Besides harmless emissions from hydrogen, the cost of fuel will be extremely low compared to gasoline.
Only if the cost of the electricity used to hydrolyze the water is also extrememly low. For the foreseeable future, the only viably-large source of electricity that is close to carbon neutral will likely be nuclear power - sun and wind likely won't be sufficient for a long time. Also, power from sun, wind, and fission are currently priced artificially higher than power from oil, because with oil we're 'borrowing' from future generations to support our extravagant lifestyle but aren't even calculating the principal, never mind the interest...
I'm all in favour of building 'hydrogen economy' vehicles and infrastructure right now, even though it's not yet clear exactly how we'll come up with enough clean energy to justify it, unless we go all-out nuclear, the prospect of which scares the sh*t out of me. But let's be VERY clear that in the short term we may in fact be increasing carbon emissions by doing so. There are WAY too many people out there who see zero emissions at the tailpipe and think the problem is solved, when in fact total emissions per mile driven may well be higher than those produced by a gasoline engine. Joe Public needs to be educated about such things, and the makers of various 'environmentally friendly' technologies aren't about to do that if it risks harming their sales. We in the tech and scientific communities have an obligation to start getting the word out that There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
Speaking as both a photographer and a very near-sighted person, it would be really awesome if these new lenses were also free(r) from dispersion as compared with standard lenses. (Dispersion is responsible for colour separation in a prism. It also causes orange-yellow and blue-violet fringing in simple lenses such as eyeglasses. Cameras use compound lens elements in a clunky and expensive way to address this problem - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achromatic_lens )
Cameras would be lighter and more accurate, and eyeglasses would be lighter and thinner. Maybe this new technology would even improve contact lenses.
This world that we live in today, where "paid reviews", "forum astroturfing", "blog spamming" and "rabid fanboyism" are been actively encouraged and sponsored by for profit corporations such as Microsoft, Adobe, Apple Inc., - mainly from the Western democracies - any effort in linking Russia to similar "illegal" and/or "unethical" activities is futile
if you can't distinguish between private businesses and a government intelligence agency then, my friend, you're a moron.
Is that simple.
if you can't distinguish between private businesses and a government intelligence agency then, my friend, you see things as they really are and haven't drunk the corporate Kool-aid.
A sovereign nation is like a free, dignified person, an entity that takes up action to protect it/him/herself, and has the freedom to do whatever it/he/she wants to do.
Haven't you heard? Sovereign nations are so yesterday! Corporations are the new providers of governance in the world. And since corporations cross the boundaries of 'sovereign nations', borders no longer matter, except as a convenient device to be enforced or ignored as required to further a corporatist agenda.
There are fewer reasons for a separate page on a desktop
How about the OS being context-sensitive, and changing its behaviour as required on different hardware platforms? People would rapidly adapt to the inconsistency between hand-held and desktop devices - they already do it every day.
Microsoft, (along with the folks who created Gnome 3 and Unity), would be far better off adopting an inclusive strategy for their designs, rather than trying to shoehorn everyone's disparate needs into a 'one size fits all' GUI paradigm. And we'd all be better off if these head-up-their-own-asses devs would put aside their arrogance and deliver what people want and can use productively.
I hate that industries can just rename a treaty or bill and resubmit it. I mean, with SOPA & PIPA, the people have spoken and stated they do not want this. Why can the industriy just reintroduce it again a few months later? We shouldn't have to be constantly fighting these battles with the industries that own our own government.
FTFY
It's probably best to disabuse ourselves of the notion that government is anything other than the legislative/judicial/wait staff division of MegaCorps Inc.
Honestly, I think you're using a different definition of the word "personal" to everyone else. It doesn't normally mean "technical attributes of files stored on a PC not being propagated across a buffered network".
From the summary: "Further, music files previously uploaded to Cloud Player or Cloud Drive are being automatically converted to 256 Kbps audio whenever Amazon 'has the rights to do so'". So they're changing the "technical attributes" of files in Cloud Drive.
"Your Files are Secure. Never worry about losing your precious photos, documents and videos. Store them in your Cloud Drive where they will be protected from a hard drive crash or a lost or stolen laptop. Your files are securely stored by Amazon and can be easily recovered."
These sound like personal files to me, and I suspect most people would agree. Furthermore, if changing the "technical attributes" of a file causes a degradation of quality, or causes an effective increase in cost to the user, then people have a good reason to complain. "Easily recovered" rather implies that the files you download are essentially identical to the files you uploaded, doesn't it?
No-one is using Amazon to "store" their pristine original MP3s.
Just as they're not using Amazon to store their "precious photos, documents, and videos"? If people aren't using Cloud Drive for that kind of storage, what ARE they using it for?.
