The initial success of the OLPC was a clear demonstration of the failure of the existing computing infrastructure. All the manufacturers at the time said that building a laptop computer for under ~$400 was impossible, and that if you could do it no one would want one. When the OLPC came in at $200 for an actually ruggedized laptop with a modest but stable set of hardware the industry was still in denial for a couple of years. Finally the Taiwanese companies started building netbooks and selling them for slightly more than the OLPC and the rest of the industry woke up.
Probably because the electrical grid is controlled by for-profit corporations run by executives hyper-focused on short-term revenue to get their next bonus.
Think of the Untied States trying to exist with 19th century technology for a couple of months. That's how bad it could be. The big equipment that runs the electrical grid is all custom made by a very few manufacturers with very long (as much as two years) backorder times in the best of conditions. End-user equipment may or may not be affected, but without power it's pretty much useless. Your car may run, but since the gasoline pumps are electric, as is all the equipment that runs the holding tanks, the pipelines and the refineries, you're not going very far with it. Food distribution system collapses without trucks, the rail system deadlocks without control systems, ships stack up in the harbor with no way to offload them. Farmers can only watch their crops whither and die in the field. Banking system goes belly up without the constant credit card traffic.
Perhaps not 'death from above', unless you need surgery (operating rooms almost never have windows), but still pretty fucking catastrophic.
The problem is that the electrical grid is run by for-profit corporations lead by executives hyper-focused on short-term profits. I unfortunately don't see any likelihood of remediation efforts ever being put into place.
The problem is not so much end-user equipment, although that alone would be pretty devastating to most people. The real problem is the destruction of the electrical grid that would result. Most of the large transformers and relays are custom-made one-off pieces, and backorder time for them under normal circumstances is 3 months to 2 years. There are no procedures available to collapse the grid in preparation to a CME to protect that equipment, it's really not doable at this point. Imagine most of North America without electricity for a series of months. Electricity is used to pump natural gas around the country, so most of that's unavailable. Electricity is used in gas pumps, so even if your car still works you have no fuel for it. Farmers have the fuel in their tanks, but after that their tractors are going to be parked for the duration. Many railroad switches can no longer be thrown by hand and schedules are all computerized, so big chunks of the rail network are going to be down. Most hospitals have 3 days of fuel for their generators, beyond that they're back to doing surgery by candlelight.
I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been 7 years continuously, MS policies require breaks in employment at certain intervals for non-blue badges to create discontinuities. They got sued several years ago by multiple-year contractors wanting full FTE benefits, and the Washington state employment commission agreed that the contractors should be treated like full time employees. Now after working x-amount of time contractors are required to take off y-amount of time before starting a new contract.
Hens can be truly nasty when they have chicks to defend. Our landlord had a 40 kilo guard mutt named 'Rambo' who wouldn't even come to the back part of the lot because our little hen regularly pecked the shit out of his face every time he got near her chicks. Rosa sent me to bring one of the chicks and the mother gave me a nasty bruise on the lower eyelid (which was quite embarrassing to explain to my students).
We used to refer to Ronnie Raygun's merry band of morons as the Reagan Badministration, because they really were bad. Shrub took in the worst of Reagan's 'True Believers' and added a bunch of even worse zealots and loonies, including people who were torture enthusiasts well before the World Trade Center attacks, royalists, free marketeers, zionists, and security state fanatics. I never imagined that I would see a worst presidency than Reagan, but Bush's was by every measure the worst presidency in the history of the Union.
I'm wondering if the issue isn't poor documentation or unrealized interactions that actually made the original attempt succeed, but all subsequent attempts fail. If University A uses Acme brand petri dishes with microscopic ripples on the bottom and University B uses Corning Dow brand petri dishes with perfectly smooth bottoms then Uni B could fail if the ripples were necessary for some reason. It was over a decade until the US Navy was able to reproduce the original 'cold fusion' results consistently, because no one realized that the specific impurities in the original anodes were actually important.
Editors and publishers have learned the hard way that you don't fuck with the energy companies unless you have a battalion of lawyers at your disposal. You especially don't fuck with Big Coal in the middle of coal country.
As far as the Bush Madministration, the link is trivially easy to make. Shrub reduced inspections, regulations, reporting, safety rules and liability levels for the entire range of extractive industries. Obama's only blame is not restoring them.
a possibly-inferior product that can be mistaken for their own
Not bloody likely, no one buying a multimeter will say "Hey, look! A Fluke multimeter for only $30!" There are a crapload of inexpensive multimeters on the market in a rainbow of colors, including non-Fluke yellow ones. No one in Fluke's target market is going to be confused by the color, the only way to mistake these for a Fluke is by silkscreening the Fluke name on them.
