The disenfranchisement of third parties is just a symptom. The cause is our one vote, plurality wins election system. It's been mathematically shown to gravitate towards two parties.
The fix is any host of alternative election systems. While no system is perfect, most are better than one vote, plurality wins. One of the simplest to implement is instant run-off.
Simplified, wealth is $, an amount.
Income is $ per year, a rate.
An income tax is $ per year, also a rate.
A wealth tax as you've outlined would also be $ per year, a rate.
When you impose a $ per year tax on a $ per year income, the units are consistent and it works out to a percentage.
When you impose a $ per year tax on $, the units are inconsistent and the amount people would be taxed is likewise inconsistent. Mary the socialite earns $50k/yr and spends every dime of it. Jane the librarian also earns $50k/yr but saves most of it. Under a wealth tax, Jane would pay a higher percentage of her income as taxes. She's saving her money instead of blowing it, which increases her wealth, and under your wealth tax that means she's supposed to pay more.
Wealth taxes as most people envision them simply don't work because of this fundamental mathematical flaw. The units have to be consistent if you want everyone under the same circumstances to be paying the same percentage. The only way to get a wealth tax to work is to tax people just once in their life. But that's easily duplicated by an inheritance tax or just taxing the income of people getting an inheritance.
Another thing most people proposing a wealth tax miss is that wealth has already been taxed. At some point it time, it was income, and thus was taxed. The fact that someone accumulates wealth means either their income is high (in which case just raise their income tax), or they tend to save their money instead of spend it (in which case taxing them higher is promoting fiscal irresponsibility).
Please tell me that this doesn't mean Verisign is poised to scoop up:.nte.ten.ent.tne.cmo.moc.mco.ocm...
to resell them to domain typo-squatters?
Y'know, if ICANN were truly looking out for the best interests of the net, they would reserve all those TLDs as well as foreign transliterations (.xom ->.com), and automatically remap them to.com,.net, etc. So if you accidentally typed randomdomain.cmo, you'd automatically be sent to randomdomain.com.
So I guess we'll see if ICANN wants what's best for the Internet, or they just want more money.
Completely agree that deficit spending is the right strategy some of the time. The problem is that in a few years when the economy is booming, most of the people advocating deficit spending now will still be advocating deficit spending then. Anyone who calls for budget cuts so we can pay back some of our accrued debt will be ostracized as hating children and poor people and military programs. After all, "the economy is booming; you'd have to be crazy to want to cut spending."
Either you increase government spending in bad times and decrease it in good times. Or you hold government spending constant regardless of the economy. You do not increase government spending in bad times, and increase it in good times.
Lobbying from the Movie/TV/Music industry overwhelming favors Democrats by nearly a 3:1 margin. There's a tendency for people to interpret politics as "D = good, R = bad" or vice versa depending on your political affiliation. It is never that simple.
I think this is a non-story. Integers are intuitive. Non-integer real numbers are not. A number line is just a graphical representation of all real numbers, integer and non-integer.
Once a kid gets the concept that there are numbers other than integers, the number line becomes perfectly natural.
My suspicion is that, once you eliminate the most obvious ways to run a company badly, it's all a big crap shoot.
It's not a suspicion. The flaw in the free market isn't that it doesn't work, as most anti-market types think. It's that it works too well. As the market becomes more efficient, the relative gains from good decisions become smaller. Meanwhile, the gains (or losses) from random luck stay the same. Eventually you arrive at a state where which company does best is mostly determined by blind luck and slick advertising, not necessarily a better product.
That's why if you plot the behavior of the stock markets, it looks like random noise. They've become so efficient that the random noise far overshadows the market movements due to good/bad decisions. Occasionally there are some blips and outliers which a quick and observant investor can act on, but in general the time spent trying to find those blips isn't worth the return compared to other productive tasks. Which is why index funds are recommended. OTOH you can't just blindly invest in index funds. Otherwise bad investments like mortgage-backed securities can soak up investment dollars without being called out for being bad investments.
Nobody forced anybody to license anything under FRAND conditions. The patent holders voluntarily committed them to FRAND licensing in order to get them included within a standard. That's how standards work.
Which is why I contend that if things continue as they are, with Apple securing exorbitant licensing fees for trivial patents like "slide to unlock" while FRAND patents are limited to small fixed royalties, there is only one logical outcome:
FRAND and standards are dead. No company/inventor in their right mind will submit their patent to become part of a standard under FRAND. They will keep it to themselves and require individual licenses, both to generate more money and to protect themselves from patent lawsuits. Welcome to the brave new world of standard-less technology, brought to you by Apple.
