But yet, that's just a facade to hide the fact that India has these gigantic problems:
Overpopulation--India has 1.1 billion people, just too much for a country of that size.
Disparity between rich and poor--there are gigantic slums in almost every major city in India, where people live in extreme squalor and the potential for a huge number of deaths from disease is very real.
Pollution--because of all this high-density human activity, pollution in various forms is still a very serious problem.
Cultural strife--because of the gigantic number of cultures on the Indian subcontinent, cultural strife is a very serious problem. (We forget only Pakistan and Indonesia have more Muslims than India, despite the 80% Hindu majority.)
India will have to come to grips with all four of these problems if they are to be a major partner with the rest of the world.
But yet, in the end they'll be back in the USA again.
The reason is simple: despite the current economic downtown, the US economy is still on a stronger foundation than other countries around the world--and unlike most of the world, the USA can evolve its economy fairly easily.
I mean, think about this:
Europe has a gigantic problem where their banking system is far more leveraged than any US bank. The possibility of the failure of RBS, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, or any of the major Swiss banks is no longer far-fetched--and a failure of any of those banks will have horrific consequences. As a result, the Euro is not as safe an alternative to the US dollar as first thought.
China and India still has to come to grips with three major problems: the disparity between the rich and poor, the very serious overpopulation problem, and reducing the pollution caused by the sheer mass of humanity in these countries. These problems will soon start to suck up whatever trade balance positives these countries have.
If what I've read about large meteor impacts is correct, a 30 meter sized meteor impacting the ground not only will have an explosive yield around that of the W88 warhead used on the Trident II missile (circa 475 kT), but also you have the highly dangerous issue of local fallout where the fallout is burning ash around 1,200 degrees F.! That right there will start massive firestorms many miles away from the point of impact.
It's possible that Amazon may have waved an offer in front of the Author's Guild that will allow both a Kindle e-book file and an Audible spoken word file download at the same time.
Interestingly, the next major step forward in what the English did at Agincourt was what the Spanish did at Cerignola with an then-revolutionary weapon, the arquebus gun. As described in an episode of the BBC series Connections, the group of well-positioned arquebus gunners literally wiped out a whole bunch of pike-square formations, ending the dominance of that type of battle formation.
Liquid water can be stable on Mars' atmosphere provided the water contains a LOT of perchlorate minerals in the water. That means the water with these minerals will vaporize much more slowly than just plain water, which will literally boil away at the equivalent of 90,000 feet altitude (which is pretty close to the atmospheric pressure of Mars).
That's why I'm a huge fan of FairTax. By essentially ending taxes on earning money and all the ridiculous compliance costs associated with that, maybe we can get back to doing productive things for a change.
please drive ie6 usage into the basement, so i don't have to support it anymore.
If you have Windows XP with the Windows Update active, most users would have upgraded to IE 7.0 a LONG time ago. I like IE 7.0, but frankly, the memory management in Firefox 3.0.6 is WAY better, so I have Firefox as my default browser in Windows Vista Home Premium (SP1).
Here's the problem: a stimulus will NOT work when our tax laws are driving American citizens to either participate in the underground economy or "offshore" trillions in assets to offshore banking centers in the Bahamas, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Panama, Singapore, Switzerland, etc. I've read that we've "offshored" legally a mind-boggling US$10 to US$16 TRILLION for income tax reduction reasons, an amount of money that if returned to the USA under better tax circumstances to participate in our financial system would end the economic crisis in almost no time flat.
That's why I'm pushing for drastic tax reform (either major tax simplification, a low-percentage flat tax, or replacing the income tax altogether with a true consumption tax like the FairTax proposal) to help revive the American economy.
Why does IBM need stimulus money from the Feds when their efforts to port Linux to run on their "big iron" hardware have already generated enough revenue to pay for the porting cost and then some?
If they can make this technology work with solid-state re-writable memory, I can see huge leaps forward in storage for portable music player solid state memory. The possibility of storing 250 to 500 GB of media files on a portable music player the size of the current 4G iPod nano is very enticing, to say the least.
And it may finally spell the end of the hard drive, replaced by a solid-state "drive" in the 750 GB to 1.5 TB range.
However, the EV1 had one gigantic problem: the battery pack was so big that you barely had room for a decent interior! Small wonder why the idea failed.
