Except you yourself haven't seen any part of the elephant. What research reports have you studied?
Here's the parts of the elephant I haven't seen yet. Maybe you "seeing person" know the answers. Tell me, what percentage of the earth's temperatures are we measuring at any one point in time? How much of the temperature throughout earth's history do we know, and within what error range? When we talk about "average temperature" what do we really mean? The average of all measurements or the average of all temperatures on the surface of the entire earth?
What are the effects of raising or lowering the average temperature of the earth by fractions of a degree? What proof do you have that these are the effects, or are you only predicting without any good models? Can you tell me how many more or fewer hurricans will hit the Florida coastline if we increase the temperature by 0.1 degrees? How accurate are your predictions? What about the effects on crops, human lifespan, average human intelligence, the economy? Are you accounting for new markets that will be created if Europe comes out of its little ice age?
Can you name all the chemicals found in our atmosphere? For each chemical, name the following properties: What is its effect on global temperatures? What concentration do we find these chemicals at which levels of the atmosphere? From whence do each of these chemicals come? What will happen to the earth's temperature if we increase or reduce the levels of this chemical? Please account for new plant growth or adaptations in the earth's environment. For instance, increasing CO2 may increase the algae population in the ocean, causing the ocean to absorb more sunlight. Please be specific and complete in all your assessments.
Can you name how much sunlight is hitting our earth, and compare with historical levels? What is the accuracy of our measurements and historical measurements? Have you measured how much heat hits the earth and is escaping? How have you done that? What are the accuracies of these measurements?
How much of the heat in our atmosphere comes from the earth itself? Can you determine what the historical levels were? How accurate are your measurements?
These are all questions I have been asking for years, and no scientist has ever been able to answer them. Bottom line: We don't see the elephant. No one does, until each of these questions can be answered definitively and with a very high accuracy for a very long period of time.
We have a minimal understanding of nature
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Plants Produce Methane
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I think this is yet another nail in the coffin of the we-are-causing-global-warming-so-stop-driving-now crowd.
We understand so little about weather and the atmosphere and global warming and our sun that to think that we even have an idea of how to reverse the process if it is happening to a significant degree, or to think that we even understand what is really causing it, is absurd.
This is the old blind men and the elephant story. One person thinks it is a spear. Another, a snake. Another, a tree. Another, a whip. Except this elephant is so large and so complicated that even with all of our eyes open and all of our technology looking into it, we still can't figure it out. One group says the earth is cooling. Another, warming. Another, it was too cold now it is coming back to normal. One group says we should stop burning fossil fuels. Another says we should stop burning fossil fuels uncleanly. Still others say that it doesn't matter how much or little CO2 we put out in the atmosphere, the earth tends to absorb it. Others say that the US is the cleanest country in the world because we allow market forces to handle the management of the environment, so we shouldn't regulate it at all but let people choose what they want to do or not do to protect it.
The weather is something beyond our understanding, so it's best that for right now, we attribute it to an Act of God. When we can understand enough about it that we can get an accurate picture and draw conclusive---and correct---results, then we can start taking responsibility for it.
Go to the local library. Check out books on running a business, setting up a corporation, accounting, and everything you are curious about. Find out what you have to do to make it all legitimate. There is a wealth of information available. If the local beauty salon can figure it all out, so can you.
Fortunately, in the US, that income you generate is considered personal income. You are taxed just as much as if you had a job. Unfortunately, that means you have to pay Social Security and Medicare tax on that income. If you forget to do that and report the income, the IRS will happily remind you with a hefty fine. When your income becomes approximately what you need to live on, you should probably start looking at a corporation.
It's simple: He stopped being an objective observer of the natural world around him. He let his preconceived notions, pride, and selfishness get in the way of simple observation. It's what happens to scientists when they stop observing and start believing.
What the Korean people have to learn, as every culture and group interested in science has to learn, is that your failures are really successes. He should've published that his method didn't work. He should've been bold with his discovery of the limitations.
We have the same problem here. We honor scientists who do something amazing, but we relegate those who don't to the back burner. Both have done an equal amount for science as a whole. For every "success" there are hundreds and thousands of "failures". Each of these observations and experiments bring us closer to a greater understanding of the universe. Unfortunately, too often we want to see something amazing or we want our predictions to come true, and that taints our ability to be objective.
Why does every post that refutes free market capitalism start with something like "in a perfect world". In a perfect world, we wouldn't need jobs because everybody would do what they are best at doing and what is most important for everyone else. We would share what they have with precisely the people who need it most. In a perfect world, we wouldn't need government because everybody would be saints! There wouldn't be any crime nor any wars. We wouldn't need schools to educate the people who are too stupid to realize that education is extremely valuable. We wouldn't need hospitals because no one would get sick, and we wouldn't need roads because everyone would be perfectly happy where they were! That's what a perfect world looks like. A perfect world is perfect without capitalism.
It's because we are living in a messed up world that capitalism works. It preys on people's greed and avarice. It takes these negative emotions and turns them into very productive and useful things. It is a temporary solution until someone discovers the way to make "a perfect world" that doesn't involve murdering people or throwing them into prison camps. I'll be glad if and when that day comes. I'll gladly join whatever society figures out how to make people saints without violence or oppression.
As far as the job market, I welcome competition, even if it costs me my own job. It drives prices down and increases the quality of workmanship. If I lose my job to an immigrant, that means I was overpaid or underworked, or that I have to find some other market to sell my services in to stay competitive, perhaps one that exploits my old job. I'm looking forward to the day when I can hire 4 or 5 me's for the same salary I am getting now. I'll be able to keep 3 or 4 of their salaries for myself!
Let's take the invention of powered flight. For many thousands of years, people have dreamed of controlling the skies. Yet not until the Wright brothers did we have anybody capable of actually doing so. What was the difference?
It is simple. Everyone can imagine. Only the Wright brothers could put the machine together. See, the Wright brothers had a foundation of sure knowledge and understanding of engines and mechanics and gears and such. In fact, if you look carefully at their original design, they had some fairly unique insights into how to build something strong but light. Their expertise in these technologies allowed them to put 2 and 2 together and get 4.
You can look at any advancement in science, culture, society, government, and military, and see how it was people who had imagination but who were also well-versed in the current technology who really brought change.
So, I would say to young people full of imagination, get off your butt, read some serious books, and learn what we already know. Don't waste your time imagining until your find yourself at the edge of human knowledge, staring into the unknown where no one has started before. But you can't get there unless you take the journey that everyone who has gone before you have taken and build on their work.
It used to be that you went to school to learn and be told how stupid you were and what you had to do to get smart. Nowadays, it's all about puffing up people's pride and giving them hope where there is none. I was frustrated when I graduated high school only to find out I was one in a million very bright people who wanted to go to the top colleges. No one had told me that I wasn't unique, I wasn't special, and my talents weren't one-of-a-kind, until life hit me in the face like a ton of bricks. I despise my teachers who puffed me up with a false sense of self-worth. I wish they had told me that if I didn't hit the books and do better on my homework I couldn't expect to compete with other kids like me.
Imagination is nice, but you have to be grounded in reality in order to make any use of it. A good example are crackpots in the physics world. These guys don't even understand the most fundamental principles that are absolutely true. Yet they spout off like they know the secrets of the universe, even though their imagination contradicts observed facts.
In other words, before you start pondering the makeup of the universe, it's much better to figure out what we already know and then work from there.
The same goes for the basics. If you can't read, write, or do basic arithmetic, what good is your imagination? There's a reason why Einstein's imagination is so much more useful for the world than your toddler's imagination. When Einstein imagined, he was really pushing the boundaries of knowledge. Your toddler still thinks he is the center of the universe.
