I would love to see a move to seperating tuners out from display devices by moving to a system where fixed spectrum assignments aren't locked in for decades. Open spectrum is always going to be under pressure from other uses that bring money to the Treasury. At least if they force a shift into technology that means you might swap out $20 in electronics every few years to receive the signal the corporations can make more money on both the new signal boards and the extra space the create for themselves thereby.
Whatever open spectrum is left for Wi-Fi and other open uses will then feel less pressure because the corps will have another way to make money without going to the bother of buying politicians and the bad pr that attaches to that.
If the Bush administration announced that it had already picked a winner in the spectrum redesign, every freaking comm lobbyist on capitol hill would mobilize to change it in Congress. Announcements like this are *supposed* to be general.
By the numbers, the largest dialect of english is the Indian variant (or the sum of the Indian variants if you like). By that standard, yes, we have atrocious accents.
One of the things that MS has going against it is that such deals are predicated on trust. The labels have to trust the technology vendor not going to screw them. Putting aside the jihad of whether or not it is deserved, MS has a well established reputation for shady and illegal business practices. Why would you ever do business with a company like that if you don't have to?
There's a great value added benefit to dealing with a technology company that is headed by an entertainment company CEO (Steve Jobs, of course, runs his own movie studio called Pixar). As long as Steve continues in his post, Apple will continue to be able to extract a few pennies extra in profit versus any deal MS will be able to make.
No, you'd just be locked out of charging more than $7 for it. Albums can't cost more than the total of their individual songs and all songs cost $0.99.
The iTunes store is just an alternative outlet for the hype machine. Hype, otherwise known as marketing, is a legitimate business function that is necessary for all artists to make a living with their art. You have to have a patron, a fan base, or be independently wealthy to be a full time artist if starvation is to be excluded from the 'options' list.
Actually, Apple agreed never to get into the music business and paid to retain the name of Apple. When they started putting in alert sounds, Apple lawyers cautioned that Apple Records could sue over it so they called the first sound released sosumi ( pronounced so sue me). They have always had a weak position with regards to the name Apple and it's always been weakest w/regards to the use of it in the music business.
The Beatles will look at it and might or might not sue but I'm sure that there is a very carefully crafted legal strategy ready in case they do.
I think that Apple's setting itself up as an honest broker of web services in order to try to stay out of Apple Record's crosshairs. If Apple starts preferring one store above another, one label above another, it can be more realistically be claimed to be in the business and thus afoul of its previous corporate commitments. If what they're doing is just providing a deal for the labels to have their content distributed on Apple's web services platform, it's much more arguable that they're in the music business at all.
In the Congo people are raping, killing, and even eating one another. In wide portions of the muslim world somebody who can wave a theology degree around without any sort of state sanction or even heirarchical religious oversight can write a judicial judgement that passes a death sentence and expect his followers to attempt to carry it out (anywhere in the world) without going to jail for conspiracy to commit murder.
These are just two situations that require adult supervision by *somebody* and since the traditional adults of the last few centuries seem to have decided to retreat into their own european countries in a funk, that leaves the US carrying an awful lot more of the burden than it should as it has a form of government designed to make it *really* bad at this sort of action.
So France is taking a shot in the Congo and good luck to it. All of that infrastructure that you say the EU doesn't need is suddenly both necessary and simply not there. You have to give the French credit for taking a step towards growing up on great power military responsibilities and truly reclaiming their place in the community of nations. Their forces are likely to be stretched quite badly by the lack of power projection capability and I hope that the results are just burnt out troops (see 3rd ID in Iraq) and not surplus casualties.
The relations between Rome and Constantinople weren't all great friendship between the Patriarch and the Pope and then one day somebody got pissed off and a thousand year rupture ensued. There were problems gathering for at least two centuries prior.
It gives me chills as an american lecturing a european to study history more.
The US wants waivers for its troops regarding the ICC. Romania signed such a waiver agreement with the US when there was no common EU policy document on ICC waivers but individual statements by various representatives. Romania's application process for the EU was threatened in a similar fashion (though not quite so succinctly or publicly as Chirac).
That's one more within recent memory that I remembered off the top of my head. I'm guessing that it isn't the only one but admittedly that's all I recall without doing any research whatsoever.
I'm interested in this actually though I think the two projects are aimed at different markets. What's the launch cost estimate per kg? What's the likely maximum weight such a system can launch and what's the stress put on the launch package, ie how many g forces will that acceleration by railgun impose?
Somehow, I don't think you're going to lift people that way and I don't see how anything fragile gets up *or* down in this system. For space tourism, it's a bust and for arbitrarily large platforms or platforms that are relatively delicate, it won't work either.
Different markets, but it probably has its own niche if it can be cheap enough.
