Well, the thing is, the space race has been mostly about international penis size, rather than any actual benefits. The moon _still_ has no economic or military value, for example, and getting a man there was just an artificial milestone, for example. "Oh yeah, we're so much greater than the Russians because we put a man where neither of us had a reason to," basically.
Yes, there have been some materials and technologies which then trickled down to civillian use, but then the same advances could have been made by just funding more research without the overhead of the manned space race.
Some would have been made anyway because either the private sector (e.g., computers) or the military sector (e.g., ablative tiles) needed them anyway, and there's no difference between developping them for an ICBM and developping them for a manned shuttle. (Unmanned) Satellites would have happened even without the Apollo program, for example.
Some space stuff has been just a monumental waste all around with nearly zero benefits.
The original shuttle concept for example, was more like a car: a small reusable vehicle for the humans and maybe some small satellites, doing up and down trips all the time, and lifting all those small satellites. There were a _lot_ of those little trips needed even so, to recoup the costs.
But then NASA wanted the Air Force's budget, so they had to promise that they can lift those huge spy satellites _and_ be able to put them in a polar orbit. So the shuttle got inflated to the space equivalent of an 18 wheeler, and costs raised through the roof, to the point where it's a huge waste to actually use it for its original purpose. Everyone still puts their small satellites up by normal rockets, which was a job the shuttle was supposed to take over. But it's just not worth using it. It's big, it's unreliable (now it has damaged tiles again, for example), it needs hideous amounts of fuel, and it's grounded most of the time.
It's telling that even Bigelow puts this stuff up there with Russian rockets instead. Yes, I know, prices are lower in the poorer ex-USSR, but the propaganda was that the reusable space shuttle will make liftoff so damn cheap, that the russkies and their rockets will be obsolete overnight. It sure didn't work that way, eh?
And, oh, the Air Force still didn't get its money worth either. They still ended up using their own rockets to put those spy satellites in orbit.
It's one thing that was a waste all around, and kept around only as a national penis size symbol. No better than other historical wastes, like the pyramids. (Contrary to what Civilization said, they don't give you a free granary in every city;) It's just a national "look what a big expensive thing we can build" symbol, nothing more.
So, much as I'm a Star Wars and Star Trek fan too, sometimes it's time to call a waste a waste. Lamenting that we could do more of that instead of doing what actually works down here (you still use oil, don't you?), is a bit weird. It's a bit like saying that we should invest more in building obelisks instead of roads.
Yes, we can do great achievements if we want to, but a lot has been artificial achievements which cost a lot and delivered very little that was actually needed at that time. Similarly you could say that it's depressing that we could build a pyramid as big as Cheops's when we wanted, but the evil current administration isn't building one for Bush. Why would it want to?
And please note the "at that time" in the above paragraph, if someone feels like letting it rip with how important it will be in the future, or how the human race needs to expand before the Sun goes red giant in 5 billion years. If we'll actually need that stuff in the future, we'll do it in the future. Maybe we'll have invented better engines in the meantime, or maybe we'll have better materials, or maybe (as with Bigelow) someone will have imagined an actual economic benefit for doing so, as opposed to being just a pork barrel exercise.
In a nutshell: why do you find it depressing that we don't waste more?
I'll largely agree with your assessment of the situation in the kleptocracies. It is that bad, and worse. Very insightful indeed.
I don't really know if it's just culture, or just the same humans in very different circumstances, though. I'd like to be able to chest-thump and say "we're richer because our culture had better values", but looking around me, I think humans are humans everywhere.
Largely any country's or human group' actions, I think, are dictated by what works well. Whether it's camping in video games, or politics or whatever. If for the same personal short-term effort, action X gets you more rewards than action Y, then most humans will see X as "right".
And as countries and cultures go, ultimately we're all plutocrats, the difference is just who gets to have more money and power. And the culture then is mostly dictated by those. If the way to get into the Roman Senate was to be a latifundiary with hundreds of slaves, then culture just got moulded to extol the virtues of slavery. If in the later Italian city states or the Netherlands the merchants had the most power, the culture just got moulded to praise the virtues of trade above all else. And so on. And kleptocratic cultures just get that way because the way to get to the top is to be a part of the corruption, so people are taught to praise those who are the most successful at it. Etc.
So if a situation produces crooked kleptocrats, IMHO we have to look at why that's the best buck-per-effort there.
At the time when Europe had its industrial revolution, basically being a manufacturer was the fastest way to make money. So those had the economic power, and soon gained political power too. Not all of it went as smoothly as in England. If a crooked aristocrat stood in their way, like was the case on most continental Europe, they had a jolly good revolution. The bloody, old fashioned way. E.g., the 1848 wave of revolts.
At the time when the USA had its industrialization spurt, its imports from continental Europe were blockaded by the British navy fighting Napoleon. So prices for manufactured stuff suddenly went through the roof. Anyone who could manufacture something, could expect disproportionately high profits. It made sense to start a workshop or a factory. Or invest in expanding it, if you had one.
Now look at the kleptocracies that you otherwise describe very well. Their choice there are:
1. Invest in land, go bankrupt because you compete with USA and EU subsidized agriculture. Loser option.
2. Start a primitive factory or workshop, lose again, because your low-tech stuff isn't competitive with first world stuff. Any industry worth mentioning in second and third world countries, is pretty much just the first-world-owned sweatshops using the cheap local labour, not the local entrepreneurship.
3. Open some kind of shop. This seems a hideously popular option in low tech places.
4. Pocket the political bribes from the West, pocket half the bribe disguised as "foreign aid", ask for bribes from the rich first-world companies coming to do business there, etc.
Option 4 is simply the disproportionately more rewarding one, followed by 3 at some distance. And as I was saying, we're all plutocracies, just different people get rich and to the top. In this case it's the option 4 people. And culture gets shaped into justifying their own actions, and encouraging people to do the same.
When Europe or the USA industrialized, option 4 just didn't exist. There was no ultra-rich (comparatively) foreign power that could make you richer than the industrialists and land owners _combined_, if you just pocket their bribes.
And from there, most of the industrial countries chose 2, because that kind of people made it to the top. But some, where agriculture was strong, chose 1. That doesn't mean just Eastern Europe, but historically Belgium proclaimed its independence from the Dutch because its interests were better served by going with option 1, and that kind of people were the richest a
Much of England's motivation to expand its colonies _fast_ at that time was precisely overpopulation, and the fact that it was starting to have serious problems feeding its population any more. So in effect, the most successful colonial empire was built by those _least_ able to feed their population. Spain, France and the Dutch (which at the time also included the fertile lands of Belgium, plus the trade power to get all the grain they needed), couldn't compete with the desperation of the English.
The decline of the Mediteranean city states -- assuming you mean the likes of Genoa and Venice, not the Greeks of 1000 BC -- well, it's a more complex issue too. It wasn't that those guys starved or anything, it was that it was an empire built on trade income in the Mediterranean, and the importance of that trade declined sharply once (A) a route around Africa, and (B) America, were discovered.
Those states weren't agriculturally poor by any reckoning. As early as the 11'th century they had urbanization rates of 20% or so, which was a hell of a lot better than the HRE or England. It says that their agriculture was already a lot better than the agriculture of the more northern europe, if it could support that many non-peasants.
But their main income wasn't made with grain, it was made because most trade with India and generally Asia went through the Mediterranean and Asia Minor. All the spices, silk, exotic goods, whatever cost big money at the time, had to go through the Mediterranean, and those Italian states made a fortune out of controlling that trade.
Byzantium too made a killing from being a stop along that road, and eventually even managed to steal silkworms and produce its own silk. Now that made an even bigger killing. The 4'th crusade put the Byzantines on the slope to extinction, but made Venice a lot of money in loot. And it gave them even more control over those trade routes too.
And as long as they had money, they could do pretty much everything they wanted. Hire mercenaries to fight their wars, build fleets to control the sea, or do anything else.
Unfortunately, what came next was that (A) someone found a way to Asia that bypassed the Mediterranean completely, and (B) finding new land in the exact opposite direction. Suddenly controlling the Mediterranean meant jack squat. Losing control of the sea was, by and large, a result of having less money, rather than being a cause of it. When all that profitable trade just evaporated, yeah, they still had food, but suddenly they were just another minor county, no more powerful than, say, a HRE county.
So in a way, the story of those city states, the way I interpret it, has the exact opposite moral: what's important is to have the money, rather than to have the grain.
Or if you want an even better counter-example, look at Poland. For a while in the middle ages it made a killing with its producing lots of grain, and exporting lots of it for big bucks. (Well, big florins, ducats, and the like;) Then by the 1700s, the price of grain was already steadily dropping, and with it declined the wealth and power of Poland too. They still had lots of food for their population, even an excess of it, but that didn't do them that much good any more.
Mind you, I'm generally seeing your point that it's good to have some kind of a safety net. Just saying that history isn't half as simple as that.
You seem to have an inaccurate idea
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Kids Review the OLPC
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Please don't take this as an offense, but you seem to have a rather inaccurate idea of how the third world works. Especially if you think you need to teach them basic agriculture, or how a two-stroke engine works. They know that. What they lack is, in no particular order:
1. Money. In the modern world, everything costs money, including getting water for irrigation, spare parts for those tractors, etc. And this is the root of all the evil that follows in this list.
2. An industry to support that agriculture. Just knowing how an internal combustion engine works, doesn't mean that you can just get a hammer and an anvil and make a tractor in a village smithy. Until this problem is solved, their agriculture is a case of either (A) inefficiently doing it by hand, or (B) importing expensive foreign tractors and spare parts, and see #1: that's money they just don't have.
3. A market where they can get that much needed money for their produce. And not just "market" as in selling it in the next city, but some kind of _export_ market, because you can't import much without exporting the equivalent. If you want to import something that costs US Dollars or Euro, you have to first sell something for US Dollars or Euro. Or you can take a loan, but then you're soon back to square one: you have to export something for US Dollars or Euro to pay it back.
But there they compete with the _massively_ subsidized EU and USA agricultural exports. And they lose.
It's as simple as that: if you and I make the same product, but the government subsidizes more than half the price of mine, you _will_ lose. That is their problem.
4. Some source of credit without all sorts of strings attached. A lot of "foreign aid" or "loans" actually come with strings attached, like "you must use that money to buy grain from the USA" or "you must use that money to buy trucks from Germany." (But when they break down, heh, you better have your own money to buy spare parts with.) Unfortunately while that may relieve a famine in the short run, in the long run it also just does even more to bankrupt the local farms and industry respectively.
5. An infrastructure. You can't have a modern agriculture without water pumps for irrigation, roads, silos, fuel pumps for the trucks and tractors, electricity, etc. And that's just infrastructure they don't have. In some cases they don't even have clean water for drinking, much less water for irrigation. And don't have the money to build an infrastructure.
6. In some cases, they don't have competent or honest politicians either. A lot of economies are run into the ground not because they don't know what an engine is, but because they're run by an incompetent, corrupt, kleptocratic clique.
