The logical response China would take would be to simply conquer Taiwan with its vastly superior military might, while extending the "suggestion" to US that any attempt to stop them would be viewed as an act of war on Chinese soil (as Chinese view Taiwan as a breakaway province, which is still part of China).
The reason they don't do it now is because they have too much to lose by doing so. If Taiwan rocks the boat, most nations will be content to look away after such stupidity, while US would be simply forced to, as it has nothing in its conventional military war chest that could put any real threat on China near its mainland. The only real means of offence would be naval, and Chinese submarine and cruise missile capacity has been mainly built on Russian tech, meaning any surface fleet would become sub-surface within a day of approaching strike range. And there's no way in hell that US Navy is going to put its expensive as hell carriers into position where they don't stand any chance of survival.
This isn't something I'm imagining - US navy intelligence has pretty much covered this about a decade ago when Chinese started building up, and several decades before that when they were comparing Soviet navy's focus on anti-ship missile-armed supersonic bombers and attack submarines over surface ships. It's where the infamous US submariner saying that "there are only two kinds of ships in a real naval war - submarines and targets" started.
It is rather difficult to bomb countries who have capability to bomb you back to stone age as a response. This discounts much of the Europe, Russia and China from the list.
The fact that you're willing to accept damage control over total elimination of the problem in the interest of principle as a counterpoint says a lot about your ethics. None of those words are complimentary.
One could argue that the system this as disgusting, warped and unethical as this can only exist with a permission from equally unethical, warped and disgusting individuals.
There is another angle in this. To many lonely elderly, things like these are their primary human contact. Think about it for a moment - do you really want to spend your retirement after your spouse dies in solitude, cared only by machines?
Because this is where this kind of progress is openly headed. It essentially ignores your psychological needs, and focuses on just taking care of the body.
The total sum is probably much higher, because this is aimed at Japanese market, where people are aging rapidly, while immigration laws are some tightest in the world.
As a result, there simply aren't enough workers to deal with the aged, typically at least partially disabled people. So the money has been thrown at robotics to do most of the carer's work instead. This is one of the examples.
Why? There's a boatload of software for symbian already, dating back to 2004 or so, most of it compatible with current versions. You're probably asking for a new UI, which is a different thing.
As an actual underlying OS, symbian can give any of the competition a head start, and still beat it by a mile. It's a very robust kernel, specifically designed for mobile devices, which allows it to perform same functions (and often more) then IOS and Android, while consuming much less hardware resources.
The problem is that UI in current gen of western symbian phones is very dated, and runs on even more dated hardware - specifically ARM11 at slightly over 400mhz with 128MB RAM for touchscreens and even less for those with keyboards and keypads. If you want to see symbian with flashier UI, you can turn to japanese phones using MOAP, which is essentially symbian with their own propietary UI on top. Those phones essentially blocked entry to iphones and android phones in Japan, in spite of massive marketing effort, and fixed follow ups showing apple having up to 60% of "smartphone market" while barely commanding a single digit number mostly among local hardcore apple fanbase in reality.
The beauty of symbian is in its phone and small mobile device-centric design - something that competition sorely lacks and is very visible, especially in terms of battery life.
Nokia has "been late" for new fad for almost every single time in its history. Be it clamshells, losing external antennas or designing the look of their phones, they have been late for all of them.
And then they sat on their being late, and came up with a product that was at least as good if not better then competition, while costing less. Much less. And they ended up destroying the competition.
This isn't some theory. This is something that happened in the past. Several times over. US folks just missed it because operators don't like selling phones that are tailored for users, rather then operators.
But Symbian, does anyone outside of tech circles even know what Symbian is? People know the iPhone, people have seen the commercial for the Droid, they know the BlackBerry, they recognize the Palm name but Symbian? Does the average person even know where to get a Symbian phone? Is there even a "flagship" phone? People can recognize the iPhone, a Droid, a BlackBerry some can even recognize a Pre, but what is the "must have" Symbian phone? No one knows that.
