So, for example - for a new album, I'd want a copy of the digital masters, and a record. 2 copies, different formats. One is ideal for duplication, playback, and distribution, the other is proof against codecs, knowledge, or hardware being lost
You have a point, but the analog copy degrades over time in ways that can't necessarily be restored. Yes, you have to be careful with digital copies to prevent total loss, but conversion is easier as long as you're careful. Also, how do you make an analog copy of a computer program?
Consider that it might not be so easy to play a phonograph in some far future time. Even if the disc doesn't become warped, you may need to construct special equipment to play it. What size and type of needle? How to you transfer the sound from the needle to the amplification system? What speed to you rotate the record? This is all stuff that, just like the magnetic tape, that you need to know. With film, most film systems in semi-modern years have a sound track. How do you play that?
Basically, I think we need to dissassociate the art from the media it's contained on. After that, it can be kepted in a 'cloud', backed up to five seperate locations, each with multiple backups, including optical media to protect against EMP.
Make no mistake, the theoretical LoC is going to have to be a very active depository, constantly testing and copying the works contained within. With a data 'cloud', this can be far more automated. With Vinyl discs, even if you transcribe once every 50 years, you end up using a stupendous amount of manpower on it.
I'd also like to point to this article on the subject:
Interesting. I broke down the digital stuff a bit more with my reply to darkjedi, where I mentioned using lossless formats, and having some sort of regular transcription system.
To be blunt, I'm not pretending that the task I would give the LoC would be 'cheap' or 'easy'. It'd be a massive effort, and insanely expensive on the whole. We're probably talking a team of a dozen people just managing the formats that books are kept in. Not actually handling the data, but setting rules for what formats you can submit your ebook in, evaluating automatic transcription programs, etc...
To pay for all this, if you want your copyright enforced after the first 10 years, you have to pay your fees. Want 30 years? Even bigger fee. My only hope is that economy of scale would win, with the Walt Disneys of the world essentially funding the effort.
But we'd get a useful amount of semi-modern public media out of it. After that, well, eventually the LoC will lose data, even if it manages my 9 9's of reliability. It probably won't manage that amount of reliability, not for unpopular stuff, or stuff that's somehow 'unique' and not suitable for automatic transcription. That's ultimately okay. If we even preserve 1% over the next 1000 years, we'll have done better than anybody else in history.
Speaking of which - On second thought I think that having the LoC charge a reasonable fee for *access* might also be a good idea. That way it's getting money both from producers and consumers. That way the fee the LoC has to charge to producers doesn't increase too much from having to cover all the now public domain information. Let's say they charge $10/month(think Netflix but also with Books, music, programs and pictures), and it has so much useful information that pretty much every household has a subscription - it works out to ~$9B/year. You should be able to pay for a LOT of data retention with that much dough.
And, since you're right in discussing what the consumer gets (versus what the studios have), that ultimately means consumers have to get archival-grade digital data for any kind of consumer-based archive (including libraries, who - as far as studios are concerned - are still consumers) to work at all.
Consumer level archiving has always depended a bit upon luck - A CD might only be rated, on average, to last a decade, but if it's popular you're shotgunning out like fish do eggs. A lucky 'good' CD is additionally lucky by being kept by somebody who keeps it in near-optimal storage conditions. The bound book is never exposed to exessive light or moisture, etc... The film is stored, forgotten, in a dark climate controlled storage room. Books are a sort of special case- despite being 'analog' they're sort of digital, in that the shape of individual letters is relatively unimportant for copying purposes, as long as the words can still be figured out. Meaning the story/information can be recovered from a book in much worse condition than, say, a picture.
This would make collecting (where playing isn't generally the point) both safer and on sounder legal ground, which in turn would boost the material preserved.
True, but consumers don't typically get their media in formats with good longevity, especially today, which is why I want to task the LoC with it. Of course, short of rewriting copyright law all by myself, it's always going to remain an incomplete scenario.
Can anybody answer how much should storing 50 GB of data(blu-ray max), with 99.9999999% reliability per year cost, in a massive warehouse scenario? It cannot be 'lost', 'misplaced', or discarded. It needs to be accessable by equipment readily available at the time, and not need difficult to obtain or unreliable legacy equipment/software. Duration? Pretty much permanently.
I considered that, which is why I didn't actually specify 'digital', simply giving examples. I want digital over analog because you can make a 100% perfect copy even over multiple generations, and 35/70mm film, for example, is on it's way out(though it still has a long life remaining, it's a bit past middle age).
Though you do bring up a good point - For copyright to be applicable, the LoC has to be provided the highest quality masters available, especially if it's going to be analog - Let the studio keep the master, but the library gets a first run copy(most theaters get a 3rd or 4th run copy - a copy of the copy of the master). I'm not going to be satisified with DVD quality of Blu-ray is available.
Still, I'm worried about cost and space - bound copies can be lost as well, to fire, for example.
