A strong sense of national/ethnic unity as a people - again, same as Germany. They have thousands of years of culture, nevermind there are entire extended families that are divided and kept apart (save for the rare, tearful temporary reunions sometimes agreed on by the two governments).
It certainly wouldn't be cheap either - North Korea is in such a shambles that rebuilding it will make German reunification look cheap by comparison. One estimate I heard was that it would be something like 10 to 100 times the cost, and that's before you consider that South Korea is far less able to pay than West Germany was.
It's strange if you think their priority is the advancement and well-being of their people and nation as a whole.
On the other hand, if you believe that their goal is maintaining the Kim family dynasty, and the power of the North Korea military elites, then it's not so strange.
No, it's exactly the correct response. This is a classic pattern of saber-rattling and threatening by North Korea. It's not about an actual threat to use nukes - which, by the way, they already had. South Korea can't afford to not respond in some way, so what do they do? Something that really pisses the North Koreans off, but without risking pushing things into actual shooting - which happens very often along the border between the two. Yes, it's entirely about saving face. No, nobody expects it will actually change anything. Obama is pretty much doing what every president has done, which is maintaining US military forces in Japan and South Korea, and promising to defend them against any aggression from North Korea.
But perhaps you think an active military response would be better? George W. Bush didn't seem to think so, even after North Korea blew past his "red line" on uranium enrichment and actually built the first of those bombs. Bottom line is, even the Bush administration didn't want a war in Korea, because it would be insanely bloody - and that's a best case scenario, nevermind that it was that way BEFORE North Korea had nukes. There just happens to be a major city of about 10 million South Koreans lying within artillery range of the border (where there just happens to be lots of artillery for that very reason).
I don't see this as a way to get cheaper products. And that's fine - there's nothing wrong with putting up extra cash for something you REALLY want. Think of it as being an early-early adopter. It's up to you and I to decide if we want something that badly to put in the money for it. The alternative of the standard model where the corporation does market research, and tries to figure out what consumers want and will pay for, does the research/design/etc, and then offers it for sale, means that you're not likely to see anything too outside the box. When the corporation is assuming 100% of the risk, why shouldn't they go with the "safe" option?
On the other hand, with this model, they can offer something a little more cutting edge, because if nobody is interested, it'll become apparent quickly. Also, you won't be running into the common Kickstarter problem of people who overpromise their ability to deliver because they have no idea of what the real costs are going to be, or how to budget, etc.
That makes a lot of sense. It's essentially the Console model - discount the hardware, make money on the games. I'm not sure how well it will work though, since your market for this is a subset of PC gaming. $600 is already too much for the Console market, and remember that's $600 on top of a PC capable of running it (which will probably run you at least $1k, roughly speaking). The console model may work well in the long run here, and would be a good way to work on lowering the price, but in the meantime, you need to make the sale to the initial install base, and that will mean a combination of VR specific games, but also other existing games that simply work better with it.
Consider some of the high end combat flight sim games. I can think of one at least where current players already use head trackers to change their in-cockpit view, and something like this could be perfect for it. Imagine the usefulness of this in FPS games, to be able to quickly shift your field of view using natural head motion - it could be game-changing.
But that all depends on how well it interfaces with those games, and others like open world RPGs (a la Fallout 4, Witcher 3, etc). It has to work well with those too, not just passably. To make the sale at the 600 pricepoint, it has to be seriously effective. I certainly won't be buying it unless I can find a use for it with the games I already play/intend to play.
Which may work for you, but those who want full access to the ecosystem of PC games already have enough to deal with, without the rest of the hassles.
Windows 10 is fine - you just have to know to turn the 'services' you don't want off, and never, under any circumstances, trade your local user account for a Microsoft cloud account.
Standards, whether they come from the government or from an industry group, are going to serve the interests of that group. It's whose interests those are that are key, because you can have industry standards designed to enrich a minority of players through proprietary formats - for instance, Blu-ray. Or look at the whole Net Neutrality debate - would you really want an "industry consortium" of internet service providers (Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner, etc) setting the rules for that, or would you prefer the FCC do it?
