Yeah, those bastards, paving roads and building bridges and schools.
Actually, if you change "government" to "the military" a lot more people would agree with you. That is one kind of spending that is just money wasted at best; at worst, they actually use those weapons, probably blowing up stuff that used to have value.
The "miser is a good neighbour" theory can be right or wrong, depending on what you mean by "not spending". Money stuffed under the bed is like a backhoe sitting idle (literally - it represents a backhoe sitting idle). Money put in a bank is money somebody can borrow to hire a backhoe. Whether you spend it yourself or loan it out to somebody to spend, is has to be SPENT somehow, to galvanize human beings to do work and produce value. The mistake is to imagine money IS value and is valuable to society sitting there. Like that backhoe, it is ONLY useful when in motion.
I'm afraid the parent lost you at the bakery. Here's what the P & GP were saying:
GP: Keynesianism is not some debatable school of thought, it's very much the accepted theory, like Einsteinian physics.
P: There does exist an "opposition", though. They have very little academic currency outside schools that are heavily supported by right-wing money, and function more as PR firms, supporting right-wing politics with a veneer of academic respectability. They are called Austrian (also "Chicago School" from Milton Friedman & co at the Chicago School of Economics).
If Einsteinian physics somehow required rich people to pay more taxes, you can bet there would still be well-funded Newtonian Schools...
Reading below, I see the debate rages on,/. being quite the libertarian-rich environment. Still, the really very basic principles of Keynes really work well in any consistent model: if people stop spending on building houses and restaurants and offices and so on, and you have millions of construction guys starving at home, it's a great time to build highways and bridges.
No, I'm not an economist, save getting the very basics in Econ 201 in first-year. What I am is the guy who picks water and sewer mains for replacement in a city of a million. And the prices I saw for doing that in 2007 and the prices I see today have dropped over 40%, because the contractors are desperate for work to hold their company from receivership, they'll work for -1% profit because it's better than -100%. I am getting as much done as possible, praise be my budget has not been slashed; It would have indeed been a perfect time to double it, THEN slash it when prices go up, and save money, so the overall 10-year budget back to the same it would have been with steady spending, but with double the work done. That's what borrowing is FOR.
Acting, now, of all times, when all construction is on a 40% off sale, like it's time to cut government spending is $%^ CRAZY.
Space would be resorted to when they run out of Earth.
There are really quite staggering areas of Earth barely inhabited because they are just a few degrees of temperature or a little below needed rainfall, or whatever other parameter, than is possible to live off of without some high-tech. You wouldn't need much of a "climate dome" to make mostly empty steppes in Russia, or Taiga in Canada, habitable - actually, a whole lot of greenhouses and a little (nuclear?) heating would do it. But living in greenhouses is much more expensive than living on land that grows food in the open, so nobody's done it.
All those areas - with their available water, air, soil, and comparatively moderate temperatures (compared to space), and low transport costs, are far cheaper to "colonize" than space, so don't get your hopes up until Russia, northern Canada, Antarctica, and the Sahara fill up first.
This would have happened whether a "Conservative, right-wing" government was in or the Liberals. To understand, you need to read a 2008 story from the same watchdog, Michael Geist (to whom all Canada should be deeply indebted for tracking these issues for years):
The key phrase in the story is "Canadian officials arrived ready to talk about a series of economic concerns but were quickly rebuffed by their U.S. counterparts, who indicated that progress on other issues would depend upon action on the copyright file."
Americans are sometimes surprised to learn (Condi Rice was one, which was disappointing from a foreign-affairs scholar) that Canada is the US' largest trading partner, more bilateral trade than with your #2 (China) and your #4 (UK) combined, nearly as much as China+Japan (#3). So imagine how large a trading partner the US is for Canada - 80% of the total, last time I checked, that is, 4X as much trade as with all other partners combined.
When the US really wants to lean on Canada at trade discussions, their only difficulty is choosing which levers to pull: making trouble over standard inspections of meat and grains? Lumber? Re-investigating whether Canada subsidizes iron ore, holding up imports while doing so?
So you can find some profoundly anti-Canadian stances being taken by Canadian trade officials - until you see the larger picture and find they were arranging to charge all Canadians an extra $100/year for media content ($3 billion from 30 million people) to smooth the path for $6B in exports - of the $76B total, they only have to pick less than 10% to threaten.
I used to decry the use of this word, as well, and still don't use it myself - the most-common other use for it means that it flirts with Godwin's Law.
Here in Alberta (oil sands, remember?) the magazine of the professional engineers association gets a lot of reader mail from those in petroleum-related industries and you get the cream global-warming critics: professional engineers, some with PhD's, putting in letters to the editor with 1000-word takedowns of AGW articles.
I was hugely impressed, after reading them for years, to see a short letter from a younger engineer. I don't have it, but the rough message was:
"These people do not want to join the scientific-method research into this issue. If they did, they would propose hypotheses, devise experiments, collect data, then publish it and their methodology and tentative conclusions. But all they ever do is pick away at work that others have done. Not one so far has actually studied climatology formally. They all seem to believe that their expertise in oil-reservoir engineering equips them to criticize any scientific work of any kind. I wonder how they would feel if climatologists wrote long letters criticizing modern theories of petroleum geology after studying magazine articles about it for a few weeks".
Or, I might add, calling petroleum geologists frauds and liars and fanatics and so forth. For instance, "Geostatistics and petroleum geology By Michael E. Hohn", on page 61, uses the phrase: "Even though the proposed model includes both vertical and horizontal components in each term, the trick of using infinite ranges (or very large ranges) means that at best the matrices used in kriging will be ill-conditioned..." Imagine the look on Dr. Hohn's face if he then found a news network repeating the words "scam" and "fraud" and "liar" with his picture on the screen.
I found that passage on Google books by googling "petroleum geology research trick" and was typing it for you two minutes later. It was EASY. Real science, the kind the young engineer recommended, is hard, slow work. Denigrating decades of work by professors who have spent a whole career in such patient, ill-paid, hard work by singling out apparent inconsistencies after about 0.1% as much work has been done, really does deserve SOME kind of harsh word to describe it. If "Denier" is too nasty for you because of the Holocaust link, give me a better one that is still strong enough to imply the 3-order-of-magnitude difference in the level of scholarship being displayed on each side.
I'm glad the real justice system doesn't agree with that approach. The null hypothesis there is that the accused is innocent. All burden of proof rests with the accuser.
Or am I reading your post wrong? You appear to be implying that if somebody makes vague claims of scientific misconduct, the accused is required to vigorously prove a negative to clear his name.