Yeah, we had the same thing going on at the University of Washington. They had all the freshman physics classes lined up to learn this way. Except the professors weren't on board. They allowed a few questions on the exam to come from the TA grad students running the program, but the majority were the dry old textbook physics stuff. And lectures were lectures that would make you die from boredom. In other words, the professor stands up when the bell rings, then says, "Continuing our discussion from two days ago, the answer is obviously expressed by this simple equation with three terms. As you can PLAINLY see, this exponential term explodes as t approaches 0, while these terms tend to 0. So..." The other stuff was run by the muckity mucks.
What was really sad is the so-called physics educators didn't understand physics themselves. So they wrote these guided labs and workbooks that were misleading. A couple of times in my memory a physics professor would get a hold of the workbook or lab material and bring it to lecture to explain why it was wrong. Needless to say, there wasn't much love between the two groups of people.
What happened was a lot of the students ended up finding a good tutor that would explain to them what was really happening in simple terms rather than letting the students grasp at straws. It takes a professional to tie the stupid labs with the real world and the book physics.
The students I tutored would always ask, "Why don't they just do THIS in lab rather than waste our time in an exercise of futility?" I told them things got better in the sophomore level and above, that physics was really a great subject with some fun things in it, but by then they were turned off completely.
Our physics department really struggled to find kids that wanted to learn physics.
Let's just all sit around all day imagining stuff. Like let's imagine that we know how to read and write and do arithmetic. That way, when we actually have to do it, we'll be ready!
We can just imagine up computer manuals. Or better yet, let's just pretend we are computer experts who know how to write software to fly airplanes! Then we can imagine that the software passes the FAA certification process. And we can imagine that that plane just didn't fall out of the sky, killing hundreds of the passengers on board because the pilots were imagining they were really pilots when that was the first time they stepped inside a cockpit!
Isn't imagination wonderful? We'll just imagine all of life's problems away because we can, and because, you know, Disney said it works!
I know you're being funny, but here are some interesting tidbits on reading I thought I'd share.
* It's not so much reading as in reading at improper light levels. Too bright, your eyes get tired. Too dark, your eyes get tired. I think that's why, as a culture, we tend to read mostly in the early morning or evening. It's when it's not too dark, you have your lights turned on at home, and the light level is just right.
* When you're reading, you don't have to look so busy. Unfortunately, it's hard to find good books that relate to work that are fun to read. But with printouts, no one can tell if it is work related or not.
* My co-worker has a dad who has his secretary print out web pages. He'll read them, and then mark what he wants to buy or get more details on. The secretary will then give him the additional information he wants. It's a clunky, slow, way to deal with the internet. But it was interesting that people out there are actually accessing the internet this way. If I had a secretary, a great deal of his time would be spent searching the internet and printing up things of interest for me.
* There was a Korean scholar from a long time ago (I think he is on the 1,000 won bill) who read using only one eye. His idea was that by using one eye for the first part of his life, he would preserve his other eye for the later part. I don't know how well that turned out there. I figured he died before his one eye gave out. Otherwise, apparently he was a smart, if eccentric, guy.
* One thing I love doing in my books is writing in them, especially if they are of the reference variety. I hate PDF because I can't mark it up with my PDF browser. Same for HTML, except you can download that and edit it some. Does anyone know of a tool or a format which encourages people to annotate and mark the text up, if not just for their own reading? There are some neat ideas out there, like Wiki, but they're still rather clunky.
Get a good laser printer. (As far as I know laser is cheaper than inkjet per page, and you get a better resolution.) Print the pages you want to read. Read them with the monitor turned off.
When I spend a great deal of time looking at a monitor, I can't focus after a while. Either the font size goes up or I turn it off and get some sleep or read a book.
Your body is sending you a signal. Pay attention and heed its warnings or suffer the consequences later in life.
In the real world, you work on a project for a time then move on to something else. Then you or someone else is assigned to revisit your old code. You don't have time to relearn the code and you certainly don't have time to sit down the guy called in to fix it and tranfers your understanding of the project. (If you did, you would've documented the code properly in the first place, right?)
When companies don't comment and don't document their code properly, they begin this vicious cycle of rewriting old code because no one know how it should or does work and no one has the time to figure it out. Let me explain why.
Imagine you find a software package on the internet licensed in a way that suits your needs. Now imagine that software package, with very few modifications, will do exactly what you need it to do for you project. You have a choice: (1) Take that software, modify it, and deploy it, or (2) write your own from scratch.
There is only ONE determining factor in whether you inevitably choose (1) or (2), and that is DOCUMENTATION.
Now remember that software you find in your own company is no better or worse than software you find on the internet, only it has a much more liberal license for your purposes. But does that change the fact that in order to make use of it you have to understand it?
On my job, I have an approach to undocumented software. I start writing documentation for it, whether or not the author wants me to and whether or not there is really enough time for it. If I have questions, I find the author, and approach him with pen and paper. We sit down and write documentation together. Inevitably, by documenting what I find in other people's codes it ends up saving me more time than if I wrote the code myself, documented it, and debugged it. So I have been able to finish a great number of projects ahead of schedule because I don't write code: I READ it. (And this is a perl world too!) And in the end, others are able to come and read my documents and notes and reuse the software as well.
I read the speech you cited. It is absolutely wonderful and refreshing. It gives me a great deal of hope for China.
One thing I got out of his speech is that he deplores the way Chinese thought and politics is so narrow-minded. He wants the students to look to China as their homeland and then do what they should to make it better. One of the problems China has is that it is sending some of its best and brightest away to the West, only to see them never return.
I don't fault Microsoft for bending to Chinese political pressure. It's not Microsoft's fight! If I were a guest in that country, I would bow under whatever rules they had. Not because I am a wussy and I don't believe in inalienable rights, but because I am not Chinese and it's not my country so it's not my place to criticize. (Interestingly enough, this is the only reason why I believe you can justify being against the rebuilding and democratization policy in Iraq.)
So that's why Microsoft is absolutely correct to bow to political pressure. Bill Gates has a voice in his own country, trying to improve education, reform patents, and change the way government works. It's his right and duty to do this. But does Bill Gates have a voice in China? Absolutely not. It's up to those students at the university to fight that fight, and that's what Li Ao told them.
Li Ao also pointed out that when you have a moral dilemna, there is usually a good way to solve it. In this case, Microsoft is actually doing far greater for encouraging democracy by building the channel by which information can be distributed than the harm it is doing for shutting down one voice to comply with the government. It would be like telling the comfort women to not accept the money from Japan but then giving them many magnitudes more money to live their lives in peace and obtain the medical help they deserve.
There has been some remarkable ideas---ideas, mind you---of what possibilities might exist for the reality we haven't been able to test in laboratories yet. These are ideas that real physicists come up with as possibilities that don't violate too many laws of physics to be utterly implausible.
We know that gravity bends space. We know that mass and energy are interchangeable. We know that mass creates a gravity field (that bends space.) What about massive energies? Does it have a gravity field? What if we took the equivalent energy in a 2 ton ball and stored that in a capacitor? Would its mass (as observed in relativity) increase by 2 tons? Incredibly, yes.
That's pretty whacko. But consider the possibilities. Using only energy, you can BEND TIME AND SPACE.
