The Orion and Daedalus projects of the 60s and 70s had theoretically designed spacecraft capable of anywhere from 5 to 12% of c given materials and power sources available at the time or soon available. (...) I believe that Freeman Dyson computed the economic cost of an Orion class starship and concluded it would be about the same as a year's worth of the United States GDP at the time
It should be noted that we still in 2012 don't have the technology to build the Daedalus, so soon available is stretching it. As for Orion, the conservative design would take 1 GDP but the optimistic "momentum limited" design only 0.1 GDP. The small caveat is that it's only for the ship itself and doesn't include the cost to put 400,000 ton in orbit - the nuclear design doesn't have the thrust to launch from Earth. So cost estimates ignore the 10,000 Saturn V or 20,000 Falcon Heavy launches required, at about $100 million per launch that's another $2 trillion not including assembly.
That is only one of many costs missing from those calculations, they're practically just material costs as if everything came off the assembly line. The cost creating and testing a real, practical design and not just a highly hypothesized theoretical design that will take all the stress of 300,000 nukes and the redundancy and reliability to last 100+ years as it'll only go 3.3% of light speed will be much higher. Oh, you can get it up to 8-10% but then you can multiply the cost estimates a lot. Even more if you want to slow down and actually orbit/land when you arrive. The "cheapest" designs are only a fly-by.
Too bad x264 is one big pile of patent infringement if used in Slashdot's home country.
Except the end user never pays. Internet broadcast for free is free, subscription or title-by-title services requires the content provider to pay license fees, that's how everyone manage to ship free-as-in-beer decoders. The reason Firefox has a bug up their ass about it is that the Internet doesn't get a truly free codec that way, not because they couldn't find a way to include a x264 decoder.
Larrabee almost certainly lowered future expectations for discrete graphics chips, fearing that Chipzilla would enter their market. I'm guessing this is the same for the foundry business, scaring away potential investors in TSMC, UMC and GloFo. Huge, huge investment costs that take years to materialize and are extremely time-to-market sensitive, any uncertainty you can add to that is advantage Intel. I very much doubt that anything remotely competing with Intel will ever get their hands on their crown jewels.
HTML V5 is gonna be locked down tighter than a nun's thighs and is controlled by one of the most aggressive patent trolls there has ever been and THAT is good? Has everyone kinda had a senior moment and forgot that H.264 is patented up the ass and is controlled by a conglomeration that will happily sue your ass if you look at them funny?
Well, most flash video is H.264 too, it's pretty hard to argue that HTML5/H.264 will be worse than Flash/H.264. Right now the alternatives to H.264 are as dead as Ogg Theora was to music but since everybody's blocking each other I assume the status quo will be maintained until the H.264 patents expire in the 2020s. You're pretending like this achieves something but I don't see how, except to continue promoting flash over HTML. You may notice that all the other players that now play YouTube videos dropped flash, but continue to use H.264. There's absolutely zero traction for moving away.
In fact, I'm not sure I can name a single site I use that makes use of Flash.
You must not get out much. I just checked BBC, CNN and they both use flash. If I go to the top three news sites in Norway (VG, Dagbladet, Aftenposten) they all use flash. Okay they all use them for ads but for a business based on showing people ads that's a rather essential use. Kill flash and the ads won't go away, they'll become HTML5 ads.
That and the fact that every new car seems to be built on the principle that repair costs are no obstacle, so if a car gets hit, its highly damaged, extremely expensive to repair, and much more likely to be a write off - meaning you need to buy a replacement.
Mostly it's safety requirements, build it too rigid and the impact is transferred to you. Today's car will absorb far more of the impact, routing it around the passenger cabin but there's no way to make it work only on the big collisions, even a small impact will bend all those parts that are supposed to bend. And you can't leave them bent because then you'd have gaps that would cause terrible shock impacts on a big collision. It's the same reason they recommend replacing your bike helmet any time it gets a good knock, even if it looks okay. Of course that's a much smaller investment but same idea.
As for computers and integration, well people want all sorts of sensors and anti-spin and stabilization systems and parking systems and so on that means it has to be all hooked up. You can still build a car like they used to, but it will lack many of the checklist points people look for today. Personally I'm hoping they'll soon give me an automated driver too, at least for the times I don't want to drive. I don't see that as a problem any more than computers putting more and more on the motherboard and in the CPU and moving towards SoCs, it's progress.