This is not just crusading journalists and panicking farmers. The (peer-reviewed) journal of the American Waterworks Association, September 2010, which mostly has articles like "Characterization of filter media MnOx(s) surfaces and Mn removal capability", also has an article on "The Threat From Hydrofracking" by Paul Rush, the deputy commissioner for water supply for New York City. It's an opinion article, not a scientific paper, but he lays out his case as if it were.
The industry's largest concern is that everybody has been forbidden to get involved in the regulation or permitting of these businesses - talk about your big-government incursion into (very) local concerns, like what's in your water source. Normally, water supply utilities are also charged by the state with protecting the watershed, and can do things like bring suit against hog farms that would let in e. coli. Not here.
As Rush puts it, "...the technical assessment indicated that migration of methane or fluids through natural fractures in the bedrock, some extending for miles, could compromise the city's aqueducts and shafts...Additionally, given the New York State regulatory infrastructure and the rules governing compulsory integration, drillers could potentially receive a permit authorizing horizontal drilling directly below a water supply tunnel without city authorization".
Being the guy responsible for the water quality, and then having any power to challenge a threat to it removed because Dick Cheney wanted to make sure no NIMBYs got in his friend's way, is fairly frightening.
The thing is, this stuff won't go away. At least if it were nuclear waste, it would naturally decay. But once they fill up a network of cracks with this stuff, in the exact geology where you know there's pressure from below, could result in a slow steady feed of it up through cracks and into the water, for decades. Or centuries. And you can inject it in, but you can't suck it out; no way to clean.
It's not unreasonable to study it further before using this technology near much-used watersheds like, well, all through densely-populated New York and Pennsylvania; part of the industry strategy has very, very clearly been to NOT study this issue so far.
This is like repealing a ban on EnergyStar CRT monitors and allowing more wasteful CRTs, just before the lighter, cheaper, much lower-power LCD monitors dropped below them on price and wiped them from the stores.
I refer, of course, to LED lighting. Your homework google for today is "CRI", colour rendering index, where sunlight (and incandescents) = 100. CFLs score in the sixties. Anything much above 80 can be quite hard to tell from incandescent for most eyes. An LED with a CRI of 85 is about to be released by a company called "Switch", profiled by Farhad Manjoo in Slate recently. Unlike CFLs, they really do last for decades under regular use, and save even more power. They're going to get much cheaper over just the next few years, and many claim will use even less power as well.
2011 and 2012 will just see early adopters, but by 2015, the end of incandescents will be as obvious as the end of LaserDisc was in 2000, if not quite gone yet.
It's funny how hard it is to let go of past models. The heart of the Internet model is, as the saying goes "a sphere", where every node has equal access to every other node. No clients, no servers, just equal connectors. Society as a whole (when weighted by money rather than head-count) keeps trying to reject that in favour of it being a fancy way to broadcast: a few large hosts running Wal-Mart-sized data centres, many clients on as dumb a terminal as possible. Efforts to democratize information flow are opposed as either unserious utopianism or outright crime. (They can't seem to find a statute forbidding Wikileaks that doesn't forbid the Times, but from the rhetoric, you'd never guess.)
When Hayden says that "users" 4th-amendment rights would be abrogated, he isn't thinking of all the users, not the big ones. Just the little ones. Which I think just models how Hayden sees society itself. Little folks don't have rights, just privileges.
The immunity to telecoms that accepted requests to wiretap without warrants, the revenge taken on Qwest for not doing so, the new rules that pretty much allow warrantless wiretapping at will...those powers would never be abused by today's FBI. They are all staunch and true. There's no chance of this happening now. No way are they going to snoop on friends-of-relatives-of suspected possible terrorists. Zero chance that people who impress a girlfriend by going to a march to support that Gaza blockade ship (which helps Gaza, which helps Hamas, who are terrorists, who no-doubt support other terrorists that might attack us some day) will find themselves on a list.
Don't be paranoid. We don't need a government of laws when we have a government of such good men who only want to protect us.
...and five minutes later I finally notice Cliff Stoll also replied to my post, and it was "Bulgarian" that I was trying to think of. I think the Nova special mentioned they were the "KGB's KGB", or some such, often used for foreign ops as a proxy. But never mind that.
Since everybody jumped in to (justly) praise his book, I want to add praise for his *second* book. His "second thoughts on the information superhighway" still strike me as a wise view. I've seen the related Newsweek article reprinted as derisive comedy, because of all the Internet commerce he thought wouldn't work so well, that eventually did. But the thrust of the book was much more than that. He decried spending money on computers for schools to do things like simulate chemistry experiments or show multimedia about the woods - displacing money that might have paid for real chemistry labs or trips to actual woods. In general, that we are all to eager to simulate life, play video games with a stranger in another state, rather than frisbee with a friend.
Oddly enough for a "techie" subject, The Cuckoo's Egg was mostly about the human relationships that Stoll formed with other sysadmins, police and intelligence folk, and of course, RT Morris, (to get back to topic) - and it is the human dimension that endears the book to so many of us.
The "end of the trail", at least from my point of view, was not the geographic location of Marcus Hess, but the end-point the information went to - and the money came from.
I rather doubt the west German government was paying him for information about American computer systems. The trail, in the book, rather clearly went past Marcus Hess to the KGB that were paying him. The book doesn't mention, but the PBS show they made from it offered additional detail (the police investigation was ongoing when the book came out) that it was (I think) the Romanian KGB or something, rather than actual Russians. But I forgot (was at work when I typed) exactly which KGB, so I went with "eastern Europe".
I guess I could dig out the VHS of that PBS show if you like, but, ahem, we were talking about RT Morris, you know, the guy that just died?
Glad I didn't make spelling or grammatical errors, or we'd have been here all day.
Clifford Stoll, who tracked a cracker backwards from the government science-lab networks being snooped on, eventually to eastern Europe, told a few great RTM stories in his memoir of it, "The Cuckoo's Egg". Stoll accepted an invitation to lecture various government and intelligence officials on his search to that point, and had one of those deals where he had to wait outside the room while other presenters spoke, then ushered out afterwards because it was all reflexively classified.
Stoll, an astronomer by trade who studied temperatures on Jupiter and became a sysadmin when his grants failed, got to the end of his presentation on ping timing and tracing and getting foreign police to check the telephone origin of a modem connection to an IP, to be asked several questions. The one from Morris, sprawled in the front row, was about adiabatic heating in Jupiter's atmosphere. Stoll switched mental tracks with some effort and answered as CIA types and military officers craned their necks around in confusion.
Later on, when the RTM-Jr. worm was wreaking havoc on the 1987 Internet, Stoll called Morris Sr. to get his take on it. A subdued and monosyllabic Morris answered that he knew about the problem and believed he could get to the bottom of it, but couldn't talk now.
