Technically, NFC is a requirement to sell any meaningful numbers in Japan and a couple of other Asian countries. It's been cited as the main reason of apple's utter failure in Japan for example (in addition to a couple of other usability features that are essentially mandatory on a phone to sell to anyone outside apple fan crowd in there).
Finally, the problem with NFC adaptation has exactly ZERO to do with phone makers. Nokia, with their ~40% worldwide market share two years ago drove really hard to get NFC payments rolled in.
Guess what stopped them? Essentially every single bank and credit institution wanting their own piece of pie. The reason Japan got it working was because they managed to get some decent agreements on terms early on. Now that the cake is big enough for everyone to want to draw blood over it, we have a situation where no credit organisation or bank will agree on a scheme without significant reimbursement, and their kind of "significant" would make NFC payments prohibitively expensive.
But if you want NFC, there's at least a dosen off the shelf nokia models that come with the chip. And then there's pretty much any japanese phone. Just grab one off the shelf/internet The only reason this is news that hit slashdot is because it has the five magical letters associated with it.
Lack of atmosphere presents a significant extra challenge but sure, the moon is also a viable source if we can establish that it's bedrock contains valuable minerals.
Personally, I suspect the first thing we will be learning is how to mine the asteroid belt, as that won't require messing around with planetary levels of gravity.
Ah, that makes more sense. Not sure why you think this would force anyone to "power up their own fire control radar", though. In simulated engagements F-22's have generally operated on passive sensors, even when engaged by an opposing force an order of magnitude larger than their own.
The more of the opponent's forces in the air, the less you want to paint huge crosshairs on yourself by firing your own active radar. When you are actually forced into pushing air superiority without friendly radar support (i.e. escorting bomber planes to enemy radar installations/airfields), you will likely have little choice in the matter.
The US isn't planning on flying it's aircraft thousands of miles into enemy territory - most engagements are likely to take place over neutral territory or coastal areas. Do you honestly think that the US wants to invade mainland China?
You can use the actual names. Taiwan. And yes, to gain air superiority over Taiwan, US will have to hit mainland China, as pretty much all radar installations and airfields are there.
Else, you can kiss air superiority good bye, and without it, US has nothing on China as far as conventional warfare goes.
This means that friendly guidance vs even low grade stealth is going to be non-existent, and enemy ground radar installations are functional and unsuppresed.
I don't see how that follows, even given your initial (flawed) premise.
To get radar guidance for missiles, stealth fighter requires active radar guidance from another source. To get active radar guidance from another source, that source has to be in meaningful range, and unsuppressed by the enemy. Enemy stealth fighter goes to hunt for your AWACS, which is forced to pull out, leaving you without radar support. You either fire your own radar and die, or rely on passive sensors deep in enemy territory, and get overwhelmed anyway at the time of airstrike at the latest, as enemy will know your general location and simply bombard the area with radar coverage at which point their conventional air superiority aircraft cause significant attrition in your forces.
The goal of chinese fighter is NOT to win toe-to-toe match vs F-22. It's goal is to push back US AWACS craft into ineffective range and force F-22s to fire up their own fire control radar or retreat due to lack of targeting data when achieving it's main task of winning air superiority.
Sure. Good luck with that. Before you can push back the AWACS, you have to get through the F-22's, F-35's, and assorted other aircraft being fielded. This is a bit like saying "the goal of our infantry is to push back their artillery". Far easier said than done.
It's actually quite a bit easier to kill an AWACS craft (which usually means a retrofitted civilian airliner with a radome) with a low grade stealth fighter then to defend one from it. F-22s and F-35s escorting these will face the same dilemma - how do you defend against something you can't see until the strike is executed.
As strategic value of each AWACS craft is far greater then of each stealth fighter, these will be the priority targets for chinese stealth fighters in air superiority war. Sure, you'll kill most if not all chinese stealth fighters. But not before your AWACS is gone and your guys inside enemy territory find themselves without AWACS capabilities.