Outside US? We just call it "Nokia". It's that text on the phone that every other person in line has. This is something that US-centric sites like slashdot and their users really don't seem to get. Nokia has near-zero market penetration in the States because it didn't bow to pressure from operators, who in US are gods of the market. They made their phones for the end users instead, often screwing the operator in the process by refusing to allow a permanent lock-in. US operators refused to stock such phones, and sales were crap from get go. But result from having such phones in countries that have people actually buy their own phones in stores rather then operators? They have almost 50% of entire market outside US. People KNOW them. People were willing to buy essentially crappy, unfinished platform like n97 in droves, because it had "nokia" written on it. They're still buying them in fact. And that was a really shitty first attempt at making symbian touchscreen compatible. Nokia is a household name, something that everyone knows instantly, in line with brand names.
One other thing. Nokia's speciality has never been revolutionising. It has been evolving and out-competing on a price point. Apple, which never got any real traction outside US with their iphone is actually losing market outside US already, mostly to android. And that is because nokia is once again evolving the existing concept of touchphone into something they can make well, and then press the price low enough to kill the competition using their (on corporate level) legendary logistics. It's how they utterly butchered competition several times over during their existence in both cheap and expensive phones.
It's something they're fairly likely to pull off yet again.
Just because German version of fascist nazi government came with concentration camps, doesn't mean that every version does. This is very much the same for democracy, which was very different back in ancient Greece where it was born, or in revolutionary France where core beliefs of modern Western society were defined.
Nontheless it is beyond any shadow of doubt that elements of fascism in Western world have been on significant increase ever seen the end of Cold War, as power shifted from people-run government to corporation-run government.
Which is by definition, fascism. Your scare of concentration camps came from nazism and nazi ideals. WW2 Germany had both. Fascist part wasn't much prettier then nazi part mind you, just like our democratic fascism isn't pretty.
Trieste was not a submarine but a bathysphere. Bathysphere's, unlike submarines can take significant pressure because the sphere that need to survive the pressure differential is very small.
Komsomolets, and her companion submarines (there were several, with Komsomolets being largest) could dive to about 1km, mainly because their inner hulls were made out of TITANIUM. It's the tech that no one in the West has, and Russians noticed that while Komsomolets eclipsed anything West had by a mile and then some, the cost to build her was astronomical. Titanium subs were scrapped promptly after scaring the shit out of every military buff in the West with them because they simply weren't worth the price tag in spite of being vastly superior in every conceivable way.
It seems that Cameron indeed meant "bathysphere" and not "submarine".
For the record, ITER is not "European". Just as the name suggests it's an international effort. There simply isn't enough know-how on the topic on necessary level to go around, so all the competing companies and countries had to come together to get this thing working. Competition simply wouldn't work because of lack of resources for a project this big.
Also, welcome to reality, where ethical theory gets bulldozed by "enlightened greed" every time. Because unlike former that can only offer warm and fuzzy feelings, latter pays in cold, hard cash.
Privacy: You've got a smartphone. I've got a smartphone. Everybody's got a smartphone.
Just no? Also, smartphones are far more likely to be of company issue then normal ones. And mind you, the normal feature phones outnumber smart phones at ration of 5:1 at least, and in many countries 10:1+.
Don't buy cheapest CFLs, and your problem is solved. More expensive ones have a more expensive quality ballast and control electronics, as well as warmer and larger spectrum. These fix most if not all the problems you mentioned.
But when you buy the cheapest one you can find, all the problems you mentioned are usually present.
Funny, I though people on slashdot were mostly educated in mathematics, and know that "pay more initially and use for a lot longer and pay less for energy it uses" equals "pay less".
It's the uneducated that just look at the initial price tag and see "this costs more", ignoring the lifetime of the product and energy savings.
If CFLs are really so wonderful then there's no need for the government to get involved because people will buy them instead of ordinary bulbs. But they're not, so they're being forced on people who don't want them.
You're missing the obvious point ON PURPOSE. The point is that no one will switch to a cheaper version that requires more initial investment, even if it clearly saves a lot of energy.
It has been like this for most more efficient technologies on customer side. Until the initial investment is either heavily subsidized, or the previous one banned, progress will not happen. This is basic human nature, to use the old thing "that works", and bitch about "new thing that doesn't work (exactly like the old one used to)".
Fun part: if you don't buy the cheapest bulb, but a quality one for a 30-50% higher price then the trashy one, most of the problems people whine about when they talk about CFLs and LEDs go away. Which again brings us to stupidity of being cheap.
