Capitalism is philosophically based upon perfectly informed rational consumers, which these guys aren't, by definition
There is, in fact, no such thing as a perfectly informed rational customer, there never has been and there never will be. Those two "simplifying" assumptions are typical of the fundamental defects that render economics almost worthless in its present form. Of course economists like simplifying assumptions, because otherwise their field would be far too complicated to make any sense out of. Unfortunately the assumptions mean that the resulting rules and laws apply only in an abstract world which hardly bears any resemblance to the real world we live in.
1. "Perfectly informed". Even in the simplest possible model of a market, a village produce market where fruit and vegetables are being sold from a collection of stalls, perfect information is far from guaranteed. Who knows what Fred has been spraying on his pumpkins? And have those delicious-looking peaches been previously frozen, transported, and defrosted? Usually the vendors will know, and maybe a few others - but then it is in the interest of the vendors to keep the information secret, even at the cost of a bribe or quid pro quo favour. Thus the concealment of important product information actually becomes part of the market, with its own price. Consider now a more sophisticated, "evolved" market such as the electronic stock exchanges where corporations will pay huge sums of money to have their servers a few feet closer to the exchange's own servers. That may give them a few nanoseconds' head start, which may be enough to make the difference between winning billions and losing billions. Again, we see payments (this time, very large ones) being made precisely to prevent information being perfectly shared. And the pattern is repeated everywhere.
2. "Rational customers". This one departs even further from reality and common sense. If you think about it for five minutes, you will see that the very concept of a "rational customer" is wholly artificial and almost meaningless in relation to the real world. We are all rational, more or less by definition, as a function of being human. But what does that really mean? I think you'll agree that virtually all humans use reason (facts and logic) as a tool when they need to, never as a way of deciding what it is they want. To suggest that all customers can be "rational" is, in effect, to make the ridiculous assumption that they are wholly focused all of the time on making financial gains! It would be more realistic to say that a rational person is one who devotes as little time, effort and attention to economic necessaities as possible, the better to enjoy the good things of life - which are NOT money (as such) or buying and selling. It is true, to some extent, that those who do best at the economic "game" are those who focus on it most unremittingly - spending almost all their waking time in business activities and reckoning their success in life solely by their net worth. For such people, the Bible has a warning.
"And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully: And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits? And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided? So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God". (Luke 12:16-21) http://biblehub.com/kjv/luke/1...
When I first saw the title of this article, I thought it might be about software vendors auditing their software for bugs and deficiencies. Silly me! Of course, bugs and deficiencies don't matter - the legal small print has all that covered. No liability, whatever happens.
No, the software audits are all about customers paying full whack for every single copy of the software - whether it works or not.
Considering the Germans were the US and UK's sworn enemy in WWII the Russians would have to be fucking idiots to believe that by the time each nation entered the war.
Like many people who are very sure they are right, you don't seem to have all the facts. Are you aware that, at the time when the German invasion of the USSR was launched, the USA was neutral? (It stayed neutral for the first 27 months of the war, and only became a combatant as a result of the Pearl Harbor attack, which even it could hardly ignore). Or that very high-ranking American leaders had strong sympathies with the Nazi movement? In 1940 Joseph Kennedy, the future President's father, was already warning FDR (from his official post as US Ambassador to Britain) that the Germans were sure to win, and that the US government should drop the British as a lost cause and make overtures to Berlin. Prescott Bush, the father of future President George H.W. Bush, was hand in glove with the Nazi leadership, as were John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen. And IBM, as is well known, went on selling equipment and technical services to Nazi Germany long after the invasion of the USSR. See (among many other sources) http://www.washingtonsblog.com... for a recent summary.
Wow. Just wow. You have to be fucking kidding me. Now I know you're either a troll or just fucking clueless. You're honestly arguing that both Communist Russia was a better system than the Capitalist US during the 20th century and the US is the only place where billionaires feast and the poor starve? That is just blatant ignorance. I heard it's great being a migrant worker in Qatar. Communist North Korea sounds great too. Maybe you should move there. It's a great system and no one starves.
