Similar tech is in use daily on large farms, but it is a rigidly defined route. Self steering tractors are very common now, there are even kits you can get that bolt on to your normal tractor. They are more intended for keeping precise plowing/tilling/planting etc spacing, where inches count highly, but using GPS and maps of the fields they work perfectly fine. If there was a dedicated lane next to existing freeways for slow and steady cargo delivery-separating human drivers from the bot drivers- this could be done today fairly easily I think using similar off the shelf stuff. The darpa challenge is way more about building autonomous robotic fighting vehicles/ military convoy vehicles (Read the oshkosh terramax site, why they are using that large truck in their efforts, it is a direct sales model if they can get it to work right, as they didn't this test), and as such needs to be loads more complicated than just following a wide and clear road with traffic all flowing the same direction, etc. One of the larger problems is off the wall events that can't be adequately programmed for in advance and have to rely on sensors, like the random deer out in the road, people running across the highway, "road gators" and other unexpected trash in the road, stuff like that. In a military situation, perhaps they wouldn't bother, smash their way through, but still try to not run over all the locals during the trip.
I think it is going to be really hard to come up with a civilian model that would work on all roads, just too many variables to contend with. In a war situation they can afford to be a little more sloppy in the collateral damage department (from their point of view, not the other guys of course). They want to pull expensive humans out of the mix as much as possible, while still retaining near the same level functionality. On a civilian road during non war conditions, the quality of the self steering needs to be loads better.
Looking at it, the gifted ones are still doing cool original work, that requires intricate knowledge about how all the pieces fit together, then doing new stuff with it. Just we have become blase about it. Look at this weekend's Darpa robotic challenge for an example. Or the solar decathlon, self powered homes plus power the family car. Coming up with brand new materials-nano everything-that will change the world just as much as vacuum tubes and transistors did. Everything they are doing is "from scratch", because it hasn't been done before. Like the tongue in cheek observation up above, "What, they got to use refined metal? Why, back in the day..." and etc.
If the studios/distributors would just get ((*^&^ing real on the cost of plastic disks, they could save blockbuster, make more money, slow down piracy. Switch from elaborately packaged boxed discs,and "renting", go to a burn on demand kiosk mode for cheap. For the same loot, customer gets "rent" and "bring back" or "take home and keep". Which would most people choose, either going to the store or doing it through the mail? Blockbuster has the locations already, they could SELL burnt on demand disks slipped into cheap paper sleeves with the title for what they charge for renting now. Popular disks-latest releases and strong demand items- they could have a lot already made up sitting on the shelves. Throw in a few duplicators in the back room or the back of the store, a few kiosks for ordering and browsing for what isn't displayed on the shelves. They could up their inventory space tremendously by going to digital tech and storing ten times the amount of movies they have now and use the on demand service. They might make less per "unit", but selling a lot more "units" they would make more net profit.
you are correct sir, that is the term I should have used! either way, don't have one, don't really need one as all of mine are pretty tamed up, all I have to do is call them, then come walking up. That rodeo cow was just an odd funny now thinking about it occurrence.
but ya, I really should get a horse. We have a donkey but it isn't the same. His job is to protect the herd from wild dogs and coyotes when I can't be watching them. He (a gelding) barely tolerates my dogs as it is already, any wild ones he runs them down and tries to stomp them. We have an on again off again problem with redneck jerkoffs dumping their uncontrollable pitbulls out in the country where they pack up, that and a few wild coyotes. I've had to shoot a couple wild pitbulls so far. the suckers will actually attack you, I have one female dog saved my ass one day when she got in the middle of an attacking pack and was actually doing a fair job ripping them up, because she is significant;y faster than most dogs outside of say greyhounds. Surprised heck out of me and am eternally greatfull to her. I had a piece, but couldn't get a clean shot so waded in and started kicking, they ran off then surprisingly. Next day I ambushed them, got one, winged another one, haven't seen that particular pack again, but noted a few cows had their tails chomped off short, so that is when we got the donkey, haven't lost any tails since then, nor calves either, which is what I was afraid of. (well, that or actually *us* getting chomped, half a dozen wild dogs can be formidable if they get onto you and you aren't armed). People say it's the dog not the breed but I'd have to call BS on that just from the overwhelming evidence you can lookup and research of dog bites and unprovoked attacks and even pitbulls who are older and allegedly tamed just going nuts one day and turning on their owners or the family's kids. I know any dog can go feral and mean, but I am just not seeing much beyond pitbulls or obvious crosses with pitbull. My current SOP is blast on sight on the property if I see any wild ones now, I am not taking any chances with them things. I mean, breeding works, they are bred to fight and that's it.
