I was hostile. I got a lot more hostile after youtube pulled a 1920s movie clip I restored for copyright infringement. I had checked that the creator died more than 70 years ago... but neglected to check about the composer of the original music that went with it, who lived substantially longer.
There is a reason for that though: Production costs. Making a movie or game these days costs far more than it used to. Even if it isn't an action film, just something like a drama - audiences won't settle for painted backdrops and plastic props any more. Same in games - no more artists drawing sprites, now it's all high-resolution textures and thousand-polygon models. With increasing costs game risk aversion. No studio or developer wants to risk such a vast amount of money on something new, untested, potentially costly. They go for the things which are guaranteed a success. That means already-successful franchises, sequals to proven successes, or works very similar to what has already proven to be profitable in the past. It is simple good business sense: Make the product with the highest ROI.
We almost didn't get them. When the first dual-cassette recorder was made available in the UK, the BPI sued the manufacturer (Amstrad), claiming that by providing a technology so potentially useful for copyright infringement to the general public Amstrad were authorising their customers to use the technlogy for infringement. It was a vicious battle, which Amstrad eventually won. A very close parallel to the Betamax case in US law.
I said it was impossible back then. This is true. HVDC needs some really hefty rectifier diodes to make, and there were no diodes then. Want to try making it work with mercury rectifiers? Getting it back to a useable level without huge waste is even harder. Doable with semiconductors, but again you're not going to make it work with valves unless you want a capacitor bank the size of a town.
That wiki page does record an attempt in 1880 using series motor-generators for production and a switable battery bank for conversion to low voltage. It didn't work very well, but it is somewhat susprising that it worked at all.
Converting AC, on the other hand, is so simple I can make the equipment at home from the washing line in my garden.
Jamming an uplink is doable, but also prone to cause diplomatic issues. Cutting a neighbouring country's TV off is sure to incite trouble. Iran jams downlinks, which isn't really that hard either. Comsats actually transmit at a surprisingly low power - they have to run off solar - and are a very long way from the receivers. That is why you need a fairly large parabolic collector to pick them up. Such a sensitive receiver is easily overwhelmed by a moderately powerful jamming signal - not even dishes are perfectly directional. Downlink jamming is much more localised.
*Almost* a holy symbol. For some strange reason, the Nazi version was drawn back-to-front. Pre-nazi, the other way around dominated, though the flipped form was not unknown.
Sounds like the PS3 OtherOS feature. Gives hobbyists enough access to play around and be content in their tinkering, but not so much that they might actually make something useful and beyond the manufacturer's control. I'm sure we all recall that as soon as someone figured out a way to actually run code outside the sandbox, Sony removed OtherOS entirely via semi-manditory firmware update - and that hack didn't even need OtherOS to run.
Any non-trivial OS is only secure if you hire a system administrator to install and configure it - and the trivial ones like DOS usually are too, as soon as you have an application running too.
Consider the implications though. Machines replace humans for even more assembly line work, then attendant and cashier work, then store shelf-stacker, and cleaning, and so forth. It works just as it should: Costs come down, and (assuming sufficient competition) these savings are passed on to the customers. All is well, up until a vaguely-defined point. Then you hit a problem: There are a lot of people who are unemployed, and unemployable due to a lack of jobs. Unless you want them to starve or turn to crime to feed themselves, that automatically means a welfare state is the only option. Worse, those people on little to no income won't be able to spend much, which means they can't create much demand for goods and services, which means even fewer jobs to meet that demand... positive feedback. Total collapse of the labor market, and everything else with it. In such a situation, a technologically-enabled communism of some form may be the only option - no matter how bad it may be, it can't be any worse than an economic nothingness. The only other possibility is a basic income model where the government guarantees every individual some level of no-strings-attached money to at least keep them fed and housed - but such a system has never been tested on such a scale, and it's dubious if sufficient taxes could be raised to sustain it.
Nature doesn't reward everyone equally. It rewards the ape who will smash your skull in with a rock and take your females. Nature really isn't a good guide on how to run a society.
Ah, this old piece of copypasta. I've seen this one before. It's been circulating on conservative blogs for years, and sometimes even making its way to a news site. There is a small problem though: It's utterly false. Nothing but a piece of self-serving propaganda written to tell a target audience exactly what they want to hear: Communism makes people so lazy they'll starve, while a free market fixes all. The story actually originated in a publication called 'The Free Market' in 1985.
