Not really, nor is it a manufactured shortage, but it is another shot in their ongoing half-assed trade war. I say half-assed becasue while there is a definite nationalistic bent to this, China is also trying to develop it's own industries.
So, China started out dumping rare earths on the global market (find your own darn citations you needy buggers), but as they see their own internal demand ramping up, they are going to divert more of their production to their own use. Of course some of that internal use will be for exportable products. Remember that they are making big investments in battery technology. I expect they plan on having an electric car that will need the rare earths currently going into Prius motors. Expect that car to be a big export item. And it will be aimed directly at hybrids and electrics and priced low enough that their competitors will have to sell at a loss to compete on price - at least until China needs them for internal consumption.
Before China started dumping (look up your own darn citations) rare earths on the world market, the US was the major producer worldwide. The US firms that used to supply the vast majority of our needs (from our own resources) have shut down most of their production. It is very hard to compete with the combination of slave labor and non-existent safety and environmental regulations. It was a series of environmental violations given as the reason for the shutdown of one of the biggest US mines, but it may have really been related to a ability to see the handwriting on the wall regarding Chinese imports as well.
If nukes are not economically feasible, why does France get ~80% of their power from them? Find out the cost per kilowatt hour for the French plants, then find out the projetced costs per kwh for a nuke plant in the US and ask yourself what is the major cause of the difference. (Hint: it is not the decomissioning cost)
How many kilowatt-hours of electricity are produced per metric ton of waste generated? How does that compare with coal? What are those waste materials specifically? Please name the elements involved and specify the following:
how many kilograms of each per ton (parts per thousand)
the half-lives of radioactive elements
the decay products for the short-lived (highly radioative bits).
Bonus questions Name industiral applications for any of the above mentioned nuclear "wastes" and their short term decay products. Are any of those elements in short supply?
"My claim is that the american people elected representatives whose agendas and views they supported, who they trusted would listen to their voices. "
Your claim is wrong:
The "american people" do not elect anyone to either house of Congress. Think about it for a moment. That is a red herring often used by opponents of term limits. Voters (in a perfect world, drawn exclusively from the ranks of living citizens) in the appropriate Congressional District and State elect their Representative and Senator resepectively. In both cases this is a very small subset of the "american people". The candidates they are permitted to choose between is very limited due to the party system. Given the rampant gerrymandering in drawing the boundaries of Congressional districts, generally one party's candidate will have a massive advantage.
I suggest that the seniority spoils system in both houses has a considerable effect on preserving incumbents in office. I'm certain you can think of one or more Congresscritters (sorry for the insult to critters there) of either party that you consider to be an utter embarrasment the nation as a whole. Are the voters of CA district 8 really going to vote against the incumbent there in a primary - much less the general election? Is the national party as well as the state and local party organization not going to do everything within their power to prevent a primary challenger there?
I suggest that it generally takes time to corrupt a Representative or Senator, but the longer they remain in office the more corrupt they become. Term limits reduces the time the congressperson is exposed to corrupting influences.
70 trillion years of bad luck as soons as we start trying to send spacecraft through the swarm. Of course, the Universe is not expected to last that long so who would be around to complain?
Approx 430 crew I believe, exact numbers depending on how many redshirts appeared in each episode.
However, the Enterprise and even the Enterprise-A did not use replicators. The ship had a fully functional galley which was seen in both TOS "Charlie X" I blieve - the one where the budding superman turned Yeaoman Rand into a lizard for rejecting him. The galley also appeared in at least one movie- "The Undiscovered Country" - I think that was ST VI.
Oh come on, it's not like the ability to express oneself in the written word is rocket science. (though to be honest, NASA "engineers" spend more time pushing paperwork than they do bending tin.)
I won't get into an argument over whether or not the Corps should be considered a government "program", but I would point out that it actaully does have a very limited amount of power over US citizens (other than the Marines themselves).
I am of the opinion that under no circumstances would the current USMC suck badly - if they were going to suck, they would do a darn good job of it. (a conscripted force would be a whole different story)
I was replying to the poster who referenced caluclated GOTOs as WMDs
"If you're working in an environment in which variable names and comments matter, then you still write with descriptive variable names and comments, and just pre-process the source"
Not necessarily - you made an assumption regarding what tools might be available. What is this "pre-processing" you speak of?
Before you get your panties in too big a bunch, this was a Point-of-sale app written in the early 80's for the TRS-80 model IV. The language was whatever BASIC interpeter the machine shipped with. The prior programmer (who really really liked TRS-80s - he specced the app to run on the Mod IV in late 1983!) used a book with a rocket and a wizard on the cover as his programming bible. The title was something like "Better and Faster BASIC". It was filled with cute little code snippets to do things like storing a date in a two byte integer - that overflowed after 12/31/95. It was also filled with other memory saving tricks like calculating GOTOs and overlays out the wazoo. So not only did you not know what line the code would GOTO, you might not know what overlay (and therefore what code) would be in RAM when it got there.
That is bad, but I'll raise you one further. Code in a limited memory space where you are not only calculating line numbers for gotos, but add in massive overlay usage to the mix. I once inherited that kind of code and had to maintain and extend it.
