Any large statistical population can have outliers which go against the general trend. Some people have poor genes, and other lifestyle effects which lead to them gaining weight even while controlling their sugar intake. That said, anecdotal evidence doesn't invalidate the general argument against high intake of simple sugars for the overall population.
Also, it should be noted that sugar reduction isn't a magic cure-all. America has significant lifestyle effects, which are nearly unavoidable, which also lead to obesity. For example, nearly all of our cities are designed so that walking is near impossible except in localized zones due to our abundance of land. Contrast this with compact euro-construction, or cities like New York, where a significant percentage of the population can walk everywhere, or ride the rail at most.
The average price of a game at $50 remained so steady that inflation surpassed it. Now even at $60 it's still cheaper than NES/Atari games.
On the sale price side, the problem (and part of he reason that game prices stayed at $60) is that real purchasing power eroded over the same time period. Inflation occurred, the value of money decreased, yet pay has not risen for the vast majority of American's commensurate with inflation. The slice of money then available for luxury goods has shrunk as a percentage of income.
Naturally, this is also coupled with the psychological pressures against game cost increases, although many large ticket industries have not fallen prey to this problem.
A similar concept, the colonization of trans-neptunian objects, and effectively colonizing in a ladder out of our star system and down into other ones by rock hopping is also quite old. Sagan and others were talking about this a long time ago.
Was this paid for by Amazon? This reads like blatant shill.
turning to [prominently mention service name] for the first time [sure it was]... it's a game changer [excellent use of PR speak]...that gives everyone a supercomputer [if you can affort it]
I'm sure it lets you breath water and gives you telekenesis too, but we don't need to do Amazon's advertising for them, they're big boys with deep pockets.
I deeply enjoyed attending the 100 YSS symposium, and actually presented in the economic track that Jemison headed. However, awarding the final seed money to one of the track chairs and program organizers makes the whole process seem like collusion. Note the Education, Social, Economic and Legal Considerations track in the 100 YSS Symposium Agenda. Having worked program allocation, this is the kind of stuff that could spark lawsuits if it weren't for such a small sum (in gov't terms). Also depends on whether she was funded by DARPA in her track chair duties. (Note: I did not submit a proposal to the RFP)
Hopefully the money is put to good use, as it looks like she partnered with Icarus, who are at least motivated and active.
It seems that Google saw this coming, as there have been several stories in the last couple months about the fact that quotations, or wholesale reprints of articles posted by users on Google+ are being rated higher by the Google algorithm than the original articles. If this is actually true, and not just tinfoil hattery, then users may just become the routing mechanism for news while the official aggregator becomes a bit more barren. A similar mechanic may also work with sites like Twitter or Reddit if they are able to argue that they're not aggregating the news, and their users are just posting links to articles.
This is a prime example a black swan. "The event is a surprise and has a major impact. After the fact, the event is rationalized by hindsight." Its a normal problem of tipping point studies and knowledge propagation. An otherwise good game goes viral and suddenly the circles of those who know about it expand exponentially until everybody does. Rationalization and questions after the fact. "Why did it spread, why is it so amazing". Its cheap. Its easy to get. Its easy to communicate why its fun. It has low bariers for starting to play. It has emergent depth. Yay.
Navel gazing about how the buildings shake doesn't illuminate why it actually spread.
If you attended, you may just have missed these panels. All three areas were discussed extensively either in presented papers or panel discussions. In fact, the whole "human's as cargo" concept was one of the more hotly debated points. Many argued that we wouldn't want to send real people at all, as they are inherently difficult to keep alive, healthy, happy, ect...
Vinge was one of the authors in attendance. Talking over drinks with him, and some of the other authors during the social on the last night (fun game of public storytelling), they seemed to believe in the concept as much or more than most attendees. Although we were able to make a game of how much they mentioned "singularity" during their panel (20+), they still noted that ideas only come to fruition if they are discussed and worked on. Waiting for a hypothetical singularity to solve all hurdles helps no one. It may not even happen. There is a very real possibility that energy limits will hamper our current trend of short term, exponential growth.
