Those people who used to work stocking the shelves of a bunch of grocery stores or manufacturing widgets in a factory are now free to educate themselves and get a better job.
Thats what happens. We outsource jobs that are shitty and move on to new jobs which are worth more money and almost always easier than the previous shitty job.
The people that say this (and at times, I'm one of them, I love LOCAL hobby shops rather than mail order, I'm an impulse shopper), that they want to keep a bunch of local stores are being selfish. Its far more efficient to have one walmart than a one or more localized store with no large bargining power. If we were good people, we'd think of global efficiency, not selfish self preservation. Personally, I go the selfish route as efficiency is useless if I'm not able to enjoy it;)
And stop your bitching about overseas manufacturing, without it you couldn't afford half the comforts you enjoy on a daily basis. You can pretend to be all high and mighty about it, but the fact that you're on the Internet shows you're a hypocrite. You couldn't afford a computer produced entirely in the US, and they do exist.
I'm a developer, my job HAS been shipped off shore... well, its been tried... and then companies learn real quickly how stupid that is and go back to american workers. I'm not afraid of my job being offshored, I'm better at it than want they can by for $2.75/month in India, and worth it.
Is an extra 100,000 page views next week worth the millions of page views they are going to lose from being banned from Apple events for the rest of their existence?
Steve jobs has a loooong memory; he won't forget this any time soon.
Actually, people who knew Gizmodo knew they should be banned from ANY EVENT EVER after the whole TV-B-Gone event where they acted like 13 year old boys and thought they were bad ass because they could turn off a bunch of monitors/TVs at a conference... where the monitors didn't have any special security features since it was a given that the conference was for adults... not 13 year old boys pretending their blog made them journalists (which they also claim they aren't depending on what you're accusing them of).
What they accomplished by fucking over Apple in this way is that they will now likely not be invited to ANY event by ANY tech company. MS and Google aren't going to want them either, they certainly don't NEED Gizmodo, but I think the other way is not the case.
No one wants a bunch of douche bags like the Gizmodo morons at their event, they are just obnoxious little fucks the world would be better off without.
Or the part where they tried to extort them before giving it back... and 3 weeks later is not 'turned around and offered to return it to me'. Especially when its AFTER the cops have kicked your door in.
The best part is the fact that even when holding the iPhone4 wrong... it STILL gets better reception than almost every other phone on the market...
Yes, on its bad day, its still light years beyond pretty much anything else you hold next to it, but hey, the Razr doesn't have that problem! Of course, its best signal is worse than an iPhone4s 'death grip' signal.
By law, that makes them just as guilty as the original thief, slightly different charge with slightly lower punishment (assuming you don't withhold evidence, which they did by not telling where they got the phone from).
They stated, simply, that if it did belong to Apple, which was not a 100% certainty but was likely, that all Apple had to do was to ask for it back through proper channels.
They were certain enough to run a story claiming it was an apple iphone stolen from an employee at a bar, again, this alone is reason enough to nail them to the wall.
When the cops showed up, and they didn't give it back, what exactly WAS the proper channel in your opinion?
Gizmodo showed the world for the umptenth time at that point that they are nothing but douche bags. This is the same group of fucks that thought they were bad ass because they went to a conference and turned off a bunch of displays with a universal remote...
They thought they were bad ass because they 'hacked' a system who's security was 'we dont need to worry about people messing with it, this is a conference for ADULTS WITH MANNERS'
If you were a judge, you'd have been shot by now for being ignorant.
The Gizmodo staff is a bunch of juvenile idiots who don't deserve to be allowed into any sort of public event as they clearly do not know how to act in public.
That only holds true if the process of converting the original fuel source into radiation (what a laser is) and BACK into useful energy is more efficient than carrying kerosine with it in flight.
So in principle it could save energy, in reality, modern lasers are incredibly inefficient when shooting through the atmosphere of a room in a test lab, let alone several kilometers of open atmosphere... in the desert... where its full of dust... and THEN converting it back into useful energy... which is extremely inefficient as well.
So from a practical perspective, this will simply never work. The laws of physics don't change just because this guy wants to sell a product. If they can get 50% efficiency out of this in a short range outdoor test I'd be amazed. The atmosphere makes this idea silly, even if you ignore all the inefficiencies in our current technologies for doing what they want to do (which is in no way new, god knows how many times I've seen something powered by lasers on national geographic... of course its always this tiny little thing that can hardly carry itself, let alone anything else... in a dark room... with no particles in the air... operating over a range of less than 10 meters.