You obviously didn't read what I wrote - you have reacted violently to something that you seem to imagine I implied. But I didn't. I was summing up the fears that led to the US government being pushed into disastrous and counter-productive wars that killed millions of people to no purpose. If you look back at what I wrote, you will see that I did not assert that "Communist Russia was a better system than the Capitalist US during the 20th century" or that "the US is the only place where billionaires feast and the poor starve". (Although I note that you don't deny that billionaires do feast, and the poor do starve, in the USA - the home of the brave and the land of the free (to starve)). If you take the time and trouble to study the historical documents that reveal the beliefs and fears of senior US government officials, bankers, businessmen, and intelligence officials, you will see the clear evidence that the very rich were scared rigid of "communism", which they thought would lead to them being deprived of some of their wealth. Whereas they weren't scared of Nazism and fascism, as they thought they could control them.
The USSR, and then Russia, agreed with no argument at all to give up control of East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and even Belarus and Ukraine
Places they took by FORCE. Places that had different cultures and languages. I had ancestors that left Poland because they didn't want to be a part of Communist Russia. Many left those countries for the same reason. You are whitewashing Russian history.
Places they took by force - from the Nazi occupying forces in 1944-45. Places where many very unpleasant people were very eager, during the German occupation, to help the Nazis get rid of Jews, gypsies, Slavs, and other people the Nazis - and their helpers - despised and hated. I can well understand that your ancestors left Poland because they didn't want to be ruled by the Soviets - but would they have preferred the Nazis, which was the main alternative? Didn't they feel any gratitude to the Soviets
Just because one side happens to lose a lot of people during war (your 1 in 7 number) doesn't mean the intent of the war was actually to kill everyone.
"After the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler expressed his future plans for the Slavs:
"'As for the ridiculous hundred million Slavs, we will mould the best of them as we see fit, and we will isolate the rest of them in their own pig-styes; and anyone who talks about cherishing the local inhabitants and civilising them, goes straight off into a concentration camp![62]'"
Dusting off old history books to try to predict the outcome of the invention of strong AI and robots is ludicrous!
So is dusting off old SF books to try to predict the invention of strong AI and robots that are actually useful outside the factory (and, possibly, war zones). There is no such thing as "strong AI", and I have seen no persuasive evidence that there ever will be.
Yep, you are right. The U.S. should cede control of the world to those nice Russians and Chinese. They'll have your best interests at heart.
I am pleased (and rather amused) to note that you begin, even if unintentionally, by admitting that the USA has indeed seized control of the world. Next you allege, without the slightest shred of supporting evidence, that if the USA relinquished control of the world, the Russians and Chinese would seize it. But when did they ever do anything like that before? (Disclaimer: I am a historian, so I tend to think about the historical record when I see such allegations).
Perhaps you will talk about the Warsaw Pact, the Iron Curtain, the "Domino Theory", the Chinese annexation of Tibet, and so on. Well, the Iron Curtain and the Warsaw Pact arose after a European nation (Germany), with what the Soviets believed to be support from the USA and Britain, launched a war of extermination against all Slavs in 1941. That attack was repelled, with the deaths of one in seven of the people of the USSR - men, women and children. (The equivalent number of deaths for the USA today would be about 45 million - that is about 15,000 times as many as those who died on 9/11). Reasoning, logically enough, that the German attack had nearly succeeded - German soldiers actually reached the Moscow tramlines before winter and fresh Soviet armies stabilized the front - the Soviet leaders decided to push the "starting line" for any future war of extermination by the West back as far as they could. That was the Iron Curtain. Any nation that has lost one-seventh of its entire population to a vicious attack will be qualified to argue whether this strategy was justified. Otherwise, not so much.
The "Domino Theory" was the ridiculous thesis that, if "the communists" managed to take over any one nation, it would be followed by all the surrounding nations. Eventually the USA would stand alone as the last place where billionaires could feast while the poor starved in gutters. To avert this horrible threat, the billionaires decreed that all "communist takeovers" must be fought to the last local soldier. This was the story in Vietnam. After a horrible war that killed over 3 million people, most of them innocent of any wrongdoing, American forces were driven from Vietnam in headlong, ignominious defeat. How many surrounding nations "went communist" as a result? Not a single one. (Although a hideous tyranny was set up in Cambodia as a direct result of the US intervention).