"DoAsYouWouldBeDoneBy" - we can all recite it as one word before we get out of elementary school.
If an Arab country did this to the United States - if, say, they hacked together remote control meant for toy planes and managed to crash a dynamite-filled Piper Cub into the American part of the naval base at Rota, Spain - and took out of a few planes or ammo sheds, plus some people - would American politicians, commentators, and citizens on the street refer to that as an "Act Of War"?
If the presence or absence of a pilot in the delivery vehicle would not matter to the USA as it put out the fires, swept up the wreckage, and mopped up the body parts, in referring to it as an "Act of War"... then it's an act of war.
Congress has been giving up the power to control the executive's authority to kill foreigners (and get Americans killed) for two-thirds of a century. You have to remember that congressfolks are "Just people" - yes, most are millionaires, but in terms of knowledge and experience, they haven't a hundredth of the background and experience than the ivy league PhD's and 30-year diplomats and military scholars that the executive has toiling away in offices producing (tailored) position papers, CIA analysts producing "threat estimates", and so on. Congress has to devote its staff budget to people who can get stuff done back in the district. And they are *terrified* of looking weak.
So, they just keep their heads down and make no fuss, and the executive goes right ahead as they please. If you don't even have hearings on what the executive is doing, the ugly prospect of having a vote on the matter (where you will either be hated later for getting Americans killed for nothing, or hated for not opposing tyranny and a threat), is avoided.
In short, it's legal "de facto" (in fact) even if an elementary-school kid could show you how it is war, and unlawful without a declaration of such, "de jure".
That was exciting to hear and I rushed to Google. I tried [ "state secrets privilege" ruling against ] as my search phrase.
Got nuthin' but the recent (May 2011) ruling that was still in favour of the SSP - but "narrowed" the grounds for using it. The one before that was the 9th circuit, Sept 2010, that the EFF described as
"Unfortunately, abdicating its responsibility is just what the Court did. It ordered summary dismissal of the complaint without allowing any discovery, or presentation of the public evidence or even a plan by the plaintiffs to litigate the case while respecting the necessary secrecy, something that has been regularly done in cases involving national security. "
This is bi-partisan because grabbing more power for the executive branch is bi-partisan. The book "Takeover" by Charlie Savage (also of the NYT) details much about how the Bush 2 administration worked to increase executive power, but also how it has been a tradition for a century before that - and persecution of whistleblowers is an important part of it.
Two stories from "Takeover" stuck with me.
One was the story of an ethics advisor for the Justice Dept, Jesslyn Radack. When John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban", was charged with many counts that led to 20 years in jail, based almost entirely on his own statement given while duct-taped to a board, naked and blindfolded with an untreated bullet wound in his leg, Atty. Gen. Ashcroft stated publicly that while the statement was given without a lawyer present, that was fine since he did not have a lawyer at the time. Alas, Ms. Radack had already notified the FBI that Lindh's father had retained council for him and notified Justice, and that they should not interrogate him - they just did, anyway. And Radack had kept the E-mails, then sent them to a reporter. It was not in her mind at the time that this was "whistleblowing" she felt she was correcting erroneous statements; releasing the information was no crime at all, since it was unclassified. For this, she found herself:
* Fired, from the private law firm she worked for (they consulted to Justice) * Subjected to a year-long criminal investigation, though no charges were ever filed, since she had committed no crime * Referred to for "discipline" by the bar associations in all the states she was licensed to practice in, via a secret report that she was not allowed to see * Placed on the "selectee" version of the no-fly list - meaning she was *always* "randomly selected" for full off-with-the-underwear search for every single flight.
Talk about a chilling effect. Thou Shalt Not Embarrass The Justice Department, even with the simple truth that it got excited and eager for a headline and made a mistake.
Just so that this isn't seen as partisan, the other story is about a democrat: Harry Truman. (Who also felt the whole Korean War(!) was strictly an executive branch decision, no congressional authorization needed... take THAT, Libya protestors!) A major avoidance of government transparency is enabled by the "state secrets" privilege, in which the government can tell a court, "dismiss this lawsuit; to argue it, we'd have to reveal State Secrets". It's been used to shut down every lawsuit about torture and unlawful detention that came after 9/11. But there's no such privilege in the Constitution. It comes from a Supreme Court decision, "US vs. Reynolds", where the survivors of 3 civilian scientists killed in a B-29 bomber crash in Georgia, 1948, while doing missile research. The government argued that the judge had to dismiss the suit without even seeing the crash report himself, lest "secret electronics" be revealed, and it was upheld - then used about 60 times since. In 2000, the daughter of one of the victims found the crash report, declassified, on the Internet. It contained NOTHING about secret electronics - it contained proof that there had been negligent maintenance of the bomber, and negligent lack of training for the civilians on how to escape the aircraft. The government had used the claim to avoid embarrassment, not to mention losing a lawsuit.
As Charlie Savage summed it up, "The central case on which the State Secrets Privilege rests, then, was a fraud. The Truman administration had lied to the courts and gotten away with it."
So that's why you need whistleblowers. And that's why governments persecute them as ruthlessly as possible; it's about executive power, the effort to restore America to the status of having a King who is above the law - partly by exempting the executive from laws that the rest of us must obey, partly by ensuring that most of their lawbreaking is never revealed in the first place, so they don't have to fight for that exemption very often.
Can we just build a second "Great Firewall" on our side from theirs and not let them OUT? I know a lot of our firms want badly to go there and make money, but the rest of the Internet is at risk from their crap, all of us.
Excerpt: The operational staffing level of a nuclear power reactor is well-established. The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) reports that the average nuclear plant in the U.S. creates 400–700 direct full-time positions for a 1000-MW nuclear plant, and about the same number of induced positions (NEI, 2008)in the local economy. Another study (in support of the U.S. Nuclear Power 2010 Program) collected best-estimate data for the next-generation plants beginning to come online, and estimated that the requirements would be in excess of 700 employees per reactor.
The Canadian Energy Research Institute (CERI) has undertaken a similar assessment of the 17 CANDU reactors operating in Canada. The direct workforce employed at the reactors is 16,137, or 949 per reactor, which is somewhat higher than is expected for the advanced CANDU reactors.(Timilsina, 2008)
And this link: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf49a_Nuclear_Power_in_Canada.html Says that Canada's "18 reactors" (I suspect the two sources differ on the meaning of "reactor" as in "reactor vessel" vs "nuclear plant", because we haven't built a new one lately) have 12,679 MW of capacity, NET.
