Important relative to entry into the watch market, one new thing about the original iPod was convincing a large portion of the population to consider a $300 portable music player a must-have accessory (when previously a $100 CD-walkman was a stretch). Apple entering the watch market could mean that a whole lot of people --- who previously wore no watch, or a $30 Casio --- would start thinking it was "normal" to spend $250 on a watch that they will throw away in a few years for a newer model.
Also, the mapping/modeling routine may be quite a bit more sophisticated than a Roomba. The Roomba has a fairly limited "short term memory," and relies heavily on tuned heuristics for how to mix methodical motions (following a wall or spiraling to cover an open area) with enough randomness to efficiently, fairly uniformly cover all areas. No overarching "floor map" is calculated/stored, just info about short-term events. The UAV might actually generate/save a more complete map, so it can retrace its steps and navigate more directly through previously "learned" areas.
Probably the aerodynamic/mechanical/control-systems design so you can do this while *flying* without being knocked out of the air. That's trickier than keeping a big, heavy hockey puck stable on the floor when it bumbles into walls.
Indeed, the quality of the senders/receivers equipment determines how much redundant data they have to "leak" beyond the theoretical limits --- and a sender/receiver using crude technology might be vulnerable to an attacker with far more sensitive equipment. Fortunately, once the sender/receiver's equipment gets "good enough," they can be mathematically certain that there isn't enough leaked data to sneakily reconstruct the message even if an attacker had theoretically "perfect" technology. While the "expected range of errors" with one current lab setup might have been broad enough to allow sneaky snooping, further technology development might squeeze this range down to exclude this possibility.
Slightly more details: this technique could only "break" quantum encryption when the sender helpfully decides to send the same message over and over again --- effectively returning to the classical limit of large numbers of quanta, hence self-defeating the "quantumness" of the encryption. Used properly, the quantum encrypted signal (a series of photons sent with pre-set polarizations) is only sent once, so the large uncertainties in single "weak" measurements assure that anyone intercepting the message still gets a garbled, uninformative result (and the end receiver does too, so they know their security was compromised).
The smarter option is not hiring people like you to engineer the mission. I think the typical proposed flight profile is to lead the asteroid in a "zigzag" path: aim the craft so it slowly drifts a bit past behind the asteroid; fire the thrusters (now clear of the asteroid) so the trajectory orbits around a bit forward; repeat as necessary. On average, you're still deflecting the asteroid sideways (at a slightly reduced rate from hanging out directly at its side, compensated by a bit more mass and/or time).
Assuming a reasonably spherical asteroid, your statement is utter rubbish. The gravitational force on a sphere integrates out to the equivalent of the pull on a point mass (of the same mass) at its center (though the nearer parts of the asteroid are pulled more strongly than those distant). Did you fail intro freshman physics, by any chance?
For a specific example, consider a spacecraft of mass m1 and an asteroid of mass m2.
The force on (F) and acceleration of (a) the asteroid when the craft is distance r away is F = G*m1*m2/r^2 = m2*a => a = G*m1/r^2.
The asteroid is deflected sideways by the force over time t by a distance of (a*t^2)/2.
Assuming a 2000kg craft (100x smaller than your example) at a distance of 10m from the asteroid, the acceleration is a = 1.33*10^-9 m/s^2. Not much, right? Now, consider applying this over 3 years: the deflection is 5982km --- pretty close to the 6371km radius of the earth. Adjust numbers as necessary for the time interval and necessary amount of deflection, and the gravitational tether is quite plausible (especially if you had 100x more spacecraft mass, as in your example, so the deflection time would be 11 days instead of 3 years).
Yes, I know gravity is an f****ng weak force, but that's all you need over enough time. If you only locate the asteroid two weeks out from impact, then you're probably screwed anyway, and a last-ditch brute-force effort might be justified. However, deploying a "net around the asteroid" is a terribly complicated and risky engineering challenge --- gravity is dead simple, and requires nothing more than "being there." From a safety and engineering perspective, the slow but 99.99%-reliable solution (after the initial launch phase) is far preferable to a much more expensive and complicated 90%-reliable fast one.
