You could be that guy. You know the one: the one who tells all his friends "This is what I use. Use that to contact me, or e-mail me instead."
For the most part, I'm that guy. I use one IM program for personal use, and another for professional use (due to corporate mandate), and that's it. The only exception to this is as I do have a Facebook account, if someone wants to message me there I'll accept these messages as well -- when I'm at my computer and logged into the web interface. I have no intention of installing their Messenger client on my mobile devices.
Then again, I don't feel the need to have people messaging me all day. My messaging contacts list consists of about four immediate family members, and that's it. Guess I'm just not social enough for "social media" and IM (for that matter, I don't own a cell phone either. I go out not to be disturbed by IM and phone calls -- why would I take the annoyance with me?)
...plus the fact that electricity to charge the cars likely comes from burning fossil fuels anyway...
That depends entirely on there you live. In the jurisdiction I live in, 87% of all electricity is hydroelectric, with most of the rest being biomass, wind, and a very small amount of natural gas. We have no coal or oil generation whatsoever. In such an environment, an electric vehicle makes a lot of sense.
If where you live the majority of your electricity is produced by coal, driving an electric vehicle isn't necessarily going to add to emissions at the plant level. Coal plants are typically run as base-load plants; that is they run at 100% all the time to supply the minimum needed power load for your area, regardless of what's plugged in. Plugging in your electric vehicle isn't going to increase emissions; they're already as bad as they're going to get. The only way electric vehicles are going to cause more plant-level air pollution from base-load coal is if enough of them are added to the roads that there is a need to increase the base load, and your local utility is stupid/evil and builds out more fossil fuel capacity to meet the demand. And if that's the case, you should be getting on the case of your local political representatives to ensure local utilities are forced to build out more renewable infrastructure as demand increases.
The problem with something like this always comes down to the fact that applications have to be coded to the lowest-common denominator of functionality of all platforms. That's the situation both Java and Web apps tend to find themselves in.
Does your OS have some cool notifications subsystem that other platforms don't have? The universal app can't use it (or if it does only for those platforms that support it, it's hardly running identically on every platform anymore). Or how about if your hardware has something fancy like Apple's new Touch Bar? Can't use that either.
This is the problem we always see with desktop Java applications. They can typically do well with the basics, but if you want to tie-in to some stand-out feature that isn't available on every platform, you're generally SOL (unless you want to rely on JNI, and perhaps filling in missing functionality on other platforms with custom native libraries I suppose -- but again, that's not exactly cross-platform code, and requires a ton more work.). With web apps we see a similar issue; you're constrained by what the various standards allow, and can only escape that with plug-ins.
We also see this in the video game console world. Sony did some really cool things with the PlayStation 4, like adding the touchpad to the controller, the programmable-colour LED array on the back of each controller, and the second screen functionality that allows you to use a tablet or phone as a wireless secondary information display. Unfortunately, most cross-platform games tend to ignore these features (to varying degrees), as they're simply not available on the PC or Xbox One.
In the world you describe, there really wouldn't be any ability for anyone to stand above the crowd with new special OS or even hardware features (beyond maybe some low-level performance tweaks), because as soon as you did so, you would be incompatible, and either nobody would use it, or you'd have to permit all of your competitors to also implement your new feature.
This reminds me somewhat of the following example: OS/2 ran Windows 3.x programs better than Windows 3.x did. It could pre-emptively multitask Windows 3.1 applications at a time when Windows itself couldn't, and a single errant Windows application could bring down the whole system, or fail to yield() and simply take up all the processing time for itself. Because of this, too many big development companies simply targeted the lowest-common denominator and wrote Windows 3.1 code for use on OS/2 (WordPerfect is a great example -- they went out of their way to tout OS/2 compatibility, but in reality their OS/2 version was the Windows 3.1 version with some OS/2 templates and WPS integration tools slapped on top of it). And we all know what happened to OS/2 (or I suppose I presume we all know -- I guess you could be 16 or 17 years old and not know what happened back then. When did I start getting so damned old???)
And if you spend even a minute thinking about whether you
application fits one of those cases, the odds are good you've just wasted
a minute, because the standard sort routine you have available is
bound to perform well enough even if it's not "preferable".
Premature optimization, you know?
It's hardly premature optimization if you're working in a memory-constrained embedded environment. Libraries are often not practical in such environments.
And you know, that code has *subroutine calls* to a "Swap"
routine. That tosses aside any hypothetical performance
advantage-- which you were crazy to worry about in the first place.
"swap" could be a macro, such as a C function-like macro which gets converted to inline code. Or the swap procedure could be flagged as "inline". I'd hardly be making criticisms if you don't know this.
The point is, the actors and actresses feel the need to make way too much and anyone in economics would tell you they are trying to optimize their profit. The problem with that is it inherently creates people who are not willing to pay the market rate for the content and since it is "free" to copy it - they do.
This is one area I feel the entertainment industry just doesn't get it. The general attitude often seems to be "I cost us X to make this thing, therefore it is worth X".
Unfortunately, that's not how any other markets work. Things are only worth what people are willing to pay for them. This goes for virtually anything that is bought and sold -- toys, comic books, computers, cars, stocks, collector coins, individual pieces of art, gold -- the price is based completely off what people are willing to pay for an item, and has little or nothing to do with how much it cost to produce. This is actually a good thing -- items with a high perceived value can command higher prices and reap more profits, while at the same time there is a push to find ways to lower prices to enhance the perceived value vs. price ratio.
I view media piracy along these lines. It's part of the markets way of telling the media companies that the perceived value of what they produce is lower for many people than what they charge.
Now admittedly in the last few years better pricing models with (legal) streaming services like Netflix have helped to improve the situation for many consumers. TV in particular seems to have done a really good job of coming up with ways of putting content online for free (TV shows are highly advertising supported anyway). But other parts of the industry seem to be fixated upon fixed pricing, especially for new media, that is above the value much of the population would put on it. People willing pay for things when they perceive the value as being more than the price; but when you price things above that perceived value line, you just drive piracy. It doesn't matter how much something cost to make -- if you want to charge more than the market is willing to pay, people simply aren't going to pay.
If these mice have all male offspring, why won't they be out-bred by the mice that have females too? Why would a non-advantageous mouse gene be passed down and take over? Wouldn't natural selection kill off the genetically modified mice?
The answer to your first question answers your entire set of questions.
The basic driving force of evolution is reproduction. Fitter animals should produce more and fitter offspring, whereas less fit animals will either produce no offspring, or will produce less-fit offspring. That is one of the most basic premises of evolution.
The issue here then is "fitness"[0], and whether or not the modified mice will have sufficient fitness to a) reproduce, and b) introduce their genes into the next generation.
