Also many countries have privacy laws that are stronger than what exists in the US. Storing content in the US may not be an option. Which is too bad as many of the largest cloud providers and application vendors are based in the US. Ever since the Patriot Act (a long time ago), some companies have included versions of their software that will allow you to host their cloud services on your own network... Though I am of the opinion of what is the point then...
In addition, these sorts of regulation (unless totally secret of course) actually probably inhibit intelligence gathering. As no one is going to store anything with any sensitivity, or value when ease of access could compromise it at a whim. With stronger controls (requiring real warrants for example), people are more apt to store valuable information...
In the end, really I seriously doubt any of this sort of thing really reveals much in the way of useful intelligence, as those stupid enough to have their data compromised would likely be caught just as easily by other means, and those that are careful and smart enough, aren't going to have their data available anyway. In 99.999999999999999999999% of the cases, you're really just compromising the privacy of regular citizens for very little real value.
Dark Matter. Or Black holes. Possibly something to do with string theory. Or any of the other astronomical whipping boys the physicists cart out when they can't explain something.
I would agree. It only looks like we have poor quality journalism because now we have the resources to find out. In the past, if someone reported something, you didn't have much choice but to either accept it or not based on trust. That also exists today, or you could look at any of a 1000 other alternative sources to see if there are mistakes, various perspectives, etc... (or if they just copy and pasted something, or you can read the original some story is based on)
The same could be said with countless other aspects of life. In the past perhaps 50 out of 1000 people might be diagnosed with something, and now in the present 500 of 1000. Does that mean that something has changed in the intervening years that make that thing more common. Many people will jump to conclusions and try to draw some causation from the new environment we live in etc... Or it could be that we are just better able to diagnose said thing and thus are able to see more instances of it.
I deal with a lot of data, statistics, and some of it pretty old. I get data requests from all sorts. Many of which try to draw whatever conclusions they want according to whatever agenda or bias they may have. However much has to do more with how the data was collected, by whom, for what purpose, and may have been altered any number of ways which at the time were perfectly justifiable. Anyway I see more variation due to how things are reported than by any other influence. For example, the particular scarcity or vulnerability of a particular species in a given area. Is that because something in the environment has affected that particular species? Or is in the data collection techniques were better or worse than before. Perhaps the group responsible for collecting the information has 100 staff, and were cut back to 30, then changed their data collection techniques to try and make do with the reduced number of staff? Anyway it is those sorts of very real, but rarely thought about issues that have big impacts on data, particularly for those just looking at the numbers without a lot of context.
LOL reminds me when people used to rent consoles and games (do people still do that?)... Some friends in college rented a PS and FF7... then we kept it for quite a long time because we wanted to finish the game... Only back then you had to also rent for extra the memory to save games, only we didn't so we had to keep the thing on the whole time so we didn't lose our game. I think eventually someone accidentally turned it off and we lost everything but only after we had it on for like a week or so...
I recently just threw away an old acer 386 laptop... I think it ran at about 4Mhz. Originally it has GEOS installed as the OS. I installed a number of OS on it, and in the end I think just had a DOS shell running. Used it in University (it was very old even then, was a grandmothers old laptop), to write my COBOL, Pascal, and C assignments (don't need a lot of HP for that). Later I had it at work when as an intern cludged together a C program to handle a CD install process. After which it sat in a cabinet and collected dust, and occasionally I would play Nethack on it is something. Before I threw it away, I fired it up for nostalgia and it churned anyway just fine, though the battery was long dead (and not replaceable for many years) so you had to keep it plugged in.
I also had an old DELL Dimension 4200 P3 800Mhz that was an absolute tank (weighed about as much also, this was back when DELL over engineered everything). It came with Windows ME originally but EOL was basically a linux box. It ran just fine right up to the end, and only got rid of it because I didn't really use it for much anymore and was just talking up space.