Also, as needs to be constantly reiterated, the idea of the 100 YSS project is not to build a starship right now. It is to develop a long lasting (100+ years), financially stable organization that can develop the capabilities, technologies, and social movements necessary to complete such a task. Not nearly as sexy as warp drive, but damned necessary. Unfortunately, the pop-sci view was reflected in attendees, with financial / economic panels lightly attended vs packed rooms for warp bubble discussion.
There is a fiscal pressure to move in the direction you're indicating.
This is the same phenomenon that the movie industry is suffering, and why we decry it.
Profit expectations require that games make large sums of safe money
Storytelling, niche audiences, and playstyle experimentation have the potential to make vast sums of money, but they are risky
Michael Bay style games, with low story, costly visuals, and safe gameplay mechanics make dependable, high income
They're also easier to convincingly advertise, as you can simply play a video or show some screens, and your argument is made
Story or inventive gameplay are much harder sells, and usually depend on trust (think Black Isle Studios or Nintendo) or word of mouth from trusted sources
However, as everyone adopts that game strategy, the noise floor becomes extremely high, and development costs escalate in a visual arms race
Soon, a strategy which was cost effective and safe now has a high base cost tied to production
To make a profit, products have to be seen as "quality", which means they have to rise above the floor, and break out as hits.
Worse, an expectation develops that "all" games should have a certain standard of visuals comparable to the last generation of Michael Bay games.
Costs rise for all games.
Less games are made which are risky (story or innovative gameplay, not visuals), as cost-value projections can't account for their unpredictable success.
The whole industry becomes risk averse.
This applies to nearly any established venture and is a natural extension of game theory (the Nash kind), where everyone makes selfish, logical choices that are good for them, but bad for the industry / society as a whole.
Perhaps the second generation of the information age is over, or the age itself. Computers are ubiquitous, but decreasing in expansion speed, the internet is nearly universal, but slowing to incremental change, and all of the old guard are leaving their posts.
As of posting, China by far dominates IE6 use at 34.5% (5.9% of total world use) Followed by India at 12.3%. I would guess a lot of those are from pirate copies of Windows.
IE6 is barely present in the English speaking world anymore (average of 3%).
In its current form, this site is preaching to the choir.
1. Most of their viewers identify with Eli (the slacker nerd genius), but he ended as a minor support character, often just tangentially involved in the plot. He should have been SGU's Rodney.
Whenever he was used, he also tended to just be a punching bag. Every second plot with him was "How can we sexually frustrate or emasculate Eli?" He's interested in a girl. He gets to see her endlessly make out with his 'friend'. He actually gets a girl. "Quick, kill her!"
Speaking of his initial crush. That girl should have died a horrible death in the first season. Her scenes were not just bad. They were painful. They were channel switchingly, mute the TV painful. No word exited her mouth that wasn't twisted into a whining plea.
Of course consumers like Chinese goods. Companies get them because they can offer a lower price, while Also having higher margins.
Given a choice between purchasing an expensive US or European made good, and purchasing a cheap Chinese / Indian good, with vague, non-specific risks, the majority of consumers are going to take the cheap item. Particularly in this economy.
The only time this isn't the case is when there is a public outcry over job loss or specific product dangers like lead. And even that only goes so far.
We can't help valuing the immediate cost of products higher than long term costs or hazards.
As an addendum to this, start with something relatively small, where you can see small, iterative improvements and get feedback on how you are doing.
A small webpage in something as simple as HTML is a decent way to start. From there, add on functionality, maybe something like Javascript, perhaps database queries, or similar.
Picking an interpreted language, like a script with widely available interpreters, can help this process, as you can achieve appreciable results beyond "Hello World" in a short amount of time.
From there, you can move on to more complex things, like learning the basic logic patterns, programming patterns, and/or languages which are compiled to hardware specific machine code.