A better solution is plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, where you have a powerful battery offering about 40-50 miles range on a full battery charge and then the vehicle operates like a normal hybrid vehicle a la Toyota Prius. Indeed, the 2010 Toyota Prius and 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid already are ready for PHEV conversion as soon as higher density storage batteries are available (whether lithium-ion, zinc-air or ultracapacitor types).
Since most commuting is under 15 miles in range, PHEV's will likely operate in mostly all-electric mode for commute drives.
...The major down side I see to farming in the city is the toxins the plants will absorb from the air making it into the food supply.
I would agree but with these structures, the air going into these multistory greenhouses could be heavily filtered using the same technology used in internal combustion engine emission controls to clean the air, so the plants absorb very clean quality air even if the structure is located in the middle of a busy city.
However, with modern understanding of how to grow plants with no need for topsoil in essentially greenhouse conditions with UV-wavelength lights, that structure is not as far-fetched as people think.
Remember, because we're growing plants in a greenhouse condition, it means the air pumped into the greenhouse could be filtered to remove the harmful pollutants (using a combination of the CO2 scrubber technology used in nuclear submarines and the same filtering technology used on internal combustion engine emission controls) so the air has the right chemical mix for maximum plant growth. Under these highly-controlled growth conditions with no worries about the weather and soil nutrient quality, we could end up doing multiple harvests per year instead of one harvest per year, dramatically improving the food supply.
That's why there is huge interest in harvesting oil-laden algae for motor fuel. Unlike plants, oil-laden algae can be harvested many times per year, and best of all some oil-laden algae species will even grow in seawater, so that avoids the gigantic issue of getting enough freshwater to grow the algae.
Except for one thing: we are on the verge of making motor fuels (diesel fuel, gasoline and kerosene) from biomass sources.
Scientists have recently demonstrated you can make motor fuels out of biomass. With the use of oil-laden algae and cellulosic biomass processing, we can use the world's agricultural waste and fast-growing plants like switchgrass and hemp to make motor fuels.
I would agree if we're talking uranium for fuel advanced nuclear reactors, but there's a far more common metallic element (Thorium-232) that can be used in the latest reactor designs. And we've barely touched the world's known thorium supply.
You're right. Remember all the concerns in the 1840's about running out of whale oil for lamps? That concern became superfluous overnight when kerosene derived from crude oil became available in the 1860's. (It was this development that started John D. Rockefeller's rise to fame.)
And they're forgetting that we're even starting to take advantage of tidal power and wave power to generate electricity, too.
Indeed, here in the USA we are very fortunate to have the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines, both of which offer huge potential for wave power generation as technology for wave power generation improves. I read up on CETO Technology's wave power system and that has the potential to power even a very large city like New York City with a large enough system.
So really we're down to a potential problem with photo-voltaic solar power, and only then on the assumption that no systems based on plentiful materials are waiting in the wings.
I think the people who wrote this article assume things that may not come to pass. After all, with nanotechnology we can build much more advanced photovoltaic solar cells without having to go to exotic metals. In short, they're conveniently forgetting that human ingenuity can overcome a lot of supposed "limits" on technology.
Given that the readership of these magazines tend to be technically very savvy, why isn't Analog, Asimov's and Fantasy & Science Fiction available in PDF, Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader formats? Or just as good, make the stories from each issue available as an audiobook from Audible.com? Given the huge number of portable media players that support Audible format files, there would be huge market for these shorter stories to be available as an audiobook.
I think magazines like Analog, Asimov's and Fantasy and Science Fiction should AGGRESSIVELY pursue other means of distribution besides the printed magazine format. Why aren't they making their magazine available in encrypted PDF, Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader format? Or just as good, have the stories in these magazines available as an audiobook from Audible.com?
I think right now, there are not that may applications that can work as web apps. The only one I know that works well are email, instant messaging and maybe teleconferencing, where if you suddenly lose your Internet connection you won't suddenly lose a lot of productivity.
In my opinion, business apps should STAY on the local computer, what with the price of hard disk storage being dirt-cheap nowadays and you can work "offline" writing documents, creating spreadsheets, creating presentations, etc. Given the cost of OpenOffice (e.g., free), do you really want to do office applications with a web-based app?
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But yet, that's just a facade to hide the fact that India has these gigantic problems:
Overpopulation--India has 1.1 billion people, just too much for a country of that size.