Wow, how awesome, you replied to me to show me whats up... but posted absolutely nothing related to the article being discussed.
I'm aware of solar power, its not unique to the military... its also in no way a viable energy source for military operations anywhere and won't be any time soon, if ever, which is highly unlikely regardless to how many companies you post that claim to be making stuff for the military. My company makes stuff for the military too, it has jack shit to do with any sort of thing that results in deaths. Charging your razor in the field, in my opinion, doesn't really count. If it counts to you, then I have a nuclear bomb in the works in my house, you'd probably call it a smoke detector.
So to date, since 2001, just under 2700 people have died in all coalition forces. Just under 1800 total deaths in the last 10 years of US soldiers.
Now... if you think over half of the deaths in the entire Middle East are from driving diesel and kerosene tanker trucks around then your're an idiot with absolutely no idea whats going on in our military operations.
As to the rest of your reply, well throw in a couple wooooshes and another you're an idiot.
The point is that you only have to use the oil once... at a cost of say... $5 million. And that can be recovered with a few hundred thousand sales at $50/each... and of course each of those copies costs essentially nothing to distribute.
All ICs on the planet depend on things extracted from oil in order to be fabricated.
Long story short, miniature electronic computing wouldn't exist without oil as its a required for fabrication of chips (ignoring all the other components in a modern computer). Forget the fact that solvents and etchants and various other things that come out of a oil refinary that are required in order to product the alloys and all the other things that go into electronic components.
You wouldn't have hardly any of the modern components without oil. Well, most of them you could have without oil, but the capacitors alone would cost more than you could afford for a new PC.
I know what you're saying, but 90% can still be considered a failure.
The US government is currently a shining example of complete and total failure, and they have 100% of their market.
MS didn't get to 90% playing the same game as everyone else, they cheated and instead of being punished they were given a stern warning and left alone.
Had they played by the same game as the rest of us, OS/2 would be the common OS, not Windows.
Things like Autotune exist because of companies like Exxon. You have no fucking clue how much Exxon alone has advanced ground radar and sonography, the amount of science Exxon has contributed is rather impressive. Because of oil companies, we know far more about our own planet than you can possibly imagine. These guys make a living out of generating high resolution maps of what the crust of our planet above AND BELOW the surface of the ocean are made of its not even funny.
They don't do it out of the goodness of their hearts, its about money, but they most certainly do advance science in numerous ways in order to further their own business, to find oil where they couldn't find it before, which directly benefits volcanologists and archeologists for instance. They've created technology that has allowed my county to turn away a potentially extremely profitable chemical processing plant... because tech the another oil company developed let them see into the ground well enough to predict that any leakage would go directly into our water supply... not just because of the whole NIMBY side, but because there was actual clear evidence that it would be a problem.
Oil companies do a lot for you besides get you to where you want to go, don't be so ignorant about the world around you. I'm not telling you that you should love the oil companies because they are trying to save the world, thats simply not true. Saying they do nothing to advance anything however is 100% false in every way.
Wrong, oil was found before the modern computer was a glimmer in someones eye. The modern computer however simply CAN NOT be produced without the beneifit of oil processing.
It is POSSIBLE to drill for oil, find it, and process it entirely without computers. You can not make a pentium processor without crude oil, it is simply not currently possible. You can act like we can't live without computers, but the reality of it is that we would simply be less efficient and not accomplish things as fast, but nothing about a modern computer is impossible without it once you take time to complete out of the equation. Without a modern computer, you might not get modern avionics, but you'd still get flight, space flight included. Again, without oil, you would not.
A modern oil field might night exist without oil, but thats only because you're drilling for oil in America instead of the places where its easier to get at.
They aren't codependent, thats your mistake. One can exist without the other, but not the other way around. Possibly assuming an infinite supply of energy, you could synthesis the right components of crude oil in order to get all the bits required to come up with all the solvents, lubricants, echants (sp) and all the other things that are required to make an IC. Some of it you can replace with more recent oils (from living plants rather than millions of years dead plants), but not all of them.
I can still show you places in Texas and Oklahoma where oil literally bubbles to the surface of the Earth, yes, they are rare, and they aren't big enough reserves for Exxon to care about, but they are there and even if they weren't you can blind drill and find oil eventually.
You can't blindly throw sand and a few other chemicals into a furnace and get a Core2Duo processor out afterwords.
Too many computers are required for the manufacturing of pretty much every component of oil, ESPECIALLY the cracking towers that make the gasoline that goes in your car.