Well, it's 75 times closer to the star than us so the starlight comes from a wider angle plus a steam atmosphere sounds like a pretty good heat conductor so I doubt it's all that different. But if it's tidally locked, the dark side of the planet could be interesting...
So why did the US enjoy decades of undisputed trade dominance? BECAUSE WE BLEW UP EVERYONE ELSE"S FACTORIES!!! It's kind of obvious isn't it?
Japan maybe, but Europe was burning from London to Moscow long before the US entered the war and with or without Pearl Harbor we'd be pretty bombed out. So to claim the US did it would be a wild exaggeration.
Really? What does it even mean to say 'living in an inconsistent universe'.
A consistent universe means that experiments are reproducible, that we are able to find formulas - even probabilistic ones like quantum physics - that have great predictive power. In searching for laws of nature there's an implicit assumption that nature is governed by laws. Obviously there's nothing to prove that gravity will work the same ten seconds from now, but we assume a consistency with how it is and how it has been. That doesn't mean we believe it is absolutely constant across all of space and time, but if it was totally chaotic we couldn't predict anything.
Science does not exclude the possibility of exceptions, whether it's Jesus walking on water or Neo flying inside the Matrix. But extraordinary claims tend to require extraordinary evidence that yes this is real. That it is not simply a flawed experiment or a shyster or that it all took place in someone's head. Which is pretty hard if you can't command it at will, if you say God did it. Of course if we didn't observe it, then at that point, at that time maybe the laws of nature were different. A religious person might believe it's a miracle, I'd probably believe something more mundane but there's no proof either way.
Heh, not that long ago I threw away my collection of old photocopied codes and manuals from the 80s before we had multitasking and PDFs. The really hard copy protection were the floppies that had intentional bad sectors in them, until a patched version came along via the sneakernet.
Anyway, people who pirate always get the best version because why not? So the most pirated copy of Windows is the Ultimate version and even if you only need to crop a few photos you get Photoshop CS5 or the whole damn Master Collection. I remember having the latest version of AutoCAD long ago, was something like a $5000 value or so. It'd take me a while to pay on my allowance, to put it that way...
Just note that crackers have been pretty good at emulating dongles and if you want it to actually work you'll have to put custom logic on the dongle and integrate it into the software quite well, it's hardly a low cost option neither in hardware nor in software. Plus you'll annoy customers who'll inevitably lose/break dongles. I doubt it's worth it.
If you go back that far, there were plenty forms of entertainment but no way to record them. I'm sure there were plenty taverns with entertainment to draw people that operated a very much so commercial operation, but there was nobody there with a microphone. A painting could only hang on one person's wall unless someone carefully repainted it and a sculpture is even harder to copy. I'm sure people paid to see Shakespeare's plays but there was nobody with a video camera present. Scribes were required to copy books, a luxury only the rich could afford. Even after the invention of the printing press you'd need not only the press but also some form of distribution and retail outlets if you wanted to sell on more than your own street corner.
In short, there was no way you could directly reach the masses and there was no way the masses could directly pay you back. Taking on ten patrons each paying 10% of the cost meant they expected ten pictures to hang on the wall not one, which is far more work than one. Today you can put up a server on the Internet and a Paypal account and reach billions of people. Whether one patron pays you $10,000 or a thousand patrons pay you $10 is almost irrelevant. Okay so maybe you wouldn't be able to pay tens of millions of dollars to headline actors, directors and such. But what else would they do? Like the market is now such that you can make $1 million instead of $30 million per movie, you want to take it or go down to McDonalds and try looking good?
I don't blame people for following the money, I'd do the same too. But people don't leave and find other work until the money is so little it's worth a career change. Your star quarterback, if you halved his pay he'd go to another team. If every team halved his pay, he'd still be there playing a quarterback. How much does a writer need to earn to make more money than they do doing anything else? You don't need to be J. K. Rowling and make $800 million. I'm sure she'd do it for $8 million if there was no way to make more. The works don't go away until the creators behind them do, and I'm confident we'd throw in enough money to do just that.