.."Neither is directly effected by external forces as both are entirely driven by local supply and demand."...HAHAHAHAHA! You need to go run that by some actual professional economists, then we'll talk.
..been in all the headlines lately, mortgages are sold upstream and in huge quantities to people outside the US. A lot of the housing market money gets offshored, and there's more of it in the financing than in the actual construction. So those homes are offshored in economic reality.
Once you get down to it, very few people actually "own" their home nowadays, except for some older retired folks and people still working in the upper middle class to rich zones, probably only 2% or so (that's a SWAG) of the homeowners there in the still working class.
A neighbor about a mile away made the mistake of getting a rodeo cow at auction this summer. he brings it home, it promptly splits,jumps three fences and gets in with my cows. Took me *weeks* (I don't have a quarterhorse yet)to get that sucker corralled by itself where we could attempt to load it into a trailer. I eventually used multiple buckets of feed, walked it half a mile a few steps at a time, and then tricked it into the barn and had a rope tied to the gate and dragged it shut fast. Then to load it into the trailer had to get a tractor in there with a box on the back and just push it in. I made the mistake of getting in there with it on the ground, geez loweez I about got squished and gored, etc. "Spooky disposition" doesn't even come close. Ya it had horns and a thoroughly constantly annoyed attitude. I've only really had two close calls working stock, that cow in general and once a full grown bull that I made the mistake of getting between him and his current love interest. We sold that guy eventually, he just got too big and too mean to be around. It's one thing to watch the rodeo, another thing to be out there on the ground with them big dudes and they are pissed at you. Pretty funny now in retrospect though....
..it's executive compensation, extraneous layers of middle management, lobbying/bribing costs, giant "my architectural penis is bigger than yours" office buildings and corporate jets that are expensive.
Why do the elevators have to have "beamed power" to them, when they could be self powered like every other "going into space" craft? Why this unusual criteria? To save weight? Who cares! Once they can make carbon nanotube space tethers, they can also make similar extremely lightweight structures and most likely have advanced electric motors also using some magical "nano" tech (might as well stay consistent with nano) and highly efficient nano solar cells. Just run the dang things during the day, park them for awhile if it becomes night wherever they are on the tether, then resume the next "morning".
With QOS, why not let the *user* decide which services they want to get priority, instead of mommy ISP deciding? What are they, professional psychics? How about they just provide a pipe, and that's it, and let the customers decide if they want email to get priority, or VOIP, or bit torrent, or a shoutcast stream, or surfing web pages or running their online gaming session or whatever? The freeking gas station doesn't pick where I drive or how fast or down which streets at some random time just because I get a tank of gas from them.
1)what is your take on the magic PV cleaning on the rovers, especially some get cleaned, some don't. Is it all dust devil cleaning, or is there perhaps some other static situation going on?
2)what do you think of the thin film printed PV that is hitting the market now or "real soon"? Any bets or SWAGS on which company has a realistic and decent product? I realize you most likely work with very high end, maximum watts per sq. meter, wheras on ye olde earth, watts per dollar is probably more of a practical business solution
Pay your urban elitist fair "free market rates" share for your piped in water stolen from the owners in the rural areas, and for the transportation of the food grown in rural areas brought to you over the publicly funded roads and for the electricity that comes to you from powerlines over rural land, where not a single penny is given to the rightful owners of that property, and maybe the rural folks would have enough money to be "rich consumers who matter", and could afford to attract some "investors" to put in better copper or fiber. Scratch that, if it was setup that way the rural folks could just pay cash out of their pocket change for any sort of internet.
