Yup. You're right. So let's do this from the top:
500 exajoules = 140,000 terawatthours or 140*10^12 watt hours / year
with 1% efficiency, we get 120*10^3watt-hours/m^2 / year (from (1400 watt/m^2) * (24 hours / day) * (365 days / year) * 0.01 )
so we need ( 140*10^12 / 120*10^3 ) m^2 to generate all of our energy needs.
or 1.2*10^9 m^2 * 1 km^2 / 10^6 m^2 = 1.2 * 10^3 = 1200 km^2
or an area around 35 km * 35 km. Quite a bit less than Alaska.
Uhmm, you're units are all fscked up. 500 exajoules is about 140 terawatthours. The average solar radiation that hits the earth is about 1.4Kw/m^2. That's watts not watt-hours. That is 1.4Kw/m^2 * 24 hours * 365 days = 12,000kw-hours/m^2. Even with your 1% efficiency conversion, that's still 120Kw-hours/m^2. So you need 10/120,000 less area than 1.6 million km^2 or about 130 km^2. That may seem like a tiny area, but in reality, compared to the energy being used by weather/wind/ocean currents/waves etc. we're still just ants jumping up and down on a football field.
I'd like to add to the interesting discussion. The suggestion of Hayao Miyazaki's films is a good one. I think in general that Mr. Miyazaki's films have more emotional depth and character depth than Pixar's. He, however, rarely attempts to ponder deeper more open-ended philosophical/societal issues. Some animated films which to try to do this are:
Ghost in the Shell a kick ass action with an open ended look some serious philosophical problems posed by cyborgs and real AI entities.
Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade amazing emotional animation of a parable about duty, strength, weakness and power.
Can't think of any more off the top of my head right now. EnkiduEOT
Another Handera user eh. Can you believe those things are still going for $170+ on ebay? I just want a sleeker Handera with 320x480 grey scale screen running Palm OS 5.x. See my ran^H^H^Hcomments on PDA design here in my journal
Of course, it's never going to happen...
There are probably two countries, U.K. and China, with the industrial and economic ability to build an Enterprise class carrier (actually, I'm not sure if China has the shipbuilding capability but 1 billion people can make up a lot). Unfortunately, the U.K. is about 10 years behind in terms of "know-how" in how to organize and a run such a ship as an efficient warship, with the Chinese around 10-20 more years behind.
Most people have no concept of the complex ballet of muscle, mind and machine that goes into launching, coordinating, and retrieving multiple squadrons of Tomcats, Hornets, and Orions. I respect all of the military for their service, but the the guys on the Carriers get the most respect in my book. They don't call it the most dangerous job in the world for nothing.
Regarding color vs. B&W/greyscale, the big difference is in battery life, 2-3 days vs. 2-3 weeks. Regarding processing power, my Handera 330 (33MHz Dragonball) does the encryption/decryption of my passwords fine (as did my Palm III and my Palm Personal). The Clie's are too big and too power hungry. The Sharp SL-C760 is HUGE and is likewise power hungry. I'm looking for small, simple and useful.
I don't need a $600 Gameboy wanna be. I don't need a crippled ipod. I don't need a video player for munchkins. I don't need a uber machine that does 6 things badly (and that I need to upgrade all together). I want something that will store and process information for me. Not media, INFORMATION. Notes, meetings, phone numbers, addresses, ideas, sketches, references, URLS, passwords (encrypted natch). For me, this information is still B&W text and graphics.
I want
long battery life (~1 month)
tack sharp 320x480 B&W screen, good for outdoor, indoor and in-dark use.
a compact size (Palm V)
CF or at least dual SD slots.
built in usb port.
I'd like
flash/static ram backup (so running out of batteries won't lose me all of my data).
a thumb-keyboard (if it is removeable or doesn't add bulk) with vim.
cheap I-net access (cell, WiFi, GPRS, GSM, I don't care).
maybe txt2speech capabilities, that would be cool.
I don't want
battery draining color
battery draining uber processors (my Mac IIsi had 20MHz and I ran Mathematica on it fer chrissake).
an over-sized complex to use phone.
a un-ergonomic crappy lens digital camera.
half-assed MP3 playback
half semi-assed audio recording (unless it has automatic transcription, but we ain't gonna see that for at least 5 years.)
half semi-demi-assed video playback.
