Modern airplanes suck pretty hard at weapon avoidance. Once a missile is fired at you, you are already in deep shit. Yeah, we have counter measures, but they are less then reliable and the sort of thing a good software upgrade can deal with. Today, most "defense" in terms of aircraft is in stealth. If you can't see the target in the first place, it doesn't matter what weapon you have, you can't hit it. I am not saying a laser might not make an excellent AAA weapon, just that hitting the target is only the second step in the larger problem... finding the target.
Good idea. Hey, to protect against bombs, we could just put a whole bunch of armor between the bomb and the target!
I am sure they will try and come up with countermeasures. That said, stealth is probably the only worthwhile countermeasure against something like this. Unless your mirror is absolutely perfect (it wont be), it WILL eat some energy. The second it eats some energy, it becomes even more imperfect and eats more energy. Rinse and repeat over a few microseconds and your mirror is gone vaporized. Maybe you could make it take a few microseconds longer to find the squishy center of a target, but it probably is not worth the cost. A better idea is to stealth whatever it is you are trying to protect from being destroyed in the first place.
It has been the position of the US for some time that if Iraq wants the US out, it will leave. In fact, we even had presidential candidates running on a platform of DEMANDING that Iraq give a thumbs up or thumbs down to the US occupation so the US can soldier on with some vague moral high ground or say "so long, have fun with your war, we are calling it a victory and getting the fuck out". Granted, this has all merrily gone by the wayside now that the violence levels of radically dropped and everyone is all smiles and hugs about the status quo.
My point is that if the Iraqi government wants the US out, it would vanish. The US just barely has the political will to stick around, even with things being quiet. A simple formal demand from the government to leave would tip the handful of senators it would take to force Bush out regardless if he wants to or not. If the US just barely has the political will to stick around, how long do you think that will would last if the democratic Iraqi government got into a fire fight when trying to remove US soldiers? The Iraqi government can make the US troops vanish, they just don't want to. They want to play up enough occupier resentment to keep the populace happy while not alienating the 150K extra policemen/soldiers they have running around pumping money into the system and keeping some vague order.
The truth is that US is wanted in Iraq by the Iraqi government. The Shiite's don't feel fully comfortable that they can keep anarchy at bay and still need US help to maintain order and (probably more importantly to them) train their defense forces. The Sunni's are scared shitless that the Shiites will find their own less humane way of trying to end the insurgency if the US is gone (see Serbia's attempts to end an insurgency for an example). The only people that actually don't need the US sitting around holding their hands are the Kurds... and the Kurds are tickled pink to have the Americans around because for the first time in a very long time they are not getting knocked around by every other power in the region and have a big friend armed to the teeth fighting (or at least winking, nodding, and sending guns) for their cause.
Uh, the invention of precision guided weapons along with new doctrine DID prevent mass civilian casualties. The US rolled in Baghdad with the city still almost entirely intact. That isn't to say that there are no civilian casualties. No matter how perfectly you drop a few hundred pounds of explosives in a city you risk killing innocents, to say nothing of the dangers of precision bomb on a target picked from bad intelligence. That said, it is a far cry from the carpet bombing that used to be par for the course. The fire bombings of Japan make the nuclear attacks look like pocket change in terms of mass death and destruction. It used to be standard operating procedure for Americans to drive into a German town, tell the mayor that all the German soldiers had to either surrender, leave, or be pointed out because the Americans were coming in, and tell him that if they got fired out they would back out of the town and level it. That sort of thing just doesn't fly any more.
If you were take out all the sectarian violence in Iraq and the suicide bombings, the Iraq war would have been an amazingly cheap war in terms of lives. In terms of just lives of US military men and the civilians they have killed, the war was on the cheap. That is small consolation to anyone caught standing next to a car bomb when it blows or a mother who has her son catch a bullet between the eyes of course.
My larger point? This laser won't cause any more lives to be lost. It might even save a few. If anything ends up costing lives it is the nature of how insurgent wars are fought in this day and age. When you can formulate the logical argument for blowing up a massive car bomb in a civilian market for the explicate purpose of killing civilians, or your entire insurgency relies on starting an ethnic war amongst the occupied nation, than you get the horrific loss of life that you see in Iraq. Giant laser beams won't make this problem any better or worse.
The difference between North Korea and Iraq/Iran/whoever is that North Korea has had "WMDs" for a very, very long time. North Korea hasn't been kicked in the nuts by the US because North Korea as the capital of South Korea in artillery range and enough biological and chemical weapons (not to mention conventional weapons) to level it. On top of that, North Korea can merrily load up a few missiles with chemical weapons to drop onto Tokyo. The US doesn't threaten military action against North Korea because everyone would know that it would be a bluff. It wouldn't star world ending MAD war, but if you lived in South Korea it would be hard to tell the difference. Tossing a nuclear weapon into North Korea's arsenal really doesn't do much to make them more of a threat than they already are. If they made enough nuclear weapons perhaps they could make a bad situation worse, but give or take one nuke is not worth losing sleep over. The only real reason to find a nuclear armed North Korea scary is that North Korea has an ugly habit of selling their military toys to anyone with a wad of cash. North Korea armed with one more nuke is not all that much more scary, but a terrorist organization armed with a nuke is.
Iraq got its face kicked in when it did because it didn't yet pose any real threat. Given enough time, Iraq might have been able to do something nasty to Israel or even Europe. The fear that Iraq could one day end up armed like a North Korea with the ability to hold neighboring nations at ransom is at least part of the motivation for the US acting when it did instead of waiting. The same holds true of Iran. The reason why the US is jumping the gun and threatening military action is because it doesn't want to be forced into another situation like North Korea where the military option is entirely off the table and all you can do is send nasty letters across the border.
I am not saying that this is the right course, I am just pointing out that the difference between North Korea and other nations with potential weapon's programs is night and day. What the US wants to avoid is having more North Korea's out there. The real danger of North Korea (as was the danger with the Soviet Union) is that when North Korea collapses, there is a very real chances that something ugly is going to happen. It only takes on military leader of high enough rank to say fuck it and go out in a blaze of glory. The Soviet Union came very close to doing this. Unstable nations armed with WMDs are a very bad thing.
I am pretty sure that the Berlin wall was working the other way around. The Berlin wall wasn't to keep people out, it was to keep people in.
My concern isn't that they are running people's ID through a database. That is fine. A government probably should be checking who is coming in and out of the country and doing a quick computer check to see if a person throws up any red flags.
My problem is that database they are using. The "watch list" is a piece of shit, as has been shown with the nightmare it has created for some airline passengers. The real crime is the database in question, not the fact that a government checks your ID and checks to see if you are a criminal.
The US will happily play "the my 1,000,000 dollars to your 10,000 dollars" game... because they will win. Money isn't the problem. Even if the US didn't have vast amounts of money on hand, the US has vast untapped reserves of money it could plow into if it desperately needed to in the form of raising their taxes which, by industrialized democracy standards, are somewhere between low and very low. The problem Americans have in fighting a war is that they get sick of troops dying very quickly, especially if they don't perceive and imminent threat. The political will to fight is far harder to muster than the cash, and even harder to sustain.