There's an old saying: "I'm not rich enough to buy cheap things".
If your choice was because of GPS navigation, you managed to fail in an epic fashion. Nokia has Ovi maps which are essentially navteq's maps. They're above and beyond google maps on application and actual maps level, both in usability and accuracy.
Not to even mention actual, real fully functional offline navigation.
All in all, your post shows the reality of nokia's problem in US. They have a great product, often superior to competition, and yet the marketing is so bad that most people don't know that, and end up buying worse choice for their requirements because of it.
Honestly, this isn't so much "gang known as government" as "gang known as intelligence community". Vast majority, in fact almost entire government is formed of various social workers, bureaucrats and so on. Even most police rarely have access, or even want such networks to exist, as they understand the consequences.
This is a small minority on top of the government, some intelligence agencies, largely with agreement from corporate heads, as without their support modern western government heads don't even sneeze nowadays.
And sad reality is, that due to the way our election system was perverted over the course of last century, we no longer choose our candidates. Big parties and corporate heads choose them for us. We just get to vote which of the choices is the better one in our opinion. People who actually want to represent people, rather then obey the system do not get high enough to matter. There are multiple failsafes in the political system to make sure of this.
Send folks high up in EU bureaucracy a message? They seem to be the only organisation in the world with both brains and balls to tell corporate dickheads that if they don't do the obvious better thing, they'd going to mandate it.
Except that if you ever used an existing dock, you know that it really isn't any simpler. Nowadays you just drop your phone into the slot on the dock, and that's it.
And the point I'm making and you're so wonderfully ignoring is that system indeed is safe in regard to accidentally convicting an innocent.
It's not in regards of letting even clearly guilty loose because of stupidity of one juror. That is the problem. Not that we get a statistical rarity of 12 dumb jurors.
Slashdot Mirror
The logical response China would take would be to simply conquer Taiwan with its vastly superior military might, while extending the "suggestion" to US that any attempt to stop them would be viewed as an act of war on Chinese soil (as Chinese view Taiwan as a breakaway province, which is still part of China).
The reason they don't do it now is because they have too much to lose by doing so. If Taiwan rocks the boat, most nations will be content to look away after such stupidity, while US would be simply forced to, as it has nothing in its conventional military war chest that could put any real threat on China near its mainland. The only real means of offence would be naval, and Chinese submarine and cruise missile capacity has been mainly built on Russian tech, meaning any surface fleet would become sub-surface within a day of approaching strike range. And there's no way in hell that US Navy is going to put its expensive as hell carriers into position where they don't stand any chance of survival.
This isn't something I'm imagining - US navy intelligence has pretty much covered this about a decade ago when Chinese started building up, and several decades before that when they were comparing Soviet navy's focus on anti-ship missile-armed supersonic bombers and attack submarines over surface ships.
It's where the infamous US submariner saying that "there are only two kinds of ships in a real naval war - submarines and targets" started.
It is rather difficult to bomb countries who have capability to bomb you back to stone age as a response. This discounts much of the Europe, Russia and China from the list.
You pretty much described how USA moved from a rural colony to a technological powerhouse.
The fact that you're willing to accept damage control over total elimination of the problem in the interest of principle as a counterpoint says a lot about your ethics. None of those words are complimentary.
One could argue that the system this as disgusting, warped and unethical as this can only exist with a permission from equally unethical, warped and disgusting individuals.
They have recently introduced a way to completely turn Real ID off on your account without having to enable parental controls just to do that.
Not exactly a shining example of doing it right, but at least they're listening.
There is another angle in this. To many lonely elderly, things like these are their primary human contact. Think about it for a moment - do you really want to spend your retirement after your spouse dies in solitude, cared only by machines?
Because this is where this kind of progress is openly headed. It essentially ignores your psychological needs, and focuses on just taking care of the body.
The total sum is probably much higher, because this is aimed at Japanese market, where people are aging rapidly, while immigration laws are some tightest in the world.
As a result, there simply aren't enough workers to deal with the aged, typically at least partially disabled people. So the money has been thrown at robotics to do most of the carer's work instead. This is one of the examples.
Why? There's a boatload of software for symbian already, dating back to 2004 or so, most of it compatible with current versions. You're probably asking for a new UI, which is a different thing.