Either stop with the hypocrisy and go all the way and return rightful ownership of the lands and resources to everyone-no more seizing or eminent domain in other words, not for anything,not for roads, water pipelines or even the water itself, electric lines, natgas lines, anything, tollroads and freemarket negotiated access all the way, boundary to boundary, and let the so called free market rule, or accept that some infrastructure does a common good and should be shared. One or the other, make up your mind.
...the bill. And this is just a toy, I imagine a well funded lab could make one even better. Either way, nice catch, some one with mod points, and etc.
It's a common mod to make a little cessna fly on regular gas. Ya, they fly better with avgas, but they can fly perfectly fine with car gas. I'm sitting right this second about 400 yards away from a 172 that gets flown all the time with such a mod.
Uh huh, sure. What this is, is MS attempt at "make a noise in the east and strike in the west". The black suit business money mercenaries love that stuff, "business is war" and so on.
If they are openly showing the 22 right now, that means they are two generations ahead in what they really have as the "ace in the hole" craft. They'll have some numbers of deployed next generation, and a smaller number of working prototypes at two generations out, while three out is still being developed.
You might like some of the stuff these guys make, including a universal human powered charger for small gadgets. We have a couple of their things, the original crank and spring (clockwork) powered multiband radio, and a later, crank to generator model, excellent build quality there. The OLPC guys are still contemplating going with their foot pedal push generator thing, along with the yo yo string puller last I heard.
...if they keep this up. They'll just step up trade with bogus regimes like burma and the sudan and saudi arabia and such places where they can get natural resources and the leaders share a similar "overlord" political philosophy, including using the intarweb.
They are rapidly nearing (or have crossed, I think they have) the point where they won't need US or western europe as customers. Think on the ramifications of that one for a bit. They have their own billion + plus people (an internal market larger than the US and the EU combined) and the entire developing world (some more billions) as customers or soon to be customers now,and that's a LOT of people, all of whom are hell bent for leather on becoming "consumers". China now needs raw materials now, energy and raw materials and that's it, they are slowing down on collecting pretty pictures of dead presidents and kings and bureaucrats that drop in value daily, they are converting them to real stuff of value as fast as possible now.
China spent the last two decades buying up all the advanced machine tools and garnering the expertise to use them that they need to become fully self supporting, as you can see they are in most manufacturing now from the simplest doo dads to the largest ships and planes. They bought entire factories, had them disassembled, and shipped over there. Stuff like that, that and "allowing" western business leaders to voluntarily pay to move high tech over there. Who wouldn't have taken buhzillions in free stuff, and get a check for taking it? That's what they were after, short term trade back trinkets as they built up their major infrastructure, and now..they have. That's part of what they have been doing with all their surplus cash, buying the juicy high tech stuff that was difficult/expensive to develop in house (country) for them, and with the rest, they are buying up very long range and huge contracts for raw resources, all over the planet. Now that they got to that point and are expanding....well....business as we know it will be rapidly changing.
They, and our snakeoil salesmen business leaders, suckered everyone. They get a century's worth of advancement in 20 years,and less than 1% of the western populations got stinking freekin ridiculously rich on the con, and everyone else (the dumb natives who swallowed that fairy tale) got some cheap beads and trinkets and wound up holding all these debt IOUs. Sweet deal for the fatcats all over! And the natives think all the debt is wonderful!
In other words, and to get to the point and here I will disagree if I am reading your post correctly, they have already "chosen", there's nothing more for them to "choose" how they will run their net and access and media and so forth, what you see is what you get, and it seems to be working for them for the most part. They nailed the west hard by walking off with the important work, so now there's no lever to use against them, because we never insisted on any credible quid pro quo towards freedom and democracy (still no alternative political parties allowed for instance) as this huge transference of wealth and technology was happening.