I've found that managers have a hard time conceptualizing data as an asset worth money. I had one manager task me with estimating the value for another project, questioned me on the results, and was pretty astounded when I broke it all down for him. Particularly when looking at data collection costs, the amount of years, and staff salary that went into it, various projects applied to the data, etc... adds up pretty quick. Cost of replacement...
A perfect example in somewhat recent times, are companies being acquired for pretty much just their data. Companies being bought for BILLIONS of dollars for their mapping divisions so that they could leverage their data in their own mapping application, or driving application or whatever. Other companies being bought for BILLIONS for what are essentially their installed user base, which has little to do with any traditional assets (technology, staff, physical presence) at all.
It is hard to convince managers to stop nickle and dimeing a system they don't want to spend the money to maintain when they have no idea how much the data that is collected is worth, and should the system fail what the implications of that are. Not to mention that many don't just "fail" but rather degrade overtime, introducing data integrity issues upon a perfectly good data repository and the implications that it has on the whole over time... In my own opinion systems and applications are seen as "sexy", but in reality it is all about the data when you come down to it, and what is important is how that is organized, systems just facilitate that (or not depending on how well they were designed or maintained).
You need to present it in terms of risk. Risk to the business, and more specifically risk to the CEO. With these kinds of legacy systems, there is generally zero support for them outside of whatever they can cobble together in terms of internal staff, which by the sounds of it they do not have, nor are they likely to get given your experience. Eventually it *will* fail. Then what? Will anyone be able to bring it back online? How long might that take? Are they business critical services? If not able to bring back, then what is their recovery plan, if they even have one? How long to acquire and then migrate the system to something that will work? What effect will that have on the bottom line of the business. Lastly what will the repercussions be on the CEO that was aware of the situation, didn't nothing about it to try and mitigate that risk... Suddenly 500k may sound like a bargain.
Then again I've seen folks refuse to upgrade equipment because it was too expensive to do so (also 500k), attempt to get some other part of the business to accept the risk, then attempt to build a totally new system, in which just the migration project cost that, and the new system likely twice that... Which makes about zero sense, though part of that decision was based on adhering to an IT strategy that no longer included the previous technology, so there is those sorts complications as well.
Unfortunately I don't deal with a lot of "new" databases, most of the work I do is with preexisting legacy stuff from the early 90's usually with little or no documentation. In trying to reverse engineer schema for various databases it becomes obvious that most of the relationships are being handled by the applications themselves which makes things difficult in a number of different and interesting ways.
Even the code depending on how it was developed (usually over time by various developers) can have some interesting challenges. For example when Oracle went from Oracle 10g to 11, it changed how it handled upper and lower case values and it broke some parts of various applications. Even within a single application, search functionality would work or not in various places depending on how meticulous the developer that did that section of code was at the time. Those that made assumptions on database specific functionality (i.e. always expecting the same case results) wouldn't work when the Oracle update chose to start looking at text differently, while those that spent the extra time to validate everything into the same case would work. Made troubleshooting somewhat interesting when you think you can assume things might be coded the same but are not.
Dealing with old databases is more akin to archaeology than computer science I think, as you have to try and ascertain the layers upon layers that have been tacked on to the original schema, all of it application dependent, and most of it due to the database being re-purposed to do more and more things beyond its original intention. One such that had me furrowing my brow, was was looked to be a perfectly good clean table being absolutely polluted by a self referential relationship inserting a ridiculous amount of duplicates into it. Which while it works, is horrible to work with to extract data, but I am sure was someones cludge/elegant solution to adding a new type of record that required a many to one relationship without having to create a new table (or perhaps better retrieval time or indexing)... Oh well it keeps me busy and employed so there is that.
The concern I would have about "strategic" dial-a-yield weapons are the fact that any remotely delivered weapon has the chance of becoming a "dud" for whatever reason.
So perhaps you just set the yield to 5kt and fired it off and it embeds itself into some earth without detonation... Then someone can come along, and provided they know what they are doing, just captured enough material for a 150kt nuclear explosion against you. I'm sure there are countermeasures and everything but still.