Contrary to popular belief in America, Government is not inherently bad, so long as it's actually serving the interests of the people, rather than rich/corporate/etc interests. Ironically, the same people who have been trying to convince Americans that "Government is bad" often tend to be the same people sucking up to those rich/corporate/etc interests. Government certainly can be subverted, but that's partly on us as citizens, to not let it happen, and more importantly to fight for a system where it's not easy to have that sort of regulatory capture occur.
I fully expect that there will be a lot of overreach attempts with this, but rather than being a bad thing, it'll be good, because it'll wake up the non-techie public to some of the insane shenanigans that are being done in DMCA/etc land on the internet. Right now there are a lot of people, including judges, who don't (or haven't yet) realized just how bad it is because the physical parallels haven't been made clear. Give them some nice, clear examples though, and it's a new ballgame.
Consider China - they panicked about population growth, instituted draconian controls (the one child policy), and look where it's gotten them - into the same boat with Japan and South Korea, the latter of whose birth rate is so low that if it continued at that rate, the entire population of some 50 million people would dwindle to nothing by 2700. Granted, it's unlikely to go quite that far, but it's worth noting that the effects on the population are significant even in the short term, as the number of aged (ie non-working) people increase as a percentage of the population.
What's more, even less advanced nations are seeing this effect. Mexico had a birth rate of something like 6-7 children per female in 1970, but today that's only 2.2. Even India is down to 2.5 and falling.
At least with their audio streaming counterpart, where they enroll specific services to not count against caps, there don't seem to have been any kickbacks or limits. They've been pretty good about bringing in a pretty wide list of services (they cite http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/... as their current list). I could certainly be wrong of course - but one other possibility is that, because T-mobile is in 4th place among the major providers, they're desperate to find anything to set them apart from Verizon/AT&T.
Put another way, because T-mobile is currently the upstart rather than one of the big incumbents, they're not in a strong position to try and play gatekeeper/tollkeeper the way Verizon/AT&T might. (Though if that changed, who knows - and this is why we need Net Neutrality regulations)
Unfortunately this is becoming more and more of a common thing in internet and other political discourse. It's become less and less about any sort of rational discussion of policies, proposals, or problems, and more and more akin to a sort of tribal religious affiliation, with a manichean outlook. Our side is right and good, the other side is bad and evil, and its supporters are either malicious, ignorant, or both. Hell, I'm guilty of thinking that way too at times, so I tend to feel it's something far more widespread than just any sort of individual influence.
I think a lot of it has to do with the ease of finding partisan reinforcement in selective media, and a resulting feedback loop once you reach a specific degree of certainty in your beliefs - you no longer accept countervailing evidence. Anyone in the middle gets attacked, or at least ostracized, by both sides. There's room for debate, but only within the confines of the core group's general range of acceptable views.
That's just my point though. Even though the democrats currently hold every statewide office in Virginia, the Republicans still have a majority in both houses of the state legislature, and hold 8 of the 11 seats in the House... and North Carolina has far more of a Republican tilt in its voting population.
As for the Governor - the reason he got elected was that the Republicans ran a complete right-wing ideologue, who on top of being a jackass that had used the Attorney General's office to go on political witchhunts against scientists (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/science/earth/23virginia.html?_r=0), was also tied to the scandals of the outgoing Republican Governor (who wound up later convicted of bribery - https://www.washingtonpost.com... ).
Yes, we are currently in the clutches of a backwards Republican state government so there are lots of headlines about regressive policies. But this is an aberration ( the first Republican government in over 100 years) and it will not last long.
This is just it though. Those "rubes" also vote, and you're going to have to deal with the fact that they will vote for people that will sell them all sorts of snake oil on behalf of rich benefactors, whether it's voting against solar development, or the state passing laws (at the behest of the telecoms) against municipal broadband, or installing their compatriots in charge of one of the state's flagship universities: http://www.newsobserver.com/ne...
As for it being an aberration - I have some bad news for you, it's not. It's part of the realignment of politics in the South. Small-c conservative Democrats have almost universally been replaced by Republicans. There are a lot of reasons behind this, but it's highly unlikely to reverse itself, partly because they've gerrymandered themselves into an entrenched position. Take a look at Virginia to your north - it's much the same way, although there at least the Republicans have a less slightly strong grip. At best it's going to be something you are constantly fighting, especially on off-year elections when the turnout is low.
