Kuwait and Saudi A. have been conquered in every sense of the word that counts. They sell the U.S. all the oil it wants, they produce more to keep prices down, they host U.S. military bases, and except for the Israel-Arab conflict they're generally pliant allies. Saudi A. even agreed to let the U.S. use airbases in the upcoming Iraq action.
Regarding research, I think Dubya wants to sink a billion or so into hydrogen powered cars. The military is spending a lot on military r&d so it's not like all r&d is drying up. If I were in charge I'd grant a large tax deduction for "green" cars such as hybrids, to make them more competitive. The market works pretty well but an anti-tax here and there can't hurt.
For that matter, an anti-tax on corporate r&d would be advisable. Every dollar a company spends developing new products, processes, techniques, etc. should come out of its tax burden, not out of its bottom line. The benefits are (1) more R&D (even allowing for the inevitable fraud), (2) more researchers are employed, and (3) companies are more likely to survive long term.
Thanks for that tip. I hate dying of starvation. I like to eat monsters but usually by the time I'm weak from hunger, they're either all gone or I can't lift my weapon to kill'em.
An anonymous coward wrote:
> Funny, are these things more dangerous than the guns you americans are so fond of?
My, what an "insightful" remark. I'm simply overwhelmed.
I shot off Estes model rockets in my youth. I think the primary danger of these things is to the operator, not to any site they might be targetting. The range is in the hundreds of feet. A slightly larger scale missile might be dangerous if it could be fitted with a payload and launched in the direction of a school, police HQ or the like. I don't think it's appropriate to ban Estes models however. Actually, how many people even use those things anymore? I thought model rocketry was pretty much dead.
The Startac line was quite innovative in its time. Since then MOT's not had too many good ideas. I wonder how the product manager who thought of using Linux managed to avoid getting sacked or demoted. Meanwhile, NOK seems to have some clever ideas up its sleeve; please NOK make lots of money so my stock portfolio will go back up;-) And please Verizon, ffs, start offering more Nokia phones! It's the biggest cell phone maker in the world, makes the best damn phones, and they offer one low end NOK and a bunch of Samsung, Motorola and Kyocera junk.
My cell phone needs are very simple; great reception, great battery life, MP3 player, 2 MP camera, PalmOS or similar pim stuff, expandability, Linux desktop connectivity. Someone please invent this phone soon!
I would partially agree; for me 3.5 hours on a charge would be fine for average use, but for burst mode use I need longer, e.g. when I attend a conference and want to take notes during several sessions I could easily exceed 3 hours of use.
My Handera with rechargeable pack is good for several weeks of average use; I can also attend a two day conference and take extensive notes using my GoType keyboard for several hours a day with no fear of running out of batteries.
Perhaps someday all desks will come with one of those
Power Pad thingies that recharge your handheld device.
It could be they're waiting to see how the Sharp SL-5600 does first. It's a pretty high end PDA and would probably compete closely with this clamshell model. I personally believe in casting the net wide and see what it catches, but I suppose the marketing experts know better. Or at least, they think they do!
Never type a password on a public computer. Instead, cut and paste the characters from the screen using the mouse only. Of course, the problem is you have to have every letter and character displayed somewhere. You could browse to a site like this and paste character by character. It's slow but better than having your identity stolen.
Regardless of what the previous employee did, the company should conduct a self-audit and ensure that it has paid for all software that it is using. In fact, all companies should do this at least once a year, depending on how often they purchase software. Simply trusting an employee to do what's right sounds like a huge mistake to me.
Unfortunately, much as we would like to say "Sue the idiot!", the company does bear responsibility for the actions of its employees, when those actions were undertaken as part of the employees' responsibilities on the premises and during working hours.
The company has no requirement to give that ex-employee a good recommendation, though.
Well if you use other than a Microsoft or Apple OS you probably can't run IE. On Linux desktops I have found Opera to be still the best browser, though Mozilla is getting there and Konqueror is a nice one for quickie tasks.
On Windows, I have to agree that IE takes the cake. I use Moz 1.2.1 on my 2000 workstation at work though. Problem is, some of the apps I have to use will only run correctly on IE. Grrr.
