You know, in the 50's the vast majority of Americans in this country wished to differentiate ourselves from communist and totalitarian countries where the phrase "papers please" was as common as hello.
How quickly we forget the danger of a government with to much control and police that arrest and detain people for nothing more than annoying the officer.
Jobs Sued Linux. He's doing it through HTC but there is no question his lawsuit is a direct attack on Android and Linux. The only other company to do so is in bankruptcy and lost. Jobs HATES Google and he will do anything he can to destroy Android, including but not limited to buying ARM and prohibiting sales for use in Android phones or charging 20X for a license to produce processors for Android phones. Job's is a petty and vindictive personality, he will use an ARM purchase to damage Android and Google. Simply look at his public comments about the Google phone and how they "stole" it from Apple. With an Ego like his he can't tolerate competitors and he will engage in vertical integration and buying suppliers to harm Android. Apple already has several monopoly markets, lets hope they aren't allowed to gain others.
They want to kill Linux on the PS3. Ever since they found out the NSA and others were buying hundereds to use in encryption cracking they announce EOL on Linux use and now a new policy to erase your firmware for you.
Problem is some enterprising lawyer is going to launch a class action and say Sony is taking away functionality and that functionality is worth $XXXXXXXX.
And I thought Firefox and IE8 which collectively have like 80% of web traffic didn't run on Webkit, thank you for correcting me and pointing out that both IE8 and Firefox now both run Webkit (at least in your world). Oh how wrong I was and how enlightened I am now!
Webkit is a niche product, not only that but you attribute to Apple that which was at least 50% (and probably closer to 80% with apple primarily being involved in performance enhancement) developed by KDE. Sure Apple came in and tweaked and improved a bit but the base of Webkit was written by KDE and Apples small improvements were rolled back into it's predecessor.
So Gizmodo paid $5k for stolen property and the guy that found it sold stolen property? And this is all publicly documented with admissions and quotes by all parties? Sounds like a slam dunk criminal prosecution and if Apple demands it I guarantee it will happen because they have to political muscle to make it happen. All it will take is Apple or the engineer to file a criminal complaint.
Hope that $5k can pay the legal costs, oh and if convicted they will have the money confiscated. It's apparent Gizmodo doesn't have lawyers.
The best part is the engineer in question now has a tort claim against Gizmodo for destroying his lively hood. There is a clear case history on stuff like this, if they deliberately and with malice harmed his career then they are going to owe him a lot of money. The story in question is a deliberate attack on the engineer and given the persistence of the internet the engineer in question will have a hell of a time ever finding another job and that's a civil tort claim in the waiting.
The engineer in question has probably already started talking to lawyers and in the state of California the law heavily favors the employee that was harmed. Gizmodo was very very stupid in trying to cover up their handling of stolen property. Not only will they face criminal charges along with the guy that sold it to them but they face a major civil tort. It was very foolish to run that story without passing it through some lawyers. Being the press doesn't shield you from stolen property laws or torts for destroying someones career.
Apple is not a friend of FOSS, at best they are one step down from MS. Given the opportunity or threat they will sue Linux companies without hesitation. Their suit against HTC was a direct shot at Android and is a dozen of bogus software patents on stuff they didn't invent. People, please stop supporting Apple with your purchases if you value FOSS, you only justify their suits and threats.
One of those defenses is someone put that gun there to frame me and I didn't know it was there. The honest intent thing is that he had no malice in possessing it but the mere possession was illegal. If you could realistically convict someone in the UK simply by planting an illegal item, even if it was obvious it was planted then your country is in a WORLD of hurt. It would be ridiculously easy to go around and get an entire city thrown in jail simply by planting illegal items, hell you could go house to house and clear out entire neighborhoods. No sane Jurist is going to let innocent people be convicted where it's clear the evidence was planted. The family likely has had their live ruined but the guy isn't going to jail now that their clear evidence of a frame job.
Look if we are going to go to the level of planet wide environmental alterations to avoid reducing carbon output why don't we just move the planet further from the sun? Take the climate models, figure out how much sequestered carbon we could put into the atmosphere, adjust the model, then slide the planet into an orbit farther from the sun that negates the effect of the increased CO2 in the atmosphere. If we ever stop using carbon based energy we just slide the planet back into the current orbit.
