I used to have a fiat 850 spider convertible, a 69. Had both the tops, too. Wish I still had it, about the easiest car I ever had to work on, got close to 50 mpg all the time, and it would (more or less depending on the hills) go 70 on the highway. I liked the toggle switches with the fuses right there for the electronics too, just a nice touch. The only US car I ever had about as reliable, but more practical from a seating and cargo angle, was a 74 dodge dart with the slant six. That only got between 20 and 25 MPG but would do 110 if you really wanted to, and wasn't all that squirrely at the speed either. I paid $325 for that bad boy. They should still make them.
Now you see why windows remains the dominant desktop. It is because by its very nature it is a tremendous cash cow, going up and down and sideways across the IT food chain. Very, very few people are altruistic enough to work as hard as they can to put themselves out of business, especially once the work involved becomes more or less easy and routine.
Human nature, you can see it at work in a number of areas, take governments for example. It would be quite possible for governments to work towards fine tuning laws and processes to the point that they are clearly understood, as universally fair as possible, and requiring the least bit of constant interferring-they would have to fire themselves, voluntarily withdraw. It doesn't and won't happen though. Bad car analogy. Could automakers make the million mile car that was super reliable, got good mileage, had decent power, and because of that, actually be cost effective for the consumer in the long run? I bet they could, but there wouldn't be much incentive for them to remain in the car making business, as sales would dreop off severely eventually. The fixit shops would hate it. The oil companies would hate it. Stockholders would hate it.
And so on. You are trying to balance consumer desires with business desires for repeat sales and increasing sales and peripheral sales, in an economic system that values and rewards that over even just a maintainance of the status quo mode. So it obviously doesn't happen... not much anyway.
...acknowledging that other operating systems might be there and NOT wiping them out in the MBR? Wouldn't that be at least a more reasonable first step? MS big probs is they got no respect for YOUR machine, they always operate on the assumption it is THEIR machine just because their crap is on there.
...to use the natural resources they have in abundance, geothermal heat and water. You can't export geothermal, but you can turn it into hydrogen which can then be used in substitution for expensive petroleum products for their various transportation needs..
It costs hard currency on the open market to get oil, yet they don't have a lot of cash, so what to do? They have apparently decided to go and use their number one natural energy resource, hydrothermal, in various ways, and it seems to be working out quite well for them. In a strict laboratory sense,it maybe doesn't make sense, in the real world of cash on the barrel head for stuff, it makes a lot of cents. And the hydrothermal resources will last a lot longer than even saudi arabias crude, their supply is regulated by the heat at the center of the earth-it ain't running out any time soon. they are very similar to some cash starved and oil lacking tropical nations, who can't afford to buy oil, but they can raise stuff like palm and use palm oil for biodiesel. You use what ya got, not what you wish you had and can't afford.
I just came in from running the splitter. We have propane heat, and a woodstove, and some small electric heaters. The number one heat we use, our primary, is the wood though, because it's is way way way cheaper for us, because we have trees, tractors, chainsaws and a splitter. There is absolutely no comparison, it's our most abundant natural resource. 10 bucks worth of diesel and two stroke mix makes me a few hundred dollars worth of heat, and even with the extra labor-well, I live here, this is what I do, farm action stuff, so the wood heat beats the pants off of propane at todays prices. If people want to pay a couple bucks more a lb for beef (over what I get wholesale at the auction now which is pitiful) and a quarter more for a chicken, swell, I'll use all propane, until then, you use what ya got that works the best with your resources. Checking mine, the international free market cash reserve wallet looks mighty thin, but the woods look slap full to bustin'-it's a no brainer.
You can either try to make more cash, or failing that, achieve your goals with useing little or no cash, and frankly, I prefer the latter as much as possible, especially as I am getting older. I strive to constantly eliminate bills, one of the reasons I started investing in solar PV as well, electricty keeps going up, what I have so far is paid off long ago and keeps pumping out the watts. It's also why we have a huge garden and a greenhouse, we eliminate a lot of middleman on the grocery bill, and if you were to see what we saved versus price of organic food at the store, it is rather a decent rate of return on cash and labor investment on our part.. And as soon as the smart guys get cellulosic ethanol production down good, the techniques, so we can use scrap wood that has been chipped up for it,because we have a decent large chipper, I'll start making ethanol and use that for fuel in what I can, at least the cars and smallish gas powered tractor. We aren't set-up to make biodiesel, we don't do a huge amount of oily row crops, no space or equipment for that really, but wood we got, wood and pasture, so that's what we exploit and use. Eliminate the middleman skimmers, always works to save you cash or make you cash.
everything you said about the cattle is true. Normal cattle more or less want to stay inside their pastures, they like the security (we raise beef here). If some little bull manages to wiggle out or jump the fence he will hangout alongside the fence as close to his herd as possible. he wants to get back in. Now there are some breeds making a comeback that can survive and thrive on rougher stuff, like dexters, and don't need as much care, but they are small, and if you take them to the local auction you won't get as much for them, but the tradeoff might be there if you can use a little more wild land and not have to put as much time/money/effort into maintaining it.. Beefalo or the cattle bison hybrids almost caught on, but they have the same temperment as the bison, or can, that's a crapshoot. But those straight buffalo, man, you need a *serious* fence for them boys, some guy near here has some, try a 6 foot fence with 8 strands of heavy guage barbed wire and twice as many fence poles as regular.
well drat, I forgot. I'll go out and help them boys out and pick me up a new icelandic car...err, wait. New cellphone from them....hmm, don't seem to see one at the phone store here....I'm looking...there's a can of whale meat and a bjork video......
supposed to be originally to allocate frequencies and set some standards and make sure folks didn't step on each other and open up broadcasting "to the public". Now they are a censor and fine organization for sale to the highest transnational corporate bidder so only the extremly rich get monopolies on the good frequencies for the most part. Oh well.....