Really? How did all of these things exist 50 years before the modern computer then, please elaborate. Again, Oil refineries are rather simple, well known chemical processes. Absolutely no computers needed. Computers help make things more efficient, but they are not required.
You do realize that computers are not a natural resource and that we actually did pretty much ALL THE SAME SHIT we do today before we had the modern computer right? I challenge you to name something other than a computing device that didn't exist in some form before modern high performance miniature computers came into being. All they've done is made things faster and more efficient, they haven't actually changed shit.
(pro-tip: without oil, the market for shiny consumer goods would skew heavily toward the 'canned' variety...);
Pro-Tip: Without oil, computers are not possible. Too many components of oil are required for manufacturing of pretty much every component, ESPECIALLY the ICs themselves. And of course the massive amount of plastic that goes into any modern computer wouldn't exist without oil. In short, no oil means no PC as well.
Yea, and what about the other 2/3rds? You think you're boss is going to understand that part not getting done?
You are CLEARLY in sales based on your statements. You think its perfectly acceptable to deliver a product that only does a 1/3rd what you claim it does.
In the last decade, 1000 soldiers have died delivering gasoline to military operations.
And how many of those thousands were during combat operations? Less than 100. Distort things much? You're still going to need to get fuel to the laser so it can power the drone... unless you think its just going to run on sunshine and rainbows?
Most fuel accidents happen no where near combat zones due to people being slack. Tensions in combat zones and natural selection tend to keep things actually safer in that respect.
As with most things related to the military, some idiot gets a number, then goes completely doom and gloom, and suddenly OMFG WE GOTTA STOP THAT!
Let me tell you what the lazier based solution does... gives them something to see in order to know A) Where the object needing fuel is located at as its being fueld and... B) The location of the refueling system. Invisible laser you say? Doesn't exist. You may not see it with the naked eye, but it'll have enough interference in the atmosphere to leave a detectable effect regardless of wavelength if it has enough energy to provide power to a drone over any sort of distance. Put on the right goggles and it'll shine for you, then you shot down the drown and mortor the refueling point. As they say in Counter Strike... Terrorist win.
Note: I as expected, did not read the actual article, just the summary. Its more fun that way.
The same idiots who drool over this will be the same idiots raving about the efficiency of their Prius.
We need to find ways to conserve energy, not event new ways to introduce massive amounts of inefficiency into a system because we're too damn lazy to plug in a cord. This sort of crap is ridiculously wasteful and lest we not forget, we're ALREADY SHORT ON POWER transmission capability. We can barely get enough energy to your house to run your refrigerator, and you want to start using devices that waste more than half the power they use to save yourself less than a seconds time?
Going to school? Good luck enrolling in classes or communicating with teachers.
I happened to do just that the other day with a friend who was registering their child... you walk into the office, fill out a couple forms, sign them, give over proof of prior education and go home.
Looking for a job? Gonna be kind of hard to do that today on foot, sans any type of electronic communication. Do you even have a hard copy of your resume? Wait, don't tell me, let me guess, it's online.
I've yet to get a job that I applied for online. Everyone I've had has been because I physically went to the location to apply. Thats what people who actually WANT a job too, online submissions are the lowest on the totum pole. When I'm looking for a job, I have several copies of my resume in my car as well as in my home office, you look like a douche when you go into a interview and they ask you for a copy because 'they forgot it' or 'lost it' or whatever. I look like I actually am prepared because I brought everything needed for the interview and backups in case prior communications failed. It happens, and showing up with a printed resume makes you look good. Showing up without one makes you look like an uprepared waste of their time.
Going to work? Go see how productivity drops when email and internet are down, regardless if they're actually needed to do your job or not.
I'm a software developer. Until today I've had my wifi (I use a laptop for everything) turned off since Friday... so I could actually get something accomplished and finished before the deadline. I had absolutely no problem accomplishing my job. Its the difference between a developer and someone who has to Google for everything. Don't get me wrong, I use Google a LOT, but I can survive without it. I have local copies of pretty much all the documentation I could ever possibly need, the Internet occasionally (and thats a big maybe) makes it quicker to find out how to do something I've never done before, but I don't NEED it.
Fact of the matter is, when I have the Internet I waste a fuck load of time doing shit like posting on Slashdot.
My job would cease to exist without the Internet as we sell an Internet service, but my ability to perform my primary job function wouldn't change.
I wonder what would ultimately have the larger impact on the US; someone cutting off all access to foreign oil, or someone cutting off access to the internet? I'll bet if you asked the majority of your friends, they would give up a car before they would give up a cell phone or internet access.
