Could I just start sending a company bills? I've changed my terms of service. I'm their customer using their service, but now they must pay be $50 for the privilege of me using their service. That I'm still using their service means that they accept the terms of my customer license agreement and they must now pay my bill otherwise I'll cancel my customer service with them and that'll be a $500 disconnection charge.
I don't have balls enough to try that. I'm sure some else here does. I'd almost want to know what would happen if we all decided August 1 to fight back and we'll start by faxing a customer license agreement to every service provider that we do business with... (Electric, water, sewage, trash, cable, internet, cell phone/telephone, and anything else that you pay on a monthly basis.) We put in there at the fine print that acceptance of our money and providing us with service means that they accept said terms of service.
The good part is that you don't have to be ugly unless they try something, and then if they do, well then you use that customer lic agreement to club them... Ok. that and a website of other customers of said service that you could post your complaint and if they've tried stuff on a wider scale.
Imagine that doing a "find . -name file.jpg" or similar might be considered an "investigation".
Um, using find *.jpg or *.doc or *.xls or *.pdf on a computer you have admin access to due to the user giving you their user name & password should be considered doing an investigation!
A computer tech isn't a PI or police person and has no right to just rumage through your data files just because you need it repaired!;) What does that mean? I'd want them not to have any access to any user documents. They are being paid to fix the damn machine not look at my content or see how I've decorated it. MS, Apple, and Linux all need an admin account that has zero access to any user files and could only check config files and uninstall/reinstall apps.
If you took your car to get it's oil changed, you wouldn't stand for it if they tried to search your trunk/groceries for drugs at the same time.
I'd say there's an important difference in there. If person A wants to take a part of their personal life and make it public, that's up to them. The problem is when person A wants to keep something private and entity B decides that person A doesn't have a say in the matter.
Well, it just depends on how easy it is to get info out of various sources and what not. Just the other day I was looking at those DVR 4 camera security cameras out at sams club. They are around 1000-1500 and you can hook them up to the internet and it says that it records a few weeks worth of video.
That's the current state of that tech. There is tech to record license plate numbers and try to id a person from these sorts of sources. Now when google offers a beta web app doing that which would integrate into on of those home DVR security setups. It don't matter if it's the government, grandmom, or me, all it would take is a google search that also searches all those homes that you just might have passed by and presto total recording and search. Just wait for those $1.5k systems to drop down to $.15k and the search software to become available. Imagine how many houses, businesses that you pass in front of daily. This doesn't require the government at all to do.
I'm just waiting until some one figures out that we should give cellphones to the 3rd world to track and spy on 'em. Of course the same could be said for us except that we pay to be spied upon...
If I zip up MS Office, for instance, I've turned it into a very long number. Is it reasonable to allow companies to claim ownership of such numbers? With the proper compression and/or encryption scheme, you could use any number (trivially in some cases) to represent a work over which you can claim copyright. Do we then let a corporation privatise the entire integer space? And if not, how do we distinguish between infringing and non-infringing uses of a large number?
Reminds me of some scifi theory/short story that I read once. It basically assumed that all data where contained in pi somewhere. All you needed was the offset, the length and an infinite processor that could calculate pi out to that far in nanoseconds.
That would be interesting if some one could search pi for valid files and if any are found.
Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID
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What NAS To Buy?
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I don't know why AC got modded troll... it's good advice. I built my file server as raid5 and am regretting it. It's the most economical, and you do get some redundancy.. but if I had to do it all over again, I'd totally go raid10.
With Raid5.. two drives fail and your done. Unless you buy every drive at a different time from a different manufacturer, chances are under the same wear conditions, two will fail around the same time. With a raid10.. you put all one brand on one side, all of another brand on the other side... possibly on a separate controller. Raid10 can withstand a much larger failure... and you also get some serious performance++.
My advice is that if you can't explain how raid5 will help you, then you most likely don't need it and should use raid10. Those that really need raid5 can explain how it is more cost effective over a given time span for them than raid10.
There is something called PGMM - Precision Guided Mortar Munitions which allow for laser target designation. They are being developed now (I know that some have been tested but haven't heard that they are in the field yet) but they still have to be fired roughly in the right direction as a mortar remains as a fundamentally ballistic weapon.
Yeah, but we'd expect that to work using high tech lasers to target. Now if could use your average cell phone camera to target dependability and text that info to the cell's of the mortar guys, then I'd be impressed. I'm not really convinced the entire land warrior concept will hit its stride until 80-90% of the software and hardware package could fit into your average cellphone/ipod form factor.
It's a great coffee table book because everyone sees it and can't resist looking up what the book has to say about their birthday. They then flip it to a few family members to just see. You'll then get them telling you about their family/friends and if they match the book's profile or differ. It's a fun religious neutral book.;) The authors describe the whole astrology and horoscope thing, but the way they really compiled most of the book was researching lots and lots of famous people and comparing them.