I'd like to hear an explanation of how a bomb can be dropped from orbit. Would it not burn up or at least be damaged when it hits the atmosphere? Furthermore, would it not be much more expensive and a lot easier to detect than a stealth cruise missile? Just wondering.
I'm starting to think that these space elevators are the way to go. A time may come when we, or our descendants, will look back at rockets as a crude and barbaric means of transportation. It's like crossing a canyon by catapult rather than building a bridge.
I especially liked the last page of the howstuffworks.com article, the obligatory "Shop or Compare Prices". This gives you the chance to "Search for Space Elevators on eBay". What am I bid for this one of a kind priceless 31 mile long nanocarbon tube??
Imagine a Java coder. Took courses exclusively in Java, aimed at knowing every minute subchunk of the API. "Graduates" from his trade school. Knows nothing of the larger art/science/cruft of computer science. Couple of years into the workforce, she wants to quit coding Java.
So "he" became a "she". I'm guessing that "he" had a sex change operation and had to drop out of school to pay for it.
It's good that you're scared. It will motivate you to come in to work on time, obey the boss, and work hard. It's good that people in general are worried about losing their jobs; it will make them work harder and thus raise overall productivity and prosperity. It's bad that people *need* to be scared; the old U.S. work ethic died thirty years ago and has been replaced by fear and uncertainty. Anyway, this is the real world we're facing; our monopoly on high technology is gone and the party's over. We have to compete on our merits alone now.
There are simple reasons for all the outsourcing. For one thing, other countries have grown up and their work forces are as smart, as well educated, and at least as hard working as ours (U.S. perspective here). Their societies tolerate a higher death rate and more dangerous working and living conditions than we do, but at the same time they don't have enormous litigation costs, malpractice insurance, OSHA, etc. to drive up their cost of living. They also live more cheaply; people live with their extended families and don't all drive.
Technology has made the world a small place indeed. It's possible and practical to work closely with someone halfway around the world when all your work can be transmitted back and forth on a free internet. Your primary concern becomes time zones. That's a small barrier when the profit potential is so great.
Thirty years ago everyone was bemoaning the loss of manufacturing in the U.S. Everything was moving to Japan. Remember when they produced all the cheap plastic junk? Then everything moved to Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, etc. Now these places have the same problem we had thirty years ago. Currently it's China in manufacturing and India in software. Probably China will hold on to manufacturing for a while; the government will kill people who try to form labor unions or otherwise push for reforms.
In the meantime, Americans have survived very well and the U.S. economy is today much vaster and more powerful than it was during its manufacturing hegemony.
Thirty years from now perhaps the U.S. will again be the manufacturing center. Who knows? It's scary but on the other hand it's also an opportunity. Maybe people should be starting companies that help other companies outsource. Translation companies. That sort of thing. Or invent a robot that works cheaper than an Indian or Chinese laborer and then you can bring the manufacturing back to the U.S.
There are several PDAs today running Linux very well; the Sharp Zaurus is the best known, but a bunch of Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturers are about to come out with a flood of Linux-based PDAs as well (see this article in the same mag as the feature). I suspect in about a year we'll see a lot of commodity PDAs based on Linux and featuring the usual color 320x240, MP3, SD slot, etc.
Linux is not specifically "architectured" for desktops or servers. If you strip away a lot of the modules, utilities and GUI fluff, it's a pretty small OS actually. Someone has a single floppy firewall distribution based on Linux. I mean, try getting Windows on a single floppy, not to mention Solaris, MacOS, etc.
Regarding why IBM would do this, I believe they're just poking Microsoft in the eye. IBM's always been the premier marketing organization despite their prodigious technical resources. So they spent a couple of million designing a "reference PDA"; that's a tiny drop in the bucket for them and it encourages lots of hungry manufacturers in Asia (and, one would like to hope, in the West as well) to jump on the Linux bandwagon and, hence, weaken PocketPC. Seems like a pretty smart and sane move to me.;-)
Another possible reason not mentioned is that RAM sucks battery power; the less, the better. So, even though lots of cheap RAM seems to make sense, it diminishes one of the few remaining advantages of the Palm platform.