While the USSR existed, it was at least possible to argue that it had an ideology that it might try to spread by force. Since 1991, of course, the USSR has not existed. The USSR, and then Russia, agreed with no argument at all to give up control of East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and even Belarus and Ukraine (which had been integral parts of Russia for much longer than the USA has existed). Still, Russia has a land area twice that of the USA, China or Canada - much of which is under-utilized or even completely unused. Its population is quite small for such a vast territory, so the last thing it needs is more territory. All Russia wants is to be left alone to develop quietly in peace.
China is just as peacefully inclined, although it went through a near-death experience every bit as bad as the Soviet one, when it was invaded by Japan in 1937-45. Unlike Russia, it did not have the possibility of "pushing back the starting line", but it does have every intention of keeping its borders intact and preventing any foreign invasion or interference.
The leaders of China and Russia have repeatedly explained, in public and with a wealth of detail, that they prefer a multi-polar world in which different peoples, nations, religions, cultures and economic systems coexist peacefully and interact willingly through trade and other forms of exchange. They do not seek to take over other people's countries and run them exclusively for their own benefi
Fleming, however, ran a few tests, decided it wouldn't work in a human body, and shelved it. 20 years later another guy hauled it back out and did the dirty work of purifying it and testing it.
In fact Fleming established that penicillin was non-toxic to humans. He wasn't even the first person to publish on the subject: according to the Wikipedia entry,
"In 1897 a French physician, Ernest Duchesne at École du Service de Santé Militaire in Lyon, published a medical thesis entitled Contribution à l'étude de la concurrence vitale chez les micro-organismes : antagonisme entre les moisissures et les microbes (Contribution to the study of the vital competition in micro-organisms: antagonism between molds and microbes) in which he specifically studied the interaction between Escherichia coli and Penicillium glaucum".
All of this actually reinforces my main point, which is that scientists often stumble across unexpected properties that can be used to advantage. Precisely because the results are serendipitous, they usually don't take any decisive steps to make products or money out of their discoveries; nevertheless the discoveries have been made, and the door has been opened for someone more practically-minded (or money-minded) to follow up, then or later.
An understandable reaction, but it's not likely things will work out that way. Makers of current battery types will have to shift quickly; but just think of all the devices that use batteries, and that can now be made so very much better!
"This was a serendipitous discovery as the researcher was playing around with the battery and coated it in a thin gel layer".
Just like Fleming's discovery of penicillin. In each case, something "just happened"; and the researcher was knowledgeable and alert enough to spot the significance of an apparently irrelevant event.
We need a lot more of this kind of thing, and it is only likely to happen where researchers have an adequate amount of freedom to experiment and "play around". Perhaps Heinlein's "Long Range Foundation" was a bit extreme - funding only projects that are very ambitious, very far-out, and immensely expensive, and even then only on condition that no useful results are expect for a long time - but that's the true spirit of scientific research. "Cast your bread upon the waters..." Ironically, the greatest practical benefits come from research that does not aim for any practical benefits.
You're just demonstrating your ignorance... Software on a weapons system is used to improve the weapons system's performance. It automates tasks which once required a human to do. It also determines whether a component of the plane is not working properly, which means it improves maintenance, thus effectiveness and longevity of the plane. Just like sensors do in your car now.
Ironic that you write about the parent "demonstrating ignorance", when you haven't taken the trouble to understand that the topic is *logistics* software. This software is NOT part of the aircraft at all; it is basically doing the job that an experienced store-room manager used to do back in the days when weapons systems were simple enough to be understood by human beings. From TFA:
"Unlike the airframe and engine, however, the software is not built into the plane itself. Instead, it runs on ground computers to support operations, mission planning, maintenance and sustainability".
I say again: "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life". Try to write down religious insights, and they slip through the pages like water between the fingers.
