And.. what would Blizzard have gotten out that equation?
People with cracked keys wouldn't be playing online?
It isn't like their decision to allow for authentication hurt anybody else. Everybody else just doesn't authenticate the keys. It actually makes their software more functional.
Yup. At a conference I heard somebody say that "the only smart code is a dumb code" - I've been convinced this is right ever since. EVERY smart coding system I've run into at work has caused untold pain when something that would "never" happen, happened...
You could store the key in hardened memory (resistant to retrieval at the physical layer), and encrypt that key with a shorter passkey.
A short password is perfectly secure if the device wipes the full key upon some small number of password failures (rendering all data stored on it lost). Of course, that opens up a DOS avenue, but if somebody can get their hands on the key they can already destroy it pretty easily anyway.
Where this kind of model should REALLY be used is with ATM and credit cards. Put a display and keypad ON THE CARD. The card signs transaction data internally after verifying a PIN entered on the card itself. Now you have a transaction-certifying device that cannot be defeated without an SEM or observing the PIN and stealing the card and using it before it is noticed, and even then it can be made awfully difficult. Plus, the cardholder is now immune to replay attacks (aka double-charges) from retailers/etc.
Having been involved with evaluating tablets, I can say that they're certainly viable options. However, you will NEVER be as productive at typing text with one as you could be with a keyboard. PERIOD.
So, it all depends on what you want to do. If you want an ebook reader, something the size of a tablet is just great. If you want a chart/map reader with some basic calculations/etc for navigation, it would be wonderful. If you are doing procedure execution and need to jot down a few numbers or check boxes they're just fine. If you want to write a Christmas letter to Aunt Betty, use the laptop.
I'm really happy to see an affordable tablet option out there. This kind of form-factor works really well for certain situations, especially if you have software designed to make use of it.
Good luck with that - you'll be out of IP space before you get anybody to approve that policy, and you're likely to see the US government take over the IP space before that happens just to squash it. All that to buy 18 months, assuming space utilization doesn't continue to grow? You're going to destroy any political capital you have just to apply a band-aid.
If you want to fix the problem you don't start out by taking 10-20 large organizations (ie 50k+ employees in each of them) and getting them to completely oppose your efforts.
I dunno. This sounds kind of like arguing that MAC addresses should be only 16 bits instead of the typical 48. After all, they only need to be unique within a single physical network segment, and who even has 255 ethernet devices on one of those? It would save us a LOT of mac address typing since you'd only need four digits of hex to identify a device.
Of course, every device would need dynamically-assigned MACs, and nobody actually types MAC addresses anyway.
I actually struggle to remember the last time I had to type an IP address. Unless you're doing network work where you actually are troubleshooting IP problems or are assigning address space, you generally don't need to deal with it. That's what DNS is for. Maybe what we need is to have network devices and DNS servers work together more easily so that home network users don't ever see AN IP unless they're going something unusual? Their new network printer could provide its hostname in the DHCP request, and the $20 linksys router would automatically register it in the DNS database (and provide resolution services). Other than some standardization there is no reason this couldn't work.
I think the key is to make IP space cheap and then not worry so much about who is allowed to use it. Unfortunately, we're stuck with IPv6 which makes the transition a big pain. What we really need is an IPv4.1 that has more backwards-compatibility.
They're especially important when the work is more routine, because that's when you're more tempted to just believe results because they look like what you expect. Or, perhaps you're talking about quality control testing and have a financial interest in having the results pass.
The only way to know that your results are actually right is to have a controlled analytical process. There are lots of ways to do that, and there is a whole field of pursuit around minimizing the cost of doing all those controls. However, the important thing is that analytical data must be controlled.
Yeah, this kind of sounds like me putting out a press release:
In today's news, Slashdot user Rich0 announced that he is launching the first personal mission to mars in only two years. He will come up with the best overall approach, and then invite NASA, ESA, and RSA to join in and actually pay for the thing.
Well, in any case, the plot is a bit contrived as I'm not aware of ANY piece of land that has valuable ores underneath that doesn't have a true government (sometimes more than one) claiming sovereignty over it.
If unobtainium is really that valuable, do you think that there wouldn't be any national interests at stake? Maybe there would be an uneasy truce or something like that (a la Dune), but rest assured that if the choices were spice or no spice, the splice must flow. Note that in Dune the Fremen actually reached a trade compromise with the interstellar powers, offering to supply them with spice. That is what made the final arrangement work (even if greed/intrigue still was at play). If they simply stated that they intended to block spice export altogether there would not have been a truce.