Basically, don't dive off the deep end too fast, and constantly give yourself information and results so you can be motivated and see how you are doing.
Just comparing the labor costs that these institutions have to deal with. Assuming similar ratio for other costs. Tabulated average yearly income for mechanical engineers (used because aerospace doesn't have enough data on payscale).
US Engineer ~ $61000
Chinese Engineer ~ $17500
Japanese Engineer ~ $44500
Indian Engineer ~ $7500
Russian Engineer ~ $42000
If they then spent their budgets completely to hire engineers, they could each get:
US ~ 288000 Engineers
China ~ 114000 Engineers
Japan ~ 45000 Engineers
India ~ 164000 Engineers
Russia ~ 57000 Engineers
Yes, NASA spends more money, currently than the other space agencies, but the bang for the buck is significantly reduced due to the cost of working 100% inside the US. India's "paltry" 1.23 B can hire 1/2 to 2/3 the number of engineers our 17.6 B can.
Since atrain already covered the issues with the calculated radius, I'll just go with their radius as the starting point.
Therefore, we deduce that the new radius is 7,974.65km.
Further assuming that the moon as it exists now settles in the center of this new waterworld relatively undisturbed, with it's mean radius remaining at 1,737.10km, we can calculate the mean depth of the water on the moon as 6237.55km.
One issue with a calculation of brightness is that a significant portion of the water on the moon is going to form a steam layer almost immediately due to the lack of pressure. Effectively forming a waterworld. As the size of the new planet is ~equivalent to Earth, the steam layer would likely be retained. It will also be a diffuse reflector, rather than specular, like for flat water.
Taking a look at albedos, Venus and Jupiter both seem like reasonable candidates, but lets go with Venus' albedo at 0.65. Up from the Moon's current albedo reflectivity of 0.12. Lets call it an increase of 5:1
Since reflective surface area goes up as the square of the radius, and the radius has gone from 1737 km to 7975 km, then the surface area would go up by a ratio of about 21:1
So, as its a diffuse reflector, we're roughly getting 100x the amount of light back compared to the normal moon.
Standard full moons have visual magnitudes of aprx. -12.7
As the apparent brightness is a log_2.512 scale, the new apparent brightness of our moon would be: -17.7
The apparent brightness of the sun -26.7, 400000 times brighter than our old moon, and 4000 times brighter than our new moon.
Obviously, a lot of assumptions and approximations going on. In addition, there would be the issues of a new gravitational equilibrium if one formed, and the somewhat changed phase angle of the moon to Earth with its new shape.
Why didn't they do it? Not for any lack of know-how, willingness, or determination. It was for lack of funds. Congress cut the hell out of NASA's budget.
Classic NASA joke:
"How do you know your project's about to be canceled?"
"They send out the coffee mugs"
Its not so much that its cut, as that targets keep shifting. Constant project cancellation within NASA has become such a way of life that dropping Constellation ends up being little surprise for the optimists, and expected by the pessimists. Hard to maintain drive, when five or ten similar goals have died.
Without a strong competitor, national fear, and/or a martyr's vision leading the way, there's just not much hope for big ticket items. In that environment, piecemeal subsidization of privatized spaceflight seems like a reasonable way to go. Although without actual hardware, you're going to lose all the clever folks to contractors, and be left with a shell organization full of farm subsidy style bureaucrats without the knowledge to supervise what they're paying for.
Guess we'll just need to wait for a Chinese moon landing to get us going again, at which point it will probably be too late.
Especially since Japanese society still largely encourages women to abandon their careers once they have children. And, as we all know, Japanese women are expected to be baby making machines , so *not* having children isn't really seen as an option.
While it is true that Japanese society does have a very patriarchal outlook, and expects women to produce children, it should also be noted that Japan has one of the lowest birth / death ratios in the entire world, even though it has one of the worlds longest lifespans.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2002rank.html?countryName=Japan&countryCode=ja®ionCode=eas&rank=218#ja
The societal pressure to have children is partially a response to the overwhelming trend of developed nation citizens to have less than the replacement rate, and the fear of an aging, declining population.