Basically their main problem is that they're too poor, not that some white man has to come and teach them basic agriculture.
It's damn near impossible to start from zero and industrialize by your own efforts any more. It's a vicious circle: as long as you don't have high-tech stuff to export for the big bucks, you can't buy the machine tools and know-how to get even your basic industry started. Raw material and agricultural products are so damn cheap that you simply can't export enough of them to get some serious industrialization going.
Stalin did industrialize the USSR in the 30's... by starving a few million peasants (a lot of them Ukrainians) to death. Literally to death. That was the only way to export enough grain to be able to buy all the machine tools and blueprints he needed to start a serious industry.
Not only that kind of a solution isn't practicable in most countries, the problem just got much worse in the meantime too.
So, anyway, ironically giving them some computer skills may actually do them a hell of a lot more good than trying to teach them basic agriculture (which they already know.) If they can at least work offshore tech support, or assemble computers in a sweatshop, they and their country might even get _some_ dollars out of that. And, who knows, maybe get at least started on building the industry and infrastructure. The agriculture will follow.
I don't see how replacing a motherboard is in any way, shape, or form a useful skill for anybody who is not a screwdriver monkey in a local PC shop.
Technically true, but developping a love for computers will help them in other ways.
I mean, by old skills with ZX-81 BASIC or (one year later) converting assembly to hex by hand because you couldn't fit even an assembler in 1K RAM, are technically worthless today too. Noone would pay you to convert to hex by hand, unless it's as a drunken dare. But the fact that I grew up thinking algorithmically and liking it, is roughly why I'm a well paid consultant today. And knowing roughly what happens under the hood, as in, exactly what does the CPU do, sure helps write better code than the monkeys who think that efficiency is measured in lines of code.
Now, if this thing taught kids to repair two-stroke engines
You mean the skill that's even more useless in the real world, unless you're a wrench monkey at the local mechanic shop? How's that more useful? Chances are he'd make less money with that than even with the most basic computer skills.
Oh, you mean how it's more macho to take your own engine apart? It never ceases to amaze me how many think their penis size is measured in how often they take their engine apart. Don't you have anything better to do with your time than pretend you're an unskilled low-wage manual labourer? I don't know about you, but my time is more valuable than that.
or basic agriculture, that would be impressive (and useful).
Now you've really lost me? Agriculture? You mean the thing that, since the Great Depression, is so worthless that it survives only by government subsidies? And where you need a damn big farm to even be able to afford the equipment, even with government subsidies?
Newsflash: nowadays everyone can produce entirely too much food, so, as is the case when supply vastly outstrips demand, prices are all the way down in the cellar. The world nowadays is split into countries which subsidize their agriculture, and countries where their farmers went bankrupt and just import the food.
So your idea of a useful profession to teach someone is... an unskilled manual labour job, which mostly lives off government subsidy, for as long as that subsidy continues? Why not just teach him to be a bum and get unemployment benefits then? It will be only mildly more humiliating, but it's less work, the result is the same, and it will cost us all less money in taxes, so I figure it's a win-win.
And generally, what's with your list containing only low-pay low-skill manual-labour examples? God knows that even if you don't understand computers, there are other better paid jobs than farmer or wrench monkey. Want to guide your kid on a non-hardware path? How about management, marketting, non-computer engineering branches (biotech still does decently well, for example), etc?
What is the value in having a monopoly if you can't tell these MPAA punks to fuck off?
How about making lots of money? Does Bill Gates actually have anything to gain by telling MPAA to fuck off? Sometimes the world isn't about fighting idealistic crusades and righting wrongs. Certainly not at the top of a corporation.
MSFT did this because "we" (the consumer, in abstract) are product they are selling to the media companies. This is just as TV viewers are product that NBC/ABC/CBS/FOX sell to the advertisement buyers. It is a perversion of the customer relationship in which megacorps pimp out the base that makes them successful.
No, actually that's not quite true any way you want to slice it. Not in this case. NBC/ABC/CBS/FOX are actually paid per estimated user who saw those ads. I don't think MS is paid by the MPAA per movie you watch on that computer.
MS's primary interest is in gaining market domination for their own media formats, not in selling MPAA's movies to you, or your eyeballs to MPAA. It could perhaps be comparing to selling both to both, but even that is stretching it. It's really selling their formats to both, with the slight added complexity that it's selling it to both sides of a single market rather than two independent markets. It's more like a plain old grab for market share and mind share, with the minor distinction that now it's for data formats instead of the more classical squeezing other products or shops out. That's really all there is to it.
It's really no different than, say, PayPal trying to sell their service to both online buyers and online sellers. It doesn't mean that it's selling either the buyers to the sellers, or viceversa, it's just trying to sell one service to both.
Briefly, eh, no need to paint the whole world with the same brush. The "they're selling you to the advertisers" explanation is right on for some market segments, but not quite for a lot of others. No need to see the whole world through those glasses now.
It _is_ a "make it suck" flag, or rather "make it suck if any component along the chain isn't DRM'ed and encrypted." The MPAA and RIAA are so caught in the whole "auugh, evil pirates are copying our content and causing us billions!" hysteria, that, well, they'd rather shoot themselves in the foot than let the spec have any place where someone could record/rip their precious content.
The difference between plain DVI and encrypted DVI (a.k.a., HDMI) is largely one created by the DMCA:
1. with DVI, you could, at least theoretically, make a video capture card with a DVI _input_ connector, and just rip the digital content that way. Basically the computer would think you're outputting to a TFT monitor, when in fact you're getting to record the digital output stream in all its quality.
2. with HDMI, well, you could do the exact same, you just have to fake the authentication and include the decryption. Which isn't impossible by any reckoning.
However,
1. Since DVI it doesn't include any copy protection, it doesn't count as circumventing it under the DMCA.
2. Since HDMI does, it does. So they could raid anyone selling such cards or adapters, and demonize anyone who bought one.
However the bottomline at the moment is that
A) I don't know of any actual such devices at the moment, and
B) If you're going to decrypt it anyway, you might as well decrypt the DVD, but
C) most people have DVI or VGA connectors on their monitors, while virtually noone has a HDMI monitor or graphics card.
So for the sake of protecting against a theoretical threat, they are making it suck for a bunch of legitimate customers. Better yet, it makes it actually more rewarding to download a ripped copy than to buy a legit one.
Actually, AFAIK it's even more funny than that. They try to detect fluctuations too, so you can't snoop on the stream in transit. So all it takes is a wobbly monitor to get your stream downgraded even if you _do_ have HDMI.
At any rate, much as I don't like MS, I dunno if I'd blame MS here, other than for bending over. If the MPAA demands that kind of stupidity, either you comply, or you get to play no HD videos on that computer. So MS likely faced the lose-lose choice of either they implement that idiocy, or they get to tell some hundreds of millions of potential customers that Vista doesn't play HD media at all. You can probably see how the latter is a faster suicide.
The problem is that ISP's everywhere have dug themselves in a PR hole, for some time now.
See, the move to "unlimited flat-rate internet access" was in a day and age when there wasn't that much to do on the 'net. The average user would read a few emails, maybe answer them too, but that's mostly time without any actual data transfer, and read a few web pages. Web pages which too meant a lot less graphics than today. And online games meant mostly MUDs and some cutesy java games on some website. (EQ and UO and AC did exist, but they accounted for maybe 1% of the internet subscribers.)
God knows AOL had plenty of subscribers who didn't complain, at a time when (at least in Europe) their ISDN service had 2000-4000ms ping to the second node in the traceroute, and bandwidth wasn't much better either.
So basically they sold you a service on the assumption that you wouldn't use much of it.
The drive to advertise higher and higher access speeds, again was mostly driven by marketting. Backbone speeds didn't increase proportionally, or in many cases at all. Again, the assumption was that you wouldn't actually use most of it. Sure, maybe the email with pic you send mom would upload faster, but then you wouldn't do much on the net for the rest of the day. Basically it's more like burst speed, than sustainable speed for everyone.
Unfortunately, what you pay for internet access doesn't even come close to paying for 24/7 usage of the whole bandwidth they advertised, and they know it.
Even more unfortunately, now the idea of unlimited unmetered access is so entrenched in everyone's mind, that it's a bit like an ISP game of chicken. Whoever is the first to not stay the course, and announces that they're reverting to pay per minute or pay per MB, has lost. But, like with the real game of chicken, if noone gives up, everyone loses a bit later.
Trying to go after the providers of such massive data streams is, basically, the band-aid. If they can't charge the users more, then, well, maybe they can try to charge BBC more. Or maybe they can stop BBC from making their users use more bandwidth altogether. Ditto for trying to demonize the users who actually use the bandwidth advertised: unpopular as it is, it's less of a seppuku maneuver than just admitting that the old model is breaking down and they're reverting to making you pay for how much you use.
To compound the problem, here's another thing they didn't count on: your using the upload bandwidth. The traditional model has been that some site publishes the content, and pays for that bandwidth, while you only download it and at most send a few emails and the HTTP requests/ TCP/IP handshake upstream. Basically the content providers would subsidize your broadband. Every 1 MB you download would be 1 MB that some web site paid for. Then the ISPs would divide that loot according to how much each pushed on the others' network.
Unfortunately nowadays more and more traffic is P2P or VOIP, between users which all are on such unmetered unlimited access plans. When you download 1MB via P2P, that's 1 MB that noone really paid for. That's not how that pricing model was supposed to work. It was supposed to be "free" for you, only because someone else paid for it. Or better said, it was never "free", it was just that someone else paid the tab.
With P2P, that model breaks down, because noone pays the tab. The ISP is left not only with a bunch of used download bandwidth that noone pays for, but actually ends up paying to the backbone for the upload part of it.
And again, it's a bit of a game of chicken: noone wants to be the first one who just announces that they're starting charging per MB uploaded.
Admittedly, the latter isn't "solved" by trying to extort BBC, but going after such sites looks like the easiest way out anyway. Maybe they can make them pay more for the bandwidth left after P2P and VOIP.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not very sympathetic to that approach, and that's putting it mildly. Just saying that, if you were wondering what's their problem, there you go. That's what it is.
Nothing new, then. At this point 1 TB may sound like "that much data", but then so did a 40 MB drive waaay back. Heck, at one point 1.4 MB meant a hard drive the size of a large washing machine. Nowadays that's called a floppy and already outdated.
What I'm getting at is that it's sorta like "Moore's law" for hard drives. (And occasionally Murphy's law too;) What's "whoa, I'd hate to lose that much data" at one point, is just adequate in a couple of years, and not even enough for your system files and/or swap file in 20 years.
Mind you, I don't have any inside information from someone actually writing those drivers, so take this with a big grain of salt.
Still, after actually reading TFA (I know, I know..;) I don't see any feature listed there that couldn't be just fixed by a driver update.
4x AA for example is already supported by both ATI and Nvidia for more than 5 years now. I fail to see why they'd have to build a new card to support that.