"Gigabit" would probably be the big deal. Verizon will only give you something like 50mb/50mb, or maybe up to 300/300 if you send them truckloads of cash. It's like expecting everyone to be satisfied with a 56k when the rest of the developed world is at or around 10mb, and charging the same prices anyway.
I'd say it's a better idea than the current setup - which isn't saying much.
The H-1B program definitely needs to be massively overhauled. I wouldn't say it needs to be permanent residency, but it certainly needs to entitle the holder to freely move to another job, just like any other worker. The companies also need to be made to pay enough in fees for sponsoring it that they won't be making money - let's say, $100k per year of the visa. There also shouldn't be any rebates if the worker quits, so there's incentive to pay the person well and treat them well. For people who really represent such critical skills that there really is no American available to do the job, that shouldn't be an issue at all.
Of course it won't hunt - they named it RMS, so it's refusing to operate until all of its software is completely free and open. Guess they'd better start working on GNU/Mine Hunter.
Yes - the lead engineer on this did some amazing maneuvers to salvage the mission after the main thruster failed. It was definitely something straight out of Kerbal Space Program, and totally cool.
No - they should be, but my experience tells me that "should be" isn't always the same as "actually are". Ideally people are following best security practices, but this is the real world, and there are often other factors in the equation that weaken that. If everything on the internet was as secure as marketing tells us it, and everyone followed best practices, IT security wouldn't be anywhere near as big of a problem as it is.
I was also talking primarily about remote access, because your original post suggested that these systems need to be "read only". Whether or not you consider it to be IOT or ICS or whatever new buzzword comes into use for a computer hooked to a physical device is largely irrelevant here, because if you need to make a change on that wind turbine, you either need write access remotely, or you're going to have an engineer hopping in a truck or boat to head out to the physical turbine, and that's a problem.
Which is great, except that wind farms tend to be in places like the middle of nowhere, Kansas, or a mile or so offshore. You know, places that it's not exactly easy to send a technician out to, in order to do things like change a setting. It's not just about monitoring "while on vacation" - there are often significant distances involved simply due to the sheer nature of these things.
This isn't to say that stuff like remote access doesn't need to be looked at very very hard as to whether it's a valid use case, but you can't simply handwave away the real world factors that are contributing to that executive suggesting it's necessary. If he/she is your boss, you need to be able to state clearly what the concerns are, and figure out a way to present those security concerns as a counterweight - and be prepared that they may not outweigh the cost of physical only access. Hopefully, though, by raising security as a concern, you can at least get it taken into account so as not to be a completely soft target.
The systems on the A-10 have been improved since the 1970s, too. Certainly if we redesigned one from the ground up today, with the same priorities, we could do a better job - but the F-35 is not that plane by any stretch of the imagination, despite what the Air Force wants us to believe. If you had to ask me which aircraft I would want a squadron of for providing ground support, in a ground war against Russia or China? I'd definitely pick a squadron of A-10s over the F-35. They'd be more effective, nevermind that I'd probably have money left over for some F-16s on top of that.
Conversely, I would argue that the F-35 is exactly the opposite. It's meant for the sort of missions that the Air Force wants, not what the Army needs. By that I mean single seat supersonic multirole fighter. It's meant for a loss-averse mentality in the sorts of attacks against Libya and the Iraq invasion, or what we would have done had we bombed Syria. By that, I mean a wave of strikes against the air defense network, then hitting other operational and strategic targets, and if they have to do CAS later, they'll use 2000 pound guided bombs from high altitude (which is far from ideal, especially when you have ground troops in contact with the enemy). It does well against those second and third tier air defenses, but against Russia and China? How well is its stealth capability going to protect it against an adversary that has the resources to try and figure out a way to defeat it? Because that's really the only card the F-35 is holding, since its capabilities in all other areas are pretty much awful.
Slashdot Mirror
A strong sense of national/ethnic unity as a people - again, same as Germany. They have thousands of years of culture, nevermind there are entire extended families that are divided and kept apart (save for the rare, tearful temporary reunions sometimes agreed on by the two governments).