A couple of inventors at Rice University have established a carbon nanotube production company using a new process that is industrially scaleable and potentially much less expensive. I'm sure that a lot of people are working on lengthening the strands which need to be at least a few of milimeters long for them to be fashioned into rope using epoxy. At least at this point, you can produce the stuff in abundance. I expect a lot of people will be looking to this material to solve all sorts of problems. Most of these problems could be solved easier if the darn tubes were longer.
It's a speculative leap but I'm optimistic that the world will see a space elevator in the next few decades.
repeat after me. Chernobyl had no containment system.
Now with a pebble bed reactor, it might be ok but this was a graphite reactor that obviously had the potential for catastrophic failure. Containment was mandatory for every design system but the Soviets thought they could do without. KISS? I don't think so.
You're quite right about the WEU and I'm sure there are equally relevant defense pacts from before the war that could just as easily be ressurected.
As for Turkey, you're repeating the arguments of France, Germany, and Belgium. All the remaining NATO powers disagreed. The unravelling of alliances are usually not sudden, but happen over long periods of time and repeated insult. The situation with Turkey is a sign that the alliance might be getting a bit frayed. The final rupture might take decades if nothing is done about it. The rupture between Constantinople and Rome took centuries. It's still a worrisome situation.
You're essentially correct that europeans are historically very good at war. But history wins no battles without well-funded, well-trained forces. The future threat situation might very well require going into a Congo or Zimbabwe to root out a future Al Queda before they can get their nukes up and running for a simple smuggling run into Marseilles. Europe seems particularly ill suited to project power these days.
I fear for the return of another charming rogue to the US presidency who will bring the US into another decade of navel gazing. I don't see anybody else stepping up and providing adult supervision.
If it were a one-shot you would be right. I don't think it was a one shot. It is a situation that deserves watching, not ranting though. The idea that the EU is all love, peace, and equality so soon after that just rubbed me the wrong way.
UCAV's, on the other hand, have provided some demonstrated some real usefulness.
Every once in awhile you can hear shrieks of pain from the Pentagon. That's Rumsfeld extracting another Cold War relic arms system from the hands of another dead general. The problem of reworking our armed forces to handle the new style of attack from weak 'non-integrating gap' nations is real and you're right to point it out. But the classic ratios say a 3:1 attack against regular enemy forces is a slam dunk. The ratio for irregulars is 10:1. Given that reality, the new style warfare may require more, not less money, just in different places.
Inevitably, a persistently faster growing society will dominate and expand while slower ones will stagnate, change (if they're flexible enough), or outright die. The winners have always been hated by the losers for this.
In no other era has it been more true than this one that the losers *don't* have to be losers. The roadmap to catching up and overtaking the US is crystal clear. It's the collective decision of the other societies not to take that route that is astounding to me. It's not like the US has any built in secrets that can't be copied. There is *no* monopoly.
The EU, AFAIK does not have a military existance outside of NATO. Without the US pretty much means without NATO. After the shabby treatment NATO member Turkey received when it invoked it's NATO obligations, is everybody 100% sure that all the other EU nations would respond?
In reality, the EU is likely to skate through for at least a decade more but after US patience is exhausted its likely to face a choice of mending fences with the US or finance its own defense.
The nature of wolves never change. They always like hunting undefended sheep.
Jacques Chirac didn't threaten the Vilnius 10 group? He didn't scare the pants off all the new entrants and some of the more reluctant incumbant EU members?
Actually, IBM is a longtime Apple supplier and is the source for Apple's G3 line.
I'm guessing that depending on the power consumption and performance characteristics, Apple's going to go with a 2 chip solution with IBM probably on the high end with their 970 and Motorola probably on the low end with their 32bit G5. This is exactly what was going on before except that the high end was previously held by Motorola.
You have to take into account that their bandwidth for the iTunes store is probably being run along the same pipes as.mac and probably the rest of their to be rolled out web services infrastructure.
The more services they roll out (and they will be rolling out more) that have different usage patterns, the less bandwidth will cost for each one as the peaks will not usually be additive and you'll have to overbuy less for each service than if they were run by different companies.
Funny, I don't see $10 albums as a rip-off, nor $0.99 singles. Since it took less than a month for the iTunes store to sell more music than all the other services combined, perhaps the other services that you're stuck with on Windows right now just suck?
Given low enough launch costs, you would just run orbital sweepers with nice thick object catchers to sweep through space and pick up the small objects you're talking about. Think of it as a huge, fluffy pillow that's trawled around to catch the stuff. It's not practical right now but at $100/kg launch costs, I expect that people will find a way to do it.