The Catechism that you mention sounds like the driest of dry bones - the remains of what was once a living, joyous being.
If renewables are cheaper, they're going to get built.
Unfortunately, it's extremely difficult - perhaps even impossible - to say what is cheaper. Government regulations and subsidies have so muddied the water that vast fortunes can now be made out of selling power that is generated less cheaply and efficently than it could be by other means.
But that is just one extreme example of how government regulation and subsidy distorts everything. It's very ironic that the governments that boast most loudly about their wonderful free-enterprise, free-market capitalist economies are the same governments that control interest rates - the fundamental price which controls all other prices. Every time a government passes a law, crates a regulation or offers a subsidy, it distorts the economy and prevents the existence of a free market.
The author of the paper, Professor Benjamin Sovacool, is Director of the Sussex Energy Group at the University of Sussex. Confusingly, the University also describes him as "Professor of Energy Policy (SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit)". A brief search of the University of Sussex, University of Aarhus, and Wikipedia Web sites reveals that he has published a vast number of papers, given many, many talks and seminars, published books, received grants, and has a PhD in 'science and technology studies from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, where he won the “Outstanding Dissertation of the Year” award from the College of Social Sciences and Humanities'.
Nowhere, however, can I find any information about Professor Sovacool's undergraduate degree discipline. From his published biographical details, he seems to have popped into existence at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University where he received his PhD - awarded, be it noted, by "the College of Social Sciences and Humanities".
Until I learn to the contrary, therefore, I am assuming that Professor Sovacool is essentially a social science specialist who has ventured - very boldly indeed - into the topical, not to say fashionable, world of climate change, global warming, and general greenness. TFA tells us that, "In a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Energy Research & Social Science, Professor Sovacool analyses energy transitions throughout history and argues that only looking towards the past can often paint an overly bleak and unnecessary picture".
"Energy Research & Social Science". Hmmmmmmm. Professor Sovacool advances undeniably compelling (if not very scientific) arguments, such as this:
"Moving from wood to coal in Europe, for example, took between 96 and 160 years, whereas electricity took 47 to 69 years to enter into mainstream use... Ontario completed a shift away from coal between 2003 and 2014; a major household energy programme in Indonesia took just three years to move two-thirds of the population from kerosene stoves to LPG stoves; and France's nuclear power programme saw supply rocket from four per cent of the electricity supply market in 1970 to 40 per cent in 1982".
Well, there you have it. Clearly that evidence leaves no possible doubt that "[t]he worldwide reliance on burning fossil fuels to create energy could be phased out in a decade". To the satisfaction of any social science professor, anyway.
Arguably, no real religion has a formal structure or a belief system. Those are just the hollow outward appearances that attempt to take the place of the real religion, which is usually lost forever as soon as its founder dies. "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life". Try to write down religious insights, and they slip through the pages like water between the fingers.
If the church of the flying spaghetti monster had lots of people gifting all their income to the church or spending years of their lives at sea working for the church then they would likely be considered a real religion.
Which brings us right back to "Stranger in a Strange Land".
How should a court of law test whether or not a follower actually believes?
This one I can do! It was worked out long ago. Tie them up and throw them into a deep river or lake. If they sink and drown, they were believers. If they survive, they obviously had help from the devil, so they are wicked unbelievers and must be burned.
Compared to "all major industries", or indeed anyone who has skin in the game, government departments have very little at stake in the matter of computer security. I would be interested to see a list of all individual government employees and contractors who have been severely punished for failing to make IT systems secure. (Except that if such a list exists, it is almost certainly "Top Secret"). In really serious cases, the government tends to punish taxpayers by pretending to fine itself.
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Capitalism is philosophically based upon perfectly informed rational consumers, which these guys aren't, by definition
There is, in fact, no such thing as a perfectly informed rational customer, there never has been and there never will be. Those two "simplifying" assumptions are typical of the fundamental defects that render economics almost worthless in its present form. Of course economists like simplifying assumptions, because otherwise their field would be far too complicated to make any sense out of. Unfortunately the assumptions mean that the resulting rules and laws apply only in an abstract world which hardly bears any resemblance to the real world we live in.
