The only reason why there are so many is because there is a fear that none of them will reach the target before being shot down. However that risk is relatively small.
That's not the reason at all. Currently there is one country in the world that can shoot down ballistic missiles (though not more than a handful on a good day), and we're not likely to shoot them at ourselves.
The reason we have so many is a surprise attack will destroy most of them in their silos. The calculus of MAD is "We have enough nukes that no matter how well you plan your attack there will always be at least a few dozen remaining for payback."
The Russian arsenal is still there, and it would take decades to rebuild ours if relations turned sour. Any significant reductions in the US strategic nuclear arsenal need to be contingent on an analysis of the first strike potential of other nations.
That's the obvious solution to some, but it's not a terribly good one.
I see no evidence this is true. I think it's far more likely to actually achieve the goal of reducing power plant emissions. People do respond to price signals.
Then the right way to go about this is to use taxes and fees so the externalities are included in the power bill. I don't understand the fixation on light bulbs - there are lots of ways to conserve power. Let's let people decide for themselves how they want to do it.
Creating a new TLD on an existing "insecure" network that doesn't require authentication to access the physical network doesn't add any security. In this scenario anyone can still access the machines and it is up the owners of the machines to implement their own security.
According to TFA part of the reason is legal. To get on you'd have to agree to deep packet inspection, something they can't do in the.com TLD because of 4th amendment concerns.
The article quotes a couple different people, but I suspect the NSA guy thinking along the lines of a VPN. Presumably to get access you'd have to install software that would include virus detection. It wouldn't solve the zombie PC problem, but with good authentication zombies could be booted off the network as soon as they're discovered.
I have mixed feelings about a VPN. On one hand if they did it right cybercrime would be a lot more difficult to pull off. Not impossible, of course, but difficult. On the other hand if it works really well we'll be more or less required to have government software installed on our machines or we'll be locked out of half the web.
Just as in every other market, you have to look at supply and demand. The world is already brimming with people who speak English and Mandarin or Cantonese. Learning a language takes a lot of time and effort, and if you're past your early 20s you probably won't ever be a fluent speaker no matter how much you put into it.. Are you really ready to risk millions of dollars because you accidentally offended your client?
You'd be far ahead getting a second job and then hiring a translator with the money you make.
Let the innovators and not the trolls make out technology.
How is it you think most innovators get paid off for the things they invent? There's nothing wrong with buying and selling rights to patents. Not everyone who gets even legitimate patents has the know-how and resources to bring his idea to market. The problem isn't that patents are bought and sold, the problem is the USPTO is awarding overly broad patents to for things that probably ought not be patentable to start with.
Russia has 21 million conscripts under arms at any time.
Not even close. The Russian Federation has 1.2 million men under arms, with another 750k in reserve. 21 million men under arms would be 2/3 of the entire cohort of military age Russians. That kind of mobilization couldn't be sustained without wrecking the economy. Most of the Russian air force is obsolete, the Russian navy is rusting at the docks, and aside from a few elite units the Russian army is poorly trained and woefully under-equipped. T-72s, which comprise the vast majority of Russian MBTs (something like 90%), are no match for a modern tank and would need to land a flank shot to penetrate enemy armor. Which would be quite a trick with obsolete sensors and communications.
The Russian military wouldn't exactly be a pushover for anybody, and you never know what's going to happen when the fighting starts, but the restructuring that occurred after the end of the cold war meant for 15 years or so there was no money for new military hardware, leaving mostly cold war junk. Of course it's mostly academic (I hope, anyway), since the two countries have more interests in common than otherwise these days, and nobody is interested in going to war with a nuclear power.
You're understating the scope of the problem by concentrating on copyright, which is only one slice of a very big pie. The US government has greatly extended its reach to an extent that previous generations (of Americans, let alone people in other countries) would have considered outrageous. In the last decade or so Congress has decided US laws apply to US citizens everywhere and even citizens of foreign countries in many cases. Drug laws, gambling laws, tax laws... did you know a US citizen who moves abroad and renounces his citizenship is supposed to pay US income taxes for ten more years?
There was an item in the news this week that reported Iranian oil suppliers are threatening to cut off Indian refineries. Why? Because the Indians can't figure out a way to pay the Iranians for the oil. Banks are afraid they'll go on the US government's financial black list and be forbidden from doing business with US banks anywhere in the world.
The US Congress simply refuses to recognize any limits on its jurisdiction. Of course it wouldn't matter if other countries would guard their own sovereignty, but for some reason they don't. Hell, I'm an American and I wish other countries would tell Uncle Sam to take a hike when he starts throwing his weight around.
