I've been sorely disappointed with the Android Market/Google Play. First, the ads are a throwback to the punch-the-monkey style ads. They're invasive blinking colorful shit that takes up valuable screen real estate on a small screen, and suck your bandwidth and battery. You're paying not only with the mind virus they install, forcing you to look at them, but also with your bandwidth and power bills. Second, the app market seems to be full of half-finished weekend projects. Very few of the apps in the market are even worth downloading, and for any given purpose you will find 100 apps that you have to sort through. Often you have to pay just to discover that the app doesn't do what you need. The open source community isn't much better -- let's face it, most things on freshmeat/sourceforge/github are half-finished weekend projects. But every once in a while someone comes along and finishes someone elses project, or a collaboration lets those projects get a bit further. This never happens in the ad-supported market. Everyone is jealous of their half-finished crap, so you have an explosion of completely crappy apps. Even the open source ones that appear are often shrouded in mystery and some dickhead with a compiler is getting a money from ads, while the original developers get nothing.
To mitigate the poor quality, security, and ad-annoyingness of that market, I offer the following proposal to Google:
1) Require that anything in the android market have its source uploaded to a Google repository. Create a license that allows collaboration, and also a fair-share distribution of any funds to contributors (perhaps using repository commits as a metric), while legally disallowing wholesale forking of the code. (Or perhaps allowing forks on the master repository only, but tracking funds that need to go to the original authors)
2) Have all apps compiled by Google. Disallow binary blob uploads appearing on the market. (for security)
3) Give the ad library a "master switch" to turn off ads in an app, in exchange for an amount of money commensurate with the proceeds from ads. Therefore all ad-based apps can become no-ad apps in a uniform way.
4) Make the ad library a separate app (ad server) with its own permissions so that the app, and the ad library can have separate permissions. (for security)
5) Make all paid apps "try-before-you-buy" with a reasonable time to evaluate, like a few days. The current 15 minute window is only useful for users that click on the wrong thing, it is not nearly long enough to try most apps.
6) Finally, addressing TFA, return to the text-based ads that made Google famous, and get rid of the current invasive android advertising.
Yes, a tiny fraction of users will be able to download apps and compile them themselves, but this is also the same set who might become contributors. Requiring open source will seriously discourage malware, and in the event some gets through, it can be detected from the source, and you will know where it came from through repository commits.
I think the books of Alastair Reynolds are quite accurate, describing fleets moving near light speed. In such a case all you really have to do is arrange for some debris in the path of the oncoming fleet (e.g. sand) and that will take it out.
One thing that has always annoyed me is that I've never seen a reasonable treatment of space wars in orbit. No one gets the orbital mechanics correct. There are a lot of counter intuitive things there. For instance, you wouldn't want to shoot a missile directly (line of sight) toward an enemy. If he's in a lower orbit you'd actually fire it backwards from the perspective of your orbit. The missile would lose orbital energy until it reached the target's orbit. Likewise, if he's in a higher orbit you'd fire it forward, in the direction of your orbit. (Thrusting toward or away from the planet you're orbiting serves to make your orbit elliptical, but doesn't raise your orbit) One also needs to be very careful about overtaking your target. There may be tactics like overtaking an enemy by dropping to a lower orbit, then thrusting back to the enemy's orbit. A dogfight would be a very counter-intuitive affair. I wish someone would make a little space sim that had the physics correct, and let players figure out the appropriate tactics.
All that was assuming attacker and target are in parallel orbits (concentric circles). If the're not, say one is in a polar orbit and the other is in an equatorial orbit, there is such a substantial difference in their energies that any collision would be devastating, so again just dumping debris that intersects the orbit of the target would be sufficient to wipe him out.
There are lots of other tricks. The slingshot effect, for instance, is used to hurl probes out to the outer reaches of the solar system. Essentially, the probe steals angular momentum from the planet, boosting its own velocity. The lowest-energy and highest-speed path to reach a given point can often involve such bizarre trajectories. NASA uses big computer programs to find these paths, see the Cassini probe's trajectory for an example. If you have thrusters, you can enhance your slingshot by thrusting at the point of closest approach (the velocity bump you get by thrusting there is more than thrusting at other times).
