I suspect that their insane water use will bite them in the ass first.
They have plenty of sun, lots of hot rocks, coal is cheap(if you don't mind huffing mercury and fly ash); but Nevada doesn't even have a convenient body of salt water to desalinate, much less enough of the fresh stuff.
Las Vegas' exoticism will certainly be increased if everybody is running around in stillsuits and shouting "Long live the hookers!" and "The Dice Must Flow!"; but it'll be pretty much all downsides from there(remember, whatever you do, when you are near the Nevada Test Site, Walk. Without. Rhythm.).
Perhaps Harry Reid meant more than one thing by "Saudi Arabia of Geothermal Energy"...
In addition to floating on the vast sea of crude that makes them our bestest ever buddies, for as long as they are willing to sell, Saudi Arabia is home to some... aggressively retro sentiments.
Given that, in this case, "economy collapsing" seems to be a synonym for "post-scarcity economy breaking out", I'd have to go with "good".
Even if Home Taping Is Killing Music(tm), there would be about a billion people being too busy having enough to eat for the first time in their lives to give a fuck. (Plus, of course, the "think of the poor artists" argument kind of breaks down when the artists are all sprawled out around their post-scarcity-cocaine-replicator, having a grand old time...)
Unless you are deeply skeptical of the (empirically undeniable) human tendency to do creative stuff for fuck-all material reward, or cling to the (arguably ethically repulsive) notions that toil and suffering are goods in themselves, it is pretty hard to argue with a post-scarcity-society.
I'd be very surprised to see Apple computers based around processors that are "Apple" in anything more than name and, possibly, specific arrangement of cookie-cutter functional units around a licensed ARM or x86 core.
Apple has historically and to the present day, shown considerable distaste for entering low margin markets(with occasional exceptions in the service of making their high margin gear more attractive: the original "airport", for instance, was actually cheaper than the Lucent gear that it was a rebadge of; but it was sold to give the high-margin macs the "wireless" feature comparatively cheaply and easily, for the user).
Chips, unless you are the top dog(like Intel, who after their rather embarrassing P4 vs. A64 era, are pretty firmly back on top of the x86 world) or a huge supplier of licensed blocks(like ARM), are a cutthroat business. The poor bastards churning out commodity Flash or DRAM seem to be losing money and/or going out of business all the time.
Apple might well(and, indeed, already have), commission a big stack of semi-custom chips, with their own preferred core and functional groups, and have somebody fab it, and(with an order of that size) whoever is contracted to package it will be happy to stamp whatever Apple wants on the casing. However, actually going into chip design/fabrication in a serious way would be entering a seriously cutthroat market to no obvious advantage.
On the x86 side, Intel has already demonstrated a willingness to give Apple some months of exclusivity and press hype for their newest gear(Xeons in the mac pros, small-package core2s in the macbook air), presumably in exchange for better margins than dell and HP's knife-fight-in-a-telephone-booth offers. As long as Intel is willing to do the hard, capital intensive, work of running cutting edge fabs, and provide their fanciest silicon at modest per-unit cost, with an exclusivity period, what would Apple have to gain?
On the ARM side, the world is crawling with vendors who have their own, slightly different, spins of ARM core + functional units. The barrier to entry to having your own isn't exactly huge; but neither are the margins or differentiation. The fact that Apple also has one, to suit their particular embedded devices, isn't surprising; but it isn't a huge strategic thing. All the assorted ARM licensees of a particular ARM generation are pretty similar.
You'd probably want to filter first(lunar regolith isn't, to the best of my knowledge, chemically much scarier than garden-variety sand; but no weathering= thousands and thousands of tiny sharp edges= silicosis ahoy!); but that would probably be about the extent of the difficulty.
More problematic would be collecting the stuff. "More water than the Great Lakes" sounds like a lot, and is, compared to "parched airless rock"; but per square kilometer it isn't very much at all. Unless the distribution is highly uneven, lunar water extraction would be an arduous process of digging through vast quantities of highly abrasive grit and micrometeorite slag, separating out a material that will just sublime and head for space unless contained. Even in 1/6th earth gravity, that isn't going to be gigantic amounts of fun.