NASA has some serious problems right now, mostly due to lack of a strong vision and the ridiculous turf wars between the White House and Congress. Most of these problems aren't hard to solve in theory, but in practice, with the rabid partisonship going on right now? Hmph.
NASA's problems go far deeper than that, because it isn't a space agency. It's a jobs program. We needed to keep the STS to supply the space station. Why did we need the space station? Well, because without it there would have been nothing for STS to do. Are we doing anything useful up there? Sure, a tiny bit, but it's not even close to justifying the cost, and could anyway be done more cheaply with temporary unmanned labs. So why are we flying an expensive, antiquated craft to an expensive space station where there's not much to do? Because 20,000 jobs are involved in districts with powerful congressmen.
Manned space isn't exploration. The real exploration is done by machines even as manned space has taken larger and larger percentages of the overall NASA budget. There's a whole lot we don't know about the solar system, and every dollar spent on vanity projects is a dollar that could have been spent on something useful.
We'll all be long dead before fossil fuels run out, unless by "fossil fuels" you mean "oil". If we make the switch it will be over environmental concerns, not supply.
I was tangentially involved in the first wave of grocery delivery services, and from what I could tell they ran up against a huge problem with unprocessed meat and vegetables: they're not uniform like processed foods. Sure, if I order the same brand of salami I'll probably get the same thing. But when I buy a steak I want to look at it and see if it has the right color and the right marbling. The same goes in spades for fish.
And as it's still running after four years, it isn't really all that failed now, is it?
Well that depends. You can offer pretty much any service you like as long as you're "tinkering" and willing to lose money. If, after four years, it's still not making money then yeah, "failed" is probably the right way to characterize it.
Pretty much. The UK has 12 times the population density we have in the US. Not only are the customers further apart, but also almost everyone has a car. Home delivery can probably work in a handful of denser US metro areas (some of them already have it), but I'll be shocked if anyone ever makes it work in the smaller cities or suburbs.
The same question could be asked of music player technology, mobile software, and tablet software. MS has had less than stellar success with their internal projects; buying something external that works may have been easier.
Buying external products is easier because you buy the customers along with the product. Most people tend to pick a tool and then continue to use it as long as it meets their needs. That's true even as better products enter the marketplace. Overcoming that inertia is difficult, and usually only happens if there's a price difference or when conditions change such that people come to expect a feature the existing tool doesn't provide.
I once worked at a company that made warehouse management software. We had a few dozen large customers which purchased our product to manage their distribution centers. One of our larger competitors bought us. Well, it was a "merger of equals", technically, otherwise my stock options would have vested at the premium price they were paying. Not that I'm bitter.
Anyway, the new owners essentially threw our product out. At first blush it doesn't make sense - they bought a software company, immediately deep-sixed its software, and laid off almost everyone who worked there. Basically they retained a small team to support existing customers so as not to lose any. What they wanted was the ongoing business relationship we had with our customers. It took a few years building out an upgrade path, but eventually they had everyone on their original product line. At which point they could afford to spend almost twice as much money on development and marketing without affecting existing profit margins, and they could afford more depth in their support organization. They had enough money coming in from enough different places they could afford to do some "wouldn't it be cool if..." projects. They ended up far better off as a result of the "merger".
I agree Microsoft has been unable to capitalize on its dominant desktop OS market position in a whole slew of related markets, but I don't think it's a question of technology. You can already make voice calls through the MS IM client, for instance, and the quality is comparable to that of Skype. Microsoft's problem is that people are already using Skype, they're reasonably happy with it, and it's a market that benefits from a network effect. If all your friends have Skype, you're not going to switch to MSN without convincing everyone else to do the same. And why would you? Beyond that Microsoft isn't "cool" (which is really just another network effect), so every new customer is more expensive. But are there key areas of expertise Microsoft lacks in this competition? I doubt it.
Remember this is the same MS that tried to buy Yahoo. What was the ultimate purpose of that acquisition?
A Yahoo! acquisition would make a lot of sense for Microsoft for the same reason it made sense to buy my warehouse management employer: you make money in software by selling the same thing to more people. Over the years the company has poured billions into MSN and Bing in an attempt to challenge Google, and Yahoo! could very well give it the critical mass it needs to succeed.
Typically the trial court is the "finder of fact". It takes extraordinary circumstances for the appellate court to gainsay the trial court's findings, and they really couldn't do that in this case because of the default judgement. But appellate courts have wide latitude to monkey with damage awards, and the reduction of the award to a token amount isn't all that uncommon.