16,137 / 12, 679 = 1.28 employees per Megawatt.
I suspect that, however, includes ALL the employees of the plant, not just operators and maintainers (add clerical, training, and the inescapable empty-suits).
And in any event, it's trivial. A full-time position is at most 2000 hours/year, let's pay them a nice high average of $90,000. The net megawatt is 8760 hours per year, at $30 each if you're selling from the generator at a below-coal 3 cents/kWh: $262,800. Staff costs would be one-third, or 1.3 cts/kWh.
Your big problem with nuclear is paying off the mortgage on the $4M-$8M of capital costs you put in on that megawatt of capacity. Nuclear would like it to be $2M and sometimes claims that, but $8M is unfortunately closer to recent estimates. That takes a good $400,000/year to pay off, so you need to charge nearly a nickel per kWh just to pay that. Then you need a few more cents to pay for the salaries, and the fuel and other operating costs. Presto, you're charging a good 7 cts/kWh, nearly twice as much as coal or even gas.
The devastating facts about this particular solar project are that the sustained plant output is only half the max. That means this plant isn't costing under $7/watt to build, but over $13. The mortgage per megawatt is $650,000, or 7.4 cts/KWh. That's an economic death sentence even if those 0.8 employees worked for minimum wage.
By "economic death sentence" I mean "if you have to compete with coal and they don't have to pay the externalized costs they inflict on the environment", which they basically don't at the moment, and have the political power to keep from doing so for at least a while yet. (Never mind global warming, they should have to pay heavily for all that mercury in the air and the 20,000 deaths/year from particulates...but they don't).
But, hell, it's early days yet. They'll get cheaper with practice and mass production, if they can crank it up. And in the American southwest, there will be windfall profits on power at noon in the summer when all the air conditioners are on and the plant is cranking the full 110 MW.
Amen to all three of you. I had no idea when I picked up a couple of 16:10 1920x1200 screens three years back for $349 each, I was getting something that was fast-disappearing. Whether you get 20" or 27" these days, they're all 1920x1080. It's funny, because computers were always a different market than TV, and in computers, more "height" pixels is always a Good Thing, for full-height word-pro pages, more rows on spreadsheets, etc.
And 2560x1600, it's got that same you-can't-go-back phenomenon that was always true for every higher resolution before them... but almost zero volume of sales means they stuck at $1200 over three years ago. Why people don't want that higher resolution is a mystery.
My best guess: so much computing now is just web pages. Web apps, cloud-provided-everything. And web pages aren't ever designed at such resolutions.
From what I've heard, there *are* some limits. Beyond a 2560x1600 in the middle and a pair of fair-sized screens on either side to park all your icons and desktop folders on, your windows that you need in sight but aren't using, you've about reached the limit of the pixels you can manage.
But I don't know. My physical desk at home is a glorious 7 ft. x 4 ft, and everything on it is at least at 300 dpi. I don't have a lot of trouble finding things on it.
PJ was making a joke. I think that even he knows that when buying and selling are not controlled by laws, the first things bought and sold are human beings.
The article was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Waterworks Association, by Paul Rush from the NYC bureau of water supply. He reviews the issues (typical well injects 50,000 gal of water and chemicals, times thousands of wells in the NYC watershed), and mainly points out the sheer LACK of regulation of the industry.
If the watershed is contaminated by this process, it will be a long time before all the chemicals come out of the deep rocks and the water can be trusted again. The gas will be sucked out, sold and burned in a matter of years; the contaminations could last for decades. This is not some anecdotal, enviro-nut issue. Some of the most respected scientists in the water industry are deeply concerned by it.
Calgary got the talk from Kirk Sorensen about LFTR reactors at our TEDx conference in March. Before Sorensen discovered the Thorium/molten-salt design that's already been tested, he worked on projects in grad studies that convinced him a lot of the high-tech hopes we were sold on (mostly by Hank Stine, Jerry Pournelle and other "high frontier" advocates) back in the 70's, just won't work economically. For space-based solar, he watched the guy doing the economic model put "Lift cost=$0/kg" into the spreadsheet...and it *still* didn't make money. On He3, similar story.
That 1GW reactor that would take mining the moon 2km^2 X 3m deep, how much could it pay? Well, 1GW = 1 million kW and there are just 8760 hours in a year. If you can get 5 cents per kWh at the plant gates, (coal plants charge less), you can make a total of $438M/year from the plant. Then you have to pay the plant mortgage (on several billion dollars, absent great breakthroughs), the operating costs, and for other fuels. I seriously doubt you'd have $100M left to pay for that moon-mining and shipping home.
Short of teleportation, I don't think you're going to make payroll. Again, even "lift cost =$0" won't put you into the black. Just the cost of running the mining operation in a vicious environment probably exceeds the budget you'd be given.
Sorry. I'd love an economic incentive for a huge, industrial-sized space program, too, but I don't think this is it.
I don't try to teach resistant people anything. They're resistant, so it's frustrating. I find that if I leave them to their own devices (literally) for even a short time, they become less resistant. Or they figure it out. Either way, my stress remains low.
A socialist like Kennedy wanting to get to the moon by a socialist government program, I can understand. But a Republican? Surely we should just wait until GE or Boeing just picks up and goes with private money and objectives. It will be much more efficiently run, and no taxpayers will be robbed to give a (literally) free ride to socialist astronauts.
After reading all my Pournelle and Niven in the 70's, I've been waiting 40 years for the power of free enterprise to get me a ticket on the Pan Am Space Clipper. I'm not sure what the hold-up is; probably, the corporations are still too highly taxed.
I've heard the theory floated that MS threw all its weight behind HD-DVD, not because they believed it would win, but would lose. They wanted the format war to go on as long as possible to "run out the clock" for physical media at all, to move people straight to the streaming solution. Apple would have similar motivations.
In a similar vein, TFA is conspicuously lacking in some crucial numbers that would really reveal whether BR is "failing". That is, what percentage of households have one, compared to the number that had DVDs, VCRs, DVRs, etc, a comparable number of years after they were available. DVD was the fastest uptake of any gadget in history - faster than telephones or refrigerators - so makes for a hard mark to beat.
Without those numbers, I have to wonder if TFA is a report, or a kind of push-polling, like the "Is Barack Obama a Socialist?" articles you can find in other parts of the Fox News world, which is a very large, integrated media conglomerate that may have similar motivations to MS and Apple, for all we know.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, those bastards, paving roads and building bridges and schools.
Actually, if you change "government" to "the military" a lot more people would agree with you. That is one kind of spending that is just money wasted at best; at worst, they actually use those weapons, probably blowing up stuff that used to have value.
