There are things they can do that aren't a default but might as well be. For one thing, the government (including the Fed) has got their hands on the printing presses; they can just make money out of thin air (and crush the debt with inflation).
Have you not considered that this exactly is the plan?
Highly unlikely, given the nature of the practical threats. Governments definitely have a reasonable desire to keep external scum (including other governments) out of critical systems, and there are plenty of such scum out there. They're better served overall by making things secure and putting their intercepts at other points in the system.
I don't need my daily personal schedule in my email program, but getting an email invite to a meeting, clicking "accept" and having it automatically added to my calendar is pretty nice.
But why does that require lots of integration?
Sure, you could make it work that the calendar program is separate, but why bother if you're going to run both anyway?
What's that got to do with anything? I run a window manager all the time, but I don't want my text editor, browser, email client, calendar, word processor, and compiler tool chain all integrated with it. What's wrong with having a program that does one task well?! It's the Unix way after all.
[A] data breach [of any online storage service] is almost guaranteed if the timeline is stretched out far enough. For someone in the medical field such as the GP that would be disastrous.
But what's the security of the system that it is replacing? You can't just consider these things in isolation; you've got to consider where they're coming from too, and what threats are actually likely on a timescale that anyone really cares about. After all, if you stretch the timeline out far enough, the Earth will be fried when the Sun goes into its red giant lifecycle phase, yet I'm not immediately concerned about this inevitable fact (nor is virtually anyone else). The indefinite future is just that: indefinite.
How is security really improved when essentially stuff it moved to "public storage?"
The scary thing is that it might actually improve security, for all your (quite valid) concerns. Healthcare professionals are not always best known for getting security right with paper records or single-hospital databases.
I don't think we'll *cause* an ice age(though one is likely fairly soon, looking at the solar cycles...),
Hard to say for sure; we (as a species) have dumped a lot of extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since the last ice age through burning coal, oil and gas, and also probably through changing land use to support agriculture too, and nobody really knows for sure what effect that will have. From a purely scientific perspective, come back in 30,000 years and we'll have a much better idea, but that's not so useful for public policy today...
but we could cirtainly distroy our economy through crap like the "carbon tax".
Don't worry, we'll destroy it first through bailing out bankers instead of supporting real businesses. (A carbon tax doesn't destroy the economy per se, it changes the tilt on the game board creating new winners and losers. It only causes big problems if you insist that the old winners must continue to be winners, which isn't something that any government ought to promise.)
...atmospheric lifetime for CO2 is estimated to be thousands of years...
Really ? With all those trees ?
Really. The issue is that plants tend overall to release carbon dioxide at about the rate that they take it out of the air; it might be locked up for a while in their tissues, but it gets released again at death. What you need is to prevent decomposition of dead plants, either through burial somehow in an anoxic environment (e.g., swamp) or by converting the wood to something more stable (e.g., biochar), but both of those aren't actually that common as processes go worldwide.
The process that really seems to take CO2 out of the atmosphere is rock weathering (especially of non-carbonate rocks, of course) but that's really rather slow.
Australian cities have started fitting peak hour traffic lights to major roundabouts. It works really well, you can go through the roundabout without slowing down much most of the time (or not slowing down at all on a motorbike) but in peak hour, you've got normal lights.
That's used quite a bit in the UK too. It's a consequence of the fact that traffic lights work better than roundabouts at high traffic densities (not as well as a separated-level junction, but they're expensive and take loads of land), though the situation is reversed at low densities, where they allow a larger fraction of traffic to keep moving.
What roundabouts do require is being careful; a part of the UK driving test is showing that you can navigate a roundabout safely. It's not that hard as long as you remember to look in the right direction (ahead before you get to the line, to the side when you get there), stick to your lanes properly, and use your turning indicators to tell others what you're up to.
The problem is, the font snobs don't design fonts to handle Unicode (or hide the ones that they've done that on behind paywalls). Those of us who work with things other than western european languages (e.g., russian, japanese, even math!) like to use Arial as it has much better coverage of the glyph-space. As a bonus, it's widely deployed too. Such practical considerations trump the font snobs regard in my eyes, and in those of many other people too.
And as far as street side (parking meter?) plugins?
Did you know that in northern Sweden they already have those installed? OK, they're there to plug in heaters to keep engines warm enough to start in the winter — they have serious winter, and no way do I want to move there — but a plug is a plug. It's quite practical, and people are less likely to mess with it if they get a real benefit from it.
