It doesn't seem to "keep the government out of the telecom business". My reading of the article says that:
1) the Federal Government can prohibit State governments from stopping private entities from entering the telecom market, but
2) the Federal Government can not prohibit State governments from preventing THEIR OWN POLITICAL SUBDIVISIONS from starting a telecom entity.
That's hugely different than the Federal Law preventing States from running telecom services. If the State wants to prevent its own dependent parts from doing something, this Federal Law does not prevent it. Although I haven't read the ruling itself (and the article may not be correct in its specifics, so I could be wrong), it sounds likely to me that it this may be a sovereignty issue.
I understand your point, but to be fair you should have noted that Microsoft is under no obligation, as far as I am aware, to tell anyone when they have been compromised. Microsoft's servers could have been cracked once a day, once a week, or once a month, and you would never know.
I believe that you are misinterpreting that Section of the Constitution. What it is saying is that the Constitution and any legal structures enacted pursuant to its requirements trump all other laws. The Constitution trumps Federal law and international treaties, which trumps State and local laws, common law, natural law, etc.
But Federal laws and treaties must conform to the legal structures imposed by the Constitution... so a treaty that is found by the Supreme Court to violate a provision of the Constitution is null and unenforceable.
Just to clarify: The Constitution provides Congress the authority to legislate copyright into existence:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries
The form of copyright restrictions that you mention were authorized by Congress through various laws down through the last 200 or so years of history... they are not present in the Constitution itself.
Um, actually, they are throwing our money at it, if only indirectly. The money that was formerly being diverted from the Patent Office into the General Fund was money that could be spent on programs without requiring a direct infusion of tax dollars or debt increases. That money has to be replaced with an identical chunk of money from somewhere else. That somewhere else has to be tax revenues flowing into the General Fund from tax payers.
Which isn't to say that this is a bad way to spend our money. Just that it is our money that will pay for this.
...the Standard Model's Higgs mechanism has absolutely no authority to avoid the term "frivolous."
That's not quite fair... as a low energy effective theory, the SM is spectacularly successful, and is not in demonstrable conflict with any experiment to date. This success is underpinned by a reliance on a Higgs-like mechanism. The SM one-doublet model may be economical and incomplete, but because the rest of the model holds up so well to tests, it is hard to see how the correct model wouldn't necessarily have a SM Higgs-like excitation in the low energy limit. Which isn't to say that it will be exactly like the SM Higgs, just that it won't look too different at low energy, or we already would have seen its impact in precision eletroweak measurements, for instance.
it uses a scalar field... of which there are no other examples in nature
That isn't quite a fair argument, of course... we have no experimentally confirmed examples of fundamental tensor fields, either, but most of us think gravitons exist:-)
And there isn't a compelling reason to expect light scalar fields, in fact quite the opposite. You are no doubt aware of the quadratic renormalization of scalar masses, whereby their masses are "pulled up" by any interactions they have. So you probably wouldn't expect massless or even light scalars, unless they don't have any interactions (in which case we wouldn't know about them). In SUSY, for instance, you would generically expect scalars to end up with masses near the SUSY breaking scale, something like a few hundred GeV... well, except for the lightest Higgs, which has to have a mass somewhere in the neighborhood of 100-200 GeV to stabilize the electroweak symmetry breaking transition.
This would allow much more complicated Higgs interactions...
There are plenty of examples of non-fundamental scalar Higgs mechanisms, and even mechanisms that employ fundamental scalars that must be heavier than we've seen. SUSY, dynamical symmetry breaking, extra-dimensions, deconstruction, etc. But they all have their own challenges, usually conflict with existing data. That, of course, is the cardinal sin in physics. No matter how lovely your theory, Nature is always right, and if you don't agree with Her, you lose.:-)
To nitpick, the "N=3" discovery is only valid in the energy range of interest.
To pick nits with your nitpick (how's that for a turn of phrase?), N=3 is the statement that there are no more SM like light neutrinoes, and hence there are only three generations of SM fermions. The precision Z boson line shapes from the four LEP experiments provide exceedingly severe constraints on weakly interacting fermions, and those line shapes are inconsistent with the presence of fermions that we haven't yet seen which are lighter than half the Z mass. In particular, the invisible line shape is consistent with more than 2.something and fewer than 3.somethingelse neutrinos, and since we already know that there are at least three, we conclude that there are only three.