'Bit Rot' would be managed by having an actual transcription program to transfer old data to new formats, preferably lossless. CDs going away? Transcribe to FLAC. FLAC going away? Transcribe to it's replacement. Are you using DLT-III tapes for your archives? Time to move up to DLT-IV. Medias and formats will be chosen on the basis of how widespread it's usage is in professional and non-professional circles, their quality and durability, availability and anticipated longevity. If a format starts becoming depreciated(DLT-III tapes are now more expensive than DLT-IV), the LoC shall conduct a study* and switch to a format that's mainstream and gaining, IE in the prime of it's life.
Personally, I'd ammend copyright in the following ways:
Copyright is free for the first 10 years. A fee is charged for the next 10. Renewals are technically unlimited, but the fee increases each time. Enough information will be published with a work that you can verify a work's copyright status online. If it can't be tracked down, it's fair game. Well, unless you stole an unfinished manuscript or something(need some wording to distinguish between protected 'work in progress' and 'abandoned'). In any case, the clock starts once you start selling.
The fee will depend on the work - a single photograph, pretty cheap. A book? The same. Movies will be more.
The work will be archived in the Library of Congress. The fees from copyright renewals will go towards this. They will be sufficient to keep the LoC running, providing good access and proper backups.
Archival copies will have the following requirements:
Common high-quality archive format. Equipment will be available to translate the archive into common consumer formats(IE CD Master to CD)
No DRM or encyryption is allowed.
For software, source code and build instructions are required. A copy of the compiler used, etc...
By 'common high-quality archive' I'm thinking things like 'glass master' for CDs and DVDs, certain backup tapes for programs, etc... Matter of fact, keeping stuff in multiple formats is ideal - For a movie: Glass master, 10 pressed DVDs, and a digital backup stored in a cloud type storage system. Regular testing and updating is included in the renewal costs.
The idea is to make Walt Disney think long and hard about keeping movies like 'Snow White' copyrighted, much less their huge archive. Sadly, Walt Disney is one of the better companies at preserving their works. Others have let films rot in vaults. Thus the requirement for the LoC to act as an archive.
Except situation B, as shown by the nuclear industry, is a lot less than even.001%. We've gotten a LOT of reactor years, with a total of 3 major incidents.
TMI - radiation release was pretty much confined to the plant, and what escaped was short lived(and likely less horrible than living a similar distance from a coal plant, even at the worst point). No identified deaths. Chernobyl - Really bad. Still a limited number of deaths, and built in ways that would never have passed muster in most of the rest of the world, much less the USA, Europe, etc... No containment dome, positive void coeffecient, carbon moderation rods, etc... Fukushima - a first generation nuclear plant, within a year of decommissioning anyways, taken out by a Tsunami. Some land is currently off limits due to radiation concerns, but on the whole the danger is far less than all the other crud released by the wave. To date, known casualties at the plant are restricted to what could have happened at any other industrial facility when hit by an earthquake and giant wave of water. In addition, it's been noted that more modern plants wouldn't suffer many of the same failures, as said failures had been figured and and countermeasures designed and implemented. Things like a somewhat higher/differently designed seawall, not putting the generators in the basement, and proper hydrogen diffusers/burnoff devices.
Risk management - I'd rather take the.02% chance* of being affected by a nuclear accident than sacrifice a pretty much guaranteed 1% of my life. Of course, I have above average math ability.
On subsidies - did you read up on Price-Anderson and find out such things that the US Governemnt hasn't ever had to pay out under it's terms? Realize that the US Government tends to stick it's nose(and finances) into ANY disaster of that magnitude? That, even being generous for counting P-A as a subsidy(insurance schemes like this being fairly discretional on how you value them on the basis of your assumptions).
*14k reactor years of civil operation, 3 major accidents,.02% chance of major accident per reactor year. Death toll is harder to calc, considering the accidental deaths are like 50 for Chernobyl, and 0 for TMI and Fukishima**. Still, let's use the 350k evacuated from Fukushima as a standard. That's a.014% chance of dying IN Chernobyl (50/350k), and much lower odds if you consider (50/(350K*14K))..000001% chance of dying if you live right next to a nuclear reactor from a major accident involving it, per year, by my calculation. Of course, that doesn't take into account that most of the 50 deaths, specifically the 35 initial ones, were all plant workers or emergency responders. **I'll admit to not counting deaths that could have happened in pretty much any industry - you can get killed in a steam explosion as easily, if not more easily, in a coal plant as you can a nuclear. Meanwhile, finding a few thousand deaths by coal isn't hard at all. Heck, it's more an annual figure of the death toll, and that's today, not going back to the begennings of the industry. Just about everything is safer today - why can't we build some safe nuke plants, get the actively killing coal plants shut down, and then move on to the older, more dangerous(and less efficient) nuke plants, just to be safe?
As for TFA, has anybody really run the numbers on these things or is it just another rich toy so they can feel all "green" about themselves? What i mean is run the total numbers, from the cost of digging up the lithium and the cost of replacing and disposing of batteries to the cost of the electricity to charge them?, and then compared it to say one of the fuel efficient 4 bangers?