I'm not entirely sure how that's "personal", and I'm not sure how you're defining "trust", but it's hard to see how anyone would be a moron for merely using the system... I can't see anyone actually being seriously affected by this move.
It's very much personal. If I've stored files at 320K, then the conversion to 256K represents a loss of quality. If I'm content with 128K and Amazon converts to 256K, then they're effectively halving the number of songs per dollar that I can store. And if they also mess with my custom tags, the files are less useful to me, and it will cost me some work to restore them on Amazon's service. So basically, if someone dicks with my data without my consent, then it's personal, regardless of the extent or nature of the dicking.
I don't use cloud services - hell, I don't even use players that 'organize' my music for me. But I can see how people will be pissed off at this latest move by Amazon. It's yet another example of the high-handed 'all of your everything are belong to us' attitude that corporations are ramming down our throats.
My 50 watt IRON LMAO This is going to be funny
Crappy Chinese components and 100w accessories.
And so what I really want to know is when do the recalls and lawsuits actually begin?
I'd mod you up if I could - 100 watts is a serious amount of power. Aside from 'crappy Chinese components', what do you think will happen when some bright spark figures out a way to defeat the interlocks, and tries to pump 5 amps through a 6-foot long old-style 28 gauge USB cable? The cable alone will be dissipating several watts. Fire, much?
Wow, this is such a complex topic, with so much to be said about it.
First off, from one of the links given: "All this adds up to an economy that generates just as much income, but with profits flowing into far fewer pockets than they did in the previous century". Yup, that right there is your disappearing middle class and your wealth-bloated '1%'. It seems that perhaps all of those people who fought, and are still fighting, the globalization movement, were right when they said that it would destroy jobs and lives in their own country. And yes, globalization was inevitable. But a lot of people in high-tech, (many of them Slashdotters), heaped laughter and scorn upon the 'deluded' 'reactionary' anti-globalization movement. If they had instead taken time to listen to the concerns and think about the problem, we might be in a better place today. And no, communism doesn't work, but it's easy to see why people are attracted to it. When the general population is either broke and unemployed, or working two jobs or more to maintain a lifestyle that's barely above subsistence, resentment of the 'fat cats' who have so much more and do so much less work to get it is inevitable.
Second, and again from the same link: "Katz argues that this will be crucial for those with only high school educations, who will need to learn a “high touch” trade—like personal trainers, kitchen designers, and home health aides—where personal interaction is critical." My apologies in advance to people working in those fields, but I was irresistably reminded of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the Golgafrincham hairdressers, phone sanitizers, ad execs etc. Is North America destined to becom a continent of middle men?
Third, if we costed our manufacturing according to sound economic principles instead of the voodoo economics we currently practise, most of this stuff wouldn't be nearly so big a problem. We are stealing from future generations - not even borrowing, (because that would require a re-payment plan and the means to pay it back), but outright stealing. We exhaust the earth's resources by pulling raw materials out of the ground, yet with those materials we manufacture goods that fail, or are otherwise disposed of, in 6 months or a year instead of after a decade or several. Re-cycling these discarded items is inefficient and energy intensive, and causes further pollution and contributes to climate change. Sure, this makes more 'profit' for shareholders, if we ignore the fact that we're impoverishing future generations, and literally making it impossible for large numbers of them to merely survive, never mind thrive. If we were being appropriately responsible to the generations that will come after us, we would make goods locally to be consumed locally, (because the total energy consumption of that is so much smaller), and we would make them to last, because that would leave behind that much more for our children, grand-children, etc.
Fourth, from a purely immediate survival standpoint, how much sense does it make to export critical skills to other jurisdictions? That leaves us utterly vulnerable to the whims and possible enmities of other countries and cultures. America is serious about securing uninterrupted and uninterruptable access to oil and gas, but what good does that do if America doesn't have the vehicles, industry, and infrastructure to make use of that oil and gas?
We're screwing ourselves, and the '1%' are fiddling while we all burn.
It's awesome what this can do for early cancer detection and the like, but just think of all the things beyond healthcare that it can be used for.
I could wee this combined with nanobots to do on-the-fly water purification, or even a kind of fractional distillation. Not to mention the possibilities for industrial process control, food, pharmaceuticals, and on and on.
Given the prevalence and frequency of attacks on our freedoms, (Internet or otherwise), I'm afraid these 'bat signals' will occur so often that even people who would otherwise be sympathetic, concerned, and involved will sooner or later simply start to ignore the warnings while the equivalent of 'compassion burnout' sets in.
