Doesn't it bother people like you that the current united states has one of the smallest rich-poor gaps in history. Granted this is true for many countries today, but still it's still really quite amazing. Of all the eras to be born to dirt-poor parents, today's united states would undoubtedly be the top choice. So first : it's not that bad at all. In most of the world, even today, dirt-poor means dying of hunger. In most of history, anywhere in the world, likewise.
It's also been extensively established that government intervention, especially handouts, GROW the gap between rich and poor.
So, while your statement sounds somewhat decent at first glance, at a closer look it's actually a call for creating a bigger gap between rich and poor. And of course it's the old racist populist call for punishing the "minority that stole 'our' wealth".
It also means that the US will be thoroughly fucked, not at the point it defaults on it's loans, but at the point intrest rates raise slightly. Not that I know any country that does better, not the Europeans, not the far-East, nor the middle-east "allah told us not to ask or pay intrest", and especially not Africa.
What happens is simple : The US borrows $100, with no intention of ever paying it back. So the US continually reborrows money to cover the capital. Do this for a while, and eventually you've borrowed so much that the tax income just barely covers the intrest on the capital. Say the intrest rate is 2%. Then the US borrows so much that the taxes just barely cover the 2% yearly intrest payments.
Then intrest rate goes to 2.5%. Result : taxes must raise 25%. Suppose intrest rate doubles : Result 100% raise in taxes.
You see the problem ? Of course, fixing the root problem would mean dropping all social services, military,... for more than a year (as US government debt is way larger than the tax income of 7 years (and that's ignoring that 10% of that income is necessary just for income payments, prolonging the payback time to 10 years). Even if Ebenezer Scrooge would become president, and fire every last government worker or program, it would take over 10 years of having ZERO government programs to pay back the debt, just to break even.
And the very sad news : given the behavior of the US, you might think this is atypically bad for states. No such luck. Even the people with cash mountains (e.g. Saudi Arabia) are worse offenders (and additionally many third-world countries blatantly lie about their obligations. Please don't quote official figures "disputing" this). There are very few states with healthy financial situations.
So the smart money is on states defaulting on loans, and big money is going to be made in which states will default first, and which won't. Suppose you think the US will default on it's loans, and China won't default. Then it's a very, very good investment to loan US dollars to buy Chinese Yuan.
While (some) hedge funds massively profited from the crash, they were not the cause of it.
Technically hedge funds raise the chance of failure of a system by a factor. That means 2 things : (1) a hedge fund, or any number of them, will NEVER be the cause of a crash. They can only accelerate the crashing of systems that were going to crash anyway (so they're a good thing, if you're interested in stability and honesty) (2) there were (and probably are) fundamental issues with our current financial system. It is not stable. Lots of things have been blamed, but there is general agreement that the transfer of financial risk to the government is the root of the problem. So the real solution is to forbid the government underscribing loans in any way, direct or (especially) indirect. Of course that means no more "loan guarantees for the poor" like the CRA. It's not just the big corporations that would get hit by this. Either give the poor money directly, or open a fixed fund, or whatever. But no underscribing loans on guessed delinquency rates by the lender of last resort.
This of course means that the government's intervention on behalf of the poor (or the rich) would become fundamentally limited to a percentage of current taxes, instead of future taxes as it is now, which would translate to a very sharp decline from current levels.
Of course the alternative is that the system will crash again "soon".
Looking at government finances, I would even say that stabilizing the system would mean eliminating some social services (even dropping military spending, even if it is quite large, will not provide more than a short delay). Not small "optimizations" (gotta love Obama-talk, right ?), but huge across-the-board drops in services. Of course, that drop in services *IS* coming, nothing can stop it. What we're doing now is putting ever more money on the table, in trade for an ever smaller delay to the next crash.
So which do you prefer ? Clearly you prefer just blaming some unrelated "rich" guys (not all of whom, of course, are actually rich), hurting them a little bit and diving headfirst into the next crash. Given our current politicians, you're probably going to get your wish.
There's also the inconvenient fact that your EMP wave, using a 250 megaton device, *might* be capable of actually generating interference in the band for, oh, say 10 seconds. Then the devices would need another 30 seconds to reconnect, and all the (radio) effects of your bomb will be gone.
EMP waves just don't work for shutting down isolated electronics (unless we're talking fields like the sun's magnetic field, which put 250 megaton devices to shame). For obvious reasons, any electronic device that includes a radio (esp. a 6ghz one), will be isolated against external interference. An EMP will not be able to disable an isolated device at more than a few dozen meters distance. And frankly, if you're a few dozen meters from a 250 megaton nuclear bomb, you have other things to worry about. Or, more likely, you have nothing at all to worry about anymore.
Disabling electronics... imho there's only one way for a dictator to disable most of his subjects electronic devices : cut power. Of course, that will have more effects than just disabling electronic devices. And in Egypt, presumably a lot of people have solar panels (at least a few small ones).
In fairness, both problems are routing problems. Routing will need simply to solve both location and bandwidth saturation. The question is really quite simple :
How do you route packets from an unknown number of sources to an unknown number of destinations without overloading links. Shortest-path routing, what we mostly have now, doesn't make any sense at all in a mesh network, where there is no distinction between the backbone and the edges.