It would have to have odd mixing angles, sure, but a fourth family isn't out of the question.
It would have to have VERY odd interactions with the SM gauge fields, to the point where it wouldn't look much at all like the rest of the SM families. There just isn't room in the precision electroweak data for much else that looks anything like the known SM fermions. In this sense, you probably wouldn't call this "fourth family" a family at all. Additionally, SM like interactions with heavy neutrinos are probably ruled out by cosmological over-closure arguments and astrophysical stellar models, although those arguments are somewhat more tentative.
There might, of course, be non-standard model like heav
It was much further back than that. The OED provides the following:
2. fig. The appropriation and reproduction of an invention or work of another for one's own profit, without authority; infringement of the rights conferred by a patent or copyright.
1771 LUCKOMBE Hist. Print. 76 They..would suffer by this act of piracy, since it was likely to prove a very bad edition.
and whatever other courts that the supreme court shall deem useful.
It's whatever other courts that the CONGRESS shall deem useful:
Article III, Section 1: The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behaviour, and shall, at stated times, receive for their services, a compensation, which shall not be diminished during their continuance in office.
Now, how the black hole doesn't gain mass from the anti-particle I'm not quite sure...
The black hole doesn't gain mass, because the particle that fell in has negative energy. Remember, you can't create energy from nowhere, but you can "borrow" some from the vacuum temporarily... that's where the virtual pairs come from. They borrow energy from the vacuum, which they have to give back after a time (roughly) Delta T < hbar/E, where E is the energy of the particle pair.
Now, if one half of the pair falls across the event horizon, it isn't coming back. The particle that escapes the hole becomes "real" because it has no one to annihilate with, so it carries off energy E/2. But since you can't yank energy out of the vacuum indefinitely, the particle that fell in had to be carrying energy -E/2... which isn't a problem, because it isn't a "real" particle, so it's energy need not be consistent with your expectations from freshman physics.
So, where does that energy E/2 that goes into the escaping particle come from? The only place it can: the black hole. Remember, a negative amount of energy fell in. So the hole has to lose some mass in the process. Which is why we say that the black hole "emits" particles.
The mathematical details are, of course, much nastier than that, but that's the gist of things...
What really got me was not the issues you point out, but the fact that of "all this money" he claims to see as "available" for this conversion, very little of it really is.... most of that $400billion or so is going to have to be paid into the current system to keep it operating AT THE SAME TIME as the conversion is being made. We can't just turn off the current systems for five years, keep paying as if we are using them, and then turn on a brand new system. It just doesn't work that way....
My understanding from earlier articles is that they aren't "brushing off" the rocks, but rather "grinding" off a circular area of the rock so that they can get to the unmodified interior of the rock. So, even if the arm can reach up to "scratch its own back", so to speak, you probably wouldn't want to use the grinder to dust off the solar panels:-)
ask any American how much of a part the Russians had in WW2, and many will say, 'the russians fought in WW2?'
Many will. And many will not be able to locate Pearl Harbor, or even Hawaii on a globe. The ignorance of a few does not mean that the rest of us are ignorant of the history of the 20th century.
what did the Americans lose, like 30 thousand or so?
Not that it matters to the defense of your thesis, but you are off by about an order of magnitude. The US lost about 400,000 soldiers and sailors in combat and non-combat actions in the various theaters of war between Dec 7 1941, and January 1 1946, with another 700,000 wounded, out of just over 16 million on active duty. See, for instance, here
Further, comparison of casualty figures is a particularly poor measure of the contribution of an army to a conflict; US technological advantages (medical, transportation, communication, weaponry, etc) in WWII gave the US Army major strategic and tactical doctrinal advantages that were just not available to the Soviet army, especially early on in the war. Additionally, American soldiers were not fighting on their own home soil, and very few were threatened with death by their own officers if they retreated; these two disadvantages by themselves were enough to doom many hundreds of thousands or millions of Soviet men to death in the defense of the Motherland.
the Germans were mostly defeated by Russia.