32-bit floating point filtering... isn't it supported already too? And even if it weren't, there's nothing to stop a driver from, basically, faking it. Both ATI and Nvidia have been known to fake some settings before, e.g., to win extra points in a benchmark. I don't see why they'd refrain from it, when it means making some customers very happy.
Basically, it seems to me that TFA is just inflammatory crap. Whoever bought an 8800 GTX, well, probably will notice no difference. At most they'll have to download a new driver. But then, they probably would have anyway.
Mind you, it's been almost a decade since last I had anything to do with game development, so take this with a grain of salt. Or to put it otherwise, major talking out the arse follows.
That said, AFAIK DirectX offers more features than just rendering. If you'll run "dxdiag", you'll see that it has more tabs and more DLLs listed than just Direct3D and DirectDraw. There's also stuff like DirectSound, DirectInput, DirectPlay, and a bunch of other stuff.
So if you want to make your game portable by not using any DirectX stuff, well, you'll have to write your own equivalent for that other stuff. That translates directly into higher development costs, plus God knows if your own stuff will work as well, and what bugs will it have.
(We all like to pretend that we can write better code in one afternoon than MS in 10 years, but that's actually hardly ever the case. That's more usually just a mixture of hubris and an excuse to write one's own code instead of learning how to use a library. The former is simply more fun than the latter. Don't get me wrong, there _is_ stuff out there that does work better than MS's stuff, but that one too wasn't written in a day or two.)
You also face the issue that, traditionally, most graphics cards have been optimized for DirectX, since that's what the lion's share of the market uses. Traditionally, Nvidia tends to do well in OpenGL too, ATI less so. (Plus, if you actually plan to port it to Linux, there ATI's drivers traditionally are an inside joke. Not a funny one, either.) So the choice to go OpenGL instead of Direct3D also means that a bunch of gamers will post "OMG, your game has crap frame rates" or "OMG, your game doesn't work on my computer." And be quite justified in doing so, btw.
So, there you go. As long as 99% of the PC gamers are running Windows, it makes no sense to annoy those to appease the fragmented rest of the market.
Being able to emulate or dual-boot Windows... well, takes even more out of the motivation there. Windows compatibility is how OS/2 committed seppuku, after all. If OS/2 people can just emulate your program, well, there's no reason for you to put any effort and money into porting it. The same applies to the Mac and Linux market currently, to some extent.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up involuntarily targeting lawyers too.
1. I'd imagine that any university would at least have a legal department, or a contract with some lawyer firm, or whatever. They may not be of the caliber of IBM, whose lawyers have been said to be like the Nazgul or darken the skies, but they have or can afford someone who knows whether a "bend over and give us your money and a self-incriminating confession" letter actually has any legal basis or not.
Basically it's not just that students are connected, it's that it only takes one university to feel targeted as an organization, to be a lot more organized in fighting back. When you target isolated persons or even some (incompetently-led) tiny companies, you can bully them around or pull a "stand and deliver" and scare them into actually giving you their money. When you target someone with lawyers, they'll ask those first.
2. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the universities actually had law one of the majors. So they'd have a lot of people whose whole job there is to learn about that kind of stuff, and, worse yet, some whose job is to teach it.
And the former can go ask the latter. I mean, it's not like Jane Grandma who'll be like "omg, where will I find a good lawyer, and can I possibly afford one?" If you have someone teaching you law courses, it just begs to go ask him about law.
3. Student connections run wider than just that campus. Even if you target a pure technical university, some of those students will be the son/daughter of a lawyer (Bill Gates was the son of a wealthy lawyer, for example), some will be dating a cute law student because those universities have more women, etc.
Basically, individual John Doe lawsuits/law-threats can be carefully targeted against people who statistically should be more likely to be defenseless. If your list of IPs includes one for the head of a famous law firm, you'd have to be a dolt to send him a pseudo-legal nastygram. But when you take a shotgun approach among such a big group as a university, you may well end up targeting the son of that same lawyer.
Downside: after one of those treatments you'll have a craving for cheese and a fear of cats. Then again, for some people it might not be much of a difference;)
2. The possibility to just copy music to cassette or movies to VHS has existed for ages, and that existed even before CDs gained much adoption. Heck, in the 90's even half the portable stereos, and every self-respecting cassette deck, had room for _two_ cassettes at the same time and a button to copy from one to the other.
3. If you think people had to wait for the Internet to swap music or movies or programs, I dare say you don't remember high school that well.
4. Before mass Internet access, there were BBSs. Frankly, now that was a bigger pirate haven than the Internet... or than the Carribeans back in the 1600's;)
5. Internet access isn't _that_ new and unlike everything before. Sure, only now it may have reached the grandmas or finally gotten very high speeds, but I don't think those were ever the biggest pirates anyway. If grandma wants to listen to folk songs from the 50's or for some good ol' fashioned symphonic music, she can get those for pence legally. Plus she already has her cassette and vinyl collection.
The biggest problems are teens who (A) are driven by peer pressure, and have to listen, watch, wear and say exactly what their peers appreciate. Even if he goes for the rebellious punk image, the average teenager won't actually be rebellious at all, he'll be a clone of whatever punk image is currently fashionable among his peers. And (B) face high prices for that image. And (C) don't have that much disposable income. So the pressure was always there to copy the latest fashionable album.
And those already had modems, virtually all universities had Interent as early as the early 90's, and most had access to a hi-fi where they could copy a cassette.
Plus, music companies have been complaining about Napster since the 90's, so at least at that point the world was already connected enough to make a difference, according to those music companies.
What does it have to do with anything? Even if he is wrong, I still think someone should have a right to see and contest (if they can) _all_ the evidence and logic used against him. That's the whole point of a trial by a jury of your peers.
Was he drunk? Maybe. Probably. But that doesn't change the fact that you can't sentence someone based on a complete black box, where noone knows what went inside and exactly what data it used and how.
The point is that if I (or the state) accuse you of a wrongdoing, you're entitled to see what I base that on. Witnesses, evidence, how I measured and calculated if any numbers are involved, etc. And if it's in front of a jury, those should see the complete picture too, and use their own brains. I shouldn't be able to just come and say "ok, this program on my laptop says he's wrong and I'm right, but you're not allowed to know what the program does and exactly what data it used."
Plus, frankly, as a programmer and a consultant, I find the notion outright laughable that _any_ program can be taken a priori to be 100% correct and more infaillible than the Pope. And that the humanly entered data is a priori 100% correct and beyond any questioning, before even knowing what it is.
Even software modules for more critical stuff like avionics, space exploration or banking are known to occasionally fail. And that's stuff that's reviewed and tested beyond what you'd ever dream of in a more mundane job. But shit happens.
E.g., take the infamous Ariane V control module on its first flight. Now that was one of the most expensive computer bugs ever. And the funny thing is, it's the same module that worked before in the Ariane IV rockets. Just someone didn't realize that, tested and reviewed as it was already, it was originally designed for a less powerful rocket. A type conversion to 16 bit was OK on the old rocket, but it caused an overflow on the new one. Good algorith, but used cluelessly on data outside the domain it was supposed to work on.
How can you be so sure that a breath analyzer gizmo can't possibly run into a problem like that?
Plus, proclaiming any gadget a priori 100% infaillible, is proclaiming that (A) the science behind it is 100% rock solid, (B) that the guys who made the mathematical model are 100% world-class experts, and (C) that the sensors were 100% accurate and infaillible, and (D) there's absolutely no room for user error in using it. Not only that is against common sense, it's against experience. Plenty of other devices (e.g., hand-held laser speed meters) were faulty in more than one of those categories.
At any rate, until you see what's going on in there, how would you know?
Fair point and very informative, but IMHO it still has a lot to do with tolerances:
1. Previous tight-fit rounds had to be made individually for each rifle. Each hunter or minuteman would basically cast their own balls, for the exact caliber of their particular rifle. The Minnie ball, by contrast, could be made more or less industrially in one size which could fit all rifles. Clever workaround, though.
2. Even the fact that they were still using muzzle-loaders, when at least the basic concept of a breach-loader existed since the 14'th century and a (very poor) breech-loading rifle was first attempted in the late 1700's, is due to the fact that they couldn't make a breech-loader that doesn't leak hot gas until the mid-1800's.
Not contradicting you, just elaborating some more on the technical difficulties one would have encountered if they tried to make a steam engine in the 1100's. That tight fit under pressure problem, for example, would have been a hell of a lot worse.
Ok, sorry for the long delay, but here's the second problem I see there: a machine is only useful in the right circumstances. There may be times and places where the same machine doesn't even make sense at all.
E.g., since we're talking threshing machines, let's remember that threshing is only one step of it all. It starts with the ploughing.
An acre was defined basically as the area of land that a peasant with one ox can plough in a day, from dawn to dusk. (They worked long hours before the industrial revolution too.) There's also a reason why that was defined not as a square, but as a long rectangle: you lose more time when turning at the end, so you could plough a larger area if it was a narrow strip and you had to turn less often.
So a peasant with one hide of land, at the worst end of the spectrum, would look at 120 days spent on just ploughing that land. Add to that work duties to the seigneur/lord/whatever-you-call-him, and that was more than half a year spent just ploughing. (They used more than one kind of crop, though, so they could sow the early crops and let them grow, while they continued ploughing the land for the later crops.)
Harvesting was also very work intensive. Not only it took a lot of time, but it was time that couldn't overlap with anything else. (E.g., you couldn't harvest some very early crop off field 1 on the same day as you ploughed field 2 for some very late crop.) And again you had some more days in between when you were required to work for the seigneur.
I mention the overlap, although maybe insultingly obvious, just to highlight the point that you can very much do a sum there. You add X days for ploughing to Y days for harvesting, and you get no overlap.
You also have pretty hard limits on when you have to be ready with it either, because the seasons don't wait. So you can't extend much further than those 120 old acres of land anyway, because then you'll be ploughing frozen ground in January to cover it all.
Threshing, by contrast, was a couple of days at the end. The whole point is that agriculture was that horribly inefficient, that you'd actually need all that surface just to feed your family and pay your rent and tithe. For all that year long working dawn-to-dusk, at the end you had a small mound of grain to thresh. Not a fun activity, but a lot shorter than everything else in that whole process.
So if someone had built a thresher back then, it would have saved those peasants... what? Maybe 1-2 days out of the whole year?
No, what had to came first was the ability to (A) get more land, (B) have the means to work more land, and (C) get more grain per acre too. Otherwise mechanizing threshing would have solved nothing. The real bottleneck would have been just the same.
Someone else correctly mentioned the black death, and indeed that was one major factor in why they could get more land to work. But another thing came a bit earlier too, namely a way to actually be able to plough more land: someone figured out a harness with which they can use a horse to pull the plough. That went much faster than with oxen. That had actually been invented much earlier, in the year 800 AD or so, but it took a while for that invention to spread and it took an even longer while for more and more peasants to be able to afford horses. (Initially that was something more exclusive, and the rise of the knight class was basically the rise of those who could afford a horse. And in some parts of Eastern Europe they continued to use oxen until the 1800's.)