Some day, batteries will last for months or years of continuous use, and handhelds will have speech recognition, telephony, email, great color screens, hundreds of gigs of storage, and life will be good.;-)
I do agree with you that it would be nice to have built-in wireless networking. Let's just make it part of every computer and move on.
Hell, I think Red Hat's stock is about twice the value of Sun's right now.
Heh... Not quite. Stock price is meaningless. It's market cap (price x shares) that counts, when you're comparing valuations. Sun's market cap is $11.77 billion (according to today's WSJ), whereas Redhat's market cap is $1 billion. Sun's total equity as of June 2002 was $9.8 billion. RedHat's total equity was $327 million as of 2-28-02, probably has gone up since then.
Still, a market cap of a billion for a Linux company is pretty impressive.
There is no internet economy, you say? There are people making money off the internet who used to be school teachers or accountants or lawyers. Now, they have web sites and sell some product or service to the world via internet technology. People get things done by internet that were impossible or very difficult before, such as telecommuting. There exist online courses that there was no equivalent before except maybe closed circuit TV. Forums for exchange of ideas such as this one. Software and music downloading, whether for free or fee. And on, and on. Therefore, I put it to you that by definition there is indeed an "internet economy". How big it is, is open to debate, however.
Living in Massachusetts, I was able to buy a gift item from a store in southern Texas simply because I found them on the web and they had what I wanted, a relatively hard to find type of sand pendulum for someone's desk. They did not have to lift a finger; I found them via a web search. Internet technology enables this store to have a national presence for merely the cost of a few static web pages. That, I would argue, is an internet economy.
As for internet sales tax, it's a bad, stupid, unenforceable thing. The conventional wisdom is that it's folly to raise taxes in a recession; it can only hurt. Perhaps these states which spent so freely during the boom years should have put more away for a rainy day, just as private citizens are supposed to do. History has shown that we have a cycle of boom and bust.
Cheap and clean is the key to colonizing the solar system. When it costs relatively little to lift people and habitats into orbit is when the mass migration to space will begin. Environmentally friendly exhaust is a nice bonus that will help disarm Green opposition to such ventures.
It's never a good thing to take away choice, and that's what the Xerox lawsuit has accomplished. The lawsuit may also force Palm to fork over royalties for past sales, which is a logical move; surely they don't want Palm to simply drop graffiti, they want Palm to pay them millions of dollars now and in the future.
I hope Palm can somehow settle with Xerox. Otherwise, the real impact of this lawsuit may well be that Palm gets weakened and Pocket PCs emerge as the winners.
Stupid Xerox; they invent great technology, then watch others implement it, then sue them.
Fight back, Palm; Apple beat Xerox, so you can too.
I remember reading somewhere that if all the roofs of public buildings in California had been painted white it would have solved the electricity shortage from a couple of years ago. I imagine putting solar panels on those roofs would have improved the situation even more.
Enron caused the power crisis there? I thought it was due to deregulation of the power industry.
Check out
this article for an interesting look at the Clean Elections Law in Arizona and what a travesty it turned out to be. Stupid politicians, yes, but a stupid law too.
This is just sick. I don't think I could even think about eating this. Anyone else feel the same way?
Some people would say that about eating insects and yet insects are a lot cleaner and safer than higher mammals. In some cultures insects are considered a normal and nutritious source of protein. When properly fed and cooked, insects are clean and safe to eat.
Do you really want to eat a piece of a huge, dirty, bacteria-ridden mammal that's been fed on pesticide-filled grains and processed, unsanitary pieces of other mammals? The amount of permissible parasites and dirt on cattle should make you sick, not to mention the diseases, putrid meat, and dirt that get past inspection. Then there's all the chemicals they pump these poor animals full of, such as growth hormones and antibiotics.