People, planet wide massive alteration of environment is as feasible as my ridiculous proposal. We don't understand the full impact of what we are doing or could do.
Climate models are uniformly complex guesses at best and completely wrong at worst. I believe carbon output is a problem long term, if we put all the sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere the planet will eventually return to the planet of the dinosaurs, very warm, very wet and a lot less land (as sea level rises). It's not going to cause human beings to go extinct, it's not going to really harm the planet. What it is going to do is displace a LOT of people and that's going to cause some rather big catastrophic wars. But the solution is not to try to alter something we have no idea what the other effects would be. Of the top of my head millions of bubbling devices in the oceans is going to cause increased acidity from the additional carbonic acid, what's the effect of that? It's a silly idea at best and catastrophic environmental tampering that could cause more severe problems than global warming at worst.
If he started the conflict and was the aggressor nation against Columbia he would not be supported by Brazil or Argentina. They are all sovereign nations and an invasion of one of them by another would not be viewed favorably by the region especially considering his military buildup made Lulu quite nervous.
Unless there is a copyright assignment the original author holds rights to the code. If they didn't specify license it would be immensely stupid to assume that it was anything but GPL because otherwise they have no rights to the codes whatsoever. You could assume that their donation was public domain, but to do so would be at your own risk to prove in a court that is what the author intended. In a he said/she said the court is going to side with the author and you are going to be responsible for damages and disgorgement of revenue. Without the author specifying your only safe course of action is to ask the author what his license on the code is.
Air-burst nuclear weapons are completely ineffective against naval ships. What do you think the pacific naval nuclear tests were for? They towed about dozens of WWII decommissioned ships (including carriers) out to the pacific and air-burst (IIRC) a ~500 Kiloton nuke over the fleet in two separate tests, Able and Baker (http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq76-1.htm). Able was an air-burst that sunk 5 ships (a Heavy Cruiser [captured Japanese Ship], 2 destroyers and 2 transports). Baker was a submerged blast, where the nuclear weapon was held submerged below a ship. Baker sunk 8 ships (2 battleships, 1 carrier, 2 submarines, 1 auxiliary, 2 landing craft and a district craft). During Able the ships with the old teak decks were the most likely to sink. The lesson of these tests was the air-burst nuclear weapons are highly ineffective against naval ships and that effective use of nuclear weapons involved a submerged blast where the concussion wave could damage the hulls. As an aside during the Able test the ships with external fire suppression systems going full blast were barely damaged and in fact the radioactivity level dropped to safe levels within a day on almost all ships. Part of that may be because Able was several hundred feet off target but realistically with the size of blast the distance probably didn't make a bit of difference.
Now if you are talking about aiming a nuclear weapon and hitting the ship with the weapon rather than air-bursting then yes, you could probably sink the carrier, but the rest of the fleet won't even be damaged. With the Aegis system the carrier fleets use it would likely be a terrible waste of a nuclear weapon. Aegis can track more than 100 incoming targets (the actual number it can track and shoot at is classified and Aegis 2 is supposed to be a major improvement). A typical carrier fleet includes at least 2 missile destroyers that can fire double digit missiles per second. And that doesn't even include the cruiser's, sub's, and all the other ships which carry anti-missile missiles. The Baker test showed that the key to nuclear use against a carrier fleet is to drop the nuke into the sea (in the middle of the fleet) and burst it a few dozen feet underwater. Doing so with a cruise missile, even a supersonic one is going to be damn near impossible. The only effective way to do so would be a ballistic missile, probably an ICBM that put the projectile into low earth orbit where it's approach would be damn near impossible to stop. ICBM's have to be shot down before separation of the nukes, otherwise it's near impossible to stop them. On approach the nuke would be going nearly 20k mph directly down. Now how to trigger it a few dozen feet underwater and how to stop the force of the impact with the water from blowing it to pieces is another question all together.
As far as Supersonic Cruise Missiles, realistically you have to wonder why the US abandoned supersonic cruise missile research. Something came up that they realized they missiles are pointless, something that the Indians have obviously overlooked.
