Yeah, that might work. But that means they would've had to spend the entire previous day carefully laying out all those cartridges and associated triggers. That's enough activity to draw unwanted attention.
So my question is this: Why is Apple holding out on the licensing of FairPlay? Is it simply that they think crippled CDs are evil and they don't want to dirty their hands with it?
No. Apple controls the hardware and distribution for iPod users, and they like it that way. They want to break consumers of the habit of buying little discs of plastic.
If buying music on a CD becomes a hassle because of the DRM it helps Apple. If music companies are forced to release only DRM-less CDs, it helps Apple because the music companies have to go through Apple to have DRM, something they desparately want. The only way Apple doesn't come out ahead is if they allow other companies a peice of the iPod pie.
The "industry" should listen to (and deal with) Microsoft because they've foolishly allowed Apple to accumulate all the power in online distribution. At some point, when CD sales fall far enough and people don't expect to carry around peices of plastic, Apple will be in a position to dictate to music companies what they can charge.
The music industry should be doing everything in its power to make sure lots of companies do online distribution so they're in a position to freeze out companies that try to compress their margins too much. If I were running the RIAA Microsoft would get really sweet deals until they'd acheived parity with Apple. So would every other small-time online service. When there was ten players with 10% of the market each, then the deals would end.
This is not the time for them to get greedy, but old habits die hard.
In any event, they probably will set up their own "super duper internet", just as soon as they settle on a complete set of new French words so they don't have to use dirty English for technology English-speakers invented.
Well, launch costs to GEO are $10,000+ per Kg. If you could move up a couple of tons at a time while saving two orders of magnitude on cost, that's economic viability.
Because as your shares in nuclear fusion inc. mature, so it will become apparent that the risk associated with what they're doing is reducing, and that the timeframe for the big payout is closing too. This will add value to the shares.
This is how the biotech market works, but fusion would just be on an (even) longer timeframe.
That may be true, but even if you create a profitable fusion plant on paper the normal everyday "friction" is likely to soak up your profits on the first couple of plants. The production of a drug is trivial after all the research is finished.
If you look at major technological advances like railroads, telephone, cheap steel, etc, you see the first movers got creamed, then later other companies came in and made profit (chunnel, anyone?). The stock price will probably reflect this reality.
I think the energy boys realize all that and would be first into the breach if we had a true breakthrough. The problem is there seems to be a conspiracy among physicists to make discoveries that are usefull for getting grants but entirely impractical for power generation.
Even the ITER people are willing to admit commercial fusion power is at least fifty (not thirty) years away, and companies just don't operate in those kinds of timeframes. As a shareholder, why would I care about profits that wont come until I'm long dead?
In terms of government funded research, you really have diminishing returns at some point. You fund the most promising research with your first dollar, and you move on to less and less promising research as the budget increases. At some point you're just wasting money, and it's not clear to me we haven't reached that point already under current budgets. How many high energy physicists out there had original ideas this year that didn't get funded?
It's a sorry state of affairs, I know, but until governments wake up and smell the crude oil we're fucked.
This is kind of a silly statement to make in a democracy - governments are a reflection of the electorate. The US government will have whatever energy policy the people demand. One of the things fusion researchers have done really poorly in recent years is sell a comelling vision to the public, and Until that happens there won't be many policy changes. What have you done lately to change the status quo?
How many people are really archiving data these days? Backups, yeah, but archives? I have, on my current hard drive, every bit of data I've touched in the last 15 years. Not because I'm desparate to save old data, but because my hard drive space increases each time I buy a new computer.
So my drive has a directory named "old computer", which in turn has an "old computer directory", which has one as well, etc.
So as long as my grandkids are willing to sort through all the dross (or have a reasonable AI to do it), they'll pretty much have my complete digital life.
Read this and consider we're talking about an airship with a large internal volume. You'll never make a waverider out of a blimp (or a rigid-frame airship, for that matter).
If you simply want to get cheap payload into orbit this decade using materials that are NOT theoretical, find a way to get funding to the blimp-to-orbit people at JP Aerospace.
Now, this is funny. You would have us trade a sound concept with materials problems for an impossible concept (under any circumstances). JP Aerospace simply has no experience with the speed and conditions they're dealing with, so they didn't realize they'll never get a L/D ratio of more than about 2 as the airship approaches hypersonic speeds. There's no way they can get to orbit. Ever.
You know you want to. Before you post that brilliant point about why it can't be done, go read the faq and see how the respond to the million other people who made the exact same point. Maybe you'll buy it, maybe not, but I'm tired of reading "but what about hurricanes?" every time we have a space elevator discussion.
