Fine. Please give me a concise list of all the laws that pertain to me. I don't want references - I want you to actually quote the laws. Tell me everything I can't do. EVERYTHING.
It would take you ages to try to compile all the laws that pertain to my behavior. That is the problem.
There are just WAY too many laws. There are laws about how tall your grass can be. There are laws about how you must maintain your home. There are laws about what you can wear in public. At any time a US citizen is subject to millions of laws and regulations. Most are well-meaning, but it is impossible to comply with all of them. The only reason we're not all in jail is selective enforcement.
While I agree with your point on the Jacket, I disagree with you on the TV.
Something like this would be perfect for light cargo transport. Why own an inefficient truck for the two times a year you need to haul something big? Instead the system would have a small number of cargo vehicles that would have all the capacity of a small truck. When you buy a big TV the store would call one to the loading dock, and when you get home you'd find it parked near your house. They could put a nice hand truck or something like that inside which you'd return on deposit by putting it back in the vehicle when you're done hauling it home.
This kind of system could almost completely replace freight delivery as well. Sure, the largest part of freight would work just as it does today, but the last mile could be serviced by vehicles like PRT. Freight could get so cheap that it would replace most baggage on flights. You could send your bags to your hotel the day before you depart and expect them to be there the next day. You'd just carry personal items on-board most of the time.
And there are solutions to cleanliness. Cameras would certainly work (perhaps without long-term storage for privacy concerns). People could report a dirty car, and as long as use isn't anonymous it would be difficult to vandalize these things.
What vandalism that does happen would probably be cheaper to keep up with than maintaining car-based transit systems. Would we have to spend billions on wars in the middle east if we didn't consume so much oil? And think of how much land is covered with parking space!
A PRT network offers all kinds of possibilities. It essentially turns transportation into a packet-switched network, with all the benefits that entails. Where other forms of transport make sense a PRT could interface with them.
Actually, if one breaks down the only people stuck would be those who don't have a route back onto the grid (such as if the line ends in a dead-end and they're on the wrong side of it).
If the broken car is in the middle of a grid somewhere everybody else can route around it. Cars adjacent to it will just reverse back onto the grid (going the wrong way on a track isn't an issue if computers are running the show and direct traffic accordingly).
Yes, a breakdown could make parts of the system inaccessible. However, it wouldn't bring the whole thing down. If routes had multiple tracks it might be handled very smoothly.
You could also have tow-cars of some kind that would be auto-dispatched to get the stuck passengers to a terminal and a new car very efficiently. It would be far less inconvenient than a car breakdown (where you're not only waiting for a tow to inch through the jam you just caused, but you then have to actually deal with your car). The broken car could systematically end up in a repair yard with no human involvement at all.
Yup - even at normal operating speeds those airframes are only good for so many hours of flight. The big thing that gets them is the pressurazation and depressurization every flight. Basically every piece of metal in that thin fusealage gets stretched out every flight - and with Aluminum there are only so many times that you can do this before it rips apart.
Thats why there are boneyards with hundreds of jets in them - the bodies look fine and would probably handle a few hundred more flights without issue. However, their ages have gotten to the point where safety is a concern and so they are retired.
Take the cost of the plane (plus interest) and divide by the expected lifetime in flights and the number of filled seats per flight and that is probably the biggest single component of the price of a ticket. Sure, fuel is a big item as well, but like most vehicles the biggest cost tends to be depreciation (and maintenance).
The problem is overcapacity. There are just way too many flights. Every major US air carrier runs it operations so that it could serve almost the entire travel needs of the USA if every other air carrier went out of business. The problem is that this means that we have 10X as many routes as we really need. USAir will fly you from Harrisburg->Phila->LA when they could just run Phila->LA and let somebody else get you to Philadelphia (but with rates being structured the way they are it isn't practical to fly multiple carriers).
The solution is to stop bailing out airlines. Let a few go out of business. Then the remaining airlines will have less competition and can raise rates modestly. As an added bonus we'll have less congestion.
The problem is that as productivity improves society is finding that we don't need as many companies to efficiently run things. Sure, you want at least a few to promote competition, but you don't need 8000 local five-and-dimes when you could have 2-4 national retail chains. Airlines are just one more example of this.
The problem is that nobody wants to deal with the job losses. Society just needs to find a better way to care for people who are hard working and talented and get them into new productive jobs without losing their homes/marriages/etc...
A 747 can't cruise on 2 engines - it needs at least 3 (depending on which two are left it probably could hobble back to a controlled landing after quickly dumping fuel - more of a powered glide than flight). So, a double engine failure on a 747 isn't really much better than a double engine failure on a 777.
Now, what was an issue prior to ETOPS was how long the jet could run on one engine. Prior to ETOPS a 777 could only reliably run on one engine for a short time - plenty to land if you were near an airport, but it wasn't designed to cruise for an hour or two. A 747 could run on three engines for a long time.
The issue is that jet engines become less reliable at their max rated speed. At cruise those engines might be running at 90-94% N1. If you lose an engine, even at the reduced cruising speed that remaining engine might be running closer to 100%. And at the reduced speed it takes longer to get to an airport. With three engines losing 25% of thrust isn't as big a hit on the remaining engines as losing 50% of thrust is.
However, being that a 747 still needs 3 engines to stay aloft I'm not sure that it becomes any safer than a 777 on an engine-out scenario. If anything I'd say that the 3 remaining engines are 3X as likely to fail as the 1 engine on the 777 - all things being equal.
In any case, those big planes are just way too heavy to control with engine power. On a glide their decent rates are very high so pulling off a landing without engines is a heroic matter indeed. Pulling it off in water is near-miraculous.