It's not as easy as people generally believe. Take anthrax, for instance. Various groups (Aum Shinrikyo, Al Queda) and governments (Saddam's Iraq) have tried and failed to get something that has both potency and the proper physical characteristics. Anthrax comes in many strains, and not all of them are dangerous. Aum Shinrikyo, which was eventually able to mount the sarin gas attack in Tokyo, first tried to attack the city with anthrax. They had competent chemists and biochemists. And yet they failed because the strain they were able to procure wasn't suitable for attacking people.
Beyond that anthrax tends to clump together. If you just breed a whole bunch of anthrax and try to spread it around a city you won't kill very many people. The clumps are heavy and will fall to the ground. A proper weapon requires additives, the composition of which isn't generally known outside researchers in a handful of governments.
The only successful germ attack (in modern times, leaving aside Japanese experiments on hapless Chinese villages) was most likely carried out by an expert in germ warfare. Do you think that would be the case if it were so easy?
Because the mechanisms that allow a bacteria to survive exposure to a given antibiotic come at a cost. It's not the genes themselves that confer resistance - it's the expression of those genes. And the same process that introduced the resistance-conferring gene works to eliminate it if it's no longer needed.
For example, there is a class of antibiotics that work by dissolving the bacterial cell wall. After repeated exposure germs evolve thicker cell walls, which makes this class of antibiotics less and less effective. But in its absence the thicker-walled bacteria version will be out-competed by its thinner-walled brethren, since thin walls are less resource intensive.
For the most part the antibiotics we use are just synthetic versions of chemicals secreted by various organisms (bacteria and fungi, mostly). If bacteria could pass down cost-free resistance they'd already be immune to anything we could throw at them.
Nonsense. In Japan the elderly are every bit as jealous of their entitlements as elderly people anywhere. And there are more of them, on a percentage basis, so they always win political fights instead of just mostly always in the US.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I think classified data is routinely stolen by other countries. I just don't think much (if any) is stolen by cyberspies hacking in from the outside. When I worked as a defense contractor the rules were pretty strict - we had a network with classified data on it, but that network was physically disconnected from the internet. The cables were even covered in thick pipes that were regularly inspected to discourage tapping from the inside.
I'm not saying nobody has ever stolen classified data by hacking in. But for that to happen someone has to physically put classified data on an insecure network, something that's not easy to do on accident.
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That's not the reason at all. Currently there is one country in the world that can shoot down ballistic missiles (though not more than a handful on a good day), and we're not likely to shoot them at ourselves.
The reason we have so many is a surprise attack will destroy most of them in their silos. The calculus of MAD is "We have enough nukes that no matter how well you plan your attack there will always be at least a few dozen remaining for payback."
The Russian arsenal is still there, and it would take decades to rebuild ours if relations turned sour. Any significant reductions in the US strategic nuclear arsenal need to be contingent on an analysis of the first strike potential of other nations.
I see no evidence this is true. I think it's far more likely to actually achieve the goal of reducing power plant emissions. People do respond to price signals.
You'd think kiddie porn was the scourge of our time from all the press it gets.
There's plenty of time to deal with the budget. The problem is they're too far apart, not that they're out of time.
Then the right way to go about this is to use taxes and fees so the externalities are included in the power bill. I don't understand the fixation on light bulbs - there are lots of ways to conserve power. Let's let people decide for themselves how they want to do it.
According to TFA part of the reason is legal. To get on you'd have to agree to deep packet inspection, something they can't do in the .com TLD because of 4th amendment concerns.
The article quotes a couple different people, but I suspect the NSA guy thinking along the lines of a VPN. Presumably to get access you'd have to install software that would include virus detection. It wouldn't solve the zombie PC problem, but with good authentication zombies could be booted off the network as soon as they're discovered.
I have mixed feelings about a VPN. On one hand if they did it right cybercrime would be a lot more difficult to pull off. Not impossible, of course, but difficult. On the other hand if it works really well we'll be more or less required to have government software installed on our machines or we'll be locked out of half the web.
He may be a freak. Or maybe he doesn't actually speak Mandarin very well.
Just as in every other market, you have to look at supply and demand. The world is already brimming with people who speak English and Mandarin or Cantonese. Learning a language takes a lot of time and effort, and if you're past your early 20s you probably won't ever be a fluent speaker no matter how much you put into it.. Are you really ready to risk millions of dollars because you accidentally offended your client?
