The thing is, the stuff you describe is happening all over the business world, and farming has just become much more modern in terms of its financial model as well as how it operates.
You don't own your seed? Well, many businesses don't own the software they use, and often the computers they run it on either. This is done for many reasons, including the cost of support and the way balance sheets are managed. At the place I work in I imagine that a LOT of the expensive hardware is on lease with $1 buyout options.
I do think that there needs to be a rebalancing of things on the Monsanto front. However, that really goes several ways. Farmers shouldn't be paying for pollen that drifts onto their fields. On the other hand, farmers should be paying for seeds they obtained from Monsanto (including subsequent generations). Monsanto does need to build into their business model the fact that the genetic changes they make will tend to spread in the wild and at some point will become part of the natural state. The problem is that if you only let them profit off of seeds the first year then nobody will be able to afford the prices this would require, which means nobody will develop genetically modified foods, which means we'll lose the benefit of having them in the first place.
Unfortunately, when operators misuse equipment through poor judgment, the courts side with the operator, so the manufacturer is forced to remove functionality from all users because one user is unable to exercise the commons sense required to operate the machinery.
Instead of removing features.... why don't we require that operators receive proper training?
The solution is neither black boxes nor unsafe devices.
Go ahead and have automation and sensors. Just require that manufacturers publish all the specifications and service manuals for the stuff they sell. The machine can still shut off when it detects an unsafe condition, but now the owner can decide whether they want to replace the $5 sensor themselves vs having somebody fly out and fix it for them.
I want to be able to fix my own car within reason. That doesn't mean that I don't want my car to sound an alarm when my brakes are in danger of failing and prevent my kid who doesn't know any better from starting the car (hey, dad, I noticed at the store that my tire is flat. didn't the TPMS light turn on? oh, that light on the dashboard I ignored? yeah, the one that forces me to drive out and fix your tire in the middle of a parking lot instead of right next to my garage with all my tools.).
(Bluetooth) dongles are widely available, just as software to read the data (Free, open and closed) for all major OS.
Dongles are cheap. The information they give you is fairly useless in diagnosing specific hardware faults, sensor codes, etc unless you have the factory proprietary software.
Want to modulate the ABS module to purge air and replace the brake fluid? Sorry.
The ABS is a critical vehicle safety system. The last thing they need is to hand over direct control to end-users. (most of whom would have no idea what they are fiddling with)
How is this any different from being able to change the brake fluid in the lines the old fashioned way? If you do it wrong, your brakes will fail, and you could die.
The solution isn't to make half the car unmaintainable. The solution is to simply publish the official service manuals, and the car owner is responsible for doing the job right or paying somebody else to do the job right. That has worked fine for 100 years.
Agree. It is foolish to only be geared up to fight the old USSR. However, it is also foolish to not be able to handle a modern confrontation.
In general you tend to get whatever confrontation you're least prepared for, since your opponents aren't going to start a confrontation you're well-prepared for. The solution is to be reasonably well-prepared for everything.
That doesn't mean that you need to be able to single-handedly conqueror the entire planet, however. That is the bigger problem the US seems to be dealing with. You can have modern fighter aircraft without having more of them then the next 12 largest alliances combined.
You could drop a whole carrier fleet fairly easily with a barrage of hypersonic missiles fired from a small number of disposable re-purposed fishing boats. Just strap on the launchers, sync them with orbital spy sat targeting and geo location... and fire. Those things come screaming in faster then bullets... and even the Aegis defense system is reported to be unable to really stop them.
The main problem with this is that in any war where carriers would actually be vulnerable, there won't be any satellites of any kind, much less spy satellites. If such a war started the first thing both sides would do is shoot down all the satellites owned by the other side, and the resulting debris would quickly wipe out everything that wasn't specifically targeted.
You can't fire a missile on a target without a half-decent idea of where it is (within miles for sure). If you want to fire using fishing boats then you need an even better idea of where it is going to be in the week it takes for your fishing boat to putter along to the target.
I'm not saying that carriers aren't still vulnerable, but people seem to take for granted the intelligence issue by just waving their hands and saying "but satellites tell us everything that is going on everywhere" not realizing that in a real modern war there won't be any satellites, with ALL the downsides that involves.