Governments-anyplace going by historical examples- inevitably evolve or de-evolve-into for-profit businesses, and get extremely pyramid shaped and more insistent on their rights and powers over the public they are supposed to serve. They turn into rulers over subjects. Goes all the way back to wherever we still have good records. And I don't think there's anything inherently weird about that, given human nature. Humans are social creatures but we are also *predators*, so we develop predatory governments and other aspects of life. Just how it works.
New governments are exciting, people are filled with hope for the future and have a lot of energy. Then, after some time, they get bloated and big and slow and full of incompetence and corruption. Then they collapse and fall and "times are interesting" again, with a little of that end-of-empire "excitement" action, then the process repeats in a slightly different way from previous. And that's how it goes. hmmm, kinda goofy but sounds like a big software project....
...about how profitable news manipulation is for governments and large corporations who influence governments and own the news media (among their other investments). People will say it doesn't work on them, but in the long run and for enough people, it obviously does.
It's like they go out of their way to call it advertising, but if truth be told, all of it is some form of brainwashing/psycyhological influence.
Natural disasters, man made disasters-instant backup. We live in a world where infrastructure on the ground over a large region can go from working fine to smashed flat or flooded out or burnt down or tsunamied or eathquaked or el-kaboomed or gassed or tornadoded or hurricaned or volcanoed, etc, long list, pretty quickly.
They have *zero* oil but a lot of "hot" and available water. Oil stuff they have to purchase on the open market with hard currency,let's call this expensive, whereas with hydrogen from geothermal and elctrolysis they can produce what they need internally and keep the icelandic buck at home. Let's call that not nearly as expensive and as time goes on gets even better. How is this not economical for them?
Now other areas besides cold northern iceland can do very similar, turn it around to an incredibly hot place, some mideast desert nation with access to the ocean. You can get a lot of cheap hot with solar thermal concentrators, just for instance, then do roughly the same process the icelanders are doing. And even if they have oil, that is what they export right now for cash, that's their main income right now,so they can use some of their profits to setup an internal "good to go" for the next few hundred years power infrastructure by doing that. It still looks economical if you take the longer view.
Even saudi arabia is going to run out of oil some day, it already takes a lot more barrels of energy in to get barrels of energy out of their fields than it did in the 50s and 60s. A whole of fields now require pumping in water, or co2 just to squeeze the oil out, whereas in the beginning it just "gushed" out. That just isn't the case anymore most areas. And should you as a society wait to runout,wait to instigate your mitigation efforts, then start actually deploying alternatives, or do a smooth transition into it while the oil resources are still cheap enough and abundant enough so it isn't a huge tax on the economy in general terms?
Now to me, it seems like a smoother move to start your transition while it is still quite affordable, knowing you will have to one way or the other sometime. That part is debaterable of course on what you personally consider affordable or not and is a variable, but just in general terms, right now, IMO, is a nice place in time to start doing the actual work. The quicker we as humans actually build this stuff, the quicker it will get really better and more economical. Like most folks here, I was a somewhat earlier adopter of computer tech, and it took all of us enthusiasts, hobbiests, business techies, and manufacturing concerns etc, dropping serious cash on what are now antique pieces of low powered junk-yet we did it, because we saw the long range benefits of getting the show on the road with computing beyond huge expensive mainframes.
Alternative energy in all its forms is exactly the same. I started using solar PV as part of my electrical needs going on 8 years ago now, because I really like the tech and want it to get better, and don't regret one penny I dropped on it so far, exactly the same as with the various computers I have bought over the years, because the industries involved need the interest, need the enthusiasm and need the cash.
It's that simple really. No investments=no returns. Just talk and waiting for the future doesn't accomplish a dang thing, stuff has to be built and used to get any better. some will suck, some will be mediocre, some will be outstanding, but we won't really know which is which until we *do it*.
That's the real "bottom line" simple basic economic science.
The main point of trying for hydrogen or something else for transportation is from pollution islands that exist in heavily populated urban and suburban "metro" areas from burning fossil fuels for transportation there. It is a huge problem, has actual economic cost, physical cost to humans who get ill from it, environmental cost, etc. We need to somehow let people move around freely like they do now, using their cars and trucks, etc, yet not dump massive amounts of toxic and corrosive gasses that get trapped in those heat islands which most urban areas are. This is a critical factor in why they are trying to figure out a way to use hydrogen, it is just clean, really really clean. So far, the more practical efforts are not with fuel cells, but just with normal ICE engines that can use hydrogen. BMW has a new car that uses both, two tanks and a switch, so the driver can choose, in town, burn clean hydrogen, out of town on the open road, switch to gasoline (or eventually ethanol or biodiesel or whatever). You have to look at all the costs, not just the energy conversion costs. Leaving out the health costs-which are considerable- and you are ignoring a lot of the realities and data there.