Oh dear. 180-190 F is 82-88 C. Not "double the temperature you make your coffee." (Which is also a nonsense statement based on the arbitrary Centigrade or Fahrenheit scale, rather than the absolute Kelvin scale.)
And FWIW, the National Coffee Association recommends holding the coffee at a temperature of 180-185 F prior to serving. Which is what the machines at McDonalds were set at. If you're serving your coffee at 140 F, you're doing it wrong.
The 700 burns were over the span of something like a dozen years and billions of cups served. When I did the math years ago, if you drove 5 miles round-trip to buy your cup of McDonalds coffee, you were more likely to die in a traffic accident than to be burned by spilling your McDonalds coffee. If their coffee was too dangerous for public consumption, then so are all cars.
I used to work at a hotel when we switched about a thousand bulbs from incandescent to CFLs. The housemen reported that they had gone from replacing 3-5 burnt-out bulbs a day, to about 1 every other day. So while there are doubtless outliers and anecdotes of CFLs burning out early, on average they really do last substantially longer than incandescents.
How long do you hold a grudge? After the rootkit thing, I avoided Sony for years. When it came time to buy a laptop a year ago, I looked at what was available. The only laptops which met my criteria (small and lightweight, discrete GPU, good to excellent high-res screen) were a Sony Z and Macbook Pro. I certainly wasn't going to give Apple my money, and the Sony rootkit things was long ago (in computer industry terms). So I took a closer look at the Sony, found it at a great price, and bit.
When I got it home, I was prepared to do the wipe and reinstall that's standard on all laptops to get rid of the crapware. I started downloading drivers on my desktop, and while creating the restore DVDs from the new laptop I noticed an option for a "minimal restore". Curious, I read up on it. It was Windows 7 + all necessary drivers pre-installed, none of the crapware. So I killed the downloads on the desktop and did the minimal restore, and have been golden ever since.
My point is, companies do bad things, companies do good things. How long do you boycott them for doing a bad thing? Forever? Then within a decade or so I'll bet every company in existence will be on your boycott list, and you won't be able to buy anything. Yes we as customers need to punish companies for bad behavior. But it needs to be proportional to the transgression, and you need to be able to forgive if they right the wrong and turn things around.
I won't say how long is a proper punishment. That's for each individual to decide. For me, 5 years seemed like enough. And I do want to encourage them for being one of the few companies to put a decent screen on their laptops, as well as addressing the preloaded crapware issue. Otherwise, Sony is the company which installed rootkits; Apple is the current Great Evil; Dell is the company which refused to replace computers with failing capacitors; HP is the company which sells ink at ridiculous markups; IBM is the company which sold Deathstar hard drives; Toshiba is the company which sold CNC milling machines to the Soviets; etc. And I guess my righteous indignation means I can never buy a laptop.
The funny thing is Apple basically did the same thing, except they secretly used their customers' iPhones without the owner's consent nor permission to collect MAC address/SSID/GPS coordinates to build a geolocation map.
Google made the mistake of doing The Right Thing - building the map completely on the company's dime, and publicly announcing what exactly they were doing. Then when they found they had collected wifi payload data as well, they reported themselves to the public.
Basically what's happening is the company who is being a responsible citizen and admitting to their mistakes is being punished. While the company which did the same stuff in secret and refuses to admit to it gets off scott free.
This. Most of the time you want to take out a target, not just blow sh*t up. The B-52's design for massive carpet-bombing dates from an age when you had to throw hundreds of bombs out there in the hopes that one might hit the target. The drone-fired missiles, while lacking in explosives, are guided or self-guided. A single missile has a very high probability of hitting the target, which in most cases makes the explosives they carry sufficient for the task. Even with JDAM bombs, you're better off dropping them one at a time with a laser designator for targeting. A small fighter/bomber like an F-18 fills that role better.
The tactical need for a big bomber like the B-52 is disappearing. The only use I can think of for them is when you're not sure where the target is, and like in the old days you want to carpet-bomb an area in the hopes that one might hit the target.
Big media doesn't care about this as long as Aereo stays in one market, but they know that the internet gives Aereo a long antenna lead to anyplace.
This is really the bigger issue here. The Internet has pretty much made the concept of geographical markets for media content obsolete. Big media refuses to accept this new reality, and is suing anyone trying to do business in accordance with reality. [Insert buggywhip analogy]
If the courts accept Oracle's position and programming languages are copyrightable, then Oracle owes a huge boatload of money to Kernighan, Ritchie, and Stroustrup. Most of Java reads like C/C++.
