Yes. Everyone will be unemployed. The state will tax deliveries, and transport, then hire these people to do useless paper pushing jobs. In the end the efficiency will be... about the same.
Console game prices were initially higher because you had to account for the cost of manufacturing the cartridges. However today all consoles use DVDs or built-in storage of some sort so that cost is no longer justified. But the games still cost a boatload. The justification is that the production costs are higher.
I think it could even go further than that. If there was a space based network of power beaming satellites, you could beam power down to any place on Earth regardless of borders or whatever. Of course the technical and economical obstacles are formidable, so I doubt it will happen any time soon.
Example of bad strategy is fuel trucks crossing the Khyber Pass, historically well-known & pretty well-suited for ambush. Just ask the British who lost an army there in the nineteenth century.
Precisely. Historically the people who successfully invaded Afghanistan usually came in from the West or North. Like the Muslim and Mongol invasions. Even so it is hard to win when you cannot control the neighboring regions and have highly permeable borders. The Mongols at least were highly self-sufficient and could resort to pillage. In the case of the US money is the only option.
Even if Moscow had been taken Germany would not have won the war. Just like Napoleon did not win by taking Moscow either. Most Soviet manufacturing plants had either been moved, or were in the process of being moved behind the Urals. To win the war decisively the Germans needed to smash the Soviet Union's military and capture their industrial production facilities. Germany stretched their supply chain over the limit. That was why they lost.
Regarding Allied bombing impacting production capacity, German war material production actually increased at the height of the campaign. While this bombing campaign did take away some manpower from German industry, most of the work done constructing underground facilities was done by slave labor from the occupied regions, something the Germans had in large quantity. I think the Allied blockade was far more effective as it reduced Germany's access to strategic materials which eventually caused their war machine to collapse. The strategic material shortage ranged from specialized metal alloys, to petroleum, and even food.
The Soviet Union would have had an even more costly victory, but I still think they would have won.
After the Japanese lost the battle of Khalkhin Gol they were not very interested in fighting the Soviet Union. Regardless of whatever the US did. Japanese naval power was formidable, and they had a decent air force, but their tanks and infantry were inferior to the ones fielded by the Soviet Union. They would not have lasted in a protracted land battle. It is one thing to win against Chinese using obsolete weapons, a different thing fighting against the best armored vehicles of WWII.
If the US Army replaced their fuel guzzling M1 tank turbines with modern diesel engines like the MTU engine used in the Leopard they would spend a lot less fuel to begin with. The same applies to the HMMWV.
If they switched to diesel-electric, the vehicles would spend even less power.
For Afghanistan this is useless, but for campaigns near the shore it would be useful to recharge the vehicles using the nuclear reactor in US Navy carriers.
If the infantry switched to caseless or cased telescoped ammunition, it would take less volume to transport the same number of rifle ammo rounds.
The B-52 uses ancient engines from the late 1950s which guzzle fuel but the Air Force cannot get Congress to pay for the upgrade because it is deemed uneconomic.
Solar can have its uses. The military could especially use flexible solar cells which could be more easily transported. However the military also needs reliability, something that works 100% of the time, which is something solar cells cannot provide.
We have come a long time since Genghis Khan. The Mongols could feed their horses by grazing and drinking water along the way. They were nomads, so they brought cattle as food supply along with them, as well as their families etc. Present military hardware requires too much power for this to be feasible anymore.
I use Fring with SIP. The issue with SIP however is the user base. A lot of people have a Skype account, and SIP usage is more hit and miss. Also there is no one centralized SIP directory. That hampers its use.
I do not think such a legal case would stick. Electronics Arts had a lawsuit some decades back where they claimed they owned all the art created by people using Deluxe Paint belong to them and they lost.
The Atari 2600 had more issues than lousy games. The hardware was obsolete the C64 was cheap enough to compete with it. What killed the consoles back then was cheap home computers.
In my opinion Apple's hardware is lagging behind that of Samsung. It would be hard for them to do any better, most components they use are manufactured by Samsung after all. HTC also does nice devices. The software of current Android is good enough. I will not be buying another Apple phone again.
Windows 98 is just plain unstable. I still remember having to reboot my machine every half an hour when doing video editing. Just upgrade them to Windows XP and change the default user interface to classic.
Another issue is that a lot of applications and drivers broke with Windows Vista/7. This is much the same problem Microsoft had with Windows 2000. The thing is Windows 7 isn't that much better than Windows XP. Whereas Windows XP was much better than Windows ME.
The Windows 7 user interface is slightly easier to use for doing average desktop work. The improvements are things like the program search bar and the improved taskbar. But it is a resource hog which will not work on older spec hardware. If you want to reconfigure your system the control panel is now a mess to navigate. Windows 7 is also a memory hog. It isn't unusable in a 32-bit system. So until people upgrade to 64-bit systems with 4GB of RAM they will stick to XP.
