> Wireless technologies are a good interim solution until fiber can be deployed ubiquitously, especially in very low density areas.
If, and ONLY IF, companies wanting to replace POTS wireline with wireless are required to satisfy the same availability and reliability standards they were required to meet with POTS (including backup power for everything upstream from the end user and beyond his direct control). Right now, they aren't.
The difference is that 25 years ago, it took a direct hit by a category 5 hurricane to make a visible dent in the phone network. There was no need to rebuild the phone network, because most of it never quit working in the first place. After Hurricane Andrew, people came home to neighborhoods so completely destroyed, they had to count streets and driveways to find the wreckage of their house... and more often than not, if they plugged a legacy-style phone into a phone jack, it worked. You can use Google to find stories from the Miami Herald about people who came home to a pile of rubble... and a very loud "off-hook" sound coming from a phone buried underneath.
Compare that to now, where a goddamn slow & sloppy tropical storm (like Isaac) can take out U-verse and Comcast for at least half the day (Which is exactly what TS Isaac did, in northern Dade and southern Broward counties) just because a few distant neighborhoods (where their regional network operation centers are located) lost commercial power for a day, and they didn't have enough backup power to keep them running. It's DISGRACEFUL.
As for #2, your house might not be "there" (in the sense of being habitable) any more, but if the storm is still in progress, working phone service is still a good thing to have.
If you're a government espionage agency or military and use AES believing it's ironclad & bulletproof... but it isn't... and your enemies know it... it's unfathomably bad.
If you're a bank using AES to encrypt and sign financial transactions, it doesn't really MATTER whether or not AES has some horrible vulnerability that the CIA, NSA, and their counterparts in China and Russia have all completely pwn3d, as long as it remains effective against organized crime syndicates (ie, requires the resources of a government espionage agency to meaningfully defeat), script kiddies, and mid-level fraudsters. If only because those same governments can get anything they want out of you ANYWAY by throwing secret court orders at you. At least being intercepted by them (as opposed to active cooperation) is free, and entitles you to claim victimhood if the press gets wind of it.
> This is a territorial battle between China and Japan, leave it to them to sort out or fight it out over on their own. > Radical concept, I know, but just because something happens, it does not require you to sit your ass in the > middle of it just because you can.
Actually, it does. AFAIK, Japan is constitutionally prohibited from having more than a token, purely-defensive military, and totally depends upon the US for its protection. A loss for national sovereignty and pride, but an epic win for saving cold hard cash in perpetuity that allows them to outsource 99% of their military needs to us, and forces us to pick up the tab.
> If the US tried to cheat there'd be a guy whose job was to stop the cheating, he'd have real powers over people > within these United States, and the President and Congress wouldn't be able to dodge him.
In what fantasy universe does this hypothetical enforcement agent with the authority to force the United States to do anything exist?
It's not constitutionally POSSIBLE for the federal government to grant that kind of direct authority to any foreign entity.
Moreover, the Supreme Court has overwhelmingly ruled on at least one occasion that international treaties have zero force against the legislative branch. I believe the case was heard by the US Supreme Court during the Clinton administration and involved a lawsuit by environmentalists seeking to force a state to stop the construction of something. They lost in state court on the grounds that it didn't violate any federal laws, then petitioned the US Supreme Court to hear the case and argued that, at the very least, the Senate should be required to act consistently with its own treaties. In the end, they were smacked down even harder by the Supremes, who unanimously opined that nothing can constitutionally *compel* the House and Senate to pass *anything* they don't want to pass. I'm pretty sure at least one Justice went a step further, and opined that if a clearly-worded treaty is backed by vaguely-worded enabling legislation, it's clear evidence that the legislative branch didn't *intend* for the treaty to be rigorously followed.
In Holland? It won't look the least bit different. They ALREADY have large-scale flood control structures in place. They'll just make them bigger.
German greens might allow Hamburg to flood just to make a political point, and cities in Bangladesh might flood occasionally until they're wealthy enough to do flood control *right*, but the world's big coastal cities aren't going away anytime soon. If sea levels rise, they'll be protected by the kind of large-scale civil engineering projects that give environmentalists nightmares, and life will go on. Rural areas that would cost more to fortify than they're worth might be allowed to flood, or become sources of cheap fill dirt, but civilization as we know it isn't going to end.
> Let's adapt by drowning all major cities which lie on the sea shore
I love the way environmentalists just take for granted that people will stand by and watch billions of dollars worth of prime urban real estate get flooded. They act like canals, dikes, pumping stations, and fill dirt have never been invented. Newsflash: Florida and the Netherlands would both be swamps or lakes without large-scale civil engineering... and in those places, another foot or ten of sea level rise just means "build them higher during their next round of reconstruction over the next hundred years". New York & London (among other places) aren't going anywhere.
> What kinds of disabilities would a segway help overcome
Er... you know that Segway was actually a spin-off technology from the iBot, which was basically a Segway wheelchair with a second pair of wheels it could use in places that were too unstable for Segway-like operation (read: sand at a beach), when the user wanted to lower the chair down to normal seating height (to sit at a table/desk or converse), or even to climb stairs.
Unfortunately, production ceased a few years ago, but nobody expects the cessation to truly be permanent. The main problem was that they were really, really expensive, insurance/medicare/VA generally wouldn't pay for it, and few people in its target market could afford it (even though the lucky few who COULD described it as "life-transforming").
Exactly. Thanks to atomic uncertainty, we're rapidly approaching the point where CPUs are going to need 3 or more pipelines executing the same instructions in parallel, just so we can compare the results and decide which result is the most likely to be the RIGHT one.