That is my main objection to the message of the movie - that an indigenous tribe can just sit on important resources and decide that if they don't need them that nobody does. That just doesn't work in the real world. EVERY advanced government on earth recognizes a power of eminent domain precisely because sometimes everybody else needs something that one person hands, and if they aren't able to supply it sometimes somebody else needs to step in and do it. Essentially the issue at stake in the movie is one of eminent domain - the sovereign power is whoever controls the air and the ground, and they had a need to exercise eminent domain.
As others have pointed out - it really does depend on the nature of the company.
If those 13,000 people all do exactly the same job (or closely related jobs), chances are you only need a few IT people to support them.
If those 13,000 people are organized into 130 departments of 100 people each, and every department does something completely different, you'll probably need a lot more people. Departments that just run MS Office or some non-finicky off-the-shelf software package need less attention than some department that needs some industry-specific troublesome software product.
If your company is doing R&D and changing direction every six months you'll need a lot more IT than you'll need if they've been making ball bearings since 1902. Likewise, you need more support if you upgrade software every six months and have 25% annual turnover than if you just use what you have for a decade at a time and are based in Topeka with 0.01% turnover.
IT is an enabler - so it doesn't make sense to cut down on it where it is needed. On the other hand, if a company can make do with its existing IT investment then there is no need to have an army of people to maintain it - continuous improvement should reduce support costs until you hit some low baseline.
Problem is, they lost most of their military assets on the planet because they made a bad decision, and everything has to be shipped in from five light-years away. Whatever they may have really needed, they didn't have it at that point and they had no way of ordering it (remember that it takes four years for the message to get to Earth, and then another six or seven for the ship with the stuff you ordered to arrive).
Uh, I don't recall seeing any mention of any of this in the movie. I was talking about the movie, not about a screenplay, or the director's blog, or whatever...
Sure, if the corporation were under those kinds of constraints, they should have given a lot more careful thought to their tactics.
they might have considered less profitable, more diplomatic solutions,
Well, they apparently were having trouble with diplomacy, but without an effective military solution they probably should have just lived with whatever they could get for the decade it would take for a government-run solution to come along. You don't pretend you're a superpower when you aren't one.
Note that I'm purely arguing the practicality of the situation and not its ethics. Ethically I think that both parties are in the wrong. The miners are willing to resort to brutal violence at any cost to displace an indigenous tribe. The tribe possesses something that is vitally important to somebody else and they aren't willing to even talk about sharing it peacefully even though it isn't of any use to them and the corporation is trying to offer compensation. Neither position is morally justified.
Supposedly there will be two more movies.
Obviously there is some larger story that some people seem to be reading. I was commenting purely on the movie and its contents as it was proposed. It wouldn't shock me if the guy who came up with the original story did a better job covering these sorts of bases than th director/producers did...
The crooks in the government are not handing out WMDs to their crooked corporate buddies. No way.
As I was trying to argue, the whole point of the movie was fairly contrived. I can't see a government giving any of the powers in that movie to a corporation. I was simply stating that a couple of bows, arrows, and charging animals wouldn't stop a corporation that truly did have permission to do whatever they wanted on the planet.
It isn't like you need the world's most powerful nerve gas to do something like this. They already demonstrated that they had tear gas or something like it - that alone would be fairly effective as a weapon at decent concentrations. Lots of industrial chemicals are dangerous at high concentrations. If nothing else they'd defoliate the area with slightly less toxic stuff which would make defense a whole lot easier.
The movie was a contrived situation so that we could depict noble natives overthrowing an evil corporation bent on domination. In a real-life situation there would be governments involved, and the corporation wouldn't be wholly evil, and the natives wouldn't be noble, and regardless of what happened the natives would lose unless the invaders decided to go easy on them. Most likely the government would step in and force some kind of compromise that everybody can be equally unhappy about.:)
Who says that I personally advocate that position? Certainly I wouldn't do that.
However, the movie was about an evil mining corporation that would do ANYTHING for money. My argument in that paragraph was that if a determined technologically advanced adversary wanted to get rid of them they could. I wasn't trying to debate the ethics of the situation.
You basically argue that a sick Einstein can be as useful to society as a healthy Rambo. I agree.
However, what do you do with people who cannot contribute to society in ANY significant way (such as many of the mentally ill)? From a practical perspective we might not ever be able to take care of everybody born this way, and I think it makes sense to avoid having these people produce offspring (often those with significant handicaps don't bother to do this anyway). However, I think it is a role of society to try to even out the benefits of the genetic lottery to some extent.
Most people reading this site are fairly intelligent compared to the norm and are likely to contribute far more to society compared to the norm. However, it isn't like we were born this way because of our own virtue. That isn't something we need to be ashamed of, but it doesn't eliminate our responsibility to care for those who are less fortunate either.