I have been involved in a lot of database project over the years on a variety of platforms. Only two of them were Oracle and both of them were multi-year multi-million dollar fiascoes. One of them was ripped out and replaced with a home brew solution built by staff on SQL Server less than two years later. The only good thing that I can think of to say about Oracle is that they're not based in Seattle so I don't have to deal with their people.
The Maori watercraft weren't large enough for rats to hitch rides unnoticed. That took European and Chinese ships with large, dark holds, bilges, and closed storage spaces.
maybe redirect ALL those prayers to Chile, with their 6.7 earthquake, which is more than 100's more severe than California's, and with probably 100 times less ability to deal with the effects.
when the big one hits, and the ocean waters come flooding in to make all-new beachfront property, you all will be electrocuted by your electric vehicles.
good riddance.
The one in Chile a couple years ago was 8.8, so 80 times the strength of the 7.0 one that devastated Haiti. My wife has been through a 7.9 in Peru, about twice as strong as the 1906 San Francisco quake. People in Peru and Chile don't even get out of bed for a 4.4 quake.
At the end of the road, or at the side of the road, doesn't matter. Those places have owners. Are you going to give up a piece of your property so that everyone in the neighborhood can take a dump in front of your house? In most places the only thing of value any poor person will ever accumulate is a piece of land, even if they're just squatters they'll defend it with their life because they don't have anything else. They're not going to give up their one and only asset just so that their neighbors have somewhere to shit. And sorry to tell you this, but squat latrines don't magically empty themselves. The only reason they get built at all is because someone, normally the municipality, gave up the space to site them.
Go live in the slum of Los Olivos in Lima for a few days, stay with my nephew. People are poor and there are no sewers there but you'll be surprised, people don't shit in the street. They go to the one and only abandoned lot around the corner, the same place that everyone takes their trash. Every month or two the municipality sends around a front-end loader and a couple of dump trucks to clean it out. People, even if they're poor, really WILL go somewhere else if they have the opportunity. Far too often they don't have the opportunity.
Any idea what it costs to roll out a sewage system and a potable water system into an area that doesn't already have one? The expense in time, manpower, materials and money is an enormous investment, it will take a poor neighborhood in a developing country 20 years or more to be ale to afford installation. My brother-in-law is a civil engineer in Peru, even with full funding provided by the central government it took 6-8 years to install water and sewer to the small town of Hyru, population less than 5000. You don't just wave a magic money wand and have infrastructure appear overnight.
another western technical solution to fundamental problems that don't need solving. . . The reason you get diseases spreading out there is because people just shit in the street.
Do you have any idea why they "shit in the street"? Obviously not, since you seem to think that the problem exists because poor people are ignorant. If you put 30 seconds of thought into it you should be able to figure out that even poor people know that it's unsanitary, stinks, causes disease, and is embarrassing. They do it because they don't have any alternative. Sewage systems are expensive, water systems are expensive, land for neighborhood latrines are expensive, pumping for a neighborhood cistern is expensive. They're poor, all the "education" you may want to give them won't provide them with an alternative to crapping the street.
If one of these devices can provide sanitation for half a dozen families then they won't HAVE to take a dump in public. If you're up to it I would highly recommend traveling in some third world countries, somewhere outside of the resorts in Cancun and Phuket, to see how people in most of the world live and, most importantly, WHY they live that way. Spend much time outside the tourist areas and I'll guarantee that at some point YOU will have to drop your pants somewhere inconvenient.
So the simple fact that widespread fraud didn't happen during the 60+ years when the regulations were in place, but suddenly bloomed into existence a few months after they had been removed is just coincidence? Really? You believe in crop circles and Sasquatch too?
using tax money to set up and run fund raisers, like Obama has done on every single trip he has ever taken to California where he does nothing else.
In all fairness, this has been SOP since at least Reagan's term in office (probably earlier as well, but I wasn't really aware of politics before then). Shrubby was particularly bad about it.
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Where do you live? Wherever it is, your situation is unusual.
The initial success of the OLPC was a clear demonstration of the failure of the existing computing infrastructure. All the manufacturers at the time said that building a laptop computer for under ~$400 was impossible, and that if you could do it no one would want one. When the OLPC came in at $200 for an actually ruggedized laptop with a modest but stable set of hardware the industry was still in denial for a couple of years. Finally the Taiwanese companies started building netbooks and selling them for slightly more than the OLPC and the rest of the industry woke up.