The people in power understand this natural tendency, and will continue to up the ante until the overwhelming majority of netizens will respond to the latest warning with nothing more than a shrug. Then the Douche-IAA's, mega-corporations, and government agencies will go ahead and do what they always do anyway, which is to concentrate power and wealth into their own hands at our expense.
The Middle Class is an endangered species. When it comes to the four boxes of liberty, we've passed the soap box stage, the ballot box has proved to be pretty much ineffective, and the jury box is useless if the real criminals are never brought to trial. We're getting damned close to the time when we'll have to choose the ammo box, or face extinction.
Yes, transistor audio amplifiers are "way more linear" with gobs of negative feedback applied, if THD, (Total Harmonic Distortion), is your measurement criterion. ANY amplifier is more 'linear' with correctly applied negative feedback. The basic premise is that added harmonics are bad - if you feed a pure sine wave into an amplifier, you want a pure sine wave at the output. The problem is that in audio, THD is a fundamentally flawed measurement with very poor correlation between lab measurements and listening tests.
THD measurements are taken as the ratio of the total power of all harmonics to the power of the fundamental, with no weighting of any kind applied. The trouble is, human hearing doesn't respond to harmonic distortions in this linear fashion - our ears find higher order harmonic distortions much more apparent and objectionable.. This deficiency was noted by prominent BBC engineers D.E.L. Shorter and Norman Crowhurst in the 40's and 50's, when they proposed weighting harmonics by the square or the cube of the order; but their voices were drowned out by market forces that wanted a simple, flattering figure of merit that made the newer, more powerful pentode-based amps, (with lots of negative feedback), look better on paper than their lower-powered triode predecessors. The market won out over scientific and technical accuracy, (it usually does), and today engineers the world over, ignorant of this history, mistakenly believe that low THD is the gold standard for measuring and defining audio amplifier quality. (For a good technical analysis of distortion and the sound of an amplifier, see Lynn Olson's excellent investigation.
By the way, in the 'tubes vs transistors' debate, good triodes have the advantage of being more intrinsically linear than transistors. This means that they require less negative feedback to tame their distortion, and often sound wonderful with NO negative feedback. The THD figures of amps built this way are often quite poor, but look at their spectra and you'll see predominantly second- and third-order, with a smooth and rapid falloff of higher order harmonics. Occasionally solid-state amps can give this kind of performance, but tubes have an easier time of it. Designing a good-sounding, (as opposed to good-measuring), audio amp, requires a lot of skill, and a lot of knowledge about distortion mechanisms and how to counter them. Unfortunately the prevailing practice in HiFi is to add more gain, throw most of it away with additional NFB, get a nice low THD figure, and call the job done. Amps designed this way generally sound like shit, if not initially, then after 20 minutes or so of listening, at which time listening fatigue sets in.
We should attach a cost to pollution, and a hefty one. The problem is, cap and trade as currently implemented is very easy to scam, with built-in incentives to do so. With no adequate policing or enforcement, current carbon trading schemes are worse than useless - they can actually allow a company or industry to emit MORE greenhouse emissions than they would otherwise have gotten away with, under the pretense that some other body somewhere else in the world is offseting those emissions.
The carbon market is already rife with fraud - companies selling credits on the premise that they're planting forests that never get planted, or where the proceeds ostensibly reduce future emissions that were never in the works anyway, or in jurisdictions where monitoring and enforcement are extremely corrupt or downright non-existent.
Carbon trading as it exists is a comforting lie, a fairy tale meant to lull us all to sleep while the house is burning down around us.
Actually, I'm Canadian - the line that implied that I'm American was PEBKAC, and I didn't catch it until after I hit submit. So no, my posting wasn't a paen to the USA - I realize that the country has some real problems right now, and that it has already handed the 9/11 terrorists the victory they sought, and then some. But even given how far America has fallen, she's still a great nation compared with many places in the world.
My point was meant to be that a society with a government has siginficant advantages that can't be matched by the unrealistic utopias promoted by Randians, Libertarians, and anarchists.
I agree with most of what you said, and I'm sorry for the anger and bitterness that you're (justifiably) feeling. Try to remember that there are still a lot of good, intelligent, reasonable people in your country - right now they just lack a focal point and a rallying cry.
I'd like to mod your comment up, but I can't - I've already commented myself.
Your parents consented to it for you when they either gave birth to you...
A hereditary obligation? You just described feudalism.
Not at all - you were too young to decide, so they decided, either actively or by default, for you. Had I considered it an hereditary obligation, I wouldn't have suggested that you leave the country.
If you wish to no longer be bound by that contract, I suggest you leave the country, forfeit the priveleges of the civilized society that has already given you countless advantages and protections without which you would likely be destitute or dead, and find some place else in the world to hang out with other 'rugged individualists'. Good luck with that.