The "miser is a good neighbour" theory can be right or wrong, depending on what you mean by "not spending". Money stuffed under the bed is like a backhoe sitting idle (literally - it represents a backhoe sitting idle). Money put in a bank is money somebody can borrow to hire a backhoe. Whether you spend it yourself or loan it out to somebody to spend, is has to be SPENT somehow, to galvanize human beings to do work and produce value. The mistake is to imagine money IS value and is valuable to society sitting there. Like that backhoe, it is ONLY useful when in motion.
I'm afraid the parent lost you at the bakery. Here's what the P & GP were saying:
GP: Keynesianism is not some debatable school of thought, it's very much the accepted theory, like Einsteinian physics.
P: There does exist an "opposition", though. They have very little academic currency outside schools that are heavily supported by right-wing money, and function more as PR firms, supporting right-wing politics with a veneer of academic respectability. They are called Austrian (also "Chicago School" from Milton Friedman & co at the Chicago School of Economics).
If Einsteinian physics somehow required rich people to pay more taxes, you can bet there would still be well-funded Newtonian Schools...
Reading below, I see the debate rages on, /. being quite the libertarian-rich environment. Still, the really very basic principles of Keynes really work well in any consistent model: if people stop spending on building houses and restaurants and offices and so on, and you have millions of construction guys starving at home, it's a great time to build highways and bridges.
No, I'm not an economist, save getting the very basics in Econ 201 in first-year. What I am is the guy who picks water and sewer mains for replacement in a city of a million. And the prices I saw for doing that in 2007 and the prices I see today have dropped over 40%, because the contractors are desperate for work to hold their company from receivership, they'll work for -1% profit because it's better than -100%. I am getting as much done as possible, praise be my budget has not been slashed; It would have indeed been a perfect time to double it, THEN slash it when prices go up, and save money, so the overall 10-year budget back to the same it would have been with steady spending, but with double the work done. That's what borrowing is FOR.
Acting, now, of all times, when all construction is on a 40% off sale, like it's time to cut government spending is $%^ CRAZY.
Sorry. It's just frustrating.
Space would be resorted to when they run out of Earth.
There are really quite staggering areas of Earth barely inhabited because they are just a few degrees of temperature or a little below needed rainfall, or whatever other parameter, than is possible to live off of without some high-tech. You wouldn't need much of a "climate dome" to make mostly empty steppes in Russia, or Taiga in Canada, habitable - actually, a whole lot of greenhouses and a little (nuclear?) heating would do it. But living in greenhouses is much more expensive than living on land that grows food in the open, so nobody's done it.
All those areas - with their available water, air, soil, and comparatively moderate temperatures (compared to space), and low transport costs, are far cheaper to "colonize" than space, so don't get your hopes up until Russia, northern Canada, Antarctica, and the Sahara fill up first.
This would have happened whether a "Conservative, right-wing" government was in or the Liberals. To understand, you need to read a 2008 story from the same watchdog, Michael Geist (to whom all Canada should be deeply indebted for tracking these issues for years):
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/443867
The key phrase in the story is "Canadian officials arrived ready to talk about a series of economic concerns but were quickly rebuffed by their U.S. counterparts, who indicated that progress on other issues would depend upon action on the copyright file."
Americans are sometimes surprised to learn (Condi Rice was one, which was disappointing from a foreign-affairs scholar) that Canada is the US' largest trading partner, more bilateral trade than with your #2 (China) and your #4 (UK) combined, nearly as much as China+Japan (#3). So imagine how large a trading partner the US is for Canada - 80% of the total, last time I checked, that is, 4X as much trade as with all other partners combined.
When the US really wants to lean on Canada at trade discussions, their only difficulty is choosing which levers to pull: making trouble over standard inspections of meat and grains? Lumber? Re-investigating whether Canada subsidizes iron ore, holding up imports while doing so?
So you can find some profoundly anti-Canadian stances being taken by Canadian trade officials - until you see the larger picture and find they were arranging to charge all Canadians an extra $100/year for media content ($3 billion from 30 million people) to smooth the path for $6B in exports - of the $76B total, they only have to pick less than 10% to threaten.
I used to decry the use of this word, as well, and still don't use it myself - the most-common other use for it means that it flirts with Godwin's Law.
Here in Alberta (oil sands, remember?) the magazine of the professional engineers association gets a lot of reader mail from those in petroleum-related industries and you get the cream global-warming critics: professional engineers, some with PhD's, putting in letters to the editor with 1000-word takedowns of AGW articles.
I was hugely impressed, after reading them for years, to see a short letter from a younger engineer. I don't have it, but the rough message was:
"These people do not want to join the scientific-method research into this issue. If they did, they would propose hypotheses, devise experiments, collect data, then publish it and their methodology and tentative conclusions. But all they ever do is pick away at work that others have done. Not one so far has actually studied climatology formally. They all seem to believe that their expertise in oil-reservoir engineering equips them to criticize any scientific work of any kind. I wonder how they would feel if climatologists wrote long letters criticizing modern theories of petroleum geology after studying magazine articles about it for a few weeks".
Or, I might add, calling petroleum geologists frauds and liars and fanatics and so forth. For instance, "Geostatistics and petroleum geology By Michael E. Hohn", on page 61, uses the phrase: "Even though the proposed model includes both vertical and horizontal components in each term, the trick of using infinite ranges (or very large ranges) means that at best the matrices used in kriging will be ill-conditioned..." Imagine the look on Dr. Hohn's face if he then found a news network repeating the words "scam" and "fraud" and "liar" with his picture on the screen.
I found that passage on Google books by googling "petroleum geology research trick" and was typing it for you two minutes later. It was EASY. Real science, the kind the young engineer recommended, is hard, slow work. Denigrating decades of work by professors who have spent a whole career in such patient, ill-paid, hard work by singling out apparent inconsistencies after about 0.1% as much work has been done, really does deserve SOME kind of harsh word to describe it. If "Denier" is too nasty for you because of the Holocaust link, give me a better one that is still strong enough to imply the 3-order-of-magnitude difference in the level of scholarship being displayed on each side.
I'm glad the real justice system doesn't agree with that approach. The null hypothesis there is that the accused is innocent. All burden of proof rests with the accuser.
Or am I reading your post wrong? You appear to be implying that if somebody makes vague claims of scientific misconduct, the accused is required to vigorously prove a negative to clear his name.
This is not just crusading journalists and panicking farmers. The (peer-reviewed) journal of the American Waterworks Association, September 2010, which mostly has articles like "Characterization of filter media MnOx(s) surfaces and Mn removal capability", also has an article on "The Threat From Hydrofracking" by Paul Rush, the deputy commissioner for water supply for New York City. It's an opinion article, not a scientific paper, but he lays out his case as if it were.