The real value in drones is that you have the potential to reduce casualties for all parties. Clearly, the party using the drones suffers less casualties because the operators are behind nice high walls. Civilians also have the potential to suffer fewer casualties though. If you ambush a squad of marines, they are going to fight back, spray bullets everywhere, and in general do the human thing and try and preserve their lives. The problem is that when people spray bullets in a city and you have soldiers scared for their lives and pumped up on adrenalin, civilians die.
Drones offer an alternative. There is a world of difference between being out in the field with your life on the line, and sitting in an AC cooled room, with no threat to your life other than your commanding officer and the military lawyer who will tack your balls against the wall if you violate the rules of engagement. Everyone is calmer and making better decisions, there are more people there to help make the decisions, and the good of the mission can win out every time over the life of the drones. If your buddy gets blown up, he grumbles, and gets a new drone. If your buddy gets blown up in the real world, you tend to get pissed and start thinking that maybe the civilian around you knew it was coming down and are far less inclined to play nice.
Yes yes... there is always the argument about cheapening war. That said, there are times when a cheap war would have been the right thing. A cheap war where a drones had stepped in to stop the horrific genocide in Rwanda would have been well worth it. Instead, no nation felt like ponying up the soldiers and lives it would have taken to stop a genocide that killed off over 10% of the population and left countless wounded and raped.
Any polls conducted in a nation fighting a violent guerrilla war should immediately fall under suspect. Most of the polls taken in Iraq are attacked on the grounds that, except in perhaps Kurdistan, most Iraqis watch what they say. Saying you want the Americans out is a pretty safe position. With the potential punishment for saying you want the Americans in being death, the fact that only half were willing to say they wanted them gone argues that public opinion is far more favorable than the poll suggests.
Second, that poll was taken during the height of the violence as the "surge" was ramping up. The situation right now is far more rosy with violence against all parties down across the board.
Take polls in Iraq with a grain of salt. Further, take the perceptions of citizens as to how to solve a problem with a grain of salt. I mean hell, over half of Americans believe that the world is less than 10,000 year old, and they supposedly have functional schools and enough wealth to blow time learning things about the world.
Don't be fooled by the so-called economic ties between the US and China. Look at who has the upper hand in all of that. It ain't the US, folks. China props up a major portion of the US debt. China supplies many of the good the US consumes. Uh, the US has the upper hand. What does China have? A billion poor people with extremely high saving rates. China is not a consumer market. China is cheap labor with decent infrastructure (by third world standards). China's market? China's market is the US and the EU. If either one of those two were to vanish tomorrow, China would plunge into economic ruin.
So, if China decided, today to dump the USD and grab the Euro, who would be the most hurt by that move? I'll leave you to answer that. And here is the answer. Trading currency is not a video game where you instantly sell it at the listed price. The truth is, the more you sell, the less you can sell it for. If China was to dump the US dollar... you know, the one thing backing THEIR currency, it would be even more damaging to them than it is to the US. The US simply raises taxes tweaks the value and buys back dollars. China on the other hand takes a massive loss from the investment they have made in the dollar. This leads to economic ruin in China and far more minor heartache in the US.
And now comes the rub. When the US faces economic ruin, it tends to go into dull out for a few years before merrily springing back. The current president gets kicked out, and within a few years things are back to normal. When China faces economic ruin, all hell breaks loose. China already has tens of thousands of instances of civil unrest each year. China is not some monolithic uniform empire of unity. China is constantly a few short steps from a change in government, and for China to change government (unlike in the US) it takes violence. The danger of economic collapse and upsetting the rising middle class and already deeply impoverished lower class is social anarchy unthinkable in the US. China has a lot to lose.
Finally, there comes the larger point. What exactly will the US and China fight over? China isn't an expansionist empire looking to import its government. In any conflict between the US and China, the EU might not jump in guns blazing for the US, but they would bring down the economic anvil of d00m at roughly the same time the US does. With China's factories go silent as their products are bared from western markets. China's finances go to hell as they are bared from US and EU financial institutions. The US and EU would like their economic wounds and go find some other place with a billion poor people to make their iPods. China is now fucked and goes back to being the impoverished archaic nation that it was just a few short decades ago.
China has everything to lose and absolutely nothing to gain. China's only hope for the future is to tie itself as tight as it can economically with the EU and the US, rise its people out of poverty as fast as possible, and pray for enough wealth to weather the damning social stability it will face when the economy turns down and there is no peaceful way to remove the government.
Oh yeah man, THE WAR is going to be on us any second now. Sure, the US and China are economically tied at the hip and have no large conflicts between them, but lets not reason get in the way of getting scared!
The fact is that the world survived the Cold War, which was a far scarier ordeal. The US has no economic tie ins with the USSR, had every reason to fear that it was an expansionist empire (and they the same), and we had poor communication with them. Now look at China. There no points of conflict except over Taiwan, and lets be honest, the US won't do anything to save Taiwan these days other than pump them with guns and cash. The US and China share the same economic heart and it would be suicide for either party to harm the other. In fact, China is even more bound to the US than the US is to China. To top it all off, the US and China have excellent lines of communication.
There is no brewing war here. The final days of the Soviet Union were a perfectly good time to be terrified that the end was near and the USSR would go out with a bang rather than a whimper. China and the US burning along with their respective economic booms, both rising in power and wealth, are hardly anything worth fearing. The remoteness of war between the two only grows as China only grows as China's becomes more liberal, its power base more diffused among practical minded leaders, and the two nations intertwine economically even further. Rogue Pakistani nukes getting into hands of radicals give me far more heartache than the thought of China deciding that in the hight of the their rising glory NOW would be a good time to be wiped out in nuclear Armageddon.
One thing to keep in mind is that during training the anti-submarine aspect has its hands tied. Certain types of active sonar are forbidden due to the belief that they can maim/kill sea animals (namely whales).
The other issue to keep in mind is that it is one thing to break in on a scheduled training mission. It is another thing to catch an aircraft carrier cruising around at 40+ knots. Diesel/electric boats have almost no capacity to hunt on the modern stage. They really need to move into position, wait, and hope that a target comes by. The sea is big, and airplanes with refueller aircraft have very long ranges.
In a sea engagement the Chinese navy really is not much of a threat. The real threat comes from the Chinese missile and rock batteries, and to some extent, their air force. In a battle over Taiwan, China has a base to fly from that can be heavily guarded so as to make anything that isn't a stealth fighter weary about entering their airspace. That isn't to say that the Chinese airforce wouldn't take horrific losses, just that they could do some damage before bleeding their airforce away on the combined US/Taiwan air defense.
The real place where China is still screwed is in the actual crossing. A Chinese boat could get lucky and whack a carrier if they positioned themselves just right, but US hunter killer subs could do horrific damage against any sort of invasion force. What the subs don't eat, the aircraft would once they leave the AAA cover of the main land. An army a few million strong doesn't do any good if it can't get to land.