Thanks! Many of us aredoing almost exactly what you suggest!
In all seriousness this time, good luck to you. I truly hope your utopia is a success; however, history would suggest that it won't succeed, and I really think you're ignoring a huge amount of psychological, sociological, and bahavioral complexity which will make your peace 'n' freedom loving society far, far different from the vision you currently have of it. And I'm pretty sure those differences will not be to your liking, 'cause your new society will soon look pretty much like the one you're attempting to leave.
PS I used to be a Randroid too, and once upon a time I would have agreed with you. Then I grew up, attained some sophistication, discovered empathy, and got a clue.
So thieving from people at gunpoint is what you call "empathy"? Well, I guess it's not you who do the actual thievery: You let the U.S. Government and their bureaucrats point the guns, steal other people's wealth, and then redistribute it down to you using an immense, multi-tiered bureaucracy of state, federal, and local agencies. That must be the "sophistication" part!:)
"Steal other people's wealth"? Well, a lot of that wealth was itself effectively stolen - enter Ragnar Danneskjold, I guess. Do you really believe that the wealth concentrated in such places as Hollywood, the recording industry, and yes, the high-tech sector, was obtained without the use of force or fraud? Surely you aren't that naive.
"At gunpoint"? Yes, that's ultimately true. So let's look at your alternative. Suppose I'm in your utopia, and I claim an unclaimed piece of land. I drill for oil, find some, and start pumping. Only my oil operation, with its noise, smells, and deadly hydrogen sulphide emissions, interferes with your ability to enjoy and make use of your adjacent land for farming. How will this dispute be resolved?
At this point a typical Randian will spout dogma - ' there are no conflicts of interest among rational men'. When pressed farther, - 'but which party prevails?' - the Randian asserts that, because the two parties are reasonable and rational, the dispute will simply be resolved to everyone's satisfaction. Assuming for the moment that this is true, who decides what is rational? Rand wrote a lot of philosophical hooey, (rhymes with Toohey), about such things being absolutes, but they're demonstrably NOT absolutes. And even if you can somehow determine an absolute 'rational' answer, how will you guarantee that the parties involved remain 'rational'? Rand herself was highly irrational - she continued to smoke, and defended it as "a symbol of the fire in the mind", long after it was conclusively proved that smoking leads to the lung cancer which she ultimately suffered from. If the originator of your faith, (you deny that it's a faith and you hate that word, but it really is a faith), was unable to b
Please show me where I consented to this contract.
Your parents consented to it for you when they either gave birth to you in the US or brought you here. Presumably you are now of legal age. If you wish to no longer be bound by that contract, I suggest you leave the country, forfeit the priveleges of the civilized society that has already given you countless advantages and protections without which you would likely be destitute or dead, and find some place else in the world to hang out with other 'rugged individualists'. Good luck with that.
PS I used to be a Randroid too, and once upon a time I would have agreed with you. Then I grew up, attained some sophistication, discovered empathy, and got a clue.
Why not? The government sees fit to utterly destroy Joe Public's privacy in the name of 'combatting terrorism', but they won't put a kink in the advertising industry's portrayal of an unobtainable ideal as a factual status quo? Who's running the US anyway?
Oh, wait, silly me...
Totally aside from the gob-smacking, appalling stupidity of this proposal, if they did implement this cosmically bad idea, how in hell would they determine which patents are 'economically significant'? And if some patents are secret from the outset, what's to prevent the government from falsely claiming to a new patent applicant "Sorry, that one's already in the pipeline", and then backdating an application and stealing some poor schmuck's idea?
If there was ever any doubt in anyone's mind that we now have 'government by the corporate sector, for the corporate sector, and individual citizens' rights be damned', this ought to dispel them.
Have you ever noticed that when a new government takes power, it very rarely reverses the stupid policies and shameful legislation perpetrated by the previous one? Politicians beat their breasts and flap their gums endlessly about their predecessors' mistakes, but once in power they seldom rectify them. So yes, it'll be a great day when Harper is given the bum's rush he so richly deserves; but we'll still be stuck with all the regressive, secretive, power-mongering, privacy-raping, freedom-destroying, corporation-fellating dictatorial BS legislation that dear Stephen is so busily ramming down our throats.
because perhaps at some point people will simply stop buying into Sony's 'all your stuff are belong to us' attitude and take their gaming and consumer electronics purchases to other companies. The sooner Sony buries itself in its own bullshit and dies a spectacular death, the better, as far as I'm concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides harmless emissions from hydrogen, the cost of fuel will be extremely low compared to gasoline.