We're ALREADY at that point with flash memory. Unlike SRAM, which is unambiguously 0 or 1, SLC flash is like a leaky bucket that starts out full (1), gets instantly drained to represent 0, and otherwise leaks over time, but still counts as '1' as long as it's not empty. MLC flash is even worse... one bucket represents 2 or more bits, so the amount that can leak away without corrupting the value is even less. Twenty years from now, CPUs will be the same way... 16 times the transistors, but maybe 4x the performance of today if we're lucky, because the transistors will be so small, they'll occasionally get "stuck" or "leak", and CPUs will need additional logic to determine when it happens and transparently fix it when it does (we might even be at that point already to some extent).
If all you've ever owned are Nexus devices, you probably won't see the point. Try using an AT&T Galaxy S3 sometime, and you'll quickly understand why CM is such a big deal.
Actually, there are a few. With an ARM Cortex, it's possible to build a phone that has encrypted ROM chips that can only be decrypted by "trusted" elements on the SoC. So, unless you can find a way to trick code running from trusted exec space into dumping the ROM chips for you, you might NOT be able to easily rip them for recovery. Whenever a new phone gets released, this is one of the first problem the early pioneers for it at XDA usually face... how to rip the carrier binaries (including parts that run in protected execution space) from the phone. Without them, you'd end up with a phone that might be able to do things that generic AOSP supports, but unable to use features specific to your own phone that go above and beyond it. Camera apps, in particular, represent one such application. Until VERY recently, the AOSP camera app was pretty crippled compared to the camera apps that shipped with the phones insofar as things like HDR, anti-shake, etc. were concerned.
> Rule #1 of mobile phones: never buy one from a telco. It is always more expensive and they add crap.
Unfortunately, if you're American and stuck with Verizon or Sprint for reasons of coverage or some other factor, you really don't have any other choice. Sprint won't activate non-Sprint phones, and a non-Verizon phone without Verizon's radio modem firmware operating on Verizon can't authenticate to EVDO, so your data speeds will max out at ~150kbps 1xRTT.
In theory, AT&T and T-Mobile are GSM... but if you care about LTE, they're both almost as carrier-locked as CDMA now. I know of exactly ONE phone (HTC One) that's even theoretically capable of doing LTE on BOTH AT&T and T-Mobile, and that's because it was built with the Renesas LTE chipset (now owned by Broadcom, originally developed by Nokia as an alternative to Qualcomm's stranglehold and licensing clusterfuck). So, sure, you can go out and buy an unlocked GSM phone to use on AT&T or T-Mobile, but unless it's an unlocked HTC One, it's not going to do LTE on either network.
Google "LTE lock-in" for lots of sad examples of how American carriers, with the active cooperation of their best buddy Qualcomm, managed to infect and corrupt an officially open standard into one that's as carrier-locked and de-facto proprietary as Sprint/Verizon CDMA.
> If you have one of those, you've been ripped off. Nexus aren't tied to carriers.
Unfortunately, the Verizon and Sprint Galaxy Nexi WERE tied to carriers. They were built with a Qualcomm chipset whose drivers were all basically closed and unique to Sprint/Verizon. Qualcomm won't even sneeze without the carriers' permission, so Google was hamstrung and couldn't release newer firmware for them. That's why Google walked away from supporting CDMA phones in disgust, and refused (at first) to license LTE radio modem firmware for the Nexus 4 -- it was the same problem, but in GSM-space. Qualcomm would only license LTE firmware for Nexus 4 phones that were carrier-locked to T-Mobile (because Qualcomm will only license radio modem firmware to carriers), and Google was in no mood to let anybody tie its hands again.
> one way to prevent it is to (humanely) catch it and take it to the nearest animal shelter/control where she can pick it up.
If her cat was vaccinated against FIV and the shelter doesn't have enough cage space to keep him or her in his or her own cage, that little stunt could get the cat killed within minutes of arrival at the shelter... BEFORE they even bother to check for a microchip.
FIV vaccine should be banned... or at the very least, veterinarians should be required to disclose to cat owners that the cat will test FIV+ for life, and enforce a 24-hour cooling off period to let the owner go home and research the vaccine on his or her own. Seven years ago, I made the terrible mistake of allowing my kitty's vet to cheerfully tell me that there was "a great new vaccine" available. At the time, I knew what FIV was, and was thrilled that there was a new vaccine. She NEVER told me that it would cause him to test FIV+ for the rest of his life, or that the only strains of FIV it worked against were statistically nonexistent in Florida.
Well... that depends. A compiler could theoretically do a better job of precisely applying memory-barrier instructions and pre-optimizing code for a specific CPU to maximize its ability to run from cache. In reality, this is a use case that almost never applies, because the only time anybody allows the compiler to hard-optimize code enough for it to matter is when they're trying to benchmark a new Intel CPU using Intel's compiler and allowing it to push that one specific CPU as hard as it can possibly be pushed (even if the same optimizations would be harmful to code performance on other models).
Likewise, a lot of compiler optimizations do things that would be unmaintainable and ugly in assembly, like unrolling loops and generating spaghetti code that caches well, but would be unreadable to a human.
The one thing compilers have always sucked at, though, is compact code. And oddly, that's starting to matter now, even though we have gigabytes of ram. Relatively speaking, DDR3 system ram is almost as slow relative to L1 cache as magnetic tape was relative to SRAM back in the 70s. The hit from having to go out and fetch bytes from main system RAM is now HUGE. Speculative execution and multiple cores & pipelines help, but only in situations where the computer is busy trying to do a dozen things at once anyway. Do something with a single core that involves lots of random-access ram fetching, and even an i7 will slow to a crawl.
Now... in theory... it might be possible to hand-tweak a build of MenuetOS for a specific processor like the i7, using assembly opcodes almost nobody who isn't a compiler-writer even knows exist to semi-deterministically set up execution from the 4 cores, laying out the code and data so it can all run entirely from cache. And maybe even a chunk of the OS executing directly on the GPU. If someone could pull off a stunt like that... good god. Your 3GHz i7 would execute with the performance of a theoretical 16GHz i7, once you got it tweaked to the point where everything ran 100% out of cache and never had to wait for slow main memory access.