Oak leaf? Childs play! I'll raise you microscopic algae! Diatoms have been used in more than one case in the US to convict murderers and were even see as a plot line in Dexter! (after being the lead story for an episode of Forensic Files on Court TV)
Where do I get 6-8 Trillion? Because the estimate about a decade ago before inflation (serious property and construction costs increases, steel is about 3x more expensive, concrete 2x and equipment costs are about double) was 2 trillion or so.
Do you seriously think you can take the construction cost for a length of flat track where ROW already exists and extrapolate cross-continental construction with 3 mountain ranges along the way? The original continental railroad link cost 10X a much per mile to cross the sierras as it did the plains. A High speed rail link across the sierra's alone will blow the 2Billion cost of the Detroit line out of the water just in the excavation and tunneling costs.
Think for god's sake, swear to god common sense is a rare commodity.
You don't transport goods on high speed rail. And why anyone would want to take a train through some of the most unstable countries in the world is beyond me. Sounds like a terrible waste of money. You talk about the US doing it but do you have ANY concept on how much high speed rail costs to build in the US? The high speed rail being built between Detroit and Chicago will cost over $2billion, the cost to build a line from LA to NY would be multiple trillions, guessing I would say 6-8 Trillion dollars. For that money we could buy everyone in the US a plane ticket and make planes the burn pure corn oil and still save trillions.
High speed rail is a non-starter in the US, construction costs are massive and the property costs even more. High speed rail works in much of europe because the lines are built on fairly flat plains (with only major cities connected and short distances between) with a few tunnels through the alps but the topography and distances in the US make high speed rail vastly uneconomical, in fact for freight it would be far cheaper to load it on a boat and sail it around the continent. Planes moving passengers around the US are hundreds of times cheaper both in cost to operate and cost to construct. Planes also need far less maintenance. Do you have any idea how much money the spend in Europe to maintain those high speed rail lines per mile? High speed rail makes sense in Europe for precisely the same reasons it doesn't make sense in the US. There are large cities fairly close together such that air travel doesn't make much sense in that the delays to take off and land are easily bypassed with rail. Those same short distances make maintenance cheaper and travel times quicker by rail and many of the large cities are constructed in the plains near the coast, the large inland cities are limited and easily connected to. The distance between major cities in the US can easily exceed the largest separation in Europe.
It immensely frustrating to compare the US and Europe transportation networks with such a broad stroke. There are many many factors why the US doesn't have workable high speed rail and most of it is geographic. Had high speed rail been economical the major rail companies would have built the lines themselves. Even as it is the only Amtrak lines in the US that are profitable are a couple short connections on the east coast. The rest of Amtrak's operations lose 2 billion a year. High Speed rail would only exacerbate those losses. Unless you are willing to double or triple your taxes don't suggest High speed rail in the US, it's simply not economical at our geographic scale.
The Iranian Government has been desperate to tie the current protests to US involvement. Without that connection they are beating up their own people, with the connection they are stopping "the great satan" from interfering in their internal affairs. I don't know why this surprises anyone, they put people to death a few weeks ago by saying they were working for the west. They are desperate to convince their own public that these election protests have been orchestrated by the US, in fact I would go so far as to say that the more paranoid members of their government are convinced of such and will do anything including manufacturing evidence of such to convince the general public they are right.
If these protests are all internally comprised they are no better than the shah, and regardless of how they feel about things they don't want to have themselves compared to him. They greatly fear that what happened to the shah could happen to them, they must convince everyone that the US is involved so they justify their own repressive actions.
Isn't it great when you distort facts for political reasons? This suit was started during the Bush administration. The current administration is obligated to carry forward policies as otherwise they would have to start from scratch every 4-8 years. And frankly blaming the president for something I doubt he's even aware of is just downright stupid.
Buying or pirating the game (either) gives Ubisoft reason to use DRM. You want them to stop you need to refuse to ever use the game while the drm is there. All pirating the game does is prove they need stricter DRM to prevent pirates it does not prove the DRM is bad. Look back to the TurboTax DRM debacle. People voted with their wallets and TurboTax sales that year were down significantly (I myself didn't buy it that year), the company got the message and next year no DRM and even fewer restrictions in the EULA.
Pirating the game contributes to the publishers belief that DRM is needed, only ignoring the game will send a message. All you that pirated the game to "send a message" got your message through, the next game will have even more DRM. If you want DRM to go away you need to exercise economic punishment of publishers that use it and the only way to do that is not buy it, not pirate it and ignore it completely regardless of how good the reviews are. There are million games out there, you can avoid the ones with the bad DRM.