The modification only changes the outcome of birth -- all mice fathered by the modified mice will exhibit the same modification, and will be born male. It doesn't impact their ability to reproduce, or their ability to fill their ecological niche. The mice will be at no reproductive disadvantage when compared to non-modified male mice, in that they will be just as likely to survive to reproduce, and will not have a shortened lifespan that causes them to reproduce any less than a non-modified male. Thus they won't be out-bred; a female mouse isn't going to have any way to distinguish (at an evolutionary level) between a modified and non-modified male. Now if the modified males also glowed bright green and failed to attract female mates, then you'd have a situation where the modified males would be at a disadvantage, however, that isn't the case here.
Not only will there will be no evolutionary disadvantage to the modified males in terms of reproduction, over time they'll actually have the advantage. Assuming litter sizes average out the same, ALL the offspring of modified males will also be modified males. Let's call that average M. The offspring of unmodified males will be mixed male and female; the average number of unmodified male mice offspring will be M/2 (as half will be male, half female). The modified mouse will have double the male offspring of the unmodified mouse. The population of modified male mice will increase linearly, whereas the population of unmodified mice will (at least initially) be relatively stable.
Over a longer time period, female mice will be more and more likely to mate with modified male mice, as they will be more available. I essence, this gene modification hacks evolution by making the modified mice MORE fit than the unmodified mice, in that their offspring will be more competitive in terms of mating with females, due to sheer numbers. As females die and are replaced with fewer and fewer females, and as the modified male population continues to soar, you're eventually going to get to a point where the only available males in a community to mate with the few remaining females is going to be modified males, who will only produce male offspring. Those last remaining females will eventually die off, and with no new females within a given local population, no further reproduction can occur, at which point the population of remaining males eventually dies off.
(I do note a "local population", as this only works within populations that reproduce together. Geographic or other divisions in reproductive populations may cause certain islands of mice to continue unaffected if there isn't a critical mass of modified males. So if the country mice and city mice don't reproduce together, one or the other may be unaffected if the modified mice aren't artificially introduced).
All of which would make for an interesting computer simulation. I may have to get on that this weekend.
All that said, it will be interesting to see what behavioural changes may be introduced in newer generations as the number of males begins to strongly outnumber the females, and opportunities for the males to reproduce decreases. Will male mice become more territorial? Mouse combat to the death for acces
Do you think XYZ Corp hasn't already done the math on whether its cheaper to offshore? They have. Repeatedly. All of them. Many did offshore. XYZ Corp isn't importing cheap H1Bs because it's cheaper than offshoring, its because it needs a domestic American presence - particularly for customer requirements.
Yes, however by forcing companies that ire H1-B holders to pay them quite a bit more than they are, the math is going to change. You may need a domestic American presence, but that presence can certainly be made smaller. You only need a team of project managers remaining in the US to handle requirements gathering; development can be done pretty much anywhere these days.
What tips the scales is real estate. It may be cheaper for XYZ Corp to bring H1-B holders into their existing American facilities that it would be to try to navigate the legalities of, and pay for the opening of a new facility overseas. Forcing them to increase salaries for H1-B holders may change the math on this. Take for example a team of 50 H1-B holders. If XYZ Corp is suddenly required to pay each of those people $20 000 more per year, that's a difference of $1 million. It may now make more sense to instead pay $500 000 to open an office in Mumbai and pay those same people their current salary -- they'd come out $500k ahead.
In effect, you may be taking those marginal cases where companies looked at the situation and decided offshoring wasn't going to save them enough money in relation to the problems it would cause, and push them over the edge. And once those jobs go, they probably aren't coming back.
I'm not arguing that there shouldn't be a solution to this -- I'm just note sure that forcing salary increases is the solution all on its own. You simply can't properly fix the problem while leaving the possibility of offshoring those same jobs on the table.
XYZ Inc wants to import some entry-level coders, for $40K each ($20K cheaper than entry-level US workers)
I'm Canadian, and we don't really have this problem in the tech industry (other industries are a different matter...), thus I don't have a personal stake in what's happening in the US (other than the fact that I do routinely get calls from HR rep from large, well-known Internet companies that want to hire me and bring me down to the US, but I have solid reasons for not uprooting my family for such a move).
Personally, from what I've read on/., the situation you describe above sucks. We had a similar situation in my city a year or so ago when it was found that several McDonalds restaurants had been turning away student applications, and was using the Temporary Foreign Worker program to bring in foreign workers while claiming no local Canadian were interested in working for them. This is low skilled work, and it turned out there were lots of Canadians who wanted the jobs -- the local McDonalds franchisee just decided that he could bully foreigners into working long hours more easily. When this hit the news, the Government took action and rescinded their ability to bring in foreign workers, and (as I understand things) McDonalds rescinded their franchises. So I agree -- it's wrong, and it needs to stop.
But do you know what else sucks? By forcing XYZ Corp., to pay those entry-level coders more, they're likely to do the math and realize that it will be cheaper to just open up a foreign branch of XYZ Corp. in the country/countries most of these workers are originally from, and then pay them the local equivalent of $20k/year. Now not only have the jobs been lost for American workers, but all the money those workers would have spent in the US for housing, food, clothing, etc. is also gone. You can't offshore fast food, but you can offshore IT workers.
So I suppose the downside is that if XYZ Corp. does the math and realizes it's going to be cheaper to just offshore, it may not do a whole lot to help American IT workers. And it will doubly hurt when the wages they're paying don't get spent in the US either. I'm not saying H1-B's are the solution (I don't have a solution) -- but getting rid of them may not work out as some rosily hope.
... this endeavor was not simply a colossal waste of time?
Here's one interesting way to think about it. As per the article, scientists had used observations and measurements to predict that metallic hydrogen would require either 25GPa or (later) 380 - 400GPa of pressure. We now know that the known lower bound is somewhere around 465GPa. With this result, we can refine the models used in the original predictions and find out where they failed, and correct them.
With such corrections in hand, we may be able to make other predictions about hydrogen (or perhaps about other elements) with much more accuracy; and you just can't ever know where that might lead. It could lead to new battery technologies. It could lead to a better understanding of star formation. Maybe it revolutionizes material science.
That's the great thing about discovery -- it's often incremental, and you never know where a result might take you. At the very least, we can correct the models that once caused scientists to predict that 25GPa of pressure would turn hydrogen into a metal; where that can take us is an exciting unknown. Sometimes it's less about actually creating metallic hydrogen as much as it is what you learned along the way that becomes useful later.
(I'd think at the very least what has been learned about preventing diamond fragility at high pressures counts as a potentially immediately useful result -- although again, how someone might be able to use this in the future is an exciting question)
We bought our current TV a few years back (2012 or 2013 IIRC). We weren't specifically aiming to get a 3D (or even Smart) TV, however we lucked into a Cyber Monday deal that had a Sony KDL-46EX720 TV with a Sony 3D BluRay player for $750 (CDN) -- only one of three being offered in all of Western Canada. We scooped it up -- and for the most part it has been an excellent TV.