I think the opposite is the desired effect. I recall reading that what eventually drove the final nail into the USSR and Communism, was that nuclear weapons (as the summary indicates) are fantastically expensive to develop, build, maintain, and all the infrastructure needed to support them, and that trying to keep up with the US essentially bankrupted the Soviet economy.
Further developments would only do the same I suppose. However the risk however is someone deciding to say screw it, if they are using small scale precise nuclear weapons, we'll just respond with our big burtha's rather than try to keep up our development cycle...
Depends on what you call "farmland". People are not burning down rain forest to make vegetable gardens. It is being deforested to make room for beef grazing.
However there are other ways that GMO food is a positive environmentally. Less pesticides are needed, less fertilizers, as you say greater crop density, likely more successful in less suitable soil, etc...
In my own opinion, most mass market "organic" food is complete BS. "Organic" is more a brand label than anything. There was an expose sometime ago on branding things "Heart Smart" and the like, where a organization owns the trademark, products pay for the service of using it, and the standards they have to meet are so low as to be ridiculous.
While getting some locally grown food is great, the bottom line is we (as in everyone) do not produce enough food without using modern techniques. Though food security has certainly become an apparent topic as I guess due to a drought in California, we're seeing things like 7$ cauliflower up here in Canada...
This outlines everything wrong with the American political system. There was a special on this topic this past year on a comedy show.
Basically it goes something like this: Getting rid of the Penny has been tried several times before. It isn't just recently that it has't made any logical sense (pardon pun). When it finally came time to legislate it, a particular politician successfully kills it. The argument was that many charities collect pennies and that to get rid of them would diminish their ability to fund themselves. As it turns out, biggest contributor to these charities, their lobby, and the politician in question was the minting industry and in particular the zinc mining industry (of which all non-valuable coins are made of). Hence the idea of getting rid of the penny dies.
What is even worse, is that the zinc market for coin minting isn't even that big, however it is still cheaper to lobby (i.e. pay off politicians to keep it around), and still make profits off that part of their production. I forget the show, but it was probably John Oliver.
Yeah I never got this. Releasing a "new and improved" operating system that lacks even the features of the old one... If they really want people to upgrade so badly, they should try addressing the missing WMC issue. That said I find I use WMC less and less simply because the supported codecs are so terrible. While I use VLC more and more, it is leaps and bound better as a player, it lacks a lot of the content management features. A few years ago I tried one of the skins/plugins to enable this sort of functionality to VLC, but it was pretty terrible. Since Windows 10 has come up, I've googled up some alternatives, and though I haven't tried them, many (at least on paper) seem to fit the bill. However I also have a WMC remote which I use, which would probably have to be hacked to use it with anything else or buy something new which I don't really want to have to bother to do... Most of which seem to be bluetooth, which I have had mixed results with (some devices it seems have a such a short range to effectively make them useless, even though they all say they support the 10m standard).
I'm just postulating really. For corporate managers they may not understand that the support is useless. It very well could be that it is just a game of management having someone else to throw under the bus should the need arise.
That said it probably has as much to do with momentum and application lock in. With Oracle being around for so long, and with most of your applications/db already using Oracle, making any kind of change or attempting to support multiple platforms is pretty difficult. That could be why you see more newer agile companies making different choices, whereas larger pre-existing companies may have a harder time moving away from what they already use.
This is why I think all nuclear generation should be nationalized. Will it be more expensive? Sure, but at least it will be done right.
In addition to the decommissioning issue you raised, the other is that of "insurance", or lack thereof. No one is willing to insure that sort of disaster. The public is always going to be the one on the hook for the cost. Do you really want someone running these things with no responsibility?
That is where democracy falls down a bit. Politicians need to get elected. If the public is made fearful of nuclear, few politicians are going to risk re-election. Far better to shine up some friendly (if useless) solar panels. China sees a need, comes to a conclusions as to how to best process for the country, then does it. There isn't a debate.
In fact, this is even more pronounced in energy due to the long term thinking necessary (i.e. past an election cycle). Just look at some of the hydro projects where they literally re-located millions of people, where geographically it made sense to do so for hydroelectric power.