Well, there's several networks like that but without any centralized authority you also lose any form of quality control. TPB has moderators, fake files, trojans and such are removed, people can make useful comments and get useful responses. A network that everybody gets to trash will quickly look like KaZaA all over again. Either you need some kind of useful distributed trust system - which nobody's managed to make popular yet - or you need a centralized index/search where most the crap has been filtered out. I think the future is more an overlay that provides a proxy service, letting you access those sites from anywhere in the world. That would at least make country-level blocks meaningless.
Space battles would consist of months, possibly years, of unmanned travel and intensive computation, followed by seconds of computers trying to out-maneuver and out-predict each other, followed by hours or days of the leaders waiting for news of the outcome.
Months of travel? Hours or days for news? Dude, it's over 4 light years to the closest star. If we met in the middle it would take years for the news to reach leaders back home. Unless you're talking about a war in this solar system, in which case I suspect 99% will happen in earth orbit since we've got no targets anywhere else worth anything. Oh, I suppose you could try throwing an asteroid down the gravity well and aim for the country you want to destroy but I doubt it's that easy to deorbit one in a timely fashion.
I don't know why you're picking on FNC here, but socialism doesn't stop people from leaving their jobs. It discourages hiring and even prohibits firing, and there are plenty of regulations telling people where they can and cannot work.
Maybe if you go to a communist country like Cuba or North Korea, but not in any of the more civilized countries you call socialist like Europe. Yes, hiring an employee here in Norway is a much bigger commitment here than in the US, because normally you have a mutual one month termination period for the first six months and three months after that. Normally people work through that period rather than the two week check as I've understood is common in the US and most people find themselves new work in this period so it's not even remotely as hostile as the US. Regardless of that companies will often let you go earlier if you've left for one of their competitors, but this is a voluntary agreement both parties must agree to.
Firing is far from prohibited but unlike the US you may not fire people for any or no reason. Essentially there are three ways to be terminated. The first is because the company has less work, is terminating stores or offices or restructuring that makes people redundant. Generally you can't hire with one hand and fire with the other, unless you've sacked them for work performance (I'll get to that) they generally have a preferred right to other open positions they're qualified for, if you're moving offices and that sort of thing. In short, downsizing is legal but it must be real.
The second way to get terminated is for poor work performance, and I admit this is hard. Basically the key word is document, document, document. You must show that the work performance has been deemed unacceptable, that the person has been informed of this, that they've been given sufficient opportunity to improve themselves and so on. Most often it's smaller businesses that either don't do all the steps, or they have too excessive reactions because they can't afford the dead weight. Larger companies generally do manage to get it right, but due to the cost and termination period involved they generally avoid to.
The third and final way is instant termination, which is pretty much like termination for cause in the US. Note that breaking internal rules is mostly not covered and would go under poor work performance, it is mostly criminal activity like theft, fraud or sabotage and willfully abusing or leaking confidential information, refusal to work and that sort of thing. If the facts of the case are unclear employees may end up suspended instead, which is not yet a termination.
That said, there are a lot of anti-discrimination laws and people given special protection by law, like for example people on sick leave or maternity leave. It does happen, I know a person that was terminated on sick leave but the company was downsizing almost 50% and if an office is closing then obviously everyone lose their jobs, but under normal circumstances they're practically immune to termination. Basically as long as they're doing their job when they're fit to work, you're not permitted to fire them no matter how inconvenient the leaves are.
Not sure what you mean about rules where people can get work, I can get work in pretty much any public or private job. A few require security clearances and a few require checking my criminal record e.g. to get work as a teacher, but for the most part every job is available to me. Of course all the usual caveats with who knows who and all that applies, but that's the same in any country. Oh and while we do have exempt workers, they're extremely few - any normal professional is still an employee with overtime pay. That cuts down on a lot of crap.
You must not go to the same countries as me, I have a bunch of 1 and 2 euro cent coins that are utterly useless. I'd have to deliver hundreds to get one ice cream. Here in Norway our smallest coin (50 øre) is about 7 euro-cents or 9 US cents and they've considered taking that away too.
Actually 1920x1080 should not be enough for a monitor, though it is enough for a TV at normal TV distance (a 65" screen at 9 feet with 20/20 vision ~= 1080p). The problem is that most software, icons etc. is retarded and assume 96 DPI so everything gets smaller instead of clearer. I used to have a 15.4" laptop with 1920x1200 resolution and no matter how many settings I tweaked some things stayed too small. I'm sure some people here will say they've made it work for them, but the masses don't. They want icons and stuff that is the "right size" and so buy lower resolution screens.