And from there there's a whole period known as the British Agricultural Revolution, spanning from the 16'th to the 19'th centuries.
That's a whole series of long steps that were needed, before a thresher even started to make sense. Before you can worry about threshing more grain faster, you first have to start with actually being able to produce more grain.
And I'm saying that the same applied to the whole industrial revolution. You don't need to just look at "hmm, what did
I didn't say they were useless. Far from it. I'm just saying that even that was damn high-tech for the time. So take that as praise, not as putting it down.
Since the whole claim in TFA is that, you know, it's just some culture changes that finally made the industrial revolution possible, I'm saying here: technology had something to do with it too. You couldn't start the steam-powered industrial revolution earlier, because the technology and knowledge were missing to invent a steam engine. If you tried to invent that in the middle ages, there'll be entirely too many pieces of technology missing that it relied on.
Basically technology is like a castle of cards. You can't build the top until you have the lower parts ready. For each invention, there were tens of other inventions and advances which had to be made first.
Hence it's silly to find explanations like "because they started boiling water" or "because they finally got off their butts and started working long hours", when earlier the foundation just wasn't there. That's all I'm saying.
You bring an insightful point, but there are two problems with it, so let's deal with the more obvious one first: you can't have a steam-powered thresher, or a steam-powered anything, without inventing steam power first. They just didn't have that earlier, so it's silly to look for other explanations like "maybe they were lazy" or "maybe they needed caffeine".
It may seem like a simple idea, but it took a huge time to have all the pieces in place even for the most primitive ones.
E.g., Watt's machine didn't use steam to _push_ a piston. It just filled a cylinder with hot steam at room temperature, sealed it, let the steam cool down, at which point its temperature would drop and _suck_ the piston in. (Or rather the higher air pressure outside would push it in.) It was a very weak and slow engine.
But even for that you first needed stuff like a gasket that seals well enough, or low enough tollerances for the piston and tube so the outside air doesn't flow right in.
It wasn't trivial at all to make something like that in the middle ages. Medieval canons, for example, left a huge empty space around the canonball (sometimes up to an inch) rather than even try to get a neat tight fit. As late as the mid-1800, it was easier to make the Minnie ball (first practical rifled bullet for mass army use) just expand its base to engage the rifling than to even try to have it made exactly the right caliber.
Plus you needed theoretical concepts that they just didn't have yet, such as air pressure. Unless you know about air pressure, and that it's greater than zero, you can't come up with the idea to use it to push a piston in.
So basically there's a damn good reason right there why the industrial revolution didn't happen earlier: they just didn't have the technology yet.
The problem with people trying to understand why there was no industrialization in 1100 as opposed to 1800, is that we all tend to take a lot of things for granted that are only true _today_. And miss a lot of real limiting factors.
E.g., earlier they simply needed 90% of the population working in agriculture, so that simply didn't leave enough people to build an industry with. When you realize that the other 10% were the army, clerks, clerics, etc, and a few craftsmen, that was all your population accounted for.
During most of the middle ages, for example, agricultural production was about 2 to 7 grains harvested for every 1 grain planted, which is piss-poor. They had a unit of surface for how much land is needed for a peasant family to subsist on, and support 1/5 of a knight, the "hide". It was 60 to 120 old acres, or 15 to 30 modern acres, or 6 to 12 hectares, depending on fertility. You needed that freaking much land just to feed a family and pay 1/5 of one knight's fee.
(And if you didn't pay that knight, someone else would come who had knights, and take your land and your crops. Getting more craftsmen and less soldiers was just not an option.)
You just couldn't _feed_ a horde of industrial workers earlier. You had a cap on how much population you can feed, and everyone over that limit would just starve. That they died of plagues was just as well, because the alternative was to die of starvation anyway.
Boiling the water wouldn't have solved much, because you'd just have more population to starve instead.
Violence? That was the reason for violence right there too. When people's only choice is to starve or mug someone, they'll mug someone. Well, not always the vulgar robbing one in a dark alley, but also the organized mugging a state by another, a.k.a., warfare. Or raids across the border motivated by just hunger.
You can see what happens when more population survives than you can feed, because that was the Viking invasions. As only the oldest son would inherit the farm, there were a lot of sons kicked on the street with exactly no means of subsistence. And that farm just couldn't feed more than a family, locally or in the city. If not enough people died of disease, that was a lot of population who had to work as mercenaries, guards, or pirates. ("Vikings" was what they called the pirates.)
A lot of people there simply _had_ to raid and loot, because the local economy couldn't support them. It wasn't a fun life. They were dirt-poor desperate people whose whole belongings fit in the small box they sat on when they rowed the longship. They had a choice to die painfully in battle or die slowly of hunger, and they chose the former.
The whole belief in the warlike Aesir gods wasn't as much the cause of violence, but the result of _having_ to be violent to maybe survive a little longer. Damn right you had to believe there's a sense to it all, and that there's some reward awaiting you for that shitty life.
That's really what would have happened if they started being healthier sooner. They'd just have produced more people that the economy can't feed. And they wouldn't have started a great industry, simply because industrial workers need to eat too. If the agriculture doesn't support them, that's it.
That's, of course, one of the factors that armchair historians miss, but it will have to do as an example. The industrial revolution didn't start earlier, simply because a lot of things weren't there to support that kind of a society. You can't go and say, basically, "oh, I know, it's because they didn't boil water" or "oh, I know, it's because they were too bigotted and violent", when other things (e.g., agricultural production) weren't there to support larger urban populations anyway.
Other surrealistic ideas I see thrown around, some even in the summary, include that somehow it took a culture change to get people to work long hours rather than stay poor (they worked long hours earlier too) or that only now they realized they should save money t
Just to play the devil's advocate about your second point, and please don't take it too harshly: how about taking responsibility for your own life? You're not the employer's serf tied to the land. You _can_ look for another job, you know. If a job is crap and ruining your health in the long run, well, maybe it's your responsibility to take care of your own health after all.
And the employer isn't your father, nor has any other responsibility or particular interest in your wellbeing. His job is to make more money for the investors, in a nutshell. No more, no less. Sure, in an ideal world that would involve realizing that more tired employees make more mistakes, that turnover and sick days do impact the bottomline, and that even the immune system goes downhill under extreme fatigue and stress. He might even expected to be humane. But in the end, there isn't any written or unwritten law that he must take care of you more than you take care of yourself.
Basically, I don't think that "but I'm addicted to instant gratification via buying overpriced useless crap, so I can't afford to quit" or "but I'm too scared of change, so I'll stay here and get fucked up the ass" should be any more excuses than "but I'm too proud to use a condom" or "I'm too lazy to brush my teeth" are. If it comes back to bite you in the ass, the first one to blame is yourself. It's _your_ choice that ruined your health: in this case, the choice to put up with those unreasonable demands for so many years.
You can't just throw your hands in the air, be passive, and expect someone else to come and fix your life and make you work sane hours and exercise. Your own life isn't a spectator sport, where you just lean back, grab a beer and blame someone else at the end if it wasn't a good game.
If a job has that bad an impact on your health, if it's eating that much time that you barely have the time to get home and flop into bed and not do much else for yourself (not even exercise half an hour), then you just shouldn't be doing it. God knows there are plenty of other choices that aren't half that bad. At any rate it's _your_ choice whether you want to do it or not.
If the boss is kind and humane enough to care about you too, kudos to him, but that's extra. It's not him who should be the main person concerned with your wellbeing. You're the first on the list of people who should care about yourself, he's very much near the end of that list.
Again, don't take that too harshly, because I've been in that mental trap myself too. "Oooh, I can't let the boss down, plus I bet he'll be so proud of me if I finish that program within a hideously unrealistic deadline. I bet he'll be soo impressed that I work 12 hours a day." It took a very rude awakening to realize that it doesn't quite work that way. So I'm fairly sympathetic to people who still are in that trap. But nevertheless, it's still _you_ to claw your way out of that trap, not someone else's responsibility to come and save you.
It's RL. There is no deus ex machina to force a happy ending. There is no fairy godmother that turns Cinderellas into princesses. There is no hunter that comes at just the right time and saves Little Red Riding Hood from her own stupidity. You make your choices, and live with them. If you let yourself be pushed into Cinderella role, you stay Cinderella for ever.
AFAIK the immune system isn't set to kill known bacteria, it's set to kill any unknown cell. Your own cells have a "self" marker, meaning "it's mine". Anything identified as lacking this marker is instantly marked for termination with extreme prejudice.
The bacteria that kill you have had millions of years to learn to cope with that big problem, precisely _because_ they had to deal with mammals all the time. Some fake the marker (with different degrees of success, usually not too well), some do the reverse peroxide kiss of death on any immune system cell trying to do it to them, some just kill you faster than your immune system can do much about it, etc. And, even so, most actually are actually pretty easily kept in check unless your immune system is already compromised.
A bacterium which is so completely foreign that it never had to live in a mammal, well, won't live too long in there. There are layers upon layers upon layers of defenses to which they have no answer whatsoever.
Now with _viruses_ it's exactly the other way around, as the immune system pretty much has to figure out an antibody and remember it. So a new one _can_ fuck you up badly. That's why flu and smallpox nearly wiped out the american indians: those were viruses.
Of course, even then the assumption is that it knows how to modify your DNA code. Flu and smallpox already had to deal with the Europeans, so they were already well tuned for humans. A completely alien virus (a la Andromeda Strain), while it would probably get past your immune system easily, it also probably wouldn't even know where to start to reprogram your cells.
1. All type 1a supernovae are exactly as bright when they blow up, because that's a star going a tiny bit over the Chandrasekhar limit. So basically they're all very nearly exactly the same weight stars, and blow up in the same way. So since seen brighness decays with the square of the distance, you can calculate how far it was when you see one.
2. (Based on 1 too.) The farther something is, the more re-shifted its spectrum will be. Basically the faster it moves. So you can know fairly accurately how far away these 4 are.
And it would have to be a freakin' big star to be _that_ bright at that distance. You're asking for a galaxy sized star.
3. We also know how big a main sequence star can possibly get, and that's only about 120 solar masses, but the closer you get to that limit, the faster it burns and the more unstable it is. The ones over 100 solar masses burn extremely fast and tend to regularly blow up huge chunks of their mass.
At any rate, we know that a star can't possibly be as big as those things at that distance. Even a star with 100 solar masses, won't have 100 times the Sun's volume. Gravity compresses them a bit more. And even 100 times the Sun's volume would be only a bit over 4.5 times the Sun's radius. It's just not even _near_ the size of a galaxy.
Also, in spite of their massive mass and fast burning rate, the hypergiant stars seem to be "capped" in brightness, so they won't get as bright as a whole galaxy anyway.