Only if the cost of the electricity used to hydrolyze the water is also extrememly low. For the foreseeable future, the only viably-large source of electricity that is close to carbon neutral will likely be nuclear power - sun and wind likely won't be sufficient for a long time. Also, power from sun, wind, and fission are currently priced artificially higher than power from oil, because with oil we're 'borrowing' from future generations to support our extravagant lifestyle but aren't even calculating the principal, never mind the interest...
I'm all in favour of building 'hydrogen economy' vehicles and infrastructure right now, even though it's not yet clear exactly how we'll come up with enough clean energy to justify it, unless we go all-out nuclear, the prospect of which scares the sh*t out of me. But let's be VERY clear that in the short term we may in fact be increasing carbon emissions by doing so. There are WAY too many people out there who see zero emissions at the tailpipe and think the problem is solved, when in fact total emissions per mile driven may well be higher than those produced by a gasoline engine. Joe Public needs to be educated about such things, and the makers of various 'environmentally friendly' technologies aren't about to do that if it risks harming their sales. We in the tech and scientific communities have an obligation to start getting the word out that There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
Speaking as both a photographer and a very near-sighted person, it would be really awesome if these new lenses were also free(r) from dispersion as compared with standard lenses. (Dispersion is responsible for colour separation in a prism. It also causes orange-yellow and blue-violet fringing in simple lenses such as eyeglasses. Cameras use compound lens elements in a clunky and expensive way to address this problem - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achromatic_lens )
Cameras would be lighter and more accurate, and eyeglasses would be lighter and thinner. Maybe this new technology would even improve contact lenses.
This world that we live in today, where "paid reviews", "forum astroturfing", "blog spamming" and "rabid fanboyism" are been actively encouraged and sponsored by for profit corporations such as Microsoft, Adobe, Apple Inc., - mainly from the Western democracies - any effort in linking Russia to similar "illegal" and/or "unethical" activities is futile
if you can't distinguish between private businesses and a government intelligence agency then, my friend, you're a moron.
Is that simple.
if you can't distinguish between private businesses and a government intelligence agency then, my friend, you see things as they really are and haven't drunk the corporate Kool-aid.
FTFY
A sovereign nation is like a free, dignified person, an entity that takes up action to protect it/him/herself, and has the freedom to do whatever it/he/she wants to do.
Haven't you heard? Sovereign nations are so yesterday! Corporations are the new providers of governance in the world. And since corporations cross the boundaries of 'sovereign nations', borders no longer matter, except as a convenient device to be enforced or ignored as required to further a corporatist agenda.
There are fewer reasons for a separate page on a desktop
How about the OS being context-sensitive, and changing its behaviour as required on different hardware platforms? People would rapidly adapt to the inconsistency between hand-held and desktop devices - they already do it every day.
Microsoft, (along with the folks who created Gnome 3 and Unity), would be far better off adopting an inclusive strategy for their designs, rather than trying to shoehorn everyone's disparate needs into a 'one size fits all' GUI paradigm. And we'd all be better off if these head-up-their-own-asses devs would put aside their arrogance and deliver what people want and can use productively.
I hate that industries can just rename a treaty or bill and resubmit it. I mean, with SOPA & PIPA, the people have spoken and stated they do not want this. Why can the industriy just reintroduce it again a few months later? We shouldn't have to be constantly fighting these battles with the industries that own our own government.
FTFY
It's probably best to disabuse ourselves of the notion that government is anything other than the legislative/judicial/wait staff division of MegaCorps Inc.
...but I sure burn a lot of time on Slashdot!
Honestly, I think you're using a different definition of the word "personal" to everyone else. It doesn't normally mean "technical attributes of files stored on a PC not being propagated across a buffered network".
From the summary: "Further, music files previously uploaded to Cloud Player or Cloud Drive are being automatically converted to 256 Kbps audio whenever Amazon 'has the rights to do so'". So they're changing the "technical attributes" of files in Cloud Drive.
From the Amazon Cloud Drive Learn More page:
"Your Files are Secure. Never worry about losing your precious photos, documents and videos. Store them in your Cloud Drive where they will be protected from a hard drive crash or a lost or stolen laptop. Your files are securely stored by Amazon and can be easily recovered."
These sound like personal files to me, and I suspect most people would agree. Furthermore, if changing the "technical attributes" of a file causes a degradation of quality, or causes an effective increase in cost to the user, then people have a good reason to complain. "Easily recovered" rather implies that the files you download are essentially identical to the files you uploaded, doesn't it?
No-one is using Amazon to "store" their pristine original MP3s.
Just as they're not using Amazon to store their "precious photos, documents, and videos"? If people aren't using Cloud Drive for that kind of storage, what ARE they using it for?.