I don't care if it's running Palm, WinCE or Linux as long as it doesn't crash more than once a month and boots up in less than 3 seconds. The closest thing is STILL the Handera 330 and it came out 2 years ago. I don't see progress, I see bloated, mediocre products designed with the mantra of "features good, more features better".
I'd like to confront your basic thesis, that computing and genetic biology are similiar enough to influence each other. Sure the basic building blocks may look similar as you have pointed out, but there is no comparing a modern cell to anything we consider a "computer". We may know some of the basics of how a cell works, but we're still a long way from coding anything in DNA. Genetic code is massively parallel and distributed (and operates in both the genetic and bio-chemical realm simultaneously) and (through evolution) has been both obfuscated and optimized. Most, if not all, of our current state of genetic knowledge consists of "let's break this piece and see what happens" and "this stuff over here looks like that stuff over there" comparison. Call me an old stick-in-the-mud, but having "decoded" the human genome doesn't mean squat until we know what all of the instructions do (and we don't, because we are only looking at the genetic side of things, not the bio-chemical operations which result from the genetic code). Progress will be made, but it will be made through hard slogging over trenches, marshes and mountains, not on a high speed railroad.
I think that biology will push computing into interesting directions, not through application of any biological principals we discover, but through the demands of biological investigation. Biological systems are too interconnected to be adapted to building software or computers. I take that back, the details of biological systems are too interconnected to be adapated to building software or computers, but the gross principals (e.g. the immune system: T-cells, B-cells etc.) will be increasingly copied in software and computer design.
I believe that eventually we will be able to write complex organisms from scratch. These may not be as robust as what nature produces, but will be useful to us in many fields. Starting with the medical and spreading through the agricultural and even industrial area. I dream of trees which produce a sap, which is easily refined into methane or natural gas. But it's going to take much longer than most people seem to think.
You may have lived there, and you may have seen the occasional demonstration. But many of the demonstrations in the late 70's and 80's were HUGE. Entire universities were shut down. An entire city Kwangju was in open rebellion until Chun sent in Korean special forces (resulting in an official tally of about 200 people killed, the real count was probably much higher). I remember coming back from school with my eyes watering because of all of the tear gas in the air from the demostrations 10 km away in downtown Seoul. 200 protesters cannot take over the campuses of 5 major universities simultaneously.
Yes, the entire country wasn't demonstrating, but practically the entire student bodies of many colleges were. 200 people my ass. After Lee, Han-yoel was killed by a tear gas canister, the protests were truly huge and included many non-students. The protests that led to the ouster of Chun, Do-hwan and Roh, Tae-woo involved many tens of thousands of people, with some estimates for the end stage protests approaching 400,000. Do you think the Korean government had 20,000 riot police (probably the best trained in the entire world) assigned to cover down town Seoul to prevent 200 protesters from wrecking havoc?
Bah, just because you only saw tiny demonstrations doesn't prove that large demonstrations never happened in Korea.
Remember "Luke, I AM your father."? Basically, everything Luke had been told was a lie also. But that doesn't mean that SW:TESB wasn't the best of the series. Matrix Revolustions isn't out yet, so I can't pass judgement, but methinks you are over hasty. All Matrix Reloaded did was show that the surface story of "The Matrix" was not the whole story. The complexity of the plots (and the metaphysical dilemma's go deeper than simply, "free your mind, free your body and then free the people from the matrix". I won't say anything more lest I spoil the movie.
So what if the fight scenes were unnecessary. They were still way better than anything that's been put on the screen since the original Matrix. Don't tell me you went to see the movie just to learn the new plot twists...
P.S. I think your title should have been "Matrix Reloads and Misfires". Dry firing is what you do when you pull the trigger on an empty chamber, which wouldn't happen if you had just reloaded.
Hey you sound like my ideal boss. Actually, my current manager is pretty close to ideal. In work, I want three things from a manager:
Give me interesting, challenging work.
Give me honest feedback on how I'm doing.
Keep people (including my boss) from interfering with me and my work.
In return I do the following:
Do the work expected of me to the best of my ability.
Keep the boss informed as to what I'm doing and how it's going.
Give him honest feedback on him and my work.
