They don't need to - there are plentiful reserves of rare earths in the US.
I'm wondering if you are serious, though, or just trolling? Attacking a nuclear power is risky all by itself, but China has enough missiles pointed at Taiwan to annihilate the place conventionally, and they could do a number on Japan and Korea as well. Military aside, they are a vital trading partner with a co-dependent economy.
Right, but when they play these games they ruin their reputation for reliable supply. The Japanese manufacturers got stung two years ago and signed long-term supply contracts with American and Eastern European suppliers which are now ramping up production. That they are playing these games again probably is making the Japanese manufacturers very glad that they diversified their supply chain.
How fast would the strikes stop if they used drones within the US and had ANY so-called civilian deaths.
So fast that they won't even start using them!
How many children have they killed accidentally with drones over there? And they wonder why the US is losing what little respect they ever had.
How many children died in Berlin, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hanoi, or Baghdad? The US is not new to the killing children game, so that's kind of a straw man. The issue is whether drone children killing is less in our interest than more established methods of children killing. I think there may be a good argument that drones are pissing people off more, but I haven't seen anything that passes scientific muster.
It's not that people are dumb, it's that computers are still very new and our society has not really become computerized in a social sense.
Well, the tools are very primitive, too. To continue your analogy, a modern ball point pen and a spiral-bound notebook is very easy to use. Early scribes had to figure out a way to make paper, ink, and a quill or brush of some sort. The paper sucked and was expensive, the ink sucked and took forever to dry, and the writing implement required a lot of training and tweaking.
This is where computers are today. Look at the computer you carry around in your pocket and compare it to anything at any price from 30 years ago... it's clear that we are still on a rapid path of tool development. Regular people probably shouldn't spend any more effort than is necessary to learn how to use these archaic tools. Even typing is a skill that I'm happy to have taught myself, but I can't see lasting a whole lot longer.
Sounds short-sighted. Since rare-earths are a commodity, this will just drive prices up and thus other people will mine them. Businesses may even prefer these new sources for stability. Then prices will crash as a glut of supply hits the market, and the unreliable producer will command an even lower price.
Or the market could do something totally unpredictable:)
I have no doubt that we will create a life form from "scratch". Though all that will prove is that an intelligent being can create life from basic elements... that won't exactly rattle a religious person's belief, now will it?:)
Far more interesting would be an experiment that replicates some early conditions on earth and then looks for life-building steps to occur. They don't all need to happen at once - you just need a good estimate of the chances of each step occurring. From that point, statistics should tell you how likely it was for life to pop out of those conditions. There was a pretty cool article in Scientific American a few years ago that I cannot find. This one is a good read, even if it's not the one I was looking for.
I will add that part of the reason that you are cocky because most of the people you have dealt with to this point in life have probably been idiots. This will change when you get an entry-level job where you are the idiot among your peers. The good news is that some of the best (and most humble) engineers that I work with now were UNBELIEVABLY cocky right out of MIT/Cornell/etc. On the other hand, some of them stayed cocky:)
You take something as overwhelmingly popular as drone strikes on terrorists and then filter out the women by conducting the polling with a game machine... I think that pretty much eliminates any mystery. There's a push in the press to show the horror of drone strikes on civilian populations, but I think to the average Joe it is hard to tell how the horror of drone strikes is any worse than the horror of a Seal raid, conventional bomb, or cruise missile.
Personally, I can understand how it must feel to have this buzzing drone overhead, knowing that it could fire off a missile at any moment. It must be scary as hell, but more importantly, it must make you feel powerless and impotent - I can totally buy that they bring out the inner terrorist in people. That said, I'm not "against" them on principle - I just wonder if they are being overused. It's hard for me to make the call, since I don't have the information that the President does. The fact that Bush and Obama both made the same decisions when given the same facts is both reassuring and unnerving. Clinton didn't have drones, but he loved to fire off Tomahawks.
Agreed. I once got bit by random corruption of data in the worst of all places: my family photos.
Luckily, my backup routine was to use Unison, which uses checksums, and my backup drive showed different checksums then my master drive. So obviously, I love Unison.
Last year when I re-jiggered everything, I kept this in mind and now run ZFS on my backup server. It is an old Core 2 Duo HP workstation that I picked up on eBay - specifically because it has ECC RAM. The HP microservers with AMD chips also support ECC, but they weren't available yet when I set mine up. That only fixes the storage end of things - stuff can still randomly corrupt in other parts of the chain. I'm still hooked on Unison for my photo backups, but I understand that there is some kind of checksumming available in rsync as well. Like you, I'm frustrated that their isn't some kind of end-to-end checksumming/error correction built-in. Or I should say "better" error correction, since there usually is some kind of error correction going on, but not at a high enough threshold.
Coal plants aren't going anywhere - they are replacing the burners in existing plants with natural gas burners. If gas goes up in price relative to coal, they will convert them right back to coal.
Exactly. When your competition is making zero or even negative profits on each unit, just stay away from the whole damn thing unless you think you can command a big premium. Or unless you want in on their business model, which I think Apple would do poorly in.
I thought it was obvious that my comment contained some irony, but such is the nature of typed speech.