And I can find your new breakthroughs in gravitational physics published in which journal? Apparently, a lot of decently competent scientists (who can certainly calculate the impact of gravitational forces implied by known physics) disagree with you, so it would be useful for you to point out which of your amazing new discoveries would invalidate this simple and robust mechanism.
No, you only need to "waste" as much thrust as needed to counter the weak and gradual force of gravity --- you aren't spending any *more* energy in this situation than you would with a direct push. Just think of gravity as a rubber-band between the spacecraft and the space-rock --- you're effectively tethered to the rock already. Conveniently, the "tether" uniformly and predictably pulls the whole mass, instead of just shearing off a layer of rubble at an impact point.
WRT the material: The first strike seems entirely legit. The one that killed the two Reuters people. They met with armed belligerents, at night, in an area where they knew there was fighting.
Funny that the term "belligerents" is rarely used to refer to the side that imported routine flaming death from the skies to the region, and actually has the option to pack up their stuff and go home. The horrifying thing revealed/verified to many people by these leaks is not that "a few bad apples sometimes do wrong in the fog of war," but that the US has created a system where it is perfectly normal and "legit" behavior to be flying around looking for folks to gun down. The phrase "the banality of evil" comes to mind for this.
The sad part is that designing and building high-reliability 3D-printed parts does take hard work, intelligence, and patience --- all wasted on guns (which only support the divide-and-conquer tactics of our "evil government overlords"), instead of *real* tools for building a more free society.
If you really wanted to "evade and disintermediate the state," then why guns? Approximately 50% of the state power elite *are* gun nuts, firing up their base of petty authoritarians with NRA-approved rhetoric (while the other ~50% are firing up their base with anti-gun rhetoric, while serving the same masters). Pro-gun-hysteria only promotes the ends of one factions in our government oligarchy, in keeping the populace from rising up about *real* issues.
If you really want to circumvent the state, then how about reclaiming a vacant lot for a community garden (absentee landowners be damned); or get some kids interested in reading with some banned/subversive literature?
Informal peer-to-peer information sharing networks do partially alleviate these problems, to a similar extent as one's ability to bit-torrent out-of-publication recordings circumvents copyright law in those areas. One perk of my institutional affiliation is having good librarians, who will photocopy/digitize old articles and send them to me with a boilerplate "fair use" cover sheet (despite the dire warnings against any form of duplication or storage printed on the articles themselves). The downside is that such things can only be done on a small scale and slightly covertly --- try sharing important papers on your own public research website, or distributing them to a whole class of students, and you risk bringing down the wrath of Elsevier's legal goons. And once you dig a few levels deep through references in referenced papers, you may exhaust your friend's libraries (for my most recent paper, I needed an article from a 1960 translation of a Russian journal, which no one else was citing directly, but which was important for correcting published errors in out own prior and others' papers in the field).
For recent papers, this works great. A lot of paper-reading research, however, leads back to articles from many decades ago --- the really important ones that frame the basic concepts that all later papers refer back to. In these cases, all the authors are likely to be retired or dead (and in any case hard to find contact info for or correspond by email). I think the biggest challenge for open-access scholarship is "rescuing" all the old papers, digitizing and archiving them in publicly accessible repositories. This is one area where evil for-profit publishers really have the academic world over a barrel; even as new submissions transition to open-access formats, a lot of the critical grounding one needs to understand what's going on in a field of research is locked away in the vaults of old-guard publishers for extortionate-pay-per-view (or hundred-thousand-dollar-per-year institutional archive subscriptions) profiteering.
The degree of publication openness varies by scientific sub-field, with some doing better than others. From my own experience, the nuclear and particle physics field does a pretty good job with this.
Papers are usually first posted, before peer review, as freely-readable preprints on arXiv.org. This is actively encouraged by the journal publishers: the last time I submitted a paper to an APS journal, they had an option to give them an arXiv preprint number, and they would import the paper from there. The journals still coordinate selecting paper referees and maintaining high editorial standards, so papers have the benefit of going through rigorous peer-review (and being re-written/improved in the process) before being officially published in a journal. The changes are included as updates on the arXiv preprint, so anyone wanting to read the paper can get a free copy there. Journals are supported by institutional library subscriptions and membership fees (in the case of professional societies like APS), with library subscription fees that are *much* lower than for money-grubbing bastards like Elsevier. APS is also promoting a new series of their own open-access journals (with publication fees).
