Judging by what actually happened, the answer would be "yes", but the outcome would have differed, and taken far longer to realize overall. After all, there have been tablets for 10 years now, and portable mp3 players out long before the iPod.
I think that, while many like to deride Apple for many reasons, there is one thing that, at least IMHO, commands respect: Apple has a knack for producing products that folks like to use, in forms that make it drop-easy to do so... and in turn they do revolutionize the industry in question, forcing competitors to adopt, adapt, or perish.
Take the iPad... Microsoft and OEMs have had tablets out since 2001-2002 or so. OTOH, those products, well... sucked. They were expensive for what they did, the functionality was crap, the battery drained almost as fast as the laptops did, and the UI was ill-fitted for the job. Then the iPad comes along - a bit limited in flexibility, but almost perfect for the form-factor and what folks expected of it. Battery life is insanely long. The UI is almost perfect for fingers (stylus? who needs that?) And everything about it just seems to 'click' with the non-techie public.
Almost immediately, and like *every other Apple product*, competitors (including Microsoft) begin aping the thing... and in a repeatable progression: First we see a ton of vaporware and 'concept' demos, then massive promises (most of which fall short), then out comes the blatant (and undeniably crap) imitators, and finally, a long time later, some competitors begin trickling in with a few halfway decent competitors... af first falling well short of the mark, in spite of being somewhat decent products in their own right. Eventually the competition becomes almost as capable, perhaps surpassing the Apple product - but by then Apple has the market pretty much sewn up - if not in marketshare, then in profit share. The iPod was like this. Even the iPhone is like this.
I think OTOH that Sun would have dickered around, then come out with a few enterprise-oriented versions, then let them each die, while more consumer-oriented competitors would have picked up the torch and limped along.
I do have to give props to Apple for one thing - without them, most consumer-oriented tech would have likely progressed a whole lot slower than it has. I also think that a lot of corollary bits (e.g. digital music licensing, apps, mobile smartphones, etc) would have been slowed down, if not stalled completely. I say this because Microsoft would have just sat around for the most part, and Linux would have had a much harder time getting anywhere (esp. w/o Google jump-starting things). I mean, sure, there are things that have moved along and disrupted tech nicely w/o Apple, but when you examine them (netbooks for instance), they're not much more than incremental iterations of existing products... not complete disruptors.
I've seen ads on Facebook for stuff I'd normally look into at work (which is what happens when you follow VMWorld's page there). OTOH, I've seen Facebook cue in on the fact that I was once an associate professor, and so it constantly offers me ads for teaching-related bits (yeah, right - like I want to halve my salary and put up with ignorant and cranky boards, deans, and/or districts and superintendents again... no fucking thank you).
Kind of a wash, really. Then again, I don't use the page for anything really geared towards buying things - I use it for (wait for it...) social reasons, mostly to keep in touch with family and friends that refuse to use anything else.
The supreme court has said that it is not possible to be a cartel or monopoly in the entertainment business because customers can always switch to another form of entertainment.
This may not be the case for much longer, considering the convergence of the corporations behind all major commercial forms of entertainment.
You already have movies on your television, political commentary/discussion on your radio, and books which either narrate existing movies, or become movies. Video games come out based on movies or books now, and vice-versa. songs are written specifically for movies, and movies almost always come out with a soundtrack CD. Everyone has their sticky little fingers in the Internet. Sporting events of all kinds are already whored out solid to all of the other forms of entertainment. Arts and crafts are nowadays mostly sold sponsored by some TV show or another, and *cooking* is even getting pulled into this.
As time goes on, we've seen movie studios swallow television networks, and television networks swallow movie studios. It won't be very long before radio gets sucked in, then gaming. Eventually, publishers will get pulled in past the event horizon... and in some cases, IIRC a lot of this has already happened.
I'm thinking that eventually, you'll have one big mega-cartel, and gardening (which will be owned by Monsanto by then anyway).
The role the Catholic Church played in the last dark age of *preserving* knowledge? Who do you think *destroyed it*?
Destruction occurred most often because of wars, civil order breaking down throughout what was left of the Roman Empire (hard to keep a school -- let alone the local local library -- going, when you can't even keep the local barbarian raiders from burning your town down at nearly every opportunity), and then locals getting a bit too zealous (The Library of Alexandria burned to the ground as a result of a local bishop+mob, who hated the chief librarian more than they ever did the scrolls - apparently she was too 'uppity' for their tastes).
Hell, the biggest factor was a general abandonment of the cities by the population at large, which in turn caused a complete lack of trade (for the longest time during this period, Rome itself was simply abandoned, and became a local quarry of sorts for building materials). Hard to constantly raid something that's an empty husk with no gold in it (and was unmaintainable anyway by then), or so the theory goes.