You might claim all this orbital mechanics junk can be circumvented by using lasers or particle beam weapons. But light feels gravity too, so one has to calculate the effect of bending on the laser's trajectory from planets and other orbital bodies. Another important point is that diffraction from the aperature of the laser's lens is substantial when the target is planetary-distances away. Your nice narrow laser beam will be a harmless diffuse mess by the time it gets to Jupiter.
Finally one should bring up the Lagrange points. These would probably be the ideal place to put weapons platforms, refuelling depots, etc. But there are only a handful of them, and an attacker would know where they are on approach, so would probably send the first volley toward them, before he could resolve any infrastructure there.
All in all, I think orbital wars would involve a lot of calculation, a lot of waiting, a lot of un-spectacular deaths (e.g. no explosions but running into debris instead), and a lot of speculative offense. You want to fire before you can see your enemy, to take advantage of orbital mechanics. Your weapons don't need lots of energy or explosive power, you can just use orbital mechanics to your advantage. But you have to be willing to wait.
Open source developers are not a simpleton code monkeys. Many take on leadership roles and many are backed by companies with the resources to support them and a vested interest in the software. The book you cite is full of examples of companies throwing programmers at a problem, and failing. OSS developers do not tend to spend their free time on lost causes, so OSS projects do not collect monkeys.
OTOH, software that has good features, seemingly good support, and solves a problem they have being sold at $20 actually seems like a more reasonable proposition.
The problem is identifying that software has good features, support, and solves a problem. The app store is full of half-finished weekend projects, each of which is a piece of shit. We'd all be better off if these guys combined forces, released source, and made an open-source app. The app store has a HUGE buyers remorse problem. The app store ecosystem is chaos. Open source is too, but at least you can determine if it solves your problem before committing to it, and fix it if it comes close to solving your problem. (because the source is available) 15 minute returns??!?!! That solves only the "I clicked on the wrong thing", not "I evaluated this software". I'd buy a lot more, and be willing to pay a lot more, if there was a reasonable try-before-you-buy window.
I hate app stores. My recent Android phone purchase has reminded me, forcefully, why I switched to using exclusively open source software around 15 years ago... Android being "open source" is about as useful to me as Macs being "Unix underneath".
Don't worry, I'm sure at least 73 CMS, ALICE and LHCb grad students and postdocs are squirreled away right now making Lego models. But I bet they won't make Slashdot. Oh and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) is very dense, I think one would have to use metal Legos...while plastic probably approximates the density of ATLAS pretty well.
I suspect GoDaddy stands to make a lot of money blacklisting, blocking, banning, and otherwise screwing up the DNS, for a price...and that is why they signed.
More importantly, we email people who's mail server admins don't know PGP from ABC.
Many years ago I found that my GPG signed mails were getting quarantined by brain-dead spam and virus filters, because my mails contained a "suspicious attachment". That was the death knell for my use of GPG. Not knowing whether your mail will be received is not really acceptable. Of course that's they way it is with all mail these days...but that's the fault of incompetent law enforcement being unable to shut down spam/trojan/botnets.
I was just wondering this the other day...it seems to me that for a handset manufacturer it would make sense to put all of CDMA/TDMA/GSM/LTE/HSPA+ etc onto one chip, and define the frequencies and protocol by some BIOS settings. That way the same phone could be sold to every mobile carrier. I would think it should also be possible to include many antennae or fractal antennae.
Is this already going on? Or are handset manufacturers really putting different chips in the same handset destined for different carriers?
Density of dark matter comes from two measurements: the CMB and galactic rotation curves. The former is more precise and gives a mass density of about 0.3 GeV/cm^3 on average over all of space. Then one can argue how this density increases as one moves toward the center of a galaxy (as it must to explain the galactic rotation curve observations). There are different "density profile" hypotheses people use for this. These sometimes have strong density enhancement at the center, the existence of which is debated, but in any case we're quite far from the center of our galaxy, so we can't enhance the local density of dark matter too much. So, one can screw with dark matter density by a bit, maybe you could argue a factor of 10. But to do what you suppose would require a factor of 1e12 or so. That much dark matter would have a ton of other observable consequences, because you just made empty space have more mass density than e.g. planets.