It certainly wouldn't be cheap either - North Korea is in such a shambles that rebuilding it will make German reunification look cheap by comparison. One estimate I heard was that it would be something like 10 to 100 times the cost, and that's before you consider that South Korea is far less able to pay than West Germany was.
Serving in Hell? It's awful - the customers are horrible, they bring their screaming kids, and they never tip.
It's strange if you think their priority is the advancement and well-being of their people and nation as a whole.
On the other hand, if you believe that their goal is maintaining the Kim family dynasty, and the power of the North Korea military elites, then it's not so strange.
No, it's exactly the correct response. This is a classic pattern of saber-rattling and threatening by North Korea. It's not about an actual threat to use nukes - which, by the way, they already had. South Korea can't afford to not respond in some way, so what do they do? Something that really pisses the North Koreans off, but without risking pushing things into actual shooting - which happens very often along the border between the two. Yes, it's entirely about saving face. No, nobody expects it will actually change anything. Obama is pretty much doing what every president has done, which is maintaining US military forces in Japan and South Korea, and promising to defend them against any aggression from North Korea.
But perhaps you think an active military response would be better? George W. Bush didn't seem to think so, even after North Korea blew past his "red line" on uranium enrichment and actually built the first of those bombs. Bottom line is, even the Bush administration didn't want a war in Korea, because it would be insanely bloody - and that's a best case scenario, nevermind that it was that way BEFORE North Korea had nukes. There just happens to be a major city of about 10 million South Koreans lying within artillery range of the border (where there just happens to be lots of artillery for that very reason).
I don't see this as a way to get cheaper products. And that's fine - there's nothing wrong with putting up extra cash for something you REALLY want. Think of it as being an early-early adopter. It's up to you and I to decide if we want something that badly to put in the money for it. The alternative of the standard model where the corporation does market research, and tries to figure out what consumers want and will pay for, does the research/design/etc, and then offers it for sale, means that you're not likely to see anything too outside the box. When the corporation is assuming 100% of the risk, why shouldn't they go with the "safe" option?
On the other hand, with this model, they can offer something a little more cutting edge, because if nobody is interested, it'll become apparent quickly. Also, you won't be running into the common Kickstarter problem of people who overpromise their ability to deliver because they have no idea of what the real costs are going to be, or how to budget, etc.
That makes a lot of sense. It's essentially the Console model - discount the hardware, make money on the games. I'm not sure how well it will work though, since your market for this is a subset of PC gaming. $600 is already too much for the Console market, and remember that's $600 on top of a PC capable of running it (which will probably run you at least $1k, roughly speaking). The console model may work well in the long run here, and would be a good way to work on lowering the price, but in the meantime, you need to make the sale to the initial install base, and that will mean a combination of VR specific games, but also other existing games that simply work better with it.
Consider some of the high end combat flight sim games. I can think of one at least where current players already use head trackers to change their in-cockpit view, and something like this could be perfect for it. Imagine the usefulness of this in FPS games, to be able to quickly shift your field of view using natural head motion - it could be game-changing.
But that all depends on how well it interfaces with those games, and others like open world RPGs (a la Fallout 4, Witcher 3, etc). It has to work well with those too, not just passably. To make the sale at the 600 pricepoint, it has to be seriously effective. I certainly won't be buying it unless I can find a use for it with the games I already play/intend to play.
It'd still probably be better than the prequels.
Yeah so all the people trying to modify the constitution to make it illegal for George Lucas to have free speech can go fuck themselves.
Yes, but have you SEEN the Phantom Menace?
Which may work for you, but those who want full access to the ecosystem of PC games already have enough to deal with, without the rest of the hassles. Windows 10 is fine - you just have to know to turn the 'services' you don't want off, and never, under any circumstances, trade your local user account for a Microsoft cloud account.
Standards, whether they come from the government or from an industry group, are going to serve the interests of that group. It's whose interests those are that are key, because you can have industry standards designed to enrich a minority of players through proprietary formats - for instance, Blu-ray. Or look at the whole Net Neutrality debate - would you really want an "industry consortium" of internet service providers (Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner, etc) setting the rules for that, or would you prefer the FCC do it?