Further as it was interpeted, variable names and comments sucked up precious RAM so it was all 2-3 character variable names and there were no comments.
"You cannot honestly believe that the US government, which depends on tax revenue from American businesses and their employees, would intentionally handicap said businesses?"
I believe some dead French guy said this: "Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence".
So, no I personally do not believe that the folks at the EPA are exercising their extreme power grab with the intent of intentionally handicapping US businesses. I do believe that they are sufficiently myopic to gut the entire country and justify it as "saving the planet". Well maybe the EPA thinks that any regulations they enforce will somehow be global in scope. The effects of such regulations will only be local, but that does not mean that the bureaucrats at the EPA really understand that - or even care.
I'm not going to bother with the hypothetical examples of how that will result in the unintended consequences of higher unemployment in the US as business move anything that can be cost-effectively moved to a country with a more business friendly "climate". Nor will I dwell on how that will setoff cascading failures throught the US economy. Y'all can surely make up your own examples of how that might play out and accept or debunk them according to your own beliefs.
I'm sticking with the point that a govenrment agency can indeed act in a way that is highly detrimental to the state it is a part of without requiring deliberate intent. The folks at the EPA know what their mission is, and they will state it in terms of "saving the planet", or at least "protecting the environment". Their mission is not to preserve the health of the US economy, the wellbeing of the citizenry, or even continued tax receipts from businesses. The actual mission of any bureaucracy is to increase its own size and power.
The important qustions to really be determined are: Has the EPA slipped its leash and if so, can it be brought back under control? What are the "checks and balances" on the power of the regulatory agencies?
If you are ok with the EPA defining CO2 as a toxic substance subject to EPA regulations, where do you stand on the FDA reclassifying nicotine as a controlled substance like heroin or cocaine? How about alcohol? refined carbohydrates? There are always bureaucrats looking for ways to build their own empires and just need to find the right "hook".
Hmm, and if you read a 500 page murder mystery where the last two sentences plays out like this:
George Smith (a character not even referred to in the entire book) enters the room. Inspector Jones says, "George Smith is the killer, because I am smarter than you are".
THE END.
Would you also make excuses for the author?
6 "Worker prawns lack initiative" - my point 6 was "Why is the shantytown full of alien weaponry? The reason this is such a big plothole is becase the worker prawns lack initiative - humans had to airlift them down to the surface via helicopter. I don't see the humans also airlifting massive quantities of weaponry up to and including powered armor down for the prawns to play with. Stripping the mothership of anything not nailed down for study yes, but letting the prawns hang onto it - not so much. If any prawns did have initiative they would have found a way to do some negotiation, but evacuating the mothership was a massive humanitarian (so sue me for terminology here) effort. Nothing whatsoever indicated the prawns were anything beyond passive aliens incapable of even getting out of their own excrement while they were on the ship.
5 Sorry, but the big question in my point 5 is, why, if they could have remotely controlled the fricken mothership(and a kid who wasn't even born/hatched/whatever did the remote piloting!) did they not just do that to start with.
3 "process", Yep, if you process crude oil into kerosene you have somthing with different properties than it originally had - but not radically different properties - they started with a black liquid, they ended with a black liquid. If the final black liquid could turn a human into a prawn, the original black liquid could be expected to have some significant effect on human DNA. I'm simplifying, but unlike you I have no need to make excuses for the intellectual dishonesty of the filmmaker.
the "command module" Clearly hypothesized (in the documentary voiceover - which must be taken as the Word of GOD given the lack of any followup or reference to any other modules on the mothership) to be a command module early on or did you not see that part of the movie? Obviously it had to be "powered" or "fueled" - Why didn't they use the command module immediately instead of undertaking a 20 year scavenger hunt? And for that matter, they were obviously doing something with scavenged human electronics - that were interfaced to something back in the command module. Why not use that to build a remote interface to the motheship?
"As much as I want to rebut everything in great detail..." I'm sure you wanted to until you started actually thinking about it, then you realized I was correct. I did find it acceptable mindless entertainment, but as "serious" or thought-provoking it failed miserably. The most disappointing thing to me is that while this movie was utter crap it did not have to be that way.
If the filmmaker had spent two hours working out a coherent story instead of "auditioning" and hiring Nigerian hookers to "negotiate" another 50 rands off the price the SFX folks were charging per week he could have made a far better movie. As it is, I feel the SyFy mythical monster of the week movies are better entertainment - and cheaper to boot. Hell I suspect (but have not verified by watching) that ECW may have a more thought-provoking storyline and better pyrotechnics than District 9.
District 9 is a great movie in the same way that Highlander and The Matrix were great movies.
Only for the feebleminded who are easily distracted by pyrotechnics and violence. The story fails so badly that all it has going for it are the special effects. The film does NOT qualify as legitimate serious science fiction - but it does blow things up "real good".
I suppose I should say "spoiler alert" here, but this movie is so damn spoiled you should be able to smell the reek from the parking lot outside the theater.