It's sort of like the make a list of your 10 most liked books, movies, video games, or even websites. and we'll know just how to stereotype you. There are days where I'd love to see the results if some AI data mined the census, face book, myspace, and google news to try to compile this book based on the info of everyone in the US. It would take an AI to do it, but I wonder if it would learn if there was anything useful or if it's a just for fun info.
There are other times that I'd want some one to seriously study astrology, history, and politics just to see if gravity or those visible lights in the sky have any effect on human politics or human migration patterns in general. It would be fun just to see the results.
What's going to end up happening with all these companies spending billions is that they will come to embrace the current screwed-up system and probably defend it because of their investment. They even may end up lobbying to maintain the status quo.
Let's face it. The status quo works. Those that have built "successful" companies in the US in say the last 100 years can attest to it working. Now they also know how to game the system for their best advantage. I'd have to say there isn't anything morally wrong about it just because you and I can't afford to do it on the same scale. If you or I built the next MS, Google, Wal-Mart, or heck Ford, then we'd have learned the existing system and have gamed it to our best use over the last generation or two. This is morally right that everyone with resources has an attempt to game the system. Those with more resources can game the system better than those with no resources or those that try to beg resources.
Changing the status quo requires effort from people that have more to gain if the current system where radically changed than those running a successful business. I have no interest in the patent system debate other than as an observer. I cheer on those that have won with the current rules rather than those that want to alter the rules for their own gain.
Sounds like racketerring in a sense. IANAL, but I wonder if an ambitious prosecutor somewhere could use the RICO statues instead of anti-trust statutes. Any lawyers familiar with RICO want to chime in?
This is actually what this group is trying to get away from. They hate lawyers as much as the next guy. They'd love to kill every lawyer in the country every generation. (You'd still need lawyers and just killing them off wouldn't stop people from going into law anyway.) Their damn problem is people like you! Yes piss ants like you that want to sue their ass. Why? They have resources, and you want them! Thief.
There are days I'd actually want some corporate feudalism except that'd require two way loyalty. Trust me I can live with IBM, HP, MS and Google doing this. I'm not worried about them. I'm worried about the dreamchasers that want to sue their companies into the ground because they have billions and make toys that my company and I buy to run our business.
The patents owners won't HAVE to sell, but if someone came to your door with a wheelbarrow full of money, you might be tempted to say "Sure, here it is." But, now that the 'secretive' group has been exposed, they are no longer, um, a secret. Yes? No?
Um, that's sort of like saying the publishers clearing house prize van and the Price is Right have been exposed for giving out money/prizes. Actually having inventors know that this is a group of not one company, but most of the heavy hitters in the industry may convince most to try selling their idea there instead of to on of those purely offensive patent companies. At least if you sold your patent here, you'd know that your idea is more likely to be used by the big boys.
(you can do it in a way that would in most cases still allow that user's web surfing to work reasonably - since most users don't websurf 20 different sites at the same time AND read those pages at the same time - it doesn't matter if pages come in one by one ).
So you must be the one that got my webcomics loading slower in the morning! I use that "open all in tabs" to open up like 20 sites in the morning. This used to take 10-20 seconds for all of them to load. Now it'll take 5 minutes or so.
Come on sluggy, megatokyo, schlockmercenary, and dominic-deegan should all load instantly! Normally those sites load as fast as google unless their site is down for some reason. Sites on Comic Genesis usually load very quickly as well unless they have site issues. (That'd take half my web comics down right there.)
I'm not saying there aren't enviro considerations with solar- but why wasn't this done years ago?
Because solar is good, and every thing else is evil. It's not until you've got people that really question that religion before it'd get studied. Remember those early factories were great. It wasn't so great for those working in them or living around them though. They questioned that whole factories are great thing and got conditions improved.
The same mindset is out there for all the alt energy sources. Those behind them are convinced that they are good and all existing sources are evil. It's not a profit/loss thing; its a religion thing. I actually question the environmental/alt energy religions more than traditional religions. Mainly because they want my tax money to be used to study climate, the environment, and to build there sun/wind worshiping devices.;) Heck, they've even invaded the public schools and have gotten teachers to teach their religion to my kids! Oh, well it wouldn't be that bad if they'd actually build useful/practical solutions.
This is probably a really dumb question, but as I Brit I have never figured out why settlers chose to live in America. I mean, the climate seems to spend half the year trying to KILL you.
Dumb Brit, what kinda of history did they teach you about why we were driven out of England and into the US, Canada, South Africa, and Australia? We'd have been in danger of being killed had have stayed in England far more than the climate in the US. The US climate is only slightly annoying. The British government on the other hand was highly annoying and deadly.
There is the additional side benefit though once you get used to the slightly annoying climate; the British tend never to visit your country. That's worth almost anything. Ask the French what they have to do to keep the British on there island.
As a resident of Texas, I hate that we're building more and more coal-fired power plants when we have such abundant sun and wind out here that we could be using instead. Hell, I have to suffer through 2 months (and counting) of 100+ degree days, I'd like to at least be getting something out of all that sun other than dehydration and sunburn.
