Additionally, such waste heat might not actually be "free" - depending on some of the implementation details.
The engine works by generating heat and then converting it to mechanical motion while dissipating that heat to a cold sink. If you don't "waste" that heat by sending it to a cold sink then the engine operates less efficiently.
Again, it depends on the details - the energy might be "free," or it might just rob the engine of power just as an alternator does. You can't get around the laws of thermodynamics, though...
I don't know, but the GP is right on with the delays - the US REALLY does trains wrong.
My family was going to visit relatives on vacation - I checked all the options. One was to drive for about 10.5 hours (680 miles) - at a cost of about $500 if you worked it all out. Flying would have been about $200 per person, plus car rental for a week - figure a few hours total investment of time.
I also looked at the Train. Despite having what looked like mostly direct service (maybe one change) it would have taken 24 hours to get there - that is 24 hours of my life crammed in a seat in coach. The cost would have been comparable to the plane option. I don't consider 680 miles all that far - certainly a train should be a better option for that distance than a car. The route was even relatively direct - at least as direct as the driving route (there weren't any stops at some city 400 miles out of the way or anything).
The US train system is completely mismanaged and almost entirely useless. About the only part that sort-of works is the NE corridor (Washington-NY-Boston) - and even with the Acela it is still slow (the US does not have adequate rail lines so TGV speeds are not possible and parts of the route have light train speeds - the trains had to be torn apart just to run since the TGV wasn't designed to operate on rails with sharp bends).
Sure, but why go through all that trouble for $75 per year. If I even spent one hour on a project like that my hourly internal charge rate would exceed that figure.
Sure, billions of dollars per year sounds like a lot of money, until you realize that those same computers are generatng tens of trillions of dollars in business value to the economy. The figure per computer is a few dimes per day.
Hey - I shut down my computer at night, but if somebody had a business use for leaving it on I wouldn't investigate any further, either.
I'm sure I'm not the first to think of this, but I wonder if wishful thinking is just a way of implementing a particular strategy for survivial. What I suggest could be applied to running a business or living in a Darwinian world.
There are a couple of ways to go about survival in a highly competitive enviornment.
The most straightforward is to be better than everybody else at one or more things. If your competitors run at 3-4mph and you can run at 5mph then you're going to be the one that catches the gazalle and has dinner. The problem with this approach is that EVERYBODY is trying to catch that gazelle and EVERYBODY is out on the track every morning trying to run a little faster. If you succeed at all it will only be by a little bit, but a little bit is enough, so I think this is the predominant method of survival.
The other approach is to just try to do something completely differently. Most likely you'll fail and starve and your genes won't be passed on (directly - though your cousin might pass them on), but just maybe you'll succeed. If you do succeed there is a good chance that it won't be just by an incremental margin.
So, if I were designing an ultimate survivor species, I'd have it do a grinding incremental evolution (approach #1) most of the time. However, I'd also have members of the species occassionally take huge risks for a possible huge reward. As long as families are big enough and these risks aren't frequent then even if the odd member of the family dies the genes that convey these tendencies will still be passed on. If a family member gets lucky then it will be at the top of the food chain for generations.
Perhaps wishful thinking is just an artifact of the brain that we call "wishful thinking" when things go wrong, and "creativity" or "innovation" when that crazy idea that everybody knows won't work actually does work?
Put the keys in a chip on the card itself and have the card both sign the transaction and encrypt it for the bank.
I don't know why we keep designing systems that trust that the terminal you swipe your card on and enter a PIN into are secure. The display and PIN pad should be be integrated into the card itself. Then the bank knows it is talking to your card (which the bank issued). The only way to forge or intercept a transaction is to attack the chip on the card itself (which is both hard and requires physical possession of the card for a significant period of time).
As was pointed out, however, banks have no incentive to fix the problem when they're not liable for security lapses.
It seems like 90% of the argument against electric has to to with long haul trips. While this is an issue that needs to be addressed, it really should not be the center of the discussion.
The single largest issue with electric is bound to become the center of discussion. Most people drive long-hauls from time to time and almost nobody will buy a car that doesn't handle this well. 99% of my trips are under 10 miles but I'd never buy a car that couldn't drive 750 miles in a single day - unless the savings were so large that they'd pay for rentals and airfare for annual vacations. Most electric cars have very modest savings and so rentals to cover the gaps aren't a no-brainer.
I agree with all your points, and yet until those problems are solved I don't think electric can take off. I have no doubt that they'll eventually be solved in some form - but until they are solved there is a gap and that is why people are still talking about alternatives.
Well, the one advantage of hydrogen is refilling times. It is very straightforward to refill a hydrogen tank quickly and be off on your way (though some safety issues do exist).
Recharging a car quickly is a fundamentally more difficult problems (though one with solutions):
1. Simply recharnging most conventional battery chemistries is just out of the question. Most take hours. Apparently some exotic ones can take 10 mins, but I'm not sure what the tradeoffs are.
2. There are things like supercapacitors which do solve the recharging problem, but those are a very new technology and I suspect there are downsides.
3. Any technology based on actually putting electricity into the battery has to contend with very high power draws. A "gas station" might need 300kV supply lines and look more like an electrical substation.
4. The alternative to recharging is cell swapping. This requires cells that are light enough to handle, and standardized enough that a filling station doesn't need a warehouse full of them. You still need to get them turned around quickly enough that batteries are available each day. You also need to somehow account for old batteries - who pays for replacing them? What keeps the owner of a filling station from just hoarding the duds into batches and then putting them in cars to swap out at the competitor down the street (thus transferring this expense to them in exchange for fresher batteries)?