A year or so later we were able to pickup two pairs of 3D glasses while in the US (where they were half the price we could buy them in Canada for). I dove into as much 3D content as I could. Sony had at the time a great Internet "channel" in its Internet Video section which features all 3D videos, most of which were of UNESCO World Heritage sites. They were short, but those were great to watch. I'd watch 3D YouTube as well from time to time, and of course I own a bunch of 3D BluRay movies.
Unfortunately, first they shut down their 3D online channel, and then they decided not to update the set when YouTube changed its API (as I had predicted when we bought the TV, the "Smart" features wouldn't last all that long. As I said, I wasn't looking for a Smart TV. We don't use the Smart features at all anymore in favour of using our PS4 or Apple TV instead). There was never any regular 3D TV content available here in Western Canada (i.e.: no 3D broadcasts on cable or antenna), so the choice was between short Internet clips, or full blown movies.
I unfortunately missed the PS3 era; 3D doesn't work over PS Now, and there have been only a handful of 3D TV enabled games on the PS4. That was one area where 3D TV would have really shined; I regret never having had the opportunity to play ICO and Shadow of the Colossus in 3D.
My wife never got into the 3D viewing, so I'm the only one in the house who ever uses it. About the only time I get to use it is when I'm home alone, or after everyone else has gone to bed. Still, I did get Star Wars VII on 3D BluRay when it was released back in November, and have been enjoying watching it again in glorious 3D. I'll probably still buy our movies in 3D BluRay packs while I can (the 3D packs generally also come with the 2D BluRay, a 2D DVD, and a digital download copy, so they can be a really good deal), and will probably have to keep our current TV somewhere in the house for as long as it continues to function to watch them. Ultimately what did 3D TV in was the lack of content (particularly TV shows in the 30 mins - 1 hr range), the cost of the glasses (the TVs should have come with two pairs each, and not sold them as $100 each add-ons!), and general apathy towards wearing the glasses. Oh well -- it was fun while it lasted.
Except if I understand correctly the shutters are driven by the television itself. My version uses an external device to drive the shutters. The point is that there is little that needs to be done to make a 3d capable extened system with televisions that are still on sale.
I think the big problem would be properly synchronizing the shutter control to the screen. 240Hz is roughly only about 4ms per frame. Modern digital TVs impart a small delay between when a frame and received and when it shows up on screen. The box you propose would have to emit the signal to keep the glasses synchronized in time, however there is no guarantee that the glasses would then be in sync with the TV. You'd need either some sort of configuration system whereby the user could control the synchronization delay (which would be somewhat of a pain for end-users to setup), or you'd have to do something truly ingenious like somehow encode the sync signal into the frames themselves (current active shutter TVs generally use an IR out to sync the glasses to the screen).
I'm not saying it would be impossible, but there would be technical challenges that don't really exist when you're doing frame sync int he same physical unit that is handling the display as active 3D TVs currently function.
I think the difference here was that Apple wasn't announcing their plans from a monopoly position in order to keep people away form the competition. Indeed, when Pink became Taligent, one of the idea of the AIM Alliance was to use a microkernel architecture that would permit various OS "flavours" to run on top of it, including Mac OS "Pink", OS/2, and Windows NT, all running on PowerPC CHRP.
My feeling was always that the problem with Apple surrounding Copland and Pink was more incompetence rather than malice, whereas Microsoft knew they were promising things they would never be able to deliver purely as a way to keep people from leaving the Windows ecosystem. Of course, it helped them quite a bit that their biggest PS OC competitor in the 90's, IBM, had a policy not to announce any product releases until 60 or 90 days before shipping (as I understand things, this was a legacy of the IBM antitrust case in the 70's). Microsoft took advantage, announcing things years in advance that they would never ship while a major competitor would basically not give anyone any information on what they were planning until it was pretty much in beta.
Maybe I'm jaded by experience, but Project Scorpio feels much the same. Sony has made no announcement about a PlayStation 5, the PS 4 and PS4 Pro are now known quantities, so now MS promises "the most powerful console ever built" before even showing anyone a prototype. Sony at least had a PS4 Pro at the PS4 Pro announcement (sure, the rumour mill expected the announcement for months, but Sony didn't officially announce anything until they were nearly ready to ship, so it wasn't a vapour announcement). This pattern feels all too familiar.
For those not up on computer history, Osborne was a computer maker that announced a great new model coming in a year... so sales started tanking while people waited... which meant there was no model in a year (or maybe there was, my memory is fuzzy on that detail).
Microsoft had a pattern of doing this throughout the 90's, and it generally worked out well for them. As soon as other PC operating systems (and OS/2 in particular) started chipping away at the badly aging Windows 3.1x line, Microsoft started promising the moon with Windows 95/PC DOS 7 -- more than two years before it shipped. They didn't deliver on most of their promises, and the end result was worse than the competition, but by that point it didn't matter -- people believed the hype and decided to skip the competition out of fear that the competition was going to be eclipsed in a years time. They did the same with Windows NT. Remember "Cairo"? Microsoft started talking about it in 1991, and continued through 1996 before dropping the release completely. WinFS probably takes the cake -- a complete redesign of how a PC OS stores information, it was first promised in 1991, and was continually touted until 2006, usually in around whenever a competing OS was being released.
Over-promising way in advance and under-delivering was MS's modus operandi through much of the 1990's and early 2000's. A lot of people fell for it, and a lot of people continue to fall for it (I follow some PlayStation forums now and then, and have seen more than one person claim they're waiting until Scorpio ships because it's going to blow everything that ever came before it out of the water...sound familiar?).
... more and more PC owners are learning they don't need to ditch their 3 year old computer and can instead opt to upgrade it. SSD, more RAM, and a new graphics card and their old machine is better than new. But they do buy those extras and upgrades... can we count those as device buys?
No, because how does Microsoft make any money off someone who upgrades their graphics card and storage, but who doesn't buy a new Windows license? Or did Microsoft start manufacturing graphics cards and SSD's when I wasn't looking?
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but isn't the FBI restricted to US jurisdiction? I grew up with the understanding that they were basically a domestic police force on the national level.
I'm assuming I am mistaken, please feel free to give me further understanding on how the FBI can be in India.
From the article:
according to Indian and American investigators, who said that the raid in Thane was carried out entirely by the local police, without assistance from American officials.
The FBI can still typically do investigation in other countries: collect intel, interview people, etc. They can then provide information tot he local authorities to handle the actual police work.
They were going to release something that likely would have been consigned to the annals of history as a failed idea and eventually been forced to go the touch screen route like everyone else.
First off, this prototype is a giant touchscreen -- the click wheel in the video is entirely virtual, and not physical.
Secondly, there is no evidence that Apple ever had any intentions of releasing this device. I know it's hard to believe, but some companies out there do actual R&D work where they build and design a whole lot of experimental products that are not intended for release.
This was presumably the work of one such R&D team that put together a prototype based on the idea of making a virtual iPod, which was evaluated, found seriously wanting, and then scrapped, which is why it's taken this long for one to even be made public.