Another big factor with self-driving cars is the elimination of traffic control devices that stop the flow of traffic.
How will pedestrians cross the street without traffic signals? Do they cross whenever/wherever they like and the autonomous cars shift around them like a river around a stone? Remember, these things are traveling while bumper-to-bumper and at high velocities.
Just give them a button to push - they could have lights of their own. In most parts of the US, pedestrians cross traffic fairly infrequently. In cities it would obviously be a concern.
This is the component that is riddled with security holes in 4.3 and earlier devices, but which Google can't update.
It is news to me that they can't update this component on GSM Nexus devices sold directly by Google without the involvement of a carrier. Last time I checked Google was not updating all the ones which were vulnerable.
See my other reply in this thread regarding the Galaxy Nexus situation. Google would update it if it were possible.
Or the Nexus S. Or the Nexus One. Or the ADP... (Granted, I'm not sure that all of those are vulnerable, and I'm fine with cutting off support at SOME point, but even the ADP would still be supported under many desktop-oriented support cycles.)
Sure, but a typical European town is a few blocks of 14-story buildings surrounded by farmland from what I've seen. A typical US town is 100 blocks of 2-story buildings. The main transport in Europe isn't the bicycle or train - it is the elevator.
I picked my house for the commute - that is why it is only a 20 minute drive to work. Closer might have been nicer, but I didn't want to pay double for it.
I've noticed that if I put my Samsung S4 into airplane mode it'll use about 2% of it's battery power over the course of a day. So, clearly the apps and the software aren't the issue, but just accessing the network even if you're not using it seems to cause the trouble.
Yes and no. In airplane mode those apps might not be running as often. An app running in the background of course directly consumes power for CPU, and also via use of mobile data - I have no idea which consumes more.
Well, we'd already convinced the Soviets that Nixon was a lunatic that was so unstable that he could preemptively launch a nuclear strike against them; I'm not entirely surprised that they armed their space station.
Yeah, that autocannon would have been real effective when we launched a nuclear anti-satellite weapon against them. I can't imagine that the way it was deployed that they could have hit the space shuttle coming in to dock with them with marines on board.
However, cars completely destroy urban density, and it doesn't matter how clean you make them, how self-driving you make them, and, how much safety buffer space you strip away.
You say it doesn't matter if they are self-driving...
This is simply not true... Cars need be only a foot apart at highway speed, when all are under computer control... that changes the density issues completely... add to that the lack of traffic jams and it changes again...
Agree, it will still be less space-efficient than walking over distances where you could walk, but it probably would be more space-efficient than biking (unless the bikes become self-driving).
Another big factor with self-driving cars is the elimination of traffic control devices that stop the flow of traffic. You don't see traffic lights and stop signs on baggage sorting machines and automated warehouses (or airways for that matter). Automated traffic can be interleaved so that it remains out of conflict, and things like road lanes and directionality can also be changed dynamically based on demand.
However, I suspect that even if we are successful in promoting mixed-use developments so people can, in theory, live near their jobs, it will have much less impact on traffic than we would hope.
Not only will people have to travel shorter distances, but denser living makes mass transit more feasible. Also, people can travel to work by other means (cycling, walking, etc).
I have a coworker who works 25 miles from home. So does his wife - in the opposite direction.
Sure, I guess ONE of them could bike to work, if they demolished all the nice homes near the workplace to build less-expensive apartment blocks in the same space so that you actually could accommodate enough people within biking distance. Oh, and assuming nobody cared about arriving to work wet in the morning if it was raining.
This is the component that is riddled with security holes in 4.3 and earlier devices, but which Google can't update.
It is news to me that they can't update this component on GSM Nexus devices sold directly by Google without the involvement of a carrier. Last time I checked Google was not updating all the ones which were vulnerable.
The institutional precedent for profiteering not withstanding, you'd think more multinational conglomerates would take a step back to avoid losing a large swath of their monopolies but no.
Your examples were healthcare and broadband internet.
With healthcare the reform did not really change anybody's market share, and subsidies ensured that there would be more market participants. That is, companies that were making money before probably will make more money. That will sure teach them!