The areas where suspension of disbelief went off the "epic fail" scale:
1> The "command module" caught on video falling off the alien ship, but no one could find it despite "massive" searches by the authorities. It later turns up buried under a shack in the alien shantytown. Special bonus failure the shantytown was not under the mothership, so how did the command module wind up buried there?
2> Said "command module" being out of "fuel" which takes abot 20 years of scavenging various bits of alien machinery in order to come up with about a cupful (250Ml) - which is sufficient to power the module. And until the last drop of this "fuel" was obtained, there was not enough to use.
3> said "fuel" just happens to be capable of transforming a human into through physical contact - yet with all the alien machinery humans have been fooling with for 20 years, no one ever came into contact with this substance and had the slightest hint that the alien fuel was capable of rewriting human DNA on the fly.
4> Rememeber that need for the final droplet of "fuel" - yet our protagonist sprays probably half of it all over himself - yet there is still somehow enough left to power the "command module" - why didn't they use it ten years earlier.
5> When the "command module" is shot down before reaching the mothership - and why are there multiple batteries of SAMs around the alien shantytown - the little kid alien is able to use the command module to remotely control the mothership, and then his dad(?) uses it to activate a tractor beam and pulls the "command module" back up to its docking bay. Why even bother collecting "fuel" when they could have tractored the darn thing back into place from the get go?
6> Why is the shantytown full of alien weaponry (including at least one suit of power armor) - when the prawns were so darn helpless that they had to be removed from their mothership via helicopter airlift?
7> The evolution of the protagonist from casually racist middle management nebbish to human/prawn Rambo is unconvincing - and is of course the centerpiece of the "serious story".
This could have been a far better movie if only someone had taken a couple of extra hours to go over the damn storyline and come up with something that had some internal logic. Instead, they shit all over any worthwhile ideas they might have had and then polished the resulting pile of crap with a generous helping of special effects.
I will say the following in it's defense: The "message" was not as overpowering as I feared it would be going in. Also, it was better than the Ang Lee "Hulk". I alos liked the semi-documentary style at the start - that was certainly better than Michael Moore's best work - possibly better even than Gore's film.
1> they will indeed spend all the money on Admin costs (remember what NASA is an acronym for - esp the last letter) 2> NASA has a vested interest in maintaining their monopoly (they don't have one - but they think they do) on manned spaceflight - so all proposed Space Taxis will be deemed unworkable. 3> After filing off the serial numbers, NASA will steal any good ideas and massage them into something that will require 5 - 10 years of increasingly expensive studies - to be funded at taxpayer expense now that those pesky entrepreurs have been dealt with.
One specific example with WalMart is their beef. Without getting into an argumanet about the relative merits of the different USDA grades (having gone more for chicken myself), I would like to point out that there are three main grades of beef:
Prime - which you generally find in high end steakhouses and some specialty stores Choice - normally the best you find in grocery stores Select - what I see in WalMart almost exclusively - and that is the entirety of their "Steakhouse Brand" (I seem to dimly recall a "utility grade", but I don't even want to think about that)
You might also compare Levi brand jeans from WalMart with Levi's from other stores - you might note a difference between the WalMart Levis and the higher priced ones available elsewhere.
But back to the original topic, distribution via download is good if the product is not tied to a specific device. I can buy and download books from Baen in a multitude of formats - I think that is good. And if I want to download a book from somewhere else, I can - my relationship with Baen (as a customer) does not prevent me from doing so. But If I want to buy a game for a next gen console and the only place I can buy it is from the "Specific Console Store (TSC)", and TSC will not allow the game I want to be sold - or worse, sells it for a while and then decides to yank it and delete it from everyone's console. Well that is bad.
1> Sure, TSC will claim it is all in order for them to guarantee the "quality" of games offered and make it "easy" to get out bug fixes. But who decides what is a bug? And when?
2> Of course, the potential for mischief is not limited to video games. Going forward any media company will be able to retroactively edit any piece of media as they saw fit. Did Han shoot first?, Did the FBI agents in ET have guns or walkie talkies? Did Obama ever say the police behaved stupidly? Is Laura Croft's bosom too big? What did the Representative from Rhode Island really say on C-Span last week?
To stick with the healing example, it is even worse than that. At some point good play by the other characters would involve them taking little or no damage (the tank that gets really good with his shield/parry?) so there would be no healing required for fights that would still give other characters an opportunity to improve their skills.
In short, the whole "useful use" concept pretty well falls to pieces. Having said that, I must also admit a desire to see an mmo game with advancement based on character skill as opposed to leveling and twitching. My favorite would be the old Runequest system (2nd edition), but I also recognize that would be a very limited niche game.
Just how much of that money (for the drive train factory) the Feds are giving Tesla is going to go into actual infrastructure (building their factory) as opposed to defending against lawsuits from the econuts and then getting into compliance with what the state and local regulators will determine is needed to be spent to ensure that there are no bad smells excessive noise etc. coming from the plant. While California may want to be business friendly, it just is not going to be happening any more.
This is the part of "out of control" regulators you don't seem to be getting. While the feds are giving Tesla money to build a drive train plant (and a lot more for making more affordable cars), all they have really managed to do is turn Tesla into a money pinata for the local crowd in California and the Bay area in particular. Note the fate of pinatas and note I said a money pinata, not a goose that lays golden eggs.