Bad enough with code, imagine once they set their hooks in so deep there's not much alternative. Food is one of those "necessary" things, you can't just "opt out", and yes, there's some credible risk with the way they are doing seed now. some of the tech seems useful to me, some seems outright e-vile. bottom line is, I don't trust them at all. They want global monopolies and cartels on food and are half way there now. And also with fresh water, but that's another discussion worthy of an entire thread..
You can still get open pollinated, unencumbered "heirloom" seed now, so I suggest you get it. That's what we use here, and I have two stashes of them, the stuff I reuse every year and save the best examples from, and some others I got a long time ago carefully packed in sealed cans so as to last a long time, years or decades. That's my personal "doomsday vault" collection.
I'll also say this for anyone interested, the fix is in on food prices for next year, they are going up dramatically, they are going full bore ahead to shift production outside the US (granted, it will take awhile but that is the trend and also the intent with fertilizer and ag chemical production now) and also "legally" do what they did in the last great depression, make it so still independent farmers go bankrupt so their property can be picked up for a dime on the dollar or whatever at auction. Serf employees of giant corporate farms is what they want, no free independents. Just another example of what I call this global shift to a two class society, technofeudalism.
I'm telling everyone I know that if you don't have a garden, get one, just do it, and use free "open source" seeds. Even if you only have an apartment, you can still look around for gardening space outside of town, I did that for several seasons when all I had was an apartment. If you can't even do that, try to find a direct supplier, a lot of smaller farmers (especially the organic and sustainable farming types) are looking to direct market their stuff, but they have to know they have a willing market,makes it a lot easier to plan for your season.
That is it exactly. Our technology has advanced to the point where we have almost completely free digital replicator copies. It's like the future really got here, amazingly enough. If we don't allow this now, then whenever we have true tangible goods star trek level replicators we won't be allowed to use them either, forced luddism to preserve business profits and models.
bad analogy time, and no cars!
On the ag side, we can see similar happening. For thousands of years, farmers saved their seed, even "shared" with others, so they could replicate food growing tech. Now we are seeing massive use of patented seed, where you can't save it legally, you must buy a new batch every year from the bigagco. Either that or the seed itself is DRMed, it will never breed true or will self destruct after one use-the "terminator technology" that they *really* want. What's next, the big companies will charge you per vegetable? Grow a tomato plant from their patented and DRMed seed, and you'll be required to send in a licensing fee per tomato produced? Only one tomato per seed is legal, the others are illegal copies?
They've perverted it way beyond the original US design and intent. "Profits" were only one part, it wasn't the whole enchilada. In fact, we fought the revolution to not only get away from the "royals" and their edicts, but to get out from under the thumb of colonizing/exploitative corporations.
In the beginning, corporations had to fulfill some public good, they were highly regulated, they couldn't own stock in each other, their charters could be revoked if they screwed up a lot easier, there were a lot more restrictions on them influencing legislation and elections, and etc.
What we have now is people just blindly parrot the "greed is good and 'it's de law'" mantra. Nuts. I say we go back to the original idea and "incorporate" the civic duty and being responsible (and *loyal* to their own nation and peoples first for that matter) bits back into the mixture, and do it before it is too late. We have transnationals now that are more powerful than governments, including huge well armed mercenary army "corporations". How about that latest IBM set of patents, patenting how to screw over the US worker? That's crazy. Governments exist for all the peoples inside that governing body, not just the top wealthiest 1%, or that is the theory anyway. I say it's a good idea to go back to that model.
It would be nice to mash a link on the main page and go back to the ten years ago today page, for the next year anyway. Or what the heck, from here on out. Like, be nice to see old flame wars, what the coolest new tech was, and the most craptacular, see which corporations were acting like asses, etc.
BTW, congrats on ten years, that's like 1,000 in internet dog years!