In Europe up until the middle ages it was generally considered the right of a father to accept or reject a child. Rejected children were left out to die. Primitive societies have always been pretty cutthroat regarding survival.
Depiction of native tribes as being "wise" is definitely revisionism. Most native societies were in constant warfare with each other before Europeans arrived. Many native societies were more than happy to engage Europeans to benefit their own standing at the expense of opposing tribes. And where do people think that "slash-and-burn" agriculture was practiced?
Even in the movie the "noble" Na'vi don't even consent to have debate with those who aren't of proper social status (let alone outsiders). I'd hardly consider that an enlightened perspective.
Hey, I'm all for treating indigenous populations nicely, and working around them as best as you can. However, they tend to massively underutilize resources compared to even the greenest modern technologies, so it is hard to say to a developed nation that they can't be allowed to sustain an extra 10k healthy people because somebody else needs the same amount of land to raise 5 tribesmen.
I think the problem with the movie was its straw-man approach. Clearly there could have been better compromises reached than the solution that was attempted in the movie. Mining occurs under settled areas on earth all the time - you just need to dig shafts and if the ore is that valuable it would easily be profitable. Just communicate to the natives that the intent is peaceful, and offer to compensate them if they're willing to accept compensation. If you still suffer attacks then fight them off in the least invasive way possible without endangering your own workers.
I also can't say I approved of the native's complete unwillingness to even talk with the miners. If they want to have an attitude that nobody not born on the planet is worth talking to or trading with, then they're just going to have to live with the consequences. In a more realistic situation you'd probably end up with factions of natives that side with the miners and fight wars amongst each other (which certainly has happened historically with native tribes on Earth).
A lot of people seem to be invoking property rights (the ore belongs to them - they have the right to just sit on it even if it is used to make medical equipment that will save the lives of millions, or whatever). However, property rights are adjudicated by governments. The local government was whoever colonized the planet, because they effectively held sovereignty over it. If you don't want foreign governments running the show then you should reconsider your decision to not fund a competitive military. The ethics governing governments aren't always the same as those governing individuals. The colonizing power should of course try to safeguard the rights of the natives as best as it can, but that doesn't mean tolerating armed revolts.
Also, there is no way that a culture like the one in the movie would be able to resist an attack indefinitely (even with the help of wild animals). Since the whole planet was toxic anyway, if they REALLY needed the ore that much they'd just nerve gas the entire area. They'd also not do their bombing runs at 25mph and 100 feet of altitude.
Even so, the effects were very well done, and I think the movie is worth seeing.
What was portrayed in a poor light was forcibly relocating a people so as to be able to mine out a large chunk of resource that they're sitting on top of, and that's just theft.
Well, they did try to pay for it.
Ultimately this should have been a political solution and not a corporate/financial solution, but when one society has something that another society needs but is unwilling to engage in reasonable commerce to deliver it, then they better have lots of tanks to back that up.
If the stuff were really that valuable there is no reason a government couldn't have negotiated some kind of reasonable arrangement so that ecologically-friendly mining techniques could be used to harvest the ore from under the settlement.
If the natives have such a hardline policy on things like this that they simply are unwilling to deal, then you will have conflict - just like has ALWAYS been the case historically.
Yup, I'd certainly have no qualms about the FBI cutting down the waste that is spam by killing botnets. The really big ones don't just sprout overnight, and they are probably easier to take down than they are to build. Most likely the US already has sufficient survailence on its border routers to trace this sort of thing, and if nothing else they can easily shut out the bot operator and poison the bots DNS so that they phone home to the FBI.
Liability isn't an issue for the US government. At most you might have foreign governments upset that the US is intruding into systems outside its jurisdiction, but the US probably just needs to tell them that if they don't hack into US computers, the US government won't hack into theirs. For governments that are friendly there could even be cooperative efforts.
Some flight clubs have a high membership cost with a low hourly cost. No matter how you slice it, you're not going to get below around $80/hr from what I've seen. It might be 100 hours per year "for free" for $8000, or it might be no money down and $100/hr, or it might be $2000/yr and $60/hr (100 hours max), or whatver.
Also, many flight clubs have a one-time capital cost associated with them - and that can be in the tens of thousands of dollars. You might pay less per hour, but consider the cost of a loan or opportunity cost on an investment. On the other hand, you can usually get money back when you leave.
Basically flight clubs are just about owning shares in a company that owns planes. No matter how you slice it, somebody has to pay to buy and maintain those planes. The only efficiency is that with a tight-knit group you can trust each other to care for them better, and you can pay for as much or as little use as you'd like (and with lots of planes in a pool availability isn't as big an issue).