And for this, chinese don't need 2000 air superiority aircraft. They need a small percentage of stealth air superiority fighters and a large conventional air superiority force which will move in the moment F-22's stealth is compromised.
A "small percentage of stealth aircraft" isn't likely to compromise anything. They'd have to detect the F-22 - which seems highly unlikely - AND avoid detection from the F-22's passive sensors in the process - which is impossible.
And missing word in last paragraph, it's supposed to say "2000 stealth air superiority aircraft". Point being that most of the air force can be conventional.
You sure are pulling a lot of numbers out of your ass....
Air superiority aircraft. When you're defensive, you don't have to have a lot of stealth ones. Just enough to force enemy stealth fighters to power up their own fire control radar. The numbers are real, and have been published by various credible defense journals, Jane's being one.
Except the F-22 has the ability to share sensor data with other aircraft. So you can send one F-22 way forward, hit the enemy with your active radar, then have the 10 F-22's behind it light up the bad guys with missiles without needing to operate any of their own sensors. That tech alone gives it a massive advantage over anything else in the skies today. Add to that the fact that China has no missiles capable of being used at ranges available to the F-22, and you're left with the conclusion that even if the Chinese have somehow managed to develop an aircraft with decent radar and stealth characteristics similar to the F-22, they'd still be heavily outmatched in any encounter.
Which once again, brings us to the problem of uneven ground. US is not expecting to field it's craft in the neutral or friendly, but hostile territory. This means that friendly guidance vs even low grade stealth is going to be non-existent, and enemy ground radar installations are functional and unsuppresed. The goal of chinese fighter is NOT to win toe-to-toe match vs F-22. It's goal is to push back US AWACS craft into ineffective range and force F-22s to fire up their own fire control radar or retreat due to lack of targeting data when achieving it's main task of winning air superiority.
And for this, chinese don't need 2000 air superiority aircraft. They need a small percentage of stealth air superiority fighters and a large conventional air superiority force which will move in the moment F-22's stealth is compromised.
1. Russians were above and beyond West in both radar tech and SAM tech by at least two-three decades according to jane's back when soviet fell apart and some US specialists got to poke at some soviet tech. It's one of the development areas known to have not stopped due to lack of funding as it was considered strategically important to Russia. Decades old S-300 is most likely capable or detecting and tracking F-117 if it comes close enough. S-400 was specifically built to track and kill B-2-generation aircraft and its derivatives in addition to cruise missiles. S-500 coming next year was officially designated as an "AWACS/Electronic warface aircraft killer" carrying insane sounding range of 600km. Most Chinese radar tech is direct derivative of russian tech. This was largely confirmed when US and Israel all but pissed their pants when hearing about S-400 being potentially sold to Iran - it would've essentially make any airstrike against Iran a one way trip for many strike craft and force to essentially use nothing but last generation stealth aircraft and still most likely take significant losses, cutting both Israel's options to zero and making US "plausible deniability" to any airstrike made zero as well.
2. Air-to-air combat between two stealth fighters has a very high probability of becoming dogfight situation. This is very, very bad for US whose strategic approach is to field a low number of nigh-untouchable aircraft from remote bases and aircraft carriers using long and medium range radar guided missiles as their main weapon. Stealth on the opponent's side makes both early detection and radar guidance difficult, and makes superiority of your own aircraft much lesser then that of the opponent. Up until now, US was counting on fielding something around 200 stealth aircraft to suppress Chinese airforce in event of Taiwan escalation (the main conflict at the moment). China can field approximately ten times that at least. So strategically this requires each airstrike group being able to fight in at least 1:4 scenario, and win with minimal attrition. Old stealth may indeed still allow for numbers, but would raise attrition rates to unacceptable levels causing a strategic failure.