What can you do? Can you set up weird gravity fields that don't look like point sources? What about the acceleration due to gravity? Is that limited by relativity? What if we effectively cut out a region of space by surrounding that with a hollow black hole. What are the rules on whole regions of space as they travel through other regions of space? If it can move near the speed of light, and we are moving near the speed of light in that piece of space, are we moving 2x the speed of light compared to objects outside of that region of space? What if we had several layers of space each travelling within another region of space near the speed of light? Can we obtain infinite speed?
What about taking a region of space and effectively patching it somewhere else in the universe. Isn't this a wormhole of sorts? And are those possible?
String theory says that there may be more than 4 dimensions. If space is curved, then we can effectively travel from one spot to the other without covering as much ground as we would've in regular space. But what if there are different rules? What if with gravity we can put a kink in a strategic location in space thus making space curve in a way that makes this kind of travel easier?
You see, there are a lot of possibilities, and they aren't all that unreasonable. Unfortunately, we can't perform these experiments with today's technologies. Or can we?
Just remember how absurd people thought Einstein was for suggesting that light waves are really very tiny massless cannon balls. That earned him the Nobel Prize, and was the concept that gave birth to Quantum Mechanics, which Einstein himself thought was absolutely absurd. Physicists spend a great deal of time calling each other names when in the end, they end up proving the other guy correct by trying to disprove him.
Fishes live near the surface of the ocean. Yes, it is possible to overfish in specific regions. It probably isn't possible to fish a species to extinction, however, even if we intended to do so. What happens in overfishing is the population of the fishes reduce to a point where it is no longer economically viable to fish. There are still plenty of fish out there, and skilled hunters (animals or human) can obtain as much fish as they really need or switch their diet. The only animals we really hurt by overfishing are ourselves because we effectively "starve" ourselves of that species of fish by making it uneconomical to continue fishing it.
It's interesting what is happening with the Pollack population in the Pacific. There are vast schools of these fish, and it is a fairly useful species. We have these huge ships that are packing facilities with a net attached scooping enormous quantities of these fish out of the ocean. However, through careful management, the Pollack fishing countries have agreed to only fish the amount that will allow the Pollack population to increase to its maximum sustainable population. This is where science, economics, and human ingenuity meet, and the result of truly free market action. Everybody who has an economic interest in the Pollack population has whole-heartedly signed on to ensure that there are going to be Pollack forever and ever.
However, what this energy source uses is not the surface water alone. It uses the mass of the ocean itself. In other words, you are limited to the scale of the volume or mass of the ocean, not the surface area. If we octuplued (8x) our output of energy, we would need to use 8x as much ocean mass to do so. This will affect only 4x as much surface area of the ocean.
Because dolphins happen to live closer to the surface of the ocean than the bottom, along with the vast majority of sea life. And waves are plentiful near the shore, where they would be seen by people and interfere with ocean traffic.
This could be built out of sight and away from the vast majority of living sea creatures. You have to build it where the ocean is very deep, namely, away from where most people live.
The ocean is so grossly unimaginably big that we would need an absolutely huge operation to even cause a measurable effect. If you really tried to change the temperature by even a fraction of a degree using this method you would have to pump extremely large quantities of water---quantities so large that I don't think anyone would ever consider building something so massive.
People sometimes forget the scale of things. On a global scale, we are not even part of the equation.
But you also have to consider the opportunity costs of doing this. If we would raise the global atmospheric temperature 1/10 of a degree with all the carbon we were burning, what will the net effect be if we can convert a significant portion of our energy sources from burning carbon to mixing a small amount of cold and warm water?
I hope Pete does well. But remember Howard Dean's campaign? Technology is not a panacea. Hopefully Pete has the stuff in politics to make it work, but I doubt it. It all comes down to raising cash, getting feet on the ground, and making sure that people turn out to vote for you and not the other guy. Technology is some help, but we're not at the point yet when a Wiki or a Drupal-based web-app will solve the problem of turning platforms into dollars and voters.
I am pretty familiar with Utah politics. I don't see any way Pete is going to take down Orrin Hatch. Orrin may have been strongly in favor of "digital rights" or whatever they want to call it nowadays, but that isn't an issue for most Utah voters. Maybe in Silicon Valley it would be. On the rest of the issues, Orrin is a perfect fit for the average Utah voter. Orrin in a way is turning into the Ted Kennedy of that state. He hasn't had a serious screw-up and he's done good with what he's got.
Is it more important to not sound like a hateful bigot or to not BE a hateful bigot?
I've got no beef with the Wahhabi sect of Islam and the likes of Al Qaeda, Hamas, and the others. I'd just as soon they let us alone, and everyone else for that matter.
Apparently, they want to come into my home, rape and murder me and my wife because we refuse to join Islam. They would also see all the Jews killed in the most horrific manner, women, men, and children. They don't tolerate homosexuality, they don't tolerate democracy, and they don't tolerate non-Moslems testifying against a Moslem in court. Osama Bin Laden called our country depraved and without any morals or religion. He thinks he has a divine calling to kill us and subjugate us to a global caliphate. He wants to impose shari'a law on us and charge us a jizrah tax if we refuse to become moslem.
And I'm the hateful bigot because I am pointing out these obvious facts? Go read and listen to Osama bin Laden's speeches if you want to know what he really thinks.
Bush didn't invent this war. This war has been happening since Mohammed's time. Go look at Europe's history for obvious proof of what some whackjobs do to a continent when they believe Mohammed justified the shameless subjugation, rape, torture, and murder of other peoples. It wasn't until France's foreign legion that they've stopped being so bold. But back in the 70's, when France withdrew the foreign legion, they started up again, kidnapping, murdering, torturing, bombing, and waging war in the most despicable manner possible against women and children.
As long as there are people on the face of the earth who would impose religion or ideology by force, I will work to destroy them. I don't care if they are communist, socialist, Islam, Jew, or Christian.
Whose the bigot? The one who wants to tear down the tower of bigotry or the one who says we should let it alone?
I have been working at online retailers since college. I've worked at retailers in high school and during college. They always work on the margins, and sometimes, their profits from sales amount to negative.
Where do they get the money to keep afloat? From other sources. Some companies get paid by their distributors or manufacturers to advertise. That's right, Retailer Y gets paid money by Manufacturer X to advertise Retailer Y's store. Since advertising is money that has to be spent anyway, this translates to free cash. Others get cash from investors who believe if they can hold on one more year they'll hit it big. Others have some other service or plan that they are selling besides the product.
Retail is about living life on the edge, with barely enough ground to stand on. When times are good, they are really, really good. (And Christmas is a really good time for everyone!) When times are bad, numbers turn red, and managers start sweating more and choosing which salespeople to let go. For most of the year, no one really knows whether they'll get bonuses or get fired.
It's a tough game. It's tough because if you are a clerk or a salesperson, unfortunately, your higher salary works against you. One store I worked at told me upfront. "If you're good, we'll give you a raise." And then the manager said, "If you make too much money, we'll let you go!"
But this is the same everywhere. Publishers are trying to find out how to whip out more product from their factories for cheaper. Distributors are trying to justify their take on the supply chain, wining and dining both suppliers and buyers. And retail shops are trying to manage the head-ache that dealing with people instead of lifeless products brings. Add to that the workers who want to bleed every dollar from their employers, consumers who are about as loyal as a goldfish, and then the government who wants to tell you how to run your business and take their cut of your money as well, whether or not you are profitable. It's a game where everyone is pitted against everyone else.
Remember, one reason the internet is great for retailers is because you can now run your mail-order business for much cheaper and have more content that interacts better with the catalog readers. We've come a long way since Sears has published their first catalog, and we have a lot of ground to cover yet, but all signs point towards the internet solving a lot of problems mail-order has.
