Re:Don't Understand?
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Steal This Film
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You might have a point, except that the laws that you're talking about don't cover the sort of mere "facilitation" that you can perhaps the Pirate Bay of doing. If the Pirate Bay was actually committing copyright infringement, then you'd have a basis to go after them via the Berne Convention. However, the legal system there has held that a BT tracker isn't actually infringing, since it merely points to files held elsewhere (the "Napster Defense").
Thankfully, just because a particular legal argument isn't valid somewhere, doesn't automatically extend that precedent everywhere. Although I have no doubt that somewhere, the *AA organizations are working on a treaty that will solve that little "loophole" too.
"Income" might not be the best metric
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Steal This Film
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Low income is relative. Actually, I think in this case it's not so much a case of "low income" versus "high income," but a person's relative amount of disposable income. That is, two people might be making the same amount of money, but one person might have a lot more money to spend on entertainment, while the other person might have significantly higher fixed expenses. (Say, a wife and kids. Or husband and kids. Whatever.) Assuming you treat the computer and internet connection as a sunk cost, the person without the additional disposable income could "afford" to download, but not to buy DVDs.
It's not really an excuse for piracy so much as an explanation of the motives involved. Given the choice between paying for something and getting the exact same thing (or something they value equivalently) for free, people are always going to pick free. Honestly I think the reason people with higher incomes don't download is not because they see much additional value in the DVD, but because they value their time more highly, and don't want to mess around with file sharing programs or hunting down torrents. At a certain point, it just becomes easier to drive down to Blockbuster/Best Buy and buy the disc than it does to download it. It's an opportunity cost calculation.
This doesn't make sense. Google Spreadsheet has one feature -- sharing, online, from anywhere -- that Excel can't touch. In all other respects, it's admittedly primitive. But if you want to do that, there's not really any question. You either use Google Spreadsheet, or you find some sort of roundabout way to avoid the problem and use Excel. (By trying to email the documents back and forth, which isn't really online in any significant sense of the word.)
Google's doesn't offer much in the way of data analysis, but if you just wanted to work on something with someone else, online, it's great. And the best part about it that it exports to Excel, so then you can take it and do all your analysis/reporting/charting in Excel. They're not mutually exclusive.
There's really no compelling reason to use Google Spreadsheet if you're satisfied with Excel as a single-user, desktop PC application; the people who are going to find it interesting are those who are constantly running into the limitations that Excel has when you attempt to use it collaboratively.
I think the market for Google Spreadsheet isn't in a direct replacement of an offline, desktop spreadsheeting program, but as part of a more collaborative workflow.
Honestly I don't think Google is aiming to replace Excel, per se. MS has too long a head start, and frankly they'd just be putting themselves in the position of playing catch-up, forever. (Kinda like WINE; people that want to find some reason not to like it, are always going to find one.)
Rather than just looking at G-Spreadsheet as "Excel...but free!" it seems better to look at what it can offer that Excel can't. Particularly since being 'free' isn't that compelling a feature, given that most companies see Microsoft Office as a sunk cost -- just part of the overhead of owning a computer. The killer feature of Google Spreadsheet is sharing.
A little ways up in the thread somebody was discussing a problem (that is very common) where you might send a bunch of people a very simple spreadsheet, in his example it was a class grading sheet. Each of them work on it and send it back to you. When you get it back, you have a mess -- how do you combine the changes back into one document? There's really not any good way to do it. The best thing you can do is to have a rigid document-management workflow, where only one person at a time can have the "working copy" of a document, and then they pass it around. (Storing it on a fileserver basically does this, but necessitates a fileserver and also brings in additional problems.)
There's definitely a market for something that allows for a lot more collaboration than the MS Office suite either allows or is designed for. Google, if they're smart (and I have every reason to think that they are) is probably looking to do more than just "reinvent the wheel...online." Or at least, if they're going to reinvent the wheel, they know that their wheel has to have some compelling features that will make people switch. In this case, I don't think that the feature is going to be the fact that it's free, it's going to be the ability to share and collaborate without worrying about CMSes, file sharing, Citrix, or any of the other hacks which people basically use in order to make single-user desktop apps more collaborative.
In the same way that someone once joked that IRC is "multiplayer Notepad," G-Cal might begin as "multiplayer Excel," but end up looking like something totally different from what it would be like, without the interactive/collaborative ability.
True. The only place I've seen a "water club" is in a government office; although I know of several private-sector offices where free coffee has been simply dropped by the employer recently, so maybe such things will start to happen there, too.
If I was managing an office, it would seem like free coffee is a no-brainer: it probably makes people more productive, it shows you value them at least nominally, and it stops people from running out for coffee breaks to get their fix in the middle of the morning.
I think this is probably pretty close to the truth. While there definitely may be an aspect of sociopathology involved in corporate advancement, I think it's also likely that someone who's making $200,000+ a year and brokering million or billion-dollar deals every day, just doesn't value the bagel very much. It's such a trivial amount of money to them, it doesn't seem worth the bother to find change (if they even carry cash) and pay for it.