I can see serious vandalism, just for the lulz.
As opposed to now where they just slash your tyres and set fire to the car, "just for the lulz"...
America hasn't led in space since around the time I was in third grade, in the 80s.
America's doing fine with leading in space, provided you're satisfied with robots of one kind or another. There's been some truly wonderful scientific work done over the past 30 years, both in Earth orbit and further away, and America's absolutely been leading that.
What there hasn't been is much about anything to do with putting people anywhere beyond LEO, and what we've learned there has been mostly that space is a hostile place to be. In particular, the radiation levels mean that it is critical that better robotics and propulsion systems be developed, so that you can build bases on other worlds before people get there, and so that you can get people there and back faster. Either that or we need a way to launch mass much more cheaply so that we can put up adequate shielding, but the only vaguely practical solution (i.e., that doesn't involve significantly new technology or science) to date there has been Orion, which is shelved for all sorts of reasons.
Crack those three problems (robotic base building, better in-space propulsion and a way to put plenty of mass in space) and manned exploration will happen, as pretty much all other problems can be tackled by a combination of having more mass, going faster, or having things set up before you arrive. (For example, the problems of microgravity can be dealt with by spinning the ship provided you have enough mass for strength, and by keeping the in-space parts of missions short.) Alas, they're the hard ones. Robotics is getting close to being able to tackle the base-building challenge, provided you can get the mass there; it's come on hugely in the past 30 years. There's also hope on the propulsion front. Getting the mass up without bankrupting us? That's still hard.
Either that or a link to something explaining how lasers will launch a vehicle.
Well, duh! Isn't it obvious? You run the lasers in reverse so that you instantaneously vaporize the sharks, creating a large volume of rapidly expanding gases, which propel the vehicle. Easy!
You never know, you might die young in an inexplicable accident with an inflatable doll, three goats of mixed gender, and 7 quarts of lime jello. There's always hope!
Does it require both ends to be not behind significant firewalls? The good feature of Skype for the majority of users was its ability to get connections past a majority of firewalls without network admins having to do lots of work. (I know of one place that has trouble, and that's because the admins there block just about everything and use a horrible firewall for everything else, so placing safety as more important than the ability to work. I don't know if any of them are actually called Mordac...) Having to massively expose your computer to the internet just so you can make calls is not the world's finest option when it comes to total system security, given that snoops most certainly aren't the only class of threat out there.
Wind and hydroelectric need to be augmented with another source of energy.
Actually hydroelectric doesn't need to be augmented (assuming it's built in an area with enough rainfall). The problems with hydro though are that it typically occupies a lot of land with those reservoirs, often has a problem with silting up of the reservoirs, and requires both geographically and geologically suitable locations, which aren't as common as all that.
Wind's main problem is that it needs a power reservoir. They're challenging to build with any sort of truly high efficiency (pumped storage hydro can do the scale, but it's horribly inefficient).
Solar is a promising candidate for quite a lot of the world, not because it works all the time, but rather because it tends to deliver power at times of (certain types of) peak load. Thus it makes loads of sense in the southern US, but is less useful in the UK (which has a cool climate profile due to the far smaller installed base of HVAC).
Sorry, but I don't believe that. It has neither Perl4 namespace syntax (look it up if you don't believe me; it existed but was utterly horrendous) nor Perl5's "object system" botch, nor even the bizarre oddness that is the plethora of magical global variables with hyper-odd names or even type globs. Damn, but that's got to be a miss on the whole "worst of Perl" front.
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It's been pointed out before, and is worth pointing out again, but US government default is prohibited by the 14th amendment of the constitution. Whether they follow it or not is left to be seen.
There are things they can do that aren't a default but might as well be. For one thing, the government (including the Fed) has got their hands on the printing presses; they can just make money out of thin air (and crush the debt with inflation).
Have you not considered that this exactly is the plan?
Highly unlikely, given the nature of the practical threats. Governments definitely have a reasonable desire to keep external scum (including other governments) out of critical systems, and there are plenty of such scum out there. They're better served overall by making things secure and putting their intercepts at other points in the system.
I don't need my daily personal schedule in my email program, but getting an email invite to a meeting, clicking "accept" and having it automatically added to my calendar is pretty nice.
But why does that require lots of integration?