..already have such stations built and operating. BMW's uses mains power and makes hydrogen onsite, and honda uses solar power at an R and D place for their hydrogen research. There's more too. Here is the hydrogen station current overview
Well, here's mine. A small light fast browser. It shows text and images. Tabs are swell, after that-leave it out. It has to be smaller lighter and faster than a barebones FF is now. LOW memory and CPU requirements, stable, secure, no cruft nor bloat,and designed from the ground up for Linux, not a one size fits nobody like they have now. I don't need a browser to wax the car while skindiving in the gulf and receiving stock ticker quotes via an automated blog that is pushed with an atomized RSS AJAXCOMET feed over a podcast that is mashed into a synergy of leveragisms. Nope, don't need it.
..a real nuke, but the government right now REALLY doesn't want it to be a real nuke, because they would have to put up or shut up over their "no nukes for axis of e-vile" places. So who knows? They have been more or less threatening Iran now for a long time on the theory they are even developing one, and saying "dire consequences" and a lot of pre emptive strike speculation, etc. So, what can they do to N. Korea if they really had one? Invade, or a pre emptive strike? Ha! They are already on the serious manure list for most everything, what else practically can they do about it? What "sanctions" are even left of any importance that aren't already beng imposed?
OK, get back to the question. If a nuke was buried deep enough and the caverns sealed before the blast, with a very small nuke, would radiation escape to be detected? And wasn't there a lot of talk the other day that the seismograph guys were good enough to tell just from the signature?
It will put that flavor of fedora at the top of the distro war desktop charts eventually, surpassing ubuntu, and also garnering a lot more interest in RPM and development for same. Once you start talking a million installs at a whack, and pre-installed to boot, that starts to add up quickly in numbers and mindshare. Granted, it's kids, but they grow up fast and it is common for young folks to start programming now while still in school. Todays schoolkids are tomorrows IT folks in business and government, etc.
It's the machine tools, entire factories they have gotten from the west. Entire factories from the rust belt here have been dissasembled, crated up and shipped over. Go look at what they buy from the US, you'll see. It's the wealth producing stuff needed to keep an economy going, it's not just paper products like the collateral on our and our kids and grand kids labor, which is all T bills are.
As to the investment guys, it's not just the chinese folks, and I am surprised you didn't know this, it's brand name western consortiums and banks and large corporations that have dropped *serious* cash over there over the last 20 years-those investors, and at least from the US side they got *tax breaks* to do this. Big names like boeing, siemens, stuff like that are over there "investing" and helping them build up their economy. As to the trade deals, I'd call buying up entire mines all over (and they aren't done shopping yet) and negotiating 20 year energy supply contracts for huge amounts from the heavy hitters pretty serious planning and lock-in efforts.
I've been following this for a long time now, this is just data that you can go look up, the data is inarguable. The trends you can argue about, but not past history and present reality. They bought up and now control both ends of the panama canal, they have the largest deep water port in the caribbean, they ownzorz long beach for most purposes with shipping, and they are building huge ports in mexico that will tie in to the globalists other pet dream, the new superhigways, the trans national "corridors", that will bring stuff in from mexico, that comes from china via these new(expanded) ports, and thereby by-pass the exensive US ports and truckers. That will be cutting out another swatch of middle class incomes, longshoreman and teamsters and the independents. They are now importing so much stuff into the US that they leave the shipping containers *here*, it's cheaper for them to build new ones then send the old ones back empty. This is called a clue.
Their take over in global trade is not a joke and shouldn't be minimized or made light of like it is some sort of neglible token effort, it's huge, simply enormous, and they have all their ducks in a row quite handily to keep expanding while other old world nations keep dropping in importance. And once they don't need to export to the west as much, when the rest of the planet hasd what they want and their infrastructure is advanced enough-they won't. the cheap goods gravy train will be over then.
Not that I am in favor of any this, no way, I have been speaking out against it for decades now, saying it would reduce the US to second world status eventually once they started, and everything I thought would happen, has happened, up to this point. I am more than satsified with my analysis to date, and why I am confident to assert what I assert.. You can just look at all the stats and then it is fairly easy to extrapolate the trends. Even our own national security establishment has quite blatantly predicted they will surpass the US within the next 15 years or so.
Well, it took them better than 20 years to do this, and it represents some hundreds of billions in infrastructure costs in terms of money and no telling how many man years labor to get to where they are now. This isn't chump change, and this is not easily reproduced. The investment guys who have dropped their cash there want a return,. they are getting it now, so I don't see them just deciding to abandon all of that real soon after spending all this time and cash getting it set-up.