I'm not entirely sure how that's "personal", and I'm not sure how you're defining "trust", but it's hard to see how anyone would be a moron for merely using the system... I can't see anyone actually being seriously affected by this move.
It's very much personal. If I've stored files at 320K, then the conversion to 256K represents a loss of quality. If I'm content with 128K and Amazon converts to 256K, then they're effectively halving the number of songs per dollar that I can store. And if they also mess with my custom tags, the files are less useful to me, and it will cost me some work to restore them on Amazon's service. So basically, if someone dicks with my data without my consent, then it's personal, regardless of the extent or nature of the dicking.
I don't use cloud services - hell, I don't even use players that 'organize' my music for me. But I can see how people will be pissed off at this latest move by Amazon. It's yet another example of the high-handed 'all of your everything are belong to us' attitude that corporations are ramming down our throats.
My 50 watt IRON LMAO This is going to be funny Crappy Chinese components and 100w accessories. And so what I really want to know is when do the recalls and lawsuits actually begin?
I'd mod you up if I could - 100 watts is a serious amount of power. Aside from 'crappy Chinese components', what do you think will happen when some bright spark figures out a way to defeat the interlocks, and tries to pump 5 amps through a 6-foot long old-style 28 gauge USB cable? The cable alone will be dissipating several watts. Fire, much?
Wow, this is such a complex topic, with so much to be said about it.
First off, from one of the links given: "All this adds up to an economy that generates just as much income, but with profits flowing into far fewer pockets than they did in the previous century". Yup, that right there is your disappearing middle class and your wealth-bloated '1%'. It seems that perhaps all of those people who fought, and are still fighting, the globalization movement, were right when they said that it would destroy jobs and lives in their own country. And yes, globalization was inevitable. But a lot of people in high-tech, (many of them Slashdotters), heaped laughter and scorn upon the 'deluded' 'reactionary' anti-globalization movement. If they had instead taken time to listen to the concerns and think about the problem, we might be in a better place today. And no, communism doesn't work, but it's easy to see why people are attracted to it. When the general population is either broke and unemployed, or working two jobs or more to maintain a lifestyle that's barely above subsistence, resentment of the 'fat cats' who have so much more and do so much less work to get it is inevitable.
Second, and again from the same link: "Katz argues that this will be crucial for those with only high school educations, who will need to learn a “high touch” trade—like personal trainers, kitchen designers, and home health aides—where personal interaction is critical." My apologies in advance to people working in those fields, but I was irresistably reminded of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the Golgafrincham hairdressers, phone sanitizers, ad execs etc. Is North America destined to becom a continent of middle men?
Third, if we costed our manufacturing according to sound economic principles instead of the voodoo economics we currently practise, most of this stuff wouldn't be nearly so big a problem. We are stealing from future generations - not even borrowing, (because that would require a re-payment plan and the means to pay it back), but outright stealing. We exhaust the earth's resources by pulling raw materials out of the ground, yet with those materials we manufacture goods that fail, or are otherwise disposed of, in 6 months or a year instead of after a decade or several. Re-cycling these discarded items is inefficient and energy intensive, and causes further pollution and contributes to climate change. Sure, this makes more 'profit' for shareholders, if we ignore the fact that we're impoverishing future generations, and literally making it impossible for large numbers of them to merely survive, never mind thrive. If we were being appropriately responsible to the generations that will come after us, we would make goods locally to be consumed locally, (because the total energy consumption of that is so much smaller), and we would make them to last, because that would leave behind that much more for our children, grand-children, etc.
Fourth, from a purely immediate survival standpoint, how much sense does it make to export critical skills to other jurisdictions? That leaves us utterly vulnerable to the whims and possible enmities of other countries and cultures. America is serious about securing uninterrupted and uninterruptable access to oil and gas, but what good does that do if America doesn't have the vehicles, industry, and infrastructure to make use of that oil and gas?
We're screwing ourselves, and the '1%' are fiddling while we all burn.
It's awesome what this can do for early cancer detection and the like, but just think of all the things beyond healthcare that it can be used for.
I could wee this combined with nanobots to do on-the-fly water purification, or even a kind of fractional distillation. Not to mention the possibilities for industrial process control, food, pharmaceuticals, and on and on.
Given the prevalence and frequency of attacks on our freedoms, (Internet or otherwise), I'm afraid these 'bat signals' will occur so often that even people who would otherwise be sympathetic, concerned, and involved will sooner or later simply start to ignore the warnings while the equivalent of 'compassion burnout' sets in.