Lithium batteries are theoretically cheaper than NiMH, Lithium is pretty common and fairly cheap, though making batteries from them is currently expensive. They could, theoretically speaking, cost around a quarter of what they do now. Oh, and the batteries are basically 100% recyclable.
Pollution wise, it's been figured that an EV is 'greener' pollution wise even if it gets it's power from the worst polluting electric supply - coal plants. A compliant coal plant has a lot of controls to keep the pollution down, and economy of scale helps.
Right now, the 4-banger is significantly cheaper to purchase, more expensive to run, but slightly more polluting(if the EV is charged with coal), to much more polluting(pretty much any other power source), and is generally more capable(longer range, faster 'charge'). The EV is more expensive up front, cheaper to run, and less polluting, especially in your neighborhood.
1. Spent fuel for a nuclear reactor is currently still mostly fuel. At least you only mentioned centuries - after the first century or so for the waste of reprocessed fuel, it's no longer that much more dangerous than many other things you'll find in the ground. 2. CO2 sequestriation for coal power is *EXPENSIVE*. It takes something like 1/3rd the power production of the plant to do it, so they're less efficient. 3. Trivia fact: Fukishima operated safely for decades, and was an older plant than either Chernobyl or even Three Mile Island. Even then, consider the cost - it took a tsunami to take it out, and even then, you have still have far more deaths from the Tsunami in the area than from the radiation.
Personally, I'd be building new nuclear plants in order to first replace coal(dirtiest first), following up with replacing the older, less safe(but still pretty safe, how many other multibillion industrial accidents don't kill anybody?) nuclear plants.
A warlord is more or less equally as dangerous as uncontrolled fire.
Just because he's unconcerned with the safety of others and their stuff, doesn't mean that he's unconcerned about the safety of himself and his stuff.
That is assuming that someone is burning only paper. Indeed, a stack of paper can be a bitch to burn beyond recognition. But if you're in the business of raping women and torching villages, you just throw the documents into a building that you are going to burn to the ground and then you leave town. Eventually the temperature of the fire gets high enough that the paper incinerates well beyond any hope of recovery.
You're positing a pretty one-dimensional warlord in this case, who always has a building at hand to torch whenever he needs to dispose of some documents. Most warlords aren't fighting all the time, and often the important papers are back at his palatial palace of an HQ, where he DOES have electricity most, if not all of the time due to being first on the repair list and having backup generators.
MobileTatsu makes a good point - some documents are too sensitive to trust to minions OR an unmonitored burning building. You never know, you could toss your documents into the fire then the US operatives sweep in and recover them. Proper forensics can reconstruct a surprising amount of information from burned, but not stirred, documents.
You might be suprised. A fire can be dangerous, a shredder is convenient. Also, we can reconstruct documents that have been burned, and if you have a big stack it can actually take longer to burn them beyond recovery. Why? It's about oxygen availability - the corners, top and bottom pages will burn first, but the center of a pile of documents will often remain intact, yielding valuable intelligence if recovered.
Having looked up the shred, it seems to be standard commercial shred sizes - the DOD goes quite a bit smaller than that.
DRM on ebooks gives Amazon a great tool for locking ebook customers into the Kindle platform.'"
Which is why I'm not buying books from Amazon or B&N at this point. Either it's without DRM, or I'm not buying it. Baen's Webscriptions for me, at least at the moment.
One thing to be wary of is over-concentrating on college-prep. I think it's best to acknowledge that a portion aren't going to college right out of HS, and give them a courseload appropriate to that. Not 'easier', just different.
Want to really fix it? The answer is the same as what's making the Chinese government uneasy, and is touched on in TFA - workers who are organized. That "dirty" word - unions.
Chinese workers are nearly universally unionized(though they aren't very powerful), and unions aren't going to help against outsourcing. Not all jobs CAN be outsourced. Not all jobs are all that ameniable to unionization, and I'm not just talking about the business being hostile to them. I'm thinking about things like the small business shop with 4-12 employees. Is a union all that beneficial there? What about the business that has a single mechanic? The family plumbing business?
If you can tell me how a union is going to help stop outsourcing, I'd love to know. Personally, I think that China is quickly developing, and has reached the point that it's using more and more of it's developing workforce/infrastructure internally, not for international goods. Wages are rapidly rising - at the cost of stagnating wages in the US and Europe, but they're already hitting the point where outsourcing isn't the 'easy sell' anymore, and the costs of dealing with a foreign country on the opposite side of the planet(delays, shipping, regulations) is making US work cheaper again. In limited areas at the moment, but it's spreading.
A living wage needs to be enouraged, but first people need a wage.
Personally, I'd try to raise wages by encouraging businesses to the point that there's a shortage of workers again. Not too serious of a s shortage, but enough that they're always looking for somebody new. I'd do this via a massive infrastructure building campaign designed to lower costs to the point that building/working in the USA is attractive again. I'd go through federal regulations with a goal of reducing them by 50% - simplifying regulations, resolving conflicting rules, eliminating duplication. At the same time, regulations should be *effective*. A rule has no meaning if it has no 'bite'.