The result of cutting off foreign oil wouldn't effect our transportation much at all if it wasn't for price gouging. Almost ALL of our gasoline comes from domestic supplies, contrary to what idiots such as yourself think about our dependancies on foreign oil. Now your Dixie cups, plastic packaging, toothpaste, cars, computers, well, pretty much EVERYTHING ELSE which depends on a petroleum product as part of the production process would sky rocket. Our foreign oil dependency has nothing to do with fuel and everything to do with all the shit that depend on other parts of crude oil in order to exist. Pretty much EVERYTHING depends on oil derivatives. The increase in fertilizer price alone would probably result in half the nation starving as crops couldn't be replenished year after year, but you'd still have plenty of gasoline to power your Prius.
Bottom line is yes, there is such a thing as cyber war, and yes, it would have a significant impact on almost everyone, personally and professionally. It's a sad state of affairs, but it is the burden of dependency that we've built up over the last couple of decades.
It would at most, slow things down as we ramped up the mail rooms again. Believe it or not, people still do use mail to communicate for pretty much every
Most people stupidly seem to assume that North Korea is technologically somewhere in the beginning of 1900. They are not.
No, but 60s or 70s is probably a pretty accurate description of their technology level for most of the population in North Korea. They may have some people that can use a network, but the general population is lucky to have electricity, even living on the outskirts of the capital and some of the capitals 'skyscrapers' are electricity optional. So its not the 1900s... but its pretty fucking close from a practical perspective.
They didn't win, they hid from them and hid all their take from them so they just couldn't be found.
The Cylons weren't wiped out, just no longer essentially immortal. They can still produce new Cylons in the same old mechanical way they used to before the original 5 met them.
In BSG, humans clearly lost the war, even 150k years later, humans had not advanced to the point of being a threat to the Cylons (yet) again, and still only populated one planet with a joke for space travel compared to the old colonies. Thats not a win, even if they took out one of the biggest advantages the Cylons had.
When you're talking about taking out an 'entire carrier group', you're talking about another world war, in which case political, ecological and economical concerns will be entirely different than anything you've ever seen in your lifetime, unless you happen to have witnessed WWII.
There are only a few countries who have this sorts of ships and they aren't little. China JUST GOT a SINGLE carrier, with no escorts. Its not like we're talking about taking out The Isle of Man's Atlantic battle fleet... which is a dingy with a couple outboard motors on it.
Now I don't see using nukes as something anyone will want to do anyway, but when you get to the that level of fighting, the world will be nothing like it is now.
Just curious, have you ever actually used Firefox... or maybe have you never used anything OTHER than Firefox?
New technology support? Sure, I'll give you that one. Faster javascript, yea, thats true... thanks to Macromedia/Adobe, not really Mozilla's doing though.... the rest of them? No way, flat out false statements that aren't true in this dimesion. It may occasionally become 'stable'... relatively, but that comes and goes, it most certainly has not gotten better at memory management. Just because they come out once or twice a year an hearld about how AWESOME their memory improvements are doesn't matter since the spend all of the rest of the time making it worse. Their improvements never get them back to the previous baseline.
Car analogy: You take your car to the mechanic because it has gotten slower over time and now won't do more than 10mph, so the mechanic 'fixes' it and tells you it'll go 50 again, but thats the best he could do. 6 months later, your back at 10mph again, so you take it to the mechanic... and he fixes it... yipeee! Now it will do 45mph... and the next time 40... 35... Do you see the pattern? The mechanic might be fixing the gross problem, but the net is worse than you started with.
My computer is one of the latest MBPs, 8 gigs of ram, whatever snazzy processor they throw in them for the high end 15" models... Firefox still runs like fucking ass compared to... well everything else.
$5 says it won't even run on a standard machine from 5 years ago for more than a few hours without exploding all over itself. Seriously, who the fuck are you trying to kid?
No, he's under the impression that plugin developers who don't want to follow the public release cycle almost certainly aren't going to follow trunk, since will, the obvious fact that they'd be following the public release cycle if they were following trunk. Not everyone spends their entire life tracking someone elses chaotic mess of a code base, no matter how much they want to use the product.
Do you have any idea how incredibly retarded it is to synchronize an imap cache and nntp cache via dropbox?
imap and nntp are MADE to keep you in sync across multiple clients on a per message basis, dropbox is designed sync files that it considers binary blobs.
Slashdot Mirror
Those people who used to work stocking the shelves of a bunch of grocery stores or manufacturing widgets in a factory are now free to educate themselves and get a better job.