And back to my other point, they-china- have been *buying up the access to the raw materials*, all over the planet, in locked-in long-term contracts. You could move the labor, rebuild the infrastructure over to east elbownia someplace at huge costs and with a lot of time, then try to get the raw materials to go to work, and run up against them already owning that stuff for most practical purposes. And they aren't in the raw material export businesss much, they use that stuff, both for export and to build up their own internal economy now, a billion and a half people is a huge market all by itself and takes just huge amounts of resources.
As to how good their tech is or isn't, they are only the third nation to get a human into actual orbiting space. Japan hasn't done it, France hasn't done it, UK hasn't done it, Germany hasn't done it, India hasn't, Brazil hasn't, Indonesia hasn't, and etc. hasn't. They can do "good enough" work when they want to. They manufacture airplanes, huge ships of every description (they now have the largest total amount of ships if you combine civil with military), and every sort of electronic or mecahnical gadget from cheap and flimsy to sold all over the world because it is at least "good enough". I doubt there is anyone here at slashdot who doesn't own and use chinese tech daily in some form or another. It's "good enough" at a minimum.
I wouldn't underestimate them. I am not *over* estimating them,either, just looking at the facts on the ground now and calling it like it is, just the data we have to go by. The word commonly used is "powerhouse" because it fits. If they choose to keep their currency where it is-I certainly don't see any western nations doing anything about it besides bitching about it, they are still importing everything they make and trading their hard currency for it, and we are stil seeing western concerns move factories over there, most of the big names have a presence, you can go down the list. That is the western tech being used. It's being bascially given away.
In short, they aren't going away anytime soon and will continue to dominate manufacturing and start to dominate most global trade, pulling it from the west primarily and to some extent from the other asian tigers and japan. If it gets to the point that the west slows down imports from there, it *won't matter* to the chinese because they still have that huge internal market and will be selling to places that have the raw materials they need, and customers in africa, the middle east and south america (and canada and russia) where the raw materials come from. that's more than a large enough market. What is going to happen is the west is being made un-important in the very long range, and the globalists are the ones who are pushing this, because they apparently don't care about the next generation and onwards.
Short term tactically, sure, it has made a ton of money for a lot of western people and got consumers just a plethora of cheaper products in the west, but longer term strategically-and this is a prediction so there's no proof one way or the other-it will be seen as a colossal strategic blunder.
For the past several years china has been using their surplus cash to buy up resources around the planet, long term heavy deals in you-name-it, oil, natgas, various minerals and metals, etc. Manufacturing takes labor and energy and raw resources combined with an infrastructure that can combine those three things into manufactured goods then you need a shipping industry to move stuff in and out. You might be able to shift just the labor part in theory easily, but without the actual factory built and without the raw stock to feed it, it just sits there. To use an IT term, china has the whole stack. while everyplace else has been concerned with next quarter's profits, they have been working towards the next generation's profits. And they used a ton of free western resources and investments to accomploish this.
They got to be seriously laughing about it over there, how naieve and shortsighted the west has been to purposely kill off wealth producing for some relatively short term gains. That's what we have been primarily exporting to them, the ability to keep producing wealth.
If there was one vertical near-complete monopoly on petroleum (your gasoline analogy), that represented roughly 90% of gasoline sales and use by most drivers on the planet, then yes, news of that company where some new big change was coming, that represented a significant shift in their polices and products,it would be interesting and important news, even if you were in that other 10%.
...and are the least bit of a technology/manufactured items consumer, or have to deal with governments and paperwork, or banks, or go shopping, etc, etc, some huge list, you can't help but be a "consumer" and help pay for microsoft products, one or two steps away in most cases. So of course what they do or don't do is news. Modern society pays a defacto microsoft tax,both in terms of money and in terms of..how things are done, how society works now. That's why they are sitting on this humongous pile of cash. In fact, if you want some sort of gauge (if you can equate importance with money), the UN budget is around 3 billion a year,while MS is sitting on 49 billion dollars. That's just the cash. There's stock and holdings as well. So ya, they are important and this is news of interest to people, even if they don't personally run MS stuff on their personal machines.
MS quite literally has the ability to issue regional/localised version of all their software and charge whatever they want for it, down to a dollar or the equivalent in local currency. If desktop and office linux is ever a real threat, they can just keep dropping prices until most people just pay up to get legit. They can match and surpass any street vendor pirate's prices in other words.
And still make a profit. And keep their vendor lockin.
Look at gasoline/petrol around the world. the price per barrel is the same to everyone, because it is sold internationally on the spot and futures markets-yet the price for the consumer varies from ten cents a gallon to ten dollars. the reason is the combinationof politics and capitalism. Software is the same in potential, and because of the riduclouslly cheap cost of duplication it can be sold for an extremely low price and still be profitable.
And that is something more and more software shops and media entertainment shops will be learning over the next few years. some understand that more than others, some are still hoplessly stuck at around 1992 era thinking.
We are in the transition stage where a lot of digitized bits are still being sold-or the effort is still there- like they are heavy industry manufactured items, like it takes a ton of steel or something to manufacture some software "product"-and it doesn't and they are not.