That is, at best, a vapid over simplification. The defeat of Germany relied on both the actions of the Soviet Army in the East, and the Western Powers opening fronts in Africa, Italy, Southern France, Normandy, Norway, and the Atlantic. It also relied on the arming of the Soviets and British by the United States, even before early 1942, and vast strategic mistakes by the German political/military leadership:
Had the Germany not attacked the USSR, the Soviets would have happily split Poland with Germany, and annexed/invaded their Eastern European neighbors; they certainly wouldn't have come to the defense of Britain.
Had the Western Allies, in particular the US, not supplied arms and supplies to the Soviets, they would have crumbled beneath the German onslaught when they ran out of supplies. Resupply via the Northern Convoys allowed the Soviets the time and materials to move their industrial capacity east of Moscow without loss of manufactured goods to maintain their army.
Had the US not supplied military and civilian goods to the British Empire around the world, the Empire would have collapsed, and with it, all active defense against the German army.
Had the Western Allies not continually maintained open fronts against the Germans on two continents, pressure would have remained very much stronger on the Soviets.
Had the Western Allies not destroyed the German Navy at sea, the lifeline to Murmansk would have been strangled.
Had the British negotiated a surrender with Germany instead of being the lone holdout against Germany, most of Europe would today speak German.
Had the Soviets not fought so valiantly on the Eastern Front, the Western Allies would have been unable to open additional fronts in Western Europe.
There are many others, but these are the ones that came to immediately to mind.
It is ridiculous to assert than any one of the three major allied powers was THE critical link in the defeat of Nazi Germany, at least the way history actually played out. Without any of them, Germany would have very likely won the war; similarly with Japan in the Pacific.
No, you can't.... and for the same reason that you can't use that argument to search for black holes. The hole/gravistar itself must be very cold, but matter surrounding the hole/gravistar would be heated during infall, emitting a large amount of energy. The physics of this are quite interesting, and covered in many introductory texts in general relativity and astrophysics; search for information on "accretion disks".
Absolute numbers of shares sold _by itself_ is no indication of anything, either in favor or against an argument of dumping. To make a compelling argument, you have to consider many other factors, including but not limited things such as: how have executives in other industries and/or companies behaved over a similar time period? how have these executives acted in past time periods? how are these executives planning to behave in the future (as determined by SEC filings)? Show that they are acting well outside the statistical bounds of the appropriate peer groups, and THEN you can make an argument (and perhaps a legal case) for a dumping scheme.
Re:Slow leak, still way above Denver pressure
on
ISS May Have A Leak
·
· Score: 1
In absolute terms, the air pressure in Denver at one mile altitude is about 83% of the air pressure at sea level (google is your friend), giving about 12.2psi, or 84kPa, or.8atm (that last one was easy:-)
There are many populations that rent. Some rent because it is cheaper and more comfortable to watch a movie at home than in the theater. Some rent because they don't want to own. And some of them rent because it is cheaper than buying AND cheaper than downloading. That was (part of) my point... the same people who currently "steal" music by downloading yet rent movies WOULD download those movies for free, if they had the bandwidth and storage space (or DVD burners). But they don't. Yet. It still costs them too much (in money for disks, time sitting in front of their computer resuming downloads, etc..) to download as compared to renting, so they see renting as a bargain. As the economics of high volume downloading change over time, I suspect you'll see a rise in people "stealing" movies and games as well.
If CDs were like 1/2 price, like $8 or less, a lot more people would think about buying them
I doubt that very much... I suspect that what would be happening at that price point is that people would be saying "If CDs were like 1/2 price, like $4 or less, a lot more people...."
People expect something for nothing and have found a way to get just that, and they use the "expense" argument to justify their actions to themselves. The only reason you don't see the same thing happening with DVDs is that most people don't have the bandwidth and diskspace to download movies. Yet. Wait a few years, and then you are going to start hearing "If DVDs were like 1/2 price, like $15 or less, a lot more people...."