But you know what? All of this uncertainty and stress and competition leads to a superior product and distribution chain. In America, you CAN buy almost any game you want in almost any condition you want for a pretty decent price in pretty much any locality. Not so in most of the rest of the world. In America, you CAN start a new publishing or producing company to compete with the big dogs. It's not easy, but if you are good, you'll succeed. It's what makes it all happen. It's all because we have these free markets where people compete for money and no one is coerced to do anything they don't want to do (except in special cases).
I do have a friend in the hardware business. He says that because the cost of building a fab plant are skyrocketing, that the fab plants are becoming independent. His own company makes a deal with a fab plant that has the right setup for their particular chip. They send off the design, get 5 or 6 back, and test them. Then when they are satisfied, they put an order up for several million of them.
This is the way of the future. The fab plants will be an entirely separate business, charging money to fab stuff for various companies.
Now, if Japan decided to consolidate all their fab plants into a single interest, with no competition, that would be bad. It's precisely because the competition we're facing in Taiwan and China that people are using those fabbers from time to time (cheaper, but not better). It's sad to see it go overseas, but it is way too expensive to run one here in the US nowadays.
BTW, you need very highly educated people to run a fab plant. These are no sweatshops, nor can they ever be.
Corporations are evil, selfish, greedy monsters. If you want to find true evil in the world, look no further than your neighboring corporate HQ. But you know what? They've been evil since they were first created. But look at what they have brought us! Like an evil Santa Claus who distributes toys to the world's children for purely selfish reasons, they have effectively brought wealth to the common person in our country.
You know what? I'm not too concerned about Monsanto or any other EVIL corporation. (Not even Haliburton, even if Satan Lord Beelzebub was CEO and chairman of the board.) I'll explain why.
I can think of several other evil corporations. Let's take Microsoft for instance. Monsanto would like to license farmers to use their seeds and using their seeds require their chemicals and the whole package. Doesn't this sound like Microsoft? Sure, food is more important than software, but for a great number of people, software is food. If servers crash or viruses hit, money is lost, money that would buy food to feed someone's family. If my company's software were to absolutely fail, I would be out of a job, and if I couldn't find more money, my family would starve. Not to mention the people who are depending on me to donate money to charity, and the government who depends on my tax revenue.
But look at what Microsoft really did. In their EVIL desire to rule the world, they put a PC or two in almost every home in America and Europe and East Asia. They are trying really hard to make the PC palatable to 3rd world countries and even in China. (I strongly believe that the reason why Bill Gates wants better education and clean water for everyone is so that they can buy more Microsoft computers. EVIL!) They also created a market for cheap consumer computer components. This has resulted in better components for much cheaper prices. Take a look at the cost of hard drive storage compared to 10 years ago. Fascinating, huh? By expanding the market by a magnitude of several million, we not only get selection, but look at the cheap prices!
I love Linux, I use Linux almost exclusively, but I can't say that Linux would've done the same thing as Microsoft did. We don't really have an incentive to saturate the market with cheap OS's and productivity suites. So no one is spending 60 hours a week trying to figure out how to boost Linux installations by 25% next year. See, unlike Microsoft, we're not evil enough to try and force Linux on the masses. In some ways, I wish we were more evil. There's hope for Red Hat yet to turn evil and start forcing its way into server rooms and home offices.
You know what? Farmers are only going to deal with Monsanto if it benefits them, period. In other words, if they can produce more higher quality food with less cost using Monsanto's evilly licensed system, they will do it. Or, in more realistic terms, if they can get paid more money for their crops while spending less and making more of it, they will do it. Farmers aren't stupid. (Individual farmers--maybe. But not the entire class as a whole.) Some farmers won't trust Monsanto, others will use a different company, and still others won't use GM crops at all. Heck, you can buy organic food pretty much anywhere nowadays. If people want something like that, then Monsanto will never penetrate the market 100%. We're going to have the same diversity that has saved us from the same kind of famines that have hit other countries in the past. And if Monsanto wants to sue to keep people from accidentally growing Monsanto licensed soybeans, that's probably a good thing.
What does this mean for the consumer? Better food, more of it, for cheaper. But we also get more variety. I can't wait until I can buy 5 pound tomatoes and soybeans the size of my arm, personally. That can't be a bad thing, can it?
That's the reason why the free market works and the US is the wealthiest country the world has ever known. The free market takes the selfish, evil desires of some very smart people and turns it into cheap, quality products
Where is Enron today? GONE! The second--yes, the very second--word got out that they were dishonest, their stock prices tanked and people began leaving. Here today, gone tomorrow. These sick kids that thought they could play a joke on the market are learning really fast that we don't take this kind of crap. Where are they now? Having nightmares of serving long sentences for fraud. Do you think they will ever see their salaries and stock options again? Do you think they will ever get a job working within 3 miles of a account book? Heck no.
Yes, Enron was dishonest. But they are gone now. That's what happens: The market corrects for them.
This is very different than the business culture in Asia. If a company does poorly, or is caught in some scandal, the government bails them out. Not so here, except for rare exceptions.
Do you think that the NSA doesn't have ways around the encryption methods you are looking at implementing?
I understand the math behind it. Keep in mind a few bright Chinese scientists were able to find weaknesses in once stalwart signature technology. The stuff we use today isn't impervious, and we know that there are ways around it. We just don't know for sure how easy it is until someone proves it.
China's only problem is that they allowed these scientists to publish this. Why the communists didn't bring these guys into their top-secret intelligence org is beyond me. In the US, if a scientist discovered how to thwart similar security measures, they wouldn't be allowed to publish it. They would be instantly whisked away to the NSA secret HQ to work on similar problems for untold amounts of cash.
Which brings an interesting thought: How smart are the people who work at NSA, and how much can they crack? How do these people's intelligences and knowledge compare to the rest of the world, at least, the public world? We'll never know for sure unless we get a job working there as a scientist who has to develop new methods of cracking encryptions. And then we wouldn't be allowed to tell anyone. So the public will never know for sure, and can never know for sure.
In short, the encryption race can't be won with the US government, any more than you could win a nuclear arms race. You can go ahead and compete with nosy neighbors and competitors, and perhaps even 2nd or 3rd world foreign intelligence, but I strongly doubt that you'll be secure from the prying eyes of any administration of any of our allies. Besides, this is one area where our government has spent and will spend the required resources to ensure they are #1, just like the arms race was.
And remember, in security, the question is, "How secure do you really need to be, and how much are you willing to pay for it?" In the end, is your grandmother really that worried about some administration official reading her super-secret brownie recipe that she passes on to her friends? What will she say that could possibly alarm them? How secure will the recipients of her messages keep those messages? What's the point of being secure if you can't secure both ends of the conversation?
This is hardly a nail in our coffin. The US knows that monopolies are bad because they become lazy and charge high prices for crap. If anything, this will ruin the semiconducter economy in Japan as they become equated with bloated prices and shoddy work.
How would you feel if you heard that all the top semiconductor companies in the US were going to merge? Wouldn't your next reaction be something about monopolies and anti-trust? Wouldn't you expect to see higher prices for shoddier work? That's exactly what's going to happen in Japan. I assume the next step is to start using the Japanese government to enforce favorable trade controls to keep the conglomerate alive.
It's competition that keeps U.S. companies honest. If they can't compete, they go out of business, to be replaced by companies that can compete. In Japan (and to a large extend, Korea) mama government will start passing out welfare checks when national corporation X stops being profitable. (We'll see if China is going to behave the same. All predictions say "yes".)
