Re:Musical innovation is across the pond in Europe
on
Napster Not To Blame
·
· Score: 2
But wow, Blind Guardian has great heavy metal music!:-) Definitely more innovative than Metallica in many ways.
If you're a J.R.R. Tolkien fan, this band is definitely for you because a lot of their music is based on his works; Nightfall in Middle-Earth is based on The Silmarillion.
The big problem is simple: The RIAA is acting as a cartel and engaging in what amounts to price fixing of audio Compact Discs.
Anyone who's taken a beginning course in microeconomics in college knows that the cartel model is exactly how the RIAA is running nowadays. Problem is, they priced CD's so high (like US$18 per album-length disc!) that there is just too much economic incentive to subvert the cartel, namely through music piracy. It's small wonder why audio CD sales are down: the RIAA has priced CD's out of the reach of the majority of consumers out there.
If the RIAA had just priced CD's at a more reasonable US$11 per album-length disc the incentive to pirate music would drop drastically.
From what I've read, the RD-180 is essentially an uprated version of the RD-170 rocket that was designed for the now-shelved Energia rocket.
Here's an interesting tidbit: the Russians literally fooled everyone about the location of the rocket motor factory and rocket motor test stands! Normally in Western practice, we would put the test stands for rocket motors far away from population centers (Aerojet, Rocketdyne, etc. have their test stands built in these locations due to the loud noise and huge exhaust plumes of rocket motors in general). Well, the Russians carefully built a rocket motor factory and rocket test stand in a Moscow suburb, using an ingenious design that effectively muffled the engine noise and dissipated the exhaust plumes; it was so well-designed that on first inspection visually you'd think it was just another of the many factories that surround Moscow! No wonder why Western intelligence agencies were puzzled about the lack of rocket motor test stands near their launch sites in Baikanour and Pletesk, because we were looking in all the wrong locations. I believe this factory is where the RD-180 rocket is currently being assembled.
However, note that the AMD Athlon XP 2600+ actually keeps up with the Pentium 4 2.53 GHz part, but at a substantially lower transistor count. And that's with the Athlon CPU supposedly hampered by slower DDR266 DDR-SDRAM and the CPU sporting only 256 KB of L2 cache on the CPU die. This shows the CPU core of the Athlon--being of more modern design--is truly a work of genius.
I'm sure Intel will be very concerned when the Barton core Athlons arrive late this year, especially since the Barton core Athlon will sport 512 KB of L2 cache on the CPU die and will likely use faster DDR333 DDR-SDRAM. A Barton core CPU rated at 2800+ stands a very good chance of outperforming the Pentium 4 2.8 GHz part by a substantial margin. Is it small wonder why Intel is rushing development of the Prescott core CPU, the successor to the Pentium 4 that will sport an enormous 1024 KB of L2 cache on the CPU die?
I think generally, if your computer is primarily used for business software and web surfing, even an Intel Celeron A 400 MHz will suffice.
The big bottlenecks nowadays are insufficient amounts of system RAM and a too-slow hard drive. Given the price of hardware nowadays, going to 256 MB of RAM and getting a modern hard drive that is ATA-33 compatible (today's ATA-100/133 drive can run in ATA-33 mode) speeds things up quite a lot, mostly because 1) you don't have to do hard drive memory swapping and 2) data read/writes on the hard drive is so much faster.
For example, a system using the Intel 440LX chipset and a Pentium II 266 MHz CPU actually runs quite well (even with Windows XP Home Edition or a contemporary Linux distribution with everything installed) with a memory upgrade to 256 MB and switching to today's fast hard drives.
I was quite impressed that the Thoroughbred B core Athlons has achieved parity with the Pentium 4 2.4 GHz and 2.53 GHz chips.
I can guess that by late October AMD may be shipping the Athlon XP 2800+ CPU, and that could even match the Pentium 4 2.8 GHz CPU due next week.
It'll be VERY interesting to see what the Barton core Athlons with the 512 KB L2 cache does in terms of performance; my guess is that a Barton core Athlon rated at 2800+ will probably outpace the Pentium 4 2.8 GHz quite handily, especially if AMD does switch to DDR333 DDR-SDRAM for this CPU.