And the point of the parent was that, if ICANN and Verisign were doing such a horrible job of administering the namespace, ICANN and Verisign would be ignored by those administering the cooperating networks. You don't HAVE to listen to ICANN, and neither does anyone else (except Verisign). Administrators CHOOSE to listen to ICANN because it is convenient for the interoperability of their networks to do so. The day that ceases to be the case, ICANN will be ignored like day old bagels....
if they should so decide for some reason in unity then they damn well have the authority over anything they wish.
Actually, no they don't. The authority of the UN, which is not a sovereign organization, is provided for by the agreement of sovereign nations through accession to the UN charter and various later multinational treaties and multilateral agreements. The UN has NO authority beyond what is granted to it by those agreements, regardless of how many countries think it would be a swell idea to do something. So the UN can't just do anything it damn well pleases, as is well evidenced by its inability to act in many instances over the years: consider the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Iran-Iraq, environmental issues, etc.
So whether the UN has any authority over regulating the Internet in any shape or form depends on whether its member governments have or will give it that authority. On that, I don't know the answer, and can't be bothered to check:-)
...And you don't think that ANY other military power with global (or even regional!) reach has plans for how to invade EVERY OTHER country on the planet? That's what militaries DO in peacetime... prepare for the next possible war, not the last one. No sir! Only the US has those types of plans!
Actually, we have very accurate data telling us what the spectrum of acoustic oscillations or "sound" was at the time of the "decoupling" of photons and matter, which was only about 350,000 years after the big bang. You might want to check out the technical papers coming out of the WMAP project, to which I have no affiliation. They've produced the most accurate maps of this acoustic noise, and this is the data that was used to make the "sound recordings". Seems kosher to me, and IAANP, so you can trust me:-)
We already lose lots (don't have the number handy) of gasoline and natural gas to similar loss mechanisms (gas stations smell like gas for a reason....). We also lose lots of electricity to transmission losses (up to 50% in some markets!). And lets not forget oil spills from grounded tankers. And we haven't been able to solve any of these problems despite 100 years of trying.
Why do you expect hydrogen to be any different? I would naively expect the losses to be much greater with H2 than with other forms of (heavier, easier to contain) fuels, and we haven't been able to even begin to approach loss free storage and transport....
.... Take the pronunciation of nuclear as "nucular." That one has been getting on people's nerves since Eisenhower made the mispronunciation famous in the 1950's. In Woody Allen's 1989 film Crimes and Misdemeanors, the Mia Farrow character says she could never fall for any man who says "nucular." That would have ruled out not just Dubya, but Bill Clinton, who said the word right only about half the time. (President Carter had his own way of saying the word, as "newkeeuh," but that probably had more to do with his Georgia accent than his ignorance of English spelling.)
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't seem to "keep the government out of the telecom business". My reading of the article says that:
1) the Federal Government can prohibit State governments from stopping private entities from entering the telecom market, but
2) the Federal Government can not prohibit State governments from preventing THEIR OWN POLITICAL SUBDIVISIONS from starting a telecom entity.
That's hugely different than the Federal Law preventing States from running telecom services. If the State wants to prevent its own dependent parts from doing something, this Federal Law does not prevent it. Although I haven't read the ruling itself (and the article may not be correct in its specifics, so I could be wrong), it sounds likely to me that it this may be a sovereignty issue.
I understand your point, but to be fair you should have noted that Microsoft is under no obligation, as far as I am aware, to tell anyone when they have been compromised. Microsoft's servers could have been cracked once a day, once a week, or once a month, and you would never know.
I believe that you are misinterpreting that Section of the Constitution. What it is saying is that the Constitution and any legal structures enacted pursuant to its requirements trump all other laws. The Constitution trumps Federal law and international treaties, which trumps State and local laws, common law, natural law, etc.
But Federal laws and treaties must conform to the legal structures imposed by the Constitution ... so a treaty that is found by the Supreme Court to violate a provision of the Constitution is null and unenforceable.
Just to clarify: The Constitution provides Congress the authority to legislate copyright into existence:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries
The form of copyright restrictions that you mention were authorized by Congress through various laws down through the last 200 or so years of history ... they are not present in the Constitution itself.