Obviously there's a sense of "entitlement" there as well, but I think people are jumping on the 'all executives are sociopaths' bandwagon a little quickly. It reeks of sour grapes.
If I was trying to keep people from taking bagels/muffins/coffee in a situation like that, rather than putting out a "coin jar" where people have to put in a piddling amount every time they take an item, which requires that they keep small change hanging around (or cash money in general, which many people don't have), it might be easier to let people pay in advance. E.g., in many government offices the water coolers are paid for by members of the "water club;" if you want to drink water, you pay $10 at the beginning of the quarter and get your name put on a list that's taped to the front of the water cooler (or simply made known to everyone else).
It's more than plausible that going with nuclear power for their domestic needs, and selling oil to foreign buyers, could offer the greatest return.
While you're right, it's possible that could be true, what makes me very suspicious of it, was that if they could make energy for their own consumption at a lower cost than they could sell their own oil on the world market for, why wouldn't the states they're selling oil to (the West), who already have nuclear programs, already be doing that? After all, when we burn oil in the U.S. to generate power, we also have to pay for its transportation cost halfway around the world.
It seems rather specious that they would sense for them to spend billions of dollars developing an alternateve source of energy, when one is so readily available -- so readily available, in fact, that most other countries forgo nuclear energy in favor of simply buying it.
But overall I think this is a silly argument to have; it's not Iran's domestic energy reserves that have really sparked so much international concern over their nuclear program, it's because of its government's attitude with regards to Israel, particularly in light of recent comments by their President. Were it not for their stated aim of destroying the Israelis, and their "peaceful nuclear research" looking so much like a bomb factory, I doubt anyone would really give a damn if that's where they decided to spend their money.
Although it's been a while since I've actually looked at the physics of it, the heavy-water reactor they're discussing constructing is what you'd need in order to produce plutonium from natural uranium, and thus have a modern, Pu-based weapon. It's heavy-water reactors like those which have produced most of the Plutonium that are in the U.S. (and ex-Soviet arsenals, although they did seem to be fond of graphite-moderated breeders as well). The heavy water acts as a moderator, which slows down the neutrons enough to induce beta-decay in the nonfissile uranium atoms, and convert them to plutonium...which, being chemically different from uranium, can be processed out of the spent fuel rods more easily than separating the various uranium isotopes.
The uranium enrichment facilities (centrifuges, etc.) which Iran was also constructing, can be seen as a parallel bomb-making process. They're all part of the isotope separation, which brings natural uranium up to the point where it can be either reacted in a light water reactor, or used in a bomb (depending on whether you go to around 3% for a power reactor or all the way up to 90+% for a bomb). On the whole, a uranium enrichment facility is a lot less problematic than a Pu-breeder reactor, as long as it's monitored. (So that you can tell how far they're enriching the uranium.)
So you're correct about the uranium devices being somewhat less problematic than the plutonium devices; they tend to be bigger and have a lower power for their size and weight, and I don't think they can be as easily used as the initiator of a hydrogen (fusion) bomb. However, the reason the whole heavy water thing is news, is because it shows Iran is going for the smaller weapons as well.
As other people have pointed out though, right now they're working on making the heavy water that would go in a breeder reactor, it's not clear that they actually have the capability yet. The real showdown will happen once they actually have a reactor built and fueled which is capable of breeding plutonium from natural or low-enriched uranium. Allowing them to have that capability would be tacit acceptance of an Iran which is not only nuclear, but has the capability of producing nuclear cruise missles, and perhaps thermonuclear weapons as well.
I think you have the right idea (although, sadly I don't think we'll sever our dependence on that oil for a long time), however I think where you go off-base is that the U.S. would let Israel and the various Arab countries just 'slug it out.'
The only reason that the U.S. support for the Israelis isn't even more glaringly obvious than it already is, has to do with our dependence on the Arabs for oil. There is a far greater social connection between the U.S. and Israel than between the U.S. and the Arab states. Outside of the ethnic communities that have direct ties to Arab countries, the "average American" population has little in common with any state in the area, besides Israel. (Probably the next-most-favored would be Lebanon, because of the Christian minority there.) Israel is a basically democratic, technologically advanced, secularist state, founded by European emigrants; the Arab countries by and large have little apparent interest in Western-style democracy or the secularist ideology that pervades our legal, governmental, and social systems.
It comes down to "foreignness." On the whole, Israel and Israeli society is far less foreign to a majority of Americans than the society of almost any Middle Eastern Arab country is. In a conflict between those two groups, without overarching geopolitical self-interests (i.e. petroleum), I think you'd see the United States come down firmly and instantly on the side of Israel.
This, I think, is one of the reasons why you see Iran playing the nuclear gambit at this point; they know that they have maximum influence over the rest of the world right now, particularly in the U.S., because of our dependence on petroleum. If they wanted to make a play either against Israel or purely for themselves (in order to align themselves as a regional power), this is the time to do it. When the oil runs out, so does their time in the spotlight.