The simple answer is to allow far less travel even inside our borders. International flights should be extremely limited. That will not only insure better health and safety but will also diminish the availability of air craft to terrorists as well. Nations such as the old USSR that restricted travel were not totally wrong in that policy.
This is just as wrong for similar reasons as our terrorism policy. It allows threats of disaster to shift our internal policy and disrupt our society. Its a short step from this to wearing facemasks everywhere and not touching doorknobs. Hell, lets all just separate ourselves equidistantly and never have human contact so we can stop stay perfectly safe.
Your quoting "In Soviet Russia" without a joke for goodness sake.
In the Newsweek article that recently came out, they specifically stated that you will be able to join specific groups of friends and share content with them only.
Wright often compared the functionality of the pollenation system during the interview to that of Facebook. You select groups of friends or communities, and you may select the level of access, rate at which you pull content, and types of content you grab. This, along with the massive feature creep of the game, was one of the main reasons the release kept getting pushed back.
Total lack of faith.
10 years ago you might have been able to sell me on that, but in those 10 years after peer sharing, web distribution, and similar technologies burst on the scene, I have seen almost no visible shift away from the consolidation of the established music industry.
The existing music publishing architecture represents a stable, visible sign of success for artists. Much like comic publishing and the syndicates, the stamp of approval from some group by BMG still represents the goal of success that IMO most groups strive for when they're trying to make it.
They may be shooting themselves in the foot and creating nothing but badwill among their consumers, but in any age group except 20 somethings, all I've so far seen is people buying into the concept that the industry is right, and terror at being accused of being a pirate.
Slashdot Mirror
Any large statistical population can have outliers which go against the general trend. Some people have poor genes, and other lifestyle effects which lead to them gaining weight even while controlling their sugar intake. That said, anecdotal evidence doesn't invalidate the general argument against high intake of simple sugars for the overall population.
Also, it should be noted that sugar reduction isn't a magic cure-all. America has significant lifestyle effects, which are nearly unavoidable, which also lead to obesity. For example, nearly all of our cities are designed so that walking is near impossible except in localized zones due to our abundance of land. Contrast this with compact euro-construction, or cities like New York, where a significant percentage of the population can walk everywhere, or ride the rail at most.
TL;DR
Energy In - Energy Out = Energy Stored
The average price of a game at $50 remained so steady that inflation surpassed it. Now even at $60 it's still cheaper than NES/Atari games.
On the sale price side, the problem (and part of he reason that game prices stayed at $60) is that real purchasing power eroded over the same time period. Inflation occurred, the value of money decreased, yet pay has not risen for the vast majority of American's commensurate with inflation. The slice of money then available for luxury goods has shrunk as a percentage of income.
Naturally, this is also coupled with the psychological pressures against game cost increases, although many large ticket industries have not fallen prey to this problem.
A similar concept, the colonization of trans-neptunian objects, and effectively colonizing in a ladder out of our star system and down into other ones by rock hopping is also quite old. Sagan and others were talking about this a long time ago.
What other station would have risked their ad funding and aired Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory | This American Life to ignite this whole shit storm.
Note that there are also a number of "Friends for Chip Rogers" groups
http://www.followthemoney.org/database/StateGlance/candidate.phtml?c=124878
Haven't paid much attention to him before now, but I'd expect a lot of pro-private health care bills.
turning to [prominently mention service name] for the first time [sure it was] ... it's a game changer [excellent use of PR speak]...that gives everyone a supercomputer [if you can affort it]
I'm sure it lets you breath water and gives you telekenesis too, but we don't need to do Amazon's advertising for them, they're big boys with deep pockets.