I think at some point people will look back in history and be baffled at some of the decisions being made that had more to do with political cycles than any logical thought.
That said I don't really want to live without democracy, it just makes long term visionary projects that might be unpopular pretty hard to do. Heck it seems with current politics, they want to take whatever the previous party managed to get done, ruin it, and then blame them for the failure in the next election.
Much of which is created to mitigate public opinion which has the nuclear industry demonized for decades. Not quite the same issue, but not a lot of new oil refineries get built for the exact same reason.
One of the more unique issues that nuclear generation does have to deal with that most don't are a) decommissioning and b) insurance. Much of which is associated with private VS public ownership. In both cases much of the regulation is probably because of privately run operations, which for both a) and b) generally revert back to public responsibility anyway due to scope.
I'm a proponent of nuclear generation done right, however even I am a bit leery of the idea of having a privately run nuclear plant where should anything go wrong the public not the company is on the hook... It's about responsibility. If I'm a company and operating an aging plant, am I more concerned with ensuing that all safety measures are in place, or that decommissioning (usually a fund) in on track, or profits for the next quarter?
Nationally I think build more and research better. I keep hearing about safer, smaller scale reactors, but I think there is a lack of incentive/appetite to build/research and everyone is getting distracted by the shiny renewables.
That said, I think if the last ten years has taught us anything it is that even things like wind can have a lot of public resistance, particularly in the best areas, near or off shore, because of very wealthy people that own cottages, who think the turbines wreak their view, or have a negative impact on re-sale value (but will cite environmental reasons).
However one cravat, you have little control over, taxes. When I bought my shitty little house, one of the nice things about it was I also only had about 1200$ a year in tax, which in comparison to some was quite small. Fast forward 10 years later, my tax is now about 2200$ (still a lot less than probably most). In that 10 year period I am pretty sure my salary has not actually increased by 80%.
You can do all the right things, but the amount of things out of your control is astounding. Simple things like bills, everything goes up. Some you can elect not to pay for such as when your internet that used to be 40$ is now faster but also 80$... Other things such as water, electricity, gas, etc... you have much less options should they decide to increase, and they all have, and I would say all faster than my wage is increasing.
I've always said, fix the system of political financial contributions, and the rest will probably just work itself out.
Make corporate donations illegal. Limit personal donations to some reasonable index. Make politically lobbying (at least in its current form) illegal. Prevent or provide serious limitations for compensation and positional appointment between politics and corporations (i.e. you don't get a sweetheart job the moment you retire from politics, don't appoint industry shills for government positions).
Do all that, and I would bet a great deal of our current social ills would be solved with in a few years. Though that is a tall order, as the system is already compromised.
So your entire argument to account for all of this is excess government salary and compensation? lol
OK Ok, I'll even add to that argument every single person is is not working and collecting some sort of social program. I would still laugh at that response.
If you follow the money, you will see where it is going. To the already wealthy in the form of debt, to which they reap more wealth, forever. Multiple that by 40 years of progressively getting worse. This wealth is not adding "liquidity" to the economy which is the new thing wealthy people like to throw around, just like "trickle down" economics never really works, because most of this is hoarded up, and sat on, never entering the economy again, other than as loans, to create debt, to create more wealth, by not doing anything. The values involved are several levels of magnitude higher than all of what you are talking about (salary + welfare) combined.
About the only interesting argument I've seen that may account for it in another way is more social, in the increasing number of women entering into the workforce, immigration, etc... increasing workforce numbers (and worker competition) thereby keeping wages and working hours stagnant (along with efficiency with automation).
Slashdot Mirror
Also many countries have privacy laws that are stronger than what exists in the US. Storing content in the US may not be an option. Which is too bad as many of the largest cloud providers and application vendors are based in the US. Ever since the Patriot Act (a long time ago), some companies have included versions of their software that will allow you to host their cloud services on your own network... Though I am of the opinion of what is the point then...