The future: Neverwinter Nights
on
Fragfest
·
· Score: 2
While the big emphasis is on first-person shooters now, I wonder what will LAN parties be like in the future with the rapid growth in the popularity of the game Neverwinter Nights, which in many ways is essentially an online Dungeons & Dragons game that handles one Dungeon Master and 60+ player characters. I believe that NWN is easily configured to play over a LAN, with one machine designated for DM use.
I personally think a NWN gaming session will probably take longer than FPS game sessions, mostly because you have to do a lot more than just attack another character.
I don't think it's the first time that scientists have tested a functional scramjet.
Back in the 1990's, Russian scientists put a model of a scramjet engine on top of a former SS-20 missile and I believe they did manage to get some test results from these fights.
I think the reason why Dell is offering machines without Windows installed is the fact Dell has announced an alliance with Red Hat Software to provide Red Hat Linux on both corporate PC's and servers on Tuesday.
That way, Dell offers a low-cost alternative to Windows to satisfy increasingly penny-pinching large-volume customers, and Dell chose the Linux distribution that is #1 in the business environment, Red Hat (which has pretty much become the de facto standard for Linux distributions).
I think another reason why Itanium CPU's haven't been accepted is their stratospheric prices.
When the price of the Itanium 2 CPU is somewhere between US$1,000 and US$3,000, no wonder why there's not much interest nowadays. My guess is that AMD's X86-compatible chips using the Hammer core design will probably be at most US$550 to US$600 in price for the fastest versions.
Here's a question for you: what version of Mandrake Linux were you installing? If it's Version 8.0 or later, it has way more hardware support than Windows 2000 Professional on its default install.
A more valid comparison would be Mandrake 8.x versions versus Windows XP on an install.
Re:Umm.. Lots of Software, not a lot of OSS
on
Mega-Geek March?
·
· Score: 2
Here's the thing that some Open Source advocates are kind of forgetting: the concept of total cost of ownership (TCO).
You are correct that state governments used closed source software from many different vendors, and the cost to convert everything currently used to Open Source in terms of coding time, testing the code and implementing the code (all part of the TCO equation) isn't going to be cheap, that's to be sure.
Open Source works best if you don't have to deal with legacy code, for example in the case of Google, the web searching service that was implemented in Linux right from the start.
In my opinion, an HSR line between Jacksonville, Orlando and Miami would actually have much more riders than people anticipate.
If the line has trains capable of running at 233 mph maximum and have at least trains passing by 4 times an hour, it could make it possible for tourists who land at any airport in Florida capable of visiting everything along the HSR line pretty quickly. Imagine your flight lands in Miami, but you can take the HSR to visit Orlando and Jacksonville in 1-2 hours of transit time. Disney World folks would love it because many more local Floridians would visit Disney World due to the fact it'll be a short train ride from Jacksonville and Miami to the literal front step of Disney World.
In my opinion, if they are going to build a high-speed rail system in Florida, I would do the following:
1. Build it with the fastest trainsets available and make it capable of topping out at 375 km/h (233 mph). The technology is there to build such a train using conventional steel rail systems.
2. The first line should be Jacksonville south to Orlando and then south to Miami. The second line is from Jacksonville west to Pensacola.
3. The service has to be frequent--that means at least 15 minutes between trains.
4. Establish train stations near airports. This means the line has to go near the main airports of Jacksonville, Orlando, Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Miami. In the Orlando area, you want a station that is very close or on Disney World property.
I've seen the current Fellowship of the Rings on widescreen DVD.
All I can say is that the picture quality is top-notch (only marred by occasional edge enhancement) and the sound quality is just flat-out SUPERB. You definitely want a quality surround-sound setup to really enjoy this movie at home.
Besides, this release is what Director Peter Jackson personally intended as the Director's Cut of the movie.
Didn't we undergo this before??
on
The Last Place
·
· Score: 2
Folks,
I think the fall of cultural provincialism via the spread of television is not exactly a new phenomenon.