There's good news too, of course. The Internet is growing faster than the maximum link speeds. In other words, it is becoming a necessity for the large ISPs to develop this technology, because channel bundling is perhaps 8-10 years removed from massive failure. So we *will* need an algorithm deployed that can spread load over a large number of links without knowing what the other nodes are doing.
We're talking a middle eastern muslim government here... These are the people who managed to get 1 million soldiers utterly defeated by 11000 determined men.
So yes, they're going to allow that.
They also "allow" sattellite, wireless links (into, say, Israel or perhaps Lybia), long-range radio,... "allow" as in they don't know how to block it, but they'll kill you if they track it back to you and they can get to you.
Let's just hope they clarify those "just and reasonable" conditions. These are AT&T's "fair and reasonable" conditions:
* A peer of AS7018 must operate a US-wide IP backbone whose links are primarily OC192 (10 Gbps) or greater. For AS7132, the peer’s US-wide IP backbone links must be predominantly OC48 (2.5 Gbps) or greater.
* Peer must meet AT&T at a minimum of three mutually agreeable geographically diverse points in the US. The US interconnection points must include at least one city on the US east coast, one in the central region, and one on the US west coast, and must currently be chosen from AT&T peering points in the following list of metropolitan areas: New York City/Newark NJ, Washington DC/Ashburn VA, Atlanta (for AS7018 only), Chicago, Dallas, Seattle (for AS7018 only), San Francisco/Palo Alto/San Jose, and Los Angeles.
* In addition a peer of AS7018 must interconnect in two mutual non-US peering locations on distinct continents where peer has a non-trivial backbone network. These non-US peerings will be with AT&T’s regional AS only.
* Peer’s traffic to/from the interconnected AT&T US network must be on-net only and must amount to an average of at least 7 Gbps in the dominant direction to/from AT&T in the US during the busiest hour of the month for peers of AS7018. An average of at least 200 Mbps in the dominant direction to/from AS7132 during the busiest hour of the month will be required to be considered for public peering with AS7132.
* Interconnection bandwidth for private peers must be at least 1 Gbps at each US interconnection point.
* A network (ASN) that is a customer of an AT&T US network for any dedicated IP services may not simultaneously be a settlement-free peer of that same network.
* Peer must have a professionally managed 24x7 NOC. Peer must agree to repair or otherwise remedy any problems within a reasonable timeframe. Peer must also agree to actively cooperate to resolve security incidents, denial of service attacks, and other operational problems.
* Peer must maintain a balanced traffic ratio between its network and AT&T. In particular, a new peer must have:
a. No more than a 2.00:1 ratio of traffic into AT&T: out of AT&T, on average each month.
b. A reasonably low peak-to-average ratio.
* Existing peers whose in: out ratio rises above 2.00:1 will be expected to work with AT&T to implement best-exit routing or to take other suitable actions to balance transport costs.
* Peer must abide by the following routing policy:
a. Peer must use the same peering AS at each US interconnection point and must announce a consistent set of routes at each point, unless otherwise mutually agreed.
b. No transit or third party routes are to be announced; all routes exchanged must be peer's and peer’s customers' routes.
c. Peer must filter route announcements from its customers by prefix.
d. Neither party shall abuse the peering relationship by engaging in activities such as but not limited to: pointing a default route at the other or otherwise forwarding traffic for destinations not explicitly advertised, resetting next-hop, selling or giving next-hop to others.
* Peer must be financially stable.
Actually, if we get nuclear fusion operational, that might not be too far from the truth. An ideal fusion fuel, Helium-3, is found on the moon in absurd quantities (due to it's constant exposure to solar radiation), and can literally be scooped up from the ground (ironically the richest deposits are surface, or just-below-surface deposits : no digging required, a spoon will do).
The advantage of Helium-3 ? It fuses without neutron radiation. This means no radioactivity has to be evacuated from the fusion reactor. You could eat the fusion products (after cooling them) and no harm would befall you.
A small scoop of helium-3 in a fusion reactor would produce enough power to transport all of humanity off the earth (by contrast, all the oil in the world could barely move a million people into orbit).
The helium-3 total on the moon contains enough energy, so that if released through fusion it could heat up the earth by 10.000 degrees. All the oil that ever was in the ground was barely enough to heat us (at least directly) 0.0001 degrees. And, the best part, suppose we strip-mine the entire moon blank, after 2 years we'll have another 20 cm of Helium-3 to mine.
So it would basically mean unlimited, "renewable" (as renewable as solar power at least) energy supply for the foreseeable future.
Well yes, you have one side that's at least giving off the semblance of being reasonable and one that's dedicated to the extermination of the other side... Apparently today's "progressive" politics basically come down to attacking the reasonable side. Why ? Because requiring concessions from the genocidal side of course brings violence...
So with the PR-line of avoiding violence, "peace now", rewards intransigence, rewards genocide, rewards starting wars at the drop of a hat.
This is a very postmodernist way of looking at the world. Real life, and anything outside of your own ideology doesn't exist, and one exploits this difference to amass power. The consequences at the long term ? Who cares, besides, if you prefer your own belief system over reality, nothin will go wrong anyway.