Also, remember when I said they burn very fast? A hypergiant burns and blows up in 1 to 3 million years, give or take a few. That's about 4 orders of magnitude shorter than our Sun. They just don't live long enough for 4 of them to come anywhere near each other.
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Well, the thing is, the space race has been mostly about international penis size, rather than any actual benefits. The moon _still_ has no economic or military value, for example, and getting a man there was just an artificial milestone, for example. "Oh yeah, we're so much greater than the Russians because we put a man where neither of us had a reason to," basically.
Yes, there have been some materials and technologies which then trickled down to civillian use, but then the same advances could have been made by just funding more research without the overhead of the manned space race.
Some would have been made anyway because either the private sector (e.g., computers) or the military sector (e.g., ablative tiles) needed them anyway, and there's no difference between developping them for an ICBM and developping them for a manned shuttle. (Unmanned) Satellites would have happened even without the Apollo program, for example.
Some space stuff has been just a monumental waste all around with nearly zero benefits.
The original shuttle concept for example, was more like a car: a small reusable vehicle for the humans and maybe some small satellites, doing up and down trips all the time, and lifting all those small satellites. There were a _lot_ of those little trips needed even so, to recoup the costs.
But then NASA wanted the Air Force's budget, so they had to promise that they can lift those huge spy satellites _and_ be able to put them in a polar orbit. So the shuttle got inflated to the space equivalent of an 18 wheeler, and costs raised through the roof, to the point where it's a huge waste to actually use it for its original purpose. Everyone still puts their small satellites up by normal rockets, which was a job the shuttle was supposed to take over. But it's just not worth using it. It's big, it's unreliable (now it has damaged tiles again, for example), it needs hideous amounts of fuel, and it's grounded most of the time.
It's telling that even Bigelow puts this stuff up there with Russian rockets instead. Yes, I know, prices are lower in the poorer ex-USSR, but the propaganda was that the reusable space shuttle will make liftoff so damn cheap, that the russkies and their rockets will be obsolete overnight. It sure didn't work that way, eh?
And, oh, the Air Force still didn't get its money worth either. They still ended up using their own rockets to put those spy satellites in orbit.
It's one thing that was a waste all around, and kept around only as a national penis size symbol. No better than other historical wastes, like the pyramids. (Contrary to what Civilization said, they don't give you a free granary in every city;) It's just a national "look what a big expensive thing we can build" symbol, nothing more.
So, much as I'm a Star Wars and Star Trek fan too, sometimes it's time to call a waste a waste. Lamenting that we could do more of that instead of doing what actually works down here (you still use oil, don't you?), is a bit weird. It's a bit like saying that we should invest more in building obelisks instead of roads.
Yes, we can do great achievements if we want to, but a lot has been artificial achievements which cost a lot and delivered very little that was actually needed at that time. Similarly you could say that it's depressing that we could build a pyramid as big as Cheops's when we wanted, but the evil current administration isn't building one for Bush. Why would it want to?
And please note the "at that time" in the above paragraph, if someone feels like letting it rip with how important it will be in the future, or how the human race needs to expand before the Sun goes red giant in 5 billion years. If we'll actually need that stuff in the future, we'll do it in the future. Maybe we'll have invented better engines in the meantime, or maybe we'll have better materials, or maybe (as with Bigelow) someone will have imagined an actual economic benefit for doing so, as opposed to being just a pork barrel exercise.
In a nutshell: why do you find it depressing that we don't waste more?
I'll largely agree with your assessment of the situation in the kleptocracies. It is that bad, and worse. Very insightful indeed.
I don't really know if it's just culture, or just the same humans in very different circumstances, though. I'd like to be able to chest-thump and say "we're richer because our culture had better values", but looking around me, I think humans are humans everywhere.
Largely any country's or human group' actions, I think, are dictated by what works well. Whether it's camping in video games, or politics or whatever. If for the same personal short-term effort, action X gets you more rewards than action Y, then most humans will see X as "right".
And as countries and cultures go, ultimately we're all plutocrats, the difference is just who gets to have more money and power. And the culture then is mostly dictated by those. If the way to get into the Roman Senate was to be a latifundiary with hundreds of slaves, then culture just got moulded to extol the virtues of slavery. If in the later Italian city states or the Netherlands the merchants had the most power, the culture just got moulded to praise the virtues of trade above all else. And so on. And kleptocratic cultures just get that way because the way to get to the top is to be a part of the corruption, so people are taught to praise those who are the most successful at it. Etc.
So if a situation produces crooked kleptocrats, IMHO we have to look at why that's the best buck-per-effort there.
At the time when Europe had its industrial revolution, basically being a manufacturer was the fastest way to make money. So those had the economic power, and soon gained political power too. Not all of it went as smoothly as in England. If a crooked aristocrat stood in their way, like was the case on most continental Europe, they had a jolly good revolution. The bloody, old fashioned way. E.g., the 1848 wave of revolts.
At the time when the USA had its industrialization spurt, its imports from continental Europe were blockaded by the British navy fighting Napoleon. So prices for manufactured stuff suddenly went through the roof. Anyone who could manufacture something, could expect disproportionately high profits. It made sense to start a workshop or a factory. Or invest in expanding it, if you had one.
Now look at the kleptocracies that you otherwise describe very well. Their choice there are:
1. Invest in land, go bankrupt because you compete with USA and EU subsidized agriculture. Loser option.
2. Start a primitive factory or workshop, lose again, because your low-tech stuff isn't competitive with first world stuff. Any industry worth mentioning in second and third world countries, is pretty much just the first-world-owned sweatshops using the cheap local labour, not the local entrepreneurship.
3. Open some kind of shop. This seems a hideously popular option in low tech places.
4. Pocket the political bribes from the West, pocket half the bribe disguised as "foreign aid", ask for bribes from the rich first-world companies coming to do business there, etc.
Option 4 is simply the disproportionately more rewarding one, followed by 3 at some distance. And as I was saying, we're all plutocracies, just different people get rich and to the top. In this case it's the option 4 people. And culture gets shaped into justifying their own actions, and encouraging people to do the same.
When Europe or the USA industrialized, option 4 just didn't exist. There was no ultra-rich (comparatively) foreign power that could make you richer than the industrialists and land owners _combined_, if you just pocket their bribes.
And from there, most of the industrial countries chose 2, because that kind of people made it to the top. But some, where agriculture was strong, chose 1. That doesn't mean just Eastern Europe, but historically Belgium proclaimed its independence from the Dutch because its interests were better served by going with option 1, and that kind of people were the richest a
Actually, I thought we were talking about the two Canadian kids that got coached into changing the motherboard.
It wasn't that easy.
Much of England's motivation to expand its colonies _fast_ at that time was precisely overpopulation, and the fact that it was starting to have serious problems feeding its population any more. So in effect, the most successful colonial empire was built by those _least_ able to feed their population. Spain, France and the Dutch (which at the time also included the fertile lands of Belgium, plus the trade power to get all the grain they needed), couldn't compete with the desperation of the English.
The decline of the Mediteranean city states -- assuming you mean the likes of Genoa and Venice, not the Greeks of 1000 BC -- well, it's a more complex issue too. It wasn't that those guys starved or anything, it was that it was an empire built on trade income in the Mediterranean, and the importance of that trade declined sharply once (A) a route around Africa, and (B) America, were discovered.
Those states weren't agriculturally poor by any reckoning. As early as the 11'th century they had urbanization rates of 20% or so, which was a hell of a lot better than the HRE or England. It says that their agriculture was already a lot better than the agriculture of the more northern europe, if it could support that many non-peasants.
But their main income wasn't made with grain, it was made because most trade with India and generally Asia went through the Mediterranean and Asia Minor. All the spices, silk, exotic goods, whatever cost big money at the time, had to go through the Mediterranean, and those Italian states made a fortune out of controlling that trade.
Byzantium too made a killing from being a stop along that road, and eventually even managed to steal silkworms and produce its own silk. Now that made an even bigger killing. The 4'th crusade put the Byzantines on the slope to extinction, but made Venice a lot of money in loot. And it gave them even more control over those trade routes too.
And as long as they had money, they could do pretty much everything they wanted. Hire mercenaries to fight their wars, build fleets to control the sea, or do anything else.
Unfortunately, what came next was that (A) someone found a way to Asia that bypassed the Mediterranean completely, and (B) finding new land in the exact opposite direction. Suddenly controlling the Mediterranean meant jack squat. Losing control of the sea was, by and large, a result of having less money, rather than being a cause of it. When all that profitable trade just evaporated, yeah, they still had food, but suddenly they were just another minor county, no more powerful than, say, a HRE county.
So in a way, the story of those city states, the way I interpret it, has the exact opposite moral: what's important is to have the money, rather than to have the grain.
Or if you want an even better counter-example, look at Poland. For a while in the middle ages it made a killing with its producing lots of grain, and exporting lots of it for big bucks. (Well, big florins, ducats, and the like;) Then by the 1700s, the price of grain was already steadily dropping, and with it declined the wealth and power of Poland too. They still had lots of food for their population, even an excess of it, but that didn't do them that much good any more.
Mind you, I'm generally seeing your point that it's good to have some kind of a safety net. Just saying that history isn't half as simple as that.
Please don't take this as an offense, but you seem to have a rather inaccurate idea of how the third world works. Especially if you think you need to teach them basic agriculture, or how a two-stroke engine works. They know that. What they lack is, in no particular order:
1. Money. In the modern world, everything costs money, including getting water for irrigation, spare parts for those tractors, etc. And this is the root of all the evil that follows in this list.
2. An industry to support that agriculture. Just knowing how an internal combustion engine works, doesn't mean that you can just get a hammer and an anvil and make a tractor in a village smithy. Until this problem is solved, their agriculture is a case of either (A) inefficiently doing it by hand, or (B) importing expensive foreign tractors and spare parts, and see #1: that's money they just don't have.
3. A market where they can get that much needed money for their produce. And not just "market" as in selling it in the next city, but some kind of _export_ market, because you can't import much without exporting the equivalent. If you want to import something that costs US Dollars or Euro, you have to first sell something for US Dollars or Euro. Or you can take a loan, but then you're soon back to square one: you have to export something for US Dollars or Euro to pay it back.
But there they compete with the _massively_ subsidized EU and USA agricultural exports. And they lose.
It's as simple as that: if you and I make the same product, but the government subsidizes more than half the price of mine, you _will_ lose. That is their problem.
4. Some source of credit without all sorts of strings attached. A lot of "foreign aid" or "loans" actually come with strings attached, like "you must use that money to buy grain from the USA" or "you must use that money to buy trucks from Germany." (But when they break down, heh, you better have your own money to buy spare parts with.) Unfortunately while that may relieve a famine in the short run, in the long run it also just does even more to bankrupt the local farms and industry respectively.
5. An infrastructure. You can't have a modern agriculture without water pumps for irrigation, roads, silos, fuel pumps for the trucks and tractors, electricity, etc. And that's just infrastructure they don't have. In some cases they don't even have clean water for drinking, much less water for irrigation. And don't have the money to build an infrastructure.