Sure, you could make it work that the calendar program is separate, but why bother if you're going to run both anyway?
What's that got to do with anything? I run a window manager all the time, but I don't want my text editor, browser, email client, calendar, word processor, and compiler tool chain all integrated with it. What's wrong with having a program that does one task well?! It's the Unix way after all.
[A] data breach [of any online storage service] is almost guaranteed if the timeline is stretched out far enough. For someone in the medical field such as the GP that would be disastrous.
But what's the security of the system that it is replacing? You can't just consider these things in isolation; you've got to consider where they're coming from too, and what threats are actually likely on a timescale that anyone really cares about. After all, if you stretch the timeline out far enough, the Earth will be fried when the Sun goes into its red giant lifecycle phase, yet I'm not immediately concerned about this inevitable fact (nor is virtually anyone else). The indefinite future is just that: indefinite.
the firm of Shark, Shyster and Slitpurse
And there I was thinking it was Dewey, Cheetham and Howe.
Scientific facts are put on the same level as ideological nonsense, because "there are two sides to every issue".
That's because it's true. It's just that one of those sides is sometimes known by the simple label: "WRONG!"
How is security really improved when essentially stuff it moved to "public storage?"
The scary thing is that it might actually improve security, for all your (quite valid) concerns. Healthcare professionals are not always best known for getting security right with paper records or single-hospital databases.
Sounds like some foolish .gov.uk got buzzworded into distributing more tax dollars for something they already had.
It's "tax pounds". Same foolishness, different currency, different taxpayers.
I don't think we'll *cause* an ice age(though one is likely fairly soon, looking at the solar cycles...),
Hard to say for sure; we (as a species) have dumped a lot of extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since the last ice age through burning coal, oil and gas, and also probably through changing land use to support agriculture too, and nobody really knows for sure what effect that will have. From a purely scientific perspective, come back in 30,000 years and we'll have a much better idea, but that's not so useful for public policy today...
but we could cirtainly distroy our economy through crap like the "carbon tax".
Don't worry, we'll destroy it first through bailing out bankers instead of supporting real businesses. (A carbon tax doesn't destroy the economy per se, it changes the tilt on the game board creating new winners and losers. It only causes big problems if you insist that the old winners must continue to be winners, which isn't something that any government ought to promise.)
...atmospheric lifetime for CO2 is estimated to be thousands of years...
Really ? With all those trees ?
Really. The issue is that plants tend overall to release carbon dioxide at about the rate that they take it out of the air; it might be locked up for a while in their tissues, but it gets released again at death. What you need is to prevent decomposition of dead plants, either through burial somehow in an anoxic environment (e.g., swamp) or by converting the wood to something more stable (e.g., biochar), but both of those aren't actually that common as processes go worldwide.
The process that really seems to take CO2 out of the atmosphere is rock weathering (especially of non-carbonate rocks, of course) but that's really rather slow.
Australian cities have started fitting peak hour traffic lights to major roundabouts. It works really well, you can go through the roundabout without slowing down much most of the time (or not slowing down at all on a motorbike) but in peak hour, you've got normal lights.
That's used quite a bit in the UK too. It's a consequence of the fact that traffic lights work better than roundabouts at high traffic densities (not as well as a separated-level junction, but they're expensive and take loads of land), though the situation is reversed at low densities, where they allow a larger fraction of traffic to keep moving.
What roundabouts do require is being careful; a part of the UK driving test is showing that you can navigate a roundabout safely. It's not that hard as long as you remember to look in the right direction (ahead before you get to the line, to the side when you get there), stick to your lanes properly, and use your turning indicators to tell others what you're up to.
The problem is, the font snobs don't design fonts to handle Unicode (or hide the ones that they've done that on behind paywalls). Those of us who work with things other than western european languages (e.g., russian, japanese, even math!) like to use Arial as it has much better coverage of the glyph-space. As a bonus, it's widely deployed too. Such practical considerations trump the font snobs regard in my eyes, and in those of many other people too.
And as far as street side (parking meter?) plugins?
Did you know that in northern Sweden they already have those installed? OK, they're there to plug in heaters to keep engines warm enough to start in the winter — they have serious winter, and no way do I want to move there — but a plug is a plug. It's quite practical, and people are less likely to mess with it if they get a real benefit from it.
I can see serious vandalism, just for the lulz.
As opposed to now where they just slash your tyres and set fire to the car, "just for the lulz"...
