"The defendants, if convicted, face a maximum of 12 years in prison and a $30,000 fine"
The best part about the California AG's response is that the indicted HP execs are being arrested and jailed. A $30K fine for those people means nothing, especially if they pay lawyers $5M defending in court. And the "humiliation" that Business Week and its corporate media chorus usually like to claim is the "worst penalty" these execs could pay (like as the total penalty they tried to stick Enron with) cost them nothing, usually not even in business opportunities.
These perps are getting frogmarched to the pen, just like anyone else, regardless of how many keys they have to corporate washrooms. That action not only stops them from more abuses, but finally warns the thousands of other execs inspired by their "innovations" to steer clear or risk getting locked up, the great equalizer.
If only that also applied to Congressional child molesters.
Last night in NYC I watched as a Heritage Foundation rightwinger, James Jay Carafano (author of The Long War), attacked one of the various serious Iraq pullout plans circulating. It called for 15,000 US/UN troops left behind to ensure Iraqis forces weren't abandoned in a vacuum. Regardless of the prudence of that plan, Carafano told the audience that American troop deployments get 1 in 7 troops actually "on the streets", so that 15K troops would put "500" actual troops on the streets. Someone in the audience shouted at the fool that "15 thousand divided by 7 is over 2000, not 500". Carafano insisted on repeating his Big Lie, refusing to stop lying (or being addled) even after someone in the audience shouted "you can't do math, and you planned this war!"
Carafano is Heritage Foundation's "Senior Fellow for National Security and Homeland Security". And he can't divide 15,000 by 7, even after several attempts.
Natural "intelligence" of that tiny caliber is going to be easy to beat with AI.
The last report like this was the AMA's 1990s report that no TV under 2 years old, and then a lean formula for hours watched always with parents, in a fairly-parity ration to hours with the TV off discussing with parents, gradually weaning kids from direct parental supervision/intervention to independent watching. Somewhere around their 44th birthday.
I joke, but the AMA's longterm longitudinal (comprehensive across demographics) study determined that more TV than that (above Amish levels) contributed directly to aggression disorders.
He used to be a Slashdot editor ("author", who publishes submitted stories on Slashdot pages). I don't know what his current status is. But he is certainly a fascist.
What's the difference between a smartphone and a PDA with phone capabilities? And how does VoIP exclude any of those, when the voice is just a feature of the UI of the apps accessed by the "phone"?
If architecture geniuses can work out virtualization so that an app can span two networked CPU nodes (across a very latent network), so eg. the GUI layer objects can run on this phone and the rest of the app can run on hosts across the LAN (or Net), these phones could become the front end to a fantastic network app collection.
As it is, Web apps and VNC bring us to virtual virtualization. If we can tune the Linux for just GUI and networking, so the GUI is really interactive, we're virtually there.
If they made one of these rings out of flexible material, they could deploy it submerged at sea, even secretly from a submarine. Electromagnetics and maybe even the projectile's mass could keep the ring circular and stable, in addition to locking solenoids. Then they could redeploy it anywhere at will, without exposing a land target to incoming attacks. Situationally deploying such a device on land would require clearing the ejection route, not to mention securing the entire area against intruders.
Since powering these rings could use energy so much cleaner and more efficiently than rockets, we should be investing in them as our next generation space launchers. Maybe there's even a way to shoot really fast things into space which pull slower human capsules behind, tethered elastically.
Thanks for the interesting insights. I think you confirmed the value of the proprioception. Because I learned to "type" on an Atari 400 membrane keyboard, and I know how its little ridges offered shape cues. Not just the pressure of my fingertips for touch, but deflecting/deforming my whole hand a little as I glided around. My hands knew the "map" of the contours. When I used one of them at a collector's home last year, I was able to get right back into speedy typing, by angling my fingers closer to parallel to the keyboard, which exaggerated the deflections enough to remind me of hte shape. My hands were getting feedback as much through the proprioception as through the touch.
But a projected keyboard is truly flat (on a readable flat surface), so no proprioception other than the plane. Unless used on a consistently textured/shaped surface, which defeats that "go anywhere" portability. Unless also porting the surface, which could then feedback to touch (eg rubber embossing or more elaborate).
