And as long as telecommunications companies continue to plan/build their infrastructure based on the predicate that only 30 to 35% of capacity will even be used at once, their systems will continue to fail whenever there's a natural or made-made disaster.
Getting a cellphone call through during an emergency is iffy, but if you weren't personally a ham, can you see where finding a ham, and getting them to put your message through to somebody else who isn't a ham, would be even more iffy?
If the cellphone networks actually "collapse" (rather than continuing to operate as fast as the can, albeit falling short of demand)... that's the kind of thing we should work on fixing. Ideally, people would find relatively long wait times to get through (several minutes), so most of them would instead send SMS, which use very little bandwidth, thus everybody could get through. Also we should push technologies like reverse 911 which allows officials to simultaneously deliver a message to everybody's phone. Of course some services like the 911 response center are going to be hopelessly overwhelmed, simply because you can't put 2 gallons into a 1 gallon jug, but I really don't see a cure for that.
And health & safety & law enforcement interagency communications? Don't get me started. Last year in some of the big wildfires, hams had to shadow groups of cops, national guard, redcross, and firefighters, because none of them could talk to each other. The same was true of the big floods a few years back.
Again, I'm not saying these things don't happen... I'm saying we should work to fix things so they don't happen anymore. Clearly, emergency services should be able to communicate. It seems like this was called out as a major need after both 911 and Katrina. I know investments have been made, I hope they have been made wisely. Pulling together a shadow ham for every emergency responder for each emergency just doesn't seem like an optimal solution.
"During 2004 in the United States, pilot error was listed as the primary cause of 78.6% of fatal general aviation accidents, and as the primary cause of 75.5% of general aviation accidents over all."
So, yeah, his made-up statistic was understating it. That said, autopilots won't be perfect either. But at least they're attentive.
I think we need to stop relying on ham's for emergencies. Most people will never be a ham. In this day and age there's no reason it should take special skills or licensing to keep emergency communications open. Maybe what we need is airborn cellphone stations that can orbit over disaster areas. (Feel free to suggest something better).
Note, I'm not saying we do not today rely on hams, only that new technology should be introduced to obviate it.
Tossing a laptop into a mix of bad teachers, and bad schools is not going to improve anything.
Are you so sure? At least kids who do want to learn will have access to the greatest library the world has ever known. I have more faith in access to information than what you believe, which is that everybody just needs more punishment. (Technology is a failure because it hasn't cured the "social problem" of copyright infringement? Let's go back to stone age, nothing curbs piracy like illiteracy and having to use a hammer and chisel!)
I read Classics as an undergraduate. Fifty years ago, students had to be able to read Latin and Greek texts without prior experience with them (unseens), compose fluently in Latin, and be able to quote a least some poetry... There is little disagreement among Classicists over falling language standards. I'm sure the same problem exists in other fields.
I'm not so sure the same problem exists in other fields; people have simply turned away from classicism towards more economically productive studies. Is that so bad? I see more value in math and science. I'd rather study "the way things are" than "the way people used to think about things."
Personally, I'm going to pass at least until I can have my entire DNA sequenced.
I think the 80/20 (or 99/1) principle is operative here. Most of your DNA doesn't even code for anything, and most of the rest is not yet well understood. I'd guess most of the medical value can be had with a small subset. By the time a full scan is affordable, you might miss out on 10 years of targeted preventative maintenance, preventing over $1000 in future medical treatment. I agree it would be much more satisfying from a collector's mindset to have the whole thing, but look at it this way, do you get a full body xray when you go to the dentist?
(All that said, I'm not running out to get this unless there is some evidence that it's a payoff, i.e. until my insurance will pay for it!)
I see no reason not to use an electric car for commuting. I understand the next-gen Prius will be able to run "all-electric" for shorter trips out of the box, if you so desire.
At some point you just give up and keep buying oil.
It must be hard to win when you actually want to lose.
"The environmentalists" are actually not shutting most things down. Fact is, wind power (for instance) is growing rapidly in the US (as elsewhere in the world): "New utility-scale wind turbines have been constructed in 20 states, most notably in California, Washington, Minnesota, New York and Texas (which now leads the nation in wind power use)."
Just because a particular project or two somewhere ran into trouble doesn't change the big picture.
FIOS and its proprietary GPON scheme is balanced towards downloads. It's not symmetrical, and was never planned to be.