So, my opinon is that this is going to be wasted money - it will not do what it is offically intended to do any more than the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act did what it's acronym suggested it would accomplish.
Electric cars will be nice, but putting the plant in California is massively wrong and stinks of rotten pork.
If Tesla is going to succeed in the long run, they need to be in a pro-busioness climate, and not in a state that needs money so badly the punitive tax burden combined with out of control state regulators will force them to either go belly up, or move their facilities to another state later (at great expense and possibly triggering additional fallout from the Feds for not staying in CA).
Robocop Mk I : Due to the incompetent handling of medical services by the local government our expected recruits from mortally wounded police officers are dieing before the ambualnce can arrive. We had to scrap this approach and decommission the prototype.
RoboCop Mk II: Since the repeal of the death penalty we are also finding a shortage of salvageable death row inmates.
ED-209s: Good news here! The ED-209 will be in full production and we further anticipate bringing additional capacity on line as we retool former GM production lines.
"If you need IVF, then you are deficient and should NOT reproduce! "
Actually, my understanding (and I may be wrong) is that about one in six couples have varying degrees of fertility issues - and both are fertile, but not very well with each other. They are not exactly defective, but have not picked the correct mate. It suggests to me that we may be seeing some signs of speciation.
Is there any work ongoing to determine if the human race may be splitting into divergent species? Because if speciation is occurring, I think we can safely assume that evolution - the old fashioned kind that God intended - is still alive and well.
Slightly offtopic, but China has already demonstrated the wonders that come from allowing parents to select the sex of their child on a massive scale. Just google +"runaway bride" +"china" for details.
China now has tens of millions of "surplus" males (of military age!) Will the preference for a wife of the same race keep them from looking further afield for wives? Consider the way China has moved into Africa (electronics recycling, etc.) - perhaps they might look at "solving" their excess male problem by persuading African women that Chinese men will make far better husbands? And by offering Chinese men some additional incentive to emigrate to Africa - perhaps allowing more than one child per couple, or even more than one wife - after all many Africans are Muslims and therefore have religious support for polygamy. Of course, this emigration would be permanent for the most part.
Such an endeavor would be another example of widespread genetic "selection" and would have a significant side effect on the racial demographics of Africa. Not that the Chinese government would ever consider genocide as such - not even a slow, long-term, and relatively non-violent method of genocide...
That would be a sub-optimal solution on a variety of levels:
1> screwing the dumb kids - no matter how pretty they are - would result in producing more dumb kids than smart ones.
2> people who get screwed tend to become quite angry when they realize they were screwed and the dumber they are the more likley they are to resort to violence.
3>There will always be some smart person somewhere (who does not like you) who will "befriend" the dumb kids and patiently explain to them exactly how they have been screwed and just who (Lilith 's Heart-shape) did the screwing.
Cute and snarky literary reference aside, you have exactly nailed the problem. Whether you call them Alphas, Betas, and Deltas or not, the hard fact is that everyone is not above average in intelligence.
A society that can not figure out how to engage (not "take care of") the folks that fall on the left hand side of the bell curve is going to have a heckuva lot of people that have nothing to lose by trashing that society. And further in a technological society, the "intelligence" of automated systems can move leftwards on that same bell curve making ever more intelligent people (to use an English term) redundant.
So, at what point will the number of unengaged people be likely to rise up and destroy society? Bear in mind that as the number of folks marginalized increases they will attract brighter people who see more to be gained by leading the "losers" against society rather than finding their own place within it.
I was going to provide current examples of reasonably smart people who have decided to lead the less intellectually inclined for their own personal gain, but my purpose is not to start a flame war on a side issue.
This is the real sticking point for the publishers. They are not so concerned about older games that sell used for a small fraction of their original price. What has really got them bitching moaning and whining is when they release a craptacular game at 60 bucks.
The first buyers (ones not working 9-5) get it on the release morning, suffer through it for a few hours and sell it to Gamestop. That evening when the folks with day jobs stop off at GameStop on their way home they have a choice of the brand new title for 60 bucks in it's original shrinkwrap or 55 bucks in the GameStop shrinkwrap. The really smart gamer will see this and think - hmm used copies on day of release...not a good sign - and pass on the title entirely. This is a lost sale to the publisher. The next gamer who has been anticipating this title for 18 months or so is going to grab the cheaper copy and think "sweet! I saved five bucks" and once again, no money for the publisher.
So the publisher only sees the money from one sale on realease day while some people saw the used copy and realized this was one to avoid, while the "sure thing" sale to the rabid fan was also lost to the used copy. so 125 dollars changed hands, and the publisher only saw about 15 bucks instead 30. Gamestop - on the other hand - just made 80 odd bucks of gross profit. And probably also sent in a cancellation on any orders they had for more copies of that particluar title.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really, nor is it a manufactured shortage, but it is another shot in their ongoing half-assed trade war. I say half-assed becasue while there is a definite nationalistic bent to this, China is also trying to develop it's own industries.