For a small plane I'd expect a few hundred mile effective range. They could actually fly upwards of 600 miles on a single tank, but you need to factor in reserves, hold time, wind, etc. You don't want to plan to land on empty.
On the other hand, if you've marked off a few small airfields along the way a fueling stop doesn't really take all that long - you plan to have to hold in case something odd comes up, but you're not going to need to do that in some field in the middle of farmland.
Gas prices seem to be about $4.25/gal right now, and small planes hold about 50 gallons. You'll definitely pay more in gas than you would for a car, but that really is one of the smallest expenses associated with a plane.
What hasn't been mentioned in this thread is the maintenance. Figure that it will cost you upwards of $80/hr to fly your plane. You can pay $100/hr or so and rent (often with limitations on being able to just take the plane somewhere), or you can buy and you end up with a "cheap hourly rate" coupled with periodic major expenses. YOU CANNOT SKIMP ON MAINTENANCE. Planes are very safe if properly cared for, and proper care costs money - at various intervals based on operational time you need to have it taken care of.
Then you have to factor in buying the plane in the first place - it costs quite a bit of money for something that you won't actually use all that often.
Unless you're up in the air all the time or just have to have your own plane, the best bet by far is a flying club of some kind. Essentially these are planes owned by lots of people, so that the overhead is shared efficiently. It still isn't what I'd call cheap, but it is fairly reasonable and you can usually reserve planes for longer periods of time. If you're doing rentals forget actually using a plane to go someplace, unless you plan to go, visit somebody for a few hours, and come home.
Note that I'm not a pilot but I've been investigating this stuff with interest - I could easily see myself going this route someday and I'm reasonably proficient on simulators now. (The/. crew types can easily benefit from simulators as they give you a chance to practice quite a few things for almost nothing. I have no illusions that they're a replacement for real-world experience, but if you fly them following real-world procedures you can get the hang of stuff like instrumentation and crosswinds without paying for time.)
Yup. I'm not sure I'm a big fan of make-work, but if I wanted an economic stimulus I'd rather see the money going into roads, bridges, trains, airports, buildings, etc, than in payments to megacorps.
That megacorp probably tires to outsource overseas any chance it gets, and it avoids paying taxes any time it can do so.
The infrastructure makes it a lot cheaper to do business INSIDE the US, and it benefits lots of small business who only hire locally and who generally can't afford massive tax shelters.
Nothing against overseas labor or anything like that, but US tax dollars should be spent making life better on the US taxpayer - not on a multinational corporation.
Well, the thermite would be detected by a metal detector I'd think (as well as an x-ray). However, it might actually be somewhat effective if you had enough of it. Thermite would basically start melting its way down until it hit dirt (30,000 feet down), or consumed itself. Unless somebody happened to have a ceramic ladle of some kind to contain it, I'm not sure what you'd do about it. I guess the best you could do is try to kick the pile of thermite into as large an area as you could (and then put out the fire that would cause) - that way the heat is spread over a larger area and perhaps doesn't melt through the bottom of the plane.
However, this should be moot as I'd hope the security teams would detect thermite.
What would be written in paper? Your boss wants to get rid of you, so he documents any little thing that you do wrong. Unless you're performance is exemplary you're going to have problems.
Usually these sorts of things don't result in same-day terminations or anything like that. Your boss's attitude towards you is determined by all kinds of stuff from how well you do at work, to whether you play golf, to your hairstyle. When the time comes that he has to get rid of somebody, all of this then factors into who goes. In an at-will state they need not give a reason for terminating you, and unless they do something like cancel your pension you're not going to spend five years trying to sue them (good luck getting anybody else to hire you as well if you do that).
As for oil, use methane instead. There are whole planets of the stuff out there.
I think the bigger issue for fuel is going to be oxidizers. For your typical H2/O2 rocket, the O2 represents 89% of the fuel mass. And finding free oxygen in space is going to be almost impossible. Sure, you can probably find it bound up in ores/etc, but it takes a LOT of energy to separate it back out (more than you'd get back by burning it, of course).
I think that combustion isn't a very practical source of energy in space.
And here is the real kicker - if you solve your space energy and propulsion problem, chances are you've solved the energy crisis on earth as well, which begs the question of why do we need to go to space to do that?
I'm all for space exploration and science and all that, but there are much cheaper ways of doing it that don't involve so much spam in a can. Once we can get the per-kg costs way down and work out the basic technologies a bit more, maybe then it will be time to start putting people up there...
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And.. what would Blizzard have gotten out that equation?
People with cracked keys wouldn't be playing online?
It isn't like their decision to allow for authentication hurt anybody else. Everybody else just doesn't authenticate the keys. It actually makes their software more functional.
