That was my reaction too. Sounds like an urban legend.
The thing that sounded most bogus to me was the $100,000 ransom. Unless it was in cash, it'd be traceable. If it *were* cash, taking that much cash out would trigger a money laundering investigation.
So Party C has a pretty strong case that the code that they received from Party B is licensed under the GPL.(Because the fact that it was modified and distributed is prima facie evidence that the license was accepted by Party B.)
Except that party B's distributing software b under a proprietary license trumps the prima facie evidence that B has accepted the GPL. Many, maybe even most people would think C morally justified in using B's code as if B were in compliance with its own license, and I suspect that B would not be able to win any monetary damages against C, but unless there is some kind of "screw you for being an asshole" rule in the law of contracts, B might be able to win some kind of injunctive relief against C. That might enable them to negotiate some kind of out of court settlement from C, thus allowing B to profit from its misdeeds.
That raises in interesting possibility I hadn't thought about. Just because GPL requires you to give certain rights to any derivative works does it mean that recipients of such works *actually receive those rights*? I'm thinking probably not.
Party A licenses software a under GPL.
Party B incorporates software a into proprietary licensed product b, thus violating GPL.
Party C creates derivative work c from b.
So, is it possible that both C and B are violating software licenses here? It'd work like this. Party C is acting as if b was licensed under GPL as it should have been, *but has not*. Morally, B *should have* licensed b as GPL, *but did not*. Therefore C should have GPL rights to use b, *but does not*.
I'm not so sure. Vinyl records were treasured possessions when I was a kid, and most people didn't throw out their record collections after they got a CD player, but I don't think my kids have ever seen a vinyl record actually being played on a turntable except in old movies. I don't think they've ever seen a 78 RPM record, or a multi-disc vinyl album sleeve.
If you've ever gone through the exercise of disposing of an elder relative's possessions after he or she dies or has to move into a nursing home, you know you can start to get pretty ruthless when his collection of stuff is large. I have friends who have a science fiction collection they've been building at a rate of two books or more a week since the late 40s, and while there are many treasures in it, no collection that size can fail to be dominated by mediocrity. What is the chances that those books (most of them paperbacks printed on cheap high acid paper) will pass on to their grandchildren? To their great-grandchildren? How many vinyl records have been passed down between more than one generation?
Of course records have the issue of playback hardware incompatibility, but storing and taking books along with us as we move incur substantial costs that we tend to take for granted because losing access to the information in the books is unthinkable. Those of us who are bibliophiles pay a price in space, inconvenience and clutter for our collections. I doubt more than a handful of our books will pass through more than one generation of inheritors. Then there's the rest of the world -- all the people we were surprised to see with a book in their hand a few years ago when The DaVinci Code was hot. The people whose kids get to first grade never having been read to. In 50 years, those people will be as likely to have a book in their house as most people are likely to have a 78 RPM record today. Even people like me will no longer have a hundred linear feet of bookshelf or more in our homes. Our small collection physical books will be curiosities for display, like my slide rule collection.
You just have to cherry pick profitable business from it. Not only is that going to be more profitable, it might provide a better user experience.
Let's take coffee. My house buys a lot of coffee. It's one of the things that might instigate a trip to the grocery store. One of our family members is lactose intolerant, and lactase pills are another market drip driver. A lot of that stuff could just show up on our doorstep every couple of weeks. Occasionally we'd have to go out for extra coffee if guests were coming.
Amazon could easily reduce the frequency and length of my trips to the supermarket. In fact, I'd much prefer to go to the butcher, fish monger and greengrocer for many of my food purchases, but since I'm going to the supermarket anyway to restock all kinds of stuff, I make do with mediocre supermarket substitutes even though I have excellent specialty shops nearby. It wouldn't have to deal with perishable goods at all.
In response, supermarkets would have to become a lot more shopper-friendly to stay in business. I *hate* going to the supermarket, because it's designed to steer you toward certain brands or to encourage impulse purchases. Amazon is too, by the way; but the supermarkets do this by trying to keep you wandering in the store. A about a decade ago search kiosks appeared in the supermarket chains I use, but shortly afterward they disappeared. Since the kiosks worked well for the shopper, I'm guessing they went away because they reduced the size and profitability of the average sale.
I tried PeaPod a few years back, but the problem was that it was even more tedious to use than going to the supermarket. I think it tried to do too much, including things it can't ever do well. I want to see the meat, fish and vegetables before I buy them. Now if I could make regular trips to the butcher, fishmonger and greengrocer and only occasionally have to visit the supermarket, I'd be a happy shopper.
Well, let's talk about a baseline for what we usually consider "affordable". We're spending $5billion/mo. in Afghanistan with no clear strategic purpose or end in sight. We spent two and a half times that *per week* in Iraq. We put 4400 American lives into Iraq and 1400 thus far into Afghanistan, and who knows how many permanently disabled.
So you're proposing $1billion and no US casualties in exchange for a high chance of removing the man who ordered the Lockerbie bombing and funded terrorist groups around the world? For a man who (unlike Sadaam) actually plotted terror attacks on US soil? We're talking about the same Ghadaffi who underwrote and helped plan Charles Taylor's use of terror by amputation against civilian populations, right? The rabid anti-american nutcase who uses his immense oil wealth to stir up trouble for us all around the globe?
$1 billion and zero casualties is no-brainer territory for anything with reasonable probability of success at removing this guy. That's far too low. Let's put the ceiling at zero US casualties, and one month of the Iraq war at its peak cost. I'm pretty dovish, but I'd gladly write a higher tax check next year for my share of that. My share of your absurdly low $1 billion figure wouldn't even buy me a small pizza -- at least if I wanted toppings.
I essentially agree with your analysis. The "United States Armed Forces" should include drones. I don't, however, think the contrary position is completely unreasonable.
Take Clinton's 1998 cruise missile strike against Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan in retaliation for the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. By *our* definition of "US Armed Forces" it should trigger the War Powers Resolution, but many would disagree, and make something like the following argument. In 1973 "Armed Forces" would have meant meant personnel in any conflict where the provisions of the act would come up: soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines etc. The clause even specifies "while equipped for combat", and in other ways seems to assume it is talking about a manned force. Clearly what the law's authors envisioned were combat personnel, not drones or semi-autonomous robots.
So a case ought to be made that "Armed Forces" includes unmanned weapons systems before we assume that is so. I believe the intent of the resolution was to regulate the President's ability to use military force in foreign countries. If that is so, any device or system under his control that can be used to exert military force has to be considered a "US Armed Force", otherwise the law makes nonsensical distinctions for purposes of its intent. The authors of a law don't have to anticipate every future technological innovation in order to pass laws regulating their use.