So, China started out dumping rare earths on the global market (find your own darn citations you needy buggers), but as they see their own internal demand ramping up, they are going to divert more of their production to their own use. Of course some of that internal use will be for exportable products. Remember that they are making big investments in battery technology. I expect they plan on having an electric car that will need the rare earths currently going into Prius motors. Expect that car to be a big export item. And it will be aimed directly at hybrids and electrics and priced low enough that their competitors will have to sell at a loss to compete on price - at least until China needs them for internal consumption.
Before China started dumping (look up your own darn citations) rare earths on the world market, the US was the major producer worldwide. The US firms that used to supply the vast majority of our needs (from our own resources) have shut down most of their production. It is very hard to compete with the combination of slave labor and non-existent safety and environmental regulations. It was a series of environmental violations given as the reason for the shutdown of one of the biggest US mines, but it may have really been related to a ability to see the handwriting on the wall regarding Chinese imports as well.
If nukes are not economically feasible, why does France get ~80% of their power from them? Find out the cost per kilowatt hour for the French plants, then find out the projetced costs per kwh for a nuke plant in the US and ask yourself what is the major cause of the difference. (Hint: it is not the decomissioning cost)
How many kilowatt-hours of electricity are produced per metric ton of waste generated?
How does that compare with coal?
What are those waste materials specifically?
Please name the elements involved and specify the following:
how many kilograms of each per ton (parts per thousand)
the half-lives of radioactive elements
the decay products for the short-lived (highly radioative bits).
Bonus questions
Name industiral applications for any of the above mentioned nuclear "wastes" and their short term decay products. Are any of those elements in short supply?
"My claim is that the american people elected representatives whose agendas and views they supported, who they trusted would listen to their voices. "
Your claim is wrong:
The "american people" do not elect anyone to either house of Congress. Think about it for a moment. That is a red herring often used by opponents of term limits. Voters (in a perfect world, drawn exclusively from the ranks of living citizens) in the appropriate Congressional District and State elect their Representative and Senator resepectively. In both cases this is a very small subset of the "american people". The candidates they are permitted to choose between is very limited due to the party system. Given the rampant gerrymandering in drawing the boundaries of Congressional districts, generally one party's candidate will have a massive advantage.
I suggest that the seniority spoils system in both houses has a considerable effect on preserving incumbents in office. I'm certain you can think of one or more Congresscritters (sorry for the insult to critters there) of either party that you consider to be an utter embarrasment the nation as a whole. Are the voters of CA district 8 really going to vote against the incumbent there in a primary - much less the general election? Is the national party as well as the state and local party organization not going to do everything within their power to prevent a primary challenger there?
I suggest that it generally takes time to corrupt a Representative or Senator, but the longer they remain in office the more corrupt they become. Term limits reduces the time the congressperson is exposed to corrupting influences.
Yes, 10 trillion small mirrors sounds good...
70 trillion years of bad luck as soons as we start trying to send spacecraft through the swarm. Of course, the Universe is not expected to last that long so who would be around to complain?
I like this idea!
Approx 430 crew I believe, exact numbers depending on how many redshirts appeared in each episode.
However, the Enterprise and even the Enterprise-A did not use replicators. The ship had a fully functional galley which was seen in both TOS "Charlie X" I blieve - the one where the budding superman turned Yeaoman Rand into a lizard for rejecting him. The galley also appeared in at least one movie- "The Undiscovered Country" - I think that was ST VI.
"..having read NASA engineer's writing..."
Oh come on, it's not like the ability to express oneself in the written word is rocket science.
(though to be honest, NASA "engineers" spend more time pushing paperwork than they do bending tin.)
I won't get into an argument over whether or not the Corps should be considered a government "program", but I would point out that it actaully does have a very limited amount of power over US citizens (other than the Marines themselves).
I am of the opinion that under no circumstances would the current USMC suck badly - if they were going to suck, they would do a darn good job of it. (a conscripted force would be a whole different story)
I was replying to the poster who referenced caluclated GOTOs as WMDs
"If you're working in an environment in which variable names and comments matter, then you still write with descriptive variable names and comments, and just pre-process the source"
Not necessarily - you made an assumption regarding what tools might be available. What is this "pre-processing" you speak of?
Before you get your panties in too big a bunch, this was a Point-of-sale app written in the early 80's for the TRS-80 model IV. The language was whatever BASIC interpeter the machine shipped with.
The prior programmer (who really really liked TRS-80s - he specced the app to run on the Mod IV in late 1983!) used a book with a rocket and a wizard on the cover as his programming bible. The title was something like "Better and Faster BASIC". It was filled with cute little code snippets to do things like storing a date in a two byte integer - that overflowed after 12/31/95. It was also filled with other memory saving tricks like calculating GOTOs and overlays out the wazoo. So not only did you not know what line the code would GOTO, you might not know what overlay (and therefore what code) would be in RAM when it got there.
That is bad, but I'll raise you one further.
Code in a limited memory space where you are not only calculating line numbers for gotos, but add in massive overlay usage to the mix. I once inherited that kind of code and had to maintain and extend it.