Were it not for oil preventing the U.S. from getting too far behind Israel, I think we'd already
They need nuclear power like a submarine needs a screen door.
They're sitting on one of the richest petroleum reserves in the world, and selling it off in order to get hard currency, which they want to use to develop a domestic energy industry that relies on imported nuclear fuel? Right.
I'm not saying it's a complete impossibility; under different leadership, in a different situation, if their priorities were obviously not what they are today, it might make sense for them to be looking for a post-petroleum energy source. Heck -- the rest of the world is. But building an obsolete plutonium-factory nuclear reactor (which hasn't exactly solved the rest of the world's energy needs) isn't the way to go about it.
If peaceful energy research was their goal, there are lots of ways they could go about it which wouldn't be so obviously antagonistic. But they're not, and the point is that they've done little to assure the rest of the world that they're out to do anything but build nuclear weapons and use them in a jihad against Israel or the West generally.
Seconded. If 'peaceful research' was really their goal, the design of their plant is rather suspect. I'm sure the Indians would have been happy to share with them their designs for a Thorium, non-weaponizable breeder system, or any number of countries would have appreciated an infusion of petrodollars into their existing R&D programs in return for setting up a facility in Tehran. Heck; with the amount of money they're burning, they could have become the world leader in any area of research that they want.
Nothing about their whole program says anything besides "bomb development," and that doesn't bode particularly well for regional stability, particularly with their president regularly sounding like the second coming of Heinrich Himmler.
That said, I'm not sure, given the number of nuclear weapons that are floating around in the world today, that it's practical to assume that we'll keep the Iranians from acquiring them indefinitely. In fact, it's starting to look more and more like the worldwide non-proliferation age is over. The question isn't whether a nuclear weapon will be used in the Middle East, and it's hardly even a question who it will be used against. The question is where, and when, and what the response will be.
The problem in this case is that unlike a few years back with Iraq, the Iranians have this time created such a well-timed diversion (Lebanon) that the Israelis aren't in much of a position for a repeat performance of 1981. Or at least, they're in a worse position. For them to destroy the plant in Iran would almost certainly guarantee that they'd receive the blame for providing the spark to reignite hostilities on the northern border, and I'm not sure if they have the stomach for that at the moment.
The situation in Iraq makes any US action that might be perceived as risking our troops a political impossibility; and the Europeans, Russians, and Chinese aren't interested in doing anything about Iran's nuclear ambitions in general, because they know they won't be the first targets of any weapons they produce.
Thus, the overall stage seems set for Tehran to continue as long and as far as they can: with Israel tied up because of Lebanon and the US pinned due to Iraq, there's no reason not to go for the bomb.
Unless there's a major shift in attitude and pressure, I think it's really only a matter of time before Iran goes nuclear; already a pariah state, they have little to lose and much to gain. And once they have it, it seems to be only a further interlude before it's used on the obvious target, Israel, whether directly or by proxy.
There's a big difference here. Normally, when you have an informant, they either need to give the police enough information to go and do the investigation themselves and find the conclusive evidence; or, if they come up with the evidence themselves (or provide a lot of very specific information), then they usually have to go and testify in court.
In this case, the 'mystery hacker' basically came up with the evidence (he told them exactly where to find it, and he had ample opportunity to have planted it), but he's not in a position where he could easily testify. Because he had access to the defendant's computer (illegally), but can't come testify (because he's in Turkey, because the police don't know who he is, whatever), it seems like they're giving the guy a good defense that the evidence was planted.
It's just sloppy policework.
For a phyiscal-goods example, it's as if somebody dropped a dime on you and told the police that when they had broken into your car earlier in the day to steal your radio, they saw that you had a baggie of heroin in the ashtray. So the police go and arrest you, and find the bag of heroin. Without being able to track down the informant and get their testimony, or some form of physical evidence linking the bag to you in such a way that doesn't leave you with a planted-evidence defense, they have a pretty weak case. (Unless they can get you to confess, which is actually pretty common.)
I'll be interested in seeing what the outcome of this case actually is. If they guy doesn't negotiate some sort of plea deal, and the only thing they found on his computer was the porn that the hacker told them about, I think he has a pretty good chance of either getting off, or forcing the police to find some way of getting the hacker to come in and testify.
Allowing in evidence that was obtained in this manner would be a mistake, and justice wouldn't be served in the long run by it, even if the immediate consequence was letting the guy off the hook.
I can't believe they'd ask the guy to keep "investigating." It seems to break every basic rule of police procedure and preservation of evidence.
If this guy's defense lawyer isn't a total retard, or if he doesn't blow it and confess under interrogation, he's going to walk.
All he has to say is "hey, I don't know where the porn came from -- my computer was hacked! The police even have proof that some mysterious Turkish guy was in my computer!" And what are the police going to say, ask the judge and jury to take the word of some anonymous guy on IRC, that he didn't plant the evidence?
When you do your 'investigation' that way, they're creating a hole the size of the Titanic.