With the internet we've yet to see what will happen, but so far the US government isn't really creating any new competitors in that space. If they allow municipal broadband and new companies to come in and it sticks, then that would get attention. However, it seems like the more likely outcome is that the big providers will be told "ok, you can keep your 1000% markups and 37 layers of fees, but these 3 fees in particular are just crossing the line." The punishment will be that they'll have to make due with 12 boatloads of money instead of 13.
I've been running tor using system without any issue at all for many months now. Like you say, it just starts/stops your network.
Maybe if you wanted to route ALL your network traffic over it you'd need to play with networkd and a proxy and all that, but this isn't a typical use case. It really wouldn't be any different than doing the same thing with any init/network-manager/etc.
Didn't realize it was an FAA rule below 10k, but it obviously makes sense.
For small aircraft the 10k bit wouldn't make sense (the whole flight is often below that), but certainly I'd say that there should be a sterile cockpit anytime you basically aren't in the cruise phase of flight.
Yet he did more to save their asses than ALL of the RAF.
Well, Turing had a HUGE impact on the war, no doubt. It is a bit much to say that it was more than ALL of the RAF. The allies would almost certainly have won without Ultra (eventually), but they certainly wouldn't have won without the conventional forces.
I hope all you brits are still ashamed of yourselves.
Well, the folks who treated him (and others) this way should be ashamed of their actions. The "brits" certainly were no worse in this regard than most who were alive at the time. The use of the word "still" is a bit chilling - most of the people who were around at the time are well into old age at this point. I think it is far more important to learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of our parents, and not beg for forgiveness from the descendants of whatever aboriginal our great great grandparents drove off their land.
I don't have a lot of time in the air, but from the little time that I've flown at night and my general understanding the cockpit of a small aircraft is typically kept very dark, since most of the time you're relying on visual navigation and sighting of stuff that isn't well-lit. A bright flash of light would probably make it hard to even see your instruments until you fumbled for the brightness dial (which would be even harder to find in the dark).
My CFI tried to discourage chit-chat of any kind during critical flight phases.
Now, my understanding is that airliners tend to operate with more light in the cockpit in general and they tend to land at fields with very bright runway lighting and of course they're always in instrument flight rules and most of the time during critical flight phases they're in controlled airspace besides. So, night-blindness would be less of an issue in an airliner, but of course any airline is going to forbid messing around with cameras while in critical phases of flight.
agreed, which is why i plan on moving to charlotte in the next 2 years after i put in some time with my new company. make the same as i do in NY, but have a good 40% more buying power.
US FDA/USDA-style regulatory enforcement and quality controls are practically non-existant in China.
Heck, they're bad enough in the US, especially for non-branded medications. Just look at the whole compounding pharmacy fiasco. Branded medications tend to not be as bad. It isn't that they don't sometimes have issues, but when you're spending millions to make pills that sell for billions you don't want to be shut down because somebody didn't change a $50 filter or whatever.
The true libertarians will argue that this is excessive government regulation, and that the government should stay out of commercial affairs like this, and that the "invisible hand of the holy free market" will correct these problems.
LIbertarians are likely to differ. Some might argue let them kill people and then sort it out with lawsuits. However, truth in labeling is something a lot of fairly hard-core libertarians would probably go along with. They wouldn't want the government banning the sale of any substance, but they would probably favor letting the buyer know what he is getting.
Selling adulterated supplements would be like selling a slave without disclosing that he has artificial teeth. That would be an abuse of the market.
Does the US own the moon? The British conquered half the world using the law of flags, so by rights, since the US is the only country with a flag up there...
Well, in the end the only thing that really matters is who has an effective military there (manned or otherwise). The British no longer own half the world for this very reason.
People like to dress national sovereignty up in all kinds of international norms, but in the end it all comes down to who is able to project power and hold onto it. Otherwise the US would be governed by Indians, England by whoever was around before the Normans, or before them, and so on. It isn't like God handed out property deeds.
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The thing is, the stuff you describe is happening all over the business world, and farming has just become much more modern in terms of its financial model as well as how it operates.