OTOH, your theory has one small problem: during most of the Dark Ages, the only knowledge being copied and passed around was through the few literate folks left... the monks who did all the manuscript copying.
The whole 'OAMG teh eevil churchez is out to bern my precious knowledgez!' trope is scattered and over-hyped at best.
One large threat to a bio dome on Earth is exactly that -- other organized human parties perceiving it as a political threat
Indeed... which is why one would be safer to park it out in orbit, where the local mobs can't quite reach it. OTOH, I think the biggest threat from other people will simply be that of the local starving/freezing mob wanting all the tasty bits and warm environment inside.
Like most mobs in the Dark Ages, you really don't care much about the dogma or politics - especially when your belly is empty and you're shivering from the cold.
That's funny, because out here (Portland, Oregon) all the premium movie channels are high-numbered, while all the crap (including such gems as QVC or one of its clones) hangs out around the low-numbered local channels. The pr0n channels sit way up there in the 800's-900's, next to the freebie music channels.
(Besides, Comcast has The Science Channel at 272 here, if that helps you out any).
SyFy (*puke*) is a whole different channel. The Science Channel is part of the Discovery channel ecosystem (not perfect, I know, but still better than SyFy...)
Actually, most cablecos do it with a moderate package deal (e.g. Comcast does it as part of their 2nd-tier up from basic cable). Out here in PDX, we get it on channel 272, nestled in w/ NatGeo, History International, Military, and (for some odd reason) that distracting celebrity-crap channel A&E stuck in there somewhere...
As far as the general crap on TV goes, that particular grouping of channels makes for a relatively sane place to hang out.
Seriously, I couldn't agree more. Science Channel did wander a bit off the reservation with the whole 'Punkin Chunkin' thing, but otherwise they tend to stay pretty much within the realm of science-related bits.
I'm kind of hoping they could cough up a weekly/daily topical news show (err, again?), and a little Science Fiction would do the place wonders, IMHO.
(yeah, so I ripped off a different show for that title, but...)
Maybe this will (I hope?) mean that the Science Channel picks up some actual Hard Sci-Fi (as in "science", kids, not "horror") shows, perhaps expanding on them?
Doesn't necessarily have to mean making new Firefly episodes (though it would be damned cool if they did that too). Just making new shows that don't suck will suffice.
They can play 'em on one or more nights of the week, and have documentaries (and yeah, even An Idiot Abroad, semi-sucky as I consider it to be) during the rest of the time.
Take the very worst that humans could do to Earth: pollution, mass species extinction, warming, massive radiation, the oceans drying up: none of these would be fraction as bad as what's out there in space on the next planets over.
Most scenarios, you're (mostly) right - a biodome of sorts would work out okay if you planned it right.
OTOH, some scenarios you just cannot escape by hanging around on Earth...
* A 50 to 100-mile-wide asteroid (there's plenty of 'em, some which get real close to Earth) would literally sterilize/melt/broil the Earth's entire surface to 4k degrees Fahrenheit, down to a couple of miles deep. Even if you could burrow deep enough to avoid being baked outright, you'd still have to hang around in that hole for about 3,000-5,000 years until things cooled off enough to come out, hope there's a breathable atmosphere and liquid water waiting up top by then, then drill your way out because the tunnel in will have most likely melted itself shut. May as well try having a colony on Venus for all the good it'll do you.
* Even with a smaller asteroid (say, 5-6 miles wide), you're going to have to be prophetic enough to park your biodome(s) somewhere that won't be cracked open by the resulting earthquakes, if not by the impact(s) itself.
* a virus or bacterium that is perfectly drug-resistant but fatal (but is not necessarily dependent on humans - maybe uses animals as a carrier but is non-fatal to them) would make life impossible on Earth for humans, in spite of perfectly normal climate... even if you could isolate yourself from the organism, you'd still be perpetually stuck in that biodome until that organism goes extinct. Nothing like having at least a quarter-million miles of hard vacuum (and one strong-assed gravity well) to keep the bugs at bay.
* If Yellowstone (or another supervolcano) goes off, you're going to be stuck in that biodome for a few hundred years... with no real source of energy (excepting perhaps geothermal), and zero solar power (think plants, not photovoltaic) until those ash clouds clear out.
Another problem with biodomes in general is the fact that you're holed-up, with not much room for expansion in most scenarios (especially those involving hostile biology), and you're going to have to add materials to it over time (if only for repair and maintenance). In some scenarios, you'd have a far easier/safer time finding those materials off of lunar regolith, or from other asteroids, or etc... than you will locally on Earth.