How does AT&T make money off this? Your phone gets stolen so you spend $200 to buy a new one. Thief gets a SIM card for service, but doesn't spend $200 on a new phone. If you assume the thief would've gotten or already had cell phone service regardless (a cheap free one if he hadn't stolen yours), it seems like it's a net wash for AT&T.
I agree they have a moral obligation to refuse to activate stolen phones, as an added discouragement for theft. But I don't see any profit motive in not doing so, just sheer laziness. In fact, strictly from an economic utilization standpoint, bricking stolen phones wastes more resources for society overall.
It's not pessimistic. You actually don't want it going quite so fast. Voyager 2's trajectory and velocity were set - it had to be moving at a certain speed in order to meet up with Uranus and Neptune. Consequently, the gravity assists had sped up Voyager 2 so much that by the time it reached Neptune, the entire close encounter was pretty much over in a day. They had to pre-program it to take pictures and measurements and store it on tape, hope that everything worked, and wait for the data to be sent back to Earth. By the time we got it, Voyager 2 was already leaving Neptune. There were no second chances, and we were fortunate that some of the pan-slew timed exposure tricks worked perfectly.
The New Horizons flyby of Pluto is pretty much going to be the same thing. All the close-up observations of Pluto and its moons are going to happen on 14 July, 2015. One day. No second chances if it turns out someone forgot to send the command to remove the lens cap. If it had been moving at 17 km/s instead of 13 km/s, we'd have about 25% less observation time. Better to wait a few years longer for the spacecraft to get there, in order to get a few more hours and days observation time.
In the future, with an ion engine, maybe we'll be able to send probes which speed up the first half of the trip, and slow down the second half. That would allow us to extend the encounter times, or even enter into orbit around the outer planet(oid), without extending the travel time to decades.
Voyagers 1 and 2 took advantage of a rare planetary alignment which won't happen again until around 2150. Originally both spacecraft were supposed to visit all four outer planets, but Voyager 1 was sacrificed to get a closer look at Titan, which had recently been discovered to have an atmosphere. Without such an alignment, they wouldn't have been anywhere near as ambitious and quite possibly might not have even been built. Pioneer 11 didn't have such a favorable alignment and had to make an almost 180 degree direction change to go from Jupiter to Saturn.
So it wasn't that we were more ambitious about space exploration back in the 1970s when the Voyagers were launched. We just knew we were up against a hard deadline for an opportunity which wouldn't come again for 175 years, and scrambled to take advantage of it before the window closed.
Carbon dioxide might not be the worst greenhouse gas, but (A) we release orders of magnitude more of it than any other green house gas. You could eliminate every methane emitter on earth and not make a dent in global warming because well over 90% of it comes from the CO2 we release.
Actually, water vapor is the most common and (cumulatively) most potent greenhouse gas and is given off in roughly the same quantity as CO2 by most combustion and cellular respiration. CO2 is a distant second, not 90%. The difference is that water vapor has a fairly dynamic and self-regulating cycle where excess quantities of it fall out of the sky as rain. CO2 kinda just sits there until plants can extract it from the air.
Diesel has about 14% higher energy density per unit volume. It weighs more and there are physically more molecules in it per gallon. So 35 mpg diesel is actually closer to 31 mpg in a direct comparison with gasoline mpg. The Union of Concerned Scientists recommends adjusting diesel mpg down by 20% when comparing to gasoline to mpg. And for emissions they recommend adjusting it down 25% when comparing to gasoline.
Fuel consumption is actually the inverse of mpg. mpg is miles per gallon; fuel consumption is gallons per mile. This is why the rest of the world uses liters per 100 km to measure fuel efficiency. Since mpg is the inverse of what we're really interested in, the high end of mpg actually represents the smallest fuel savings. For a given commute, switching from a 15 mpg vehicle to a 25 mpg vehicle saves more fuel than switching from a 25 mpg vehicle to a 50 mpg vehicle. This is despite the first switch being an improvement of "only" 10 mpg, while the second switch is an improvement of 25 mpg. If you measure it in gallons per 100 miles, it becomes obvious:
15 mpg = 6.67 gal per 100 mi
25 mpg = 4 gal per 100 mi (improvement of 2.67 gal per 100 mi)
25 mpg = 4 gal per 100 mi
50 mpg = 2 gal per 100 mi (improvement of 2 gal per 100 mi)
So sky-high mpg figures like 50 mpg or 100 mpg actually aren't that impressive in terms of fuel savings, the use of mpg exaggerates their benefit. Our research into more fuel-efficient vehicles really should be concentrating on improving the mileage of gas guzzlers like trucks and SUVs, not on developing super-efficient vehicles like the Prius.