You'd be far ahead getting a second job and then hiring a translator with the money you make.
How is it you think most innovators get paid off for the things they invent? There's nothing wrong with buying and selling rights to patents. Not everyone who gets even legitimate patents has the know-how and resources to bring his idea to market. The problem isn't that patents are bought and sold, the problem is the USPTO is awarding overly broad patents to for things that probably ought not be patentable to start with.
Russia has 21 million conscripts under arms at any time.
Not even close. The Russian Federation has 1.2 million men under arms, with another 750k in reserve. 21 million men under arms would be 2/3 of the entire cohort of military age Russians. That kind of mobilization couldn't be sustained without wrecking the economy. Most of the Russian air force is obsolete, the Russian navy is rusting at the docks, and aside from a few elite units the Russian army is poorly trained and woefully under-equipped. T-72s, which comprise the vast majority of Russian MBTs (something like 90%), are no match for a modern tank and would need to land a flank shot to penetrate enemy armor. Which would be quite a trick with obsolete sensors and communications.
The Russian military wouldn't exactly be a pushover for anybody, and you never know what's going to happen when the fighting starts, but the restructuring that occurred after the end of the cold war meant for 15 years or so there was no money for new military hardware, leaving mostly cold war junk. Of course it's mostly academic (I hope, anyway), since the two countries have more interests in common than otherwise these days, and nobody is interested in going to war with a nuclear power.
You're understating the scope of the problem by concentrating on copyright, which is only one slice of a very big pie. The US government has greatly extended its reach to an extent that previous generations (of Americans, let alone people in other countries) would have considered outrageous. In the last decade or so Congress has decided US laws apply to US citizens everywhere and even citizens of foreign countries in many cases. Drug laws, gambling laws, tax laws... did you know a US citizen who moves abroad and renounces his citizenship is supposed to pay US income taxes for ten more years?
There was an item in the news this week that reported Iranian oil suppliers are threatening to cut off Indian refineries. Why? Because the Indians can't figure out a way to pay the Iranians for the oil. Banks are afraid they'll go on the US government's financial black list and be forbidden from doing business with US banks anywhere in the world.
The US Congress simply refuses to recognize any limits on its jurisdiction. Of course it wouldn't matter if other countries would guard their own sovereignty, but for some reason they don't. Hell, I'm an American and I wish other countries would tell Uncle Sam to take a hike when he starts throwing his weight around.
NASA's problems go far deeper than that, because it isn't a space agency. It's a jobs program. We needed to keep the STS to supply the space station. Why did we need the space station? Well, because without it there would have been nothing for STS to do. Are we doing anything useful up there? Sure, a tiny bit, but it's not even close to justifying the cost, and could anyway be done more cheaply with temporary unmanned labs. So why are we flying an expensive, antiquated craft to an expensive space station where there's not much to do? Because 20,000 jobs are involved in districts with powerful congressmen.
Manned space isn't exploration. The real exploration is done by machines even as manned space has taken larger and larger percentages of the overall NASA budget. There's a whole lot we don't know about the solar system, and every dollar spent on vanity projects is a dollar that could have been spent on something useful.
We'll all be long dead before fossil fuels run out, unless by "fossil fuels" you mean "oil". If we make the switch it will be over environmental concerns, not supply.
I was tangentially involved in the first wave of grocery delivery services, and from what I could tell they ran up against a huge problem with unprocessed meat and vegetables: they're not uniform like processed foods. Sure, if I order the same brand of salami I'll probably get the same thing. But when I buy a steak I want to look at it and see if it has the right color and the right marbling. The same goes in spades for fish.
Well that depends. You can offer pretty much any service you like as long as you're "tinkering" and willing to lose money. If, after four years, it's still not making money then yeah, "failed" is probably the right way to characterize it.
Pretty much. The UK has 12 times the population density we have in the US. Not only are the customers further apart, but also almost everyone has a car. Home delivery can probably work in a handful of denser US metro areas (some of them already have it), but I'll be shocked if anyone ever makes it work in the smaller cities or suburbs.
Buying external products is easier because you buy the customers along with the product. Most people tend to pick a tool and then continue to use it as long as it meets their needs. That's true even as better products enter the marketplace. Overcoming that inertia is difficult, and usually only happens if there's a price difference or when conditions change such that people come to expect a feature the existing tool doesn't provide.
I once worked at a company that made warehouse management software. We had a few dozen large customers which purchased our product to manage their distribution centers. One of our larger competitors bought us. Well, it was a "merger of equals", technically, otherwise my stock options would have vested at the premium price they were paying. Not that I'm bitter.