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Except you yourself haven't seen any part of the elephant. What research reports have you studied?
Here's the parts of the elephant I haven't seen yet. Maybe you "seeing person" know the answers. Tell me, what percentage of the earth's temperatures are we measuring at any one point in time? How much of the temperature throughout earth's history do we know, and within what error range? When we talk about "average temperature" what do we really mean? The average of all measurements or the average of all temperatures on the surface of the entire earth?
What are the effects of raising or lowering the average temperature of the earth by fractions of a degree? What proof do you have that these are the effects, or are you only predicting without any good models? Can you tell me how many more or fewer hurricans will hit the Florida coastline if we increase the temperature by 0.1 degrees? How accurate are your predictions? What about the effects on crops, human lifespan, average human intelligence, the economy? Are you accounting for new markets that will be created if Europe comes out of its little ice age?
Can you name all the chemicals found in our atmosphere? For each chemical, name the following properties: What is its effect on global temperatures? What concentration do we find these chemicals at which levels of the atmosphere? From whence do each of these chemicals come? What will happen to the earth's temperature if we increase or reduce the levels of this chemical? Please account for new plant growth or adaptations in the earth's environment. For instance, increasing CO2 may increase the algae population in the ocean, causing the ocean to absorb more sunlight. Please be specific and complete in all your assessments.
Can you name how much sunlight is hitting our earth, and compare with historical levels? What is the accuracy of our measurements and historical measurements? Have you measured how much heat hits the earth and is escaping? How have you done that? What are the accuracies of these measurements?
How much of the heat in our atmosphere comes from the earth itself? Can you determine what the historical levels were? How accurate are your measurements?
These are all questions I have been asking for years, and no scientist has ever been able to answer them. Bottom line: We don't see the elephant. No one does, until each of these questions can be answered definitively and with a very high accuracy for a very long period of time.
I think this is yet another nail in the coffin of the we-are-causing-global-warming-so-stop-driving-now crowd.
We understand so little about weather and the atmosphere and global warming and our sun that to think that we even have an idea of how to reverse the process if it is happening to a significant degree, or to think that we even understand what is really causing it, is absurd.
This is the old blind men and the elephant story. One person thinks it is a spear. Another, a snake. Another, a tree. Another, a whip. Except this elephant is so large and so complicated that even with all of our eyes open and all of our technology looking into it, we still can't figure it out. One group says the earth is cooling. Another, warming. Another, it was too cold now it is coming back to normal. One group says we should stop burning fossil fuels. Another says we should stop burning fossil fuels uncleanly. Still others say that it doesn't matter how much or little CO2 we put out in the atmosphere, the earth tends to absorb it. Others say that the US is the cleanest country in the world because we allow market forces to handle the management of the environment, so we shouldn't regulate it at all but let people choose what they want to do or not do to protect it.
The weather is something beyond our understanding, so it's best that for right now, we attribute it to an Act of God. When we can understand enough about it that we can get an accurate picture and draw conclusive---and correct---results, then we can start taking responsibility for it.
Simple: Go figure it out for yourself.
Go to the local library. Check out books on running a business, setting up a corporation, accounting, and everything you are curious about. Find out what you have to do to make it all legitimate. There is a wealth of information available. If the local beauty salon can figure it all out, so can you.
Fortunately, in the US, that income you generate is considered personal income. You are taxed just as much as if you had a job. Unfortunately, that means you have to pay Social Security and Medicare tax on that income. If you forget to do that and report the income, the IRS will happily remind you with a hefty fine. When your income becomes approximately what you need to live on, you should probably start looking at a corporation.
It's simple: He stopped being an objective observer of the natural world around him. He let his preconceived notions, pride, and selfishness get in the way of simple observation. It's what happens to scientists when they stop observing and start believing.
What the Korean people have to learn, as every culture and group interested in science has to learn, is that your failures are really successes. He should've published that his method didn't work. He should've been bold with his discovery of the limitations.
We have the same problem here. We honor scientists who do something amazing, but we relegate those who don't to the back burner. Both have done an equal amount for science as a whole. For every "success" there are hundreds and thousands of "failures". Each of these observations and experiments bring us closer to a greater understanding of the universe. Unfortunately, too often we want to see something amazing or we want our predictions to come true, and that taints our ability to be objective.
Is this some sort of Communist joke?
Why does every post that refutes free market capitalism start with something like "in a perfect world". In a perfect world, we wouldn't need jobs because everybody would do what they are best at doing and what is most important for everyone else. We would share what they have with precisely the people who need it most. In a perfect world, we wouldn't need government because everybody would be saints! There wouldn't be any crime nor any wars. We wouldn't need schools to educate the people who are too stupid to realize that education is extremely valuable. We wouldn't need hospitals because no one would get sick, and we wouldn't need roads because everyone would be perfectly happy where they were! That's what a perfect world looks like. A perfect world is perfect without capitalism.
It's because we are living in a messed up world that capitalism works. It preys on people's greed and avarice. It takes these negative emotions and turns them into very productive and useful things. It is a temporary solution until someone discovers the way to make "a perfect world" that doesn't involve murdering people or throwing them into prison camps. I'll be glad if and when that day comes. I'll gladly join whatever society figures out how to make people saints without violence or oppression.
As far as the job market, I welcome competition, even if it costs me my own job. It drives prices down and increases the quality of workmanship. If I lose my job to an immigrant, that means I was overpaid or underworked, or that I have to find some other market to sell my services in to stay competitive, perhaps one that exploits my old job. I'm looking forward to the day when I can hire 4 or 5 me's for the same salary I am getting now. I'll be able to keep 3 or 4 of their salaries for myself!
You are completely wrong on so many counts.
Let's take the invention of powered flight. For many thousands of years, people have dreamed of controlling the skies. Yet not until the Wright brothers did we have anybody capable of actually doing so. What was the difference?
It is simple. Everyone can imagine. Only the Wright brothers could put the machine together. See, the Wright brothers had a foundation of sure knowledge and understanding of engines and mechanics and gears and such. In fact, if you look carefully at their original design, they had some fairly unique insights into how to build something strong but light. Their expertise in these technologies allowed them to put 2 and 2 together and get 4.
You can look at any advancement in science, culture, society, government, and military, and see how it was people who had imagination but who were also well-versed in the current technology who really brought change.
So, I would say to young people full of imagination, get off your butt, read some serious books, and learn what we already know. Don't waste your time imagining until your find yourself at the edge of human knowledge, staring into the unknown where no one has started before. But you can't get there unless you take the journey that everyone who has gone before you have taken and build on their work.
It used to be that you went to school to learn and be told how stupid you were and what you had to do to get smart. Nowadays, it's all about puffing up people's pride and giving them hope where there is none. I was frustrated when I graduated high school only to find out I was one in a million very bright people who wanted to go to the top colleges. No one had told me that I wasn't unique, I wasn't special, and my talents weren't one-of-a-kind, until life hit me in the face like a ton of bricks. I despise my teachers who puffed me up with a false sense of self-worth. I wish they had told me that if I didn't hit the books and do better on my homework I couldn't expect to compete with other kids like me.
Imagination is nice, but you have to be grounded in reality in order to make any use of it. A good example are crackpots in the physics world. These guys don't even understand the most fundamental principles that are absolutely true. Yet they spout off like they know the secrets of the universe, even though their imagination contradicts observed facts.
In other words, before you start pondering the makeup of the universe, it's much better to figure out what we already know and then work from there.