Really, I don't need to read beyond this. Does the US have a privacy problem with personal data held by corporations without regulation? Yes. Does the US have a privacy problem with novel government surveillance methods without (serious) oversight? Hell Yes. Can one be used to excuse the other in any way shape or form? Hell no! It is worse than that. I don't like private companies to have piles of information on me. I don't like telemarketing spam. That said, what a private corporation can do with my personal information is a whole lot less than what the government can do. So Google knows what sort of pr0n I like and that I am looking for a job in another industry. Great. They can target ads for asian midget preggo lesbian white sock fetish porn at me while serving up ads for opening as a toll booth collector.
The government on the other hand can do far worse to me. The government can realize that I am a fan of a radical centrist group and start keeping tabs on my every move. While they can't prove that I have done anything wrong in terms of being a radical terrorist, they can easily keep track of the laws I break and hit me all at once for them. As they track my GPS they can dish out a fine each time I touch above the speed limit, charge me the full $250,000 per son each time I let a friend borrow a CD, castrate me for drinking on the sabbath, toss me in jail for illegal drug possession when I pop one of my girlfriends anti-allergy pills, and in general make my life a miserable hell.
Apple gained design control over the device, not contractual control. Your contract with the carrier has nothing to do with Apple (except to the degree that Apple could and should just sell the phones unlocked, but that doesn't solve the problems of cell phone contracts). Really? So when Apple takes a cut from your monthly fee to the carrier, that isn't contract control? Take your face out of the Kool-Aid bowl for a few seconds to think and breath.
Look, if people want to buy an iPhone and sign a contract to AT&T, and pay a gross amount of money in the deal, more power to them. People buy all sorts of shit that I don't want on a regular basis and I am sure I buy stuff that other people think is stupid. All of that said, don't go on with the silliness that some how Apple is doing the world a favor "wrestling power" from the carriers. If Apple had offered up an open phone and not tied it to carriers, I might have agreed. As it stands though, Apple "wrestling power" from the carriers resulted in a single concession from the carriers; "visual voice mail". Outside of that, Apple's new deal with the carriers just means that the consumer eats a bigger bill and is still stuck with the same lousy contract terms that he has always had. Apple has hardly done the world a favor by "wrestling power" from the carriers.
I don't disagree in the slightest. I think that people should be complete mercenaries in the working world. The company you work for will not think twice about firing you to better the company, and you should not think twice about quitting to better yourself. That said, there is a fundamentally different calculus that goes on between someone intending to say years, and someone intending to stay two weeks. If you are going to stay for years, you probably manage yourself in such a manner as to achieve the best long term benefits for yourself. When you have two weeks to go, you don't really give a damn about the long term health of the company in question, especially if you are a mercenary sort of person.
Now, I personally think that for most industries it is silly to dump someone when they give their notice. So long as there is no bad blood, an exiting person can be very helpful of handing over his responsibilities. When you show someone the door, they take with the door the knowledge of how to do their job. That said, I think that the entity to suffer is the company, not the individual. For the individual, it is a two weeks paid vacation. People should not be so offended and simply take their two weeks with a smile.
If anything, I think I would feel down right merry at being given two weeks of pay for nothing AND (if I was feeling vindictive) knowing that the company is scrambling to fill in the void I left and recover whatever knowledge I take with me. If the company really feels that security is more important than a smooth transfer, eh, more power to them.
...talking about how Apple is changing the phone game by wrestling power from the carriers... Right. Apple has certainly wrestled control away from the carriers. Now, instead of just paying the carrier blood money and selling our soul for two years, we get to pay both Apple AND the carrier... and still sell our soul away for two years. Maybe Nokia can compete with Apple by coming out with a phone where I need to sign a 5 year soul sucking deal with the hell (like AT&T, but more pleasant), have the phone chomp on my balls while it is in my pocket, eat my first born child, and get a direct hookup to my bank account from where it funnels money into everyone's pocket but my own.
Come on Google, buy the damn spectrum, open it up, and lets say fuck you to the ass pounding consumers are getting in the US cellular market.
The point isn't to keep you from co-workers, though that might be a small part. The real point of escorting you out is to give you no time to ponder over all the bad things you could do to damage the company as you leave. True, if you want to sabotage and steal, you can do it BEFORE you you resign. That said, I think that dumping you quickly is designed to not let you fester and change your mind before the two weeks are up.
Just think of it from their perspective. You just quit, so you clearly are not a completely loyal employee. You obviously don't care if they fire you, so there is no punishment for screwing up. The only thing they have to go on is some general trust that you will 'do the right thing' despite the fact that they are out of methods to exert any sort of control over you.
I personally think that the policy is a little paranoid, but it works out fine for employees. If you know your company does the walk, just clear your shit out first, say good by to everyone, THEN go tell your boss. You get a two weeks paid vacation and the joy of walking out with a smug grin on. Hell, maybe you can wear your Google T-shirt that day under your sweater and pull it off for the walk. Get a kazoo and make your walk a mini parade.
I agree -- there should be an internet UN that handles this. I'm just thinking of 9 years from now when the Republicans take control again... and this time there really will be the technology to control everyone if thats what people want. Why would a foreign business want to have to deal with the US if they didn't have to anyway? (sad but true) Being something like 20% if the consumer market helps in getting business to want to 'deal' with the US.
As far as the UN 'handling' the internet, is this the same body that puts Cuba, Syria, and Libya on the human rights committee? The same guys that watched the Rwandan claim 10% of the population? Yeah. The UN is not exactly a model of speed and efficiency. By the time they realize they have a problem, it is a decade too late.
Of course, this is all an utterly moot point. The "control" the US has is just keeping a copy of the DNS list. You can actually go up into your browser settings and use someone else's list if you really want to. If the rest of the world wants to use a new system, absolutely nothing is stopping them other than that if they get out of sync with the US, they might have pissed off users. The US doesn't have to 'give up' anything. The rest of the world just needs to point their browsers in a different direction.
In the memory field the price will be just barely enough to reap profit and not a cent more. When it comes to semiconductors, MEMS, and other such devices, the amount of profit made on each unit when produced for mass consumption is amazingly small. The pressure and competition to build it smaller and cheaper leaves very little time for price gouging. If you want to see market forces working at their finest, just take a look at the semiconductor industry. Competition is absolutely brutal and prices fall at breathtaking speeds.
Hell, just ponder how much a flash drive is these days. I bought my first flash drive in 2004 or 2005. It was a little 32mb one that cost me something like $50. Just the other day I got a frigging two 2gb flash drives for $30.
You might get gouged in price for your iPhone, PS4, or whatever, but it wont be because they had to pay an arm and a leg for the memory. Memory prices go in only one direction, and they do it very rapidly.
That depends on whether you're the one being slandered without just cause or the one doing the slandering... Being a less than wealthy person in the grand scheme of things, I can safely say that I much prefer it when getting sued for saying mean things is harder rather than easier. Even if I put absolutely no value on freedom of speech, I do put a great deal of value in not having to defend myself from a lawsuit every single time I say something that some public figure might take issue with. Just the threat of having to defend a lawsuit, regardless of its merits, results in most people folding long before the law gets involved. This has been shown very clearly in cases of the DMCA in the US.