As I look closer at both sides of the argument I haven't changed my mind, but the contrary position looks stronger than it first appeared. It might well be the case that considering unmanned drones "Armed Forces" would be nonsensical in the context of other laws, say those exclusively concerned with the welfare of US military personnel and their families.
I don't think the ICBM counter-example is such a strong one. You don't need a War Powers Resolution to deal with that; a nuclear can't be hidden and the conflict is over before anyone can debate anything. The WPR is to prevent the President from getting us irretrievably tangled up in a war before Congress can get its act together and demand an explanation. WPR doesn't do anything useful in the ICBM example, but it does in the case of drones, which function just like conventional manned attacked aircraft for purposes of triggering Congressional oversight.
There's a difference between sending an army in to destabilize a stable stable regime in a country with 32 million people in it that sits right on the geographic boundary of the Sunni/Shia and Arab/Kurd divides, and sending drones to assist an existing insurgency that is already destabilizing a regime in a country of six million in the middle of North Africa.
man are you like some kind of Highlander, who pops up throughout history making the same arguments at the beginning of every 10-year war?
As far as Iraq is concerned, I was against it before most people realized there was going to be an invasion of Iraq, back in July of 2002 when I heard Rumsfeld float what what seemed to me to be a trial balloon for invading Iraq. When I heard that, I realized that the bait and switch was on. When the authorization was being debated in Congress, I protested at my senator's office. I was against the Iraq invasion because I thought (a) it would be a distraction that would prolong the Afghanistan war; (b) it would cause a shift of power and influence toward Iran and (c) the occupation would be longer and more difficult than we were being told. What, exactly, did I get wrong?
None of these considerations apply in Libya. That doesn't justify the drone attacks, but it means you can't say, "we did the exact same thing in Iraq and Vietnam". It's a different course of action being taken in a different kind of country. Details matter. Your exact same mode of reasoning by vague historical analogy was used to support the invasion of Iraq, if you are old enough to remember it. The occupation was going to be like post WW2 Japan or post Korean War RoK.
im sorry that us dum dums in the 'citizenry' have the 'audacity' to discuss the law of war. we should just bow our heads, grab our guns, cheer for the king, and make one last run over the top.
Well, I don't know about the other "dum dums" in the citizenry, but if *your* reading level were a little higher you'd notice that I said *I* think that the War Powers act should be invoked and the Libyan intervention should be brought before Congress. However, that doesn't mean that the position the administration is taking is totally absurd. Only an idiot thinks that everyone who disagrees with him must be an idiot. As far as what invoking the War Powers Act would accomplish, it would accomplish nothing of practical use other than reaffirm that the President doesn't have the power to conduct war on his own authority, but that would be enough.
If we tax the wealthy enough, they'll stop being rich and then they won't get the exemptions.
Even when the top tax bracket was at its historical non-wartime maximum, there were plenty of rich people, and plenty of people getting rich. From 1954-1963, the tax rate on people making more than 400K (3.2 million in 2010 dollars) was 91%. The current maximum rate is 35% on incomes over 357,700 (roughly 50K in 1954 dollars).
The argument that a higher tax rate causes wealthy people to invest less and the economy to grow less makes intuitive sense, but we can see from this data that this is not necessarily so. Since the top tax rate was reduced to 35%, the US GDP growth rate has ranged between 1% and 3%. The GDP growth rate was far more robust when the top bracket was 91%. In fact the *lowest* GDP growth in that era was higher than the *higest* growth rate in the 35% era.
Now I'm not going to take a simplistic position here and say high rates for the top tax bracket *cause* economic growth, although looking at the historical co-varation of top tax rates to GDP one is tempted to. But other things were happening in the 1950s and other eras with high tax rates and high GDP growth. What I will say is that the argument that a higher tax for people with millions of dollars of annual income would necessarily kill economic growth is clearly poppycock. *It depends on what else is going on in the economy and the world*. I feel it would be rash to return to the Eisenhower era tax rates of 91%, but I think it would be safe to go with the Reagan era tax rate of 50% on income over a quarter of a million or so in current dollars. That would wipe out our deficit with plenty surplus for critical infrastructure programs like weather satellites. In fact, going back to the post-Reagan rate of 38.5% (if not the Clinton era rates of 39.6%) would help our budget problems a great deal with relatively little risk.
The historical support for high top bracket tax rates killing economic growth simply doesn't exist. If anything the data suggests otherwise. If the deficit is such a risk to the nation's future, it seems reasonable to consider tax increases to the moderate Reagan era rates, if not the 91% rates of the Eisenhower era.
Well, our having this discussion is a bit like non-geeks discussing computer topics. They use relevant terms, but not necessarily with their correct meaning. "Real-time" is a term whose misuse often makes me cringe.
We can't even understand what this argument is about without at least looking at the legal briefs. Clearly the administration isn't claiming that dropping bombs from a drone is a benign or friendly act; they're making the argument that it does not fall into a class of actions defined by some specific law (in this case the War Powers Act I think), and referred to by the shorthand "hostilities" in the text of the law. If the law in question says something like, "A 'hostile action' for the purposes of this act is one in which (a) (b) or (c)," then what we're talking about is whether the Libyan operation qualifies under those terms, regardless of whether it is "hostile" according to the common definition of the word.
I support the Libyan operation, because it's a rare opportunity to take a state sponsor of terrorism out of the picture at relatively low cost. But I think the operation should be authorized by Congress first. That won't happen because the current congress is all too willing to play with critical national interests for short term electoral advantage. At any other time this would be a no-brainer, but for now it's a non-starter. For that reason I would not be surprised if the Administration is bending the law past the point of breaking in order to get the job done. But it is quite possible that a reasonable argument could be made that an operation in which US personnel aren't placed in harm's way *might* not fall under the definition of "hostilities" laid out in certain laws.
To know whether the position taken is as ridiculous as it sounds, we'd have to see the actual arguments being made, as opposed to some dumbed down, hand-waving media account.
Instead of saying 'NO', you need to figure out a way to say 'Yes' while solving the problems that make the request 'stupid and retarded'
It is not my job to tell the boss "yes". It is my job to tell the boss the truth about what he needs to know, employing professional experience and diligence, and of course trying to keep an open mind. Naturally, sometimes my opinion has to be delivered discreetly, in private, but the important thing is for the boss to have access to the truth without having to perform some elaborate deconstruction. Having "no" in my communications toolkit is what keeps my "yes" from being devalued to "maybe".