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I used to have a fiat 850 spider convertible, a 69. Had both the tops, too. Wish I still had it, about the easiest car I ever had to work on, got close to 50 mpg all the time, and it would (more or less depending on the hills) go 70 on the highway. I liked the toggle switches with the fuses right there for the electronics too, just a nice touch. The only US car I ever had about as reliable, but more practical from a seating and cargo angle, was a 74 dodge dart with the slant six. That only got between 20 and 25 MPG but would do 110 if you really wanted to, and wasn't all that squirrely at the speed either. I paid $325 for that bad boy. They should still make them.
Now you see why windows remains the dominant desktop. It is because by its very nature it is a tremendous cash cow, going up and down and sideways across the IT food chain. Very, very few people are altruistic enough to work as hard as they can to put themselves out of business, especially once the work involved becomes more or less easy and routine.
Human nature, you can see it at work in a number of areas, take governments for example. It would be quite possible for governments to work towards fine tuning laws and processes to the point that they are clearly understood, as universally fair as possible, and requiring the least bit of constant interferring-they would have to fire themselves, voluntarily withdraw. It doesn't and won't happen though. Bad car analogy. Could automakers make the million mile car that was super reliable, got good mileage, had decent power, and because of that, actually be cost effective for the consumer in the long run? I bet they could, but there wouldn't be much incentive for them to remain in the car making business, as sales would dreop off severely eventually. The fixit shops would hate it. The oil companies would hate it. Stockholders would hate it.
And so on. You are trying to balance consumer desires with business desires for repeat sales and increasing sales and peripheral sales, in an economic system that values and rewards that over even just a maintainance of the status quo mode. So it obviously doesn't happen... not much anyway.
...acknowledging that other operating systems might be there and NOT wiping them out in the MBR? Wouldn't that be at least a more reasonable first step? MS big probs is they got no respect for YOUR machine, they always operate on the assumption it is THEIR machine just because their crap is on there.
...to use the natural resources they have in abundance, geothermal heat and water. You can't export geothermal, but you can turn it into hydrogen which can then be used in substitution for expensive petroleum products for their various transportation needs..
It costs hard currency on the open market to get oil, yet they don't have a lot of cash, so what to do? They have apparently decided to go and use their number one natural energy resource, hydrothermal, in various ways, and it seems to be working out quite well for them. In a strict laboratory sense,it maybe doesn't make sense, in the real world of cash on the barrel head for stuff, it makes a lot of cents. And the hydrothermal resources will last a lot longer than even saudi arabias crude, their supply is regulated by the heat at the center of the earth-it ain't running out any time soon. they are very similar to some cash starved and oil lacking tropical nations, who can't afford to buy oil, but they can raise stuff like palm and use palm oil for biodiesel. You use what ya got, not what you wish you had and can't afford.
I just came in from running the splitter. We have propane heat, and a woodstove, and some small electric heaters. The number one heat we use, our primary, is the wood though, because it's is way way way cheaper for us, because we have trees, tractors, chainsaws and a splitter. There is absolutely no comparison, it's our most abundant natural resource. 10 bucks worth of diesel and two stroke mix makes me a few hundred dollars worth of heat, and even with the extra labor-well, I live here, this is what I do, farm action stuff, so the wood heat beats the pants off of propane at todays prices. If people want to pay a couple bucks more a lb for beef (over what I get wholesale at the auction now which is pitiful) and a quarter more for a chicken, swell, I'll use all propane, until then, you use what ya got that works the best with your resources. Checking mine, the international free market cash reserve wallet looks mighty thin, but the woods look slap full to bustin'-it's a no brainer.
You can either try to make more cash, or failing that, achieve your goals with useing little or no cash, and frankly, I prefer the latter as much as possible, especially as I am getting older. I strive to constantly eliminate bills, one of the reasons I started investing in solar PV as well, electricty keeps going up, what I have so far is paid off long ago and keeps pumping out the watts. It's also why we have a huge garden and a greenhouse, we eliminate a lot of middleman on the grocery bill, and if you were to see what we saved versus price of organic food at the store, it is rather a decent rate of return on cash and labor investment on our part.. And as soon as the smart guys get cellulosic ethanol production down good, the techniques, so we can use scrap wood that has been chipped up for it,because we have a decent large chipper, I'll start making ethanol and use that for fuel in what I can, at least the cars and smallish gas powered tractor. We aren't set-up to make biodiesel, we don't do a huge amount of oily row crops, no space or equipment for that really, but wood we got, wood and pasture, so that's what we exploit and use. Eliminate the middleman skimmers, always works to save you cash or make you cash.
everything you said about the cattle is true. Normal cattle more or less want to stay inside their pastures, they like the security (we raise beef here). If some little bull manages to wiggle out or jump the fence he will hangout alongside the fence as close to his herd as possible. he wants to get back in. Now there are some breeds making a comeback that can survive and thrive on rougher stuff, like dexters, and don't need as much care, but they are small, and if you take them to the local auction you won't get as much for them, but the tradeoff might be there if you can use a little more wild land and not have to put as much time/money/effort into maintaining it.. Beefalo or the cattle bison hybrids almost caught on, but they have the same temperment as the bison, or can, that's a crapshoot. But those straight buffalo, man, you need a *serious* fence for them boys, some guy near here has some, try a 6 foot fence with 8 strands of heavy guage barbed wire and twice as many fence poles as regular.
well drat, I forgot. I'll go out and help them boys out and pick me up a new icelandic car...err, wait. New cellphone from them....hmm, don't seem to see one at the phone store here....I'm looking...there's a can of whale meat and a bjork video......
supposed to be originally to allocate frequencies and set some standards and make sure folks didn't step on each other and open up broadcasting "to the public". Now they are a censor and fine organization for sale to the highest transnational corporate bidder so only the extremly rich get monopolies on the good frequencies for the most part. Oh well.....