Dude, Texas had the largest wind farms in the US the last time that I checked. O.k. a lot of those so called environmental liberal states had planned wind farms, but Texas actually has them now and they were rapidly expanding. I'm in Arkansas so can relate on the heat issue. The last time I was in the Dallas area, I thought if they could just build one of those power towers, the heat coming off the city alone would produce most the energy for the surrounding areas.
Every time my family drives on the interstate highways, I wonder why the hell they aren't covered with solar panels and have wind mills ever so often. Arkansas sucks for wind according the wind power maps, but we've got lots of long flat state and interstate highways in the southern part of the state that could be covered for solar. If we are going to spend money creating road and power construction jobs, shouldn't it be on the same stretch of land where we can all see the results?
Solar requires more surface area than we have. It's a no-go until cheap panels are ~ 60% efficient, and even then it will require the clearing of massive stretches of land.
Um, we already have that. They are called roads. Why can't we figure out a way to turn those roads into decent solar collectors and still be usable roads? How about if we just cover all those highways with solar panels and build a windmill in the median every 1/4 mile or so. I know solar requires lots of land well, we should make the most efficient use of our land. Well, wind isn't a great solution because it doesn't always produce the same, well if we had a one for every 1/4 mile of highway, it should average out.
On, nuclear. Don't get me even started on nuclear. Remember that article a few days ago about jobs moving back to the US due to shipping prices due to the change in oil prices? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah If we hadn't stopped developing this tech, the price of shipping wouldn't change due to oil prices at all. The more that I research nuclear the more that I become pissed at people and decisions that were made in the 60s and 70s that have really prevented the US from having a nuclear industry. Basically blame the coal and oil industries for funding environmentalists and most of the anti-nuke hype/PR from the 60s onward. It's only recently that those environmentalists have seriously turned on the coal and oil industries, but we are still stuck with all those anti-nuke regs and the anti-nuke PR machine preventing most useful nuke construction.
I don't understand all the hostility toward solar.
I don't understand any of the hostility toward genetically engineering or the number 666. O.k. seriously, the ideal solar collector that I want is a replacement for grass. I hate grass. Existing grass is morally wrong. Why? I want want something like a green self repairing carpet that is always within certain height and if it close to the max of those bounds instead of wasting energy on needless growth to produce directly usable electricity or a liquid bio fuel that is stored in a 100 gallon grown barrel by my driveway. For bonus, it would also provide defense against intruders and lifeforms other than humans.
Socio-economic stability is a prerequisite for business success. The rich benefit more from programs that help create such stability. Therefore, they should pay more.
Um, not really. It's a requirement for us lower class and middle classes to thrive. Business and the rich can do well in any environment. You wouldn't like some of the results though. The Walmart door greeters aren't 18-21 year olds with machine guns to shoot shop lifters or protesters.
It boils down to the rich have resources that the poor want to make use of. So we let the government rob the rich to pay the poor. The rich could have their own private cities/police forces and such. Would you want million acres or billionaire estate where you have to be a millionaire or billionaire to move there, but all the local taxes/laws were designed to preserve the the resources of their citizens from the poor of the outside? I'd bet that the first floating city will be a tax haven designed for these folks to have their cake and keep it away from you and I.
Really though, sales tax is always a regressive tax and I don't think it is a great idea in general for that reason...
Sales tax is the only universally fair demand based tax. Every other tax tries to leech your resources away just because you have them and the government wants them. I'd love to get rid of property and income taxes and force all government to operate under a say 10% overall tax. If you don't want to pay taxes, just don't buy anything. That should be a simple concept. Of course now, it's if you own anything expect the government to come rob you of some resources just because you have a home, car, income, and a savings/retirement account.
But I have to agree with the other poster here who said it was very worrisome that US military scenarios for the near future are anticipating irregular, guerrilla-style warfare with fighters drawn from the local population. To put it another way, "we're in countries where the locals don't want us and we're doing shit they don't want us to do. In other words, we're invaders." Defending democracy my white ass, that's fucking imperialism through and through.
You could just say that they are practicing on foreigners before they need to use those skills domestically.
Google's ease of discovery eliminates a lot of the understanding learned from research. Now we can get the information we want, easily, without actually understanding it. IMHO this is a very dangerous thing.
Yes, because people can learn instantly what ever answers and not actually get the accepted view point stamped into them at the same time. That's extremely dangerous. There is no telling what people will come up with if the don't have their government's, employer's, school's, church's, or parent's viewpoint stamped onto every bit of information that they learn. Google can get the exact answer only without many of those built in bias that those teaching are trying to stamp/mold into their students.
Here is a simple one. Cheating is wrong. Teachers and graders have always tried to cram that one into their students. The real answer is getting found out about your cheating is wrong, never get found out. With google, the internet, and out sourcing today, the modern student can out source their assignments and get reliable usable answers back. How many times have you gotten usable answers from your teachers?