Slashdot Mirror
Similar tech is in use daily on large farms, but it is a rigidly defined route. Self steering tractors are very common now, there are even kits you can get that bolt on to your normal tractor. They are more intended for keeping precise plowing/tilling/planting etc spacing, where inches count highly, but using GPS and maps of the fields they work perfectly fine. If there was a dedicated lane next to existing freeways for slow and steady cargo delivery-separating human drivers from the bot drivers- this could be done today fairly easily I think using similar off the shelf stuff. The darpa challenge is way more about building autonomous robotic fighting vehicles/ military convoy vehicles (Read the oshkosh terramax site, why they are using that large truck in their efforts, it is a direct sales model if they can get it to work right, as they didn't this test), and as such needs to be loads more complicated than just following a wide and clear road with traffic all flowing the same direction, etc. One of the larger problems is off the wall events that can't be adequately programmed for in advance and have to rely on sensors, like the random deer out in the road, people running across the highway, "road gators" and other unexpected trash in the road, stuff like that. In a military situation, perhaps they wouldn't bother, smash their way through, but still try to not run over all the locals during the trip.
I think it is going to be really hard to come up with a civilian model that would work on all roads, just too many variables to contend with. In a war situation they can afford to be a little more sloppy in the collateral damage department (from their point of view, not the other guys of course). They want to pull expensive humans out of the mix as much as possible, while still retaining near the same level functionality. On a civilian road during non war conditions, the quality of the self steering needs to be loads better.
Looking at it, the gifted ones are still doing cool original work, that requires intricate knowledge about how all the pieces fit together, then doing new stuff with it. Just we have become blase about it. Look at this weekend's Darpa robotic challenge for an example. Or the solar decathlon, self powered homes plus power the family car. Coming up with brand new materials-nano everything-that will change the world just as much as vacuum tubes and transistors did. Everything they are doing is "from scratch", because it hasn't been done before. Like the tongue in cheek observation up above, "What, they got to use refined metal? Why, back in the day..." and etc.
If the studios/distributors would just get ((*^&^ing real on the cost of plastic disks, they could save blockbuster, make more money, slow down piracy. Switch from elaborately packaged boxed discs,and "renting", go to a burn on demand kiosk mode for cheap. For the same loot, customer gets "rent" and "bring back" or "take home and keep". Which would most people choose, either going to the store or doing it through the mail? Blockbuster has the locations already, they could SELL burnt on demand disks slipped into cheap paper sleeves with the title for what they charge for renting now. Popular disks-latest releases and strong demand items- they could have a lot already made up sitting on the shelves. Throw in a few duplicators in the back room or the back of the store, a few kiosks for ordering and browsing for what isn't displayed on the shelves. They could up their inventory space tremendously by going to digital tech and storing ten times the amount of movies they have now and use the on demand service. They might make less per "unit", but selling a lot more "units" they would make more net profit.
Then there's this
you are correct sir, that is the term I should have used! either way, don't have one, don't really need one as all of mine are pretty tamed up, all I have to do is call them, then come walking up. That rodeo cow was just an odd funny now thinking about it occurrence.
but ya, I really should get a horse. We have a donkey but it isn't the same. His job is to protect the herd from wild dogs and coyotes when I can't be watching them. He (a gelding) barely tolerates my dogs as it is already, any wild ones he runs them down and tries to stomp them. We have an on again off again problem with redneck jerkoffs dumping their uncontrollable pitbulls out in the country where they pack up, that and a few wild coyotes. I've had to shoot a couple wild pitbulls so far. the suckers will actually attack you, I have one female dog saved my ass one day when she got in the middle of an attacking pack and was actually doing a fair job ripping them up, because she is significant;y faster than most dogs outside of say greyhounds. Surprised heck out of me and am eternally greatfull to her. I had a piece, but couldn't get a clean shot so waded in and started kicking, they ran off then surprisingly. Next day I ambushed them, got one, winged another one, haven't seen that particular pack again, but noted a few cows had their tails chomped off short, so that is when we got the donkey, haven't lost any tails since then, nor calves either, which is what I was afraid of. (well, that or actually *us* getting chomped, half a dozen wild dogs can be formidable if they get onto you and you aren't armed). People say it's the dog not the breed but I'd have to call BS on that just from the overwhelming evidence you can lookup and research of dog bites and unprovoked attacks and even pitbulls who are older and allegedly tamed just going nuts one day and turning on their owners or the family's kids. I know any dog can go feral and mean, but I am just not seeing much beyond pitbulls or obvious crosses with pitbull. My current SOP is blast on sight on the property if I see any wild ones now, I am not taking any chances with them things. I mean, breeding works, they are bred to fight and that's it.