This may all be true. I didn't say the company would win the lawsuit, I just said the idea they couldn't "threaten" a journalist with a lawsuit is wrong. Look, I could sue you because the color of your shirt is causing me emotional damage. I'll never win, but it's gonna cost you some money.
Many lawsuits are filed with the expectation they would lose if taken to trial. But they still make sense in the US if a) the defendent doesn't have enough money to defend himself at all or b) the defendent can save money by settling instead of fighting it out and is likely to do so.
I find the practice abhorrent, but that's reality in a country where you always pay your own legal costs. In other countries they have "loser pays", so you're less likely to sue someone who'll trounce you in court. But here the lawyers have enough political clout to keep that from happening.
I didn't mean to imply that because I could produce the same plot we can't produce a realtime dynamic plot. In fact we do on a daily basis for planning and maintennence purposes. In this case by realtime I mean within three seconds of call termination. It may be there's some subtle point the journalist missed but I'm at a loss to know what it is.
My point about interference cancelling was it's actually pretty common for academic researchers to produce things that aren't cutting edge at all because they base their ideas of "cutting edge" mostly on what appears on academic journals. I'm sure most researchers do as much investigation as they can to avoid later embarrassment, but every few years something really blatant slips through. Sometimes it's duplication of classified projects (understandable), and sometimes they're duplicating commercial research. This is less understandable, since companies are usually pretty forthcoming with this kind of thing (more than they should be, in my opinion). I'm pretty sure if an MIT professor called up my employer and asked what we do he would get at least enough information to know whether or not he was wasting his time.
Well, the satellite stuff was probably classified, so yeah, I could understand that. This particular story, though, is just amusing. How did they think cellphone companies manage network coverage? Blind guessing and ouija boards? Also, in the US cell phone companies are required by law to pinpoint customer locations during an emergency as part of 911 service.
I work for a big cellphone company. The question I have is:
Why are these people reinventing the wheel?
We plot phone traffic patterns as a function of geography on a daily basis so we can make sure we have capacity where we need it. Hell, I could go to a plotter 25 yards from my desk and plot out a map very similar to the one in the article.
Honestly, sometimes I chuckle at what academics think is cutting edge. Years ago a friend of mine from school was discussing "new" compensation algorithms for telescopes which were in fact over 20 years old to the people who've been working in satellite recon.
This is quite a bit of a problem because Californian law and First Amendment precedent requires Apple check up on itself before threatening journalists.
This is clearly wrong. The law requires nothing for a lawsuit but an allegation. Most companies actually get the desired result from these kind of lawsuits because the defendent doesn't have the money to fight it. The only way you can recover your money from the plaintif is if you can prove the plaintif knew the lawsuit was bogus, but judges rarely (meanint very, very, very rarely, almost never) actually punish people for filing frivolous lawsuits.
You are confusing size with lift. An airship is huge, no doubt, but it doesn't have much lift compared to its size. If you were actually going to carry any cargo I doubt you'd have much lift left over for a credible air defense. It would be far easier and cheaper to use conventional air cover.
So, Intel chips are cheap if you don't count most of their costs. Wow, that's some analysis. WalMart's costs are cheap too, if you don't count what they paid to the manufacturer. Drug companies make boatloads of money if you don't count development and marketing costs. This business stuff is pretty easy...
Yeah, like all political stories on slashdot, there's a lot less meat in this article than you'd guess from the summary. The fact of the matter is these kinds of things are just policy papers without any teeth. They're not really designed for domestic consumption anyway.
People who write these policies work for the president, and they can't give him any more or less authority than he already has. I'm always saddened by adults who don't understand their own government. Don't they teach civics in high school anymore?
The War Powers Act was adhered to in Iraq. It doesn't say every war has to be over in 60 days, it just says the president must get congressional approval if it goes longer than 60 days. He has that approval.
On the subject of missiles: I wonder how effective traditional homing mechanisms would be on a craft like this, with its potential for unusual engine positionings, visual profile, and probably an odd, disproportionate radar signature.
Well, presumably radar guided missles will home in on the cargo area, which may or may not be what you'd want. But IR missles will probably pick out one of the engines. If you lose an engine you probably wouldn't crash, but you might not be able to land either, since landing airships requires vectored thrust. This could be worse than crashing, depending on how sensitive your cargo is and which way the wind is blowing.
That said, I like the concept. DoD spends huge amounts of money for routine air transport, and this could save big bucks by filling the niche between sea and air freight. Airships are much, much cheaper to operate than C-130s. The key would be to make sure they didn't accidentally become mission critical systems during wartime.