Um, actually, they are throwing our money at it, if only indirectly. The money that was formerly being diverted from the Patent Office into the General Fund was money that could be spent on programs without requiring a direct infusion of tax dollars or debt increases. That money has to be replaced with an identical chunk of money from somewhere else. That somewhere else has to be tax revenues flowing into the General Fund from tax payers.
Which isn't to say that this is a bad way to spend our money. Just that it is our money that will pay for this.
That's not quite fair ... as a low energy effective theory, the SM is spectacularly successful, and is not in demonstrable conflict with any experiment to date. This success is underpinned by a reliance on a Higgs-like mechanism. The SM one-doublet model may be economical and incomplete, but because the rest of the model holds up so well to tests, it is hard to see how the correct model wouldn't necessarily have a SM Higgs-like excitation in the low energy limit. Which isn't to say that it will be exactly like the SM Higgs, just that it won't look too different at low energy, or we already would have seen its impact in precision eletroweak measurements, for instance.
it uses a scalar field ... of which there are no other examples in nature
That isn't quite a fair argument, of course ... we have no experimentally confirmed examples of fundamental tensor fields, either, but most of us think gravitons exist :-)
And there isn't a compelling reason to expect light scalar fields, in fact quite the opposite. You are no doubt aware of the quadratic renormalization of scalar masses, whereby their masses are "pulled up" by any interactions they have. So you probably wouldn't expect massless or even light scalars, unless they don't have any interactions (in which case we wouldn't know about them). In SUSY, for instance, you would generically expect scalars to end up with masses near the SUSY breaking scale, something like a few hundred GeV ... well, except for the lightest Higgs, which has to have a mass somewhere in the neighborhood of 100-200 GeV to stabilize the electroweak symmetry breaking transition.
This would allow much more complicated Higgs interactions...
There are plenty of examples of non-fundamental scalar Higgs mechanisms, and even mechanisms that employ fundamental scalars that must be heavier than we've seen. SUSY, dynamical symmetry breaking, extra-dimensions, deconstruction, etc. But they all have their own challenges, usually conflict with existing data. That, of course, is the cardinal sin in physics. No matter how lovely your theory, Nature is always right, and if you don't agree with Her, you lose. :-)
To nitpick, the "N=3" discovery is only valid in the energy range of interest.
To pick nits with your nitpick (how's that for a turn of phrase?), N=3 is the statement that there are no more SM like light neutrinoes, and hence there are only three generations of SM fermions. The precision Z boson line shapes from the four LEP experiments provide exceedingly severe constraints on weakly interacting fermions, and those line shapes are inconsistent with the presence of fermions that we haven't yet seen which are lighter than half the Z mass. In particular, the invisible line shape is consistent with more than 2.something and fewer than 3.somethingelse neutrinos, and since we already know that there are at least three, we conclude that there are only three.
It would have to have odd mixing angles, sure, but a fourth family isn't out of the question.
It would have to have VERY odd interactions with the SM gauge fields, to the point where it wouldn't look much at all like the rest of the SM families. There just isn't room in the precision electroweak data for much else that looks anything like the known SM fermions. In this sense, you probably wouldn't call this "fourth family" a family at all. Additionally, SM like interactions with heavy neutrinos are probably ruled out by cosmological over-closure arguments and astrophysical stellar models, although those arguments are somewhat more tentative.
There might, of course, be non-standard model like heav
It was much further back than that. The OED provides the following:
2. fig. The appropriation and reproduction of an invention or work of another for one's own profit, without authority; infringement of the rights conferred by a patent or copyright.
1771 LUCKOMBE Hist. Print. 76 They..would suffer by this act of piracy, since it was likely to prove a very bad edition.
and whatever other courts that the supreme court shall deem useful.
It's whatever other courts that the CONGRESS shall deem useful:
Article III, Section 1: The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behaviour, and shall, at stated times, receive for their services, a compensation, which shall not be diminished during their continuance in office.
Now, how the black hole doesn't gain mass from the anti-particle I'm not quite sure...
The black hole doesn't gain mass, because the particle that fell in has negative energy. Remember, you can't create energy from nowhere, but you can "borrow" some from the vacuum temporarily ... that's where the virtual pairs come from. They borrow energy from the vacuum, which they have to give back after a time (roughly) Delta T < hbar/E, where E is the energy of the particle pair.
