On that particular issue, you don't have to worry too much. The Chinese government do pay attention to private investments and have a tendency to mess about with the market to stop them getting out of hand.
When they saw people investing in housing, they reacted with a new build scheme that put up masses of new flats ready for use at almost any price level, which dropped the value of existing housing. It didn't entirely stop a fashion for housing investment, but nobody's fooled into thinking that it's a magic money making machine.
It would hurt them very badly if they did it unprovoked. The mechanism by which it would hurt them would be undoing their currency manipulation which keeps the yuan weak and their exports subsidised.
If there was an embargo against them, dumping the currency would have no extra effect whatsoever and it would be a very sensible retaliatory move.
You can't be sure that allowing them wouldn't have been worse. Early breeder reactor designs were inherently unstable, allowing situations where there could be a runaway reaction. Building one and having it blow its top would have been a far worse setback than the path we did take.
I'd agree completely that what we need need now is solid, proven breeder reactor tech, and the opportunity to get it was wasted. I just wanted to provide an alternative to the "grass is always greener" thinking - it could have been a disaster too.
This is nowhere near the top of the list of liberties that the Saudis are lacking. Compared to everything else that's already in place, that's been in place for decades, which is accepted... yes, this is trivial.
Most of their carbon neutral plan seems to be based on hefty use of space based solar power in combination with dumping C02 into seawater. The first, you can do perfectly well on land, and the second you should't be doing at all.
It sounds like a crap idea buried under a pile of justifications.
I have absolutely no idea what point you're trying to make here.
The loss of established-tech manufacturing is already a done deal. We can try to encourage the growth of that sector too if you like, but we're at a disadvantage. Exactly counter to what you've just claimed, we're not relying on poor working conditions abroad, we're in competetion with them. We can't subsidise industry to the same degree that China does, we can't get labour as cheaply as scores of other nations can. What else is there that we can actually do? It's a serious question, and please do try to answer it because so far I haven't seen you make any positive suggestions.
Education is an entirely seperate matter. Changing the model of payments for university education is happening right now, but that's only related to research funding in a broad sense, as far as the economics goes.
You might want to note that what I'm suggesting as a fix is to rely more heavily on the high tech industries. It was a message very heavily promoted at the protest (yes, I was there) - the UK can't compete on cheap labour, we can't compete on natural resources, and the service sector economy and banking are too unreliable as a sole source of income. High tech manufacturing driven by science is our only sensible option for a strong economy.
It's ridiculous to call science funding economically damaging. It's not just pissing money up against the wall for no reason, it's an investment in economic growth. The science investment that we have paid for during the boom is what it taking us out of the bust.
If you have a science education good enough to do real research, then you could also get at one of the huge banks as a trader for something like 20 times the income. Anybody who has that kind of education and became a scientist has made the decision to not be part of the problem and be part of the solution.
During the recovery, when old businesses resume normal operation and new businesses start up, it's the high tech manufacturing sector that lead the way. The work of scientists over the past decade is exactly what makes that sector's growth possible.
You didn't build their internet either, unless you think that the western world has been paying for all their telephone infrastructure over the last several decades. It's not your network.
So... all I have to do is hack the market price calculations, buy my gold for $10.00 an ounce, then sell it for $300 an ounce. I give these guys less than a year before they're hacked into bankruptcy.
My gods! You mean that they're going to be transmitting data with financial implications via computer? The fools!
Just imagine if normal ATMs or cash registers did anything so stupid, this "hacking" could allow somebody to ignore the whole system of money! I shudder at the very idea.
General relativity already has this one covered. The universe is, to the best of our ability to measure it, very closely balanced between the positive energy that makes up all the matter it contains, and the negative energy of the tension of spacetime. If you could run the expansion of the universe backwards and collapse it all into a point again, you'd end up with nothing. The something we see around us came from exactly that - a grand total of zero on every scale you can measure.
This is more or less the same debate as over early abortions and chemical contraceptives, it's about when your genetic material becomes an independent and legally protected person. Unless you're suggesting that the libertarian approach is to let people sell their children thus making the question irrelevant, you need to set some defined boundaries of personhood and embryohood.
and if I start. New sentence's. In completely inappropriate. Location's within my text. You can still understand. What I mean. Adding apostrophe's to my plural's also leaves my meaning clear.
It's still not correct.
The differences are in how compact the engine is and exhaust velocity. Airliner engines are designed solely for efficiency and as such have bypass ratios that make start to look like a helicopter mounted sideways in a tube. The actual power generating bit of the engine is tiny and most of the thrust comes from shunting air through the outer parts at relatively low speeds without ever being compressed.
Generating exhaust simultaneously at high rate, high velocity and in a compact package is vastly different.