Agreed. I think the next revolutions in air travel would be:
1. Cheap sustained hypersonic flight (maybe it will be possible someday - I'm not talking Concorde - I'm talking maybe only a little more expense than a 747 and multiple-mach speed).
2. Suborbital travel. If you can reliably build a passenger suborbital craft that can cruise outside the atmosphere you could really boost speed and maybe not even increase cost much. Lots of challenges to get past, however, including passenger comfort in free fall.
Those technologies could turn NY->Beijing into a 2 hour flight. However, re-entry becomes a big issue (unless you're talking about slower trips) and doing that cheaply followed by a powered landing isn't easy to pull off.
Yup. I don't know that I'd even call myself an amatuer astronomer but I remember being fascinated by a Nova episode about IRAS ages ago.
This is a very poorly explored region of the spectrum, hence the interest. I think the issue with sending up another Hubble is that it just isn't as much bang for buck.
Don't get me wrong - it seems silly not to have ONE visual spectrum space telescope, but looking into different wavelengths is far more likely to turn up revolutionary results and advance the field.
Here's an analogy. We discover a planet on a distant star. Which is more likely to turn up new results - a detailed observation of that distant planet, or a careful high-resolution analysis of craters on the Earth's moon? Sure, the latter might be good science, and turn up results, but it just isn't going to be as likely to change how we think about everything.
See the post below about package management. This is a BIG need for windows.
Half the pain of windows background services isn't the fact that some program is constantly in RAM checking for updates. The pain is that 14 separate programs are constantly in RAM checking for updates.
Why can't MS just release some update manager that uses next to no RAM/CPU and handles this stuff. All you need is an RSS feed, an update interval, and a program to execute when it changes. Software would register for updates, and then it would get a callback when there is something worth looking at.
Most likely that agreement indicated that it could be modified at any time, given notice and a decision to keep your service would constitute an acceptance of the new terms.
However, if you're under some kind of contract with an obligated duration of service you can certainly get out of it if they change the terms. If you signed on for some 2-year deal and they change the deal after 12 months you can just tell them you want to be converted to a monthly contract or keep your current terms. If they give you a hard time mention the PUC and class action lawsuits. They'd never stand a chance if they tried to pull a stunt like that.
The same applies to cell phones and any other kind of lock-in deal. The agreement cannot be modified unilaterally without breaking the obligatory duration of service.
I'm all for a crackdown on internet service advertising. The word "unlimited" means NO LIMITS! Sure, it is impossible to truly offer that (without an expensive price tag), so don't use the word!
They should just advertise up to x GB of traffic at y mbps for z$ - pick the plan you want. Then people could compare and choose.
However, don't expect to see datacenter prices for bandwidth for residential service. At a datacenter they run in a bundle of fiber optic lines to their upstream provider (possibly in the next floor), and then run an ethernet network around a single room. The whole works is in an air conditioned building not exposed to the elements. They can charge very little for bandwidth and make a profit. The home ISP needs to maintain a wire that actually leads to the premises, they need to consolidate these lines at some intermediate point, and they need to maintain a mini-datacenter of points at all the branches. They also need to process a bill/etc.
Perhaps what would make you handy is if the bill were itemized. $5 per month would be for billing/processing. $30/month would be for line maintenance. $15/month would be for the data rate (this part of the bill would change if you opt for a better plan). A more honest breakdown might be $5/month for data and $10/month for "we're the only licensed ISP in town and we can charge whatever we want". But, we certainly won't see that...:)
History doesn't really back your views. When in history have nations ever managed to live in complete peace without a balance of power? What nation in history hasn't sought the greatest diplomatic advantage? The only reason countries that lack military options cry to the UN is because it gives them a diplomatic advantage. If those same countries had military supremacy you'd be hearing the very same leaders talking about the need to go it alone.
Look - I'm a big fan of the US taking a less active role in running every other country on the planet. I think that every dollar spent on the gulf war should be added as a tariff to oil imports. Then those who opposed the war don't have to pay a dime for it if they either avoid driving or buy certified non-middle-east gas. It would also help to reduce dependence on oil from the nations that seem to require an invasion every decade or two, and the oil barons will be lobbying less for invasions if they know their products will rise in price every time an invasion is launched. The US should be getting out of the intervention business.
However, the US absolutely should maintain a position of military supremacy. All those nations that get along just fine without big armies do so only because the country that is spending all that money on the military is a nice one. Sure, Europeans might like to hate the US, but they certainly would rather see US flags on aircraft carriers than Chinese ones (or the old Soviet ones). I trust the US government politicians about as far as I can throw them, but I don't see any better options around. For its part the US needs to do a better job of being a nice world policeman, and it wouldn't hurt if other nations realized that the US taxpayers are doing quite a bit to deter conflict in all those other nations that take the lack of a need to have an army for granted.
Indeed - depending at what point in a takeoff/landing roll something like that happened the appropriate solution would be to go full throttle and try to get over it. Big jets have long breaking distances (especially during takeoff when weight is maximized and the engines take seconds to spool down). Past a certain point the only reason they would hit the brakes at all is that fewer people would die when you hit whatever is past the end of the runway than if you were to try to take off and come crashing back down on whatever is past the end of the runway.
This stuff is drilled into pilots and briefed before every flight. Both pilots know exactly when they will hit the brakes and when they'll just do their best and push forward (knowing that quite likely they'll end up dead but maybe they can pull it off). A good analogy would be the driver of a train who sees a car stopped on a crossing 20 seconds ahead. He can hit the horn, and hit the brakes, but if the car doesn't move the outcome of the next 30 seconds is inevitable.