For one thing, it fails the common-sense test. In a colony on the edge of starvation, so you really think people are going to just laze around and not bother raising crops just because someone else might get to share them too? People are not that stupid, and most of them dislike starving to death. Like all really good pieces of propaganda, it is half true. The Plymouth colony was indeed founded on an initial seven-year collective-property system - that was a standard practice at the time, a simple practical way to deal with the extreme supply shortages in a new colony. After all, you can't run a farm if the owner of the plough refuses to let another use it, and you can't hope to build individual houses for every colonist before winter sets in and kills everyone. It was usual to share all non-trivial property long enough to get everyone settled in, houses built, tools made and industry established. Similarily, there was an initial food shortage. The mistake is in attributing the latter to the former. The actual reason was rather less interesting: European farmers, most of them not even very experienced, with unfamiliar crops and weather far worse than anticipated.
Look at the numbers. The great die-off was in the winter of 1620-1621, during which 45 died from a population of 102. That is the event of which your account speaks. Yet the ship only arrived in december 1620 - if, as you claim, the problems were caused by the use of a temporary collective ownership leading to a lack of hard work than the effects should not have been felt until the following harvest, rather then immediatly upon arrival. Unless you wish to suggest that people were standing around in the snow refusing to build housing because they wouldn't fully own it afterwards, which strikes me as unrealistic.
And of later events? Wikipedia has some figures on the growth of the colony:
December 1620, 99
April 1621, 50 (The first winter of which we spoke)
November 1621, 85
July 1623, 180
May 1627, 156
As you can see, once that first winter passed the colony florished - growth was rapid, and no food shortage around. In fact, this was a florishing economy: In november 1921, almost exactly one year after the arrival of the Mayflower, the Fortune arrived with more settlers - and departed with a trade goods exported to pay off the investors who funded the settlement. Doesn't sound like a communist nightmare to me.
The final damning line comes from your own testament: "The failure of the experiment of communal service, which was tried for several years." Several years. Yet the colony was already passed the intitial winter deaths and running successful exports after only a single year from the arrival of the mayflower - which means that, by the account you use, that great success was achieved *before* the abolition of collective ownership!
So while socialism may not have been the perfect solution for Plymouth, it wasn't an utter disaster either. It worked, for a time, well enough to get them established, growing and exporting.
There is a school of thought which holds that not only will advance in computer technology render communism practical, they'll also render it the only option by destroying the labor market that forms the foundation of a market economy - as computers and automation take over more and more jobs, there may come a point where unemployment becomes so high that a positive feedback effect destroys the economy completly. All it needs is advances in robotics enough to get them out of the factory and behind the till at McDonalds.
Because employers can't afford to put every candidate through a two-day series of intensive exams and assessments to determine their actual skill level. Employers barely bother to skim a CV. The piece of paper tells them that this candidate has passed a course, and so probably isn't a total idiot in the field.
Better than Saddam, but after how many years? Eight now, and yet it still sees a terrorist attack of one sort or another there every week. The peace is not yet being fully kept. The US pulled it off this time, but it took billions of dollars, eight years, as many dead troops as the public morale can stand, and still it isn't complete. Iran has more than double the population: If the US was barely able to manage Iraq, will they want to even attempt something like that with twice the population?
No-one ever doubted the ability of the US to crush Iraq militarily. When it comes to blowing stuff up, the US is the best there is. The questions were always over the ability of the US ability to win the peace, and not end up just creating a nation full of people filled with a deep hate for the invaders, and a new leadership worse than the old one.
The efficiency standard is too strict for plain, old incandescents to meet. You can use halogen lamps though, which have all the same advantages, being essentially just incandescents with a few improvements.
Transformers were invented back then - that is why AC had the advantage. The big technological proponent of AC was Tesla who (In between contributing to our modern image of the Mad Scientist by electrifying the atmosphere of an entire planet) designed the foundation upon which the national grid would be built. He knew transformers. He invented a whole new type of transformer, and called it a Tesla coil.
Providing you don't want to send it any significent distance. Doing so was impossible back then, and even today it's a lot easier to just use a simple transformer than mess around with efficient solid-state voltage conversion.
The leadership in China know that open war with the US would just be MAD. That is why the latent hostility between the countries is fought in diplomacy and economics. China would just keep out of things... and assist Iran in a covert, entirely deniable manner.
Slashdot Mirror
I was hostile. I got a lot more hostile after youtube pulled a 1920s movie clip I restored for copyright infringement. I had checked that the creator died more than 70 years ago... but neglected to check about the composer of the original music that went with it, who lived substantially longer.