In the US, do to less than happy copyright law wording, you can be very easily sued for copyright violations. There is a provision in the law for what is known as 'fair use', which lets you use copyrighted works without the consent of the author. In extreme fit of poor judgment on the part of law makers, US laws state that all 'creative works' are automatically under copyright unless the artists in question relinquishes his copyright claims. So for instance, this post is technically under US copyright protection and copying it would be a clear violation of the law. Fair use laws state that you can copy such works under certain circumstances. So, you can legally quote this post in the US, despite the fact that it is automatically under copyright, via the "fair use" provision.
So, we have a system designed to protect the "reasonable" use of copyrighted works. How does this work in practice? If a copy decides that it doesn't like you using any portion of their copyrighted works, irregardless of if it is fair use or not, they can send a DMCA take down notice to demand that you take it down and sue you if you don't. Now, technically you can merrily go to court and fight for your right of fair use. In practice though, few people have the time or money to battle Sony in court for 7 years defending their fair use rights.
I can think of nothing more distasteful than trying to recreate this battle of lawsuits over to free speech. Individuals get fucked in such systems. Even when they win, they lose in court costs, or at the very least, time and heartache. Copyright restrictions are stifling enough, but at least I can speak my piece about anyone or anything so long as I don't copy without a threat of lawsuit.
, for instance, the New York Times publishes unfounded corruption allegations against a politician, its editor is ultimately responsible for those allegations, and the politician could sue him for defamation. No, not in the US. The US has some of the weakest defamation laws in the world, and they become even weaker when talking about a public figure. In order for an editor to get sued in your example he would have to knowingly and blatantly lie AND do it for the purpose of causing the politician in question harm. If he can point to even a scrap of evidence to show that he could have thought what he was printing was true, he is off free. Even then, the fact that the politician is a public figure means that the burden of proof is so high, he basically has to be caught on camera laughing melavolantly while declaring out loud that his false and horrible lies will finally bring down politician X. You think I am joking, but I am not. It is nearly impossible to get sued in the US for libel and or defamation against a public figure.
Now, the editor might very well get skewed for writing false alligations, but he will get skewered by his boss and adveritsers, not by the law. He might very well find himself out on the street, but the law will have no part in it.
There are a lot of things to not love about many American laws. US free speech law (or lack there off) is not one of them. When it comes to free speech, the US kicks ass and takes names like few others in the world. You will find yourself very hard pressed to find a nation with more liberal free speech laws.
The energy/mass ratio is not and never really has been the issue with hydrogen. The issue with hydrogen is the energy energy/volume ratio. Hydrogen's big problem is that it takes a lot of energy to squeeze into a small enough space to be worth while. Even if you are willing to burn the energy to compress hydrogen down into something that is tolerably dense, you are now talking about either A) a very heavy and expensive cooling system that is keeping it in liquid form or B) an extremely heavy, expensive, and marginally dangerous high pressure tank or C) both.
There are some potential tricks around this dilemma, but the truth is that we are still a fair ways off. The path towards hydrogen as a fuel source is less than obvious. Hydrogen has a lot of potential, but as it stands, it is a pain in the ass and expensive to make, it is a pain in the ass and expensive to store, and it really while shifts the environmental issues onto the grid where they are perhaps more easily tackled, it is not a silver bullet.
I am not poo-pooing hydrogen. Hell, I WORK for a hydrogen fuel cell company. I am just pointing out that the problem is much harder than it appears, and the golden future much further off than you might think. On top of that, there are lots of competing alternatives to hydrogen that might very well prove to be more utilitarian.
We won't be abandoning skyscrapers and cars. There are lots of alternatives out there that we don't try for one reason or another. If costs is your concern, then coal is the answer. The rest of the world might be in a bit of a tight spot, but the US and China own a massive portion of the worlds coal supply. If these two nations are willing to rip up their country side and dump some more CO2 into the air, they will easily and happily meet all energy demands. The US in particular owns a mind numbing supply of coal just waiting to be turned into cheap energy. Once you have energy in one form, you can merrily turn it into other forms. With electricty from coal, there are a whole host of ways to turn it into something you can put it into a car. Hydrogen, and various combustible synthetic liquids are all possibilities that only really demand energy from the grid.
As for alternative infrastructure, a 10-20 year time frame is silly. China is a poor nation that built its infrastructure in 10-20 yearsm and they were being conservative. A rich first world nation will able to switch over its infrastructure, especially if the option is 'change or stop using cars and skyscrapers', very quickly.
The real losers in this game isn't going to be the first world nation. The first world might see a recession, though just as likely, the change over might very well spawn a boom in technology and construction. The real people who are going to take the shaft are in such a crisis will be those who are harmed the most by the increased pollution and the nations who don't have the money or skill to switch gears in terms of energy consumption. The US can pretty easily take a minor and temporary standards of living hit as it readjusts to alternative energy. A country like India or China with far much more sever environmental problems and far less cash to blow on radical infrastructure changes will be the ones that take it hard. Africa will find the transition even harder.
Civilization won't collapse. You might do less driving on average, but truth be told, it isn't going to be some radical life altering event for the first world. If anything, the first world might reap cash rewards for it as investment money pours into R&D to combat rising energy prices. The people who will pay the real price are those who are already struggling to build infrastructure that the US and Europe had 50 years ago.
Giving a guy who is about to dump a few billion dollars into your nation "a taste of their own medicine" is by far the stupidest idea I can possibly think of. I don't rate Nigeria's government all that high in terms of competency, but unless the winners of the special Olympics have taken over the nation, I doubt this is some veiled attempt at diplomacy.
I am pretty sure Nigeria doesn't have a big problem with Americans illegally immigrating into the nation. The most likely reason for this is simply that someone didn't get their bribe, doesn't really give a shit that Gates is looking to save a few million lives, and so found a piece of paper with a check box missing in it to deny entrance in hopes of getting his fair share to correct the 'misunderstanding'.
I think you might find that Nigeria does have a problem with illegal immigrants. While most people don't have billions to donate like Mr. Gates, the majority of VISITORS to the US do not want to stay and while visiting do contribute to your economy. And they are required to prove they will not be a burden, so I am not sure why he shouldn't be required to do the same.
I am sure if you donate a few billion to American health services, someone will make sure that can get your visa within a minimal amount of time.
As for getting a visa to visit the US, it really is not that hard, it just takes time and money. The big issue with getting a visa in the US isn't proving that you won't go, it is just the stupid amount of time it takes to process it. Granted, there are plenty of nations with sprawling bureaucracies that take longer, but it really shouldn't take as long as it does. The real lag time in US visa's is not proving you won't leave, it is running your name against a pile of government watch lists for suspected terrorist and checking that you are who you say you are.