From what I've seen, diesel prices tend to be more volatile than gasoline prices.
It's volatile, but there's a pattern to it. When you refine a barrel of petroleum, depending on where you got it (i.e. light vs. heavy), a certain percentage distils into gasoline and a certain percentage into diesel. In other words, cars and trucks/machinery are in a symbiotic relationship keeping each others' fuel prices down. If all cars switched to diesel, then refineries would end up with a lot of excess gasoline. Gas prices would go down while diesel prices went up.
Now the reason for the volatility: It is relatively easy to break down heavier fuels like diesel into lighter fuels like gasoline. You're just breaking up the hydrocarbon chains into shorter chains. It takes some energy to do this and thus costs more than if it's a natural distillate of the oil, but it can be done. Going the other way however - converting a lighter fuel like gasoline to a heavier fuel like diesel - is really really hard. You have to glue the hydrocarbon chains together somehow. That's why diesel prices are more volatile. When there's a shortage of gasoline, refineries can just process diesel into gasoline, and the price of gas stays stable. When there's a shortage of diesel, they can't turn gasoline into diesel (at least nowhere near as cost-effectively as going the other way).
This is why switching all cars from gas to diesel simply won't work. You'd end up with the cost of a gallon of diesel being the cost of the diesel plus the cost of the unused gasoline. You need a certain percentage of motor vehicles (roughly half) to run on gasoline in order to sit at an optimal minimum of both gasoline and diesel prices.
It only seems complicated because (most?) businesspeople think there are a separate set of rules just for them. Hence the fact that the term "business ethics" even exists. Option 1 is the correct answer.
And this is exactly why corruption grows. People like you insist on option 1, no compromises. Consequently the ethical companies go out of business, leaving only unethical companies around, and the circle of corruption grows worse.
The correct answer is option 3. Offer something of similar value to a bribe, but one which isn't so overt and open-ended, and will help to gradually bring the recipient around to your ethical way of thinking. If you want to change a corrupt process, you first have to gain some leverage in the process, which means getting your hands dirty participating in some of the corruption. Embrace, extend, extinguish (yes it works for the good guys as well as it does the bad guys).
Correct. The vast majority of population growth is in developing countries. Downsizing the US or EU population would have little to no impact on the world's population growth.
"Full on" Internet was a rarity back then. Dedicated data lines were expensive. Most schools/companies had a LAN, and some servers which would occasionally dial out to neighbor Internet nodes with modems over phone lines to exchange files, mail, news, etc. in a quick data burst, thus minimizing long distance phone line usage costs. An email could take days, sometimes over a week to get to the other side of the world because each network hop in what is now traceroute could introduce a delay of a few hours.
This was in contrast to BBSes, which were basically user-to-server connections (with users eating the long distance fees if they wished to dial a non-local BBS). The Internet made intermittent server-to-server connections behind the scenes which asynchronously simulated long-distance user-to-user connections. If you cut your teeth on BBSes, it worked a lot like FidoNet eventually did.
One reason storing it is such a big deal is because generating it can be expensive. Make hydrogen easier to produce and it lowers the demands on storage.
Eh? Those have nothing to do with each other. Hydrogen storage is a pain because of density and sealing. At STP, hydrogen is a very low density gas. To get decent energy density out of it, you either have to compress it to ridiculously high pressures, or chill it to ridiculously low temperatures. Di-atomic hydrogen gas molecules are about the smallest molecules that exist. They will leak through anything. A seal which is water-tight and air-tight is not necessarily hydrogen-tight. Couple this with high pressures and you have a major storage PITA.
Unless we discover some sort of hydrogen sponge which soaks up H2 gas and easily holds it at an energy density competitive with batteries and chemicals, I really doubt the hydrogen economy will take off. OTOH if someone can tweak this process so it can convert CO2 + 2 H2O ==> CH4 + 2 O2, then we have a winner. Methane, while not as ideal for storage as a liquid hydrocarbon (most oil wells and refineries just burn it off rather than try to capture and store it), is much easier to work with than H2 gas and has nearly 4x the volumetric energy density.