The iPhone 4 put 960x640 pixel in 3.5" and people surely noticed the upgrade from 150 ppi to 300 ppi. It's rumored that the iPad 3 will put a 2048x1536 display in the same 9.7" form factor. Surely on a 24"-30" screen on the desktop we could use 4K. But since nobody's buying it'll currently cost you $10k+ to get a 4K monitor and there's no 4K content to play, just one ultra sharp desktop. That's overkill for most, particularly when you can do 3x1080p for much, much less as long as you only need more screen real estate. Or even 6x1080p with a display rack and one of those Eyefinity cards.
Yeah, on the other hand a lot of people seem to have heard Moore's law so many times they're starting to think there's an actually law that computers will improve at some crazy rate. That we can just go infinitely small, infinitely fast, infinitely everything. Not simply that there might be a way around it, but that there must be a way around it. It's one thing to use it estimate that 128 bit encryption should at least be good for another X years, quite another to blindly assume that in X years then we will as a matter of fact be able to do it.
My first computer, a Commodore 64 ran at 985 kHz (PAL version) and for a while it just went up, up and away until we hit 1 GHz. Extrapolating we should be at 100+ GHz by now and closing in on THz processors. That's not going to happen, the way it looks now we'd be lucky to see a 10GHz processor if at all that. Of course we've done more cores and higher IPC and all that, but they all reflect that we can't just bump clock speed anymore. We're starting to see the same with graphics cards, they can give you more shaders but each shader is running into the same wall single threaded CPUs did.
Process die shrinks will start hitting atom size issues in the 2020s, where it's just not physically possible to go smaller. There are exotic theories but they're of the "flying car" variety, they certainly have very little to do with conventional processors that we've used for the last 30 years. So if we can't go faster and we can't go smaller, well we might be stuck. Another issue is power, how far down can you bring performance/watt? You battle leakage with SOI and 3D transistors and whatnot, but fundamentally process improvements don't give nearly the amount of "free" power drop it used to.
On the other hand, people have been saying Moore's "law" is coming to an end now for ages, and I'll be happy for every round of improvements we manage to squeeze out of it. But I'm not going to be surprised when the end comes.
You make it sound like getting to the end is a chore and the end is the reward. Perhaps you should enjoy the journey more and obsess less about the destination? I didn't exactly need a crystal ball to know Lord Voldemort was going to be defeated knowing the age bracket they aimed for, whether it's in three movies or in eight. The kind of movies where the bad guys more or less win is reserved for movies like "Man on Fire" or "Sin City". If you were sitting there waiting for the final epic battle of good vs evil and drumming your fingers "get on with it" you missed.... well, everything. The only stories that get me down are those that put the main plot on hold and go off doing everything else, and there Robert Jordan sinned a lot.
There were at times *at least* five primary plot threads for Rand, Matrim, Perrin, Egwene and Nynaeve and it's just too many. Even worse he'd continue to spin into subplots of minor characters like Thom, Aviendha, Tuon and so on until there was ten stories running and you could barely remember the last one by the time it came back into rotation. If you look at LotR - which can also get fairly long-winded at times - it never split up into more than two story threads, Frodo's party and the war efforts. In Jordan's style the whole fellowship would have been split up and he'd tell Frodo and Sam's story, Merry and Pippin's story, Gandalf's story, Aragon's story, Legolas' story, Gimli's story and Boromir's story as separate plot lines with side arcs for Elrond, Arwen, Eowyn and then some.
In all fairness, there's been a helluva lot less of that since Brandon Sanderson took over. In fact, I think the series has much improved overall since he took all those loose threads and have been tying them down, it may have taken him 3 books and almost a million words - 25% of the total length of the series - but he's done it. I was more than suspecting that Robert Jordan would never get around to doing it or would do so poorly, since the only thing he seems to know is to start new subplots and side arcs while milking the fans and if he hadn't fallen ill and died I suspect it would have continued. Sucks for him of course, but I suspect the series didn't get any worse for wear - in fact possibly quite a lot better.