You don't own your seed? Well, many businesses don't own the software they use, and often the computers they run it on either. This is done for many reasons, including the cost of support and the way balance sheets are managed. At the place I work in I imagine that a LOT of the expensive hardware is on lease with $1 buyout options.
I do think that there needs to be a rebalancing of things on the Monsanto front. However, that really goes several ways. Farmers shouldn't be paying for pollen that drifts onto their fields. On the other hand, farmers should be paying for seeds they obtained from Monsanto (including subsequent generations). Monsanto does need to build into their business model the fact that the genetic changes they make will tend to spread in the wild and at some point will become part of the natural state. The problem is that if you only let them profit off of seeds the first year then nobody will be able to afford the prices this would require, which means nobody will develop genetically modified foods, which means we'll lose the benefit of having them in the first place.
Unfortunately, when operators misuse equipment through poor judgment, the courts side with the operator, so the manufacturer is forced to remove functionality from all users because one user is unable to exercise the commons sense required to operate the machinery.
Instead of removing features.... why don't we require that operators receive proper training?
The solution is neither black boxes nor unsafe devices.
Go ahead and have automation and sensors. Just require that manufacturers publish all the specifications and service manuals for the stuff they sell. The machine can still shut off when it detects an unsafe condition, but now the owner can decide whether they want to replace the $5 sensor themselves vs having somebody fly out and fix it for them.
I want to be able to fix my own car within reason. That doesn't mean that I don't want my car to sound an alarm when my brakes are in danger of failing and prevent my kid who doesn't know any better from starting the car (hey, dad, I noticed at the store that my tire is flat. didn't the TPMS light turn on? oh, that light on the dashboard I ignored? yeah, the one that forces me to drive out and fix your tire in the middle of a parking lot instead of right next to my garage with all my tools.).
Dongles are cheap. The information they give you is fairly useless in diagnosing specific hardware faults, sensor codes, etc unless you have the factory proprietary software.
Want to modulate the ABS module to purge air and replace the brake fluid? Sorry.
The ABS is a critical vehicle safety system. The last thing they need is to hand over direct control to end-users. (most of whom would have no idea what they are fiddling with)
How is this any different from being able to change the brake fluid in the lines the old fashioned way? If you do it wrong, your brakes will fail, and you could die.
The solution isn't to make half the car unmaintainable. The solution is to simply publish the official service manuals, and the car owner is responsible for doing the job right or paying somebody else to do the job right. That has worked fine for 100 years.
Agree. It is foolish to only be geared up to fight the old USSR. However, it is also foolish to not be able to handle a modern confrontation.
In general you tend to get whatever confrontation you're least prepared for, since your opponents aren't going to start a confrontation you're well-prepared for. The solution is to be reasonably well-prepared for everything.
That doesn't mean that you need to be able to single-handedly conqueror the entire planet, however. That is the bigger problem the US seems to be dealing with. You can have modern fighter aircraft without having more of them then the next 12 largest alliances combined.
You could drop a whole carrier fleet fairly easily with a barrage of hypersonic missiles fired from a small number of disposable re-purposed fishing boats. Just strap on the launchers, sync them with orbital spy sat targeting and geo location... and fire. Those things come screaming in faster then bullets... and even the Aegis defense system is reported to be unable to really stop them.
The main problem with this is that in any war where carriers would actually be vulnerable, there won't be any satellites of any kind, much less spy satellites. If such a war started the first thing both sides would do is shoot down all the satellites owned by the other side, and the resulting debris would quickly wipe out everything that wasn't specifically targeted.
You can't fire a missile on a target without a half-decent idea of where it is (within miles for sure). If you want to fire using fishing boats then you need an even better idea of where it is going to be in the week it takes for your fishing boat to putter along to the target.
I'm not saying that carriers aren't still vulnerable, but people seem to take for granted the intelligence issue by just waving their hands and saying "but satellites tell us everything that is going on everywhere" not realizing that in a real modern war there won't be any satellites, with ALL the downsides that involves.
Another big factor with self-driving cars is the elimination of traffic control devices that stop the flow of traffic.
How will pedestrians cross the street without traffic signals? Do they cross whenever/wherever they like and the autonomous cars shift around them like a river around a stone? Remember, these things are traveling while bumper-to-bumper and at high velocities.