What would be really interesting would be testing this I-Tech keyboard on you, compared to a membrane keyboard. If I had an extra, I'd send it to you:).
You're not getting it. After repeated emphasis on the actual point, not your hairsplitting, it's clear you are unable to get it, probably through deliberate denial or at least willful ignorance.
For others reading this thread confused by your misdirection, I'll repeat the point.
Sending the Enterprise to the region is important to Iran, as the "small skirmish" was also by far their largest naval engagement, which crushed them. Their response is propaganda (possibly based on a real program, but far from necessarily) announcing a videogame training Iranians to blow up an oil tanker in the straits. This is important to the US because it generates fear of naval warfare in the Straits in the public consciousness. That fear's basis in reality of the real risk is a separate issue. We're talking about terrorism, which is always and only a war in the media, even when it harnesses military or other violent attacks to generate the fear.
So my point, as I've made from the beginning, is that the US and Iran are already in a war terrorizing each other in specific terms that will affect each other's people. Compared to that, it's immaterial if WWII battles were so much bigger that subsequent battles are relatively small, because they're big enough to register with the targeted audiences.
The bigger point is that people who hairsplit about technical details dismissing actions after WWII because they're smaller are totally unfit to analyze the strategy of our current Terror War. Pearl Harbor was big, but the WWII it launched the US into was over in under 4 years. 9/11/2001 killed only 3000 Americans, but we've been in that war for over 5 years now, and we're just getting started. Because the people planning it and reporting on it don't get the basic strategic power of terrorism, preferring to focus instead on the violence itself for their own vested interests to the detriment of their jobs. The Terror War that is much more important than historical comparisons of battle scales, because we need to do something to stop it. Which includes recognizing how those past battles condition our expectations of, thereby reactions to, new events largely symbolic, but extremely dangerous.
The CIA Director and his counterterrorism chief jump into a car to force Rice to listen to their urgent warnings that Osama is going to attack us. She listens, Osama attacks us, and she denies she was warned. For 5 years she lied, even after Woodward's book documented it. She's an incompetent LIAR:
A review of White House records has determined that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, did brief Condoleezza Rice and other top officials on July 10, 2001, about the looming threat from Al Qaeda, a State Department spokesman said Monday.
The account by Sean McCormack came hours after Ms. Rice, the secretary of state, told reporters aboard her airplane that she did not recall the specific meeting on July 10, 2001, noting that she had met repeatedly with Mr. Tenet that summer about terrorist threats. Ms. Rice, the national security adviser at the time, said it was "incomprehensible" she ignored dire terrorist threats two months before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Now even Rice cannot comprehend how truly incompetent she is.
Has anyone harnessed these folding algorithms for de/compression? Because 20-40x more power that can be stuffed into several PCI slots for parallel de/compression so cheap is worth waiting through all these exotic @Home projects to get better Net streaming.
You're a Republican yesman. The main qualification is a combination of ignorance and denial - you're hired! The Defense Department could use a new Secretary.
Her competence has been questioned by me, and everyone else except Republican yesmen (like you), since she appeared on the scene. It was already obvious that she was generally incompetent when confirmed by Senate Republicans as Sect'y of State, after Iraq had no WMD despite her assurances as NSC chief, that Saddam wasn't training Qaeda in WMD, as she officially asserted. But Republican yesmen (like you) confirmed her anyway.
So despite your Rice-esque insistence that her competence is being questioned ony "right before an election", she's been called out as incompetent before every election during Bush's reign. Because she is incompetent. As are you setting up these ridiculous arguments to defend her. And getting your chance to call her a "nigger", which you misspelled.
So I'm not going to go back through what I've already written about how Rice is a token, assigned to an essential job out of contempt for both minorities and government. Because you're incompetent to argue any of this. All you can do is make shit up to defend Bush. Which qualifies you for his Sect'y of State, even if you're neither black nor a woman (though it helps).
I think I got mod'ed "Offtopic" merely for pointing out that the Reuters story is mainly part of the US/Iran propaganda efforts to scare Americans for political power: terrorism.
To make matters worse, I pointed out how Reuters was just reprinting an uncorroborated story floated by an Iranian propaganda outlet, which underscores the US/Iran(/UK) cooperation in terrorizing us.