Heck, Elsevier generally remains hostile/ignorant to the idea that there are people *inside* "normal academia that desperately want access to valuable, and high quality materials, if for no other reason than self-education, and that those people have opinions that are worthy of being heard." No, neither I (out-of-pocket) nor my research group can afford $85 single reprint fees to gamble on whether potentially interesting title/abstract papers are relevant to our research. Tracking down references from other papers, only to find they've been published in a semi-obscure Elsevier journal (hence likely inaccessible even through my top-tier research university's library subscriptions), means I've hit a dead end --- and any useful information has been forever lost even from *inside* the highest levels of ivory-towerdom.
You can't expect too much gender symmetry in languages that developed alongside culturally pervasive sexism. The "character flaws" of a man, such as being "effeminate," could be attributed to external sources: having been emasculated (by a telephone??). For an "un-ladylike" woman, her "flaws" were likely seen as "her own fault," hence the lack of symmetric terminology for passing blame to an external source.
(a) A bicycle/motorcycle is certainly stabilized against rapid orientation changes by the wheels, but requires active feedback from the ingrained reflexes of the rider to not tip over. If the rider is surprised by an unexpected situation for which their ingrained reflexes are inadequate, they'll flip the bike. This system automates the stabilizing feedback loop with an electronic tilt sensor system that can probably do a better job (not panicking and thrashing about) in the type of "surprise" slipping/acceleration situations where any but the most highly trained human stunt drivers are likely to flip out.
(b) The gyros (wheels) on a bike need to maintain a fixed orientation to the road, and cannot be independently manipulated over a large range. They also are limited/linked in rotation speed to the forward velocity of the vehicle. Using a separate gyro from the wheels allows said gyro to be pushed about to any orientation as needed by the stabilizing system, and also allows it to run at *much* higher angular momentum (without undue weight increases) than the wheels (providing a lot more torque for correcting the most extreme de-stabilizing forces).
Yep, if I wanted to actually work a job in software design/engineering, I'd go get a PhD in that, too. I just use self-taught (because when I was growing up, most school teachers had less years of computer experience than I did) programming skills "on the side" for my work (and play), in which fields I do have extensive "formal" education. Just like we teach arithmetic to kids who aren't necessarily on a career track to being an actuary, a basic level of programming proficiency is a generally handy skill for anyone to pick up, and would be a useful addition to general curricula.
However, expecting that this will effectively secure a better jobs future for the children is just plain stupid --- real advances in employment prospects have only come when workers fight to retain a bigger chunk of the pie they are baking, rather than simply becoming better educated and lower paid obedient tools for their corporate overlords.
When I go to Walmart, competing products are within view at all times.
Or, in many cases, a bunch of products all produced in the same factory for one mega-holdings-conglomerate are displayed in different colored boxes with different brand names and prices to provide the illusion of choice (and make you feel so smart for buying the $7.99 detergent, because that *must* be a great deal when other detergents are selling for up to $18.99). Proctor & Gamble figured out this scam decades ago, and now it's commonplace. You're very unlikely to see *actual* competition from anyone outside the handful of big oligopoly players who play nice with "industry standard" price fixing.
Being self-taught in programming, and benefitting from those skills for professional and personal use, I certainly think that's a useful thing for kids to learn.
But, "strangely," industry leaders who claim concern about kids learning skills for getting good jobs in the future, never seem to call for education in those skills that have historically had the greatest impact on boosting job prospects for the next generation. Learning from the past, what is it that assures better jobs for the next generation? Perhaps kids should learn what it took to get things like 40 hour work weeks, vacations, paid overtime, compensation for workplace injury (and workplaces that don't injure/kill workers on a daily basis), equal pay for equal work, pensions, salaries in money rather than company scrip, etc.
In other words, we should be teaching kids how to effectively organize; unionize; march; protest; picket; leaflet; boycott; sit-in; slowdown; sabotage; riot: to strike terror in the very heart of power, until once "unthinkable" concessions are extracted from their oppressors. The generation of kids that learns these skills will surely, as with past generations of heroes, find their job prospects immeasurably brightened.