Along with that are many other policy changes that I'd enact, too many to list here, including fixing education, ending the drug war, raising taxes on the wealthiest(yes, I'd raise taxes at this point), etc...
Maybe what needs to be done is mot encouraging the technical schools, but rather discouraging parents & others from feeling that little Johnny and Suzie must go to college, no matter how much better served they might be by going a different route.
Oh, I agree. I just didn't think to put it in my post. You can expect to miss things when you spend 2 minutes writing something and do minimal editing. I think I was perhaps hesitant to discourage going to college.
Well, obviously you'd have to filter through the requests and find career fields that are actually short-changed, but I know they're out there. Excessive numbers of temporary foreign workers, higher pay than what you'd expect from the education/difficulty, etc...
So sure, I'd listen, but it'd only be one data point. One thing to remember when you get into these things is that everything affects everything else - and I wasn't writing a book. 'Yelling' - trying to get more workers so they can pay less. 'Screaming' - shortages are hurting their business.
You make some points, I'll make the point that I listed it in last place for a reason. I wouldn't actually shut down career paths, just maybe draw them down a bit. Look at careers with shortfalls, encourage them a bit.
As for Jamie, he's not working in a 'russian lit' job, now is he? He'd technically do better with an engineering degree(though he's probably gotten that through practical experience, at least). He's also in a position where college are more or less a non-factor - Such as Bill Gates(dropout) and Steve Jobs(dropout).
That any given individual succeeds or fails is ultimately up to them, but when you look in on it as a whole, there are choices that are better and worse.
I agree, it's definitely an enabler. But in many cases they're also producing so many college grads that graduating college is no longer the special thing it used to be. Jobs are requiring a Bachelor's that, 20 years ago, only required a HS Diploma, and 10 years ago an associate degree. But it's doing it at an additional cost of like $15k/year, plus people aren't (as) productive during their school years, so there's 2-4 years less time working. It's ugly.
Well, going with apprenticeships/internships, businesses really need to rebuild their training programs rather than expecting to always be able to hire people with prior experience.
It used to be that big companies like Ford, GM, and such did huge amounts of training - it's why working for them was so often a lifetime career.
For smaller businesses, the military steadily churned out skilled workers. Most of that work has been outsourced anymore, often to the same ex-military guys who the government trained in the first place. I've seen it myself - well over a dozen guys retire out of the military, is back on the job in a month wearing civilian clothes.
I don't entirely disagree, but money does have a certain amount of marginal happiness to it - it doesn't guarantee happiness, and there's decreasing returns as the amount of money increases. IE you'll be happier at $10k than $1k, maybe a bit happier at $100k, but after that the effects are minimal. You're better off addressing other parts of your life - at which point the money is an enabler.
As such, I think that 'productive' is a good measure because it can be vague.
Actually, I think that the US needs to make high school worth something again.
Second would be encouraging technical schools, stuff where businesses are screaming they can't find employees.
Third would be reigning in the cost of an education. There shouldn't be any excuse for tuition to be skyrocketing like it has for as long as it has. It's a classic sign of a bubble.
Fourth would perhaps be cutting funding for, as the op mentions, 'unproductive majors'.
There's many levels of data, and not all of them are classified. Besides classification levels, you also have FOUO, Privacy Act, HIPAA, etc... Most of which require increasingly higher levels of protection.
Of course, Tricare(our healthcare system) contractors seem to LOVE losing our data and having to pay for credit monitoring...
Just because a wipe utility says it can do a DoD wipe, doesn't mean it does. Even if it does(likely), doesn't mean that the NSA&DoD has tested/audited said program to ensure that it meets the required standards(suprisingly unlikely).
Disclaimer: I AM a uniformed DoD servicemember who's duties impign upon this, but I am NOT a contract expert, nor do I know the level of data he's processing. Heck, I don't even know if you're working with the DoD.
1. Ignore all other advice in this thread about using programs to wipe HDs. Only NSA approved wiping software may be used, and the instructions would have to be followed to the letter. In this field non-approved programs aren't considered trustworthy enough. The base 2. While the DoD is moving towards 'Data at rest' encryption, it's not considered remnence security, at this time. 3. Don't view it as a security expense. View it as a contract expense. The customer is allowed to request silly things. You just work it into the contract. 4. Given that the contract has just been renewed and the contract is still in place, there should be NO need to destroy at this time. Only destroy if a HD fails, or would otherwise be replaced/become excess for whatever reason, in which case you have the replacement expense anyways. The contract should contain some blurb about 'when no longer being used for the purpose'. Given that the contract is continuing... 5. Contact your contract office/QAR for more exact details. 6. If you have to ship HD's off to be destroyed, send them to an approved facility. Being contractors, you may or may not be able to use the ones I've used.
Man, a million doesn't stretch as far as it used too...
The point wasn't to get to be a 'super rich multi-millionaire'. The point was to have money to retire on. In many cases, if people invested their money instead of buying lotto tickets, they'd have a pretty decent retirement. And, as Tyler mentioned - the marginal utility/'happiness' of a dollar does decrease the more you have. Money, after a certain point, doesn't buy happiness.