And to seal the fate, I pointed out that this alleged videogame is so far vaporware, pissing off all the gamers who got their hopes up.
Even so, the appropriate response from all those cowards would be mod'ing me "Flamebait", as their more aggressive fellow cowards flamed me rather than face their fears.
Fuck you. I, like the story submitter in their summary, refer to the Swiss device as a "turbine" in shorthand for the essentially interesting part of the device:
The matchbox-sized motor generates the equivalent of 100 watts, including the power electronics interface, and has an efficiency of close to 95 percent. Powered by a gas turbine, one tankful of fuel drives the generator
If I didn't read the damned article, where did I get their 95% efficiency claim, or the rest of the details of the device and its limits?
While the original article that article merely excerpts further refers to the device as " These micro-gas turbines".
Why don't you try reading the damned article yourself, and my damned post, to offer some damend useful input, rather than your annoying nitpick?
All of the Reuters info about the game comes from a single Iranian report.
FTA: "The game, "Counter Strike", invites players to plant two bombs on the oil tanker to sink it and make the strait of Hormuz impassable, the Jomhouri-ye Eslami daily reported."
Reuters didn't even remark on the videogame called "Counterstrike" so popular in the US and elsewhere. It just picked up an Iranian report, entirely likely just propaganda vaporware, and created a story about it.
I didn't say that Reuters was "a controlled Iranian news organization". But if it can be made to produce a story that gets such wide circulation just from an uncorroborated story from a controlled Iranian news organization, I'd say it's pretty well controlled, at least in this instance - and probably others.
Funny how the Republican Abramoff machine that took bribes to protect casinos against new competition is still cranking out its legislation product, even after Abramoff is headed to jail. Maybe they're just hedging their bets in case they get jailed for protecting Republican boy rapists.
Why the "cause celebre" of the lobbyists who paid to elect Bush and his Republican Congress being passed by them surprises anyone is the only mystery here. Or is it pure "chance", according to some coincidence theorists?
Anonymous denial Coward, sending the Enterprise back to the Iranian region in the current saberrattling between the US and Iran is most certainly part of the propaganda war of intimidation. I understand that you didn't click to the Wikipedia article I quoted about what was in fact "the largest surface naval battle since WWII". I understand that you didn't click to the news reports relating the Enterprise deployment to our standoff with Iran.
Anonymous denial Cowards battle curiosity with ease, refusing to "see for themselves" when they're already so sure of how the world works. "Greeted as liberators" is so much more appealing to armchair generals than "catastrophicly bungled invasion" that they won't even hear about the truth when it's beating against their ears.
But how could you read my post without understanding the distinction between an attack and just the escalation of deployments? That's what this story is all about.
You're not just an Anonymous denial Coward. You're damn stupid, too. Exactly the kind of American the Iranians have been beating since they threw out our Shah in their revolution.
Even the chemical reactions at the center of all these fuel->energy devices are "mechanical". The Swiss turbine is in the cm^3 scale, yet claims 95% efficiency (presumably from the energy content of the fuel delivered to the power of the spinning rotor). Fuelcells operate on catalytic mechanisms for separating electrons from molecules, mechanics at the nanoscale. But the highest fuelcell efficiency I've seen claimed is only about 60%, from fuel to DC current. I wonder what kind of efficiency could be gained from manufacturing the Swiss motor from MEMS. And whether IBM's fast-rotating molecular arrays could be harnessed for even more efficient "fuelcells" at the nanoscale.
While 95->99.999% efficiency might seem a small gain for so much R&D investment, consider that the Swiss turbine has to lose efficiency generating DC to compare with the fuelcells. And consider how much energy could be saved by reducing the waste in vast arrays consuming lots of fuel across the world, from industrial to mobile to micromedical.
That's the convenient myth of "centrists". Centrist values, OK. But cooperation with the extremist Republicans even "sometimes" in the name of "centrism" is just denial. It's a copout. Like the fake "Libertarians" who vote for Republicans or just defend them.
The denial is coming faster than ever these days. The clarifying moment is coming now, as Republicans lie to coverup Mark Foley (R-FL), boy rapist, and "centrists" rush to believe them.
These "centrists" are collaborators, like the Vichy French.