Paying as much or more for ephemeral e-books than physical hardcover editions is a scam, no matter whose e-reader you use. But I love my Nook --- it's a perfect platform carrying around a load of free books (from, e.g., Project Gutenberg, or my own reference compilations) to read on long trips. Battery life is great, screen quality is nice (better than the lowest grades of pulp paperbacks, though with room for improvement compared to a quality printing). I've got the silly WiFi "store" turned off, since I never intend to fork over extortion fees for overpriced, DRM'd novels.
The catch is "worth more alive than dead" --- the investment class making the decisions only cares about the fraction of worth *to them,* not to the economy and all stakeholders as a whole. Thus a company that is doing perfectly well --- able to maintain high employee pay, solid pensions and benefits, and still turn a profit for the investors --- will get killed if it will funnel more money into the pockets of the rich (even if the total economic value to everyone is lost).
For example: if a currently profitable company has a big pension fund saved up to pay out to retirees, corporate raiders will load the company up with debt, funneling all its money to "contractors" and "consultants" until they are "forced" to dip into the pension funds to keep the company afloat. When all the assets are gone, tell the workers and retirees "sorry, we're bankrupt!" before cruising away on your new yacht.
Killing thriving companies is also useful for breaking unions --- one profitable, strongly unionized corporation in an industry will drive up wages and benefits even for non-union competitors (by competing for skilled workers). Thus, the investing class will want to drive the unionized company into the ground --- at least long enough to win major concessions, if not outright dissolution, from the workers. Then it's profit for everyone else at the top.
Killing off a thriving corporation may also be cheaper/easier than integrating it through merger/acquisition when a bigger corporation wants to buy off a competitor to assume a more solid monopoly position.
In all these cases, "worth" to the economy as a whole is destroyed if all stakeholders are counted (especially employees and customers) --- but so long as more money ends up in the pockets of the super-rich, it's a "win" for the decision-makers.
Slashdot Mirror
Important relative to entry into the watch market, one new thing about the original iPod was convincing a large portion of the population to consider a $300 portable music player a must-have accessory (when previously a $100 CD-walkman was a stretch). Apple entering the watch market could mean that a whole lot of people --- who previously wore no watch, or a $30 Casio --- would start thinking it was "normal" to spend $250 on a watch that they will throw away in a few years for a newer model.
Also, the mapping/modeling routine may be quite a bit more sophisticated than a Roomba. The Roomba has a fairly limited "short term memory," and relies heavily on tuned heuristics for how to mix methodical motions (following a wall or spiraling to cover an open area) with enough randomness to efficiently, fairly uniformly cover all areas. No overarching "floor map" is calculated/stored, just info about short-term events. The UAV might actually generate/save a more complete map, so it can retrace its steps and navigate more directly through previously "learned" areas.
Probably the aerodynamic/mechanical/control-systems design so you can do this while *flying* without being knocked out of the air. That's trickier than keeping a big, heavy hockey puck stable on the floor when it bumbles into walls.
Indeed, the quality of the senders/receivers equipment determines how much redundant data they have to "leak" beyond the theoretical limits --- and a sender/receiver using crude technology might be vulnerable to an attacker with far more sensitive equipment. Fortunately, once the sender/receiver's equipment gets "good enough," they can be mathematically certain that there isn't enough leaked data to sneakily reconstruct the message even if an attacker had theoretically "perfect" technology. While the "expected range of errors" with one current lab setup might have been broad enough to allow sneaky snooping, further technology development might squeeze this range down to exclude this possibility.
Short answer: No.
Slightly more details: this technique could only "break" quantum encryption when the sender helpfully decides to send the same message over and over again --- effectively returning to the classical limit of large numbers of quanta, hence self-defeating the "quantumness" of the encryption. Used properly, the quantum encrypted signal (a series of photons sent with pre-set polarizations) is only sent once, so the large uncertainties in single "weak" measurements assure that anyone intercepting the message still gets a garbled, uninformative result (and the end receiver does too, so they know their security was compromised).