Back on lotto winners - there's plenty of evidence that most lotto winner's money skills are worse than average, given that the majority of multi-million winners end up declaring bankruptcy within 5 years of winning, and by 7-10 years most are back in the same financial situation as they were before winning.
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So, for example - for a new album, I'd want a copy of the digital masters, and a record. 2 copies, different formats. One is ideal for duplication, playback, and distribution, the other is proof against codecs, knowledge, or hardware being lost
You have a point, but the analog copy degrades over time in ways that can't necessarily be restored. Yes, you have to be careful with digital copies to prevent total loss, but conversion is easier as long as you're careful. Also, how do you make an analog copy of a computer program?
Consider that it might not be so easy to play a phonograph in some far future time. Even if the disc doesn't become warped, you may need to construct special equipment to play it. What size and type of needle? How to you transfer the sound from the needle to the amplification system? What speed to you rotate the record? This is all stuff that, just like the magnetic tape, that you need to know. With film, most film systems in semi-modern years have a sound track. How do you play that?
Basically, I think we need to dissassociate the art from the media it's contained on. After that, it can be kepted in a 'cloud', backed up to five seperate locations, each with multiple backups, including optical media to protect against EMP.
Make no mistake, the theoretical LoC is going to have to be a very active depository, constantly testing and copying the works contained within. With a data 'cloud', this can be far more automated. With Vinyl discs, even if you transcribe once every 50 years, you end up using a stupendous amount of manpower on it.
I'd also like to point to this article on the subject:
Interesting. I broke down the digital stuff a bit more with my reply to darkjedi, where I mentioned using lossless formats, and having some sort of regular transcription system.
To be blunt, I'm not pretending that the task I would give the LoC would be 'cheap' or 'easy'. It'd be a massive effort, and insanely expensive on the whole. We're probably talking a team of a dozen people just managing the formats that books are kept in. Not actually handling the data, but setting rules for what formats you can submit your ebook in, evaluating automatic transcription programs, etc...
To pay for all this, if you want your copyright enforced after the first 10 years, you have to pay your fees. Want 30 years? Even bigger fee. My only hope is that economy of scale would win, with the Walt Disneys of the world essentially funding the effort.
But we'd get a useful amount of semi-modern public media out of it. After that, well, eventually the LoC will lose data, even if it manages my 9 9's of reliability. It probably won't manage that amount of reliability, not for unpopular stuff, or stuff that's somehow 'unique' and not suitable for automatic transcription. That's ultimately okay. If we even preserve 1% over the next 1000 years, we'll have done better than anybody else in history.
Speaking of which - On second thought I think that having the LoC charge a reasonable fee for *access* might also be a good idea. That way it's getting money both from producers and consumers. That way the fee the LoC has to charge to producers doesn't increase too much from having to cover all the now public domain information. Let's say they charge $10/month(think Netflix but also with Books, music, programs and pictures), and it has so much useful information that pretty much every household has a subscription - it works out to ~$9B/year. You should be able to pay for a LOT of data retention with that much dough.
And, since you're right in discussing what the consumer gets (versus what the studios have), that ultimately means consumers have to get archival-grade digital data for any kind of consumer-based archive (including libraries, who - as far as studios are concerned - are still consumers) to work at all.
Consumer level archiving has always depended a bit upon luck - A CD might only be rated, on average, to last a decade, but if it's popular you're shotgunning out like fish do eggs. A lucky 'good' CD is additionally lucky by being kept by somebody who keeps it in near-optimal storage conditions. The bound book is never exposed to exessive light or moisture, etc... The film is stored, forgotten, in a dark climate controlled storage room. Books are a sort of special case- despite being 'analog' they're sort of digital, in that the shape of individual letters is relatively unimportant for copying purposes, as long as the words can still be figured out. Meaning the story/information can be recovered from a book in much worse condition than, say, a picture.
This would make collecting (where playing isn't generally the point) both safer and on sounder legal ground, which in turn would boost the material preserved.
True, but consumers don't typically get their media in formats with good longevity, especially today, which is why I want to task the LoC with it. Of course, short of rewriting copyright law all by myself, it's always going to remain an incomplete scenario.
Can anybody answer how much should storing 50 GB of data(blu-ray max), with 99.9999999% reliability per year cost, in a massive warehouse scenario? It cannot be 'lost', 'misplaced', or discarded. It needs to be accessable by equipment readily available at the time, and not need difficult to obtain or unreliable legacy equipment/software. Duration? Pretty much permanently.
I considered that, which is why I didn't actually specify 'digital', simply giving examples. I want digital over analog because you can make a 100% perfect copy even over multiple generations, and 35/70mm film, for example, is on it's way out(though it still has a long life remaining, it's a bit past middle age).
Though you do bring up a good point - For copyright to be applicable, the LoC has to be provided the highest quality masters available, especially if it's going to be analog - Let the studio keep the master, but the library gets a first run copy(most theaters get a 3rd or 4th run copy - a copy of the copy of the master). I'm not going to be satisified with DVD quality of Blu-ray is available.
