I predict that the bazaar will continue to grow and expand and cater to all kinds of needs and tastes in the future. That really is the benefit of FOSS, isn't it? The freedom to choose (and use) the software that suits our needs, rather than being forced to take what the silo masters are pushing.
Well I think its super, actually. I think some people can confuse FOSS with anti-corporatism, and certainly, there's those that would and on both sides of the boring old aisle. But I think really that the whole thing is about freedom, and sometimes freedom does not necessarily mean efficiency and it doesn't necessarily mean free as in beer either. I see no moral quandry with using, supporting, and developing for Linux while at the same time being a money grubbing capitalist, even if it might have a sad impact on the stock price of a certain large software company whose products aggravate me, and nor do I have any fundamental problem with donating to organizations that actually worked on things for Linux.
I kinda think an NPR for Linux would not be a bad thing at all.
The crazy thing is, I would be willing to bet that if Microsoft just GPL'd Windows, they would actually be much, much better off as a company. Yeah, they would be paying for the development of something they are giving away, but all of a sudden they would have a huge new market for their tool chains as Linux is just killing Windows on every computer that is not a PC. It seems like for every deal Microsoft inks with some Windows variant, there's another dozen devices popping up that run Linux. MS just can't keep up with everyone and every niche market, and that's where the bazaar really wins.
Alas, as Linux has gotten bigger and more complex, it is also requiring more capital to sustain itself as well, and capital means corporate funding. How ironic that the bazaar has grown to becoming a sprawling, flopping, traffic jammed, flea market, and suddenly key parts of the bazaar are suspiciously looking rather cathedral like (FireFox, the kernel).
I predict that within a few years, Linux will grow to the point that its advocates will quietly abandon the collaborative, libertarian rhetoric that drove it early on, and instead turn more towards a quest for government funding along the lines of National Public Radio. It will continually seek corporate sponsorship, even as it decries their existence.
Yes, that's right. Og the caveman not only invented Fire, he also invented coal power plants. There was definitely no time between the Stone Age and the modern day. Nope, definitely not
Well, if the goal of the environmental movement is a restoration of the earth to pre-industrial levels of pollution, then Og the caveman is where we are headed, because humans have always been industrious.
Yeah, we all got together at a secret meeting and decided on that figure. For good measure, we also assassinated the crazy loons who were advocating 49%, fucking imperialists the lot of them.
Actually, it seems to be the case. top rate: move to 39.6% Fed (pre Bush, +3.6% increase), which leaves about 10% for states and local governments.
I should note that under Roosevelt, that Democratic superstar, the top rate was actually 90%+.
Even the Lauffer Curve, beloved of Reagan, says that taxes lead to more productivity. While 100% is bad, 0% is also bad. The right number is in-between
The problem is that a lot of leading political figures on the left believe that 50% is the right mark, and we Reaganites believe that's a bit too high!
0% being useful assumes investment in useful things like roads and bridges that actually improve the business climate. If it doesn't improve business, which does actually include quality of life and nationalistic branding stuff, then, it shouldn't be there. That would automatically chop a lot out of the budget, for sure.
Question I have is, why do rates need to go up at all? Population is increasing, GDP is increasing.. shouldn't government spending increases be constrained, at least, to GDP? Unfortunately Bush has been absolutely terrible on this one, but no President will do actually the right thing here either. I mean, why should Medicare ever go up more than GDP?
Wow, that's one hell of a strawman... haven't you conveniently forgotten the growing, ever growing, numbers of independent professional and semi-professional musicians fueled by new options for making money from their music who many of us, like me, are willing to pay?
There's no strawman at all, but you arguably introduced one. Just because someone has a business model that you like doesn't give you the right to steal from someone whose doesn't have a business model that you like. Look, Capitol Records and others are offering you a service (a song), for some money and terms and conditions. If you don't like any part of the deal, don't take it. If you value the terms and conditions more than you value the art, then by all means, go ahead and buy your music from someone that wants to sell it with the terms that you prefer, such as someone who is willing to give their music away for free.