I've given this mini-spiel at every interview I've had with whomever would be my immediate supervisor and I can get a good feel for what kind of company I'm interviewing at by their reaction.
How much memory do you have? If <256 you should consider getting an extry 256 or 512. Memory is cheap and will improve your performance. I have a G4450 (64+128+512 memory) and it's plenty fast for all of my home uses (web, email, docs, entertainment) etc. Also, doing a clean install or even just cleaning up with the disk first aid can help in the speed department.
But such a test wouldn't include multiple large population centers' cell phone, television, radio, WiFi interference, multiple flying objects, ships (if near the water) and other factors. Nor would the missiles/decoys be coming from around the globe. Now that really wouldn't be a full integration test, would it?
What you're talking about is component level testing. Unfortunately, all that testing doesn't substitute for a true "shakedown" integration test. Look up the AEGIS cruiser system (actually sort of a mini-SDI for a ship). On it's first full integration test, it failed to shoot down 6 out of 17 targets due to software errors. Now, make the integrated platform 2 orders of magnitude more complicated than that (and at least one order of magnitude more complicated than ANY software project attempted to date) and you can see why I'm skeptical of the chances of SDI working as advertised.
Nice troll. I'll bite, if only to add some information.
First, I didn't see beta mentioned anywhere. And yes, we are all "Gold master" testers. The integration beta testing is done in labs, test tracks and factories. You can run the same tests over and over again. You can run different tests over and over again. A global missile defense shield cannot be tested under real operating conditions before it is deployed.
For example, the first time the Aegis cruiser system (designed to track and destroy 20 targets over a 300 mile radius) was field tested it was given 17 targets to shoot down. It missed 6. Now increase the complexity of a Aegis cruiser by 2 orders of magnitude and tell me that it will work perfectly the first time.
No, you missed it. Your car and all of its embedded controllers gets a real world test everyday you drive it, tens of thousands of hours of component level and integration testing. It is impossible to run an integration test of any SDI system and, when completed, would contain a couple orders of magnitude more code than is in your car.
II. The two sides will move toward full normalization of political and economic relations.
1) Within three months of the date of this Document, both sides will reduce barriers to trade and investment, including restrictions on telecommunications services and financial transactions.
2) Each side will open a liaison office in the other's capital following resolution of consular and other technical issues through expert level discussions.
3) As progress is made on issues of concern to each side, the U.S. and DPRK will upgrade bilateral relations to the
Ambassadorial level.
III. Both sides will work together for peace and security on a nuclear-free Korean peninsula.
1) The U.S. will provide formal assurances to the DPRK, against the threat or use of nuclear weapons by the U.S.
Not. Part of the agreement was that the U.S. would maintain a dialogue with N.K regarding future economic and diplomatic concerns. When GWB came into office, he unilaterally ceased all high level diplomatic communication with N.K., in clear breach of the agreed framework. I'm not saying N.K. is a bunch of saints, they're worse than practically any nation out there. But geopolitically, they are weak with their only weapons being their huge army, the threat of their nukes and their unique strategically powerful location at the hub of 2 of the most economically important countries in the world (China and Japan).
Most of the process of getting nukes is gaining the technical expertise to build them. They can sell this without losing it. Also, they can keep some plutonium and sell some. How many nuclear weapons does one terrorist or rogue nation need to cause trouble? Exactly, one.
Uhmmm no. Practically any industrialized nation has the technical ability build a nuke, the problems lie in getting/purifying fissile material and building small nukes. And building them small isn't really possible without testing. If you sell your material, you don't get it back. BTW, terrorist or rogue nation's don't need nuclear weapons to cause trouble. All they need is the will, the organization and the security to organize a dozen or so people to sneak into a chemical/petroleum/water facility near a large population center to truly fuck things up.
I guess since this is a capitalist society, it also isn't the government's responsibility to provide for roads, sewage or electricity. Or regulate our food, drugs, oil or water. The free market solved all of those problems so incredibly well that we don't have any government involvement in any of those areas. Do you think that all roads should be privately owned toll roads? Should the interstate system be privatized?
The neo-cons may mistakenly believe the pseudo-libertarian notion that everything should be a market, but any student of history and economics knows that a society is best served when public utilities are managed in the interest of the public as a whole. In case you didn't notice, sewage, gas, electricity, water, and roads are considered public utilities. What's so different about telecommunications?