The P4 was epic fail across the board... it was slower at old code, and STILL slower with new code. Even if you hand-tweaked code specifically for Netburst architecture, random spew running on any PIII would toast the best optimized code crawling on a P4.
The Pentium 4 (and Netburst architecture) had exactly one purpose: cheap gigahertz for Intel's marketing department to advertise. It's the reason why a 1.6 GHz Pentium M (which was for all intents and purposes, a 1.6GHz Pentium III Xeon with hyperthreading and power management) completely toasted even 3GHz Pentium 4 CPUs, and a big part of the reason why AMD completely spanked Intel for a couple of years despite having CPUs that were half the nominal speed of Intel's.
The Pentium 4 will forever be remembered as an unloved artifact of Intel's descent into Microsoft-like insanity. Fortunately, we had AMD standing by to give us a consequence-free superior alternative, so Intel had no choice but to throw in the towel on Netburst and become sane again quickly. Unfortunately, OS X is tied to Apple's overpriced hardware, and Linux is far from being an effortless & transparent alternative to Windows (*), so the best we can hope for is that Windows 8.1 will be followed by Windows 9 and Windows 7XPE (available in Professional and Enterprise versions only), with 7's UI, but Windows 8's performance improvements backported, and and Metro just overlaid on top of IE12.
(*) Just to name one issue that's always annoyed me with Linux... its mouse ballistics. No, seriously. Regardless of what I've tried, it's just never seemed *right* compared to Windows. It doesn't matter which mouse I use, or what I set its parameters to be... I just can't precisely replicate Windows mouse ballistics under Linux, and always feel like I'm fighting with the mouse.
As much as I hate to admit it, you're probably right. It's like food manufacturers have been taking lessons from Linksys and Netgear (release a kick-ass product with top-notch components, rack up 5-star reviews, then quietly replace it with an inferior and crippled second version so you can rake in the sales for a few months before people catch on and start neutralizing the early 5-star reviews with angry 1-star reviews).
You're right, I was just making the point that CRTs don't necessarily *have* to be the horrific energy hogs everyone makes them out to be. They were, because that's how everything back then was designed to be, and they were obsolete before most of the things that NOW make LCD displays energy-efficient were the norm.
Much of the alleged energy efficiency of LEDs comes from the fact that manufacturers are somehow able to pass off LEDs that are visibly inferior (when viewed side by side) as the "equivalent" of conventional technologies. A dim laptop screen is going to be more energy-efficient than any CRT is ever likely to be. A retina-searing OLED or superbright LCD that's measurably putting out as much brightness as a bright CRT or plasma TV will ultimately use almost as much power, and throw off almost as much total heat, as the genuinely-equivalent CRT or plasma TV will.
Illustrative exampe: LED Christmas lights, at least 60-70% of which aren't even half the brightness of the incandescent lights they're alleged to replace.
> Because responding to massive fires across entire regions is cheap, responding to cat 4 and 5 hurricanes is cheap,
Today's forest fires aren't really any bigger or worse than the forest fires we had 200 years ago. The ONLY difference is that 200 years ago, the forest fires burned vast areas where nobody lived, but those same forests NOW have tens of thousands of multi-million dollar estate homes sitting on wooded lots 50 miles+ out into suburbia, and occasionally a really bad fire makes its way into a more middle-class neighborhood that backs up against an area that hasn't been developed yet.
Ditto for hurricanes. The hurricanes making landfall in the US aren't really any worse than the ones that hit a century ago.The difference is, a hundred years ago, Florida had less than a million people, most of whom lived north of Orlando. In 1899, the City of Miami's founders had to semi-fraudulently recruit soldiers stationed at Fort Dallas to get a quorum of 100 people and qualify for incorporation as a city. Today, there are VERY few places along Florida's coast where a hurricane could make landfall without directly affecting at least a million people. A picture is worth a thousand words: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:South_Florida_from_space_NASA.jpg
The energy use of CRTs is exaggerated. If you compare the power consumption of a 32" CRT from around 1997 to the power consumption of a second-generation 32" LCD from around 2004, they were almost dead even, and both were substantially less than the power used by plasma and projection TVs.
NEW LCDs do use less power, but it's not really fair to compare a 15 year old CRT to a brand new LCD, because for LCDs, low power consumption is a recent phenomenon that was absolutely NOT the norm before governments started to make a big deal about it.
Most of the energy savings from NEW LCD TVs comes from the use of high-efficiency switchmode power supplies instead of low-efficiency (but cheap) linear power supplies, and vastly more energy-efficient energy usage when "off". If you retrofitted the same improvements onto a CRT, it wouldn't do as well as a LCD of comparable brightness, size, and resolution... but it wouldn't be the night/day difference people seem to think it would be.
In theory, a CRT could almost be MORE efficient than a LCD TV. Stop and think for a moment how superbright LED-illuminated LCD TVs are illuminated. You have fairly hot LEDs emitting ultraviolet light that causes a phosphor coating to fluoresce white, then shield that light through colored filters controlled by solid-state venetian blinds. Compare that to the elegant simplicity of using a high-voltage, but low-power, electron beam to illuminate phosphors directly. You can't quite compare the two technologies directly, but LCD (and LED) are not the holy nirvana they're made out to be, especially when amped up to the same brightness levels as an old CRT TV.
What are you talking about? Honda or Toyota (I forget which) is ALREADY the largest automaker in America, and VW would be on the list as well if they weren't able to make cars in Mexico and Brazil instead. Japanese carmakers now export about as many finished cars to Japan from the US as they import into the US. For all intents and purposes, it now costs as much to make a car in Japan as it does to make one in the US, so it's more cost-effective for companies like Honda to make some models in Japan, some models in the US, and run the cargo ships full in both directions.