In constrast refilling hydrogen tanks is a completely conventional process - there isn't really any massively new technology involved. Even the infrastructure is a somewhat mature problem (unless we're talking about new ways to store/transport H2 other than as a liquified gas).
I'm not convinced that H2 is the better solution or anything, but I can certainly see its appeal. Both approaches have their downsides. Also - the fact that you can convert between H2 and electricity tends to link the problems somewhat as well (an H2 generation station has all the power supply issues a recharging station has - unless you use a non-electrical method to split water).
No. It is just proof that a good percentage of the population have no moral objections to cheating.
I think you need to define cheating.
It seems like the legitimate way to have an advantage on an MMO is to have lots of time to kill. Spending 100 hours per week playing is not cheating.
It seems like an illegitimat way to have an advantage on an MMO is using your brain to manipulate the game mechanics to not actually have to spend 100 hours to do the same thing. That gets called cheating.
I think that most talk of cheating is just a way to differentiate between people who have lots of time and those who have some other resource (money, ability to program, whatever).
My employer pays me to cheat every day. I spend my time automating processes so that our employees can do in 10 hours of investment what our competitors require 100 hours to do. That's just the nature of life...:)
You could say that the only real MMO currency is time spent playing. A certain amount of effort needs to be put in to achieve any goal.
You've hit the nail on the head exactly, but I disagree with your conclusions.
In my experience people who hate trading of real-world cash for in-game gold tend to be people who have lots of time to play, and not lots of real-world cash to spend. People who like to buy in-game gold tend ot have little time to play, and lots of real-world cash to spend.
Obviously self-interest dictates that people who have lots of time to kill should want the game to reward time spent above all else. People who have lots of money to spend want the game to value real-world money above all else.
There really is no "right" and "wrong" way to design a game. Thus, there is no end to arguing between these parties and a huge arms race as people willing to take real-world money will do whatever they can to create in-game advantages for their customers to stay in business.
I think there needs to be a balance. Games should not be designed so that new players can't expect to enjoy the majority of the game until they've spent 300,000 hours playing it. New content needs to be available at all levels of play. On the other hand, it isn't good for gameplay when some newbie can walk around killing people left and right with an uber-sword-of-destruction that they bought for $19.95 on ebay.
I think that if you make the game fun and have rewards both for people who have leveled for 18 hours a day and also for those who play an hour a week and don't level at all, then you'll get rid of much of the incentive for farmers.
Unfortunately, the only common filesystem that truly is "atomic" is ext3 with ordered data mode turned on (which is a very uncommon setting).
I certainly agree that filesystems need to strive for atomic behavior, but this just isn't common yet. In fact, as pointed out in another reply it seems like filesystem authors think that "runs fsck quickly without regard to the data" is the main goal. Those authors should just quick-format the device on a dirty mount - can't get much faster than that and the filesystem will be completely consistent after doing so (if empty).
I think the issue is that these companies don't realize how they're endangering their own reputations with these kinds of mass-litigation campaigns.
In most companies ordinary company employees don't go sending out C&D letters - or filing lawsuits. If somebody notices something amiss it goes way up the chain of command. Most likely the CEO would personally approve an action like this with input from counsel before taking this kind of step.
The problem is that when a company decides to get agreesive with litigation the CEO can't handle every case personally. Some department gets created to handle the litigation, and now you have people with a few years experience running google searches and firing off letters to anything that comes up as a hit. Litigation becomes a thoughtless exercise since it needs to be cheap to execute. You can't sustain a mass-litigation campaign if you actually take the time to thoroughly investigate every suspicious website before sending out a C&D letter.
Companies need to reserve litigation and heavy-handed letters for serious offenses, and companies need to control these carefully. Some 25-year-old who has been working for the company for a year shouldn't be sending out C&D letters with maybe only one level of oversight.
To me this kind of conduct is like having a neighborhood watch program where you hire teenagers from the neighborhood and issue them AK47s. You're going to have problems...
Wouldn't this only impact long-range communications? I would tend to think that the ground wave would be transmitted just fine - that has to be good for what, 50-100 miles?
Unless we're talking about VERY large-scale disasters I'd tend to think that this would be enough. It isn't like you need to be able to talk to China to coordinate disaster efforts for a hurricane in South Carolina.
That's the thing I didn't like about that movie - I couldn't see the navy having that kind of ambiguity in its protocols. Certainly if that situation came up in real life the ambiguity would be resolved.
That whole problem could be avoided if they had a few possible processes in place:
1. Make fire orders unrevokable. Then once you get the order there is no need to verify/etc - and if you get a message fragment there is no concern over what it might be. Don't issue fire orders unless you REALLY want the missiles to fly.
2. State that orders stand until authenticated counter-orders are confirmed. This prevents DOS attacks if an enemy floods the air with false traffic - you can't have ships sitting around trying to make sense of unauthenticated orders.
In any case, orders to actually launch missles should not be issued if there is ANY chance you want to take them back. When you try to revoke such an order you're just banking on nothing having been launched yet. If one missile flies, they'll all fly eventually. The last thing you want is to launch exactly one missile - then you've invited massive retaliation without even doing an effective first strike.
