To Pickens' credit, he tried hard for years to get financing for this project
The T. Boone Pickens Plan had one little-advertised caveat that most people never heard of, and which is what was really responsible for killing the deal.
Pickens wanted the government to impose a Right-Of-Way for his company to provide "utility services" to the major cities in Texas. Selling wind power was a oh-by-the-way to putting some great big huge wells and pumps on the Texas Aquifer, great big water pipes next to the electricity transmission lines, and selling water to the major cities. He would have made boatloads of money from that.
The utility right of way was not agreed to, so Pickens lost his chance to sell water, the thing he was really interested in, and the deal was dropped.
Now, the big cities still have water source problems, so Pickens will probably get what he wants, he'll just have to make a few more campaign contributions first.
As technology improves and ads become more targeted, they will be increasingly effective and less annoying.
Nope. There's a major problem with this viewpoint.
Privacy is the opposite of targeted advertising. For targeted advertising to work, you cannot have any privacy.
Targeted advertising is more than just "You read articles about computers, so we'll show you computer advertisements".
It is "Your car needs an oil change, we'll show you ads about your local QuickLube". It is "Your kid got in a fight at school, we'll show you ads for self defense classes and team sports". It is "Your marriage is going to crap, we'll show you ads for divorce attorneys".
Are you really comfortable with that idea? Because that is what targeted advertising is really about.
First, sales tax is owed by the seller, not the buyer.
Bzzt!
When giving a state-specific answer, please also say the state your answer applies to.
For example, in Florida where I live, if you buy something by mailorder (including internet purchases of real physical items) and the vendor does not charge you sales tax, you are required by state law to file and pay proper sales tax at the end of the calendar year.
If you wish to change your answer to "But no one pays attention to the law that says the buyer must pay sales tax" then that is a completely different argument. That tends to decay into a discussion about laws that are selectively enforced, and only used to punish... whoever the prosecutor wants to punish.
You know, I agree that regulated capitalistic markets are the "best" way to run an economy, but I'm going to comment on what seems an internal contradiction here anyway.
New industries might start out competitive but once they get to a certain size, they start bending the rules in their own favor. Using unfair practices to freeze out competition, getting sweetheart legislation pushed through Congress, buying influence.
You free market preachers are just naive. The only free markets are also fair markets.
You seem to assume here that business grow until they can unbalance the system by exerting undue influence on the government, at which point you get a non-free market with government-enforced barriers to entry and monopolies or oligopolies.
The solution to this is to have the government properly regulated markets to promote fairness, remove artificial barriers to entry, and increase transparency to give small consumers and small businesses more power against large suppliers.
I agree with that.
Now, the problem I have with that, the way you say it, and the way I think about it, is this: In the quote from you above, a major problem is that governments are easily bribed and influenced. For our "fair market" preference, a basic requirement is that government NOT be easily bribed and influenced.
But it's the same government.
We appear to have some implementation difficulties that were not adequately covered in the design.:)
There are good arguments for environmental policy that do not depend on the risk of global climate change, and the environmental movement is doing itself no good by linking policy and science together they way they have, so that people think "if there is no risk of global climate change then driving my SUV must be ok."
This tends to reflect my feelings on the matter too.
I want more fuel efficient vehicles. There are several reasons for this, and, frankly, global climate change doesn't make the top 10. Reducing my out-of-pocket driving expenses (gas) does. Reducing my country's (USA) exporting of wealth to nations that fund religious extremists does.
I want cleaner production methods, and better enforcement of environmental regulations. I like breathing air that doesn't make my lungs and eyes burn. I like camping and hiking, and not finding industrial sludge on the banks of rivers. I like scuba diving, and not seeing coral reefs covered in red algae from sewage waste disposal pipes (West Palm Beach, I'm looking at you.).
Simple, solid, personal-self-interest reasons to support better efficiency and good environmental stewardship. I don't need doom prophecies to support that. Clear rational open science.
Never forget this country was founded by rich white land owners that didn't want to pay taxes. without representation in Parlimentbecause they refused such representation when offered, knowing they would then be taxed with representation
History is rarely as simple or concise as one-line rallying cries would have you believe.
Really, if some ominous "they" want to track you then "they" already know your banking info and attendant RFID signatures, vehicle profile and numbers, list of known or possible associates, etc..
This is true, but there are other issues to consider with this.
For example, one of the things that is legal in the United States is for the police to follow you around throughout your day, seeing where you go, who you talk to, when you scratch your butt walking down the street. There's plkenty of case law supporting the idea that as long as you are in public areas, the police can follow you as much as they want, given their resource limitations.
That last limitation is VERY important, especially in a mostly free society like the United States or other free democracies/republics/whatever.
The police should have the power (with reasonable oversight) to do what they need to do to enforce good laws. I'll define "good laws" in the US context as "constitutional". One of the ways they do this is following "people of interest" around.