There's no grand conspiracy to keep fuel-efficient European microcars off the road. If you want to buy a Smart Car or a Mini Cooper, most big cities (on the east and west coast, at least... not sure about the middle part of the country) have at least one dealer. There just isn't much of a market for them, because nobody who isn't a wealthy trend-conscious Green is going to go out and spend $25k+ for a car that's basically a glorified 2-seater Geo Metro with leather seats.
> Solar energy is a nearly ideal source for air conditioning power since generally when you need it the worst the Sun is shining brightly.
Except for the fact that you'd need about an acre of PV cells to generate enough electricity to air condition a single-family home, let alone a multistory office building.
There are more efficient ways to use solar energy for air conditioning (like geothermal, using the sun's heat to superheat and compress the refrigerant gas), but it only works WELL in places that only get really hot for a few weeks per year, like Michigan, Canada, and Scandinavia. In places like Florida, Dubai, and India, the ground has absorbed so much heat over the millennia (because the temperatures don't really vary much over the course of the year), a semi-passive geothermal air conditioning system would only be able to drop the indoor air temperature a few degrees below ambient outdoor air temperatures, and would do a shit job of wringing humidity out of the air because it has too much latent heat for a geothermal system to deal with. To chill a 90-degree room down to 75 degrees and reduce the humidity, you can't pump 75-degree air into the room... you have to pump ~40-50 degree air into the room. If you had perfect insulation and kept up the 75-degree air, you'd eventually end up with an interior that approached 75 degrees, but had air saturated with almost 100% relative humidity. To really wring the moisture out of the air, it has to be supercooled relative to your desired target temperature.
^^^ Actually, you don't loathe and despise DST... you loathe and despise STANDARD TIME. To shift the clock so the sun sets later during the winter (when it's cooler and you WANT to golf after work), you'd want daylight saving time to be the normal time ALL year.
It could be worse, though... you COULD live in California, which gets *completely* screwed by being in Pacific time rather than Mountain time (especially Los Angeles). I dare *anybody* to look at the sunrise/sunset times for Los Angeles in June & December and justify it being 3 hours behind New York instead of 2. Without even getting into travel logistics or flogging the energy horse, it's obvious that LA is in the wrong time zone, period, unless you're a vampire who likes having a few extra hours of darkness to go shopping before stores close at 9.
Seriously... in the summer, the sun comes up in LA around 4:45am, but still sets a little after 7pm. And people in Las Vegas get even MORE screwed by being in Pacific. At least in LA, they get to enjoy about an hour of twilight as the sun sets. In Las Vegas, the sun drops behind the mountains to the west, the city gets engulfed by the shadow, and that's *it* -- early twilight to total darkness in something like 5 minutes. The first time I ever went to Las Vegas, it totally blew my mind. I walked into a 7-11 my first day right as the sun was starting to set, and walked out 3 minutes later into pitch-black night.
If anything, it might make sense to abolish Pacific time AND permanently split the difference between MST and MDT (creating a new "Pacific/West" timezone that was permanently UTC-6.5), which would have the effect of shifting times in what's now Pacific Time to an hour and a half hour later than they are now (so that in the summer, sunrise/sunset would be around 6:11am/8:38pm, and in the winter it would be around 8:28am/6:24pm). In the worst case, Summer/Winter sunrise/sunset times for Seattle would be 5:45am/9:30pm and 9:28am/5:58pm. In exchange for driving to work in total darkness (instead of pre-dawn darkness), they'd at least get to see real sunlight while driving home.
Likewise, a case could be made for Central merging with Eastern into a new East/Atlantic timezone that was permanently UTC-4.5 (splitting the difference between EST and EDT, shifting what's now Central back by 1/2 or 1-1/2 hours), the only big city with REALLY crazy sunrise/sunset times would be Minneapolis (9:51am sunrise in the winter... but 6:11pm sunset in return). If Minnesota really hated it, they could move into the new Pacific/West timezone at UTC-6.5), which would make their sunrise/sunset times almost exactly the same as New York's. I suspect, though, that they'd just stay in East/Atlantic and enjoy the late winter sunsets.
Of course, some might object that the creation of two new timezones (East/Atlantic at UTC-4.5, and Pacific/West at UTC-6.5) on the grounds that they'd be oddball half-hour timezones compared to the rest of the world... but fuck it. India got away with it, and we're at least as important globally as they are. Not to mention the fact that Europe would probably do the exact same thing with CET once the soft taboo was broken.
> Why would it matter in any sense if sunset happens at 3:11?
Because businesses are inflexible, and most of the people who live there would be stuck having most of their daylight hours fall when they're either passed out and asleep, or stuck at work. The hours on the clock might be completely arbitrary, but HR-dictated working hours are equally arbitrary. DST is a rare example of the political process actually working to accomplish something people want (evening daylight) over the objections of business bureaucracy.
As a practical matter, Southern California would probably LOVE to move to MST, or even year-round MDT/CST. I'm guessing that they haven't been allowed to do it because everyone ELSE on the west coast knows that if LA moves to Mountain time, they'll get dragged into it by LA-dictated TV, sports, and work schedules by default.
Historically, when the decision has been left up to voters and popular opinion, timezone boundaries have tended to drift westward over time. People grumble about early-morning darkness, but will fight tooth and nail to preserve evening sunlight. Part of it is probably because of the feeling that your mornings are mostly still dictated by the need to be somewhere at a specific time, while your evenings are more open-ended and yours. Obviously, this isn't true for everyone... but it's a use case that can be safely said to apply to most.
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> Wireless technologies are a good interim solution until fiber can be deployed ubiquitously, especially in very low density areas.
If, and ONLY IF, companies wanting to replace POTS wireline with wireless are required to satisfy the same availability and reliability standards they were required to meet with POTS (including backup power for everything upstream from the end user and beyond his direct control). Right now, they aren't.