They want to pretend like they know everything, but really they want you to figure it out yourself. Why should I figure it out? What if I just want an answer that I know will work for my problem set? I don't care about learning everything under the sun, I just care about the min tools need to get my tasks done. Heck, I don't even care about the tools, I just want/need the task done with the min amount of personal effort.
Take databases, I don't care about SQL, access, or mysql or any of that. I just want my user's data stored in a nice tidy database that I don't have to have a mental melt down to manage or for them to use. If I could commune with the Google DB Design AI and have it instantly make the database that I need, I and many others would use it rather than alternative methods.
There was a common sentiment of not wanting to second-guess the man in the field thousands of miles away.
They'd have had todays micromanagement problems if they had radio or any form of communication that is about as speedy as radio. If back home could get local newspaper reports of what their military was doing within 24 hours, then public or government policy might have changed and new orders be issued to the captain the next day. The
Captain was only god on ship because civilization was far away and the ship was the entire world. If the crew could bring valid complaints to the government, then officers would have had to treat crew better or be aware that crew would file notice with the government and the government would take immediate action. Crews may not ever have reason to mutiny if they could get the government to remove problem officers and assign temp. replacements from those on board. Officers may never fear mutiny if they could send out an alert to their government and all of civilization knows that x crew members have unlawfully mutinied. The captain might get dead, but if the crew ever return home then they'd be arrested and stand trail.
On the other hand, the GPS box isn't a person, and it certainly isn't higher than me in a military chain of command. The real problem, as the summary mentions, is micromanagement. The guys on the ground need information so that they can make their own decisions, and they need us (yes, us, the people who aren't there) to back them up when they make reasonable decisions, even if they are sometimes wrong.
Actually, we just need to develop the right RTS game interface for generals to actually micromanage their troops with. Their data may reflect actual troop stats, ammo any medical alerts or what not, but they'd be limited to giving unit assignments from your typical RTS game.
I think that the current land warrior concept is probably an awful, terrible, no good idea. But I also think in twenty or thirty years, we're going to be seeing a lot of stuff on the battlefield that soldiers will consider absolutely valuable, cannot do without but we'll still be able to trace the design lineage back to the useless crap they were twiddling around with today.
I keep thinking of a cellphone with a visor output to overlay text, graphics, google maps, or what not. It doesn't even have to be a military app. I read alittle about google's software plans for cellphones in Wired. What if some one decided to use a cell phone as an interface for a FPS MMO that's GPS enabled and is designed to form flash mobs? If something like that was the next WOW, then maybe in 5-10 years you could have something that the military would find useful.
Assume you could use blue tooth to tie in your real-life military hardware like guns or some medical monitoring and upload video, and if you suddenly have a medical alert or start shooting your weapon, then everyone on your local team could have a mini clip of what you were looking at/shooting at, and exactly where you were and maybe a mini map so that they could find you in an urban environment that they've never actually visited before.
Doing some quicky cost analysis, guides my point of view towards the idea that the benefits (a couple cents cheaper gas in a decade or so) out weight the cost (more exploited land).
But then again I'm okay with the current "shortage" of oil, since we might slowly ween ourselves back from the gross, and inexcusable, excess lead to by the false sense of infinite resources/entitlement. Its a dose of reality, something we need in America.
Personally, I'm mixed on the entire thing. We have no shortage of oil and the price ain't all that expensive. O.k. we do have a temp. fuel price issue because we have to compete with everyone else to buy the damned stuff. I've been reading about N.S. SAVANNAH http://www.marad.dot.gov/Offices/MSP/Ship_Operations/NSS/index.htm . Read up on that ship. Basically there wasn't any tech. reason why we shouldn't have nuclear civilian cargo ships. The poor ship was doomed because of the PR stunt thing, but it worked and made a profit. The real hidden cons where that those specialists got more money due to all those nuclear related classes that they had to attend, and those that supervised them usually made more money and complained to their union. Oh, and that half the ship was a cargo ship/half was a passenger PR ship. It was built as a tech demo and the tech worked fine. They then complained that it wasn't economical, well it was never built to be.
This link is about 100% solar/hydrogen powered home http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=hydrogen-house&page=2 The home works. It cost the guy $100K of his money, $400K of government grants, and a $3 million car to make it work. I'm sorry, but the tech may be there, but I'd rather us focus on building cost effective tech. Nuclear powered ships, trains, and airplanes make far more sense than solar powered homes at this point in time.
It should be bringing nuclear vessels. With the cost of oil to fire a ship being what it is, the Savannah would have been competitive back in the 70's. The only problem to solve is that high seas piracy still exists and the US government doesn't want the nebulous "bad guys" to steal a nuclear wessel and reuse its atomic fuel for something nasty.
Um, what I'm really curious in why isn't some other country like China doing this? The article basically states that stuff is moving back here because shipping prices are increases, well if China or India moved to nuclear shipping and price of shipping drops to their country, will we have a flood of stuff moving out?