Education is almost always at the front, and I'd say that NASA is second in line for the big axe.
You must already be on our "red planet neighbor". Here on Earth (well, in the US, anyway), Education funding has doubled in real terms over the last thirty years, although there hasn't been any appreciable increase in test scores to justify it. It's gone up 50% since Bush (damn liberal) took office.
Don't need to read your mind, just pointing out you are using the same rhetoric the Bush administration uses, dropping 9/11 at every turn to avoid having to making a coherent argument.
I think my argument is logical and coherent. You seem to have some fixation with the Bush administration - maybe you should see someone about that. The point was every low-level military guy and civil servant classifies as much as possible as a career preservation tactic. They really are afraid of getting blamed for some major catastrophe on the order of the 9/11 attack even if it doesn't make objective sense.
Obviously not it was CENSORED and to my knowledge it hasn't leaked which is miraculous as leak prone as Washington is. They only thing we know is the Bush administration censored everything in the report relating to Saudi Arabia, some 90-100 pages. The congressmen who wrote the report said that much.
Right, my point exactly. Hard to use a report you don't have access to to support an argument. For all we know it included information on Saudi government corruption or some prince's embarrassing relations with a goat. We can speculate, but that's all it is - speculation.
We know with as much certainty as anyone can know about anything the CIA does, that the CIA starting tailing Atta in Germany as far back as 2000, the trusty Wikipedia article. Its well known the CIA tracked him until he entered the U.S. and then dropped surveillance of him because they are precluded from operations in the U.S. Either they didn't flag him to the FBI when he entered or the FBI didn't follow up, I don't remember which.
I refuse to accept Wikipedia as a source, and the references are either subscription only or don't support that assertion. Do you have another source for the part about the CIA, preferably something official? I can't find any reasonable source on Google to back it up.
There is a distinct chance Able Danger learned Atta was an Al Qaeda suspect from someone in the CIA and claimed their data mining project discovered this fact independently to make themselves look good.
Do you have a reason to think this beyond idle speculation? I see no reason they couldn't have done what they claim to have done.
Bottomline is you really can't believe anything Able Danger people say, waiting until 4 years later to claim they could have foiled 9/11.
That's not really true. The information was given to the 9/11 commission years ago, they just chose not to reference or investigate it, since it either a) didn't fit with their notion that Atta never travelled under false passport (which isn't true, but that's what they were told by the CIA) or b) their (unofficial) charter was spread out the blame, which couldn't be done if this information came to light. The reason we're hearing about it four years later is the official report came out with no mention Abel Danger and the people involved have (illegally) gone public out of frustration.
So what is the point of spending billions on intelligence and intelligence briefings if you don't follow up on any of it unless its a "slam dunk".
Now you're being deliberately obtuse. You must realize I meant the president can't address all those leads personally. The fact it was in a breifing given to him is meaningless without knowing exactly what was said and the surrounding context. If it was just a long laundry list of possibilities there would have been no reason for him to address it specifically. Consider the fact the 9/11 attack is pretty minor-league compared to the things the president actually is addressing personally, like fusion bombs simultaneously detonated in multiple large US cities.
My only point is that had the President had directed them to look at the threat that might have set off some light bulb in someones head about the hijackers training in U.S. flight schools they might have foiled the plot.
If you delve a little deeper into those reports you'll find the money they make on selling oil is lost in the noise. For the most part, oil companies make money building infrastructure. The actual price/barrel doesn't affect the profit margin much, but high prices will make them money because there's more pressure for capacity growth.
As you say, these kinds of profits aren't outrageous. Consider film producers have averaged 30% over the last couple of decades.
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Yeah, that might work. But that means they would've had to spend the entire previous day carefully laying out all those cartridges and associated triggers. That's enough activity to draw unwanted attention.
No. Apple controls the hardware and distribution for iPod users, and they like it that way. They want to break consumers of the habit of buying little discs of plastic.
If buying music on a CD becomes a hassle because of the DRM it helps Apple. If music companies are forced to release only DRM-less CDs, it helps Apple because the music companies have to go through Apple to have DRM, something they desparately want. The only way Apple doesn't come out ahead is if they allow other companies a peice of the iPod pie.
The music industry should be doing everything in its power to make sure lots of companies do online distribution so they're in a position to freeze out companies that try to compress their margins too much. If I were running the RIAA Microsoft would get really sweet deals until they'd acheived parity with Apple. So would every other small-time online service. When there was ten players with 10% of the market each, then the deals would end.
This is not the time for them to get greedy, but old habits die hard.
In any event, they probably will set up their own "super duper internet", just as soon as they settle on a complete set of new French words so they don't have to use dirty English for technology English-speakers invented.