In addition, these sorts of regulation (unless totally secret of course) actually probably inhibit intelligence gathering. As no one is going to store anything with any sensitivity, or value when ease of access could compromise it at a whim. With stronger controls (requiring real warrants for example), people are more apt to store valuable information...
In the end, really I seriously doubt any of this sort of thing really reveals much in the way of useful intelligence, as those stupid enough to have their data compromised would likely be caught just as easily by other means, and those that are careful and smart enough, aren't going to have their data available anyway. In 99.999999999999999999999% of the cases, you're really just compromising the privacy of regular citizens for very little real value.
Dark Matter. Or Black holes. Possibly something to do with string theory. Or any of the other astronomical whipping boys the physicists cart out when they can't explain something.
I would agree. It only looks like we have poor quality journalism because now we have the resources to find out. In the past, if someone reported something, you didn't have much choice but to either accept it or not based on trust. That also exists today, or you could look at any of a 1000 other alternative sources to see if there are mistakes, various perspectives, etc... (or if they just copy and pasted something, or you can read the original some story is based on)
The same could be said with countless other aspects of life. In the past perhaps 50 out of 1000 people might be diagnosed with something, and now in the present 500 of 1000. Does that mean that something has changed in the intervening years that make that thing more common. Many people will jump to conclusions and try to draw some causation from the new environment we live in etc... Or it could be that we are just better able to diagnose said thing and thus are able to see more instances of it.
I deal with a lot of data, statistics, and some of it pretty old. I get data requests from all sorts. Many of which try to draw whatever conclusions they want according to whatever agenda or bias they may have. However much has to do more with how the data was collected, by whom, for what purpose, and may have been altered any number of ways which at the time were perfectly justifiable. Anyway I see more variation due to how things are reported than by any other influence. For example, the particular scarcity or vulnerability of a particular species in a given area. Is that because something in the environment has affected that particular species? Or is in the data collection techniques were better or worse than before. Perhaps the group responsible for collecting the information has 100 staff, and were cut back to 30, then changed their data collection techniques to try and make do with the reduced number of staff? Anyway it is those sorts of very real, but rarely thought about issues that have big impacts on data, particularly for those just looking at the numbers without a lot of context.
Much of the developed world falls into that category. Most of these countries maintain or grow populations through immigration.
LOL reminds me when people used to rent consoles and games (do people still do that?)... Some friends in college rented a PS and FF7... then we kept it for quite a long time because we wanted to finish the game... Only back then you had to also rent for extra the memory to save games, only we didn't so we had to keep the thing on the whole time so we didn't lose our game. I think eventually someone accidentally turned it off and we lost everything but only after we had it on for like a week or so...
I recently just threw away an old acer 386 laptop... I think it ran at about 4Mhz. Originally it has GEOS installed as the OS. I installed a number of OS on it, and in the end I think just had a DOS shell running. Used it in University (it was very old even then, was a grandmothers old laptop), to write my COBOL, Pascal, and C assignments (don't need a lot of HP for that). Later I had it at work when as an intern cludged together a C program to handle a CD install process. After which it sat in a cabinet and collected dust, and occasionally I would play Nethack on it is something. Before I threw it away, I fired it up for nostalgia and it churned anyway just fine, though the battery was long dead (and not replaceable for many years) so you had to keep it plugged in.
I also had an old DELL Dimension 4200 P3 800Mhz that was an absolute tank (weighed about as much also, this was back when DELL over engineered everything). It came with Windows ME originally but EOL was basically a linux box. It ran just fine right up to the end, and only got rid of it because I didn't really use it for much anymore and was just talking up space.
I've found that managers have a hard time conceptualizing data as an asset worth money. I had one manager task me with estimating the value for another project, questioned me on the results, and was pretty astounded when I broke it all down for him. Particularly when looking at data collection costs, the amount of years, and staff salary that went into it, various projects applied to the data, etc... adds up pretty quick. Cost of replacement...