Finally, you may want to make that biodome defensible. You and your buddies may have a bed in there, but hordes of survivors will also want a piece of it. It's easier to welcome the relative few survivors who manage to get up to you with a spaceship, than it is to fight/kill off mobs of desperate people trying to get what you have - some of whom are almost guaranteed to have the weapons and means to take it from you anyway. Between the initial event, and a period of peace sufficient to consider rebuilding, there's gonna be a shit-ton of hungry, desperate people fighting each other for what's left - few of whom will care very much beyond their next meal or two... let alone about the future of human knowledge.
Seriously, no matter how bad it gets, things simply can't ever get bad enough for us to make leaving more attractive.
Engineer this one for a bit first... I think you'll find that there are a lot of factors that got left out in your assumption.
Now the fall of our current global empire (for lack of a better term) may make the whole biodome thing appealing. It would be similar to the role the Catholic Church played during the last Dark Ages (e.g. monks laboriously copying over the odd technical/literary script or two along with the usual scriptural copying.) OTOH, much like the pre-Medieval Church, a large amont of useful stuff will simply be cast aside due to political (and in their case religious) concerns, lack of manpower sufficient to copy
What about the pornographic lyrics in the music their children listen to, with artists like Rhianna, lady gaga and others singing about fucking girls faces, gang bangs, and BSDM themes that are prevalent in modern music.
I sincerely doubt that parents are playing that kind of music in front of their first-grade kids, let alone allowing them to walk around with iPods full of it... those who do usually wind up starring on an episode of 'Cops' anyway, if only for unrelated reasons.:/
That said, I'm not passing judgement on the fact that it was sexual per se - I'm saying that the guy defrauded the kids' parents and then associated their kids with something pornographic (which is far different than what the singers you mentioned are doing).
I think the fear is that we will descend into a dark age (or even be obliterated entirely) before we can put that knowledge to use.
By way of explanation... with folks living in viable, self-contained colonies on the Moon, Mars, or in Bernal/O'Neill stations, we can at least have the ultimate backup for human knowledge (and humanity itself). This way, if things go to shit here on Earth, at least some people will still be pushing the boundaries of knowledge (or in some scenarios, still be alive in a not-as-hostile environment).
It's nice to have all the ever-increasing knowledge and all, but one 'oh shit!' event, and we'll lose it entirely, having to regain it over thousands of years. Even simple stuff like Concrete, first invented and used by *Romans*, was lost for well over a thousand years between their empire and the Industrial Revolution. Now imagine what it would take to regain something like a Transistor (let alone computer programming) if some massive or cyclical event plunged humanity into another Dark Age. It's not like we can simply write it all down and hope someone decodes it later - the concepts and techniques are too numerous, and far too complex. Unlike the fall of the Roman Empire, if we go down, it's going to get real ugly, real fast (mostly due to over-interdependence, resource distribution, knowledge distribution, and sheer population)... put short, we're balanced a bit more delicately in this particular cycle of civilization. This in turn will mean a longer recovery time. Asimov only scratched the surface of this in his Foundation Series (he should have dug deeper IMHO), but the idea still holds: The more complex a civilization/empire is, the longer the inevitable dark age that follows it.
Given things like historic/cyclic civilizational trends, NEO asteroids, hostile bacteriological evolution, overpopulation, nuclear weaponry, supervolcanoes, human industrial activity, 'idiocracy', zombies, whatever (in descending order of likelihood)? It just makes sense to me that we have a viable backup for all our stuff, our knowledge, and for our DNA (preferably breathing and reproducing).
Overall, It makes for a damned good idea to have some sort of place where humanity can carry on in spite of what happens down here. Besides, having folks actively working and living in space may even help solve some of the bigger problems we're already facing (even those I've listed... especially problems concerning population growth, asteroids, industry, etc)./P
Small problem (mostly technical) with saying that it's covered just because the Principal said that the parents opted-in:
The parents didn't opt-in for that particular usage.
Not saying the prosecution is right (seriously, they went way the hell overboard), but there's a huge diff between a parent opting-in for a harmless child sing-along video, and one opting-in for something that, while pretty lame, is still way the hell out of line for what it was originally sold to the parents as. I believe it would be considered as Fraud on quite a few levels. Doesn't matter whether the kid heard the lyrics directly or not; I'd damned sure not want any children of mine associated with it. Mind you, this has bugger-all to do with sheltering the kids from the Big Bad World(tm) - I just don't want them permanently and publicly associated with some lame-ass YouTube attempt at sexual humor - or rather, as pawns to some jackass and his attempt to get famous by less-than-honorable means.
Also, put it this way - what if, instead of sex, the guy was singing pro-Aryan lyrics, or some similar diatribe about killing Jews, Blacks, or gays? Would you be as okay with having your kid associated with it?