Just give them a button to push - they could have lights of their own. In most parts of the US, pedestrians cross traffic fairly infrequently. In cities it would obviously be a concern.
This is the component that is riddled with security holes in 4.3 and earlier devices, but which Google can't update.
It is news to me that they can't update this component on GSM Nexus devices sold directly by Google without the involvement of a carrier. Last time I checked Google was not updating all the ones which were vulnerable.
See my other reply in this thread regarding the Galaxy Nexus situation. Google would update it if it were possible.
Or the Nexus S. Or the Nexus One. Or the ADP... (Granted, I'm not sure that all of those are vulnerable, and I'm fine with cutting off support at SOME point, but even the ADP would still be supported under many desktop-oriented support cycles.)
Sure, but a typical European town is a few blocks of 14-story buildings surrounded by farmland from what I've seen. A typical US town is 100 blocks of 2-story buildings. The main transport in Europe isn't the bicycle or train - it is the elevator.
I picked my house for the commute - that is why it is only a 20 minute drive to work. Closer might have been nicer, but I didn't want to pay double for it.
Wow, warmer than MONTANA!!!! That is a real endorsement. :)
I've noticed that if I put my Samsung S4 into airplane mode it'll use about 2% of it's battery power over the course of a day. So, clearly the apps and the software aren't the issue, but just accessing the network even if you're not using it seems to cause the trouble.
Yes and no. In airplane mode those apps might not be running as often. An app running in the background of course directly consumes power for CPU, and also via use of mobile data - I have no idea which consumes more.
Well, we'd already convinced the Soviets that Nixon was a lunatic that was so unstable that he could preemptively launch a nuclear strike against them; I'm not entirely surprised that they armed their space station.
Yeah, that autocannon would have been real effective when we launched a nuclear anti-satellite weapon against them. I can't imagine that the way it was deployed that they could have hit the space shuttle coming in to dock with them with marines on board.
This may come to as a shock to you but outside of China you don't register with Google+ with your passport or your social security number.
I guess that's why he said, "Did you really that registering with your real name in China means the same thing it did on Google+???"
However, cars completely destroy urban density, and it doesn't matter how clean you make them, how self-driving you make them, and, how much safety buffer space you strip away.
You say it doesn't matter if they are self-driving...
This is simply not true... Cars need be only a foot apart at highway speed, when all are under computer control... that changes the density issues completely... add to that the lack of traffic jams and it changes again...
Agree, it will still be less space-efficient than walking over distances where you could walk, but it probably would be more space-efficient than biking (unless the bikes become self-driving).
Another big factor with self-driving cars is the elimination of traffic control devices that stop the flow of traffic. You don't see traffic lights and stop signs on baggage sorting machines and automated warehouses (or airways for that matter). Automated traffic can be interleaved so that it remains out of conflict, and things like road lanes and directionality can also be changed dynamically based on demand.
However, I suspect that even if we are successful in promoting mixed-use developments so people can, in theory, live near their jobs, it will have much less impact on traffic than we would hope.
Not only will people have to travel shorter distances, but denser living makes mass transit more feasible. Also, people can travel to work by other means (cycling, walking, etc).
I have a coworker who works 25 miles from home. So does his wife - in the opposite direction.
Sure, I guess ONE of them could bike to work, if they demolished all the nice homes near the workplace to build less-expensive apartment blocks in the same space so that you actually could accommodate enough people within biking distance. Oh, and assuming nobody cared about arriving to work wet in the morning if it was raining.
This is the component that is riddled with security holes in 4.3 and earlier devices, but which Google can't update.
It is news to me that they can't update this component on GSM Nexus devices sold directly by Google without the involvement of a carrier. Last time I checked Google was not updating all the ones which were vulnerable.
The institutional precedent for profiteering not withstanding, you'd think more multinational conglomerates would take a step back to avoid losing a large swath of their monopolies but no.
Your examples were healthcare and broadband internet.
With healthcare the reform did not really change anybody's market share, and subsidies ensured that there would be more market participants. That is, companies that were making money before probably will make more money. That will sure teach them!