You would need a powerful laser to burn off surface of space junk but that's no problem, we've got cutting laser that have been able to do that for decades. It's the focus that's the issue, poor focus wastes a lot of power so you need more brute force light to compensate.
Once you've got something like that in place though there's no problem. The vapour given off by rapidly heated space junk is just gas, by the time it cools down enough to act like a solid again it's too spread out to crystallise - no threat to anything. The propulsive effect you get isn't great, but not so tiny that it isn't worth doing, particularly for junk in low orbits that only need a tiny nudge to skim atmosphere.
This seems to vary depending on where you are. I have a friend who has a TV set and doesn't have a licence for it. When the licence people questioned this, he invited them in, showed them his antenna socket was taped over, and explained that he didn't use his TV for recieving signals. They were quite happy to take his word for it and haven't bothered him since.
I think it's better to think of this thing as being a spy satellite, rather than something used to tend them. It's a spy satellite that can land itself for periodic upgrades, periodic refuels, and which doesn't need to be shunted about because it has its own engine.
It's also a fair bet that it can carry more than just sensors, but I wouldn't imagine anybody is keen to show off all of its capabilities, so for the forseeable future it'll just be carrying cameras.
As far as I am aware, the distinction in most countries legal systems is whether the work was commissioned by a particular buyer. If somebody has created something copyrightable to specific instructions by a single buyer, the copyright is owned by the buyer. That applies to everything, not just software, although it can be overriden if there is a contract that states the coder/writer/artist/whatever retains their copyright. If the work was created without any prior arrangement, the rights work the way you would expect and you can then sell the work to whoever you want as many times as you want.
Power output of a wind farm is variable, but you take that into account when designing it. You set a minimum power output and an acceptable probability of failing to meet it, then you build however many turbines it takes to match that. For Britain which has so much coastline to play with, it's not usually a very high number.
If the worst problem you have to deal with is occasional power surplus, you're doing well.
I already have several computers powerful enough to play vimeo video, but turning them on just for one clip isn't worth the effort when the same thing is usually available to see on youtube.
I would prefer "be less like vimeo" because the only difference between them that affects me is that the youtube player decodes video efficiently enough that my processor can handle it, and vimeo is a browser locking slideshow.
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On that particular issue, you don't have to worry too much. The Chinese government do pay attention to private investments and have a tendency to mess about with the market to stop them getting out of hand.
When they saw people investing in housing, they reacted with a new build scheme that put up masses of new flats ready for use at almost any price level, which dropped the value of existing housing. It didn't entirely stop a fashion for housing investment, but nobody's fooled into thinking that it's a magic money making machine.
It would hurt them very badly if they did it unprovoked. The mechanism by which it would hurt them would be undoing their currency manipulation which keeps the yuan weak and their exports subsidised.
If there was an embargo against them, dumping the currency would have no extra effect whatsoever and it would be a very sensible retaliatory move.
You can't be sure that allowing them wouldn't have been worse. Early breeder reactor designs were inherently unstable, allowing situations where there could be a runaway reaction. Building one and having it blow its top would have been a far worse setback than the path we did take.
I'd agree completely that what we need need now is solid, proven breeder reactor tech, and the opportunity to get it was wasted. I just wanted to provide an alternative to the "grass is always greener" thinking - it could have been a disaster too.
This is nowhere near the top of the list of liberties that the Saudis are lacking. Compared to everything else that's already in place, that's been in place for decades, which is accepted... yes, this is trivial.
Most of their carbon neutral plan seems to be based on hefty use of space based solar power in combination with dumping C02 into seawater. The first, you can do perfectly well on land, and the second you should't be doing at all.
It sounds like a crap idea buried under a pile of justifications.
I have absolutely no idea what point you're trying to make here.
The loss of established-tech manufacturing is already a done deal. We can try to encourage the growth of that sector too if you like, but we're at a disadvantage. Exactly counter to what you've just claimed, we're not relying on poor working conditions abroad, we're in competetion with them. We can't subsidise industry to the same degree that China does, we can't get labour as cheaply as scores of other nations can. What else is there that we can actually do? It's a serious question, and please do try to answer it because so far I haven't seen you make any positive suggestions.
Education is an entirely seperate matter. Changing the model of payments for university education is happening right now, but that's only related to research funding in a broad sense, as far as the economics goes.
You might want to note that what I'm suggesting as a fix is to rely more heavily on the high tech industries. It was a message very heavily promoted at the protest (yes, I was there) - the UK can't compete on cheap labour, we can't compete on natural resources, and the service sector economy and banking are too unreliable as a sole source of income. High tech manufacturing driven by science is our only sensible option for a strong economy.
It's ridiculous to call science funding economically damaging. It's not just pissing money up against the wall for no reason, it's an investment in economic growth. The science investment that we have paid for during the boom is what it taking us out of the bust.