It's the perfect policy, of course, from a postmodernist point of view. The point of politics, for a politician, is to amass power, and this "peace now" tactic goes like so: 1. peace now, demand concessions from the reasonable side 2. it is easily defensible, to dumb idiots, that this leads to peace, but of course in reality emboldens the genocidal party 3. needless to say, emboldened genocidal idiots... leads to incidents 4. clearly these incidents "prove" that more concessions are needed, and that thus the politician involved needs to have more power to press the reasonable party further
Of course, at some point the situation will explode. But by then, of course, the politician is out of office. And, for example, for Bill Clinton this worked really well.
Well, like you say, we use the same algorithm as for believing the official story. Critical thinking !
What algorithm you ask ? Well : 1. Does it match my previous opinion on the matter (e.g. here Jews evil vs Muslims evil ?) 2. If yes, believe 3. If no, don't believe
No but the fact that he founded it as a catholic university as the head of the church (need to check if that is correct) kinda does. That university was basically started, like just about all others, and all older ones, by the pope.
Islam's attitude towards science can be trivially summarized : Here's what muslims believe allah said to the caliph. This has as much authority in islam as the ten commandments have in Christianity or Judaism. These are the "divinely inspired" words of the first caliph, about books and knowledge in general :
""they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous."
You have to admit, it is not exactly lacking in clarity.
So why does islam have a reputation for being scientific ? Well, because Egypt was very scientific between 800-1100, and, to a much lesser extent, for Cordoba. There is of course, one tiny little detail : Egypt was at least 95% christian during that time, with separate government for muslims and christians.
Now make a wild guess which of the 2 governments was the only one with a science department...
Same goes for Cordoba. The muslim government carried out genocides on the countryside, to eventually be stopped by the French, Christians still did science.
This is still going on today in Egypt, of course. Noone cares, of course. This is what muslims mean by "freedom of religion", because this is their religion, this is what they want to carry out.
Pfff... the catholic church was perfectly happy to have Galileo be a scientist telling people how the sun was the center of the universe. They even paid for this, and in fact Galileo was hardly the first or only scientist taking this position... it's just that Galileo wanted to be a politician and screwed up badly.
So imho, neither are innocent in this. Science and politics should not mix, and that means politicians stay out of science AND scientists stay out of politics (and by that I mean the people, obviously politicians basing decisions on science is not wrong. It's just people having power in both the scientific and political communities have a serious conflict of intrest).
Of course, neither is innocent. Religion and politics also shouldn't mix.
... and for atoms, planets, suns, puppies, dinosaurs or even slashdotters inside the black hole, obviously only the inside volume matters.
In other words, black holes can contain perfectly normal galaxies, even if the black hole itself it tiny, as seen from our galaxy (a black hole the size of earth could contain our 5 neighboring galaxies).
The only constant is that it's mass would be equal inside and out.
So that could account for a hell of a lot of human-supporting planets totally invisible to us, made of perfectly boring normal matter.
And, just for the fun of it, this is the most probable candidate for dark matter. Most other theories are seriously more exotic than this one.
You know, just for the hell of it, given that life on earth needs hundreds of millions of years to recover from a single supernova, if it's 400 years, and one in thousand would hit us (talk about optimistic), it would *still* prevent complex life from arising on earth.
They would need to be 100 times less frequent than that at least.
Certainly, big complex life forms like us would have issues with the whole "atmosphere blown away" thing...
Earth would be reduced to bacteria for the next few hundred million years. Given this time frame for recovery, and the fact that our galaxy, 100000 light years across, has a supernova every 10 years or so, don't you think that we've been very lucky indeed to have 3 billion years without getting struck by a supernova solar wind ?
I once read an article that claimed that the chances of getting hit by such supernova waves is unknown in near earth, but for the "middle" 20% of the milky way, there is no place at all that has avoided such atmosphere-destroying waves in the last 100 years, never mind the last 3 billion years.
Earth is pretty far out to the edges of the milky way, but not entirely. Entirely at the edge it couldn't survive either apparently.
An obvious flaw in your interpretation is the assumption that ordinary matter vs dark matter necessarily means a different kind of matter than we are made of.
I realize this is the case in Star Trek, however in science without fiction dark matter doesn't have to be any kind of strange in the least.
The only thing *known* about dark matter is that we can't (easily ?) see it. It could very well be totally boring ordinary matter that is somehow prevented from exchanging photons with us (e.g. matter "trapped" inside a huge black hole would be perfectly ordinary matter. It could even form planets and stars, galaxies and puppies, so yes, maybe even life (black holes are bigger on the inside than on the outside. A 0.1mm diameter black hole could contain the earth, both mass and volume. A 1cm black hole can contain the solar system, without necessarily making life unpleasant for those inside it. It's very easy to mathematically see the "big bang" as the formation of a black hole, viewed from the inside, and this would point to an obvious source for those "dark matter" gravity fields : they're simply things outside of "our" black hole).
In general, given event horizons exist, unless matter is falling into the black hole from our nook of the universe, we would have no way of finding it : it would in effect be dark matter, and it could very well be right on top of us (in fact lots of experiments are trying to find small versions of exactly this phenomenon. We may not have found it, but a hell of a lot of physicists seem to think that there's gotta be something there)
And if there are other kinds of event horizons in the universe than merely the black hole kind that we know of (and since black holes are inconsistent, both for quantum mechanics and for relativity, every physicist is hoping this is the case*), then all bets are off.