Long-term, I think alcohol biofuels will win out. Alcohol is nearly as good a storage medium as gasoline/diesel. First you use photosynthesis to create sugar: CO2 + H2O + sunlight ==> O2 + (CH2O)n. Plants are basically made of really long sugar molecules (cellulose). You then ferment the sugar to create alcohol: (CH2O)n ==> C(n)H(2n+1)OH. At some point we'll probably figure out a way to go straight from the raw ingredients (CO2 + H2O + sunlight) to alcohol, at which point you're converting solar energy straight into liquid fuel.
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The disenfranchisement of third parties is just a symptom. The cause is our one vote, plurality wins election system. It's been mathematically shown to gravitate towards two parties.
The fix is any host of alternative election systems. While no system is perfect, most are better than one vote, plurality wins. One of the simplest to implement is instant run-off.
You can't tax wealth, at least not consistently.
Simplified, wealth is $, an amount.
Income is $ per year, a rate.
An income tax is $ per year, also a rate.
A wealth tax as you've outlined would also be $ per year, a rate.
When you impose a $ per year tax on a $ per year income, the units are consistent and it works out to a percentage.
When you impose a $ per year tax on $, the units are inconsistent and the amount people would be taxed is likewise inconsistent. Mary the socialite earns $50k/yr and spends every dime of it. Jane the librarian also earns $50k/yr but saves most of it. Under a wealth tax, Jane would pay a higher percentage of her income as taxes. She's saving her money instead of blowing it, which increases her wealth, and under your wealth tax that means she's supposed to pay more.
Wealth taxes as most people envision them simply don't work because of this fundamental mathematical flaw. The units have to be consistent if you want everyone under the same circumstances to be paying the same percentage. The only way to get a wealth tax to work is to tax people just once in their life. But that's easily duplicated by an inheritance tax or just taxing the income of people getting an inheritance.
Another thing most people proposing a wealth tax miss is that wealth has already been taxed. At some point it time, it was income, and thus was taxed. The fact that someone accumulates wealth means either their income is high (in which case just raise their income tax), or they tend to save their money instead of spend it (in which case taxing them higher is promoting fiscal irresponsibility).
Y'know, if ICANN were truly looking out for the best interests of the net, they would reserve all those TLDs as well as foreign transliterations (.xom -> .com), and automatically remap them to .com, .net, etc. So if you accidentally typed randomdomain.cmo, you'd automatically be sent to randomdomain.com.
So I guess we'll see if ICANN wants what's best for the Internet, or they just want more money.
Completely agree that deficit spending is the right strategy some of the time. The problem is that in a few years when the economy is booming, most of the people advocating deficit spending now will still be advocating deficit spending then. Anyone who calls for budget cuts so we can pay back some of our accrued debt will be ostracized as hating children and poor people and military programs. After all, "the economy is booming; you'd have to be crazy to want to cut spending."
Either you increase government spending in bad times and decrease it in good times. Or you hold government spending constant regardless of the economy. You do not increase government spending in bad times, and increase it in good times.
Lobbying from the Movie/TV/Music industry overwhelming favors Democrats by nearly a 3:1 margin. There's a tendency for people to interpret politics as "D = good, R = bad" or vice versa depending on your political affiliation. It is never that simple.
I think this is a non-story. Integers are intuitive. Non-integer real numbers are not. A number line is just a graphical representation of all real numbers, integer and non-integer.
Once a kid gets the concept that there are numbers other than integers, the number line becomes perfectly natural.
It's not a suspicion. The flaw in the free market isn't that it doesn't work, as most anti-market types think. It's that it works too well. As the market becomes more efficient, the relative gains from good decisions become smaller. Meanwhile, the gains (or losses) from random luck stay the same. Eventually you arrive at a state where which company does best is mostly determined by blind luck and slick advertising, not necessarily a better product.
That's why if you plot the behavior of the stock markets, it looks like random noise. They've become so efficient that the random noise far overshadows the market movements due to good/bad decisions. Occasionally there are some blips and outliers which a quick and observant investor can act on, but in general the time spent trying to find those blips isn't worth the return compared to other productive tasks. Which is why index funds are recommended. OTOH you can't just blindly invest in index funds. Otherwise bad investments like mortgage-backed securities can soak up investment dollars without being called out for being bad investments.
