad enough". And to a large extent, that's true. It's also true for most other industries. One of the biggest problems the U.S. has is its own success. On the one hand, you have communism where there's no incentive to do better because you don't get any more, so nothing gets done very well. On the other hand, you have pure capitalism, where the vast majority of people are slave labor to the people at the top, with only a few fields breaking the rules at any given time and providing a means to actually get ahead of the curve. So all the smart people flock to those fields, those fields achieve wonders, and nothing else gets done very well. What you really need is a system in which everyone in every field is rewarded equally for their achievements, which is, unfortunately, a hard system to design and sustain. For example, such a system precludes the existence of multi-million-dollar CEO salaries because nothing outside of the management field can possibly achieve similar levels. The problem with this, of course, is that somebody who does a wonderful job as a waitress can't feasibly be paid as much as somebody who does a wonderful job as a software engineer at a multi-million-dollar company because we can't afford to pay ten grand for a meal. And that's why economic systems are fundamentally inequitable by nature. Eventually, automation will render much of this moot, but in the short and medium term, it's a problem.
In the medium term, though, our society is going to be really screwed if we continue to pay teachers the salaries we pay them. But before we can pay teachers more, we have to have money to pay them with. This means that we either have to lower the number of teachers (which is already too low in many districts), raise taxes, or cut spending somewhere else. That's the harsh reality. We've built up a system of government that taxes and spends (Democrats) or borrows and spends (Republicans) right up to the very edge of its means, without saving for tough times, without any long-term thinking about the eventual costs associated with its choices, focused solely on what the bottom line will look like around election day when it matters to them, and that's bad for many, many reasons. We have to start by tearing down that system, one large swath at a time, cutting deeply but judiciously into government spending, and frankly, the only way to do that is to spend money.
Give proportional bonuses to manager-level personnel in the public sector for finding ways to cut costs without cutting services. Provide additional temporary jobs to aid in doing so, as needed. As soon as you implement such a system, you'll likely cut 20% out of your budget in the first year. Right now, the tendency at all levels of the government is to horde resources---to concentrate resources within each individual administrator's fiefdom, knowing that if they don't use it, they will lose it. And indeed, we see this in business, too---managers saying things like, "If they think you're working on something that they don't think is important, they'll say we have too many resources and cut our budget," a policy that only encourages people to disguise what they are working on from upper levels of management so that they can get done the things that need to get done. There are three differences, though. First, businesses periodically clean house, whereas government only does so up at the top (the elected officials). Second, businesses give bonuses for cutting costs. Third, (well-run) businesses do not generally cut the budgets of departments that do not use all of their budget. They reward it. Fix those last two things, and you might get away with not having to do the first.
For example, most government departments could be vastly improved in their efficiency by taking cumbersome tasks and throwing computers at the problem, yet many of these departments still use technology that borders on stone age, like passing Excel documents
For that matter, there's not even any evidence that there was an actual conversation going on, either. That's what acting is about.
Besides, is it really so much of a stretch to believe that the idea of a phone without wires was not in people's minds in the late 1920s, almost two decades after the first commercial radio broadcast, two decades after the first wireless phone patent, and almost fifty years after the first wireless phone call? :-)
There were already radio phones on trains and aircraft by the mid-1920s. Granted, they were not handheld devices (except perhaps for the handset part), but it's naive to assume that the idea of a handheld radio phone was beyond the conception of people at that time. It merely was not practical yet with the technology available at the time, in much the same way as the ideas of force fields, antigravity, artificial gravity, tractor beams, FTL travel, and teleportation are not beyond our comprehension, but the technology needed to make them happen is decades away, if not centuries.
By this same standard, someone might look at the hardware in Star Trek and assume that somebody had traveled back in time with a Palm Pilot. By this same standard, perhaps somebody traveled back in time and brought the creator of Dick Tracy one of the new cell phone watches that just came out a couple of years ago, some sixty-plus years after the concept first appeared in those comics.