Yup. At a conference I heard somebody say that "the only smart code is a dumb code" - I've been convinced this is right ever since. EVERY smart coding system I've run into at work has caused untold pain when something that would "never" happen, happened...
You could store the key in hardened memory (resistant to retrieval at the physical layer), and encrypt that key with a shorter passkey.
A short password is perfectly secure if the device wipes the full key upon some small number of password failures (rendering all data stored on it lost). Of course, that opens up a DOS avenue, but if somebody can get their hands on the key they can already destroy it pretty easily anyway.
Where this kind of model should REALLY be used is with ATM and credit cards. Put a display and keypad ON THE CARD. The card signs transaction data internally after verifying a PIN entered on the card itself. Now you have a transaction-certifying device that cannot be defeated without an SEM or observing the PIN and stealing the card and using it before it is noticed, and even then it can be made awfully difficult. Plus, the cardholder is now immune to replay attacks (aka double-charges) from retailers/etc.
Having been involved with evaluating tablets, I can say that they're certainly viable options. However, you will NEVER be as productive at typing text with one as you could be with a keyboard. PERIOD.
So, it all depends on what you want to do. If you want an ebook reader, something the size of a tablet is just great. If you want a chart/map reader with some basic calculations/etc for navigation, it would be wonderful. If you are doing procedure execution and need to jot down a few numbers or check boxes they're just fine. If you want to write a Christmas letter to Aunt Betty, use the laptop.
I'm really happy to see an affordable tablet option out there. This kind of form-factor works really well for certain situations, especially if you have software designed to make use of it.
Good luck with that - you'll be out of IP space before you get anybody to approve that policy, and you're likely to see the US government take over the IP space before that happens just to squash it. All that to buy 18 months, assuming space utilization doesn't continue to grow? You're going to destroy any political capital you have just to apply a band-aid.
If you want to fix the problem you don't start out by taking 10-20 large organizations (ie 50k+ employees in each of them) and getting them to completely oppose your efforts.
I dunno. This sounds kind of like arguing that MAC addresses should be only 16 bits instead of the typical 48. After all, they only need to be unique within a single physical network segment, and who even has 255 ethernet devices on one of those? It would save us a LOT of mac address typing since you'd only need four digits of hex to identify a device.
Of course, every device would need dynamically-assigned MACs, and nobody actually types MAC addresses anyway.
I actually struggle to remember the last time I had to type an IP address. Unless you're doing network work where you actually are troubleshooting IP problems or are assigning address space, you generally don't need to deal with it. That's what DNS is for. Maybe what we need is to have network devices and DNS servers work together more easily so that home network users don't ever see AN IP unless they're going something unusual? Their new network printer could provide its hostname in the DHCP request, and the $20 linksys router would automatically register it in the DNS database (and provide resolution services). Other than some standardization there is no reason this couldn't work.
I think the key is to make IP space cheap and then not worry so much about who is allowed to use it. Unfortunately, we're stuck with IPv6 which makes the transition a big pain. What we really need is an IPv4.1 that has more backwards-compatibility.
Yup - good controls are critical to good science.
They're especially important when the work is more routine, because that's when you're more tempted to just believe results because they look like what you expect. Or, perhaps you're talking about quality control testing and have a financial interest in having the results pass.
The only way to know that your results are actually right is to have a controlled analytical process. There are lots of ways to do that, and there is a whole field of pursuit around minimizing the cost of doing all those controls. However, the important thing is that analytical data must be controlled.
Yeah, this kind of sounds like me putting out a press release:
In today's news, Slashdot user Rich0 announced that he is launching the first personal mission to mars in only two years. He will come up with the best overall approach, and then invite NASA, ESA, and RSA to join in and actually pay for the thing.
Well, in any case, the plot is a bit contrived as I'm not aware of ANY piece of land that has valuable ores underneath that doesn't have a true government (sometimes more than one) claiming sovereignty over it.
If unobtainium is really that valuable, do you think that there wouldn't be any national interests at stake? Maybe there would be an uneasy truce or something like that (a la Dune), but rest assured that if the choices were spice or no spice, the splice must flow. Note that in Dune the Fremen actually reached a trade compromise with the interstellar powers, offering to supply them with spice. That is what made the final arrangement work (even if greed/intrigue still was at play). If they simply stated that they intended to block spice export altogether there would not have been a truce.
That is my main objection to the message of the movie - that an indigenous tribe can just sit on important resources and decide that if they don't need them that nobody does. That just doesn't work in the real world. EVERY advanced government on earth recognizes a power of eminent domain precisely because sometimes everybody else needs something that one person hands, and if they aren't able to supply it sometimes somebody else needs to step in and do it. Essentially the issue at stake in the movie is one of eminent domain - the sovereign power is whoever controls the air and the ground, and they had a need to exercise eminent domain.