Videogames might or might not be used to train "terrorists". Until there's actual evidence of an Iranian training videogame, rather than just scary announcements by a controlled Iranian news organization, all we're sure of is that Iran is threatening to block the straits one way or another.
Of course, the US has sent a nuclear aircraft carrier, the Enterprise, to the region, possibly to confront Iran directly - the Enterprise as instrumental in "Operation Praying Mantis", the largest surface naval battle since WWII, between the US and Iran in the Persian Gulf in 1988. So the threats are flying thick and heavy in both directions.
But this is no videogame. The people who will die and get maimed will be real. Everyone has to look away from the screens and at the reality to see that this story is part of the propaganda war between the US and Iran, and recognize our own roles perpetuating and even escalating it.
Of course it's "something" - it's self defense. It's competition. Most of the Americans against "globalization" are against unfair labor competition that hurts American labor, either themselves directly or others in their domestic economy on which they depend. They're against Slovaks getting the jobs as much as against Chinese, when that does happen due to unfair competition. Unfair because they compete without labor, environmental, political, economic protections. Which makes American labor cost more in the short term, but has longterm hidden costs overseas.
Of course, antiglobalization, even in America, is so popular that of course there are racists who oppose sending jobs to people who aren't from their ethnicity. That's a reflection of the popularity of racism in America, and its common acceptance of many contradictions. It's nothing to do with the economics or real politics of the opposition. The domestic labor they protect is populated by people of all races. Since it's more manual labor, it in fact has much less White representation than society at large. The racism is in fact on the part of those shipping the jobs overseas, the mainly White men who don't care about destroying American labor rights now that they're not mostly White men laboring, and the overseas laborers working without protections aren't White men, either.
Your example is an excellent one. Manuel isn't telling his kids that. Manuel is telling his kids "when I cross the border for a few months, I miss you, but I work for more money, at a safe job, in a clean valley, without fear of the secret police". If our labor protections were stronger, Manuel would more often tell his kids "I'll be back next week from working with your uncles to open a union like the one in the US, pray for me to return safe so I can make your life like the ones I saw up North".
America's labor protections were bought with blood. Saying the people elsewhere should get the jobs we created in the society we created without living up to that blood debt is certainly "something". It's "Communism", the rhetoric of greedy tyrants telling workers of the world they all lived in a "worker's paradise" while forcing them to work in prisons without rights. In the biggest labor market, China, this is still literally true, though it's merely an equivalence elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
"The defendants, if convicted, face a maximum of 12 years in prison and a $30,000 fine"
The best part about the California AG's response is that the indicted HP execs are being arrested and jailed. A $30K fine for those people means nothing, especially if they pay lawyers $5M defending in court. And the "humiliation" that Business Week and its corporate media chorus usually like to claim is the "worst penalty" these execs could pay (like as the total penalty they tried to stick Enron with) cost them nothing, usually not even in business opportunities.
These perps are getting frogmarched to the pen, just like anyone else, regardless of how many keys they have to corporate washrooms. That action not only stops them from more abuses, but finally warns the thousands of other execs inspired by their "innovations" to steer clear or risk getting locked up, the great equalizer.
If only that also applied to Congressional child molesters.
Last night in NYC I watched as a Heritage Foundation rightwinger, James Jay Carafano (author of The Long War), attacked one of the various serious Iraq pullout plans circulating. It called for 15,000 US/UN troops left behind to ensure Iraqis forces weren't abandoned in a vacuum. Regardless of the prudence of that plan, Carafano told the audience that American troop deployments get 1 in 7 troops actually "on the streets", so that 15K troops would put "500" actual troops on the streets. Someone in the audience shouted at the fool that "15 thousand divided by 7 is over 2000, not 500". Carafano insisted on repeating his Big Lie, refusing to stop lying (or being addled) even after someone in the audience shouted "you can't do math, and you planned this war!"
Carafano is Heritage Foundation's "Senior Fellow for National Security and Homeland Security". And he can't divide 15,000 by 7, even after several attempts.
Natural "intelligence" of that tiny caliber is going to be easy to beat with AI.
The last report like this was the AMA's 1990s report that no TV under 2 years old, and then a lean formula for hours watched always with parents, in a fairly-parity ration to hours with the TV off discussing with parents, gradually weaning kids from direct parental supervision/intervention to independent watching. Somewhere around their 44th birthday.