There is a reason for that though: Production costs. Making a movie or game these days costs far more than it used to. Even if it isn't an action film, just something like a drama - audiences won't settle for painted backdrops and plastic props any more. Same in games - no more artists drawing sprites, now it's all high-resolution textures and thousand-polygon models. With increasing costs game risk aversion. No studio or developer wants to risk such a vast amount of money on something new, untested, potentially costly. They go for the things which are guaranteed a success. That means already-successful franchises, sequals to proven successes, or works very similar to what has already proven to be profitable in the past. It is simple good business sense: Make the product with the highest ROI.
We almost didn't get them. When the first dual-cassette recorder was made available in the UK, the BPI sued the manufacturer (Amstrad), claiming that by providing a technology so potentially useful for copyright infringement to the general public Amstrad were authorising their customers to use the technlogy for infringement. It was a vicious battle, which Amstrad eventually won. A very close parallel to the Betamax case in US law.
I said it was impossible back then. This is true. HVDC needs some really hefty rectifier diodes to make, and there were no diodes then. Want to try making it work with mercury rectifiers? Getting it back to a useable level without huge waste is even harder. Doable with semiconductors, but again you're not going to make it work with valves unless you want a capacitor bank the size of a town.
That wiki page does record an attempt in 1880 using series motor-generators for production and a switable battery bank for conversion to low voltage. It didn't work very well, but it is somewhat susprising that it worked at all.
Converting AC, on the other hand, is so simple I can make the equipment at home from the washing line in my garden.
Jamming an uplink is doable, but also prone to cause diplomatic issues. Cutting a neighbouring country's TV off is sure to incite trouble. Iran jams downlinks, which isn't really that hard either. Comsats actually transmit at a surprisingly low power - they have to run off solar - and are a very long way from the receivers. That is why you need a fairly large parabolic collector to pick them up. Such a sensitive receiver is easily overwhelmed by a moderately powerful jamming signal - not even dishes are perfectly directional. Downlink jamming is much more localised.
*Almost* a holy symbol. For some strange reason, the Nazi version was drawn back-to-front. Pre-nazi, the other way around dominated, though the flipped form was not unknown.
You underestimate the power of marketing. People will buy what they are told to buy.
Sounds like the PS3 OtherOS feature. Gives hobbyists enough access to play around and be content in their tinkering, but not so much that they might actually make something useful and beyond the manufacturer's control. I'm sure we all recall that as soon as someone figured out a way to actually run code outside the sandbox, Sony removed OtherOS entirely via semi-manditory firmware update - and that hack didn't even need OtherOS to run.
Any non-trivial OS is only secure if you hire a system administrator to install and configure it - and the trivial ones like DOS usually are too, as soon as you have an application running too.
If no terms have been made public, how do you know no money has been paid?
Consider the implications though. Machines replace humans for even more assembly line work, then attendant and cashier work, then store shelf-stacker, and cleaning, and so forth. It works just as it should: Costs come down, and (assuming sufficient competition) these savings are passed on to the customers. All is well, up until a vaguely-defined point. Then you hit a problem: There are a lot of people who are unemployed, and unemployable due to a lack of jobs. Unless you want them to starve or turn to crime to feed themselves, that automatically means a welfare state is the only option. Worse, those people on little to no income won't be able to spend much, which means they can't create much demand for goods and services, which means even fewer jobs to meet that demand... positive feedback. Total collapse of the labor market, and everything else with it. In such a situation, a technologically-enabled communism of some form may be the only option - no matter how bad it may be, it can't be any worse than an economic nothingness. The only other possibility is a basic income model where the government guarantees every individual some level of no-strings-attached money to at least keep them fed and housed - but such a system has never been tested on such a scale, and it's dubious if sufficient taxes could be raised to sustain it.
It's common to give laws strange acronyms to spin their purpose. SOPA isn't one of those laws, but it's counterpart PROTECT-IP is.
Nature doesn't reward everyone equally. It rewards the ape who will smash your skull in with a rock and take your females. Nature really isn't a good guide on how to run a society.
Ah, this old piece of copypasta. I've seen this one before. It's been circulating on conservative blogs for years, and sometimes even making its way to a news site. There is a small problem though: It's utterly false. Nothing but a piece of self-serving propaganda written to tell a target audience exactly what they want to hear: Communism makes people so lazy they'll starve, while a free market fixes all. The story actually originated in a publication called 'The Free Market' in 1985.