And, of course, the scenario for a nuclear launch should be in response to an opposing launch. ICBMs aren't really a good choice for anything short of killing every person on the planet...
The solution is oversight. Congress passes a law noting that major pieces of infrastructure are critical to national security. An oversight body is created to set policies for administration of such intrastructure. Violation of these policies carries criminal penalties.
Then you have the Feds start busting control rooms. Manager in charge gets sent to prison.
Let's see how fast those managers can arrange to have competent people on-duty 24x7 and not need to use pcAnywhere or whatever to get in.
As much as I'm not a fan of a lot of military culture this is one thing they REALLY get right. The mission comes first. Just think about it - they manage to work out every process to something that some 20-year-old with two years experience can supervise with 18-year-olds doing the grunt work. The officers then stay on top of things. The captain of the ship sleeps on the ship and can be woken up at any time should the situation require it. Even the president can be woken up if the chain of command truly requires it.
Manager too lazy to come in to work to see what is going on - no problem, just hire one for each shift.
Not every business needs to be run like a ship. However, the power grid isn't just any business - it requires a much higher level of rigor.
Some have pointed out labor relations issues. These sorts of issues should not impact national security - just look at the Air Traffic Controller strike. By all means the workers should be given proper time to complete their jobs in a secure way - if two computers slow them down then hire a few more people and give them time to do the job right. The solution isn't to cut corners.
Why not have both? Use the most secure protocols in existence to protect your network, and then as an added measure against zero-day exploits provide strong physical security to keep people out of this network.
Such a piece of critical infrastructure shouldn't depend on any one human being who might be at a conference and need remote access. When a balistic missle submarine 1000 feet under the ocean is interpreting orders to nuke some foreign country do they depend on being able to reach some particular person to ask questions? Any system critical to national security must be engineered so that it is completely self-sufficient in a crisis.
Electrical grids are very critical to national security. A well-planned attack could leave melted transmission lines, damaged generators and gearboxes, and a nationwide blackout in its wake. With the possibility of substantial physical damage it isn't like you could just repair from this kind of catastrophe in a few days - or even weeks. Power plants are physical machines that have a symphony of fast-moving parts with thousands of tons of force being transmitted - a well-engineered attack could result in major failures.
Power grids should have as much security as any other piece of critical military infrastructure. They're going to be targets in any attack. The networks should be subject to routine penetration testing and auditing. Access needs to be the minimum needed to do any particular job. The system should be reasonably partitioned so that one spy getting a job in one office somewhere doesn't subject the entire system to compromise. Those who circumvent authorized procedures (rogue access points, bridges, etc) should be made public examples with criminal penalties. People should be given the funds needed to do their jobs right, and then should be expected to do them right.
Security is just a matter of being thorough and not cutting corners. There is a lot at stake here. I don't really care who is behind these penetrations (Chinese, hackers, whatever) - the blame rests with the folks who should be protecting this infrastructure.
Somehow I doubt that if this were an ordinary person and not a former senator on trial the justice department wouldn't settle for a tarnished reputation and old age. A very large percentage of Congress is fairly elderly - if we don't punish corruption in elderly Senators then we might as well just have them start taking bribes in full view inside the Senate hall.
The punishment for a crime cannot be merely to stop the crime - it must be very undesirable. Otherwise, there is no incentive for people not to commit crimes in the first place.
If I rob a bank and I am caught, and the sentence is that I need to return the money - then I'm out nothing in net and I might as well try again. Very little downside, very big upside.
Corruption is deadly to a democratic government - it should be punished very harshly. These Congressmen are paid very handsomely, and they have very little in the way of job requirements beyond just showing up (yes, I realize that most members of Congress do more than just show up - but the stress level has to be lower than most corporate jobs that pay these kinds of salaries). To expect them to actually represent their constituents and not take bribes isn't asking a whole lot.
Political corruption is a betrayal of democracy - it should be punished as such. I have no problem with putting these people behind bars for decades right next to crack dealers, murders, and others who receive these kinds of sentences. They should lose their pensions, and pay stiff fines as well (certainly if I clearly accepted bribes to the detriment of my employer they would consider termination for cause and revoking my pension).
Hardly. However, they might be gassing their own population, or generally destabilizing the region.
I'm not sure that there wouldn't have been some kind of invasion sometime if I were running the show. However, one thing that is for sure is that every dollar of it would be paid for by taxes on imported mideast oil. If that were threatened I wouldn't be surprised if OPEC figured out some way to take care of the problems on their own. If wars in the middle east are the cost of oil imports, then those who use this oil should pay for it. If that makes other energy sources more economical then our dependence on oil would be reduced, and that would lower the power of Mideast regimes, and make it less likely that their civilians will end up on the wrong end of smart bombs.
It's all about economics and incentives. Remove the incentive and you get rid of the war...
First - I agree with your points about the obligations of armies to follow the Geneva Conventions even when inconvenient. Of course, that is a two-way street - you can't cry foul when lots of your civilians die if your own soldiers dress as civilians and you have civilians sit on bridges (which doesn't release the other army from trying to prevent unnecessary civilian loss of life, but I don't think that there is anything wrong with bombing a military target that has civilians sitting on the roof if they have freely chosen to be there (prisoners are another matter) - they are no longer non-combatants).