This is a VERY different thing from the police putting a GPS transponder on every car in America, and looking through their logs for nearby vehicles when a convenience store gets robbed. It is also different form the police logging your location information from cell tower triangulation (or cellphone GPS) and, again, looking through their logs to find all the people near a crime scene when it occurred.
The first starts with suspicion. They must already have a reason to be interested in you, because assigning a police officer, or more likely several of them, is a very resource-intensive operation. They don't do it a lot because there are only so many cops. This is, societally, on purpose. We limit police power by making it hard and expensive for the police to poke their nose into your business.
GPS logging into a database, and then a simple database query for "every person near YYY at time ZZZ" is cheap. It is too easy for the police to poke their nose into the business of the generally law-abiding public.
It isn't that the technology is easy or hard. It isn't really that is it cheap or expensive in dollars to acquire the capability initially. It is that it is cheap to operate all the time, and makes it too easy and cheap for the police to poke their noses into private citizens' business with little reason, justification, or oversight. That's a good way to get bad police.
Don't design systems that make it easy to get bad police. It is too dangerous to our society.
But we need to be very careful not to miss, Russia is right next door [to Iran].
Google maps is a wonderful resource. Look at it. There's about 400 miles between Tehran and the nearest Russian city, on the Caspian Sea. It's not that near.
One of the reasons we were scared about nuclear weapons based in Cuba is that if we nuked them to stop a launch we would also be nuking ourselves.
Not so much. We were concerned that the flight time for a ballistic missile from Cuba, aimed at Miami, was about 6 minutes. You cannot respond with anything other than a completely automated system in that time frame. Which is unacceptable when you are talking about a nuclear response. As to the "be nuking ourselves" we do have low-yield nuclear weapons also.
In fact, any attempt to launch nuclear weapons at Iran would probably set off the Russian early warning systems and they would just retaliate before our missiles hit their targets.
Probably not. If the United States were to launch nuclear weapons at Iran, it would probably be from SSBN(s). The flight time for a SLBM (Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile) is less than 8 minutes. Most early warning systems can detect that fast... but they have a human in the loop, and alerting that human (Obama, Putin, whoever), getting a decision, and sending that decision back to the military can easily take more than 8 minutes.
The really worrying thing is that this would also probably true if Israel launched a nuclear strike on Iran.
Israel would probably use a nuclear weapon dropped by an F-15. From a distance, it's rather hard to tell the difference between an F-15 carrying a conventional payload and one carrying a nuclear payload, before it hits the target.
Assuming, of course, that you believe they have nuclear weapons, which they refuse to acknowledge. *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*
The odds of an accident are approximately 1 per 10,000 for every car trip. [snip] The chance that you have been in an accident is, if my math is correct, about 62% by the time you're 35.
The thing with that logic is that the distribution of accidents is not flat. I looked around a bit, and couldn't find any stats to support what I'm about to say, which is from memory of some stuff I read a few years ago. Feel free to find a few references I couldn't and tell me I don't know how to use Google.:)
The distribution of accidents among the driving population is not even. Most drivers (more than 50%) will drive their entire career and never be in an accident. Most accidents involve at least one driver who has been in one or more accidents already. This is one of those 80/20 rule things. 80% of accidents occur with 20% of drivers. Or something like that, I made up the 80/20, I expect the distribution is something else.
This is why it is so easy to mislead with statistics. Sometimes when distilling numbers down, you lose significant related facts.
Oh, and can anyone tell me why I kept typing "accidnets" instead of "accidents"? It's an annoying typo, and I was very consistent with it.
So has the US... practically our entire Navy runs on nuclear power, and has (safely) for over 50 years now.
Not really.
The US Navy's submarine fleet is, I believe, completely nuclear powered. The US Navy just retired, or is in the process of retiring, its last non-nuclear powered aircraft carrier.
Every other ship in the US Navy is powered by oil or gas. Oil for diesel engines or gas for gas turbines.
The US Navy has decided that nuclear power is for special purpose or very large platforms. Not for general purpose. A 600-foot long guided missile destroyer (DDG51 class, current production being built now) is too small for a nuclear power plant.
with a space elevator, sending a kg. into space will be way more cheap than what is cost nonadays
Unless, of course, the unobtainium used to build it turns out to be really expensive.
He left out the base assumption there, that everyone leaves out.
Once you pay for the space elevator, the incremental cost for sending a KG of cargo into space is cheap.
This is the same statement, less clearly made, as the comment somewhere above here that talks about costs of a space shuttle flight. It says, looking at total program costs, the space shuttle costs $1.3 billion per flight as of 2006, but looking at incremental costs, it is only $60 million per flight.
The unobtanium is, of course, part of the initial cost, and which most people on here seem to think is underestimated in the Japanese announcement.
I say this as a guy with a Libertarian Party card in his wallet -- Bob Barr is worse than either Obama or McCain. He's fucking crazy -- seriously.