That said, I don't often say "no". More often I say, "yes, but..." Typically this involves things that the boss hasn't anticipated. After I've brought him up to speed, it's up to him to decide whether it's worth the expense and risk. It is rare that I give an unqualified "no", but when I do it's usually because I am being asked to do something illegal or unethical. Personally, I think no boss in his right mind would prefer employees who casually say "yes" to doing something illegal.
It's true many IT guys blame their own shortcomings on technology. The boss equivalent of this is blaming his failures on employees. I don't think much of for managers think they're three sigma geniuses at business strategy yet don't see their inability to hire employees they can respect as a professional liability.
I'm for a culture of realism and responsibility in business. Subordinates should give realistic advice to superiors. When superiors choose to overrule advice, they should take responsibility for that. It's not necessarily a sign of disrespect to overrule a subordinate. What is disrespectful is refusing to work with a a colleague who disagrees with you, whether that colleague is a subordinate, superior, or peer. Demanding the *appearance* of agreement goes beyond disrespect into the realm of self-delusion.
Well, from others have said it would appear that the licensing costs are closer to $20, but let's go with "a couple of dollars". This is going to be a low cost, low margin, high volume product. They expect to sell a gazillion of them, and a couple of dollars times a gazillion units is (*** bites pinky finger ***) a couple of gazillion dollars.
And how much of a car's operating costs are subsidized by the government? I'm talking about highways, streets, police, traffic signals etc.
The reason that the government subsidizes transit isn't because of some liberal conspiracy to help the indigent. It's because shifting that money over to more automobile subsidies wouldn't produce enough additional capacity to handle the influx of drivers.
I live in a city that has the most expensive mile of road ever built. Yet more than half the commutes into the city are *still* by transit. We might have spent ten times what we did on that road and still not have enough additional auto capacity to replace transit. On the other hand, we probably could have endowed a fund which eliminated transit fares in perpetuity for less than we spent on that road. So why didn't anyone consider that?
If we're subsidizing 90% of the cost of the bus, why not go to 100%? Not only would that attract more riders, it would eliminate the cost of fare collection systems and personnel. That means we'd need a lot less than an 11% increase to eliminate fares, and we'd get additional savings by having less car infrastructure. The reason is that car drivers would get bent out of shape over transit riders getting something "for free", even though they themselves use free and very expensive auto infrastructure and would benefit by having reduced traffic. It's simply not rational to fund 90% of the cost of the bus, and not go all the way to 100%, but the rational thing isn't politically correct.
If you want to see real contractor rip-offs of the public, you should look at the US, where it has become an art form.
I once was invited to a meeting in which a state agency (state withheld to protect the clueless) discussed the next plans for a system it purchased from a major government contractor with an emergency two million dollar federal grant. The agency wasn't a bad agency, mind you. In fact it was a fairly good one, but used to operating on a shoestring. They had no idea whatsoever what things cost, and suddenly they had two million bucks dumped on them that had to be shoveled out the door faster than the speed of thought. A politically connected federal contractor landed the contract and delivered on time and on budget, but the system wasn't really useful unless it was integrated with the agencies various activities.
So I was asked to come and discuss how this could be done. In truth I think I was invited down so they could pick my brain for for free, because it turned out they didn't have *any* money left over from the two million they'd blown on initial development. Even if I'd offered my services pro bono, they wouldn't have had the money to pay my expenses. After the initial presentation, I asked the disgusted state IT guy next to me how much his department would have charged to build the system they'd just bought for two million. His estimate was sixty thousand. Mine was sixty-five.
I've always thought that the whole situation must have been a set-up. The grant was dumped on an agency that had no idea how to procure technology, and they weren't given enough time to put together a reasonable RFP or to obtain competitive bids. It was a perfect sting. Had the extent of the waste come to public attention, some hapless state manager would have taken the fall. People love to crucify bureaucrats. The politician behind the earmark would point his finger at his political enemies at the state level, and his (I am presuming) contractor cronies would truthfully say they had done everything they had contracted for.
The lesson is that while government is often infuriatingly slow, beware of any project where there's pressure to spend taxpayer money before it disappears. Never spend public money in a hurry. "Shovel-ready" equals "graft-ready".
A typical mobile phone can last maybe 10-12 hours on a charge, when talking. Up to two weeks standby. For these devices well let's be generous, make it double the time, that's 24 hours of broadcasting signals. The rest of the year: no battery. And I didn't see a battery on the photos.
The blue plastic wrapped thing is the battery pack. It contains three cells the size of a AA. A single alkaline AA has more energy than most fully charged cell phone batteries, and of course has a multi-year shelf-life. A three alkaline cell could provide (by your calculations) as much as 40 hours of talk time and several years stand-by. There are battery technologies that would out perform this by an additional factor of three, but given given the number of these things produced I think the cheaper technology is a reasonable compromise. Most conversations recorded would be less than an hour or two.
As for the receiver, I don't see why it would be so hard for the secret police to set up a receiver network or even *use* an existing one, but there doesn't even have to be such a network. Since the transmitter would be activated by agents keeping the subject under surveillance, the receiver could even be mounted on the agent's car.
None of which proves what this thing actually does of course, but it has a number of bits that you'd expect in a bug and no alternative explanation for their presence yet. If you could record just ten hours of conversation from *any* car in the territory at *any* time, that'd be a pretty sweet system for the secret police. And it's physically plausible that a bug that looks like this could record much more before having to be swapped out.
Well, look at the thing. If it isn't meant to transmit, then why the UHF antenna? And it has a hefty looking 3 cell battery. Plain old alkaline cells could deliver 1100 maH apiece. More expensive Li-Fe2 cells would provide up to 3000 maH apiece and have good shelf-life. A three cell battery pack could yield as much as 9000 maH, or 10x the energy of a typical cell phone battery when fully charged. Since a regular 900 maH cell phone battery might yield 3 hours talk time, a 3000 maH alkaline battery pack might deliver nine hours or more, and a 9000 maH Li-Fe2 battery pack might yield *30* hours of transmission.
Since the Chinese aren't stupid, we can assume that the device isn't transmitting all the time. If it were *me* designing this program, it'd work like this: the secret police observe a person of interest being picked up by some car, not necessarily known to be associated with that person. The agent calls in the car's registration to HQ, which transmits the "record" command. The conversation is sent to a recording facility, until the "stop recording" command is sent. The battery, even if it's just an alkaline battery, should be good for several uses. When it is close to being used up, the police discreetly replace the device, a process that takes only a minute or so with practice.