The difference is that 25 years ago, it took a direct hit by a category 5 hurricane to make a visible dent in the phone network. There was no need to rebuild the phone network, because most of it never quit working in the first place. After Hurricane Andrew, people came home to neighborhoods so completely destroyed, they had to count streets and driveways to find the wreckage of their house... and more often than not, if they plugged a legacy-style phone into a phone jack, it worked. You can use Google to find stories from the Miami Herald about people who came home to a pile of rubble... and a very loud "off-hook" sound coming from a phone buried underneath.
Compare that to now, where a goddamn slow & sloppy tropical storm (like Isaac) can take out U-verse and Comcast for at least half the day (Which is exactly what TS Isaac did, in northern Dade and southern Broward counties) just because a few distant neighborhoods (where their regional network operation centers are located) lost commercial power for a day, and they didn't have enough backup power to keep them running. It's DISGRACEFUL.
As for #2, your house might not be "there" (in the sense of being habitable) any more, but if the storm is still in progress, working phone service is still a good thing to have.
> That's even worse
Yes... and no.
If you're a government espionage agency or military and use AES believing it's ironclad & bulletproof... but it isn't... and your enemies know it... it's unfathomably bad.
If you're a bank using AES to encrypt and sign financial transactions, it doesn't really MATTER whether or not AES has some horrible vulnerability that the CIA, NSA, and their counterparts in China and Russia have all completely pwn3d, as long as it remains effective against organized crime syndicates (ie, requires the resources of a government espionage agency to meaningfully defeat), script kiddies, and mid-level fraudsters. If only because those same governments can get anything they want out of you ANYWAY by throwing secret court orders at you. At least being intercepted by them (as opposed to active cooperation) is free, and entitles you to claim victimhood if the press gets wind of it.
> This is a territorial battle between China and Japan, leave it to them to sort out or fight it out over on their own.
> Radical concept, I know, but just because something happens, it does not require you to sit your ass in the
> middle of it just because you can.
Actually, it does. AFAIK, Japan is constitutionally prohibited from having more than a token, purely-defensive military, and totally depends upon the US for its protection. A loss for national sovereignty and pride, but an epic win for saving cold hard cash in perpetuity that allows them to outsource 99% of their military needs to us, and forces us to pick up the tab.
> If the US tried to cheat there'd be a guy whose job was to stop the cheating, he'd have real powers over people
> within these United States, and the President and Congress wouldn't be able to dodge him.
In what fantasy universe does this hypothetical enforcement agent with the authority to force the United States to do anything exist?
It's not constitutionally POSSIBLE for the federal government to grant that kind of direct authority to any foreign entity.
Moreover, the Supreme Court has overwhelmingly ruled on at least one occasion that international treaties have zero force against the legislative branch. I believe the case was heard by the US Supreme Court during the Clinton administration and involved a lawsuit by environmentalists seeking to force a state to stop the construction of something. They lost in state court on the grounds that it didn't violate any federal laws, then petitioned the US Supreme Court to hear the case and argued that, at the very least, the Senate should be required to act consistently with its own treaties. In the end, they were smacked down even harder by the Supremes, who unanimously opined that nothing can constitutionally *compel* the House and Senate to pass *anything* they don't want to pass. I'm pretty sure at least one Justice went a step further, and opined that if a clearly-worded treaty is backed by vaguely-worded enabling legislation, it's clear evidence that the legislative branch didn't *intend* for the treaty to be rigorously followed.
In Holland? It won't look the least bit different. They ALREADY have large-scale flood control structures in place. They'll just make them bigger.
German greens might allow Hamburg to flood just to make a political point, and cities in Bangladesh might flood occasionally until they're wealthy enough to do flood control *right*, but the world's big coastal cities aren't going away anytime soon. If sea levels rise, they'll be protected by the kind of large-scale civil engineering projects that give environmentalists nightmares, and life will go on. Rural areas that would cost more to fortify than they're worth might be allowed to flood, or become sources of cheap fill dirt, but civilization as we know it isn't going to end.
> Let's adapt by drowning all major cities which lie on the sea shore
I love the way environmentalists just take for granted that people will stand by and watch billions of dollars worth of prime urban real estate get flooded. They act like canals, dikes, pumping stations, and fill dirt have never been invented. Newsflash: Florida and the Netherlands would both be swamps or lakes without large-scale civil engineering... and in those places, another foot or ten of sea level rise just means "build them higher during their next round of reconstruction over the next hundred years". New York & London (among other places) aren't going anywhere.
> What kinds of disabilities would a segway help overcome
Er... you know that Segway was actually a spin-off technology from the iBot, which was basically a Segway wheelchair with a second pair of wheels it could use in places that were too unstable for Segway-like operation (read: sand at a beach), when the user wanted to lower the chair down to normal seating height (to sit at a table/desk or converse), or even to climb stairs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibot
Unfortunately, production ceased a few years ago, but nobody expects the cessation to truly be permanent. The main problem was that they were really, really expensive, insurance/medicare/VA generally wouldn't pay for it, and few people in its target market could afford it (even though the lucky few who COULD described it as "life-transforming").
Exactly. Thanks to atomic uncertainty, we're rapidly approaching the point where CPUs are going to need 3 or more pipelines executing the same instructions in parallel, just so we can compare the results and decide which result is the most likely to be the RIGHT one.
We're ALREADY at that point with flash memory. Unlike SRAM, which is unambiguously 0 or 1, SLC flash is like a leaky bucket that starts out full (1), gets instantly drained to represent 0, and otherwise leaks over time, but still counts as '1' as long as it's not empty. MLC flash is even worse... one bucket represents 2 or more bits, so the amount that can leak away without corrupting the value is even less. Twenty years from now, CPUs will be the same way... 16 times the transistors, but maybe 4x the performance of today if we're lucky, because the transistors will be so small, they'll occasionally get "stuck" or "leak", and CPUs will need additional logic to determine when it happens and transparently fix it when it does (we might even be at that point already to some extent).