This is my major problem in this election.
I don't like Obama. His messages of "hope" and "change" seems to be hoping you don't realize the only change he wants is Democrats in office instead of Republicans.
McCain I have other issues with. He gets a little credit for knowing his weaknesses, but not enough.
I'm looking for a 3rd party candidate that isn't a complete fruitcake, and I haven't seen one yet. This is seriously frustrating to me.
This is, I admit, really cool. Until you do some math.
The problem with any technology that assumes a very short time to charge an electric car, whether that's batteries or supercapacitors or something else yet to be invented, is that the electricity has to come from somewhere. And for a short charge time, it has to come from somewhere VERY FAST.
Wander around in Wikipedia, and you'll see estimates for electric car ranges around 5 miles per kWh of battery capacity. Sometimes less, down to 2 miles per kWh, but I'll be generous. So a 200 mile range electric car needs 40 kWh of battery capacity.
40kWh of battery capacity, charged in 10 minutes. 10 minutes is 1/6 of an hour, and I'll happily assume perfect charging efficiency. Your electric charging station needs to provide 240kW of electricity PER CAR.
Your house in the US gets about 10 kilowatts from street power lines, that's 110 volts with a 20 amp rating. You might get 15 kilowatts if you have a 30 amp feed.
The gas station I usually fill up at has 6 pumps, and can fill cars on either side of each pump, total of 12 cars at a time. And sometimes its full. 12 cars at 240kW each is nearly 1.5 megawatts of electricity.
That's a neighborhood electric substation completely devoted to a car charging station. Oh, and to feed it, you need the substation feeder lines, which are... 15kV lines?
How many gas stations are there in your city?
Fast charging for batteries for electric cars does not scale. Not with our current power generation and distribution system.
Slow charging overnight (6-8 hour charge time) when the electric grid has excess capacity works very well, and will scale in the US to about 30 million cars. With our current electric generation and distribution.
Personally, I'm looking for a good math-based analysis of the usefulness of covering parking garages and parking lots in solar cells, and doing slow charging while the car is sitting there during the workday. How much do you really gain considering if you cover a parking lot with a solar-cell-covered roof, you need to put in 24-hour lighting, which consumes electricity?
Fair warning, I'm giving a USA-centric reply here. If you aren't in the USA, this will apply much less well to you.
The industry's business model (make music, sell it) is fine. Except that the people it wants to sell its product to are breaking the law to get their product by other means.... You may not like that they are doing terrible things to try to stop people from breaking the law, but their business model is not the problem.
Really, the business model is not the problem I have with the RIAA and the companies that make it up.
The problem I have, and the problem that a lot of people here have, is that the RIAA based its business model on a social contract, and then purposefully perverted that contract. I'm talking about Copyright, obviously, as defined by the US Constitution. (Told you this was a USA-centric reply.)
Copying blatantly from Wikipedia: Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
This was implemented first as a 14 year copyright, with an optional 14-year extension if the Author applied for that extension. That 14-year term has been extended several times in the last 200 years. Every extension of that term in the 20th Century (3 of them, I think) has been retroactive, mostly to prevent Steamboat Willie (the first cartoon featuring Mickey Mouse) from falling into the public domain.
Many people, myself included, view this as a violation of the social contract for Copyright, that refers to "limited times" for protection.
The problem isn't the business model, really. It's the dirty politics and betrayal of the public trust that allows that business model.
Nah, this story needs some rampant sexual innuendo, pedophilia, and themes that would give serial rapists nightmares. Let's see... Is Piers Anthony in the middle of anything at the moment?
Hey, the author of Bio of a Space Tyrant could never write anything violent and disturbing.
The reality is, the labels are the walking dead and they know it. Their sole reason for existence is music distribution.
Your first statement, I agree with. You second, I do not agree with.
The reason for the labels existence is not distribution. It is promotion. The labels provide other (way overpriced) services, but the thing they do best is promotion. They take relatively-unknown groups, and make them the next hot national property.
The other things the labels do, the artists can do themselves, or contract directly for better prices, but then they would have to pay immediately, and not out of possible future revenue, which the labels allow (for those already-mentioned grossly-inflated prices). The labels provide recording studio time, sound engineers, graphic artists for album art, and distribution.
All of that the artists can do themselves, or arrange themselves.
But the primary thing the labels do is promotion. That means radio airplay. That means music videos and getting them out and seen on tv. That means other related... stuff.
And that is harder to replace. If you want to become extremely well known, and have best-selling albums, you go with a top-4 label. Of course, the trade-off there is that you won't make any money off your first 3 albums, but you label will make plenty. After about the third album, if you last that long, you might start seeing some decent money.
Or you stay independent or with a smaller label, and maybe make reasonable money for doing a lot of work yourself.
More users means more revenue for them. You still gotta pay for access (on their terms), so why wouldn't they want to aprove as many as possible?