The irony is that it would probably be illegal for that pilot to fly another leg for a few days, but driving a car is just fine. We just take for granted having so many car accidents in a day...
Actually, some linux package managers handle this fairly well.
For example, on gentoo portage will drop privs to perform all the installation tasks up to creating a directory tree of files that need to be merged into the filesystem. If you want you can have it stop at that point and inspect the files or whatever. The package manager itself will then (as root) install the actual files where they belong. Any scripts associated with the installer run with user-level permissions up until that point.
Now, if the installer needs to run some script after it is complete (such as for a data/config migration of some kind beyond just installing files) then that might run as root. No getting around that, but good practice is to do as much of that stuff non-root as possible. (For example, if you want to merge your new config file with settings from an old one you can just copy the data out of the old one as non-root into the proposed install file, and then the new file will overwrite the old as root (with gentoo having some config file protection features to allow the user to confirm the changes)).
If you want to go really nuts you could do all of this in a chroot, test the package, and then install a perfect copy from a binary package in your root.
This all works because in linux the installer is not part of the software package being installed, but it is a standard part of the OS.
I described gentoo since that is what I know, but I'm sure debian has similar sorts of safeguards. Of course, all of this is somewhat moot if the package drops something into/etc/init.d which runs as root and does something nefarious. You're relying on the distributions QC at some point. An even more secure model might be something like android where the apps are all sandboxed and the user needs to approve the range of functions they can run. Something like SELinux would be similar but currently the zone configurations aren't as automated as they could be. A distro designed from the ground up for SELinux (with a full list of packages) would be the ultimate in security.
Yes, but the immortal liver cells in this device could very well be cancerous. Isn't the most common method for immortalizing cell lines in the lab to fuse the desired cell with cancer cells to form an immortal hybrid (selecting for the hybrids by both immortality and a genetic marker)?
I think that great care would need to be taken to make sure that the cells never leak into your blood stream. That shouldn't be too hard with the right engineering, but there certainly is some cause for concern.
My point was that this kind of socialism does not exist currently in the US. That is why we have the kinds of clashes we do over IP. If artists were just paid some kind of welfare to make art, then I doubt they'd be signing over copyright to the likes of the RIAA. After all, they are making art for art's sake and they don't need it sold in every record store in America to have a following of devoted fans. Likewise, if I could just write GPL software and have my bills paid for by the government I'd be happy to quit my job.
However, this isn't the world we live in today. I'm not sure this kind of system would even work today (I'm not advocating some kind of move to communism - at least not today). However, I think that society will end up there eventually - simply because productivity will rise to a point where it becomes almost impossible to employ everybody to do "practical" work. In most first-world nations you could meet the basic material needs of the entire country while employing only a few percent of the population. How many people actually work in the building, clothing, and farming industries?
The problem with socialism/communism is that some jobs will always be more desirable than others, so how do you decide who gets to be paid to meditate on poetry and who gets paid to collect the trash? At least with captitalism anybody is free to try to do anything - and the bottom line is getting somebody to pay you for it. Until we literally do have self-replicating robots serving us that is going to be an issue, but the problems with IP will continue to grow up until that point (and there will be a growing divide between those who own the means of production and those who work for them).
And the reality is that if robots ever do get to the point where we could settle down into utopia the robots are likely to figure out that they don't really need us and make their own utopia...:)
Uh, that link doesn't mention anything about a washed out dam. It looks like that was just a conventional flood. (Or the article was wrong.)
But, obviously I agree that if you're going to build a dam it is important to do it right. I have a suspicion that people are going to look at the three gorges dam with shock and horror once it is full from what I've read about their quality issues.
There can be a lot of politics and cultural issues involved here.
I've known people sent to foreign plants with a mandate to institute some change, and they've made changes to the plant design only to come in the next day to find those changes reversed. The changes were made again (with managers nodding the whole time) and again the changes would be reversed overnight. Said changes involved welding pipes and adding hardware and stuff like that (this was a chemical plant). It was apparently something to behold. In this case the cultural issue was that "yes" meant "yes, I understand" and not "yes, I agree." Having traveled a little to asia on business myself I've encountered similar situations (not to this extent).
Rarely will company senior management step in on something like this, unless there is a real cost to the company involved. They just care that they can say that they're outsourcing x% of their work or whatever the driver is. As long as those Chinese branch workers are selling product or are being paid less or whatever the driver is, the office isn't going to be closed. And if the branch office manager was hired because they're friends with the local party leader then good luck getting rid of him.
Business in China doesn't always work the same as business in the US. The cultures are very different. Sometimes you need to put your foot down, and sometimes you need to decide if a hill is worth dying on...
The issue with intellectual property is a problem with how society works.
Right now, the only way you can obtain resources is with money. Not all resources are unlimited, and there is no reason to think that they ever will be completely unlimited (even in the world of Star Trek). The only way to get money is to produce some product that somebody else who has money will pay you for. For most individual people that is a work product of some kind.
The issue with IP is that one person's work product can benefit a HUGE number of people (copies are "free"), but the one person has no incentive to provide that product if nobody will pay for it. Often a software product might cost millions to produce, and yet be sold for $100 per copy. That only works if lots of people pay (at least hundreds). If only the first person pays $100 and nobody else pays a dime then nobody will make software except for altruistic reasons. However, even a person's ability to do altruistic work depends on their ability to get money to pay the bills from some other source. If RMS starves to death, he can't write GPL software.