6. In some cases, they don't have competent or honest politicians either. A lot of economies are run into the ground not because they don't know what an engine is, but because they're run by an incompetent, corrupt, kleptocratic clique.
Basically their main problem is that they're too poor, not that some white man has to come and teach them basic agriculture.
It's damn near impossible to start from zero and industrialize by your own efforts any more. It's a vicious circle: as long as you don't have high-tech stuff to export for the big bucks, you can't buy the machine tools and know-how to get even your basic industry started. Raw material and agricultural products are so damn cheap that you simply can't export enough of them to get some serious industrialization going.
Stalin did industrialize the USSR in the 30's... by starving a few million peasants (a lot of them Ukrainians) to death. Literally to death. That was the only way to export enough grain to be able to buy all the machine tools and blueprints he needed to start a serious industry.
Not only that kind of a solution isn't practicable in most countries, the problem just got much worse in the meantime too.
So, anyway, ironically giving them some computer skills may actually do them a hell of a lot more good than trying to teach them basic agriculture (which they already know.) If they can at least work offshore tech support, or assemble computers in a sweatshop, they and their country might even get _some_ dollars out of that. And, who knows, maybe get at least started on building the industry and infrastructure. The agriculture will follow.
Technically true, but developping a love for computers will help them in other ways.
I mean, by old skills with ZX-81 BASIC or (one year later) converting assembly to hex by hand because you couldn't fit even an assembler in 1K RAM, are technically worthless today too. Noone would pay you to convert to hex by hand, unless it's as a drunken dare. But the fact that I grew up thinking algorithmically and liking it, is roughly why I'm a well paid consultant today. And knowing roughly what happens under the hood, as in, exactly what does the CPU do, sure helps write better code than the monkeys who think that efficiency is measured in lines of code.
You mean the skill that's even more useless in the real world, unless you're a wrench monkey at the local mechanic shop? How's that more useful? Chances are he'd make less money with that than even with the most basic computer skills.
Oh, you mean how it's more macho to take your own engine apart? It never ceases to amaze me how many think their penis size is measured in how often they take their engine apart. Don't you have anything better to do with your time than pretend you're an unskilled low-wage manual labourer? I don't know about you, but my time is more valuable than that.
Now you've really lost me? Agriculture? You mean the thing that, since the Great Depression, is so worthless that it survives only by government subsidies? And where you need a damn big farm to even be able to afford the equipment, even with government subsidies?
Newsflash: nowadays everyone can produce entirely too much food, so, as is the case when supply vastly outstrips demand, prices are all the way down in the cellar. The world nowadays is split into countries which subsidize their agriculture, and countries where their farmers went bankrupt and just import the food.
So your idea of a useful profession to teach someone is... an unskilled manual labour job, which mostly lives off government subsidy, for as long as that subsidy continues? Why not just teach him to be a bum and get unemployment benefits then? It will be only mildly more humiliating, but it's less work, the result is the same, and it will cost us all less money in taxes, so I figure it's a win-win.
And generally, what's with your list containing only low-pay low-skill manual-labour examples? God knows that even if you don't understand computers, there are other better paid jobs than farmer or wrench monkey. Want to guide your kid on a non-hardware path? How about management, marketting, non-computer engineering branches (biotech still does decently well, for example), etc?
How about making lots of money? Does Bill Gates actually have anything to gain by telling MPAA to fuck off? Sometimes the world isn't about fighting idealistic crusades and righting wrongs. Certainly not at the top of a corporation.
No, actually that's not quite true any way you want to slice it. Not in this case. NBC/ABC/CBS/FOX are actually paid per estimated user who saw those ads. I don't think MS is paid by the MPAA per movie you watch on that computer.
MS's primary interest is in gaining market domination for their own media formats, not in selling MPAA's movies to you, or your eyeballs to MPAA. It could perhaps be comparing to selling both to both, but even that is stretching it. It's really selling their formats to both, with the slight added complexity that it's selling it to both sides of a single market rather than two independent markets. It's more like a plain old grab for market share and mind share, with the minor distinction that now it's for data formats instead of the more classical squeezing other products or shops out. That's really all there is to it.
It's really no different than, say, PayPal trying to sell their service to both online buyers and online sellers. It doesn't mean that it's selling either the buyers to the sellers, or viceversa, it's just trying to sell one service to both.
Briefly, eh, no need to paint the whole world with the same brush. The "they're selling you to the advertisers" explanation is right on for some market segments, but not quite for a lot of others. No need to see the whole world through those glasses now.
It _is_ a "make it suck" flag, or rather "make it suck if any component along the chain isn't DRM'ed and encrypted." The MPAA and RIAA are so caught in the whole "auugh, evil pirates are copying our content and causing us billions!" hysteria, that, well, they'd rather shoot themselves in the foot than let the spec have any place where someone could record/rip their precious content.
The difference between plain DVI and encrypted DVI (a.k.a., HDMI) is largely one created by the DMCA:
1. with DVI, you could, at least theoretically, make a video capture card with a DVI _input_ connector, and just rip the digital content that way. Basically the computer would think you're outputting to a TFT monitor, when in fact you're getting to record the digital output stream in all its quality.
2. with HDMI, well, you could do the exact same, you just have to fake the authentication and include the decryption. Which isn't impossible by any reckoning.
However,
1. Since DVI it doesn't include any copy protection, it doesn't count as circumventing it under the DMCA.
2. Since HDMI does, it does. So they could raid anyone selling such cards or adapters, and demonize anyone who bought one.
However the bottomline at the moment is that
A) I don't know of any actual such devices at the moment, and
B) If you're going to decrypt it anyway, you might as well decrypt the DVD, but
C) most people have DVI or VGA connectors on their monitors, while virtually noone has a HDMI monitor or graphics card.
So for the sake of protecting against a theoretical threat, they are making it suck for a bunch of legitimate customers. Better yet, it makes it actually more rewarding to download a ripped copy than to buy a legit one.
Actually, AFAIK it's even more funny than that. They try to detect fluctuations too, so you can't snoop on the stream in transit. So all it takes is a wobbly monitor to get your stream downgraded even if you _do_ have HDMI.
At any rate, much as I don't like MS, I dunno if I'd blame MS here, other than for bending over. If the MPAA demands that kind of stupidity, either you comply, or you get to play no HD videos on that computer. So MS likely faced the lose-lose choice of either they implement that idiocy, or they get to tell some hundreds of millions of potential customers that Vista doesn't play HD media at all. You can probably see how the latter is a faster suicide.
The problem is that ISP's everywhere have dug themselves in a PR hole, for some time now.
See, the move to "unlimited flat-rate internet access" was in a day and age when there wasn't that much to do on the 'net. The average user would read a few emails, maybe answer them too, but that's mostly time without any actual data transfer, and read a few web pages. Web pages which too meant a lot less graphics than today. And online games meant mostly MUDs and some cutesy java games on some website. (EQ and UO and AC did exist, but they accounted for maybe 1% of the internet subscribers.)
God knows AOL had plenty of subscribers who didn't complain, at a time when (at least in Europe) their ISDN service had 2000-4000ms ping to the second node in the traceroute, and bandwidth wasn't much better either.
So basically they sold you a service on the assumption that you wouldn't use much of it.
The drive to advertise higher and higher access speeds, again was mostly driven by marketting. Backbone speeds didn't increase proportionally, or in many cases at all. Again, the assumption was that you wouldn't actually use most of it. Sure, maybe the email with pic you send mom would upload faster, but then you wouldn't do much on the net for the rest of the day. Basically it's more like burst speed, than sustainable speed for everyone.
Unfortunately, what you pay for internet access doesn't even come close to paying for 24/7 usage of the whole bandwidth they advertised, and they know it.
Even more unfortunately, now the idea of unlimited unmetered access is so entrenched in everyone's mind, that it's a bit like an ISP game of chicken. Whoever is the first to not stay the course, and announces that they're reverting to pay per minute or pay per MB, has lost. But, like with the real game of chicken, if noone gives up, everyone loses a bit later.
Trying to go after the providers of such massive data streams is, basically, the band-aid. If they can't charge the users more, then, well, maybe they can try to charge BBC more. Or maybe they can stop BBC from making their users use more bandwidth altogether. Ditto for trying to demonize the users who actually use the bandwidth advertised: unpopular as it is, it's less of a seppuku maneuver than just admitting that the old model is breaking down and they're reverting to making you pay for how much you use.
To compound the problem, here's another thing they didn't count on: your using the upload bandwidth. The traditional model has been that some site publishes the content, and pays for that bandwidth, while you only download it and at most send a few emails and the HTTP requests/ TCP/IP handshake upstream. Basically the content providers would subsidize your broadband. Every 1 MB you download would be 1 MB that some web site paid for. Then the ISPs would divide that loot according to how much each pushed on the others' network.
Unfortunately nowadays more and more traffic is P2P or VOIP, between users which all are on such unmetered unlimited access plans. When you download 1MB via P2P, that's 1 MB that noone really paid for. That's not how that pricing model was supposed to work. It was supposed to be "free" for you, only because someone else paid for it. Or better said, it was never "free", it was just that someone else paid the tab.
With P2P, that model breaks down, because noone pays the tab. The ISP is left not only with a bunch of used download bandwidth that noone pays for, but actually ends up paying to the backbone for the upload part of it.
And again, it's a bit of a game of chicken: noone wants to be the first one who just announces that they're starting charging per MB uploaded.
Admittedly, the latter isn't "solved" by trying to extort BBC, but going after such sites looks like the easiest way out anyway. Maybe they can make them pay more for the bandwidth left after P2P and VOIP.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not very sympathetic to that approach, and that's putting it mildly. Just saying that, if you were wondering what's their problem, there you go. That's what it is.
Nothing new, then. At this point 1 TB may sound like "that much data", but then so did a 40 MB drive waaay back. Heck, at one point 1.4 MB meant a hard drive the size of a large washing machine. Nowadays that's called a floppy and already outdated.
What I'm getting at is that it's sorta like "Moore's law" for hard drives. (And occasionally Murphy's law too;) What's "whoa, I'd hate to lose that much data" at one point, is just adequate in a couple of years, and not even enough for your system files and/or swap file in 20 years.
Mind you, I don't have any inside information from someone actually writing those drivers, so take this with a big grain of salt.
Still, after actually reading TFA (I know, I know..;) I don't see any feature listed there that couldn't be just fixed by a driver update.
4x AA for example is already supported by both ATI and Nvidia for more than 5 years now. I fail to see why they'd have to build a new card to support that.
32-bit floating point filtering... isn't it supported already too? And even if it weren't, there's nothing to stop a driver from, basically, faking it. Both ATI and Nvidia have been known to fake some settings before, e.g., to win extra points in a benchmark. I don't see why they'd refrain from it, when it means making some customers very happy.