Things in the "vacuum" that could refract light (including big bang relic photons, neutrinos, and dark matter) are all uncharged. They do still interact with light and there is an index of refraction but it is extremely suppressed (loop Feynman diagrams). For light interacting with dark matter, the relevant diagram is suppressed by a factor p_F/M_Z ~ 1e-12. This is far smaller than the effect seen.
Let's assume that for some reason the density of dark matter (or whatever) is substantially more than we expect, such that it does cause an index of refraction for light (or neutrinos) of the right size. What we've just done is changed the phase velocity. What OPERA measures is the group velocity. One can have a "faster than light" phase velocity while still having a group velocity less than the speed of light, x-rays in air have this property. (Explanation on Wikipedia)
I second the tablet PC form factor. Others that qualify are the ASUS Eee Slate, Samsung Series 7 Slate, as well as models from HP and Fujitsu.
I use a Thinkpad X61 tablet on linux with the note-taking software Xournal, which also can annotate pdf's.
Unfortunately, Steve Jobs in his infinite wisdom, very publicly denounced the stylus as a failure when the iPad was released, and you know, Steve Jobs is always right. Never mind 10,000 years of history placing sticks to parchment. So the entire iPad clone industry (Android) has completely eschewed the stylus, much to my dismay. Worse, the manufacturers have decided that the only thing people really need to do with a tablet is watch movies, so the screens are low resolution, and 16:9 aspect ratio. This, when placed in portrait mode, is much taller and narrower than a piece of paper. And because the resolution is low, if you put up a full-page PDF on the thing, small letters like subscripts in equations are often readable. And even worse, all the new tablets are 10.1". A 8.5x11 piece of paper has a 14" diagonal, for comparison.
So, if any of you have the ear of any Android/tablet manufacturers, please bring back 4:3 screens at high resolution, with a form factor essentially the same as that of paper. Minimum DPI for this usage is about 150 (or about 1024 vertical resolution).
Why are we allocating in blocks and then assigning devices which are allowed to use fixed frequencies? Why don't we have software-defined radios, antennae, and something like cognitive radio to define on-demand spectrum usage.
For example, when you turn your phone on it pings a tower using a low-bandwidth common channel to get a frequency allocation (like DHCP) and power assignment. Using a software antenna, it configures some internal hardware to transmit on that frequency/frequencies. Let the whole spectrum be used, by anyone, rather than block allocating in a way that is guaranteed to waste resources. This way, multiple carriers can share frequencies, even if they use different communication protocols (CDMA/TDMA/GSM). In practice, I'm sure a single carrier would effectively "grab" a frequency block in an area by setting up a tower. But the key is that if you travel to the next city, that same carrier could be using a different frequency, and your phone could detect it and use it.
That's what I was going to say. This can be had for as little as $20/month, and you can do anything you want with it.
Note however that the asshats at Hulu, Pandora, etc have been using a lot of dirty tricks to figure out of you're using a proxy. Currently Hulu does not work, even with a proxy. You will probably need to run a VPN. I think they're using some flash trickery to make a secondary verification that you're not using a proxy. It's a lot more than just the IP address of the originating request. There are a few HOWTO's out there that describe setting up proxies for Hulu that are a year or two old. They no longer work. (I've tried)
So, to sum up, simply buying a proxy service (from anyone) will likely not work with many services. You're better off with a VPS over which you can run a VPN. Of course, you need the technical ability to set that up...
And that's why big shifts in monetary technology must be accompanied by a decree that it will be used (and only a government could do that). The US government doesn't seem to understand that. Look at the fiasco with the dollar coin. All they had to do there was require that all vendors give the dollar coin as change, or remove the dollar bill from circulation. Instead they tried the experiment of minting a fuck-ton of coins, hoping they would be used. *facepalm*
Unlikely. For comparison, the threshold for getting a party into congress is 50% compared to Germany's 5%. Second, we have no such enlightened system of using tax money to fund campaigns, we prefer our congressmen to be bought. Investing in the underdog is not a good business strategy. These two things, which generally go under the headings "electoral reform" and "campaign finance reform" require constitutional amendments. It's unlikely in the extreme that 2/3 of the sitting congresspeople will vote for such a thing. They are, however, the most important things the US government needs to prevent the long slow decline and corruption of its democracy.