Governments-anyplace going by historical examples- inevitably evolve or de-evolve-into for-profit businesses, and get extremely pyramid shaped and more insistent on their rights and powers over the public they are supposed to serve. They turn into rulers over subjects. Goes all the way back to wherever we still have good records. And I don't think there's anything inherently weird about that, given human nature. Humans are social creatures but we are also *predators*, so we develop predatory governments and other aspects of life. Just how it works.
New governments are exciting, people are filled with hope for the future and have a lot of energy. Then, after some time, they get bloated and big and slow and full of incompetence and corruption. Then they collapse and fall and "times are interesting" again, with a little of that end-of-empire "excitement" action, then the process repeats in a slightly different way from previous. And that's how it goes. hmmm, kinda goofy but sounds like a big software project....
...about how profitable news manipulation is for governments and large corporations who influence governments and own the news media (among their other investments). People will say it doesn't work on them, but in the long run and for enough people, it obviously does.
It's like they go out of their way to call it advertising, but if truth be told, all of it is some form of brainwashing/psycyhological influence.
Natural disasters, man made disasters-instant backup. We live in a world where infrastructure on the ground over a large region can go from working fine to smashed flat or flooded out or burnt down or tsunamied or eathquaked or el-kaboomed or gassed or tornadoded or hurricaned or volcanoed, etc, long list, pretty quickly.
Seems to be one place where it might be useful...
They have *zero* oil but a lot of "hot" and available water. Oil stuff they have to purchase on the open market with hard currency,let's call this expensive, whereas with hydrogen from geothermal and elctrolysis they can produce what they need internally and keep the icelandic buck at home. Let's call that not nearly as expensive and as time goes on gets even better. How is this not economical for them?
Now other areas besides cold northern iceland can do very similar, turn it around to an incredibly hot place, some mideast desert nation with access to the ocean. You can get a lot of cheap hot with solar thermal concentrators, just for instance, then do roughly the same process the icelanders are doing. And even if they have oil, that is what they export right now for cash, that's their main income right now,so they can use some of their profits to setup an internal "good to go" for the next few hundred years power infrastructure by doing that. It still looks economical if you take the longer view.
Even saudi arabia is going to run out of oil some day, it already takes a lot more barrels of energy in to get barrels of energy out of their fields than it did in the 50s and 60s. A whole of fields now require pumping in water, or co2 just to squeeze the oil out, whereas in the beginning it just "gushed" out. That just isn't the case anymore most areas. And should you as a society wait to runout,wait to instigate your mitigation efforts, then start actually deploying alternatives, or do a smooth transition into it while the oil resources are still cheap enough and abundant enough so it isn't a huge tax on the economy in general terms?
Now to me, it seems like a smoother move to start your transition while it is still quite affordable, knowing you will have to one way or the other sometime. That part is debaterable of course on what you personally consider affordable or not and is a variable, but just in general terms, right now, IMO, is a nice place in time to start doing the actual work. The quicker we as humans actually build this stuff, the quicker it will get really better and more economical. Like most folks here, I was a somewhat earlier adopter of computer tech, and it took all of us enthusiasts, hobbiests, business techies, and manufacturing concerns etc, dropping serious cash on what are now antique pieces of low powered junk-yet we did it, because we saw the long range benefits of getting the show on the road with computing beyond huge expensive mainframes.
Alternative energy in all its forms is exactly the same. I started using solar PV as part of my electrical needs going on 8 years ago now, because I really like the tech and want it to get better, and don't regret one penny I dropped on it so far, exactly the same as with the various computers I have bought over the years, because the industries involved need the interest, need the enthusiasm and need the cash.
It's that simple really. No investments=no returns. Just talk and waiting for the future doesn't accomplish a dang thing, stuff has to be built and used to get any better. some will suck, some will be mediocre, some will be outstanding, but we won't really know which is which until we *do it*.
That's the real "bottom line" simple basic economic science.
The main point of trying for hydrogen or something else for transportation is from pollution islands that exist in heavily populated urban and suburban "metro" areas from burning fossil fuels for transportation there. It is a huge problem, has actual economic cost, physical cost to humans who get ill from it, environmental cost, etc. We need to somehow let people move around freely like they do now, using their cars and trucks, etc, yet not dump massive amounts of toxic and corrosive gasses that get trapped in those heat islands which most urban areas are. This is a critical factor in why they are trying to figure out a way to use hydrogen, it is just clean, really really clean. So far, the more practical efforts are not with fuel cells, but just with normal ICE engines that can use hydrogen. BMW has a new car that uses both, two tanks and a switch, so the driver can choose, in town, burn clean hydrogen, out of town on the open road, switch to gasoline (or eventually ethanol or biodiesel or whatever). You have to look at all the costs, not just the energy conversion costs. Leaving out the health costs-which are considerable- and you are ignoring a lot of the realities and data there.