If you listen to the developer comment on Portal you will find out why Portal is more important to Valve than Half Like is at this point. Portal is probably the most popular "FPS" genre game for Women ever released. IIRC the lead developer at Valve was even a woman. Gabe makes the comment in the developer commentary with Portal that it opened their eyes to the potential to selling games to that other 50% of the population. Portal was a huge hit with the girls and from a business perspective Portal then became more important than Half Life.
You didn't look at the picture in the article did you?
They have a big dead lawn with 6 plants planted between a fence and the sidewalk. It's the most god awfull thing I've ever seen and I'm a HUGE fan of Xeroscaping. They didn't Xeroscape, they let the lawn die then planted half a dozen plants along the sidewalk, in fact the bare dirt behind the fence is going to be a dust hazzard in the summer. They could have easily Xeroscaped and hit the 40% plant rule. Try opening the article and looking at the picture.
Childs isn't going to be convicted. Not only that but the personal injury lawyers in California are going to be falling over themselves to represent him in a civil suit against the city, manager that caused all this and the DA that went along with it. He's worth several million dollars for what they did to him. His job specifically required that he not disclose his password to anyone other than city management. He was confronted with a situation he handled badly with a room full of people demanding the passwords to the WAN. His response should have been that he couldn't legally provide them to the people in the meeting or that he needed an attorney present before answering any questions.
But the past is the past, once the city went to the stage of prosecuting him and publicly demonizing him they had to go full court and try to convict him because they just opened themselves up to civil damages. Now two years later I'm willing to bet they have made at least one offer for a minor conviction to end it all simply so he can't sue them. He didn't fall for the trick and once this is over he's going to be paid a tidy sum, likely with an NDA so the political people involved don't get burned for what they did. Personally I hope he demands they fire the bitch that caused all this as part of the settlement with the city. I know I would.
You are right no one outside the negotiations knows what happened. But we do know a few things, Apple tried to get admitted to the GSM patent group (or license them on terms members of the group get) and Nokia didn't believe what they were offering was worth what they were getting. What resulted was after Nokia determined the negotiations were going nowhere they launched suit to block Apple from continuing to use the GSM patents. Apple fired back with the patent shotgun.
After Apple's attack on Andriod and all FOSS today I'd like to see them lose badly.
Exactly - and thus the standard they set is supposed to be licensed under the same terms by ANYONE.
NOPE. RAND only applies to the members of the GSM club. Apple want's to join that club and thereby gain access to RAND. Nokia is saying what they are bringing to the table isn't worth what they will get from it so they won't let them join the club without paying to join which would gain them access to RAND.
It would be clinically stupid of the GSM authors to allow anyone to join the club and get the patents for free. To get free access you have to bring something worthwhile to the group (and be approved by current members), without that value you must buy your way in. Apple is trying to bully their way in and I hope they lose badly. In fact I hope ITC bars imports of the Iphone.
Current maximum demonstrated efficiency is 42.8% percent, this is actual laboratory verified efficiency numbers. Seeing as how you say maximum theoretical is 10% less than demonstrated currently I guess we can just call the rest of your post utter garbage. If you can't do the most basic of fact checking and rely on pulling numbers out of your butt don't bother posting.
None of the examples you presented REQUIRE software they might use it, but they don't "depend" on it. NONE. Hell more than half of infrastructure you use every day was designed and built before software even existed. Software might increase productivity but it's not essential nor does that put it in the most valuable profession category. Hell more than half the New York Skyline was designed with slide rules, there are roads, aqueducts and sewers built during the Roman empire still in use in Europe. Hell, they went to the moon with slide rules. Software developers aren't essential to civilization. It's a modern profession that increases productivity at the expense of larger errors due to GIGO. We could shoot all the software developers into the SUN and there would be a hiccup as we relearned to do things the old way (as in the early 70's, not the 30's as you claim) but civilization isn't going to collapse without them.
Don't over inflate the value of software, it's a commodity that increases productivity and can make life better, but we got along just fine without it up until the mid 70's and we could do so again. Software development isn't a profession that makes civilization possible and as a result it's not even in the top 100 of most important professions. I swear the kids today just don't realize how far we got before computers even existed.