Which part is rare? It seems to me that there are two parts to the phenomena of societies self-destructing due to external forces: the dysfunctional management of external forces and the power of the external forces being large enough to destroy the society. I would venture that the latter is uncommon, but former much less so. Just because our society has survived doesn't mean that we've been any better at handling such crises: it could mean that our handling has been just as poor, it's just that our crises haven't developed to the point of causing our collapse.
I beg to disagree. To reduce Diamond's insights to a rehasing of economic externalities is like saying that game theory is just another way to talk about market equilibrium. Diamond's point is that market externalities are not sufficient to explain and understand how such externalities effect the futures of societies and how these futures are shaped by the societies themselves.
Simply stating that assigning artificial costs to compensate for market externalities is not sufficient to solving the problems associated with long-term ecological and environmental change. Diamond is pointing out that recognizing the costs and properly assessing and the potential costs, are hampered by the psychological and sociological structures embedded within society. He's pointing out that economics alone cannot solve the problem. Because the root systemic causes of the problems don't lie only in the economic realm, but also in the psychological and sociological realm.
And what is wrong with not wanting guns on the premises? There are lots of ways (even ones that would be no fault of the trained woman) in which an accident could have happened.
Name one. Would the evil gun jump out of her holster and start shooting people? Gun accidents are almost invariably a case of gun negligence. Following the four basic rules of gun handling (1. Guns are always loaded, 2. Never point a gun at anything you are unwilling to destroy. 3. Keep you finger off the trigger (and out of the trigger guard fer Christ's sake!) until you are on target. 4. Be aware of your target and what lies before and beyond) in addition to a secure holster will always result in NO danger to anyone. The added rules are, of course, that you don't hand a gun to anyone who doesn't know the 4 rules of gun safety and you always completely unload and check your piece before you hand it to anyone who does know the 4 rules of gun safety.
I respect your right to own a gun, but you have to respect my right to have you leave it outside my house.
and I respect that right. But my workplace is not your house. If carrying a gun doesn't interfere with my duties, what difference does it make to you? If I am intent on using a gun to commit a crime, will saying "don't bring your gun to work" deter me? And if I am not intent on comitting a crime, wouldn't you prefer to have me armed?
If she were to go crazy, would it matter if the company wanted her to leave her gun in her car? Does the sign "No robbing of the bank allowed" deter any bank robbers? Perhaps you think that you should simply fire all employees who have access to a gun? Heck, you knew that they were a potential danger to the company. Where does liability begin?
Also its illegal in most if not all states to bring a weapon to work unless its the military or a police department.
Uhmmm, not in most states, and especially not Florida. In fact the reverse is true, military and police departments are one of the places where concealed weapons are consistently not permitted (including courthouses, jails, legislative buildings and airports).
I think this is bs but lawyers make a living doing scummy shit as this.
Hey, you're still there:-). I don't recall calling for anybody in management's blood (although I do think the guys who did the foam impact analysis should be fired for incompetence). I said I believed that they were all doing their best. But, being a manager for such a complex and sophisticated project does not mean that you should simply trust everything that you are told. It means questioning reports by asking alternate opinions. It means being able to read the summaries of reports with your BS meter always turned on. Yes, hindsight is 20/20, but that doesn't mean that all problems are only visible after they manifest themselves. Both the O-ring and the foam shedding problem gave ample warning that something was amiss.
You seem to view the report from Boeing as the be all and end all of investigations and reports. What you don't mention is the limited amount of questioning that report received from management and the large number of engineers who were uncomfortable with that analysis and wanted more information. What concerns me is that the NASA management were content to use that report as the justification to end further discussion and investigation, without ever questioning the methodology of the report and the sparseness of the data that it was based on. The foam impact on the SS what not just another "small impact". It was a 1kg+ object travelling at ~800kph (think of the kinetic (not explosive) energy of a mortar being launched).
Did you read the quotes? Did you know that NASA (after the Columbia accident) had to ask for a copy of a report on tile damage risk analysis they had commissioned from the authors, because they couldn't find their copy? Did you read Dr. Diane Vaughan's comments? Let me quote Robert Thompson, who headed the SS program during the 70's. "Thompson likened NASA's attitude about foam damage to that of a person who narrowly escapes several gunshots and then assumes future gunshots pose no danger. ''Would you like me to continue to shoot at you?'' Thompson said." I don't think that you can attribute these facts to biased journalism.