I joke, but the AMA's longterm longitudinal (comprehensive across demographics) study determined that more TV than that (above Amish levels) contributed directly to aggression disorders.
He used to be a Slashdot editor ("author", who publishes submitted stories on Slashdot pages). I don't know what his current status is. But he is certainly a fascist.
What's the difference between a smartphone and a PDA with phone capabilities? And how does VoIP exclude any of those, when the voice is just a feature of the UI of the apps accessed by the "phone"?
If architecture geniuses can work out virtualization so that an app can span two networked CPU nodes (across a very latent network), so eg. the GUI layer objects can run on this phone and the rest of the app can run on hosts across the LAN (or Net), these phones could become the front end to a fantastic network app collection.
As it is, Web apps and VNC bring us to virtual virtualization. If we can tune the Linux for just GUI and networking, so the GUI is really interactive, we're virtually there.
Only to the extent of "yes, you're an idiot!"
Which, while not any great leap of intellect, is still an original and correct idea of mine. You cannot claim such abilities for yourself.
Really, you Republicans are now reduced to "I know you are, but what am I"? Rice dosen't deserve better defenders than you, but she usually gets them.
If they made one of these rings out of flexible material, they could deploy it submerged at sea, even secretly from a submarine. Electromagnetics and maybe even the projectile's mass could keep the ring circular and stable, in addition to locking solenoids. Then they could redeploy it anywhere at will, without exposing a land target to incoming attacks. Situationally deploying such a device on land would require clearing the ejection route, not to mention securing the entire area against intruders.
Since powering these rings could use energy so much cleaner and more efficiently than rockets, we should be investing in them as our next generation space launchers. Maybe there's even a way to shoot really fast things into space which pull slower human capsules behind, tethered elastically.
Thanks for the interesting insights. I think you confirmed the value of the proprioception. Because I learned to "type" on an Atari 400 membrane keyboard, and I know how its little ridges offered shape cues. Not just the pressure of my fingertips for touch, but deflecting/deforming my whole hand a little as I glided around. My hands knew the "map" of the contours. When I used one of them at a collector's home last year, I was able to get right back into speedy typing, by angling my fingers closer to parallel to the keyboard, which exaggerated the deflections enough to remind me of hte shape. My hands were getting feedback as much through the proprioception as through the touch.
:).
But a projected keyboard is truly flat (on a readable flat surface), so no proprioception other than the plane. Unless used on a consistently textured/shaped surface, which defeats that "go anywhere" portability. Unless also porting the surface, which could then feedback to touch (eg rubber embossing or more elaborate).
What would be really interesting would be testing this I-Tech keyboard on you, compared to a membrane keyboard. If I had an extra, I'd send it to you
You're not getting it. After repeated emphasis on the actual point, not your hairsplitting, it's clear you are unable to get it, probably through deliberate denial or at least willful ignorance.
For others reading this thread confused by your misdirection, I'll repeat the point.
Sending the Enterprise to the region is important to Iran, as the "small skirmish" was also by far their largest naval engagement, which crushed them. Their response is propaganda (possibly based on a real program, but far from necessarily) announcing a videogame training Iranians to blow up an oil tanker in the straits. This is important to the US because it generates fear of naval warfare in the Straits in the public consciousness. That fear's basis in reality of the real risk is a separate issue. We're talking about terrorism, which is always and only a war in the media, even when it harnesses military or other violent attacks to generate the fear.
So my point, as I've made from the beginning, is that the US and Iran are already in a war terrorizing each other in specific terms that will affect each other's people. Compared to that, it's immaterial if WWII battles were so much bigger that subsequent battles are relatively small, because they're big enough to register with the targeted audiences.
The bigger point is that people who hairsplit about technical details dismissing actions after WWII because they're smaller are totally unfit to analyze the strategy of our current Terror War. Pearl Harbor was big, but the WWII it launched the US into was over in under 4 years. 9/11/2001 killed only 3000 Americans, but we've been in that war for over 5 years now, and we're just getting started. Because the people planning it and reporting on it don't get the basic strategic power of terrorism, preferring to focus instead on the violence itself for their own vested interests to the detriment of their jobs. The Terror War that is much more important than historical comparisons of battle scales, because we need to do something to stop it. Which includes recognizing how those past battles condition our expectations of, thereby reactions to, new events largely symbolic, but extremely dangerous.