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Could I just start sending a company bills? I've changed my terms of service. I'm their customer using their service, but now they must pay be $50 for the privilege of me using their service. That I'm still using their service means that they accept the terms of my customer license agreement and they must now pay my bill otherwise I'll cancel my customer service with them and that'll be a $500 disconnection charge.
I don't have balls enough to try that. I'm sure some else here does. I'd almost want to know what would happen if we all decided August 1 to fight back and we'll start by faxing a customer license agreement to every service provider that we do business with... (Electric, water, sewage, trash, cable, internet, cell phone/telephone, and anything else that you pay on a monthly basis.) We put in there at the fine print that acceptance of our money and providing us with service means that they accept said terms of service.
The good part is that you don't have to be ugly unless they try something, and then if they do, well then you use that customer lic agreement to club them... Ok. that and a website of other customers of said service that you could post your complaint and if they've tried stuff on a wider scale.
Imagine that doing a "find . -name file.jpg" or similar might be considered an "investigation".
Um, using find *.jpg or *.doc or *.xls or *.pdf on a computer you have admin access to due to the user giving you their user name & password should be considered doing an investigation!
A computer tech isn't a PI or police person and has no right to just rumage through your data files just because you need it repaired! ;) What does that mean? I'd want them not to have any access to any user documents. They are being paid to fix the damn machine not look at my content or see how I've decorated it. MS, Apple, and Linux all need an admin account that has zero access to any user files and could only check config files and uninstall/reinstall apps.
If you took your car to get it's oil changed, you wouldn't stand for it if they tried to search your trunk/groceries for drugs at the same time.
I'd say there's an important difference in there. If person A wants to take a part of their personal life and make it public, that's up to them. The problem is when person A wants to keep something private and entity B decides that person A doesn't have a say in the matter.
Well, it just depends on how easy it is to get info out of various sources and what not. Just the other day I was looking at those DVR 4 camera security cameras out at sams club. They are around 1000-1500 and you can hook them up to the internet and it says that it records a few weeks worth of video.
That's the current state of that tech. There is tech to record license plate numbers and try to id a person from these sorts of sources. Now when google offers a beta web app doing that which would integrate into on of those home DVR security setups. It don't matter if it's the government, grandmom, or me, all it would take is a google search that also searches all those homes that you just might have passed by and presto total recording and search. Just wait for those $1.5k systems to drop down to $.15k and the search software to become available. Imagine how many houses, businesses that you pass in front of daily. This doesn't require the government at all to do.
I'm just waiting until some one figures out that we should give cellphones to the 3rd world to track and spy on 'em. Of course the same could be said for us except that we pay to be spied upon...
If I zip up MS Office, for instance, I've turned it into a very long number. Is it reasonable to allow companies to claim ownership of such numbers? With the proper compression and/or encryption scheme, you could use any number (trivially in some cases) to represent a work over which you can claim copyright. Do we then let a corporation privatise the entire integer space? And if not, how do we distinguish between infringing and non-infringing uses of a large number?
Reminds me of some scifi theory/short story that I read once. It basically assumed that all data where contained in pi somewhere. All you needed was the offset, the length and an infinite processor that could calculate pi out to that far in nanoseconds.
That would be interesting if some one could search pi for valid files and if any are found.
I don't know why AC got modded troll... it's good advice. I built my file server as raid5 and am regretting it. It's the most economical, and you do get some redundancy.. but if I had to do it all over again, I'd totally go raid10.
With Raid5 .. two drives fail and your done. Unless you buy every drive at a different time from a different manufacturer, chances are under the same wear conditions, two will fail around the same time. With a raid10 .. you put all one brand on one side, all of another brand on the other side... possibly on a separate controller. Raid10 can withstand a much larger failure... and you also get some serious performance++.
My advice is that if you can't explain how raid5 will help you, then you most likely don't need it and should use raid10.
Those that really need raid5 can explain how it is more cost effective over a given time span for them than raid10.
There is something called PGMM - Precision Guided Mortar Munitions which allow for laser target designation. They are being developed now (I know that some have been tested but haven't heard that they are in the field yet) but they still have to be fired roughly in the right direction as a mortar remains as a fundamentally ballistic weapon.
Yeah, but we'd expect that to work using high tech lasers to target. Now if could use your average cell phone camera to target dependability and text that info to the cell's of the mortar guys, then I'd be impressed. I'm not really convinced the entire land warrior concept will hit its stride until 80-90% of the software and hardware package could fit into your average cellphone/ipod form factor.
I bet it's as accurate as this book.
The Secret Language of Birthdays: Personology Profiles for Each Day of the Year
http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Language-Birthdays-Personology-Profiles/dp/0670858579
It's a great coffee table book because everyone sees it and can't resist looking up what the book has to say about their birthday. They then flip it to a few family members to just see. You'll then get them telling you about their family/friends and if they match the book's profile or differ. It's a fun religious neutral book. ;) The authors describe the whole astrology and horoscope thing, but the way they really compiled most of the book was researching lots and lots of famous people and comparing them.