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I would love to see a move to seperating tuners out from display devices by moving to a system where fixed spectrum assignments aren't locked in for decades. Open spectrum is always going to be under pressure from other uses that bring money to the Treasury. At least if they force a shift into technology that means you might swap out $20 in electronics every few years to receive the signal the corporations can make more money on both the new signal boards and the extra space the create for themselves thereby.
Whatever open spectrum is left for Wi-Fi and other open uses will then feel less pressure because the corps will have another way to make money without going to the bother of buying politicians and the bad pr that attaches to that.
If the Bush administration announced that it had already picked a winner in the spectrum redesign, every freaking comm lobbyist on capitol hill would mobilize to change it in Congress. Announcements like this are *supposed* to be general.
By the numbers, the largest dialect of english is the Indian variant (or the sum of the Indian variants if you like). By that standard, yes, we have atrocious accents.
One of the things that MS has going against it is that such deals are predicated on trust. The labels have to trust the technology vendor not going to screw them. Putting aside the jihad of whether or not it is deserved, MS has a well established reputation for shady and illegal business practices. Why would you ever do business with a company like that if you don't have to?
There's a great value added benefit to dealing with a technology company that is headed by an entertainment company CEO (Steve Jobs, of course, runs his own movie studio called Pixar). As long as Steve continues in his post, Apple will continue to be able to extract a few pennies extra in profit versus any deal MS will be able to make.
No, you'd just be locked out of charging more than $7 for it. Albums can't cost more than the total of their individual songs and all songs cost $0.99.
The iTunes store is just an alternative outlet for the hype machine. Hype, otherwise known as marketing, is a legitimate business function that is necessary for all artists to make a living with their art. You have to have a patron, a fan base, or be independently wealthy to be a full time artist if starvation is to be excluded from the 'options' list.
Actually, Apple agreed never to get into the music business and paid to retain the name of Apple. When they started putting in alert sounds, Apple lawyers cautioned that Apple Records could sue over it so they called the first sound released sosumi ( pronounced so sue me). They have always had a weak position with regards to the name Apple and it's always been weakest w/regards to the use of it in the music business.
The Beatles will look at it and might or might not sue but I'm sure that there is a very carefully crafted legal strategy ready in case they do.
You can get the most recent cash number here. As of the most recent quarter it's 4.53, slowly creeping up from 4 over the last few quarters.
I think that Apple's setting itself up as an honest broker of web services in order to try to stay out of Apple Record's crosshairs. If Apple starts preferring one store above another, one label above another, it can be more realistically be claimed to be in the business and thus afoul of its previous corporate commitments. If what they're doing is just providing a deal for the labels to have their content distributed on Apple's web services platform, it's much more arguable that they're in the music business at all.
In the Congo people are raping, killing, and even eating one another. In wide portions of the muslim world somebody who can wave a theology degree around without any sort of state sanction or even heirarchical religious oversight can write a judicial judgement that passes a death sentence and expect his followers to attempt to carry it out (anywhere in the world) without going to jail for conspiracy to commit murder.
These are just two situations that require adult supervision by *somebody* and since the traditional adults of the last few centuries seem to have decided to retreat into their own european countries in a funk, that leaves the US carrying an awful lot more of the burden than it should as it has a form of government designed to make it *really* bad at this sort of action.
So France is taking a shot in the Congo and good luck to it. All of that infrastructure that you say the EU doesn't need is suddenly both necessary and simply not there. You have to give the French credit for taking a step towards growing up on great power military responsibilities and truly reclaiming their place in the community of nations. Their forces are likely to be stretched quite badly by the lack of power projection capability and I hope that the results are just burnt out troops (see 3rd ID in Iraq) and not surplus casualties.
The relations between Rome and Constantinople weren't all great friendship between the Patriarch and the Pope and then one day somebody got pissed off and a thousand year rupture ensued. There were problems gathering for at least two centuries prior.
It gives me chills as an american lecturing a european to study history more.
The world is coming to an end!
B-)
The US wants waivers for its troops regarding the ICC. Romania signed such a waiver agreement with the US when there was no common EU policy document on ICC waivers but individual statements by various representatives. Romania's application process for the EU was threatened in a similar fashion (though not quite so succinctly or publicly as Chirac).
That's one more within recent memory that I remembered off the top of my head. I'm guessing that it isn't the only one but admittedly that's all I recall without doing any research whatsoever.
I'm interested in this actually though I think the two projects are aimed at different markets. What's the launch cost estimate per kg? What's the likely maximum weight such a system can launch and what's the stress put on the launch package, ie how many g forces will that acceleration by railgun impose?
Somehow, I don't think you're going to lift people that way and I don't see how anything fragile gets up *or* down in this system. For space tourism, it's a bust and for arbitrarily large platforms or platforms that are relatively delicate, it won't work either.
Different markets, but it probably has its own niche if it can be cheap enough.