Leaving aside the hygiene, disease, and chemical pollutants issues, what about morality? Higher mammals such as pigs and cattle dream, feel emotions such as fear, love, and anger. On the grand evolutionary scale, they're cousins to humans. If someone finds a way to cheaply grow meat-like protein in a vat that reduces or eliminates animal suffering and the capacity of bad meat to transmit disease, it would be a very good thing.
Also, I am willing to take some risk when traveling by plane. We take risks every day and driving your car is still FAR more dangerous than air travel.
I guess it all depends what your life is worth to you.
I'd rather pay more money and get there.
I suspect that the average family will make up the difference of higher prices for tickets in lower premiums for their life insurance, travel insurance, etc.
come out with a plane that has the following features:
- Sub-space and trans-sonic capability (like the "hypersonic jet" talked about years ago) that would take passengers from NYC to Tokyo in 2 hours. Or at least go as fast as the late, lamented sonic cruiser.
- Explosion-resistant cargo bay to enhance survivability should a bomb make it on board.
- At check-in time, luggage is placed (carefully, gently, by robots) into Mylar-wrapped, bullet-proofed boxes to contain and reduce the impact of bombs. Damage by throwing and dropping will be eliminated by the mechanical process of loading and unloading.
- Detachable passenger cabin; in the event of an extreme emergency, rather than simply falling to the ground or thudding into a mountainside, the passenger and crew compartments would detach from the expendable portions of the craft and huge parachutes would lower them to the surface. Note: the design goal of the plane is survivability, not efficiency.
- 15" LCD displays in every seat, hooked up to satellite internet broadband connections. Unlimited browsing. Headphones would let people listen to streaming media available on the net. Interactive games also available.
- Pilot cabin inaccessible from passenger compartment except through a large, lock-able door. Pilots have guns. Two air marshalls on every flight, armed with guns and non-lethal pacifying tools; they'll be highly paid and well treated (unlike today).
- Vertical takeoff and landing capability for emergencies (or for regular use, if it could be made efficient)
Slashdot Mirror
Kuwait and Saudi A. have been conquered in every sense of the word that counts. They sell the U.S. all the oil it wants, they produce more to keep prices down, they host U.S. military bases, and except for the Israel-Arab conflict they're generally pliant allies. Saudi A. even agreed to let the U.S. use airbases in the upcoming Iraq action.
Regarding research, I think Dubya wants to sink a billion or so into hydrogen powered cars. The military is spending a lot on military r&d so it's not like all r&d is drying up. If I were in charge I'd grant a large tax deduction for "green" cars such as hybrids, to make them more competitive. The market works pretty well but an anti-tax here and there can't hurt.
For that matter, an anti-tax on corporate r&d would be advisable. Every dollar a company spends developing new products, processes, techniques, etc. should come out of its tax burden, not out of its bottom line. The benefits are (1) more R&D (even allowing for the inevitable fraud), (2) more researchers are employed, and (3) companies are more likely to survive long term.
Thanks for that tip. I hate dying of starvation. I like to eat monsters but usually by the time I'm weak from hunger, they're either all gone or I can't lift my weapon to kill'em.
Life's hard, ain't it.
An anonymous coward wrote:
> Funny, are these things more dangerous than the guns you americans are so fond of?
My, what an "insightful" remark. I'm simply overwhelmed.
I shot off Estes model rockets in my youth. I think the primary danger of these things is to the operator, not to any site they might be targetting. The range is in the hundreds of feet. A slightly larger scale missile might be dangerous if it could be fitted with a payload and launched in the direction of a school, police HQ or the like. I don't think it's appropriate to ban Estes models however. Actually, how many people even use those things anymore? I thought model rocketry was pretty much dead.
The Startac line was quite innovative in its time. Since then MOT's not had too many good ideas. I wonder how the product manager who thought of using Linux managed to avoid getting sacked or demoted. Meanwhile, NOK seems to have some clever ideas up its sleeve; please NOK make lots of money so my stock portfolio will go back up ;-) And please Verizon, ffs, start offering more Nokia phones! It's the biggest cell phone maker in the world, makes the best damn phones, and they offer one low end NOK and a bunch of Samsung, Motorola and Kyocera junk.
