Rather, he's talking about disclosing the layout of the campus.
And once again, do you think the temp employees were actually made to sign an NDA promising not to describe the layout of the campus? I doubt it!
Maybe they agreed to some blanket term covering "proprietary information", but disclosing the arrival a score of computers hardly qualifies (although a guy like this has no resources or motivation to challenge Microsoft's interpretation).
I have access to a Top Secret research lab. Just for fun, I could disclose exactly how many Dell workstations they've purchased in the past two months(98, bringing the total to 214). I really wouldn't expect they'd care.
I think Newton, Gauss, Einstein and all scientists and engineers might have begged to differ...
Tee hee hee! Newton is the one who published what I just said:
"in all energy exchanges, if no energy enters or leaves the system, the potential energy of the state will always be less than that of the initial state."
Farming hasn't changed it's use of solar energy in the last 5000 years (or even much further back). Modern farming does have a tremendous reliance on fossil fuels that wasn't a factor 300 years ago.
The "viable attempt" that Bronster mentioned not having seen would be some way to make tractors and delivery trucks run off of the sun.
The point is that the amount of resources of any kind is not a static amount.
For all practical, long-term purposes it is. The earth is a closed system. So is the sun (which transfers energy resources to earth at a constant rate, thus for any period the expected total transfer is static).
Work in a factory for your entire life so you can afford to feed your 18 kids,
What would you rather do? Starve in a cold shack when you're too decrepit to find your own food? Or be surrounded by 6 respectful children and 15 adoring grandkids? Having children is an investment in your own future.
In "3rd world" countries, many parents can recoup their investment in feeding children by age 10. At that point, they can be sent to work in fields or sewing sneakers, and bring home a useful salary for Daddy.
and if anything reduces infant mortality (raising birth rates).
No, that's exactly wrong (especially if you want to be picky). Infant mortality, by definition, takes effect after birth. Infants have already been born.
A higher infant mortality will increase birth rate, as families have more children to replace those that have died.
Every major economy is driven at least in part by the destruction of pre-existing, irreplacable resources. Nobody creates wealth- they just shift it from place to place, with transactional inefficiency bleeding off 5% here and there.
What economists call "growth" is the same thing venture capitalists call "burn rate". Both can make a system appear vigorous and attractive, for a time. Reality will set back in sometime.
When you buy a stock, you are endorsing the business practices of the company. If you don't believe the company's business is sound, you shouldn't be investing in them.
Not really. Buying a stock can be either investing or trading, which are actually different things.
To invest in a company is to make a financial assertion of its value, and is an endorsement of its practices. But merely trading in a stock is different. If you believe a company is worthless, but nonetheless expect it to temporarily run up in reaction to a news event, you can trade in it for a few days without endorsing it's business. You can even get into short-selling, where you trade in a company you believe is going downhill.
Investors hold onto shares long enough to get invited to the annual meeting. Traders don't, and can't really be identified as members of a corp, just parasites.
Copyright law governs "copy and distribute". It doesn't care too much about either by itself.
Nope. Absolutely untrue. Read the text of the law sometime. By itself, "reproduction" (= copying) is forbidden by the US code. Under law, it is ILLEGAL to make thirty CD-R copies of Microsoft(tm) Excel(r) and stuff them in your pillowcase. Even if you have no intent to distribute, it doesn't matter.
Quoting the law: "17.1.106: the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:... (1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;"
This is where you get legal backup copies of stuff.
Nope. Legal backup copies come from "Fair Use" Exceptions. Fair Use is a complex topic, and allows you to do many things that break any part of copyright. It permits you to sometimes copy things, sometimes copy and distribute them, sometimes even republish them. It all depends on exactly what you're doing. There are guidelines, but no firm rules except trial precedent.
It's something that the pseudo-Communists of the last century strove for. But just like I've said in 3 messages higher up, those nations were not communist, no matter what signs they hung on the headquarters.
In the big picture, there is no real conflict between efficiency and employment. If you have people sitting around not working, then full efficiency has not been achieved, because they could be doing something marginally useful.