Simply not the same as a PCIe asic. I dont care how much theoretical bandwidth there is on USB3, or that they did away with polled mode. It is not the same if nothing else but because it has to go through two different driver stacks for data to enter and leave the media. The idea here is security consciousness, not simple function. Smaller attack surface is better.
No, but Thunderbolt 3 is PCIe (either x2 or x4, depending on the configuration/power mode), with a full 40GB/s of bandwidth. So what you do is you get a Thunderbolt PCIe Expansion Box (something like this), and put standard PCIe NIC cards into it -- whichever ones you prefer.
(What would be awesome is if someone came out with a multi-ethernet Thunderbolt 3 breakout box. The best I've found is dual 10Gbit Ethernet to Thunderbolt, but something like 8 x 1Gbit to Thunderbolt 3, with a TB3 chaining port would be pretty awesome for a box like this. Intel -- are you listening?)
The intention of articles such as this is clearly to make people feel bad about... well, their existence, really.
No, it isn't. And there is something seriously wrong with the psyche of anyone who reads a scientific article and that is what they pull out of it.
The article reported on a scientific paper, and that is all. Stop trying to "read between the lines" on everything to pick out intentions that are not there. You only wind up reinforcing your own prejudices.
You clearly didn't read the summary. It skipped over the fig leaf and jumped almost directly into all of the ways that you and your roads are killing the planet.
No, I went one better and went and found the actual paper the article is based on.
The summary didn't make any judgement of you or anyone else either. It listed a variety of problems caused by roads -- and that's it. If you feel personally slighted by the list, that's your problem.
Again -- nobody said anything about tearing up roads, or that we shouldn't use them. Roads cause some problems, and help with others. Adults can discuss the cons of something without it implicitly becoming about trying to ban or tear that item out of existence. Indeed, instead of going insane and assuming they are being judged by a scientific paper, rational adults would instead have a discussion on how we might be able to mitigate the problems, while continuing to enjoy the benefits.
Instead, we seem to have too many babies around here who read a list acknowledging problems with roads and assume "They hate roads! I use roads! Therefore they hate me/civilization/everything I stand for!", when no such things were stated or implied.
Now if you're interested in putting on your adult pants and discussing like an rational human being, a more interesting discussion would be on the relative benefits of mitigation strategies, such as wildlife overpasses/underpasses. Parks Canada is considered one of the major world experts on practical wildlife crossing research, and has some interesting materials online discussing the problems and solutions.
See how that works? Someone identifies a problem. Someone else identifies possible solutions. The solutions are evaluated. Nobody goes berserk and simply tears everything apart, nobody calls anyone names, nobody assumes anyone is a bad person. Like an adult. Try it for yourself.
I was going to mod you down, but I thought I'd take the time to publicly berate you instead.
The article in question is a scientific, scholarly article, written by actual environmental researchers. It appears[0] to have done what you would expect of a scientific article -- it has identified a possible problem (environmental fragmentation due to roads), and had done some measurements surrounding the issue. And that's it. The article isn't judging you. It's not judging society. Indeed, right in the very first sentence of the abstract it says:
Roads have done much to help humanity spread across the planet and maintain global movement and trade.
About the only conclusion the authors draw is that more should be done to protect the existing large tracts of land without roads (totalling about 7% of earth surface). And that's it. They don't call you a bad person for using roads. They aren't trying to guilt people into ripping up existing roads. All they are saying is "roads are great; we need roads; they cause some problems; and we have a measurement to frame the problem". Nothing more. There is no complaining going on. This is science, not ethics, so get a grip already. The one with a huge bias here isn't./ or the articles authors, it's you.
Yaz
[0] -- I unfortunately haven't been able to access the full article. While I do have access to a number of scientific article databases, this article was just published today, and doesn't appear to be indexed in any of them just yet.
The article isn't clear but it implies that most of the divestment comes from removing fossil fuel companies from stock portfolios.
If so then the companies aren't buying those stocks back, somebody else is buying them. It doesn't effect the company one bit, other than maybe drive the price down minutely while it's a sellers market. All that really does is minutely help the buyers who are now taking on the risk and the reward of owning that stock.
Either I'm confused about what they're doing or they are.
You forget that the divested funds are then being invested into clean energy technology companies. I have little doubt that such companies can make really good use of additional funding, and that improvements and breakthroughs are already being made because of it.
You'd be correct if the funds in question were only divesting, but they're not. They divesting and re-investing the money into another, more desirable (and potentially very lucrative) area, and that's the part you seem to have missed.
Actually, the Diefenbaker Conservatives have prior claim - the destruction (literally) of the Avro Arrow (the most advanced fighter of the time) at the behest of the US government because the Bomarc nuclear SAM missiles would supposedly make the Avro obsolete (funny how we still need jet fighters and bombers more than half a century later, isn't it).
I have to correct you on that there, as the CF-105 wasn't designed as a fighter -- it was designed as an interceptor. Interceptors (and in particular the CF-105) weren't designed for areal dogfighting with other fighter aircraft -- they were designed to take down larger aircraft such as bombers.
The purported reason for cancelling the Arrow project was that the world was moving away from nuclear capable bombers towards ICBMs. The threat that the CF-105 was designed for was Russian bombers flying over our northern coast, but the advancement of technology was making the need to fly bombers unnecessary, hence a straight-on interceptor was no longer necessary.
Indeed, today very few countries design or purchase straight-up Interceptor aircraft for their air defence. Fighter jets became advanced enough back in the 60's and 70's to take on the role of both fighter and interceptor as needed. A multi-role fighter-interceptor was a much better investment for a smaller country like ours.
You are also somewhat incorrect concerning the BOMARC missiles. While the US designed them to be nuclear capable, and the initial intention was to have Canada's inventory equipped with nuclear warheads, in the end Died the Chief caved into public pressure, and the nuclear option was scrapped. Eventually, of course, all of the BOMARC missiles were scrapped -- the mission they were intended for (destroying bombers flying towards the DEW line) evaporated in the face of ICBMs.
Today we face relative little danger from bombers from Russia flying over the north pole, and even should that happen we have modern advanced middles to take care of them. There really is no place for dedicated interceptors anymore, and there hasn't been for decades. Now none of that is to say that Diefenbaker was right to scrap the CF-105s -- the way the completed jets and all of their plans was dismantled/discarded/destroyed is a national disgrace. My family knows very well how this went down and the pain it caused -- my grandfather was a mechanic at AV Roe who worked on the Arrow project, and who became unemployed at the projects termination. His pride in the Arrow project and his regret at its destruction (and general anger towards Diefenbaker and his cabinet for causing it to happen) lasted until the last of his days.
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You could be that guy. You know the one: the one who tells all his friends "This is what I use. Use that to contact me, or e-mail me instead."
For the most part, I'm that guy. I use one IM program for personal use, and another for professional use (due to corporate mandate), and that's it. The only exception to this is as I do have a Facebook account, if someone wants to message me there I'll accept these messages as well -- when I'm at my computer and logged into the web interface. I have no intention of installing their Messenger client on my mobile devices.