As an actual underlying OS, symbian can give any of the competition a head start, and still beat it by a mile. It's a very robust kernel, specifically designed for mobile devices, which allows it to perform same functions (and often more) then IOS and Android, while consuming much less hardware resources.
The problem is that UI in current gen of western symbian phones is very dated, and runs on even more dated hardware - specifically ARM11 at slightly over 400mhz with 128MB RAM for touchscreens and even less for those with keyboards and keypads. If you want to see symbian with flashier UI, you can turn to japanese phones using MOAP, which is essentially symbian with their own propietary UI on top. Those phones essentially blocked entry to iphones and android phones in Japan, in spite of massive marketing effort, and fixed follow ups showing apple having up to 60% of "smartphone market" while barely commanding a single digit number mostly among local hardcore apple fanbase in reality.
The beauty of symbian is in its phone and small mobile device-centric design - something that competition sorely lacks and is very visible, especially in terms of battery life.
Nokia has "been late" for new fad for almost every single time in its history. Be it clamshells, losing external antennas or designing the look of their phones, they have been late for all of them.
And then they sat on their being late, and came up with a product that was at least as good if not better then competition, while costing less. Much less. And they ended up destroying the competition.
This isn't some theory. This is something that happened in the past. Several times over. US folks just missed it because operators don't like selling phones that are tailored for users, rather then operators.
But Symbian, does anyone outside of tech circles even know what Symbian is? People know the iPhone, people have seen the commercial for the Droid, they know the BlackBerry, they recognize the Palm name but Symbian? Does the average person even know where to get a Symbian phone? Is there even a "flagship" phone? People can recognize the iPhone, a Droid, a BlackBerry some can even recognize a Pre, but what is the "must have" Symbian phone? No one knows that.
Outside US? We just call it "Nokia". It's that text on the phone that every other person in line has.
This is something that US-centric sites like slashdot and their users really don't seem to get. Nokia has near-zero market penetration in the States because it didn't bow to pressure from operators, who in US are gods of the market. They made their phones for the end users instead, often screwing the operator in the process by refusing to allow a permanent lock-in. US operators refused to stock such phones, and sales were crap from get go.
But result from having such phones in countries that have people actually buy their own phones in stores rather then operators? They have almost 50% of entire market outside US. People KNOW them. People were willing to buy essentially crappy, unfinished platform like n97 in droves, because it had "nokia" written on it. They're still buying them in fact. And that was a really shitty first attempt at making symbian touchscreen compatible. Nokia is a household name, something that everyone knows instantly, in line with brand names.
One other thing. Nokia's speciality has never been revolutionising. It has been evolving and out-competing on a price point. Apple, which never got any real traction outside US with their iphone is actually losing market outside US already, mostly to android. And that is because nokia is once again evolving the existing concept of touchphone into something they can make well, and then press the price low enough to kill the competition using their (on corporate level) legendary logistics. It's how they utterly butchered competition several times over during their existence in both cheap and expensive phones.
It's something they're fairly likely to pull off yet again.
Just because German version of fascist nazi government came with concentration camps, doesn't mean that every version does. This is very much the same for democracy, which was very different back in ancient Greece where it was born, or in revolutionary France where core beliefs of modern Western society were defined.
Nontheless it is beyond any shadow of doubt that elements of fascism in Western world have been on significant increase ever seen the end of Cold War, as power shifted from people-run government to corporation-run government.
Which is by definition, fascism. Your scare of concentration camps came from nazism and nazi ideals. WW2 Germany had both. Fascist part wasn't much prettier then nazi part mind you, just like our democratic fascism isn't pretty.
Trieste was not a submarine but a bathysphere. Bathysphere's, unlike submarines can take significant pressure because the sphere that need to survive the pressure differential is very small.
Komsomolets, and her companion submarines (there were several, with Komsomolets being largest) could dive to about 1km, mainly because their inner hulls were made out of TITANIUM. It's the tech that no one in the West has, and Russians noticed that while Komsomolets eclipsed anything West had by a mile and then some, the cost to build her was astronomical. Titanium subs were scrapped promptly after scaring the shit out of every military buff in the West with them because they simply weren't worth the price tag in spite of being vastly superior in every conceivable way.