* and if the universe is inconsistent, the question is meaningless.
Additionally, most theories imply, in case you don't know this, that viewed from most places in the universe, we are inside a black hole (earth does not exchange photons with the large majority of places in the universe since inflation ended). There are problems with this (e.g. it implies that gravitons and photons travel at different speeds -unlikely but certainly not impossible), and we don't have either better theories or actual experimental data to point out which is right.
Earth is much more special than we ever imagined too :
Earth has a very special location in the solar system (the habitable zone is quite small, roughly earth-mars orbit is habitable, everything else is a non-starter) Earth has a very special location in the galaxy (slightly more to the edge wouldn't be habitable, anywhere (and by "near" we mean "within 10000 lightyears) of a supernova event is not habitable, so life is not possible in things like "stellar nurseries") Earth has another property of it's position in the galaxy : deep within, but not at the center, at one of the spiral arms, which stop certain waves from reaching earth. Anywhere near a black hole (even a small one) or neutron star wouldn't be livable (not because of gravity, but due to the frequency of getting hit by absurdly high-energy photons) Earth is on a path that has not suffered either a direct or indirect collision with another star system (an indirect collision would massively heat up the planet by creating friction in the core of the planet. The chances of survival when the entire earth turns into lave seem slim. Earth does not require that much heating up to make that happen) Earth is at a location sufficiently remote (far enough from the other planets) in the solar system to maintain an atmosphere (e.g. mars is not, even though an initial examination of it's orbit wouldn't suggest this) Earth is at a distance from the sun that is close enough to the sun, yet far enough to prevent the sun from blowing our atmosphere away Earth has a molten, metallic core, which protects us from the sun (which is only possible in third- or fourth- generation stars. "Our" solar system has blown up two times already, but the last 2 times there were no earth-like planets. After we blow up, there might be a second earth -unlikely but not impossible as far as we know- but that will be the last habitable planet in our nook of the milky way). I'm sure this is not the end of it
Perhaps a better argument would be that this "dark matter" that we still don't know what it is, also allows for life, and that therefore a balance between the two would be necessary, necessitating a very small positive constant.
Because his argument *is* dependent on the rather far-fetched assumption that this unknown matter can not possibly be alive (or pleasing to God in some other way).
rather, amazon will advertise their price as something like "50% off RRP!" and make a killing.
And so will the developer. The developer will make at least 2.5 times more than amazon makes... Under those conditions, x $ to amazon 2.5 * x $ to me, I fully and completely support amazon making a killing.
But the reason they're not is that "the right" is... well... right : people do not work "for the betterment" of humanity. They work for the betterment of themselves.
Why does open source work according to the extreme left :
Because it's more communist. People sharing. People working for nothing, for me ! People giving things away for free.
Why does open source work in practice (in no particular order) :
a) because it's a good school, and allows dumb starters (and we all start out dumb) to work in trade for comments, experience, and generally improvement in their technique. In general it's the old learning contract : you work in trade for mentoring. b) because it allows a company to trade allowing public access to their program in trade for free or nearly-free software maintenance (ever seen the prices of maintaining and updating a software non-trivial package ?) c) because it allows it's authors to make serious money on consultancy, support, or other forms of non-free services
Note how people took a concept that was developed in a utopian fantasy, then cut out all fantasy, and for once, something remained. It was not an empty shell that was left without the fantasy... it was something real. So people tried starting it, and it worked.
Note also what it does NOT prove : it does not prove the fantasy of sharing works, quite the reverse. Even with real life objects open source is more akin to the development of the car. There were lots of cars "powered by perpetuum mobili" before the first car ever moved, either on electricity or gasoline. A car is not, as many people think, a "horseless carriage", that would hardly work. A car is a development of a fantasy concept, the "automobile" (which is the latin word for moving by itself, but really an early name for the conept of a perpetuum mobile). A number of things were designed by these fantasy cars that never moved, because so many people were utterly convinced the perpetuum mobile existed, things like brakes, suspension, steering,... (horse carriage breaks, for example, would not work on a car at all, and horse carriages do not have steering, they don't need it : the horses turn, and the carriage simply follows them). The real breakthrough of the first car was it's engine. All other parts were in place.
So like the car, which is what remained when science fantasy was cut out of the automobile, open source simply is what remained when communism was cut out of communist software development.
Just don't expect any lefty (and there sure are a lot of "infinite resources" lefties) to acknowledge this is why it works.
Funny how calling apple dictatorial always gets downmodded, even when it is beyond obvious that apple believes in freedom about as much as the average leftist.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't it bother people like you that the current united states has one of the smallest rich-poor gaps in history. Granted this is true for many countries today, but still it's still really quite amazing. Of all the eras to be born to dirt-poor parents, today's united states would undoubtedly be the top choice. So first : it's not that bad at all. In most of the world, even today, dirt-poor means dying of hunger. In most of history, anywhere in the world, likewise.
It's also been extensively established that government intervention, especially handouts, GROW the gap between rich and poor.
So, while your statement sounds somewhat decent at first glance, at a closer look it's actually a call for creating a bigger gap between rich and poor. And of course it's the old racist populist call for punishing the "minority that stole 'our' wealth".