As others have pointed out - it really does depend on the nature of the company.
If those 13,000 people all do exactly the same job (or closely related jobs), chances are you only need a few IT people to support them.
If those 13,000 people are organized into 130 departments of 100 people each, and every department does something completely different, you'll probably need a lot more people. Departments that just run MS Office or some non-finicky off-the-shelf software package need less attention than some department that needs some industry-specific troublesome software product.
If your company is doing R&D and changing direction every six months you'll need a lot more IT than you'll need if they've been making ball bearings since 1902. Likewise, you need more support if you upgrade software every six months and have 25% annual turnover than if you just use what you have for a decade at a time and are based in Topeka with 0.01% turnover.
IT is an enabler - so it doesn't make sense to cut down on it where it is needed. On the other hand, if a company can make do with its existing IT investment then there is no need to have an army of people to maintain it - continuous improvement should reduce support costs until you hit some low baseline.
Problem is, they lost most of their military assets on the planet because they made a bad decision, and everything has to be shipped in from five light-years away. Whatever they may have really needed, they didn't have it at that point and they had no way of ordering it (remember that it takes four years for the message to get to Earth, and then another six or seven for the ship with the stuff you ordered to arrive).
Uh, I don't recall seeing any mention of any of this in the movie. I was talking about the movie, not about a screenplay, or the director's blog, or whatever...
Sure, if the corporation were under those kinds of constraints, they should have given a lot more careful thought to their tactics.
they might have considered less profitable, more diplomatic solutions,
Well, they apparently were having trouble with diplomacy, but without an effective military solution they probably should have just lived with whatever they could get for the decade it would take for a government-run solution to come along. You don't pretend you're a superpower when you aren't one.
Note that I'm purely arguing the practicality of the situation and not its ethics. Ethically I think that both parties are in the wrong. The miners are willing to resort to brutal violence at any cost to displace an indigenous tribe. The tribe possesses something that is vitally important to somebody else and they aren't willing to even talk about sharing it peacefully even though it isn't of any use to them and the corporation is trying to offer compensation. Neither position is morally justified.
Supposedly there will be two more movies.
Obviously there is some larger story that some people seem to be reading. I was commenting purely on the movie and its contents as it was proposed. It wouldn't shock me if the guy who came up with the original story did a better job covering these sorts of bases than th director/producers did...
Frankly, I'd consider RSS as an add-on a feature, not a bug.
The whole reason firefox was written was because mozilla became bloated with all kinds of junk, and was slower than molasses.
The whole reason chrome is being written is that firefox today is what mozilla used to be.
I just want a program that can render webpages. Sure, have a way to put in extensions, but let's keep the core simple!
The crooks in the government are not handing out WMDs to their crooked corporate buddies. No way.
As I was trying to argue, the whole point of the movie was fairly contrived. I can't see a government giving any of the powers in that movie to a corporation. I was simply stating that a couple of bows, arrows, and charging animals wouldn't stop a corporation that truly did have permission to do whatever they wanted on the planet.
It isn't like you need the world's most powerful nerve gas to do something like this. They already demonstrated that they had tear gas or something like it - that alone would be fairly effective as a weapon at decent concentrations. Lots of industrial chemicals are dangerous at high concentrations. If nothing else they'd defoliate the area with slightly less toxic stuff which would make defense a whole lot easier.
The movie was a contrived situation so that we could depict noble natives overthrowing an evil corporation bent on domination. In a real-life situation there would be governments involved, and the corporation wouldn't be wholly evil, and the natives wouldn't be noble, and regardless of what happened the natives would lose unless the invaders decided to go easy on them. Most likely the government would step in and force some kind of compromise that everybody can be equally unhappy about. :)
Who says that I personally advocate that position? Certainly I wouldn't do that.
However, the movie was about an evil mining corporation that would do ANYTHING for money. My argument in that paragraph was that if a determined technologically advanced adversary wanted to get rid of them they could. I wasn't trying to debate the ethics of the situation.
I'd take that argument a step further.
You basically argue that a sick Einstein can be as useful to society as a healthy Rambo. I agree.
However, what do you do with people who cannot contribute to society in ANY significant way (such as many of the mentally ill)? From a practical perspective we might not ever be able to take care of everybody born this way, and I think it makes sense to avoid having these people produce offspring (often those with significant handicaps don't bother to do this anyway). However, I think it is a role of society to try to even out the benefits of the genetic lottery to some extent.