If all you've ever owned are Nexus devices, you probably won't see the point. Try using an AT&T Galaxy S3 sometime, and you'll quickly understand why CM is such a big deal.
> There's no technical reason why not;
Actually, there are a few. With an ARM Cortex, it's possible to build a phone that has encrypted ROM chips that can only be decrypted by "trusted" elements on the SoC. So, unless you can find a way to trick code running from trusted exec space into dumping the ROM chips for you, you might NOT be able to easily rip them for recovery. Whenever a new phone gets released, this is one of the first problem the early pioneers for it at XDA usually face... how to rip the carrier binaries (including parts that run in protected execution space) from the phone. Without them, you'd end up with a phone that might be able to do things that generic AOSP supports, but unable to use features specific to your own phone that go above and beyond it. Camera apps, in particular, represent one such application. Until VERY recently, the AOSP camera app was pretty crippled compared to the camera apps that shipped with the phones insofar as things like HDR, anti-shake, etc. were concerned.
> Rule #1 of mobile phones: never buy one from a telco. It is always more expensive and they add crap.
Unfortunately, if you're American and stuck with Verizon or Sprint for reasons of coverage or some other factor, you really don't have any other choice. Sprint won't activate non-Sprint phones, and a non-Verizon phone without Verizon's radio modem firmware operating on Verizon can't authenticate to EVDO, so your data speeds will max out at ~150kbps 1xRTT.
In theory, AT&T and T-Mobile are GSM... but if you care about LTE, they're both almost as carrier-locked as CDMA now. I know of exactly ONE phone (HTC One) that's even theoretically capable of doing LTE on BOTH AT&T and T-Mobile, and that's because it was built with the Renesas LTE chipset (now owned by Broadcom, originally developed by Nokia as an alternative to Qualcomm's stranglehold and licensing clusterfuck). So, sure, you can go out and buy an unlocked GSM phone to use on AT&T or T-Mobile, but unless it's an unlocked HTC One, it's not going to do LTE on either network.
Google "LTE lock-in" for lots of sad examples of how American carriers, with the active cooperation of their best buddy Qualcomm, managed to infect and corrupt an officially open standard into one that's as carrier-locked and de-facto proprietary as Sprint/Verizon CDMA.
> If you have one of those, you've been ripped off. Nexus aren't tied to carriers.
Unfortunately, the Verizon and Sprint Galaxy Nexi WERE tied to carriers. They were built with a Qualcomm chipset whose drivers were all basically closed and unique to Sprint/Verizon. Qualcomm won't even sneeze without the carriers' permission, so Google was hamstrung and couldn't release newer firmware for them. That's why Google walked away from supporting CDMA phones in disgust, and refused (at first) to license LTE radio modem firmware for the Nexus 4 -- it was the same problem, but in GSM-space. Qualcomm would only license LTE firmware for Nexus 4 phones that were carrier-locked to T-Mobile (because Qualcomm will only license radio modem firmware to carriers), and Google was in no mood to let anybody tie its hands again.
> one way to prevent it is to (humanely) catch it and take it to the nearest animal shelter/control where she can pick it up.
If her cat was vaccinated against FIV and the shelter doesn't have enough cage space to keep him or her in his or her own cage, that little stunt could get the cat killed within minutes of arrival at the shelter... BEFORE they even bother to check for a microchip.
FIV vaccine should be banned... or at the very least, veterinarians should be required to disclose to cat owners that the cat will test FIV+ for life, and enforce a 24-hour cooling off period to let the owner go home and research the vaccine on his or her own. Seven years ago, I made the terrible mistake of allowing my kitty's vet to cheerfully tell me that there was "a great new vaccine" available. At the time, I knew what FIV was, and was thrilled that there was a new vaccine. She NEVER told me that it would cause him to test FIV+ for the rest of his life, or that the only strains of FIV it worked against were statistically nonexistent in Florida.
Well... that depends. A compiler could theoretically do a better job of precisely applying memory-barrier instructions and pre-optimizing code for a specific CPU to maximize its ability to run from cache. In reality, this is a use case that almost never applies, because the only time anybody allows the compiler to hard-optimize code enough for it to matter is when they're trying to benchmark a new Intel CPU using Intel's compiler and allowing it to push that one specific CPU as hard as it can possibly be pushed (even if the same optimizations would be harmful to code performance on other models).
Likewise, a lot of compiler optimizations do things that would be unmaintainable and ugly in assembly, like unrolling loops and generating spaghetti code that caches well, but would be unreadable to a human.
The one thing compilers have always sucked at, though, is compact code. And oddly, that's starting to matter now, even though we have gigabytes of ram. Relatively speaking, DDR3 system ram is almost as slow relative to L1 cache as magnetic tape was relative to SRAM back in the 70s. The hit from having to go out and fetch bytes from main system RAM is now HUGE. Speculative execution and multiple cores & pipelines help, but only in situations where the computer is busy trying to do a dozen things at once anyway. Do something with a single core that involves lots of random-access ram fetching, and even an i7 will slow to a crawl.
Now... in theory... it might be possible to hand-tweak a build of MenuetOS for a specific processor like the i7, using assembly opcodes almost nobody who isn't a compiler-writer even knows exist to semi-deterministically set up execution from the 4 cores, laying out the code and data so it can all run entirely from cache. And maybe even a chunk of the OS executing directly on the GPU. If someone could pull off a stunt like that... good god. Your 3GHz i7 would execute with the performance of a theoretical 16GHz i7, once you got it tweaked to the point where everything ran 100% out of cache and never had to wait for slow main memory access.
