They damn well understood the risks. The risks were: "Call them out, and our golfing buddies get angry at us."
Our entire financial system has been a rigged casino for a very long time - much worse since 1996 (repeal of Glass-Steagal), but really not a whole lot better before that.
I find it outrageous that there is still no serious discussion about reform or regulation of derivatives, when it has been soundly mathematically proven that they are (as a class of instrument) all completely fraudulent.
Reports of LibreOffice's demise are greatly exaggerated.
Everything else, though, is as good as dead. Kiss them goodbye. Virtualbox, as well. I'd like to believe that there is enough 3rd-party community support on Java that Oracle can't kill it. But I suspect that there will be some heavy-handed legal action coming down the pipe soon, to block this. I think Oracle will allow an open effort to become established, and then kill it.
Recall that Sun is "Stanford University Network" from back in the old days. VERY literally "old school". Academic background seldom (ie. NEVER) plays-nice with MBA/business (Oracle) background, in the long-run. Just long enough to pump-and-dump. When two such corporate cultures meet in a merger, you can ALWAYS count on a clash. No matter what the PR drones say, the folks in management on the business side are going to eventually steamroller the academic side.
The only exception to this rule I've ever seen was the Apple+NeXT merger. And in the end. . . I don't think the NeXT people won-out as much as we think they did. They *did* have their golden moment to shine in the sun, maybe 2003-2007 or so, when Apple was really shaping up to be THE premier Unix platform. Then the iOS goons took over.
Lay off more American workers, until nobody has a job to commute to. No gasoline to buy. No cars to charge any time of the day. No homes on which to mount rooftop solar panels.
The biggest flaw of Oracle is the licensing extortion scheme of "price per seat" and "price per cpu". It scales great - but please open your checkbook.
"near a river" - lol. Not really. The town of Hanford is near a river. The waste storage is a hundred miles north, up in a very arid grassland. The site is equipped and populated with experts in dealing with contamination and nuclear waste. Hanford is the perfect place. Except for the whole volcanic eruption thing. . . .
Molten Salt Reactors HAVE been built - and operated, and they have a lot of advantages over water or graphite moderated designs. The one in Thousand Oaks had a little accident when a pump-bearing lubricant leaked into the coolant stream, fouling the system, and clogging the outlet, causing the reactor to overheat. I guess there was some kind of explosion or release in this case too - but it was not widely publicized, because it was a classified research reactor. (there was a documentary made of released info, and it's on Youtube).
The advantage of this type, of course, is that you don't have to rely on water, oxidation of metal parts, generation of hydrogen gas at high temperatures in contact with the zircalloy core cladding, etc.
However, big disadvantage: the plan to deal with a leak: (and subsequently catches fire, which is pretty much a guarantee when liquid sodium makes contact with air) . . . is to let it burn out. Because there is no way to extinguish such a fire. (sodium burns on contact with water, as well). All of the fuel is then oxidized, and spewed into the atmosphere.
And of course - they can report on the TV news that the radiation is as bad as having a couple of chest x rays, or the equivalent of eating a couple of bananas a day for 5 years. But this is utterly dishonest, because inhaling these radionuclides, and having them chemically incorporated into cell biology, is often lethal, in the form of higher cancer risk. And these contaminants spread far and wide, with every spill or release, and they remain in the environment for months (iodine) years (strontium) and even centuries (plutonium). Being able to turn lights on is really neat and nifty. Poisoning people over an area of thousands of square miles like this is too high a price to pay for that.
we should have "seen the light" in 1973. We've had 38 years to prepare for this. We sat on our thumbs and said "la la la - this isn't happening!" instead, and prayed to the almighty invisible hand to bail us out.
We figured back in 2003 that we could point our national "gun" at Iraq, and force them to be "free".
And that worked out so well too! And just like the Bush Administration predicted ( http://www.americanprogress.org/kf/priraqclaimfact1029.htm )- it only cost $60 billion, we were in and out of there in 6 weeks, and the oil revenues paid for it with zero lasting economic consequence. And they have a "George W Bush" square in Baghdad, and hold parades there where the children throw candies and flowers at the George W Bush statue.
AGW opponents were looking for a reason. Whether the CRU gave them a valid one or not - doesn't really matter. They could have forgotten to wash their hands after going to the bathroom, and it would have been enough.
Never mind the comparative wrongdoings of the financial community which has been screaming "don't regulate us, don't cap n trade us." - we're still suffering through a crashed economy, and no, we haven't capped and traded or regulated. So it kind of makes their arguments a moot point. Their obscene payscales - justify some kind of superhuman financial expertise? I doubt it. They are simply dishonest, they've fucked up, and they want to blame others for their problems - and they're certainly making 99% of the rest of the world suffer for their crimes.