Most people reading this site are fairly intelligent compared to the norm and are likely to contribute far more to society compared to the norm. However, it isn't like we were born this way because of our own virtue. That isn't something we need to be ashamed of, but it doesn't eliminate our responsibility to care for those who are less fortunate either.
In Europe up until the middle ages it was generally considered the right of a father to accept or reject a child. Rejected children were left out to die. Primitive societies have always been pretty cutthroat regarding survival.
Depiction of native tribes as being "wise" is definitely revisionism. Most native societies were in constant warfare with each other before Europeans arrived. Many native societies were more than happy to engage Europeans to benefit their own standing at the expense of opposing tribes. And where do people think that "slash-and-burn" agriculture was practiced?
Even in the movie the "noble" Na'vi don't even consent to have debate with those who aren't of proper social status (let alone outsiders). I'd hardly consider that an enlightened perspective.
Hey, I'm all for treating indigenous populations nicely, and working around them as best as you can. However, they tend to massively underutilize resources compared to even the greenest modern technologies, so it is hard to say to a developed nation that they can't be allowed to sustain an extra 10k healthy people because somebody else needs the same amount of land to raise 5 tribesmen.
I think the problem with the movie was its straw-man approach. Clearly there could have been better compromises reached than the solution that was attempted in the movie. Mining occurs under settled areas on earth all the time - you just need to dig shafts and if the ore is that valuable it would easily be profitable. Just communicate to the natives that the intent is peaceful, and offer to compensate them if they're willing to accept compensation. If you still suffer attacks then fight them off in the least invasive way possible without endangering your own workers.
I also can't say I approved of the native's complete unwillingness to even talk with the miners. If they want to have an attitude that nobody not born on the planet is worth talking to or trading with, then they're just going to have to live with the consequences. In a more realistic situation you'd probably end up with factions of natives that side with the miners and fight wars amongst each other (which certainly has happened historically with native tribes on Earth).
A lot of people seem to be invoking property rights (the ore belongs to them - they have the right to just sit on it even if it is used to make medical equipment that will save the lives of millions, or whatever). However, property rights are adjudicated by governments. The local government was whoever colonized the planet, because they effectively held sovereignty over it. If you don't want foreign governments running the show then you should reconsider your decision to not fund a competitive military. The ethics governing governments aren't always the same as those governing individuals. The colonizing power should of course try to safeguard the rights of the natives as best as it can, but that doesn't mean tolerating armed revolts.
Also, there is no way that a culture like the one in the movie would be able to resist an attack indefinitely (even with the help of wild animals). Since the whole planet was toxic anyway, if they REALLY needed the ore that much they'd just nerve gas the entire area. They'd also not do their bombing runs at 25mph and 100 feet of altitude.
Even so, the effects were very well done, and I think the movie is worth seeing.
What was portrayed in a poor light was forcibly relocating a people so as to be able to mine out a large chunk of resource that they're sitting on top of, and that's just theft.
Well, they did try to pay for it.
Ultimately this should have been a political solution and not a corporate/financial solution, but when one society has something that another society needs but is unwilling to engage in reasonable commerce to deliver it, then they better have lots of tanks to back that up.
If the stuff were really that valuable there is no reason a government couldn't have negotiated some kind of reasonable arrangement so that ecologically-friendly mining techniques could be used to harvest the ore from under the settlement.
If the natives have such a hardline policy on things like this that they simply are unwilling to deal, then you will have conflict - just like has ALWAYS been the case historically.
Yup, I'd certainly have no qualms about the FBI cutting down the waste that is spam by killing botnets. The really big ones don't just sprout overnight, and they are probably easier to take down than they are to build. Most likely the US already has sufficient survailence on its border routers to trace this sort of thing, and if nothing else they can easily shut out the bot operator and poison the bots DNS so that they phone home to the FBI.
Liability isn't an issue for the US government. At most you might have foreign governments upset that the US is intruding into systems outside its jurisdiction, but the US probably just needs to tell them that if they don't hack into US computers, the US government won't hack into theirs. For governments that are friendly there could even be cooperative efforts.
Some flight clubs have a high membership cost with a low hourly cost. No matter how you slice it, you're not going to get below around $80/hr from what I've seen. It might be 100 hours per year "for free" for $8000, or it might be no money down and $100/hr, or it might be $2000/yr and $60/hr (100 hours max), or whatver.
Also, many flight clubs have a one-time capital cost associated with them - and that can be in the tens of thousands of dollars. You might pay less per hour, but consider the cost of a loan or opportunity cost on an investment. On the other hand, you can usually get money back when you leave.