I deeply enjoyed attending the 100 YSS symposium, and actually presented in the economic track that Jemison headed. However, awarding the final seed money to one of the track chairs and program organizers makes the whole process seem like collusion. Note the Education, Social, Economic and Legal Considerations track in the 100 YSS Symposium Agenda. Having worked program allocation, this is the kind of stuff that could spark lawsuits if it weren't for such a small sum (in gov't terms). Also depends on whether she was funded by DARPA in her track chair duties. (Note: I did not submit a proposal to the RFP)
Hopefully the money is put to good use, as it looks like she partnered with Icarus, who are at least motivated and active.
It seems that Google saw this coming, as there have been several stories in the last couple months about the fact that quotations, or wholesale reprints of articles posted by users on Google+ are being rated higher by the Google algorithm than the original articles. If this is actually true, and not just tinfoil hattery, then users may just become the routing mechanism for news while the official aggregator becomes a bit more barren. A similar mechanic may also work with sites like Twitter or Reddit if they are able to argue that they're not aggregating the news, and their users are just posting links to articles.
This is a prime example a black swan. "The event is a surprise and has a major impact. After the fact, the event is rationalized by hindsight." Its a normal problem of tipping point studies and knowledge propagation. An otherwise good game goes viral and suddenly the circles of those who know about it expand exponentially until everybody does. Rationalization and questions after the fact. "Why did it spread, why is it so amazing". Its cheap. Its easy to get. Its easy to communicate why its fun. It has low bariers for starting to play. It has emergent depth. Yay.
Navel gazing about how the buildings shake doesn't illuminate why it actually spread.
Undiscussed problem areas:...
If you attended, you may just have missed these panels. All three areas were discussed extensively either in presented papers or panel discussions. In fact, the whole "human's as cargo" concept was one of the more hotly debated points. Many argued that we wouldn't want to send real people at all, as they are inherently difficult to keep alive, healthy, happy, ect...
Vinge was one of the authors in attendance. Talking over drinks with him, and some of the other authors during the social on the last night (fun game of public storytelling), they seemed to believe in the concept as much or more than most attendees. Although we were able to make a game of how much they mentioned "singularity" during their panel (20+), they still noted that ideas only come to fruition if they are discussed and worked on. Waiting for a hypothetical singularity to solve all hurdles helps no one. It may not even happen. There is a very real possibility that energy limits will hamper our current trend of short term, exponential growth.
Also, as needs to be constantly reiterated, the idea of the 100 YSS project is not to build a starship right now. It is to develop a long lasting (100+ years), financially stable organization that can develop the capabilities, technologies, and social movements necessary to complete such a task. Not nearly as sexy as warp drive, but damned necessary. Unfortunately, the pop-sci view was reflected in attendees, with financial / economic panels lightly attended vs packed rooms for warp bubble discussion.
There is a fiscal pressure to move in the direction you're indicating.
This is the same phenomenon that the movie industry is suffering, and why we decry it.
Profit expectations require that games make large sums of safe money
Storytelling, niche audiences, and playstyle experimentation have the potential to make vast sums of money, but they are risky
Michael Bay style games, with low story, costly visuals, and safe gameplay mechanics make dependable, high income
They're also easier to convincingly advertise, as you can simply play a video or show some screens, and your argument is made
Story or inventive gameplay are much harder sells, and usually depend on trust (think Black Isle Studios or Nintendo) or word of mouth from trusted sources
However, as everyone adopts that game strategy, the noise floor becomes extremely high, and development costs escalate in a visual arms race
Soon, a strategy which was cost effective and safe now has a high base cost tied to production
To make a profit, products have to be seen as "quality", which means they have to rise above the floor, and break out as hits.
Worse, an expectation develops that "all" games should have a certain standard of visuals comparable to the last generation of Michael Bay games.
Costs rise for all games.
Less games are made which are risky (story or innovative gameplay, not visuals), as cost-value projections can't account for their unpredictable success.
The whole industry becomes risk averse.
This applies to nearly any established venture and is a natural extension of game theory (the Nash kind), where everyone makes selfish, logical choices that are good for them, but bad for the industry / society as a whole.