The people in power understand this natural tendency, and will continue to up the ante until the overwhelming majority of netizens will respond to the latest warning with nothing more than a shrug. Then the Douche-IAA's, mega-corporations, and government agencies will go ahead and do what they always do anyway, which is to concentrate power and wealth into their own hands at our expense.
The Middle Class is an endangered species. When it comes to the four boxes of liberty, we've passed the soap box stage, the ballot box has proved to be pretty much ineffective, and the jury box is useless if the real criminals are never brought to trial. We're getting damned close to the time when we'll have to choose the ammo box, or face extinction.
Yes, transistor audio amplifiers are "way more linear" with gobs of negative feedback applied, if THD, (Total Harmonic Distortion), is your measurement criterion. ANY amplifier is more 'linear' with correctly applied negative feedback. The basic premise is that added harmonics are bad - if you feed a pure sine wave into an amplifier, you want a pure sine wave at the output. The problem is that in audio, THD is a fundamentally flawed measurement with very poor correlation between lab measurements and listening tests.
THD measurements are taken as the ratio of the total power of all harmonics to the power of the fundamental, with no weighting of any kind applied. The trouble is, human hearing doesn't respond to harmonic distortions in this linear fashion - our ears find higher order harmonic distortions much more apparent and objectionable.. This deficiency was noted by prominent BBC engineers D.E.L. Shorter and Norman Crowhurst in the 40's and 50's, when they proposed weighting harmonics by the square or the cube of the order; but their voices were drowned out by market forces that wanted a simple, flattering figure of merit that made the newer, more powerful pentode-based amps, (with lots of negative feedback), look better on paper than their lower-powered triode predecessors. The market won out over scientific and technical accuracy, (it usually does), and today engineers the world over, ignorant of this history, mistakenly believe that low THD is the gold standard for measuring and defining audio amplifier quality. (For a good technical analysis of distortion and the sound of an amplifier, see Lynn Olson's excellent investigation.
By the way, in the 'tubes vs transistors' debate, good triodes have the advantage of being more intrinsically linear than transistors. This means that they require less negative feedback to tame their distortion, and often sound wonderful with NO negative feedback. The THD figures of amps built this way are often quite poor, but look at their spectra and you'll see predominantly second- and third-order, with a smooth and rapid falloff of higher order harmonics. Occasionally solid-state amps can give this kind of performance, but tubes have an easier time of it. Designing a good-sounding, (as opposed to good-measuring), audio amp, requires a lot of skill, and a lot of knowledge about distortion mechanisms and how to counter them. Unfortunately the prevailing practice in HiFi is to add more gain, throw most of it away with additional NFB, get a nice low THD figure, and call the job done. Amps designed this way generally sound like shit, if not initially, then after 20 minutes or so of listening, at which time listening fatigue sets in.
Why shouldn't we attach a cost to pollution?
We should attach a cost to pollution, and a hefty one. The problem is, cap and trade as currently implemented is very easy to scam, with built-in incentives to do so. With no adequate policing or enforcement, current carbon trading schemes are worse than useless - they can actually allow a company or industry to emit MORE greenhouse emissions than they would otherwise have gotten away with, under the pretense that some other body somewhere else in the world is offseting those emissions.
The carbon market is already rife with fraud - companies selling credits on the premise that they're planting forests that never get planted, or where the proceeds ostensibly reduce future emissions that were never in the works anyway, or in jurisdictions where monitoring and enforcement are extremely corrupt or downright non-existent.
Carbon trading as it exists is a comforting lie, a fairy tale meant to lull us all to sleep while the house is burning down around us.
Are you sure it is the US that you are in?
Actually, I'm Canadian - the line that implied that I'm American was PEBKAC, and I didn't catch it until after I hit submit. So no, my posting wasn't a paen to the USA - I realize that the country has some real problems right now, and that it has already handed the 9/11 terrorists the victory they sought, and then some. But even given how far America has fallen, she's still a great nation compared with many places in the world.
My point was meant to be that a society with a government has siginficant advantages that can't be matched by the unrealistic utopias promoted by Randians, Libertarians, and anarchists.
I agree with most of what you said, and I'm sorry for the anger and bitterness that you're (justifiably) feeling. Try to remember that there are still a lot of good, intelligent, reasonable people in your country - right now they just lack a focal point and a rallying cry.
I'd like to mod your comment up, but I can't - I've already commented myself.
A hereditary obligation? You just described feudalism.
Not at all - you were too young to decide, so they decided, either actively or by default, for you. Had I considered it an hereditary obligation, I wouldn't have suggested that you leave the country.
Thanks! Many of us are doing almost exactly what you suggest!