Now even Rice cannot comprehend how truly incompetent she is.
Has anyone harnessed these folding algorithms for de/compression? Because 20-40x more power that can be stuffed into several PCI slots for parallel de/compression so cheap is worth waiting through all these exotic @Home projects to get better Net streaming.
She's a failure, and everyone knows it.
You're a Republican yesman. The main qualification is a combination of ignorance and denial - you're hired! The Defense Department could use a new Secretary.
Moderation -1
100% Troll
TrollMods can't face the truth: Republican pedophiles are raping us all, on both sides of the bars.
Her competence has been questioned by me, and everyone else except Republican yesmen (like you), since she appeared on the scene. It was already obvious that she was generally incompetent when confirmed by Senate Republicans as Sect'y of State, after Iraq had no WMD despite her assurances as NSC chief, that Saddam wasn't training Qaeda in WMD, as she officially asserted. But Republican yesmen (like you) confirmed her anyway.
So despite your Rice-esque insistence that her competence is being questioned ony "right before an election", she's been called out as incompetent before every election during Bush's reign. Because she is incompetent. As are you setting up these ridiculous arguments to defend her. And getting your chance to call her a "nigger", which you misspelled.
So I'm not going to go back through what I've already written about how Rice is a token, assigned to an essential job out of contempt for both minorities and government. Because you're incompetent to argue any of this. All you can do is make shit up to defend Bush. Which qualifies you for his Sect'y of State, even if you're neither black nor a woman (though it helps).
I think I got mod'ed "Offtopic" merely for pointing out that the Reuters story is mainly part of the US/Iran propaganda efforts to scare Americans for political power: terrorism.
To make matters worse, I pointed out how Reuters was just reprinting an uncorroborated story floated by an Iranian propaganda outlet, which underscores the US/Iran(/UK) cooperation in terrorizing us.
And to seal the fate, I pointed out that this alleged videogame is so far vaporware, pissing off all the gamers who got their hopes up.
Even so, the appropriate response from all those cowards would be mod'ing me "Flamebait", as their more aggressive fellow cowards flamed me rather than face their fears.
Yep, another day at Slashdot.
If I didn't read the damned article, where did I get their 95% efficiency claim, or the rest of the details of the device and its limits?
While the original article that article merely excerpts further refers to the device as " These micro-gas turbines".
Why don't you try reading the damned article yourself, and my damned post, to offer some damend useful input, rather than your annoying nitpick?
All of the Reuters info about the game comes from a single Iranian report.
FTA: "The game, "Counter Strike", invites players to plant two bombs on the oil tanker to sink it and make the strait of Hormuz impassable, the Jomhouri-ye Eslami daily reported."
Reuters didn't even remark on the videogame called "Counterstrike" so popular in the US and elsewhere. It just picked up an Iranian report, entirely likely just propaganda vaporware, and created a story about it.
I didn't say that Reuters was "a controlled Iranian news organization". But if it can be made to produce a story that gets such wide circulation just from an uncorroborated story from a controlled Iranian news organization, I'd say it's pretty well controlled, at least in this instance - and probably others.
Funny how the Republican Abramoff machine that took bribes to protect casinos against new competition is still cranking out its legislation product, even after Abramoff is headed to jail. Maybe they're just hedging their bets in case they get jailed for protecting Republican boy rapists.
Why the "cause celebre" of the lobbyists who paid to elect Bush and his Republican Congress being passed by them surprises anyone is the only mystery here. Or is it pure "chance", according to some coincidence theorists?
Anonymous denial Coward, sending the Enterprise back to the Iranian region in the current saberrattling between the US and Iran is most certainly part of the propaganda war of intimidation. I understand that you didn't click to the Wikipedia article I quoted about what was in fact "the largest surface naval battle since WWII". I understand that you didn't click to the news reports relating the Enterprise deployment to our standoff with Iran.
Anonymous denial Cowards battle curiosity with ease, refusing to "see for themselves" when they're already so sure of how the world works. "Greeted as liberators" is so much more appealing to armchair generals than "catastrophicly bungled invasion" that they won't even hear about the truth when it's beating against their ears.