Now, if one half of the pair falls across the event horizon, it isn't coming back. The particle that escapes the hole becomes "real" because it has no one to annihilate with, so it carries off energy E/2. But since you can't yank energy out of the vacuum indefinitely, the particle that fell in had to be carrying energy -E/2 ... which isn't a problem, because it isn't a "real" particle, so it's energy need not be consistent with your expectations from freshman physics.
So, where does that energy E/2 that goes into the escaping particle come from? The only place it can: the black hole. Remember, a negative amount of energy fell in. So the hole has to lose some mass in the process. Which is why we say that the black hole "emits" particles.
The mathematical details are, of course, much nastier than that, but that's the gist of things...
What really got me was not the issues you point out, but the fact that of "all this money" he claims to see as "available" for this conversion, very little of it really is .... most of that $400billion or so is going to have to be paid into the current system to keep it operating AT THE SAME TIME as the conversion is being made. We can't just turn off the current systems for five years, keep paying as if we are using them, and then turn on a brand new system. It just doesn't work that way....
How about 45 or 50 MW?
My understanding from earlier articles is that they aren't "brushing off" the rocks, but rather "grinding" off a circular area of the rock so that they can get to the unmodified interior of the rock. So, even if the arm can reach up to "scratch its own back", so to speak, you probably wouldn't want to use the grinder to dust off the solar panels :-)
ask any American how much of a part the Russians had in WW2, and many will say, 'the russians fought in WW2?'
Many will. And many will not be able to locate Pearl Harbor, or even Hawaii on a globe. The ignorance of a few does not mean that the rest of us are ignorant of the history of the 20th century.
what did the Americans lose, like 30 thousand or so?
Not that it matters to the defense of your thesis, but you are off by about an order of magnitude. The US lost about 400,000 soldiers and sailors in combat and non-combat actions in the various theaters of war between Dec 7 1941, and January 1 1946, with another 700,000 wounded, out of just over 16 million on active duty. See, for instance, here
Further, comparison of casualty figures is a particularly poor measure of the contribution of an army to a conflict; US technological advantages (medical, transportation, communication, weaponry, etc) in WWII gave the US Army major strategic and tactical doctrinal advantages that were just not available to the Soviet army, especially early on in the war. Additionally, American soldiers were not fighting on their own home soil, and very few were threatened with death by their own officers if they retreated; these two disadvantages by themselves were enough to doom many hundreds of thousands or millions of Soviet men to death in the defense of the Motherland.
the Germans were mostly defeated by Russia.
That is, at best, a vapid over simplification. The defeat of Germany relied on both the actions of the Soviet Army in the East, and the Western Powers opening fronts in Africa, Italy, Southern France, Normandy, Norway, and the Atlantic. It also relied on the arming of the Soviets and British by the United States, even before early 1942, and vast strategic mistakes by the German political/military leadership:
There are many others, but these are the ones that came to immediately to mind.
It is ridiculous to assert than any one of the three major allied powers was THE critical link in the defeat of Nazi Germany, at least the way history actually played out. Without any of them, Germany would have very likely won the war; similarly with Japan in the Pacific.
No, you can't .... and for the same reason that you can't use that argument to search for black holes. The hole/gravistar itself must be very cold, but matter surrounding the hole/gravistar would be heated during infall, emitting a large amount of energy. The physics of this are quite interesting, and covered in many introductory texts in general relativity and astrophysics; search for information on "accretion disks".
Absolute numbers of shares sold _by itself_ is no indication of anything, either in favor or against an argument of dumping. To make a compelling argument, you have to consider many other factors, including but not limited things such as: how have executives in other industries and/or companies behaved over a similar time period? how have these executives acted in past time periods? how are these executives planning to behave in the future (as determined by SEC filings)? Show that they are acting well outside the statistical bounds of the appropriate peer groups, and THEN you can make an argument (and perhaps a legal case) for a dumping scheme.