We know how China's tech is mostly simply copied/licensed russian tech, we can trust that craft in question most likely have older, worse stealth, but significantly better radar system and most likely better tracking. We still couldn't fit helmet-mounted HUD and wide-angle tracking on F-22, it simply wasn't ready yet. It's a major feature of F-35 though, and it's a direct copy of russian tech reverse engineered from MiG-29 lifted from the few aircraft that Germany gained in unification. This system gives pilot tremendous advantage in dogfighting, and if chinese can indeed use older stealth to force F-22 into close range dogfights and has a copy of that old russian tech as well , F-22's superiority itself becomes questionable.
Finally, there's an obvious home field advantage for stealth aircraft and radar usage. Firing up your active radar essentially nullifies your stealth to a large degree. This is why neither F-117 nor B-2 carry any kind of active radar. F-22, being an actual air superiority fighter however does, and would have to actually fire it up to engage enemy fighters stealthy enough to disallow passive guidance. This makes it vulnerable to ground-based interception as well as air based one.
All in all, any opponent who is in possession of any stealth tech AND plans to fight inside or close to its border presents a number of strategic and tactical problems that opponent that doesn't have stealth fighters won't. Even in best-case scenario where Chinese wouldn't have access to russian radar tech and software, this would cause a major headache and significantly more restrictive rules of engagement, cutting down strategic options.
Consider that the moment you remove "must make short term profit" from equation, many major projects become very viable.
Terraforming Mars would be extremely difficult and costly, but the potential profit to humans as a race from lessons learned doing it, are simply astronomical. This is somewhat similar to industrial revolution - the cost of inventing and implementing many early inventions, as well as building necessary infrastructure was astronomical. The profit gained by both our race and individuals has far eclipsed the losses since then however. Same thing could be said about things like "terraforming other planets".
Considering how, in current real world economy Chinese are playing the long term profit at cost of short term one, and now tens of years after starting the fight they are emerging clear victors, I'd say long term approach is very viable as far as history is concerned. I do concede that it will not work in current capitalist system that governs the West at the moment without a major reform on our leaders' way of thinking back to what it was during industrial revolution era.
The article is, of course, being stupid-- deliberately stupid, I expect, but still stupid.
Actually, it's very smart, you just have to be able to see through the obvious in-your-face shock effect to see the real message. It's something that anyone with a keen analytical mind has known for a long time now.
The biggest, most powerful cause of pollution is overpopulation. The more people, and the higher their level of life, the worse we have to pollute the planet to sustain it. This is largely caused by our "prime directive" as an organic DNA-based life form, we are driven to push the population up to as high as the ecosystem will sustain. This isn't a feature unique to humans by any stretch - essentially all DNA-based life forms are bound by this rule. Just look at any large predator mammal for an example: As long as there is enough food to sustain the large population, they will reproduce at high rate. Eventually there are too many predators and too few prey, and predator population is naturally culled by lack of food. Lack of predators causes less deaths to predators in prey species, causing their population to grow large enough to again cause over-abundance starting the cycle again. Problem with us is, we learned how to overstress the ecosystem to the level where we essentially strip-mine it by polluting it to get our population and level of life up - meaning when we hit the true upper level of the sinus curve, we may be looking at a fall from which we will simply be unable to recover, as there will not be enough functional ecosystem left to sustain our species at all. Greenhouse gas emissions are just a small part of a big picture where we, as a race, are essentially depleting the planet's capability to sustain our population at the rate where we are not only depleting the "prey species" like predators do, but also inhibit ecosystem from repopulating the "prey" as well.
And in the end, we will suffer the same fate of all other species that have become too numerous for ecosystem to sustain them. Unless we control our reproduction rate on our own. We are already seeing this in North Africa, where land has been strip-mined of resources needed to sustain farmland, causing desert's essentially irreversible (the costs of pushing it back are enormous) growth. But all signs are pointing to the fact that those are minor problems in comparison to what we are potentially causing.