And they focus on this issue by the CRU as the reason why we should be cautious about regulating carbon output? Fucking rude, man.
I subscribed to Sci Am for 15 years, up until around 2000 or 2003 or so, back when they changed ownership, and the overall quality of articles went on a rapid decline. Around that time is when all of these competing publications started to appear, so I know that I was not alone in my disgust.
Underneath rooftops are occupied living space, which must expend energy to be actively cooled, if not painted white (or covered with PV panels and energy converted to electricity in some percentage).
Which is worse? collecting that energy for use? Or having to explicitly BURN additional energy to actively counter solar heating (which then adds extra CO2, which causes MORE heating over time. . . )? If you're not going to spend the $$$ to put PV panels on your roof, at least freaking paint it white.
The main problem right now - is private finance refuses to pay for PV projects. (this is changing - obviously). Oil and Coal are profitable, because they can finance a plant, and force people to pay monthly rates. They can also force people to pay taxes for a war to secure feedstock. Private finance LOVES Oil and Coal, and they do not give a flying fuck what happens to the people who get sick, get bombed, or what happens to the environment. Even Nuclear is not fully profitable on a private basis, and requires massive public subsidies to operate.
Lincoln was assassinated because he took-on the UNconstitutional power of issuing government currency (the greenback). Had this policy continued, we would not have been dependent, as a nation, on private capital to finance our public projects. We would not be having a debt ceiling discussion right now. Private campaign financing would not be an issue. (private banking, OF COURSE, would still exist - it would simply have to COMPETE with the public system - like the Bank of North Dakota). Opponents of public banking made certain that this policy did not continue, by enabling the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln.
If private finance were taken out of this game, solar would already be the clear market winner, and we would not even be debating any of this. I am certain that petroleum would STILL be an extremely vital transportation fuel resource! But we would have begun phasing it out at a serious level back in the 1970's, when we had the technology to do so.
It's an excellent opportunity then, to set up a honeypot, to seek-out the illegitimate sort of opportunists. Then cart them and their families off in the dead of night, and grind them into sausage meat.
Ha ha. I know. Bad Korean Joke.:D But given that I know of Korean-Americans whose Korean-national relatives DO still eat dogs, and consider it to be a delicacy, - - it IS teh FUNNY!
You send some cosmonauts up there in EVA suits with some tools. They take the thing apart, and put the pieces back in their Lego boxes. Then they de-orbit the boxes.
Contrary to the other posters, the main problem with establishing the ISS in lunar orbit is not really about enough delta-V.
The main problem is that the ISS was designed for LEO. That means, the thermal, and geomagnetic environment in Low Earth Orbit.
If we were to park the ISS in orbit around the moon, the station would rapidly become uninhabitable. The solar power cells would not be able to generate sufficient power. (they can generate power, sure, but they were designed to keep gyroscopes running, heaters going, lights on, given a certain amount of sunlight per time, with exposure cycling every 90-minute orbit, angle of sunlight constantly changing, and motors constantly rotating to compensate - etc). Too much heat would radiate away, and it would be impossible to maintain a working temperature while the station orbited across the dark side of the moon. Heat build-up during the daylight cycle of the orbit was a huge problem, so the ISS has to radiate that away. Structural thermal expansion and contraction are also huge issues, which would be completely different in a lunar orbit environment. The station would be exposed to too much solar radiation during storms, and personnel would be unable to shelter, and would succumb to radiation sickness. There are probably electromagnetic discharge issues that I don't even have a clue how to understand or explain - but orbiting through the earth's magnetic field causes a lot of plasma and static current build-up issues, and there are systems set up to mitigate these problems, which can probably cause other issues in the lunar-orbit environment. We would be unable to easily supply and re-crew the station.
On the bright side, the station would be less vulnerable to space junk. (but then it would quickly BECOME lunar orbit space junk).
A station for orbiting in deep space, and long-term human habitation, would need to be very specifically designed for that purpose.
We are not a practical bunch. We are not willing to put aside political differences. We have a rebellious group in the south, and our wealthiest are tax cheats and criminals. We had to reign them in by force in the civil war, and even then, in the face of removing power from the private banking cartels by granting the government the power to issue currency via the greenback (Lincoln) - they resorted to assassination. (this was the real reason Lincoln was assassinated - to prevent that power from becoming permanent, and to restore our enslavement to the private banking cartels).