1. Loan money from A ...
2. Kill A, destroy the loan
3. profit
Historically, many, many states have done this. None have survived it. Read up a bit on history and see what happens.
It also means that the US will be thoroughly fucked, not at the point it defaults on it's loans, but at the point intrest rates raise slightly. Not that I know any country that does better, not the Europeans, not the far-East, nor the middle-east "allah told us not to ask or pay intrest", and especially not Africa.
What happens is simple :
The US borrows $100, with no intention of ever paying it back. So the US continually reborrows money to cover the capital. Do this for a while, and eventually you've borrowed so much that the tax income just barely covers the intrest on the capital. Say the intrest rate is 2%. Then the US borrows so much that the taxes just barely cover the 2% yearly intrest payments.
Then intrest rate goes to 2.5%. Result : taxes must raise 25%.
Suppose intrest rate doubles : Result 100% raise in taxes.
You see the problem ? Of course, fixing the root problem would mean dropping all social services, military, ... for more than a year (as US government debt is way larger than the tax income of 7 years (and that's ignoring that 10% of that income is necessary just for income payments, prolonging the payback time to 10 years). Even if Ebenezer Scrooge would become president, and fire every last government worker or program, it would take over 10 years of having ZERO government programs to pay back the debt, just to break even.
And the very sad news : given the behavior of the US, you might think this is atypically bad for states. No such luck. Even the people with cash mountains (e.g. Saudi Arabia) are worse offenders (and additionally many third-world countries blatantly lie about their obligations. Please don't quote official figures "disputing" this). There are very few states with healthy financial situations.
So the smart money is on states defaulting on loans, and big money is going to be made in which states will default first, and which won't. Suppose you think the US will default on it's loans, and China won't default. Then it's a very, very good investment to loan US dollars to buy Chinese Yuan.
While (some) hedge funds massively profited from the crash, they were not the cause of it.
Technically hedge funds raise the chance of failure of a system by a factor. That means 2 things :
(1) a hedge fund, or any number of them, will NEVER be the cause of a crash. They can only accelerate the crashing of systems that were going to crash anyway (so they're a good thing, if you're interested in stability and honesty)
(2) there were (and probably are) fundamental issues with our current financial system. It is not stable. Lots of things have been blamed, but there is general agreement that the transfer of financial risk to the government is the root of the problem. So the real solution is to forbid the government underscribing loans in any way, direct or (especially) indirect. Of course that means no more "loan guarantees for the poor" like the CRA. It's not just the big corporations that would get hit by this. Either give the poor money directly, or open a fixed fund, or whatever. But no underscribing loans on guessed delinquency rates by the lender of last resort.
This of course means that the government's intervention on behalf of the poor (or the rich) would become fundamentally limited to a percentage of current taxes, instead of future taxes as it is now, which would translate to a very sharp decline from current levels.
Of course the alternative is that the system will crash again "soon".
Looking at government finances, I would even say that stabilizing the system would mean eliminating some social services (even dropping military spending, even if it is quite large, will not provide more than a short delay). Not small "optimizations" (gotta love Obama-talk, right ?), but huge across-the-board drops in services. Of course, that drop in services *IS* coming, nothing can stop it. What we're doing now is putting ever more money on the table, in trade for an ever smaller delay to the next crash.
So which do you prefer ? Clearly you prefer just blaming some unrelated "rich" guys (not all of whom, of course, are actually rich), hurting them a little bit and diving headfirst into the next crash. Given our current politicians, you're probably going to get your wish.
There's also the inconvenient fact that your EMP wave, using a 250 megaton device, *might* be capable of actually generating interference in the band for, oh, say 10 seconds. Then the devices would need another 30 seconds to reconnect, and all the (radio) effects of your bomb will be gone.
EMP waves just don't work for shutting down isolated electronics (unless we're talking fields like the sun's magnetic field, which put 250 megaton devices to shame). For obvious reasons, any electronic device that includes a radio (esp. a 6ghz one), will be isolated against external interference. An EMP will not be able to disable an isolated device at more than a few dozen meters distance. And frankly, if you're a few dozen meters from a 250 megaton nuclear bomb, you have other things to worry about. Or, more likely, you have nothing at all to worry about anymore.
Disabling electronics ... imho there's only one way for a dictator to disable most of his subjects electronic devices : cut power. Of course, that will have more effects than just disabling electronic devices. And in Egypt, presumably a lot of people have solar panels (at least a few small ones).
In fairness, both problems are routing problems. Routing will need simply to solve both location and bandwidth saturation. The question is really quite simple :
How do you route packets from an unknown number of sources to an unknown number of destinations without overloading links. Shortest-path routing, what we mostly have now, doesn't make any sense at all in a mesh network, where there is no distinction between the backbone and the edges.
There's good news too, of course. The Internet is growing faster than the maximum link speeds. In other words, it is becoming a necessity for the large ISPs to develop this technology, because channel bundling is perhaps 8-10 years removed from massive failure. So we *will* need an algorithm deployed that can spread load over a large number of links without knowing what the other nodes are doing.
We're talking a middle eastern muslim government here ... These are the people who managed to get 1 million soldiers utterly defeated by 11000 determined men.
So yes, they're going to allow that.