Sorry, no. You don't make money moving bits. That is a commodity market, and gets commodity profits (almost none).
If you are just paying for moving bits... Your ringtone will not cost $2.99. Your ringback tone will not cost $1.99 for the music snippet, plus $0.99 per month for the service. Your text messaging will not be $0.10/message.
Why do you think they sell cameraphones with 2MP (and higher) cameras, and disable bluetooth file transfer so the only way to get the picture off the phone is with a picture message?
Verizon Wireless is in the business of offering "Premium" content, because that gets them Premium profits. They are not, and do not want to be, a commodity bit mover.
A lot of the reason capitalism worked was that social pressure on companies to be good members of the community kept the worst legal abuses in check. It's a fact that bosses who fire workers have more heart attacks in the following year. You can't work with someone every day and not see them as people.
You say this differently than I do, but I basically agree with you.
My way of saying this: Capitalism is good, but it only works on a small scale.
Your local baker with one store is a fine example of Capitalism. Your national baked goods company is not.
If there is no good way for a community to exert social pressure on a company, then the required feedback needed in Capitalism is missing, and the system breaks. A local employer producing something with a local market is how capitalism works best.
Alternate explanation: HDTV is an incremental improvement over TV, not a revolutionary, must-have killer app that calls for overnight, universal adoption. Compounding this is the fact that there remains a very large volume of content in standard-definition and this will be the case for a little while yet. Considering these two observations, it should not come as a shock that HDTV rollout has been slow.
This is part of my issue, and my problem with HDTV. It is an incremental improvement, that is only useful for a small subset of the market.
For normal living room viewing distances, for normal TV set sizes, you can't tell the difference.
Definitions: Normal living room viewing distance == 8 feet Normal TV set size == 32" or less
Now, if your TV set is bigger than 32", and/or you sit closer than 8 feet, then HDTV might have some benefit to you.
But otherwise, you'll be able to see the difference on the showroom floor when you stand 2 feet away, but not in your living room when you are sitting in the recliner across the room. And that assumes you have it all hooked up right too.
Spend your money on something you will get benefit from.
My 27" Panasonic that I bought in 2000 still works fine.
Yep, this is my situation. I bought a 32" Apex CRT SD TV at Sam's Club in 2002 when I bought my house. Until it dies, I don't plan on buying a new TV. Until I have a new (HD) TV, what's the point in a HD player?
This is only partly about prices and stable technology. It is also about replacement cycles for existing equipment.
5 years ago, I avoided HDTV for 3 reasons. 1) Not enough content 2) No stable interfaces. Component? DVI? HDMI? HDCP? Any idea what the next one will be that won't work with existing displays? 3) Expensive. Back in 2002 HDTVs started around... $2500 or so I think. No thanks. $1000 now is still more than I want to spend on a TV.
And, if you read it, the HD spec has about 20 supported formats (combinations of resolution, framerate, and interlaced/progressive). I just find that annoying, for no particular reason.
And most of my TV watching is on cable anyway. Which annoys me more with the CableCARD spec that doesn't really work outside of the box you rent from the cable company. So I'm holding on to analog cable, until I'm forced to go to digital cable. The Tivo works easier with the analog cable anyway.
So I have a mid-quality CRT SD TV in the living room that will probably last for at least another 5 years, and maybe much more than that. A decent TV should last 15-20 years. And right now, it is mostly used for watching cartoons and sitcoms. Neither of which need HDTV.
Why do I feel like screaming "Get off my lawn!" ???
I've seen people spend 15 minutes of their time to save $2 on a gasoline fillup.
I haven't seen that, but honestly I wouldn't remark on it too much even if I did. Outside of work, most people don't assign a dollar value to their time. A lot of people seem to regard their money as more precious than their time, or at least their actions give that impression.
But I have seen people drive 15 miles out of their way to save $2 on gas, for a vehicle that gets 20mpg. Ignoring the value of time, they lost money on the deal, just in extra gas consumed. Yes, this only applies for cases where you weren't driving that way anyway. A specific trip to do that is a direct money-loser.
No, it doesn't. It's totally broken. And if in the end the voting result happens to be the correct one (rejection of the "fast track") after all, that won't be the case because of a trustworthy process based on legitimate, valid arguments, but rather it would be the case because of the successful application of comment-bombing and similar tactics by the opposition.
So let me see if I can distill this a little.
You said (paraphrasing) "The system only works if people of good character are actively involved."
Congratulations, you've just described everything that involves people. In the entire world. In the entire history of humanity.
The scale of human activity is just too small compared to the mass of the earth
I agree with this, but I'm going to pretend to disagree anyway. Okay, I admit, I'm just feeling like being annoying. Watch me make an invalid comparison... At least, I think it is an invalid comparison.
We used to think this with a bunch of human activity. Dump all the junk into a river that you want, the river is too big for us to have an effect. Kill all the buffalo you want, there is an unending supply on the American plains. Dump all the crap into the ocean that you want, there's so much water it can't have any measurable effect. Dump all the smoke/soot into the air that you want, we can't possibly have an effect on something like the total atmosphere.