Probably because the electrical grid is controlled by for-profit corporations run by executives hyper-focused on short-term revenue to get their next bonus.
Think of the Untied States trying to exist with 19th century technology for a couple of months. That's how bad it could be. The big equipment that runs the electrical grid is all custom made by a very few manufacturers with very long (as much as two years) backorder times in the best of conditions. End-user equipment may or may not be affected, but without power it's pretty much useless. Your car may run, but since the gasoline pumps are electric, as is all the equipment that runs the holding tanks, the pipelines and the refineries, you're not going very far with it. Food distribution system collapses without trucks, the rail system deadlocks without control systems, ships stack up in the harbor with no way to offload them. Farmers can only watch their crops whither and die in the field. Banking system goes belly up without the constant credit card traffic.
Perhaps not 'death from above', unless you need surgery (operating rooms almost never have windows), but still pretty fucking catastrophic.
The problem is that the electrical grid is run by for-profit corporations lead by executives hyper-focused on short-term profits. I unfortunately don't see any likelihood of remediation efforts ever being put into place.
The problem is not so much end-user equipment, although that alone would be pretty devastating to most people. The real problem is the destruction of the electrical grid that would result. Most of the large transformers and relays are custom-made one-off pieces, and backorder time for them under normal circumstances is 3 months to 2 years. There are no procedures available to collapse the grid in preparation to a CME to protect that equipment, it's really not doable at this point. Imagine most of North America without electricity for a series of months. Electricity is used to pump natural gas around the country, so most of that's unavailable. Electricity is used in gas pumps, so even if your car still works you have no fuel for it. Farmers have the fuel in their tanks, but after that their tractors are going to be parked for the duration. Many railroad switches can no longer be thrown by hand and schedules are all computerized, so big chunks of the rail network are going to be down. Most hospitals have 3 days of fuel for their generators, beyond that they're back to doing surgery by candlelight.
The repercussions are enormous.
I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been 7 years continuously, MS policies require breaks in employment at certain intervals for non-blue badges to create discontinuities. They got sued several years ago by multiple-year contractors wanting full FTE benefits, and the Washington state employment commission agreed that the contractors should be treated like full time employees. Now after working x-amount of time contractors are required to take off y-amount of time before starting a new contract.
Don't forget support staff, project managers, meeting rooms, collaboration software, networks, servers, version control software, backups, accountants, HR staff, janitors, and security guards.
Hens can be truly nasty when they have chicks to defend. Our landlord had a 40 kilo guard mutt named 'Rambo' who wouldn't even come to the back part of the lot because our little hen regularly pecked the shit out of his face every time he got near her chicks. Rosa sent me to bring one of the chicks and the mother gave me a nasty bruise on the lower eyelid (which was quite embarrassing to explain to my students).
Could give a whole new meaning to 'Buffalo Wings'.
Cheney, Pearle, Armitrage, Wolfowitz, Powell, Rumsfeld, Gates, there were more.
We used to refer to Ronnie Raygun's merry band of morons as the Reagan Badministration, because they really were bad. Shrub took in the worst of Reagan's 'True Believers' and added a bunch of even worse zealots and loonies, including people who were torture enthusiasts well before the World Trade Center attacks, royalists, free marketeers, zionists, and security state fanatics. I never imagined that I would see a worst presidency than Reagan, but Bush's was by every measure the worst presidency in the history of the Union.
I'm wondering if the issue isn't poor documentation or unrealized interactions that actually made the original attempt succeed, but all subsequent attempts fail. If University A uses Acme brand petri dishes with microscopic ripples on the bottom and University B uses Corning Dow brand petri dishes with perfectly smooth bottoms then Uni B could fail if the ripples were necessary for some reason. It was over a decade until the US Navy was able to reproduce the original 'cold fusion' results consistently, because no one realized that the specific impurities in the original anodes were actually important.
Editors and publishers have learned the hard way that you don't fuck with the energy companies unless you have a battalion of lawyers at your disposal. You especially don't fuck with Big Coal in the middle of coal country.
As far as the Bush Madministration, the link is trivially easy to make. Shrub reduced inspections, regulations, reporting, safety rules and liability levels for the entire range of extractive industries. Obama's only blame is not restoring them.