Like I said - jailing the guy is wrong. Wrong as hell. OTOH, it's not like he's some pure flower being stomped on by a jackboot - he *had* to have known that this would turn out badly for him (yet decided to do it anyway...)
That said, IMHO the guy is only guilty of being an overly-cocky dumbass, with a little fraudster thrown in. I hope the trial is dismissed at first opportunity.
OTOH, I'll damned sure cheer the parents on if/when they fire up their lawyers and sue the unholy fuck out of the guy.
Thing is, he may not want that particular bit of publicity anymore, especially since most of the articles linking to the video are laced liberally with the phrase "sexual predator" and worse.
Even for the music industry, that's not exactly a phrase you want popping up (even indirectly) in your portfolio.
An increase in the cost of driving would mean a permanent, structural, reduction in the value of suburbs and exurbs: too far from the city for efficient walking/mass transit, too dense for self-sufficient farming. Some will, certainly, hang on as places for the genuinely wealthy to escape from crime and those of the pigmented persuasion; but Joe "Middle Class" isn't going to be able to afford a white picket fence and two hour commute.
Dunno... if you can park enough commerce in the middle of a chunk of suburb, and run a rail line to it... (well, you'd get something like the towns around Portland, Oregon).
One would think that Microsoft would beta-release their patches to the really big software partners, so that at least some sort of testing could happen.
Then again, the conspiracy theorist side of me keeps saying that maybe Microsoft doesn't mind if the biggest competitor to Hyper-V suffers a few PR flubs once in awhile...
As sibling mentioned, the whole damned market is fungible (Hell, we sell Alaskan crude to Japan and the rest of Asia, if memory serves... with very little making it to the lower 48).
I figure that, *if* renewables do start picking up, then we have options...
* rising gas prices will almost guarantee that folks will (if they can) shift to more fuel efficient vehicles. Hybrids? Probably not until the come down in price to something sane, and EV's will likely not be viable until they come with a decent range (the Nissan Leaf IIRC only gets around 140 miles per charge... then you get to wait an hour or two for it to recharge). Meanwhile, the very poor and the very rich will still be driving SUV's (the former because the things will be cast off like so much detritus), but only one group will actually be able to afford to.
* there will likely be a surge in public transit in many areas - those areas where it exists will likely get a huge boost in routes (now if only they can string a track from PDX to the coast...) Even out in the Western US, where distances between towns are obscenely long, this is already happening to an extent (e.g. Ogden to SLC light rail).
* I get the feeling that the NIMBY crowd will start getting bitch-slapped once the masses realize that either we build the solar/wind farm on that Western Cross-Eyed Spotted Dormouse habitat, or you start putting up with brownouts.
Unlike the crapware, I do find the junk paper mail useful at times:
* Start fires in the fireplace with them * potty train your puppy with 'em * garden compost and under-mulch
I suppose you can use the crapware (before you blow away the box entirely and reinstall) as a means of testing or learning how to decompile, crack, exploit, whatever. After all, if you destroy the binary, so what?
For your particular situation? Here's how you fix that: -- Step one: build a standard generic OS image, with as many generic drivers as possible. Step two: boot each new machine of the same type to immediately dump that built image onto the machine (you have choices here - PXE, USB stick, CD, whatever... just make sure it's networked). Step three: kick back and relax - only takes 20-30 minutes for each box you do. Step four: install any custom drivers if needed. The generic image will have just enough in it to give you a basic box.
I look at the price of some of the systems out there, and I can only assume that without 30-day Office 2010 trial editions and all the other crap they'd probably be in the hole.
Oh, they wouldn't be in the hole - just that some other OEM would beat them on price, which would (assuming the other OEM actually did a decent job of it) put HP and Dell in a bit of a bind. It could also force OEMs to go grey-market, use "house brand" (read: cheap-as-hell) parts, or latch high-spec'd components onto a slower mobo, or......or, they'd just raise the price nice and slowly, so you wouldn't notice without a very close watch over things. They actually have some room to do that, but could only go so high before folks would start looking at Apple and going "you know, I could spend only $x more and get..."
It would make getting a job (or keeping your current one) a bitch, though.
"Sex tapes" may boost a celeb (or wannabe celeb's) career, but for someone who works for a public service organization, a government agency, the military, or most large corporations? It's a quick trip to a pink slip.
('course, it's a good way for the guy who filmed it to get sued or worse, which is why I posted it mostly in jest. Call it a MAD "Mutually Assured Destruction" scenario...)
Slashdot Mirror
Judging by what actually happened, the answer would be "yes", but the outcome would have differed, and taken far longer to realize overall. After all, there have been tablets for 10 years now, and portable mp3 players out long before the iPod.