Even defeated in the civil war - they continue to insist on having their way. It is kind of sad. Very sad. You had better start doing your re-assessing, because this nation is fucked. I do not believe we can successfully fight another civil war. We are about to go the way of the old Soviet Union. Just watch.
To be fairer: The president isn't even proposing the following: Allowing the Temporary Bush Tax Cuts to EXPIRE. Which is being falsely called a "tax increase".
The distortion of this whole debate by the media has been just absurd. Let the freaking tax cuts expire already.
I guess the real question I have is: How can I hack my old PSU from my dual 2.0 GHz G5 so that it will support a modern intel motherboard, so I can build a new system using the old (sexy) aluminum powermac case and power supply (and fan)? (I'm actually not all that "in love" with the PSU - just don't want to have to purchase a brand new one if I don't have to - but it's one sexy case - especially if I buff-off the Apple logo on the side, and maybe acid-etch or silkscreen something else in there.
This really had nothing to do with "Republicans" per se, but more to do with very powerful career senator Orrin Hatch trying to funnel money to Utah-based ATK (formerly Morton-Thiokol) - the folks who make the Solid Rocket Boosters - devices which are wildly inappropriate for manned spaceflight, or really, anything other than nuclear ballistic missiles. (for which purpose, they are PERFECT).
The SRB is about 90% of why the STS sucked so badly, and was also why Ares/Liberty sucked so badly. It is pure pork of the worst kind. ATK, of course, is a private corporation (which just so happens to operate in a business environment completely devoid of actual competition) - so I am not laboring under the absurd illusion that "privatizing spaceflight" is going to fix all our problems like magic.
Letting engineers design launch vehicles, instead of greedy senators, just may be the ticket, though.
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Krugman was exactly correct when he predicted that the 2009 stimulus bill would not be enough to correct the economic slump. And here we are.
They damn well understood the risks.
The risks were: "Call them out, and our golfing buddies get angry at us."
Our entire financial system has been a rigged casino for a very long time - much worse since 1996 (repeal of Glass-Steagal), but really not a whole lot better before that.
I find it outrageous that there is still no serious discussion about reform or regulation of derivatives, when it has been soundly mathematically proven that they are (as a class of instrument) all completely fraudulent.
Reports of LibreOffice's demise are greatly exaggerated.
Everything else, though, is as good as dead. Kiss them goodbye. Virtualbox, as well.
I'd like to believe that there is enough 3rd-party community support on Java that Oracle can't kill it. But I suspect that there will be some heavy-handed legal action coming down the pipe soon, to block this. I think Oracle will allow an open effort to become established, and then kill it.
Recall that Sun is "Stanford University Network" from back in the old days. VERY literally "old school". Academic background seldom (ie. NEVER) plays-nice with MBA/business (Oracle) background, in the long-run. Just long enough to pump-and-dump. When two such corporate cultures meet in a merger, you can ALWAYS count on a clash. No matter what the PR drones say, the folks in management on the business side are going to eventually steamroller the academic side.
The only exception to this rule I've ever seen was the Apple+NeXT merger. And in the end. . . I don't think the NeXT people won-out as much as we think they did. They *did* have their golden moment to shine in the sun, maybe 2003-2007 or so, when Apple was really shaping up to be THE premier Unix platform.
Then the iOS goons took over.
Here's what we'll REALLY do.
Lay off more American workers, until nobody has a job to commute to.
No gasoline to buy.
No cars to charge any time of the day.
No homes on which to mount rooftop solar panels.
Problem solved.
The biggest flaw of Oracle is the licensing extortion scheme of "price per seat" and "price per cpu". It scales great - but please open your checkbook.
yay, +infinity: insightful.
done been did that already; Aliens vs Predator.
How about some more creative ideas for match ups?
I wanna see Terminator versus Ninjas. (who can hunt down and kill John Conner faster?)
Oh wait, that was The Last Starfighter. Or maybe Empire Strikes Back.
Okay, what about Time Lord versus Terminator? Who can travel back in time 100 years faster?
Epic Serial Killer (Hannibal Lechter) versus Captain Jack Sparrow? Simple Debauchery of a female FBI agent?
Cowboy Bebop versus SG-1? (who can hunt down and kill John Conner - who is really just some dude infected with an alien mind-control parasite?)
Bender versus Cylons? Philosophy contest.
"near a river" - lol. Not really. The town of Hanford is near a river. The waste storage is a hundred miles north, up in a very arid grassland. The site is equipped and populated with experts in dealing with contamination and nuclear waste. Hanford is the perfect place. Except for the whole volcanic eruption thing. . . .