.."Neither is directly effected by external forces as both are entirely driven by local supply and demand."...HAHAHAHAHA! You need to go run that by some actual professional economists, then we'll talk.
..been in all the headlines lately, mortgages are sold upstream and in huge quantities to people outside the US. A lot of the housing market money gets offshored, and there's more of it in the financing than in the actual construction. So those homes are offshored in economic reality.
Once you get down to it, very few people actually "own" their home nowadays, except for some older retired folks and people still working in the upper middle class to rich zones, probably only 2% or so (that's a SWAG) of the homeowners there in the still working class.
A neighbor about a mile away made the mistake of getting a rodeo cow at auction this summer. he brings it home, it promptly splits,jumps three fences and gets in with my cows. Took me *weeks* (I don't have a quarterhorse yet)to get that sucker corralled by itself where we could attempt to load it into a trailer. I eventually used multiple buckets of feed, walked it half a mile a few steps at a time, and then tricked it into the barn and had a rope tied to the gate and dragged it shut fast. Then to load it into the trailer had to get a tractor in there with a box on the back and just push it in. I made the mistake of getting in there with it on the ground, geez loweez I about got squished and gored, etc. "Spooky disposition" doesn't even come close. Ya it had horns and a thoroughly constantly annoyed attitude. I've only really had two close calls working stock, that cow in general and once a full grown bull that I made the mistake of getting between him and his current love interest. We sold that guy eventually, he just got too big and too mean to be around. It's one thing to watch the rodeo, another thing to be out there on the ground with them big dudes and they are pissed at you. Pretty funny now in retrospect though....
...this guy knew what to do
..it's executive compensation, extraneous layers of middle management, lobbying/bribing costs, giant "my architectural penis is bigger than yours" office buildings and corporate jets that are expensive.
Why do the elevators have to have "beamed power" to them, when they could be self powered like every other "going into space" craft? Why this unusual criteria? To save weight? Who cares! Once they can make carbon nanotube space tethers, they can also make similar extremely lightweight structures and most likely have advanced electric motors also using some magical "nano" tech (might as well stay consistent with nano) and highly efficient nano solar cells. Just run the dang things during the day, park them for awhile if it becomes night wherever they are on the tether, then resume the next "morning".
With QOS, why not let the *user* decide which services they want to get priority, instead of mommy ISP deciding? What are they, professional psychics? How about they just provide a pipe, and that's it, and let the customers decide if they want email to get priority, or VOIP, or bit torrent, or a shoutcast stream, or surfing web pages or running their online gaming session or whatever? The freeking gas station doesn't pick where I drive or how fast or down which streets at some random time just because I get a tank of gas from them.
1)what is your take on the magic PV cleaning on the rovers, especially some get cleaned, some don't. Is it all dust devil cleaning, or is there perhaps some other static situation going on?
2)what do you think of the thin film printed PV that is hitting the market now or "real soon"? Any bets or SWAGS on which company has a realistic and decent product? I realize you most likely work with very high end, maximum watts per sq. meter, wheras on ye olde earth, watts per dollar is probably more of a practical business solution
thanks in advance
Pay your urban elitist fair "free market rates" share for your piped in water stolen from the owners in the rural areas, and for the transportation of the food grown in rural areas brought to you over the publicly funded roads and for the electricity that comes to you from powerlines over rural land, where not a single penny is given to the rightful owners of that property, and maybe the rural folks would have enough money to be "rich consumers who matter", and could afford to attract some "investors" to put in better copper or fiber. Scratch that, if it was setup that way the rural folks could just pay cash out of their pocket change for any sort of internet.