My cell phone needs are very simple; great reception, great battery life, MP3 player, 2 MP camera, PalmOS or similar pim stuff, expandability, Linux desktop connectivity. Someone please invent this phone soon!
I would partially agree; for me 3.5 hours on a charge would be fine for average use, but for burst mode use I need longer, e.g. when I attend a conference and want to take notes during several sessions I could easily exceed 3 hours of use.
My Handera with rechargeable pack is good for several weeks of average use; I can also attend a two day conference and take extensive notes using my GoType keyboard for several hours a day with no fear of running out of batteries.
Perhaps someday all desks will come with one of those Power Pad thingies that recharge your handheld device.
It could be they're waiting to see how the Sharp SL-5600 does first. It's a pretty high end PDA and would probably compete closely with this clamshell model. I personally believe in casting the net wide and see what it catches, but I suppose the marketing experts know better. Or at least, they think they do!
J. Carter won a Nobel prize for stopping North Korean nuclear weapons development.
'nuff said.
Never type a password on a public computer. Instead, cut and paste the characters from the screen using the mouse only. Of course, the problem is you have to have every letter and character displayed somewhere. You could browse to a site like this and paste character by character. It's slow but better than having your identity stolen.
Regardless of what the previous employee did, the company should conduct a self-audit and ensure that it has paid for all software that it is using. In fact, all companies should do this at least once a year, depending on how often they purchase software. Simply trusting an employee to do what's right sounds like a huge mistake to me.
Unfortunately, much as we would like to say "Sue the idiot!", the company does bear responsibility for the actions of its employees, when those actions were undertaken as part of the employees' responsibilities on the premises and during working hours.
The company has no requirement to give that ex-employee a good recommendation, though.
Just my opinions; I am neither anal nor a lawyer.
Well if you use other than a Microsoft or Apple OS you probably can't run IE. On Linux desktops I have found Opera to be still the best browser, though Mozilla is getting there and Konqueror is a nice one for quickie tasks.
On Windows, I have to agree that IE takes the cake. I use Moz 1.2.1 on my 2000 workstation at work though. Problem is, some of the apps I have to use will only run correctly on IE. Grrr.
I'd like to hear an explanation of how a bomb can be dropped from orbit. Would it not burn up or at least be damaged when it hits the atmosphere?
Furthermore, would it not be much more expensive and a lot easier to detect than a stealth cruise missile?
Just wondering.
I'm starting to think that these space elevators are the way to go. A time may come when we, or our descendants, will look back at rockets as a crude and barbaric means of transportation. It's like crossing a canyon by catapult rather than building a bridge.
I especially liked the last page of the howstuffworks.com article, the obligatory "Shop or Compare Prices". This gives you the chance to "Search for Space Elevators on eBay". What am I bid for this one of a kind priceless 31 mile long nanocarbon tube??
Imagine a Java coder. Took courses exclusively in Java, aimed at knowing every minute subchunk of the API. "Graduates" from his trade school. Knows nothing of the larger art/science/cruft of computer science. Couple of years into the workforce, she wants to quit coding Java.
So "he" became a "she". I'm guessing that "he" had a sex change operation and had to drop out of school to pay for it.
It's good that you're scared. It will motivate you to come in to work on time, obey the boss, and work hard. It's good that people in general are worried about losing their jobs; it will make them work harder and thus raise overall productivity and prosperity. It's bad that people *need* to be scared; the old U.S. work ethic died thirty years ago and has been replaced by fear and uncertainty. Anyway, this is the real world we're facing; our monopoly on high technology is gone and the party's over. We have to compete on our merits alone now.
There are simple reasons for all the outsourcing. For one thing, other countries have grown up and their work forces are as smart, as well educated, and at least as hard working as ours (U.S. perspective here). Their societies tolerate a higher death rate and more dangerous working and living conditions than we do, but at the same time they don't have enormous litigation costs, malpractice insurance, OSHA, etc. to drive up their cost of living. They also live more cheaply; people live with their extended families and don't all drive.