Look, I don't like defending kiddy pornographers, but it seems like a pretty good defense that there's a good possibility that you're being framed, when all the evidence came to the police by way of some mysterious, psuedonymous foreigner who had the opportunity to plant the material themselves; unless Mr. Turkish Hacker is willing to come and testify, that is.
If companies are starting to advertise Linux compatibility on products sold in mainstream retail stores, than that's a big step forward. I've yet to see it though.
What brand/model card was this, and where did you see it? The last time I went shopping for them, I took a walk through the local WorstBuy, and it was the usual morass of Windows-only cards with identical model numbers and different chipsets -- basically, your only solution for Linux was "Plug'N'Pray." (I gave up and got a spool of Cat6, after messing with ndiswrappers for too long.)
Actually there is another part of Sony which is (and really always has) been good: their professional video gear.
This is not anything that 'regular folks' ever touch, but their professional equipment has always been top-notch. There are a ton of BetaSP decks and cameras out there in operation, and probably will be for years.
I think they missed the boat a little on digital stuff and have handed a lot of business off to Panasonic, but you can start a holy war among camera guys with that.
At any rate, I think that you can't say that Sony is incapable of producing quality gear... it's like they just produce either quality stuff for a market that doesn't exist, or they hobble what could be a good solution with artificial restrictions, because they're afraid of alienating another aspect of the empire. (E.g., they never made a good consumer digital audio player because of piracy fears from Sony Music.)
The best thing that could happen to that company would be if they split it out into a number of smaller independent organizations. I think the Japanese have thing for giant industrial conglomerates that produce everything, and this is anathema to them, but eventually it's going to have to be done. Far from there being any advantage to having the same company make movies and music and consumer hardware, it's a huge disadvantage.
Just out of curiosity (and yes, I am very jealous), do you have any idea what the bit rate is of those MPEG-4 HD streams?
It would be interesting to see how many the WL network would be capable of handling at once.
I'm not sure how many video streams the network has to be able to carry for people to consider it practical. Obviously, if the network can handle one stream, it's not going to work well for most households, who have more than one TV. And when you get into TIVO-type DVR boxes, then you might need more than one stream per viewing device, if your DVR boxes have multiple "tuners"...the number of simultaneous streams could get pretty large quickly, I think. All depends on your viewing habits, I guess.
Insurance companies don't cover loss of data, though. They'll replace that 500GB hard drive full of all your photos/videos/purchased-music with... a blank 500GB hard drive. It's just like having a photo album: to you, it might be priceless, to the insurance adjuster, it's just a $15 Pioneer photo album from WalMart.
Hopefully someone would have the immediate necessities of life taken care of before they'd start to worry about data backups, but that doesn't mean that there's not a big (and increasing) demand for off-site storage for home users.
Your use of the phallic capital "I", as a reminder of the misogynist and violent nature of patriarchial culture, is offensive and incites violence. We must ban its use, and replace it with the capital "O" instead, which represents peace, tranquility, and the circle of life.
I've been saying the same thing every time this discussion comes up. Now I just don't waste my breath.
Sometimes it's better to just let idealists try their thing; if you try to tell them that their idealism is flawed, they'll just tar and feather you. Just shut your mouth and make the best of it that you can.
I think the most likely outcome of this whole project, if they ever get around to shipping a bunch of them to a really poor country, is that they'll be taken by corrupt government officials or warlords and sold back in return for hard currency that can be used to purchase weapons. The kids will end up with guns, and the PC's will end up on eBay.
The status quo in the developing world will basically remain unchanged, but we'll all end up with marginally cheaper laptops, because producing these things is going to cause component prices to fall due to the economies of scale involved.
If you want to be cynical, look at it this way: a whole lot of rich governments, and probably a few poor ones, are going to give you a nice indirect subsidy on your next AMD laptop. Enjoy.
in fact, macs are probably worse, they just SEEM easier, because if it works, it works, if it doesn't, too bad.
Except that's exactly the reality of the situation. Macs probably have 1/10th the hardware compatibility that Linux does, but they seem like they "Just Work" because everything is clearly marked. If you want a wireless card, you don't go down to Best Buy and buy some $35 piece of trash that maybe works / maybe won't, you go to the Apple store, spend $99, and get something that you KNOW is going to function flawlessly.
That's what Linux is missing. It's really hard to tell whether a particular piece of hardware will work with Linux, without trying it and wasting a lot of time. That's what's frustrating. That's what drives users away. If there was a clear set of hardware that would be guaranteed to work, and you could tell what it was in the store, even if it cost more, I think that would be superior to the status quo.
Apple has shown that people will pay extra for compatibility. I don't think Linux is any different.
I have a HP "workstation" computer, which was certified to work with RHEL, because I didn't want to risk getting a PC that might have had components in it that weren't compatible with Linux. I could have gotten the same hardware for a slightly lower price, but not had that guarantee. It was well worth the few extra bucks to know I wouldn't be left with a network or sound card that wasn't compatible.