Which is why I contend that if things continue as they are, with Apple securing exorbitant licensing fees for trivial patents like "slide to unlock" while FRAND patents are limited to small fixed royalties, there is only one logical outcome:
FRAND and standards are dead. No company/inventor in their right mind will submit their patent to become part of a standard under FRAND. They will keep it to themselves and require individual licenses, both to generate more money and to protect themselves from patent lawsuits. Welcome to the brave new world of standard-less technology, brought to you by Apple.
Oh dear. 180-190 F is 82-88 C. Not "double the temperature you make your coffee." (Which is also a nonsense statement based on the arbitrary Centigrade or Fahrenheit scale, rather than the absolute Kelvin scale.)
And FWIW, the National Coffee Association recommends holding the coffee at a temperature of 180-185 F prior to serving. Which is what the machines at McDonalds were set at. If you're serving your coffee at 140 F, you're doing it wrong.
The 700 burns were over the span of something like a dozen years and billions of cups served. When I did the math years ago, if you drove 5 miles round-trip to buy your cup of McDonalds coffee, you were more likely to die in a traffic accident than to be burned by spilling your McDonalds coffee. If their coffee was too dangerous for public consumption, then so are all cars.
I used to work at a hotel when we switched about a thousand bulbs from incandescent to CFLs. The housemen reported that they had gone from replacing 3-5 burnt-out bulbs a day, to about 1 every other day. So while there are doubtless outliers and anecdotes of CFLs burning out early, on average they really do last substantially longer than incandescents.
How long do you hold a grudge? After the rootkit thing, I avoided Sony for years. When it came time to buy a laptop a year ago, I looked at what was available. The only laptops which met my criteria (small and lightweight, discrete GPU, good to excellent high-res screen) were a Sony Z and Macbook Pro. I certainly wasn't going to give Apple my money, and the Sony rootkit things was long ago (in computer industry terms). So I took a closer look at the Sony, found it at a great price, and bit.
When I got it home, I was prepared to do the wipe and reinstall that's standard on all laptops to get rid of the crapware. I started downloading drivers on my desktop, and while creating the restore DVDs from the new laptop I noticed an option for a "minimal restore". Curious, I read up on it. It was Windows 7 + all necessary drivers pre-installed, none of the crapware. So I killed the downloads on the desktop and did the minimal restore, and have been golden ever since.
My point is, companies do bad things, companies do good things. How long do you boycott them for doing a bad thing? Forever? Then within a decade or so I'll bet every company in existence will be on your boycott list, and you won't be able to buy anything. Yes we as customers need to punish companies for bad behavior. But it needs to be proportional to the transgression, and you need to be able to forgive if they right the wrong and turn things around.
I won't say how long is a proper punishment. That's for each individual to decide. For me, 5 years seemed like enough. And I do want to encourage them for being one of the few companies to put a decent screen on their laptops, as well as addressing the preloaded crapware issue. Otherwise, Sony is the company which installed rootkits; Apple is the current Great Evil; Dell is the company which refused to replace computers with failing capacitors; HP is the company which sells ink at ridiculous markups; IBM is the company which sold Deathstar hard drives; Toshiba is the company which sold CNC milling machines to the Soviets; etc. And I guess my righteous indignation means I can never buy a laptop.
The funny thing is Apple basically did the same thing, except they secretly used their customers' iPhones without the owner's consent nor permission to collect MAC address/SSID/GPS coordinates to build a geolocation map.
Google made the mistake of doing The Right Thing - building the map completely on the company's dime, and publicly announcing what exactly they were doing. Then when they found they had collected wifi payload data as well, they reported themselves to the public .
Basically what's happening is the company who is being a responsible citizen and admitting to their mistakes is being punished. While the company which did the same stuff in secret and refuses to admit to it gets off scott free.
This. Most of the time you want to take out a target, not just blow sh*t up. The B-52's design for massive carpet-bombing dates from an age when you had to throw hundreds of bombs out there in the hopes that one might hit the target. The drone-fired missiles, while lacking in explosives, are guided or self-guided. A single missile has a very high probability of hitting the target, which in most cases makes the explosives they carry sufficient for the task. Even with JDAM bombs, you're better off dropping them one at a time with a laser designator for targeting. A small fighter/bomber like an F-18 fills that role better.
The tactical need for a big bomber like the B-52 is disappearing. The only use I can think of for them is when you're not sure where the target is, and like in the old days you want to carpet-bomb an area in the hopes that one might hit the target.