I want NASA to succeed. And for it to succeed, they need to change their culture to eliminate the kind of "creeping risk acceptance" which seems to have contributed significantly to both the Columbia and Challenger failures. And if that requires people to be fired, then so be it. Given the dedication of the people involved, it probably doesn't. But it is clear that proper and rigorous risk analysis is severely lacking in NASA's current decision making process. The culture does need to be changed. Or we'll be picking up the pieces from the next disaster and the one after that with distressing regularity.
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Yup. You're right. So let's do this from the top: /m^2) * (24 hours / day) * (365 days / year) * 0.01 )
500 exajoules = 140,000 terawatthours or 140*10^12 watt hours / year
with 1% efficiency, we get 120*10^3watt-hours/m^2 / year (from (1400 watt
so we need ( 140*10^12 / 120*10^3 ) m^2 to generate all of our energy needs.
or 1.2*10^9 m^2 * 1 km^2 / 10^6 m^2 = 1.2 * 10^3 = 1200 km^2
or an area around 35 km * 35 km. Quite a bit less than Alaska.
Please people, check your units. enkiduEOT
Ghost in the Shell a kick ass action with an open ended look some serious philosophical problems posed by cyborgs and real AI entities.
Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade amazing emotional animation of a parable about duty, strength, weakness and power.
Can't think of any more off the top of my head right now. EnkiduEOT
Another Handera user eh. Can you believe those things are still going for $170+ on ebay? I just want a sleeker Handera with 320x480 grey scale screen running Palm OS 5.x. See my ran^H^H^Hcomments on PDA design here in my journal Of course, it's never going to happen...
Most people have no concept of the complex ballet of muscle, mind and machine that goes into launching, coordinating, and retrieving multiple squadrons of Tomcats, Hornets, and Orions. I respect all of the military for their service, but the the guys on the Carriers get the most respect in my book. They don't call it the most dangerous job in the world for nothing.
Regarding color vs. B&W/greyscale, the big difference is in battery life, 2-3 days vs. 2-3 weeks. Regarding processing power, my Handera 330 (33MHz Dragonball) does the encryption/decryption of my passwords fine (as did my Palm III and my Palm Personal). The Clie's are too big and too power hungry. The Sharp SL-C760 is HUGE and is likewise power hungry. I'm looking for small, simple and useful.
- long battery life (~1 month)
- tack sharp 320x480 B&W screen, good for outdoor, indoor and in-dark use.
- a compact size (Palm V)
- CF or at least dual SD slots.
- built in usb port.
I'd like- flash/static ram backup (so running out of batteries won't lose me all of my data).
- a thumb-keyboard (if it is removeable or doesn't add bulk) with vim.
- cheap I-net access (cell, WiFi, GPRS, GSM, I don't care).
- maybe txt2speech capabilities, that would be cool.
I don't want- battery draining color
- battery draining uber processors (my Mac IIsi had 20MHz and I ran Mathematica on it fer chrissake).
- an over-sized complex to use phone.
- a un-ergonomic crappy lens digital camera.
- half-assed MP3 playback
- half semi-assed audio recording (unless it has automatic transcription, but we ain't gonna see that for at least 5 years.)
- half semi-demi-assed video playback.
I don't care if it's running Palm, WinCE or Linux as long as it doesn't crash more than once a month and boots up in less than 3 seconds. The closest thing is STILL the Handera 330 and it came out 2 years ago. I don't see progress, I see bloated, mediocre products designed with the mantra of "features good, more features better".I think that biology will push computing into interesting directions, not through application of any biological principals we discover, but through the demands of biological investigation. Biological systems are too interconnected to be adapted to building software or computers. I take that back, the details of biological systems are too interconnected to be adapated to building software or computers, but the gross principals (e.g. the immune system: T-cells, B-cells etc.) will be increasingly copied in software and computer design.
I believe that eventually we will be able to write complex organisms from scratch. These may not be as robust as what nature produces, but will be useful to us in many fields. Starting with the medical and spreading through the agricultural and even industrial area. I dream of trees which produce a sap, which is easily refined into methane or natural gas. But it's going to take much longer than most people seem to think.