Then again, I don't feel the need to have people messaging me all day. My messaging contacts list consists of about four immediate family members, and that's it. Guess I'm just not social enough for "social media" and IM (for that matter, I don't own a cell phone either. I go out not to be disturbed by IM and phone calls -- why would I take the annoyance with me?)
Yaz
...plus the fact that electricity to charge the cars likely comes from burning fossil fuels anyway...
That depends entirely on there you live. In the jurisdiction I live in, 87% of all electricity is hydroelectric, with most of the rest being biomass, wind, and a very small amount of natural gas. We have no coal or oil generation whatsoever. In such an environment, an electric vehicle makes a lot of sense.
If where you live the majority of your electricity is produced by coal, driving an electric vehicle isn't necessarily going to add to emissions at the plant level. Coal plants are typically run as base-load plants; that is they run at 100% all the time to supply the minimum needed power load for your area, regardless of what's plugged in. Plugging in your electric vehicle isn't going to increase emissions; they're already as bad as they're going to get. The only way electric vehicles are going to cause more plant-level air pollution from base-load coal is if enough of them are added to the roads that there is a need to increase the base load, and your local utility is stupid/evil and builds out more fossil fuel capacity to meet the demand. And if that's the case, you should be getting on the case of your local political representatives to ensure local utilities are forced to build out more renewable infrastructure as demand increases.
Yaz
The problem with something like this always comes down to the fact that applications have to be coded to the lowest-common denominator of functionality of all platforms. That's the situation both Java and Web apps tend to find themselves in.
Does your OS have some cool notifications subsystem that other platforms don't have? The universal app can't use it (or if it does only for those platforms that support it, it's hardly running identically on every platform anymore). Or how about if your hardware has something fancy like Apple's new Touch Bar? Can't use that either.
This is the problem we always see with desktop Java applications. They can typically do well with the basics, but if you want to tie-in to some stand-out feature that isn't available on every platform, you're generally SOL (unless you want to rely on JNI, and perhaps filling in missing functionality on other platforms with custom native libraries I suppose -- but again, that's not exactly cross-platform code, and requires a ton more work.). With web apps we see a similar issue; you're constrained by what the various standards allow, and can only escape that with plug-ins.
We also see this in the video game console world. Sony did some really cool things with the PlayStation 4, like adding the touchpad to the controller, the programmable-colour LED array on the back of each controller, and the second screen functionality that allows you to use a tablet or phone as a wireless secondary information display. Unfortunately, most cross-platform games tend to ignore these features (to varying degrees), as they're simply not available on the PC or Xbox One.
In the world you describe, there really wouldn't be any ability for anyone to stand above the crowd with new special OS or even hardware features (beyond maybe some low-level performance tweaks), because as soon as you did so, you would be incompatible, and either nobody would use it, or you'd have to permit all of your competitors to also implement your new feature.
This reminds me somewhat of the following example: OS/2 ran Windows 3.x programs better than Windows 3.x did. It could pre-emptively multitask Windows 3.1 applications at a time when Windows itself couldn't, and a single errant Windows application could bring down the whole system, or fail to yield() and simply take up all the processing time for itself. Because of this, too many big development companies simply targeted the lowest-common denominator and wrote Windows 3.1 code for use on OS/2 (WordPerfect is a great example -- they went out of their way to tout OS/2 compatibility, but in reality their OS/2 version was the Windows 3.1 version with some OS/2 templates and WPS integration tools slapped on top of it). And we all know what happened to OS/2 (or I suppose I presume we all know -- I guess you could be 16 or 17 years old and not know what happened back then. When did I start getting so damned old???)
Yaz
And if you spend even a minute thinking about whether you application fits one of those cases, the odds are good you've just wasted a minute, because the standard sort routine you have available is bound to perform well enough even if it's not "preferable". Premature optimization, you know?
It's hardly premature optimization if you're working in a memory-constrained embedded environment. Libraries are often not practical in such environments.
And you know, that code has *subroutine calls* to a "Swap" routine. That tosses aside any hypothetical performance advantage-- which you were crazy to worry about in the first place.
"swap" could be a macro, such as a C function-like macro which gets converted to inline code. Or the swap procedure could be flagged as "inline". I'd hardly be making criticisms if you don't know this.
Yaz
The point is, the actors and actresses feel the need to make way too much and anyone in economics would tell you they are trying to optimize their profit. The problem with that is it inherently creates people who are not willing to pay the market rate for the content and since it is "free" to copy it - they do.
This is one area I feel the entertainment industry just doesn't get it. The general attitude often seems to be "I cost us X to make this thing, therefore it is worth X".
Unfortunately, that's not how any other markets work. Things are only worth what people are willing to pay for them. This goes for virtually anything that is bought and sold -- toys, comic books, computers, cars, stocks, collector coins, individual pieces of art, gold -- the price is based completely off what people are willing to pay for an item, and has little or nothing to do with how much it cost to produce. This is actually a good thing -- items with a high perceived value can command higher prices and reap more profits, while at the same time there is a push to find ways to lower prices to enhance the perceived value vs. price ratio.
I view media piracy along these lines. It's part of the markets way of telling the media companies that the perceived value of what they produce is lower for many people than what they charge.
Now admittedly in the last few years better pricing models with (legal) streaming services like Netflix have helped to improve the situation for many consumers. TV in particular seems to have done a really good job of coming up with ways of putting content online for free (TV shows are highly advertising supported anyway). But other parts of the industry seem to be fixated upon fixed pricing, especially for new media, that is above the value much of the population would put on it. People willing pay for things when they perceive the value as being more than the price; but when you price things above that perceived value line, you just drive piracy. It doesn't matter how much something cost to make -- if you want to charge more than the market is willing to pay, people simply aren't going to pay.
Yaz
If these mice have all male offspring, why won't they be out-bred by the mice that have females too? Why would a non-advantageous mouse gene be passed down and take over? Wouldn't natural selection kill off the genetically modified mice?
The answer to your first question answers your entire set of questions.
The basic driving force of evolution is reproduction. Fitter animals should produce more and fitter offspring, whereas less fit animals will either produce no offspring, or will produce less-fit offspring. That is one of the most basic premises of evolution.
The issue here then is "fitness"[0], and whether or not the modified mice will have sufficient fitness to a) reproduce, and b) introduce their genes into the next generation.
The modification only changes the outcome of birth -- all mice fathered by the modified mice will exhibit the same modification, and will be born male. It doesn't impact their ability to reproduce, or their ability to fill their ecological niche. The mice will be at no reproductive disadvantage when compared to non-modified male mice, in that they will be just as likely to survive to reproduce, and will not have a shortened lifespan that causes them to reproduce any less than a non-modified male. Thus they won't be out-bred; a female mouse isn't going to have any way to distinguish (at an evolutionary level) between a modified and non-modified male. Now if the modified males also glowed bright green and failed to attract female mates, then you'd have a situation where the modified males would be at a disadvantage, however, that isn't the case here.