However, I find your reference to WWII interesting. WWII took a HEAVY toll on civilian populations - largely as a result of ariel bombardment (and also as a consequence of the sheer destructive power of other forms of bombardment). In many cases WWII involved total war and while there was a goal of reducing civilian loss of life it was very much secondary to accomplishing military objectives. By the time the war was grinding into years of duration generals were happy to destroy anything if it would shorten the war.
WWII also had its share of fighting in urban areas. Of course, the solution to this was often to turn the urban area into rubble first, and then fight in it.
The main thing that has changed since WWII was a greater disregard for civilians by their own governments. At least the Germans didn't have civilians stand on bridges/etc to keep them from being bombed (not that this would have really deterred attacks by the time those bridges were targets). The fact that governments consider human shields an effective tactic is actually a testimony to the restraint that the US has shown in dealing with civilians. You don't find human shields in places like Rwanda since the opposing force would just mow them down - their only military value would be in consuming enemy amunition and maybe slowing down advance just out of the need to bulldoze bodies off the roads.
I don't think the GP was trying to suggest that he advocated the deliberate targetting of civilians. However, it is true that when one side in a war fights the battles in the middle of a town, not wearing uniform, that lots of civilians are going to be killed. When a sniper opens fire from a window they're inviting artillery fire on the building they're firing from. Lots of people are going to die, and that is unfortunate.
When soldiers raid a building and nobody reveals who the insurgents are, and then some soldier gets shot while trying to systematically search every person, then the next time soldiers go into a buliding the grenade will go through the door first. That is unfortunate, but that is what happens in war.
Many "civilians" in these kinds of wars give shelter and comfort to the combatants, and do their best to conceal them. Those are not the actions of a noncombatant, and while it shouldn't be punished by summary execution it will lead to escalations in the level of force employed.
Look, we can all argue about whether it is right or wrong or whatever. That won't change history - when you conduct combat operations in a town people living there are going to die. If you don't want people to die the solution is to not get into a war in the first place, but that is an action that requires two parties to agree upon. Wars are never stopped unilaterally unless it is the result of the complete destruction of the ability of the other side to make war.
I'm also the first to question US foreign policy in the Middle East. However, the dead civilians are the natural result of these policies (and the counter-policies adopted by US opponents) and not merely the result of a few soliders getting out of hand.
If the government is corrupt, 20th Century history contains numerous examples of peaceful revolutions taking place under non-democratic governments (India, and the fall of the USSR most notably come to mind)
I'm not really a general advocate of armed revolt or anything (certainly not in democratic western nations), but historically the examples you cite are more exceptions than the rule.
In both cases the revolts were only effective because those in power chose to lay down their authority peacefully. Essentially the oppressed appealed to the oppressors and the oppressors said "ok, you have a point." There are far more examples of tyrranical rulers where those in charge simply wiped out the protestors, or where they were so clearly interested in only their own power that the people never bothered to stage a mass demonstration in the first place. Could you see something like this working in half of the Middle East or in a place like North Korea? It already failed once in China - I'd think that as China becomes more influenced by Western culture it might be more likely to actually work there now or in the future.
Don't get me wrong - peaceful resistance does work sometimes. I suspect that it would have eventually worked in the formation of the US since the English Parliament was at least sympathetic to their aims. Even nations that you think would be basically peaceful have at times in history become very suppressive and warlike. Just look at WWI - half of Europe was just looking for an excuse to go to war and one guy getting shot in a very minor country was enough of a pretense to end up getting 37 million people killed.
On the other hand, most armed revolts only succeed when those in charge willingly lay down their arms, or if some external power intervenes. It wasn't like the Continental Army actually destroyed the British's ability to make war - if anything the US campaign was more of a series of defeats, but the cost to the British was enough to make them have to keep thinking twice about the issues until they gave in. The intervention of the French had a huge impact as well.
IANAL, but generally there are limits on the kinds of contracts you can enter into.
Suppose I (a complete stranger) write up a contract whereby you sell me your house for one dollar (assume you completely own your house). You foolishly sign it, and I hand you a dollar. Then a week later you realize how dumb that was and refuse to let me occupy the home - we go to court.
I suspect that I would not have a strong case in court. If I were a very close personal friend or a family member I might prevail, but as a stranger a court would ask why somebody would sell me an expensive house for one dollar. Now, if the house were sitting on a superfund site then the contract might seem reasonable, but when you sell a perfectly nice house for $1 a court is going to ask why.
Courts can actually be pretty reasonable in these kinds of circumstances. If it looks like one party is out to take advantage of others the court is going to tend to side against them. So, if you get people to sign contracts with onerous conditions on the hope that they will default and you can wipe them out, the court is going to side against you.
In this particular situation if you logged in and your account balance was 1% higher and you somehow lost money that wasn't yours and the broker tried to penalize you, the court would probably rule against the broker because an honest person might not notice that something was wrong with such a small error. On the other hand, if you try to cash out an account balance that is 100X the expected amount a court is going to recognize that you're trying to take advantage of your broker and they'll slam you for it.
The purpose of contracts is for reasonable people to conduct business in a civil manner. They're not intended to be weapons to take advantage of others, and courts will enforce this.
Yup - since they themselves submitted an estimate of the value of the copyright that should give him a strong case. I'd think that a lot of lawyers would take something like this on contingency - we're talking about tens of thousands of dollars.
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Additionally, such waste heat might not actually be "free" - depending on some of the implementation details.
The engine works by generating heat and then converting it to mechanical motion while dissipating that heat to a cold sink. If you don't "waste" that heat by sending it to a cold sink then the engine operates less efficiently.