Would you "accidentally" buy it? I would immediately take a second look if the price on the thing were $30 instead of $120.
a possibly-inferior product that can be mistaken for their own
Not bloody likely, no one buying a multimeter will say "Hey, look! A Fluke multimeter for only $30!" There are a crapload of inexpensive multimeters on the market in a rainbow of colors, including non-Fluke yellow ones. No one in Fluke's target market is going to be confused by the color, the only way to mistake these for a Fluke is by silkscreening the Fluke name on them.
I have been involved in a lot of database project over the years on a variety of platforms. Only two of them were Oracle and both of them were multi-year multi-million dollar fiascoes. One of them was ripped out and replaced with a home brew solution built by staff on SQL Server less than two years later. The only good thing that I can think of to say about Oracle is that they're not based in Seattle so I don't have to deal with their people.
Anyone who believes that any fishery can be even vaguely "sustainable in perpetuity" knows nothing of fish, fishermen, or aquatic ecosystems.
The Maori watercraft weren't large enough for rats to hitch rides unnoticed. That took European and Chinese ships with large, dark holds, bilges, and closed storage spaces.
maybe redirect ALL those prayers to Chile, with their 6.7 earthquake, which is more than 100's more severe than California's, and with probably 100 times less ability to deal with the effects.
when the big one hits, and the ocean waters come flooding in to make all-new beachfront property, you all will be electrocuted by your electric vehicles.
good riddance.
The one in Chile a couple years ago was 8.8, so 80 times the strength of the 7.0 one that devastated Haiti. My wife has been through a 7.9 in Peru, about twice as strong as the 1906 San Francisco quake. People in Peru and Chile don't even get out of bed for a 4.4 quake.
At the end of the road, or at the side of the road, doesn't matter. Those places have owners. Are you going to give up a piece of your property so that everyone in the neighborhood can take a dump in front of your house? In most places the only thing of value any poor person will ever accumulate is a piece of land, even if they're just squatters they'll defend it with their life because they don't have anything else. They're not going to give up their one and only asset just so that their neighbors have somewhere to shit. And sorry to tell you this, but squat latrines don't magically empty themselves. The only reason they get built at all is because someone, normally the municipality, gave up the space to site them.
Go live in the slum of Los Olivos in Lima for a few days, stay with my nephew. People are poor and there are no sewers there but you'll be surprised, people don't shit in the street. They go to the one and only abandoned lot around the corner, the same place that everyone takes their trash. Every month or two the municipality sends around a front-end loader and a couple of dump trucks to clean it out. People, even if they're poor, really WILL go somewhere else if they have the opportunity. Far too often they don't have the opportunity.
Any idea what it costs to roll out a sewage system and a potable water system into an area that doesn't already have one? The expense in time, manpower, materials and money is an enormous investment, it will take a poor neighborhood in a developing country 20 years or more to be ale to afford installation. My brother-in-law is a civil engineer in Peru, even with full funding provided by the central government it took 6-8 years to install water and sewer to the small town of Hyru, population less than 5000. You don't just wave a magic money wand and have infrastructure appear overnight.
another western technical solution to fundamental problems that don't need solving. . . The reason you get diseases spreading out there is because people just shit in the street.
Do you have any idea why they "shit in the street"? Obviously not, since you seem to think that the problem exists because poor people are ignorant. If you put 30 seconds of thought into it you should be able to figure out that even poor people know that it's unsanitary, stinks, causes disease, and is embarrassing. They do it because they don't have any alternative. Sewage systems are expensive, water systems are expensive, land for neighborhood latrines are expensive, pumping for a neighborhood cistern is expensive. They're poor, all the "education" you may want to give them won't provide them with an alternative to crapping the street.
If one of these devices can provide sanitation for half a dozen families then they won't HAVE to take a dump in public. If you're up to it I would highly recommend traveling in some third world countries, somewhere outside of the resorts in Cancun and Phuket, to see how people in most of the world live and, most importantly, WHY they live that way. Spend much time outside the tourist areas and I'll guarantee that at some point YOU will have to drop your pants somewhere inconvenient.
So the simple fact that widespread fraud didn't happen during the 60+ years when the regulations were in place, but suddenly bloomed into existence a few months after they had been removed is just coincidence? Really? You believe in crop circles and Sasquatch too?
using tax money to set up and run fund raisers, like Obama has done on every single trip he has ever taken to California where he does nothing else.
In all fairness, this has been SOP since at least Reagan's term in office (probably earlier as well, but I wasn't really aware of politics before then). Shrubby was particularly bad about it.