I think that, while many like to deride Apple for many reasons, there is one thing that, at least IMHO, commands respect: Apple has a knack for producing products that folks like to use, in forms that make it drop-easy to do so... and in turn they do revolutionize the industry in question, forcing competitors to adopt, adapt, or perish.
Take the iPad... Microsoft and OEMs have had tablets out since 2001-2002 or so. OTOH, those products, well... sucked. They were expensive for what they did, the functionality was crap, the battery drained almost as fast as the laptops did, and the UI was ill-fitted for the job. Then the iPad comes along - a bit limited in flexibility, but almost perfect for the form-factor and what folks expected of it. Battery life is insanely long. The UI is almost perfect for fingers (stylus? who needs that?) And everything about it just seems to 'click' with the non-techie public.
Almost immediately, and like *every other Apple product*, competitors (including Microsoft) begin aping the thing... and in a repeatable progression: First we see a ton of vaporware and 'concept' demos, then massive promises (most of which fall short), then out comes the blatant (and undeniably crap) imitators, and finally, a long time later, some competitors begin trickling in with a few halfway decent competitors... af first falling well short of the mark, in spite of being somewhat decent products in their own right. Eventually the competition becomes almost as capable, perhaps surpassing the Apple product - but by then Apple has the market pretty much sewn up - if not in marketshare, then in profit share. The iPod was like this. Even the iPhone is like this.
I think OTOH that Sun would have dickered around, then come out with a few enterprise-oriented versions, then let them each die, while more consumer-oriented competitors would have picked up the torch and limped along.
I do have to give props to Apple for one thing - without them, most consumer-oriented tech would have likely progressed a whole lot slower than it has. I also think that a lot of corollary bits (e.g. digital music licensing, apps, mobile smartphones, etc) would have been slowed down, if not stalled completely. I say this because Microsoft would have just sat around for the most part, and Linux would have had a much harder time getting anywhere (esp. w/o Google jump-starting things). I mean, sure, there are things that have moved along and disrupted tech nicely w/o Apple, but when you examine them (netbooks for instance), they're not much more than incremental iterations of existing products... not complete disruptors.
I think you're both right.
I've seen ads on Facebook for stuff I'd normally look into at work (which is what happens when you follow VMWorld's page there). OTOH, I've seen Facebook cue in on the fact that I was once an associate professor, and so it constantly offers me ads for teaching-related bits (yeah, right - like I want to halve my salary and put up with ignorant and cranky boards, deans, and/or districts and superintendents again... no fucking thank you).
Kind of a wash, really. Then again, I don't use the page for anything really geared towards buying things - I use it for (wait for it...) social reasons, mostly to keep in touch with family and friends that refuse to use anything else.
The supreme court has said that it is not possible to be a cartel or monopoly in the entertainment business because customers can always switch to another form of entertainment.
This may not be the case for much longer, considering the convergence of the corporations behind all major commercial forms of entertainment.
You already have movies on your television, political commentary/discussion on your radio, and books which either narrate existing movies, or become movies. Video games come out based on movies or books now, and vice-versa. songs are written specifically for movies, and movies almost always come out with a soundtrack CD. Everyone has their sticky little fingers in the Internet. Sporting events of all kinds are already whored out solid to all of the other forms of entertainment. Arts and crafts are nowadays mostly sold sponsored by some TV show or another, and *cooking* is even getting pulled into this.
As time goes on, we've seen movie studios swallow television networks, and television networks swallow movie studios. It won't be very long before radio gets sucked in, then gaming. Eventually, publishers will get pulled in past the event horizon... and in some cases, IIRC a lot of this has already happened.
I'm thinking that eventually, you'll have one big mega-cartel, and gardening (which will be owned by Monsanto by then anyway).
The role the Catholic Church played in the last dark age of *preserving* knowledge? Who do you think *destroyed it*?
Destruction occurred most often because of wars, civil order breaking down throughout what was left of the Roman Empire (hard to keep a school -- let alone the local local library -- going, when you can't even keep the local barbarian raiders from burning your town down at nearly every opportunity), and then locals getting a bit too zealous (The Library of Alexandria burned to the ground as a result of a local bishop+mob, who hated the chief librarian more than they ever did the scrolls - apparently she was too 'uppity' for their tastes).
Hell, the biggest factor was a general abandonment of the cities by the population at large, which in turn caused a complete lack of trade (for the longest time during this period, Rome itself was simply abandoned, and became a local quarry of sorts for building materials). Hard to constantly raid something that's an empty husk with no gold in it (and was unmaintainable anyway by then), or so the theory goes.
OTOH, your theory has one small problem: during most of the Dark Ages, the only knowledge being copied and passed around was through the few literate folks left... the monks who did all the manuscript copying.