Well, launch costs to GEO are $10,000+ per Kg. If you could move up a couple of tons at a time while saving two orders of magnitude on cost, that's economic viability.
This is how the biotech market works, but fusion would just be on an (even) longer timeframe.
That may be true, but even if you create a profitable fusion plant on paper the normal everyday "friction" is likely to soak up your profits on the first couple of plants. The production of a drug is trivial after all the research is finished.
If you look at major technological advances like railroads, telephone, cheap steel, etc, you see the first movers got creamed, then later other companies came in and made profit (chunnel, anyone?). The stock price will probably reflect this reality.
Even the ITER people are willing to admit commercial fusion power is at least fifty (not thirty) years away, and companies just don't operate in those kinds of timeframes. As a shareholder, why would I care about profits that wont come until I'm long dead?
In terms of government funded research, you really have diminishing returns at some point. You fund the most promising research with your first dollar, and you move on to less and less promising research as the budget increases. At some point you're just wasting money, and it's not clear to me we haven't reached that point already under current budgets. How many high energy physicists out there had original ideas this year that didn't get funded?
It's a sorry state of affairs, I know, but until governments wake up and smell the crude oil we're fucked.
This is kind of a silly statement to make in a democracy - governments are a reflection of the electorate. The US government will have whatever energy policy the people demand. One of the things fusion researchers have done really poorly in recent years is sell a comelling vision to the public, and Until that happens there won't be many policy changes. What have you done lately to change the status quo?
So my drive has a directory named "old computer", which in turn has an "old computer directory", which has one as well, etc.
So as long as my grandkids are willing to sort through all the dross (or have a reasonable AI to do it), they'll pretty much have my complete digital life.
Read this and consider we're talking about an airship with a large internal volume. You'll never make a waverider out of a blimp (or a rigid-frame airship, for that matter).
Now, this is funny. You would have us trade a sound concept with materials problems for an impossible concept (under any circumstances). JP Aerospace simply has no experience with the speed and conditions they're dealing with, so they didn't realize they'll never get a L/D ratio of more than about 2 as the airship approaches hypersonic speeds. There's no way they can get to orbit. Ever.
You know you want to. Before you post that brilliant point about why it can't be done, go read the faq and see how the respond to the million other people who made the exact same point. Maybe you'll buy it, maybe not, but I'm tired of reading "but what about hurricanes?" every time we have a space elevator discussion.
Yeah, but usually the other ones can't complain anymore since they're rotting in barrels in the basement.
Many lawsuits are filed with the expectation they would lose if taken to trial. But they still make sense in the US if a) the defendent doesn't have enough money to defend himself at all or b) the defendent can save money by settling instead of fighting it out and is likely to do so.
I find the practice abhorrent, but that's reality in a country where you always pay your own legal costs. In other countries they have "loser pays", so you're less likely to sue someone who'll trounce you in court. But here the lawyers have enough political clout to keep that from happening.
My point about interference cancelling was it's actually pretty common for academic researchers to produce things that aren't cutting edge at all because they base their ideas of "cutting edge" mostly on what appears on academic journals. I'm sure most researchers do as much investigation as they can to avoid later embarrassment, but every few years something really blatant slips through. Sometimes it's duplication of classified projects (understandable), and sometimes they're duplicating commercial research. This is less understandable, since companies are usually pretty forthcoming with this kind of thing (more than they should be, in my opinion). I'm pretty sure if an MIT professor called up my employer and asked what we do he would get at least enough information to know whether or not he was wasting his time.
Well, the satellite stuff was probably classified, so yeah, I could understand that. This particular story, though, is just amusing. How did they think cellphone companies manage network coverage? Blind guessing and ouija boards? Also, in the US cell phone companies are required by law to pinpoint customer locations during an emergency as part of 911 service.
Why are these people reinventing the wheel?
We plot phone traffic patterns as a function of geography on a daily basis so we can make sure we have capacity where we need it. Hell, I could go to a plotter 25 yards from my desk and plot out a map very similar to the one in the article.
Honestly, sometimes I chuckle at what academics think is cutting edge. Years ago a friend of mine from school was discussing "new" compensation algorithms for telescopes which were in fact over 20 years old to the people who've been working in satellite recon.
This is clearly wrong. The law requires nothing for a lawsuit but an allegation. Most companies actually get the desired result from these kind of lawsuits because the defendent doesn't have the money to fight it. The only way you can recover your money from the plaintif is if you can prove the plaintif knew the lawsuit was bogus, but judges rarely (meanint very, very, very rarely, almost never) actually punish people for filing frivolous lawsuits.