Further as it was interpeted, variable names and comments sucked up precious RAM so it was all 2-3 character variable names and there were no comments.
"You cannot honestly believe that the US government, which depends on tax revenue from American businesses and their employees, would intentionally handicap said businesses?"
I believe some dead French guy said this:
"Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence".
So, no I personally do not believe that the folks at the EPA are exercising their extreme power grab with the intent of intentionally handicapping US businesses. I do believe that they are sufficiently myopic to gut the entire country and justify it as "saving the planet". Well maybe the EPA thinks that any regulations they enforce will somehow be global in scope. The effects of such regulations will only be local, but that does not mean that the bureaucrats at the EPA really understand that - or even care.
I'm not going to bother with the hypothetical examples of how that will result in the unintended consequences of higher unemployment in the US as business move anything that can be cost-effectively
moved to a country with a more business friendly "climate". Nor will I dwell on how that will setoff cascading failures throught the US economy. Y'all can surely make up your own examples of how that might play out and accept or debunk them according to your own beliefs.
I'm sticking with the point that a govenrment agency can indeed act in a way that is highly detrimental to the state it is a part of without requiring deliberate intent. The folks at the EPA know what their mission is, and they will state it in terms of "saving the planet", or at least "protecting the environment". Their mission is not to preserve the health of the US economy, the wellbeing of the citizenry, or even continued tax receipts from businesses. The actual mission of any bureaucracy is to increase its own size and power.
The important qustions to really be determined are:
Has the EPA slipped its leash and if so, can it be brought back under control?
What are the "checks and balances" on the power of the regulatory agencies?
If you are ok with the EPA defining CO2 as a toxic substance subject to EPA regulations, where do you stand on the FDA reclassifying nicotine as a controlled substance like heroin or cocaine? How about alcohol? refined carbohydrates? There are always bureaucrats looking for ways to build their own empires and just need to find the right "hook".
Hmm, and if you read a 500 page murder mystery where the last two sentences plays out like this:
George Smith (a character not even referred to in the entire book) enters the room.
Inspector Jones says, "George Smith is the killer, because I am smarter than you are".
THE END.
Would you also make excuses for the author?
6 "Worker prawns lack initiative" - my point 6 was "Why is the shantytown full of alien weaponry? The reason this is such a big plothole is becase the worker prawns lack initiative - humans had to airlift them down to the surface via helicopter. I don't see the humans also airlifting massive quantities of weaponry up to and including powered armor down for the prawns to play with. Stripping the mothership of anything not nailed down for study yes, but letting the prawns hang onto it - not so much. If any prawns did have initiative they would have found a way to do some negotiation, but evacuating the mothership was a massive humanitarian (so sue me for terminology here) effort. Nothing whatsoever indicated the prawns were anything beyond passive aliens incapable of even getting out of their own excrement while they were on the ship.
5 Sorry, but the big question in my point 5 is, why, if they could have remotely controlled the fricken mothership(and a kid who wasn't even born/hatched/whatever did the remote piloting!) did they not just do that to start with.
3 "process", Yep, if you process crude oil into kerosene you have somthing with different properties than it originally had - but not radically different properties - they started with a black liquid, they ended with a black liquid. If the final black liquid could turn a human into a prawn, the original black liquid could be expected to have some significant effect on human DNA. I'm simplifying, but unlike you I have no need to make excuses for the intellectual dishonesty of the filmmaker.
the "command module" Clearly hypothesized (in the documentary voiceover - which must be taken as the Word of GOD given the lack of any followup or reference to any other modules on the mothership) to be a command module early on or did you not see that part of the movie? Obviously it had to be "powered" or "fueled" - Why didn't they use the command module immediately instead of undertaking a 20 year scavenger hunt? And for that matter, they were obviously doing something with scavenged human electronics - that were interfaced to something back in the command module. Why not use that to build a remote interface to the motheship?
"As much as I want to rebut everything in great detail..." I'm sure you wanted to until you started actually thinking about it, then you realized I was correct. I did find it acceptable mindless entertainment, but as "serious" or thought-provoking it failed miserably. The most disappointing thing to me is that while this movie was utter crap it did not have to be that way.
If the filmmaker had spent two hours working out a coherent story instead of "auditioning" and hiring Nigerian hookers to "negotiate" another 50 rands off the price the SFX folks were charging per week he could have made a far better movie. As it is, I feel the SyFy mythical monster of the week movies are better entertainment - and cheaper to boot. Hell I suspect (but have not verified by watching) that ECW may have a more thought-provoking storyline and better pyrotechnics than District 9.
District 9 is a great movie in the same way that Highlander and The Matrix were great movies.
Only for the feebleminded who are easily distracted by pyrotechnics and violence. The story fails so badly that all it has going for it are the special effects. The film does NOT qualify as legitimate serious science fiction - but it does blow things up "real good".
I suppose I should say "spoiler alert" here, but this movie is so damn spoiled you should be able to smell the reek from the parking lot outside the theater.