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You might have a point, except that the laws that you're talking about don't cover the sort of mere "facilitation" that you can perhaps the Pirate Bay of doing. If the Pirate Bay was actually committing copyright infringement, then you'd have a basis to go after them via the Berne Convention. However, the legal system there has held that a BT tracker isn't actually infringing, since it merely points to files held elsewhere (the "Napster Defense").
Thankfully, just because a particular legal argument isn't valid somewhere, doesn't automatically extend that precedent everywhere. Although I have no doubt that somewhere, the *AA organizations are working on a treaty that will solve that little "loophole" too.
Low income is relative. Actually, I think in this case it's not so much a case of "low income" versus "high income," but a person's relative amount of disposable income. That is, two people might be making the same amount of money, but one person might have a lot more money to spend on entertainment, while the other person might have significantly higher fixed expenses. (Say, a wife and kids. Or husband and kids. Whatever.) Assuming you treat the computer and internet connection as a sunk cost, the person without the additional disposable income could "afford" to download, but not to buy DVDs.
It's not really an excuse for piracy so much as an explanation of the motives involved. Given the choice between paying for something and getting the exact same thing (or something they value equivalently) for free, people are always going to pick free. Honestly I think the reason people with higher incomes don't download is not because they see much additional value in the DVD, but because they value their time more highly, and don't want to mess around with file sharing programs or hunting down torrents. At a certain point, it just becomes easier to drive down to Blockbuster/Best Buy and buy the disc than it does to download it. It's an opportunity cost calculation.
This doesn't make sense. Google Spreadsheet has one feature -- sharing, online, from anywhere -- that Excel can't touch. In all other respects, it's admittedly primitive. But if you want to do that, there's not really any question. You either use Google Spreadsheet, or you find some sort of roundabout way to avoid the problem and use Excel. (By trying to email the documents back and forth, which isn't really online in any significant sense of the word.)
Google's doesn't offer much in the way of data analysis, but if you just wanted to work on something with someone else, online, it's great. And the best part about it that it exports to Excel, so then you can take it and do all your analysis/reporting/charting in Excel. They're not mutually exclusive.
There's really no compelling reason to use Google Spreadsheet if you're satisfied with Excel as a single-user, desktop PC application; the people who are going to find it interesting are those who are constantly running into the limitations that Excel has when you attempt to use it collaboratively.
I think the market for Google Spreadsheet isn't in a direct replacement of an offline, desktop spreadsheeting program, but as part of a more collaborative workflow.
Honestly I don't think Google is aiming to replace Excel, per se. MS has too long a head start, and frankly they'd just be putting themselves in the position of playing catch-up, forever. (Kinda like WINE; people that want to find some reason not to like it, are always going to find one.)
Rather than just looking at G-Spreadsheet as "Excel...but free!" it seems better to look at what it can offer that Excel can't. Particularly since being 'free' isn't that compelling a feature, given that most companies see Microsoft Office as a sunk cost -- just part of the overhead of owning a computer. The killer feature of Google Spreadsheet is sharing.
A little ways up in the thread somebody was discussing a problem (that is very common) where you might send a bunch of people a very simple spreadsheet, in his example it was a class grading sheet. Each of them work on it and send it back to you. When you get it back, you have a mess -- how do you combine the changes back into one document? There's really not any good way to do it. The best thing you can do is to have a rigid document-management workflow, where only one person at a time can have the "working copy" of a document, and then they pass it around. (Storing it on a fileserver basically does this, but necessitates a fileserver and also brings in additional problems.)
There's definitely a market for something that allows for a lot more collaboration than the MS Office suite either allows or is designed for. Google, if they're smart (and I have every reason to think that they are) is probably looking to do more than just "reinvent the wheel...online." Or at least, if they're going to reinvent the wheel, they know that their wheel has to have some compelling features that will make people switch. In this case, I don't think that the feature is going to be the fact that it's free, it's going to be the ability to share and collaborate without worrying about CMSes, file sharing, Citrix, or any of the other hacks which people basically use in order to make single-user desktop apps more collaborative.
In the same way that someone once joked that IRC is "multiplayer Notepad," G-Cal might begin as "multiplayer Excel," but end up looking like something totally different from what it would be like, without the interactive/collaborative ability.
I think I'm going to patent "Pay per Prod" quickly.
I think some ladies in Amsterdam have prior art on this.
True. The only place I've seen a "water club" is in a government office; although I know of several private-sector offices where free coffee has been simply dropped by the employer recently, so maybe such things will start to happen there, too.
If I was managing an office, it would seem like free coffee is a no-brainer: it probably makes people more productive, it shows you value them at least nominally, and it stops people from running out for coffee breaks to get their fix in the middle of the morning.
I think this is probably pretty close to the truth. While there definitely may be an aspect of sociopathology involved in corporate advancement, I think it's also likely that someone who's making $200,000+ a year and brokering million or billion-dollar deals every day, just doesn't value the bagel very much. It's such a trivial amount of money to them, it doesn't seem worth the bother to find change (if they even carry cash) and pay for it.
Obviously there's a sense of "entitlement" there as well, but I think people are jumping on the 'all executives are sociopaths' bandwagon a little quickly. It reeks of sour grapes.