The whole 'OAMG teh eevil churchez is out to bern my precious knowledgez!' trope is scattered and over-hyped at best.
One large threat to a bio dome on Earth is exactly that -- other organized human parties perceiving it as a political threat
Indeed... which is why one would be safer to park it out in orbit, where the local mobs can't quite reach it. OTOH, I think the biggest threat from other people will simply be that of the local starving/freezing mob wanting all the tasty bits and warm environment inside.
Like most mobs in the Dark Ages, you really don't care much about the dogma or politics - especially when your belly is empty and you're shivering from the cold.
That's funny, because out here (Portland, Oregon) all the premium movie channels are high-numbered, while all the crap (including such gems as QVC or one of its clones) hangs out around the low-numbered local channels. The pr0n channels sit way up there in the 800's-900's, next to the freebie music channels.
(Besides, Comcast has The Science Channel at 272 here, if that helps you out any).
To be fair, engineering *is* a science...
The URL is http://science.discovery.com/ WTF, Slashdot?
SyFy (*puke*) is a whole different channel. The Science Channel is part of the Discovery channel ecosystem (not perfect, I know, but still better than SyFy...)
Actually, most cablecos do it with a moderate package deal (e.g. Comcast does it as part of their 2nd-tier up from basic cable). Out here in PDX, we get it on channel 272, nestled in w/ NatGeo, History International, Military, and (for some odd reason) that distracting celebrity-crap channel A&E stuck in there somewhere...
As far as the general crap on TV goes, that particular grouping of channels makes for a relatively sane place to hang out.
Seriously, I couldn't agree more. Science Channel did wander a bit off the reservation with the whole 'Punkin Chunkin' thing, but otherwise they tend to stay pretty much within the realm of science-related bits.
I'm kind of hoping they could cough up a weekly/daily topical news show (err, again?), and a little Science Fiction would do the place wonders, IMHO.
Hell, I'd be happy with seeing an episode or two showing what it's like from the Alliance POV...
(yeah, so I ripped off a different show for that title, but...)
Maybe this will (I hope?) mean that the Science Channel picks up some actual Hard Sci-Fi (as in "science", kids, not "horror") shows, perhaps expanding on them?
Doesn't necessarily have to mean making new Firefly episodes (though it would be damned cool if they did that too). Just making new shows that don't suck will suffice.
They can play 'em on one or more nights of the week, and have documentaries (and yeah, even An Idiot Abroad, semi-sucky as I consider it to be) during the rest of the time.
Take the very worst that humans could do to Earth: pollution, mass species extinction, warming, massive radiation, the oceans drying up: none of these would be fraction as bad as what's out there in space on the next planets over.
Most scenarios, you're (mostly) right - a biodome of sorts would work out okay if you planned it right.
OTOH, some scenarios you just cannot escape by hanging around on Earth...
* A 50 to 100-mile-wide asteroid (there's plenty of 'em, some which get real close to Earth) would literally sterilize/melt/broil the Earth's entire surface to 4k degrees Fahrenheit, down to a couple of miles deep. Even if you could burrow deep enough to avoid being baked outright, you'd still have to hang around in that hole for about 3,000-5,000 years until things cooled off enough to come out, hope there's a breathable atmosphere and liquid water waiting up top by then, then drill your way out because the tunnel in will have most likely melted itself shut. May as well try having a colony on Venus for all the good it'll do you.
* Even with a smaller asteroid (say, 5-6 miles wide), you're going to have to be prophetic enough to park your biodome(s) somewhere that won't be cracked open by the resulting earthquakes, if not by the impact(s) itself.
* a virus or bacterium that is perfectly drug-resistant but fatal (but is not necessarily dependent on humans - maybe uses animals as a carrier but is non-fatal to them) would make life impossible on Earth for humans, in spite of perfectly normal climate... even if you could isolate yourself from the organism, you'd still be perpetually stuck in that biodome until that organism goes extinct. Nothing like having at least a quarter-million miles of hard vacuum (and one strong-assed gravity well) to keep the bugs at bay.
* If Yellowstone (or another supervolcano) goes off, you're going to be stuck in that biodome for a few hundred years... with no real source of energy (excepting perhaps geothermal), and zero solar power (think plants, not photovoltaic) until those ash clouds clear out.
Another problem with biodomes in general is the fact that you're holed-up, with not much room for expansion in most scenarios (especially those involving hostile biology), and you're going to have to add materials to it over time (if only for repair and maintenance). In some scenarios, you'd have a far easier/safer time finding those materials off of lunar regolith, or from other asteroids, or etc... than you will locally on Earth.