..already have such stations built and operating. BMW's uses mains power and makes hydrogen onsite, and honda uses solar power at an R and D place for their hydrogen research. There's more too. Here is the hydrogen station current overview
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_station
I like it!
I was thinking more a small neat looking server rack with a little modding. Snail mail to email with the some of the same hardware!
Well, here's mine. A small light fast browser. It shows text and images. Tabs are swell, after that-leave it out. It has to be smaller lighter and faster than a barebones FF is now. LOW memory and CPU requirements, stable, secure, no cruft nor bloat,and designed from the ground up for Linux, not a one size fits nobody like they have now. I don't need a browser to wax the car while skindiving in the gulf and receiving stock ticker quotes via an automated blog that is pushed with an atomized RSS AJAXCOMET feed over a podcast that is mashed into a synergy of leveragisms. Nope, don't need it.
..a real nuke, but the government right now REALLY doesn't want it to be a real nuke, because they would have to put up or shut up over their "no nukes for axis of e-vile" places. So who knows? They have been more or less threatening Iran now for a long time on the theory they are even developing one, and saying "dire consequences" and a lot of pre emptive strike speculation, etc. So, what can they do to N. Korea if they really had one? Invade, or a pre emptive strike? Ha! They are already on the serious manure list for most everything, what else practically can they do about it? What "sanctions" are even left of any importance that aren't already beng imposed?
OK, get back to the question. If a nuke was buried deep enough and the caverns sealed before the blast, with a very small nuke, would radiation escape to be detected? And wasn't there a lot of talk the other day that the seismograph guys were good enough to tell just from the signature?
It will put that flavor of fedora at the top of the distro war desktop charts eventually, surpassing ubuntu, and also garnering a lot more interest in RPM and development for same. Once you start talking a million installs at a whack, and pre-installed to boot, that starts to add up quickly in numbers and mindshare. Granted, it's kids, but they grow up fast and it is common for young folks to start programming now while still in school. Todays schoolkids are tomorrows IT folks in business and government, etc.
We both have our predictions. We'll check back once a year to see how things are going, deal?
It's the machine tools, entire factories they have gotten from the west. Entire factories from the rust belt here have been dissasembled, crated up and shipped over. Go look at what they buy from the US, you'll see. It's the wealth producing stuff needed to keep an economy going, it's not just paper products like the collateral on our and our kids and grand kids labor, which is all T bills are.
As to the investment guys, it's not just the chinese folks, and I am surprised you didn't know this, it's brand name western consortiums and banks and large corporations that have dropped *serious* cash over there over the last 20 years-those investors, and at least from the US side they got *tax breaks* to do this. Big names like boeing, siemens, stuff like that are over there "investing" and helping them build up their economy. As to the trade deals, I'd call buying up entire mines all over (and they aren't done shopping yet) and negotiating 20 year energy supply contracts for huge amounts from the heavy hitters pretty serious planning and lock-in efforts.
I've been following this for a long time now, this is just data that you can go look up, the data is inarguable. The trends you can argue about, but not past history and present reality. They bought up and now control both ends of the panama canal, they have the largest deep water port in the caribbean, they ownzorz long beach for most purposes with shipping, and they are building huge ports in mexico that will tie in to the globalists other pet dream, the new superhigways, the trans national "corridors", that will bring stuff in from mexico, that comes from china via these new(expanded) ports, and thereby by-pass the exensive US ports and truckers. That will be cutting out another swatch of middle class incomes, longshoreman and teamsters and the independents. They are now importing so much stuff into the US that they leave the shipping containers *here*, it's cheaper for them to build new ones then send the old ones back empty. This is called a clue.
Their take over in global trade is not a joke and shouldn't be minimized or made light of like it is some sort of neglible token effort, it's huge, simply enormous, and they have all their ducks in a row quite handily to keep expanding while other old world nations keep dropping in importance. And once they don't need to export to the west as much, when the rest of the planet hasd what they want and their infrastructure is advanced enough-they won't. the cheap goods gravy train will be over then.
Not that I am in favor of any this, no way, I have been speaking out against it for decades now, saying it would reduce the US to second world status eventually once they started, and everything I thought would happen, has happened, up to this point. I am more than satsified with my analysis to date, and why I am confident to assert what I assert.. You can just look at all the stats and then it is fairly easy to extrapolate the trends. Even our own national security establishment has quite blatantly predicted they will surpass the US within the next 15 years or so.
Well, it took them better than 20 years to do this, and it represents some hundreds of billions in infrastructure costs in terms of money and no telling how many man years labor to get to where they are now. This isn't chump change, and this is not easily reproduced. The investment guys who have dropped their cash there want a return,. they are getting it now, so I don't see them just deciding to abandon all of that real soon after spending all this time and cash getting it set-up.