If I was trying to keep people from taking bagels/muffins/coffee in a situation like that, rather than putting out a "coin jar" where people have to put in a piddling amount every time they take an item, which requires that they keep small change hanging around (or cash money in general, which many people don't have), it might be easier to let people pay in advance. E.g., in many government offices the water coolers are paid for by members of the "water club;" if you want to drink water, you pay $10 at the beginning of the quarter and get your name put on a list that's taped to the front of the water cooler (or simply made known to everyone else).
It's more than plausible that going with nuclear power for their domestic needs, and selling oil to foreign buyers, could offer the greatest return.
While you're right, it's possible that could be true, what makes me very suspicious of it, was that if they could make energy for their own consumption at a lower cost than they could sell their own oil on the world market for, why wouldn't the states they're selling oil to (the West), who already have nuclear programs, already be doing that? After all, when we burn oil in the U.S. to generate power, we also have to pay for its transportation cost halfway around the world.
It seems rather specious that they would sense for them to spend billions of dollars developing an alternateve source of energy, when one is so readily available -- so readily available, in fact, that most other countries forgo nuclear energy in favor of simply buying it.
But overall I think this is a silly argument to have; it's not Iran's domestic energy reserves that have really sparked so much international concern over their nuclear program, it's because of its government's attitude with regards to Israel, particularly in light of recent comments by their President. Were it not for their stated aim of destroying the Israelis, and their "peaceful nuclear research" looking so much like a bomb factory, I doubt anyone would really give a damn if that's where they decided to spend their money.
Although it's been a while since I've actually looked at the physics of it, the heavy-water reactor they're discussing constructing is what you'd need in order to produce plutonium from natural uranium, and thus have a modern, Pu-based weapon. It's heavy-water reactors like those which have produced most of the Plutonium that are in the U.S. (and ex-Soviet arsenals, although they did seem to be fond of graphite-moderated breeders as well). The heavy water acts as a moderator, which slows down the neutrons enough to induce beta-decay in the nonfissile uranium atoms, and convert them to plutonium...which, being chemically different from uranium, can be processed out of the spent fuel rods more easily than separating the various uranium isotopes.
m oderator
WP confirms this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water#Neutron_
The uranium enrichment facilities (centrifuges, etc.) which Iran was also constructing, can be seen as a parallel bomb-making process. They're all part of the isotope separation, which brings natural uranium up to the point where it can be either reacted in a light water reactor, or used in a bomb (depending on whether you go to around 3% for a power reactor or all the way up to 90+% for a bomb). On the whole, a uranium enrichment facility is a lot less problematic than a Pu-breeder reactor, as long as it's monitored. (So that you can tell how far they're enriching the uranium.)
So you're correct about the uranium devices being somewhat less problematic than the plutonium devices; they tend to be bigger and have a lower power for their size and weight, and I don't think they can be as easily used as the initiator of a hydrogen (fusion) bomb. However, the reason the whole heavy water thing is news, is because it shows Iran is going for the smaller weapons as well.
As other people have pointed out though, right now they're working on making the heavy water that would go in a breeder reactor, it's not clear that they actually have the capability yet. The real showdown will happen once they actually have a reactor built and fueled which is capable of breeding plutonium from natural or low-enriched uranium. Allowing them to have that capability would be tacit acceptance of an Iran which is not only nuclear, but has the capability of producing nuclear cruise missles, and perhaps thermonuclear weapons as well.
I think you have the right idea (although, sadly I don't think we'll sever our dependence on that oil for a long time), however I think where you go off-base is that the U.S. would let Israel and the various Arab countries just 'slug it out.'
The only reason that the U.S. support for the Israelis isn't even more glaringly obvious than it already is, has to do with our dependence on the Arabs for oil. There is a far greater social connection between the U.S. and Israel than between the U.S. and the Arab states. Outside of the ethnic communities that have direct ties to Arab countries, the "average American" population has little in common with any state in the area, besides Israel. (Probably the next-most-favored would be Lebanon, because of the Christian minority there.) Israel is a basically democratic, technologically advanced, secularist state, founded by European emigrants; the Arab countries by and large have little apparent interest in Western-style democracy or the secularist ideology that pervades our legal, governmental, and social systems.
It comes down to "foreignness." On the whole, Israel and Israeli society is far less foreign to a majority of Americans than the society of almost any Middle Eastern Arab country is. In a conflict between those two groups, without overarching geopolitical self-interests (i.e. petroleum), I think you'd see the United States come down firmly and instantly on the side of Israel.
This, I think, is one of the reasons why you see Iran playing the nuclear gambit at this point; they know that they have maximum influence over the rest of the world right now, particularly in the U.S., because of our dependence on petroleum. If they wanted to make a play either against Israel or purely for themselves (in order to align themselves as a regional power), this is the time to do it. When the oil runs out, so does their time in the spotlight.
Were it not for oil preventing the U.S. from getting too far behind Israel, I think we'd already
They need nuclear power like a submarine needs a screen door.