Regardless, the summary says FIOS would give me 10 mbps up, which would slaughter my Comcast upstream by a factor of about 30! 10 mbps is enough to stream two rather high-quality video streams. Personally I'm not hung up on symmetry, I just want to have enough in both directions, and currently I don't. Sometimes I can't even upstream an mp3 to myself at work reliably, especially if my wife is home talking on Vonage.
For something like this that's easily classified as a bug, yes.
However, at some point they will encounter the gray areas, which are resolved by courts in real life - do they really want to go that route? For instance, are there "lemon laws" for in-game purchases, and contract law for in-game agreements? Take the whole "who owns Unix" debacle Novell and SCO have been engaged in. What if second-life outlaws resort to bartering with some other scarce resource besides money to circumvent all the rules? Property is a nice concept, but it's still a made-up concept that is whatever it is defined to be, so policing it will be almost as messy as in real life.
Pork is in the eye of the beholder (c.f. "waste"). Seems like a decent project to me, and it's not like they awarded the contract to some unqualified fly-by-night outfit (despite what Stanford will tell you:) Tanks could be so much faster, lighter, and cheaper if not for the need to protect the soft, chewy middle. Make 'em 80% cheaper than the M1 and deploy 3x as many to make sure the job gets done.
Also, "unmanned" is a bit of a misnomer; as with unmanned aerial vehicles, I'm sure they will be remotely "manned" - people will still decide whether to pull the trigger (and probably do most of the driving, at first).
Take a population of species A and split it into two groups separated from each other and placed into different environments (eg. group A in a wet environment and group B in a dry one). Allow each group to reproduce for some arbitrary large number of generations. If you accept micro-evolution, you will expect that group A will become more adapted to dry conditions and group B to wet in response to the environments in which they find themselves. Thus the two populations will inevitably diverge from each other.
It's also entirely possible - or even more likely - that either or both of A and B will simply die off.
Believing in micro-evolution but not believing in macro-evolution makes about as much sense as believing in centimetres but not believing in kilometres.
The problem with your analogy is nonlinearity. Look at evolutionary algorithms: there's a reason most of the software you use (web browser, word processor), are not evolved: nobody can get it to work that well. The idea of evolving programs is so tantalizing, it seems it should obviously work, yet it doesn't work all that well. It's indeed very easy to make them improve something a little. But then they get stuck on a plateau and stay there. In theory, it's easy to show there's a nonzero probability of jumping from any point to any other point in solution space, but it's a vanishingly small probability; you let your cluster run trillions of operations for a year and it still doesn't happen. So you put all kinds of effort into designing an evolutionary algorithm that preserves diversity to broaden the search, and design a complicated reward function that reduces discontinuities in the fitness landscape, all of which amounts to cheating, and it still doesn't work all that well. Adherents will say, "wow, it designed this patentable circuit board," but have evolutionary algorithms actually displaced conventionally designed circuits in normal engineering practice? No.
You could argue people are a grossly sub-optimal "solution" themselves, but they sure do put to shame anything we've been able to evolve synthetically.
I'm not saying any of this proves there's a god or disproves evolution. Only that your analogy is wrong, because sometimes incrementalism cannot get you where you need to go.
I think it goes like this "Oh, I can't explain how life began. I think God must have done it". Biggest cop-out excuse ever.
Neither science or religion really explains anything, because there are no ultimate explanations: If God created us, who created him? But if the Big Bang created us, why did it happen? If every cause is the effect of previous causes, it's an infinite regress. Either that or something happened for no reason at all, which is nonsense; in that case, rationality is irrelevant anyways.
1. Is a vital national security interest threatened?
2. Do we have a clear attainable objective?
3. Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
4. Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
5. Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
6. Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
7. Is the action supported by the American people?
8. Do we have genuine broad international support?
The fifth point of the Doctrine is normally interpreted to mean that the U.S. should not get involved in peacekeeping or nation-building exercises. (End quote).
It's not about putting enough boots on the ground so much as embarking on the right missions in the first place. That was the problem in Vietnam that shaped Powell's outlook, and that is the Iraq problem also. To blame it on the size of the force or the structure of the force is wrong.
WWII was really a low point, though, rather than a long-lived status quo. It was the only modern total war (with both sides freely slaughtering civilians, up to tens of thousands per day, using every weapon up to and including WMD). My point being, let's not only compare ourselves to the greatest catastrophe in human history. Bombing a wedding or shooting down an airliner are still awfully bad things, even if we do it with super-cool weaponry.