Last I checked, issuing currency to enable commerce was a responsibility of the government. The US government has been utterly failing to create electronic currency for about 30 years now, preferring to let insurance companies and usurers create a ridiculously insecure, non-interoperable systems, all the while dragging down the economy with transaction fees, so they can get campaign contributions from them.
This is the responsibility of the government. Give us electronic currency already!
You know, I never look at my keyboard. Every time I put my hands on it I have to hunt for the raised bumps on F and J in the home row. This tactile feedback is useful and necessary but imprecise, because all the other keys are tactilely identical. Translating both hands up/down/left/right feels identical, except for the F and J bumps. Why haven't we started making (physical) keyboards with braille on every key? I imagine the tactile feedback, even for sighted people, would allow for much faster input and transitions (e.g. keyboard->mouse->keyboard). Hell, I bet you could even train yourself to type with your hands in the "wrong" position because you'd recognize the braille instead. Maybe a blind user can chime in on this...
How many times have we been through this "my BIOS doesn't recognize my drive because it's too large". Then the BIOS vendors find another way to tack on another factor of two. Then next year we have the same problem. Why the hell can't we solve this problem once and for all? Is there some fool that actually believes that next year, drives won't be bigger?
Do you have a magic ball which wells you what chemicals cause harm to humans, or which actions by oil companies will lead to harm to humans? If so, please let the rest of us mere mortals know. The rest of us do not, and must find meager, scientific ways of testing what will harm us, and who causes harm.
I think the best we can do is outlaw things which are known to cause harm, fine things which are discovered to cause harm, and ensure that the tools are available to discover who is causing harm. So, in the other case to my proposal, we must prove that fracking is harmful to humans or the environment. I think the best way to do that is to that is to put tracer chemicals in fracking material, and do tests of groundwater. But if the fines and tracers are proposed first, the profit motive may cause oil companies to discover problems before they become problems.
I'm not a chemist, so I can't evaluate how "easy" this is. But yes, one would need to identify a compound (or more likely a set of related compounds) that is biologically inactive, soluble in both water and hydrocarbons, and not naturally occuring. Perhaps some organic molecules with strong bonds and something odd, like a metal bound to it. Or hell, buckyballs with some metal inside and some OH groups on the outside.
This idea should probably apply universally to all industries releasing materials into nature. I would bet you would be hard pressed to find any environmental contaminant that could not be tagged. One would also need regulatory agencies to police that the wells actually do contain the tagging chemicals, so oil companies don't just cheat on adding them.
Here's an easy solution: require oil companies to put trace additives that are uniquely identifiable into the chemicals they inject. (e.g. custom molecules that identify the oil company/well). Then if these chemicals are found in drinking water, lakes or streams, you know where they came from, and can issue a massive fine to the oil company and well owner. This way they can keep their fracking formula secret, and will self-police themselves to some extent as long as the fines are sufficiently large that it destroys any profit from breaking the rules.
There have to be a few chemists, oil guys, and political wonks reading. Do it.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been sorely disappointed with the Android Market/Google Play. First, the ads are a throwback to the punch-the-monkey style ads. They're invasive blinking colorful shit that takes up valuable screen real estate on a small screen, and suck your bandwidth and battery. You're paying not only with the mind virus they install, forcing you to look at them, but also with your bandwidth and power bills. Second, the app market seems to be full of half-finished weekend projects. Very few of the apps in the market are even worth downloading, and for any given purpose you will find 100 apps that you have to sort through. Often you have to pay just to discover that the app doesn't do what you need. The open source community isn't much better -- let's face it, most things on freshmeat/sourceforge/github are half-finished weekend projects. But every once in a while someone comes along and finishes someone elses project, or a collaboration lets those projects get a bit further. This never happens in the ad-supported market. Everyone is jealous of their half-finished crap, so you have an explosion of completely crappy apps. Even the open source ones that appear are often shrouded in mystery and some dickhead with a compiler is getting a money from ads, while the original developers get nothing.
To mitigate the poor quality, security, and ad-annoyingness of that market, I offer the following proposal to Google:
Yes, a tiny fraction of users will be able to download apps and compile them themselves, but this is also the same set who might become contributors. Requiring open source will seriously discourage malware, and in the event some gets through, it can be detected from the source, and you will know where it came from through repository commits.