It's sort of like the make a list of your 10 most liked books, movies, video games, or even websites. and we'll know just how to stereotype you. There are days where I'd love to see the results if some AI data mined the census, face book, myspace, and google news to try to compile this book based on the info of everyone in the US. It would take an AI to do it, but I wonder if it would learn if there was anything useful or if it's a just for fun info.
There are other times that I'd want some one to seriously study astrology, history, and politics just to see if gravity or those visible lights in the sky have any effect on human politics or human migration patterns in general. It would be fun just to see the results.
What's going to end up happening with all these companies spending billions is that they will come to embrace the current screwed-up system and probably defend it because of their investment. They even may end up lobbying to maintain the status quo.
Let's face it. The status quo works. Those that have built "successful" companies in the US in say the last 100 years can attest to it working. Now they also know how to game the system for their best advantage. I'd have to say there isn't anything morally wrong about it just because you and I can't afford to do it on the same scale. If you or I built the next MS, Google, Wal-Mart, or heck Ford, then we'd have learned the existing system and have gamed it to our best use over the last generation or two. This is morally right that everyone with resources has an attempt to game the system. Those with more resources can game the system better than those with no resources or those that try to beg resources.
Changing the status quo requires effort from people that have more to gain if the current system where radically changed than those running a successful business. I have no interest in the patent system debate other than as an observer. I cheer on those that have won with the current rules rather than those that want to alter the rules for their own gain.
Sounds like racketerring in a sense. IANAL, but I wonder if an ambitious prosecutor somewhere could use the RICO statues instead of anti-trust statutes.
Any lawyers familiar with RICO want to chime in?
This is actually what this group is trying to get away from. They hate lawyers as much as the next guy. They'd love to kill every lawyer in the country every generation. (You'd still need lawyers and just killing them off wouldn't stop people from going into law anyway.) Their damn problem is people like you! Yes piss ants like you that want to sue their ass. Why? They have resources, and you want them! Thief.
There are days I'd actually want some corporate feudalism except that'd require two way loyalty. Trust me I can live with IBM, HP, MS and Google doing this. I'm not worried about them. I'm worried about the dreamchasers that want to sue their companies into the ground because they have billions and make toys that my company and I buy to run our business.
The patents owners won't HAVE to sell, but if someone came to your door with a wheelbarrow full of money, you might be tempted to say "Sure, here it is." But, now that the 'secretive' group has been exposed, they are no longer, um, a secret. Yes? No?
Um, that's sort of like saying the publishers clearing house prize van and the Price is Right have been exposed for giving out money/prizes. Actually having inventors know that this is a group of not one company, but most of the heavy hitters in the industry may convince most to try selling their idea there instead of to on of those purely offensive patent companies. At least if you sold your patent here, you'd know that your idea is more likely to be used by the big boys.
(you can do it in a way that would in most cases still allow that user's web surfing to work reasonably - since most users don't websurf 20 different sites at the same time AND read those pages at the same time - it doesn't matter if pages come in one by one ).
So you must be the one that got my webcomics loading slower in the morning! I use that "open all in tabs" to open up like 20 sites in the morning. This used to take 10-20 seconds for all of them to load. Now it'll take 5 minutes or so.
Come on sluggy, megatokyo, schlockmercenary, and dominic-deegan should all load instantly! Normally those sites load as fast as google unless their site is down for some reason. Sites on Comic Genesis usually load very quickly as well unless they have site issues. (That'd take half my web comics down right there.)
I'm not saying there aren't enviro considerations with solar- but why wasn't this done years ago?
Because solar is good, and every thing else is evil. It's not until you've got people that really question that religion before it'd get studied. Remember those early factories were great. It wasn't so great for those working in them or living around them though. They questioned that whole factories are great thing and got conditions improved.
The same mindset is out there for all the alt energy sources. Those behind them are convinced that they are good and all existing sources are evil. It's not a profit/loss thing; its a religion thing. I actually question the environmental/alt energy religions more than traditional religions. Mainly because they want my tax money to be used to study climate, the environment, and to build there sun/wind worshiping devices. ;) Heck, they've even invaded the public schools and have gotten teachers to teach their religion to my kids! Oh, well it wouldn't be that bad if they'd actually build useful/practical solutions.
This is probably a really dumb question, but as I Brit I have never figured out why settlers chose to live in America. I mean, the climate seems to spend half the year trying to KILL you.
Dumb Brit, what kinda of history did they teach you about why we were driven out of England and into the US, Canada, South Africa, and Australia? We'd have been in danger of being killed had have stayed in England far more than the climate in the US. The US climate is only slightly annoying. The British government on the other hand was highly annoying and deadly.
There is the additional side benefit though once you get used to the slightly annoying climate; the British tend never to visit your country. That's worth almost anything. Ask the French what they have to do to keep the British on there island.
As a resident of Texas, I hate that we're building more and more coal-fired power plants when we have such abundant sun and wind out here that we could be using instead. Hell, I have to suffer through 2 months (and counting) of 100+ degree days, I'd like to at least be getting something out of all that sun other than dehydration and sunburn.