I think that as time goes on productivity will rise to the point where you can produce the whole planet's physical needs with a 90% unemployment rate. What do you do then? Everybody else can only make intellectual products (entertainment, software, etc). Those people need to have resources - so unless you have communism of some kind they need to be able to sell their products.
The ultimate extreme is a world in which robots are stronger and "smarter" than humans (let's argue that they are non-sentient to simplify the ethics involved). Nobody is employed, because nobody can compete in this world. Everybody could live in luxury cared for by robots, but nobody can actually afford to buy a robot, since nobody has any money at all. How does this society work.
There are all kinds of issues related to population size / etc as well.
I'm not arguing that any of this is reality today - but this is the direction we're trending in, and I think that this is the source of many of our current problems with IP.
They can be useful for more complex setups where your root/bin/etc/lib drive requires user-mode initialization to work. LVM2 comes to mind - I don't think you can use a logical volume for your root without an initrd.
The other option would be linuxbios. I'm assuming it would let you do the user-mode initialization but I'm not certain on that. Linuxbios would also let you boot off of more exotic hardware (such as a parallel-port CD drive, or iSCSI, or some network boot more sophisticated than PXE).
Legislated self-interest is the sort of thing that leads to all kinds of evils. Basically it is mob rule.
Was I born black? No. Could I have been born black - who cares? So, why shouldn't I go ahead and enslave my next door neighbor who is black? The answer has nothing to do with voter demographics and everything to do with right and wrong. It is wrong to enslave another human - period.
Ultimately I don't think that it is possible to completely separate religion and morality. Fortunately in western culture the most basic standards of morality are fairly well shared across people with a diversity of religious views. This is not true across all cultures and over all of history. You can find numerous examples of civilizations where mainstream values would be considered abhorent to most people alive today. How many cultures have practiced child sacrifice of one sort or another? Even in the modern world there are horrific cases of genocide that don't make sense until you realize that the perfect symmetry you propose doesn't exist everywhere all the time.
Self-interest is a poor moral compass. It doesn't point in the same direction for everybody, and in some cases even when it does I'm not sure it points where I want to go.
Yup - I have more junk than a typical desktop install (netfilter, ivtv, lots of extra lm_sensors), and my kernel is only 3MB (bzip2'ed). And that is on amd64 where code is bigger. No need for an initrd either.
You can get the linux kernel pretty small if you need to.
Yup - ABMs aren't entirely new. What is new is kinetic-kill weapons (rather than lobbing a tactical nuke into a warhead cloud and setting it off).
Did the 1970s-ear ABMs generate EMPs sufficient enough to cause "fratricide"? I'd be nervous about setting off nuclear detonations at high altitude over my own country. Granted, it is prefereable than having them go off at ground level.
You could get around some of the delivery issues by pre-positioning the bomb, but that creates a whole mess of other issues:
1. If there are any leaks and the US finds out, they'll raid the operation and the end result is either a really ticked off US showing your bomb to the world media (while dropping bombs of their own on you), or a detonation and a REALLY ticked off US turning your country into a parking lot.
2. If there are no leaks at all you're putting a nuclear bomb into the hands of your agents, with the ability to set it off. Presumably those agents are at least somewhat whacky considering they're willing to do this job in the first place. Do you want them to have the ability to start a nuclear war if they wake up with a revelation from God? That's the job of the ayatollahs.
If you don't pre-deliver the bomb then it will never get to the US. Why would Iran launch a nuclear attack on the US anyway? It would only come if a war started. If the US were at war with Iran you wouldn't be seeing container ships launched from Iranian ports and docking in New York without any searches enroute. If Iran keeps the bomb at some other port you run into all the issues with pre-delivering it.
A container ship with a nuclear bomb is a first strike weapon - one likely to be mainly used by terrorist groups. Iran won't be using this attack vector unless it can be certain the US won't associate the attack with them, or it has nothing left to lose. Or (quite possibly) becuase the folks in charge think that God told them to do it - in which case they'd just as happily launch missles since retaliation isn't a concern.
What about the $3M you spent on NoNameSoft's RunMyWarehouse five years ago? That software doesn't work on Widnows 7, but the latest upgrade does. The $300k you've spent annually on license maintenance makes that a "free" upgrade, but it has a new GUI and you're going to have to spend $1M to retool all your configuration. The users will need extensive training to use the new version. And no, they're not going to learn this from the Video Professor at home.
One thing people who don't work in medium/large companies don't realize is how much industry-specific software there is out there. This kind of stuff is what drives big companies. Excel and Word and Outlook are commodity items that are expected to "just work". The headaches for these companies are the ERP systems and inventory systems and ordering systems and all that stuff. If you change one you end up making some kind of change in half of the others, and nobody wants to do that unless it adds value. Nobody does it simply to say that they're running the latest version of Windows.
At work the Desktop Engineering group was making a big deal about Vista and everybody in the application groups were just laughing. It would never fly. Not only did they want to roll out Vista, but they also wanted to remove admin privs from end users and pre-package ALL software on the desktop. Now, that is a laudable goal, but to expect to get there overnight with an OS upgrade with all kinds of non-negotiables like keeping your business running with a bunch of $5M software packages made it a non-starter. The project was canceled unsurprisingly.
When your company has 40k computers and more $1M+ applications than anybody can keep track of, a major OS upgrade is a little harder than if you're running your campus computer lab with nothing installed but Office. When that OS upgrade does things "really different" it is even harder. XP was a big step up in stability/maintainability/compatibility, so everybody was willing to accept this. The only thing that will cause it to be left behind is when it is desupported, and there will be much wailing when that happens.