Think about it: when the Roman Empire spread throughout the Mediterrean, the culture of that empire heavily stomped out most local cultures and/or adapted local cultures to Roman needs. It was this singular culture that allowed Christianity to spread throughout the Empire by the 3rd Century AD.
When Johann Gutenberg invented the moveable type printing press around 1453, it made it much easier to spread learning around Europe. The ability to print thousands of identical copies of books formed the basis of national culture throughout Europe.
And from the 1920's on, the rapid deployment of radio did a lot to reduce provincial spoken dialects, especially with national radio networks pretty much forcing people to speak in very few or only one standard dialect(s).
Television is just only a recent medium that is stomping out cultural provincialism through the world; the Internet is doing the same right now.
I think the reason why 12 oz. cups of coffee are more common nowadays is the fact that the average standard size coffee mug is 12 oz. to start with. I'm sure folks in the Seattle area have seen certain coffee beverages served on what looks like a large soupbowl (yikes!).
As for single-serviing cold drinks, we first started with 8 oz. bottles, then 12 oz. bottles, then 16 oz. bottles, then 12 oz. cans, then 16 oz. cans (though this is rare nowadays), and now 20 oz. bottles. Indeed, pretty much every soft drink I know of if they use a bottle are sold in a 20 oz. bottle that can fit most automobile cupholders easily.
The so-called Super Sized cups are not as common as people think. I actually find it a bit unwieldy to hold even the 32 oz. cups found at most convenience stores. In fact, the largest cup I can hold comfortably is the 22 oz. Slurpee cup from 7-Eleven, due to the fact this cup can fit standard automobile cup holders and also my hand can comfortably hold the cup.
While Trident may have come up with a low-cost 3-D graphics card breakthrough of sorts, that's what SiS claimed with the 305 and 315 chipset cards, which proved to be a bit disappointing in 3-D performance.
I'm not sure if OEM's here in the USA want to install cards using the new Trident XP4 chipset, especially when you consider that for slightly more money OEM's can install cards with the ATI RV250 chipset, which will likely offer much better overall 3-D performance, especially for DirectX 9.0. Indeed, the ATI RV250 chipset cards are definitely aimed for the various small computer assemblers, and because of the cachet of the ATI brand name will likely be quite popular, too.
Aftering see all these office toys on that web page, you wonder if some office cubicle workers need to be paid combat pay with those rubber band guns, "burp" shooters, and crossbow dart shooters.:-/
It might be needed in places like Google and Microsoft, where hijinks using these devices are quite common. (shrug)
I think the reason why Linux has finally gotten popular for servers is the fact the 2.4.x kernel releases can do the type of heavy-duty volume transctions that used to the realm of commercial Unix releases such as Solaris. I think a lot of the 2.4.x improvements were prodded on by IBM, who has a vested interest in running Linux on most of their big iron hardware.
It's the 2.4.x kernel that makes to possible for a company like Google to do massive web page indexing and Usenet archiving with a massive server farm, that's to be sure. =)
Because Linux can finally do large scale data processing, the OS has finally gotten the notice of Fortune 500 firms that want large scale data processing but blanch at the license costs of a commercial Unix like Solaris.
It's possible the whole thing is a coverup, but I think it's more likely that Aereon is just a group of people who believe in the idea of an aerobody.
Given the historical way that Lockheed's Skunk Works operated, I wouldn't be surprised that Aereon provides a nice cover for the research Lockheed has done, so the research can't be traced back to Lockheed.
Lockheed's security is generally so good that while we can do a pretty good guess at what they developed, the guesses don't even come close to the reality of their developments. Take for example the F-117A stealth fighter; who would have guessed tht the F-117A's design was essentially a series of flat plates shaped into something resembling an airplane? Or the fact their Sea Shadow stealth ship project was developed and operated out of the San Francisco Bay Area without anyone in the Bay Area noticing it? Or the fact the D-21 hypersonic drone was totally unknown until a bunch of them turned up at Davis-Monthan AFB's storage yard?
Why do I have this feeling that Aereon is actually a front company for a Lockheed Skunk Works project?