Yes, the entire country wasn't demonstrating, but practically the entire student bodies of many colleges were. 200 people my ass. After Lee, Han-yoel was killed by a tear gas canister, the protests were truly huge and included many non-students. The protests that led to the ouster of Chun, Do-hwan and Roh, Tae-woo involved many tens of thousands of people, with some estimates for the end stage protests approaching 400,000. Do you think the Korean government had 20,000 riot police (probably the best trained in the entire world) assigned to cover down town Seoul to prevent 200 protesters from wrecking havoc?
Bah, just because you only saw tiny demonstrations doesn't prove that large demonstrations never happened in Korea.
So what if the fight scenes were unnecessary. They were still way better than anything that's been put on the screen since the original Matrix. Don't tell me you went to see the movie just to learn the new plot twists...
P.S. I think your title should have been "Matrix Reloads and Misfires". Dry firing is what you do when you pull the trigger on an empty chamber, which wouldn't happen if you had just reloaded.
In return I do the following:
- Do the work expected of me to the best of my ability.
- Keep the boss informed as to what I'm doing and how it's going.
- Give him honest feedback on him and my work.
I've given this mini-spiel at every interview I've had with whomever would be my immediate supervisor and I can get a good feel for what kind of company I'm interviewing at by their reaction.How much memory do you have? If <256 you should consider getting an extry 256 or 512. Memory is cheap and will improve your performance. I have a G4450 (64+128+512 memory) and it's plenty fast for all of my home uses (web, email, docs, entertainment) etc. Also, doing a clean install or even just cleaning up with the disk first aid can help in the speed department.
But such a test wouldn't include multiple large population centers' cell phone, television, radio, WiFi interference, multiple flying objects, ships (if near the water) and other factors. Nor would the missiles/decoys be coming from around the globe. Now that really wouldn't be a full integration test, would it?
What you're talking about is component level testing. Unfortunately, all that testing doesn't substitute for a true "shakedown" integration test. Look up the AEGIS cruiser system (actually sort of a mini-SDI for a ship). On it's first full integration test, it failed to shoot down 6 out of 17 targets due to software errors. Now, make the integrated platform 2 orders of magnitude more complicated than that (and at least one order of magnitude more complicated than ANY software project attempted to date) and you can see why I'm skeptical of the chances of SDI working as advertised.
First, I didn't see beta mentioned anywhere. And yes, we are all "Gold master" testers. The integration beta testing is done in labs, test tracks and factories. You can run the same tests over and over again. You can run different tests over and over again. A global missile defense shield cannot be tested under real operating conditions before it is deployed.
For example, the first time the Aegis cruiser system (designed to track and destroy 20 targets over a 300 mile radius) was field tested it was given 17 targets to shoot down. It missed 6. Now increase the complexity of a Aegis cruiser by 2 orders of magnitude and tell me that it will work perfectly the first time.
No, you missed it. Your car and all of its embedded controllers gets a real world test everyday you drive it, tens of thousands of hours of component level and integration testing. It is impossible to run an integration test of any SDI system and, when completed, would contain a couple orders of magnitude more code than is in your car.
II. The two sides will move toward full normalization of political and economic relations.
1) Within three months of the date of this Document, both sides will reduce barriers to trade and investment, including restrictions on telecommunications services and financial transactions.
2) Each side will open a liaison office in the other's capital following resolution of consular and other technical issues through expert level discussions.
3) As progress is made on issues of concern to each side, the U.S. and DPRK will upgrade bilateral relations to the Ambassadorial level.
III. Both sides will work together for peace and security on a nuclear-free Korean peninsula.
1) The U.S. will provide formal assurances to the DPRK, against the threat or use of nuclear weapons by the U.S.
Not. Part of the agreement was that the U.S. would maintain a dialogue with N.K regarding future economic and diplomatic concerns. When GWB came into office, he unilaterally ceased all high level diplomatic communication with N.K., in clear breach of the agreed framework. I'm not saying N.K. is a bunch of saints, they're worse than practically any nation out there. But geopolitically, they are weak with their only weapons being their huge army, the threat of their nukes and their unique strategically powerful location at the hub of 2 of the most economically important countries in the world (China and Japan).