Ideas always lead feasibility by a fair margin. The only thing that defines commercial success these days is correctly gauging when an idea's time has finally come and applying for a patent. One should never assume that the lack of a working product at any given point in history means that nobody had thought of it at the time, for to do so is quite frequently in error.
Depends on where the fire is. Sure, you might not be able to extinguish a burning lithium battery fire, but you could darn well contain it if the fire occurs in the passenger compartment. If it occurs in the luggage compartment close to avionics, you're probably pretty f*cked.
Agreed. There's definitely a transition period, depending in large part on when people first got computers. For people like me, at 33, we're more like the generation that contains the twenty-somethings. For the ones who didn't get computers until high school or college, they're more like Gen X. That said, I don't think I know anybody my age who doesn't fit better with the younger crowd. By the time you get to people who are about 37 or so, you're well into the Gen X territory.
That said, I readily admit that I don't get the whole text messaging thing. It's not that I can't parse it---it's just a subtle variation on the dialect we used to use on 1200 baud BBSes in the 80s. I just don't get why anybody would willingly pay money to use it when it costs more for a few hundred bytes than for a few minutes of talk time.... I also don't get why so many young people seem to think ROFL, LOL, etc. are new.... Kids today....
Akamai works just fine with SSL. Akamai is not a transparent cache, but rather an explicit push cache in which a web administrator chooses content to host on Akamai, pushes the content to their servers, and modifies local content to point to the Akamai copy when it has been fully staged. Akamai has supported SSL for almost a decade now.
Just to be pedantic here, most labor unions are legally corporations under 501(c)5. Similarly nonprofits under 501(c)3 are also corporations, as are political action committees under 527. You need to be a lot more specific than just "corporations" here. Maybe "for-profit corporations".
And that's why, at least in most states, unions are required by law to allow you to opt out of paying all union dues except the portion that directly contributes to its expenses in collective bargaining. To the extent that this is the case, any political contributions made by a union are to a large extent determined by the consent of its members, unlike a corporation's contributions, which are only determined by the consent of its board members.
And as someone else pointed out above, there are at least two more:
Neither of these is likely to be a hot button political issue at the national level except when somebody does something catastrophically stupid like going into Vietnam or Iraq, but still, they represent distinct differences in opinion. And while we're at it, I might as well add:
That's a particularly interesting one because both liberals and conservatives are deeply divided on this issue. It's not enough to say whether you're in favor of choosing life or allowing others to choose to take a life. You must say whether that applies to everyone or only to fetuses that have committed no crime yet. So we're up to seven politically independent dimensions so far, and counting.
There are far more than two degrees. I tend to want fiscal conservatism in terms of government spending (which does not mean "cut everything", but rather "fund responsibly"), social liberalism in terms of personal freedoms, but increased restriction of corporations, and no deregulation. Put another way, in my view, personal freedom applies to a person acting as a person. As soon as you have the corporate veil protecting you from personal responsibility for your actions, the corporation should cease to have those same rights.
Here are a few of the higher level axes, each of which contains several areas that fall under it.
And those are just some of the many areas that people disagree about. And although many people will have the same leaning about most of the things in each of the larger groups, that still gives you a minimum of four political axes instead of just one or even two.
It's more than that. At least for the past few years, people with higher levels of education have leaned more heavily towards the left, while people with less education have leaned more heavily towards the right. (Source: chronicle.com) Since Silicon Valley companies employ highly educated people almost exclusively, you would expect them to lean to the left.
Further, computer geeks in general tend to lean even further towards the left because their skeptical nature makes them much less capable of accepting any strict literal interpretation of theology that conflicts with their observations. This tends to mean that there are fewer members of conservative faiths, and that even among those who are members of traditionally conservative Christian groups, they tend to be a good bit to the left of their faith's average member.
And they disclaim any rumors that one of the patrons escaped through a window and is now involved in a manhunt all over the city. In other news, the body of the museum's curator was found dead, having written "Call Robert Langdon" in his own blood.