Again, it depends on the details - the energy might be "free," or it might just rob the engine of power just as an alternator does. You can't get around the laws of thermodynamics, though...
I don't know, but the GP is right on with the delays - the US REALLY does trains wrong.
My family was going to visit relatives on vacation - I checked all the options. One was to drive for about 10.5 hours (680 miles) - at a cost of about $500 if you worked it all out. Flying would have been about $200 per person, plus car rental for a week - figure a few hours total investment of time.
I also looked at the Train. Despite having what looked like mostly direct service (maybe one change) it would have taken 24 hours to get there - that is 24 hours of my life crammed in a seat in coach. The cost would have been comparable to the plane option. I don't consider 680 miles all that far - certainly a train should be a better option for that distance than a car. The route was even relatively direct - at least as direct as the driving route (there weren't any stops at some city 400 miles out of the way or anything).
The US train system is completely mismanaged and almost entirely useless. About the only part that sort-of works is the NE corridor (Washington-NY-Boston) - and even with the Acela it is still slow (the US does not have adequate rail lines so TGV speeds are not possible and parts of the route have light train speeds - the trains had to be torn apart just to run since the TGV wasn't designed to operate on rails with sharp bends).
Sure, but why go through all that trouble for $75 per year. If I even spent one hour on a project like that my hourly internal charge rate would exceed that figure.
Sure, billions of dollars per year sounds like a lot of money, until you realize that those same computers are generatng tens of trillions of dollars in business value to the economy. The figure per computer is a few dimes per day.
Hey - I shut down my computer at night, but if somebody had a business use for leaving it on I wouldn't investigate any further, either.
Make that every computer on the subnet and I'll agree with you.
WOL is almost useless in a large corporate setting unless it has some kind of support at the switch level.
I'm sure I'm not the first to think of this, but I wonder if wishful thinking is just a way of implementing a particular strategy for survivial. What I suggest could be applied to running a business or living in a Darwinian world.
There are a couple of ways to go about survival in a highly competitive enviornment.
The most straightforward is to be better than everybody else at one or more things. If your competitors run at 3-4mph and you can run at 5mph then you're going to be the one that catches the gazalle and has dinner. The problem with this approach is that EVERYBODY is trying to catch that gazelle and EVERYBODY is out on the track every morning trying to run a little faster. If you succeed at all it will only be by a little bit, but a little bit is enough, so I think this is the predominant method of survival.
The other approach is to just try to do something completely differently. Most likely you'll fail and starve and your genes won't be passed on (directly - though your cousin might pass them on), but just maybe you'll succeed. If you do succeed there is a good chance that it won't be just by an incremental margin.
So, if I were designing an ultimate survivor species, I'd have it do a grinding incremental evolution (approach #1) most of the time. However, I'd also have members of the species occassionally take huge risks for a possible huge reward. As long as families are big enough and these risks aren't frequent then even if the odd member of the family dies the genes that convey these tendencies will still be passed on. If a family member gets lucky then it will be at the top of the food chain for generations.
Perhaps wishful thinking is just an artifact of the brain that we call "wishful thinking" when things go wrong, and "creativity" or "innovation" when that crazy idea that everybody knows won't work actually does work?
NO!!!!
Put the keys in a chip on the card itself and have the card both sign the transaction and encrypt it for the bank.
I don't know why we keep designing systems that trust that the terminal you swipe your card on and enter a PIN into are secure. The display and PIN pad should be be integrated into the card itself. Then the bank knows it is talking to your card (which the bank issued). The only way to forge or intercept a transaction is to attack the chip on the card itself (which is both hard and requires physical possession of the card for a significant period of time).
As was pointed out, however, banks have no incentive to fix the problem when they're not liable for security lapses.
We're talking about how MMOs should operate to be most enjoyable for their customers.
So, what should your MMO put in its TOS to make it fun?
I'm not talking about whether automation IS cheating - but rather SHOULD IT BE cheating?
It seems like 90% of the argument against electric has to to with long haul trips. While this is an issue that needs to be addressed, it really should not be the center of the discussion.
The single largest issue with electric is bound to become the center of discussion. Most people drive long-hauls from time to time and almost nobody will buy a car that doesn't handle this well. 99% of my trips are under 10 miles but I'd never buy a car that couldn't drive 750 miles in a single day - unless the savings were so large that they'd pay for rentals and airfare for annual vacations. Most electric cars have very modest savings and so rentals to cover the gaps aren't a no-brainer.
I agree with all your points, and yet until those problems are solved I don't think electric can take off. I have no doubt that they'll eventually be solved in some form - but until they are solved there is a gap and that is why people are still talking about alternatives.
Well, the one advantage of hydrogen is refilling times. It is very straightforward to refill a hydrogen tank quickly and be off on your way (though some safety issues do exist).
Recharging a car quickly is a fundamentally more difficult problems (though one with solutions):
1. Simply recharnging most conventional battery chemistries is just out of the question. Most take hours. Apparently some exotic ones can take 10 mins, but I'm not sure what the tradeoffs are.
2. There are things like supercapacitors which do solve the recharging problem, but those are a very new technology and I suspect there are downsides.
3. Any technology based on actually putting electricity into the battery has to contend with very high power draws. A "gas station" might need 300kV supply lines and look more like an electrical substation.