Molten Salt Reactors HAVE been built - and operated, and they have a lot of advantages over water or graphite moderated designs. The one in Thousand Oaks had a little accident when a pump-bearing lubricant leaked into the coolant stream, fouling the system, and clogging the outlet, causing the reactor to overheat. I guess there was some kind of explosion or release in this case too - but it was not widely publicized, because it was a classified research reactor. (there was a documentary made of released info, and it's on Youtube).
The advantage of this type, of course, is that you don't have to rely on water, oxidation of metal parts, generation of hydrogen gas at high temperatures in contact with the zircalloy core cladding, etc.
However, big disadvantage: the plan to deal with a leak: (and subsequently catches fire, which is pretty much a guarantee when liquid sodium makes contact with air) . . . is to let it burn out. Because there is no way to extinguish such a fire. (sodium burns on contact with water, as well). All of the fuel is then oxidized, and spewed into the atmosphere.
And of course - they can report on the TV news that the radiation is as bad as having a couple of chest x rays, or the equivalent of eating a couple of bananas a day for 5 years. But this is utterly dishonest, because inhaling these radionuclides, and having them chemically incorporated into cell biology, is often lethal, in the form of higher cancer risk. And these contaminants spread far and wide, with every spill or release, and they remain in the environment for months (iodine) years (strontium) and even centuries (plutonium). Being able to turn lights on is really neat and nifty. Poisoning people over an area of thousands of square miles like this is too high a price to pay for that.
You're right. You're no expert. In theory, breeder reactors could solve this. But the problem is FAR from simply political.
we should have "seen the light" in 1973. We've had 38 years to prepare for this. We sat on our thumbs and said "la la la - this isn't happening!" instead, and prayed to the almighty invisible hand to bail us out.
Why not?
We figured back in 2003 that we could point our national "gun" at Iraq, and force them to be "free".
And that worked out so well too! And just like the Bush Administration predicted ( http://www.americanprogress.org/kf/priraqclaimfact1029.htm )- it only cost $60 billion, we were in and out of there in 6 weeks, and the oil revenues paid for it with zero lasting economic consequence. And they have a "George W Bush" square in Baghdad, and hold parades there where the children throw candies and flowers at the George W Bush statue.
AGW opponents were looking for a reason. Whether the CRU gave them a valid one or not - doesn't really matter. They could have forgotten to wash their hands after going to the bathroom, and it would have been enough.
Never mind the comparative wrongdoings of the financial community which has been screaming "don't regulate us, don't cap n trade us." - we're still suffering through a crashed economy, and no, we haven't capped and traded or regulated. So it kind of makes their arguments a moot point. Their obscene payscales - justify some kind of superhuman financial expertise? I doubt it. They are simply dishonest, they've fucked up, and they want to blame others for their problems - and they're certainly making 99% of the rest of the world suffer for their crimes.
And they focus on this issue by the CRU as the reason why we should be cautious about regulating carbon output? Fucking rude, man.
I subscribed to Sci Am for 15 years, up until around 2000 or 2003 or so, back when they changed ownership, and the overall quality of articles went on a rapid decline. Around that time is when all of these competing publications started to appear, so I know that I was not alone in my disgust.
Underneath rooftops are occupied living space, which must expend energy to be actively cooled, if not painted white (or covered with PV panels and energy converted to electricity in some percentage).
Which is worse? collecting that energy for use? Or having to explicitly BURN additional energy to actively counter solar heating (which then adds extra CO2, which causes MORE heating over time. . . )? If you're not going to spend the $$$ to put PV panels on your roof, at least freaking paint it white.
The main problem right now - is private finance refuses to pay for PV projects. (this is changing - obviously). Oil and Coal are profitable, because they can finance a plant, and force people to pay monthly rates. They can also force people to pay taxes for a war to secure feedstock. Private finance LOVES Oil and Coal, and they do not give a flying fuck what happens to the people who get sick, get bombed, or what happens to the environment. Even Nuclear is not fully profitable on a private basis, and requires massive public subsidies to operate.
Lincoln was assassinated because he took-on the UNconstitutional power of issuing government currency (the greenback). Had this policy continued, we would not have been dependent, as a nation, on private capital to finance our public projects. We would not be having a debt ceiling discussion right now. Private campaign financing would not be an issue. (private banking, OF COURSE, would still exist - it would simply have to COMPETE with the public system - like the Bank of North Dakota). Opponents of public banking made certain that this policy did not continue, by enabling the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln.