Not only will there will be no evolutionary disadvantage to the modified males in terms of reproduction, over time they'll actually have the advantage. Assuming litter sizes average out the same, ALL the offspring of modified males will also be modified males. Let's call that average M. The offspring of unmodified males will be mixed male and female; the average number of unmodified male mice offspring will be M/2 (as half will be male, half female). The modified mouse will have double the male offspring of the unmodified mouse. The population of modified male mice will increase linearly, whereas the population of unmodified mice will (at least initially) be relatively stable.
Over a longer time period, female mice will be more and more likely to mate with modified male mice, as they will be more available. I essence, this gene modification hacks evolution by making the modified mice MORE fit than the unmodified mice, in that their offspring will be more competitive in terms of mating with females, due to sheer numbers. As females die and are replaced with fewer and fewer females, and as the modified male population continues to soar, you're eventually going to get to a point where the only available males in a community to mate with the few remaining females is going to be modified males, who will only produce male offspring. Those last remaining females will eventually die off, and with no new females within a given local population, no further reproduction can occur, at which point the population of remaining males eventually dies off.
(I do note a "local population", as this only works within populations that reproduce together. Geographic or other divisions in reproductive populations may cause certain islands of mice to continue unaffected if there isn't a critical mass of modified males. So if the country mice and city mice don't reproduce together, one or the other may be unaffected if the modified mice aren't artificially introduced).
All of which would make for an interesting computer simulation. I may have to get on that this weekend.
All that said, it will be interesting to see what behavioural changes may be introduced in newer generations as the number of males begins to strongly outnumber the females, and opportunities for the males to reproduce decreases. Will male mice become more territorial? Mouse combat to the death for acces
Do you think XYZ Corp hasn't already done the math on whether its cheaper to offshore? They have. Repeatedly. All of them. Many did offshore. XYZ Corp isn't importing cheap H1Bs because it's cheaper than offshoring, its because it needs a domestic American presence - particularly for customer requirements.
Yes, however by forcing companies that ire H1-B holders to pay them quite a bit more than they are, the math is going to change. You may need a domestic American presence, but that presence can certainly be made smaller. You only need a team of project managers remaining in the US to handle requirements gathering; development can be done pretty much anywhere these days.
What tips the scales is real estate. It may be cheaper for XYZ Corp to bring H1-B holders into their existing American facilities that it would be to try to navigate the legalities of, and pay for the opening of a new facility overseas. Forcing them to increase salaries for H1-B holders may change the math on this. Take for example a team of 50 H1-B holders. If XYZ Corp is suddenly required to pay each of those people $20 000 more per year, that's a difference of $1 million. It may now make more sense to instead pay $500 000 to open an office in Mumbai and pay those same people their current salary -- they'd come out $500k ahead.
In effect, you may be taking those marginal cases where companies looked at the situation and decided offshoring wasn't going to save them enough money in relation to the problems it would cause, and push them over the edge. And once those jobs go, they probably aren't coming back.
I'm not arguing that there shouldn't be a solution to this -- I'm just note sure that forcing salary increases is the solution all on its own. You simply can't properly fix the problem while leaving the possibility of offshoring those same jobs on the table.
Yaz
XYZ Inc wants to import some entry-level coders, for $40K each ($20K cheaper than entry-level US workers)
I'm Canadian, and we don't really have this problem in the tech industry (other industries are a different matter...), thus I don't have a personal stake in what's happening in the US (other than the fact that I do routinely get calls from HR rep from large, well-known Internet companies that want to hire me and bring me down to the US, but I have solid reasons for not uprooting my family for such a move).
Personally, from what I've read on /., the situation you describe above sucks. We had a similar situation in my city a year or so ago when it was found that several McDonalds restaurants had been turning away student applications, and was using the Temporary Foreign Worker program to bring in foreign workers while claiming no local Canadian were interested in working for them. This is low skilled work, and it turned out there were lots of Canadians who wanted the jobs -- the local McDonalds franchisee just decided that he could bully foreigners into working long hours more easily. When this hit the news, the Government took action and rescinded their ability to bring in foreign workers, and (as I understand things) McDonalds rescinded their franchises. So I agree -- it's wrong, and it needs to stop.
But do you know what else sucks? By forcing XYZ Corp., to pay those entry-level coders more, they're likely to do the math and realize that it will be cheaper to just open up a foreign branch of XYZ Corp. in the country/countries most of these workers are originally from, and then pay them the local equivalent of $20k/year. Now not only have the jobs been lost for American workers, but all the money those workers would have spent in the US for housing, food, clothing, etc. is also gone. You can't offshore fast food, but you can offshore IT workers.
So I suppose the downside is that if XYZ Corp. does the math and realizes it's going to be cheaper to just offshore, it may not do a whole lot to help American IT workers. And it will doubly hurt when the wages they're paying don't get spent in the US either. I'm not saying H1-B's are the solution (I don't have a solution) -- but getting rid of them may not work out as some rosily hope.
Yaz
... this endeavor was not simply a colossal waste of time?
Here's one interesting way to think about it. As per the article, scientists had used observations and measurements to predict that metallic hydrogen would require either 25GPa or (later) 380 - 400GPa of pressure. We now know that the known lower bound is somewhere around 465GPa. With this result, we can refine the models used in the original predictions and find out where they failed, and correct them.
With such corrections in hand, we may be able to make other predictions about hydrogen (or perhaps about other elements) with much more accuracy; and you just can't ever know where that might lead. It could lead to new battery technologies. It could lead to a better understanding of star formation. Maybe it revolutionizes material science.
That's the great thing about discovery -- it's often incremental, and you never know where a result might take you. At the very least, we can correct the models that once caused scientists to predict that 25GPa of pressure would turn hydrogen into a metal; where that can take us is an exciting unknown. Sometimes it's less about actually creating metallic hydrogen as much as it is what you learned along the way that becomes useful later.
(I'd think at the very least what has been learned about preventing diamond fragility at high pressures counts as a potentially immediately useful result -- although again, how someone might be able to use this in the future is an exciting question)
Yaz
What can you claim?
First post?
Yaz
Count me in as one of 3D TV's few fans.
We bought our current TV a few years back (2012 or 2013 IIRC). We weren't specifically aiming to get a 3D (or even Smart) TV, however we lucked into a Cyber Monday deal that had a Sony KDL-46EX720 TV with a Sony 3D BluRay player for $750 (CDN) -- only one of three being offered in all of Western Canada. We scooped it up -- and for the most part it has been an excellent TV.
A year or so later we were able to pickup two pairs of 3D glasses while in the US (where they were half the price we could buy them in Canada for). I dove into as much 3D content as I could. Sony had at the time a great Internet "channel" in its Internet Video section which features all 3D videos, most of which were of UNESCO World Heritage sites. They were short, but those were great to watch. I'd watch 3D YouTube as well from time to time, and of course I own a bunch of 3D BluRay movies.