If you had competition at all, then everyoen would not be equal and then by definition you would not have Communism! Period.
If you claim that competition implies inequality, then you must likewise say that telling one man to plant trees and another to cut grass makes them unequal! Such an impossibly high-standard of equality is meaningless.
A command-economy could quite possibly instruct three people to independently write plans for a new airplane, and then use the best one.
I'm sure you already know this, but none of those guys were Communists. Some of them claimed to be, but since they're obviously evil, their words shouldn't be trusted. And Hitler never called himself a Communist! He publicly hated the idea.
The Kingdom of Heaven is completely orthogonal to the political system of the country in which you stand.
If you stand in a country but have no power over it, then you should not be judged as that nation is. But if you are a member of the ruling class- if you influence decisions and are rewarded by the actions of a nation- then you bear guilt for whatever ills it does. To encourage and justify a way of evil is to do evil yourself.
Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.
And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw... When I shall bring again their captivity, the captivity of Sodom and her daughters, and the captivity of Samaria and her daughters, then the captivity of thy captives in the midst of them
Bottom line: Free Speech and Free Enterprise are both American.
I believe they're American. But they're not Christian, and the USA is not a Christian nation. It may follow the pattern established by so-called "Christian" churches in Europe since the founding of Catholocism, but that behavior is a far cry from what is actually expounded by the New Testament.
WWJD? He sure wouldn't spend 25%+ of the federal budget on weapons and warriors! He wouldn't launch an transcontinental war to hunt down a few Muslims who blew up some towers. He'd never impose a death penalty. He would not approve of the violent methods which the "born-again Christian" president of the USA excells at.
These are the typical arguments of America's brainwashing of anti-communism.
They are understandable impressions gleaned from watching the events in so-call "Communist" nations in the 20th century. That goes back to my earlier point that USSR and China weren't/aren't Communist.
Communism doesn't destroy competition, but it doesn't guarantee it either. Capitalism does guarantee competition. Whether or not useful competition is ever likely to occur under "true" Communism is an open question.
And yes, communism has been tried in a couple human societies, but the reason they failed was because they were Totalitarianistic.
I'd argue that it's never been tried. A Totaltarian country could almost never go communist, that's a contradiction. Communism means that "the workers control the means of production". That doesn't mean a steel mill in every backyard (a phony attempt China made), it means they are the ones in control. Not some despot. Communism actually implies something much like democracy. If working Communism ever emerges, it will be the result of democratic voting, not a violent revolution.
I am sorry, but communism is contradictory to evolution.
That's largely true. The tendencies the Darwininan process has impressed upon humanity (like all animals and plants) are to compete against creatures similar to yourself, favoring your relatives over the rest of your species, and your species over the rest of life.
However, those tendencies might not be inescapable. Humans have brains and intelligence. They can think and plan ahead. They can override evolved traits if they need to.
And it's possibile they may someday need to. Because not only are the Darwinian traits impediments to Communism, they also may be obstacles to the long term survival of the species. Intercontinental thermonuclear weapons are a reality. They become more and more common each day. We have no way to be sure, but it certainly looks like maintaining the tribalistic divisions of aggressive nation-states may keep warfare happening into the future, when collateral casualties may be more and more enormous, until the whole of humanity is threatened.
Maybe, the only way to head off self-induced exctintion is to give up much of our individualistic drive, and shift focus from personal welfare to global survival.
I don't like it, but I'm just looking at facts and trying to see where they could lead. (The Fermi Paradox is one disturbing factor, but I won't go into more detail on it).
and this requires that the weakest die out childless, the strongest survive.
That's obselete. No biological evolution of humanity has occured in recorded history. We haven't escaped evolution, but it moves too slowly to be a force we should plan to maintain. Genetic evolution may be superceded by "memetic" evolution- the inheritance of more successful ideas and beliefs.
One might expect that in the next century, evolution will be replaced with genetic engineering. It sound Orwellian, and it's the kind of thing an advanced Communist society might do.
homeless and unemployed can not afford to have children.