Slashdot Mirror
The Orion and Daedalus projects of the 60s and 70s had theoretically designed spacecraft capable of anywhere from 5 to 12% of c given materials and power sources available at the time or soon available. (...) I believe that Freeman Dyson computed the economic cost of an Orion class starship and concluded it would be about the same as a year's worth of the United States GDP at the time
It should be noted that we still in 2012 don't have the technology to build the Daedalus, so soon available is stretching it. As for Orion, the conservative design would take 1 GDP but the optimistic "momentum limited" design only 0.1 GDP. The small caveat is that it's only for the ship itself and doesn't include the cost to put 400,000 ton in orbit - the nuclear design doesn't have the thrust to launch from Earth. So cost estimates ignore the 10,000 Saturn V or 20,000 Falcon Heavy launches required, at about $100 million per launch that's another $2 trillion not including assembly.
That is only one of many costs missing from those calculations, they're practically just material costs as if everything came off the assembly line. The cost creating and testing a real, practical design and not just a highly hypothesized theoretical design that will take all the stress of 300,000 nukes and the redundancy and reliability to last 100+ years as it'll only go 3.3% of light speed will be much higher. Oh, you can get it up to 8-10% but then you can multiply the cost estimates a lot. Even more if you want to slow down and actually orbit/land when you arrive. The "cheapest" designs are only a fly-by.
Too bad x264 is one big pile of patent infringement if used in Slashdot's home country.
Except the end user never pays. Internet broadcast for free is free, subscription or title-by-title services requires the content provider to pay license fees, that's how everyone manage to ship free-as-in-beer decoders. The reason Firefox has a bug up their ass about it is that the Internet doesn't get a truly free codec that way, not because they couldn't find a way to include a x264 decoder.
Larrabee almost certainly lowered future expectations for discrete graphics chips, fearing that Chipzilla would enter their market. I'm guessing this is the same for the foundry business, scaring away potential investors in TSMC, UMC and GloFo. Huge, huge investment costs that take years to materialize and are extremely time-to-market sensitive, any uncertainty you can add to that is advantage Intel. I very much doubt that anything remotely competing with Intel will ever get their hands on their crown jewels.
HTML V5 is gonna be locked down tighter than a nun's thighs and is controlled by one of the most aggressive patent trolls there has ever been and THAT is good? Has everyone kinda had a senior moment and forgot that H.264 is patented up the ass and is controlled by a conglomeration that will happily sue your ass if you look at them funny?
Well, most flash video is H.264 too, it's pretty hard to argue that HTML5/H.264 will be worse than Flash/H.264. Right now the alternatives to H.264 are as dead as Ogg Theora was to music but since everybody's blocking each other I assume the status quo will be maintained until the H.264 patents expire in the 2020s. You're pretending like this achieves something but I don't see how, except to continue promoting flash over HTML. You may notice that all the other players that now play YouTube videos dropped flash, but continue to use H.264. There's absolutely zero traction for moving away.
In fact, I'm not sure I can name a single site I use that makes use of Flash.
You must not get out much. I just checked BBC, CNN and they both use flash. If I go to the top three news sites in Norway (VG, Dagbladet, Aftenposten) they all use flash. Okay they all use them for ads but for a business based on showing people ads that's a rather essential use. Kill flash and the ads won't go away, they'll become HTML5 ads.
That and the fact that every new car seems to be built on the principle that repair costs are no obstacle, so if a car gets hit, its highly damaged, extremely expensive to repair, and much more likely to be a write off - meaning you need to buy a replacement.
Mostly it's safety requirements, build it too rigid and the impact is transferred to you. Today's car will absorb far more of the impact, routing it around the passenger cabin but there's no way to make it work only on the big collisions, even a small impact will bend all those parts that are supposed to bend. And you can't leave them bent because then you'd have gaps that would cause terrible shock impacts on a big collision. It's the same reason they recommend replacing your bike helmet any time it gets a good knock, even if it looks okay. Of course that's a much smaller investment but same idea.
As for computers and integration, well people want all sorts of sensors and anti-spin and stabilization systems and parking systems and so on that means it has to be all hooked up. You can still build a car like they used to, but it will lack many of the checklist points people look for today. Personally I'm hoping they'll soon give me an automated driver too, at least for the times I don't want to drive. I don't see that as a problem any more than computers putting more and more on the motherboard and in the CPU and moving towards SoCs, it's progress.
From the linked PDF, last of section 5.1 on page 15:
In the meantime, we adopt an atmosphere with at least 50% water by mass as the most plausible model to explain the WFC3 observations.