The idea there was essentially the same - you mount reactor derived from other naval reactors and mount it on a large, specialized barge. Part about it being submarine rather then marine is most likely a gimmick designed to attract attention to the project, seeing how unfeasible such a construction actually seems - the maintenance alone becomes far more difficult. In a nutshell, it's a simple submarine reactor, just without the submarine. Doesn't make much sense financially, seeing how expensive such a unit would be in comparison to a surface unit, and how much easier it would be to maintain a manned, surface unit.
Unless, of course, that's the whole point, because the company producing the plants plans to charge a massive premium on maintenance. Russian design is far more usable, as it has most of advantages of a normal nuclear power plant, as well as mobility granted by the barge.
That depends what you mean by "translating". Most fansubs are absolutely horrible quality, full of mistakes, misunderstandings, clumsy translation, excruciatingly poor writing, etc.
Has been true about 5-7 years ago for anime, and about 4-6 years for live action shows at least as far as translating japanese/german/french to english goes. Nowadays, the professional subs are generally considered by fans to be of lower quality, with fansubber crowd doing editing/translation passes and re-releasing the "professional" releases.
That and copyright infridgement pressure from fansubs has pressured at least anime industry to already do simulcast releases on the net with sites like crunchyroll "airing" new shows within hours of official airing in Japan. I'm fervently hoping this will also be the case for more mainstream shows - as grandparent noted, Europe is notoriously at least a season behind on most of the popular US shows.
Why not just do what most sensible people do and wait until 4.1 before upgrading from 3.x?
It usually means you:
1. Avoid the early adopter bugs. 2. All your addons keep on working. 3. Your browser remains stable and usable. 4. Most of the new "features" have been documented, and ways to disable them (if they are counter-productive to you) are already well known.
As mozilla usually keeps updating the previous major version of firefox for a long time after next major is released for security and stability reasons, there is very little reason to jump the bandwagon of early adopting, unless you really, really want some of the new features, and there's no addon that makes those features available in previous major version.
On a more funny note, that's what you also do with new windows releases. Firefox has come a long way.
As the massive fansub crowd, and lately several "simulcast" websites show, fully translating and subtitling an episode to a different language is an effort that takes only a few hours from a professional team.
It's not that Apple doesn't want to compete on price point - it's that it can't. Study the history, and the main reasons why Apple was bankrupt 10 years ago.
Apple's main selling point is the image associated with its devices, not the device itself. Device obviously has to be fitting the image, i.e. hip, trendy, pretty, usable, etc. But all of these and more are just an afterthought to the image.
This is why Apple is valued as "one of the most expensive technology companies in the world" if not THE most valuable, yet it stock nosedives every time Jobs gets a health scare. It's all about the image.
It's worth noting that this is also how USA became a technological superpower - copying and stealing from Europe.
This is in fact the case with most scientific leaders - they jump-start their catch-up with pretty open theft of inventions, and as their own engineers become more and more adept at technology they eventually become inventors who are stolen from themselves.
His is probably the worst paid job in the world when you factor in the risks. And it would still remain such even if he netted millions from it. Which he apparently doesn't, seeing how he has to sell book rights to pay for his legal defense.
It's actually pretty easy to spy via a "court subpoena". Setup a kangaroo court that will make whatever subpoena you want, and have it subpoena. Voila.
Slashdot Mirror
Technically, NFC is a requirement to sell any meaningful numbers in Japan and a couple of other Asian countries. It's been cited as the main reason of apple's utter failure in Japan for example (in addition to a couple of other usability features that are essentially mandatory on a phone to sell to anyone outside apple fan crowd in there).
Finally, the problem with NFC adaptation has exactly ZERO to do with phone makers. Nokia, with their ~40% worldwide market share two years ago drove really hard to get NFC payments rolled in.
Guess what stopped them? Essentially every single bank and credit institution wanting their own piece of pie. The reason Japan got it working was because they managed to get some decent agreements on terms early on. Now that the cake is big enough for everyone to want to draw blood over it, we have a situation where no credit organisation or bank will agree on a scheme without significant reimbursement, and their kind of "significant" would make NFC payments prohibitively expensive.