So, if you thought Toyota was crooked, would you just drive a car off the lot without paying for it? What I'm saying is, if you don't like what Capitol Records does, then, don't listen to the likes of "hundreds of artists, including Beastie Boys, Beatles, Beach Boys, Garth Brooks, Duran Duran, Everclear, Foo Fighters, Judy Garland, Heart,...", at all, and just find some artist that you like, who is willing to give their work away for free. There's plenty of homeless people with guitars and horns that you can listen to.
The biggest crock argument that file thieves make is that they are entitled to steal content because the music industry is somehow immoral. After all, if all of a sudden we can go willy nilly and pick and chooose copyrights because we feel some institution is moral and another is not, then, what's to suddenly argue that well, the GPL is amoral and Linus Torvald's isn't even an American, and start stealing that work as well!
It's really simple. If you don't like to buy music from some morally bankrupt institution, then, don't buy it. Go find your music from people that are willing to work for free. I'm sure there are plenty of homeless people. If you like the content, and you want it, then pay for it, or, obey the terms of license from the holder of the copyright. Don't steal music copyrighted by Warner Brothers, and don't subsume GPL code into proprietary applications.
We shouldn't be thinking about how to put this stuff away, we need to think about ways of creating less of it! Alternative fuels, more fuel efficient cars (especially in the US!) and nuclear fusion, ESPECIALLY nuclear fusion.
So basically, what you're saying is, that we should live in caves until someone invents nuclear fusion. The logic from the environmental left is brilliant. In order to save the earth so that we can have decent lives, we should go back to living the way we did in the stone ages, and all die at 25 of starvation, exposure and disease.
That's the craziest thing I ever heard of. As soon women get any rights, the first thing they do is stop having babies. The old 1980's battle of the sexes is a two way street. If men may be obsolete sperm providers, then it follows that a woman is useless unless she is pregnant!
I've been trolling on slashdot and usenet for quite a few years, and, um, what do I do if potential employees discover, by searching, that yeah, I really am something of a pompous jerk? Is there somebody I can pay to make them think I'm nice... like, if I put a bunch of flowers and stuff on my home page, and say that I love you all and cry a lot, would that help? Or do I just have to suck it?
Moral of the story is, at some point, what you do on the internet is really yourself, or at least a piece of it, and there's going to be a phase where you have to reconcile who you want to be with who you really are. If you don't like what you write, then, maybe you need to change yourself, not what other people think of you.
I love you all, even you stupid liberals. Does that help?:-)
I do not agree that using fetal cells for the purposes of saving lives will necessarily lead to pre-emptive wars--that's a slippery slope argument and has no real merit.
You might be surprised. People are pretty vicious when it comes to moralizing killing. The Nazis were able to convince a seemingly moral people that in order to avoid generational revenge, they also had to kill the women and children of their enemies in concentration camps. And, in the USA, a lot of people are quite willing to support the indefinite detainment and torture of non-American muslims as a -precautionary measure-, just because they are terrorists. While this viewpoint is often simplified on the left as fear-mongering induced hysteria, it could also and more equally be construed as the dehumanizing logic that it is. In other words, its like, muslims are sort of dangerous insects, so if you kill or torture a few to be on the safe side, its really not any big crime. Some folks choose age past birth to define humanity, and others choose religious affiliation, but, ultimately, people will choose any sort of definition, if it makes it mentally easier for them to support the killing of someone they do not like.
Your morals are not the same as everyone else's morals--as such, your definition of 'barbaric' will differ; I, for one, consider the standpoint where one lets someone die painfully rather than hurt a clump of cells that may not actually grow into something capable of living on its own to be barbaric.
Fair enough. But once we start making that choice to extinguish one life to save another, where does it end? We could just as easily go to the other end of the scale and say, exterminate all the muslims pre-emptively rather than risk a nuclear attack on the West, thus saving millions of lives by killing a billion. Or, for that matter, vice versa.
The point is, once you've given yourself the right to kill to save a life, regardless of the tiniest smattering of cellular humanity that it might be, someone else is going to claim the right for themselves as well, and you've turned discussion about something that we intuitively think should be sacred, into a political punting game. For a more real example, consider the death penalty. Murderers have very high recidivism rate, particularly serial killers. If you kill them, then, you obviously save lives. But some people won't make that moral choice. It all rather depends on whether you think a fetus has more social redeeming value than the likes of John Gacy.