4. The alternative to recharging is cell swapping. This requires cells that are light enough to handle, and standardized enough that a filling station doesn't need a warehouse full of them. You still need to get them turned around quickly enough that batteries are available each day. You also need to somehow account for old batteries - who pays for replacing them? What keeps the owner of a filling station from just hoarding the duds into batches and then putting them in cars to swap out at the competitor down the street (thus transferring this expense to them in exchange for fresher batteries)?
In constrast refilling hydrogen tanks is a completely conventional process - there isn't really any massively new technology involved. Even the infrastructure is a somewhat mature problem (unless we're talking about new ways to store/transport H2 other than as a liquified gas).
I'm not convinced that H2 is the better solution or anything, but I can certainly see its appeal. Both approaches have their downsides. Also - the fact that you can convert between H2 and electricity tends to link the problems somewhat as well (an H2 generation station has all the power supply issues a recharging station has - unless you use a non-electrical method to split water).
No. It is just proof that a good percentage of the population have no moral objections to cheating.
I think you need to define cheating.
It seems like the legitimate way to have an advantage on an MMO is to have lots of time to kill. Spending 100 hours per week playing is not cheating.
It seems like an illegitimat way to have an advantage on an MMO is using your brain to manipulate the game mechanics to not actually have to spend 100 hours to do the same thing. That gets called cheating.
I think that most talk of cheating is just a way to differentiate between people who have lots of time and those who have some other resource (money, ability to program, whatever).
My employer pays me to cheat every day. I spend my time automating processes so that our employees can do in 10 hours of investment what our competitors require 100 hours to do. That's just the nature of life... :)
You could say that the only real MMO currency is time spent playing. A certain amount of effort needs to be put in to achieve any goal.
You've hit the nail on the head exactly, but I disagree with your conclusions.
In my experience people who hate trading of real-world cash for in-game gold tend to be people who have lots of time to play, and not lots of real-world cash to spend. People who like to buy in-game gold tend ot have little time to play, and lots of real-world cash to spend.
Obviously self-interest dictates that people who have lots of time to kill should want the game to reward time spent above all else. People who have lots of money to spend want the game to value real-world money above all else.
There really is no "right" and "wrong" way to design a game. Thus, there is no end to arguing between these parties and a huge arms race as people willing to take real-world money will do whatever they can to create in-game advantages for their customers to stay in business.
I think there needs to be a balance. Games should not be designed so that new players can't expect to enjoy the majority of the game until they've spent 300,000 hours playing it. New content needs to be available at all levels of play. On the other hand, it isn't good for gameplay when some newbie can walk around killing people left and right with an uber-sword-of-destruction that they bought for $19.95 on ebay.
I think that if you make the game fun and have rewards both for people who have leveled for 18 hours a day and also for those who play an hour a week and don't level at all, then you'll get rid of much of the incentive for farmers.
Sorry - yes... :)
Unfortunately, the only common filesystem that truly is "atomic" is ext3 with ordered data mode turned on (which is a very uncommon setting).
I certainly agree that filesystems need to strive for atomic behavior, but this just isn't common yet. In fact, as pointed out in another reply it seems like filesystem authors think that "runs fsck quickly without regard to the data" is the main goal. Those authors should just quick-format the device on a dirty mount - can't get much faster than that and the filesystem will be completely consistent after doing so (if empty).
I think the issue is that these companies don't realize how they're endangering their own reputations with these kinds of mass-litigation campaigns.
In most companies ordinary company employees don't go sending out C&D letters - or filing lawsuits. If somebody notices something amiss it goes way up the chain of command. Most likely the CEO would personally approve an action like this with input from counsel before taking this kind of step.
The problem is that when a company decides to get agreesive with litigation the CEO can't handle every case personally. Some department gets created to handle the litigation, and now you have people with a few years experience running google searches and firing off letters to anything that comes up as a hit. Litigation becomes a thoughtless exercise since it needs to be cheap to execute. You can't sustain a mass-litigation campaign if you actually take the time to thoroughly investigate every suspicious website before sending out a C&D letter.
Companies need to reserve litigation and heavy-handed letters for serious offenses, and companies need to control these carefully. Some 25-year-old who has been working for the company for a year shouldn't be sending out C&D letters with maybe only one level of oversight.
To me this kind of conduct is like having a neighborhood watch program where you hire teenagers from the neighborhood and issue them AK47s. You're going to have problems...
Wouldn't this only impact long-range communications? I would tend to think that the ground wave would be transmitted just fine - that has to be good for what, 50-100 miles?
Unless we're talking about VERY large-scale disasters I'd tend to think that this would be enough. It isn't like you need to be able to talk to China to coordinate disaster efforts for a hurricane in South Carolina.
That's the thing I didn't like about that movie - I couldn't see the navy having that kind of ambiguity in its protocols. Certainly if that situation came up in real life the ambiguity would be resolved.
That whole problem could be avoided if they had a few possible processes in place:
1. Make fire orders unrevokable. Then once you get the order there is no need to verify/etc - and if you get a message fragment there is no concern over what it might be. Don't issue fire orders unless you REALLY want the missiles to fly.
2. State that orders stand until authenticated counter-orders are confirmed. This prevents DOS attacks if an enemy floods the air with false traffic - you can't have ships sitting around trying to make sense of unauthenticated orders.