Unfortunately, first they shut down their 3D online channel, and then they decided not to update the set when YouTube changed its API (as I had predicted when we bought the TV, the "Smart" features wouldn't last all that long. As I said, I wasn't looking for a Smart TV. We don't use the Smart features at all anymore in favour of using our PS4 or Apple TV instead). There was never any regular 3D TV content available here in Western Canada (i.e.: no 3D broadcasts on cable or antenna), so the choice was between short Internet clips, or full blown movies.
I unfortunately missed the PS3 era; 3D doesn't work over PS Now, and there have been only a handful of 3D TV enabled games on the PS4. That was one area where 3D TV would have really shined; I regret never having had the opportunity to play ICO and Shadow of the Colossus in 3D.
My wife never got into the 3D viewing, so I'm the only one in the house who ever uses it. About the only time I get to use it is when I'm home alone, or after everyone else has gone to bed. Still, I did get Star Wars VII on 3D BluRay when it was released back in November, and have been enjoying watching it again in glorious 3D. I'll probably still buy our movies in 3D BluRay packs while I can (the 3D packs generally also come with the 2D BluRay, a 2D DVD, and a digital download copy, so they can be a really good deal), and will probably have to keep our current TV somewhere in the house for as long as it continues to function to watch them. Ultimately what did 3D TV in was the lack of content (particularly TV shows in the 30 mins - 1 hr range), the cost of the glasses (the TVs should have come with two pairs each, and not sold them as $100 each add-ons!), and general apathy towards wearing the glasses. Oh well -- it was fun while it lasted.
Yaz
Except if I understand correctly the shutters are driven by the television itself. My version uses an external device to drive the shutters. The point is that there is little that needs to be done to make a 3d capable extened system with televisions that are still on sale.
I think the big problem would be properly synchronizing the shutter control to the screen. 240Hz is roughly only about 4ms per frame. Modern digital TVs impart a small delay between when a frame and received and when it shows up on screen. The box you propose would have to emit the signal to keep the glasses synchronized in time, however there is no guarantee that the glasses would then be in sync with the TV. You'd need either some sort of configuration system whereby the user could control the synchronization delay (which would be somewhat of a pain for end-users to setup), or you'd have to do something truly ingenious like somehow encode the sync signal into the frames themselves (current active shutter TVs generally use an IR out to sync the glasses to the screen).
I'm not saying it would be impossible, but there would be technical challenges that don't really exist when you're doing frame sync int he same physical unit that is handling the display as active 3D TVs currently function.
Yaz
Was Apple any worse with its "Pink" and "Copland" projects?
I think the difference here was that Apple wasn't announcing their plans from a monopoly position in order to keep people away form the competition. Indeed, when Pink became Taligent, one of the idea of the AIM Alliance was to use a microkernel architecture that would permit various OS "flavours" to run on top of it, including Mac OS "Pink", OS/2, and Windows NT, all running on PowerPC CHRP.
My feeling was always that the problem with Apple surrounding Copland and Pink was more incompetence rather than malice, whereas Microsoft knew they were promising things they would never be able to deliver purely as a way to keep people from leaving the Windows ecosystem. Of course, it helped them quite a bit that their biggest PS OC competitor in the 90's, IBM, had a policy not to announce any product releases until 60 or 90 days before shipping (as I understand things, this was a legacy of the IBM antitrust case in the 70's). Microsoft took advantage, announcing things years in advance that they would never ship while a major competitor would basically not give anyone any information on what they were planning until it was pretty much in beta.
Maybe I'm jaded by experience, but Project Scorpio feels much the same. Sony has made no announcement about a PlayStation 5, the PS 4 and PS4 Pro are now known quantities, so now MS promises "the most powerful console ever built" before even showing anyone a prototype. Sony at least had a PS4 Pro at the PS4 Pro announcement (sure, the rumour mill expected the announcement for months, but Sony didn't officially announce anything until they were nearly ready to ship, so it wasn't a vapour announcement). This pattern feels all too familiar.
Yaz
For those not up on computer history, Osborne was a computer maker that announced a great new model coming in a year... so sales started tanking while people waited... which meant there was no model in a year (or maybe there was, my memory is fuzzy on that detail).
Microsoft had a pattern of doing this throughout the 90's, and it generally worked out well for them. As soon as other PC operating systems (and OS/2 in particular) started chipping away at the badly aging Windows 3.1x line, Microsoft started promising the moon with Windows 95/PC DOS 7 -- more than two years before it shipped. They didn't deliver on most of their promises, and the end result was worse than the competition, but by that point it didn't matter -- people believed the hype and decided to skip the competition out of fear that the competition was going to be eclipsed in a years time. They did the same with Windows NT. Remember "Cairo"? Microsoft started talking about it in 1991, and continued through 1996 before dropping the release completely. WinFS probably takes the cake -- a complete redesign of how a PC OS stores information, it was first promised in 1991, and was continually touted until 2006, usually in around whenever a competing OS was being released.
Over-promising way in advance and under-delivering was MS's modus operandi through much of the 1990's and early 2000's. A lot of people fell for it, and a lot of people continue to fall for it (I follow some PlayStation forums now and then, and have seen more than one person claim they're waiting until Scorpio ships because it's going to blow everything that ever came before it out of the water...sound familiar?).
Yaz
... more and more PC owners are learning they don't need to ditch their 3 year old computer and can instead opt to upgrade it. SSD, more RAM, and a new graphics card and their old machine is better than new. But they do buy those extras and upgrades... can we count those as device buys?
No, because how does Microsoft make any money off someone who upgrades their graphics card and storage, but who doesn't buy a new Windows license? Or did Microsoft start manufacturing graphics cards and SSD's when I wasn't looking?
Yaz
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but isn't the FBI restricted to US jurisdiction? I grew up with the understanding that they were basically a domestic police force on the national level.
I'm assuming I am mistaken, please feel free to give me further understanding on how the FBI can be in India.
From the article:
according to Indian and American investigators, who said that the raid in Thane was carried out entirely by the local police, without assistance from American officials.
The FBI can still typically do investigation in other countries: collect intel, interview people, etc. They can then provide information tot he local authorities to handle the actual police work.
Yaz
They were going to release something that likely would have been consigned to the annals of history as a failed idea and eventually been forced to go the touch screen route like everyone else.
First off, this prototype is a giant touchscreen -- the click wheel in the video is entirely virtual, and not physical.
Secondly, there is no evidence that Apple ever had any intentions of releasing this device. I know it's hard to believe, but some companies out there do actual R&D work where they build and design a whole lot of experimental products that are not intended for release.
This was presumably the work of one such R&D team that put together a prototype based on the idea of making a virtual iPod, which was evaluated, found seriously wanting, and then scrapped, which is why it's taken this long for one to even be made public.