Contrary to popular belief in America, Government is not inherently bad, so long as it's actually serving the interests of the people, rather than rich/corporate/etc interests. Ironically, the same people who have been trying to convince Americans that "Government is bad" often tend to be the same people sucking up to those rich/corporate/etc interests. Government certainly can be subverted, but that's partly on us as citizens, to not let it happen, and more importantly to fight for a system where it's not easy to have that sort of regulatory capture occur.
I fully expect that there will be a lot of overreach attempts with this, but rather than being a bad thing, it'll be good, because it'll wake up the non-techie public to some of the insane shenanigans that are being done in DMCA/etc land on the internet. Right now there are a lot of people, including judges, who don't (or haven't yet) realized just how bad it is because the physical parallels haven't been made clear. Give them some nice, clear examples though, and it's a new ballgame.
Or so I'd hope at least.
Ouch - that's pretty bad then, since Czechoslovakia no longer exists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Mod Parent up.
Consider China - they panicked about population growth, instituted draconian controls (the one child policy), and look where it's gotten them - into the same boat with Japan and South Korea, the latter of whose birth rate is so low that if it continued at that rate, the entire population of some 50 million people would dwindle to nothing by 2700. Granted, it's unlikely to go quite that far, but it's worth noting that the effects on the population are significant even in the short term, as the number of aged (ie non-working) people increase as a percentage of the population.
What's more, even less advanced nations are seeing this effect. Mexico had a birth rate of something like 6-7 children per female in 1970, but today that's only 2.2. Even India is down to 2.5 and falling.
At least with their audio streaming counterpart, where they enroll specific services to not count against caps, there don't seem to have been any kickbacks or limits. They've been pretty good about bringing in a pretty wide list of services (they cite http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/... as their current list). I could certainly be wrong of course - but one other possibility is that, because T-mobile is in 4th place among the major providers, they're desperate to find anything to set them apart from Verizon/AT&T.
Put another way, because T-mobile is currently the upstart rather than one of the big incumbents, they're not in a strong position to try and play gatekeeper/tollkeeper the way Verizon/AT&T might. (Though if that changed, who knows - and this is why we need Net Neutrality regulations)
Unfortunately this is becoming more and more of a common thing in internet and other political discourse. It's become less and less about any sort of rational discussion of policies, proposals, or problems, and more and more akin to a sort of tribal religious affiliation, with a manichean outlook. Our side is right and good, the other side is bad and evil, and its supporters are either malicious, ignorant, or both. Hell, I'm guilty of thinking that way too at times, so I tend to feel it's something far more widespread than just any sort of individual influence.
I think a lot of it has to do with the ease of finding partisan reinforcement in selective media, and a resulting feedback loop once you reach a specific degree of certainty in your beliefs - you no longer accept countervailing evidence. Anyone in the middle gets attacked, or at least ostracized, by both sides. There's room for debate, but only within the confines of the core group's general range of acceptable views.
That's just my point though. Even though the democrats currently hold every statewide office in Virginia, the Republicans still have a majority in both houses of the state legislature, and hold 8 of the 11 seats in the House... and North Carolina has far more of a Republican tilt in its voting population.
As for the Governor - the reason he got elected was that the Republicans ran a complete right-wing ideologue, who on top of being a jackass that had used the Attorney General's office to go on political witchhunts against scientists (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/science/earth/23virginia.html?_r=0), was also tied to the scandals of the outgoing Republican Governor (who wound up later convicted of bribery - https://www.washingtonpost.com... ).
Yes, we are currently in the clutches of a backwards Republican state government so there are lots of headlines about regressive policies. But this is an aberration ( the first Republican government in over 100 years) and it will not last long.
This is just it though. Those "rubes" also vote, and you're going to have to deal with the fact that they will vote for people that will sell them all sorts of snake oil on behalf of rich benefactors, whether it's voting against solar development, or the state passing laws (at the behest of the telecoms) against municipal broadband, or installing their compatriots in charge of one of the state's flagship universities: http://www.newsobserver.com/ne...
As for it being an aberration - I have some bad news for you, it's not. It's part of the realignment of politics in the South. Small-c conservative Democrats have almost universally been replaced by Republicans. There are a lot of reasons behind this, but it's highly unlikely to reverse itself, partly because they've gerrymandered themselves into an entrenched position. Take a look at Virginia to your north - it's much the same way, although there at least the Republicans have a less slightly strong grip. At best it's going to be something you are constantly fighting, especially on off-year elections when the turnout is low.