The same goes for the basics. If you can't read, write, or do basic arithmetic, what good is your imagination? There's a reason why Einstein's imagination is so much more useful for the world than your toddler's imagination. When Einstein imagined, he was really pushing the boundaries of knowledge. Your toddler still thinks he is the center of the universe.
Yeah, we had the same thing going on at the University of Washington. They had all the freshman physics classes lined up to learn this way. Except the professors weren't on board. They allowed a few questions on the exam to come from the TA grad students running the program, but the majority were the dry old textbook physics stuff. And lectures were lectures that would make you die from boredom. In other words, the professor stands up when the bell rings, then says, "Continuing our discussion from two days ago, the answer is obviously expressed by this simple equation with three terms. As you can PLAINLY see, this exponential term explodes as t approaches 0, while these terms tend to 0. So..." The other stuff was run by the muckity mucks.
What was really sad is the so-called physics educators didn't understand physics themselves. So they wrote these guided labs and workbooks that were misleading. A couple of times in my memory a physics professor would get a hold of the workbook or lab material and bring it to lecture to explain why it was wrong. Needless to say, there wasn't much love between the two groups of people.
What happened was a lot of the students ended up finding a good tutor that would explain to them what was really happening in simple terms rather than letting the students grasp at straws. It takes a professional to tie the stupid labs with the real world and the book physics.
The students I tutored would always ask, "Why don't they just do THIS in lab rather than waste our time in an exercise of futility?" I told them things got better in the sophomore level and above, that physics was really a great subject with some fun things in it, but by then they were turned off completely.
Our physics department really struggled to find kids that wanted to learn physics.
Let's just all sit around all day imagining stuff. Like let's imagine that we know how to read and write and do arithmetic. That way, when we actually have to do it, we'll be ready!
We can just imagine up computer manuals. Or better yet, let's just pretend we are computer experts who know how to write software to fly airplanes! Then we can imagine that the software passes the FAA certification process. And we can imagine that that plane just didn't fall out of the sky, killing hundreds of the passengers on board because the pilots were imagining they were really pilots when that was the first time they stepped inside a cockpit!
Isn't imagination wonderful? We'll just imagine all of life's problems away because we can, and because, you know, Disney said it works!
I know you're being funny, but here are some interesting tidbits on reading I thought I'd share.
* It's not so much reading as in reading at improper light levels. Too bright, your eyes get tired. Too dark, your eyes get tired. I think that's why, as a culture, we tend to read mostly in the early morning or evening. It's when it's not too dark, you have your lights turned on at home, and the light level is just right.
* When you're reading, you don't have to look so busy. Unfortunately, it's hard to find good books that relate to work that are fun to read. But with printouts, no one can tell if it is work related or not.
* My co-worker has a dad who has his secretary print out web pages. He'll read them, and then mark what he wants to buy or get more details on. The secretary will then give him the additional information he wants. It's a clunky, slow, way to deal with the internet. But it was interesting that people out there are actually accessing the internet this way. If I had a secretary, a great deal of his time would be spent searching the internet and printing up things of interest for me.
* There was a Korean scholar from a long time ago (I think he is on the 1,000 won bill) who read using only one eye. His idea was that by using one eye for the first part of his life, he would preserve his other eye for the later part. I don't know how well that turned out there. I figured he died before his one eye gave out. Otherwise, apparently he was a smart, if eccentric, guy.
* One thing I love doing in my books is writing in them, especially if they are of the reference variety. I hate PDF because I can't mark it up with my PDF browser. Same for HTML, except you can download that and edit it some. Does anyone know of a tool or a format which encourages people to annotate and mark the text up, if not just for their own reading? There are some neat ideas out there, like Wiki, but they're still rather clunky.
Get a good laser printer. (As far as I know laser is cheaper than inkjet per page, and you get a better resolution.) Print the pages you want to read. Read them with the monitor turned off.
When I spend a great deal of time looking at a monitor, I can't focus after a while. Either the font size goes up or I turn it off and get some sleep or read a book.
Your body is sending you a signal. Pay attention and heed its warnings or suffer the consequences later in life.
In the real world, you work on a project for a time then move on to something else. Then you or someone else is assigned to revisit your old code. You don't have time to relearn the code and you certainly don't have time to sit down the guy called in to fix it and tranfers your understanding of the project. (If you did, you would've documented the code properly in the first place, right?)
When companies don't comment and don't document their code properly, they begin this vicious cycle of rewriting old code because no one know how it should or does work and no one has the time to figure it out. Let me explain why.
Imagine you find a software package on the internet licensed in a way that suits your needs. Now imagine that software package, with very few modifications, will do exactly what you need it to do for you project. You have a choice: (1) Take that software, modify it, and deploy it, or (2) write your own from scratch.
There is only ONE determining factor in whether you inevitably choose (1) or (2), and that is DOCUMENTATION.
Now remember that software you find in your own company is no better or worse than software you find on the internet, only it has a much more liberal license for your purposes. But does that change the fact that in order to make use of it you have to understand it?
On my job, I have an approach to undocumented software. I start writing documentation for it, whether or not the author wants me to and whether or not there is really enough time for it. If I have questions, I find the author, and approach him with pen and paper. We sit down and write documentation together. Inevitably, by documenting what I find in other people's codes it ends up saving me more time than if I wrote the code myself, documented it, and debugged it. So I have been able to finish a great number of projects ahead of schedule because I don't write code: I READ it. (And this is a perl world too!) And in the end, others are able to come and read my documents and notes and reuse the software as well.
I read the speech you cited. It is absolutely wonderful and refreshing. It gives me a great deal of hope for China.
One thing I got out of his speech is that he deplores the way Chinese thought and politics is so narrow-minded. He wants the students to look to China as their homeland and then do what they should to make it better. One of the problems China has is that it is sending some of its best and brightest away to the West, only to see them never return.
I don't fault Microsoft for bending to Chinese political pressure. It's not Microsoft's fight! If I were a guest in that country, I would bow under whatever rules they had. Not because I am a wussy and I don't believe in inalienable rights, but because I am not Chinese and it's not my country so it's not my place to criticize. (Interestingly enough, this is the only reason why I believe you can justify being against the rebuilding and democratization policy in Iraq.)
So that's why Microsoft is absolutely correct to bow to political pressure. Bill Gates has a voice in his own country, trying to improve education, reform patents, and change the way government works. It's his right and duty to do this. But does Bill Gates have a voice in China? Absolutely not. It's up to those students at the university to fight that fight, and that's what Li Ao told them.
Li Ao also pointed out that when you have a moral dilemna, there is usually a good way to solve it. In this case, Microsoft is actually doing far greater for encouraging democracy by building the channel by which information can be distributed than the harm it is doing for shutting down one voice to comply with the government. It would be like telling the comfort women to not accept the money from Japan but then giving them many magnitudes more money to live their lives in peace and obtain the medical help they deserve.
There has been some remarkable ideas---ideas, mind you---of what possibilities might exist for the reality we haven't been able to test in laboratories yet. These are ideas that real physicists come up with as possibilities that don't violate too many laws of physics to be utterly implausible.
We know that gravity bends space. We know that mass and energy are interchangeable. We know that mass creates a gravity field (that bends space.) What about massive energies? Does it have a gravity field? What if we took the equivalent energy in a 2 ton ball and stored that in a capacitor? Would its mass (as observed in relativity) increase by 2 tons? Incredibly, yes.
That's pretty whacko. But consider the possibilities. Using only energy, you can BEND TIME AND SPACE.