Basically, if you can write a program to find answers to problems that require combinations of numbers without having to go through all of the combinations, then, you create a breakthrough such that you would add insight to cracking real crypto codes such as DES, would most certainly take out the RSA and Diffie Helfman (sp?) that are used for SSL certificates (that https), and really just open the internet wide up. You wouldn't be able to have an encrypted packet going across the internet, because, anyone could read it, alter it, and spit it back out. No e-commerce, because you couldn't have secret messages, and, even worse, you couldn't even reliably tell if who you were talking to was in fact the computer that you thought. To wit, if such a theoretical breakthrough happened, someone could make a website called https://www.amazon.com/ and impersonate the credit card section of Amazon if they could put their network between your computer and the Amazon.com server. On the plus side, though, you would have a world where computers could really calculate the optimal way to build things, be able to figure out the chemical reaction needed to produce a particular molecule, and so forth. You wouldn't be able to surf securely, perhaps, but you'd most likely wind up with cures for AIDs, cancer and the cold, working nuclear fusion, batteries that last a lot longer, and yeah, some people would probably have flying cars.
First off, Verizon is really running fiber optic everywhere in its service territory with FIOS. Secondly, supposedly obsolete cable internet providers are touting their DOCSYS 3 modems which match that performance. So, bandwidth is being made available and at a rapid pace to people that are willing to pay for it.
More importantly, 100B is entirely something that American internet providers can afford. Verizon's market cap alone is 110B, and Comcast's market cap is 50B. That's just two companies worth more than enough to finance growth in bandwidth. So, in a way, people arguing for massive government taxpayer internet are really arguing for taxpayers to pay for something that the private sector CAN afford. There's no need for the government to get involved. The private sector has the money.
John Paul II might have considered it, but Benedict is extremely conservative and is living up to the 'placeholder' assessment that most people had of him at the time of his election.
JPII was a very conservative pope. He was just conservative with a smile. Honestly, I'd actually appreciate conservatism in religion as something to live up to. We should feel squeemish on some level about creating living things willy nilly, simply so that we can experiment with them. It doesn't even really matter if a human fetus is human or not. It is a life, and we are taking it, and not only for the most noble of reasons.
Ultimately, the Pope is on the right side of this issue. A few generations down the road, we will look back on what we have done with animal testing and embryonic testing, and realize that we are in fact barbaric.
The blind march to a fully connected and wired rule is horrifically dependent upon an unknown and unproven set of assumptions in computer science that underpin much of our present security infrastructure. We have not proven that FACTOR is NP-Complete, don't know if P=NP or not, and so, there's absolutely nothing to rule out some future innovation that allows for not only rapid factoring, but possibly even P=NP. There are certainly long odds against this happening, but it could happen, and it seems to me that we ought to be congnizant of the risks that we are taking. A theoretical breakthrough in computer science could render much of cryptography obsolete, and with it the promise of secure messaging and storage on any third party computer.
I remember, back when I was a youth, and TV was just over the air, the Sunday afternoon ritual of standing outside with my father during football season, making adjustments to an ever complicated contraption of antenna.
All manners of materials and shapes were experimented on, and my mother would yell, "better", "worse", or, "oh my god", depending on just how our adjustments altered the picture.
Now, my son and I will be standing outside, in the not too distant future, adjusting the antenna as my wife stands by some sort of a bandwidth meter, yelling, "better", "worse", or "oh my god".
And that's where railguns start to become interesting
Yes, in that scenario, carriers become almost obsolete as the first rate weapon they are today, and something more like a well, battleship, again becomes vogue.
OK, so you're a mercantilist. Mercantilism was discredited about 250 years ago, but enough about that: the fact that the US exports billions of dollars in goods every year shows that it's a matter of degree, and such matters can be changed by simply producing better goods
Uh no. I'm a capitalist, that recognizes that USA developed most of its industries under protectionism right up until the 1950s, you know, back in the bad old days when there was a middle class.
I honestly don't believe that the rest of the world sees things the way you do. Nobody wants to buy something from some other land in other countries, and they don't. For every dollar the USA exports, the world dumps at least two on American shores. It has been that way since the advent of free trade and it always will be. Waiting for the gap to close is like waiting for Jesus to come back, at this point. We have been doing this experiment now for over 50 years and it has failed, and it is time to move on.