Anyway, Nickleback may or may not be talented individual musicians, but collectively they represent something like an embodiment of all that is wrong with the cookie cutter music industry. You end up with awesome stuff like this clip where they play two songs at the same time. Yes, those are two different songs. Same chord progression, same tempo, mostly the same rhythm, and only a slight difference in melody. Even if the songs weren't exactly the same song, my impulse is always to turn the radio station when this stuff comes on. I didn't even know I was turning off Nickleback so consistently until someone laughed and said, "I guess you don't like Nickleback..." That's how I learned who they were.
Anyway, if you enjoy it, good for you. But you are probably a douche-bag;p Fortunately for you, you are in good company - there are certainly a lot of Nickleback fans, as they have sold 50 million records. Most of them at the northern Jersey shore, though in at a close second is the Long Island market.
I'm not going to defend wasting that kind of money, because I have a $30/month plan. But do you really think an executive is sweating $100/month? That's like 1/7 of a BMW payment and 1/40 of a McMansion payment. You can hardly get a decent bottle of wine with dinner for that.
Star Trek? I get that. It's campy, but you can have fun with that.
The Misfits... pffft... What I want to know is, what planet are Nickleback fans from? Go to the Nickleback Facebook page and see which of your "friends" actually clicked on the Like button - it is very highly correlated with the douche-bags on your Friends list.
Not to mention you can't even do anything to "unbrick" when there is no net, you are just SOL.
I don't have one, but my understanding is that you can still access and edit Google Drive (and thus all your docs) when disconnected from the net - it just won't update the "cloud" until you reconnect.
They sell the new Atom dual core netbooks for that at Walmart and those have a fully functional OS and can have the OS changed for anything you want.
Yeah, but the Acer at Walmart has a crappier screen (1024x600 vs 1366x768) and is slightly heavier. It also comes with less RAM. You are right, it's not going to wipe out the low end - but it's also a pretty good deal, hardware-wise.
I'm not sure what you mean? There are certainly "macro" type malware that infect documents, but most of it gets at you executables. If your executables are all read-only from Google's servers, how are you going to infect them?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm thinking it will go "mental" or something like it, and I suspect much sooner than 20 years.
They don't need to - there are plentiful reserves of rare earths in the US.
I'm wondering if you are serious, though, or just trolling? Attacking a nuclear power is risky all by itself, but China has enough missiles pointed at Taiwan to annihilate the place conventionally, and they could do a number on Japan and Korea as well. Military aside, they are a vital trading partner with a co-dependent economy.
Right, but when they play these games they ruin their reputation for reliable supply. The Japanese manufacturers got stung two years ago and signed long-term supply contracts with American and Eastern European suppliers which are now ramping up production. That they are playing these games again probably is making the Japanese manufacturers very glad that they diversified their supply chain.
Why yes, as a matter of fact, some of them were :)
If the price goes up, the private investor will have no problem raising the money. That's exactly what happened 2 years ago.
How fast would the strikes stop if they used drones within the US and had ANY so-called civilian deaths.
So fast that they won't even start using them!
How many children have they killed accidentally with drones over there? And they wonder why the US is losing what little respect they ever had.
How many children died in Berlin, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hanoi, or Baghdad? The US is not new to the killing children game, so that's kind of a straw man. The issue is whether drone children killing is less in our interest than more established methods of children killing. I think there may be a good argument that drones are pissing people off more, but I haven't seen anything that passes scientific muster.
It's not that people are dumb, it's that computers are still very new and our society has not really become computerized in a social sense.
Well, the tools are very primitive, too. To continue your analogy, a modern ball point pen and a spiral-bound notebook is very easy to use. Early scribes had to figure out a way to make paper, ink, and a quill or brush of some sort. The paper sucked and was expensive, the ink sucked and took forever to dry, and the writing implement required a lot of training and tweaking.
This is where computers are today. Look at the computer you carry around in your pocket and compare it to anything at any price from 30 years ago... it's clear that we are still on a rapid path of tool development. Regular people probably shouldn't spend any more effort than is necessary to learn how to use these archaic tools. Even typing is a skill that I'm happy to have taught myself, but I can't see lasting a whole lot longer.
but I made a bunch of $$$$ last year with this one
It's down 74% off it's 52-week... are you shorting it???
Actually, if you've been paying attention, they are mostly giving these sort of contracts to Chinese companies. They don't exactly love Americans.
Sounds short-sighted. Since rare-earths are a commodity, this will just drive prices up and thus other people will mine them. Businesses may even prefer these new sources for stability. Then prices will crash as a glut of supply hits the market, and the unreliable producer will command an even lower price.
Or the market could do something totally unpredictable :)
I have no doubt that we will create a life form from "scratch". Though all that will prove is that an intelligent being can create life from basic elements... that won't exactly rattle a religious person's belief, now will it? :)
Far more interesting would be an experiment that replicates some early conditions on earth and then looks for life-building steps to occur. They don't all need to happen at once - you just need a good estimate of the chances of each step occurring. From that point, statistics should tell you how likely it was for life to pop out of those conditions. There was a pretty cool article in Scientific American a few years ago that I cannot find. This one is a good read, even if it's not the one I was looking for.