This is really the bigger issue here. The Internet has pretty much made the concept of geographical markets for media content obsolete. Big media refuses to accept this new reality, and is suing anyone trying to do business in accordance with reality. [Insert buggywhip analogy]
If the courts accept Oracle's position and programming languages are copyrightable, then Oracle owes a huge boatload of money to Kernighan, Ritchie, and Stroustrup. Most of Java reads like C/C++.
How does AT&T make money off this? Your phone gets stolen so you spend $200 to buy a new one. Thief gets a SIM card for service, but doesn't spend $200 on a new phone. If you assume the thief would've gotten or already had cell phone service regardless (a cheap free one if he hadn't stolen yours), it seems like it's a net wash for AT&T.
I agree they have a moral obligation to refuse to activate stolen phones, as an added discouragement for theft. But I don't see any profit motive in not doing so, just sheer laziness. In fact, strictly from an economic utilization standpoint, bricking stolen phones wastes more resources for society overall.
It's not pessimistic. You actually don't want it going quite so fast. Voyager 2's trajectory and velocity were set - it had to be moving at a certain speed in order to meet up with Uranus and Neptune. Consequently, the gravity assists had sped up Voyager 2 so much that by the time it reached Neptune, the entire close encounter was pretty much over in a day. They had to pre-program it to take pictures and measurements and store it on tape, hope that everything worked, and wait for the data to be sent back to Earth. By the time we got it, Voyager 2 was already leaving Neptune. There were no second chances, and we were fortunate that some of the pan-slew timed exposure tricks worked perfectly.
The New Horizons flyby of Pluto is pretty much going to be the same thing. All the close-up observations of Pluto and its moons are going to happen on 14 July, 2015. One day. No second chances if it turns out someone forgot to send the command to remove the lens cap. If it had been moving at 17 km/s instead of 13 km/s, we'd have about 25% less observation time. Better to wait a few years longer for the spacecraft to get there, in order to get a few more hours and days observation time.
In the future, with an ion engine, maybe we'll be able to send probes which speed up the first half of the trip, and slow down the second half. That would allow us to extend the encounter times, or even enter into orbit around the outer planet(oid), without extending the travel time to decades.
Voyagers 1 and 2 took advantage of a rare planetary alignment which won't happen again until around 2150. Originally both spacecraft were supposed to visit all four outer planets, but Voyager 1 was sacrificed to get a closer look at Titan, which had recently been discovered to have an atmosphere. Without such an alignment, they wouldn't have been anywhere near as ambitious and quite possibly might not have even been built. Pioneer 11 didn't have such a favorable alignment and had to make an almost 180 degree direction change to go from Jupiter to Saturn.
So it wasn't that we were more ambitious about space exploration back in the 1970s when the Voyagers were launched. We just knew we were up against a hard deadline for an opportunity which wouldn't come again for 175 years, and scrambled to take advantage of it before the window closed.
Actually, water vapor is the most common and (cumulatively) most potent greenhouse gas and is given off in roughly the same quantity as CO2 by most combustion and cellular respiration. CO2 is a distant second, not 90%. The difference is that water vapor has a fairly dynamic and self-regulating cycle where excess quantities of it fall out of the sky as rain. CO2 kinda just sits there until plants can extract it from the air.
Couple other factors:
Diesel has about 14% higher energy density per unit volume. It weighs more and there are physically more molecules in it per gallon. So 35 mpg diesel is actually closer to 31 mpg in a direct comparison with gasoline mpg. The Union of Concerned Scientists recommends adjusting diesel mpg down by 20% when comparing to gasoline to mpg. And for emissions they recommend adjusting it down 25% when comparing to gasoline.
Fuel consumption is actually the inverse of mpg. mpg is miles per gallon; fuel consumption is gallons per mile. This is why the rest of the world uses liters per 100 km to measure fuel efficiency. Since mpg is the inverse of what we're really interested in, the high end of mpg actually represents the smallest fuel savings. For a given commute, switching from a 15 mpg vehicle to a 25 mpg vehicle saves more fuel than switching from a 25 mpg vehicle to a 50 mpg vehicle. This is despite the first switch being an improvement of "only" 10 mpg, while the second switch is an improvement of 25 mpg. If you measure it in gallons per 100 miles, it becomes obvious:
15 mpg = 6.67 gal per 100 mi
25 mpg = 4 gal per 100 mi (improvement of 2.67 gal per 100 mi)
25 mpg = 4 gal per 100 mi
50 mpg = 2 gal per 100 mi (improvement of 2 gal per 100 mi)
So sky-high mpg figures like 50 mpg or 100 mpg actually aren't that impressive in terms of fuel savings, the use of mpg exaggerates their benefit. Our research into more fuel-efficient vehicles really should be concentrating on improving the mileage of gas guzzlers like trucks and SUVs, not on developing super-efficient vehicles like the Prius.