Thats what happens. We outsource jobs that are shitty and move on to new jobs which are worth more money and almost always easier than the previous shitty job.
The people that say this (and at times, I'm one of them, I love LOCAL hobby shops rather than mail order, I'm an impulse shopper), that they want to keep a bunch of local stores are being selfish. Its far more efficient to have one walmart than a one or more localized store with no large bargining power. If we were good people, we'd think of global efficiency, not selfish self preservation. Personally, I go the selfish route as efficiency is useless if I'm not able to enjoy it ;)
And stop your bitching about overseas manufacturing, without it you couldn't afford half the comforts you enjoy on a daily basis. You can pretend to be all high and mighty about it, but the fact that you're on the Internet shows you're a hypocrite. You couldn't afford a computer produced entirely in the US, and they do exist.
I'm a developer, my job HAS been shipped off shore ... well, its been tried ... and then companies learn real quickly how stupid that is and go back to american workers. I'm not afraid of my job being offshored, I'm better at it than want they can by for $2.75/month in India, and worth it.
Is an extra 100,000 page views next week worth the millions of page views they are going to lose from being banned from Apple events for the rest of their existence?
Steve jobs has a loooong memory; he won't forget this any time soon.
Actually, people who knew Gizmodo knew they should be banned from ANY EVENT EVER after the whole TV-B-Gone event where they acted like 13 year old boys and thought they were bad ass because they could turn off a bunch of monitors/TVs at a conference ... where the monitors didn't have any special security features since it was a given that the conference was for adults ... not 13 year old boys pretending their blog made them journalists (which they also claim they aren't depending on what you're accusing them of).
What they accomplished by fucking over Apple in this way is that they will now likely not be invited to ANY event by ANY tech company. MS and Google aren't going to want them either, they certainly don't NEED Gizmodo, but I think the other way is not the case.
No one wants a bunch of douche bags like the Gizmodo morons at their event, they are just obnoxious little fucks the world would be better off without.
Or the part where they tried to extort them before giving it back ... and 3 weeks later is not 'turned around and offered to return it to me'. Especially when its AFTER the cops have kicked your door in.
The best part is the fact that even when holding the iPhone4 wrong ... it STILL gets better reception than almost every other phone on the market ...
Yes, on its bad day, its still light years beyond pretty much anything else you hold next to it, but hey, the Razr doesn't have that problem! Of course, its best signal is worse than an iPhone4s 'death grip' signal.
They openly acknowledged how they got it.
By law, that makes them just as guilty as the original thief, slightly different charge with slightly lower punishment (assuming you don't withhold evidence, which they did by not telling where they got the phone from).
They stated, simply, that if it did belong to Apple, which was not a 100% certainty but was likely, that all Apple had to do was to ask for it back through proper channels.
They were certain enough to run a story claiming it was an apple iphone stolen from an employee at a bar, again, this alone is reason enough to nail them to the wall.
When the cops showed up, and they didn't give it back, what exactly WAS the proper channel in your opinion?
Gizmodo showed the world for the umptenth time at that point that they are nothing but douche bags. This is the same group of fucks that thought they were bad ass because they went to a conference and turned off a bunch of displays with a universal remote ...
They thought they were bad ass because they 'hacked' a system who's security was 'we dont need to worry about people messing with it, this is a conference for ADULTS WITH MANNERS'
If you were a judge, you'd have been shot by now for being ignorant.
The Gizmodo staff is a bunch of juvenile idiots who don't deserve to be allowed into any sort of public event as they clearly do not know how to act in public.
Those are converted to kerosine, i.e. JP-8, like everything else.
They switched to a single fuel for everything a long time ago.
That only holds true if the process of converting the original fuel source into radiation (what a laser is) and BACK into useful energy is more efficient than carrying kerosine with it in flight.
So in principle it could save energy, in reality, modern lasers are incredibly inefficient when shooting through the atmosphere of a room in a test lab, let alone several kilometers of open atmosphere ... in the desert ... where its full of dust ... and THEN converting it back into useful energy ... which is extremely inefficient as well.
So from a practical perspective, this will simply never work. The laws of physics don't change just because this guy wants to sell a product. If they can get 50% efficiency out of this in a short range outdoor test I'd be amazed. The atmosphere makes this idea silly, even if you ignore all the inefficiencies in our current technologies for doing what they want to do (which is in no way new, god knows how many times I've seen something powered by lasers on national geographic ... of course its always this tiny little thing that can hardly carry itself, let alone anything else ... in a dark room ... with no particles in the air ... operating over a range of less than 10 meters.