Well, it's 75 times closer to the star than us so the starlight comes from a wider angle plus a steam atmosphere sounds like a pretty good heat conductor so I doubt it's all that different. But if it's tidally locked, the dark side of the planet could be interesting...
So why did the US enjoy decades of undisputed trade dominance? BECAUSE WE BLEW UP EVERYONE ELSE"S FACTORIES!!! It's kind of obvious isn't it?
Japan maybe, but Europe was burning from London to Moscow long before the US entered the war and with or without Pearl Harbor we'd be pretty bombed out. So to claim the US did it would be a wild exaggeration.
Really? What does it even mean to say 'living in an inconsistent universe'.
A consistent universe means that experiments are reproducible, that we are able to find formulas - even probabilistic ones like quantum physics - that have great predictive power. In searching for laws of nature there's an implicit assumption that nature is governed by laws. Obviously there's nothing to prove that gravity will work the same ten seconds from now, but we assume a consistency with how it is and how it has been. That doesn't mean we believe it is absolutely constant across all of space and time, but if it was totally chaotic we couldn't predict anything.
Science does not exclude the possibility of exceptions, whether it's Jesus walking on water or Neo flying inside the Matrix. But extraordinary claims tend to require extraordinary evidence that yes this is real. That it is not simply a flawed experiment or a shyster or that it all took place in someone's head. Which is pretty hard if you can't command it at will, if you say God did it. Of course if we didn't observe it, then at that point, at that time maybe the laws of nature were different. A religious person might believe it's a miracle, I'd probably believe something more mundane but there's no proof either way.
Dead as in inert, inactive like a dead volcano. Not everything we describe as dead was ever alive...
Heh, not that long ago I threw away my collection of old photocopied codes and manuals from the 80s before we had multitasking and PDFs. The really hard copy protection were the floppies that had intentional bad sectors in them, until a patched version came along via the sneakernet.
Anyway, people who pirate always get the best version because why not? So the most pirated copy of Windows is the Ultimate version and even if you only need to crop a few photos you get Photoshop CS5 or the whole damn Master Collection. I remember having the latest version of AutoCAD long ago, was something like a $5000 value or so. It'd take me a while to pay on my allowance, to put it that way...
Just note that crackers have been pretty good at emulating dongles and if you want it to actually work you'll have to put custom logic on the dongle and integrate it into the software quite well, it's hardly a low cost option neither in hardware nor in software. Plus you'll annoy customers who'll inevitably lose/break dongles. I doubt it's worth it.
The works don't go away until the creators behind them do, and I'm confident we'd throw in enough money to avoid just that.
FTFM
If you go back that far, there were plenty forms of entertainment but no way to record them. I'm sure there were plenty taverns with entertainment to draw people that operated a very much so commercial operation, but there was nobody there with a microphone. A painting could only hang on one person's wall unless someone carefully repainted it and a sculpture is even harder to copy. I'm sure people paid to see Shakespeare's plays but there was nobody with a video camera present. Scribes were required to copy books, a luxury only the rich could afford. Even after the invention of the printing press you'd need not only the press but also some form of distribution and retail outlets if you wanted to sell on more than your own street corner.
In short, there was no way you could directly reach the masses and there was no way the masses could directly pay you back. Taking on ten patrons each paying 10% of the cost meant they expected ten pictures to hang on the wall not one, which is far more work than one. Today you can put up a server on the Internet and a Paypal account and reach billions of people. Whether one patron pays you $10,000 or a thousand patrons pay you $10 is almost irrelevant. Okay so maybe you wouldn't be able to pay tens of millions of dollars to headline actors, directors and such. But what else would they do? Like the market is now such that you can make $1 million instead of $30 million per movie, you want to take it or go down to McDonalds and try looking good?
I don't blame people for following the money, I'd do the same too. But people don't leave and find other work until the money is so little it's worth a career change. Your star quarterback, if you halved his pay he'd go to another team. If every team halved his pay, he'd still be there playing a quarterback. How much does a writer need to earn to make more money than they do doing anything else? You don't need to be J. K. Rowling and make $800 million. I'm sure she'd do it for $8 million if there was no way to make more. The works don't go away until the creators behind them do, and I'm confident we'd throw in enough money to do just that.