With the internet we've yet to see what will happen, but so far the US government isn't really creating any new competitors in that space. If they allow municipal broadband and new companies to come in and it sticks, then that would get attention. However, it seems like the more likely outcome is that the big providers will be told "ok, you can keep your 1000% markups and 37 layers of fees, but these 3 fees in particular are just crossing the line." The punishment will be that they'll have to make due with 12 boatloads of money instead of 13.
I've been running tor using system without any issue at all for many months now. Like you say, it just starts/stops your network.
Maybe if you wanted to route ALL your network traffic over it you'd need to play with networkd and a proxy and all that, but this isn't a typical use case. It really wouldn't be any different than doing the same thing with any init/network-manager/etc.
Didn't realize it was an FAA rule below 10k, but it obviously makes sense.
For small aircraft the 10k bit wouldn't make sense (the whole flight is often below that), but certainly I'd say that there should be a sterile cockpit anytime you basically aren't in the cruise phase of flight.
Yet he did more to save their asses than ALL of the RAF.
Well, Turing had a HUGE impact on the war, no doubt. It is a bit much to say that it was more than ALL of the RAF. The allies would almost certainly have won without Ultra (eventually), but they certainly wouldn't have won without the conventional forces.
I hope all you brits are still ashamed of yourselves.
Well, the folks who treated him (and others) this way should be ashamed of their actions. The "brits" certainly were no worse in this regard than most who were alive at the time. The use of the word "still" is a bit chilling - most of the people who were around at the time are well into old age at this point. I think it is far more important to learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of our parents, and not beg for forgiveness from the descendants of whatever aboriginal our great great grandparents drove off their land.
I don't have a lot of time in the air, but from the little time that I've flown at night and my general understanding the cockpit of a small aircraft is typically kept very dark, since most of the time you're relying on visual navigation and sighting of stuff that isn't well-lit. A bright flash of light would probably make it hard to even see your instruments until you fumbled for the brightness dial (which would be even harder to find in the dark).
My CFI tried to discourage chit-chat of any kind during critical flight phases.
Now, my understanding is that airliners tend to operate with more light in the cockpit in general and they tend to land at fields with very bright runway lighting and of course they're always in instrument flight rules and most of the time during critical flight phases they're in controlled airspace besides. So, night-blindness would be less of an issue in an airliner, but of course any airline is going to forbid messing around with cameras while in critical phases of flight.
agreed, which is why i plan on moving to charlotte in the next 2 years after i put in some time with my new company. make the same as i do in NY, but have a good 40% more buying power.
Yeah, but won't you miss the traffic?
US FDA/USDA-style regulatory enforcement and quality controls are practically non-existant in China.
Heck, they're bad enough in the US, especially for non-branded medications. Just look at the whole compounding pharmacy fiasco. Branded medications tend to not be as bad. It isn't that they don't sometimes have issues, but when you're spending millions to make pills that sell for billions you don't want to be shut down because somebody didn't change a $50 filter or whatever.
But, yes, in China things can get incredibly bad.
The true libertarians will argue that this is excessive government regulation, and that the government should stay out of commercial affairs like this, and that the "invisible hand of the holy free market" will correct these problems.
LIbertarians are likely to differ. Some might argue let them kill people and then sort it out with lawsuits. However, truth in labeling is something a lot of fairly hard-core libertarians would probably go along with. They wouldn't want the government banning the sale of any substance, but they would probably favor letting the buyer know what he is getting.
Selling adulterated supplements would be like selling a slave without disclosing that he has artificial teeth. That would be an abuse of the market.
Does the US own the moon? The British conquered half the world using the law of flags, so by rights, since the US is the only country with a flag up there...
Well, in the end the only thing that really matters is who has an effective military there (manned or otherwise). The British no longer own half the world for this very reason.
People like to dress national sovereignty up in all kinds of international norms, but in the end it all comes down to who is able to project power and hold onto it. Otherwise the US would be governed by Indians, England by whoever was around before the Normans, or before them, and so on. It isn't like God handed out property deeds.
"Ooh, your identity got stolen, that sucks. Have fun fighting with the credit reporting agencies forever."
Particularly galling considering that these are the guys who basically run the credit reporting agencies.