If private finance were taken out of this game, solar would already be the clear market winner, and we would not even be debating any of this. I am certain that petroleum would STILL be an extremely vital transportation fuel resource! But we would have begun phasing it out at a serious level back in the 1970's, when we had the technology to do so.
It's an excellent opportunity then, to set up a honeypot, to seek-out the illegitimate sort of opportunists. Then cart them and their families off in the dead of night, and grind them into sausage meat.
The real question is - how does it taste?
Ha ha. I know. Bad Korean Joke. :D But given that I know of Korean-Americans whose Korean-national relatives DO still eat dogs, and consider it to be a delicacy, - - it IS teh FUNNY!
You send some cosmonauts up there in EVA suits with some tools. They take the thing apart, and put the pieces back in their Lego boxes. Then they de-orbit the boxes.
Contrary to the other posters, the main problem with establishing the ISS in lunar orbit is not really about enough delta-V.
The main problem is that the ISS was designed for LEO. That means, the thermal, and geomagnetic environment in Low Earth Orbit.
If we were to park the ISS in orbit around the moon, the station would rapidly become uninhabitable.
The solar power cells would not be able to generate sufficient power. (they can generate power, sure, but they were designed to keep gyroscopes running, heaters going, lights on, given a certain amount of sunlight per time, with exposure cycling every 90-minute orbit, angle of sunlight constantly changing, and motors constantly rotating to compensate - etc).
Too much heat would radiate away, and it would be impossible to maintain a working temperature while the station orbited across the dark side of the moon. Heat build-up during the daylight cycle of the orbit was a huge problem, so the ISS has to radiate that away.
Structural thermal expansion and contraction are also huge issues, which would be completely different in a lunar orbit environment.
The station would be exposed to too much solar radiation during storms, and personnel would be unable to shelter, and would succumb to radiation sickness.
There are probably electromagnetic discharge issues that I don't even have a clue how to understand or explain - but orbiting through the earth's magnetic field causes a lot of plasma and static current build-up issues, and there are systems set up to mitigate these problems, which can probably cause other issues in the lunar-orbit environment.
We would be unable to easily supply and re-crew the station.
On the bright side, the station would be less vulnerable to space junk. (but then it would quickly BECOME lunar orbit space junk).
A station for orbiting in deep space, and long-term human habitation, would need to be very specifically designed for that purpose.
That's where you're wrong.
We are not a practical bunch. We are not willing to put aside political differences. We have a rebellious group in the south, and our wealthiest are tax cheats and criminals. We had to reign them in by force in the civil war, and even then, in the face of removing power from the private banking cartels by granting the government the power to issue currency via the greenback (Lincoln) - they resorted to assassination. (this was the real reason Lincoln was assassinated - to prevent that power from becoming permanent, and to restore our enslavement to the private banking cartels).
Even defeated in the civil war - they continue to insist on having their way. It is kind of sad. Very sad. You had better start doing your re-assessing, because this nation is fucked. I do not believe we can successfully fight another civil war. We are about to go the way of the old Soviet Union. Just watch.
To be fairer: The president isn't even proposing the following: Allowing the Temporary Bush Tax Cuts to EXPIRE. Which is being falsely called a "tax increase".
The distortion of this whole debate by the media has been just absurd. Let the freaking tax cuts expire already.
Yes. Same for 2012 and Obama. Yet, a ham sandwich will probably win.
sounds kind of like a protection racket to me.
I guess the real question I have is:
How can I hack my old PSU from my dual 2.0 GHz G5 so that it will support a modern intel motherboard, so I can build a new system using the old (sexy) aluminum powermac case and power supply (and fan)? (I'm actually not all that "in love" with the PSU - just don't want to have to purchase a brand new one if I don't have to - but it's one sexy case - especially if I buff-off the Apple logo on the side, and maybe acid-etch or silkscreen something else in there.
This really had nothing to do with "Republicans" per se, but more to do with very powerful career senator Orrin Hatch trying to funnel money to Utah-based ATK (formerly Morton-Thiokol) - the folks who make the Solid Rocket Boosters - devices which are wildly inappropriate for manned spaceflight, or really, anything other than nuclear ballistic missiles. (for which purpose, they are PERFECT).
The SRB is about 90% of why the STS sucked so badly, and was also why Ares/Liberty sucked so badly. It is pure pork of the worst kind. ATK, of course, is a private corporation (which just so happens to operate in a business environment completely devoid of actual competition) - so I am not laboring under the absurd illusion that "privatizing spaceflight" is going to fix all our problems like magic.
Letting engineers design launch vehicles, instead of greedy senators, just may be the ticket, though.