Well, there's several networks like that but without any centralized authority you also lose any form of quality control. TPB has moderators, fake files, trojans and such are removed, people can make useful comments and get useful responses. A network that everybody gets to trash will quickly look like KaZaA all over again. Either you need some kind of useful distributed trust system - which nobody's managed to make popular yet - or you need a centralized index/search where most the crap has been filtered out. I think the future is more an overlay that provides a proxy service, letting you access those sites from anywhere in the world. That would at least make country-level blocks meaningless.
And clouds, I swear I saw one in the shape of a copyrighted work.
Space battles would consist of months, possibly years, of unmanned travel and intensive computation, followed by seconds of computers trying to out-maneuver and out-predict each other, followed by hours or days of the leaders waiting for news of the outcome.
Months of travel? Hours or days for news? Dude, it's over 4 light years to the closest star. If we met in the middle it would take years for the news to reach leaders back home. Unless you're talking about a war in this solar system, in which case I suspect 99% will happen in earth orbit since we've got no targets anywhere else worth anything. Oh, I suppose you could try throwing an asteroid down the gravity well and aim for the country you want to destroy but I doubt it's that easy to deorbit one in a timely fashion.
I don't know why you're picking on FNC here, but socialism doesn't stop people from leaving their jobs. It discourages hiring and even prohibits firing, and there are plenty of regulations telling people where they can and cannot work.
Maybe if you go to a communist country like Cuba or North Korea, but not in any of the more civilized countries you call socialist like Europe. Yes, hiring an employee here in Norway is a much bigger commitment here than in the US, because normally you have a mutual one month termination period for the first six months and three months after that. Normally people work through that period rather than the two week check as I've understood is common in the US and most people find themselves new work in this period so it's not even remotely as hostile as the US. Regardless of that companies will often let you go earlier if you've left for one of their competitors, but this is a voluntary agreement both parties must agree to.
Firing is far from prohibited but unlike the US you may not fire people for any or no reason. Essentially there are three ways to be terminated. The first is because the company has less work, is terminating stores or offices or restructuring that makes people redundant. Generally you can't hire with one hand and fire with the other, unless you've sacked them for work performance (I'll get to that) they generally have a preferred right to other open positions they're qualified for, if you're moving offices and that sort of thing. In short, downsizing is legal but it must be real.
The second way to get terminated is for poor work performance, and I admit this is hard. Basically the key word is document, document, document. You must show that the work performance has been deemed unacceptable, that the person has been informed of this, that they've been given sufficient opportunity to improve themselves and so on. Most often it's smaller businesses that either don't do all the steps, or they have too excessive reactions because they can't afford the dead weight. Larger companies generally do manage to get it right, but due to the cost and termination period involved they generally avoid to.
The third and final way is instant termination, which is pretty much like termination for cause in the US. Note that breaking internal rules is mostly not covered and would go under poor work performance, it is mostly criminal activity like theft, fraud or sabotage and willfully abusing or leaking confidential information, refusal to work and that sort of thing. If the facts of the case are unclear employees may end up suspended instead, which is not yet a termination.
That said, there are a lot of anti-discrimination laws and people given special protection by law, like for example people on sick leave or maternity leave. It does happen, I know a person that was terminated on sick leave but the company was downsizing almost 50% and if an office is closing then obviously everyone lose their jobs, but under normal circumstances they're practically immune to termination. Basically as long as they're doing their job when they're fit to work, you're not permitted to fire them no matter how inconvenient the leaves are.
Not sure what you mean about rules where people can get work, I can get work in pretty much any public or private job. A few require security clearances and a few require checking my criminal record e.g. to get work as a teacher, but for the most part every job is available to me. Of course all the usual caveats with who knows who and all that applies, but that's the same in any country. Oh and while we do have exempt workers, they're extremely few - any normal professional is still an employee with overtime pay. That cuts down on a lot of crap.
You must not go to the same countries as me, I have a bunch of 1 and 2 euro cent coins that are utterly useless. I'd have to deliver hundreds to get one ice cream. Here in Norway our smallest coin (50 øre) is about 7 euro-cents or 9 US cents and they've considered taking that away too.
Actually 1920x1080 should not be enough for a monitor, though it is enough for a TV at normal TV distance (a 65" screen at 9 feet with 20/20 vision ~= 1080p). The problem is that most software, icons etc. is retarded and assume 96 DPI so everything gets smaller instead of clearer. I used to have a 15.4" laptop with 1920x1200 resolution and no matter how many settings I tweaked some things stayed too small. I'm sure some people here will say they've made it work for them, but the masses don't. They want icons and stuff that is the "right size" and so buy lower resolution screens.