If you are a grandstanding chief prosecutor in a mob-riddled hellhole where all the people you really should be leveling charges against could have you wearing cement shoes in short order, it would appear that the answer is "yes"...
In situations where you can't investigate everything yourself, doesn't it make sense to give the private sector an incentive to investigate for you? Seems wholly logical. If anything, because the False Claims Act applies to a lot of potential whistleblowers, it is far harder to buy off all of those than it is to corrupt a single investigative body...
Because the government is intrinsically evil, anything it does that a corporation doesn't like is communism. Therefore, their deal with Oracle couldn't possibly be legit, even if Oracle signed.
However, because the government is intrinsically wasteful, any example of it getting a poor deal is just further evidence of how evil and wasteful it is...
You can see how this, completely internally consistent, line of reasoning leads to governance that is both inefficient and grossly expensive. Pity most of the people who articulate it aren't joking...
The difference is, "AI" systems are neither advanced enough, nor sufficiently embedded in the public mind to be seen as distinct from their creators.
If my doctor fucks up, I sue the doctor(and possibly the hospital, if they really should have known about his habit of bringing a hip-flask into the surgical suite). I don't sue the medical school that "produced" the doctor.
If an AI expert system fucks up, I don't sue the AI, I sue the company that built the AI. Thus, unless the company wishes to carry some sort of novel "aggregate malpractice insurance" covering all the products it sells, selling that product would be wildly uneconomic.
The same basic conditions apply with the various proposals to automate cars. Humans are shit drivers. It is easy to believe that machines will be able to do better within the decade, and do better cheaply not too long thereafter. However, courts have an easy time with the idea that humans suck, and are morally responsible. Therefore, unless a definite defect in the vehicle is detected, the driver is usually blamed. Even if AI drivers cut vehicular crashes by 80%, saving thousands of lives a year, the companies building them would be sued into oblivion.
Based on the size and influence of the America "nutritional supplements" industry, the ADA won't be able to do much more than force US sellers to print "This product is for novelty purposes only and is not intended to treat, diagnose, or cure any disease. This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA." somewhere on the package.
You can sell virtually anything, so long as you slap that on the package and stick to vague claims like "improves immune function" and "enhances wellbeing". You don't even have to comply, in any serious way, with purity and potency requirements. Only if it is reported to the FDA(they don't proactively investigate) that your product is injuring or killing people, will they come after you. The FTC might come after you if you make too many blatantly false statements in your commercials; but that is a distinct problem.
MiniPCI based SSDs, if they exist at all(I've never seen one) are doomed to forever be super-niche items. Why? Because miniPCIe SSDs became a fairly major product category with the rise of the netbook. (a randomly chosen example. No endorsement is implied; just to demonstrate how easy to find they are.) Since basically no new laptops are coming out with miniPCI slots, only miniPCIe slots, there just isn't a whole lot of demand. If you actually meant PCIe, though, shop away!(assuming your laptop has a large enough empty space. The SSD cards are usually rather longer than the wifi or cell cards.
As for CD-ROM replacements, the trick is that there is no standard for the actual modules that swap in and out of laptops. The CD-rom drives themselves, are standardish(not "standard" as in "you can get replacements and all the cables and connectors you could want wherever parts are sold"; but they all seem to be approximately the same). By the time the manufacturer has put a custom plastic housing around them, and possibly a custom hot-swap connector, anything goes. Many; but by no means all, laptop models have a module available(from the manufacturer, or a third party) that will allow you to put an HDD in the CD-ROM slot. They are just dumb mechanical adapters and will work just as well with an 2.5 inch format SSD.
I'm afraid your reading comprehension leaves something to be desired.
"Outside of people informed enough to oppose particular scientific projects as being ill-conceived compared to other ones, support for, or opposition to, research projects is pretty much an ideological matter. People who support science as an end will be dissuaded only by the most grindingly uninteresting streaks of purely negative results. People who oppose it(or who rank it very low compared to other ends) will be appeased by only results that are trivially applicable to whatever they do care about. If, for example, one of these Higgs particles could be commercialized as a cure for male-pattern baldness or a source of HDTVs within the next two years..."