1. "Perfectly informed". Even in the simplest possible model of a market, a village produce market where fruit and vegetables are being sold from a collection of stalls, perfect information is far from guaranteed. Who knows what Fred has been spraying on his pumpkins? And have those delicious-looking peaches been previously frozen, transported, and defrosted? Usually the vendors will know, and maybe a few others - but then it is in the interest of the vendors to keep the information secret, even at the cost of a bribe or quid pro quo favour. Thus the concealment of important product information actually becomes part of the market, with its own price. Consider now a more sophisticated, "evolved" market such as the electronic stock exchanges where corporations will pay huge sums of money to have their servers a few feet closer to the exchange's own servers. That may give them a few nanoseconds' head start, which may be enough to make the difference between winning billions and losing billions. Again, we see payments (this time, very large ones) being made precisely to prevent information being perfectly shared. And the pattern is repeated everywhere.
2. "Rational customers". This one departs even further from reality and common sense. If you think about it for five minutes, you will see that the very concept of a "rational customer" is wholly artificial and almost meaningless in relation to the real world. We are all rational, more or less by definition, as a function of being human. But what does that really mean? I think you'll agree that virtually all humans use reason (facts and logic) as a tool when they need to, never as a way of deciding what it is they want. To suggest that all customers can be "rational" is, in effect, to make the ridiculous assumption that they are wholly focused all of the time on making financial gains! It would be more realistic to say that a rational person is one who devotes as little time, effort and attention to economic necessaities as possible, the better to enjoy the good things of life - which are NOT money (as such) or buying and selling. It is true, to some extent, that those who do best at the economic "game" are those who focus on it most unremittingly - spending almost all their waking time in business activities and reckoning their success in life solely by their net worth. For such people, the Bible has a warning.
"And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully: And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits? And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided? So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God". (Luke 12:16-21) http://biblehub.com/kjv/luke/1...
That is, unless you actually believe in the fairy tale that government and the people are one and the same.
Well, I believe that one originated with the US... er... government.
When I first saw the title of this article, I thought it might be about software vendors auditing their software for bugs and deficiencies. Silly me! Of course, bugs and deficiencies don't matter - the legal small print has all that covered. No liability, whatever happens.
No, the software audits are all about customers paying full whack for every single copy of the software - whether it works or not.
Considering the Germans were the US and UK's sworn enemy in WWII the Russians would have to be fucking idiots to believe that by the time each nation entered the war.
Like many people who are very sure they are right, you don't seem to have all the facts. Are you aware that, at the time when the German invasion of the USSR was launched, the USA was neutral? (It stayed neutral for the first 27 months of the war, and only became a combatant as a result of the Pearl Harbor attack, which even it could hardly ignore). Or that very high-ranking American leaders had strong sympathies with the Nazi movement? In 1940 Joseph Kennedy, the future President's father, was already warning FDR (from his official post as US Ambassador to Britain) that the Germans were sure to win, and that the US government should drop the British as a lost cause and make overtures to Berlin. Prescott Bush, the father of future President George H.W. Bush, was hand in glove with the Nazi leadership, as were John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen. And IBM, as is well known, went on selling equipment and technical services to Nazi Germany long after the invasion of the USSR. See (among many other sources) http://www.washingtonsblog.com... for a recent summary.
Wow. Just wow. You have to be fucking kidding me. Now I know you're either a troll or just fucking clueless. You're honestly arguing that both Communist Russia was a better system than the Capitalist US during the 20th century and the US is the only place where billionaires feast and the poor starve? That is just blatant ignorance. I heard it's great being a migrant worker in Qatar. Communist North Korea sounds great too. Maybe you should move there. It's a great system and no one starves.