Oh, they can HAVE children. Those kids may not SURVIVE, but they are born. (Although by and large, they do survive). Across all modern societies, income is a strong negative correlate of children. Persons with $90k+ salaries have less than 2 kids on average. Those under $30k have 3. Outside of the US, it can be even more extreme.
Incorrect. Communism has never been attempted by any human civilization. You may have been confused by the Soviet Bolsheviks, who claimed to be "Communist", but they were liars. As were the Maoists who imitated them.
If Communism is ever tried, it might succeed in one of a few ways. Possibly, Marx will have been correct, and the natural evolution of a mature, capitalist society will be towards greater and greater corporate control, until a handful of merged companies + unions control the entire economy, and are indistinguishable from the government.
Or, there's the even more off-the-wall chance that a resurgence of Christianity will bring with it the recognition that their religion is doctrinally Communist (as laid out in Matthew 25:44, amoung many other places). Some people think Communism implies atheism, but they are independent social factors. A strong religion might be one way to overcome the natural greed that impedes Communism.
Last I checked, we weren't running out of space on the earth due to eating beef or any other reason.
We're not running out of space at all. An enormously bigger concern is food. And fuel is an order of magnitude more worrisome than that, since growing food takes fuel. And spreading out across Texas and Oklahoma demands a huge amount of fuel to cover those distances too.
Even if everyone in the united states stopped eating beef, this would have no effect on starving vegetarians on the otherside of the world.
It would free up $900,000,000,000 annually, which could be used to feed the entire rest of the planet. And since the only reasonable explanation for the US to turn veggie is pathological idealism, that's probably what they'd do with the money.
It's rather idiotic to assume that meat eating in prosperous countries is related to starvation in poor countries.
Meat eating is just one of the major luxuries enjoyed by the people of the US and Europe which contributes to deprivation around the rest of the world.
The only thing idiotic is to assume that ANY two things on this planet are unrelated.
Or, in lieu of more people, we can work toward preserving the natural resources that we currently have and try to trim down our "burn rate"
The interesting philosophical question is, how much better is it for 5 billion humans to survive 10,000 years, versus 50 billion lasting 1000?
From one point of view, the total accumulated "man hours" all that matters. From another perspective, the members of a smaller population will have more enjoyable lives, since they have more personal space allocated to each one.
However, choosing to keep a small population living a long time creates the risk that some external factor will destroy the planet before we've fully expended the resources, and some of the savings will have gone to waste.
PS. Note that I only said "14,000,000,000 people are important". I didn't say if that's good or bad, but that an astronomical number of human lives is an important topic.
The US Armed Forces has been activley recruiting "pimply faced geeks with thick glasses" for....well since forever.
Exactly! The Army would love to get an enlisted nerd to run their computers for $21,000/per year. That's less than 1/6 what Northrop or Raytheon would charge them for the same service.
They really need technical personnel... the DIs will find a way to squeeze wimps through phyiscal qualifications, since they won't really be entering combat. PT requirements are slipping downwards all the time. Lots of new soldiers can hardly even march.
Sure, we got the cool new camouflague that makes us look like the Waffen SS,
Yeah, I just noticed that. I was loitering around the Pentagon when a fellow came through in an odd camo, and I said "It's that scout from BF1942!"
PS. I later saw some of the simulation programs the DoD uses to test battleplans for the next decade. The Navy's ran on Linux, as did the MC and Army's. The Air Force used a Solaris program. The only Microsoft(tm) system in evidence was something that ran MySQL + PHP to tally up the casualties.
We're likely to run out of breathable air before we run out of fossil fuels.
Wherever do you get that from? Optimistic, pro-oil sources claim "We won't run out for 90 years"! How anyone can say that running out of fuel in 2093 (when I fully expect to be still alive) is not a problem is beyond me!
Pessimists assume that China and India will start to consume oil in this century, and that their usage will run us out much faster. You must know a dangerous secret if you think the air will be destroyed in less than a century.