"Gigabit" would probably be the big deal. Verizon will only give you something like 50mb/50mb, or maybe up to 300/300 if you send them truckloads of cash. It's like expecting everyone to be satisfied with a 56k when the rest of the developed world is at or around 10mb, and charging the same prices anyway.
I'd say it's a better idea than the current setup - which isn't saying much.
The H-1B program definitely needs to be massively overhauled. I wouldn't say it needs to be permanent residency, but it certainly needs to entitle the holder to freely move to another job, just like any other worker. The companies also need to be made to pay enough in fees for sponsoring it that they won't be making money - let's say, $100k per year of the visa. There also shouldn't be any rebates if the worker quits, so there's incentive to pay the person well and treat them well. For people who really represent such critical skills that there really is no American available to do the job, that shouldn't be an issue at all.
Of course it won't hunt - they named it RMS, so it's refusing to operate until all of its software is completely free and open. Guess they'd better start working on GNU/Mine Hunter.
Not to the original, but here's a link to the image of the series of maneuvers they had to do to get into orbit, over five years:
http://goo.gl/ONZpns
Full article here: http://gizmodo.com/tonight-is-...
Yes - the lead engineer on this did some amazing maneuvers to salvage the mission after the main thruster failed. It was definitely something straight out of Kerbal Space Program, and totally cool.
No - they should be, but my experience tells me that "should be" isn't always the same as "actually are". Ideally people are following best security practices, but this is the real world, and there are often other factors in the equation that weaken that. If everything on the internet was as secure as marketing tells us it, and everyone followed best practices, IT security wouldn't be anywhere near as big of a problem as it is.
I was also talking primarily about remote access, because your original post suggested that these systems need to be "read only". Whether or not you consider it to be IOT or ICS or whatever new buzzword comes into use for a computer hooked to a physical device is largely irrelevant here, because if you need to make a change on that wind turbine, you either need write access remotely, or you're going to have an engineer hopping in a truck or boat to head out to the physical turbine, and that's a problem.
Which is great, except that wind farms tend to be in places like the middle of nowhere, Kansas, or a mile or so offshore. You know, places that it's not exactly easy to send a technician out to, in order to do things like change a setting. It's not just about monitoring "while on vacation" - there are often significant distances involved simply due to the sheer nature of these things.
This isn't to say that stuff like remote access doesn't need to be looked at very very hard as to whether it's a valid use case, but you can't simply handwave away the real world factors that are contributing to that executive suggesting it's necessary. If he/she is your boss, you need to be able to state clearly what the concerns are, and figure out a way to present those security concerns as a counterweight - and be prepared that they may not outweigh the cost of physical only access. Hopefully, though, by raising security as a concern, you can at least get it taken into account so as not to be a completely soft target.
The systems on the A-10 have been improved since the 1970s, too. Certainly if we redesigned one from the ground up today, with the same priorities, we could do a better job - but the F-35 is not that plane by any stretch of the imagination, despite what the Air Force wants us to believe. If you had to ask me which aircraft I would want a squadron of for providing ground support, in a ground war against Russia or China? I'd definitely pick a squadron of A-10s over the F-35. They'd be more effective, nevermind that I'd probably have money left over for some F-16s on top of that.
Conversely, I would argue that the F-35 is exactly the opposite. It's meant for the sort of missions that the Air Force wants, not what the Army needs. By that I mean single seat supersonic multirole fighter. It's meant for a loss-averse mentality in the sorts of attacks against Libya and the Iraq invasion, or what we would have done had we bombed Syria. By that, I mean a wave of strikes against the air defense network, then hitting other operational and strategic targets, and if they have to do CAS later, they'll use 2000 pound guided bombs from high altitude (which is far from ideal, especially when you have ground troops in contact with the enemy). It does well against those second and third tier air defenses, but against Russia and China? How well is its stealth capability going to protect it against an adversary that has the resources to try and figure out a way to defeat it? Because that's really the only card the F-35 is holding, since its capabilities in all other areas are pretty much awful.