A perfect example in somewhat recent times, are companies being acquired for pretty much just their data. Companies being bought for BILLIONS of dollars for their mapping divisions so that they could leverage their data in their own mapping application, or driving application or whatever. Other companies being bought for BILLIONS for what are essentially their installed user base, which has little to do with any traditional assets (technology, staff, physical presence) at all.
It is hard to convince managers to stop nickle and dimeing a system they don't want to spend the money to maintain when they have no idea how much the data that is collected is worth, and should the system fail what the implications of that are. Not to mention that many don't just "fail" but rather degrade overtime, introducing data integrity issues upon a perfectly good data repository and the implications that it has on the whole over time... In my own opinion systems and applications are seen as "sexy", but in reality it is all about the data when you come down to it, and what is important is how that is organized, systems just facilitate that (or not depending on how well they were designed or maintained).
You need to present it in terms of risk. Risk to the business, and more specifically risk to the CEO. With these kinds of legacy systems, there is generally zero support for them outside of whatever they can cobble together in terms of internal staff, which by the sounds of it they do not have, nor are they likely to get given your experience. Eventually it *will* fail. Then what? Will anyone be able to bring it back online? How long might that take? Are they business critical services? If not able to bring back, then what is their recovery plan, if they even have one? How long to acquire and then migrate the system to something that will work? What effect will that have on the bottom line of the business. Lastly what will the repercussions be on the CEO that was aware of the situation, didn't nothing about it to try and mitigate that risk... Suddenly 500k may sound like a bargain.
Then again I've seen folks refuse to upgrade equipment because it was too expensive to do so (also 500k), attempt to get some other part of the business to accept the risk, then attempt to build a totally new system, in which just the migration project cost that, and the new system likely twice that... Which makes about zero sense, though part of that decision was based on adhering to an IT strategy that no longer included the previous technology, so there is those sorts complications as well.
Unfortunately I don't deal with a lot of "new" databases, most of the work I do is with preexisting legacy stuff from the early 90's usually with little or no documentation. In trying to reverse engineer schema for various databases it becomes obvious that most of the relationships are being handled by the applications themselves which makes things difficult in a number of different and interesting ways.
Even the code depending on how it was developed (usually over time by various developers) can have some interesting challenges. For example when Oracle went from Oracle 10g to 11, it changed how it handled upper and lower case values and it broke some parts of various applications. Even within a single application, search functionality would work or not in various places depending on how meticulous the developer that did that section of code was at the time. Those that made assumptions on database specific functionality (i.e. always expecting the same case results) wouldn't work when the Oracle update chose to start looking at text differently, while those that spent the extra time to validate everything into the same case would work. Made troubleshooting somewhat interesting when you think you can assume things might be coded the same but are not.
Dealing with old databases is more akin to archaeology than computer science I think, as you have to try and ascertain the layers upon layers that have been tacked on to the original schema, all of it application dependent, and most of it due to the database being re-purposed to do more and more things beyond its original intention. One such that had me furrowing my brow, was was looked to be a perfectly good clean table being absolutely polluted by a self referential relationship inserting a ridiculous amount of duplicates into it. Which while it works, is horrible to work with to extract data, but I am sure was someones cludge/elegant solution to adding a new type of record that required a many to one relationship without having to create a new table (or perhaps better retrieval time or indexing)... Oh well it keeps me busy and employed so there is that.
The concern I would have about "strategic" dial-a-yield weapons are the fact that any remotely delivered weapon has the chance of becoming a "dud" for whatever reason.
So perhaps you just set the yield to 5kt and fired it off and it embeds itself into some earth without detonation... Then someone can come along, and provided they know what they are doing, just captured enough material for a 150kt nuclear explosion against you. I'm sure there are countermeasures and everything but still.
I think the opposite is the desired effect. I recall reading that what eventually drove the final nail into the USSR and Communism, was that nuclear weapons (as the summary indicates) are fantastically expensive to develop, build, maintain, and all the infrastructure needed to support them, and that trying to keep up with the US essentially bankrupted the Soviet economy.