If you remember from the late Ben Rich's book Skunk Works, the way Clarence Kelly Johnson got the parts to build the U-2 was to order the parts through a front company named C & J Engineering, complete with a postal box out in Sunland, CA, which was well-away from the Lockhead plant at Burbank, CA. It's possible that the Aereon company was a ruse to cover up Lockheed's ressearch into stealth lighter-than-air vehicles used for reconnaissance and special ops transport.
I think I know what is the worry: people think we'll end up with a Soviet-style internal passport that the law enforcement authorities can ask to be checked anytime.
Anyway, we're most of the way there already here in the USA. Most of the state-level driver's license data are nationally linked, mostly as a means to prevent truckers from running up multiple traffic citations in several states and other states not knowing about it (truckers used to have multiple state commercial trucker's licenses).
In the long term, one way or another, poor nations must eliminate their dependency on food imports. They need to address their internal social and political problems, they must work on infrastructure, commerce, and population planning. And they need to develop crops domestically that work well within their countries.
That is EXACTLY the problem brought on by Robert Mugabe's use of food production and distribution as a weapon against his enemies.
If the farms in Zimbabwe had been working at full capacity with proper planting and harvesting of foods and proper distribution of foods, the starvation that 50% of the population of Zimbabwe now faces would never have happened in the first place. The problem is that Mugabe has essentially short-circuited the entire agricultural infrastructure in the country, not only stopping food production but also channeling what foodstuffs are left to his closest allies only. This is the EXACT policy that has caused untold suffering all over Africa since the 1960's.
I think what will happen is that by 2022 genetic engineering will be good enough that we'll never run out of the "original" gene foodstuffs, since it'll be very easy to genetically make the original version of corn, wheat, oats, barley, alfalfa, etc. as reference standards for genetically-improved footstuffs.
Besides, today's yellow and white kernel corn are completely nothing like the maize originals with their reddish and bluish kernels.
Anyway, by then genome sequencing of grains will be so good we can pick and choose the exact traits down to the last DNA sequence we want for the grain, whether it's higher starch content for livestock feed, higher sugar content for human consumption, better disease and insect resistance, etc. The genetic engineering will be so precise that it would be almost impossible to tell from the unmodified original.
Slashdot Mirror
But wow, Blind Guardian has great heavy metal music! :-) Definitely more innovative than Metallica in many ways.
If you're a J.R.R. Tolkien fan, this band is definitely for you because a lot of their music is based on his works; Nightfall in Middle-Earth is based on The Silmarillion.
You are completely correct in your assessments.
The big problem is simple: The RIAA is acting as a cartel and engaging in what amounts to price fixing of audio Compact Discs.
Anyone who's taken a beginning course in microeconomics in college knows that the cartel model is exactly how the RIAA is running nowadays. Problem is, they priced CD's so high (like US$18 per album-length disc!) that there is just too much economic incentive to subvert the cartel, namely through music piracy. It's small wonder why audio CD sales are down: the RIAA has priced CD's out of the reach of the majority of consumers out there.
If the RIAA had just priced CD's at a more reasonable US$11 per album-length disc the incentive to pirate music would drop drastically.
From what I've read, the RD-180 is essentially an uprated version of the RD-170 rocket that was designed for the now-shelved Energia rocket.
Here's an interesting tidbit: the Russians literally fooled everyone about the location of the rocket motor factory and rocket motor test stands! Normally in Western practice, we would put the test stands for rocket motors far away from population centers (Aerojet, Rocketdyne, etc. have their test stands built in these locations due to the loud noise and huge exhaust plumes of rocket motors in general). Well, the Russians carefully built a rocket motor factory and rocket test stand in a Moscow suburb, using an ingenious design that effectively muffled the engine noise and dissipated the exhaust plumes; it was so well-designed that on first inspection visually you'd think it was just another of the many factories that surround Moscow! No wonder why Western intelligence agencies were puzzled about the lack of rocket motor test stands near their launch sites in Baikanour and Pletesk, because we were looking in all the wrong locations. I believe this factory is where the RD-180 rocket is currently being assembled.