You make exactly the point I was going to. What's interesting about this thread is that I agree both with you AND GP. Arrogant pricks running things sucks, whether they do it directly or they use their media clout to strike fear into the hearts of the timid masses.
I guess I'm for a world in which the masses don't rally behind brand X or Y because they are driven by fear. In such a world "elite" wouldn't be the next thing to "child molester" in the emotional lexicon of politics, so people who knew what they were talking about could have their say. And then everyone else could decide how credible that sounded without throwing out any part of the evidence as being too terrible to contemplate.
In such a world, you wouldn't have to believe that *every* nuclear plant is a Fukushima waiting to happen. Nor would you have to believe that *no* nuclear plant is a Fukushima waiting to happen. In such a world you would examine the management and situation of each plant and probably shut some of them down. You might build some new plants with new technology and an updated grid to give you some flexibility in siting the plant. But you wouldn't necessarily go on a building spree as if a crash nuclear power program was our One Last Hope[tm].
The average person isn't really that dumb, in fact he often displays considerable shrewdness within some limited scope. It's not a matter of having a brain so much as choosing to apply it. You wouldn't have to convince the masses to become geniuses. You'd just have to convince them to grow a spine.
we should be *increasing* our use of energy, not decreasing it.
That argument only makes sense if technology remains constant. I remember the energy crisis of the 1970s. This was before computers and micro-controllers were common. It was still quite common in industrial plants to control liquid flows in industrial plants by using a valve to constrict flow from a dumb pump. That meant energy consumption went up the *less* liquid that was moved. Nobody would do it that way now. You'd use a computer controlled pump.
In 1958, a 21" RCA color TV would have nearly 30 vacuum tubes. Heating the tube filaments and driving the CRT resulted in a power draw 380 watts. A modern 32" (we're talking about progress here) LCD TV can draw as little as 75 watts; that's more than twice the viewing area for 1/5 the energy. The energy consumed watching the 1958 TV for one hour would power an iPad for 150 hours. 380 watt hours should be good for at least 40-50 hours of movie watching on a modern tablet.
A 190 hp 1959 Corvette does 0-60 in 6.9 seconds and guzzles 10 miles/gallon. Fifty years later one of it's descendants does 0-60 in 3.9 seconds and gets 14-20 MPG. For that matter, a Honda Accord EX sedan will do 0-60 in 0.8 seconds faster than the '59 'vette and go nearly three times as far on a gallon of gas.
The lesson is that advancing civilization doesn't get more utility by consuming more energy; if anything it's marked by *less* energy consumed to generate a unit of utility.
What's needed are large scale regional/local energy sequestering for night use: winds die at night, and solar power does as well.
This misconception comes up every time renewable energy is mentioned here. The technology not only exists to store any surplus solar power you generate, it's already been built and widely deployed. It's called a fossil fuel tank.
The objection you raising is a serious one -- for a 100% solar electric system. If we could get some smaller but still absurdly high percentage of our power from renewable sources every excess kilowatt-hour we generated would be "stored" in the form of so many cubic inches of natural gas that is still sitting in a tank because we didn't have to burn it when the sun was shining and the wind was blowing. This "storage" scheme not only requires no investment, it is bound to be more efficient than converting sunlight to electricity to something else then back to electricity.
If we could generate, say 20% as much solar electricity as fossil fuel electricity (an absurd figure for any time in the near future), and at a competitive price, that would have enormous environmental and economic benefits and not require any kind of storage system. Its only as intermittent sources exceed 50% of all power sources that we'd have any kind of need for storage. Today that might happen in "off-grid" applications, but throwing a solar panel up on your roof doesn't require you to take a vow of fossil-fuel chastity.
So if you want to reduce the need for power plants, you're talking about reducing demand
Turn in your geek card! To reduce the need for power plants, you have to reduce *peak* demand, not necessarily *net* demand. We can use your car counter-example to the need for a smart grid to demonstrate the usefulness *of* a smart grid.
Suppose you have an electric car. You tell your charging system to ensure you've got 70 miles range for tomorrow's trip and you're leaving at 7am. The battery needs 5 hours of charging, but the lowest rates are from 2am to 5am -- only three hours. For your normal commute the charger would work only between 2 and 5, but to enable your planned trip it determines the cheapest charge period would be 12:30 am to 5:30 am. Your systems could also negotiate *future* prices. Suppose you're taking a weekend trip. On Monday you'd request the battery be charged for a 100 mile trip by Saturday morning, and the battery would be gradually topped off over the course of the week.
Why wouldn't you top off your battery every night? Well you could, and a lot of people would, but some people might prefer to get a cheaper rate in return for letting the power company top them off when there's cheap surplus power. If you were a two car house, you might keep one car topped off every morning and the other so it's only guaranteed a 30 mile range. But often that second car would have more range. The system might pack some extra joules in before a heat wave strikes, or if there's a night where it's a bit cooler.
The net result of this kind of contract would be to even out off-peak and peak demand, which would *certainly* reduce the need for generation capacity.
It's not like our current grid is dumping massive amounts of power into a hole somewhere.
That's like saying that Ancient Rome had fewer automobile accidents than modern New York. The grid doesn't waste power because it is not used in situations where that would happen, even if it means rolling brown-outs like California had a few years ago.
Perhaps more than the whizbang "smart" feature I described above, we need a grid that makes electricity markets geographically larger. Environmentalists should want this because it allows us to capture intermittent but renewable sources such as solar, wind and tidal, and allows for the construction of larger, more advanced plants that can amortize the cost of pollution controls over more output. Nuclear power advocates should want this because it will enable plants to be built away from population centers, coastlines and geological faults. While consumer facing "smart" features aren't strictly necessary, managing a larger and more diverse set of power grids would mean being able to respond to instantaneous changes in demand and source pricing.
That's your problem right there. Chromium metal has hardness of 8.5 Mohs, smack dab between topaz and corundum. It's harder than most tool steel, which makes it resistant to filing.
A software company bought the campus and uses the office space. The grounds are managed by a non-profit organization and rented out for weddings and public events like music festivals.
Slashdot Mirror
That was my reaction too. Sounds like an urban legend.
The thing that sounded most bogus to me was the $100,000 ransom. Unless it was in cash, it'd be traceable. If it *were* cash, taking that much cash out would trigger a money laundering investigation.