Either stop with the hypocrisy and go all the way and return rightful ownership of the lands and resources to everyone-no more seizing or eminent domain in other words, not for anything,not for roads, water pipelines or even the water itself, electric lines, natgas lines, anything, tollroads and freemarket negotiated access all the way, boundary to boundary, and let the so called free market rule, or accept that some infrastructure does a common good and should be shared. One or the other, make up your mind.
...the bill. And this is just a toy, I imagine a well funded lab could make one even better. Either way, nice catch, some one with mod points, and etc.
It's a common mod to make a little cessna fly on regular gas. Ya, they fly better with avgas, but they can fly perfectly fine with car gas. I'm sitting right this second about 400 yards away from a 172 that gets flown all the time with such a mod.
Uh huh, sure. What this is, is MS attempt at "make a noise in the east and strike in the west". The black suit business money mercenaries love that stuff, "business is war" and so on.
just plain "fire" linky
If they are openly showing the 22 right now, that means they are two generations ahead in what they really have as the "ace in the hole" craft. They'll have some numbers of deployed next generation, and a smaller number of working prototypes at two generations out, while three out is still being developed.
So, speculate on those. Whatcha think?
You might like some of the stuff these guys make, including a universal human powered charger for small gadgets. We have a couple of their things, the original crank and spring (clockwork) powered multiband radio, and a later, crank to generator model, excellent build quality there. The OLPC guys are still contemplating going with their foot pedal push generator thing, along with the yo yo string puller last I heard.
...if they keep this up. They'll just step up trade with bogus regimes like burma and the sudan and saudi arabia and such places where they can get natural resources and the leaders share a similar "overlord" political philosophy, including using the intarweb.
They are rapidly nearing (or have crossed, I think they have) the point where they won't need US or western europe as customers. Think on the ramifications of that one for a bit. They have their own billion + plus people (an internal market larger than the US and the EU combined) and the entire developing world (some more billions) as customers or soon to be customers now,and that's a LOT of people, all of whom are hell bent for leather on becoming "consumers". China now needs raw materials now, energy and raw materials and that's it, they are slowing down on collecting pretty pictures of dead presidents and kings and bureaucrats that drop in value daily, they are converting them to real stuff of value as fast as possible now.
China spent the last two decades buying up all the advanced machine tools and garnering the expertise to use them that they need to become fully self supporting, as you can see they are in most manufacturing now from the simplest doo dads to the largest ships and planes. They bought entire factories, had them disassembled, and shipped over there. Stuff like that, that and "allowing" western business leaders to voluntarily pay to move high tech over there. Who wouldn't have taken buhzillions in free stuff, and get a check for taking it? That's what they were after, short term trade back trinkets as they built up their major infrastructure, and now..they have. That's part of what they have been doing with all their surplus cash, buying the juicy high tech stuff that was difficult/expensive to develop in house (country) for them, and with the rest, they are buying up very long range and huge contracts for raw resources, all over the planet. Now that they got to that point and are expanding....well....business as we know it will be rapidly changing.
They, and our snakeoil salesmen business leaders, suckered everyone. They get a century's worth of advancement in 20 years,and less than 1% of the western populations got stinking freekin ridiculously rich on the con, and everyone else (the dumb natives who swallowed that fairy tale) got some cheap beads and trinkets and wound up holding all these debt IOUs. Sweet deal for the fatcats all over! And the natives think all the debt is wonderful!
In other words, and to get to the point and here I will disagree if I am reading your post correctly, they have already "chosen", there's nothing more for them to "choose" how they will run their net and access and media and so forth, what you see is what you get, and it seems to be working for them for the most part. They nailed the west hard by walking off with the important work, so now there's no lever to use against them, because we never insisted on any credible quid pro quo towards freedom and democracy (still no alternative political parties allowed for instance) as this huge transference of wealth and technology was happening.