Dude, Texas had the largest wind farms in the US the last time that I checked. O.k. a lot of those so called environmental liberal states had planned wind farms, but Texas actually has them now and they were rapidly expanding. I'm in Arkansas so can relate on the heat issue. The last time I was in the Dallas area, I thought if they could just build one of those power towers, the heat coming off the city alone would produce most the energy for the surrounding areas.
Every time my family drives on the interstate highways, I wonder why the hell they aren't covered with solar panels and have wind mills ever so often. Arkansas sucks for wind according the wind power maps, but we've got lots of long flat state and interstate highways in the southern part of the state that could be covered for solar. If we are going to spend money creating road and power construction jobs, shouldn't it be on the same stretch of land where we can all see the results?
Solar requires more surface area than we have. It's a no-go until cheap panels are ~ 60% efficient, and even then it will require the clearing of massive stretches of land.
Um, we already have that. They are called roads. Why can't we figure out a way to turn those roads into decent solar collectors and still be usable roads? How about if we just cover all those highways with solar panels and build a windmill in the median every 1/4 mile or so. I know solar requires lots of land well, we should make the most efficient use of our land. Well, wind isn't a great solution because it doesn't always produce the same, well if we had a one for every 1/4 mile of highway, it should average out.
On, nuclear. Don't get me even started on nuclear. Remember that article a few days ago about jobs moving back to the US due to shipping prices due to the change in oil prices? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah If we hadn't stopped developing this tech, the price of shipping wouldn't change due to oil prices at all. The more that I research nuclear the more that I become pissed at people and decisions that were made in the 60s and 70s that have really prevented the US from having a nuclear industry. Basically blame the coal and oil industries for funding environmentalists and most of the anti-nuke hype/PR from the 60s onward. It's only recently that those environmentalists have seriously turned on the coal and oil industries, but we are still stuck with all those anti-nuke regs and the anti-nuke PR machine preventing most useful nuke construction.
I don't understand all the hostility toward solar.
I don't understand any of the hostility toward genetically engineering or the number 666. O.k. seriously, the ideal solar collector that I want is a replacement for grass. I hate grass. Existing grass is morally wrong. Why? I want want something like a green self repairing carpet that is always within certain height and if it close to the max of those bounds instead of wasting energy on needless growth to produce directly usable electricity or a liquid bio fuel that is stored in a 100 gallon grown barrel by my driveway. For bonus, it would also provide defense against intruders and lifeforms other than humans.
Where is my genetically engineered super grass?
Socio-economic stability is a prerequisite for business success. The rich benefit more from programs that help create such stability. Therefore, they should pay more.
Um, not really. It's a requirement for us lower class and middle classes to thrive. Business and the rich can do well in any environment. You wouldn't like some of the results though. The Walmart door greeters aren't 18-21 year olds with machine guns to shoot shop lifters or protesters.
It boils down to the rich have resources that the poor want to make use of. So we let the government rob the rich to pay the poor. The rich could have their own private cities/police forces and such. Would you want million acres or billionaire estate where you have to be a millionaire or billionaire to move there, but all the local taxes/laws were designed to preserve the the resources of their citizens from the poor of the outside? I'd bet that the first floating city will be a tax haven designed for these folks to have their cake and keep it away from you and I.
Really though, sales tax is always a regressive tax and I don't think it is a great idea in general for that reason...
Sales tax is the only universally fair demand based tax. Every other tax tries to leech your resources away just because you have them and the government wants them. I'd love to get rid of property and income taxes and force all government to operate under a say 10% overall tax. If you don't want to pay taxes, just don't buy anything. That should be a simple concept. Of course now, it's if you own anything expect the government to come rob you of some resources just because you have a home, car, income, and a savings/retirement account.
But I have to agree with the other poster here who said it was very worrisome that US military scenarios for the near future are anticipating irregular, guerrilla-style warfare with fighters drawn from the local population. To put it another way, "we're in countries where the locals don't want us and we're doing shit they don't want us to do. In other words, we're invaders." Defending democracy my white ass, that's fucking imperialism through and through.
You could just say that they are practicing on foreigners before they need to use those skills domestically.
Google's ease of discovery eliminates a lot of the understanding learned from research. Now we can get the information we want, easily, without actually understanding it. IMHO this is a very dangerous thing.
Yes, because people can learn instantly what ever answers and not actually get the accepted view point stamped into them at the same time. That's extremely dangerous. There is no telling what people will come up with if the don't have their government's, employer's, school's, church's, or parent's viewpoint stamped onto every bit of information that they learn. Google can get the exact answer only without many of those built in bias that those teaching are trying to stamp/mold into their students.
Here is a simple one. Cheating is wrong. Teachers and graders have always tried to cram that one into their students. The real answer is getting found out about your cheating is wrong, never get found out. With google, the internet, and out sourcing today, the modern student can out source their assignments and get reliable usable answers back. How many times have you gotten usable answers from your teachers?