Most of the process of getting nukes is gaining the technical expertise to build them. They can sell this without losing it. Also, they can keep some plutonium and sell some. How many nuclear weapons does one terrorist or rogue nation need to cause trouble? Exactly, one.
Uhmmm no. Practically any industrialized nation has the technical ability build a nuke, the problems lie in getting/purifying fissile material and building small nukes. And building them small isn't really possible without testing. If you sell your material, you don't get it back. BTW, terrorist or rogue nation's don't need nuclear weapons to cause trouble. All they need is the will, the organization and the security to organize a dozen or so people to sneak into a chemical/petroleum/water facility near a large population center to truly fuck things up.
The neo-cons may mistakenly believe the pseudo-libertarian notion that everything should be a market, but any student of history and economics knows that a society is best served when public utilities are managed in the interest of the public as a whole. In case you didn't notice, sewage, gas, electricity, water, and roads are considered public utilities. What's so different about telecommunications?
Which part is rare? It seems to me that there are two parts to the phenomena of societies self-destructing due to external forces: the dysfunctional management of external forces and the power of the external forces being large enough to destroy the society. I would venture that the latter is uncommon, but former much less so. Just because our society has survived doesn't mean that we've been any better at handling such crises: it could mean that our handling has been just as poor, it's just that our crises haven't developed to the point of causing our collapse.
Simply stating that assigning artificial costs to compensate for market externalities is not sufficient to solving the problems associated with long-term ecological and environmental change. Diamond is pointing out that recognizing the costs and properly assessing and the potential costs, are hampered by the psychological and sociological structures embedded within society. He's pointing out that economics alone cannot solve the problem. Because the root systemic causes of the problems don't lie only in the economic realm, but also in the psychological and sociological realm.
Lawyer: (Smugly)Of course.
Boss' Lawyer: And this policy is posted at your front door?
Lawyer: Of course.
Boss' Lawyer: And next to this sign you have an armed guard who searches all persons who enter your offices?
Lawyer: No, we don't. We like to have a friendly atmosphere.
Boss' Lawyer: Then how do you know that all person's who enter your offices are unarmed?
Lawyer: My clients don't carry guns.
Boss' Lawyer: So you're 100% certain that all people who have ever entered your offices have been unarmed?
Lawyer: I can't be 100% sure.
Boss' Lawyer: Mr. Lawyer, if Ms. Employee had decided to shoot up your offices, how would your policy have prevented her from doing so?
Lawyer: I guess it couldn't.
Boss' Lawyer: And could your policy have prevented this crime from occurring at the office it did occur at? Please answer yes or no.
Lawyer: No.
Boss' Lawyer: So you're saying that neither your policy nor my client's policy could have altered the events of XX/XX?
Lawyer: ...
You seem to view the report from Boeing as the be all and end all of investigations and reports. What you don't mention is the limited amount of questioning that report received from management and the large number of engineers who were uncomfortable with that analysis and wanted more information. What concerns me is that the NASA management were content to use that report as the justification to end further discussion and investigation, without ever questioning the methodology of the report and the sparseness of the data that it was based on. The foam impact on the SS what not just another "small impact". It was a 1kg+ object travelling at ~800kph (think of the kinetic (not explosive) energy of a mortar being launched).
Did you read the quotes? Did you know that NASA (after the Columbia accident) had to ask for a copy of a report on tile damage risk analysis they had commissioned from the authors, because they couldn't find their copy? Did you read Dr. Diane Vaughan's comments? Let me quote Robert Thompson, who headed the SS program during the 70's. "Thompson likened NASA's attitude about foam damage to that of a person who narrowly escapes several gunshots and then assumes future gunshots pose no danger. ''Would you like me to continue to shoot at you?'' Thompson said." I don't think that you can attribute these facts to biased journalism.
I want NASA to succeed. And for it to succeed, they need to change their culture to eliminate the kind of "creeping risk acceptance" which seems to have contributed significantly to both the Columbia and Challenger failures. And if that requires people to be fired, then so be it. Given the dedication of the people involved, it probably doesn't. But it is clear that proper and rigorous risk analysis is severely lacking in NASA's current decision making process. The culture does need to be changed. Or we'll be picking up the pieces from the next disaster and the one after that with distressing regularity.