Finally, you may want to make that biodome defensible. You and your buddies may have a bed in there, but hordes of survivors will also want a piece of it. It's easier to welcome the relative few survivors who manage to get up to you with a spaceship, than it is to fight/kill off mobs of desperate people trying to get what you have - some of whom are almost guaranteed to have the weapons and means to take it from you anyway. Between the initial event, and a period of peace sufficient to consider rebuilding, there's gonna be a shit-ton of hungry, desperate people fighting each other for what's left - few of whom will care very much beyond their next meal or two... let alone about the future of human knowledge.
Seriously, no matter how bad it gets, things simply can't ever get bad enough for us to make leaving more attractive.
Engineer this one for a bit first... I think you'll find that there are a lot of factors that got left out in your assumption.
Now the fall of our current global empire (for lack of a better term) may make the whole biodome thing appealing. It would be similar to the role the Catholic Church played during the last Dark Ages (e.g. monks laboriously copying over the odd technical/literary script or two along with the usual scriptural copying.) OTOH, much like the pre-Medieval Church, a large amont of useful stuff will simply be cast aside due to political (and in their case religious) concerns, lack of manpower sufficient to copy
What about the pornographic lyrics in the music their children listen to, with artists like Rhianna, lady gaga and others singing about fucking girls faces, gang bangs, and BSDM themes that are prevalent in modern music.
I sincerely doubt that parents are playing that kind of music in front of their first-grade kids, let alone allowing them to walk around with iPods full of it... those who do usually wind up starring on an episode of 'Cops' anyway, if only for unrelated reasons. :/
That said, I'm not passing judgement on the fact that it was sexual per se - I'm saying that the guy defrauded the kids' parents and then associated their kids with something pornographic (which is far different than what the singers you mentioned are doing).
I think the fear is that we will descend into a dark age (or even be obliterated entirely) before we can put that knowledge to use.
By way of explanation... with folks living in viable, self-contained colonies on the Moon, Mars, or in Bernal/O'Neill stations, we can at least have the ultimate backup for human knowledge (and humanity itself). This way, if things go to shit here on Earth, at least some people will still be pushing the boundaries of knowledge (or in some scenarios, still be alive in a not-as-hostile environment).
It's nice to have all the ever-increasing knowledge and all, but one 'oh shit!' event, and we'll lose it entirely, having to regain it over thousands of years. Even simple stuff like Concrete, first invented and used by *Romans*, was lost for well over a thousand years between their empire and the Industrial Revolution. Now imagine what it would take to regain something like a Transistor (let alone computer programming) if some massive or cyclical event plunged humanity into another Dark Age. It's not like we can simply write it all down and hope someone decodes it later - the concepts and techniques are too numerous, and far too complex. Unlike the fall of the Roman Empire, if we go down, it's going to get real ugly, real fast (mostly due to over-interdependence, resource distribution, knowledge distribution, and sheer population)... put short, we're balanced a bit more delicately in this particular cycle of civilization. This in turn will mean a longer recovery time. Asimov only scratched the surface of this in his Foundation Series (he should have dug deeper IMHO), but the idea still holds: The more complex a civilization/empire is, the longer the inevitable dark age that follows it.
Given things like historic/cyclic civilizational trends, NEO asteroids, hostile bacteriological evolution, overpopulation, nuclear weaponry, supervolcanoes, human industrial activity, 'idiocracy', zombies, whatever (in descending order of likelihood)? It just makes sense to me that we have a viable backup for all our stuff, our knowledge, and for our DNA (preferably breathing and reproducing).
Overall, It makes for a damned good idea to have some sort of place where humanity can carry on in spite of what happens down here. Besides, having folks actively working and living in space may even help solve some of the bigger problems we're already facing (even those I've listed... especially problems concerning population growth, asteroids, industry, etc). /P
Small problem (mostly technical) with saying that it's covered just because the Principal said that the parents opted-in:
The parents didn't opt-in for that particular usage.
Not saying the prosecution is right (seriously, they went way the hell overboard), but there's a huge diff between a parent opting-in for a harmless child sing-along video, and one opting-in for something that, while pretty lame, is still way the hell out of line for what it was originally sold to the parents as. I believe it would be considered as Fraud on quite a few levels. Doesn't matter whether the kid heard the lyrics directly or not; I'd damned sure not want any children of mine associated with it. Mind you, this has bugger-all to do with sheltering the kids from the Big Bad World(tm) - I just don't want them permanently and publicly associated with some lame-ass YouTube attempt at sexual humor - or rather, as pawns to some jackass and his attempt to get famous by less-than-honorable means.
Also, put it this way - what if, instead of sex, the guy was singing pro-Aryan lyrics, or some similar diatribe about killing Jews, Blacks, or gays? Would you be as okay with having your kid associated with it?