I think the books of Alastair Reynolds are quite accurate, describing fleets moving near light speed. In such a case all you really have to do is arrange for some debris in the path of the oncoming fleet (e.g. sand) and that will take it out.
One thing that has always annoyed me is that I've never seen a reasonable treatment of space wars in orbit. No one gets the orbital mechanics correct. There are a lot of counter intuitive things there. For instance, you wouldn't want to shoot a missile directly (line of sight) toward an enemy. If he's in a lower orbit you'd actually fire it backwards from the perspective of your orbit. The missile would lose orbital energy until it reached the target's orbit. Likewise, if he's in a higher orbit you'd fire it forward, in the direction of your orbit. (Thrusting toward or away from the planet you're orbiting serves to make your orbit elliptical, but doesn't raise your orbit) One also needs to be very careful about overtaking your target. There may be tactics like overtaking an enemy by dropping to a lower orbit, then thrusting back to the enemy's orbit. A dogfight would be a very counter-intuitive affair. I wish someone would make a little space sim that had the physics correct, and let players figure out the appropriate tactics.
All that was assuming attacker and target are in parallel orbits (concentric circles). If the're not, say one is in a polar orbit and the other is in an equatorial orbit, there is such a substantial difference in their energies that any collision would be devastating, so again just dumping debris that intersects the orbit of the target would be sufficient to wipe him out.
There are lots of other tricks. The slingshot effect, for instance, is used to hurl probes out to the outer reaches of the solar system. Essentially, the probe steals angular momentum from the planet, boosting its own velocity. The lowest-energy and highest-speed path to reach a given point can often involve such bizarre trajectories. NASA uses big computer programs to find these paths, see the Cassini probe's trajectory for an example. If you have thrusters, you can enhance your slingshot by thrusting at the point of closest approach (the velocity bump you get by thrusting there is more than thrusting at other times).
You might claim all this orbital mechanics junk can be circumvented by using lasers or particle beam weapons. But light feels gravity too, so one has to calculate the effect of bending on the laser's trajectory from planets and other orbital bodies. Another important point is that diffraction from the aperature of the laser's lens is substantial when the target is planetary-distances away. Your nice narrow laser beam will be a harmless diffuse mess by the time it gets to Jupiter.
Finally one should bring up the Lagrange points. These would probably be the ideal place to put weapons platforms, refuelling depots, etc. But there are only a handful of them, and an attacker would know where they are on approach, so would probably send the first volley toward them, before he could resolve any infrastructure there.
All in all, I think orbital wars would involve a lot of calculation, a lot of waiting, a lot of un-spectacular deaths (e.g. no explosions but running into debris instead), and a lot of speculative offense. You want to fire before you can see your enemy, to take advantage of orbital mechanics. Your weapons don't need lots of energy or explosive power, you can just use orbital mechanics to your advantage. But you have to be willing to wait.
Open source developers are not a simpleton code monkeys. Many take on leadership roles and many are backed by companies with the resources to support them and a vested interest in the software. The book you cite is full of examples of companies throwing programmers at a problem, and failing. OSS developers do not tend to spend their free time on lost causes, so OSS projects do not collect monkeys.
The problem is identifying that software has good features, support, and solves a problem. The app store is full of half-finished weekend projects, each of which is a piece of shit. We'd all be better off if these guys combined forces, released source, and made an open-source app. The app store has a HUGE buyers remorse problem. The app store ecosystem is chaos. Open source is too, but at least you can determine if it solves your problem before committing to it, and fix it if it comes close to solving your problem. (because the source is available) 15 minute returns??!?!! That solves only the "I clicked on the wrong thing", not "I evaluated this software". I'd buy a lot more, and be willing to pay a lot more, if there was a reasonable try-before-you-buy window.
I hate app stores. My recent Android phone purchase has reminded me, forcefully, why I switched to using exclusively open source software around 15 years ago... Android being "open source" is about as useful to me as Macs being "Unix underneath".
Don't worry, I'm sure at least 73 CMS, ALICE and LHCb grad students and postdocs are squirreled away right now making Lego models. But I bet they won't make Slashdot. Oh and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) is very dense, I think one would have to use metal Legos...while plastic probably approximates the density of ATLAS pretty well.