In all seriousness this time, good luck to you. I truly hope your utopia is a success; however, history would suggest that it won't succeed, and I really think you're ignoring a huge amount of psychological, sociological, and bahavioral complexity which will make your peace 'n' freedom loving society far, far different from the vision you currently have of it. And I'm pretty sure those differences will not be to your liking, 'cause your new society will soon look pretty much like the one you're attempting to leave.
So thieving from people at gunpoint is what you call "empathy"? Well, I guess it's not you who do the actual thievery: You let the U.S. Government and their bureaucrats point the guns, steal other people's wealth, and then redistribute it down to you using an immense, multi-tiered bureaucracy of state, federal, and local agencies. That must be the "sophistication" part! :)
"Steal other people's wealth"? Well, a lot of that wealth was itself effectively stolen - enter Ragnar Danneskjold, I guess. Do you really believe that the wealth concentrated in such places as Hollywood, the recording industry, and yes, the high-tech sector, was obtained without the use of force or fraud? Surely you aren't that naive.
"At gunpoint"? Yes, that's ultimately true. So let's look at your alternative. Suppose I'm in your utopia, and I claim an unclaimed piece of land. I drill for oil, find some, and start pumping. Only my oil operation, with its noise, smells, and deadly hydrogen sulphide emissions, interferes with your ability to enjoy and make use of your adjacent land for farming. How will this dispute be resolved?
At this point a typical Randian will spout dogma - ' there are no conflicts of interest among rational men'. When pressed farther, - 'but which party prevails?' - the Randian asserts that, because the two parties are reasonable and rational, the dispute will simply be resolved to everyone's satisfaction. Assuming for the moment that this is true, who decides what is rational? Rand wrote a lot of philosophical hooey, (rhymes with Toohey), about such things being absolutes, but they're demonstrably NOT absolutes. And even if you can somehow determine an absolute 'rational' answer, how will you guarantee that the parties involved remain 'rational'? Rand herself was highly irrational - she continued to smoke, and defended it as "a symbol of the fire in the mind", long after it was conclusively proved that smoking leads to the lung cancer which she ultimately suffered from. If the originator of your faith, (you deny that it's a faith and you hate that word, but it really is a faith), was unable to b
Flammable lifting gas? Are you trying to tell us you don't know how important the Hydrogen extraction process is for our future fuel and energy needs?
Sheesh! I'd mod you down for this, but I can't find the selection for 'utterly lacking a sense of humour'.
Please show me where I consented to this contract.
Your parents consented to it for you when they either gave birth to you in the US or brought you here. Presumably you are now of legal age. If you wish to no longer be bound by that contract, I suggest you leave the country, forfeit the priveleges of the civilized society that has already given you countless advantages and protections without which you would likely be destitute or dead, and find some place else in the world to hang out with other 'rugged individualists'. Good luck with that.
PS I used to be a Randroid too, and once upon a time I would have agreed with you. Then I grew up, attained some sophistication, discovered empathy, and got a clue.
...ahead of its corporations' greed. What a novel concept! We should try that here in North America!
It's so much fairer and more sensible when the dog wags the tail instead of vice versa
Why not? The government sees fit to utterly destroy Joe Public's privacy in the name of 'combatting terrorism', but they won't put a kink in the advertising industry's portrayal of an unobtainable ideal as a factual status quo? Who's running the US anyway? Oh, wait, silly me...
How about "Ministry of Peace"? Orwell,. (good Englishman that he was), is spinning in his sleeve, or laughing up his grave, or something like that.
Totally aside from the gob-smacking, appalling stupidity of this proposal, if they did implement this cosmically bad idea, how in hell would they determine which patents are 'economically significant'? And if some patents are secret from the outset, what's to prevent the government from falsely claiming to a new patent applicant "Sorry, that one's already in the pipeline", and then backdating an application and stealing some poor schmuck's idea?
If there was ever any doubt in anyone's mind that we now have 'government by the corporate sector, for the corporate sector, and individual citizens' rights be damned', this ought to dispel them.
Can't wait until he is turfed out.
Have you ever noticed that when a new government takes power, it very rarely reverses the stupid policies and shameful legislation perpetrated by the previous one? Politicians beat their breasts and flap their gums endlessly about their predecessors' mistakes, but once in power they seldom rectify them. So yes, it'll be a great day when Harper is given the bum's rush he so richly deserves; but we'll still be stuck with all the regressive, secretive, power-mongering, privacy-raping, freedom-destroying, corporation-fellating dictatorial BS legislation that dear Stephen is so busily ramming down our throats.
because perhaps at some point people will simply stop buying into Sony's 'all your stuff are belong to us' attitude and take their gaming and consumer electronics purchases to other companies. The sooner Sony buries itself in its own bullshit and dies a spectacular death, the better, as far as I'm concerned.