You obviously didn't read what I wrote - you have reacted violently to something that you seem to imagine I implied. But I didn't. I was summing up the fears that led to the US government being pushed into disastrous and counter-productive wars that killed millions of people to no purpose. If you look back at what I wrote, you will see that I did not assert that "Communist Russia was a better system than the Capitalist US during the 20th century" or that "the US is the only place where billionaires feast and the poor starve". (Although I note that you don't deny that billionaires do feast, and the poor do starve, in the USA - the home of the brave and the land of the free (to starve)). If you take the time and trouble to study the historical documents that reveal the beliefs and fears of senior US government officials, bankers, businessmen, and intelligence officials, you will see the clear evidence that the very rich were scared rigid of "communism", which they thought would lead to them being deprived of some of their wealth. Whereas they weren't scared of Nazism and fascism, as they thought they could control them.
Places they took by FORCE. Places that had different cultures and languages. I had ancestors that left Poland because they didn't want to be a part of Communist Russia. Many left those countries for the same reason. You are whitewashing Russian history.
Places they took by force - from the Nazi occupying forces in 1944-45. Places where many very unpleasant people were very eager, during the German occupation, to help the Nazis get rid of Jews, gypsies, Slavs, and other people the Nazis - and their helpers - despised and hated. I can well understand that your ancestors left Poland because they didn't want to be ruled by the Soviets - but would they have preferred the Nazis, which was the main alternative? Didn't they feel any gratitude to the Soviets
Just because one side happens to lose a lot of people during war (your 1 in 7 number) doesn't mean the intent of the war was actually to kill everyone.
"After the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler expressed his future plans for the Slavs:
"'As for the ridiculous hundred million Slavs, we will mould the best of them as we see fit, and we will isolate the rest of them in their own pig-styes; and anyone who talks about cherishing the local inhabitants and civilising them, goes straight off into a concentration camp![62]'"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Dusting off old history books to try to predict the outcome of the invention of strong AI and robots is ludicrous!
So is dusting off old SF books to try to predict the invention of strong AI and robots that are actually useful outside the factory (and, possibly, war zones). There is no such thing as "strong AI", and I have seen no persuasive evidence that there ever will be.
Apple is an Irish company and registers profits there, not USA. The US merely has a small branch office that at a loss.
Oh, thanks for that! I was getting quite worked up and needed some amusement. Your comment is the funniest thing I have seen today.
Yep, you are right. The U.S. should cede control of the world to those nice Russians and Chinese. They'll have your best interests at heart.
I am pleased (and rather amused) to note that you begin, even if unintentionally, by admitting that the USA has indeed seized control of the world. Next you allege, without the slightest shred of supporting evidence, that if the USA relinquished control of the world, the Russians and Chinese would seize it. But when did they ever do anything like that before? (Disclaimer: I am a historian, so I tend to think about the historical record when I see such allegations).
Perhaps you will talk about the Warsaw Pact, the Iron Curtain, the "Domino Theory", the Chinese annexation of Tibet, and so on. Well, the Iron Curtain and the Warsaw Pact arose after a European nation (Germany), with what the Soviets believed to be support from the USA and Britain, launched a war of extermination against all Slavs in 1941. That attack was repelled, with the deaths of one in seven of the people of the USSR - men, women and children. (The equivalent number of deaths for the USA today would be about 45 million - that is about 15,000 times as many as those who died on 9/11). Reasoning, logically enough, that the German attack had nearly succeeded - German soldiers actually reached the Moscow tramlines before winter and fresh Soviet armies stabilized the front - the Soviet leaders decided to push the "starting line" for any future war of extermination by the West back as far as they could. That was the Iron Curtain. Any nation that has lost one-seventh of its entire population to a vicious attack will be qualified to argue whether this strategy was justified. Otherwise, not so much.
The "Domino Theory" was the ridiculous thesis that, if "the communists" managed to take over any one nation, it would be followed by all the surrounding nations. Eventually the USA would stand alone as the last place where billionaires could feast while the poor starved in gutters. To avert this horrible threat, the billionaires decreed that all "communist takeovers" must be fought to the last local soldier. This was the story in Vietnam. After a horrible war that killed over 3 million people, most of them innocent of any wrongdoing, American forces were driven from Vietnam in headlong, ignominious defeat. How many surrounding nations "went communist" as a result? Not a single one. (Although a hideous tyranny was set up in Cambodia as a direct result of the US intervention).