Add on a few nuke reactors, and/or a nice capacitor bank, and you're suddenly only restricted by how many projectiles you can carry. As you mention, these are going to be simple - basically just metal slugs. There's no more powder or fuel required for the task, which is in sharp contrast to conventional weaponry
That's the whole attractiveness of it. You suddenly make your supply chain smaller because your weapon is lighter to transport, and, you've made your chain more survivable because your weapon doesn't go boom when exposed to heat.
(My understanding of history is, American cars were, in fact, unable to compete with the imports in terms of quality of build or fuel efficiency, and that many Americans by and large refused to put buy inferior cars just out some jingoistic pride.) Well, they were. I don't disagree with that and I also think the Japanese do build good cars - if fuel efficiency and build quality is the standard on which you judge them, and many Americans agree with that.
Unfortunately, this is a case of where local decisions did not yield to an optimal solution to the larger economic problem, the sort of mathematical basis on which capitalism depends. In the case of buying foreign products, we assume that the citizens of other countries feel the same way, and the reality is, they don't. Instead, they are culturally pre-disposed against foreign products, and that culture means that free trade is ultimately a one way street. When you factor in that foreign governments enact all sorts of barriers to free trade - some subtle, some not, and cultural advancement against them, then you can see the disadvantages for those who believe in it emerging.
Indeed, the foreign policy of most other nations today is similar to that of the USA when it began to first industrialize. Even though GB at the time made better, higher tech stuff, the jingoistic importance local industry justified protectionist barriers and ultimately the USA gained the expertise to become an industrial powerhouse. That's what other countries do today.
So, yeah, we should develop a cultural bias against foreign products, and foreign things, not because they aren't good, simply because, if we are all buying foreign goods, and foreigners aren't buying ours, then we are just bankrupting ourselves. That is simply an indisputable fact. A quick look at the declining dollar and record current account deficit shows, in fact, that we really are, and that, people buying foreign products is damaging the nation. No wonder wages are depressed in the USA and rising everywhere else in the world!
Since the Cold War, the US has dicked around with cruisers and battleships but now the only large surface combatants left are carriers. Even the Aegis cruisers are running on hulls more comparable to destroyers and the arleigh burkes are using the same aegis. With the hitting power of modern anti-ship missiles, it's seen as impossible to armor a ship sufficiently to survive a strike. Then again, US naval thinking is still shaped by the Cold War and the idea that incoming weapons are going to be nuclear so you have to knock them down or else be incinerated, there's no such thing as armoring against a nuke fireball. Since we haven't had a proper naval engagement since WWII, all we're operating under is a bunch of theory that has not been put to the test in a very long time.. 1. Arleigh Burke destroyers are actually pretty big. Let's compare, shall we, a Burke destroyer against, say, an Royal Navy King George V class battleship of World War I.
So, the Arleigh Burke is nearly as long, has three times the engine power as a World War I era top of the line British Battleship. In terms of firepower, there's really no comparison. If you plopped an Alreigh Burke and a KGV into the same ocean, the Burke is going to have missiles away before the KGV can even make visual contact.
The moral of the story is that you really have to think about what the Navy has evolved into. It's not that there are no more battleships, per se, it is more like every combatant the navy has is a capital ship in its own right.
I must also digress about armor. It's also a bit of a gap to say that American ships aren't armoured. Yes, it is true that American warships do not have thick steel armour belts in the past, but its also true that thick armour belts can't resist modern shaped charges, its also true that they only were really thick at areas of a ship where designers anticipated the firing arcs of other shells would be. Have a look at the now declassified maps of the USS New Jersey's armor belts. You could theoretically program missiles to hit other parts of the ship. Against a range of threats, from bombs to torpedos, or even missiles that can be programmed to hit a ship from any angle, it is simply impossible to provide passive armor protection on all surfaces.