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You know, in the 50's the vast majority of Americans in this country wished to differentiate ourselves from communist and totalitarian countries where the phrase "papers please" was as common as hello.
How quickly we forget the danger of a government with to much control and police that arrest and detain people for nothing more than annoying the officer.
Jobs Sued Linux. He's doing it through HTC but there is no question his lawsuit is a direct attack on Android and Linux. The only other company to do so is in bankruptcy and lost. Jobs HATES Google and he will do anything he can to destroy Android, including but not limited to buying ARM and prohibiting sales for use in Android phones or charging 20X for a license to produce processors for Android phones. Job's is a petty and vindictive personality, he will use an ARM purchase to damage Android and Google. Simply look at his public comments about the Google phone and how they "stole" it from Apple. With an Ego like his he can't tolerate competitors and he will engage in vertical integration and buying suppliers to harm Android. Apple already has several monopoly markets, lets hope they aren't allowed to gain others.
They want to kill Linux on the PS3. Ever since they found out the NSA and others were buying hundereds to use in encryption cracking they announce EOL on Linux use and now a new policy to erase your firmware for you.
Problem is some enterprising lawyer is going to launch a class action and say Sony is taking away functionality and that functionality is worth $XXXXXXXX.
And I thought Firefox and IE8 which collectively have like 80% of web traffic didn't run on Webkit, thank you for correcting me and pointing out that both IE8 and Firefox now both run Webkit (at least in your world). Oh how wrong I was and how enlightened I am now!
Webkit is a niche product, not only that but you attribute to Apple that which was at least 50% (and probably closer to 80% with apple primarily being involved in performance enhancement) developed by KDE. Sure Apple came in and tweaked and improved a bit but the base of Webkit was written by KDE and Apples small improvements were rolled back into it's predecessor.
So Gizmodo paid $5k for stolen property and the guy that found it sold stolen property? And this is all publicly documented with admissions and quotes by all parties? Sounds like a slam dunk criminal prosecution and if Apple demands it I guarantee it will happen because they have to political muscle to make it happen. All it will take is Apple or the engineer to file a criminal complaint.
Hope that $5k can pay the legal costs, oh and if convicted they will have the money confiscated. It's apparent Gizmodo doesn't have lawyers.
The best part is the engineer in question now has a tort claim against Gizmodo for destroying his lively hood. There is a clear case history on stuff like this, if they deliberately and with malice harmed his career then they are going to owe him a lot of money. The story in question is a deliberate attack on the engineer and given the persistence of the internet the engineer in question will have a hell of a time ever finding another job and that's a civil tort claim in the waiting.
The engineer in question has probably already started talking to lawyers and in the state of California the law heavily favors the employee that was harmed. Gizmodo was very very stupid in trying to cover up their handling of stolen property. Not only will they face criminal charges along with the guy that sold it to them but they face a major civil tort. It was very foolish to run that story without passing it through some lawyers. Being the press doesn't shield you from stolen property laws or torts for destroying someones career.
Apple is not a friend of FOSS, at best they are one step down from MS. Given the opportunity or threat they will sue Linux companies without hesitation. Their suit against HTC was a direct shot at Android and is a dozen of bogus software patents on stuff they didn't invent. People, please stop supporting Apple with your purchases if you value FOSS, you only justify their suits and threats.
One of those defenses is someone put that gun there to frame me and I didn't know it was there. The honest intent thing is that he had no malice in possessing it but the mere possession was illegal. If you could realistically convict someone in the UK simply by planting an illegal item, even if it was obvious it was planted then your country is in a WORLD of hurt. It would be ridiculously easy to go around and get an entire city thrown in jail simply by planting illegal items, hell you could go house to house and clear out entire neighborhoods. No sane Jurist is going to let innocent people be convicted where it's clear the evidence was planted. The family likely has had their live ruined but the guy isn't going to jail now that their clear evidence of a frame job.
Look if we are going to go to the level of planet wide environmental alterations to avoid reducing carbon output why don't we just move the planet further from the sun? Take the climate models, figure out how much sequestered carbon we could put into the atmosphere, adjust the model, then slide the planet into an orbit farther from the sun that negates the effect of the increased CO2 in the atmosphere. If we ever stop using carbon based energy we just slide the planet back into the current orbit.