If there is any redeeming value of the American system for dealing with visitors and immigrants it is that the weaker US social service programs makes the American system far more tolerant of immigrants (legal or otherwise) than much of Europe simply because freeloading off the system is much more difficult. The result that is that the only people in the US that really bitterly complain are a few right-wing nut jobs... and even then, then right is split on the issue. The US doesn't have any leftist that are offended by immigration due to the strain it puts on social systems, and so there is far less resistance against immigration.
Peak oil is an environmental problem, not an economic problem. There are lots of fuel alternatives, they are just expensive or environmentally damaging. As oil prices rise, alternative methods of energy storage become viable. As alternative energy sources become profitable, the price of oil drops. The result is that no matter how hard you try, you can't force oil prices up rapidly over a long period of time. The worst that will happen will be a steady long term climb as oil is phased out and new energy sources are phased in.
The real danger in peak oil is the environmental impact. As oil becomes more expensive, alternative methods of fueling vehicles will be needed. Now, there are lots of viable alternatives to get buy one little to no oil. The problem is that all the alternatives require spending energy... energy that will likely come from the grid. You could switch to a hydrogen fueled car or plug in hybrids for instance in a few years. The problem is that making hydrogen (or any alternative fuel) or to recharge off the grid is going to demand you spend energy from the grid. This is good in that your automotive industry becomes as clean as your gird... so if you have a clean grid, you have a clean automotive industry. The downside is that as you pull more power from the grid, energy prices go up. The only way to keep them down and keep from killing the grid is to put more power online. Coal is the cheapest and most efficient way to dump more power into the grid, but coal has the downside of being less than friendly to the environment or good for CO2 emissions.
My point is that the world will move on smoothly from peak oil (should it exist). The market will happily even out the price and the transition will be smooth. The real danger is an environmental danger as we scramble to get energy from alternative sources.
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Modern airplanes suck pretty hard at weapon avoidance. Once a missile is fired at you, you are already in deep shit. Yeah, we have counter measures, but they are less then reliable and the sort of thing a good software upgrade can deal with. Today, most "defense" in terms of aircraft is in stealth. If you can't see the target in the first place, it doesn't matter what weapon you have, you can't hit it. I am not saying a laser might not make an excellent AAA weapon, just that hitting the target is only the second step in the larger problem... finding the target.
Good idea. Hey, to protect against bombs, we could just put a whole bunch of armor between the bomb and the target!
I am sure they will try and come up with countermeasures. That said, stealth is probably the only worthwhile countermeasure against something like this. Unless your mirror is absolutely perfect (it wont be), it WILL eat some energy. The second it eats some energy, it becomes even more imperfect and eats more energy. Rinse and repeat over a few microseconds and your mirror is gone vaporized. Maybe you could make it take a few microseconds longer to find the squishy center of a target, but it probably is not worth the cost. A better idea is to stealth whatever it is you are trying to protect from being destroyed in the first place.
It has been the position of the US for some time that if Iraq wants the US out, it will leave. In fact, we even had presidential candidates running on a platform of DEMANDING that Iraq give a thumbs up or thumbs down to the US occupation so the US can soldier on with some vague moral high ground or say "so long, have fun with your war, we are calling it a victory and getting the fuck out". Granted, this has all merrily gone by the wayside now that the violence levels of radically dropped and everyone is all smiles and hugs about the status quo.
My point is that if the Iraqi government wants the US out, it would vanish. The US just barely has the political will to stick around, even with things being quiet. A simple formal demand from the government to leave would tip the handful of senators it would take to force Bush out regardless if he wants to or not. If the US just barely has the political will to stick around, how long do you think that will would last if the democratic Iraqi government got into a fire fight when trying to remove US soldiers? The Iraqi government can make the US troops vanish, they just don't want to. They want to play up enough occupier resentment to keep the populace happy while not alienating the 150K extra policemen/soldiers they have running around pumping money into the system and keeping some vague order.
The truth is that US is wanted in Iraq by the Iraqi government. The Shiite's don't feel fully comfortable that they can keep anarchy at bay and still need US help to maintain order and (probably more importantly to them) train their defense forces. The Sunni's are scared shitless that the Shiites will find their own less humane way of trying to end the insurgency if the US is gone (see Serbia's attempts to end an insurgency for an example). The only people that actually don't need the US sitting around holding their hands are the Kurds... and the Kurds are tickled pink to have the Americans around because for the first time in a very long time they are not getting knocked around by every other power in the region and have a big friend armed to the teeth fighting (or at least winking, nodding, and sending guns) for their cause.
Uh, the invention of precision guided weapons along with new doctrine DID prevent mass civilian casualties. The US rolled in Baghdad with the city still almost entirely intact. That isn't to say that there are no civilian casualties. No matter how perfectly you drop a few hundred pounds of explosives in a city you risk killing innocents, to say nothing of the dangers of precision bomb on a target picked from bad intelligence. That said, it is a far cry from the carpet bombing that used to be par for the course. The fire bombings of Japan make the nuclear attacks look like pocket change in terms of mass death and destruction. It used to be standard operating procedure for Americans to drive into a German town, tell the mayor that all the German soldiers had to either surrender, leave, or be pointed out because the Americans were coming in, and tell him that if they got fired out they would back out of the town and level it. That sort of thing just doesn't fly any more.
If you were take out all the sectarian violence in Iraq and the suicide bombings, the Iraq war would have been an amazingly cheap war in terms of lives. In terms of just lives of US military men and the civilians they have killed, the war was on the cheap. That is small consolation to anyone caught standing next to a car bomb when it blows or a mother who has her son catch a bullet between the eyes of course.
My larger point? This laser won't cause any more lives to be lost. It might even save a few. If anything ends up costing lives it is the nature of how insurgent wars are fought in this day and age. When you can formulate the logical argument for blowing up a massive car bomb in a civilian market for the explicate purpose of killing civilians, or your entire insurgency relies on starting an ethnic war amongst the occupied nation, than you get the horrific loss of life that you see in Iraq. Giant laser beams won't make this problem any better or worse.
The difference between North Korea and Iraq/Iran/whoever is that North Korea has had "WMDs" for a very, very long time. North Korea hasn't been kicked in the nuts by the US because North Korea as the capital of South Korea in artillery range and enough biological and chemical weapons (not to mention conventional weapons) to level it. On top of that, North Korea can merrily load up a few missiles with chemical weapons to drop onto Tokyo. The US doesn't threaten military action against North Korea because everyone would know that it would be a bluff. It wouldn't star world ending MAD war, but if you lived in South Korea it would be hard to tell the difference. Tossing a nuclear weapon into North Korea's arsenal really doesn't do much to make them more of a threat than they already are. If they made enough nuclear weapons perhaps they could make a bad situation worse, but give or take one nuke is not worth losing sleep over. The only real reason to find a nuclear armed North Korea scary is that North Korea has an ugly habit of selling their military toys to anyone with a wad of cash. North Korea armed with one more nuke is not all that much more scary, but a terrorist organization armed with a nuke is.