I suspect GoDaddy stands to make a lot of money blacklisting, blocking, banning, and otherwise screwing up the DNS, for a price...and that is why they signed.
More importantly, we email people who's mail server admins don't know PGP from ABC.
Many years ago I found that my GPG signed mails were getting quarantined by brain-dead spam and virus filters, because my mails contained a "suspicious attachment". That was the death knell for my use of GPG. Not knowing whether your mail will be received is not really acceptable. Of course that's they way it is with all mail these days...but that's the fault of incompetent law enforcement being unable to shut down spam/trojan/botnets.
PGP was defeated by stupidity.
I was just wondering this the other day...it seems to me that for a handset manufacturer it would make sense to put all of CDMA/TDMA/GSM/LTE/HSPA+ etc onto one chip, and define the frequencies and protocol by some BIOS settings. That way the same phone could be sold to every mobile carrier. I would think it should also be possible to include many antennae or fractal antennae.
Is this already going on? Or are handset manufacturers really putting different chips in the same handset destined for different carriers?
Density of dark matter comes from two measurements: the CMB and galactic rotation curves. The former is more precise and gives a mass density of about 0.3 GeV/cm^3 on average over all of space. Then one can argue how this density increases as one moves toward the center of a galaxy (as it must to explain the galactic rotation curve observations). There are different "density profile" hypotheses people use for this. These sometimes have strong density enhancement at the center, the existence of which is debated, but in any case we're quite far from the center of our galaxy, so we can't enhance the local density of dark matter too much. So, one can screw with dark matter density by a bit, maybe you could argue a factor of 10. But to do what you suppose would require a factor of 1e12 or so. That much dark matter would have a ton of other observable consequences, because you just made empty space have more mass density than e.g. planets.
I second the tablet PC form factor. Others that qualify are the ASUS Eee Slate, Samsung Series 7 Slate, as well as models from HP and Fujitsu.
I use a Thinkpad X61 tablet on linux with the note-taking software Xournal, which also can annotate pdf's.
Unfortunately, Steve Jobs in his infinite wisdom, very publicly denounced the stylus as a failure when the iPad was released, and you know, Steve Jobs is always right. Never mind 10,000 years of history placing sticks to parchment. So the entire iPad clone industry (Android) has completely eschewed the stylus, much to my dismay. Worse, the manufacturers have decided that the only thing people really need to do with a tablet is watch movies, so the screens are low resolution, and 16:9 aspect ratio. This, when placed in portrait mode, is much taller and narrower than a piece of paper. And because the resolution is low, if you put up a full-page PDF on the thing, small letters like subscripts in equations are often readable. And even worse, all the new tablets are 10.1". A 8.5x11 piece of paper has a 14" diagonal, for comparison.
So, if any of you have the ear of any Android/tablet manufacturers, please bring back 4:3 screens at high resolution, with a form factor essentially the same as that of paper. Minimum DPI for this usage is about 150 (or about 1024 vertical resolution).
Why are we allocating in blocks and then assigning devices which are allowed to use fixed frequencies? Why don't we have software-defined radios, antennae, and something like cognitive radio to define on-demand spectrum usage.
For example, when you turn your phone on it pings a tower using a low-bandwidth common channel to get a frequency allocation (like DHCP) and power assignment. Using a software antenna, it configures some internal hardware to transmit on that frequency/frequencies. Let the whole spectrum be used, by anyone, rather than block allocating in a way that is guaranteed to waste resources. This way, multiple carriers can share frequencies, even if they use different communication protocols (CDMA/TDMA/GSM). In practice, I'm sure a single carrier would effectively "grab" a frequency block in an area by setting up a tower. But the key is that if you travel to the next city, that same carrier could be using a different frequency, and your phone could detect it and use it.
Holy shit, thanks for that link!
That's what I was going to say. This can be had for as little as $20/month, and you can do anything you want with it.
Note however that the asshats at Hulu, Pandora, etc have been using a lot of dirty tricks to figure out of you're using a proxy. Currently Hulu does not work, even with a proxy. You will probably need to run a VPN. I think they're using some flash trickery to make a secondary verification that you're not using a proxy. It's a lot more than just the IP address of the originating request. There are a few HOWTO's out there that describe setting up proxies for Hulu that are a year or two old. They no longer work. (I've tried)
So, to sum up, simply buying a proxy service (from anyone) will likely not work with many services. You're better off with a VPS over which you can run a VPN. Of course, you need the technical ability to set that up...