Still, I'm worried about cost and space - bound copies can be lost as well, to fire, for example.
'Bit Rot' would be managed by having an actual transcription program to transfer old data to new formats, preferably lossless. CDs going away? Transcribe to FLAC. FLAC going away? Transcribe to it's replacement. Are you using DLT-III tapes for your archives? Time to move up to DLT-IV. Medias and formats will be chosen on the basis of how widespread it's usage is in professional and non-professional circles, their quality and durability, availability and anticipated longevity. If a format starts becoming depreciated(DLT-III tapes are now more expensive than DLT-IV), the LoC shall conduct a study* and switch to a format that's mainstream and gaining, IE in the prime of it's life.
*Should be formal, shouldn't cost millions
Personally, I'd ammend copyright in the following ways:
By 'common high-quality archive' I'm thinking things like 'glass master' for CDs and DVDs, certain backup tapes for programs, etc... Matter of fact, keeping stuff in multiple formats is ideal - For a movie: Glass master, 10 pressed DVDs, and a digital backup stored in a cloud type storage system. Regular testing and updating is included in the renewal costs.
The idea is to make Walt Disney think long and hard about keeping movies like 'Snow White' copyrighted, much less their huge archive. Sadly, Walt Disney is one of the better companies at preserving their works. Others have let films rot in vaults. Thus the requirement for the LoC to act as an archive.
Oh yeah, like price-anderson is news to me...
Other disasters with massive human life lost(P-A comes up) - November 2, 2010
Except situation B, as shown by the nuclear industry, is a lot less than even .001%. We've gotten a LOT of reactor years, with a total of 3 major incidents.
TMI - radiation release was pretty much confined to the plant, and what escaped was short lived(and likely less horrible than living a similar distance from a coal plant, even at the worst point). No identified deaths.
Chernobyl - Really bad. Still a limited number of deaths, and built in ways that would never have passed muster in most of the rest of the world, much less the USA, Europe, etc... No containment dome, positive void coeffecient, carbon moderation rods, etc...
Fukushima - a first generation nuclear plant, within a year of decommissioning anyways, taken out by a Tsunami. Some land is currently off limits due to radiation concerns, but on the whole the danger is far less than all the other crud released by the wave. To date, known casualties at the plant are restricted to what could have happened at any other industrial facility when hit by an earthquake and giant wave of water. In addition, it's been noted that more modern plants wouldn't suffer many of the same failures, as said failures had been figured and and countermeasures designed and implemented. Things like a somewhat higher/differently designed seawall, not putting the generators in the basement, and proper hydrogen diffusers/burnoff devices.
Risk management - I'd rather take the .02% chance* of being affected by a nuclear accident than sacrifice a pretty much guaranteed 1% of my life. Of course, I have above average math ability.
On subsidies - did you read up on Price-Anderson and find out such things that the US Governemnt hasn't ever had to pay out under it's terms? Realize that the US Government tends to stick it's nose(and finances) into ANY disaster of that magnitude? That, even being generous for counting P-A as a subsidy(insurance schemes like this being fairly discretional on how you value them on the basis of your assumptions).
*14k reactor years of civil operation, 3 major accidents, .02% chance of major accident per reactor year. Death toll is harder to calc, considering the accidental deaths are like 50 for Chernobyl, and 0 for TMI and Fukishima**. Still, let's use the 350k evacuated from Fukushima as a standard. That's a .014% chance of dying IN Chernobyl (50/350k), and much lower odds if you consider (50/(350K*14K)). .000001% chance of dying if you live right next to a nuclear reactor from a major accident involving it, per year, by my calculation. Of course, that doesn't take into account that most of the 50 deaths, specifically the 35 initial ones, were all plant workers or emergency responders.
**I'll admit to not counting deaths that could have happened in pretty much any industry - you can get killed in a steam explosion as easily, if not more easily, in a coal plant as you can a nuclear. Meanwhile, finding a few thousand deaths by coal isn't hard at all. Heck, it's more an annual figure of the death toll, and that's today, not going back to the begennings of the industry. Just about everything is safer today - why can't we build some safe nuke plants, get the actively killing coal plants shut down, and then move on to the older, more dangerous(and less efficient) nuke plants, just to be safe?
As for TFA, has anybody really run the numbers on these things or is it just another rich toy so they can feel all "green" about themselves? What i mean is run the total numbers, from the cost of digging up the lithium and the cost of replacing and disposing of batteries to the cost of the electricity to charge them?, and then compared it to say one of the fuel efficient 4 bangers?
Lithium batteries are theoretically cheaper than NiMH, Lithium is pretty common and fairly cheap, though making batteries from them is currently expensive. They could, theoretically speaking, cost around a quarter of what they do now. Oh, and the batteries are basically 100% recyclable.
Pollution wise, it's been figured that an EV is 'greener' pollution wise even if it gets it's power from the worst polluting electric supply - coal plants. A compliant coal plant has a lot of controls to keep the pollution down, and economy of scale helps.