The areas where suspension of disbelief went off the "epic fail" scale:
1> The "command module" caught on video falling off the alien ship, but no one could find it despite "massive" searches by the authorities. It later turns up buried under a shack in the alien shantytown. Special bonus failure the shantytown was not under the mothership, so how did the command module wind up buried there?
2> Said "command module" being out of "fuel" which takes abot 20 years of scavenging various bits of alien machinery in order to come up with about a cupful (250Ml) - which is sufficient to power the module. And until the last drop of this "fuel" was obtained, there was not enough to use.
3> said "fuel" just happens to be capable of transforming a human into through physical contact - yet with all the alien machinery humans have been fooling with for 20 years, no one ever came into contact with this substance and had the slightest hint that the alien fuel was capable of rewriting human DNA on the fly.
4> Rememeber that need for the final droplet of "fuel" - yet our protagonist sprays probably half of it all over himself - yet there is still somehow enough left to power the "command module" - why didn't they use it ten years earlier.
5> When the "command module" is shot down before reaching the mothership - and why are there multiple batteries of SAMs around the alien shantytown - the little kid alien is able to use the command module to remotely control the mothership, and then his dad(?) uses it to activate a tractor beam and pulls the "command module" back up to its docking bay. Why even bother collecting "fuel" when they could have tractored the darn thing back into place from the get go?
6> Why is the shantytown full of alien weaponry (including at least one suit of power armor) - when the prawns were so darn helpless that they had to be removed from their mothership via helicopter airlift?
7> The evolution of the protagonist from casually racist middle management nebbish to human/prawn Rambo is unconvincing - and is of course the centerpiece of the "serious story".
This could have been a far better movie if only someone had taken a couple of extra hours to go over the damn storyline and come up with something that had some internal logic. Instead, they shit all over any worthwhile ideas they might have had and then polished the resulting pile of crap with a generous helping of special effects.
I will say the following in it's defense:
The "message" was not as overpowering as I feared it would be going in. Also, it was better than the Ang Lee "Hulk". I alos liked the semi-documentary style at the start - that was certainly better than Michael Moore's best work - possibly better even than Gore's film.
NASA will have three reasons for doing this:
1> they will indeed spend all the money on Admin costs (remember what NASA is an acronym for - esp the last letter)
2> NASA has a vested interest in maintaining their monopoly (they don't have one - but they think they do) on manned spaceflight - so all proposed Space Taxis will be deemed unworkable.
3> After filing off the serial numbers, NASA will steal any good ideas and massage them into something that will require 5 - 10 years of increasingly expensive studies - to be funded at taxpayer expense now that those pesky entrepreurs have been dealt with.
One specific example with WalMart is their beef. Without getting into an argumanet about the relative merits of the different USDA grades (having gone more for chicken myself), I would like to point out that there are three main grades of beef:
Prime - which you generally find in high end steakhouses and some specialty stores
Choice - normally the best you find in grocery stores
Select - what I see in WalMart almost exclusively - and that is the entirety of their "Steakhouse Brand"
(I seem to dimly recall a "utility grade", but I don't even want to think about that)
You might also compare Levi brand jeans from WalMart with Levi's from other stores - you might note a difference between the WalMart Levis and the higher priced ones available elsewhere.
But back to the original topic, distribution via download is good if the product is not tied to a specific device. I can buy and download books from Baen in a multitude of formats - I think that is good. And if I want to download a book from somewhere else, I can - my relationship with Baen (as a customer) does not prevent me from doing so. But If I want to buy a game for a next gen console and the only place I can buy it is from the "Specific Console Store (TSC)", and TSC will not allow the game I want to be sold - or worse, sells it for a while and then decides to yank it and delete it from everyone's console. Well that is bad.
1> Sure, TSC will claim it is all in order for them to guarantee the "quality" of games offered and make it "easy" to get out bug fixes. But who decides what is a bug? And when?
2> Of course, the potential for mischief is not limited to video games. Going forward any media company will be able to retroactively edit any piece of media as they saw fit. Did Han shoot first?, Did the FBI agents in ET have guns or walkie talkies? Did Obama ever say the police behaved stupidly? Is Laura Croft's bosom too big? What did the Representative from Rhode Island really say on C-Span last week?
To stick with the healing example, it is even worse than that. At some point good play by the other characters would involve them taking little or no damage (the tank that gets really good with his shield/parry?) so there would be no healing required for fights that would still give other characters an opportunity to improve their skills.
In short, the whole "useful use" concept pretty well falls to pieces. Having said that, I must also admit a desire to see an mmo game with advancement based on character skill as opposed to leveling and twitching. My favorite would be the old Runequest system (2nd edition), but I also recognize that would be a very limited niche game.
Ralph,
Just how much of that money (for the drive train factory) the Feds are giving Tesla is going to go into actual infrastructure (building their factory) as opposed to defending against lawsuits from the econuts and then getting into compliance with what the state and local regulators will determine is needed to be spent to ensure that there are no bad smells excessive noise etc. coming from the plant. While California may want to be business friendly, it just is not going to be happening any more.