The first phrase intentionally excludes scientists in the discipline and very atypically well informed laymen from the rest of the discussion. For them, negative results are certainly of use(though, if you look at scientific publication patterns, even among the professionals, positive results publish better) and of interest.
Then there is the category of interested laymen. The sort of people who like science, think space travel and big science machines are pretty cool, paid attention in high school/undergrad science classes, read science popularizations and maybe the occasional lighter paper, attend lectures when available, etc. Here, I stand by my assertion that an excessively dull string of negative results will blunt their enthusiasm. Not enough to turn them into the third category; but enough that they will probably lose interest in project X and go watch project Y instead.
I'm not sure that the people with cash would really want an even more nuclear than nuclear option floating around...
Being the only kid on the block with nukes has its perks; but that state lasted for about 20 minutes, back in the late 40's. Since then, anybody who has them has to contend with the fact that, if they actually do anything, pretty much everybody else will freak out and glass them. This has virtually obviated the theoretical killing potential. From their invention to the present, nukes probably trail machetes(never mind Kalashnikovs and assorted knockoffs) in terms of body count. You still have to have a collection of them on the mantle, kept polished and dusted, if you want to be part of the great powers club; but you don't actually get to use them, and you can't really stop uncouth little upstarts from collecting their own. Worse, you have to deal with the fact that, although you cannot use them, non-state, covert, or just plain nihilistic actors can. Back when you could be pretty certain that only real countries had nukes, you could rely on MAD. If some nutjob, or untraceable tool of somebody's intelligence apparatus goes and blows up something expensive, the incumbents lose, and don't have any good way of retaliating.
Some sort of uber-nuke super-superweapon would, at best, bring you back to the late 40's situation(minus the enviable economic position of being the only major industrialized nation not squatting in a pile of its own rubble). At worst, it would just antagonize the other nuclear powers.
There will certainly always be money to keep the existing stock dusted and polished, and react to any threats to its efficacy; but I suspect that, if you want military money, you'd do much better by developing weapons that they will be able to use without excessive diplomatic trouble. Drones, precision munitions, vehicles that can't be destroyed by explosively formed penetrators that can be fabricated by anybody with a supply of ammonium nitrate and metal forming skills somewhere between "early modern blacksmith" and "1850's machine shop", etc.
To exactly how many "particular spaces" would this vigilant monitoring have to expand before the two scenarios are functionally identical?
Unless your idea of fun is accessing your own remote hosts by IP address, over any encrypted channel, any realistic use of the internet is going to take you across a fair few "particular spaces". Monitoring of even a subset of those will, fairly quickly, generate a dataset largely equivalent, for most purposes, to just following you around, particularly if those "particular spaces" are aggregating their monitoring data in some way(or kicking it to a third party that is doing so).
The efficiency and centralization with which "public information" is processed matters a great deal. Yes, the notion that you have no expectation of privacy in public spaces is an old and established one. However, never in history has non-privacy been so revealing...
I'm guessing that this won't reassure them. "So, our big machine discovered some weird stuff, that we'll need to build two bigger machines to investigate in proper detail. I'm sure that neither of those will repeat this process..."
Outside of people informed enough to oppose particular scientific projects as being ill-conceived compared to other ones, support for, or opposition to, research projects is pretty much an ideological matter. People who support science as an end will be dissuaded only by the most grindingly uninteresting streaks of purely negative results. People who oppose it(or who rank it very low compared to other ends) will be appeased by only results that are trivially applicable to whatever they do care about. If, for example, one of these Higgs particles could be commercialized as a cure for male-pattern baldness or a source of HDTVs within the next two years...
Surely you recognise the difference between "no expectation of privacy" and "unknown; but likely substantial, levels of automated surveillance by the feds"?
You don't have an expectation of privacy when walking around town; but if there were a plainclothes G-man following everybody around, that would be a Bad Sign(tm)....