They also "allow" sattellite, wireless links (into, say, Israel or perhaps Lybia), long-range radio, ... "allow" as in they don't know how to block it, but they'll kill you if they track it back to you and they can get to you.
Let's just hope they clarify those "just and reasonable" conditions. These are AT&T's "fair and reasonable" conditions :
* A peer of AS7018 must operate a US-wide IP backbone whose links are primarily OC192 (10 Gbps) or greater. For AS7132, the peer’s US-wide IP backbone links must be predominantly OC48 (2.5 Gbps) or greater.
* Peer must meet AT&T at a minimum of three mutually agreeable geographically diverse points in the US. The US interconnection points must include at least one city on the US east coast, one in the central region, and one on the US west coast, and must currently be chosen from AT&T peering points in the following list of metropolitan areas: New York City/Newark NJ, Washington DC/Ashburn VA, Atlanta (for AS7018 only), Chicago, Dallas, Seattle (for AS7018 only), San Francisco/Palo Alto/San Jose, and Los Angeles.
* In addition a peer of AS7018 must interconnect in two mutual non-US peering locations on distinct continents where peer has a non-trivial backbone network. These non-US peerings will be with AT&T’s regional AS only.
* Peer’s traffic to/from the interconnected AT&T US network must be on-net only and must amount to an average of at least 7 Gbps in the dominant direction to/from AT&T in the US during the busiest hour of the month for peers of AS7018. An average of at least 200 Mbps in the dominant direction to/from AS7132 during the busiest hour of the month will be required to be considered for public peering with AS7132.
* Interconnection bandwidth for private peers must be at least 1 Gbps at each US interconnection point.
* A network (ASN) that is a customer of an AT&T US network for any dedicated IP services may not simultaneously be a settlement-free peer of that same network.
* Peer must have a professionally managed 24x7 NOC. Peer must agree to repair or otherwise remedy any problems within a reasonable timeframe. Peer must also agree to actively cooperate to resolve security incidents, denial of service attacks, and other operational problems.
* Peer must maintain a balanced traffic ratio between its network and AT&T. In particular, a new peer must have:
a. No more than a 2.00:1 ratio of traffic into AT&T: out of AT&T, on average each month.
b. A reasonably low peak-to-average ratio.
* Existing peers whose in: out ratio rises above 2.00:1 will be expected to work with AT&T to implement best-exit routing or to take other suitable actions to balance transport costs.
* Peer must abide by the following routing policy:
a. Peer must use the same peering AS at each US interconnection point and must announce a consistent set of routes at each point, unless otherwise mutually agreed.
b. No transit or third party routes are to be announced; all routes exchanged must be peer's and peer’s customers' routes.
c. Peer must filter route announcements from its customers by prefix.
d. Neither party shall abuse the peering relationship by engaging in activities such as but not limited to: pointing a default route at the other or otherwise forwarding traffic for destinations not explicitly advertised, resetting next-hop, selling or giving next-hop to others.
* Peer must be financially stable.
(source http://www.corp.att.com/peering/)
So by these conditions, the law would achieve exactly nothing. I especially love the 7 Gbit in several loc
Actually, if we get nuclear fusion operational, that might not be too far from the truth. An ideal fusion fuel, Helium-3, is found on the moon in absurd quantities (due to it's constant exposure to solar radiation), and can literally be scooped up from the ground (ironically the richest deposits are surface, or just-below-surface deposits : no digging required, a spoon will do).
The advantage of Helium-3 ? It fuses without neutron radiation. This means no radioactivity has to be evacuated from the fusion reactor. You could eat the fusion products (after cooling them) and no harm would befall you.
A small scoop of helium-3 in a fusion reactor would produce enough power to transport all of humanity off the earth (by contrast, all the oil in the world could barely move a million people into orbit).
The helium-3 total on the moon contains enough energy, so that if released through fusion it could heat up the earth by 10.000 degrees. All the oil that ever was in the ground was barely enough to heat us (at least directly) 0.0001 degrees. And, the best part, suppose we strip-mine the entire moon blank, after 2 years we'll have another 20 cm of Helium-3 to mine.
So it would basically mean unlimited, "renewable" (as renewable as solar power at least) energy supply for the foreseeable future.
Well yes, you have one side that's at least giving off the semblance of being reasonable and one that's dedicated to the extermination of the other side ... Apparently today's "progressive" politics basically come down to attacking the reasonable side. Why ? Because requiring concessions from the genocidal side of course brings violence ...
So with the PR-line of avoiding violence, "peace now", rewards intransigence, rewards genocide, rewards starting wars at the drop of a hat.
This is a very postmodernist way of looking at the world. Real life, and anything outside of your own ideology doesn't exist, and one exploits this difference to amass power. The consequences at the long term ? Who cares, besides, if you prefer your own belief system over reality, nothin will go wrong anyway.
It's the perfect policy, of course, from a postmodernist point of view. The point of politics, for a politician, is to amass power, and this "peace now" tactic goes like so: ... leads to incidents
1. peace now, demand concessions from the reasonable side
2. it is easily defensible, to dumb idiots, that this leads to peace, but of course in reality emboldens the genocidal party
3. needless to say, emboldened genocidal idiots
4. clearly these incidents "prove" that more concessions are needed, and that thus the politician involved needs to have more power to press the reasonable party further
Of course, at some point the situation will explode. But by then, of course, the politician is out of office. And, for example, for Bill Clinton this worked really well.