Iraq got its face kicked in when it did because it didn't yet pose any real threat. Given enough time, Iraq might have been able to do something nasty to Israel or even Europe. The fear that Iraq could one day end up armed like a North Korea with the ability to hold neighboring nations at ransom is at least part of the motivation for the US acting when it did instead of waiting. The same holds true of Iran. The reason why the US is jumping the gun and threatening military action is because it doesn't want to be forced into another situation like North Korea where the military option is entirely off the table and all you can do is send nasty letters across the border.
I am not saying that this is the right course, I am just pointing out that the difference between North Korea and other nations with potential weapon's programs is night and day. What the US wants to avoid is having more North Korea's out there. The real danger of North Korea (as was the danger with the Soviet Union) is that when North Korea collapses, there is a very real chances that something ugly is going to happen. It only takes on military leader of high enough rank to say fuck it and go out in a blaze of glory. The Soviet Union came very close to doing this. Unstable nations armed with WMDs are a very bad thing.
I am pretty sure that the Berlin wall was working the other way around. The Berlin wall wasn't to keep people out, it was to keep people in.
My concern isn't that they are running people's ID through a database. That is fine. A government probably should be checking who is coming in and out of the country and doing a quick computer check to see if a person throws up any red flags.
My problem is that database they are using. The "watch list" is a piece of shit, as has been shown with the nightmare it has created for some airline passengers. The real crime is the database in question, not the fact that a government checks your ID and checks to see if you are a criminal.
The US will happily play "the my 1,000,000 dollars to your 10,000 dollars" game... because they will win. Money isn't the problem. Even if the US didn't have vast amounts of money on hand, the US has vast untapped reserves of money it could plow into if it desperately needed to in the form of raising their taxes which, by industrialized democracy standards, are somewhere between low and very low. The problem Americans have in fighting a war is that they get sick of troops dying very quickly, especially if they don't perceive and imminent threat. The political will to fight is far harder to muster than the cash, and even harder to sustain.
The real value in drones is that you have the potential to reduce casualties for all parties. Clearly, the party using the drones suffers less casualties because the operators are behind nice high walls. Civilians also have the potential to suffer fewer casualties though. If you ambush a squad of marines, they are going to fight back, spray bullets everywhere, and in general do the human thing and try and preserve their lives. The problem is that when people spray bullets in a city and you have soldiers scared for their lives and pumped up on adrenalin, civilians die.
Drones offer an alternative. There is a world of difference between being out in the field with your life on the line, and sitting in an AC cooled room, with no threat to your life other than your commanding officer and the military lawyer who will tack your balls against the wall if you violate the rules of engagement. Everyone is calmer and making better decisions, there are more people there to help make the decisions, and the good of the mission can win out every time over the life of the drones. If your buddy gets blown up, he grumbles, and gets a new drone. If your buddy gets blown up in the real world, you tend to get pissed and start thinking that maybe the civilian around you knew it was coming down and are far less inclined to play nice.
Yes yes... there is always the argument about cheapening war. That said, there are times when a cheap war would have been the right thing. A cheap war where a drones had stepped in to stop the horrific genocide in Rwanda would have been well worth it. Instead, no nation felt like ponying up the soldiers and lives it would have taken to stop a genocide that killed off over 10% of the population and left countless wounded and raped.
Any polls conducted in a nation fighting a violent guerrilla war should immediately fall under suspect. Most of the polls taken in Iraq are attacked on the grounds that, except in perhaps Kurdistan, most Iraqis watch what they say. Saying you want the Americans out is a pretty safe position. With the potential punishment for saying you want the Americans in being death, the fact that only half were willing to say they wanted them gone argues that public opinion is far more favorable than the poll suggests.
Second, that poll was taken during the height of the violence as the "surge" was ramping up. The situation right now is far more rosy with violence against all parties down across the board.
Take polls in Iraq with a grain of salt. Further, take the perceptions of citizens as to how to solve a problem with a grain of salt. I mean hell, over half of Americans believe that the world is less than 10,000 year old, and they supposedly have functional schools and enough wealth to blow time learning things about the world.
And now comes the rub. When the US faces economic ruin, it tends to go into dull out for a few years before merrily springing back. The current president gets kicked out, and within a few years things are back to normal. When China faces economic ruin, all hell breaks loose. China already has tens of thousands of instances of civil unrest each year. China is not some monolithic uniform empire of unity. China is constantly a few short steps from a change in government, and for China to change government (unlike in the US) it takes violence. The danger of economic collapse and upsetting the rising middle class and already deeply impoverished lower class is social anarchy unthinkable in the US. China has a lot to lose.
Finally, there comes the larger point. What exactly will the US and China fight over? China isn't an expansionist empire looking to import its government. In any conflict between the US and China, the EU might not jump in guns blazing for the US, but they would bring down the economic anvil of d00m at roughly the same time the US does. With China's factories go silent as their products are bared from western markets. China's finances go to hell as they are bared from US and EU financial institutions. The US and EU would like their economic wounds and go find some other place with a billion poor people to make their iPods. China is now fucked and goes back to being the impoverished archaic nation that it was just a few short decades ago.
China has everything to lose and absolutely nothing to gain. China's only hope for the future is to tie itself as tight as it can economically with the EU and the US, rise its people out of poverty as fast as possible, and pray for enough wealth to weather the damning social stability it will face when the economy turns down and there is no peaceful way to remove the government.
Oh yeah man, THE WAR is going to be on us any second now. Sure, the US and China are economically tied at the hip and have no large conflicts between them, but lets not reason get in the way of getting scared!
The fact is that the world survived the Cold War, which was a far scarier ordeal. The US has no economic tie ins with the USSR, had every reason to fear that it was an expansionist empire (and they the same), and we had poor communication with them. Now look at China. There no points of conflict except over Taiwan, and lets be honest, the US won't do anything to save Taiwan these days other than pump them with guns and cash. The US and China share the same economic heart and it would be suicide for either party to harm the other. In fact, China is even more bound to the US than the US is to China. To top it all off, the US and China have excellent lines of communication.
There is no brewing war here. The final days of the Soviet Union were a perfectly good time to be terrified that the end was near and the USSR would go out with a bang rather than a whimper. China and the US burning along with their respective economic booms, both rising in power and wealth, are hardly anything worth fearing. The remoteness of war between the two only grows as China only grows as China's becomes more liberal, its power base more diffused among practical minded leaders, and the two nations intertwine economically even further. Rogue Pakistani nukes getting into hands of radicals give me far more heartache than the thought of China deciding that in the hight of the their rising glory NOW would be a good time to be wiped out in nuclear Armageddon.
One thing to keep in mind is that during training the anti-submarine aspect has its hands tied. Certain types of active sonar are forbidden due to the belief that they can maim/kill sea animals (namely whales).
The other issue to keep in mind is that it is one thing to break in on a scheduled training mission. It is another thing to catch an aircraft carrier cruising around at 40+ knots. Diesel/electric boats have almost no capacity to hunt on the modern stage. They really need to move into position, wait, and hope that a target comes by. The sea is big, and airplanes with refueller aircraft have very long ranges.