Yaz
Apparently, yes.
https://rewards.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/aboutus
I have no problem accepting "points" for work, so long as those "points" are prepended by a $ symbol.
Yaz
Experience Points?
Simply not the same as a PCIe asic. I dont care how much theoretical bandwidth there is on USB3, or that they did away with polled mode. It is not the same if nothing else but because it has to go through two different driver stacks for data to enter and leave the media. The idea here is security consciousness, not simple function. Smaller attack surface is better.
No, but Thunderbolt 3 is PCIe (either x2 or x4, depending on the configuration/power mode), with a full 40GB/s of bandwidth. So what you do is you get a Thunderbolt PCIe Expansion Box (something like this), and put standard PCIe NIC cards into it -- whichever ones you prefer.
(What would be awesome is if someone came out with a multi-ethernet Thunderbolt 3 breakout box. The best I've found is dual 10Gbit Ethernet to Thunderbolt, but something like 8 x 1Gbit to Thunderbolt 3, with a TB3 chaining port would be pretty awesome for a box like this. Intel -- are you listening?)
Yaz
The intention of articles such as this is clearly to make people feel bad about... well, their existence, really.
No, it isn't. And there is something seriously wrong with the psyche of anyone who reads a scientific article and that is what they pull out of it.
The article reported on a scientific paper, and that is all. Stop trying to "read between the lines" on everything to pick out intentions that are not there. You only wind up reinforcing your own prejudices.
Yaz
You clearly didn't read the summary. It skipped over the fig leaf and jumped almost directly into all of the ways that you and your roads are killing the planet.
No, I went one better and went and found the actual paper the article is based on.
The summary didn't make any judgement of you or anyone else either. It listed a variety of problems caused by roads -- and that's it. If you feel personally slighted by the list, that's your problem.
Again -- nobody said anything about tearing up roads, or that we shouldn't use them. Roads cause some problems, and help with others. Adults can discuss the cons of something without it implicitly becoming about trying to ban or tear that item out of existence. Indeed, instead of going insane and assuming they are being judged by a scientific paper, rational adults would instead have a discussion on how we might be able to mitigate the problems, while continuing to enjoy the benefits.
Instead, we seem to have too many babies around here who read a list acknowledging problems with roads and assume "They hate roads! I use roads! Therefore they hate me/civilization/everything I stand for!", when no such things were stated or implied.
Now if you're interested in putting on your adult pants and discussing like an rational human being, a more interesting discussion would be on the relative benefits of mitigation strategies, such as wildlife overpasses/underpasses. Parks Canada is considered one of the major world experts on practical wildlife crossing research, and has some interesting materials online discussing the problems and solutions.
See how that works? Someone identifies a problem. Someone else identifies possible solutions. The solutions are evaluated. Nobody goes berserk and simply tears everything apart, nobody calls anyone names, nobody assumes anyone is a bad person. Like an adult. Try it for yourself.
Yaz
I was going to mod you down, but I thought I'd take the time to publicly berate you instead.
The article in question is a scientific, scholarly article, written by actual environmental researchers. It appears[0] to have done what you would expect of a scientific article -- it has identified a possible problem (environmental fragmentation due to roads), and had done some measurements surrounding the issue. And that's it. The article isn't judging you. It's not judging society. Indeed, right in the very first sentence of the abstract it says:
Roads have done much to help humanity spread across the planet and maintain global movement and trade.
About the only conclusion the authors draw is that more should be done to protect the existing large tracts of land without roads (totalling about 7% of earth surface). And that's it. They don't call you a bad person for using roads. They aren't trying to guilt people into ripping up existing roads. All they are saying is "roads are great; we need roads; they cause some problems; and we have a measurement to frame the problem". Nothing more. There is no complaining going on. This is science, not ethics, so get a grip already. The one with a huge bias here isn't ./ or the articles authors, it's you.
Yaz
[0] -- I unfortunately haven't been able to access the full article. While I do have access to a number of scientific article databases, this article was just published today, and doesn't appear to be indexed in any of them just yet.
The article isn't clear but it implies that most of the divestment comes from removing fossil fuel companies from stock portfolios.
If so then the companies aren't buying those stocks back, somebody else is buying them. It doesn't effect the company one bit, other than maybe drive the price down minutely while it's a sellers market. All that really does is minutely help the buyers who are now taking on the risk and the reward of owning that stock.
Either I'm confused about what they're doing or they are.
You forget that the divested funds are then being invested into clean energy technology companies. I have little doubt that such companies can make really good use of additional funding, and that improvements and breakthroughs are already being made because of it.
You'd be correct if the funds in question were only divesting, but they're not. They divesting and re-investing the money into another, more desirable (and potentially very lucrative) area, and that's the part you seem to have missed.
Yaz
Actually, the Diefenbaker Conservatives have prior claim - the destruction (literally) of the Avro Arrow (the most advanced fighter of the time) at the behest of the US government because the Bomarc nuclear SAM missiles would supposedly make the Avro obsolete (funny how we still need jet fighters and bombers more than half a century later, isn't it).
I have to correct you on that there, as the CF-105 wasn't designed as a fighter -- it was designed as an interceptor. Interceptors (and in particular the CF-105) weren't designed for areal dogfighting with other fighter aircraft -- they were designed to take down larger aircraft such as bombers.
The purported reason for cancelling the Arrow project was that the world was moving away from nuclear capable bombers towards ICBMs. The threat that the CF-105 was designed for was Russian bombers flying over our northern coast, but the advancement of technology was making the need to fly bombers unnecessary, hence a straight-on interceptor was no longer necessary.
Indeed, today very few countries design or purchase straight-up Interceptor aircraft for their air defence. Fighter jets became advanced enough back in the 60's and 70's to take on the role of both fighter and interceptor as needed. A multi-role fighter-interceptor was a much better investment for a smaller country like ours.
You are also somewhat incorrect concerning the BOMARC missiles. While the US designed them to be nuclear capable, and the initial intention was to have Canada's inventory equipped with nuclear warheads, in the end Died the Chief caved into public pressure, and the nuclear option was scrapped. Eventually, of course, all of the BOMARC missiles were scrapped -- the mission they were intended for (destroying bombers flying towards the DEW line) evaporated in the face of ICBMs.
Today we face relative little danger from bombers from Russia flying over the north pole, and even should that happen we have modern advanced middles to take care of them. There really is no place for dedicated interceptors anymore, and there hasn't been for decades. Now none of that is to say that Diefenbaker was right to scrap the CF-105s -- the way the completed jets and all of their plans was dismantled/discarded/destroyed is a national disgrace. My family knows very well how this went down and the pain it caused -- my grandfather was a mechanic at AV Roe who worked on the Arrow project, and who became unemployed at the projects termination. His pride in the Arrow project and his regret at its destruction (and general anger towards Diefenbaker and his cabinet for causing it to happen) lasted until the last of his days.
Yaz