Given his disdain for the product, and its notorious inefficiency, I'm not sure that he wouldn't use it for that purpose...
Just like the antiquated eMachine(Duron 650, 256 MB of RAM, WinME) running IE express and a cracked copy of Paint Shop Pro that he keeps in the "penal cubicle" for the use of those who displease him.
Unfortunately, Apple (while abundantly evil, and extra dangerous because they are good at it), is not especially short of company.
Microsoft has Xbox360, Zune, and Windows Phone 7, all as cryptographically controlled platforms. Further, their newer PC OSes feature goodies like the "protected media path" and the steady deprecation of kernel drivers not blessed from Redmond.
Sony has the PS3, PSP, and all things Blu-ray. Not to mention their creative subversions of the CD standard...
Intel are the fine folks behind HDMI, and reading any of their TPM or EFI "trusted boot" related whitepapers should give you a good case of the chills for their vision of the future of the x86 platform.
There is a second problem: Unless the "tamper-protected circuit"(and presumably "trusted" software) is the entirety of the device, it will be completely useless, even if never cracked. Consider:
1. I receive an encrypted copy of $BIG_MEDIA_PABLUM$. It requires the super secret playkey to decrypt. The super secret playkey is stored in an unbreakable TPM.
2. My software requests the playkey, uses it to decrypt $BIG_MEDIA_PABLUM$ and hands me a plaintext copy.
3. I have a plaintext copy. I no longer care a whit about the playkey. Even if the TPM is unbreakable, and the "rivalrous" revocation mechanism impossible to defeat, what does it matter? I have a plaintext copy.
As with any DRM system, this "kinder, gentler" system requires that all the software on a system be aligned against you(and, to keep it that way, typically involves hardware measures that make it hard or impossible to replace that software, even if you wish to opt out of the "ecosystem" entirely). Thus, no matter how "benevolent" the terms of the DRM are technologically capable of being such a system will necessarily be an enemy of software freedom(or even the potential possession of software freedom) and will, in practice, be as restrictive as desired by the company or consortium that exercises cryptographic control over "your" hardware in perpetuity.
The real concern is that a (portable, screen-and-keyboard-provided, generally well regarded) macbook laptop now costs only slightly more than does the mini. In fact, the cost of a mini + decent monitor and adequate peripherals is pretty much identical, without the battery.
If you already have a $1,000+ HDTV, the mini is certainly elegant looking, and a hell of a lot punchier than any of the atom-based HTPCs in similar size classes(albeit 1/2 to 1/3 the price); but I'm not sure how much of a virtue that will end up being. If you plan on gaming on an HDTV, the mini's graphics are going to be a serious issue. If you are just doing video, pretty much any CPU will be fast enough, with hardware decode assistance.
If you want a general-purpose mac, the modest premium for a laptop, that can be toted around or attached to external peripherals, seems much more compelling.
Steve, the turtlenecked one: "Web minion! The weak fools we call 'customers' will endure any delay for our superior products, and the media interprets server slowness as a sign of overwhelming demand. Make it so!"
Web minion: *starts iTunes on the Xserve handling orders, the beachball starts spinning*
Steve, the turtlenecked one: "No, you fool! I don't want a slight increase in ping times, I want interminable delays, I want pages that have to be refreshed a dozen times, I want those pitiful insects to beg for our order confirmation screen. Take any measures necessary."
Web minion: "Master, surely you don't mean?"
Steve, the turtlenecked one: "Yes. Load a Flash Applet..."
Working on the assumption that, in the contemporary west, "generation" means ~25 years, there have been pretty enormous changes in that time. In '85, a 386 fabbed on a 1.5 micrometer process was seriously exciting stuff. In 1960, the transistor was only 13 years old, and seriously retro(but electromagnetically robust) stuff like magnetic core memory was still standard. There were plenty of electric gadgets, though.
Protip: If TFA is found on the "telegraph.co.uk" domain, it almost certainly represents the state of knowledge of someone who majored in "journalism", after surviving an editor, rather than the state of knowledge of the actual scientists involved with the question...
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that their insane water use will bite them in the ass first.