Well, like you say, we use the same algorithm as for believing the official story. Critical thinking !
What algorithm you ask ?
Well :
1. Does it match my previous opinion on the matter (e.g. here Jews evil vs Muslims evil ?)
2. If yes, believe
3. If no, don't believe
What I believe you ask ?
Well, I also believe in compromise.
No but the fact that he founded it as a catholic university as the head of the church (need to check if that is correct) kinda does. That university was basically started, like just about all others, and all older ones, by the pope.
Islam's attitude towards science can be trivially summarized : Here's what muslims believe allah said to the caliph. This has as much authority in islam as the ten commandments have in Christianity or Judaism. These are the "divinely inspired" words of the first caliph, about books and knowledge in general :
""they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous."
You have to admit, it is not exactly lacking in clarity.
So why does islam have a reputation for being scientific ? Well, because Egypt was very scientific between 800-1100, and, to a much lesser extent, for Cordoba. There is of course, one tiny little detail : Egypt was at least 95% christian during that time, with separate government for muslims and christians.
Now make a wild guess which of the 2 governments was the only one with a science department ...
Same goes for Cordoba. The muslim government carried out genocides on the countryside, to eventually be stopped by the French, Christians still did science.
This is still going on today in Egypt, of course. Noone cares, of course. This is what muslims mean by "freedom of religion", because this is their religion, this is what they want to carry out.
Euhm ... yes it does. Especially in physics.
Ideally :
Side A
Side B
Hypothesis : describe experiment. If sideA is right -> outcome A, if sideB is right -> outcome B
Experiment : setup, measurements, caveats, ...
Conclusion : sideA is right. Can someone please replicate my findings ?
Pfff ... the catholic church was perfectly happy to have Galileo be a scientist telling people how the sun was the center of the universe. They even paid for this, and in fact Galileo was hardly the first or only scientist taking this position ... it's just that Galileo wanted to be a politician and screwed up badly.
So imho, neither are innocent in this. Science and politics should not mix, and that means politicians stay out of science AND scientists stay out of politics (and by that I mean the people, obviously politicians basing decisions on science is not wrong. It's just people having power in both the scientific and political communities have a serious conflict of intrest).
Of course, neither is innocent. Religion and politics also shouldn't mix.
... and for atoms, planets, suns, puppies, dinosaurs or even slashdotters inside the black hole, obviously only the inside volume matters.
In other words, black holes can contain perfectly normal galaxies, even if the black hole itself it tiny, as seen from our galaxy (a black hole the size of earth could contain our 5 neighboring galaxies).
The only constant is that it's mass would be equal inside and out.
So that could account for a hell of a lot of human-supporting planets totally invisible to us, made of perfectly boring normal matter.
And, just for the fun of it, this is the most probable candidate for dark matter. Most other theories are seriously more exotic than this one.
You know, just for the hell of it, given that life on earth needs hundreds of millions of years to recover from a single supernova, if it's 400 years, and one in thousand would hit us (talk about optimistic), it would *still* prevent complex life from arising on earth.
They would need to be 100 times less frequent than that at least.
Certainly, big complex life forms like us would have issues with the whole "atmosphere blown away" thing ...
Earth would be reduced to bacteria for the next few hundred million years. Given this time frame for recovery, and the fact that our galaxy, 100000 light years across, has a supernova every 10 years or so, don't you think that we've been very lucky indeed to have 3 billion years without getting struck by a supernova solar wind ?
I once read an article that claimed that the chances of getting hit by such supernova waves is unknown in near earth, but for the "middle" 20% of the milky way, there is no place at all that has avoided such atmosphere-destroying waves in the last 100 years, never mind the last 3 billion years.
Earth is pretty far out to the edges of the milky way, but not entirely. Entirely at the edge it couldn't survive either apparently.
An obvious flaw in your interpretation is the assumption that ordinary matter vs dark matter necessarily means a different kind of matter than we are made of.
I realize this is the case in Star Trek, however in science without fiction dark matter doesn't have to be any kind of strange in the least.
The only thing *known* about dark matter is that we can't (easily ?) see it. It could very well be totally boring ordinary matter that is somehow prevented from exchanging photons with us (e.g. matter "trapped" inside a huge black hole would be perfectly ordinary matter. It could even form planets and stars, galaxies and puppies, so yes, maybe even life (black holes are bigger on the inside than on the outside. A 0.1mm diameter black hole could contain the earth, both mass and volume. A 1cm black hole can contain the solar system, without necessarily making life unpleasant for those inside it. It's very easy to mathematically see the "big bang" as the formation of a black hole, viewed from the inside, and this would point to an obvious source for those "dark matter" gravity fields : they're simply things outside of "our" black hole).
In general, given event horizons exist, unless matter is falling into the black hole from our nook of the universe, we would have no way of finding it : it would in effect be dark matter, and it could very well be right on top of us (in fact lots of experiments are trying to find small versions of exactly this phenomenon. We may not have found it, but a hell of a lot of physicists seem to think that there's gotta be something there)
And if there are other kinds of event horizons in the universe than merely the black hole kind that we know of (and since black holes are inconsistent, both for quantum mechanics and for relativity, every physicist is hoping this is the case*), then all bets are off.