Perhaps the second generation of the information age is over, or the age itself. Computers are ubiquitous, but decreasing in expansion speed, the internet is nearly universal, but slowing to incremental change, and all of the old guard are leaving their posts.
Seems like they're definitely angling for the funding of the recently posted medical tricorder prize
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/05/13/2134228/Invent-the-Medical-Tricorder-Win-10000000
If successful, it would give them money to work with for years to come.
As of posting, China by far dominates IE6 use at 34.5% (5.9% of total world use) Followed by India at 12.3%. I would guess a lot of those are from pirate copies of Windows.
IE6 is barely present in the English speaking world anymore (average of 3%).
In its current form, this site is preaching to the choir.
1. Most of their viewers identify with Eli (the slacker nerd genius), but he ended as a minor support character, often just tangentially involved in the plot. He should have been SGU's Rodney.
Whenever he was used, he also tended to just be a punching bag. Every second plot with him was "How can we sexually frustrate or emasculate Eli?" He's interested in a girl. He gets to see her endlessly make out with his 'friend'. He actually gets a girl. "Quick, kill her!"
Speaking of his initial crush. That girl should have died a horrible death in the first season. Her scenes were not just bad. They were painful. They were channel switchingly, mute the TV painful. No word exited her mouth that wasn't twisted into a whining plea.
Of course consumers like Chinese goods. Companies get them because they can offer a lower price, while Also having higher margins.
Given a choice between purchasing an expensive US or European made good, and purchasing a cheap Chinese / Indian good, with vague, non-specific risks, the majority of consumers are going to take the cheap item. Particularly in this economy.
The only time this isn't the case is when there is a public outcry over job loss or specific product dangers like lead. And even that only goes so far.
We can't help valuing the immediate cost of products higher than long term costs or hazards.
As an addendum to this, start with something relatively small, where you can see small, iterative improvements and get feedback on how you are doing.
A small webpage in something as simple as HTML is a decent way to start. From there, add on functionality, maybe something like Javascript, perhaps database queries, or similar.
Picking an interpreted language, like a script with widely available interpreters, can help this process, as you can achieve appreciable results beyond "Hello World" in a short amount of time.
From there, you can move on to more complex things, like learning the basic logic patterns, programming patterns, and/or languages which are compiled to hardware specific machine code.
Basically, don't dive off the deep end too fast, and constantly give yourself information and results so you can be motivated and see how you are doing.
This completely ignores globalization.
Just comparing the labor costs that these institutions have to deal with. Assuming similar ratio for other costs. Tabulated average yearly income for mechanical engineers (used because aerospace doesn't have enough data on payscale).
US Engineer ~ $61000
Chinese Engineer ~ $17500
Japanese Engineer ~ $44500
Indian Engineer ~ $7500
Russian Engineer ~ $42000
If they then spent their budgets completely to hire engineers, they could each get:
US ~ 288000 Engineers
China ~ 114000 Engineers
Japan ~ 45000 Engineers
India ~ 164000 Engineers
Russia ~ 57000 Engineers
Yes, NASA spends more money, currently than the other space agencies, but the bang for the buck is significantly reduced due to the cost of working 100% inside the US. India's "paltry" 1.23 B can hire 1/2 to 2/3 the number of engineers our 17.6 B can.
Therefore, we deduce that the new radius is 7,974.65km. Further assuming that the moon as it exists now settles in the center of this new waterworld relatively undisturbed, with it's mean radius remaining at 1,737.10km, we can calculate the mean depth of the water on the moon as 6237.55km.
One issue with a calculation of brightness is that a significant portion of the water on the moon is going to form a steam layer almost immediately due to the lack of pressure. Effectively forming a waterworld. As the size of the new planet is ~equivalent to Earth, the steam layer would likely be retained. It will also be a diffuse reflector, rather than specular, like for flat water.