The iPhone 4 put 960x640 pixel in 3.5" and people surely noticed the upgrade from 150 ppi to 300 ppi. It's rumored that the iPad 3 will put a 2048x1536 display in the same 9.7" form factor. Surely on a 24"-30" screen on the desktop we could use 4K. But since nobody's buying it'll currently cost you $10k+ to get a 4K monitor and there's no 4K content to play, just one ultra sharp desktop. That's overkill for most, particularly when you can do 3x1080p for much, much less as long as you only need more screen real estate. Or even 6x1080p with a display rack and one of those Eyefinity cards.
Yeah, on the other hand a lot of people seem to have heard Moore's law so many times they're starting to think there's an actually law that computers will improve at some crazy rate. That we can just go infinitely small, infinitely fast, infinitely everything. Not simply that there might be a way around it, but that there must be a way around it. It's one thing to use it estimate that 128 bit encryption should at least be good for another X years, quite another to blindly assume that in X years then we will as a matter of fact be able to do it.
My first computer, a Commodore 64 ran at 985 kHz (PAL version) and for a while it just went up, up and away until we hit 1 GHz. Extrapolating we should be at 100+ GHz by now and closing in on THz processors. That's not going to happen, the way it looks now we'd be lucky to see a 10GHz processor if at all that. Of course we've done more cores and higher IPC and all that, but they all reflect that we can't just bump clock speed anymore. We're starting to see the same with graphics cards, they can give you more shaders but each shader is running into the same wall single threaded CPUs did.
Process die shrinks will start hitting atom size issues in the 2020s, where it's just not physically possible to go smaller. There are exotic theories but they're of the "flying car" variety, they certainly have very little to do with conventional processors that we've used for the last 30 years. So if we can't go faster and we can't go smaller, well we might be stuck. Another issue is power, how far down can you bring performance/watt? You battle leakage with SOI and 3D transistors and whatnot, but fundamentally process improvements don't give nearly the amount of "free" power drop it used to.
On the other hand, people have been saying Moore's "law" is coming to an end now for ages, and I'll be happy for every round of improvements we manage to squeeze out of it. But I'm not going to be surprised when the end comes.
You make it sound like getting to the end is a chore and the end is the reward. Perhaps you should enjoy the journey more and obsess less about the destination? I didn't exactly need a crystal ball to know Lord Voldemort was going to be defeated knowing the age bracket they aimed for, whether it's in three movies or in eight. The kind of movies where the bad guys more or less win is reserved for movies like "Man on Fire" or "Sin City". If you were sitting there waiting for the final epic battle of good vs evil and drumming your fingers "get on with it" you missed.... well, everything. The only stories that get me down are those that put the main plot on hold and go off doing everything else, and there Robert Jordan sinned a lot.
There were at times *at least* five primary plot threads for Rand, Matrim, Perrin, Egwene and Nynaeve and it's just too many. Even worse he'd continue to spin into subplots of minor characters like Thom, Aviendha, Tuon and so on until there was ten stories running and you could barely remember the last one by the time it came back into rotation. If you look at LotR - which can also get fairly long-winded at times - it never split up into more than two story threads, Frodo's party and the war efforts. In Jordan's style the whole fellowship would have been split up and he'd tell Frodo and Sam's story, Merry and Pippin's story, Gandalf's story, Aragon's story, Legolas' story, Gimli's story and Boromir's story as separate plot lines with side arcs for Elrond, Arwen, Eowyn and then some.
Even the wiki summary was too freaking long. Someone sum this series up in one sentence please.
This is not the book series you're looking for, move along now.
In all fairness, there's been a helluva lot less of that since Brandon Sanderson took over. In fact, I think the series has much improved overall since he took all those loose threads and have been tying them down, it may have taken him 3 books and almost a million words - 25% of the total length of the series - but he's done it. I was more than suspecting that Robert Jordan would never get around to doing it or would do so poorly, since the only thing he seems to know is to start new subplots and side arcs while milking the fans and if he hadn't fallen ill and died I suspect it would have continued. Sucks for him of course, but I suspect the series didn't get any worse for wear - in fact possibly quite a lot better.