Like I said - jailing the guy is wrong. Wrong as hell. OTOH, it's not like he's some pure flower being stomped on by a jackboot - he *had* to have known that this would turn out badly for him (yet decided to do it anyway...)
That said, IMHO the guy is only guilty of being an overly-cocky dumbass, with a little fraudster thrown in. I hope the trial is dismissed at first opportunity.
OTOH, I'll damned sure cheer the parents on if/when they fire up their lawyers and sue the unholy fuck out of the guy.
Thing is, he may not want that particular bit of publicity anymore, especially since most of the articles linking to the video are laced liberally with the phrase "sexual predator" and worse.
Even for the music industry, that's not exactly a phrase you want popping up (even indirectly) in your portfolio.
An increase in the cost of driving would mean a permanent, structural, reduction in the value of suburbs and exurbs: too far from the city for efficient walking/mass transit, too dense for self-sufficient farming. Some will, certainly, hang on as places for the genuinely wealthy to escape from crime and those of the pigmented persuasion; but Joe "Middle Class" isn't going to be able to afford a white picket fence and two hour commute.
Dunno... if you can park enough commerce in the middle of a chunk of suburb, and run a rail line to it... (well, you'd get something like the towns around Portland, Oregon).
One would think that Microsoft would beta-release their patches to the really big software partners, so that at least some sort of testing could happen.
Then again, the conspiracy theorist side of me keeps saying that maybe Microsoft doesn't mind if the biggest competitor to Hyper-V suffers a few PR flubs once in awhile...
As sibling mentioned, the whole damned market is fungible (Hell, we sell Alaskan crude to Japan and the rest of Asia, if memory serves... with very little making it to the lower 48).
I figure that, *if* renewables do start picking up, then we have options...
* rising gas prices will almost guarantee that folks will (if they can) shift to more fuel efficient vehicles. Hybrids? Probably not until the come down in price to something sane, and EV's will likely not be viable until they come with a decent range (the Nissan Leaf IIRC only gets around 140 miles per charge... then you get to wait an hour or two for it to recharge). Meanwhile, the very poor and the very rich will still be driving SUV's (the former because the things will be cast off like so much detritus), but only one group will actually be able to afford to.
* there will likely be a surge in public transit in many areas - those areas where it exists will likely get a huge boost in routes (now if only they can string a track from PDX to the coast...) Even out in the Western US, where distances between towns are obscenely long, this is already happening to an extent (e.g. Ogden to SLC light rail).
* I get the feeling that the NIMBY crowd will start getting bitch-slapped once the masses realize that either we build the solar/wind farm on that Western Cross-Eyed Spotted Dormouse habitat, or you start putting up with brownouts.
Unlike the crapware, I do find the junk paper mail useful at times:
* Start fires in the fireplace with them
* potty train your puppy with 'em
* garden compost and under-mulch
I suppose you can use the crapware (before you blow away the box entirely and reinstall) as a means of testing or learning how to decompile, crack, exploit, whatever. After all, if you destroy the binary, so what?
For your particular situation? Here's how you fix that:
--
Step one: build a standard generic OS image, with as many generic drivers as possible.
Step two: boot each new machine of the same type to immediately dump that built image onto the machine (you have choices here - PXE, USB stick, CD, whatever... just make sure it's networked).
Step three: kick back and relax - only takes 20-30 minutes for each box you do.
Step four: install any custom drivers if needed. The generic image will have just enough in it to give you a basic box.
What about all the people that "just need a computer" so they can go on Facebook or whatever?
I suspect that this is where the tablet market will find its biggest demographic...
I look at the price of some of the systems out there, and I can only assume that without 30-day Office 2010 trial editions and all the other crap they'd probably be in the hole.
Oh, they wouldn't be in the hole - just that some other OEM would beat them on price, which would (assuming the other OEM actually did a decent job of it) put HP and Dell in a bit of a bind. It could also force OEMs to go grey-market, use "house brand" (read: cheap-as-hell) parts, or latch high-spec'd components onto a slower mobo, or... ...or, they'd just raise the price nice and slowly, so you wouldn't notice without a very close watch over things. They actually have some room to do that, but could only go so high before folks would start looking at Apple and going "you know, I could spend only $x more and get..."
It would make getting a job (or keeping your current one) a bitch, though.
"Sex tapes" may boost a celeb (or wannabe celeb's) career, but for someone who works for a public service organization, a government agency, the military, or most large corporations? It's a quick trip to a pink slip.
('course, it's a good way for the guy who filmed it to get sued or worse, which is why I posted it mostly in jest. Call it a MAD "Mutually Assured Destruction" scenario...)