So, what designers do do is local armoring. They might not armour the entire hull, but they'll wrap critical equipment with some kevlar jackets, and that's not too shabby. That does come from combat experience, in a weird way. During vietnam, they did nothing to protect combat aircraft, but, they realized that putting a little bit of armor around a few critical things would save a lot of planes. These things were incorporated, among other things, into the highly successful A-10, which is a very survivable plane, and, to some extent, that sort of thinking has found itself into US Navy ships as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I predict that the bazaar will continue to grow and expand and cater to all kinds of needs and tastes in the future. That really is the benefit of FOSS, isn't it? The freedom to choose (and use) the software that suits our needs, rather than being forced to take what the silo masters are pushing.
Well I think its super, actually. I think some people can confuse FOSS with anti-corporatism, and certainly, there's those that would and on both sides of the boring old aisle. But I think really that the whole thing is about freedom, and sometimes freedom does not necessarily mean efficiency and it doesn't necessarily mean free as in beer either. I see no moral quandry with using, supporting, and developing for Linux while at the same time being a money grubbing capitalist, even if it might have a sad impact on the stock price of a certain large software company whose products aggravate me, and nor do I have any fundamental problem with donating to organizations that actually worked on things for Linux.
I kinda think an NPR for Linux would not be a bad thing at all.
The crazy thing is, I would be willing to bet that if Microsoft just GPL'd Windows, they would actually be much, much better off as a company. Yeah, they would be paying for the development of something they are giving away, but all of a sudden they would have a huge new market for their tool chains as Linux is just killing Windows on every computer that is not a PC. It seems like for every deal Microsoft inks with some Windows variant, there's another dozen devices popping up that run Linux. MS just can't keep up with everyone and every niche market, and that's where the bazaar really wins.
So much for the cathedral and the bazaar.
Alas, as Linux has gotten bigger and more complex, it is also requiring more capital to sustain itself as well, and capital means corporate funding. How ironic that the bazaar has grown to becoming a sprawling, flopping, traffic jammed, flea market, and suddenly key parts of the bazaar are suspiciously looking rather cathedral like (FireFox, the kernel).
I predict that within a few years, Linux will grow to the point that its advocates will quietly abandon the collaborative, libertarian rhetoric that drove it early on, and instead turn more towards a quest for government funding along the lines of National Public Radio. It will continually seek corporate sponsorship, even as it decries their existence.
Yes, that's right. Og the caveman not only invented Fire, he also invented coal power plants. There was definitely no time between the Stone Age and the modern day. Nope, definitely not
Well, if the goal of the environmental movement is a restoration of the earth to pre-industrial levels of pollution, then Og the caveman is where we are headed, because humans have always been industrious.
Yeah, we all got together at a secret meeting and decided on that figure. For good measure, we also assassinated the crazy loons who were advocating 49%, fucking imperialists the lot of them.
Actually, it seems to be the case. top rate: move to 39.6% Fed (pre Bush, +3.6% increase), which leaves about 10% for states and local governments.
I should note that under Roosevelt, that Democratic superstar, the top rate was actually 90%+.
Even the Lauffer Curve, beloved of Reagan, says that taxes lead to more productivity. While 100% is bad, 0% is also bad. The right number is in-between
The problem is that a lot of leading political figures on the left believe that 50% is the right mark, and we Reaganites believe that's a bit too high!
0% being useful assumes investment in useful things like roads and bridges that actually improve the business climate. If it doesn't improve business, which does actually include quality of life and nationalistic branding stuff, then, it shouldn't be there. That would automatically chop a lot out of the budget, for sure.
Question I have is, why do rates need to go up at all? Population is increasing, GDP is increasing.. shouldn't government spending increases be constrained, at least, to GDP? Unfortunately Bush has been absolutely terrible on this one, but no President will do actually the right thing here either. I mean, why should Medicare ever go up more than GDP?
Wow, that's one hell of a strawman... haven't you conveniently forgotten the growing, ever growing, numbers of independent professional and semi-professional musicians fueled by new options for making money from their music who many of us, like me, are willing to pay?
There's no strawman at all, but you arguably introduced one. Just because someone has a business model that you like doesn't give you the right to steal from someone whose doesn't have a business model that you like. Look, Capitol Records and others are offering you a service (a song), for some money and terms and conditions. If you don't like any part of the deal, don't take it. If you value the terms and conditions more than you value the art, then by all means, go ahead and buy your music from someone that wants to sell it with the terms that you prefer, such as someone who is willing to give their music away for free.