Right now, the 4-banger is significantly cheaper to purchase, more expensive to run, but slightly more polluting(if the EV is charged with coal), to much more polluting(pretty much any other power source), and is generally more capable(longer range, faster 'charge').
The EV is more expensive up front, cheaper to run, and less polluting, especially in your neighborhood.
1. Spent fuel for a nuclear reactor is currently still mostly fuel. At least you only mentioned centuries - after the first century or so for the waste of reprocessed fuel, it's no longer that much more dangerous than many other things you'll find in the ground.
2. CO2 sequestriation for coal power is *EXPENSIVE*. It takes something like 1/3rd the power production of the plant to do it, so they're less efficient.
3. Trivia fact: Fukishima operated safely for decades, and was an older plant than either Chernobyl or even Three Mile Island. Even then, consider the cost - it took a tsunami to take it out, and even then, you have still have far more deaths from the Tsunami in the area than from the radiation.
Personally, I'd be building new nuclear plants in order to first replace coal(dirtiest first), following up with replacing the older, less safe(but still pretty safe, how many other multibillion industrial accidents don't kill anybody?) nuclear plants.
A warlord is more or less equally as dangerous as uncontrolled fire.
Just because he's unconcerned with the safety of others and their stuff, doesn't mean that he's unconcerned about the safety of himself and his stuff.
That is assuming that someone is burning only paper. Indeed, a stack of paper can be a bitch to burn beyond recognition. But if you're in the business of raping women and torching villages, you just throw the documents into a building that you are going to burn to the ground and then you leave town. Eventually the temperature of the fire gets high enough that the paper incinerates well beyond any hope of recovery.
You're positing a pretty one-dimensional warlord in this case, who always has a building at hand to torch whenever he needs to dispose of some documents. Most warlords aren't fighting all the time, and often the important papers are back at his palatial palace of an HQ, where he DOES have electricity most, if not all of the time due to being first on the repair list and having backup generators.
MobileTatsu makes a good point - some documents are too sensitive to trust to minions OR an unmonitored burning building. You never know, you could toss your documents into the fire then the US operatives sweep in and recover them. Proper forensics can reconstruct a surprising amount of information from burned, but not stirred, documents.
You might be suprised. A fire can be dangerous, a shredder is convenient. Also, we can reconstruct documents that have been burned, and if you have a big stack it can actually take longer to burn them beyond recovery. Why? It's about oxygen availability - the corners, top and bottom pages will burn first, but the center of a pile of documents will often remain intact, yielding valuable intelligence if recovered.
Having looked up the shred, it seems to be standard commercial shred sizes - the DOD goes quite a bit smaller than that.
DRM on ebooks gives Amazon a great tool for locking ebook customers into the Kindle platform.'"
Which is why I'm not buying books from Amazon or B&N at this point. Either it's without DRM, or I'm not buying it. Baen's Webscriptions for me, at least at the moment.
One thing to be wary of is over-concentrating on college-prep. I think it's best to acknowledge that a portion aren't going to college right out of HS, and give them a courseload appropriate to that. Not 'easier', just different.
Want to really fix it? The answer is the same as what's making the Chinese government uneasy, and is touched on in TFA - workers who are organized. That "dirty" word - unions.
Chinese workers are nearly universally unionized(though they aren't very powerful), and unions aren't going to help against outsourcing. Not all jobs CAN be outsourced. Not all jobs are all that ameniable to unionization, and I'm not just talking about the business being hostile to them. I'm thinking about things like the small business shop with 4-12 employees. Is a union all that beneficial there? What about the business that has a single mechanic? The family plumbing business?
If you can tell me how a union is going to help stop outsourcing, I'd love to know. Personally, I think that China is quickly developing, and has reached the point that it's using more and more of it's developing workforce/infrastructure internally, not for international goods. Wages are rapidly rising - at the cost of stagnating wages in the US and Europe, but they're already hitting the point where outsourcing isn't the 'easy sell' anymore, and the costs of dealing with a foreign country on the opposite side of the planet(delays, shipping, regulations) is making US work cheaper again. In limited areas at the moment, but it's spreading.
A living wage needs to be enouraged, but first people need a wage.
Personally, I'd try to raise wages by encouraging businesses to the point that there's a shortage of workers again. Not too serious of a s shortage, but enough that they're always looking for somebody new. I'd do this via a massive infrastructure building campaign designed to lower costs to the point that building/working in the USA is attractive again. I'd go through federal regulations with a goal of reducing them by 50% - simplifying regulations, resolving conflicting rules, eliminating duplication. At the same time, regulations should be *effective*. A rule has no meaning if it has no 'bite'.
Along with that are many other policy changes that I'd enact, too many to list here, including fixing education, ending the drug war, raising taxes on the wealthiest(yes, I'd raise taxes at this point), etc...
Maybe what needs to be done is mot encouraging the technical schools, but rather discouraging parents & others from feeling that little Johnny and Suzie must go to college, no matter how much better served they might be by going a different route.