Now, of course we will never 100% run out of oil. As it gets rarer, the price will shoot up to 100s of dollars per liter, and nobody can afford it. The effect on society will be similar to a total loss of fossil fuel.
Math summary:There are 649 billion barrels worth of oil underground around the world (an optimistic view). Last year, the world burned 75 million barrels of oil each day. That's 8653 days left, or just 23 years. Obviously, one can dispute the accuracy of the source data- but even using MORE optimistic guesses about how much oil the world really contains, you shouldn't expect it to last more than another century or two.
unfortunately the superpowers are concerned primarily with just that.
Wherever do you get that from? Every big nation is pulling back from investment into nuclear energy, which besides fossil fuel is the only reliable source of major power. On the contrary, the US is now pushing for a $90,000,000,000 investment in Iraq's infrastructure, which is really an investment in oil extraction (the only thing Iraq is good for).
At some point, we'll have to get our plastics (& related petrochem materials) by recylcing other plastics.
It is concievable that after using up crude oil fields, we could go on re-using the plastics over and over in new products. The same cannot be said for petroleum fuels. They WILL run out, and we WILL need something else. (Which probably won't turn out to be ethanol)
because it is using the machine in the niche for which it is intended,
The Hummer was only intended for purposes involving guided missles or at least a 50 cal MG. It's a military tool. If your needs aren't military, then it is just a symbol.
For remote construction tasks, a traditional pickup truck will have better mileage, more cargo space, and 1/3 the price tag.
then the true cost of the Hummer is transparent to its owners.
You should choose a different word than "transparent", such as "invisible". Those words are not synonyms!
A subject is often called "transparent" when all of the data needed to understand it is visible. But that's plainly not what you meant. "Transparent" doesn't mean you are unable to see something- it means there are no barriers to seeing inside it. cf
Slashdot Mirror
Rather, he's talking about disclosing the layout of the campus.
And once again, do you think the temp employees were actually made to sign an NDA promising not to describe the layout of the campus? I doubt it!
Maybe they agreed to some blanket term covering "proprietary information", but disclosing the arrival a score of computers hardly qualifies (although a guy like this has no resources or motivation to challenge Microsoft's interpretation).
I have access to a Top Secret research lab. Just for fun, I could disclose exactly how many Dell workstations they've purchased in the past two months(98, bringing the total to 214). I really wouldn't expect they'd care.
the price-point of solar panels is $10/watt.
Here's a Slashdot entry about how the price is now as low as $4/w, and may hopefully go down to $0.2/w someday soon.
Tee hee hee! Newton is the one who published what I just said:
I have...it's called farming.
Farming hasn't changed it's use of solar energy in the last 5000 years (or even much further back). Modern farming does have a tremendous reliance on fossil fuels that wasn't a factor 300 years ago.
The "viable attempt" that Bronster mentioned not having seen would be some way to make tractors and delivery trucks run off of the sun.
The point is that the amount of resources of any kind is not a static amount.
For all practical, long-term purposes it is. The earth is a closed system. So is the sun (which transfers energy resources to earth at a constant rate, thus for any period the expected total transfer is static).
Wrong. People absolutely have kids on purpose.
Work in a factory for your entire life so you can afford to feed your 18 kids,
What would you rather do? Starve in a cold shack when you're too decrepit to find your own food? Or be surrounded by 6 respectful children and 15 adoring grandkids? Having children is an investment in your own future.
In "3rd world" countries, many parents can recoup their investment in feeding children by age 10. At that point, they can be sent to work in fields or sewing sneakers, and bring home a useful salary for Daddy.
and if anything reduces infant mortality (raising birth rates).
No, that's exactly wrong (especially if you want to be picky). Infant mortality, by definition, takes effect after birth. Infants have already been born.
A higher infant mortality will increase birth rate, as families have more children to replace those that have died.
The economy is not a zero-sum game.
Right, it's not zero-sum... it's negative sum.