They have plenty of sun, lots of hot rocks, coal is cheap(if you don't mind huffing mercury and fly ash); but Nevada doesn't even have a convenient body of salt water to desalinate, much less enough of the fresh stuff.
Las Vegas' exoticism will certainly be increased if everybody is running around in stillsuits and shouting "Long live the hookers!" and "The Dice Must Flow!"; but it'll be pretty much all downsides from there(remember, whatever you do, when you are near the Nevada Test Site, Walk. Without. Rhythm.).
Perhaps Harry Reid meant more than one thing by "Saudi Arabia of Geothermal Energy"...
In addition to floating on the vast sea of crude that makes them our bestest ever buddies, for as long as they are willing to sell, Saudi Arabia is home to some... aggressively retro sentiments.
Given that, in this case, "economy collapsing" seems to be a synonym for "post-scarcity economy breaking out", I'd have to go with "good".
Even if Home Taping Is Killing Music(tm), there would be about a billion people being too busy having enough to eat for the first time in their lives to give a fuck. (Plus, of course, the "think of the poor artists" argument kind of breaks down when the artists are all sprawled out around their post-scarcity-cocaine-replicator, having a grand old time...)
Unless you are deeply skeptical of the (empirically undeniable) human tendency to do creative stuff for fuck-all material reward, or cling to the (arguably ethically repulsive) notions that toil and suffering are goods in themselves, it is pretty hard to argue with a post-scarcity-society.
I'd be very surprised to see Apple computers based around processors that are "Apple" in anything more than name and, possibly, specific arrangement of cookie-cutter functional units around a licensed ARM or x86 core.
Apple has historically and to the present day, shown considerable distaste for entering low margin markets(with occasional exceptions in the service of making their high margin gear more attractive: the original "airport", for instance, was actually cheaper than the Lucent gear that it was a rebadge of; but it was sold to give the high-margin macs the "wireless" feature comparatively cheaply and easily, for the user). Chips, unless you are the top dog(like Intel, who after their rather embarrassing P4 vs. A64 era, are pretty firmly back on top of the x86 world) or a huge supplier of licensed blocks(like ARM), are a cutthroat business. The poor bastards churning out commodity Flash or DRAM seem to be losing money and/or going out of business all the time.
Apple might well(and, indeed, already have), commission a big stack of semi-custom chips, with their own preferred core and functional groups, and have somebody fab it, and(with an order of that size) whoever is contracted to package it will be happy to stamp whatever Apple wants on the casing. However, actually going into chip design/fabrication in a serious way would be entering a seriously cutthroat market to no obvious advantage.
On the x86 side, Intel has already demonstrated a willingness to give Apple some months of exclusivity and press hype for their newest gear(Xeons in the mac pros, small-package core2s in the macbook air), presumably in exchange for better margins than dell and HP's knife-fight-in-a-telephone-booth offers. As long as Intel is willing to do the hard, capital intensive, work of running cutting edge fabs, and provide their fanciest silicon at modest per-unit cost, with an exclusivity period, what would Apple have to gain?
On the ARM side, the world is crawling with vendors who have their own, slightly different, spins of ARM core + functional units. The barrier to entry to having your own isn't exactly huge; but neither are the margins or differentiation. The fact that Apple also has one, to suit their particular embedded devices, isn't surprising; but it isn't a huge strategic thing. All the assorted ARM licensees of a particular ARM generation are pretty similar.
You'd probably want to filter first(lunar regolith isn't, to the best of my knowledge, chemically much scarier than garden-variety sand; but no weathering= thousands and thousands of tiny sharp edges= silicosis ahoy!); but that would probably be about the extent of the difficulty.
More problematic would be collecting the stuff. "More water than the Great Lakes" sounds like a lot, and is, compared to "parched airless rock"; but per square kilometer it isn't very much at all. Unless the distribution is highly uneven, lunar water extraction would be an arduous process of digging through vast quantities of highly abrasive grit and micrometeorite slag, separating out a material that will just sublime and head for space unless contained. Even in 1/6th earth gravity, that isn't going to be gigantic amounts of fun.