People, planet wide massive alteration of environment is as feasible as my ridiculous proposal. We don't understand the full impact of what we are doing or could do.
Climate models are uniformly complex guesses at best and completely wrong at worst. I believe carbon output is a problem long term, if we put all the sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere the planet will eventually return to the planet of the dinosaurs, very warm, very wet and a lot less land (as sea level rises). It's not going to cause human beings to go extinct, it's not going to really harm the planet. What it is going to do is displace a LOT of people and that's going to cause some rather big catastrophic wars. But the solution is not to try to alter something we have no idea what the other effects would be. Of the top of my head millions of bubbling devices in the oceans is going to cause increased acidity from the additional carbonic acid, what's the effect of that? It's a silly idea at best and catastrophic environmental tampering that could cause more severe problems than global warming at worst.
If he started the conflict and was the aggressor nation against Columbia he would not be supported by Brazil or Argentina. They are all sovereign nations and an invasion of one of them by another would not be viewed favorably by the region especially considering his military buildup made Lulu quite nervous.
Unless there is a copyright assignment the original author holds rights to the code. If they didn't specify license it would be immensely stupid to assume that it was anything but GPL because otherwise they have no rights to the codes whatsoever. You could assume that their donation was public domain, but to do so would be at your own risk to prove in a court that is what the author intended. In a he said/she said the court is going to side with the author and you are going to be responsible for damages and disgorgement of revenue. Without the author specifying your only safe course of action is to ask the author what his license on the code is.
Air-burst nuclear weapons are completely ineffective against naval ships. What do you think the pacific naval nuclear tests were for? They towed about dozens of WWII decommissioned ships (including carriers) out to the pacific and air-burst (IIRC) a ~500 Kiloton nuke over the fleet in two separate tests, Able and Baker (http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq76-1.htm). Able was an air-burst that sunk 5 ships (a Heavy Cruiser [captured Japanese Ship], 2 destroyers and 2 transports). Baker was a submerged blast, where the nuclear weapon was held submerged below a ship. Baker sunk 8 ships (2 battleships, 1 carrier, 2 submarines, 1 auxiliary, 2 landing craft and a district craft). During Able the ships with the old teak decks were the most likely to sink. The lesson of these tests was the air-burst nuclear weapons are highly ineffective against naval ships and that effective use of nuclear weapons involved a submerged blast where the concussion wave could damage the hulls. As an aside during the Able test the ships with external fire suppression systems going full blast were barely damaged and in fact the radioactivity level dropped to safe levels within a day on almost all ships. Part of that may be because Able was several hundred feet off target but realistically with the size of blast the distance probably didn't make a bit of difference.
Now if you are talking about aiming a nuclear weapon and hitting the ship with the weapon rather than air-bursting then yes, you could probably sink the carrier, but the rest of the fleet won't even be damaged. With the Aegis system the carrier fleets use it would likely be a terrible waste of a nuclear weapon. Aegis can track more than 100 incoming targets (the actual number it can track and shoot at is classified and Aegis 2 is supposed to be a major improvement). A typical carrier fleet includes at least 2 missile destroyers that can fire double digit missiles per second. And that doesn't even include the cruiser's, sub's, and all the other ships which carry anti-missile missiles. The Baker test showed that the key to nuclear use against a carrier fleet is to drop the nuke into the sea (in the middle of the fleet) and burst it a few dozen feet underwater. Doing so with a cruise missile, even a supersonic one is going to be damn near impossible. The only effective way to do so would be a ballistic missile, probably an ICBM that put the projectile into low earth orbit where it's approach would be damn near impossible to stop. ICBM's have to be shot down before separation of the nukes, otherwise it's near impossible to stop them. On approach the nuke would be going nearly 20k mph directly down. Now how to trigger it a few dozen feet underwater and how to stop the force of the impact with the water from blowing it to pieces is another question all together.
As far as Supersonic Cruise Missiles, realistically you have to wonder why the US abandoned supersonic cruise missile research. Something came up that they realized they missiles are pointless, something that the Indians have obviously overlooked.