Every time we say "the scale of human activity can't have an effect on" some part of the world, we find we are wrong a few decades or centuries or millennium later.
Lots of things work well on a small scale, and break large systems badly on a large scale.
I'm getting tired of watching people do the same stupid mistake over and over again, and keep saying "Oh, it can't possibly happen this time!"
You even admitted you think this too... That said, I am sure that someday in the distant future, such concerns would be warranted.
This is a short-term solution only. But it won't be used as a short-term solution, because humans are just too stupid. What's the quote from MiB? "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
The only real thing to argue over with this is the scale of "short term". But then, all power generation topics decay to this. Fossil fuels will only last X decades or centuries. Nuclear will be used up in Y centuries or millennium. Renewables are not steady enough, generally, to meet full needs, so only work in conjunction with other generating/storage systems. Have fun running your solar cells at night, or your hydro-electric during a drought.
Fusion (the dream) will only last as long as we have hydrogen. That's probably barely more than a billion years.:)
The proper answer is usually "a mix that makes sense after a lot of thinking".
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The T. Boone Pickens Plan had one little-advertised caveat that most people never heard of, and which is what was really responsible for killing the deal.
Pickens wanted the government to impose a Right-Of-Way for his company to provide "utility services" to the major cities in Texas. Selling wind power was a oh-by-the-way to putting some great big huge wells and pumps on the Texas Aquifer, great big water pipes next to the electricity transmission lines, and selling water to the major cities. He would have made boatloads of money from that.
The utility right of way was not agreed to, so Pickens lost his chance to sell water, the thing he was really interested in, and the deal was dropped.
Now, the big cities still have water source problems, so Pickens will probably get what he wants, he'll just have to make a few more campaign contributions first.
Nope. There's a major problem with this viewpoint.
Privacy is the opposite of targeted advertising. For targeted advertising to work, you cannot have any privacy.
Targeted advertising is more than just "You read articles about computers, so we'll show you computer advertisements".
It is "Your car needs an oil change, we'll show you ads about your local QuickLube". It is "Your kid got in a fight at school, we'll show you ads for self defense classes and team sports". It is "Your marriage is going to crap, we'll show you ads for divorce attorneys".
Are you really comfortable with that idea? Because that is what targeted advertising is really about.
Bzzt!
When giving a state-specific answer, please also say the state your answer applies to.
For example, in Florida where I live, if you buy something by mailorder (including internet purchases of real physical items) and the vendor does not charge you sales tax, you are required by state law to file and pay proper sales tax at the end of the calendar year.
If you wish to change your answer to "But no one pays attention to the law that says the buyer must pay sales tax" then that is a completely different argument. That tends to decay into a discussion about laws that are selectively enforced, and only used to punish... whoever the prosecutor wants to punish.
You know, I agree that regulated capitalistic markets are the "best" way to run an economy, but I'm going to comment on what seems an internal contradiction here anyway.
New industries might start out competitive but once they get to a certain size, they start bending the rules in their own favor. Using unfair practices to freeze out competition, getting sweetheart legislation pushed through Congress, buying influence.
You free market preachers are just naive. The only free markets are also fair markets.
You seem to assume here that business grow until they can unbalance the system by exerting undue influence on the government, at which point you get a non-free market with government-enforced barriers to entry and monopolies or oligopolies.
The solution to this is to have the government properly regulated markets to promote fairness, remove artificial barriers to entry, and increase transparency to give small consumers and small businesses more power against large suppliers.
I agree with that.
Now, the problem I have with that, the way you say it, and the way I think about it, is this:
In the quote from you above, a major problem is that governments are easily bribed and influenced.
For our "fair market" preference, a basic requirement is that government NOT be easily bribed and influenced.
But it's the same government.
We appear to have some implementation difficulties that were not adequately covered in the design. :)
This tends to reflect my feelings on the matter too.
I want more fuel efficient vehicles. There are several reasons for this, and, frankly, global climate change doesn't make the top 10. Reducing my out-of-pocket driving expenses (gas) does. Reducing my country's (USA) exporting of wealth to nations that fund religious extremists does.
I want cleaner production methods, and better enforcement of environmental regulations. I like breathing air that doesn't make my lungs and eyes burn. I like camping and hiking, and not finding industrial sludge on the banks of rivers. I like scuba diving, and not seeing coral reefs covered in red algae from sewage waste disposal pipes (West Palm Beach, I'm looking at you.).
Simple, solid, personal-self-interest reasons to support better efficiency and good environmental stewardship. I don't need doom prophecies to support that. Clear rational open science.
Speaking as an American...
History is rarely as simple or concise as one-line rallying cries would have you believe.
This is true, but there are other issues to consider with this.
