Hydrogen is problematic as a fuel. For one thing, it has a terribly low density, which is why the space shuttle has that enormous external fuel tank. For another, H2 is a really, really tiny molecule that will go through just about anything over time. That makes it a lot more dangerous and expensive to deal with.
I'm curious how they're going to go about this. For the most part people who play EVE don't do much FPS, and vice versa. Without an overlap in the player base, they'll be essentially making a completely different game for a different demographic. So what's the point of trying to tie the two together?
Which is why, instead of wasting money on sightseeing trips to the moon or Mars, NASA should be working to bring kg-to-LEO costs down. The fact that it costs this much after almost sixty years of space flight is a crime. The fuel itself comprises something like 2% of total launch cost, so we don't even need fancy new technologies to do it, just better engineering.
While it's true game consoles typically lose money when they debut, that doesn't continue forever. Both Nintendo and Microsoft have been making money off the hardware for years now. Sony is still subsidizing hardware, but that has more to do with a late release and some iffy design decisions.
In any event, there's no reason to think downloads will require the manufacturers to turn a profit on hardware. If console game distribution goes primarily to download they'll make it so you can't just download a game from anywhere - you'll need to get it from the manufacturer-authorized distributor. That way they still get their ten bucks (or whatever).
The US military is the most powerful military in the world because it is the best funded military in the world. There's no basis for anyone to say the government is doing a particularly good job managing that particular function. Anybody who's every dealt with the military can tell you it's riddled with inefficiency on a scale that would never be tolerated in a private enterprise, but efficiency doesn't matter if you can swamp it with cash.
And yeah, if the government takes over health care the quality will almost certainly be worse for the vast majority of consumers.
But it's too easy: anyone can do that, no matter what encryption scheme they've been using prior to the police raid, provided the person still has a copy of their encrypted drive.
I don't think this is true. With all the commercial encryption schemes I'm aware of you will be unable to produce anything that looks like unencrypted data without the real key. Indeed, that must be true for brute-force codebreaking to work.
Also, if you're in the position of having the cops demand the key do decrypt some of your data, it's highly unlikely they're going to give you access to the encrypted data.
I've been thinking about that for awhile. You don't want a system that will destroy the encrypted data - as others have pointed out, the cops will image your drive before they do anything, so it's sort of pointless. But I think you could do even better with a set of one time pads. I'm envisioning a system that works like this:
You have data you want to encrypt of a certain size. Doesn't matter how large, but you can't really add to it after it's encrypted.
You generate a key the size of your original data and xor the key with the data you want to encrypt. If your key is random enough it should be impossible to decrypt. They say you can get something truly random with atomic decay or cosmic background radiation. These days storage is cheap, so having a key as big as a couple gigs should be no big deal - keep it on a fob.
Now here's the twist. After you've encrypted your data you generate a second "key" by xor-ing the encrypted data with something innocuous. War and Peace, maybe, or cat pictures from the internet. Now you have a key you can give to the cops if they ever come calling, and the data they come up with will be recognizable as data of some sort. So it will be difficult for them to argue you haven't provided "the key".
Prohibiting real world trades is both laughable futile, and self destructive. Companies that do it are punishing their paying players and themselves: it's truly lose-lose. I'm glad to see that CCP have finally figured this out, and stopped punching themselves in the balls.
The question that I have is: why did it take them so long to get smart, and why wasn't this designed in from the start?
Don't get the wrong idea here. Trading ISK for cash outside the GTC system will still get you banned. This system has been around for years, but it's only recently they've made enough headway against farmers that the cost of ISK through the GTC system is at or below the ebay price. The way they managed to do that was by investigating large transactions between unrelated characters - the same way governments catch drug dealers.
Two years? Nah... maybe six months if you picked the right race and plot your skills carefully.
And that's running missions. The most profitable thing you can do with your time in EVE is market arbitrage, which doesn't take that much in the way of skills. I don't do it myself because it's too much like real work, but I know people who regularly make a billion ISK in a couple full days of fiddling with market orders.
A 2 month GTC will cost you around 600-650M isk. With a proper setup and the right skills you can easily make this within 12-15 hours (2-3 days of semi casual playing.) - The way I look at it is that basically you're working for 12-15 hours and the pay you get is $30, which isn't exactly impressive if you compare it with other jobs (i.e. if you take a weekend job every other week and use that money to buy play time.)