But if you want NFC, there's at least a dosen off the shelf nokia models that come with the chip. And then there's pretty much any japanese phone. Just grab one off the shelf/internet The only reason this is news that hit slashdot is because it has the five magical letters associated with it.
You really think that the New York Times would have published anything like what Wikileaks did?
Not "think" but "know". NYT was one of the three major papers whom wikileaks used as their fact-checkers and editors for all their latest major leaks.
So yes, we know that NYT would, and in fact by proxy did publish those facts.
So, a small number of stable and fast seed boxes are used by many uploaders?
Truly, this is news...
Indeed. The easiest way is to search for something, and then sort by amount of seeders.
Essentially every single torrent that is posted by a registered user and has decent amount of seeds is a real thing.
Lack of atmosphere presents a significant extra challenge but sure, the moon is also a viable source if we can establish that it's bedrock contains valuable minerals.
Personally, I suspect the first thing we will be learning is how to mine the asteroid belt, as that won't require messing around with planetary levels of gravity.
Ah, that makes more sense. Not sure why you think this would force anyone to "power up their own fire control radar", though. In simulated engagements F-22's have generally operated on passive sensors, even when engaged by an opposing force an order of magnitude larger than their own.
The more of the opponent's forces in the air, the less you want to paint huge crosshairs on yourself by firing your own active radar. When you are actually forced into pushing air superiority without friendly radar support (i.e. escorting bomber planes to enemy radar installations/airfields), you will likely have little choice in the matter.
The US isn't planning on flying it's aircraft thousands of miles into enemy territory - most engagements are likely to take place over neutral territory or coastal areas. Do you honestly think that the US wants to invade mainland China?
You can use the actual names. Taiwan. And yes, to gain air superiority over Taiwan, US will have to hit mainland China, as pretty much all radar installations and airfields are there.
Else, you can kiss air superiority good bye, and without it, US has nothing on China as far as conventional warfare goes.
This means that friendly guidance vs even low grade stealth is going to be non-existent, and enemy ground radar installations are functional and unsuppresed.
I don't see how that follows, even given your initial (flawed) premise.
To get radar guidance for missiles, stealth fighter requires active radar guidance from another source. To get active radar guidance from another source, that source has to be in meaningful range, and unsuppressed by the enemy. Enemy stealth fighter goes to hunt for your AWACS, which is forced to pull out, leaving you without radar support. You either fire your own radar and die, or rely on passive sensors deep in enemy territory, and get overwhelmed anyway at the time of airstrike at the latest, as enemy will know your general location and simply bombard the area with radar coverage at which point their conventional air superiority aircraft cause significant attrition in your forces.
The goal of chinese fighter is NOT to win toe-to-toe match vs F-22. It's goal is to push back US AWACS craft into ineffective range and force F-22s to fire up their own fire control radar or retreat due to lack of targeting data when achieving it's main task of winning air superiority.
Sure. Good luck with that. Before you can push back the AWACS, you have to get through the F-22's, F-35's, and assorted other aircraft being fielded. This is a bit like saying "the goal of our infantry is to push back their artillery". Far easier said than done.
It's actually quite a bit easier to kill an AWACS craft (which usually means a retrofitted civilian airliner with a radome) with a low grade stealth fighter then to defend one from it. F-22s and F-35s escorting these will face the same dilemma - how do you defend against something you can't see until the strike is executed.
As strategic value of each AWACS craft is far greater then of each stealth fighter, these will be the priority targets for chinese stealth fighters in air superiority war. Sure, you'll kill most if not all chinese stealth fighters. But not before your AWACS is gone and your guys inside enemy territory find themselves without AWACS capabilities.
And for this, chinese don't need 2000 air superiority aircraft. They need a small percentage of stealth air superiority fighters and a large conventional air superiority force which will move in the moment F-22's stealth is compromised.