For example, one of the things that is legal in the United States is for the police to follow you around throughout your day, seeing where you go, who you talk to, when you scratch your butt walking down the street. There's plkenty of case law supporting the idea that as long as you are in public areas, the police can follow you as much as they want, given their resource limitations.
That last limitation is VERY important, especially in a mostly free society like the United States or other free democracies/republics/whatever.
The police should have the power (with reasonable oversight) to do what they need to do to enforce good laws. I'll define "good laws" in the US context as "constitutional". One of the ways they do this is following "people of interest" around.
This is a VERY different thing from the police putting a GPS transponder on every car in America, and looking through their logs for nearby vehicles when a convenience store gets robbed. It is also different form the police logging your location information from cell tower triangulation (or cellphone GPS) and, again, looking through their logs to find all the people near a crime scene when it occurred.
The first starts with suspicion. They must already have a reason to be interested in you, because assigning a police officer, or more likely several of them, is a very resource-intensive operation. They don't do it a lot because there are only so many cops. This is, societally, on purpose. We limit police power by making it hard and expensive for the police to poke their nose into your business.
GPS logging into a database, and then a simple database query for "every person near YYY at time ZZZ" is cheap. It is too easy for the police to poke their nose into the business of the generally law-abiding public.
It isn't that the technology is easy or hard. It isn't really that is it cheap or expensive in dollars to acquire the capability initially. It is that it is cheap to operate all the time, and makes it too easy and cheap for the police to poke their noses into private citizens' business with little reason, justification, or oversight. That's a good way to get bad police.
Don't design systems that make it easy to get bad police. It is too dangerous to our society.
Okay, you are
But perhaps not terribly consistent.
Why would you
if there is
.
Aside from a cool volcanic eruption, what am I missing?
Google maps is a wonderful resource. Look at it. There's about 400 miles between Tehran and the nearest Russian city, on the Caspian Sea. It's not that near.
Not so much. We were concerned that the flight time for a ballistic missile from Cuba, aimed at Miami, was about 6 minutes. You cannot respond with anything other than a completely automated system in that time frame. Which is unacceptable when you are talking about a nuclear response. As to the "be nuking ourselves" we do have low-yield nuclear weapons also.
Probably not. If the United States were to launch nuclear weapons at Iran, it would probably be from SSBN(s). The flight time for a SLBM (Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile) is less than 8 minutes. Most early warning systems can detect that fast... but they have a human in the loop, and alerting that human (Obama, Putin, whoever), getting a decision, and sending that decision back to the military can easily take more than 8 minutes.
Israel would probably use a nuclear weapon dropped by an F-15. From a distance, it's rather hard to tell the difference between an F-15 carrying a conventional payload and one carrying a nuclear payload, before it hits the target.
Assuming, of course, that you believe they have nuclear weapons, which they refuse to acknowledge. *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*
The thing with that logic is that the distribution of accidents is not flat. I looked around a bit, and couldn't find any stats to support what I'm about to say, which is from memory of some stuff I read a few years ago. Feel free to find a few references I couldn't and tell me I don't know how to use Google. :)
The distribution of accidents among the driving population is not even. Most drivers (more than 50%) will drive their entire career and never be in an accident. Most accidents involve at least one driver who has been in one or more accidents already. This is one of those 80/20 rule things. 80% of accidents occur with 20% of drivers. Or something like that, I made up the 80/20, I expect the distribution is something else.
This is why it is so easy to mislead with statistics. Sometimes when distilling numbers down, you lose significant related facts.
Oh, and can anyone tell me why I kept typing "accidnets" instead of "accidents"? It's an annoying typo, and I was very consistent with it.
So has the US... practically our entire Navy runs on nuclear power, and has (safely) for over 50 years now.
Not really.
The US Navy's submarine fleet is, I believe, completely nuclear powered. The US Navy just retired, or is in the process of retiring, its last non-nuclear powered aircraft carrier.
Every other ship in the US Navy is powered by oil or gas. Oil for diesel engines or gas for gas turbines.
The US Navy has decided that nuclear power is for special purpose or very large platforms. Not for general purpose. A 600-foot long guided missile destroyer (DDG51 class, current production being built now) is too small for a nuclear power plant.
He left out the base assumption there, that everyone leaves out.
Once you pay for the space elevator, the incremental cost for sending a KG of cargo into space is cheap.
This is the same statement, less clearly made, as the comment somewhere above here that talks about costs of a space shuttle flight. It says, looking at total program costs, the space shuttle costs $1.3 billion per flight as of 2006, but looking at incremental costs, it is only $60 million per flight.
The unobtanium is, of course, part of the initial cost, and which most people on here seem to think is underestimated in the Japanese announcement.
I say this as a guy with a Libertarian Party card in his wallet -- Bob Barr is worse than either Obama or McCain. He's fucking crazy -- seriously.
This is my major problem in this election.