If you are a grandstanding chief prosecutor in a mob-riddled hellhole where all the people you really should be leveling charges against could have you wearing cement shoes in short order, it would appear that the answer is "yes"...
In situations where you can't investigate everything yourself, doesn't it make sense to give the private sector an incentive to investigate for you? Seems wholly logical. If anything, because the False Claims Act applies to a lot of potential whistleblowers, it is far harder to buy off all of those than it is to corrupt a single investigative body...
One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison...
Don't you understand? Here is how it works:
Because the government is intrinsically evil, anything it does that a corporation doesn't like is communism. Therefore, their deal with Oracle couldn't possibly be legit, even if Oracle signed.
However, because the government is intrinsically wasteful, any example of it getting a poor deal is just further evidence of how evil and wasteful it is...
You can see how this, completely internally consistent, line of reasoning leads to governance that is both inefficient and grossly expensive. Pity most of the people who articulate it aren't joking...
The difference is, "AI" systems are neither advanced enough, nor sufficiently embedded in the public mind to be seen as distinct from their creators.
If my doctor fucks up, I sue the doctor(and possibly the hospital, if they really should have known about his habit of bringing a hip-flask into the surgical suite). I don't sue the medical school that "produced" the doctor.
If an AI expert system fucks up, I don't sue the AI, I sue the company that built the AI. Thus, unless the company wishes to carry some sort of novel "aggregate malpractice insurance" covering all the products it sells, selling that product would be wildly uneconomic.
The same basic conditions apply with the various proposals to automate cars. Humans are shit drivers. It is easy to believe that machines will be able to do better within the decade, and do better cheaply not too long thereafter. However, courts have an easy time with the idea that humans suck, and are morally responsible. Therefore, unless a definite defect in the vehicle is detected, the driver is usually blamed. Even if AI drivers cut vehicular crashes by 80%, saving thousands of lives a year, the companies building them would be sued into oblivion.
Based on the size and influence of the America "nutritional supplements" industry, the ADA won't be able to do much more than force US sellers to print "This product is for novelty purposes only and is not intended to treat, diagnose, or cure any disease. This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA." somewhere on the package.
You can sell virtually anything, so long as you slap that on the package and stick to vague claims like "improves immune function" and "enhances wellbeing". You don't even have to comply, in any serious way, with purity and potency requirements. Only if it is reported to the FDA(they don't proactively investigate) that your product is injuring or killing people, will they come after you. The FTC might come after you if you make too many blatantly false statements in your commercials; but that is a distinct problem.
MiniPCI based SSDs, if they exist at all(I've never seen one) are doomed to forever be super-niche items. Why? Because miniPCIe SSDs became a fairly major product category with the rise of the netbook. (a randomly chosen example. No endorsement is implied; just to demonstrate how easy to find they are.) Since basically no new laptops are coming out with miniPCI slots, only miniPCIe slots, there just isn't a whole lot of demand. If you actually meant PCIe, though, shop away!(assuming your laptop has a large enough empty space. The SSD cards are usually rather longer than the wifi or cell cards.
As for CD-ROM replacements, the trick is that there is no standard for the actual modules that swap in and out of laptops. The CD-rom drives themselves, are standardish(not "standard" as in "you can get replacements and all the cables and connectors you could want wherever parts are sold"; but they all seem to be approximately the same). By the time the manufacturer has put a custom plastic housing around them, and possibly a custom hot-swap connector, anything goes. Many; but by no means all, laptop models have a module available(from the manufacturer, or a third party) that will allow you to put an HDD in the CD-ROM slot. They are just dumb mechanical adapters and will work just as well with an 2.5 inch format SSD.
I'm afraid your reading comprehension leaves something to be desired.
"Outside of people informed enough to oppose particular scientific projects as being ill-conceived compared to other ones, support for, or opposition to, research projects is pretty much an ideological matter. People who support science as an end will be dissuaded only by the most grindingly uninteresting streaks of purely negative results. People who oppose it(or who rank it very low compared to other ends) will be appeased by only results that are trivially applicable to whatever they do care about. If, for example, one of these Higgs particles could be commercialized as a cure for male-pattern baldness or a source of HDTVs within the next two years..."