Technology has made the world a small place indeed. It's possible and practical to work closely with someone halfway around the world when all your work can be transmitted back and forth on a free internet. Your primary concern becomes time zones. That's a small barrier when the profit potential is so great.
Thirty years ago everyone was bemoaning the loss of manufacturing in the U.S. Everything was moving to Japan. Remember when they produced all the cheap plastic junk? Then everything moved to Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, etc. Now these places have the same problem we had thirty years ago. Currently it's China in manufacturing and India in software. Probably China will hold on to manufacturing for a while; the government will kill people who try to form labor unions or otherwise push for reforms.
In the meantime, Americans have survived very well and the U.S. economy is today much vaster and more powerful than it was during its manufacturing hegemony.
Thirty years from now perhaps the U.S. will again be the manufacturing center. Who knows? It's scary but on the other hand it's also an opportunity. Maybe people should be starting companies that help other companies outsource. Translation companies. That sort of thing. Or invent a robot that works cheaper than an Indian or Chinese laborer and then you can bring the manufacturing back to the U.S.
There are several PDAs today running Linux very well; the Sharp Zaurus is the best known, but a bunch of Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturers are about to come out with a flood of Linux-based PDAs as well (see this article in the same mag as the feature). I suspect in about a year we'll see a lot of commodity PDAs based on Linux and featuring the usual color 320x240, MP3, SD slot, etc.
;-)
Linux is not specifically "architectured" for desktops or servers. If you strip away a lot of the modules, utilities and GUI fluff, it's a pretty small OS actually. Someone has a single floppy firewall distribution based on Linux. I mean, try getting Windows on a single floppy, not to mention Solaris, MacOS, etc.
Regarding why IBM would do this, I believe they're just poking Microsoft in the eye. IBM's always been the premier marketing organization despite their prodigious technical resources. So they spent a couple of million designing a "reference PDA"; that's a tiny drop in the bucket for them and it encourages lots of hungry manufacturers in Asia (and, one would like to hope, in the West as well) to jump on the Linux bandwagon and, hence, weaken PocketPC. Seems like a pretty smart and sane move to me.
Another possible reason not mentioned is that RAM sucks battery power; the less, the better. So, even though lots of cheap RAM seems to make sense, it diminishes one of the few remaining advantages of the Palm platform.
;-)
Some day, batteries will last for months or years of continuous use, and handhelds will have speech recognition, telephony, email, great color screens, hundreds of gigs of storage, and life will be good.
I do agree with you that it would be nice to have built-in wireless networking. Let's just make it part of every computer and move on.
Hell, I think Red Hat's stock is about twice the value of Sun's right now.
Heh... Not quite. Stock price is meaningless. It's market cap (price x shares) that counts, when you're comparing valuations. Sun's market cap is $11.77 billion (according to today's WSJ), whereas Redhat's market cap is $1 billion. Sun's total equity as of June 2002 was $9.8 billion. RedHat's total equity was $327 million as of 2-28-02, probably has gone up since then.
Still, a market cap of a billion for a Linux company is pretty impressive.
There is no internet economy, you say? There are people making money off the internet who used to be school teachers or accountants or lawyers. Now, they have web sites and sell some product or service to the world via internet technology. People get things done by internet that were impossible or very difficult before, such as telecommuting. There exist online courses that there was no equivalent before except maybe closed circuit TV. Forums for exchange of ideas such as this one. Software and music downloading, whether for free or fee. And on, and on. Therefore, I put it to you that by definition there is indeed an "internet economy". How big it is, is open to debate, however.
Living in Massachusetts, I was able to buy a gift item from a store in southern Texas simply because I found them on the web and they had what I wanted, a relatively hard to find type of sand pendulum for someone's desk. They did not have to lift a finger; I found them via a web search. Internet technology enables this store to have a national presence for merely the cost of a few static web pages. That, I would argue, is an internet economy.
As for internet sales tax, it's a bad, stupid, unenforceable thing. The conventional wisdom is that it's folly to raise taxes in a recession; it can only hurt. Perhaps these states which spent so freely during the boom years should have put more away for a rainy day, just as private citizens are supposed to do. History has shown that we have a cycle of boom and bust.