They're sitting on one of the richest petroleum reserves in the world, and selling it off in order to get hard currency, which they want to use to develop a domestic energy industry that relies on imported nuclear fuel? Right.
I'm not saying it's a complete impossibility; under different leadership, in a different situation, if their priorities were obviously not what they are today, it might make sense for them to be looking for a post-petroleum energy source. Heck -- the rest of the world is. But building an obsolete plutonium-factory nuclear reactor (which hasn't exactly solved the rest of the world's energy needs) isn't the way to go about it.
If peaceful energy research was their goal, there are lots of ways they could go about it which wouldn't be so obviously antagonistic. But they're not, and the point is that they've done little to assure the rest of the world that they're out to do anything but build nuclear weapons and use them in a jihad against Israel or the West generally.
Seconded. If 'peaceful research' was really their goal, the design of their plant is rather suspect. I'm sure the Indians would have been happy to share with them their designs for a Thorium, non-weaponizable breeder system, or any number of countries would have appreciated an infusion of petrodollars into their existing R&D programs in return for setting up a facility in Tehran. Heck; with the amount of money they're burning, they could have become the world leader in any area of research that they want.
Nothing about their whole program says anything besides "bomb development," and that doesn't bode particularly well for regional stability, particularly with their president regularly sounding like the second coming of Heinrich Himmler.
That said, I'm not sure, given the number of nuclear weapons that are floating around in the world today, that it's practical to assume that we'll keep the Iranians from acquiring them indefinitely. In fact, it's starting to look more and more like the worldwide non-proliferation age is over. The question isn't whether a nuclear weapon will be used in the Middle East, and it's hardly even a question who it will be used against. The question is where, and when, and what the response will be.
The problem in this case is that unlike a few years back with Iraq, the Iranians have this time created such a well-timed diversion (Lebanon) that the Israelis aren't in much of a position for a repeat performance of 1981. Or at least, they're in a worse position. For them to destroy the plant in Iran would almost certainly guarantee that they'd receive the blame for providing the spark to reignite hostilities on the northern border, and I'm not sure if they have the stomach for that at the moment.
The situation in Iraq makes any US action that might be perceived as risking our troops a political impossibility; and the Europeans, Russians, and Chinese aren't interested in doing anything about Iran's nuclear ambitions in general, because they know they won't be the first targets of any weapons they produce.
Thus, the overall stage seems set for Tehran to continue as long and as far as they can: with Israel tied up because of Lebanon and the US pinned due to Iraq, there's no reason not to go for the bomb.
Unless there's a major shift in attitude and pressure, I think it's really only a matter of time before Iran goes nuclear; already a pariah state, they have little to lose and much to gain. And once they have it, it seems to be only a further interlude before it's used on the obvious target, Israel, whether directly or by proxy.
The real question is, what happens then?
There's a big difference here. Normally, when you have an informant, they either need to give the police enough information to go and do the investigation themselves and find the conclusive evidence; or, if they come up with the evidence themselves (or provide a lot of very specific information), then they usually have to go and testify in court.
In this case, the 'mystery hacker' basically came up with the evidence (he told them exactly where to find it, and he had ample opportunity to have planted it), but he's not in a position where he could easily testify. Because he had access to the defendant's computer (illegally), but can't come testify (because he's in Turkey, because the police don't know who he is, whatever), it seems like they're giving the guy a good defense that the evidence was planted.
It's just sloppy policework.
For a phyiscal-goods example, it's as if somebody dropped a dime on you and told the police that when they had broken into your car earlier in the day to steal your radio, they saw that you had a baggie of heroin in the ashtray. So the police go and arrest you, and find the bag of heroin. Without being able to track down the informant and get their testimony, or some form of physical evidence linking the bag to you in such a way that doesn't leave you with a planted-evidence defense, they have a pretty weak case. (Unless they can get you to confess, which is actually pretty common.)
I'll be interested in seeing what the outcome of this case actually is. If they guy doesn't negotiate some sort of plea deal, and the only thing they found on his computer was the porn that the hacker told them about, I think he has a pretty good chance of either getting off, or forcing the police to find some way of getting the hacker to come in and testify.
Allowing in evidence that was obtained in this manner would be a mistake, and justice wouldn't be served in the long run by it, even if the immediate consequence was letting the guy off the hook.
I can't believe they'd ask the guy to keep "investigating." It seems to break every basic rule of police procedure and preservation of evidence.
If this guy's defense lawyer isn't a total retard, or if he doesn't blow it and confess under interrogation, he's going to walk.
All he has to say is "hey, I don't know where the porn came from -- my computer was hacked! The police even have proof that some mysterious Turkish guy was in my computer!" And what are the police going to say, ask the judge and jury to take the word of some anonymous guy on IRC, that he didn't plant the evidence?
When you do your 'investigation' that way, they're creating a hole the size of the Titanic.
Look, I don't like defending kiddy pornographers, but it seems like a pretty good defense that there's a good possibility that you're being framed, when all the evidence came to the police by way of some mysterious, psuedonymous foreigner who had the opportunity to plant the material themselves; unless Mr. Turkish Hacker is willing to come and testify, that is.