However, note that the AMD Athlon XP 2600+ actually keeps up with the Pentium 4 2.53 GHz part, but at a substantially lower transistor count. And that's with the Athlon CPU supposedly hampered by slower DDR266 DDR-SDRAM and the CPU sporting only 256 KB of L2 cache on the CPU die. This shows the CPU core of the Athlon--being of more modern design--is truly a work of genius.
I'm sure Intel will be very concerned when the Barton core Athlons arrive late this year, especially since the Barton core Athlon will sport 512 KB of L2 cache on the CPU die and will likely use faster DDR333 DDR-SDRAM. A Barton core CPU rated at 2800+ stands a very good chance of outperforming the Pentium 4 2.8 GHz part by a substantial margin. Is it small wonder why Intel is rushing development of the Prescott core CPU, the successor to the Pentium 4 that will sport an enormous 1024 KB of L2 cache on the CPU die?
I think generally, if your computer is primarily used for business software and web surfing, even an Intel Celeron A 400 MHz will suffice.
The big bottlenecks nowadays are insufficient amounts of system RAM and a too-slow hard drive. Given the price of hardware nowadays, going to 256 MB of RAM and getting a modern hard drive that is ATA-33 compatible (today's ATA-100/133 drive can run in ATA-33 mode) speeds things up quite a lot, mostly because 1) you don't have to do hard drive memory swapping and 2) data read/writes on the hard drive is so much faster.
For example, a system using the Intel 440LX chipset and a Pentium II 266 MHz CPU actually runs quite well (even with Windows XP Home Edition or a contemporary Linux distribution with everything installed) with a memory upgrade to 256 MB and switching to today's fast hard drives.
I was quite impressed that the Thoroughbred B core Athlons has achieved parity with the Pentium 4 2.4 GHz and 2.53 GHz chips.
I can guess that by late October AMD may be shipping the Athlon XP 2800+ CPU, and that could even match the Pentium 4 2.8 GHz CPU due next week.
It'll be VERY interesting to see what the Barton core Athlons with the 512 KB L2 cache does in terms of performance; my guess is that a Barton core Athlon rated at 2800+ will probably outpace the Pentium 4 2.8 GHz quite handily, especially if AMD does switch to DDR333 DDR-SDRAM for this CPU.
While the big emphasis is on first-person shooters now, I wonder what will LAN parties be like in the future with the rapid growth in the popularity of the game Neverwinter Nights, which in many ways is essentially an online Dungeons & Dragons game that handles one Dungeon Master and 60+ player characters. I believe that NWN is easily configured to play over a LAN, with one machine designated for DM use.
I personally think a NWN gaming session will probably take longer than FPS game sessions, mostly because you have to do a lot more than just attack another character.
I don't think it's the first time that scientists have tested a functional scramjet.
Back in the 1990's, Russian scientists put a model of a scramjet engine on top of a former SS-20 missile and I believe they did manage to get some test results from these fights.
I think the reason why Dell is offering machines without Windows installed is the fact Dell has announced an alliance with Red Hat Software to provide Red Hat Linux on both corporate PC's and servers on Tuesday.
That way, Dell offers a low-cost alternative to Windows to satisfy increasingly penny-pinching large-volume customers, and Dell chose the Linux distribution that is #1 in the business environment, Red Hat (which has pretty much become the de facto standard for Linux distributions).
I think another reason why Itanium CPU's haven't been accepted is their stratospheric prices.
When the price of the Itanium 2 CPU is somewhere between US$1,000 and US$3,000, no wonder why there's not much interest nowadays. My guess is that AMD's X86-compatible chips using the Hammer core design will probably be at most US$550 to US$600 in price for the fastest versions.
Hold it right there.
Here's a question for you: what version of Mandrake Linux were you installing? If it's Version 8.0 or later, it has way more hardware support than Windows 2000 Professional on its default install.
A more valid comparison would be Mandrake 8.x versions versus Windows XP on an install.
Here's the thing that some Open Source advocates are kind of forgetting: the concept of total cost of ownership (TCO).