Well, sure, but it depends on what you consider "work". When I get home from my real (programming) job, I'll putter around mission running for an hour or two just to relax. I could never justify it based on $/hr, but, for me at least... it's fun.
Uh huh. You think by taking those kinds of draconian measures companies would stop doing the things you want them to stop doing. But what would really happen is they'd fold or move to other countries. What do you suppose we'd do with our time when unemployment is 60% or so?
You're not going to make the world better by destroying the economy, no matter what your intentions are.
This style of advertising never really went away, it's just a bit more subtle. Madison Avenue pays big money for product placement in TV shows - a quick Google turned up this 2008 article from the Washington Post which contains the line "Among the top 10 broadcast television shows, advertisers paid for 26,000 product placements in 2007." Advertisers pay for product placement on TV, in the movies, and in video games. They pay for celebrities to get photographed using or wearing products.
I don't think more of it will be a big winner for advertisers, because the market is already saturated. You could argue we'll see a return to overt product flogging in electronic media, but it's difficult to believe it's actually more effective. If the hero is seen drinking a Duff Beer I may subconsciously connect Duff drinking to some testosterone-infused fantasy. But if the action stops and the hero turns to the camera and says "you know folks, when I want a cold one I reach for a Duff!", that segment won't make it through the advertising filter in my head.
The ISS is the most amazing laboratory ever built. Vast amounts of awesome science is done on it. Thing is, NASA is so completely inept at communicating this to the public that even space geeks, like myself, have no idea what the hell they do up there.
If you don't know what the hell they do up there, how do you know "vast amounts of awesome science" is done in it? I have yet to hear of one little tiny bit of actual science (awesome or not) they've done that couldn't have been done in a much cheaper way.
You're mixing a lot of stuff in here that doesn't belong. Of course we "proved" the UN is useless for stopping wars. That much has been obvious since its creation. If backward, weak, dirt-poor states like North Korea can thumb their noses at the UN, then anybody can. The very idea of the UN rests on a false premise - that every problem can be peacefully resolved.
Nukes are not harder to use because they're harder to survive. We would have had no problem surviving, for example, a 12.5 kt cruise missile hit to Kabul. The real reason we don't use nukes is we know that, down the line, most countries will have nukes and we don't want to encourage their use. That's why we didn't use nukes in Afghanistan, and that's why we wouldn't have used nuclear bunker busters.
And I realize Abu Ghraib is a favorite hobby horse to people on the left, but there's never been any evidence what happened there was sanctioned by anyone who wasn't directly involved. Obama has access to all that data - if there was a smoking gun we'd have heard about it by now.
I don't accept your characterization of these weapons as "easier to use". From a political standpoint they are no easier to use than any of the other nuclear weapons we have in the arsenal.
High resolution satellite photos are classified because the resolution itself is classified. We don't want potential subjects to use photos of innocuous landscape to determine what features the camera is capable of resolving, because that has a lot of implications when you're trying to build decoys or hide troop movements. These particular images have probably been declassified because 1 meter is no longer something anybody is going to get excited over. These days you can buy commercial black-and-white imagery with that resolution.
What's cutting edge on the military side? I dunno. It's almost certainly classified.
What the Bush administration advocated was for tactical nuclear weapons that could serve in battlefield conditions. They requested these for use in Iraq and Afghanistan, and had diddly to do with PRNK.
They would not have been ready in time for Afghanistan and were never thought to be needed in Iraq. The target was the Norks. And they were never "requested for use" by anyone. It was a capability the administration wanted to develop.
This was all part of their "Who has the biggest dick" approach to foreign policy. It served us quite well...while we were out swinging dicks in the sand Iran and PRNK became (or nearly became) the proud new owners of nuclear weapons.
There was never anything we were going to do that would prevent the Norks from getting nuclear weapons. Short of actually nuking them, anyway. The idea that if only we didn't invade Iraq we could have somehow prevented North Korea from getting the bomb is just silly - Clinton tried to bribe them to stop and had no effect whatsoever (though they did take the money). Are you saying we should have gone to war with North Korea? Should we go to war with Iran?
It's not as simple as you're trying to portray it. What the Bush administration wanted was nuclear ground-penetrating weapons. Whether or not such weapons are more likely to be used is a matter of some debate. You're assuming they would make it easier to "go nuclear" on someone because the damage wouldn't be widespread. But I don't think that's the case - it's hard to imagine a bomb that's big enough to do the job but doesn't kick up a whole hell of a lot of fallout. And the first use any kind of nuclear weapon is bound to open a bigger can of worms than the problem you're trying to solve. The Bush administration was well aware of this.