Thats just it we DONT buy it we download it
...", at all, and just find some artist that you like, who is willing to give their work away for free. There's plenty of homeless people with guitars and horns that you can listen to.
So, if you thought Toyota was crooked, would you just drive a car off the lot without paying for it? What I'm saying is, if you don't like what Capitol Records does, then, don't listen to the likes of "hundreds of artists, including Beastie Boys, Beatles, Beach Boys, Garth Brooks, Duran Duran, Everclear, Foo Fighters, Judy Garland, Heart,
The biggest crock argument that file thieves make is that they are entitled to steal content because the music industry is somehow immoral. After all, if all of a sudden we can go willy nilly and pick and chooose copyrights because we feel some institution is moral and another is not, then, what's to suddenly argue that well, the GPL is amoral and Linus Torvald's isn't even an American, and start stealing that work as well!
It's really simple. If you don't like to buy music from some morally bankrupt institution, then, don't buy it. Go find your music from people that are willing to work for free. I'm sure there are plenty of homeless people. If you like the content, and you want it, then pay for it, or, obey the terms of license from the holder of the copyright. Don't steal music copyrighted by Warner Brothers, and don't subsume GPL code into proprietary applications.
We shouldn't be thinking about how to put this stuff away, we need to think about ways of creating less of it! Alternative fuels, more fuel efficient cars (especially in the US!) and nuclear fusion, ESPECIALLY nuclear fusion.
So basically, what you're saying is, that we should live in caves until someone invents nuclear fusion. The logic from the environmental left is brilliant. In order to save the earth so that we can have decent lives, we should go back to living the way we did in the stone ages, and all die at 25 of starvation, exposure and disease.
That's the craziest thing I ever heard of. As soon women get any rights, the first thing they do is stop having babies. The old 1980's battle of the sexes is a two way street. If men may be obsolete sperm providers, then it follows that a woman is useless unless she is pregnant!
I've been trolling on slashdot and usenet for quite a few years, and, um, what do I do if potential employees discover, by searching, that yeah, I really am something of a pompous jerk? Is there somebody I can pay to make them think I'm nice... like, if I put a bunch of flowers and stuff on my home page, and say that I love you all and cry a lot, would that help? Or do I just have to suck it?
:-)
Moral of the story is, at some point, what you do on the internet is really yourself, or at least a piece of it, and there's going to be a phase where you have to reconcile who you want to be with who you really are. If you don't like what you write, then, maybe you need to change yourself, not what other people think of you.
I love you all, even you stupid liberals. Does that help?
I will only take you seriously if you swear to forsake any and all medical treatment for the rest of your life, however short that may be.
Hey, even Hitler listened to Jewish music....
I do not agree that using fetal cells for the purposes of saving lives will necessarily lead to pre-emptive wars--that's a slippery slope argument and has no real merit.
You might be surprised. People are pretty vicious when it comes to moralizing killing. The Nazis were able to convince a seemingly moral people that in order to avoid generational revenge, they also had to kill the women and children of their enemies in concentration camps. And, in the USA, a lot of people are quite willing to support the indefinite detainment and torture of non-American muslims as a -precautionary measure-, just because they are terrorists. While this viewpoint is often simplified on the left as fear-mongering induced hysteria, it could also and more equally be construed as the dehumanizing logic that it is. In other words, its like, muslims are sort of dangerous insects, so if you kill or torture a few to be on the safe side, its really not any big crime. Some folks choose age past birth to define humanity, and others choose religious affiliation, but, ultimately, people will choose any sort of definition, if it makes it mentally easier for them to support the killing of someone they do not like.
Your morals are not the same as everyone else's morals--as such, your definition of 'barbaric' will differ; I, for one, consider the standpoint where one lets someone die painfully rather than hurt a clump of cells that may not actually grow into something capable of living on its own to be barbaric.
Fair enough. But once we start making that choice to extinguish one life to save another, where does it end? We could just as easily go to the other end of the scale and say, exterminate all the muslims pre-emptively rather than risk a nuclear attack on the West, thus saving millions of lives by killing a billion. Or, for that matter, vice versa.