You are correct that state governments used closed source software from many different vendors, and the cost to convert everything currently used to Open Source in terms of coding time, testing the code and implementing the code (all part of the TCO equation) isn't going to be cheap, that's to be sure.
Open Source works best if you don't have to deal with legacy code, for example in the case of Google, the web searching service that was implemented in Linux right from the start.
In my opinion, an HSR line between Jacksonville, Orlando and Miami would actually have much more riders than people anticipate.
If the line has trains capable of running at 233 mph maximum and have at least trains passing by 4 times an hour, it could make it possible for tourists who land at any airport in Florida capable of visiting everything along the HSR line pretty quickly. Imagine your flight lands in Miami, but you can take the HSR to visit Orlando and Jacksonville in 1-2 hours of transit time. Disney World folks would love it because many more local Floridians would visit Disney World due to the fact it'll be a short train ride from Jacksonville and Miami to the literal front step of Disney World.
In my opinion, if they are going to build a high-speed rail system in Florida, I would do the following:
1. Build it with the fastest trainsets available and make it capable of topping out at 375 km/h (233 mph). The technology is there to build such a train using conventional steel rail systems.
2. The first line should be Jacksonville south to Orlando and then south to Miami. The second line is from Jacksonville west to Pensacola.
3. The service has to be frequent--that means at least 15 minutes between trains.
4. Establish train stations near airports. This means the line has to go near the main airports of Jacksonville, Orlando, Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Miami. In the Orlando area, you want a station that is very close or on Disney World property.
I've seen the current Fellowship of the Rings on widescreen DVD.
All I can say is that the picture quality is top-notch (only marred by occasional edge enhancement) and the sound quality is just flat-out SUPERB. You definitely want a quality surround-sound setup to really enjoy this movie at home.
Besides, this release is what Director Peter Jackson personally intended as the Director's Cut of the movie.
Folks,
I think the fall of cultural provincialism via the spread of television is not exactly a new phenomenon.
Think about it: when the Roman Empire spread throughout the Mediterrean, the culture of that empire heavily stomped out most local cultures and/or adapted local cultures to Roman needs. It was this singular culture that allowed Christianity to spread throughout the Empire by the 3rd Century AD.
When Johann Gutenberg invented the moveable type printing press around 1453, it made it much easier to spread learning around Europe. The ability to print thousands of identical copies of books formed the basis of national culture throughout Europe.
And from the 1920's on, the rapid deployment of radio did a lot to reduce provincial spoken dialects, especially with national radio networks pretty much forcing people to speak in very few or only one standard dialect(s).
Television is just only a recent medium that is stomping out cultural provincialism through the world; the Internet is doing the same right now.
I think the reason why 12 oz. cups of coffee are more common nowadays is the fact that the average standard size coffee mug is 12 oz. to start with. I'm sure folks in the Seattle area have seen certain coffee beverages served on what looks like a large soupbowl (yikes!).
As for single-serviing cold drinks, we first started with 8 oz. bottles, then 12 oz. bottles, then 16 oz. bottles, then 12 oz. cans, then 16 oz. cans (though this is rare nowadays), and now 20 oz. bottles. Indeed, pretty much every soft drink I know of if they use a bottle are sold in a 20 oz. bottle that can fit most automobile cupholders easily.
The so-called Super Sized cups are not as common as people think. I actually find it a bit unwieldy to hold even the 32 oz. cups found at most convenience stores. In fact, the largest cup I can hold comfortably is the 22 oz. Slurpee cup from 7-Eleven, due to the fact this cup can fit standard automobile cup holders and also my hand can comfortably hold the cup.
While Trident may have come up with a low-cost 3-D graphics card breakthrough of sorts, that's what SiS claimed with the 305 and 315 chipset cards, which proved to be a bit disappointing in 3-D performance.
I'm not sure if OEM's here in the USA want to install cards using the new Trident XP4 chipset, especially when you consider that for slightly more money OEM's can install cards with the ATI RV250 chipset, which will likely offer much better overall 3-D performance, especially for DirectX 9.0. Indeed, the ATI RV250 chipset cards are definitely aimed for the various small computer assemblers, and because of the cachet of the ATI brand name will likely be quite popular, too.