A "small percentage of stealth aircraft" isn't likely to compromise anything. They'd have to detect the F-22 - which seems highly unlikely - AND avoid detection from the F-22's passive sensors in the process - which is impossible.
And missing word in last paragraph, it's supposed to say "2000 stealth air superiority aircraft". Point being that most of the air force can be conventional.
China can field 2,000 stealth aircraft?
You sure are pulling a lot of numbers out of your ass ....
Air superiority aircraft. When you're defensive, you don't have to have a lot of stealth ones. Just enough to force enemy stealth fighters to power up their own fire control radar. The numbers are real, and have been published by various credible defense journals, Jane's being one.
Except the F-22 has the ability to share sensor data with other aircraft. So you can send one F-22 way forward, hit the enemy with your active radar, then have the 10 F-22's behind it light up the bad guys with missiles without needing to operate any of their own sensors. That tech alone gives it a massive advantage over anything else in the skies today. Add to that the fact that China has no missiles capable of being used at ranges available to the F-22, and you're left with the conclusion that even if the Chinese have somehow managed to develop an aircraft with decent radar and stealth characteristics similar to the F-22, they'd still be heavily outmatched in any encounter.
Which once again, brings us to the problem of uneven ground. US is not expecting to field it's craft in the neutral or friendly, but hostile territory. This means that friendly guidance vs even low grade stealth is going to be non-existent, and enemy ground radar installations are functional and unsuppresed. The goal of chinese fighter is NOT to win toe-to-toe match vs F-22. It's goal is to push back US AWACS craft into ineffective range and force F-22s to fire up their own fire control radar or retreat due to lack of targeting data when achieving it's main task of winning air superiority.
And for this, chinese don't need 2000 air superiority aircraft. They need a small percentage of stealth air superiority fighters and a large conventional air superiority force which will move in the moment F-22's stealth is compromised.
Concerns are based on two problems:
1. Russians were above and beyond West in both radar tech and SAM tech by at least two-three decades according to jane's back when soviet fell apart and some US specialists got to poke at some soviet tech. It's one of the development areas known to have not stopped due to lack of funding as it was considered strategically important to Russia. Decades old S-300 is most likely capable or detecting and tracking F-117 if it comes close enough. S-400 was specifically built to track and kill B-2-generation aircraft and its derivatives in addition to cruise missiles. S-500 coming next year was officially designated as an "AWACS/Electronic warface aircraft killer" carrying insane sounding range of 600km.
Most Chinese radar tech is direct derivative of russian tech. This was largely confirmed when US and Israel all but pissed their pants when hearing about S-400 being potentially sold to Iran - it would've essentially make any airstrike against Iran a one way trip for many strike craft and force to essentially use nothing but last generation stealth aircraft and still most likely take significant losses, cutting both Israel's options to zero and making US "plausible deniability" to any airstrike made zero as well.
2. Air-to-air combat between two stealth fighters has a very high probability of becoming dogfight situation. This is very, very bad for US whose strategic approach is to field a low number of nigh-untouchable aircraft from remote bases and aircraft carriers using long and medium range radar guided missiles as their main weapon. Stealth on the opponent's side makes both early detection and radar guidance difficult, and makes superiority of your own aircraft much lesser then that of the opponent. Up until now, US was counting on fielding something around 200 stealth aircraft to suppress Chinese airforce in event of Taiwan escalation (the main conflict at the moment). China can field approximately ten times that at least. So strategically this requires each airstrike group being able to fight in at least 1:4 scenario, and win with minimal attrition. Old stealth may indeed still allow for numbers, but would raise attrition rates to unacceptable levels causing a strategic failure.