What can you do? Can you set up weird gravity fields that don't look like point sources? What about the acceleration due to gravity? Is that limited by relativity? What if we effectively cut out a region of space by surrounding that with a hollow black hole. What are the rules on whole regions of space as they travel through other regions of space? If it can move near the speed of light, and we are moving near the speed of light in that piece of space, are we moving 2x the speed of light compared to objects outside of that region of space? What if we had several layers of space each travelling within another region of space near the speed of light? Can we obtain infinite speed?
What about taking a region of space and effectively patching it somewhere else in the universe. Isn't this a wormhole of sorts? And are those possible?
String theory says that there may be more than 4 dimensions. If space is curved, then we can effectively travel from one spot to the other without covering as much ground as we would've in regular space. But what if there are different rules? What if with gravity we can put a kink in a strategic location in space thus making space curve in a way that makes this kind of travel easier?
You see, there are a lot of possibilities, and they aren't all that unreasonable. Unfortunately, we can't perform these experiments with today's technologies. Or can we?
Just remember how absurd people thought Einstein was for suggesting that light waves are really very tiny massless cannon balls. That earned him the Nobel Prize, and was the concept that gave birth to Quantum Mechanics, which Einstein himself thought was absolutely absurd. Physicists spend a great deal of time calling each other names when in the end, they end up proving the other guy correct by trying to disprove him.
Fishes live near the surface of the ocean. Yes, it is possible to overfish in specific regions. It probably isn't possible to fish a species to extinction, however, even if we intended to do so. What happens in overfishing is the population of the fishes reduce to a point where it is no longer economically viable to fish. There are still plenty of fish out there, and skilled hunters (animals or human) can obtain as much fish as they really need or switch their diet. The only animals we really hurt by overfishing are ourselves because we effectively "starve" ourselves of that species of fish by making it uneconomical to continue fishing it.
It's interesting what is happening with the Pollack population in the Pacific. There are vast schools of these fish, and it is a fairly useful species. We have these huge ships that are packing facilities with a net attached scooping enormous quantities of these fish out of the ocean. However, through careful management, the Pollack fishing countries have agreed to only fish the amount that will allow the Pollack population to increase to its maximum sustainable population. This is where science, economics, and human ingenuity meet, and the result of truly free market action. Everybody who has an economic interest in the Pollack population has whole-heartedly signed on to ensure that there are going to be Pollack forever and ever.
However, what this energy source uses is not the surface water alone. It uses the mass of the ocean itself. In other words, you are limited to the scale of the volume or mass of the ocean, not the surface area. If we octuplued (8x) our output of energy, we would need to use 8x as much ocean mass to do so. This will affect only 4x as much surface area of the ocean.
Because dolphins happen to live closer to the surface of the ocean than the bottom, along with the vast majority of sea life. And waves are plentiful near the shore, where they would be seen by people and interfere with ocean traffic.
This could be built out of sight and away from the vast majority of living sea creatures. You have to build it where the ocean is very deep, namely, away from where most people live.
The ocean is so grossly unimaginably big that we would need an absolutely huge operation to even cause a measurable effect. If you really tried to change the temperature by even a fraction of a degree using this method you would have to pump extremely large quantities of water---quantities so large that I don't think anyone would ever consider building something so massive.
People sometimes forget the scale of things. On a global scale, we are not even part of the equation.
But you also have to consider the opportunity costs of doing this. If we would raise the global atmospheric temperature 1/10 of a degree with all the carbon we were burning, what will the net effect be if we can convert a significant portion of our energy sources from burning carbon to mixing a small amount of cold and warm water?
I hope Pete does well. But remember Howard Dean's campaign? Technology is not a panacea. Hopefully Pete has the stuff in politics to make it work, but I doubt it. It all comes down to raising cash, getting feet on the ground, and making sure that people turn out to vote for you and not the other guy. Technology is some help, but we're not at the point yet when a Wiki or a Drupal-based web-app will solve the problem of turning platforms into dollars and voters.
I am pretty familiar with Utah politics. I don't see any way Pete is going to take down Orrin Hatch. Orrin may have been strongly in favor of "digital rights" or whatever they want to call it nowadays, but that isn't an issue for most Utah voters. Maybe in Silicon Valley it would be. On the rest of the issues, Orrin is a perfect fit for the average Utah voter. Orrin in a way is turning into the Ted Kennedy of that state. He hasn't had a serious screw-up and he's done good with what he's got.
Is it more important to not sound like a hateful bigot or to not BE a hateful bigot?
I've got no beef with the Wahhabi sect of Islam and the likes of Al Qaeda, Hamas, and the others. I'd just as soon they let us alone, and everyone else for that matter.
Apparently, they want to come into my home, rape and murder me and my wife because we refuse to join Islam. They would also see all the Jews killed in the most horrific manner, women, men, and children. They don't tolerate homosexuality, they don't tolerate democracy, and they don't tolerate non-Moslems testifying against a Moslem in court. Osama Bin Laden called our country depraved and without any morals or religion. He thinks he has a divine calling to kill us and subjugate us to a global caliphate. He wants to impose shari'a law on us and charge us a jizrah tax if we refuse to become moslem.
And I'm the hateful bigot because I am pointing out these obvious facts? Go read and listen to Osama bin Laden's speeches if you want to know what he really thinks.
Bush didn't invent this war. This war has been happening since Mohammed's time. Go look at Europe's history for obvious proof of what some whackjobs do to a continent when they believe Mohammed justified the shameless subjugation, rape, torture, and murder of other peoples. It wasn't until France's foreign legion that they've stopped being so bold. But back in the 70's, when France withdrew the foreign legion, they started up again, kidnapping, murdering, torturing, bombing, and waging war in the most despicable manner possible against women and children.
As long as there are people on the face of the earth who would impose religion or ideology by force, I will work to destroy them. I don't care if they are communist, socialist, Islam, Jew, or Christian.
Whose the bigot? The one who wants to tear down the tower of bigotry or the one who says we should let it alone?
I have been working at online retailers since college. I've worked at retailers in high school and during college. They always work on the margins, and sometimes, their profits from sales amount to negative.
Where do they get the money to keep afloat? From other sources. Some companies get paid by their distributors or manufacturers to advertise. That's right, Retailer Y gets paid money by Manufacturer X to advertise Retailer Y's store. Since advertising is money that has to be spent anyway, this translates to free cash. Others get cash from investors who believe if they can hold on one more year they'll hit it big. Others have some other service or plan that they are selling besides the product.
Retail is about living life on the edge, with barely enough ground to stand on. When times are good, they are really, really good. (And Christmas is a really good time for everyone!) When times are bad, numbers turn red, and managers start sweating more and choosing which salespeople to let go. For most of the year, no one really knows whether they'll get bonuses or get fired.
It's a tough game. It's tough because if you are a clerk or a salesperson, unfortunately, your higher salary works against you. One store I worked at told me upfront. "If you're good, we'll give you a raise." And then the manager said, "If you make too much money, we'll let you go!"
But this is the same everywhere. Publishers are trying to find out how to whip out more product from their factories for cheaper. Distributors are trying to justify their take on the supply chain, wining and dining both suppliers and buyers. And retail shops are trying to manage the head-ache that dealing with people instead of lifeless products brings. Add to that the workers who want to bleed every dollar from their employers, consumers who are about as loyal as a goldfish, and then the government who wants to tell you how to run your business and take their cut of your money as well, whether or not you are profitable. It's a game where everyone is pitted against everyone else.
Remember, one reason the internet is great for retailers is because you can now run your mail-order business for much cheaper and have more content that interacts better with the catalog readers. We've come a long way since Sears has published their first catalog, and we have a lot of ground to cover yet, but all signs point towards the internet solving a lot of problems mail-order has.