So Party C has a pretty strong case that the code that they received from Party B is licensed under the GPL.(Because the fact that it was modified and distributed is prima facie evidence that the license was accepted by Party B.)
Except that party B's distributing software b under a proprietary license trumps the prima facie evidence that B has accepted the GPL. Many, maybe even most people would think C morally justified in using B's code as if B were in compliance with its own license, and I suspect that B would not be able to win any monetary damages against C, but unless there is some kind of "screw you for being an asshole" rule in the law of contracts, B might be able to win some kind of injunctive relief against C. That might enable them to negotiate some kind of out of court settlement from C, thus allowing B to profit from its misdeeds.
That raises in interesting possibility I hadn't thought about. Just because GPL requires you to give certain rights to any derivative works does it mean that recipients of such works *actually receive those rights*? I'm thinking probably not.
Party A licenses software a under GPL.
Party B incorporates software a into proprietary licensed product b, thus violating GPL.
Party C creates derivative work c from b.
So, is it possible that both C and B are violating software licenses here? It'd work like this. Party C is acting as if b was licensed under GPL as it should have been, *but has not*. Morally, B *should have* licensed b as GPL, *but did not*. Therefore C should have GPL rights to use b, *but does not*.
I'm not so sure. Vinyl records were treasured possessions when I was a kid, and most people didn't throw out their record collections after they got a CD player, but I don't think my kids have ever seen a vinyl record actually being played on a turntable except in old movies. I don't think they've ever seen a 78 RPM record, or a multi-disc vinyl album sleeve.
If you've ever gone through the exercise of disposing of an elder relative's possessions after he or she dies or has to move into a nursing home, you know you can start to get pretty ruthless when his collection of stuff is large. I have friends who have a science fiction collection they've been building at a rate of two books or more a week since the late 40s, and while there are many treasures in it, no collection that size can fail to be dominated by mediocrity. What is the chances that those books (most of them paperbacks printed on cheap high acid paper) will pass on to their grandchildren? To their great-grandchildren? How many vinyl records have been passed down between more than one generation?
Of course records have the issue of playback hardware incompatibility, but storing and taking books along with us as we move incur substantial costs that we tend to take for granted because losing access to the information in the books is unthinkable. Those of us who are bibliophiles pay a price in space, inconvenience and clutter for our collections. I doubt more than a handful of our books will pass through more than one generation of inheritors. Then there's the rest of the world -- all the people we were surprised to see with a book in their hand a few years ago when The DaVinci Code was hot. The people whose kids get to first grade never having been read to. In 50 years, those people will be as likely to have a book in their house as most people are likely to have a 78 RPM record today. Even people like me will no longer have a hundred linear feet of bookshelf or more in our homes. Our small collection physical books will be curiosities for display, like my slide rule collection.
I agree. That hawguy .... (fails saving throw) ... makes me sick.
You just have to cherry pick profitable business from it. Not only is that going to be more profitable, it might provide a better user experience.
Let's take coffee. My house buys a lot of coffee. It's one of the things that might instigate a trip to the grocery store. One of our family members is lactose intolerant, and lactase pills are another market drip driver. A lot of that stuff could just show up on our doorstep every couple of weeks. Occasionally we'd have to go out for extra coffee if guests were coming.
Amazon could easily reduce the frequency and length of my trips to the supermarket. In fact, I'd much prefer to go to the butcher, fish monger and greengrocer for many of my food purchases, but since I'm going to the supermarket anyway to restock all kinds of stuff, I make do with mediocre supermarket substitutes even though I have excellent specialty shops nearby. It wouldn't have to deal with perishable goods at all.
In response, supermarkets would have to become a lot more shopper-friendly to stay in business. I *hate* going to the supermarket, because it's designed to steer you toward certain brands or to encourage impulse purchases. Amazon is too, by the way; but the supermarkets do this by trying to keep you wandering in the store. A about a decade ago search kiosks appeared in the supermarket chains I use, but shortly afterward they disappeared. Since the kiosks worked well for the shopper, I'm guessing they went away because they reduced the size and profitability of the average sale.
I tried PeaPod a few years back, but the problem was that it was even more tedious to use than going to the supermarket. I think it tried to do too much, including things it can't ever do well. I want to see the meat, fish and vegetables before I buy them. Now if I could make regular trips to the butcher, fishmonger and greengrocer and only occasionally have to visit the supermarket, I'd be a happy shopper.
Well, let's talk about a baseline for what we usually consider "affordable". We're spending $5billion/mo. in Afghanistan with no clear strategic purpose or end in sight. We spent two and a half times that *per week* in Iraq. We put 4400 American lives into Iraq and 1400 thus far into Afghanistan, and who knows how many permanently disabled.
So you're proposing $1billion and no US casualties in exchange for a high chance of removing the man who ordered the Lockerbie bombing and funded terrorist groups around the world? For a man who (unlike Sadaam) actually plotted terror attacks on US soil? We're talking about the same Ghadaffi who underwrote and helped plan Charles Taylor's use of terror by amputation against civilian populations, right? The rabid anti-american nutcase who uses his immense oil wealth to stir up trouble for us all around the globe?
$1 billion and zero casualties is no-brainer territory for anything with reasonable probability of success at removing this guy. That's far too low. Let's put the ceiling at zero US casualties, and one month of the Iraq war at its peak cost. I'm pretty dovish, but I'd gladly write a higher tax check next year for my share of that. My share of your absurdly low $1 billion figure wouldn't even buy me a small pizza -- at least if I wanted toppings.
I essentially agree with your analysis. The "United States Armed Forces" should include drones. I don't, however, think the contrary position is completely unreasonable.
Take Clinton's 1998 cruise missile strike against Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan in retaliation for the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. By *our* definition of "US Armed Forces" it should trigger the War Powers Resolution, but many would disagree, and make something like the following argument. In 1973 "Armed Forces" would have meant meant personnel in any conflict where the provisions of the act would come up: soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines etc. The clause even specifies "while equipped for combat", and in other ways seems to assume it is talking about a manned force. Clearly what the law's authors envisioned were combat personnel, not drones or semi-autonomous robots.
So a case ought to be made that "Armed Forces" includes unmanned weapons systems before we assume that is so. I believe the intent of the resolution was to regulate the President's ability to use military force in foreign countries. If that is so, any device or system under his control that can be used to exert military force has to be considered a "US Armed Force", otherwise the law makes nonsensical distinctions for purposes of its intent. The authors of a law don't have to anticipate every future technological innovation in order to pass laws regulating their use.