Every major economy is driven at least in part by the destruction of pre-existing, irreplacable resources. Nobody creates wealth- they just shift it from place to place, with transactional inefficiency bleeding off 5% here and there.
What economists call "growth" is the same thing venture capitalists call "burn rate". Both can make a system appear vigorous and attractive, for a time. Reality will set back in sometime.
When you buy a stock, you are endorsing the business practices of the company. If you don't believe the company's business is sound, you shouldn't be investing in them.
Not really. Buying a stock can be either investing or trading, which are actually different things.
To invest in a company is to make a financial assertion of its value, and is an endorsement of its practices. But merely trading in a stock is different. If you believe a company is worthless, but nonetheless expect it to temporarily run up in reaction to a news event, you can trade in it for a few days without endorsing it's business. You can even get into short-selling, where you trade in a company you believe is going downhill.
Investors hold onto shares long enough to get invited to the annual meeting. Traders don't, and can't really be identified as members of a corp, just parasites.
Copyright law governs "copy and distribute". It doesn't care too much about either by itself.
Nope. Absolutely untrue. Read the text of the law sometime. By itself, "reproduction" (= copying) is forbidden by the US code. Under law, it is ILLEGAL to make thirty CD-R copies of Microsoft(tm) Excel(r) and stuff them in your pillowcase. Even if you have no intent to distribute, it doesn't matter.
Quoting the law: "17.1.106: the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:... (1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;"
This is where you get legal backup copies of stuff.
Nope. Legal backup copies come from "Fair Use" Exceptions. Fair Use is a complex topic, and allows you to do many things that break any part of copyright. It permits you to sometimes copy things, sometimes copy and distribute them, sometimes even republish them. It all depends on exactly what you're doing. There are guidelines, but no firm rules except trial precedent.
in Communism you strive for full employment
Full employment is no requirement of Communism.
It's something that the pseudo-Communists of the last century strove for. But just like I've said in 3 messages higher up, those nations were not communist, no matter what signs they hung on the headquarters.
In the big picture, there is no real conflict between efficiency and employment. If you have people sitting around not working, then full efficiency has not been achieved, because they could be doing something marginally useful.
If you had competition at all, then everyoen would not be equal and then by definition you would not have Communism! Period.
If you claim that competition implies inequality, then you must likewise say that telling one man to plant trees and another to cut grass makes them unequal! Such an impossibly high-standard of equality is meaningless.
A command-economy could quite possibly instruct three people to independently write plans for a new airplane, and then use the best one.
I'm sure you already know this, but none of those guys were Communists. Some of them claimed to be, but since they're obviously evil, their words shouldn't be trusted. And Hitler never called himself a Communist! He publicly hated the idea.
If you stand in a country but have no power over it, then you should not be judged as that nation is. But if you are a member of the ruling class- if you influence decisions and are rewarded by the actions of a nation- then you bear guilt for whatever ills it does. To encourage and justify a way of evil is to do evil yourself.
And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw
When I shall bring again their captivity, the captivity of Sodom and her daughters, and the captivity of Samaria and her daughters, then the captivity of thy captives in the midst of them
Bottom line: Free Speech and Free Enterprise are both American.
I believe they're American. But they're not Christian, and the USA is not a Christian nation. It may follow the pattern established by so-called "Christian" churches in Europe since the founding of Catholocism, but that behavior is a far cry from what is actually expounded by the New Testament.
WWJD? He sure wouldn't spend 25%+ of the federal budget on weapons and warriors! He wouldn't launch an transcontinental war to hunt down a few Muslims who blew up some towers. He'd never impose a death penalty. He would not approve of the violent methods which the "born-again Christian" president of the USA excells at.
These are the typical arguments of America's brainwashing of anti-communism.
They are understandable impressions gleaned from watching the events in so-call "Communist" nations in the 20th century. That goes back to my earlier point that USSR and China weren't/aren't Communist.
Communism doesn't destroy competition, but it doesn't guarantee it either. Capitalism does guarantee competition. Whether or not useful competition is ever likely to occur under "true" Communism is an open question.