The reason they wanted this weapon was for retaliation against a nuclear or biological attack. There are governments around the world that have built deep enough bunkers they might get the idea they could survive a limited retaliation. The bunker buster was, like all nukes, a political weapon aimed at those governments (particularly North Korea).
That's the way things work in Washington. It's not just this particular center. It's all military projects. It's NASA. It's roads and bridges. And national parks. Congress decides where everything goes based on horse-trading, and it's been that way for at least the four decades I've been alive. Did you ever wonder why they built Johnson Space Center in Houston when the launch facilities were in Florida? Or why we have, literally, hundreds of military bases strewn all throughout the country? The military wants to close at least a third of them, but Congress won't allow it.
You automatically assume no environmental effects of these alternate energy efforts, while failing to recognize we consume way more oil today than we did in the days of smog filled skies.
It's hard to imagine using millions of barrels of oil without moving a whole lot of carbon from the ground to the atmosphere. If you believe there's a significant human component to global warming it makes sense to encourage a carbon-neutral fuel technology like biodiesel.
There is no commitment to "future shareholders", only current ones, so no the company has little incentive to do anything aside from very short term "investment".
This is just silly. And wrong. If oil companies only cared about profits in the next quarter, how do you explain expenditures of hundreds of millions of dollars on a new oil field? It takes at lest three or four years to bring a new field online, not counting exploration. And how do you explain drug companies researching drugs that won't hit the market for almost twenty years, if ever?
Companies have a commitment to future shareholders in the sense that what people think a stock will be worth in the future is the major determiner for what it's worth today. That's why Intel builds new fabs, drug companies research drugs, and oil companies spend money trying to insure they'll have a product to sell when they start running out of oil.
It's really a shame Cargolifter AG went under. The airship they had planned would have been just perfect for this kind of work. It would have been able to carry a complete tower to the installation site. Bolt it to the foundation, hook up the wires, and done!
I wonder if the Germans are tired of the tropical "island" they made out of the Cargolifter hanger.
I must admit I'm not sure how to convert units of "personal slaves" into kilowatt-hours. I must have gotten my degree too early, or, I guess, too late. But assuming I understand the gist of your comment, and further assuming scientists have accurately assessed the impact of fossil fuels on the earth's climate (which would exclude coal as a long-term power source), I don't see why nuclear power can't produce all the power we'll need for hundreds of years. And that's assuming we can never get reasonable efficiencies out of the various solar power schemes (PV, biofuel, concentrators, space-based), which is a dubious assumption.
Of course we'll have to start reprocessing spent fuel, and we'll need switch to thorium eventually, but you and I won't outlive the uranium supply.
Sigh. I understand all that, but the numbers are hardly insurmountable, or even very uncomfortable. How many nuclear power plants could we have built for the trillion dollars we spent on "stimulus"? Four or five in every state, by my calculations. The idea that everything is just going to fall apart when the price of oil goes up is just silly.
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Hydrogen is problematic as a fuel. For one thing, it has a terribly low density, which is why the space shuttle has that enormous external fuel tank. For another, H2 is a really, really tiny molecule that will go through just about anything over time. That makes it a lot more dangerous and expensive to deal with.
It's just not practical for combat aircraft.
I'm curious how they're going to go about this. For the most part people who play EVE don't do much FPS, and vice versa. Without an overlap in the player base, they'll be essentially making a completely different game for a different demographic. So what's the point of trying to tie the two together?
Which is why, instead of wasting money on sightseeing trips to the moon or Mars, NASA should be working to bring kg-to-LEO costs down. The fact that it costs this much after almost sixty years of space flight is a crime. The fuel itself comprises something like 2% of total launch cost, so we don't even need fancy new technologies to do it, just better engineering.
While it's true game consoles typically lose money when they debut, that doesn't continue forever. Both Nintendo and Microsoft have been making money off the hardware for years now. Sony is still subsidizing hardware, but that has more to do with a late release and some iffy design decisions.
In any event, there's no reason to think downloads will require the manufacturers to turn a profit on hardware. If console game distribution goes primarily to download they'll make it so you can't just download a game from anywhere - you'll need to get it from the manufacturer-authorized distributor. That way they still get their ten bucks (or whatever).