The P4 was epic fail across the board... it was slower at old code, and STILL slower with new code. Even if you hand-tweaked code specifically for Netburst architecture, random spew running on any PIII would toast the best optimized code crawling on a P4.
The Pentium 4 (and Netburst architecture) had exactly one purpose: cheap gigahertz for Intel's marketing department to advertise. It's the reason why a 1.6 GHz Pentium M (which was for all intents and purposes, a 1.6GHz Pentium III Xeon with hyperthreading and power management) completely toasted even 3GHz Pentium 4 CPUs, and a big part of the reason why AMD completely spanked Intel for a couple of years despite having CPUs that were half the nominal speed of Intel's.
The Pentium 4 will forever be remembered as an unloved artifact of Intel's descent into Microsoft-like insanity. Fortunately, we had AMD standing by to give us a consequence-free superior alternative, so Intel had no choice but to throw in the towel on Netburst and become sane again quickly. Unfortunately, OS X is tied to Apple's overpriced hardware, and Linux is far from being an effortless & transparent alternative to Windows (*), so the best we can hope for is that Windows 8.1 will be followed by Windows 9 and Windows 7XPE (available in Professional and Enterprise versions only), with 7's UI, but Windows 8's performance improvements backported, and and Metro just overlaid on top of IE12.
(*) Just to name one issue that's always annoyed me with Linux... its mouse ballistics. No, seriously. Regardless of what I've tried, it's just never seemed *right* compared to Windows. It doesn't matter which mouse I use, or what I set its parameters to be... I just can't precisely replicate Windows mouse ballistics under Linux, and always feel like I'm fighting with the mouse.
As much as I hate to admit it, you're probably right. It's like food manufacturers have been taking lessons from Linksys and Netgear (release a kick-ass product with top-notch components, rack up 5-star reviews, then quietly replace it with an inferior and crippled second version so you can rake in the sales for a few months before people catch on and start neutralizing the early 5-star reviews with angry 1-star reviews).
Example: ConAgra replacing HFCS with sugar in Hunt's ketchup, advertising it heavily for a few months, then quietly eliminating the proclamation from the label, ceasing the ads, coasting for another year and a half, then quietly replacing the sugar with HFCS & hoping nobody will notice. http://consumerist.com/2013/01/30/hunts-manages-to-sneak-high-fructose-corn-syrup-back-into-its-ketchup-after-2-years-without/
You're right, I was just making the point that CRTs don't necessarily *have* to be the horrific energy hogs everyone makes them out to be. They were, because that's how everything back then was designed to be, and they were obsolete before most of the things that NOW make LCD displays energy-efficient were the norm.
Much of the alleged energy efficiency of LEDs comes from the fact that manufacturers are somehow able to pass off LEDs that are visibly inferior (when viewed side by side) as the "equivalent" of conventional technologies. A dim laptop screen is going to be more energy-efficient than any CRT is ever likely to be. A retina-searing OLED or superbright LCD that's measurably putting out as much brightness as a bright CRT or plasma TV will ultimately use almost as much power, and throw off almost as much total heat, as the genuinely-equivalent CRT or plasma TV will.
Illustrative exampe: LED Christmas lights, at least 60-70% of which aren't even half the brightness of the incandescent lights they're alleged to replace.
> Because responding to massive fires across entire regions is cheap, responding to cat 4 and 5 hurricanes is cheap,
Today's forest fires aren't really any bigger or worse than the forest fires we had 200 years ago. The ONLY difference is that 200 years ago, the forest fires burned vast areas where nobody lived, but those same forests NOW have tens of thousands of multi-million dollar estate homes sitting on wooded lots 50 miles+ out into suburbia, and occasionally a really bad fire makes its way into a more middle-class neighborhood that backs up against an area that hasn't been developed yet.
Ditto for hurricanes. The hurricanes making landfall in the US aren't really any worse than the ones that hit a century ago.The difference is, a hundred years ago, Florida had less than a million people, most of whom lived north of Orlando. In 1899, the City of Miami's founders had to semi-fraudulently recruit soldiers stationed at Fort Dallas to get a quorum of 100 people and qualify for incorporation as a city. Today, there are VERY few places along Florida's coast where a hurricane could make landfall without directly affecting at least a million people. A picture is worth a thousand words: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:South_Florida_from_space_NASA.jpg
The energy use of CRTs is exaggerated. If you compare the power consumption of a 32" CRT from around 1997 to the power consumption of a second-generation 32" LCD from around 2004, they were almost dead even, and both were substantially less than the power used by plasma and projection TVs.
NEW LCDs do use less power, but it's not really fair to compare a 15 year old CRT to a brand new LCD, because for LCDs, low power consumption is a recent phenomenon that was absolutely NOT the norm before governments started to make a big deal about it.
Most of the energy savings from NEW LCD TVs comes from the use of high-efficiency switchmode power supplies instead of low-efficiency (but cheap) linear power supplies, and vastly more energy-efficient energy usage when "off". If you retrofitted the same improvements onto a CRT, it wouldn't do as well as a LCD of comparable brightness, size, and resolution... but it wouldn't be the night/day difference people seem to think it would be.
In theory, a CRT could almost be MORE efficient than a LCD TV. Stop and think for a moment how superbright LED-illuminated LCD TVs are illuminated. You have fairly hot LEDs emitting ultraviolet light that causes a phosphor coating to fluoresce white, then shield that light through colored filters controlled by solid-state venetian blinds. Compare that to the elegant simplicity of using a high-voltage, but low-power, electron beam to illuminate phosphors directly. You can't quite compare the two technologies directly, but LCD (and LED) are not the holy nirvana they're made out to be, especially when amped up to the same brightness levels as an old CRT TV.