Now go back and read her title: "Italian minister of Education and Scientific Research".
And that's why big shifts in monetary technology must be accompanied by a decree that it will be used (and only a government could do that). The US government doesn't seem to understand that. Look at the fiasco with the dollar coin. All they had to do there was require that all vendors give the dollar coin as change, or remove the dollar bill from circulation. Instead they tried the experiment of minting a fuck-ton of coins, hoping they would be used. *facepalm*
Try paying for your coffee with ACH.
Unlikely. For comparison, the threshold for getting a party into congress is 50% compared to Germany's 5%. Second, we have no such enlightened system of using tax money to fund campaigns, we prefer our congressmen to be bought. Investing in the underdog is not a good business strategy. These two things, which generally go under the headings "electoral reform" and "campaign finance reform" require constitutional amendments. It's unlikely in the extreme that 2/3 of the sitting congresspeople will vote for such a thing. They are, however, the most important things the US government needs to prevent the long slow decline and corruption of its democracy.
The circus in the USA will continue apace.
Last I checked, issuing currency to enable commerce was a responsibility of the government. The US government has been utterly failing to create electronic currency for about 30 years now, preferring to let insurance companies and usurers create a ridiculously insecure, non-interoperable systems, all the while dragging down the economy with transaction fees, so they can get campaign contributions from them.
This is the responsibility of the government. Give us electronic currency already!
You know, I never look at my keyboard. Every time I put my hands on it I have to hunt for the raised bumps on F and J in the home row. This tactile feedback is useful and necessary but imprecise, because all the other keys are tactilely identical. Translating both hands up/down/left/right feels identical, except for the F and J bumps. Why haven't we started making (physical) keyboards with braille on every key? I imagine the tactile feedback, even for sighted people, would allow for much faster input and transitions (e.g. keyboard->mouse->keyboard). Hell, I bet you could even train yourself to type with your hands in the "wrong" position because you'd recognize the braille instead. Maybe a blind user can chime in on this...
How many times have we been through this "my BIOS doesn't recognize my drive because it's too large". Then the BIOS vendors find another way to tack on another factor of two. Then next year we have the same problem. Why the hell can't we solve this problem once and for all? Is there some fool that actually believes that next year, drives won't be bigger?
Do you have a magic ball which wells you what chemicals cause harm to humans, or which actions by oil companies will lead to harm to humans? If so, please let the rest of us mere mortals know. The rest of us do not, and must find meager, scientific ways of testing what will harm us, and who causes harm.
I think the best we can do is outlaw things which are known to cause harm, fine things which are discovered to cause harm, and ensure that the tools are available to discover who is causing harm. So, in the other case to my proposal, we must prove that fracking is harmful to humans or the environment. I think the best way to do that is to that is to put tracer chemicals in fracking material, and do tests of groundwater. But if the fines and tracers are proposed first, the profit motive may cause oil companies to discover problems before they become problems.
I'm not a chemist, so I can't evaluate how "easy" this is. But yes, one would need to identify a compound (or more likely a set of related compounds) that is biologically inactive, soluble in both water and hydrocarbons, and not naturally occuring. Perhaps some organic molecules with strong bonds and something odd, like a metal bound to it. Or hell, buckyballs with some metal inside and some OH groups on the outside.
This idea should probably apply universally to all industries releasing materials into nature. I would bet you would be hard pressed to find any environmental contaminant that could not be tagged. One would also need regulatory agencies to police that the wells actually do contain the tagging chemicals, so oil companies don't just cheat on adding them.
And the released hydrocarbons wouldn't mix with the fracking material?
Here's an easy solution: require oil companies to put trace additives that are uniquely identifiable into the chemicals they inject. (e.g. custom molecules that identify the oil company/well). Then if these chemicals are found in drinking water, lakes or streams, you know where they came from, and can issue a massive fine to the oil company and well owner. This way they can keep their fracking formula secret, and will self-police themselves to some extent as long as the fines are sufficiently large that it destroys any profit from breaking the rules.
There have to be a few chemists, oil guys, and political wonks reading. Do it.