The first phrase intentionally excludes scientists in the discipline and very atypically well informed laymen from the rest of the discussion. For them, negative results are certainly of use(though, if you look at scientific publication patterns, even among the professionals, positive results publish better) and of interest.
Then there is the category of interested laymen. The sort of people who like science, think space travel and big science machines are pretty cool, paid attention in high school/undergrad science classes, read science popularizations and maybe the occasional lighter paper, attend lectures when available, etc. Here, I stand by my assertion that an excessively dull string of negative results will blunt their enthusiasm. Not enough to turn them into the third category; but enough that they will probably lose interest in project X and go watch project Y instead.
I'm not sure that the people with cash would really want an even more nuclear than nuclear option floating around...
Being the only kid on the block with nukes has its perks; but that state lasted for about 20 minutes, back in the late 40's. Since then, anybody who has them has to contend with the fact that, if they actually do anything, pretty much everybody else will freak out and glass them. This has virtually obviated the theoretical killing potential. From their invention to the present, nukes probably trail machetes(never mind Kalashnikovs and assorted knockoffs) in terms of body count. You still have to have a collection of them on the mantle, kept polished and dusted, if you want to be part of the great powers club; but you don't actually get to use them, and you can't really stop uncouth little upstarts from collecting their own. Worse, you have to deal with the fact that, although you cannot use them, non-state, covert, or just plain nihilistic actors can. Back when you could be pretty certain that only real countries had nukes, you could rely on MAD. If some nutjob, or untraceable tool of somebody's intelligence apparatus goes and blows up something expensive, the incumbents lose, and don't have any good way of retaliating.
Some sort of uber-nuke super-superweapon would, at best, bring you back to the late 40's situation(minus the enviable economic position of being the only major industrialized nation not squatting in a pile of its own rubble). At worst, it would just antagonize the other nuclear powers.
There will certainly always be money to keep the existing stock dusted and polished, and react to any threats to its efficacy; but I suspect that, if you want military money, you'd do much better by developing weapons that they will be able to use without excessive diplomatic trouble. Drones, precision munitions, vehicles that can't be destroyed by explosively formed penetrators that can be fabricated by anybody with a supply of ammonium nitrate and metal forming skills somewhere between "early modern blacksmith" and "1850's machine shop", etc.
To exactly how many "particular spaces" would this vigilant monitoring have to expand before the two scenarios are functionally identical?
Unless your idea of fun is accessing your own remote hosts by IP address, over any encrypted channel, any realistic use of the internet is going to take you across a fair few "particular spaces". Monitoring of even a subset of those will, fairly quickly, generate a dataset largely equivalent, for most purposes, to just following you around, particularly if those "particular spaces" are aggregating their monitoring data in some way(or kicking it to a third party that is doing so).
The efficiency and centralization with which "public information" is processed matters a great deal. Yes, the notion that you have no expectation of privacy in public spaces is an old and established one. However, never in history has non-privacy been so revealing...
I'm guessing that this won't reassure them. "So, our big machine discovered some weird stuff, that we'll need to build two bigger machines to investigate in proper detail. I'm sure that neither of those will repeat this process..."
Outside of people informed enough to oppose particular scientific projects as being ill-conceived compared to other ones, support for, or opposition to, research projects is pretty much an ideological matter. People who support science as an end will be dissuaded only by the most grindingly uninteresting streaks of purely negative results. People who oppose it(or who rank it very low compared to other ends) will be appeased by only results that are trivially applicable to whatever they do care about. If, for example, one of these Higgs particles could be commercialized as a cure for male-pattern baldness or a source of HDTVs within the next two years...
Surely you recognise the difference between "no expectation of privacy" and "unknown; but likely substantial, levels of automated surveillance by the feds"?
You don't have an expectation of privacy when walking around town; but if there were a plainclothes G-man following everybody around, that would be a Bad Sign(tm)....
Are you familiar with the McCormick raper? This mechanized marvel can perform the work of a hundred men...