America hasn't led in space since around the time I was in third grade, in the 80s.
America's doing fine with leading in space, provided you're satisfied with robots of one kind or another. There's been some truly wonderful scientific work done over the past 30 years, both in Earth orbit and further away, and America's absolutely been leading that.
What there hasn't been is much about anything to do with putting people anywhere beyond LEO, and what we've learned there has been mostly that space is a hostile place to be. In particular, the radiation levels mean that it is critical that better robotics and propulsion systems be developed, so that you can build bases on other worlds before people get there, and so that you can get people there and back faster. Either that or we need a way to launch mass much more cheaply so that we can put up adequate shielding, but the only vaguely practical solution (i.e., that doesn't involve significantly new technology or science) to date there has been Orion, which is shelved for all sorts of reasons.
Crack those three problems (robotic base building, better in-space propulsion and a way to put plenty of mass in space) and manned exploration will happen, as pretty much all other problems can be tackled by a combination of having more mass, going faster, or having things set up before you arrive. (For example, the problems of microgravity can be dealt with by spinning the ship provided you have enough mass for strength, and by keeping the in-space parts of missions short.) Alas, they're the hard ones. Robotics is getting close to being able to tackle the base-building challenge, provided you can get the mass there; it's come on hugely in the past 30 years. There's also hope on the propulsion front. Getting the mass up without bankrupting us? That's still hard.
Either that or a link to something explaining how lasers will launch a vehicle.
Well, duh! Isn't it obvious? You run the lasers in reverse so that you instantaneously vaporize the sharks, creating a large volume of rapidly expanding gases, which propel the vehicle. Easy!
The expected winning bid if everyone is rational and everything is ideal is the second highest valuation of all of the bidders in the room.
Ah, but Google have demonstrated that they're transcendental instead of rational.
Apart from, perhaps, a larger complex number?
In which sense do you mean "larger complex number"?
The only good people in society are in finance and top corporate management.
Why do you draw artificial distinctions between financiers and top corporate management?
You're clearly misinformed. Tau is a much more elegant number for every use case. Way to post AC, btw.
So you're claiming that it is better for calculating areas of circles? (\pi r^2 vs \tau/2 r^2) Or volumes of spheres? (4/3\pi r^3 vs 2/3\tau r^3)
everyone will eventually be an old person
You never know, you might die young in an inexplicable accident with an inflatable doll, three goats of mixed gender, and 7 quarts of lime jello. There's always hope!
I don't know if they used that to pay for hookers and blow.
Hookers and blow, also known as "Supporting the economy of this great city."
Does it require both ends to be not behind significant firewalls? The good feature of Skype for the majority of users was its ability to get connections past a majority of firewalls without network admins having to do lots of work. (I know of one place that has trouble, and that's because the admins there block just about everything and use a horrible firewall for everything else, so placing safety as more important than the ability to work. I don't know if any of them are actually called Mordac...) Having to massively expose your computer to the internet just so you can make calls is not the world's finest option when it comes to total system security, given that snoops most certainly aren't the only class of threat out there.
There are often 15-20MB files being reviewed.
Peanuts. Or at least damn well should be peanuts.
Wind and hydroelectric need to be augmented with another source of energy.
Actually hydroelectric doesn't need to be augmented (assuming it's built in an area with enough rainfall). The problems with hydro though are that it typically occupies a lot of land with those reservoirs, often has a problem with silting up of the reservoirs, and requires both geographically and geologically suitable locations, which aren't as common as all that.
Wind's main problem is that it needs a power reservoir. They're challenging to build with any sort of truly high efficiency (pumped storage hydro can do the scale, but it's horribly inefficient).
Solar is a promising candidate for quite a lot of the world, not because it works all the time, but rather because it tends to deliver power at times of (certain types of) peak load. Thus it makes loads of sense in the southern US, but is less useful in the UK (which has a cool climate profile due to the far smaller installed base of HVAC).
[Ruby] itself takes the worst of Perl
Sorry, but I don't believe that. It has neither Perl4 namespace syntax (look it up if you don't believe me; it existed but was utterly horrendous) nor Perl5's "object system" botch, nor even the bizarre oddness that is the plethora of magical global variables with hyper-odd names or even type globs. Damn, but that's got to be a miss on the whole "worst of Perl" front.
Keep the hyperbole toned down, please.