But you know what? All of this uncertainty and stress and competition leads to a superior product and distribution chain. In America, you CAN buy almost any game you want in almost any condition you want for a pretty decent price in pretty much any locality. Not so in most of the rest of the world. In America, you CAN start a new publishing or producing company to compete with the big dogs. It's not easy, but if you are good, you'll succeed. It's what makes it all happen. It's all because we have these free markets where people compete for money and no one is coerced to do anything they don't want to do (except in special cases).
You have an excellent point.
I do have a friend in the hardware business. He says that because the cost of building a fab plant are skyrocketing, that the fab plants are becoming independent. His own company makes a deal with a fab plant that has the right setup for their particular chip. They send off the design, get 5 or 6 back, and test them. Then when they are satisfied, they put an order up for several million of them.
This is the way of the future. The fab plants will be an entirely separate business, charging money to fab stuff for various companies.
Now, if Japan decided to consolidate all their fab plants into a single interest, with no competition, that would be bad. It's precisely because the competition we're facing in Taiwan and China that people are using those fabbers from time to time (cheaper, but not better). It's sad to see it go overseas, but it is way too expensive to run one here in the US nowadays.
BTW, you need very highly educated people to run a fab plant. These are no sweatshops, nor can they ever be.
Corporations are evil, selfish, greedy monsters. If you want to find true evil in the world, look no further than your neighboring corporate HQ. But you know what? They've been evil since they were first created. But look at what they have brought us! Like an evil Santa Claus who distributes toys to the world's children for purely selfish reasons, they have effectively brought wealth to the common person in our country.
You know what? I'm not too concerned about Monsanto or any other EVIL corporation. (Not even Haliburton, even if Satan Lord Beelzebub was CEO and chairman of the board.) I'll explain why.
I can think of several other evil corporations. Let's take Microsoft for instance. Monsanto would like to license farmers to use their seeds and using their seeds require their chemicals and the whole package. Doesn't this sound like Microsoft? Sure, food is more important than software, but for a great number of people, software is food. If servers crash or viruses hit, money is lost, money that would buy food to feed someone's family. If my company's software were to absolutely fail, I would be out of a job, and if I couldn't find more money, my family would starve. Not to mention the people who are depending on me to donate money to charity, and the government who depends on my tax revenue.
But look at what Microsoft really did. In their EVIL desire to rule the world, they put a PC or two in almost every home in America and Europe and East Asia. They are trying really hard to make the PC palatable to 3rd world countries and even in China. (I strongly believe that the reason why Bill Gates wants better education and clean water for everyone is so that they can buy more Microsoft computers. EVIL!) They also created a market for cheap consumer computer components. This has resulted in better components for much cheaper prices. Take a look at the cost of hard drive storage compared to 10 years ago. Fascinating, huh? By expanding the market by a magnitude of several million, we not only get selection, but look at the cheap prices!
I love Linux, I use Linux almost exclusively, but I can't say that Linux would've done the same thing as Microsoft did. We don't really have an incentive to saturate the market with cheap OS's and productivity suites. So no one is spending 60 hours a week trying to figure out how to boost Linux installations by 25% next year. See, unlike Microsoft, we're not evil enough to try and force Linux on the masses. In some ways, I wish we were more evil. There's hope for Red Hat yet to turn evil and start forcing its way into server rooms and home offices.
You know what? Farmers are only going to deal with Monsanto if it benefits them, period. In other words, if they can produce more higher quality food with less cost using Monsanto's evilly licensed system, they will do it. Or, in more realistic terms, if they can get paid more money for their crops while spending less and making more of it, they will do it. Farmers aren't stupid. (Individual farmers--maybe. But not the entire class as a whole.) Some farmers won't trust Monsanto, others will use a different company, and still others won't use GM crops at all. Heck, you can buy organic food pretty much anywhere nowadays. If people want something like that, then Monsanto will never penetrate the market 100%. We're going to have the same diversity that has saved us from the same kind of famines that have hit other countries in the past. And if Monsanto wants to sue to keep people from accidentally growing Monsanto licensed soybeans, that's probably a good thing.
What does this mean for the consumer? Better food, more of it, for cheaper. But we also get more variety. I can't wait until I can buy 5 pound tomatoes and soybeans the size of my arm, personally. That can't be a bad thing, can it?
That's the reason why the free market works and the US is the wealthiest country the world has ever known. The free market takes the selfish, evil desires of some very smart people and turns it into cheap, quality products
Where is Enron today? GONE! The second--yes, the very second--word got out that they were dishonest, their stock prices tanked and people began leaving. Here today, gone tomorrow. These sick kids that thought they could play a joke on the market are learning really fast that we don't take this kind of crap. Where are they now? Having nightmares of serving long sentences for fraud. Do you think they will ever see their salaries and stock options again? Do you think they will ever get a job working within 3 miles of a account book? Heck no.
Yes, Enron was dishonest. But they are gone now. That's what happens: The market corrects for them.
This is very different than the business culture in Asia. If a company does poorly, or is caught in some scandal, the government bails them out. Not so here, except for rare exceptions.
Do you think that the NSA doesn't have ways around the encryption methods you are looking at implementing?
I understand the math behind it. Keep in mind a few bright Chinese scientists were able to find weaknesses in once stalwart signature technology. The stuff we use today isn't impervious, and we know that there are ways around it. We just don't know for sure how easy it is until someone proves it.
China's only problem is that they allowed these scientists to publish this. Why the communists didn't bring these guys into their top-secret intelligence org is beyond me. In the US, if a scientist discovered how to thwart similar security measures, they wouldn't be allowed to publish it. They would be instantly whisked away to the NSA secret HQ to work on similar problems for untold amounts of cash.
Which brings an interesting thought: How smart are the people who work at NSA, and how much can they crack? How do these people's intelligences and knowledge compare to the rest of the world, at least, the public world? We'll never know for sure unless we get a job working there as a scientist who has to develop new methods of cracking encryptions. And then we wouldn't be allowed to tell anyone. So the public will never know for sure, and can never know for sure.
In short, the encryption race can't be won with the US government, any more than you could win a nuclear arms race. You can go ahead and compete with nosy neighbors and competitors, and perhaps even 2nd or 3rd world foreign intelligence, but I strongly doubt that you'll be secure from the prying eyes of any administration of any of our allies. Besides, this is one area where our government has spent and will spend the required resources to ensure they are #1, just like the arms race was.
And remember, in security, the question is, "How secure do you really need to be, and how much are you willing to pay for it?" In the end, is your grandmother really that worried about some administration official reading her super-secret brownie recipe that she passes on to her friends? What will she say that could possibly alarm them? How secure will the recipients of her messages keep those messages? What's the point of being secure if you can't secure both ends of the conversation?
This is hardly a nail in our coffin. The US knows that monopolies are bad because they become lazy and charge high prices for crap. If anything, this will ruin the semiconducter economy in Japan as they become equated with bloated prices and shoddy work.
How would you feel if you heard that all the top semiconductor companies in the US were going to merge? Wouldn't your next reaction be something about monopolies and anti-trust? Wouldn't you expect to see higher prices for shoddier work? That's exactly what's going to happen in Japan. I assume the next step is to start using the Japanese government to enforce favorable trade controls to keep the conglomerate alive.
It's competition that keeps U.S. companies honest. If they can't compete, they go out of business, to be replaced by companies that can compete. In Japan (and to a large extend, Korea) mama government will start passing out welfare checks when national corporation X stops being profitable. (We'll see if China is going to behave the same. All predictions say "yes".)