It's volatile, but there's a pattern to it. When you refine a barrel of petroleum, depending on where you got it (i.e. light vs. heavy), a certain percentage distils into gasoline and a certain percentage into diesel. In other words, cars and trucks/machinery are in a symbiotic relationship keeping each others' fuel prices down. If all cars switched to diesel, then refineries would end up with a lot of excess gasoline. Gas prices would go down while diesel prices went up.
Now the reason for the volatility: It is relatively easy to break down heavier fuels like diesel into lighter fuels like gasoline. You're just breaking up the hydrocarbon chains into shorter chains. It takes some energy to do this and thus costs more than if it's a natural distillate of the oil, but it can be done. Going the other way however - converting a lighter fuel like gasoline to a heavier fuel like diesel - is really really hard. You have to glue the hydrocarbon chains together somehow. That's why diesel prices are more volatile. When there's a shortage of gasoline, refineries can just process diesel into gasoline, and the price of gas stays stable. When there's a shortage of diesel, they can't turn gasoline into diesel (at least nowhere near as cost-effectively as going the other way).
This is why switching all cars from gas to diesel simply won't work. You'd end up with the cost of a gallon of diesel being the cost of the diesel plus the cost of the unused gasoline. You need a certain percentage of motor vehicles (roughly half) to run on gasoline in order to sit at an optimal minimum of both gasoline and diesel prices.
And this is exactly why corruption grows. People like you insist on option 1, no compromises. Consequently the ethical companies go out of business, leaving only unethical companies around, and the circle of corruption grows worse.
The correct answer is option 3. Offer something of similar value to a bribe, but one which isn't so overt and open-ended, and will help to gradually bring the recipient around to your ethical way of thinking. If you want to change a corrupt process, you first have to gain some leverage in the process, which means getting your hands dirty participating in some of the corruption. Embrace, extend, extinguish (yes it works for the good guys as well as it does the bad guys).
Correct. The vast majority of population growth is in developing countries. Downsizing the US or EU population would have little to no impact on the world's population growth.
"Full on" Internet was a rarity back then. Dedicated data lines were expensive. Most schools/companies had a LAN, and some servers which would occasionally dial out to neighbor Internet nodes with modems over phone lines to exchange files, mail, news, etc. in a quick data burst, thus minimizing long distance phone line usage costs. An email could take days, sometimes over a week to get to the other side of the world because each network hop in what is now traceroute could introduce a delay of a few hours.
This was in contrast to BBSes, which were basically user-to-server connections (with users eating the long distance fees if they wished to dial a non-local BBS). The Internet made intermittent server-to-server connections behind the scenes which asynchronously simulated long-distance user-to-user connections. If you cut your teeth on BBSes, it worked a lot like FidoNet eventually did.
Eh? Those have nothing to do with each other. Hydrogen storage is a pain because of density and sealing. At STP, hydrogen is a very low density gas. To get decent energy density out of it, you either have to compress it to ridiculously high pressures, or chill it to ridiculously low temperatures. Di-atomic hydrogen gas molecules are about the smallest molecules that exist. They will leak through anything. A seal which is water-tight and air-tight is not necessarily hydrogen-tight. Couple this with high pressures and you have a major storage PITA.
Unless we discover some sort of hydrogen sponge which soaks up H2 gas and easily holds it at an energy density competitive with batteries and chemicals, I really doubt the hydrogen economy will take off. OTOH if someone can tweak this process so it can convert CO2 + 2 H2O ==> CH4 + 2 O2, then we have a winner. Methane, while not as ideal for storage as a liquid hydrocarbon (most oil wells and refineries just burn it off rather than try to capture and store it), is much easier to work with than H2 gas and has nearly 4x the volumetric energy density.
Long-term, I think alcohol biofuels will win out. Alcohol is nearly as good a storage medium as gasoline/diesel. First you use photosynthesis to create sugar: CO2 + H2O + sunlight ==> O2 + (CH2O)n. Plants are basically made of really long sugar molecules (cellulose). You then ferment the sugar to create alcohol: (CH2O)n ==> C(n)H(2n+1)OH. At some point we'll probably figure out a way to go straight from the raw ingredients (CO2 + H2O + sunlight) to alcohol, at which point you're converting solar energy straight into liquid fuel.