Aftering see all these office toys on that web page, you wonder if some office cubicle workers need to be paid combat pay with those rubber band guns, "burp" shooters, and crossbow dart shooters. :-/
It might be needed in places like Google and Microsoft, where hijinks using these devices are quite common. (shrug)
I think the reason why Linux has finally gotten popular for servers is the fact the 2.4.x kernel releases can do the type of heavy-duty volume transctions that used to the realm of commercial Unix releases such as Solaris. I think a lot of the 2.4.x improvements were prodded on by IBM, who has a vested interest in running Linux on most of their big iron hardware.
It's the 2.4.x kernel that makes to possible for a company like Google to do massive web page indexing and Usenet archiving with a massive server farm, that's to be sure. =)
Because Linux can finally do large scale data processing, the OS has finally gotten the notice of Fortune 500 firms that want large scale data processing but blanch at the license costs of a commercial Unix like Solaris.
It's possible the whole thing is a coverup, but I think it's more likely that Aereon is just a group of people who believe in the idea of an aerobody.
Given the historical way that Lockheed's Skunk Works operated, I wouldn't be surprised that Aereon provides a nice cover for the research Lockheed has done, so the research can't be traced back to Lockheed.
Lockheed's security is generally so good that while we can do a pretty good guess at what they developed, the guesses don't even come close to the reality of their developments. Take for example the F-117A stealth fighter; who would have guessed tht the F-117A's design was essentially a series of flat plates shaped into something resembling an airplane? Or the fact their Sea Shadow stealth ship project was developed and operated out of the San Francisco Bay Area without anyone in the Bay Area noticing it? Or the fact the D-21 hypersonic drone was totally unknown until a bunch of them turned up at Davis-Monthan AFB's storage yard?
gleam,
Why do I have this feeling that Aereon is actually a front company for a Lockheed Skunk Works project?
If you remember from the late Ben Rich's book Skunk Works, the way Clarence Kelly Johnson got the parts to build the U-2 was to order the parts through a front company named C & J Engineering, complete with a postal box out in Sunland, CA, which was well-away from the Lockhead plant at Burbank, CA. It's possible that the Aereon company was a ruse to cover up Lockheed's ressearch into stealth lighter-than-air vehicles used for reconnaissance and special ops transport.
I think I know what is the worry: people think we'll end up with a Soviet-style internal passport that the law enforcement authorities can ask to be checked anytime.
Anyway, we're most of the way there already here in the USA. Most of the state-level driver's license data are nationally linked, mostly as a means to prevent truckers from running up multiple traffic citations in several states and other states not knowing about it (truckers used to have multiple state commercial trucker's licenses).
In the long term, one way or another, poor nations must eliminate their dependency on food imports. They need to address their internal social and political problems, they must work on infrastructure, commerce, and population planning. And they need to develop crops domestically that work well within their countries.
That is EXACTLY the problem brought on by Robert Mugabe's use of food production and distribution as a weapon against his enemies.
If the farms in Zimbabwe had been working at full capacity with proper planting and harvesting of foods and proper distribution of foods, the starvation that 50% of the population of Zimbabwe now faces would never have happened in the first place. The problem is that Mugabe has essentially short-circuited the entire agricultural infrastructure in the country, not only stopping food production but also channeling what foodstuffs are left to his closest allies only. This is the EXACT policy that has caused untold suffering all over Africa since the 1960's.
I think what will happen is that by 2022 genetic engineering will be good enough that we'll never run out of the "original" gene foodstuffs, since it'll be very easy to genetically make the original version of corn, wheat, oats, barley, alfalfa, etc. as reference standards for genetically-improved footstuffs.
Besides, today's yellow and white kernel corn are completely nothing like the maize originals with their reddish and bluish kernels.
Anyway, by then genome sequencing of grains will be so good we can pick and choose the exact traits down to the last DNA sequence we want for the grain, whether it's higher starch content for livestock feed, higher sugar content for human consumption, better disease and insect resistance, etc. The genetic engineering will be so precise that it would be almost impossible to tell from the unmodified original.