Said far better than I ever could :)
I will add that part of the reason that you are cocky because most of the people you have dealt with to this point in life have probably been idiots. This will change when you get an entry-level job where you are the idiot among your peers. The good news is that some of the best (and most humble) engineers that I work with now were UNBELIEVABLY cocky right out of MIT/Cornell/etc. On the other hand, some of them stayed cocky :)
You take something as overwhelmingly popular as drone strikes on terrorists and then filter out the women by conducting the polling with a game machine... I think that pretty much eliminates any mystery. There's a push in the press to show the horror of drone strikes on civilian populations, but I think to the average Joe it is hard to tell how the horror of drone strikes is any worse than the horror of a Seal raid, conventional bomb, or cruise missile.
Personally, I can understand how it must feel to have this buzzing drone overhead, knowing that it could fire off a missile at any moment. It must be scary as hell, but more importantly, it must make you feel powerless and impotent - I can totally buy that they bring out the inner terrorist in people. That said, I'm not "against" them on principle - I just wonder if they are being overused. It's hard for me to make the call, since I don't have the information that the President does. The fact that Bush and Obama both made the same decisions when given the same facts is both reassuring and unnerving. Clinton didn't have drones, but he loved to fire off Tomahawks.
Agreed. I once got bit by random corruption of data in the worst of all places: my family photos.
Luckily, my backup routine was to use Unison, which uses checksums, and my backup drive showed different checksums then my master drive. So obviously, I love Unison.
Last year when I re-jiggered everything, I kept this in mind and now run ZFS on my backup server. It is an old Core 2 Duo HP workstation that I picked up on eBay - specifically because it has ECC RAM. The HP microservers with AMD chips also support ECC, but they weren't available yet when I set mine up. That only fixes the storage end of things - stuff can still randomly corrupt in other parts of the chain. I'm still hooked on Unison for my photo backups, but I understand that there is some kind of checksumming available in rsync as well. Like you, I'm frustrated that their isn't some kind of end-to-end checksumming/error correction built-in. Or I should say "better" error correction, since there usually is some kind of error correction going on, but not at a high enough threshold.
The financial considerations killed it more than the unstable ground, but the irony of it is that the park that resulted is pretty nice :)
Coal plants aren't going anywhere - they are replacing the burners in existing plants with natural gas burners. If gas goes up in price relative to coal, they will convert them right back to coal.
Too much attention, methinks.
Exactly. When your competition is making zero or even negative profits on each unit, just stay away from the whole damn thing unless you think you can command a big premium. Or unless you want in on their business model, which I think Apple would do poorly in.
I thought it was obvious that my comment contained some irony, but such is the nature of typed speech.
Anyway, Nickleback may or may not be talented individual musicians, but collectively they represent something like an embodiment of all that is wrong with the cookie cutter music industry. You end up with awesome stuff like this clip where they play two songs at the same time. Yes, those are two different songs. Same chord progression, same tempo, mostly the same rhythm, and only a slight difference in melody. Even if the songs weren't exactly the same song, my impulse is always to turn the radio station when this stuff comes on. I didn't even know I was turning off Nickleback so consistently until someone laughed and said, "I guess you don't like Nickleback..." That's how I learned who they were.
Anyway, if you enjoy it, good for you. But you are probably a douche-bag ;p Fortunately for you, you are in good company - there are certainly a lot of Nickleback fans, as they have sold 50 million records. Most of them at the northern Jersey shore, though in at a close second is the Long Island market.
My first-generation iPhone still works (mostly). If I want a reaction, I just swap the SIM into it and bust that thing out.
I'm not going to defend wasting that kind of money, because I have a $30/month plan. But do you really think an executive is sweating $100/month? That's like 1/7 of a BMW payment and 1/40 of a McMansion payment. You can hardly get a decent bottle of wine with dinner for that.
(the wine bit was sarcasm)
Star Trek? I get that. It's campy, but you can have fun with that.
The Misfits... pffft... What I want to know is, what planet are Nickleback fans from? Go to the Nickleback Facebook page and see which of your "friends" actually clicked on the Like button - it is very highly correlated with the douche-bags on your Friends list.
Not to mention you can't even do anything to "unbrick" when there is no net, you are just SOL.
I don't have one, but my understanding is that you can still access and edit Google Drive (and thus all your docs) when disconnected from the net - it just won't update the "cloud" until you reconnect.
They sell the new Atom dual core netbooks for that at Walmart and those have a fully functional OS and can have the OS changed for anything you want.
Yeah, but the Acer at Walmart has a crappier screen (1024x600 vs 1366x768) and is slightly heavier. It also comes with less RAM. You are right, it's not going to wipe out the low end - but it's also a pretty good deal, hardware-wise.
I'm not sure what you mean? There are certainly "macro" type malware that infect documents, but most of it gets at you executables. If your executables are all read-only from Google's servers, how are you going to infect them?
Woah... did you just compare a $1700, 7 pound laptop to a $250, 2.5 pound laptop and conclude that the technology hasn't advanced?
But the government does it's job so competently everywhere else!