While the USSR existed, it was at least possible to argue that it had an ideology that it might try to spread by force. Since 1991, of course, the USSR has not existed. The USSR, and then Russia, agreed with no argument at all to give up control of East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and even Belarus and Ukraine (which had been integral parts of Russia for much longer than the USA has existed). Still, Russia has a land area twice that of the USA, China or Canada - much of which is under-utilized or even completely unused. Its population is quite small for such a vast territory, so the last thing it needs is more territory. All Russia wants is to be left alone to develop quietly in peace.
China is just as peacefully inclined, although it went through a near-death experience every bit as bad as the Soviet one, when it was invaded by Japan in 1937-45. Unlike Russia, it did not have the possibility of "pushing back the starting line", but it does have every intention of keeping its borders intact and preventing any foreign invasion or interference.
The leaders of China and Russia have repeatedly explained, in public and with a wealth of detail, that they prefer a multi-polar world in which different peoples, nations, religions, cultures and economic systems coexist peacefully and interact willingly through trade and other forms of exchange. They do not seek to take over other people's countries and run them exclusively for their own benefi
This is just one of the reasons that patents really ought to be use it or lose it.
Yes, that is a very good suggestion.
Fleming, however, ran a few tests, decided it wouldn't work in a human body, and shelved it. 20 years later another guy hauled it back out and did the dirty work of purifying it and testing it.
In fact Fleming established that penicillin was non-toxic to humans. He wasn't even the first person to publish on the subject: according to the Wikipedia entry,
"In 1897 a French physician, Ernest Duchesne at École du Service de Santé Militaire in Lyon, published a medical thesis entitled Contribution à l'étude de la concurrence vitale chez les micro-organismes : antagonisme entre les moisissures et les microbes (Contribution to the study of the vital competition in micro-organisms: antagonism between molds and microbes) in which he specifically studied the interaction between Escherichia coli and Penicillium glaucum".
All of this actually reinforces my main point, which is that scientists often stumble across unexpected properties that can be used to advantage. Precisely because the results are serendipitous, they usually don't take any decisive steps to make products or money out of their discoveries; nevertheless the discoveries have been made, and the door has been opened for someone more practically-minded (or money-minded) to follow up, then or later.
An understandable reaction, but it's not likely things will work out that way. Makers of current battery types will have to shift quickly; but just think of all the devices that use batteries, and that can now be made so very much better!
"This was a serendipitous discovery as the researcher was playing around with the battery and coated it in a thin gel layer".
Just like Fleming's discovery of penicillin. In each case, something "just happened"; and the researcher was knowledgeable and alert enough to spot the significance of an apparently irrelevant event.
We need a lot more of this kind of thing, and it is only likely to happen where researchers have an adequate amount of freedom to experiment and "play around". Perhaps Heinlein's "Long Range Foundation" was a bit extreme - funding only projects that are very ambitious, very far-out, and immensely expensive, and even then only on condition that no useful results are expect for a long time - but that's the true spirit of scientific research. "Cast your bread upon the waters..." Ironically, the greatest practical benefits come from research that does not aim for any practical benefits.
You're just demonstrating your ignorance... Software on a weapons system is used to improve the weapons system's performance. It automates tasks which once required a human to do. It also determines whether a component of the plane is not working properly, which means it improves maintenance, thus effectiveness and longevity of the plane. Just like sensors do in your car now.
Ironic that you write about the parent "demonstrating ignorance", when you haven't taken the trouble to understand that the topic is *logistics* software. This software is NOT part of the aircraft at all; it is basically doing the job that an experienced store-room manager used to do back in the days when weapons systems were simple enough to be understood by human beings. From TFA:
"Unlike the airframe and engine, however, the software is not built into the plane itself. Instead, it runs on ground computers to support operations, mission planning, maintenance and sustainability".
I say again: "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life". Try to write down religious insights, and they slip through the pages like water between the fingers.
The Catechism that you mention sounds like the driest of dry bones - the remains of what was once a living, joyous being.
Congratulations. Your account has been upgraded with more free disk space.