They want to pretend like they know everything, but really they want you to figure it out yourself. Why should I figure it out? What if I just want an answer that I know will work for my problem set? I don't care about learning everything under the sun, I just care about the min tools need to get my tasks done. Heck, I don't even care about the tools, I just want/need the task done with the min amount of personal effort.
Take databases, I don't care about SQL, access, or mysql or any of that. I just want my user's data stored in a nice tidy database that I don't have to have a mental melt down to manage or for them to use. If I could commune with the Google DB Design AI and have it instantly make the database that I need, I and many others would use it rather than alternative methods.
There was a common sentiment of not wanting to second-guess the man in the field thousands of miles away.
They'd have had todays micromanagement problems if they had radio or any form of communication that is about as speedy as radio. If back home could get local newspaper reports of what their military was doing within 24 hours, then public or government policy might have changed and new orders be issued to the captain the next day. The
Captain was only god on ship because civilization was far away and the ship was the entire world. If the crew could bring valid complaints to the government, then officers would have had to treat crew better or be aware that crew would file notice with the government and the government would take immediate action. Crews may not ever have reason to mutiny if they could get the government to remove problem officers and assign temp. replacements from those on board. Officers may never fear mutiny if they could send out an alert to their government and all of civilization knows that x crew members have unlawfully mutinied. The captain might get dead, but if the crew ever return home then they'd be arrested and stand trail.
On the other hand, the GPS box isn't a person, and it certainly isn't higher than me in a military chain of command. The real problem, as the summary mentions, is micromanagement. The guys on the ground need information so that they can make their own decisions, and they need us (yes, us, the people who aren't there) to back them up when they make reasonable decisions, even if they are sometimes wrong.
Actually, we just need to develop the right RTS game interface for generals to actually micromanage their troops with. Their data may reflect actual troop stats, ammo any medical alerts or what not, but they'd be limited to giving unit assignments from your typical RTS game.
I think that the current land warrior concept is probably an awful, terrible, no good idea. But I also think in twenty or thirty years, we're going to be seeing a lot of stuff on the battlefield that soldiers will consider absolutely valuable, cannot do without but we'll still be able to trace the design lineage back to the useless crap they were twiddling around with today.
I keep thinking of a cellphone with a visor output to overlay text, graphics, google maps, or what not. It doesn't even have to be a military app. I read alittle about google's software plans for cellphones in Wired. What if some one decided to use a cell phone as an interface for a FPS MMO that's GPS enabled and is designed to form flash mobs? If something like that was the next WOW, then maybe in 5-10 years you could have something that the military would find useful.
Assume you could use blue tooth to tie in your real-life military hardware like guns or some medical monitoring and upload video, and if you suddenly have a medical alert or start shooting your weapon, then everyone on your local team could have a mini clip of what you were looking at/shooting at, and exactly where you were and maybe a mini map so that they could find you in an urban environment that they've never actually visited before.
Doing some quicky cost analysis, guides my point of view towards the idea that the benefits (a couple cents cheaper gas in a decade or so) out weight the cost (more exploited land).
But then again I'm okay with the current "shortage" of oil, since we might slowly ween ourselves back from the gross, and inexcusable, excess lead to by the false sense of infinite resources/entitlement. Its a dose of reality, something we need in America.
Personally, I'm mixed on the entire thing. We have no shortage of oil and the price ain't all that expensive. O.k. we do have a temp. fuel price issue because we have to compete with everyone else to buy the damned stuff. I've been reading about N.S. SAVANNAH
http://www.marad.dot.gov/Offices/MSP/Ship_Operations/NSS/index.htm . Read up on that ship. Basically there wasn't any tech. reason why we shouldn't have nuclear civilian cargo ships. The poor ship was doomed because of the PR stunt thing, but it worked and made a profit. The real hidden cons where that those specialists got more money due to all those nuclear related classes that they had to attend, and those that supervised them usually made more money and complained to their union. Oh, and that half the ship was a cargo ship/half was a passenger PR ship. It was built as a tech demo and the tech worked fine. They then complained that it wasn't economical, well it was never built to be.
This link is about 100% solar/hydrogen powered home http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=hydrogen-house&page=2
The home works. It cost the guy $100K of his money, $400K of government grants, and a $3 million car to make it work. I'm sorry, but the tech may be there, but I'd rather us focus on building cost effective tech. Nuclear powered ships, trains, and airplanes make far more sense than solar powered homes at this point in time.
It should be bringing nuclear vessels. With the cost of oil to fire a ship being what it is, the Savannah would have been competitive back in the 70's. The only problem to solve is that high seas piracy still exists and the US government doesn't want the nebulous "bad guys" to steal a nuclear wessel and reuse its atomic fuel for something nasty.
Um, what I'm really curious in why isn't some other country like China doing this? The article basically states that stuff is moving back here because shipping prices are increases, well if China or India moved to nuclear shipping and price of shipping drops to their country, will we have a flood of stuff moving out?