Wow, how awesome, you replied to me to show me whats up ... but posted absolutely nothing related to the article being discussed.
I'm aware of solar power, its not unique to the military ... its also in no way a viable energy source for military operations anywhere and won't be any time soon, if ever, which is highly unlikely regardless to how many companies you post that claim to be making stuff for the military. My company makes stuff for the military too, it has jack shit to do with any sort of thing that results in deaths. Charging your razor in the field, in my opinion, doesn't really count. If it counts to you, then I have a nuclear bomb in the works in my house, you'd probably call it a smoke detector.
So to date, since 2001, just under 2700 people have died in all coalition forces. Just under 1800 total deaths in the last 10 years of US soldiers.
Now ... if you think over half of the deaths in the entire Middle East are from driving diesel and kerosene tanker trucks around then your're an idiot with absolutely no idea whats going on in our military operations.
As to the rest of your reply, well throw in a couple wooooshes and another you're an idiot.
The point is that you only have to use the oil once ... at a cost of say ... $5 million. And that can be recovered with a few hundred thousand sales at $50/each ... and of course each of those copies costs essentially nothing to distribute.
All ICs on the planet depend on things extracted from oil in order to be fabricated.
Long story short, miniature electronic computing wouldn't exist without oil as its a required for fabrication of chips (ignoring all the other components in a modern computer). Forget the fact that solvents and etchants and various other things that come out of a oil refinary that are required in order to product the alloys and all the other things that go into electronic components.
You wouldn't have hardly any of the modern components without oil. Well, most of them you could have without oil, but the capacitors alone would cost more than you could afford for a new PC.
I know what you're saying, but 90% can still be considered a failure.
The US government is currently a shining example of complete and total failure, and they have 100% of their market.
MS didn't get to 90% playing the same game as everyone else, they cheated and instead of being punished they were given a stern warning and left alone.
Had they played by the same game as the rest of us, OS/2 would be the common OS, not Windows.
Exxon doesn't advance anything.
Silly little man.
Things like Autotune exist because of companies like Exxon. You have no fucking clue how much Exxon alone has advanced ground radar and sonography, the amount of science Exxon has contributed is rather impressive. Because of oil companies, we know far more about our own planet than you can possibly imagine. These guys make a living out of generating high resolution maps of what the crust of our planet above AND BELOW the surface of the ocean are made of its not even funny.
They don't do it out of the goodness of their hearts, its about money, but they most certainly do advance science in numerous ways in order to further their own business, to find oil where they couldn't find it before, which directly benefits volcanologists and archeologists for instance. They've created technology that has allowed my county to turn away a potentially extremely profitable chemical processing plant ... because tech the another oil company developed let them see into the ground well enough to predict that any leakage would go directly into our water supply ... not just because of the whole NIMBY side, but because there was actual clear evidence that it would be a problem.
Oil companies do a lot for you besides get you to where you want to go, don't be so ignorant about the world around you. I'm not telling you that you should love the oil companies because they are trying to save the world, thats simply not true. Saying they do nothing to advance anything however is 100% false in every way.
Wrong, oil was found before the modern computer was a glimmer in someones eye. The modern computer however simply CAN NOT be produced without the beneifit of oil processing.
It is POSSIBLE to drill for oil, find it, and process it entirely without computers. You can not make a pentium processor without crude oil, it is simply not currently possible. You can act like we can't live without computers, but the reality of it is that we would simply be less efficient and not accomplish things as fast, but nothing about a modern computer is impossible without it once you take time to complete out of the equation. Without a modern computer, you might not get modern avionics, but you'd still get flight, space flight included. Again, without oil, you would not.
A modern oil field might night exist without oil, but thats only because you're drilling for oil in America instead of the places where its easier to get at.
They aren't codependent, thats your mistake. One can exist without the other, but not the other way around. Possibly assuming an infinite supply of energy, you could synthesis the right components of crude oil in order to get all the bits required to come up with all the solvents, lubricants, echants (sp) and all the other things that are required to make an IC. Some of it you can replace with more recent oils (from living plants rather than millions of years dead plants), but not all of them.
I can still show you places in Texas and Oklahoma where oil literally bubbles to the surface of the Earth, yes, they are rare, and they aren't big enough reserves for Exxon to care about, but they are there and even if they weren't you can blind drill and find oil eventually.
You can't blindly throw sand and a few other chemicals into a furnace and get a Core2Duo processor out afterwords.
Too many computers are required for the manufacturing of pretty much every component of oil, ESPECIALLY the cracking towers that make the gasoline that goes in your car.