Anyway, the new owners essentially threw our product out. At first blush it doesn't make sense - they bought a software company, immediately deep-sixed its software, and laid off almost everyone who worked there. Basically they retained a small team to support existing customers so as not to lose any. What they wanted was the ongoing business relationship we had with our customers. It took a few years building out an upgrade path, but eventually they had everyone on their original product line. At which point they could afford to spend almost twice as much money on development and marketing without affecting existing profit margins, and they could afford more depth in their support organization. They had enough money coming in from enough different places they could afford to do some "wouldn't it be cool if..." projects. They ended up far better off as a result of the "merger".
I agree Microsoft has been unable to capitalize on its dominant desktop OS market position in a whole slew of related markets, but I don't think it's a question of technology. You can already make voice calls through the MS IM client, for instance, and the quality is comparable to that of Skype. Microsoft's problem is that people are already using Skype, they're reasonably happy with it, and it's a market that benefits from a network effect. If all your friends have Skype, you're not going to switch to MSN without convincing everyone else to do the same. And why would you? Beyond that Microsoft isn't "cool" (which is really just another network effect), so every new customer is more expensive. But are there key areas of expertise Microsoft lacks in this competition? I doubt it.
A Yahoo! acquisition would make a lot of sense for Microsoft for the same reason it made sense to buy my warehouse management employer: you make money in software by selling the same thing to more people. Over the years the company has poured billions into MSN and Bing in an attempt to challenge Google, and Yahoo! could very well give it the critical mass it needs to succeed.
What technology does Skype have that Microsoft doesn't already have or can't develop for a tiny fraction of the Skype acquisition?
Typically the trial court is the "finder of fact". It takes extraordinary circumstances for the appellate court to gainsay the trial court's findings, and they really couldn't do that in this case because of the default judgement. But appellate courts have wide latitude to monkey with damage awards, and the reduction of the award to a token amount isn't all that uncommon.
It's not as easy as people generally believe. Take anthrax, for instance. Various groups (Aum Shinrikyo, Al Queda) and governments (Saddam's Iraq) have tried and failed to get something that has both potency and the proper physical characteristics. Anthrax comes in many strains, and not all of them are dangerous. Aum Shinrikyo, which was eventually able to mount the sarin gas attack in Tokyo, first tried to attack the city with anthrax. They had competent chemists and biochemists. And yet they failed because the strain they were able to procure wasn't suitable for attacking people.
Beyond that anthrax tends to clump together. If you just breed a whole bunch of anthrax and try to spread it around a city you won't kill very many people. The clumps are heavy and will fall to the ground. A proper weapon requires additives, the composition of which isn't generally known outside researchers in a handful of governments.
The only successful germ attack (in modern times, leaving aside Japanese experiments on hapless Chinese villages) was most likely carried out by an expert in germ warfare. Do you think that would be the case if it were so easy?
What is it you think happens during a birth that would prevent this? It seems quite normal to me.
Because the mechanisms that allow a bacteria to survive exposure to a given antibiotic come at a cost. It's not the genes themselves that confer resistance - it's the expression of those genes. And the same process that introduced the resistance-conferring gene works to eliminate it if it's no longer needed.
For example, there is a class of antibiotics that work by dissolving the bacterial cell wall. After repeated exposure germs evolve thicker cell walls, which makes this class of antibiotics less and less effective. But in its absence the thicker-walled bacteria version will be out-competed by its thinner-walled brethren, since thin walls are less resource intensive.
For the most part the antibiotics we use are just synthetic versions of chemicals secreted by various organisms (bacteria and fungi, mostly). If bacteria could pass down cost-free resistance they'd already be immune to anything we could throw at them.
Nonsense. In Japan the elderly are every bit as jealous of their entitlements as elderly people anywhere. And there are more of them, on a percentage basis, so they always win political fights instead of just mostly always in the US.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I think classified data is routinely stolen by other countries. I just don't think much (if any) is stolen by cyberspies hacking in from the outside. When I worked as a defense contractor the rules were pretty strict - we had a network with classified data on it, but that network was physically disconnected from the internet. The cables were even covered in thick pipes that were regularly inspected to discourage tapping from the inside.
I'm not saying nobody has ever stolen classified data by hacking in. But for that to happen someone has to physically put classified data on an insecure network, something that's not easy to do on accident.
Oh? Classified information has been stolen by hacking in from the internet? When?