The industry's largest concern is that everybody has been forbidden to get involved in the regulation or permitting of these businesses - talk about your big-government incursion into (very) local concerns, like what's in your water source. Normally, water supply utilities are also charged by the state with protecting the watershed, and can do things like bring suit against hog farms that would let in e. coli. Not here.
As Rush puts it, "...the technical assessment indicated that migration of methane or fluids through natural fractures in the bedrock, some extending for miles, could compromise the city's aqueducts and shafts...Additionally, given the New York State regulatory infrastructure and the rules governing compulsory integration, drillers could potentially receive a permit authorizing horizontal drilling directly below a water supply tunnel without city authorization".
Being the guy responsible for the water quality, and then having any power to challenge a threat to it removed because Dick Cheney wanted to make sure no NIMBYs got in his friend's way, is fairly frightening.
The thing is, this stuff won't go away. At least if it were nuclear waste, it would naturally decay. But once they fill up a network of cracks with this stuff, in the exact geology where you know there's pressure from below, could result in a slow steady feed of it up through cracks and into the water, for decades. Or centuries. And you can inject it in, but you can't suck it out; no way to clean.
It's not unreasonable to study it further before using this technology near much-used watersheds like, well, all through densely-populated New York and Pennsylvania; part of the industry strategy has very, very clearly been to NOT study this issue so far.
This is like repealing a ban on EnergyStar CRT monitors and allowing more wasteful CRTs, just before the lighter, cheaper, much lower-power LCD monitors dropped below them on price and wiped them from the stores.
I refer, of course, to LED lighting. Your homework google for today is "CRI", colour rendering index, where sunlight (and incandescents) = 100. CFLs score in the sixties. Anything much above 80 can be quite hard to tell from incandescent for most eyes. An LED with a CRI of 85 is about to be released by a company called "Switch", profiled by Farhad Manjoo in Slate recently. Unlike CFLs, they really do last for decades under regular use, and save even more power. They're going to get much cheaper over just the next few years, and many claim will use even less power as well.
2011 and 2012 will just see early adopters, but by 2015, the end of incandescents will be as obvious as the end of LaserDisc was in 2000, if not quite gone yet.
It's funny how hard it is to let go of past models. The heart of the Internet model is, as the saying goes "a sphere", where every node has equal access to every other node. No clients, no servers, just equal connectors. Society as a whole (when weighted by money rather than head-count) keeps trying to reject that in favour of it being a fancy way to broadcast: a few large hosts running Wal-Mart-sized data centres, many clients on as dumb a terminal as possible. Efforts to democratize information flow are opposed as either unserious utopianism or outright crime. (They can't seem to find a statute forbidding Wikileaks that doesn't forbid the Times, but from the rhetoric, you'd never guess.)
When Hayden says that "users" 4th-amendment rights would be abrogated, he isn't thinking of all the users, not the big ones. Just the little ones. Which I think just models how Hayden sees society itself. Little folks don't have rights, just privileges.
The immunity to telecoms that accepted requests to wiretap without warrants, the revenge taken on Qwest for not doing so, the new rules that pretty much allow warrantless wiretapping at will...those powers would never be abused by today's FBI. They are all staunch and true. There's no chance of this happening now. No way are they going to snoop on friends-of-relatives-of suspected possible terrorists. Zero chance that people who impress a girlfriend by going to a march to support that Gaza blockade ship (which helps Gaza, which helps Hamas, who are terrorists, who no-doubt support other terrorists that might attack us some day) will find themselves on a list.
Don't be paranoid. We don't need a government of laws when we have a government of such good men who only want to protect us.
From terrorists.
And communists.
...and five minutes later I finally notice Cliff Stoll also replied to my post, and it was "Bulgarian" that I was trying to think of. I think the Nova special mentioned they were the "KGB's KGB", or some such, often used for foreign ops as a proxy. But never mind that.
Since everybody jumped in to (justly) praise his book, I want to add praise for his *second* book. His "second thoughts on the information superhighway" still strike me as a wise view. I've seen the related Newsweek article reprinted as derisive comedy, because of all the Internet commerce he thought wouldn't work so well, that eventually did. But the thrust of the book was much more than that. He decried spending money on computers for schools to do things like simulate chemistry experiments or show multimedia about the woods - displacing money that might have paid for real chemistry labs or trips to actual woods. In general, that we are all to eager to simulate life, play video games with a stranger in another state, rather than frisbee with a friend.
Oddly enough for a "techie" subject, The Cuckoo's Egg was mostly about the human relationships that Stoll formed with other sysadmins, police and intelligence folk, and of course, RT Morris, (to get back to topic) - and it is the human dimension that endears the book to so many of us.
The "end of the trail", at least from my point of view, was not the geographic location of Marcus Hess, but the end-point the information went to - and the money came from.
I rather doubt the west German government was paying him for information about American computer systems. The trail, in the book, rather clearly went past Marcus Hess to the KGB that were paying him. The book doesn't mention, but the PBS show they made from it offered additional detail (the police investigation was ongoing when the book came out) that it was (I think) the Romanian KGB or something, rather than actual Russians. But I forgot (was at work when I typed) exactly which KGB, so I went with "eastern Europe".
I guess I could dig out the VHS of that PBS show if you like, but, ahem, we were talking about RT Morris, you know, the guy that just died?
Glad I didn't make spelling or grammatical errors, or we'd have been here all day.
Clifford Stoll, who tracked a cracker backwards from the government science-lab networks being snooped on, eventually to eastern Europe, told a few great RTM stories in his memoir of it, "The Cuckoo's Egg". Stoll accepted an invitation to lecture various government and intelligence officials on his search to that point, and had one of those deals where he had to wait outside the room while other presenters spoke, then ushered out afterwards because it was all reflexively classified.
Stoll, an astronomer by trade who studied temperatures on Jupiter and became a sysadmin when his grants failed, got to the end of his presentation on ping timing and tracing and getting foreign police to check the telephone origin of a modem connection to an IP, to be asked several questions. The one from Morris, sprawled in the front row, was about adiabatic heating in Jupiter's atmosphere. Stoll switched mental tracks with some effort and answered as CIA types and military officers craned their necks around in confusion.
Later on, when the RTM-Jr. worm was wreaking havoc on the 1987 Internet, Stoll called Morris Sr. to get his take on it. A subdued and monosyllabic Morris answered that he knew about the problem and believed he could get to the bottom of it, but couldn't talk now.
"DoAsYouWouldBeDoneBy" - we can all recite it as one word before we get out of elementary school.