Many games programmers today want their games to be portable to game console hardware. Game console hardware is lagging PC hardware by some six years or more. This is another reason for not wanting to upgrade. Many desktop applications are being moved to the browser, and the ones which are not being moved to the browser run on older spec hardware.
These schemes seem like a great way to shaft customers with high power prices to me. Would you be interested in paying unpredictable power prices? Boy it will be "fun" to have to program my house's power supply to only buy power when it's lower than a certain price. It will be like being force to play in the stock market just to heat a pizza.
I doubt his state has coal powered energy. The most expensive electricity is usually in places like Hawaii, where there are little local resources to harvest and you need to generate a limited amount of power. Small islands usually use petroleum to generate electricity.
I guess you do not follow Chinese projects very well. They may start projects with a high number of imported components, but they have a tenacious drive to reduce the imported component count on everything. Of course it will take more time to do so with technologies which the Chinese did not previously have at all, such as high-speed trains. Most of the cost in a system is in the track, not the cars anyway, so if they manage to reduce that cost, they are half the way there.
China cannot use advanced semiconductor manufacturing processes because of a trade embargo on the export of such machine tools to China. Namely lithography machines of the latest generation. This means their processors will always have worse performance no matter how smart they are.
Their government is probably just interested in having "good enough" electronics for a wide range of products. Even if they cannot replace imported components, they can still have their own home grown electronics used on strategic assets which do not require a lot of computing performance.
Not necessarily. Ever heard the expression "if you want peace, prepare for war?". By making an attack on Iran highly costly to the invading army, Iran can deter a land invasion. For this application they do not even need a sophisticated delivery vehicle. Knowing the recent history of Iran I am pretty certain they would be willing to use nuclear weapons in their own territory if it came to it.
The issue at stake here is that Iran is not merely interested in defending their own territory. They want to have global influence. This is shown by their support of Hamas. This makes the possibility of some of the weapons getting out of Iran and being used all that more likely.
Some of them come bundled with the device itself. The web browser, music player, maps, book reading apps, are examples. I still use Stanza for book reading and X Comics for comic book reading. But Apple has launched iBooks, so I suspect these 3rd party book apps will eventually die even if it just for the convenience of not having to install anything. The non-Apple apps I use most on my iPhone are probably VOIP apps like Skype and Fring.
Unix became Linux and BSD. Arguably even MacOS X. But Unix was not a desktop computer OS to begin with. It was designed on minicomputers and eventually used on workstations. Today Linux can run from Android smartphones to high-end servers featuring thousands of processors (really, just look at the Top500 supercomputing list).
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Yes. Everyone will be unemployed. The state will tax deliveries, and transport, then hire these people to do useless paper pushing jobs. In the end the efficiency will be... about the same.
It took me less time to finish StarCraft II than the original StarCraft. Fallout 3 is nice.
Console game prices were initially higher because you had to account for the cost of manufacturing the cartridges. However today all consoles use DVDs or built-in storage of some sort so that cost is no longer justified. But the games still cost a boatload. The justification is that the production costs are higher.
I think it could even go further than that. If there was a space based network of power beaming satellites, you could beam power down to any place on Earth regardless of borders or whatever. Of course the technical and economical obstacles are formidable, so I doubt it will happen any time soon.
Precisely. Historically the people who successfully invaded Afghanistan usually came in from the West or North. Like the Muslim and Mongol invasions. Even so it is hard to win when you cannot control the neighboring regions and have highly permeable borders. The Mongols at least were highly self-sufficient and could resort to pillage. In the case of the US money is the only option.
Even if Moscow had been taken Germany would not have won the war. Just like Napoleon did not win by taking Moscow either. Most Soviet manufacturing plants had either been moved, or were in the process of being moved behind the Urals. To win the war decisively the Germans needed to smash the Soviet Union's military and capture their industrial production facilities. Germany stretched their supply chain over the limit. That was why they lost.
Regarding Allied bombing impacting production capacity, German war material production actually increased at the height of the campaign. While this bombing campaign did take away some manpower from German industry, most of the work done constructing underground facilities was done by slave labor from the occupied regions, something the Germans had in large quantity. I think the Allied blockade was far more effective as it reduced Germany's access to strategic materials which eventually caused their war machine to collapse. The strategic material shortage ranged from specialized metal alloys, to petroleum, and even food.
The Soviet Union would have had an even more costly victory, but I still think they would have won.
After the Japanese lost the battle of Khalkhin Gol they were not very interested in fighting the Soviet Union. Regardless of whatever the US did. Japanese naval power was formidable, and they had a decent air force, but their tanks and infantry were inferior to the ones fielded by the Soviet Union. They would not have lasted in a protracted land battle. It is one thing to win against Chinese using obsolete weapons, a different thing fighting against the best armored vehicles of WWII.
If the US Army replaced their fuel guzzling M1 tank turbines with modern diesel engines like the MTU engine used in the Leopard they would spend a lot less fuel to begin with. The same applies to the HMMWV.
If they switched to diesel-electric, the vehicles would spend even less power.