What are you talking about? Honda or Toyota (I forget which) is ALREADY the largest automaker in America, and VW would be on the list as well if they weren't able to make cars in Mexico and Brazil instead. Japanese carmakers now export about as many finished cars to Japan from the US as they import into the US. For all intents and purposes, it now costs as much to make a car in Japan as it does to make one in the US, so it's more cost-effective for companies like Honda to make some models in Japan, some models in the US, and run the cargo ships full in both directions.
There's no grand conspiracy to keep fuel-efficient European microcars off the road. If you want to buy a Smart Car or a Mini Cooper, most big cities (on the east and west coast, at least... not sure about the middle part of the country) have at least one dealer. There just isn't much of a market for them, because nobody who isn't a wealthy trend-conscious Green is going to go out and spend $25k+ for a car that's basically a glorified 2-seater Geo Metro with leather seats.
> Solar energy is a nearly ideal source for air conditioning power since generally when you need it the worst the Sun is shining brightly.
Except for the fact that you'd need about an acre of PV cells to generate enough electricity to air condition a single-family home, let alone a multistory office building.
There are more efficient ways to use solar energy for air conditioning (like geothermal, using the sun's heat to superheat and compress the refrigerant gas), but it only works WELL in places that only get really hot for a few weeks per year, like Michigan, Canada, and Scandinavia. In places like Florida, Dubai, and India, the ground has absorbed so much heat over the millennia (because the temperatures don't really vary much over the course of the year), a semi-passive geothermal air conditioning system would only be able to drop the indoor air temperature a few degrees below ambient outdoor air temperatures, and would do a shit job of wringing humidity out of the air because it has too much latent heat for a geothermal system to deal with. To chill a 90-degree room down to 75 degrees and reduce the humidity, you can't pump 75-degree air into the room... you have to pump ~40-50 degree air into the room. If you had perfect insulation and kept up the 75-degree air, you'd eventually end up with an interior that approached 75 degrees, but had air saturated with almost 100% relative humidity. To really wring the moisture out of the air, it has to be supercooled relative to your desired target temperature.
^^^ Actually, you don't loathe and despise DST... you loathe and despise STANDARD TIME. To shift the clock so the sun sets later during the winter (when it's cooler and you WANT to golf after work), you'd want daylight saving time to be the normal time ALL year.
It could be worse, though... you COULD live in California, which gets *completely* screwed by being in Pacific time rather than Mountain time (especially Los Angeles). I dare *anybody* to look at the sunrise/sunset times for Los Angeles in June & December and justify it being 3 hours behind New York instead of 2. Without even getting into travel logistics or flogging the energy horse, it's obvious that LA is in the wrong time zone, period, unless you're a vampire who likes having a few extra hours of darkness to go shopping before stores close at 9.
Seriously... in the summer, the sun comes up in LA around 4:45am, but still sets a little after 7pm. And people in Las Vegas get even MORE screwed by being in Pacific. At least in LA, they get to enjoy about an hour of twilight as the sun sets. In Las Vegas, the sun drops behind the mountains to the west, the city gets engulfed by the shadow, and that's *it* -- early twilight to total darkness in something like 5 minutes. The first time I ever went to Las Vegas, it totally blew my mind. I walked into a 7-11 my first day right as the sun was starting to set, and walked out 3 minutes later into pitch-black night.
If anything, it might make sense to abolish Pacific time AND permanently split the difference between MST and MDT (creating a new "Pacific/West" timezone that was permanently UTC-6.5), which would have the effect of shifting times in what's now Pacific Time to an hour and a half hour later than they are now (so that in the summer, sunrise/sunset would be around 6:11am/8:38pm, and in the winter it would be around 8:28am/6:24pm). In the worst case, Summer/Winter sunrise/sunset times for Seattle would be 5:45am/9:30pm and 9:28am/5:58pm. In exchange for driving to work in total darkness (instead of pre-dawn darkness), they'd at least get to see real sunlight while driving home.
Likewise, a case could be made for Central merging with Eastern into a new East/Atlantic timezone that was permanently UTC-4.5 (splitting the difference between EST and EDT, shifting what's now Central back by 1/2 or 1-1/2 hours), the only big city with REALLY crazy sunrise/sunset times would be Minneapolis (9:51am sunrise in the winter... but 6:11pm sunset in return). If Minnesota really hated it, they could move into the new Pacific/West timezone at UTC-6.5), which would make their sunrise/sunset times almost exactly the same as New York's. I suspect, though, that they'd just stay in East/Atlantic and enjoy the late winter sunsets.
Of course, some might object that the creation of two new timezones (East/Atlantic at UTC-4.5, and Pacific/West at UTC-6.5) on the grounds that they'd be oddball half-hour timezones compared to the rest of the world... but fuck it. India got away with it, and we're at least as important globally as they are. Not to mention the fact that Europe would probably do the exact same thing with CET once the soft taboo was broken.
> Why would it matter in any sense if sunset happens at 3:11?
Because businesses are inflexible, and most of the people who live there would be stuck having most of their daylight hours fall when they're either passed out and asleep, or stuck at work. The hours on the clock might be completely arbitrary, but HR-dictated working hours are equally arbitrary. DST is a rare example of the political process actually working to accomplish something people want (evening daylight) over the objections of business bureaucracy.
As a practical matter, Southern California would probably LOVE to move to MST, or even year-round MDT/CST. I'm guessing that they haven't been allowed to do it because everyone ELSE on the west coast knows that if LA moves to Mountain time, they'll get dragged into it by LA-dictated TV, sports, and work schedules by default.
Historically, when the decision has been left up to voters and popular opinion, timezone boundaries have tended to drift westward over time. People grumble about early-morning darkness, but will fight tooth and nail to preserve evening sunlight. Part of it is probably because of the feeling that your mornings are mostly still dictated by the need to be somewhere at a specific time, while your evenings are more open-ended and yours. Obviously, this isn't true for everyone... but it's a use case that can be safely said to apply to most.