Further developments would only do the same I suppose. However the risk however is someone deciding to say screw it, if they are using small scale precise nuclear weapons, we'll just respond with our big burtha's rather than try to keep up our development cycle...
I believe there was even a movie about stealing them from a ship staring Steven Siegal... Even the movie is very old now.
Depends on what you call "farmland". People are not burning down rain forest to make vegetable gardens. It is being deforested to make room for beef grazing.
However there are other ways that GMO food is a positive environmentally. Less pesticides are needed, less fertilizers, as you say greater crop density, likely more successful in less suitable soil, etc...
In my own opinion, most mass market "organic" food is complete BS. "Organic" is more a brand label than anything. There was an expose sometime ago on branding things "Heart Smart" and the like, where a organization owns the trademark, products pay for the service of using it, and the standards they have to meet are so low as to be ridiculous.
While getting some locally grown food is great, the bottom line is we (as in everyone) do not produce enough food without using modern techniques. Though food security has certainly become an apparent topic as I guess due to a drought in California, we're seeing things like 7$ cauliflower up here in Canada...
This outlines everything wrong with the American political system. There was a special on this topic this past year on a comedy show.
Basically it goes something like this: Getting rid of the Penny has been tried several times before. It isn't just recently that it has't made any logical sense (pardon pun). When it finally came time to legislate it, a particular politician successfully kills it. The argument was that many charities collect pennies and that to get rid of them would diminish their ability to fund themselves. As it turns out, biggest contributor to these charities, their lobby, and the politician in question was the minting industry and in particular the zinc mining industry (of which all non-valuable coins are made of). Hence the idea of getting rid of the penny dies.
What is even worse, is that the zinc market for coin minting isn't even that big, however it is still cheaper to lobby (i.e. pay off politicians to keep it around), and still make profits off that part of their production. I forget the show, but it was probably John Oliver.
All of this reminded me of the lunacy of the movie Dr. Strangeglove, with military leaders explaining about the Mine Gap.
We need more speakers, bigger and louder ones too, otherwise our enemies will have a speaker advantage!
Yeah I never got this. Releasing a "new and improved" operating system that lacks even the features of the old one... If they really want people to upgrade so badly, they should try addressing the missing WMC issue. That said I find I use WMC less and less simply because the supported codecs are so terrible. While I use VLC more and more, it is leaps and bound better as a player, it lacks a lot of the content management features. A few years ago I tried one of the skins/plugins to enable this sort of functionality to VLC, but it was pretty terrible. Since Windows 10 has come up, I've googled up some alternatives, and though I haven't tried them, many (at least on paper) seem to fit the bill. However I also have a WMC remote which I use, which would probably have to be hacked to use it with anything else or buy something new which I don't really want to have to bother to do... Most of which seem to be bluetooth, which I have had mixed results with (some devices it seems have a such a short range to effectively make them useless, even though they all say they support the 10m standard).
I'm just postulating really. For corporate managers they may not understand that the support is useless. It very well could be that it is just a game of management having someone else to throw under the bus should the need arise.
That said it probably has as much to do with momentum and application lock in. With Oracle being around for so long, and with most of your applications/db already using Oracle, making any kind of change or attempting to support multiple platforms is pretty difficult. That could be why you see more newer agile companies making different choices, whereas larger pre-existing companies may have a harder time moving away from what they already use.
Certainly! :)
This is why I think all nuclear generation should be nationalized. Will it be more expensive? Sure, but at least it will be done right.
In addition to the decommissioning issue you raised, the other is that of "insurance", or lack thereof. No one is willing to insure that sort of disaster. The public is always going to be the one on the hook for the cost. Do you really want someone running these things with no responsibility?
That is where democracy falls down a bit. Politicians need to get elected. If the public is made fearful of nuclear, few politicians are going to risk re-election. Far better to shine up some friendly (if useless) solar panels. China sees a need, comes to a conclusions as to how to best process for the country, then does it. There isn't a debate.