If you have a science education good enough to do real research, then you could also get at one of the huge banks as a trader for something like 20 times the income. Anybody who has that kind of education and became a scientist has made the decision to not be part of the problem and be part of the solution.
During the recovery, when old businesses resume normal operation and new businesses start up, it's the high tech manufacturing sector that lead the way. The work of scientists over the past decade is exactly what makes that sector's growth possible.
You didn't build their internet either, unless you think that the western world has been paying for all their telephone infrastructure over the last several decades. It's not your network.
So... all I have to do is hack the market price calculations, buy my gold for $10.00 an ounce, then sell it for $300 an ounce. I give these guys less than a year before they're hacked into bankruptcy.
My gods! You mean that they're going to be transmitting data with financial implications via computer? The fools!
Just imagine if normal ATMs or cash registers did anything so stupid, this "hacking" could allow somebody to ignore the whole system of money! I shudder at the very idea.
Anybody who has been to a sea coast can notice one, and there are few enough options available that you can easily guess the other.
Bertrand Russell got there first with that analogy, Dawkins didn't come up with it. It's fairly famous under the name "Russell's Teapot."
General relativity already has this one covered. The universe is, to the best of our ability to measure it, very closely balanced between the positive energy that makes up all the matter it contains, and the negative energy of the tension of spacetime. If you could run the expansion of the universe backwards and collapse it all into a point again, you'd end up with nothing. The something we see around us came from exactly that - a grand total of zero on every scale you can measure.
That's missing the point entirely.
This is more or less the same debate as over early abortions and chemical contraceptives, it's about when your genetic material becomes an independent and legally protected person. Unless you're suggesting that the libertarian approach is to let people sell their children thus making the question irrelevant, you need to set some defined boundaries of personhood and embryohood.
and if I start. New sentence's. In completely inappropriate. Location's within my text. You can still understand. What I mean. Adding apostrophe's to my plural's also leaves my meaning clear. It's still not correct.
Having the phone effectively destroy itself such that it can only be repaired by the manufacturer is not comparable to voiding the warranty.
The differences are in how compact the engine is and exhaust velocity. Airliner engines are designed solely for efficiency and as such have bypass ratios that make start to look like a helicopter mounted sideways in a tube. The actual power generating bit of the engine is tiny and most of the thrust comes from shunting air through the outer parts at relatively low speeds without ever being compressed.
Generating exhaust simultaneously at high rate, high velocity and in a compact package is vastly different.
You would need a powerful laser to burn off surface of space junk but that's no problem, we've got cutting laser that have been able to do that for decades. It's the focus that's the issue, poor focus wastes a lot of power so you need more brute force light to compensate. Once you've got something like that in place though there's no problem. The vapour given off by rapidly heated space junk is just gas, by the time it cools down enough to act like a solid again it's too spread out to crystallise - no threat to anything. The propulsive effect you get isn't great, but not so tiny that it isn't worth doing, particularly for junk in low orbits that only need a tiny nudge to skim atmosphere.
This seems to vary depending on where you are. I have a friend who has a TV set and doesn't have a licence for it. When the licence people questioned this, he invited them in, showed them his antenna socket was taped over, and explained that he didn't use his TV for recieving signals. They were quite happy to take his word for it and haven't bothered him since.
I think it's better to think of this thing as being a spy satellite, rather than something used to tend them. It's a spy satellite that can land itself for periodic upgrades, periodic refuels, and which doesn't need to be shunted about because it has its own engine.
It's also a fair bet that it can carry more than just sensors, but I wouldn't imagine anybody is keen to show off all of its capabilities, so for the forseeable future it'll just be carrying cameras.
not a lawyer, blah, blah, usual disclaimer
As far as I am aware, the distinction in most countries legal systems is whether the work was commissioned by a particular buyer. If somebody has created something copyrightable to specific instructions by a single buyer, the copyright is owned by the buyer. That applies to everything, not just software, although it can be overriden if there is a contract that states the coder/writer/artist/whatever retains their copyright. If the work was created without any prior arrangement, the rights work the way you would expect and you can then sell the work to whoever you want as many times as you want.
Power output of a wind farm is variable, but you take that into account when designing it. You set a minimum power output and an acceptable probability of failing to meet it, then you build however many turbines it takes to match that. For Britain which has so much coastline to play with, it's not usually a very high number.
If the worst problem you have to deal with is occasional power surplus, you're doing well.
I already have several computers powerful enough to play vimeo video, but turning them on just for one clip isn't worth the effort when the same thing is usually available to see on youtube.
I would prefer "be less like vimeo" because the only difference between them that affects me is that the youtube player decodes video efficiently enough that my processor can handle it, and vimeo is a browser locking slideshow.