Actually there is a real point here. The idea of "transformation" - smaller, faster, higher-tech forces that require fewer troops, inflict less collateral damage, and ultimately cost less money - is likely to die with Rumsfeld's career. Now we are investing in putting more boots on the ground, and mammoth pig-iron siege machines optimized for driving over IED's. I think it's a real shame. The whole point of the Powell Doctrine was that we weren't going to fight this kind of war again. Had we stuck to defense, we could have protected ourselves just as well with a much more efficient and nimble forces. Now we are reshaping our armed forces for occupation. Is that really a business we want to be in?
So, the question of where to place blame for the Iraq war is a very pertinent one.
The same thing will happen again. Nobody is going to just lie down as our world falls apart. If for no other reason than there's a (huge) buck to be made in preventing that.
So let's get on with it and start investing in alternative energy instead of fighting for oil! (Was that your point?)
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If the cellphone networks actually "collapse" (rather than continuing to operate as fast as the can, albeit falling short of demand)... that's the kind of thing we should work on fixing. Ideally, people would find relatively long wait times to get through (several minutes), so most of them would instead send SMS, which use very little bandwidth, thus everybody could get through. Also we should push technologies like reverse 911 which allows officials to simultaneously deliver a message to everybody's phone. Of course some services like the 911 response center are going to be hopelessly overwhelmed, simply because you can't put 2 gallons into a 1 gallon jug, but I really don't see a cure for that.
Again, I'm not saying these things don't happen... I'm saying we should work to fix things so they don't happen anymore. Clearly, emergency services should be able to communicate. It seems like this was called out as a major need after both 911 and Katrina. I know investments have been made, I hope they have been made wisely. Pulling together a shadow ham for every emergency responder for each emergency just doesn't seem like an optimal solution.So, yeah, his made-up statistic was understating it. That said, autopilots won't be perfect either. But at least they're attentive.
Note, I'm not saying we do not today rely on hams, only that new technology should be introduced to obviate it.
Dang, that's just as bad as what Windows does when you install it alongside Linux.
Where is the theft with OLPCs?
How dare governments invest in education! Don't they know that's just a money pit, and it makes the "help" get all uppity.
(All that said, I'm not running out to get this unless there is some evidence that it's a payoff, i.e. until my insurance will pay for it!)
I see no reason not to use an electric car for commuting. I understand the next-gen Prius will be able to run "all-electric" for shorter trips out of the box, if you so desire.
"The environmentalists" are actually not shutting most things down. Fact is, wind power (for instance) is growing rapidly in the US (as elsewhere in the world): "New utility-scale wind turbines have been constructed in 20 states, most notably in California, Washington, Minnesota, New York and Texas (which now leads the nation in wind power use)."
Just because a particular project or two somewhere ran into trouble doesn't change the big picture.
However, at some point they will encounter the gray areas, which are resolved by courts in real life - do they really want to go that route? For instance, are there "lemon laws" for in-game purchases, and contract law for in-game agreements? Take the whole "who owns Unix" debacle Novell and SCO have been engaged in. What if second-life outlaws resort to bartering with some other scarce resource besides money to circumvent all the rules? Property is a nice concept, but it's still a made-up concept that is whatever it is defined to be, so policing it will be almost as messy as in real life.
Also, "unmanned" is a bit of a misnomer; as with unmanned aerial vehicles, I'm sure they will be remotely "manned" - people will still decide whether to pull the trigger (and probably do most of the driving, at first).
You could argue people are a grossly sub-optimal "solution" themselves, but they sure do put to shame anything we've been able to evolve synthetically.
I'm not saying any of this proves there's a god or disproves evolution. Only that your analogy is wrong, because sometimes incrementalism cannot get you where you need to go.
Wrong, because the issue is not whether all spammers have quit (they haven't), but whether there is a decrease.
WWII was really a low point, though, rather than a long-lived status quo. It was the only modern total war (with both sides freely slaughtering civilians, up to tens of thousands per day, using every weapon up to and including WMD). My point being, let's not only compare ourselves to the greatest catastrophe in human history. Bombing a wedding or shooting down an airliner are still awfully bad things, even if we do it with super-cool weaponry.
What would survive 1 ton of concrete landing directly on it at terminal velocity?
So, the question of where to place blame for the Iraq war is a very pertinent one.
The hypocrites! Next you'll tell me most cancer doctors don't even have cancer!
and CO2