The smarter option is not hiring people like you to engineer the mission. I think the typical proposed flight profile is to lead the asteroid in a "zigzag" path: aim the craft so it slowly drifts a bit past behind the asteroid; fire the thrusters (now clear of the asteroid) so the trajectory orbits around a bit forward; repeat as necessary. On average, you're still deflecting the asteroid sideways (at a slightly reduced rate from hanging out directly at its side, compensated by a bit more mass and/or time).
Assuming a reasonably spherical asteroid, your statement is utter rubbish. The gravitational force on a sphere integrates out to the equivalent of the pull on a point mass (of the same mass) at its center (though the nearer parts of the asteroid are pulled more strongly than those distant). Did you fail intro freshman physics, by any chance?
For a specific example, consider a spacecraft of mass m1 and an asteroid of mass m2.
The force on (F) and acceleration of (a) the asteroid when the craft is distance r away is F = G*m1*m2/r^2 = m2*a => a = G*m1/r^2.
The asteroid is deflected sideways by the force over time t by a distance of (a*t^2)/2.
Assuming a 2000kg craft (100x smaller than your example) at a distance of 10m from the asteroid, the acceleration is a = 1.33*10^-9 m/s^2. Not much, right? Now, consider applying this over 3 years: the deflection is 5982km --- pretty close to the 6371km radius of the earth. Adjust numbers as necessary for the time interval and necessary amount of deflection, and the gravitational tether is quite plausible (especially if you had 100x more spacecraft mass, as in your example, so the deflection time would be 11 days instead of 3 years).
Yes, I know gravity is an f****ng weak force, but that's all you need over enough time. If you only locate the asteroid two weeks out from impact, then you're probably screwed anyway, and a last-ditch brute-force effort might be justified. However, deploying a "net around the asteroid" is a terribly complicated and risky engineering challenge --- gravity is dead simple, and requires nothing more than "being there." From a safety and engineering perspective, the slow but 99.99%-reliable solution (after the initial launch phase) is far preferable to a much more expensive and complicated 90%-reliable fast one.
And I can find your new breakthroughs in gravitational physics published in which journal? Apparently, a lot of decently competent scientists (who can certainly calculate the impact of gravitational forces implied by known physics) disagree with you, so it would be useful for you to point out which of your amazing new discoveries would invalidate this simple and robust mechanism.
No, you only need to "waste" as much thrust as needed to counter the weak and gradual force of gravity --- you aren't spending any *more* energy in this situation than you would with a direct push. Just think of gravity as a rubber-band between the spacecraft and the space-rock --- you're effectively tethered to the rock already. Conveniently, the "tether" uniformly and predictably pulls the whole mass, instead of just shearing off a layer of rubble at an impact point.
WRT the material: The first strike seems entirely legit. The one that killed the two Reuters people. They met with armed belligerents, at night, in an area where they knew there was fighting.
Funny that the term "belligerents" is rarely used to refer to the side that imported routine flaming death from the skies to the region, and actually has the option to pack up their stuff and go home. The horrifying thing revealed/verified to many people by these leaks is not that "a few bad apples sometimes do wrong in the fog of war," but that the US has created a system where it is perfectly normal and "legit" behavior to be flying around looking for folks to gun down. The phrase "the banality of evil" comes to mind for this.
The sad part is that designing and building high-reliability 3D-printed parts does take hard work, intelligence, and patience --- all wasted on guns (which only support the divide-and-conquer tactics of our "evil government overlords"), instead of *real* tools for building a more free society.
If you really wanted to "evade and disintermediate the state," then why guns? Approximately 50% of the state power elite *are* gun nuts, firing up their base of petty authoritarians with NRA-approved rhetoric (while the other ~50% are firing up their base with anti-gun rhetoric, while serving the same masters). Pro-gun-hysteria only promotes the ends of one factions in our government oligarchy, in keeping the populace from rising up about *real* issues.
If you really want to circumvent the state, then how about reclaiming a vacant lot for a community garden (absentee landowners be damned); or get some kids interested in reading with some banned/subversive literature?