The US military is the most powerful military in the world because it is the best funded military in the world. There's no basis for anyone to say the government is doing a particularly good job managing that particular function. Anybody who's every dealt with the military can tell you it's riddled with inefficiency on a scale that would never be tolerated in a private enterprise, but efficiency doesn't matter if you can swamp it with cash.
And yeah, if the government takes over health care the quality will almost certainly be worse for the vast majority of consumers.
I don't think this is true. With all the commercial encryption schemes I'm aware of you will be unable to produce anything that looks like unencrypted data without the real key. Indeed, that must be true for brute-force codebreaking to work.
Also, if you're in the position of having the cops demand the key do decrypt some of your data, it's highly unlikely they're going to give you access to the encrypted data.
I've been thinking about that for awhile. You don't want a system that will destroy the encrypted data - as others have pointed out, the cops will image your drive before they do anything, so it's sort of pointless. But I think you could do even better with a set of one time pads. I'm envisioning a system that works like this:
Don't get the wrong idea here. Trading ISK for cash outside the GTC system will still get you banned. This system has been around for years, but it's only recently they've made enough headway against farmers that the cost of ISK through the GTC system is at or below the ebay price. The way they managed to do that was by investigating large transactions between unrelated characters - the same way governments catch drug dealers.
Two years? Nah... maybe six months if you picked the right race and plot your skills carefully.
And that's running missions. The most profitable thing you can do with your time in EVE is market arbitrage, which doesn't take that much in the way of skills. I don't do it myself because it's too much like real work, but I know people who regularly make a billion ISK in a couple full days of fiddling with market orders.
Well, sure, but it depends on what you consider "work". When I get home from my real (programming) job, I'll putter around mission running for an hour or two just to relax. I could never justify it based on $/hr, but, for me at least... it's fun.
Uh huh. You think by taking those kinds of draconian measures companies would stop doing the things you want them to stop doing. But what would really happen is they'd fold or move to other countries. What do you suppose we'd do with our time when unemployment is 60% or so?
You're not going to make the world better by destroying the economy, no matter what your intentions are.
This style of advertising never really went away, it's just a bit more subtle. Madison Avenue pays big money for product placement in TV shows - a quick Google turned up this 2008 article from the Washington Post which contains the line "Among the top 10 broadcast television shows, advertisers paid for 26,000 product placements in 2007." Advertisers pay for product placement on TV, in the movies, and in video games. They pay for celebrities to get photographed using or wearing products.
I don't think more of it will be a big winner for advertisers, because the market is already saturated. You could argue we'll see a return to overt product flogging in electronic media, but it's difficult to believe it's actually more effective. If the hero is seen drinking a Duff Beer I may subconsciously connect Duff drinking to some testosterone-infused fantasy. But if the action stops and the hero turns to the camera and says "you know folks, when I want a cold one I reach for a Duff!", that segment won't make it through the advertising filter in my head.
If you don't know what the hell they do up there, how do you know "vast amounts of awesome science" is done in it? I have yet to hear of one little tiny bit of actual science (awesome or not) they've done that couldn't have been done in a much cheaper way.
This is simply untrue. Even Karpinsky didn't know about it - the reason she was disciplined is because she was in charge, not because she knew.
This conversation is over. You just keep repeating assertions that are, for the most part, incorrect.
You're mixing a lot of stuff in here that doesn't belong. Of course we "proved" the UN is useless for stopping wars. That much has been obvious since its creation. If backward, weak, dirt-poor states like North Korea can thumb their noses at the UN, then anybody can. The very idea of the UN rests on a false premise - that every problem can be peacefully resolved.
Nukes are not harder to use because they're harder to survive. We would have had no problem surviving, for example, a 12.5 kt cruise missile hit to Kabul. The real reason we don't use nukes is we know that, down the line, most countries will have nukes and we don't want to encourage their use. That's why we didn't use nukes in Afghanistan, and that's why we wouldn't have used nuclear bunker busters.
And I realize Abu Ghraib is a favorite hobby horse to people on the left, but there's never been any evidence what happened there was sanctioned by anyone who wasn't directly involved. Obama has access to all that data - if there was a smoking gun we'd have heard about it by now.
When did we use WP as an anti-personnel weapon?
I don't accept your characterization of these weapons as "easier to use". From a political standpoint they are no easier to use than any of the other nuclear weapons we have in the arsenal.