Bad enough with code, imagine once they set their hooks in so deep there's not much alternative. Food is one of those "necessary" things, you can't just "opt out", and yes, there's some credible risk with the way they are doing seed now. some of the tech seems useful to me, some seems outright e-vile. bottom line is, I don't trust them at all. They want global monopolies and cartels on food and are half way there now. And also with fresh water, but that's another discussion worthy of an entire thread..
You can still get open pollinated, unencumbered "heirloom" seed now, so I suggest you get it. That's what we use here, and I have two stashes of them, the stuff I reuse every year and save the best examples from, and some others I got a long time ago carefully packed in sealed cans so as to last a long time, years or decades. That's my personal "doomsday vault" collection.
I'll also say this for anyone interested, the fix is in on food prices for next year, they are going up dramatically, they are going full bore ahead to shift production outside the US (granted, it will take awhile but that is the trend and also the intent with fertilizer and ag chemical production now) and also "legally" do what they did in the last great depression, make it so still independent farmers go bankrupt so their property can be picked up for a dime on the dollar or whatever at auction. Serf employees of giant corporate farms is what they want, no free independents. Just another example of what I call this global shift to a two class society, technofeudalism.
I'm telling everyone I know that if you don't have a garden, get one, just do it, and use free "open source" seeds. Even if you only have an apartment, you can still look around for gardening space outside of town, I did that for several seasons when all I had was an apartment. If you can't even do that, try to find a direct supplier, a lot of smaller farmers (especially the organic and sustainable farming types) are looking to direct market their stuff, but they have to know they have a willing market,makes it a lot easier to plan for your season.
That is it exactly. Our technology has advanced to the point where we have almost completely free digital replicator copies. It's like the future really got here, amazingly enough. If we don't allow this now, then whenever we have true tangible goods star trek level replicators we won't be allowed to use them either, forced luddism to preserve business profits and models.
bad analogy time, and no cars!
On the ag side, we can see similar happening. For thousands of years, farmers saved their seed, even "shared" with others, so they could replicate food growing tech. Now we are seeing massive use of patented seed, where you can't save it legally, you must buy a new batch every year from the bigagco. Either that or the seed itself is DRMed, it will never breed true or will self destruct after one use-the "terminator technology" that they *really* want. What's next, the big companies will charge you per vegetable? Grow a tomato plant from their patented and DRMed seed, and you'll be required to send in a licensing fee per tomato produced? Only one tomato per seed is legal, the others are illegal copies?
They've perverted it way beyond the original US design and intent. "Profits" were only one part, it wasn't the whole enchilada. In fact, we fought the revolution to not only get away from the "royals" and their edicts, but to get out from under the thumb of colonizing/exploitative corporations.
In the beginning, corporations had to fulfill some public good, they were highly regulated, they couldn't own stock in each other, their charters could be revoked if they screwed up a lot easier, there were a lot more restrictions on them influencing legislation and elections, and etc.
What we have now is people just blindly parrot the "greed is good and 'it's de law'" mantra. Nuts. I say we go back to the original idea and "incorporate" the civic duty and being responsible (and *loyal* to their own nation and peoples first for that matter) bits back into the mixture, and do it before it is too late. We have transnationals now that are more powerful than governments, including huge well armed mercenary army "corporations". How about that latest IBM set of patents, patenting how to screw over the US worker? That's crazy. Governments exist for all the peoples inside that governing body, not just the top wealthiest 1%, or that is the theory anyway. I say it's a good idea to go back to that model.
Here is a short overview history of US corporations,and here's another take on it. Google has a lot of choices there, chose those two at random from the top of the list.
It would be nice to mash a link on the main page and go back to the ten years ago today page, for the next year anyway. Or what the heck, from here on out. Like, be nice to see old flame wars, what the coolest new tech was, and the most craptacular, see which corporations were acting like asses, etc.
BTW, congrats on ten years, that's like 1,000 in internet dog years!