A couple of inventors at Rice University have established a carbon nanotube production company using a new process that is industrially scaleable and potentially much less expensive. I'm sure that a lot of people are working on lengthening the strands which need to be at least a few of milimeters long for them to be fashioned into rope using epoxy. At least at this point, you can produce the stuff in abundance. I expect a lot of people will be looking to this material to solve all sorts of problems. Most of these problems could be solved easier if the darn tubes were longer.
It's a speculative leap but I'm optimistic that the world will see a space elevator in the next few decades.
repeat after me. Chernobyl had no containment system.
Now with a pebble bed reactor, it might be ok but this was a graphite reactor that obviously had the potential for catastrophic failure. Containment was mandatory for every design system but the Soviets thought they could do without. KISS? I don't think so.
You're quite right about the WEU and I'm sure there are equally relevant defense pacts from before the war that could just as easily be ressurected.
As for Turkey, you're repeating the arguments of France, Germany, and Belgium. All the remaining NATO powers disagreed. The unravelling of alliances are usually not sudden, but happen over long periods of time and repeated insult. The situation with Turkey is a sign that the alliance might be getting a bit frayed. The final rupture might take decades if nothing is done about it. The rupture between Constantinople and Rome took centuries. It's still a worrisome situation.
You're essentially correct that europeans are historically very good at war. But history wins no battles without well-funded, well-trained forces. The future threat situation might very well require going into a Congo or Zimbabwe to root out a future Al Queda before they can get their nukes up and running for a simple smuggling run into Marseilles. Europe seems particularly ill suited to project power these days.
I fear for the return of another charming rogue to the US presidency who will bring the US into another decade of navel gazing. I don't see anybody else stepping up and providing adult supervision.
If it were a one-shot you would be right. I don't think it was a one shot. It is a situation that deserves watching, not ranting though. The idea that the EU is all love, peace, and equality so soon after that just rubbed me the wrong way.
Wow, and I bet you are unhappy with religion because it tells you what to do.
UCAV's, on the other hand, have provided some demonstrated some real usefulness.
Every once in awhile you can hear shrieks of pain from the Pentagon. That's Rumsfeld extracting another Cold War relic arms system from the hands of another dead general. The problem of reworking our armed forces to handle the new style of attack from weak 'non-integrating gap' nations is real and you're right to point it out. But the classic ratios say a 3:1 attack against regular enemy forces is a slam dunk. The ratio for irregulars is 10:1. Given that reality, the new style warfare may require more, not less money, just in different places.
Inevitably, a persistently faster growing society will dominate and expand while slower ones will stagnate, change (if they're flexible enough), or outright die. The winners have always been hated by the losers for this.
In no other era has it been more true than this one that the losers *don't* have to be losers. The roadmap to catching up and overtaking the US is crystal clear. It's the collective decision of the other societies not to take that route that is astounding to me. It's not like the US has any built in secrets that can't be copied. There is *no* monopoly.
The EU, AFAIK does not have a military existance outside of NATO. Without the US pretty much means without NATO. After the shabby treatment NATO member Turkey received when it invoked it's NATO obligations, is everybody 100% sure that all the other EU nations would respond?
In reality, the EU is likely to skate through for at least a decade more but after US patience is exhausted its likely to face a choice of mending fences with the US or finance its own defense.
The nature of wolves never change. They always like hunting undefended sheep.
Jacques Chirac didn't threaten the Vilnius 10 group? He didn't scare the pants off all the new entrants and some of the more reluctant incumbant EU members?
Wake up, man, that post was serious.
Actually, IBM is a longtime Apple supplier and is the source for Apple's G3 line.
I'm guessing that depending on the power consumption and performance characteristics, Apple's going to go with a 2 chip solution with IBM probably on the high end with their 970 and Motorola probably on the low end with their 32bit G5. This is exactly what was going on before except that the high end was previously held by Motorola.
You have to take into account that their bandwidth for the iTunes store is probably being run along the same pipes as .mac and probably the rest of their to be rolled out web services infrastructure.
The more services they roll out (and they will be rolling out more) that have different usage patterns, the less bandwidth will cost for each one as the peaks will not usually be additive and you'll have to overbuy less for each service than if they were run by different companies.
Funny, I don't see $10 albums as a rip-off, nor $0.99 singles. Since it took less than a month for the iTunes store to sell more music than all the other services combined, perhaps the other services that you're stuck with on Windows right now just suck?
Given low enough launch costs, you would just run orbital sweepers with nice thick object catchers to sweep through space and pick up the small objects you're talking about. Think of it as a huge, fluffy pillow that's trawled around to catch the stuff. It's not practical right now but at $100/kg launch costs, I expect that people will find a way to do it.