If companies are starting to advertise Linux compatibility on products sold in mainstream retail stores, than that's a big step forward. I've yet to see it though.
What brand/model card was this, and where did you see it? The last time I went shopping for them, I took a walk through the local WorstBuy, and it was the usual morass of Windows-only cards with identical model numbers and different chipsets -- basically, your only solution for Linux was "Plug'N'Pray." (I gave up and got a spool of Cat6, after messing with ndiswrappers for too long.)
Actually there is another part of Sony which is (and really always has) been good: their professional video gear.
... it's like they just produce either quality stuff for a market that doesn't exist, or they hobble what could be a good solution with artificial restrictions, because they're afraid of alienating another aspect of the empire. (E.g., they never made a good consumer digital audio player because of piracy fears from Sony Music.)
This is not anything that 'regular folks' ever touch, but their professional equipment has always been top-notch. There are a ton of BetaSP decks and cameras out there in operation, and probably will be for years.
I think they missed the boat a little on digital stuff and have handed a lot of business off to Panasonic, but you can start a holy war among camera guys with that.
At any rate, I think that you can't say that Sony is incapable of producing quality gear
The best thing that could happen to that company would be if they split it out into a number of smaller independent organizations. I think the Japanese have thing for giant industrial conglomerates that produce everything, and this is anathema to them, but eventually it's going to have to be done. Far from there being any advantage to having the same company make movies and music and consumer hardware, it's a huge disadvantage.
If Apple is in the same shit, its "Sony's fault"???
No, I think the correct response is "It's a FEATURE!"
You are aware you can "leech" quite a bit of HD just by sticking up a VHF antenna, right?
Just out of curiosity (and yes, I am very jealous), do you have any idea what the bit rate is of those MPEG-4 HD streams?
It would be interesting to see how many the WL network would be capable of handling at once.
I'm not sure how many video streams the network has to be able to carry for people to consider it practical. Obviously, if the network can handle one stream, it's not going to work well for most households, who have more than one TV. And when you get into TIVO-type DVR boxes, then you might need more than one stream per viewing device, if your DVR boxes have multiple "tuners"...the number of simultaneous streams could get pretty large quickly, I think. All depends on your viewing habits, I guess.
That's what insurance is for.
... a blank 500GB hard drive. It's just like having a photo album: to you, it might be priceless, to the insurance adjuster, it's just a $15 Pioneer photo album from WalMart.
Insurance companies don't cover loss of data, though. They'll replace that 500GB hard drive full of all your photos/videos/purchased-music with
Hopefully someone would have the immediate necessities of life taken care of before they'd start to worry about data backups, but that doesn't mean that there's not a big (and increasing) demand for off-site storage for home users.
Your use of the phallic capital "I", as a reminder of the misogynist and violent nature of patriarchial culture, is offensive and incites violence. We must ban its use, and replace it with the capital "O" instead, which represents peace, tranquility, and the circle of life.
I've been saying the same thing every time this discussion comes up. Now I just don't waste my breath.
Sometimes it's better to just let idealists try their thing; if you try to tell them that their idealism is flawed, they'll just tar and feather you. Just shut your mouth and make the best of it that you can.
I think the most likely outcome of this whole project, if they ever get around to shipping a bunch of them to a really poor country, is that they'll be taken by corrupt government officials or warlords and sold back in return for hard currency that can be used to purchase weapons. The kids will end up with guns, and the PC's will end up on eBay.
The status quo in the developing world will basically remain unchanged, but we'll all end up with marginally cheaper laptops, because producing these things is going to cause component prices to fall due to the economies of scale involved.
If you want to be cynical, look at it this way: a whole lot of rich governments, and probably a few poor ones, are going to give you a nice indirect subsidy on your next AMD laptop. Enjoy.
It's like consulting, only with more sex.
in fact, macs are probably worse, they just SEEM easier, because if it works, it works, if it doesn't, too bad.
Except that's exactly the reality of the situation. Macs probably have 1/10th the hardware compatibility that Linux does, but they seem like they "Just Work" because everything is clearly marked. If you want a wireless card, you don't go down to Best Buy and buy some $35 piece of trash that maybe works / maybe won't, you go to the Apple store, spend $99, and get something that you KNOW is going to function flawlessly.
That's what Linux is missing. It's really hard to tell whether a particular piece of hardware will work with Linux, without trying it and wasting a lot of time. That's what's frustrating. That's what drives users away. If there was a clear set of hardware that would be guaranteed to work, and you could tell what it was in the store, even if it cost more, I think that would be superior to the status quo.
Apple has shown that people will pay extra for compatibility. I don't think Linux is any different.
I have a HP "workstation" computer, which was certified to work with RHEL, because I didn't want to risk getting a PC that might have had components in it that weren't compatible with Linux. I could have gotten the same hardware for a slightly lower price, but not had that guarantee. It was well worth the few extra bucks to know I wouldn't be left with a network or sound card that wasn't compatible.