* and if the universe is inconsistent, the question is meaningless.
Additionally, most theories imply, in case you don't know this, that viewed from most places in the universe, we are inside a black hole (earth does not exchange photons with the large majority of places in the universe since inflation ended). There are problems with this (e.g. it implies that gravitons and photons travel at different speeds -unlikely but certainly not impossible), and we don't have either better theories or actual experimental data to point out which is right.
Earth is much more special than we ever imagined too :
Earth has a very special location in the solar system (the habitable zone is quite small, roughly earth-mars orbit is habitable, everything else is a non-starter)
Earth has a very special location in the galaxy (slightly more to the edge wouldn't be habitable, anywhere (and by "near" we mean "within 10000 lightyears) of a supernova event is not habitable, so life is not possible in things like "stellar nurseries")
Earth has another property of it's position in the galaxy : deep within, but not at the center, at one of the spiral arms, which stop certain waves from reaching earth.
Anywhere near a black hole (even a small one) or neutron star wouldn't be livable (not because of gravity, but due to the frequency of getting hit by absurdly high-energy photons)
Earth is on a path that has not suffered either a direct or indirect collision with another star system (an indirect collision would massively heat up the planet by creating friction in the core of the planet. The chances of survival when the entire earth turns into lave seem slim. Earth does not require that much heating up to make that happen)
Earth is at a location sufficiently remote (far enough from the other planets) in the solar system to maintain an atmosphere (e.g. mars is not, even though an initial examination of it's orbit wouldn't suggest this)
Earth is at a distance from the sun that is close enough to the sun, yet far enough to prevent the sun from blowing our atmosphere away
Earth has a molten, metallic core, which protects us from the sun (which is only possible in third- or fourth- generation stars. "Our" solar system has blown up two times already, but the last 2 times there were no earth-like planets. After we blow up, there might be a second earth -unlikely but not impossible as far as we know- but that will be the last habitable planet in our nook of the milky way).
I'm sure this is not the end of it
Perhaps a better argument would be that this "dark matter" that we still don't know what it is, also allows for life, and that therefore a balance between the two would be necessary, necessitating a very small positive constant.
Because his argument *is* dependent on the rather far-fetched assumption that this unknown matter can not possibly be alive (or pleasing to God in some other way).
For more analysis than you can shake a stick at :
http://blog.wolfram.com/2008/10/16/stock-market-returns-by-presidential-party/
(strictly speaking it's not about public debt ... but it's definitely related)
(it includes a lot of details. E.g. how do democrats get such very good returns ? Well searching for "inflation" in that page will tell you how)
*sigh* point 1 is subjective, and that's being generous. It's also plainly false. Compared to the previous keepers of the peace
Earlier time of relative peace and globalist trade routes ?
a) the period before the barbary wars
b) classical times
You're going to claim it's Holland that's securing trade routes world-wide ? Okay ... why exactly am I discussing anything with you ?
rather, amazon will advertise their price as something like "50% off RRP!" and make a killing.
And so will the developer. The developer will make at least 2.5 times more than amazon makes ... Under those conditions, x $ to amazon 2.5 * x $ to me, I fully and completely support amazon making a killing.
But the reason they're not is that "the right" is ... well ... right : people do not work "for the betterment" of humanity. They work for the betterment of themselves.
Why does open source work according to the extreme left :
Because it's more communist. People sharing. People working for nothing, for me ! People giving things away for free.
Why does open source work in practice (in no particular order) :
a) because it's a good school, and allows dumb starters (and we all start out dumb) to work in trade for comments, experience, and generally improvement in their technique. In general it's the old learning contract : you work in trade for mentoring.
b) because it allows a company to trade allowing public access to their program in trade for free or nearly-free software maintenance (ever seen the prices of maintaining and updating a software non-trivial package ?)
c) because it allows it's authors to make serious money on consultancy, support, or other forms of non-free services
Note how people took a concept that was developed in a utopian fantasy, then cut out all fantasy, and for once, something remained. It was not an empty shell that was left without the fantasy ... it was something real. So people tried starting it, and it worked.
Note also what it does NOT prove : it does not prove the fantasy of sharing works, quite the reverse. Even with real life objects open source is more akin to the development of the car. There were lots of cars "powered by perpetuum mobili" before the first car ever moved, either on electricity or gasoline. A car is not, as many people think, a "horseless carriage", that would hardly work. A car is a development of a fantasy concept, the "automobile" (which is the latin word for moving by itself, but really an early name for the conept of a perpetuum mobile). A number of things were designed by these fantasy cars that never moved, because so many people were utterly convinced the perpetuum mobile existed, things like brakes, suspension, steering, ... (horse carriage breaks, for example, would not work on a car at all, and horse carriages do not have steering, they don't need it : the horses turn, and the carriage simply follows them). The real breakthrough of the first car was it's engine. All other parts were in place.
So like the car, which is what remained when science fantasy was cut out of the automobile, open source simply is what remained when communism was cut out of communist software development.
Just don't expect any lefty (and there sure are a lot of "infinite resources" lefties) to acknowledge this is why it works.
Funny how calling apple dictatorial always gets downmodded, even when it is beyond obvious that apple believes in freedom about as much as the average leftist.
Oh right ... now I see.