I don't like Obama. His messages of "hope" and "change" seems to be hoping you don't realize the only change he wants is Democrats in office instead of Republicans.
McCain I have other issues with. He gets a little credit for knowing his weaknesses, but not enough.
I'm looking for a 3rd party candidate that isn't a complete fruitcake, and I haven't seen one yet. This is seriously frustrating to me.
Any suggestions?
This is, I admit, really cool. Until you do some math.
The problem with any technology that assumes a very short time to charge an electric car, whether that's batteries or supercapacitors or something else yet to be invented, is that the electricity has to come from somewhere. And for a short charge time, it has to come from somewhere VERY FAST.
Wander around in Wikipedia, and you'll see estimates for electric car ranges around 5 miles per kWh of battery capacity. Sometimes less, down to 2 miles per kWh, but I'll be generous. So a 200 mile range electric car needs 40 kWh of battery capacity.
40kWh of battery capacity, charged in 10 minutes. 10 minutes is 1/6 of an hour, and I'll happily assume perfect charging efficiency. Your electric charging station needs to provide 240kW of electricity PER CAR.
Your house in the US gets about 10 kilowatts from street power lines, that's 110 volts with a 20 amp rating. You might get 15 kilowatts if you have a 30 amp feed.
The gas station I usually fill up at has 6 pumps, and can fill cars on either side of each pump, total of 12 cars at a time. And sometimes its full. 12 cars at 240kW each is nearly 1.5 megawatts of electricity.
That's a neighborhood electric substation completely devoted to a car charging station. Oh, and to feed it, you need the substation feeder lines, which are... 15kV lines?
How many gas stations are there in your city?
Fast charging for batteries for electric cars does not scale. Not with our current power generation and distribution system.
Slow charging overnight (6-8 hour charge time) when the electric grid has excess capacity works very well, and will scale in the US to about 30 million cars. With our current electric generation and distribution.
Personally, I'm looking for a good math-based analysis of the usefulness of covering parking garages and parking lots in solar cells, and doing slow charging while the car is sitting there during the workday. How much do you really gain considering if you cover a parking lot with a solar-cell-covered roof, you need to put in 24-hour lighting, which consumes electricity?
Fair warning, I'm giving a USA-centric reply here. If you aren't in the USA, this will apply much less well to you.
Really, the business model is not the problem I have with the RIAA and the companies that make it up.
The problem I have, and the problem that a lot of people here have, is that the RIAA based its business model on a social contract, and then purposefully perverted that contract. I'm talking about Copyright, obviously, as defined by the US Constitution. (Told you this was a USA-centric reply.)
Copying blatantly from Wikipedia:
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
This was implemented first as a 14 year copyright, with an optional 14-year extension if the Author applied for that extension. That 14-year term has been extended several times in the last 200 years. Every extension of that term in the 20th Century (3 of them, I think) has been retroactive, mostly to prevent Steamboat Willie (the first cartoon featuring Mickey Mouse) from falling into the public domain.
Many people, myself included, view this as a violation of the social contract for Copyright, that refers to "limited times" for protection.
The problem isn't the business model, really. It's the dirty politics and betrayal of the public trust that allows that business model.
Hey, the author of Bio of a Space Tyrant could never write anything violent and disturbing.
Your first statement, I agree with. You second, I do not agree with.
The reason for the labels existence is not distribution. It is promotion. The labels provide other (way overpriced) services, but the thing they do best is promotion. They take relatively-unknown groups, and make them the next hot national property.
The other things the labels do, the artists can do themselves, or contract directly for better prices, but then they would have to pay immediately, and not out of possible future revenue, which the labels allow (for those already-mentioned grossly-inflated prices). The labels provide recording studio time, sound engineers, graphic artists for album art, and distribution.
All of that the artists can do themselves, or arrange themselves.
But the primary thing the labels do is promotion. That means radio airplay. That means music videos and getting them out and seen on tv. That means other related... stuff.
And that is harder to replace. If you want to become extremely well known, and have best-selling albums, you go with a top-4 label. Of course, the trade-off there is that you won't make any money off your first 3 albums, but you label will make plenty. After about the third album, if you last that long, you might start seeing some decent money.
Or you stay independent or with a smaller label, and maybe make reasonable money for doing a lot of work yourself.
Sorry, no. You don't make money moving bits. That is a commodity market, and gets commodity profits (almost none).
If you are just paying for moving bits...
Your ringtone will not cost $2.99.
Your ringback tone will not cost $1.99 for the music snippet, plus $0.99 per month for the service.
Your text messaging will not be $0.10/message.
Why do you think they sell cameraphones with 2MP (and higher) cameras, and disable bluetooth file transfer so the only way to get the picture off the phone is with a picture message?
Verizon Wireless is in the business of offering "Premium" content, because that gets them Premium profits. They are not, and do not want to be, a commodity bit mover.
You say this differently than I do, but I basically agree with you.