This is the part of "out of control" regulators you don't seem to be getting. While the feds are giving Tesla money to build a drive train plant (and a lot more for making more affordable cars), all they have really managed to do is turn Tesla into a money pinata for the local crowd in California and the Bay area in particular. Note the fate of pinatas and note I said a money pinata, not a goose that lays golden eggs.
So, my opinon is that this is going to be wasted money - it will not do what it is offically intended to do any more than the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act did what it's acronym suggested it would accomplish.
Electric cars will be nice, but putting the plant in California is massively wrong and stinks of rotten pork.
If Tesla is going to succeed in the long run, they need to be in a pro-busioness climate, and not in a state that needs money so badly the punitive tax burden combined with out of control state regulators will force them to either go belly up, or move their facilities to another state later (at great expense and possibly triggering additional fallout from the Feds for not staying in CA).
Umm.. about those robocops.
Robocop Mk I : Due to the incompetent handling of medical services by the local government our expected recruits from mortally wounded police officers are dieing before the ambualnce can arrive. We had to scrap this approach and decommission the prototype.
RoboCop Mk II: Since the repeal of the death penalty we are also finding a shortage of salvageable death row inmates.
ED-209s: Good news here! The ED-209 will be in full production and we further anticipate bringing additional capacity on line as we retool former GM production lines.
Your pals at OCP
Speak for yourself Dirt-Boy. I am a Tellurian and have the Delameters to back that up.
"If you need IVF, then you are deficient and should NOT reproduce! "
Actually, my understanding (and I may be wrong) is that about one in six couples have varying degrees of fertility issues - and both are fertile, but not very well with each other. They are not exactly defective, but have not picked the correct mate. It suggests to me that we may be seeing some signs of speciation.
Is there any work ongoing to determine if the human race may be splitting into divergent species? Because if speciation is occurring, I think we can safely assume that evolution - the old fashioned kind that God intended - is still alive and well.
Slightly offtopic, but China has already demonstrated the wonders that come from allowing parents to select the sex of their child on a massive scale. Just google +"runaway bride" +"china" for details.
China now has tens of millions of "surplus" males (of military age!) Will the preference for a wife of the same race keep them from looking further afield for wives? Consider the way China has moved into Africa (electronics recycling, etc.) - perhaps they might look at "solving" their excess male problem by persuading African women that Chinese men will make far better husbands? And by offering Chinese men some additional incentive to emigrate to Africa - perhaps allowing more than one child per couple, or even more than one wife - after all many Africans are Muslims and therefore have religious support for polygamy. Of course, this emigration would be permanent for the most part.
Such an endeavor would be another example of widespread genetic "selection" and would have a significant side effect on the racial demographics of Africa. Not that the Chinese government would ever consider genocide as such - not even a slow, long-term, and relatively non-violent method of genocide...
That would be a sub-optimal solution on a variety of levels:
1> screwing the dumb kids - no matter how pretty they are - would result in producing more dumb kids than smart ones.
2> people who get screwed tend to become quite angry when they realize they were screwed and the dumber they are the more likley they are to resort to violence.
3>There will always be some smart person somewhere (who does not like you) who will "befriend" the dumb kids and patiently explain to them exactly how they have been screwed and just who (Lilith 's Heart-shape) did the screwing.
Cute and snarky literary reference aside, you have exactly nailed the problem. Whether you call them Alphas, Betas, and Deltas or not, the hard fact is that everyone is not above average in intelligence.
A society that can not figure out how to engage (not "take care of") the folks that fall on the left hand side of the bell curve is going to have a heckuva lot of people that have nothing to lose by trashing that society. And further in a technological society, the "intelligence" of automated systems can move leftwards on that same bell curve making ever more intelligent people (to use an English term) redundant.
So, at what point will the number of unengaged people be likely to rise up and destroy society? Bear in mind that as the number of folks marginalized increases they will attract brighter people who see more to be gained by leading the "losers" against society rather than finding their own place within it.
I was going to provide current examples of reasonably smart people who have decided to lead the less intellectually inclined for their own personal gain, but my purpose is not to start a flame war on a side issue.
This is the real sticking point for the publishers. They are not so concerned about older games that sell used for a small fraction of their original price. What has really got them bitching moaning and whining is when they release a craptacular game at 60 bucks.
The first buyers (ones not working 9-5) get it on the release morning, suffer through it for a few hours and sell it to Gamestop. That evening when the folks with day jobs stop off at GameStop on their way home they have a choice of the brand new title for 60 bucks in it's original shrinkwrap or 55 bucks in the GameStop shrinkwrap. The really smart gamer will see this and think - hmm used copies on day of release...not a good sign - and pass on the title entirely. This is a lost sale to the publisher. The next gamer who has been anticipating this title for 18 months or so is going to grab the cheaper copy and think "sweet! I saved five bucks" and once again, no money for the publisher.
So the publisher only sees the money from one sale on realease day while some people saw the used copy and realized this was one to avoid, while the "sure thing" sale to the rabid fan was also lost to the used copy. so 125 dollars changed hands, and the publisher only saw about 15 bucks instead 30. Gamestop - on the other hand - just made 80 odd bucks of gross profit. And probably also sent in a cancellation on any orders they had for more copies of that particluar title.