For Afghanistan this is useless, but for campaigns near the shore it would be useful to recharge the vehicles using the nuclear reactor in US Navy carriers.
If the infantry switched to caseless or cased telescoped ammunition, it would take less volume to transport the same number of rifle ammo rounds.
The B-52 uses ancient engines from the late 1950s which guzzle fuel but the Air Force cannot get Congress to pay for the upgrade because it is deemed uneconomic.
Solar can have its uses. The military could especially use flexible solar cells which could be more easily transported. However the military also needs reliability, something that works 100% of the time, which is something solar cells cannot provide.
We have come a long time since Genghis Khan. The Mongols could feed their horses by grazing and drinking water along the way. They were nomads, so they brought cattle as food supply along with them, as well as their families etc. Present military hardware requires too much power for this to be feasible anymore.
I use Fring with SIP. The issue with SIP however is the user base. A lot of people have a Skype account, and SIP usage is more hit and miss. Also there is no one centralized SIP directory. That hampers its use.
I do not think such a legal case would stick. Electronics Arts had a lawsuit some decades back where they claimed they owned all the art created by people using Deluxe Paint belong to them and they lost.
The Atari 2600 had more issues than lousy games. The hardware was obsolete the C64 was cheap enough to compete with it. What killed the consoles back then was cheap home computers.
In my opinion Apple's hardware is lagging behind that of Samsung. It would be hard for them to do any better, most components they use are manufactured by Samsung after all. HTC also does nice devices. The software of current Android is good enough. I will not be buying another Apple phone again.
Windows 98 is just plain unstable. I still remember having to reboot my machine every half an hour when doing video editing. Just upgrade them to Windows XP and change the default user interface to classic.
Another issue is that a lot of applications and drivers broke with Windows Vista/7. This is much the same problem Microsoft had with Windows 2000. The thing is Windows 7 isn't that much better than Windows XP. Whereas Windows XP was much better than Windows ME.
The Windows 7 user interface is slightly easier to use for doing average desktop work. The improvements are things like the program search bar and the improved taskbar. But it is a resource hog which will not work on older spec hardware. If you want to reconfigure your system the control panel is now a mess to navigate. Windows 7 is also a memory hog. It isn't unusable in a 32-bit system. So until people upgrade to 64-bit systems with 4GB of RAM they will stick to XP.
Many games programmers today want their games to be portable to game console hardware. Game console hardware is lagging PC hardware by some six years or more. This is another reason for not wanting to upgrade. Many desktop applications are being moved to the browser, and the ones which are not being moved to the browser run on older spec hardware.
If you are a student you can probably get a Windows license for cheap or even free (well it's free to you anyway).
Just add tolls on every road. Or force every car to have a meter. Simple.
These schemes seem like a great way to shaft customers with high power prices to me. Would you be interested in paying unpredictable power prices? Boy it will be "fun" to have to program my house's power supply to only buy power when it's lower than a certain price. It will be like being force to play in the stock market just to heat a pizza.
I doubt his state has coal powered energy. The most expensive electricity is usually in places like Hawaii, where there are little local resources to harvest and you need to generate a limited amount of power. Small islands usually use petroleum to generate electricity.
I guess you do not follow Chinese projects very well. They may start projects with a high number of imported components, but they have a tenacious drive to reduce the imported component count on everything. Of course it will take more time to do so with technologies which the Chinese did not previously have at all, such as high-speed trains. Most of the cost in a system is in the track, not the cars anyway, so if they manage to reduce that cost, they are half the way there.
The Chinese do not need to design a new cellphone platform. Android is there for anyone to use.
Their government is probably just interested in having "good enough" electronics for a wide range of products. Even if they cannot replace imported components, they can still have their own home grown electronics used on strategic assets which do not require a lot of computing performance.
The Gaza Strip isn't that far off from being a concentration camp. But it is not a death camp.
Not necessarily. Ever heard the expression "if you want peace, prepare for war?". By making an attack on Iran highly costly to the invading army, Iran can deter a land invasion. For this application they do not even need a sophisticated delivery vehicle. Knowing the recent history of Iran I am pretty certain they would be willing to use nuclear weapons in their own territory if it came to it.
The issue at stake here is that Iran is not merely interested in defending their own territory. They want to have global influence. This is shown by their support of Hamas. This makes the possibility of some of the weapons getting out of Iran and being used all that more likely.
Some of them come bundled with the device itself. The web browser, music player, maps, book reading apps, are examples. I still use Stanza for book reading and X Comics for comic book reading. But Apple has launched iBooks, so I suspect these 3rd party book apps will eventually die even if it just for the convenience of not having to install anything. The non-Apple apps I use most on my iPhone are probably VOIP apps like Skype and Fring.
Unix became Linux and BSD. Arguably even MacOS X. But Unix was not a desktop computer OS to begin with. It was designed on minicomputers and eventually used on workstations. Today Linux can run from Android smartphones to high-end servers featuring thousands of processors (really, just look at the Top500 supercomputing list).