You are confusing size with lift. An airship is huge, no doubt, but it doesn't have much lift compared to its size. If you were actually going to carry any cargo I doubt you'd have much lift left over for a credible air defense. It would be far easier and cheaper to use conventional air cover.
So, Intel chips are cheap if you don't count most of their costs. Wow, that's some analysis. WalMart's costs are cheap too, if you don't count what they paid to the manufacturer. Drug companies make boatloads of money if you don't count development and marketing costs. This business stuff is pretty easy...
People who write these policies work for the president, and they can't give him any more or less authority than he already has. I'm always saddened by adults who don't understand their own government. Don't they teach civics in high school anymore?
The War Powers Act was adhered to in Iraq. It doesn't say every war has to be over in 60 days, it just says the president must get congressional approval if it goes longer than 60 days. He has that approval.
Well, presumably radar guided missles will home in on the cargo area, which may or may not be what you'd want. But IR missles will probably pick out one of the engines. If you lose an engine you probably wouldn't crash, but you might not be able to land either, since landing airships requires vectored thrust. This could be worse than crashing, depending on how sensitive your cargo is and which way the wind is blowing.
That said, I like the concept. DoD spends huge amounts of money for routine air transport, and this could save big bucks by filling the niche between sea and air freight. Airships are much, much cheaper to operate than C-130s. The key would be to make sure they didn't accidentally become mission critical systems during wartime.
You must already be on our "red planet neighbor". Here on Earth (well, in the US, anyway), Education funding has doubled in real terms over the last thirty years, although there hasn't been any appreciable increase in test scores to justify it. It's gone up 50% since Bush (damn liberal) took office.
I think my argument is logical and coherent. You seem to have some fixation with the Bush administration - maybe you should see someone about that. The point was every low-level military guy and civil servant classifies as much as possible as a career preservation tactic. They really are afraid of getting blamed for some major catastrophe on the order of the 9/11 attack even if it doesn't make objective sense.
Obviously not it was CENSORED and to my knowledge it hasn't leaked which is miraculous as leak prone as Washington is. They only thing we know is the Bush administration censored everything in the report relating to Saudi Arabia, some 90-100 pages. The congressmen who wrote the report said that much.
Right, my point exactly. Hard to use a report you don't have access to to support an argument. For all we know it included information on Saudi government corruption or some prince's embarrassing relations with a goat. We can speculate, but that's all it is - speculation.
We know with as much certainty as anyone can know about anything the CIA does, that the CIA starting tailing Atta in Germany as far back as 2000, the trusty Wikipedia article. Its well known the CIA tracked him until he entered the U.S. and then dropped surveillance of him because they are precluded from operations in the U.S. Either they didn't flag him to the FBI when he entered or the FBI didn't follow up, I don't remember which.
I refuse to accept Wikipedia as a source, and the references are either subscription only or don't support that assertion. Do you have another source for the part about the CIA, preferably something official? I can't find any reasonable source on Google to back it up.
There is a distinct chance Able Danger learned Atta was an Al Qaeda suspect from someone in the CIA and claimed their data mining project discovered this fact independently to make themselves look good.
Do you have a reason to think this beyond idle speculation? I see no reason they couldn't have done what they claim to have done.
Bottomline is you really can't believe anything Able Danger people say, waiting until 4 years later to claim they could have foiled 9/11.
That's not really true. The information was given to the 9/11 commission years ago, they just chose not to reference or investigate it, since it either a) didn't fit with their notion that Atta never travelled under false passport (which isn't true, but that's what they were told by the CIA) or b) their (unofficial) charter was spread out the blame, which couldn't be done if this information came to light. The reason we're hearing about it four years later is the official report came out with no mention Abel Danger and the people involved have (illegally) gone public out of frustration.
So what is the point of spending billions on intelligence and intelligence briefings if you don't follow up on any of it unless its a "slam dunk".
Now you're being deliberately obtuse. You must realize I meant the president can't address all those leads personally. The fact it was in a breifing given to him is meaningless without knowing exactly what was said and the surrounding context. If it was just a long laundry list of possibilities there would have been no reason for him to address it specifically. Consider the fact the 9/11 attack is pretty minor-league compared to the things the president actually is addressing personally, like fusion bombs simultaneously detonated in multiple large US cities.
My only point is that had the President had directed them to look at the threat that might have set off some light bulb in someones head about the hijackers training in U.S. flight schools they might have foiled the plot.
And my point was you can't exp
As you say, these kinds of profits aren't outrageous. Consider film producers have averaged 30% over the last couple of decades.