If an Arab country did this to the United States - if, say, they hacked together remote control meant for toy planes and managed to crash a dynamite-filled Piper Cub into the American part of the naval base at Rota, Spain - and took out of a few planes or ammo sheds, plus some people - would American politicians, commentators, and citizens on the street refer to that as an "Act Of War"?
If the presence or absence of a pilot in the delivery vehicle would not matter to the USA as it put out the fires, swept up the wreckage, and mopped up the body parts, in referring to it as an "Act of War" ... then it's an act of war.
Congress has been giving up the power to control the executive's authority to kill foreigners (and get Americans killed) for two-thirds of a century. You have to remember that congressfolks are "Just people" - yes, most are millionaires, but in terms of knowledge and experience, they haven't a hundredth of the background and experience than the ivy league PhD's and 30-year diplomats and military scholars that the executive has toiling away in offices producing (tailored) position papers, CIA analysts producing "threat estimates", and so on. Congress has to devote its staff budget to people who can get stuff done back in the district. And they are *terrified* of looking weak.
So, they just keep their heads down and make no fuss, and the executive goes right ahead as they please. If you don't even have hearings on what the executive is doing, the ugly prospect of having a vote on the matter (where you will either be hated later for getting Americans killed for nothing, or hated for not opposing tyranny and a threat), is avoided.
In short, it's legal "de facto" (in fact) even if an elementary-school kid could show you how it is war, and unlawful without a declaration of such, "de jure".
That was exciting to hear and I rushed to Google. I tried [ "state secrets privilege" ruling against ] as my search phrase.
Got nuthin' but the recent (May 2011) ruling that was still in favour of the SSP - but "narrowed" the grounds for using it. The one before that was the 9th circuit, Sept 2010, that the EFF described as
"Unfortunately, abdicating its responsibility is just what the Court did. It ordered summary dismissal of the complaint without allowing any discovery, or presentation of the public evidence or even a plan by the plaintiffs to litigate the case while respecting the necessary secrecy, something that has been regularly done in cases involving national security. "
so, I believe you're mis-remembering. Alas.
This is bi-partisan because grabbing more power for the executive branch is bi-partisan. The book "Takeover" by Charlie Savage (also of the NYT) details much about how the Bush 2 administration worked to increase executive power, but also how it has been a tradition for a century before that - and persecution of whistleblowers is an important part of it.
Two stories from "Takeover" stuck with me.
One was the story of an ethics advisor for the Justice Dept, Jesslyn Radack. When John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban", was charged with many counts that led to 20 years in jail, based almost entirely on his own statement given while duct-taped to a board, naked and blindfolded with an untreated bullet wound in his leg, Atty. Gen. Ashcroft stated publicly that while the statement was given without a lawyer present, that was fine since he did not have a lawyer at the time. Alas, Ms. Radack had already notified the FBI that Lindh's father had retained council for him and notified Justice, and that they should not interrogate him - they just did, anyway. And Radack had kept the E-mails, then sent them to a reporter. It was not in her mind at the time that this was "whistleblowing" she felt she was correcting erroneous statements; releasing the information was no crime at all, since it was unclassified. For this, she found herself:
* Fired, from the private law firm she worked for (they consulted to Justice)
* Subjected to a year-long criminal investigation, though no charges were ever filed, since she had committed no crime
* Referred to for "discipline" by the bar associations in all the states she was licensed to practice in, via a secret report that she was not allowed to see
* Placed on the "selectee" version of the no-fly list - meaning she was *always* "randomly selected" for full off-with-the-underwear search for every single flight.
Talk about a chilling effect. Thou Shalt Not Embarrass The Justice Department, even with the simple truth that it got excited and eager for a headline and made a mistake.
Just so that this isn't seen as partisan, the other story is about a democrat: Harry Truman. (Who also felt the whole Korean War(!) was strictly an executive branch decision, no congressional authorization needed ... take THAT, Libya protestors!) A major avoidance of government transparency is enabled by the "state secrets" privilege, in which the government can tell a court, "dismiss this lawsuit; to argue it, we'd have to reveal State Secrets". It's been used to shut down every lawsuit about torture and unlawful detention that came after 9/11. But there's no such privilege in the Constitution. It comes from a Supreme Court decision, "US vs. Reynolds", where the survivors of 3 civilian scientists killed in a B-29 bomber crash in Georgia, 1948, while doing missile research. The government argued that the judge had to dismiss the suit without even seeing the crash report himself, lest "secret electronics" be revealed, and it was upheld - then used about 60 times since. In 2000, the daughter of one of the victims found the crash report, declassified, on the Internet. It contained NOTHING about secret electronics - it contained proof that there had been negligent maintenance of the bomber, and negligent lack of training for the civilians on how to escape the aircraft. The government had used the claim to avoid embarrassment, not to mention losing a lawsuit.
As Charlie Savage summed it up, "The central case on which the State Secrets Privilege rests, then, was a fraud. The Truman administration had lied to the courts and gotten away with it."
So that's why you need whistleblowers. And that's why governments persecute them as ruthlessly as possible; it's about executive power, the effort to restore America to the status of having a King who is above the law - partly by exempting the executive from laws that the rest of us must obey, partly by ensuring that most of their lawbreaking is never revealed in the first place, so they don't have to fight for that exemption very often.
...we shouldn't let them play at all.
Can we just build a second "Great Firewall" on our side from theirs and not let them OUT? I know a lot of our firms want badly to go there and make money, but the rest of the Internet is at risk from their crap, all of us.
http://www.energy.alberta.ca/Electricity/1591.asp
Excerpt: The operational staffing level of a nuclear power reactor is well-established. The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) reports that the average nuclear plant in the U.S. creates 400–700 direct full-time positions for a 1000-MW nuclear plant, and about the same number of induced positions (NEI, 2008)in the local economy. Another study (in support of the U.S. Nuclear Power 2010 Program) collected best-estimate data for the next-generation plants beginning to come online, and estimated that the requirements would be in excess of 700 employees per reactor.
The Canadian Energy Research Institute (CERI) has undertaken a similar assessment of the 17 CANDU reactors operating in Canada. The direct workforce employed at the reactors is 16,137, or 949 per reactor, which is somewhat higher than is expected for the advanced CANDU reactors.(Timilsina, 2008)
And this link: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf49a_Nuclear_Power_in_Canada.html
Says that Canada's "18 reactors" (I suspect the two sources differ on the meaning of "reactor" as in "reactor vessel" vs "nuclear plant", because we haven't built a new one lately) have 12,679 MW of capacity, NET.
16,137 / 12, 679 = 1.28 employees per Megawatt.