Disparity between rich and poor--there are gigantic slums in almost every major city in India, where people live in extreme squalor and the potential for a huge number of deaths from disease is very real.
Pollution--because of all this high-density human activity, pollution in various forms is still a very serious problem.
Cultural strife--because of the gigantic number of cultures on the Indian subcontinent, cultural strife is a very serious problem. (We forget only Pakistan and Indonesia have more Muslims than India, despite the 80% Hindu majority.)
India will have to come to grips with all four of these problems if they are to be a major partner with the rest of the world.
But yet, in the end they'll be back in the USA again.
The reason is simple: despite the current economic downtown, the US economy is still on a stronger foundation than other countries around the world--and unlike most of the world, the USA can evolve its economy fairly easily.
I mean, think about this:
Europe has a gigantic problem where their banking system is far more leveraged than any US bank. The possibility of the failure of RBS, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, or any of the major Swiss banks is no longer far-fetched--and a failure of any of those banks will have horrific consequences. As a result, the Euro is not as safe an alternative to the US dollar as first thought.
China and India still has to come to grips with three major problems: the disparity between the rich and poor, the very serious overpopulation problem, and reducing the pollution caused by the sheer mass of humanity in these countries. These problems will soon start to suck up whatever trade balance positives these countries have.
If what I've read about large meteor impacts is correct, a 30 meter sized meteor impacting the ground not only will have an explosive yield around that of the W88 warhead used on the Trident II missile (circa 475 kT), but also you have the highly dangerous issue of local fallout where the fallout is burning ash around 1,200 degrees F.! That right there will start massive firestorms many miles away from the point of impact.
It's possible that Amazon may have waved an offer in front of the Author's Guild that will allow both a Kindle e-book file and an Audible spoken word file download at the same time.
Interestingly, the next major step forward in what the English did at Agincourt was what the Spanish did at Cerignola with an then-revolutionary weapon, the arquebus gun. As described in an episode of the BBC series Connections, the group of well-positioned arquebus gunners literally wiped out a whole bunch of pike-square formations, ending the dominance of that type of battle formation.
Liquid water can be stable on Mars' atmosphere provided the water contains a LOT of perchlorate minerals in the water. That means the water with these minerals will vaporize much more slowly than just plain water, which will literally boil away at the equivalent of 90,000 feet altitude (which is pretty close to the atmospheric pressure of Mars).
AMEN to what you just said! :-)
That's why I'm a huge fan of FairTax. By essentially ending taxes on earning money and all the ridiculous compliance costs associated with that, maybe we can get back to doing productive things for a change.
Because the "offshored" money is more than just the Cayman Islands--they're all over the world.
please drive ie6 usage into the basement, so i don't have to support it anymore.
If you have Windows XP with the Windows Update active, most users would have upgraded to IE 7.0 a LONG time ago. I like IE 7.0, but frankly, the memory management in Firefox 3.0.6 is WAY better, so I have Firefox as my default browser in Windows Vista Home Premium (SP1).
Here's the problem: a stimulus will NOT work when our tax laws are driving American citizens to either participate in the underground economy or "offshore" trillions in assets to offshore banking centers in the Bahamas, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Panama, Singapore, Switzerland, etc. I've read that we've "offshored" legally a mind-boggling US$10 to US$16 TRILLION for income tax reduction reasons, an amount of money that if returned to the USA under better tax circumstances to participate in our financial system would end the economic crisis in almost no time flat.
That's why I'm pushing for drastic tax reform (either major tax simplification, a low-percentage flat tax, or replacing the income tax altogether with a true consumption tax like the FairTax proposal) to help revive the American economy.
Why does IBM need stimulus money from the Feds when their efforts to port Linux to run on their "big iron" hardware have already generated enough revenue to pay for the porting cost and then some?
If they can make this technology work with solid-state re-writable memory, I can see huge leaps forward in storage for portable music player solid state memory. The possibility of storing 250 to 500 GB of media files on a portable music player the size of the current 4G iPod nano is very enticing, to say the least.
And it may finally spell the end of the hard drive, replaced by a solid-state "drive" in the 750 GB to 1.5 TB range.
However, the EV1 had one gigantic problem: the battery pack was so big that you barely had room for a decent interior! Small wonder why the idea failed.