We know how China's tech is mostly simply copied/licensed russian tech, we can trust that craft in question most likely have older, worse stealth, but significantly better radar system and most likely better tracking. We still couldn't fit helmet-mounted HUD and wide-angle tracking on F-22, it simply wasn't ready yet. It's a major feature of F-35 though, and it's a direct copy of russian tech reverse engineered from MiG-29 lifted from the few aircraft that Germany gained in unification. This system gives pilot tremendous advantage in dogfighting, and if chinese can indeed use older stealth to force F-22 into close range dogfights and has a copy of that old russian tech as well , F-22's superiority itself becomes questionable.
Finally, there's an obvious home field advantage for stealth aircraft and radar usage. Firing up your active radar essentially nullifies your stealth to a large degree. This is why neither F-117 nor B-2 carry any kind of active radar. F-22, being an actual air superiority fighter however does, and would have to actually fire it up to engage enemy fighters stealthy enough to disallow passive guidance. This makes it vulnerable to ground-based interception as well as air based one.
All in all, any opponent who is in possession of any stealth tech AND plans to fight inside or close to its border presents a number of strategic and tactical problems that opponent that doesn't have stealth fighters won't. Even in best-case scenario where Chinese wouldn't have access to russian radar tech and software, this would cause a major headache and significantly more restrictive rules of engagement, cutting down strategic options.
Consider that the moment you remove "must make short term profit" from equation, many major projects become very viable.
Terraforming Mars would be extremely difficult and costly, but the potential profit to humans as a race from lessons learned doing it, are simply astronomical. This is somewhat similar to industrial revolution - the cost of inventing and implementing many early inventions, as well as building necessary infrastructure was astronomical. The profit gained by both our race and individuals has far eclipsed the losses since then however. Same thing could be said about things like "terraforming other planets".
Considering how, in current real world economy Chinese are playing the long term profit at cost of short term one, and now tens of years after starting the fight they are emerging clear victors, I'd say long term approach is very viable as far as history is concerned. I do concede that it will not work in current capitalist system that governs the West at the moment without a major reform on our leaders' way of thinking back to what it was during industrial revolution era.
The article is, of course, being stupid-- deliberately stupid, I expect, but still stupid.
Actually, it's very smart, you just have to be able to see through the obvious in-your-face shock effect to see the real message. It's something that anyone with a keen analytical mind has known for a long time now.
The biggest, most powerful cause of pollution is overpopulation. The more people, and the higher their level of life, the worse we have to pollute the planet to sustain it. This is largely caused by our "prime directive" as an organic DNA-based life form, we are driven to push the population up to as high as the ecosystem will sustain. This isn't a feature unique to humans by any stretch - essentially all DNA-based life forms are bound by this rule. Just look at any large predator mammal for an example: As long as there is enough food to sustain the large population, they will reproduce at high rate. Eventually there are too many predators and too few prey, and predator population is naturally culled by lack of food. Lack of predators causes less deaths to predators in prey species, causing their population to grow large enough to again cause over-abundance starting the cycle again. Problem with us is, we learned how to overstress the ecosystem to the level where we essentially strip-mine it by polluting it to get our population and level of life up - meaning when we hit the true upper level of the sinus curve, we may be looking at a fall from which we will simply be unable to recover, as there will not be enough functional ecosystem left to sustain our species at all. Greenhouse gas emissions are just a small part of a big picture where we, as a race, are essentially depleting the planet's capability to sustain our population at the rate where we are not only depleting the "prey species" like predators do, but also inhibit ecosystem from repopulating the "prey" as well.
And in the end, we will suffer the same fate of all other species that have become too numerous for ecosystem to sustain them. Unless we control our reproduction rate on our own. We are already seeing this in North Africa, where land has been strip-mined of resources needed to sustain farmland, causing desert's essentially irreversible (the costs of pushing it back are enormous) growth. But all signs are pointing to the fact that those are minor problems in comparison to what we are potentially causing.