In a sea engagement the Chinese navy really is not much of a threat. The real threat comes from the Chinese missile and rock batteries, and to some extent, their air force. In a battle over Taiwan, China has a base to fly from that can be heavily guarded so as to make anything that isn't a stealth fighter weary about entering their airspace. That isn't to say that the Chinese airforce wouldn't take horrific losses, just that they could do some damage before bleeding their airforce away on the combined US/Taiwan air defense.
The real place where China is still screwed is in the actual crossing. A Chinese boat could get lucky and whack a carrier if they positioned themselves just right, but US hunter killer subs could do horrific damage against any sort of invasion force. What the subs don't eat, the aircraft would once they leave the AAA cover of the main land. An army a few million strong doesn't do any good if it can't get to land.
The government on the other hand can do far worse to me. The government can realize that I am a fan of a radical centrist group and start keeping tabs on my every move. While they can't prove that I have done anything wrong in terms of being a radical terrorist, they can easily keep track of the laws I break and hit me all at once for them. As they track my GPS they can dish out a fine each time I touch above the speed limit, charge me the full $250,000 per son each time I let a friend borrow a CD, castrate me for drinking on the sabbath, toss me in jail for illegal drug possession when I pop one of my girlfriends anti-allergy pills, and in general make my life a miserable hell.
Look, if people want to buy an iPhone and sign a contract to AT&T, and pay a gross amount of money in the deal, more power to them. People buy all sorts of shit that I don't want on a regular basis and I am sure I buy stuff that other people think is stupid. All of that said, don't go on with the silliness that some how Apple is doing the world a favor "wrestling power" from the carriers. If Apple had offered up an open phone and not tied it to carriers, I might have agreed. As it stands though, Apple "wrestling power" from the carriers resulted in a single concession from the carriers; "visual voice mail". Outside of that, Apple's new deal with the carriers just means that the consumer eats a bigger bill and is still stuck with the same lousy contract terms that he has always had. Apple has hardly done the world a favor by "wrestling power" from the carriers.
I don't disagree in the slightest. I think that people should be complete mercenaries in the working world. The company you work for will not think twice about firing you to better the company, and you should not think twice about quitting to better yourself. That said, there is a fundamentally different calculus that goes on between someone intending to say years, and someone intending to stay two weeks. If you are going to stay for years, you probably manage yourself in such a manner as to achieve the best long term benefits for yourself. When you have two weeks to go, you don't really give a damn about the long term health of the company in question, especially if you are a mercenary sort of person.
Now, I personally think that for most industries it is silly to dump someone when they give their notice. So long as there is no bad blood, an exiting person can be very helpful of handing over his responsibilities. When you show someone the door, they take with the door the knowledge of how to do their job. That said, I think that the entity to suffer is the company, not the individual. For the individual, it is a two weeks paid vacation. People should not be so offended and simply take their two weeks with a smile.
If anything, I think I would feel down right merry at being given two weeks of pay for nothing AND (if I was feeling vindictive) knowing that the company is scrambling to fill in the void I left and recover whatever knowledge I take with me. If the company really feels that security is more important than a smooth transfer, eh, more power to them.
...talking about how Apple is changing the phone game by wrestling power from the carriers... Right. Apple has certainly wrestled control away from the carriers. Now, instead of just paying the carrier blood money and selling our soul for two years, we get to pay both Apple AND the carrier... and still sell our soul away for two years. Maybe Nokia can compete with Apple by coming out with a phone where I need to sign a 5 year soul sucking deal with the hell (like AT&T, but more pleasant), have the phone chomp on my balls while it is in my pocket, eat my first born child, and get a direct hookup to my bank account from where it funnels money into everyone's pocket but my own.Come on Google, buy the damn spectrum, open it up, and lets say fuck you to the ass pounding consumers are getting in the US cellular market.
The point isn't to keep you from co-workers, though that might be a small part. The real point of escorting you out is to give you no time to ponder over all the bad things you could do to damage the company as you leave. True, if you want to sabotage and steal, you can do it BEFORE you you resign. That said, I think that dumping you quickly is designed to not let you fester and change your mind before the two weeks are up.
Just think of it from their perspective. You just quit, so you clearly are not a completely loyal employee. You obviously don't care if they fire you, so there is no punishment for screwing up. The only thing they have to go on is some general trust that you will 'do the right thing' despite the fact that they are out of methods to exert any sort of control over you.
I personally think that the policy is a little paranoid, but it works out fine for employees. If you know your company does the walk, just clear your shit out first, say good by to everyone, THEN go tell your boss. You get a two weeks paid vacation and the joy of walking out with a smug grin on. Hell, maybe you can wear your Google T-shirt that day under your sweater and pull it off for the walk. Get a kazoo and make your walk a mini parade.
As far as the UN 'handling' the internet, is this the same body that puts Cuba, Syria, and Libya on the human rights committee? The same guys that watched the Rwandan claim 10% of the population? Yeah. The UN is not exactly a model of speed and efficiency. By the time they realize they have a problem, it is a decade too late.
Of course, this is all an utterly moot point. The "control" the US has is just keeping a copy of the DNS list. You can actually go up into your browser settings and use someone else's list if you really want to. If the rest of the world wants to use a new system, absolutely nothing is stopping them other than that if they get out of sync with the US, they might have pissed off users. The US doesn't have to 'give up' anything. The rest of the world just needs to point their browsers in a different direction.
In the memory field the price will be just barely enough to reap profit and not a cent more. When it comes to semiconductors, MEMS, and other such devices, the amount of profit made on each unit when produced for mass consumption is amazingly small. The pressure and competition to build it smaller and cheaper leaves very little time for price gouging. If you want to see market forces working at their finest, just take a look at the semiconductor industry. Competition is absolutely brutal and prices fall at breathtaking speeds.
Hell, just ponder how much a flash drive is these days. I bought my first flash drive in 2004 or 2005. It was a little 32mb one that cost me something like $50. Just the other day I got a frigging two 2gb flash drives for $30.
You might get gouged in price for your iPhone, PS4, or whatever, but it wont be because they had to pay an arm and a leg for the memory. Memory prices go in only one direction, and they do it very rapidly.
In the US, do to less than happy copyright law wording, you can be very easily sued for copyright violations. There is a provision in the law for what is known as 'fair use', which lets you use copyrighted works without the consent of the author. In extreme fit of poor judgment on the part of law makers, US laws state that all 'creative works' are automatically under copyright unless the artists in question relinquishes his copyright claims. So for instance, this post is technically under US copyright protection and copying it would be a clear violation of the law. Fair use laws state that you can copy such works under certain circumstances. So, you can legally quote this post in the US, despite the fact that it is automatically under copyright, via the "fair use" provision.
So, we have a system designed to protect the "reasonable" use of copyrighted works. How does this work in practice? If a copy decides that it doesn't like you using any portion of their copyrighted works, irregardless of if it is fair use or not, they can send a DMCA take down notice to demand that you take it down and sue you if you don't. Now, technically you can merrily go to court and fight for your right of fair use. In practice though, few people have the time or money to battle Sony in court for 7 years defending their fair use rights.