And yes, communism has been tried in a couple human societies, but the reason they failed was because they were Totalitarianistic.
I'd argue that it's never been tried. A Totaltarian country could almost never go communist, that's a contradiction. Communism means that "the workers control the means of production". That doesn't mean a steel mill in every backyard (a phony attempt China made), it means they are the ones in control. Not some despot. Communism actually implies something much like democracy. If working Communism ever emerges, it will be the result of democratic voting, not a violent revolution.
I am sorry, but communism is contradictory to evolution.
That's largely true. The tendencies the Darwininan process has impressed upon humanity (like all animals and plants) are to compete against creatures similar to yourself, favoring your relatives over the rest of your species, and your species over the rest of life.
However, those tendencies might not be inescapable. Humans have brains and intelligence. They can think and plan ahead. They can override evolved traits if they need to.
And it's possibile they may someday need to. Because not only are the Darwinian traits impediments to Communism, they also may be obstacles to the long term survival of the species. Intercontinental thermonuclear weapons are a reality. They become more and more common each day. We have no way to be sure, but it certainly looks like maintaining the tribalistic divisions of aggressive nation-states may keep warfare happening into the future, when collateral casualties may be more and more enormous, until the whole of humanity is threatened.
Maybe, the only way to head off self-induced exctintion is to give up much of our individualistic drive, and shift focus from personal welfare to global survival.
I don't like it, but I'm just looking at facts and trying to see where they could lead. (The Fermi Paradox is one disturbing factor, but I won't go into more detail on it).
and this requires that the weakest die out childless, the strongest survive.
That's obselete. No biological evolution of humanity has occured in recorded history. We haven't escaped evolution, but it moves too slowly to be a force we should plan to maintain. Genetic evolution may be superceded by "memetic" evolution- the inheritance of more successful ideas and beliefs.
One might expect that in the next century, evolution will be replaced with genetic engineering. It sound Orwellian, and it's the kind of thing an advanced Communist society might do.
homeless and unemployed can not afford to have children.
Oh, they can HAVE children. Those kids may not SURVIVE, but they are born. (Although by and large, they do survive). Across all modern societies, income is a strong negative correlate of children. Persons with $90k+ salaries have less than 2 kids on average. Those under $30k have 3. Outside of the US, it can be even more extreme.
Ok, that was a completely moronic moderator. If you want to call someone offtopic, look at the posts I was replying to, huh?
Communism has been tried before,
Incorrect. Communism has never been attempted by any human civilization. You may have been confused by the Soviet Bolsheviks, who claimed to be "Communist", but they were liars. As were the Maoists who imitated them.
If Communism is ever tried, it might succeed in one of a few ways. Possibly, Marx will have been correct, and the natural evolution of a mature, capitalist society will be towards greater and greater corporate control, until a handful of merged companies + unions control the entire economy, and are indistinguishable from the government.
Or, there's the even more off-the-wall chance that a resurgence of Christianity will bring with it the recognition that their religion is doctrinally Communist (as laid out in Matthew 25:44, amoung many other places). Some people think Communism implies atheism, but they are independent social factors. A strong religion might be one way to overcome the natural greed that impedes Communism.
Last I checked, we weren't running out of space on the earth due to eating beef or any other reason.
We're not running out of space at all. An enormously bigger concern is food. And fuel is an order of magnitude more worrisome than that, since growing food takes fuel. And spreading out across Texas and Oklahoma demands a huge amount of fuel to cover those distances too.
Even if everyone in the united states stopped eating beef, this would have no effect on starving vegetarians on the otherside of the world.
It would free up $900,000,000,000 annually, which could be used to feed the entire rest of the planet. And since the only reasonable explanation for the US to turn veggie is pathological idealism, that's probably what they'd do with the money.
It's rather idiotic to assume that meat eating in prosperous countries is related to starvation in poor countries.
Meat eating is just one of the major luxuries enjoyed by the people of the US and Europe which contributes to deprivation around the rest of the world.