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Fine. Please give me a concise list of all the laws that pertain to me. I don't want references - I want you to actually quote the laws. Tell me everything I can't do. EVERYTHING.
It would take you ages to try to compile all the laws that pertain to my behavior. That is the problem.
There are just WAY too many laws. There are laws about how tall your grass can be. There are laws about how you must maintain your home. There are laws about what you can wear in public. At any time a US citizen is subject to millions of laws and regulations. Most are well-meaning, but it is impossible to comply with all of them. The only reason we're not all in jail is selective enforcement.
While I agree with your point on the Jacket, I disagree with you on the TV.
Something like this would be perfect for light cargo transport. Why own an inefficient truck for the two times a year you need to haul something big? Instead the system would have a small number of cargo vehicles that would have all the capacity of a small truck. When you buy a big TV the store would call one to the loading dock, and when you get home you'd find it parked near your house. They could put a nice hand truck or something like that inside which you'd return on deposit by putting it back in the vehicle when you're done hauling it home.
This kind of system could almost completely replace freight delivery as well. Sure, the largest part of freight would work just as it does today, but the last mile could be serviced by vehicles like PRT. Freight could get so cheap that it would replace most baggage on flights. You could send your bags to your hotel the day before you depart and expect them to be there the next day. You'd just carry personal items on-board most of the time.
And there are solutions to cleanliness. Cameras would certainly work (perhaps without long-term storage for privacy concerns). People could report a dirty car, and as long as use isn't anonymous it would be difficult to vandalize these things.
What vandalism that does happen would probably be cheaper to keep up with than maintaining car-based transit systems. Would we have to spend billions on wars in the middle east if we didn't consume so much oil? And think of how much land is covered with parking space!
A PRT network offers all kinds of possibilities. It essentially turns transportation into a packet-switched network, with all the benefits that entails. Where other forms of transport make sense a PRT could interface with them.
Actually, if one breaks down the only people stuck would be those who don't have a route back onto the grid (such as if the line ends in a dead-end and they're on the wrong side of it).
If the broken car is in the middle of a grid somewhere everybody else can route around it. Cars adjacent to it will just reverse back onto the grid (going the wrong way on a track isn't an issue if computers are running the show and direct traffic accordingly).
Yes, a breakdown could make parts of the system inaccessible. However, it wouldn't bring the whole thing down. If routes had multiple tracks it might be handled very smoothly.
You could also have tow-cars of some kind that would be auto-dispatched to get the stuck passengers to a terminal and a new car very efficiently. It would be far less inconvenient than a car breakdown (where you're not only waiting for a tow to inch through the jam you just caused, but you then have to actually deal with your car). The broken car could systematically end up in a repair yard with no human involvement at all.
Yup - even at normal operating speeds those airframes are only good for so many hours of flight. The big thing that gets them is the pressurazation and depressurization every flight. Basically every piece of metal in that thin fusealage gets stretched out every flight - and with Aluminum there are only so many times that you can do this before it rips apart.
Thats why there are boneyards with hundreds of jets in them - the bodies look fine and would probably handle a few hundred more flights without issue. However, their ages have gotten to the point where safety is a concern and so they are retired.
Take the cost of the plane (plus interest) and divide by the expected lifetime in flights and the number of filled seats per flight and that is probably the biggest single component of the price of a ticket. Sure, fuel is a big item as well, but like most vehicles the biggest cost tends to be depreciation (and maintenance).
The problem is overcapacity. There are just way too many flights. Every major US air carrier runs it operations so that it could serve almost the entire travel needs of the USA if every other air carrier went out of business. The problem is that this means that we have 10X as many routes as we really need. USAir will fly you from Harrisburg->Phila->LA when they could just run Phila->LA and let somebody else get you to Philadelphia (but with rates being structured the way they are it isn't practical to fly multiple carriers).
The solution is to stop bailing out airlines. Let a few go out of business. Then the remaining airlines will have less competition and can raise rates modestly. As an added bonus we'll have less congestion.
The problem is that as productivity improves society is finding that we don't need as many companies to efficiently run things. Sure, you want at least a few to promote competition, but you don't need 8000 local five-and-dimes when you could have 2-4 national retail chains. Airlines are just one more example of this.
The problem is that nobody wants to deal with the job losses. Society just needs to find a better way to care for people who are hard working and talented and get them into new productive jobs without losing their homes/marriages/etc...
It depends.
A 747 can't cruise on 2 engines - it needs at least 3 (depending on which two are left it probably could hobble back to a controlled landing after quickly dumping fuel - more of a powered glide than flight). So, a double engine failure on a 747 isn't really much better than a double engine failure on a 777.
Now, what was an issue prior to ETOPS was how long the jet could run on one engine. Prior to ETOPS a 777 could only reliably run on one engine for a short time - plenty to land if you were near an airport, but it wasn't designed to cruise for an hour or two. A 747 could run on three engines for a long time.
The issue is that jet engines become less reliable at their max rated speed. At cruise those engines might be running at 90-94% N1. If you lose an engine, even at the reduced cruising speed that remaining engine might be running closer to 100%. And at the reduced speed it takes longer to get to an airport. With three engines losing 25% of thrust isn't as big a hit on the remaining engines as losing 50% of thrust is.
However, being that a 747 still needs 3 engines to stay aloft I'm not sure that it becomes any safer than a 777 on an engine-out scenario. If anything I'd say that the 3 remaining engines are 3X as likely to fail as the 1 engine on the 777 - all things being equal.
In any case, those big planes are just way too heavy to control with engine power. On a glide their decent rates are very high so pulling off a landing without engines is a heroic matter indeed. Pulling it off in water is near-miraculous.