Oak leaf? Childs play! I'll raise you microscopic algae! Diatoms have been used in more than one case in the US to convict murderers and were even see as a plot line in Dexter! (after being the lead story for an episode of Forensic Files on Court TV)
Where do I get 6-8 Trillion? Because the estimate about a decade ago before inflation (serious property and construction costs increases, steel is about 3x more expensive, concrete 2x and equipment costs are about double) was 2 trillion or so.
Do you seriously think you can take the construction cost for a length of flat track where ROW already exists and extrapolate cross-continental construction with 3 mountain ranges along the way? The original continental railroad link cost 10X a much per mile to cross the sierras as it did the plains. A High speed rail link across the sierra's alone will blow the 2Billion cost of the Detroit line out of the water just in the excavation and tunneling costs.
Think for god's sake, swear to god common sense is a rare commodity.
You don't transport goods on high speed rail. And why anyone would want to take a train through some of the most unstable countries in the world is beyond me. Sounds like a terrible waste of money. You talk about the US doing it but do you have ANY concept on how much high speed rail costs to build in the US? The high speed rail being built between Detroit and Chicago will cost over $2billion, the cost to build a line from LA to NY would be multiple trillions, guessing I would say 6-8 Trillion dollars. For that money we could buy everyone in the US a plane ticket and make planes the burn pure corn oil and still save trillions.
High speed rail is a non-starter in the US, construction costs are massive and the property costs even more. High speed rail works in much of europe because the lines are built on fairly flat plains (with only major cities connected and short distances between) with a few tunnels through the alps but the topography and distances in the US make high speed rail vastly uneconomical, in fact for freight it would be far cheaper to load it on a boat and sail it around the continent. Planes moving passengers around the US are hundreds of times cheaper both in cost to operate and cost to construct. Planes also need far less maintenance. Do you have any idea how much money the spend in Europe to maintain those high speed rail lines per mile? High speed rail makes sense in Europe for precisely the same reasons it doesn't make sense in the US. There are large cities fairly close together such that air travel doesn't make much sense in that the delays to take off and land are easily bypassed with rail. Those same short distances make maintenance cheaper and travel times quicker by rail and many of the large cities are constructed in the plains near the coast, the large inland cities are limited and easily connected to. The distance between major cities in the US can easily exceed the largest separation in Europe.
It immensely frustrating to compare the US and Europe transportation networks with such a broad stroke. There are many many factors why the US doesn't have workable high speed rail and most of it is geographic. Had high speed rail been economical the major rail companies would have built the lines themselves. Even as it is the only Amtrak lines in the US that are profitable are a couple short connections on the east coast. The rest of Amtrak's operations lose 2 billion a year. High Speed rail would only exacerbate those losses. Unless you are willing to double or triple your taxes don't suggest High speed rail in the US, it's simply not economical at our geographic scale.
The Iranian Government has been desperate to tie the current protests to US involvement. Without that connection they are beating up their own people, with the connection they are stopping "the great satan" from interfering in their internal affairs. I don't know why this surprises anyone, they put people to death a few weeks ago by saying they were working for the west. They are desperate to convince their own public that these election protests have been orchestrated by the US, in fact I would go so far as to say that the more paranoid members of their government are convinced of such and will do anything including manufacturing evidence of such to convince the general public they are right.
If these protests are all internally comprised they are no better than the shah, and regardless of how they feel about things they don't want to have themselves compared to him. They greatly fear that what happened to the shah could happen to them, they must convince everyone that the US is involved so they justify their own repressive actions.
Isn't it great when you distort facts for political reasons? This suit was started during the Bush administration. The current administration is obligated to carry forward policies as otherwise they would have to start from scratch every 4-8 years. And frankly blaming the president for something I doubt he's even aware of is just downright stupid.
Buying or pirating the game (either) gives Ubisoft reason to use DRM. You want them to stop you need to refuse to ever use the game while the drm is there. All pirating the game does is prove they need stricter DRM to prevent pirates it does not prove the DRM is bad. Look back to the TurboTax DRM debacle. People voted with their wallets and TurboTax sales that year were down significantly (I myself didn't buy it that year), the company got the message and next year no DRM and even fewer restrictions in the EULA.
Pirating the game contributes to the publishers belief that DRM is needed, only ignoring the game will send a message. All you that pirated the game to "send a message" got your message through, the next game will have even more DRM. If you want DRM to go away you need to exercise economic punishment of publishers that use it and the only way to do that is not buy it, not pirate it and ignore it completely regardless of how good the reviews are. There are million games out there, you can avoid the ones with the bad DRM.