Given his disdain for the product, and its notorious inefficiency, I'm not sure that he wouldn't use it for that purpose...
Just like the antiquated eMachine(Duron 650, 256 MB of RAM, WinME) running IE express and a cracked copy of Paint Shop Pro that he keeps in the "penal cubicle" for the use of those who displease him.
Unfortunately, Apple (while abundantly evil, and extra dangerous because they are good at it), is not especially short of company.
Microsoft has Xbox360, Zune, and Windows Phone 7, all as cryptographically controlled platforms. Further, their newer PC OSes feature goodies like the "protected media path" and the steady deprecation of kernel drivers not blessed from Redmond.
Sony has the PS3, PSP, and all things Blu-ray. Not to mention their creative subversions of the CD standard...
Intel are the fine folks behind HDMI, and reading any of their TPM or EFI "trusted boot" related whitepapers should give you a good case of the chills for their vision of the future of the x86 platform.
There is a second problem: Unless the "tamper-protected circuit"(and presumably "trusted" software) is the entirety of the device, it will be completely useless, even if never cracked. Consider:
1. I receive an encrypted copy of $BIG_MEDIA_PABLUM$. It requires the super secret playkey to decrypt. The super secret playkey is stored in an unbreakable TPM.
2. My software requests the playkey, uses it to decrypt $BIG_MEDIA_PABLUM$ and hands me a plaintext copy.
3. I have a plaintext copy. I no longer care a whit about the playkey. Even if the TPM is unbreakable, and the "rivalrous" revocation mechanism impossible to defeat, what does it matter? I have a plaintext copy.
As with any DRM system, this "kinder, gentler" system requires that all the software on a system be aligned against you(and, to keep it that way, typically involves hardware measures that make it hard or impossible to replace that software, even if you wish to opt out of the "ecosystem" entirely). Thus, no matter how "benevolent" the terms of the DRM are technologically capable of being such a system will necessarily be an enemy of software freedom(or even the potential possession of software freedom) and will, in practice, be as restrictive as desired by the company or consortium that exercises cryptographic control over "your" hardware in perpetuity.
The real concern is that a (portable, screen-and-keyboard-provided, generally well regarded) macbook laptop now costs only slightly more than does the mini. In fact, the cost of a mini + decent monitor and adequate peripherals is pretty much identical, without the battery.
If you already have a $1,000+ HDTV, the mini is certainly elegant looking, and a hell of a lot punchier than any of the atom-based HTPCs in similar size classes(albeit 1/2 to 1/3 the price); but I'm not sure how much of a virtue that will end up being. If you plan on gaming on an HDTV, the mini's graphics are going to be a serious issue. If you are just doing video, pretty much any CPU will be fast enough, with hardware decode assistance.
If you want a general-purpose mac, the modest premium for a laptop, that can be toted around or attached to external peripherals, seems much more compelling.
Steve, the turtlenecked one: "Web minion! The weak fools we call 'customers' will endure any delay for our superior products, and the media interprets server slowness as a sign of overwhelming demand. Make it so!"
..."
Web minion: *starts iTunes on the Xserve handling orders, the beachball starts spinning*
Steve, the turtlenecked one: "No, you fool! I don't want a slight increase in ping times, I want interminable delays, I want pages that have to be refreshed a dozen times, I want those pitiful insects to beg for our order confirmation screen. Take any measures necessary."
Web minion: "Master, surely you don't mean?"
Steve, the turtlenecked one: "Yes. Load a Flash Applet
Working on the assumption that, in the contemporary west, "generation" means ~25 years, there have been pretty enormous changes in that time. In '85, a 386 fabbed on a 1.5 micrometer process was seriously exciting stuff. In 1960, the transistor was only 13 years old, and seriously retro(but electromagnetically robust) stuff like magnetic core memory was still standard. There were plenty of electric gadgets, though.
Protip: If TFA is found on the "telegraph.co.uk" domain, it almost certainly represents the state of knowledge of someone who majored in "journalism", after surviving an editor, rather than the state of knowledge of the actual scientists involved with the question...