Agreed. I think the next revolutions in air travel would be:
1. Cheap sustained hypersonic flight (maybe it will be possible someday - I'm not talking Concorde - I'm talking maybe only a little more expense than a 747 and multiple-mach speed).
2. Suborbital travel. If you can reliably build a passenger suborbital craft that can cruise outside the atmosphere you could really boost speed and maybe not even increase cost much. Lots of challenges to get past, however, including passenger comfort in free fall.
Those technologies could turn NY->Beijing into a 2 hour flight. However, re-entry becomes a big issue (unless you're talking about slower trips) and doing that cheaply followed by a powered landing isn't easy to pull off.
Yup. I don't know that I'd even call myself an amatuer astronomer but I remember being fascinated by a Nova episode about IRAS ages ago.
This is a very poorly explored region of the spectrum, hence the interest. I think the issue with sending up another Hubble is that it just isn't as much bang for buck.
Don't get me wrong - it seems silly not to have ONE visual spectrum space telescope, but looking into different wavelengths is far more likely to turn up revolutionary results and advance the field.
Here's an analogy. We discover a planet on a distant star. Which is more likely to turn up new results - a detailed observation of that distant planet, or a careful high-resolution analysis of craters on the Earth's moon? Sure, the latter might be good science, and turn up results, but it just isn't going to be as likely to change how we think about everything.
See the post below about package management. This is a BIG need for windows.
Half the pain of windows background services isn't the fact that some program is constantly in RAM checking for updates. The pain is that 14 separate programs are constantly in RAM checking for updates.
Why can't MS just release some update manager that uses next to no RAM/CPU and handles this stuff. All you need is an RSS feed, an update interval, and a program to execute when it changes. Software would register for updates, and then it would get a callback when there is something worth looking at.
Most likely that agreement indicated that it could be modified at any time, given notice and a decision to keep your service would constitute an acceptance of the new terms.
However, if you're under some kind of contract with an obligated duration of service you can certainly get out of it if they change the terms. If you signed on for some 2-year deal and they change the deal after 12 months you can just tell them you want to be converted to a monthly contract or keep your current terms. If they give you a hard time mention the PUC and class action lawsuits. They'd never stand a chance if they tried to pull a stunt like that.
The same applies to cell phones and any other kind of lock-in deal. The agreement cannot be modified unilaterally without breaking the obligatory duration of service.
I'm all for a crackdown on internet service advertising. The word "unlimited" means NO LIMITS! Sure, it is impossible to truly offer that (without an expensive price tag), so don't use the word!
They should just advertise up to x GB of traffic at y mbps for z$ - pick the plan you want. Then people could compare and choose.
However, don't expect to see datacenter prices for bandwidth for residential service. At a datacenter they run in a bundle of fiber optic lines to their upstream provider (possibly in the next floor), and then run an ethernet network around a single room. The whole works is in an air conditioned building not exposed to the elements. They can charge very little for bandwidth and make a profit. The home ISP needs to maintain a wire that actually leads to the premises, they need to consolidate these lines at some intermediate point, and they need to maintain a mini-datacenter of points at all the branches. They also need to process a bill/etc.
Perhaps what would make you handy is if the bill were itemized. $5 per month would be for billing/processing. $30/month would be for line maintenance. $15/month would be for the data rate (this part of the bill would change if you opt for a better plan). A more honest breakdown might be $5/month for data and $10/month for "we're the only licensed ISP in town and we can charge whatever we want". But, we certainly won't see that... :)
History doesn't really back your views. When in history have nations ever managed to live in complete peace without a balance of power? What nation in history hasn't sought the greatest diplomatic advantage? The only reason countries that lack military options cry to the UN is because it gives them a diplomatic advantage. If those same countries had military supremacy you'd be hearing the very same leaders talking about the need to go it alone.
Look - I'm a big fan of the US taking a less active role in running every other country on the planet. I think that every dollar spent on the gulf war should be added as a tariff to oil imports. Then those who opposed the war don't have to pay a dime for it if they either avoid driving or buy certified non-middle-east gas. It would also help to reduce dependence on oil from the nations that seem to require an invasion every decade or two, and the oil barons will be lobbying less for invasions if they know their products will rise in price every time an invasion is launched. The US should be getting out of the intervention business.
However, the US absolutely should maintain a position of military supremacy. All those nations that get along just fine without big armies do so only because the country that is spending all that money on the military is a nice one. Sure, Europeans might like to hate the US, but they certainly would rather see US flags on aircraft carriers than Chinese ones (or the old Soviet ones). I trust the US government politicians about as far as I can throw them, but I don't see any better options around. For its part the US needs to do a better job of being a nice world policeman, and it wouldn't hurt if other nations realized that the US taxpayers are doing quite a bit to deter conflict in all those other nations that take the lack of a need to have an army for granted.
Indeed - depending at what point in a takeoff/landing roll something like that happened the appropriate solution would be to go full throttle and try to get over it. Big jets have long breaking distances (especially during takeoff when weight is maximized and the engines take seconds to spool down). Past a certain point the only reason they would hit the brakes at all is that fewer people would die when you hit whatever is past the end of the runway than if you were to try to take off and come crashing back down on whatever is past the end of the runway.
This stuff is drilled into pilots and briefed before every flight. Both pilots know exactly when they will hit the brakes and when they'll just do their best and push forward (knowing that quite likely they'll end up dead but maybe they can pull it off). A good analogy would be the driver of a train who sees a car stopped on a crossing 20 seconds ahead. He can hit the horn, and hit the brakes, but if the car doesn't move the outcome of the next 30 seconds is inevitable.