And back to my other point, they-china- have been *buying up the access to the raw materials*, all over the planet, in locked-in long-term contracts. You could move the labor, rebuild the infrastructure over to east elbownia someplace at huge costs and with a lot of time, then try to get the raw materials to go to work, and run up against them already owning that stuff for most practical purposes. And they aren't in the raw material export businesss much, they use that stuff, both for export and to build up their own internal economy now, a billion and a half people is a huge market all by itself and takes just huge amounts of resources.
As to how good their tech is or isn't, they are only the third nation to get a human into actual orbiting space. Japan hasn't done it, France hasn't done it, UK hasn't done it, Germany hasn't done it, India hasn't, Brazil hasn't, Indonesia hasn't, and etc. hasn't. They can do "good enough" work when they want to. They manufacture airplanes, huge ships of every description (they now have the largest total amount of ships if you combine civil with military), and every sort of electronic or mecahnical gadget from cheap and flimsy to sold all over the world because it is at least "good enough". I doubt there is anyone here at slashdot who doesn't own and use chinese tech daily in some form or another. It's "good enough" at a minimum.
I wouldn't underestimate them. I am not *over* estimating them,either, just looking at the facts on the ground now and calling it like it is, just the data we have to go by. The word commonly used is "powerhouse" because it fits. If they choose to keep their currency where it is-I certainly don't see any western nations doing anything about it besides bitching about it, they are still importing everything they make and trading their hard currency for it, and we are stil seeing western concerns move factories over there, most of the big names have a presence, you can go down the list. That is the western tech being used. It's being bascially given away.
In short, they aren't going away anytime soon and will continue to dominate manufacturing and start to dominate most global trade, pulling it from the west primarily and to some extent from the other asian tigers and japan. If it gets to the point that the west slows down imports from there, it *won't matter* to the chinese because they still have that huge internal market and will be selling to places that have the raw materials they need, and customers in africa, the middle east and south america (and canada and russia) where the raw materials come from. that's more than a large enough market. What is going to happen is the west is being made un-important in the very long range, and the globalists are the ones who are pushing this, because they apparently don't care about the next generation and onwards.
Short term tactically, sure, it has made a ton of money for a lot of western people and got consumers just a plethora of cheaper products in the west, but longer term strategically-and this is a prediction so there's no proof one way or the other-it will be seen as a colossal strategic blunder.
For the past several years china has been using their surplus cash to buy up resources around the planet, long term heavy deals in you-name-it, oil, natgas, various minerals and metals, etc. Manufacturing takes labor and energy and raw resources combined with an infrastructure that can combine those three things into manufactured goods then you need a shipping industry to move stuff in and out. You might be able to shift just the labor part in theory easily, but without the actual factory built and without the raw stock to feed it, it just sits there. To use an IT term, china has the whole stack. while everyplace else has been concerned with next quarter's profits, they have been working towards the next generation's profits. And they used a ton of free western resources and investments to accomploish this.
They got to be seriously laughing about it over there, how naieve and shortsighted the west has been to purposely kill off wealth producing for some relatively short term gains. That's what we have been primarily exporting to them, the ability to keep producing wealth.
If there was one vertical near-complete monopoly on petroleum (your gasoline analogy), that represented roughly 90% of gasoline sales and use by most drivers on the planet, then yes, news of that company where some new big change was coming, that represented a significant shift in their polices and products,it would be interesting and important news, even if you were in that other 10%.
...and are the least bit of a technology/manufactured items consumer, or have to deal with governments and paperwork, or banks, or go shopping, etc, etc, some huge list, you can't help but be a "consumer" and help pay for microsoft products, one or two steps away in most cases. So of course what they do or don't do is news. Modern society pays a defacto microsoft tax,both in terms of money and in terms of..how things are done, how society works now. That's why they are sitting on this humongous pile of cash. In fact, if you want some sort of gauge (if you can equate importance with money), the UN budget is around 3 billion a year,while MS is sitting on 49 billion dollars. That's just the cash. There's stock and holdings as well. So ya, they are important and this is news of interest to people, even if they don't personally run MS stuff on their personal machines.
MS quite literally has the ability to issue regional/localised version of all their software and charge whatever they want for it, down to a dollar or the equivalent in local currency. If desktop and office linux is ever a real threat, they can just keep dropping prices until most people just pay up to get legit. They can match and surpass any street vendor pirate's prices in other words.
And still make a profit. And keep their vendor lockin.
Look at gasoline/petrol around the world. the price per barrel is the same to everyone, because it is sold internationally on the spot and futures markets-yet the price for the consumer varies from ten cents a gallon to ten dollars. the reason is the combinationof politics and capitalism. Software is the same in potential, and because of the riduclouslly cheap cost of duplication it can be sold for an extremely low price and still be profitable.
And that is something more and more software shops and media entertainment shops will be learning over the next few years. some understand that more than others, some are still hoplessly stuck at around 1992 era thinking.
We are in the transition stage where a lot of digitized bits are still being sold-or the effort is still there- like they are heavy industry manufactured items, like it takes a ton of steel or something to manufacture some software "product"-and it doesn't and they are not.
..I thought it was some dual same size screen that cleverly folded out of the case. Now that would be spiffy!