The point is, once you've given yourself the right to kill to save a life, regardless of the tiniest smattering of cellular humanity that it might be, someone else is going to claim the right for themselves as well, and you've turned discussion about something that we intuitively think should be sacred, into a political punting game. For a more real example, consider the death penalty. Murderers have very high recidivism rate, particularly serial killers. If you kill them, then, you obviously save lives. But some people won't make that moral choice. It all rather depends on whether you think a fetus has more social redeeming value than the likes of John Gacy.
Basically, if you can write a program to find answers to problems that require combinations of numbers without having to go through all of the combinations, then, you create a breakthrough such that you would add insight to cracking real crypto codes such as DES, would most certainly take out the RSA and Diffie Helfman (sp?) that are used for SSL certificates (that https), and really just open the internet wide up. You wouldn't be able to have an encrypted packet going across the internet, because, anyone could read it, alter it, and spit it back out. No e-commerce, because you couldn't have secret messages, and, even worse, you couldn't even reliably tell if who you were talking to was in fact the computer that you thought. To wit, if such a theoretical breakthrough happened, someone could make a website called https://www.amazon.com/ and impersonate the credit card section of Amazon if they could put their network between your computer and the Amazon.com server. On the plus side, though, you would have a world where computers could really calculate the optimal way to build things, be able to figure out the chemical reaction needed to produce a particular molecule, and so forth. You wouldn't be able to surf securely, perhaps, but you'd most likely wind up with cures for AIDs, cancer and the cold, working nuclear fusion, batteries that last a lot longer, and yeah, some people would probably have flying cars.
First off, Verizon is really running fiber optic everywhere in its service territory with FIOS. Secondly, supposedly obsolete cable internet providers are touting their DOCSYS 3 modems which match that performance. So, bandwidth is being made available and at a rapid pace to people that are willing to pay for it.
More importantly, 100B is entirely something that American internet providers can afford. Verizon's market cap alone is 110B, and Comcast's market cap is 50B. That's just two companies worth more than enough to finance growth in bandwidth. So, in a way, people arguing for massive government taxpayer internet are really arguing for taxpayers to pay for something that the private sector CAN afford. There's no need for the government to get involved. The private sector has the money.
John Paul II might have considered it, but Benedict is extremely conservative and is living up to the 'placeholder' assessment that most people had of him at the time of his election.
JPII was a very conservative pope. He was just conservative with a smile. Honestly, I'd actually appreciate conservatism in religion as something to live up to. We should feel squeemish on some level about creating living things willy nilly, simply so that we can experiment with them. It doesn't even really matter if a human fetus is human or not. It is a life, and we are taking it, and not only for the most noble of reasons.
Ultimately, the Pope is on the right side of this issue. A few generations down the road, we will look back on what we have done with animal testing and embryonic testing, and realize that we are in fact barbaric.
The blind march to a fully connected and wired rule is horrifically dependent upon an unknown and unproven set of assumptions in computer science that underpin much of our present security infrastructure. We have not proven that FACTOR is NP-Complete, don't know if P=NP or not, and so, there's absolutely nothing to rule out some future innovation that allows for not only rapid factoring, but possibly even P=NP. There are certainly long odds against this happening, but it could happen, and it seems to me that we ought to be congnizant of the risks that we are taking. A theoretical breakthrough in computer science could render much of cryptography obsolete, and with it the promise of secure messaging and storage on any third party computer.
We have come full circle.
I remember, back when I was a youth, and TV was just over the air, the Sunday afternoon ritual of standing outside with my father during football season, making adjustments to an ever complicated contraption of antenna.
All manners of materials and shapes were experimented on, and my mother would yell, "better", "worse", or, "oh my god", depending on just how our adjustments altered the picture.
Now, my son and I will be standing outside, in the not too distant future, adjusting the antenna as my wife stands by some sort of a bandwidth meter, yelling, "better", "worse", or "oh my god".
There should be no cultural bias against foreign products, that smacks of racism and is social unhealthy
I don't believe either statement is true. It's not socially unhealthy to favor your own country first. In fact, its usually better.