Said the BOFH... 8-)
Probably because of being in England... 8-)
The idea that fossil fuels could be "phased out" in a decade is so ludicrous that I hardly know where to begin.
You must be new to the world of social science.
If renewables are cheaper, they're going to get built.
Unfortunately, it's extremely difficult - perhaps even impossible - to say what is cheaper. Government regulations and subsidies have so muddied the water that vast fortunes can now be made out of selling power that is generated less cheaply and efficently than it could be by other means.
But that is just one extreme example of how government regulation and subsidy distorts everything. It's very ironic that the governments that boast most loudly about their wonderful free-enterprise, free-market capitalist economies are the same governments that control interest rates - the fundamental price which controls all other prices. Every time a government passes a law, crates a regulation or offers a subsidy, it distorts the economy and prevents the existence of a free market.
The author of the paper, Professor Benjamin Sovacool, is Director of the Sussex Energy Group at the University of Sussex. Confusingly, the University also describes him as "Professor of Energy Policy (SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit)". A brief search of the University of Sussex, University of Aarhus, and Wikipedia Web sites reveals that he has published a vast number of papers, given many, many talks and seminars, published books, received grants, and has a PhD in 'science and technology studies from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, where he won the “Outstanding Dissertation of the Year” award from the College of Social Sciences and Humanities'.
Nowhere, however, can I find any information about Professor Sovacool's undergraduate degree discipline. From his published biographical details, he seems to have popped into existence at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University where he received his PhD - awarded, be it noted, by "the College of Social Sciences and Humanities".
Until I learn to the contrary, therefore, I am assuming that Professor Sovacool is essentially a social science specialist who has ventured - very boldly indeed - into the topical, not to say fashionable, world of climate change, global warming, and general greenness. TFA tells us that, "In a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Energy Research & Social Science, Professor Sovacool analyses energy transitions throughout history and argues that only looking towards the past can often paint an overly bleak and unnecessary picture".
"Energy Research & Social Science". Hmmmmmmm. Professor Sovacool advances undeniably compelling (if not very scientific) arguments, such as this:
"Moving from wood to coal in Europe, for example, took between 96 and 160 years, whereas electricity took 47 to 69 years to enter into mainstream use... Ontario completed a shift away from coal between 2003 and 2014; a major household energy programme in Indonesia took just three years to move two-thirds of the population from kerosene stoves to LPG stoves; and France's nuclear power programme saw supply rocket from four per cent of the electricity supply market in 1970 to 40 per cent in 1982".
Well, there you have it. Clearly that evidence leaves no possible doubt that "[t]he worldwide reliance on burning fossil fuels to create energy could be phased out in a decade". To the satisfaction of any social science professor, anyway.
http://phys.org/news/2016-04-f...
Arguably, no real religion has a formal structure or a belief system. Those are just the hollow outward appearances that attempt to take the place of the real religion, which is usually lost forever as soon as its founder dies. "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life". Try to write down religious insights, and they slip through the pages like water between the fingers.
If the church of the flying spaghetti monster had lots of people gifting all their income to the church or spending years of their lives at sea working for the church then they would likely be considered a real religion.
Which brings us right back to "Stranger in a Strange Land".
How should a court of law test whether or not a follower actually believes?
This one I can do! It was worked out long ago. Tie them up and throw them into a deep river or lake. If they sink and drown, they were believers. If they survive, they obviously had help from the devil, so they are wicked unbelievers and must be burned.
A religion is a formal structure incorporating a belief system.
I call Zen Buddhism. Not only does it not have "a formal structure" or "a belief system", it lays great stress on avoiding both.
Compared to "all major industries", or indeed anyone who has skin in the game, government departments have very little at stake in the matter of computer security. I would be interested to see a list of all individual government employees and contractors who have been severely punished for failing to make IT systems secure. (Except that if such a list exists, it is almost certainly "Top Secret"). In really serious cases, the government tends to punish taxpayers by pretending to fine itself.
Putin is thought to be the richest man in the world.
"is thought"??? The unattributed, anonymous passive voice? Is that honestly the best you can do?
You are thought to be a ridiculous dork.