The only thing idiotic is to assume that ANY two things on this planet are unrelated.
Or, in lieu of more people, we can work toward preserving the natural resources that we currently have and try to trim down our "burn rate"
The interesting philosophical question is, how much better is it for 5 billion humans to survive 10,000 years, versus 50 billion lasting 1000?
From one point of view, the total accumulated "man hours" all that matters. From another perspective, the members of a smaller population will have more enjoyable lives, since they have more personal space allocated to each one.
However, choosing to keep a small population living a long time creates the risk that some external factor will destroy the planet before we've fully expended the resources, and some of the savings will have gone to waste.
PS. Note that I only said "14,000,000,000 people are important". I didn't say if that's good or bad, but that an astronomical number of human lives is an important topic.
The US Armed Forces has been activley recruiting "pimply faced geeks with thick glasses" for....well since forever.
Exactly! The Army would love to get an enlisted nerd to run their computers for $21,000/per year. That's less than 1/6 what Northrop or Raytheon would charge them for the same service.
They really need technical personnel... the DIs will find a way to squeeze wimps through phyiscal qualifications, since they won't really be entering combat. PT requirements are slipping downwards all the time. Lots of new soldiers can hardly even march.
Sure, we got the cool new camouflague that makes us look like the Waffen SS,
Yeah, I just noticed that. I was loitering around the Pentagon when a fellow came through in an odd camo, and I said "It's that scout from BF1942!"
PS. I later saw some of the simulation programs the DoD uses to test battleplans for the next decade. The Navy's ran on Linux, as did the MC and Army's. The Air Force used a Solaris program. The only Microsoft(tm) system in evidence was something that ran MySQL + PHP to tally up the casualties.
We're likely to run out of breathable air before we run out of fossil fuels.
Wherever do you get that from? Optimistic, pro-oil sources claim "We won't run out for 90 years"! How anyone can say that running out of fuel in 2093 (when I fully expect to be still alive) is not a problem is beyond me!
Pessimists assume that China and India will start to consume oil in this century, and that their usage will run us out much faster. You must know a dangerous secret if you think the air will be destroyed in less than a century.
Now, of course we will never 100% run out of oil. As it gets rarer, the price will shoot up to 100s of dollars per liter, and nobody can afford it. The effect on society will be similar to a total loss of fossil fuel.
Math summary: There are 649 billion barrels worth of oil underground around the world (an optimistic view). Last year, the world burned 75 million barrels of oil each day. That's 8653 days left, or just 23 years. Obviously, one can dispute the accuracy of the source data- but even using MORE optimistic guesses about how much oil the world really contains, you shouldn't expect it to last more than another century or two.
unfortunately the superpowers are concerned primarily with just that.
Wherever do you get that from? Every big nation is pulling back from investment into nuclear energy, which besides fossil fuel is the only reliable source of major power. On the contrary, the US is now pushing for a $90,000,000,000 investment in Iraq's infrastructure, which is really an investment in oil extraction (the only thing Iraq is good for).
As long as we need plastics
At some point, we'll have to get our plastics (& related petrochem materials) by recylcing other plastics.
It is concievable that after using up crude oil fields, we could go on re-using the plastics over and over in new products. The same cannot be said for petroleum fuels. They WILL run out, and we WILL need something else. (Which probably won't turn out to be ethanol)
because it is using the machine in the niche for which it is intended,
The Hummer was only intended for purposes involving guided missles or at least a 50 cal MG. It's a military tool. If your needs aren't military, then it is just a symbol.
For remote construction tasks, a traditional pickup truck will have better mileage, more cargo space, and 1/3 the price tag.
then the true cost of the Hummer is transparent to its owners.
You should choose a different word than "transparent", such as "invisible". Those words are not synonyms!
A subject is often called "transparent" when all of the data needed to understand it is visible. But that's plainly not what you meant. "Transparent" doesn't mean you are unable to see something- it means there are no barriers to seeing inside it. cf