And that's where railguns start to become interesting
Yes, in that scenario, carriers become almost obsolete as the first rate weapon they are today, and something more like a well, battleship, again becomes vogue.
OK, so you're a mercantilist. Mercantilism was discredited about 250 years ago, but enough about that: the fact that the US exports billions of dollars in goods every year shows that it's a matter of degree, and such matters can be changed by simply producing better goods
Uh no. I'm a capitalist, that recognizes that USA developed most of its industries under protectionism right up until the 1950s, you know, back in the bad old days when there was a middle class.
I honestly don't believe that the rest of the world sees things the way you do. Nobody wants to buy something from some other land in other countries, and they don't. For every dollar the USA exports, the world dumps at least two on American shores. It has been that way since the advent of free trade and it always will be. Waiting for the gap to close is like waiting for Jesus to come back, at this point. We have been doing this experiment now for over 50 years and it has failed, and it is time to move on.
Add on a few nuke reactors, and/or a nice capacitor bank, and you're suddenly only restricted by how many projectiles you can carry. As you mention, these are going to be simple - basically just metal slugs. There's no more powder or fuel required for the task, which is in sharp contrast to conventional weaponry
That's the whole attractiveness of it. You suddenly make your supply chain smaller because your weapon is lighter to transport, and, you've made your chain more survivable because your weapon doesn't go boom when exposed to heat.
Unfortunately, this is a case of where local decisions did not yield to an optimal solution to the larger economic problem, the sort of mathematical basis on which capitalism depends. In the case of buying foreign products, we assume that the citizens of other countries feel the same way, and the reality is, they don't. Instead, they are culturally pre-disposed against foreign products, and that culture means that free trade is ultimately a one way street. When you factor in that foreign governments enact all sorts of barriers to free trade - some subtle, some not, and cultural advancement against them, then you can see the disadvantages for those who believe in it emerging.
Indeed, the foreign policy of most other nations today is similar to that of the USA when it began to first industrialize. Even though GB at the time made better, higher tech stuff, the jingoistic importance local industry justified protectionist barriers and ultimately the USA gained the expertise to become an industrial powerhouse. That's what other countries do today.
So, yeah, we should develop a cultural bias against foreign products, and foreign things, not because they aren't good, simply because, if we are all buying foreign goods, and foreigners aren't buying ours, then we are just bankrupting ourselves. That is simply an indisputable fact. A quick look at the declining dollar and record current account deficit shows, in fact, that we really are, and that, people buying foreign products is damaging the nation. No wonder wages are depressed in the USA and rising everywhere else in the world!
CategoryArleigh BurkeKing George V>
Displacement9000 tons23,400 tons
Length509 feet598 feet
Beam60 feet89 feet
Propulsion100,000shp31,000shp
Crew320/td>870
So, the Arleigh Burke is nearly as long, has three times the engine power as a World War I era top of the line British Battleship. In terms of firepower, there's really no comparison. If you plopped an Alreigh Burke and a KGV into the same ocean, the Burke is going to have missiles away before the KGV can even make visual contact.
The moral of the story is that you really have to think about what the Navy has evolved into. It's not that there are no more battleships, per se, it is more like every combatant the navy has is a capital ship in its own right.
I must also digress about armor. It's also a bit of a gap to say that American ships aren't armoured. Yes, it is true that American warships do not have thick steel armour belts in the past, but its also true that thick armour belts can't resist modern shaped charges, its also true that they only were really thick at areas of a ship where designers anticipated the firing arcs of other shells would be. Have a look at the now declassified maps of the USS New Jersey's armor belts. You could theoretically program missiles to hit other parts of the ship. Against a range of threats, from bombs to torpedos, or even missiles that can be programmed to hit a ship from any angle, it is simply impossible to provide passive armor protection on all surfaces.
So, what designers do do is local armoring. They might not armour the entire hull, but they'll wrap critical equipment with some kevlar jackets, and that's not too shabby. That does come from combat experience, in a weird way. During vietnam, they did nothing to protect combat aircraft, but, they realized that putting a little bit of armor around a few critical things would save a lot of planes. These things were incorporated, among other things, into the highly successful A-10, which is a very survivable plane, and, to some extent, that sort of thinking has found itself into US Navy ships as well.