But they'll never learn.
Cheap and clean is the key to colonizing the solar system. When it costs relatively little to lift people and habitats into orbit is when the mass migration to space will begin. Environmentally friendly exhaust is a nice bonus that will help disarm Green opposition to such ventures.
This is really bad news, in my opinion.
It's never a good thing to take away choice, and that's what the Xerox lawsuit has accomplished. The lawsuit may also force Palm to fork over royalties for past sales, which is a logical move; surely they don't want Palm to simply drop graffiti, they want Palm to pay them millions of dollars now and in the future.
I hope Palm can somehow settle with Xerox. Otherwise, the real impact of this lawsuit may well be that Palm gets weakened and Pocket PCs emerge as the winners.
Stupid Xerox; they invent great technology, then watch others implement it, then sue them.
Fight back, Palm; Apple beat Xerox, so you can too.
I remember reading somewhere that if all the roofs of public buildings in California had been painted white it would have solved the electricity shortage from a couple of years ago. I imagine putting solar panels on those roofs would have improved the situation even more.
Enron caused the power crisis there? I thought it was due to deregulation of the power industry.
Check out this article for an interesting look at the Clean Elections Law in Arizona and what a travesty it turned out to be. Stupid politicians, yes, but a stupid law too.
This is just sick. I don't think I could even think about eating this. Anyone else feel the same way?
Some people would say that about eating insects and yet insects are a lot cleaner and safer than higher mammals. In some cultures insects are considered a normal and nutritious source of protein. When properly fed and cooked, insects are clean and safe to eat.
Do you really want to eat a piece of a huge, dirty, bacteria-ridden mammal that's been fed on pesticide-filled grains and processed, unsanitary pieces of other mammals? The amount of permissible parasites and dirt on cattle should make you sick, not to mention the diseases, putrid meat, and dirt that get past inspection. Then there's all the chemicals they pump these poor animals full of, such as growth hormones and antibiotics.
Leaving aside the hygiene, disease, and chemical pollutants issues, what about morality? Higher mammals such as pigs and cattle dream, feel emotions such as fear, love, and anger. On the grand evolutionary scale, they're cousins to humans. If someone finds a way to cheaply grow meat-like protein in a vat that reduces or eliminates animal suffering and the capacity of bad meat to transmit disease, it would be a very good thing.
Also, I am willing to take some risk when traveling by plane. We take risks every day and driving your car is still FAR more dangerous than air travel.
I guess it all depends what your life is worth to you.
I'd rather pay more money and get there.
I suspect that the average family will make up the difference of higher prices for tickets in lower premiums for their life insurance, travel insurance, etc.
come out with a plane that has the following features:
- Sub-space and trans-sonic capability (like the "hypersonic jet" talked about years ago) that would take passengers from NYC to Tokyo in 2 hours. Or at least go as fast as the late, lamented sonic cruiser.
- Explosion-resistant cargo bay to enhance survivability should a bomb make it on board.
- At check-in time, luggage is placed (carefully, gently, by robots) into Mylar-wrapped, bullet-proofed boxes to contain and reduce the impact of bombs. Damage by throwing and dropping will be eliminated by the mechanical process of loading and unloading.
- Detachable passenger cabin; in the event of an extreme emergency, rather than simply falling to the ground or thudding into a mountainside, the passenger and crew compartments would detach from the expendable portions of the craft and huge parachutes would lower them to the surface. Note: the design goal of the plane is survivability, not efficiency.
- 15" LCD displays in every seat, hooked up to satellite internet broadband connections. Unlimited browsing. Headphones would let people listen to streaming media available on the net. Interactive games also available.
- Pilot cabin inaccessible from passenger compartment except through a large, lock-able door. Pilots have guns. Two air marshalls on every flight, armed with guns and non-lethal pacifying tools; they'll be highly paid and well treated (unlike today).
- Vertical takeoff and landing capability for emergencies (or for regular use, if it could be made efficient)
- Any other ideas?