In any case, orders to actually launch missles should not be issued if there is ANY chance you want to take them back. When you try to revoke such an order you're just banking on nothing having been launched yet. If one missile flies, they'll all fly eventually. The last thing you want is to launch exactly one missile - then you've invited massive retaliation without even doing an effective first strike.
And, of course, the scenario for a nuclear launch should be in response to an opposing launch. ICBMs aren't really a good choice for anything short of killing every person on the planet...
The solution is oversight. Congress passes a law noting that major pieces of infrastructure are critical to national security. An oversight body is created to set policies for administration of such intrastructure. Violation of these policies carries criminal penalties.
Then you have the Feds start busting control rooms. Manager in charge gets sent to prison.
Let's see how fast those managers can arrange to have competent people on-duty 24x7 and not need to use pcAnywhere or whatever to get in.
As much as I'm not a fan of a lot of military culture this is one thing they REALLY get right. The mission comes first. Just think about it - they manage to work out every process to something that some 20-year-old with two years experience can supervise with 18-year-olds doing the grunt work. The officers then stay on top of things. The captain of the ship sleeps on the ship and can be woken up at any time should the situation require it. Even the president can be woken up if the chain of command truly requires it.
Manager too lazy to come in to work to see what is going on - no problem, just hire one for each shift.
Not every business needs to be run like a ship. However, the power grid isn't just any business - it requires a much higher level of rigor.
Some have pointed out labor relations issues. These sorts of issues should not impact national security - just look at the Air Traffic Controller strike. By all means the workers should be given proper time to complete their jobs in a secure way - if two computers slow them down then hire a few more people and give them time to do the job right. The solution isn't to cut corners.
Why not have both? Use the most secure protocols in existence to protect your network, and then as an added measure against zero-day exploits provide strong physical security to keep people out of this network.
Such a piece of critical infrastructure shouldn't depend on any one human being who might be at a conference and need remote access. When a balistic missle submarine 1000 feet under the ocean is interpreting orders to nuke some foreign country do they depend on being able to reach some particular person to ask questions? Any system critical to national security must be engineered so that it is completely self-sufficient in a crisis.
Electrical grids are very critical to national security. A well-planned attack could leave melted transmission lines, damaged generators and gearboxes, and a nationwide blackout in its wake. With the possibility of substantial physical damage it isn't like you could just repair from this kind of catastrophe in a few days - or even weeks. Power plants are physical machines that have a symphony of fast-moving parts with thousands of tons of force being transmitted - a well-engineered attack could result in major failures.
Power grids should have as much security as any other piece of critical military infrastructure. They're going to be targets in any attack. The networks should be subject to routine penetration testing and auditing. Access needs to be the minimum needed to do any particular job. The system should be reasonably partitioned so that one spy getting a job in one office somewhere doesn't subject the entire system to compromise. Those who circumvent authorized procedures (rogue access points, bridges, etc) should be made public examples with criminal penalties. People should be given the funds needed to do their jobs right, and then should be expected to do them right.
Security is just a matter of being thorough and not cutting corners. There is a lot at stake here. I don't really care who is behind these penetrations (Chinese, hackers, whatever) - the blame rests with the folks who should be protecting this infrastructure.
Somehow I doubt that if this were an ordinary person and not a former senator on trial the justice department wouldn't settle for a tarnished reputation and old age. A very large percentage of Congress is fairly elderly - if we don't punish corruption in elderly Senators then we might as well just have them start taking bribes in full view inside the Senate hall.
The punishment for a crime cannot be merely to stop the crime - it must be very undesirable. Otherwise, there is no incentive for people not to commit crimes in the first place.
If I rob a bank and I am caught, and the sentence is that I need to return the money - then I'm out nothing in net and I might as well try again. Very little downside, very big upside.
Corruption is deadly to a democratic government - it should be punished very harshly. These Congressmen are paid very handsomely, and they have very little in the way of job requirements beyond just showing up (yes, I realize that most members of Congress do more than just show up - but the stress level has to be lower than most corporate jobs that pay these kinds of salaries). To expect them to actually represent their constituents and not take bribes isn't asking a whole lot.
Political corruption is a betrayal of democracy - it should be punished as such. I have no problem with putting these people behind bars for decades right next to crack dealers, murders, and others who receive these kinds of sentences. They should lose their pensions, and pay stiff fines as well (certainly if I clearly accepted bribes to the detriment of my employer they would consider termination for cause and revoking my pension).
Hardly. However, they might be gassing their own population, or generally destabilizing the region.
I'm not sure that there wouldn't have been some kind of invasion sometime if I were running the show. However, one thing that is for sure is that every dollar of it would be paid for by taxes on imported mideast oil. If that were threatened I wouldn't be surprised if OPEC figured out some way to take care of the problems on their own. If wars in the middle east are the cost of oil imports, then those who use this oil should pay for it. If that makes other energy sources more economical then our dependence on oil would be reduced, and that would lower the power of Mideast regimes, and make it less likely that their civilians will end up on the wrong end of smart bombs.
It's all about economics and incentives. Remove the incentive and you get rid of the war...
First - I agree with your points about the obligations of armies to follow the Geneva Conventions even when inconvenient. Of course, that is a two-way street - you can't cry foul when lots of your civilians die if your own soldiers dress as civilians and you have civilians sit on bridges (which doesn't release the other army from trying to prevent unnecessary civilian loss of life, but I don't think that there is anything wrong with bombing a military target that has civilians sitting on the roof if they have freely chosen to be there (prisoners are another matter) - they are no longer non-combatants).