Basically flight clubs are just about owning shares in a company that owns planes. No matter how you slice it, somebody has to pay to buy and maintain those planes. The only efficiency is that with a tight-knit group you can trust each other to care for them better, and you can pay for as much or as little use as you'd like (and with lots of planes in a pool availability isn't as big an issue).
For a small plane I'd expect a few hundred mile effective range. They could actually fly upwards of 600 miles on a single tank, but you need to factor in reserves, hold time, wind, etc. You don't want to plan to land on empty.
On the other hand, if you've marked off a few small airfields along the way a fueling stop doesn't really take all that long - you plan to have to hold in case something odd comes up, but you're not going to need to do that in some field in the middle of farmland.
Gas prices seem to be about $4.25/gal right now, and small planes hold about 50 gallons. You'll definitely pay more in gas than you would for a car, but that really is one of the smallest expenses associated with a plane.
What hasn't been mentioned in this thread is the maintenance. Figure that it will cost you upwards of $80/hr to fly your plane. You can pay $100/hr or so and rent (often with limitations on being able to just take the plane somewhere), or you can buy and you end up with a "cheap hourly rate" coupled with periodic major expenses. YOU CANNOT SKIMP ON MAINTENANCE. Planes are very safe if properly cared for, and proper care costs money - at various intervals based on operational time you need to have it taken care of.
Then you have to factor in buying the plane in the first place - it costs quite a bit of money for something that you won't actually use all that often.
Unless you're up in the air all the time or just have to have your own plane, the best bet by far is a flying club of some kind. Essentially these are planes owned by lots of people, so that the overhead is shared efficiently. It still isn't what I'd call cheap, but it is fairly reasonable and you can usually reserve planes for longer periods of time. If you're doing rentals forget actually using a plane to go someplace, unless you plan to go, visit somebody for a few hours, and come home.
Note that I'm not a pilot but I've been investigating this stuff with interest - I could easily see myself going this route someday and I'm reasonably proficient on simulators now. (The /. crew types can easily benefit from simulators as they give you a chance to practice quite a few things for almost nothing. I have no illusions that they're a replacement for real-world experience, but if you fly them following real-world procedures you can get the hang of stuff like instrumentation and crosswinds without paying for time.)
Yup. I'm not sure I'm a big fan of make-work, but if I wanted an economic stimulus I'd rather see the money going into roads, bridges, trains, airports, buildings, etc, than in payments to megacorps.
That megacorp probably tires to outsource overseas any chance it gets, and it avoids paying taxes any time it can do so.
The infrastructure makes it a lot cheaper to do business INSIDE the US, and it benefits lots of small business who only hire locally and who generally can't afford massive tax shelters.
Nothing against overseas labor or anything like that, but US tax dollars should be spent making life better on the US taxpayer - not on a multinational corporation.
Well, the thermite would be detected by a metal detector I'd think (as well as an x-ray). However, it might actually be somewhat effective if you had enough of it. Thermite would basically start melting its way down until it hit dirt (30,000 feet down), or consumed itself. Unless somebody happened to have a ceramic ladle of some kind to contain it, I'm not sure what you'd do about it. I guess the best you could do is try to kick the pile of thermite into as large an area as you could (and then put out the fire that would cause) - that way the heat is spread over a larger area and perhaps doesn't melt through the bottom of the plane.
However, this should be moot as I'd hope the security teams would detect thermite.
What would be written in paper? Your boss wants to get rid of you, so he documents any little thing that you do wrong. Unless you're performance is exemplary you're going to have problems.
Usually these sorts of things don't result in same-day terminations or anything like that. Your boss's attitude towards you is determined by all kinds of stuff from how well you do at work, to whether you play golf, to your hairstyle. When the time comes that he has to get rid of somebody, all of this then factors into who goes. In an at-will state they need not give a reason for terminating you, and unless they do something like cancel your pension you're not going to spend five years trying to sue them (good luck getting anybody else to hire you as well if you do that).
As for oil, use methane instead. There are whole planets of the stuff out there.
I think the bigger issue for fuel is going to be oxidizers. For your typical H2/O2 rocket, the O2 represents 89% of the fuel mass. And finding free oxygen in space is going to be almost impossible. Sure, you can probably find it bound up in ores/etc, but it takes a LOT of energy to separate it back out (more than you'd get back by burning it, of course).
I think that combustion isn't a very practical source of energy in space.
And here is the real kicker - if you solve your space energy and propulsion problem, chances are you've solved the energy crisis on earth as well, which begs the question of why do we need to go to space to do that?
I'm all for space exploration and science and all that, but there are much cheaper ways of doing it that don't involve so much spam in a can. Once we can get the per-kg costs way down and work out the basic technologies a bit more, maybe then it will be time to start putting people up there...