I suspect that, however, includes ALL the employees of the plant, not just operators and maintainers (add clerical, training, and the inescapable empty-suits).
And in any event, it's trivial. A full-time position is at most 2000 hours/year, let's pay them a nice high average of $90,000. The net megawatt is 8760 hours per year, at $30 each if you're selling from the generator at a below-coal 3 cents/kWh: $262,800. Staff costs would be one-third, or 1.3 cts/kWh.
Your big problem with nuclear is paying off the mortgage on the $4M-$8M of capital costs you put in on that megawatt of capacity. Nuclear would like it to be $2M and sometimes claims that, but $8M is unfortunately closer to recent estimates. That takes a good $400,000/year to pay off, so you need to charge nearly a nickel per kWh just to pay that. Then you need a few more cents to pay for the salaries, and the fuel and other operating costs. Presto, you're charging a good 7 cts/kWh, nearly twice as much as coal or even gas.
The devastating facts about this particular solar project are that the sustained plant output is only half the max. That means this plant isn't costing under $7/watt to build, but over $13. The mortgage per megawatt is $650,000, or 7.4 cts/KWh. That's an economic death sentence even if those 0.8 employees worked for minimum wage.
By "economic death sentence" I mean "if you have to compete with coal and they don't have to pay the externalized costs they inflict on the environment", which they basically don't at the moment, and have the political power to keep from doing so for at least a while yet. (Never mind global warming, they should have to pay heavily for all that mercury in the air and the 20,000 deaths/year from particulates...but they don't).
But, hell, it's early days yet. They'll get cheaper with practice and mass production, if they can crank it up. And in the American southwest, there will be windfall profits on power at noon in the summer when all the air conditioners are on and the plant is cranking the full 110 MW.
Amen to all three of you. I had no idea when I picked up a couple of 16:10 1920x1200 screens three years back for $349 each, I was getting something that was fast-disappearing. Whether you get 20" or 27" these days, they're all 1920x1080. It's funny, because computers were always a different market than TV, and in computers, more "height" pixels is always a Good Thing, for full-height word-pro pages, more rows on spreadsheets, etc.
And 2560x1600, it's got that same you-can't-go-back phenomenon that was always true for every higher resolution before them ... but almost zero volume of sales means they stuck at $1200 over three years ago. Why people don't want that higher resolution is a mystery.
My best guess: so much computing now is just web pages. Web apps, cloud-provided-everything. And web pages aren't ever designed at such resolutions.
From what I've heard, there *are* some limits. Beyond a 2560x1600 in the middle and a pair of fair-sized screens on either side to park all your icons and desktop folders on, your windows that you need in sight but aren't using, you've about reached the limit of the pixels you can manage.
But I don't know. My physical desk at home is a glorious 7 ft. x 4 ft, and everything on it is at least at 300 dpi. I don't have a lot of trouble finding things on it.
PJ was making a joke. I think that even he knows that when buying and selling are not controlled by laws, the first things bought and sold are human beings.
Let's not fight THAT war again...
For anybody who imagines that this issue is confined to a few farmers and their wells, please skim:
http://www.hazenandsawyer.com/uploads/files/The_Threat_From_Hydrofracking.pdf
The article was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Waterworks Association, by Paul Rush from the NYC bureau of water supply. He reviews the issues (typical well injects 50,000 gal of water and chemicals, times thousands of wells in the NYC watershed), and mainly points out the sheer LACK of regulation of the industry.
If the watershed is contaminated by this process, it will be a long time before all the chemicals come out of the deep rocks and the water can be trusted again. The gas will be sucked out, sold and burned in a matter of years; the contaminations could last for decades. This is not some anecdotal, enviro-nut issue. Some of the most respected scientists in the water industry are deeply concerned by it.
Calgary got the talk from Kirk Sorensen about LFTR reactors at our TEDx conference in March. Before Sorensen discovered the Thorium/molten-salt design that's already been tested, he worked on projects in grad studies that convinced him a lot of the high-tech hopes we were sold on (mostly by Hank Stine, Jerry Pournelle and other "high frontier" advocates) back in the 70's, just won't work economically. For space-based solar, he watched the guy doing the economic model put "Lift cost=$0/kg" into the spreadsheet ...and it *still* didn't make money. On He3, similar story.
That 1GW reactor that would take mining the moon 2km^2 X 3m deep, how much could it pay? Well, 1GW = 1 million kW and there are just 8760 hours in a year. If you can get 5 cents per kWh at the plant gates, (coal plants charge less), you can make a total of $438M/year from the plant. Then you have to pay the plant mortgage (on several billion dollars, absent great breakthroughs), the operating costs, and for other fuels. I seriously doubt you'd have $100M left to pay for that moon-mining and shipping home.
Short of teleportation, I don't think you're going to make payroll. Again, even "lift cost =$0" won't put you into the black. Just the cost of running the mining operation in a vicious environment probably exceeds the budget you'd be given.
Sorry. I'd love an economic incentive for a huge, industrial-sized space program, too, but I don't think this is it.
I don't try to teach resistant people anything. They're resistant, so it's frustrating. I find that if I leave them to their own devices (literally) for even a short time, they become less resistant. Or they figure it out. Either way, my stress remains low.
A socialist like Kennedy wanting to get to the moon by a socialist government program, I can understand. But a Republican? Surely we should just wait until GE or Boeing just picks up and goes with private money and objectives. It will be much more efficiently run, and no taxpayers will be robbed to give a (literally) free ride to socialist astronauts.
After reading all my Pournelle and Niven in the 70's, I've been waiting 40 years for the power of free enterprise to get me a ticket on the Pan Am Space Clipper. I'm not sure what the hold-up is; probably, the corporations are still too highly taxed.
>They want people to support iTunes, not Blu-ray.
I've heard the theory floated that MS threw all its weight behind HD-DVD, not because they believed it would win, but would lose. They wanted the format war to go on as long as possible to "run out the clock" for physical media at all, to move people straight to the streaming solution. Apple would have similar motivations.
In a similar vein, TFA is conspicuously lacking in some crucial numbers that would really reveal whether BR is "failing". That is, what percentage of households have one, compared to the number that had DVDs, VCRs, DVRs, etc, a comparable number of years after they were available. DVD was the fastest uptake of any gadget in history - faster than telephones or refrigerators - so makes for a hard mark to beat.
Without those numbers, I have to wonder if TFA is a report, or a kind of push-polling, like the "Is Barack Obama a Socialist?" articles you can find in other parts of the Fox News world, which is a very large, integrated media conglomerate that may have similar motivations to MS and Apple, for all we know.