This is VERY old idea, directly stolen from Russians. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power_station
The idea there was essentially the same - you mount reactor derived from other naval reactors and mount it on a large, specialized barge. Part about it being submarine rather then marine is most likely a gimmick designed to attract attention to the project, seeing how unfeasible such a construction actually seems - the maintenance alone becomes far more difficult. In a nutshell, it's a simple submarine reactor, just without the submarine. Doesn't make much sense financially, seeing how expensive such a unit would be in comparison to a surface unit, and how much easier it would be to maintain a manned, surface unit.
Unless, of course, that's the whole point, because the company producing the plants plans to charge a massive premium on maintenance. Russian design is far more usable, as it has most of advantages of a normal nuclear power plant, as well as mobility granted by the barge.
That depends what you mean by "translating". Most fansubs are absolutely horrible quality, full of mistakes, misunderstandings, clumsy translation, excruciatingly poor writing, etc.
Has been true about 5-7 years ago for anime, and about 4-6 years for live action shows at least as far as translating japanese/german/french to english goes. Nowadays, the professional subs are generally considered by fans to be of lower quality, with fansubber crowd doing editing/translation passes and re-releasing the "professional" releases.
That and copyright infridgement pressure from fansubs has pressured at least anime industry to already do simulcast releases on the net with sites like crunchyroll "airing" new shows within hours of official airing in Japan. I'm fervently hoping this will also be the case for more mainstream shows - as grandparent noted, Europe is notoriously at least a season behind on most of the popular US shows.
Why not just do what most sensible people do and wait until 4.1 before upgrading from 3.x?
It usually means you:
1. Avoid the early adopter bugs.
2. All your addons keep on working.
3. Your browser remains stable and usable.
4. Most of the new "features" have been documented, and ways to disable them (if they are counter-productive to you) are already well known.
As mozilla usually keeps updating the previous major version of firefox for a long time after next major is released for security and stability reasons, there is very little reason to jump the bandwagon of early adopting, unless you really, really want some of the new features, and there's no addon that makes those features available in previous major version.
On a more funny note, that's what you also do with new windows releases. Firefox has come a long way.
As the massive fansub crowd, and lately several "simulcast" websites show, fully translating and subtitling an episode to a different language is an effort that takes only a few hours from a professional team.
It's not that Apple doesn't want to compete on price point - it's that it can't. Study the history, and the main reasons why Apple was bankrupt 10 years ago.
Apple's main selling point is the image associated with its devices, not the device itself. Device obviously has to be fitting the image, i.e. hip, trendy, pretty, usable, etc. But all of these and more are just an afterthought to the image.
This is why Apple is valued as "one of the most expensive technology companies in the world" if not THE most valuable, yet it stock nosedives every time Jobs gets a health scare. It's all about the image.
It's worth noting that this is also how USA became a technological superpower - copying and stealing from Europe.
This is in fact the case with most scientific leaders - they jump-start their catch-up with pretty open theft of inventions, and as their own engineers become more and more adept at technology they eventually become inventors who are stolen from themselves.
His is probably the worst paid job in the world when you factor in the risks. And it would still remain such even if he netted millions from it. Which he apparently doesn't, seeing how he has to sell book rights to pay for his legal defense.
Assange isn't a fact-checker. He's a middle man that passes facts from ones disclosing to ones fact-checking.
Fact checkers include big name newspapers like NYT. Assange's merits lie in setting up the system and agreeing to take the heat.
It's actually pretty easy to spy via a "court subpoena". Setup a kangaroo court that will make whatever subpoena you want, and have it subpoena. Voila.
No point in military hardware dick-waving. We're looking at nuclear powers on both ends of the fence, so any potential full out war would imply MAD.
The point remains that they also cannot ignore EU law either. As a result, they end up in crossfire of a legal conflict between two giants.
This is one of those posts that makes you wish it was possible to reach 6 points.
World of Warcraft has an Undead guy riding with a mounted laser gun mounted on a flying shark. I think they have insiders...
Yet are still growing in absolute numbers by single-to-double digit percentage annually. I.e. anything but actually dying.