My way of saying this: Capitalism is good, but it only works on a small scale.
Your local baker with one store is a fine example of Capitalism. Your national baked goods company is not.
If there is no good way for a community to exert social pressure on a company, then the required feedback needed in Capitalism is missing, and the system breaks. A local employer producing something with a local market is how capitalism works best.
This is part of my issue, and my problem with HDTV. It is an incremental improvement, that is only useful for a small subset of the market.
For normal living room viewing distances, for normal TV set sizes, you can't tell the difference.
Definitions:
Normal living room viewing distance == 8 feet
Normal TV set size == 32" or less
Now, if your TV set is bigger than 32", and/or you sit closer than 8 feet, then HDTV might have some benefit to you.
But otherwise, you'll be able to see the difference on the showroom floor when you stand 2 feet away, but not in your living room when you are sitting in the recliner across the room. And that assumes you have it all hooked up right too.
Spend your money on something you will get benefit from.
Yep, this is my situation. I bought a 32" Apex CRT SD TV at Sam's Club in 2002 when I bought my house. Until it dies, I don't plan on buying a new TV. Until I have a new (HD) TV, what's the point in a HD player?
This is only partly about prices and stable technology. It is also about replacement cycles for existing equipment.
5 years ago, I avoided HDTV for 3 reasons.
1) Not enough content
2) No stable interfaces. Component? DVI? HDMI? HDCP? Any idea what the next one will be that won't work with existing displays?
3) Expensive. Back in 2002 HDTVs started around... $2500 or so I think. No thanks. $1000 now is still more than I want to spend on a TV.
And, if you read it, the HD spec has about 20 supported formats (combinations of resolution, framerate, and interlaced/progressive). I just find that annoying, for no particular reason.
And most of my TV watching is on cable anyway. Which annoys me more with the CableCARD spec that doesn't really work outside of the box you rent from the cable company. So I'm holding on to analog cable, until I'm forced to go to digital cable. The Tivo works easier with the analog cable anyway.
So I have a mid-quality CRT SD TV in the living room that will probably last for at least another 5 years, and maybe much more than that. A decent TV should last 15-20 years. And right now, it is mostly used for watching cartoons and sitcoms. Neither of which need HDTV.
Why do I feel like screaming "Get off my lawn!" ???
I've seen people spend 15 minutes of their time to save $2 on a gasoline fillup.
I haven't seen that, but honestly I wouldn't remark on it too much even if I did. Outside of work, most people don't assign a dollar value to their time. A lot of people seem to regard their money as more precious than their time, or at least their actions give that impression.
But I have seen people drive 15 miles out of their way to save $2 on gas, for a vehicle that gets 20mpg. Ignoring the value of time, they lost money on the deal, just in extra gas consumed. Yes, this only applies for cases where you weren't driving that way anyway. A specific trip to do that is a direct money-loser.
We're talking about military resources of larger governments
Very true. But even larger governments do not have unlimited military resources.
If you make them spend those resources finding something you didn't tell them for free, they can't use those resources for some other purpose.
Always make it more expensive for the other guy. Don't give them something for free needlessly.
So let me see if I can distill this a little.
You said (paraphrasing) "The system only works if people of good character are actively involved."
Congratulations, you've just described everything that involves people. In the entire world. In the entire history of humanity.
The scale of human activity is just too small compared to the mass of the earth
:)
I agree with this, but I'm going to pretend to disagree anyway. Okay, I admit, I'm just feeling like being annoying. Watch me make an invalid comparison... At least, I think it is an invalid comparison.
We used to think this with a bunch of human activity.
Dump all the junk into a river that you want, the river is too big for us to have an effect.
Kill all the buffalo you want, there is an unending supply on the American plains.
Dump all the crap into the ocean that you want, there's so much water it can't have any measurable effect.
Dump all the smoke/soot into the air that you want, we can't possibly have an effect on something like the total atmosphere.
Every time we say "the scale of human activity can't have an effect on" some part of the world, we find we are wrong a few decades or centuries or millennium later.
Lots of things work well on a small scale, and break large systems badly on a large scale.
I'm getting tired of watching people do the same stupid mistake over and over again, and keep saying "Oh, it can't possibly happen this time!"
You even admitted you think this too...
That said, I am sure that someday in the distant future, such concerns would be warranted.
This is a short-term solution only. But it won't be used as a short-term solution, because humans are just too stupid. What's the quote from MiB? "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
The only real thing to argue over with this is the scale of "short term". But then, all power generation topics decay to this. Fossil fuels will only last X decades or centuries. Nuclear will be used up in Y centuries or millennium. Renewables are not steady enough, generally, to meet full needs, so only work in conjunction with other generating/storage systems. Have fun running your solar cells at night, or your hydro-electric during a drought.
Fusion (the dream) will only last as long as we have hydrogen. That's probably barely more than a billion years.
The proper answer is usually "a mix that makes sense after a lot of thinking".