But how could you read my post without understanding the distinction between an attack and just the escalation of deployments? That's what this story is all about.
You're not just an Anonymous denial Coward. You're damn stupid, too. Exactly the kind of American the Iranians have been beating since they threw out our Shah in their revolution.
Even the chemical reactions at the center of all these fuel->energy devices are "mechanical". The Swiss turbine is in the cm^3 scale, yet claims 95% efficiency (presumably from the energy content of the fuel delivered to the power of the spinning rotor). Fuelcells operate on catalytic mechanisms for separating electrons from molecules, mechanics at the nanoscale. But the highest fuelcell efficiency I've seen claimed is only about 60%, from fuel to DC current. I wonder what kind of efficiency could be gained from manufacturing the Swiss motor from MEMS. And whether IBM's fast-rotating molecular arrays could be harnessed for even more efficient "fuelcells" at the nanoscale.
While 95->99.999% efficiency might seem a small gain for so much R&D investment, consider that the Swiss turbine has to lose efficiency generating DC to compare with the fuelcells. And consider how much energy could be saved by reducing the waste in vast arrays consuming lots of fuel across the world, from industrial to mobile to micromedical.
That's the convenient myth of "centrists". Centrist values, OK. But cooperation with the extremist Republicans even "sometimes" in the name of "centrism" is just denial. It's a copout. Like the fake "Libertarians" who vote for Republicans or just defend them.
The denial is coming faster than ever these days. The clarifying moment is coming now, as Republicans lie to coverup Mark Foley (R-FL), boy rapist, and "centrists" rush to believe them.
These "centrists" are collaborators, like the Vichy French.
Oh, I'm aware of Pudge tactics, all right.
Videogames might or might not be used to train "terrorists". Until there's actual evidence of an Iranian training videogame, rather than just scary announcements by a controlled Iranian news organization, all we're sure of is that Iran is threatening to block the straits one way or another.
Of course, the US has sent a nuclear aircraft carrier, the Enterprise, to the region, possibly to confront Iran directly - the Enterprise as instrumental in "Operation Praying Mantis", the largest surface naval battle since WWII, between the US and Iran in the Persian Gulf in 1988. So the threats are flying thick and heavy in both directions.
But this is no videogame. The people who will die and get maimed will be real. Everyone has to look away from the screens and at the reality to see that this story is part of the propaganda war between the US and Iran, and recognize our own roles perpetuating and even escalating it.
Of course it's "something" - it's self defense. It's competition. Most of the Americans against "globalization" are against unfair labor competition that hurts American labor, either themselves directly or others in their domestic economy on which they depend. They're against Slovaks getting the jobs as much as against Chinese, when that does happen due to unfair competition. Unfair because they compete without labor, environmental, political, economic protections. Which makes American labor cost more in the short term, but has longterm hidden costs overseas.
Of course, antiglobalization, even in America, is so popular that of course there are racists who oppose sending jobs to people who aren't from their ethnicity. That's a reflection of the popularity of racism in America, and its common acceptance of many contradictions. It's nothing to do with the economics or real politics of the opposition. The domestic labor they protect is populated by people of all races. Since it's more manual labor, it in fact has much less White representation than society at large. The racism is in fact on the part of those shipping the jobs overseas, the mainly White men who don't care about destroying American labor rights now that they're not mostly White men laboring, and the overseas laborers working without protections aren't White men, either.
Your example is an excellent one. Manuel isn't telling his kids that. Manuel is telling his kids "when I cross the border for a few months, I miss you, but I work for more money, at a safe job, in a clean valley, without fear of the secret police". If our labor protections were stronger, Manuel would more often tell his kids "I'll be back next week from working with your uncles to open a union like the one in the US, pray for me to return safe so I can make your life like the ones I saw up North".
America's labor protections were bought with blood. Saying the people elsewhere should get the jobs we created in the society we created without living up to that blood debt is certainly "something". It's "Communism", the rhetoric of greedy tyrants telling workers of the world they all lived in a "worker's paradise" while forcing them to work in prisons without rights. In the biggest labor market, China, this is still literally true, though it's merely an equivalence elsewhere.
Racism and Communism.