However, I find your reference to WWII interesting. WWII took a HEAVY toll on civilian populations - largely as a result of ariel bombardment (and also as a consequence of the sheer destructive power of other forms of bombardment). In many cases WWII involved total war and while there was a goal of reducing civilian loss of life it was very much secondary to accomplishing military objectives. By the time the war was grinding into years of duration generals were happy to destroy anything if it would shorten the war.
WWII also had its share of fighting in urban areas. Of course, the solution to this was often to turn the urban area into rubble first, and then fight in it.
The main thing that has changed since WWII was a greater disregard for civilians by their own governments. At least the Germans didn't have civilians stand on bridges/etc to keep them from being bombed (not that this would have really deterred attacks by the time those bridges were targets). The fact that governments consider human shields an effective tactic is actually a testimony to the restraint that the US has shown in dealing with civilians. You don't find human shields in places like Rwanda since the opposing force would just mow them down - their only military value would be in consuming enemy amunition and maybe slowing down advance just out of the need to bulldoze bodies off the roads.
I don't think the GP was trying to suggest that he advocated the deliberate targetting of civilians. However, it is true that when one side in a war fights the battles in the middle of a town, not wearing uniform, that lots of civilians are going to be killed. When a sniper opens fire from a window they're inviting artillery fire on the building they're firing from. Lots of people are going to die, and that is unfortunate.
When soldiers raid a building and nobody reveals who the insurgents are, and then some soldier gets shot while trying to systematically search every person, then the next time soldiers go into a buliding the grenade will go through the door first. That is unfortunate, but that is what happens in war.
Many "civilians" in these kinds of wars give shelter and comfort to the combatants, and do their best to conceal them. Those are not the actions of a noncombatant, and while it shouldn't be punished by summary execution it will lead to escalations in the level of force employed.
Look, we can all argue about whether it is right or wrong or whatever. That won't change history - when you conduct combat operations in a town people living there are going to die. If you don't want people to die the solution is to not get into a war in the first place, but that is an action that requires two parties to agree upon. Wars are never stopped unilaterally unless it is the result of the complete destruction of the ability of the other side to make war.
I'm also the first to question US foreign policy in the Middle East. However, the dead civilians are the natural result of these policies (and the counter-policies adopted by US opponents) and not merely the result of a few soliders getting out of hand.
If the government is corrupt, 20th Century history contains numerous examples of peaceful revolutions taking place under non-democratic governments (India, and the fall of the USSR most notably come to mind)
I'm not really a general advocate of armed revolt or anything (certainly not in democratic western nations), but historically the examples you cite are more exceptions than the rule.
In both cases the revolts were only effective because those in power chose to lay down their authority peacefully. Essentially the oppressed appealed to the oppressors and the oppressors said "ok, you have a point." There are far more examples of tyrranical rulers where those in charge simply wiped out the protestors, or where they were so clearly interested in only their own power that the people never bothered to stage a mass demonstration in the first place. Could you see something like this working in half of the Middle East or in a place like North Korea? It already failed once in China - I'd think that as China becomes more influenced by Western culture it might be more likely to actually work there now or in the future.
Don't get me wrong - peaceful resistance does work sometimes. I suspect that it would have eventually worked in the formation of the US since the English Parliament was at least sympathetic to their aims. Even nations that you think would be basically peaceful have at times in history become very suppressive and warlike. Just look at WWI - half of Europe was just looking for an excuse to go to war and one guy getting shot in a very minor country was enough of a pretense to end up getting 37 million people killed.
On the other hand, most armed revolts only succeed when those in charge willingly lay down their arms, or if some external power intervenes. It wasn't like the Continental Army actually destroyed the British's ability to make war - if anything the US campaign was more of a series of defeats, but the cost to the British was enough to make them have to keep thinking twice about the issues until they gave in. The intervention of the French had a huge impact as well.
IANAL, but generally there are limits on the kinds of contracts you can enter into.
Suppose I (a complete stranger) write up a contract whereby you sell me your house for one dollar (assume you completely own your house). You foolishly sign it, and I hand you a dollar. Then a week later you realize how dumb that was and refuse to let me occupy the home - we go to court.
I suspect that I would not have a strong case in court. If I were a very close personal friend or a family member I might prevail, but as a stranger a court would ask why somebody would sell me an expensive house for one dollar. Now, if the house were sitting on a superfund site then the contract might seem reasonable, but when you sell a perfectly nice house for $1 a court is going to ask why.
Courts can actually be pretty reasonable in these kinds of circumstances. If it looks like one party is out to take advantage of others the court is going to tend to side against them. So, if you get people to sign contracts with onerous conditions on the hope that they will default and you can wipe them out, the court is going to side against you.
In this particular situation if you logged in and your account balance was 1% higher and you somehow lost money that wasn't yours and the broker tried to penalize you, the court would probably rule against the broker because an honest person might not notice that something was wrong with such a small error. On the other hand, if you try to cash out an account balance that is 100X the expected amount a court is going to recognize that you're trying to take advantage of your broker and they'll slam you for it.
The purpose of contracts is for reasonable people to conduct business in a civil manner. They're not intended to be weapons to take advantage of others, and courts will enforce this.
Yup - since they themselves submitted an estimate of the value of the copyright that should give him a strong case. I'd think that a lot of lawyers would take something like this on contingency - we're talking about tens of thousands of dollars.