As I look closer at both sides of the argument I haven't changed my mind, but the contrary position looks stronger than it first appeared. It might well be the case that considering unmanned drones "Armed Forces" would be nonsensical in the context of other laws, say those exclusively concerned with the welfare of US military personnel and their families.
I don't think the ICBM counter-example is such a strong one. You don't need a War Powers Resolution to deal with that; a nuclear can't be hidden and the conflict is over before anyone can debate anything. The WPR is to prevent the President from getting us irretrievably tangled up in a war before Congress can get its act together and demand an explanation. WPR doesn't do anything useful in the ICBM example, but it does in the case of drones, which function just like conventional manned attacked aircraft for purposes of triggering Congressional oversight.
There's a difference between sending an army in to destabilize a stable stable regime in a country with 32 million people in it that sits right on the geographic boundary of the Sunni/Shia and Arab/Kurd divides, and sending drones to assist an existing insurgency that is already destabilizing a regime in a country of six million in the middle of North Africa.
man are you like some kind of Highlander, who pops up throughout history making the same arguments at the beginning of every 10-year war?
As far as Iraq is concerned, I was against it before most people realized there was going to be an invasion of Iraq, back in July of 2002 when I heard Rumsfeld float what what seemed to me to be a trial balloon for invading Iraq. When I heard that, I realized that the bait and switch was on. When the authorization was being debated in Congress, I protested at my senator's office. I was against the Iraq invasion because I thought (a) it would be a distraction that would prolong the Afghanistan war; (b) it would cause a shift of power and influence toward Iran and (c) the occupation would be longer and more difficult than we were being told. What, exactly, did I get wrong?
None of these considerations apply in Libya. That doesn't justify the drone attacks, but it means you can't say, "we did the exact same thing in Iraq and Vietnam". It's a different course of action being taken in a different kind of country. Details matter. Your exact same mode of reasoning by vague historical analogy was used to support the invasion of Iraq, if you are old enough to remember it. The occupation was going to be like post WW2 Japan or post Korean War RoK.
im sorry that us dum dums in the 'citizenry' have the 'audacity' to discuss the law of war. we should just bow our heads, grab our guns, cheer for the king, and make one last run over the top.
Well, I don't know about the other "dum dums" in the citizenry, but if *your* reading level were a little higher you'd notice that I said *I* think that the War Powers act should be invoked and the Libyan intervention should be brought before Congress. However, that doesn't mean that the position the administration is taking is totally absurd. Only an idiot thinks that everyone who disagrees with him must be an idiot. As far as what invoking the War Powers Act would accomplish, it would accomplish nothing of practical use other than reaffirm that the President doesn't have the power to conduct war on his own authority, but that would be enough.
If we tax the wealthy enough, they'll stop being rich and then they won't get the exemptions.
Even when the top tax bracket was at its historical non-wartime maximum, there were plenty of rich people, and plenty of people getting rich. From 1954-1963, the tax rate on people making more than 400K (3.2 million in 2010 dollars) was 91%. The current maximum rate is 35% on incomes over 357,700 (roughly 50K in 1954 dollars).
The argument that a higher tax rate causes wealthy people to invest less and the economy to grow less makes intuitive sense, but we can see from this data that this is not necessarily so. Since the top tax rate was reduced to 35%, the US GDP growth rate has ranged between 1% and 3%. The GDP growth rate was far more robust when the top bracket was 91%. In fact the *lowest* GDP growth in that era was higher than the *higest* growth rate in the 35% era.
Now I'm not going to take a simplistic position here and say high rates for the top tax bracket *cause* economic growth, although looking at the historical co-varation of top tax rates to GDP one is tempted to. But other things were happening in the 1950s and other eras with high tax rates and high GDP growth. What I will say is that the argument that a higher tax for people with millions of dollars of annual income would necessarily kill economic growth is clearly poppycock. *It depends on what else is going on in the economy and the world*. I feel it would be rash to return to the Eisenhower era tax rates of 91%, but I think it would be safe to go with the Reagan era tax rate of 50% on income over a quarter of a million or so in current dollars. That would wipe out our deficit with plenty surplus for critical infrastructure programs like weather satellites. In fact, going back to the post-Reagan rate of 38.5% (if not the Clinton era rates of 39.6%) would help our budget problems a great deal with relatively little risk.
The historical support for high top bracket tax rates killing economic growth simply doesn't exist. If anything the data suggests otherwise. If the deficit is such a risk to the nation's future, it seems reasonable to consider tax increases to the moderate Reagan era rates, if not the 91% rates of the Eisenhower era.
Well, our having this discussion is a bit like non-geeks discussing computer topics. They use relevant terms, but not necessarily with their correct meaning. "Real-time" is a term whose misuse often makes me cringe.
We can't even understand what this argument is about without at least looking at the legal briefs. Clearly the administration isn't claiming that dropping bombs from a drone is a benign or friendly act; they're making the argument that it does not fall into a class of actions defined by some specific law (in this case the War Powers Act I think), and referred to by the shorthand "hostilities" in the text of the law. If the law in question says something like, "A 'hostile action' for the purposes of this act is one in which (a) (b) or (c)," then what we're talking about is whether the Libyan operation qualifies under those terms, regardless of whether it is "hostile" according to the common definition of the word.
I support the Libyan operation, because it's a rare opportunity to take a state sponsor of terrorism out of the picture at relatively low cost. But I think the operation should be authorized by Congress first. That won't happen because the current congress is all too willing to play with critical national interests for short term electoral advantage. At any other time this would be a no-brainer, but for now it's a non-starter. For that reason I would not be surprised if the Administration is bending the law past the point of breaking in order to get the job done. But it is quite possible that a reasonable argument could be made that an operation in which US personnel aren't placed in harm's way *might* not fall under the definition of "hostilities" laid out in certain laws.
To know whether the position taken is as ridiculous as it sounds, we'd have to see the actual arguments being made, as opposed to some dumbed down, hand-waving media account.
Instead of saying 'NO', you need to figure out a way to say 'Yes' while solving the problems that make the request 'stupid and retarded'
It is not my job to tell the boss "yes". It is my job to tell the boss the truth about what he needs to know, employing professional experience and diligence, and of course trying to keep an open mind. Naturally, sometimes my opinion has to be delivered discreetly, in private, but the important thing is for the boss to have access to the truth without having to perform some elaborate deconstruction. Having "no" in my communications toolkit is what keeps my "yes" from being devalued to "maybe".