The irony is that it would probably be illegal for that pilot to fly another leg for a few days, but driving a car is just fine. We just take for granted having so many car accidents in a day...
Actually, some linux package managers handle this fairly well.
For example, on gentoo portage will drop privs to perform all the installation tasks up to creating a directory tree of files that need to be merged into the filesystem. If you want you can have it stop at that point and inspect the files or whatever. The package manager itself will then (as root) install the actual files where they belong. Any scripts associated with the installer run with user-level permissions up until that point.
Now, if the installer needs to run some script after it is complete (such as for a data/config migration of some kind beyond just installing files) then that might run as root. No getting around that, but good practice is to do as much of that stuff non-root as possible. (For example, if you want to merge your new config file with settings from an old one you can just copy the data out of the old one as non-root into the proposed install file, and then the new file will overwrite the old as root (with gentoo having some config file protection features to allow the user to confirm the changes)).
If you want to go really nuts you could do all of this in a chroot, test the package, and then install a perfect copy from a binary package in your root.
This all works because in linux the installer is not part of the software package being installed, but it is a standard part of the OS.
I described gentoo since that is what I know, but I'm sure debian has similar sorts of safeguards. Of course, all of this is somewhat moot if the package drops something into /etc/init.d which runs as root and does something nefarious. You're relying on the distributions QC at some point. An even more secure model might be something like android where the apps are all sandboxed and the user needs to approve the range of functions they can run. Something like SELinux would be similar but currently the zone configurations aren't as automated as they could be. A distro designed from the ground up for SELinux (with a full list of packages) would be the ultimate in security.
Yes, but the immortal liver cells in this device could very well be cancerous. Isn't the most common method for immortalizing cell lines in the lab to fuse the desired cell with cancer cells to form an immortal hybrid (selecting for the hybrids by both immortality and a genetic marker)?
I think that great care would need to be taken to make sure that the cells never leak into your blood stream. That shouldn't be too hard with the right engineering, but there certainly is some cause for concern.
I agree - the solutions you propose would work.
My point was that this kind of socialism does not exist currently in the US. That is why we have the kinds of clashes we do over IP. If artists were just paid some kind of welfare to make art, then I doubt they'd be signing over copyright to the likes of the RIAA. After all, they are making art for art's sake and they don't need it sold in every record store in America to have a following of devoted fans. Likewise, if I could just write GPL software and have my bills paid for by the government I'd be happy to quit my job.
However, this isn't the world we live in today. I'm not sure this kind of system would even work today (I'm not advocating some kind of move to communism - at least not today). However, I think that society will end up there eventually - simply because productivity will rise to a point where it becomes almost impossible to employ everybody to do "practical" work. In most first-world nations you could meet the basic material needs of the entire country while employing only a few percent of the population. How many people actually work in the building, clothing, and farming industries?
The problem with socialism/communism is that some jobs will always be more desirable than others, so how do you decide who gets to be paid to meditate on poetry and who gets paid to collect the trash? At least with captitalism anybody is free to try to do anything - and the bottom line is getting somebody to pay you for it. Until we literally do have self-replicating robots serving us that is going to be an issue, but the problems with IP will continue to grow up until that point (and there will be a growing divide between those who own the means of production and those who work for them).
And the reality is that if robots ever do get to the point where we could settle down into utopia the robots are likely to figure out that they don't really need us and make their own utopia... :)
Uh, that link doesn't mention anything about a washed out dam. It looks like that was just a conventional flood. (Or the article was wrong.)
But, obviously I agree that if you're going to build a dam it is important to do it right. I have a suspicion that people are going to look at the three gorges dam with shock and horror once it is full from what I've read about their quality issues.
There can be a lot of politics and cultural issues involved here.
I've known people sent to foreign plants with a mandate to institute some change, and they've made changes to the plant design only to come in the next day to find those changes reversed. The changes were made again (with managers nodding the whole time) and again the changes would be reversed overnight. Said changes involved welding pipes and adding hardware and stuff like that (this was a chemical plant). It was apparently something to behold. In this case the cultural issue was that "yes" meant "yes, I understand" and not "yes, I agree." Having traveled a little to asia on business myself I've encountered similar situations (not to this extent).
Rarely will company senior management step in on something like this, unless there is a real cost to the company involved. They just care that they can say that they're outsourcing x% of their work or whatever the driver is. As long as those Chinese branch workers are selling product or are being paid less or whatever the driver is, the office isn't going to be closed. And if the branch office manager was hired because they're friends with the local party leader then good luck getting rid of him.
Business in China doesn't always work the same as business in the US. The cultures are very different. Sometimes you need to put your foot down, and sometimes you need to decide if a hill is worth dying on...
The issue with intellectual property is a problem with how society works.
Right now, the only way you can obtain resources is with money. Not all resources are unlimited, and there is no reason to think that they ever will be completely unlimited (even in the world of Star Trek). The only way to get money is to produce some product that somebody else who has money will pay you for. For most individual people that is a work product of some kind.
The issue with IP is that one person's work product can benefit a HUGE number of people (copies are "free"), but the one person has no incentive to provide that product if nobody will pay for it. Often a software product might cost millions to produce, and yet be sold for $100 per copy. That only works if lots of people pay (at least hundreds). If only the first person pays $100 and nobody else pays a dime then nobody will make software except for altruistic reasons. However, even a person's ability to do altruistic work depends on their ability to get money to pay the bills from some other source. If RMS starves to death, he can't write GPL software.