Really? How did all of these things exist 50 years before the modern computer then, please elaborate. Again, Oil refineries are rather simple, well known chemical processes. Absolutely no computers needed. Computers help make things more efficient, but they are not required.
You do realize that computers are not a natural resource and that we actually did pretty much ALL THE SAME SHIT we do today before we had the modern computer right? I challenge you to name something other than a computing device that didn't exist in some form before modern high performance miniature computers came into being. All they've done is made things faster and more efficient, they haven't actually changed shit.
(pro-tip: without oil, the market for shiny consumer goods would skew heavily toward the 'canned' variety...);
Pro-Tip: Without oil, computers are not possible. Too many components of oil are required for manufacturing of pretty much every component, ESPECIALLY the ICs themselves. And of course the massive amount of plastic that goes into any modern computer wouldn't exist without oil. In short, no oil means no PC as well.
Yea, and what about the other 2/3rds? You think you're boss is going to understand that part not getting done?
You are CLEARLY in sales based on your statements. You think its perfectly acceptable to deliver a product that only does a 1/3rd what you claim it does.
In the last decade, 1000 soldiers have died delivering gasoline to military operations.
And how many of those thousands were during combat operations? Less than 100. Distort things much? You're still going to need to get fuel to the laser so it can power the drone ... unless you think its just going to run on sunshine and rainbows?
Most fuel accidents happen no where near combat zones due to people being slack. Tensions in combat zones and natural selection tend to keep things actually safer in that respect.
As with most things related to the military, some idiot gets a number, then goes completely doom and gloom, and suddenly OMFG WE GOTTA STOP THAT!
Let me tell you what the lazier based solution does ... gives them something to see in order to know A) Where the object needing fuel is located at as its being fueld and ... B) The location of the refueling system. Invisible laser you say? Doesn't exist. You may not see it with the naked eye, but it'll have enough interference in the atmosphere to leave a detectable effect regardless of wavelength if it has enough energy to provide power to a drone over any sort of distance. Put on the right goggles and it'll shine for you, then you shot down the drown and mortor the refueling point. As they say in Counter Strike ... Terrorist win.
Note: I as expected, did not read the actual article, just the summary. Its more fun that way.
The same idiots who drool over this will be the same idiots raving about the efficiency of their Prius.
We need to find ways to conserve energy, not event new ways to introduce massive amounts of inefficiency into a system because we're too damn lazy to plug in a cord. This sort of crap is ridiculously wasteful and lest we not forget, we're ALREADY SHORT ON POWER transmission capability. We can barely get enough energy to your house to run your refrigerator, and you want to start using devices that waste more than half the power they use to save yourself less than a seconds time?
Going to school? Good luck enrolling in classes or communicating with teachers.
I happened to do just that the other day with a friend who was registering their child ... you walk into the office, fill out a couple forms, sign them, give over proof of prior education and go home.
Looking for a job? Gonna be kind of hard to do that today on foot, sans any type of electronic communication. Do you even have a hard copy of your resume? Wait, don't tell me, let me guess, it's online.
I've yet to get a job that I applied for online. Everyone I've had has been because I physically went to the location to apply. Thats what people who actually WANT a job too, online submissions are the lowest on the totum pole. When I'm looking for a job, I have several copies of my resume in my car as well as in my home office, you look like a douche when you go into a interview and they ask you for a copy because 'they forgot it' or 'lost it' or whatever. I look like I actually am prepared because I brought everything needed for the interview and backups in case prior communications failed. It happens, and showing up with a printed resume makes you look good. Showing up without one makes you look like an uprepared waste of their time.
Going to work? Go see how productivity drops when email and internet are down, regardless if they're actually needed to do your job or not.
I'm a software developer. Until today I've had my wifi (I use a laptop for everything) turned off since Friday ... so I could actually get something accomplished and finished before the deadline. I had absolutely no problem accomplishing my job. Its the difference between a developer and someone who has to Google for everything. Don't get me wrong, I use Google a LOT, but I can survive without it. I have local copies of pretty much all the documentation I could ever possibly need, the Internet occasionally (and thats a big maybe) makes it quicker to find out how to do something I've never done before, but I don't NEED it.
Fact of the matter is, when I have the Internet I waste a fuck load of time doing shit like posting on Slashdot.
My job would cease to exist without the Internet as we sell an Internet service, but my ability to perform my primary job function wouldn't change.