That said, I don't often say "no". More often I say, "yes, but..." Typically this involves things that the boss hasn't anticipated. After I've brought him up to speed, it's up to him to decide whether it's worth the expense and risk. It is rare that I give an unqualified "no", but when I do it's usually because I am being asked to do something illegal or unethical. Personally, I think no boss in his right mind would prefer employees who casually say "yes" to doing something illegal.
It's true many IT guys blame their own shortcomings on technology. The boss equivalent of this is blaming his failures on employees. I don't think much of for managers think they're three sigma geniuses at business strategy yet don't see their inability to hire employees they can respect as a professional liability.
I'm for a culture of realism and responsibility in business. Subordinates should give realistic advice to superiors. When superiors choose to overrule advice, they should take responsibility for that. It's not necessarily a sign of disrespect to overrule a subordinate. What is disrespectful is refusing to work with a a colleague who disagrees with you, whether that colleague is a subordinate, superior, or peer. Demanding the *appearance* of agreement goes beyond disrespect into the realm of self-delusion.
Well, from others have said it would appear that the licensing costs are closer to $20, but let's go with "a couple of dollars". This is going to be a low cost, low margin, high volume product. They expect to sell a gazillion of them, and a couple of dollars times a gazillion units is (*** bites pinky finger ***) a couple of gazillion dollars.
And how much of a car's operating costs are subsidized by the government? I'm talking about highways, streets, police, traffic signals etc.
The reason that the government subsidizes transit isn't because of some liberal conspiracy to help the indigent. It's because shifting that money over to more automobile subsidies wouldn't produce enough additional capacity to handle the influx of drivers.
I live in a city that has the most expensive mile of road ever built. Yet more than half the commutes into the city are *still* by transit. We might have spent ten times what we did on that road and still not have enough additional auto capacity to replace transit. On the other hand, we probably could have endowed a fund which eliminated transit fares in perpetuity for less than we spent on that road. So why didn't anyone consider that?
If we're subsidizing 90% of the cost of the bus, why not go to 100%? Not only would that attract more riders, it would eliminate the cost of fare collection systems and personnel. That means we'd need a lot less than an 11% increase to eliminate fares, and we'd get additional savings by having less car infrastructure. The reason is that car drivers would get bent out of shape over transit riders getting something "for free", even though they themselves use free and very expensive auto infrastructure and would benefit by having reduced traffic. It's simply not rational to fund 90% of the cost of the bus, and not go all the way to 100%, but the rational thing isn't politically correct.
If you want to see real contractor rip-offs of the public, you should look at the US, where it has become an art form.
I once was invited to a meeting in which a state agency (state withheld to protect the clueless) discussed the next plans for a system it purchased from a major government contractor with an emergency two million dollar federal grant. The agency wasn't a bad agency, mind you. In fact it was a fairly good one, but used to operating on a shoestring. They had no idea whatsoever what things cost, and suddenly they had two million bucks dumped on them that had to be shoveled out the door faster than the speed of thought. A politically connected federal contractor landed the contract and delivered on time and on budget, but the system wasn't really useful unless it was integrated with the agencies various activities.
So I was asked to come and discuss how this could be done. In truth I think I was invited down so they could pick my brain for for free, because it turned out they didn't have *any* money left over from the two million they'd blown on initial development. Even if I'd offered my services pro bono, they wouldn't have had the money to pay my expenses. After the initial presentation, I asked the disgusted state IT guy next to me how much his department would have charged to build the system they'd just bought for two million. His estimate was sixty thousand. Mine was sixty-five.
I've always thought that the whole situation must have been a set-up. The grant was dumped on an agency that had no idea how to procure technology, and they weren't given enough time to put together a reasonable RFP or to obtain competitive bids. It was a perfect sting. Had the extent of the waste come to public attention, some hapless state manager would have taken the fall. People love to crucify bureaucrats. The politician behind the earmark would point his finger at his political enemies at the state level, and his (I am presuming) contractor cronies would truthfully say they had done everything they had contracted for.
The lesson is that while government is often infuriatingly slow, beware of any project where there's pressure to spend taxpayer money before it disappears. Never spend public money in a hurry. "Shovel-ready" equals "graft-ready".
A typical mobile phone can last maybe 10-12 hours on a charge, when talking. Up to two weeks standby. For these devices well let's be generous, make it double the time, that's 24 hours of broadcasting signals. The rest of the year: no battery. And I didn't see a battery on the photos.
The blue plastic wrapped thing is the battery pack. It contains three cells the size of a AA. A single alkaline AA has more energy than most fully charged cell phone batteries, and of course has a multi-year shelf-life. A three alkaline cell could provide (by your calculations) as much as 40 hours of talk time and several years stand-by. There are battery technologies that would out perform this by an additional factor of three, but given given the number of these things produced I think the cheaper technology is a reasonable compromise. Most conversations recorded would be less than an hour or two.
As for the receiver, I don't see why it would be so hard for the secret police to set up a receiver network or even *use* an existing one, but there doesn't even have to be such a network. Since the transmitter would be activated by agents keeping the subject under surveillance, the receiver could even be mounted on the agent's car.
None of which proves what this thing actually does of course, but it has a number of bits that you'd expect in a bug and no alternative explanation for their presence yet. If you could record just ten hours of conversation from *any* car in the territory at *any* time, that'd be a pretty sweet system for the secret police. And it's physically plausible that a bug that looks like this could record much more before having to be swapped out.
Well, look at the thing. If it isn't meant to transmit, then why the UHF antenna? And it has a hefty looking 3 cell battery. Plain old alkaline cells could deliver 1100 maH apiece. More expensive Li-Fe2 cells would provide up to 3000 maH apiece and have good shelf-life. A three cell battery pack could yield as much as 9000 maH, or 10x the energy of a typical cell phone battery when fully charged. Since a regular 900 maH cell phone battery might yield 3 hours talk time, a 3000 maH alkaline battery pack might deliver nine hours or more, and a 9000 maH Li-Fe2 battery pack might yield *30* hours of transmission.
Since the Chinese aren't stupid, we can assume that the device isn't transmitting all the time. If it were *me* designing this program, it'd work like this: the secret police observe a person of interest being picked up by some car, not necessarily known to be associated with that person. The agent calls in the car's registration to HQ, which transmits the "record" command. The conversation is sent to a recording facility, until the "stop recording" command is sent. The battery, even if it's just an alkaline battery, should be good for several uses. When it is close to being used up, the police discreetly replace the device, a process that takes only a minute or so with practice.