I can think of nothing more distasteful than trying to recreate this battle of lawsuits over to free speech. Individuals get fucked in such systems. Even when they win, they lose in court costs, or at the very least, time and heartache. Copyright restrictions are stifling enough, but at least I can speak my piece about anyone or anything so long as I don't copy without a threat of lawsuit.
Now, the editor might very well get skewed for writing false alligations, but he will get skewered by his boss and adveritsers, not by the law. He might very well find himself out on the street, but the law will have no part in it.
There are a lot of things to not love about many American laws. US free speech law (or lack there off) is not one of them. When it comes to free speech, the US kicks ass and takes names like few others in the world. You will find yourself very hard pressed to find a nation with more liberal free speech laws.
The energy/mass ratio is not and never really has been the issue with hydrogen. The issue with hydrogen is the energy energy/volume ratio. Hydrogen's big problem is that it takes a lot of energy to squeeze into a small enough space to be worth while. Even if you are willing to burn the energy to compress hydrogen down into something that is tolerably dense, you are now talking about either A) a very heavy and expensive cooling system that is keeping it in liquid form or B) an extremely heavy, expensive, and marginally dangerous high pressure tank or C) both.
There are some potential tricks around this dilemma, but the truth is that we are still a fair ways off. The path towards hydrogen as a fuel source is less than obvious. Hydrogen has a lot of potential, but as it stands, it is a pain in the ass and expensive to make, it is a pain in the ass and expensive to store, and it really while shifts the environmental issues onto the grid where they are perhaps more easily tackled, it is not a silver bullet.
I am not poo-pooing hydrogen. Hell, I WORK for a hydrogen fuel cell company. I am just pointing out that the problem is much harder than it appears, and the golden future much further off than you might think. On top of that, there are lots of competing alternatives to hydrogen that might very well prove to be more utilitarian.
We won't be abandoning skyscrapers and cars. There are lots of alternatives out there that we don't try for one reason or another. If costs is your concern, then coal is the answer. The rest of the world might be in a bit of a tight spot, but the US and China own a massive portion of the worlds coal supply. If these two nations are willing to rip up their country side and dump some more CO2 into the air, they will easily and happily meet all energy demands. The US in particular owns a mind numbing supply of coal just waiting to be turned into cheap energy. Once you have energy in one form, you can merrily turn it into other forms. With electricty from coal, there are a whole host of ways to turn it into something you can put it into a car. Hydrogen, and various combustible synthetic liquids are all possibilities that only really demand energy from the grid.
As for alternative infrastructure, a 10-20 year time frame is silly. China is a poor nation that built its infrastructure in 10-20 yearsm and they were being conservative. A rich first world nation will able to switch over its infrastructure, especially if the option is 'change or stop using cars and skyscrapers', very quickly.
The real losers in this game isn't going to be the first world nation. The first world might see a recession, though just as likely, the change over might very well spawn a boom in technology and construction. The real people who are going to take the shaft are in such a crisis will be those who are harmed the most by the increased pollution and the nations who don't have the money or skill to switch gears in terms of energy consumption. The US can pretty easily take a minor and temporary standards of living hit as it readjusts to alternative energy. A country like India or China with far much more sever environmental problems and far less cash to blow on radical infrastructure changes will be the ones that take it hard. Africa will find the transition even harder.
Civilization won't collapse. You might do less driving on average, but truth be told, it isn't going to be some radical life altering event for the first world. If anything, the first world might reap cash rewards for it as investment money pours into R&D to combat rising energy prices. The people who will pay the real price are those who are already struggling to build infrastructure that the US and Europe had 50 years ago.
Giving a guy who is about to dump a few billion dollars into your nation "a taste of their own medicine" is by far the stupidest idea I can possibly think of. I don't rate Nigeria's government all that high in terms of competency, but unless the winners of the special Olympics have taken over the nation, I doubt this is some veiled attempt at diplomacy.
I am pretty sure Nigeria doesn't have a big problem with Americans illegally immigrating into the nation. The most likely reason for this is simply that someone didn't get their bribe, doesn't really give a shit that Gates is looking to save a few million lives, and so found a piece of paper with a check box missing in it to deny entrance in hopes of getting his fair share to correct the 'misunderstanding'.
I think you might find that Nigeria does have a problem with illegal immigrants. While most people don't have billions to donate like Mr. Gates, the majority of VISITORS to the US do not want to stay and while visiting do contribute to your economy. And they are required to prove they will not be a burden, so I am not sure why he shouldn't be required to do the same.
I am sure if you donate a few billion to American health services, someone will make sure that can get your visa within a minimal amount of time.
As for getting a visa to visit the US, it really is not that hard, it just takes time and money. The big issue with getting a visa in the US isn't proving that you won't go, it is just the stupid amount of time it takes to process it. Granted, there are plenty of nations with sprawling bureaucracies that take longer, but it really shouldn't take as long as it does. The real lag time in US visa's is not proving you won't leave, it is running your name against a pile of government watch lists for suspected terrorist and checking that you are who you say you are.
If there is any redeeming value of the American system for dealing with visitors and immigrants it is that the weaker US social service programs makes the American system far more tolerant of immigrants (legal or otherwise) than much of Europe simply because freeloading off the system is much more difficult. The result that is that the only people in the US that really bitterly complain are a few right-wing nut jobs... and even then, then right is split on the issue. The US doesn't have any leftist that are offended by immigration due to the strain it puts on social systems, and so there is far less resistance against immigration.
Peak oil is an environmental problem, not an economic problem. There are lots of fuel alternatives, they are just expensive or environmentally damaging. As oil prices rise, alternative methods of energy storage become viable. As alternative energy sources become profitable, the price of oil drops. The result is that no matter how hard you try, you can't force oil prices up rapidly over a long period of time. The worst that will happen will be a steady long term climb as oil is phased out and new energy sources are phased in.
The real danger in peak oil is the environmental impact. As oil becomes more expensive, alternative methods of fueling vehicles will be needed. Now, there are lots of viable alternatives to get buy one little to no oil. The problem is that all the alternatives require spending energy... energy that will likely come from the grid. You could switch to a hydrogen fueled car or plug in hybrids for instance in a few years. The problem is that making hydrogen (or any alternative fuel) or to recharge off the grid is going to demand you spend energy from the grid. This is good in that your automotive industry becomes as clean as your gird... so if you have a clean grid, you have a clean automotive industry. The downside is that as you pull more power from the grid, energy prices go up. The only way to keep them down and keep from killing the grid is to put more power online. Coal is the cheapest and most efficient way to dump more power into the grid, but coal has the downside of being less than friendly to the environment or good for CO2 emissions.
My point is that the world will move on smoothly from peak oil (should it exist). The market will happily even out the price and the transition will be smooth. The real danger is an environmental danger as we scramble to get energy from alternative sources.