I wonder what would ultimately have the larger impact on the US; someone cutting off all access to foreign oil, or someone cutting off access to the internet? I'll bet if you asked the majority of your friends, they would give up a car before they would give up a cell phone or internet access.
The result of cutting off foreign oil wouldn't effect our transportation much at all if it wasn't for price gouging. Almost ALL of our gasoline comes from domestic supplies, contrary to what idiots such as yourself think about our dependancies on foreign oil. Now your Dixie cups, plastic packaging, toothpaste, cars, computers, well, pretty much EVERYTHING ELSE which depends on a petroleum product as part of the production process would sky rocket. Our foreign oil dependency has nothing to do with fuel and everything to do with all the shit that depend on other parts of crude oil in order to exist. Pretty much EVERYTHING depends on oil derivatives. The increase in fertilizer price alone would probably result in half the nation starving as crops couldn't be replenished year after year, but you'd still have plenty of gasoline to power your Prius.
Bottom line is yes, there is such a thing as cyber war, and yes, it would have a significant impact on almost everyone, personally and professionally. It's a sad state of affairs, but it is the burden of dependency that we've built up over the last couple of decades.
It would at most, slow things down as we ramped up the mail rooms again. Believe it or not, people still do use mail to communicate for pretty much every
Most people stupidly seem to assume that North Korea is technologically somewhere in the beginning of 1900. They are not.
No, but 60s or 70s is probably a pretty accurate description of their technology level for most of the population in North Korea. They may have some people that can use a network, but the general population is lucky to have electricity, even living on the outskirts of the capital and some of the capitals 'skyscrapers' are electricity optional. So its not the 1900s ... but its pretty fucking close from a practical perspective.
They didn't win, they hid from them and hid all their take from them so they just couldn't be found.
The Cylons weren't wiped out, just no longer essentially immortal. They can still produce new Cylons in the same old mechanical way they used to before the original 5 met them.
In BSG, humans clearly lost the war, even 150k years later, humans had not advanced to the point of being a threat to the Cylons (yet) again, and still only populated one planet with a joke for space travel compared to the old colonies. Thats not a win, even if they took out one of the biggest advantages the Cylons had.
When you're talking about taking out an 'entire carrier group', you're talking about another world war, in which case political, ecological and economical concerns will be entirely different than anything you've ever seen in your lifetime, unless you happen to have witnessed WWII.
There are only a few countries who have this sorts of ships and they aren't little. China JUST GOT a SINGLE carrier, with no escorts. Its not like we're talking about taking out The Isle of Man's Atlantic battle fleet ... which is a dingy with a couple outboard motors on it.
Now I don't see using nukes as something anyone will want to do anyway, but when you get to the that level of fighting, the world will be nothing like it is now.
Just curious, have you ever actually used Firefox ... or maybe have you never used anything OTHER than Firefox?
New technology support? Sure, I'll give you that one. Faster javascript, yea, thats true ... thanks to Macromedia/Adobe, not really Mozilla's doing though. ... the rest of them? No way, flat out false statements that aren't true in this dimesion. It may occasionally become 'stable' ... relatively, but that comes and goes, it most certainly has not gotten better at memory management. Just because they come out once or twice a year an hearld about how AWESOME their memory improvements are doesn't matter since the spend all of the rest of the time making it worse. Their improvements never get them back to the previous baseline.
Car analogy: You take your car to the mechanic because it has gotten slower over time and now won't do more than 10mph, so the mechanic 'fixes' it and tells you it'll go 50 again, but thats the best he could do. 6 months later, your back at 10mph again, so you take it to the mechanic ... and he fixes it ... yipeee! Now it will do 45mph ... and the next time 40 ... 35 ... Do you see the pattern? The mechanic might be fixing the gross problem, but the net is worse than you started with.
My computer is one of the latest MBPs, 8 gigs of ram, whatever snazzy processor they throw in them for the high end 15" models ... Firefox still runs like fucking ass compared to ... well everything else.
$5 says it won't even run on a standard machine from 5 years ago for more than a few hours without exploding all over itself. Seriously, who the fuck are you trying to kid?
No, he's under the impression that plugin developers who don't want to follow the public release cycle almost certainly aren't going to follow trunk, since will, the obvious fact that they'd be following the public release cycle if they were following trunk. Not everyone spends their entire life tracking someone elses chaotic mess of a code base, no matter how much they want to use the product.
Do you have any idea how incredibly retarded it is to synchronize an imap cache and nntp cache via dropbox?
imap and nntp are MADE to keep you in sync across multiple clients on a per message basis, dropbox is designed sync files that it considers binary blobs.