You make exactly the point I was going to. What's interesting about this thread is that I agree both with you AND GP. Arrogant pricks running things sucks, whether they do it directly or they use their media clout to strike fear into the hearts of the timid masses.
I guess I'm for a world in which the masses don't rally behind brand X or Y because they are driven by fear. In such a world "elite" wouldn't be the next thing to "child molester" in the emotional lexicon of politics, so people who knew what they were talking about could have their say. And then everyone else could decide how credible that sounded without throwing out any part of the evidence as being too terrible to contemplate.
In such a world, you wouldn't have to believe that *every* nuclear plant is a Fukushima waiting to happen. Nor would you have to believe that *no* nuclear plant is a Fukushima waiting to happen. In such a world you would examine the management and situation of each plant and probably shut some of them down. You might build some new plants with new technology and an updated grid to give you some flexibility in siting the plant. But you wouldn't necessarily go on a building spree as if a crash nuclear power program was our One Last Hope[tm].
The average person isn't really that dumb, in fact he often displays considerable shrewdness within some limited scope. It's not a matter of having a brain so much as choosing to apply it. You wouldn't have to convince the masses to become geniuses. You'd just have to convince them to grow a spine.
we should be *increasing* our use of energy, not decreasing it.
That argument only makes sense if technology remains constant. I remember the energy crisis of the 1970s. This was before computers and micro-controllers were common. It was still quite common in industrial plants to control liquid flows in industrial plants by using a valve to constrict flow from a dumb pump. That meant energy consumption went up the *less* liquid that was moved. Nobody would do it that way now. You'd use a computer controlled pump.
In 1958, a 21" RCA color TV would have nearly 30 vacuum tubes. Heating the tube filaments and driving the CRT resulted in a power draw 380 watts. A modern 32" (we're talking about progress here) LCD TV can draw as little as 75 watts; that's more than twice the viewing area for 1/5 the energy. The energy consumed watching the 1958 TV for one hour would power an iPad for 150 hours. 380 watt hours should be good for at least 40-50 hours of movie watching on a modern tablet.
A 190 hp 1959 Corvette does 0-60 in 6.9 seconds and guzzles 10 miles/gallon. Fifty years later one of it's descendants does 0-60 in 3.9 seconds and gets 14-20 MPG. For that matter, a Honda Accord EX sedan will do 0-60 in 0.8 seconds faster than the '59 'vette and go nearly three times as far on a gallon of gas.
The lesson is that advancing civilization doesn't get more utility by consuming more energy; if anything it's marked by *less* energy consumed to generate a unit of utility.
What's needed are large scale regional/local energy sequestering for night use: winds die at night, and solar power does as well.
This misconception comes up every time renewable energy is mentioned here. The technology not only exists to store any surplus solar power you generate, it's already been built and widely deployed. It's called a fossil fuel tank.
The objection you raising is a serious one -- for a 100% solar electric system. If we could get some smaller but still absurdly high percentage of our power from renewable sources every excess kilowatt-hour we generated would be "stored" in the form of so many cubic inches of natural gas that is still sitting in a tank because we didn't have to burn it when the sun was shining and the wind was blowing. This "storage" scheme not only requires no investment, it is bound to be more efficient than converting sunlight to electricity to something else then back to electricity.
If we could generate, say 20% as much solar electricity as fossil fuel electricity (an absurd figure for any time in the near future), and at a competitive price, that would have enormous environmental and economic benefits and not require any kind of storage system. Its only as intermittent sources exceed 50% of all power sources that we'd have any kind of need for storage. Today that might happen in "off-grid" applications, but throwing a solar panel up on your roof doesn't require you to take a vow of fossil-fuel chastity.
So if you want to reduce the need for power plants, you're talking about reducing demand
Turn in your geek card! To reduce the need for power plants, you have to reduce *peak* demand, not necessarily *net* demand. We can use your car counter-example to the need for a smart grid to demonstrate the usefulness *of* a smart grid.
Suppose you have an electric car. You tell your charging system to ensure you've got 70 miles range for tomorrow's trip and you're leaving at 7am. The battery needs 5 hours of charging, but the lowest rates are from 2am to 5am -- only three hours. For your normal commute the charger would work only between 2 and 5, but to enable your planned trip it determines the cheapest charge period would be 12:30 am to 5:30 am. Your systems could also negotiate *future* prices. Suppose you're taking a weekend trip. On Monday you'd request the battery be charged for a 100 mile trip by Saturday morning, and the battery would be gradually topped off over the course of the week.
Why wouldn't you top off your battery every night? Well you could, and a lot of people would, but some people might prefer to get a cheaper rate in return for letting the power company top them off when there's cheap surplus power. If you were a two car house, you might keep one car topped off every morning and the other so it's only guaranteed a 30 mile range. But often that second car would have more range. The system might pack some extra joules in before a heat wave strikes, or if there's a night where it's a bit cooler.
The net result of this kind of contract would be to even out off-peak and peak demand, which would *certainly* reduce the need for generation capacity.
It's not like our current grid is dumping massive amounts of power into a hole somewhere.
That's like saying that Ancient Rome had fewer automobile accidents than modern New York. The grid doesn't waste power because it is not used in situations where that would happen, even if it means rolling brown-outs like California had a few years ago.
Perhaps more than the whizbang "smart" feature I described above, we need a grid that makes electricity markets geographically larger. Environmentalists should want this because it allows us to capture intermittent but renewable sources such as solar, wind and tidal, and allows for the construction of larger, more advanced plants that can amortize the cost of pollution controls over more output. Nuclear power advocates should want this because it will enable plants to be built away from population centers, coastlines and geological faults. While consumer facing "smart" features aren't strictly necessary, managing a larger and more diverse set of power grids would mean being able to respond to instantaneous changes in demand and source pricing.
Now if you ask me, I will stick to real value like dollars which is the natural measure of Man and all his works, not some silly thing...
Ha! Have you looked at the value of the USD in bitcoins? The dollar tanked yesterday, although it's starting to recover.
That's your problem right there. Chromium metal has hardness of 8.5 Mohs, smack dab between topaz and corundum. It's harder than most tool steel, which makes it resistant to filing.
Ah. The old "they lose money on each sale but make up for it with volume" gambit.
A software company bought the campus and uses the office space. The grounds are managed by a non-profit organization and rented out for weddings and public events like music festivals.