A better solution is plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, where you have a powerful battery offering about 40-50 miles range on a full battery charge and then the vehicle operates like a normal hybrid vehicle a la Toyota Prius. Indeed, the 2010 Toyota Prius and 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid already are ready for PHEV conversion as soon as higher density storage batteries are available (whether lithium-ion, zinc-air or ultracapacitor types).
Since most commuting is under 15 miles in range, PHEV's will likely operate in mostly all-electric mode for commute drives.
...The major down side I see to farming in the city is the toxins the plants will absorb from the air making it into the food supply.
I would agree but with these structures, the air going into these multistory greenhouses could be heavily filtered using the same technology used in internal combustion engine emission controls to clean the air, so the plants absorb very clean quality air even if the structure is located in the middle of a busy city.
However, with modern understanding of how to grow plants with no need for topsoil in essentially greenhouse conditions with UV-wavelength lights, that structure is not as far-fetched as people think.
Remember, because we're growing plants in a greenhouse condition, it means the air pumped into the greenhouse could be filtered to remove the harmful pollutants (using a combination of the CO2 scrubber technology used in nuclear submarines and the same filtering technology used on internal combustion engine emission controls) so the air has the right chemical mix for maximum plant growth. Under these highly-controlled growth conditions with no worries about the weather and soil nutrient quality, we could end up doing multiple harvests per year instead of one harvest per year, dramatically improving the food supply.
That's why there is huge interest in harvesting oil-laden algae for motor fuel. Unlike plants, oil-laden algae can be harvested many times per year, and best of all some oil-laden algae species will even grow in seawater, so that avoids the gigantic issue of getting enough freshwater to grow the algae.
Except for one thing: we are on the verge of making motor fuels (diesel fuel, gasoline and kerosene) from biomass sources.
Scientists have recently demonstrated you can make motor fuels out of biomass. With the use of oil-laden algae and cellulosic biomass processing, we can use the world's agricultural waste and fast-growing plants like switchgrass and hemp to make motor fuels.
In short, don't discount human ingenuity.
I would agree if we're talking uranium for fuel advanced nuclear reactors, but there's a far more common metallic element (Thorium-232) that can be used in the latest reactor designs. And we've barely touched the world's known thorium supply.
You're right. Remember all the concerns in the 1840's about running out of whale oil for lamps? That concern became superfluous overnight when kerosene derived from crude oil became available in the 1860's. (It was this development that started John D. Rockefeller's rise to fame.)
And they're forgetting that we're even starting to take advantage of tidal power and wave power to generate electricity, too.
Indeed, here in the USA we are very fortunate to have the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines, both of which offer huge potential for wave power generation as technology for wave power generation improves. I read up on CETO Technology's wave power system and that has the potential to power even a very large city like New York City with a large enough system.
So really we're down to a potential problem with photo-voltaic solar power, and only then on the assumption that no systems based on plentiful materials are waiting in the wings.
I think the people who wrote this article assume things that may not come to pass. After all, with nanotechnology we can build much more advanced photovoltaic solar cells without having to go to exotic metals. In short, they're conveniently forgetting that human ingenuity can overcome a lot of supposed "limits" on technology.
Good enough for me! :-)
But first, they DO need to advertise this availability much more widely.
Given that the readership of these magazines tend to be technically very savvy, why isn't Analog, Asimov's and Fantasy & Science Fiction available in PDF, Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader formats? Or just as good, make the stories from each issue available as an audiobook from Audible.com? Given the huge number of portable media players that support Audible format files, there would be huge market for these shorter stories to be available as an audiobook.
I think magazines like Analog, Asimov's and Fantasy and Science Fiction should AGGRESSIVELY pursue other means of distribution besides the printed magazine format. Why aren't they making their magazine available in encrypted PDF, Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader format? Or just as good, have the stories in these magazines available as an audiobook from Audible.com?
I think right now, there are not that may applications that can work as web apps. The only one I know that works well are email, instant messaging and maybe teleconferencing, where if you suddenly lose your Internet connection you won't suddenly lose a lot of productivity.
In my opinion, business apps should STAY on the local computer, what with the price of hard disk storage being dirt-cheap nowadays and you can work "offline" writing documents, creating spreadsheets, creating presentations, etc. Given the cost of OpenOffice (e.g., free), do you really want to do office applications with a web-based app?