Informal peer-to-peer information sharing networks do partially alleviate these problems, to a similar extent as one's ability to bit-torrent out-of-publication recordings circumvents copyright law in those areas. One perk of my institutional affiliation is having good librarians, who will photocopy/digitize old articles and send them to me with a boilerplate "fair use" cover sheet (despite the dire warnings against any form of duplication or storage printed on the articles themselves). The downside is that such things can only be done on a small scale and slightly covertly --- try sharing important papers on your own public research website, or distributing them to a whole class of students, and you risk bringing down the wrath of Elsevier's legal goons. And once you dig a few levels deep through references in referenced papers, you may exhaust your friend's libraries (for my most recent paper, I needed an article from a 1960 translation of a Russian journal, which no one else was citing directly, but which was important for correcting published errors in out own prior and others' papers in the field).
For recent papers, this works great. A lot of paper-reading research, however, leads back to articles from many decades ago --- the really important ones that frame the basic concepts that all later papers refer back to. In these cases, all the authors are likely to be retired or dead (and in any case hard to find contact info for or correspond by email). I think the biggest challenge for open-access scholarship is "rescuing" all the old papers, digitizing and archiving them in publicly accessible repositories. This is one area where evil for-profit publishers really have the academic world over a barrel; even as new submissions transition to open-access formats, a lot of the critical grounding one needs to understand what's going on in a field of research is locked away in the vaults of old-guard publishers for extortionate-pay-per-view (or hundred-thousand-dollar-per-year institutional archive subscriptions) profiteering.
The degree of publication openness varies by scientific sub-field, with some doing better than others. From my own experience, the nuclear and particle physics field does a pretty good job with this.
Papers are usually first posted, before peer review, as freely-readable preprints on arXiv.org. This is actively encouraged by the journal publishers: the last time I submitted a paper to an APS journal, they had an option to give them an arXiv preprint number, and they would import the paper from there. The journals still coordinate selecting paper referees and maintaining high editorial standards, so papers have the benefit of going through rigorous peer-review (and being re-written/improved in the process) before being officially published in a journal. The changes are included as updates on the arXiv preprint, so anyone wanting to read the paper can get a free copy there. Journals are supported by institutional library subscriptions and membership fees (in the case of professional societies like APS), with library subscription fees that are *much* lower than for money-grubbing bastards like Elsevier. APS is also promoting a new series of their own open-access journals (with publication fees).
Heck, Elsevier generally remains hostile/ignorant to the idea that there are people *inside* "normal academia that desperately want access to valuable, and high quality materials, if for no other reason than self-education, and that those people have opinions that are worthy of being heard." No, neither I (out-of-pocket) nor my research group can afford $85 single reprint fees to gamble on whether potentially interesting title/abstract papers are relevant to our research. Tracking down references from other papers, only to find they've been published in a semi-obscure Elsevier journal (hence likely inaccessible even through my top-tier research university's library subscriptions), means I've hit a dead end --- and any useful information has been forever lost even from *inside* the highest levels of ivory-towerdom.
You can't expect too much gender symmetry in languages that developed alongside culturally pervasive sexism. The "character flaws" of a man, such as being "effeminate," could be attributed to external sources: having been emasculated (by a telephone??). For an "un-ladylike" woman, her "flaws" were likely seen as "her own fault," hence the lack of symmetric terminology for passing blame to an external source.
(a) A bicycle/motorcycle is certainly stabilized against rapid orientation changes by the wheels, but requires active feedback from the ingrained reflexes of the rider to not tip over. If the rider is surprised by an unexpected situation for which their ingrained reflexes are inadequate, they'll flip the bike. This system automates the stabilizing feedback loop with an electronic tilt sensor system that can probably do a better job (not panicking and thrashing about) in the type of "surprise" slipping/acceleration situations where any but the most highly trained human stunt drivers are likely to flip out.
(b) The gyros (wheels) on a bike need to maintain a fixed orientation to the road, and cannot be independently manipulated over a large range. They also are limited/linked in rotation speed to the forward velocity of the vehicle. Using a separate gyro from the wheels allows said gyro to be pushed about to any orientation as needed by the stabilizing system, and also allows it to run at *much* higher angular momentum (without undue weight increases) than the wheels (providing a lot more torque for correcting the most extreme de-stabilizing forces).