If you listen to the developer comment on Portal you will find out why Portal is more important to Valve than Half Like is at this point. Portal is probably the most popular "FPS" genre game for Women ever released. IIRC the lead developer at Valve was even a woman. Gabe makes the comment in the developer commentary with Portal that it opened their eyes to the potential to selling games to that other 50% of the population. Portal was a huge hit with the girls and from a business perspective Portal then became more important than Half Life.
You didn't look at the picture in the article did you?
They have a big dead lawn with 6 plants planted between a fence and the sidewalk. It's the most god awfull thing I've ever seen and I'm a HUGE fan of Xeroscaping. They didn't Xeroscape, they let the lawn die then planted half a dozen plants along the sidewalk, in fact the bare dirt behind the fence is going to be a dust hazzard in the summer. They could have easily Xeroscaped and hit the 40% plant rule. Try opening the article and looking at the picture.
Childs isn't going to be convicted. Not only that but the personal injury lawyers in California are going to be falling over themselves to represent him in a civil suit against the city, manager that caused all this and the DA that went along with it. He's worth several million dollars for what they did to him. His job specifically required that he not disclose his password to anyone other than city management. He was confronted with a situation he handled badly with a room full of people demanding the passwords to the WAN. His response should have been that he couldn't legally provide them to the people in the meeting or that he needed an attorney present before answering any questions.
But the past is the past, once the city went to the stage of prosecuting him and publicly demonizing him they had to go full court and try to convict him because they just opened themselves up to civil damages. Now two years later I'm willing to bet they have made at least one offer for a minor conviction to end it all simply so he can't sue them. He didn't fall for the trick and once this is over he's going to be paid a tidy sum, likely with an NDA so the political people involved don't get burned for what they did. Personally I hope he demands they fire the bitch that caused all this as part of the settlement with the city. I know I would.
You are right no one outside the negotiations knows what happened. But we do know a few things, Apple tried to get admitted to the GSM patent group (or license them on terms members of the group get) and Nokia didn't believe what they were offering was worth what they were getting. What resulted was after Nokia determined the negotiations were going nowhere they launched suit to block Apple from continuing to use the GSM patents. Apple fired back with the patent shotgun.
After Apple's attack on Andriod and all FOSS today I'd like to see them lose badly.
NOPE. RAND only applies to the members of the GSM club. Apple want's to join that club and thereby gain access to RAND. Nokia is saying what they are bringing to the table isn't worth what they will get from it so they won't let them join the club without paying to join which would gain them access to RAND.
It would be clinically stupid of the GSM authors to allow anyone to join the club and get the patents for free. To get free access you have to bring something worthwhile to the group (and be approved by current members), without that value you must buy your way in. Apple is trying to bully their way in and I hope they lose badly. In fact I hope ITC bars imports of the Iphone.
Current maximum demonstrated efficiency is 42.8% percent, this is actual laboratory verified efficiency numbers. Seeing as how you say maximum theoretical is 10% less than demonstrated currently I guess we can just call the rest of your post utter garbage. If you can't do the most basic of fact checking and rely on pulling numbers out of your butt don't bother posting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell
None of the examples you presented REQUIRE software they might use it, but they don't "depend" on it. NONE. Hell more than half of infrastructure you use every day was designed and built before software even existed. Software might increase productivity but it's not essential nor does that put it in the most valuable profession category. Hell more than half the New York Skyline was designed with slide rules, there are roads, aqueducts and sewers built during the Roman empire still in use in Europe. Hell, they went to the moon with slide rules. Software developers aren't essential to civilization. It's a modern profession that increases productivity at the expense of larger errors due to GIGO. We could shoot all the software developers into the SUN and there would be a hiccup as we relearned to do things the old way (as in the early 70's, not the 30's as you claim) but civilization isn't going to collapse without them.
Don't over inflate the value of software, it's a commodity that increases productivity and can make life better, but we got along just fine without it up until the mid 70's and we could do so again. Software development isn't a profession that makes civilization possible and as a result it's not even in the top 100 of most important professions. I swear the kids today just don't realize how far we got before computers even existed.