In absolute terms, the air pressure in Denver at one mile altitude is about 83% of the air pressure at sea level (google is your friend), giving about 12.2psi, or 84kPa, or .8atm (that last one was easy :-)
There are many populations that rent. Some rent because it is cheaper and more comfortable to watch a movie at home than in the theater. Some rent because they don't want to own. And some of them rent because it is cheaper than buying AND cheaper than downloading. That was (part of) my point ... the same people who currently "steal" music by downloading yet rent movies WOULD download those movies for free, if they had the bandwidth and storage space (or DVD burners). But they don't. Yet. It still costs them too much (in money for disks, time sitting in front of their computer resuming downloads, etc..) to download as compared to renting, so they see renting as a bargain. As the economics of high volume downloading change over time, I suspect you'll see a rise in people "stealing" movies and games as well.
If CDs were like 1/2 price, like $8 or less, a lot more people would think about buying them
I doubt that very much ... I suspect that what would be happening at that price point is that people would be saying "If CDs were like 1/2 price, like $4 or less, a lot more people ...."
People expect something for nothing and have found a way to get just that, and they use the "expense" argument to justify their actions to themselves. The only reason you don't see the same thing happening with DVDs is that most people don't have the bandwidth and diskspace to download movies. Yet. Wait a few years, and then you are going to start hearing "If DVDs were like 1/2 price, like $15 or less, a lot more people ...."
And the point of the parent was that, if ICANN and Verisign were doing such a horrible job of administering the namespace, ICANN and Verisign would be ignored by those administering the cooperating networks. You don't HAVE to listen to ICANN, and neither does anyone else (except Verisign). Administrators CHOOSE to listen to ICANN because it is convenient for the interoperability of their networks to do so. The day that ceases to be the case, ICANN will be ignored like day old bagels....
if they should so decide for some reason in unity then they damn well have the authority over anything they wish.
Actually, no they don't. The authority of the UN, which is not a sovereign organization, is provided for by the agreement of sovereign nations through accession to the UN charter and various later multinational treaties and multilateral agreements. The UN has NO authority beyond what is granted to it by those agreements, regardless of how many countries think it would be a swell idea to do something. So the UN can't just do anything it damn well pleases, as is well evidenced by its inability to act in many instances over the years: consider the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Iran-Iraq, environmental issues, etc.
So whether the UN has any authority over regulating the Internet in any shape or form depends on whether its member governments have or will give it that authority. On that, I don't know the answer, and can't be bothered to check :-)
...And you don't think that ANY other military power with global (or even regional!) reach has plans for how to invade EVERY OTHER country on the planet? That's what militaries DO in peacetime ... prepare for the next possible war, not the last one. No sir! Only the US has those types of plans!
Actually, we have very accurate data telling us what the spectrum of acoustic oscillations or "sound" was at the time of the "decoupling" of photons and matter, which was only about 350,000 years after the big bang. You might want to check out the technical papers coming out of the WMAP project, to which I have no affiliation. They've produced the most accurate maps of this acoustic noise, and this is the data that was used to make the "sound recordings". Seems kosher to me, and IAANP, so you can trust me :-)
I'm not sure he'd want a plate that said HIT HERE on it :-)
The big question is: how?
We already lose lots (don't have the number handy) of gasoline and natural gas to similar loss mechanisms (gas stations smell like gas for a reason ....). We also lose lots of electricity to transmission losses (up to 50% in some markets!). And lets not forget oil spills from grounded tankers. And we haven't been able to solve any of these problems despite 100 years of trying.
Why do you expect hydrogen to be any different? I would naively expect the losses to be much greater with H2 than with other forms of (heavier, easier to contain) fuels, and we haven't been able to even begin to approach loss free storage and transport....
Shamelessly swiping from Geoffrey Nunberg here
.... Take the pronunciation of nuclear as "nucular." That one has been getting on people's nerves since Eisenhower made the mispronunciation famous in the 1950's. In Woody Allen's 1989 film Crimes and Misdemeanors, the Mia Farrow character says she could never fall for any man who says "nucular." That would have ruled out not just Dubya, but Bill Clinton, who said the word right only about half the time. (President Carter had his own way of saying the word, as "newkeeuh," but that probably had more to do with his Georgia accent than his ignorance of English spelling.)