For one thing, it fails the common-sense test. In a colony on the edge of starvation, so you really think people are going to just laze around and not bother raising crops just because someone else might get to share them too? People are not that stupid, and most of them dislike starving to death. Like all really good pieces of propaganda, it is half true. The Plymouth colony was indeed founded on an initial seven-year collective-property system - that was a standard practice at the time, a simple practical way to deal with the extreme supply shortages in a new colony. After all, you can't run a farm if the owner of the plough refuses to let another use it, and you can't hope to build individual houses for every colonist before winter sets in and kills everyone. It was usual to share all non-trivial property long enough to get everyone settled in, houses built, tools made and industry established. Similarily, there was an initial food shortage. The mistake is in attributing the latter to the former. The actual reason was rather less interesting: European farmers, most of them not even very experienced, with unfamiliar crops and weather far worse than anticipated.
Look at the numbers. The great die-off was in the winter of 1620-1621, during which 45 died from a population of 102. That is the event of which your account speaks. Yet the ship only arrived in december 1620 - if, as you claim, the problems were caused by the use of a temporary collective ownership leading to a lack of hard work than the effects should not have been felt until the following harvest, rather then immediatly upon arrival. Unless you wish to suggest that people were standing around in the snow refusing to build housing because they wouldn't fully own it afterwards, which strikes me as unrealistic.
And of later events? Wikipedia has some figures on the growth of the colony:
December 1620, 99
April 1621, 50 (The first winter of which we spoke)
November 1621, 85
July 1623, 180
May 1627, 156
As you can see, once that first winter passed the colony florished - growth was rapid, and no food shortage around. In fact, this was a florishing economy: In november 1921, almost exactly one year after the arrival of the Mayflower, the Fortune arrived with more settlers - and departed with a trade goods exported to pay off the investors who funded the settlement. Doesn't sound like a communist nightmare to me.
The final damning line comes from your own testament: "The failure of the experiment of communal service, which was tried for several years." Several years. Yet the colony was already passed the intitial winter deaths and running successful exports after only a single year from the arrival of the mayflower - which means that, by the account you use, that great success was achieved *before* the abolition of collective ownership!
So while socialism may not have been the perfect solution for Plymouth, it wasn't an utter disaster either. It worked, for a time, well enough to get them established, growing and exporting.
There is a school of thought which holds that not only will advance in computer technology render communism practical, they'll also render it the only option by destroying the labor market that forms the foundation of a market economy - as computers and automation take over more and more jobs, there may come a point where unemployment becomes so high that a positive feedback effect destroys the economy completly. All it needs is advances in robotics enough to get them out of the factory and behind the till at McDonalds.
Communism has existed. In communes. It can actually work, if you just want to run a village. It just scales really, really poorly.
Because employers can't afford to put every candidate through a two-day series of intensive exams and assessments to determine their actual skill level. Employers barely bother to skim a CV. The piece of paper tells them that this candidate has passed a course, and so probably isn't a total idiot in the field.
Most are like that. It's part of the DOCSIS standard, I think.
Or as the prison operators see it, repeat customers.
Better than Saddam, but after how many years? Eight now, and yet it still sees a terrorist attack of one sort or another there every week. The peace is not yet being fully kept. The US pulled it off this time, but it took billions of dollars, eight years, as many dead troops as the public morale can stand, and still it isn't complete. Iran has more than double the population: If the US was barely able to manage Iraq, will they want to even attempt something like that with twice the population?
No-one ever doubted the ability of the US to crush Iraq militarily. When it comes to blowing stuff up, the US is the best there is. The questions were always over the ability of the US ability to win the peace, and not end up just creating a nation full of people filled with a deep hate for the invaders, and a new leadership worse than the old one.
The efficiency standard is too strict for plain, old incandescents to meet. You can use halogen lamps though, which have all the same advantages, being essentially just incandescents with a few improvements.
Transformers were invented back then - that is why AC had the advantage. The big technological proponent of AC was Tesla who (In between contributing to our modern image of the Mad Scientist by electrifying the atmosphere of an entire planet) designed the foundation upon which the national grid would be built. He knew transformers. He invented a whole new type of transformer, and called it a Tesla coil.
Providing you don't want to send it any significent distance. Doing so was impossible back then, and even today it's a lot easier to just use a simple transformer than mess around with efficient solid-state voltage conversion.
The leadership in China know that open war with the US would just be MAD. That is why the latent hostility between the countries is fought in diplomacy and economics. China would just keep out of things... and assist Iran in a covert, entirely deniable manner.