Oh, I agree. I just didn't think to put it in my post. You can expect to miss things when you spend 2 minutes writing something and do minimal editing. I think I was perhaps hesitant to discourage going to college.
Well, obviously you'd have to filter through the requests and find career fields that are actually short-changed, but I know they're out there. Excessive numbers of temporary foreign workers, higher pay than what you'd expect from the education/difficulty, etc...
So sure, I'd listen, but it'd only be one data point. One thing to remember when you get into these things is that everything affects everything else - and I wasn't writing a book. 'Yelling' - trying to get more workers so they can pay less. 'Screaming' - shortages are hurting their business.
You make some points, I'll make the point that I listed it in last place for a reason. I wouldn't actually shut down career paths, just maybe draw them down a bit. Look at careers with shortfalls, encourage them a bit.
As for Jamie, he's not working in a 'russian lit' job, now is he? He'd technically do better with an engineering degree(though he's probably gotten that through practical experience, at least). He's also in a position where college are more or less a non-factor - Such as Bill Gates(dropout) and Steve Jobs(dropout).
That any given individual succeeds or fails is ultimately up to them, but when you look in on it as a whole, there are choices that are better and worse.
I agree, it's definitely an enabler. But in many cases they're also producing so many college grads that graduating college is no longer the special thing it used to be. Jobs are requiring a Bachelor's that, 20 years ago, only required a HS Diploma, and 10 years ago an associate degree. But it's doing it at an additional cost of like $15k/year, plus people aren't (as) productive during their school years, so there's 2-4 years less time working. It's ugly.
Well, going with apprenticeships/internships, businesses really need to rebuild their training programs rather than expecting to always be able to hire people with prior experience.
It used to be that big companies like Ford, GM, and such did huge amounts of training - it's why working for them was so often a lifetime career.
For smaller businesses, the military steadily churned out skilled workers. Most of that work has been outsourced anymore, often to the same ex-military guys who the government trained in the first place. I've seen it myself - well over a dozen guys retire out of the military, is back on the job in a month wearing civilian clothes.
I don't entirely disagree, but money does have a certain amount of marginal happiness to it - it doesn't guarantee happiness, and there's decreasing returns as the amount of money increases. IE you'll be happier at $10k than $1k, maybe a bit happier at $100k, but after that the effects are minimal. You're better off addressing other parts of your life - at which point the money is an enabler.
As such, I think that 'productive' is a good measure because it can be vague.
Actually, I think that the US needs to make high school worth something again.
Second would be encouraging technical schools, stuff where businesses are screaming they can't find employees.
Third would be reigning in the cost of an education. There shouldn't be any excuse for tuition to be skyrocketing like it has for as long as it has. It's a classic sign of a bubble.
Fourth would perhaps be cutting funding for, as the op mentions, 'unproductive majors'.
There's many levels of data, and not all of them are classified.
Besides classification levels, you also have FOUO, Privacy Act, HIPAA, etc... Most of which require increasingly higher levels of protection.
Of course, Tricare(our healthcare system) contractors seem to LOVE losing our data and having to pay for credit monitoring...
Just because a wipe utility says it can do a DoD wipe, doesn't mean it does. Even if it does(likely), doesn't mean that the NSA&DoD has tested/audited said program to ensure that it meets the required standards(suprisingly unlikely).
Disclaimer: I AM a uniformed DoD servicemember who's duties impign upon this, but I am NOT a contract expert, nor do I know the level of data he's processing. Heck, I don't even know if you're working with the DoD.
1. Ignore all other advice in this thread about using programs to wipe HDs. Only NSA approved wiping software may be used, and the instructions would have to be followed to the letter. In this field non-approved programs aren't considered trustworthy enough. The base
2. While the DoD is moving towards 'Data at rest' encryption, it's not considered remnence security, at this time.
3. Don't view it as a security expense. View it as a contract expense. The customer is allowed to request silly things. You just work it into the contract.
4. Given that the contract has just been renewed and the contract is still in place, there should be NO need to destroy at this time. Only destroy if a HD fails, or would otherwise be replaced/become excess for whatever reason, in which case you have the replacement expense anyways. The contract should contain some blurb about 'when no longer being used for the purpose'. Given that the contract is continuing...
5. Contact your contract office/QAR for more exact details.
6. If you have to ship HD's off to be destroyed, send them to an approved facility. Being contractors, you may or may not be able to use the ones I've used.
Man, a million doesn't stretch as far as it used too...
The point wasn't to get to be a 'super rich multi-millionaire'. The point was to have money to retire on. In many cases, if people invested their money instead of buying lotto tickets, they'd have a pretty decent retirement. And, as Tyler mentioned - the marginal utility/'happiness' of a dollar does decrease the more you have. Money, after a certain point, doesn't buy happiness.
Back on lotto winners - there's plenty of evidence that most lotto winner's money skills are worse than average, given that the majority of multi-million winners end up declaring bankruptcy within 5 years of winning, and by 7-10 years most are back in the same financial situation as they were before winning.