It seems that Cameron indeed meant "bathysphere" and not "submarine".
For the record, ITER is not "European". Just as the name suggests it's an international effort. There simply isn't enough know-how on the topic on necessary level to go around, so all the competing companies and countries had to come together to get this thing working. Competition simply wouldn't work because of lack of resources for a project this big.
Nice ethical theory.
Also, welcome to reality, where ethical theory gets bulldozed by "enlightened greed" every time. Because unlike former that can only offer warm and fuzzy feelings, latter pays in cold, hard cash.
Delays, buzzing and flickering can happen for two reasons:
1. Chemicals needed for reaction are running out. This usually takes place several years after the lamp has entered use.
2. Controller is dying. If your lamp goes bad in first two years or so, this is most likely the reason. This is usually the case for cheap lamps.
Privacy: You've got a smartphone. I've got a smartphone. Everybody's got a smartphone.
Just no? Also, smartphones are far more likely to be of company issue then normal ones. And mind you, the normal feature phones outnumber smart phones at ration of 5:1 at least, and in many countries 10:1+.
Don't buy cheapest CFLs, and your problem is solved. More expensive ones have a more expensive quality ballast and control electronics, as well as warmer and larger spectrum. These fix most if not all the problems you mentioned.
But when you buy the cheapest one you can find, all the problems you mentioned are usually present.
Funny, I though people on slashdot were mostly educated in mathematics, and know that "pay more initially and use for a lot longer and pay less for energy it uses" equals "pay less".
It's the uneducated that just look at the initial price tag and see "this costs more", ignoring the lifetime of the product and energy savings.
If CFLs are really so wonderful then there's no need for the government to get involved because people will buy them instead of ordinary bulbs. But they're not, so they're being forced on people who don't want them.
You're missing the obvious point ON PURPOSE. The point is that no one will switch to a cheaper version that requires more initial investment, even if it clearly saves a lot of energy.
It has been like this for most more efficient technologies on customer side. Until the initial investment is either heavily subsidized, or the previous one banned, progress will not happen. This is basic human nature, to use the old thing "that works", and bitch about "new thing that doesn't work (exactly like the old one used to)".
Fun part: if you don't buy the cheapest bulb, but a quality one for a 30-50% higher price then the trashy one, most of the problems people whine about when they talk about CFLs and LEDs go away. Which again brings us to stupidity of being cheap.
There's an old saying: "I'm not rich enough to buy cheap things".
If your choice was because of GPS navigation, you managed to fail in an epic fashion. Nokia has Ovi maps which are essentially navteq's maps. They're above and beyond google maps on application and actual maps level, both in usability and accuracy.
Not to even mention actual, real fully functional offline navigation.
All in all, your post shows the reality of nokia's problem in US. They have a great product, often superior to competition, and yet the marketing is so bad that most people don't know that, and end up buying worse choice for their requirements because of it.
Honestly, this isn't so much "gang known as government" as "gang known as intelligence community". Vast majority, in fact almost entire government is formed of various social workers, bureaucrats and so on. Even most police rarely have access, or even want such networks to exist, as they understand the consequences.
This is a small minority on top of the government, some intelligence agencies, largely with agreement from corporate heads, as without their support modern western government heads don't even sneeze nowadays.
And sad reality is, that due to the way our election system was perverted over the course of last century, we no longer choose our candidates. Big parties and corporate heads choose them for us. We just get to vote which of the choices is the better one in our opinion. People who actually want to represent people, rather then obey the system do not get high enough to matter. There are multiple failsafes in the political system to make sure of this.
Send folks high up in EU bureaucracy a message? They seem to be the only organisation in the world with both brains and balls to tell corporate dickheads that if they don't do the obvious better thing, they'd going to mandate it.
Except that if you ever used an existing dock, you know that it really isn't any simpler. Nowadays you just drop your phone into the slot on the dock, and that's it.
Blizzard called. They said their tubes are clogged with 1k USD bills again.
And the point I'm making and you're so wonderfully ignoring is that system indeed is safe in regard to accidentally convicting an innocent.
It's not in regards of letting even clearly guilty loose because of stupidity of one juror. That is the problem. Not that we get a statistical rarity of 12 dumb jurors.