High resolution satellite photos are classified because the resolution itself is classified. We don't want potential subjects to use photos of innocuous landscape to determine what features the camera is capable of resolving, because that has a lot of implications when you're trying to build decoys or hide troop movements. These particular images have probably been declassified because 1 meter is no longer something anybody is going to get excited over. These days you can buy commercial black-and-white imagery with that resolution.
What's cutting edge on the military side? I dunno. It's almost certainly classified.
What the Bush administration advocated was for tactical nuclear weapons that could serve in battlefield conditions. They requested these for use in Iraq and Afghanistan, and had diddly to do with PRNK.
They would not have been ready in time for Afghanistan and were never thought to be needed in Iraq. The target was the Norks. And they were never "requested for use" by anyone. It was a capability the administration wanted to develop.
This was all part of their "Who has the biggest dick" approach to foreign policy. It served us quite well...while we were out swinging dicks in the sand Iran and PRNK became (or nearly became) the proud new owners of nuclear weapons.
There was never anything we were going to do that would prevent the Norks from getting nuclear weapons. Short of actually nuking them, anyway. The idea that if only we didn't invade Iraq we could have somehow prevented North Korea from getting the bomb is just silly - Clinton tried to bribe them to stop and had no effect whatsoever (though they did take the money). Are you saying we should have gone to war with North Korea? Should we go to war with Iran?
It's not as simple as you're trying to portray it. What the Bush administration wanted was nuclear ground-penetrating weapons. Whether or not such weapons are more likely to be used is a matter of some debate. You're assuming they would make it easier to "go nuclear" on someone because the damage wouldn't be widespread. But I don't think that's the case - it's hard to imagine a bomb that's big enough to do the job but doesn't kick up a whole hell of a lot of fallout. And the first use any kind of nuclear weapon is bound to open a bigger can of worms than the problem you're trying to solve. The Bush administration was well aware of this.
The reason they wanted this weapon was for retaliation against a nuclear or biological attack. There are governments around the world that have built deep enough bunkers they might get the idea they could survive a limited retaliation. The bunker buster was, like all nukes, a political weapon aimed at those governments (particularly North Korea).
That's the way things work in Washington. It's not just this particular center. It's all military projects. It's NASA. It's roads and bridges. And national parks. Congress decides where everything goes based on horse-trading, and it's been that way for at least the four decades I've been alive. Did you ever wonder why they built Johnson Space Center in Houston when the launch facilities were in Florida? Or why we have, literally, hundreds of military bases strewn all throughout the country? The military wants to close at least a third of them, but Congress won't allow it.
It's hard to imagine using millions of barrels of oil without moving a whole lot of carbon from the ground to the atmosphere. If you believe there's a significant human component to global warming it makes sense to encourage a carbon-neutral fuel technology like biodiesel.
This is just silly. And wrong. If oil companies only cared about profits in the next quarter, how do you explain expenditures of hundreds of millions of dollars on a new oil field? It takes at lest three or four years to bring a new field online, not counting exploration. And how do you explain drug companies researching drugs that won't hit the market for almost twenty years, if ever?
Companies have a commitment to future shareholders in the sense that what people think a stock will be worth in the future is the major determiner for what it's worth today. That's why Intel builds new fabs, drug companies research drugs, and oil companies spend money trying to insure they'll have a product to sell when they start running out of oil.
It's really a shame Cargolifter AG went under. The airship they had planned would have been just perfect for this kind of work. It would have been able to carry a complete tower to the installation site. Bolt it to the foundation, hook up the wires, and done!
I wonder if the Germans are tired of the tropical "island" they made out of the Cargolifter hanger.
I must admit I'm not sure how to convert units of "personal slaves" into kilowatt-hours. I must have gotten my degree too early, or, I guess, too late. But assuming I understand the gist of your comment, and further assuming scientists have accurately assessed the impact of fossil fuels on the earth's climate (which would exclude coal as a long-term power source), I don't see why nuclear power can't produce all the power we'll need for hundreds of years. And that's assuming we can never get reasonable efficiencies out of the various solar power schemes (PV, biofuel, concentrators, space-based), which is a dubious assumption.
Of course we'll have to start reprocessing spent fuel, and we'll need switch to thorium eventually, but you and I won't outlive the uranium supply.
Sigh. I understand all that, but the numbers are hardly insurmountable, or even very uncomfortable. How many nuclear power plants could we have built for the trillion dollars we spent on "stimulus"? Four or five in every state, by my calculations. The idea that everything is just going to fall apart when the price of oil goes up is just silly.