Yep, if I wanted to actually work a job in software design/engineering, I'd go get a PhD in that, too. I just use self-taught (because when I was growing up, most school teachers had less years of computer experience than I did) programming skills "on the side" for my work (and play), in which fields I do have extensive "formal" education. Just like we teach arithmetic to kids who aren't necessarily on a career track to being an actuary, a basic level of programming proficiency is a generally handy skill for anyone to pick up, and would be a useful addition to general curricula.
However, expecting that this will effectively secure a better jobs future for the children is just plain stupid --- real advances in employment prospects have only come when workers fight to retain a bigger chunk of the pie they are baking, rather than simply becoming better educated and lower paid obedient tools for their corporate overlords.
When I go to Walmart, competing products are within view at all times.
Or, in many cases, a bunch of products all produced in the same factory for one mega-holdings-conglomerate are displayed in different colored boxes with different brand names and prices to provide the illusion of choice (and make you feel so smart for buying the $7.99 detergent, because that *must* be a great deal when other detergents are selling for up to $18.99). Proctor & Gamble figured out this scam decades ago, and now it's commonplace. You're very unlikely to see *actual* competition from anyone outside the handful of big oligopoly players who play nice with "industry standard" price fixing.
Being self-taught in programming, and benefitting from those skills for professional and personal use, I certainly think that's a useful thing for kids to learn.
But, "strangely," industry leaders who claim concern about kids learning skills for getting good jobs in the future, never seem to call for education in those skills that have historically had the greatest impact on boosting job prospects for the next generation. Learning from the past, what is it that assures better jobs for the next generation? Perhaps kids should learn what it took to get things like 40 hour work weeks, vacations, paid overtime, compensation for workplace injury (and workplaces that don't injure/kill workers on a daily basis), equal pay for equal work, pensions, salaries in money rather than company scrip, etc.
In other words, we should be teaching kids how to effectively organize; unionize; march; protest; picket; leaflet; boycott; sit-in; slowdown; sabotage; riot: to strike terror in the very heart of power, until once "unthinkable" concessions are extracted from their oppressors. The generation of kids that learns these skills will surely, as with past generations of heroes, find their job prospects immeasurably brightened.
Paying as much or more for ephemeral e-books than physical hardcover editions is a scam, no matter whose e-reader you use. But I love my Nook --- it's a perfect platform carrying around a load of free books (from, e.g., Project Gutenberg, or my own reference compilations) to read on long trips. Battery life is great, screen quality is nice (better than the lowest grades of pulp paperbacks, though with room for improvement compared to a quality printing). I've got the silly WiFi "store" turned off, since I never intend to fork over extortion fees for overpriced, DRM'd novels.
The catch is "worth more alive than dead" --- the investment class making the decisions only cares about the fraction of worth *to them,* not to the economy and all stakeholders as a whole. Thus a company that is doing perfectly well --- able to maintain high employee pay, solid pensions and benefits, and still turn a profit for the investors --- will get killed if it will funnel more money into the pockets of the rich (even if the total economic value to everyone is lost).
For example: if a currently profitable company has a big pension fund saved up to pay out to retirees, corporate raiders will load the company up with debt, funneling all its money to "contractors" and "consultants" until they are "forced" to dip into the pension funds to keep the company afloat. When all the assets are gone, tell the workers and retirees "sorry, we're bankrupt!" before cruising away on your new yacht.
Killing thriving companies is also useful for breaking unions --- one profitable, strongly unionized corporation in an industry will drive up wages and benefits even for non-union competitors (by competing for skilled workers). Thus, the investing class will want to drive the unionized company into the ground --- at least long enough to win major concessions, if not outright dissolution, from the workers. Then it's profit for everyone else at the top.
Killing off a thriving corporation may also be cheaper/easier than integrating it through merger/acquisition when a bigger corporation wants to buy off a competitor to assume a more solid monopoly position.
In all these cases, "worth" to the economy as a whole is destroyed if all stakeholders are counted (especially employees and customers) --- but so long as more money ends up in the pockets of the super-rich, it's a "win" for the decision-makers.