Basically, it seems to me that TFA is just inflammatory crap. Whoever bought an 8800 GTX, well, probably will notice no difference. At most they'll have to download a new driver. But then, they probably would have anyway.
Mind you, it's been almost a decade since last I had anything to do with game development, so take this with a grain of salt. Or to put it otherwise, major talking out the arse follows.
That said, AFAIK DirectX offers more features than just rendering. If you'll run "dxdiag", you'll see that it has more tabs and more DLLs listed than just Direct3D and DirectDraw. There's also stuff like DirectSound, DirectInput, DirectPlay, and a bunch of other stuff.
So if you want to make your game portable by not using any DirectX stuff, well, you'll have to write your own equivalent for that other stuff. That translates directly into higher development costs, plus God knows if your own stuff will work as well, and what bugs will it have.
(We all like to pretend that we can write better code in one afternoon than MS in 10 years, but that's actually hardly ever the case. That's more usually just a mixture of hubris and an excuse to write one's own code instead of learning how to use a library. The former is simply more fun than the latter. Don't get me wrong, there _is_ stuff out there that does work better than MS's stuff, but that one too wasn't written in a day or two.)
You also face the issue that, traditionally, most graphics cards have been optimized for DirectX, since that's what the lion's share of the market uses. Traditionally, Nvidia tends to do well in OpenGL too, ATI less so. (Plus, if you actually plan to port it to Linux, there ATI's drivers traditionally are an inside joke. Not a funny one, either.) So the choice to go OpenGL instead of Direct3D also means that a bunch of gamers will post "OMG, your game has crap frame rates" or "OMG, your game doesn't work on my computer." And be quite justified in doing so, btw.
So, there you go. As long as 99% of the PC gamers are running Windows, it makes no sense to annoy those to appease the fragmented rest of the market.
Being able to emulate or dual-boot Windows... well, takes even more out of the motivation there. Windows compatibility is how OS/2 committed seppuku, after all. If OS/2 people can just emulate your program, well, there's no reason for you to put any effort and money into porting it. The same applies to the Mac and Linux market currently, to some extent.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up involuntarily targeting lawyers too.
1. I'd imagine that any university would at least have a legal department, or a contract with some lawyer firm, or whatever. They may not be of the caliber of IBM, whose lawyers have been said to be like the Nazgul or darken the skies, but they have or can afford someone who knows whether a "bend over and give us your money and a self-incriminating confession" letter actually has any legal basis or not.
Basically it's not just that students are connected, it's that it only takes one university to feel targeted as an organization, to be a lot more organized in fighting back. When you target isolated persons or even some (incompetently-led) tiny companies, you can bully them around or pull a "stand and deliver" and scare them into actually giving you their money. When you target someone with lawyers, they'll ask those first.
2. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the universities actually had law one of the majors. So they'd have a lot of people whose whole job there is to learn about that kind of stuff, and, worse yet, some whose job is to teach it.
And the former can go ask the latter. I mean, it's not like Jane Grandma who'll be like "omg, where will I find a good lawyer, and can I possibly afford one?" If you have someone teaching you law courses, it just begs to go ask him about law.
3. Student connections run wider than just that campus. Even if you target a pure technical university, some of those students will be the son/daughter of a lawyer (Bill Gates was the son of a wealthy lawyer, for example), some will be dating a cute law student because those universities have more women, etc.
Basically, individual John Doe lawsuits/law-threats can be carefully targeted against people who statistically should be more likely to be defenseless. If your list of IPs includes one for the head of a famous law firm, you'd have to be a dolt to send him a pseudo-legal nastygram. But when you take a shotgun approach among such a big group as a university, you may well end up targeting the son of that same lawyer.
Downside: after one of those treatments you'll have a craving for cheese and a fear of cats. Then again, for some people it might not be much of a difference ;)
It's not that new, though:
;)
1. CD burners have existed for ages.
2. The possibility to just copy music to cassette or movies to VHS has existed for ages, and that existed even before CDs gained much adoption. Heck, in the 90's even half the portable stereos, and every self-respecting cassette deck, had room for _two_ cassettes at the same time and a button to copy from one to the other.
3. If you think people had to wait for the Internet to swap music or movies or programs, I dare say you don't remember high school that well.
4. Before mass Internet access, there were BBSs. Frankly, now that was a bigger pirate haven than the Internet... or than the Carribeans back in the 1600's
5. Internet access isn't _that_ new and unlike everything before. Sure, only now it may have reached the grandmas or finally gotten very high speeds, but I don't think those were ever the biggest pirates anyway. If grandma wants to listen to folk songs from the 50's or for some good ol' fashioned symphonic music, she can get those for pence legally. Plus she already has her cassette and vinyl collection.
The biggest problems are teens who (A) are driven by peer pressure, and have to listen, watch, wear and say exactly what their peers appreciate. Even if he goes for the rebellious punk image, the average teenager won't actually be rebellious at all, he'll be a clone of whatever punk image is currently fashionable among his peers. And (B) face high prices for that image. And (C) don't have that much disposable income. So the pressure was always there to copy the latest fashionable album.
And those already had modems, virtually all universities had Interent as early as the early 90's, and most had access to a hi-fi where they could copy a cassette.
Plus, music companies have been complaining about Napster since the 90's, so at least at that point the world was already connected enough to make a difference, according to those music companies.
What does it have to do with anything? Even if he is wrong, I still think someone should have a right to see and contest (if they can) _all_ the evidence and logic used against him. That's the whole point of a trial by a jury of your peers.
Was he drunk? Maybe. Probably. But that doesn't change the fact that you can't sentence someone based on a complete black box, where noone knows what went inside and exactly what data it used and how.
The point is that if I (or the state) accuse you of a wrongdoing, you're entitled to see what I base that on. Witnesses, evidence, how I measured and calculated if any numbers are involved, etc. And if it's in front of a jury, those should see the complete picture too, and use their own brains. I shouldn't be able to just come and say "ok, this program on my laptop says he's wrong and I'm right, but you're not allowed to know what the program does and exactly what data it used."
Plus, frankly, as a programmer and a consultant, I find the notion outright laughable that _any_ program can be taken a priori to be 100% correct and more infaillible than the Pope. And that the humanly entered data is a priori 100% correct and beyond any questioning, before even knowing what it is.
Even software modules for more critical stuff like avionics, space exploration or banking are known to occasionally fail. And that's stuff that's reviewed and tested beyond what you'd ever dream of in a more mundane job. But shit happens.
E.g., take the infamous Ariane V control module on its first flight. Now that was one of the most expensive computer bugs ever. And the funny thing is, it's the same module that worked before in the Ariane IV rockets. Just someone didn't realize that, tested and reviewed as it was already, it was originally designed for a less powerful rocket. A type conversion to 16 bit was OK on the old rocket, but it caused an overflow on the new one. Good algorith, but used cluelessly on data outside the domain it was supposed to work on.
How can you be so sure that a breath analyzer gizmo can't possibly run into a problem like that?
Plus, proclaiming any gadget a priori 100% infaillible, is proclaiming that (A) the science behind it is 100% rock solid, (B) that the guys who made the mathematical model are 100% world-class experts, and (C) that the sensors were 100% accurate and infaillible, and (D) there's absolutely no room for user error in using it. Not only that is against common sense, it's against experience. Plenty of other devices (e.g., hand-held laser speed meters) were faulty in more than one of those categories.
At any rate, until you see what's going on in there, how would you know?
Fair point and very informative, but IMHO it still has a lot to do with tolerances:
1. Previous tight-fit rounds had to be made individually for each rifle. Each hunter or minuteman would basically cast their own balls, for the exact caliber of their particular rifle. The Minnie ball, by contrast, could be made more or less industrially in one size which could fit all rifles. Clever workaround, though.
2. Even the fact that they were still using muzzle-loaders, when at least the basic concept of a breach-loader existed since the 14'th century and a (very poor) breech-loading rifle was first attempted in the late 1700's, is due to the fact that they couldn't make a breech-loader that doesn't leak hot gas until the mid-1800's.
Not contradicting you, just elaborating some more on the technical difficulties one would have encountered if they tried to make a steam engine in the 1100's. That tight fit under pressure problem, for example, would have been a hell of a lot worse.
Ok, sorry for the long delay, but here's the second problem I see there: a machine is only useful in the right circumstances. There may be times and places where the same machine doesn't even make sense at all.
E.g., since we're talking threshing machines, let's remember that threshing is only one step of it all. It starts with the ploughing.
An acre was defined basically as the area of land that a peasant with one ox can plough in a day, from dawn to dusk. (They worked long hours before the industrial revolution too.) There's also a reason why that was defined not as a square, but as a long rectangle: you lose more time when turning at the end, so you could plough a larger area if it was a narrow strip and you had to turn less often.
So a peasant with one hide of land, at the worst end of the spectrum, would look at 120 days spent on just ploughing that land. Add to that work duties to the seigneur/lord/whatever-you-call-him, and that was more than half a year spent just ploughing. (They used more than one kind of crop, though, so they could sow the early crops and let them grow, while they continued ploughing the land for the later crops.)
Harvesting was also very work intensive. Not only it took a lot of time, but it was time that couldn't overlap with anything else. (E.g., you couldn't harvest some very early crop off field 1 on the same day as you ploughed field 2 for some very late crop.) And again you had some more days in between when you were required to work for the seigneur.
I mention the overlap, although maybe insultingly obvious, just to highlight the point that you can very much do a sum there. You add X days for ploughing to Y days for harvesting, and you get no overlap.
You also have pretty hard limits on when you have to be ready with it either, because the seasons don't wait. So you can't extend much further than those 120 old acres of land anyway, because then you'll be ploughing frozen ground in January to cover it all.
Threshing, by contrast, was a couple of days at the end. The whole point is that agriculture was that horribly inefficient, that you'd actually need all that surface just to feed your family and pay your rent and tithe. For all that year long working dawn-to-dusk, at the end you had a small mound of grain to thresh. Not a fun activity, but a lot shorter than everything else in that whole process.
So if someone had built a thresher back then, it would have saved those peasants... what? Maybe 1-2 days out of the whole year?
No, what had to came first was the ability to (A) get more land, (B) have the means to work more land, and (C) get more grain per acre too. Otherwise mechanizing threshing would have solved nothing. The real bottleneck would have been just the same.
Someone else correctly mentioned the black death, and indeed that was one major factor in why they could get more land to work. But another thing came a bit earlier too, namely a way to actually be able to plough more land: someone figured out a harness with which they can use a horse to pull the plough. That went much faster than with oxen. That had actually been invented much earlier, in the year 800 AD or so, but it took a while for that invention to spread and it took an even longer while for more and more peasants to be able to afford horses. (Initially that was something more exclusive, and the rise of the knight class was basically the rise of those who could afford a horse. And in some parts of Eastern Europe they continued to use oxen until the 1800's.)
And from there there's a whole period known as the British Agricultural Revolution, spanning from the 16'th to the 19'th centuries.