I think that as time goes on productivity will rise to the point where you can produce the whole planet's physical needs with a 90% unemployment rate. What do you do then? Everybody else can only make intellectual products (entertainment, software, etc). Those people need to have resources - so unless you have communism of some kind they need to be able to sell their products.
The ultimate extreme is a world in which robots are stronger and "smarter" than humans (let's argue that they are non-sentient to simplify the ethics involved). Nobody is employed, because nobody can compete in this world. Everybody could live in luxury cared for by robots, but nobody can actually afford to buy a robot, since nobody has any money at all. How does this society work.
There are all kinds of issues related to population size / etc as well.
I'm not arguing that any of this is reality today - but this is the direction we're trending in, and I think that this is the source of many of our current problems with IP.
They can be useful for more complex setups where your root/bin/etc/lib drive requires user-mode initialization to work. LVM2 comes to mind - I don't think you can use a logical volume for your root without an initrd.
The other option would be linuxbios. I'm assuming it would let you do the user-mode initialization but I'm not certain on that. Linuxbios would also let you boot off of more exotic hardware (such as a parallel-port CD drive, or iSCSI, or some network boot more sophisticated than PXE).
Legislated self-interest is the sort of thing that leads to all kinds of evils. Basically it is mob rule.
Was I born black? No. Could I have been born black - who cares? So, why shouldn't I go ahead and enslave my next door neighbor who is black? The answer has nothing to do with voter demographics and everything to do with right and wrong. It is wrong to enslave another human - period.
Ultimately I don't think that it is possible to completely separate religion and morality. Fortunately in western culture the most basic standards of morality are fairly well shared across people with a diversity of religious views. This is not true across all cultures and over all of history. You can find numerous examples of civilizations where mainstream values would be considered abhorent to most people alive today. How many cultures have practiced child sacrifice of one sort or another? Even in the modern world there are horrific cases of genocide that don't make sense until you realize that the perfect symmetry you propose doesn't exist everywhere all the time.
Self-interest is a poor moral compass. It doesn't point in the same direction for everybody, and in some cases even when it does I'm not sure it points where I want to go.
Yup - I have more junk than a typical desktop install (netfilter, ivtv, lots of extra lm_sensors), and my kernel is only 3MB (bzip2'ed). And that is on amd64 where code is bigger. No need for an initrd either.
You can get the linux kernel pretty small if you need to.
Yup - ABMs aren't entirely new. What is new is kinetic-kill weapons (rather than lobbing a tactical nuke into a warhead cloud and setting it off).
Did the 1970s-ear ABMs generate EMPs sufficient enough to cause "fratricide"? I'd be nervous about setting off nuclear detonations at high altitude over my own country. Granted, it is prefereable than having them go off at ground level.
You could get around some of the delivery issues by pre-positioning the bomb, but that creates a whole mess of other issues:
1. If there are any leaks and the US finds out, they'll raid the operation and the end result is either a really ticked off US showing your bomb to the world media (while dropping bombs of their own on you), or a detonation and a REALLY ticked off US turning your country into a parking lot.
2. If there are no leaks at all you're putting a nuclear bomb into the hands of your agents, with the ability to set it off. Presumably those agents are at least somewhat whacky considering they're willing to do this job in the first place. Do you want them to have the ability to start a nuclear war if they wake up with a revelation from God? That's the job of the ayatollahs.
If you don't pre-deliver the bomb then it will never get to the US. Why would Iran launch a nuclear attack on the US anyway? It would only come if a war started. If the US were at war with Iran you wouldn't be seeing container ships launched from Iranian ports and docking in New York without any searches enroute. If Iran keeps the bomb at some other port you run into all the issues with pre-delivering it.
A container ship with a nuclear bomb is a first strike weapon - one likely to be mainly used by terrorist groups. Iran won't be using this attack vector unless it can be certain the US won't associate the attack with them, or it has nothing left to lose. Or (quite possibly) becuase the folks in charge think that God told them to do it - in which case they'd just as happily launch missles since retaliation isn't a concern.
What about the $3M you spent on NoNameSoft's RunMyWarehouse five years ago? That software doesn't work on Widnows 7, but the latest upgrade does. The $300k you've spent annually on license maintenance makes that a "free" upgrade, but it has a new GUI and you're going to have to spend $1M to retool all your configuration. The users will need extensive training to use the new version. And no, they're not going to learn this from the Video Professor at home.
One thing people who don't work in medium/large companies don't realize is how much industry-specific software there is out there. This kind of stuff is what drives big companies. Excel and Word and Outlook are commodity items that are expected to "just work". The headaches for these companies are the ERP systems and inventory systems and ordering systems and all that stuff. If you change one you end up making some kind of change in half of the others, and nobody wants to do that unless it adds value. Nobody does it simply to say that they're running the latest version of Windows.
At work the Desktop Engineering group was making a big deal about Vista and everybody in the application groups were just laughing. It would never fly. Not only did they want to roll out Vista, but they also wanted to remove admin privs from end users and pre-package ALL software on the desktop. Now, that is a laudable goal, but to expect to get there overnight with an OS upgrade with all kinds of non-negotiables like keeping your business running with a bunch of $5M software packages made it a non-starter. The project was canceled unsurprisingly.
When your company has 40k computers and more $1M+ applications than anybody can keep track of, a major OS upgrade is a little harder than if you're running your campus computer lab with nothing installed but Office. When that OS upgrade does things "really different" it is even harder. XP was a big step up in stability/maintainability/compatibility, so everybody was willing to accept this. The only thing that will cause it to be left behind is when it is desupported, and there will be much wailing when that happens.