In fact, this is even more pronounced in energy due to the long term thinking necessary (i.e. past an election cycle). Just look at some of the hydro projects where they literally re-located millions of people, where geographically it made sense to do so for hydroelectric power.
I think at some point people will look back in history and be baffled at some of the decisions being made that had more to do with political cycles than any logical thought.
That said I don't really want to live without democracy, it just makes long term visionary projects that might be unpopular pretty hard to do. Heck it seems with current politics, they want to take whatever the previous party managed to get done, ruin it, and then blame them for the failure in the next election.
Much of which is created to mitigate public opinion which has the nuclear industry demonized for decades. Not quite the same issue, but not a lot of new oil refineries get built for the exact same reason.
One of the more unique issues that nuclear generation does have to deal with that most don't are a) decommissioning and b) insurance. Much of which is associated with private VS public ownership. In both cases much of the regulation is probably because of privately run operations, which for both a) and b) generally revert back to public responsibility anyway due to scope.
I'm a proponent of nuclear generation done right, however even I am a bit leery of the idea of having a privately run nuclear plant where should anything go wrong the public not the company is on the hook... It's about responsibility. If I'm a company and operating an aging plant, am I more concerned with ensuing that all safety measures are in place, or that decommissioning (usually a fund) in on track, or profits for the next quarter?
Nationally I think build more and research better. I keep hearing about safer, smaller scale reactors, but I think there is a lack of incentive/appetite to build/research and everyone is getting distracted by the shiny renewables.
That said, I think if the last ten years has taught us anything it is that even things like wind can have a lot of public resistance, particularly in the best areas, near or off shore, because of very wealthy people that own cottages, who think the turbines wreak their view, or have a negative impact on re-sale value (but will cite environmental reasons).
"Since then, conquering other countries and robbing their gold has been frowned upon."
You could probably update your historical synopsis easily by replacing "gold" with "oil".
Now internationally is is all about debt transfer it seems. Here have more debt. A different kind of war perhaps.
I agree.
However one cravat, you have little control over, taxes. When I bought my shitty little house, one of the nice things about it was I also only had about 1200$ a year in tax, which in comparison to some was quite small. Fast forward 10 years later, my tax is now about 2200$ (still a lot less than probably most). In that 10 year period I am pretty sure my salary has not actually increased by 80%.
You can do all the right things, but the amount of things out of your control is astounding. Simple things like bills, everything goes up. Some you can elect not to pay for such as when your internet that used to be 40$ is now faster but also 80$... Other things such as water, electricity, gas, etc... you have much less options should they decide to increase, and they all have, and I would say all faster than my wage is increasing.
I've always said, fix the system of political financial contributions, and the rest will probably just work itself out.
Make corporate donations illegal. Limit personal donations to some reasonable index. Make politically lobbying (at least in its current form) illegal. Prevent or provide serious limitations for compensation and positional appointment between politics and corporations (i.e. you don't get a sweetheart job the moment you retire from politics, don't appoint industry shills for government positions).
Do all that, and I would bet a great deal of our current social ills would be solved with in a few years. Though that is a tall order, as the system is already compromised.
So your entire argument to account for all of this is excess government salary and compensation? lol
OK Ok, I'll even add to that argument every single person is is not working and collecting some sort of social program. I would still laugh at that response.
If you follow the money, you will see where it is going. To the already wealthy in the form of debt, to which they reap more wealth, forever. Multiple that by 40 years of progressively getting worse. This wealth is not adding "liquidity" to the economy which is the new thing wealthy people like to throw around, just like "trickle down" economics never really works, because most of this is hoarded up, and sat on, never entering the economy again, other than as loans, to create debt, to create more wealth, by not doing anything. The values involved are several levels of magnitude higher than all of what you are talking about (salary + welfare) combined.
About the only interesting argument I've seen that may account for it in another way is more social, in the increasing number of women entering into the workforce, immigration, etc... increasing workforce numbers (and worker competition) thereby keeping wages and working hours stagnant (along with efficiency with automation).