That's a whole series of long steps that were needed, before a thresher even started to make sense. Before you can worry about threshing more grain faster, you first have to start with actually being able to produce more grain.
And I'm saying that the same applied to the whole industrial revolution. You don't need to just look at "hmm, what did
I didn't say they were useless. Far from it. I'm just saying that even that was damn high-tech for the time. So take that as praise, not as putting it down.
Since the whole claim in TFA is that, you know, it's just some culture changes that finally made the industrial revolution possible, I'm saying here: technology had something to do with it too. You couldn't start the steam-powered industrial revolution earlier, because the technology and knowledge were missing to invent a steam engine. If you tried to invent that in the middle ages, there'll be entirely too many pieces of technology missing that it relied on.
Basically technology is like a castle of cards. You can't build the top until you have the lower parts ready. For each invention, there were tens of other inventions and advances which had to be made first.
Hence it's silly to find explanations like "because they started boiling water" or "because they finally got off their butts and started working long hours", when earlier the foundation just wasn't there. That's all I'm saying.
You bring an insightful point, but there are two problems with it, so let's deal with the more obvious one first: you can't have a steam-powered thresher, or a steam-powered anything, without inventing steam power first. They just didn't have that earlier, so it's silly to look for other explanations like "maybe they were lazy" or "maybe they needed caffeine".
It may seem like a simple idea, but it took a huge time to have all the pieces in place even for the most primitive ones.
E.g., Watt's machine didn't use steam to _push_ a piston. It just filled a cylinder with hot steam at room temperature, sealed it, let the steam cool down, at which point its temperature would drop and _suck_ the piston in. (Or rather the higher air pressure outside would push it in.) It was a very weak and slow engine.
But even for that you first needed stuff like a gasket that seals well enough, or low enough tollerances for the piston and tube so the outside air doesn't flow right in.
It wasn't trivial at all to make something like that in the middle ages. Medieval canons, for example, left a huge empty space around the canonball (sometimes up to an inch) rather than even try to get a neat tight fit. As late as the mid-1800, it was easier to make the Minnie ball (first practical rifled bullet for mass army use) just expand its base to engage the rifling than to even try to have it made exactly the right caliber.
Plus you needed theoretical concepts that they just didn't have yet, such as air pressure. Unless you know about air pressure, and that it's greater than zero, you can't come up with the idea to use it to push a piston in.
So basically there's a damn good reason right there why the industrial revolution didn't happen earlier: they just didn't have the technology yet.
The problem with people trying to understand why there was no industrialization in 1100 as opposed to 1800, is that we all tend to take a lot of things for granted that are only true _today_. And miss a lot of real limiting factors.
E.g., earlier they simply needed 90% of the population working in agriculture, so that simply didn't leave enough people to build an industry with. When you realize that the other 10% were the army, clerks, clerics, etc, and a few craftsmen, that was all your population accounted for.
During most of the middle ages, for example, agricultural production was about 2 to 7 grains harvested for every 1 grain planted, which is piss-poor. They had a unit of surface for how much land is needed for a peasant family to subsist on, and support 1/5 of a knight, the "hide". It was 60 to 120 old acres, or 15 to 30 modern acres, or 6 to 12 hectares, depending on fertility. You needed that freaking much land just to feed a family and pay 1/5 of one knight's fee.
(And if you didn't pay that knight, someone else would come who had knights, and take your land and your crops. Getting more craftsmen and less soldiers was just not an option.)
You just couldn't _feed_ a horde of industrial workers earlier. You had a cap on how much population you can feed, and everyone over that limit would just starve. That they died of plagues was just as well, because the alternative was to die of starvation anyway.
Boiling the water wouldn't have solved much, because you'd just have more population to starve instead.
Violence? That was the reason for violence right there too. When people's only choice is to starve or mug someone, they'll mug someone. Well, not always the vulgar robbing one in a dark alley, but also the organized mugging a state by another, a.k.a., warfare. Or raids across the border motivated by just hunger.
You can see what happens when more population survives than you can feed, because that was the Viking invasions. As only the oldest son would inherit the farm, there were a lot of sons kicked on the street with exactly no means of subsistence. And that farm just couldn't feed more than a family, locally or in the city. If not enough people died of disease, that was a lot of population who had to work as mercenaries, guards, or pirates. ("Vikings" was what they called the pirates.)
A lot of people there simply _had_ to raid and loot, because the local economy couldn't support them. It wasn't a fun life. They were dirt-poor desperate people whose whole belongings fit in the small box they sat on when they rowed the longship. They had a choice to die painfully in battle or die slowly of hunger, and they chose the former.
The whole belief in the warlike Aesir gods wasn't as much the cause of violence, but the result of _having_ to be violent to maybe survive a little longer. Damn right you had to believe there's a sense to it all, and that there's some reward awaiting you for that shitty life.
That's really what would have happened if they started being healthier sooner. They'd just have produced more people that the economy can't feed. And they wouldn't have started a great industry, simply because industrial workers need to eat too. If the agriculture doesn't support them, that's it.
That's, of course, one of the factors that armchair historians miss, but it will have to do as an example. The industrial revolution didn't start earlier, simply because a lot of things weren't there to support that kind of a society. You can't go and say, basically, "oh, I know, it's because they didn't boil water" or "oh, I know, it's because they were too bigotted and violent", when other things (e.g., agricultural production) weren't there to support larger urban populations anyway.
Other surrealistic ideas I see thrown around, some even in the summary, include that somehow it took a culture change to get people to work long hours rather than stay poor (they worked long hours earlier too) or that only now they realized they should save money t
Just to play the devil's advocate about your second point, and please don't take it too harshly: how about taking responsibility for your own life? You're not the employer's serf tied to the land. You _can_ look for another job, you know. If a job is crap and ruining your health in the long run, well, maybe it's your responsibility to take care of your own health after all.
And the employer isn't your father, nor has any other responsibility or particular interest in your wellbeing. His job is to make more money for the investors, in a nutshell. No more, no less. Sure, in an ideal world that would involve realizing that more tired employees make more mistakes, that turnover and sick days do impact the bottomline, and that even the immune system goes downhill under extreme fatigue and stress. He might even expected to be humane. But in the end, there isn't any written or unwritten law that he must take care of you more than you take care of yourself.
Basically, I don't think that "but I'm addicted to instant gratification via buying overpriced useless crap, so I can't afford to quit" or "but I'm too scared of change, so I'll stay here and get fucked up the ass" should be any more excuses than "but I'm too proud to use a condom" or "I'm too lazy to brush my teeth" are. If it comes back to bite you in the ass, the first one to blame is yourself. It's _your_ choice that ruined your health: in this case, the choice to put up with those unreasonable demands for so many years.
You can't just throw your hands in the air, be passive, and expect someone else to come and fix your life and make you work sane hours and exercise. Your own life isn't a spectator sport, where you just lean back, grab a beer and blame someone else at the end if it wasn't a good game.
If a job has that bad an impact on your health, if it's eating that much time that you barely have the time to get home and flop into bed and not do much else for yourself (not even exercise half an hour), then you just shouldn't be doing it. God knows there are plenty of other choices that aren't half that bad. At any rate it's _your_ choice whether you want to do it or not.
If the boss is kind and humane enough to care about you too, kudos to him, but that's extra. It's not him who should be the main person concerned with your wellbeing. You're the first on the list of people who should care about yourself, he's very much near the end of that list.
Again, don't take that too harshly, because I've been in that mental trap myself too. "Oooh, I can't let the boss down, plus I bet he'll be so proud of me if I finish that program within a hideously unrealistic deadline. I bet he'll be soo impressed that I work 12 hours a day." It took a very rude awakening to realize that it doesn't quite work that way. So I'm fairly sympathetic to people who still are in that trap. But nevertheless, it's still _you_ to claw your way out of that trap, not someone else's responsibility to come and save you.
It's RL. There is no deus ex machina to force a happy ending. There is no fairy godmother that turns Cinderellas into princesses. There is no hunter that comes at just the right time and saves Little Red Riding Hood from her own stupidity. You make your choices, and live with them. If you let yourself be pushed into Cinderella role, you stay Cinderella for ever.
It wasn't supposed to be sarcasm.
Yes and no, mostly no.
AFAIK the immune system isn't set to kill known bacteria, it's set to kill any unknown cell. Your own cells have a "self" marker, meaning "it's mine". Anything identified as lacking this marker is instantly marked for termination with extreme prejudice.
The bacteria that kill you have had millions of years to learn to cope with that big problem, precisely _because_ they had to deal with mammals all the time. Some fake the marker (with different degrees of success, usually not too well), some do the reverse peroxide kiss of death on any immune system cell trying to do it to them, some just kill you faster than your immune system can do much about it, etc. And, even so, most actually are actually pretty easily kept in check unless your immune system is already compromised.
A bacterium which is so completely foreign that it never had to live in a mammal, well, won't live too long in there. There are layers upon layers upon layers of defenses to which they have no answer whatsoever.
Now with _viruses_ it's exactly the other way around, as the immune system pretty much has to figure out an antibody and remember it. So a new one _can_ fuck you up badly. That's why flu and smallpox nearly wiped out the american indians: those were viruses.
Of course, even then the assumption is that it knows how to modify your DNA code. Flu and smallpox already had to deal with the Europeans, so they were already well tuned for humans. A completely alien virus (a la Andromeda Strain), while it would probably get past your immune system easily, it also probably wouldn't even know where to start to reprogram your cells.
It's sorta like this:
Some time ago, we figured out that:
1. All type 1a supernovae are exactly as bright when they blow up, because that's a star going a tiny bit over the Chandrasekhar limit. So basically they're all very nearly exactly the same weight stars, and blow up in the same way. So since seen brighness decays with the square of the distance, you can calculate how far it was when you see one.
2. (Based on 1 too.) The farther something is, the more re-shifted its spectrum will be. Basically the faster it moves. So you can know fairly accurately how far away these 4 are.
And it would have to be a freakin' big star to be _that_ bright at that distance. You're asking for a galaxy sized star.
3. We also know how big a main sequence star can possibly get, and that's only about 120 solar masses, but the closer you get to that limit, the faster it burns and the more unstable it is. The ones over 100 solar masses burn extremely fast and tend to regularly blow up huge chunks of their mass.
At any rate, we know that a star can't possibly be as big as those things at that distance. Even a star with 100 solar masses, won't have 100 times the Sun's volume. Gravity compresses them a bit more. And even 100 times the Sun's volume would be only a bit over 4.5 times the Sun's radius. It's just not even _near_ the size of a galaxy.
Also, in spite of their massive mass and fast burning rate, the hypergiant stars seem to be "capped" in brightness, so they won't get as bright as a whole galaxy anyway.
Also, remember when I said they burn very fast? A hypergiant burns and blows up in 1 to 3 million years, give or take a few. That's about 4 orders of magnitude shorter than our Sun. They just don't live long enough for 4 of them to come anywhere near each other.