Taking a look at albedos, Venus and Jupiter both seem like reasonable candidates, but lets go with Venus' albedo at 0.65. Up from the Moon's current albedo reflectivity of 0.12. Lets call it an increase of 5:1
Since reflective surface area goes up as the square of the radius, and the radius has gone from 1737 km to 7975 km, then the surface area would go up by a ratio of about 21:1
So, as its a diffuse reflector, we're roughly getting 100x the amount of light back compared to the normal moon.
Standard full moons have visual magnitudes of aprx. -12.7
As the apparent brightness is a log_2.512 scale, the new apparent brightness of our moon would be: -17.7
The apparent brightness of the sun -26.7, 400000 times brighter than our old moon, and 4000 times brighter than our new moon.
Obviously, a lot of assumptions and approximations going on. In addition, there would be the issues of a new gravitational equilibrium if one formed, and the somewhat changed phase angle of the moon to Earth with its new shape.
Why didn't they do it? Not for any lack of know-how, willingness, or determination. It was for lack of funds. Congress cut the hell out of NASA's budget.
Classic NASA joke:
"How do you know your project's about to be canceled?"
"They send out the coffee mugs"
Its not so much that its cut, as that targets keep shifting. Constant project cancellation within NASA has become such a way of life that dropping Constellation ends up being little surprise for the optimists, and expected by the pessimists. Hard to maintain drive, when five or ten similar goals have died.
Without a strong competitor, national fear, and/or a martyr's vision leading the way, there's just not much hope for big ticket items. In that environment, piecemeal subsidization of privatized spaceflight seems like a reasonable way to go. Although without actual hardware, you're going to lose all the clever folks to contractors, and be left with a shell organization full of farm subsidy style bureaucrats without the knowledge to supervise what they're paying for.
Guess we'll just need to wait for a Chinese moon landing to get us going again, at which point it will probably be too late.
Especially since Japanese society still largely encourages women to abandon their careers once they have children. And, as we all know, Japanese women are expected to be baby making machines , so *not* having children isn't really seen as an option.
While it is true that Japanese society does have a very patriarchal outlook, and expects women to produce children, it should also be noted that Japan has one of the lowest birth / death ratios in the entire world, even though it has one of the worlds longest lifespans. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2002rank.html?countryName=Japan&countryCode=ja®ionCode=eas&rank=218#ja The societal pressure to have children is partially a response to the overwhelming trend of developed nation citizens to have less than the replacement rate, and the fear of an aging, declining population.
The simple answer is to allow far less travel even inside our borders. International flights should be extremely limited. That will not only insure better health and safety but will also diminish the availability of air craft to terrorists as well. Nations such as the old USSR that restricted travel were not totally wrong in that policy.
This is just as wrong for similar reasons as our terrorism policy. It allows threats of disaster to shift our internal policy and disrupt our society. Its a short step from this to wearing facemasks everywhere and not touching doorknobs. Hell, lets all just separate ourselves equidistantly and never have human contact so we can stop stay perfectly safe. Your quoting "In Soviet Russia" without a joke for goodness sake.
In the Newsweek article that recently came out, they specifically stated that you will be able to join specific groups of friends and share content with them only. Wright often compared the functionality of the pollenation system during the interview to that of Facebook. You select groups of friends or communities, and you may select the level of access, rate at which you pull content, and types of content you grab. This, along with the massive feature creep of the game, was one of the main reasons the release kept getting pushed back.
Total lack of faith. 10 years ago you might have been able to sell me on that, but in those 10 years after peer sharing, web distribution, and similar technologies burst on the scene, I have seen almost no visible shift away from the consolidation of the established music industry. The existing music publishing architecture represents a stable, visible sign of success for artists. Much like comic publishing and the syndicates, the stamp of approval from some group by BMG still represents the goal of success that IMO most groups strive for when they're trying to make it. They may be shooting themselves in the foot and creating nothing but badwill among their consumers, but in any age group except 20 somethings, all I've so far seen is people buying into the concept that the industry is right, and terror at being accused of being a pirate.