You'll have that same problem pretty much no matter what you do, unless you go whole-hog and set up a hidden server on Tor. Yeah, the Cloud will cut you off if somebody with enough pull leans on them. Switch to running your own leased server, and the leasing company will pull your plug. Run your own servers in your own home/office/lair, and either your ISP will pull the plug, or you'll get raided directly. Or both. Run or lease servers in some other country, and they'll pressure that country and try to take your domain name too.
But then, why worry so much? Publishing top-secret info from major countries is always risky. Don't do that if you aren't prepared to take the heat. It's kinda like asking how to hide from the police after you've killed somebody - yeah it's hard, because it's supposed to be, so don't do that.
If anything like that ever happened, I'd figure that manufactured goods would be orders of magnitude more valuable than any raw materials. Especially ones that are relatively easy to get, like lead. Scavenging or mining lead would be pretty easy, not so much to have the infrastructure just for casting decent quality bullets, much less quality jacketed bullets, casings, powder, primers, and putting them together into consistent and reliable live ammunition.
I'm not a hardcore economics geek or anything, but the argument that I've found the most persuasive is that gold and other fixed-supply currencies are a bad idea because the economy itself is growing and increasing it's value. If your currency supply is fixed and your overall economic value is growing, then you get deflation, which discourages people from spending or investing their money because letting it just sit there will increase its value just as fast as investing it would. Apparanly, you get a nasty boom-bust cycle when large economic activity creates lots of extra wealth, but the money supply is fixed so it all deflates, then nobody wants to spend anymore, and the economy crashes again until total wealth drops back down to where it makes sense to invest again. I'm not completely sure if it's true, but I've heard that the whole European colonial period really came about because the societies at the time were creating lots of extra wealth and they had to find more gold to represent that wealth in order to avoid deflation, and it seems to make a kind of sense.
Essentially, to have a economy that it stable in the long term, you must inflate your currency at a controlled pace to create low but positive inflation. Thus, you must have a Fiat currency, and it basically has to be controlled by the Government.
Also persuasive is that we have hundreds of countries with all sorts of governments and economic policies. If the gold standard was such a great idea, then wouldn't some country somewhere try it and out-compete everyone else, or at least their neighbors/local rivals?
Now whether recent government have done a lousy job of running the economy and the currency, that's a whole different argument...
Gold doesn't have any more intrinsic value than any other form of currency - from US Treasuries to Bitcoins. Just like everything else, it has value only because we think it does. Storing gold for an apocalypse of some sort doesn't make much sense - gold only protects you from a very specific kind of economic collapse (massive inflation). And even that is only worthwhile if enough of a modern economy remains in existence for there to be people willing to create things that do have intrinsic value (food, medicine, shelter, assorted luxuries, etc) in exchange for bits of shiny rocks that may or may not have any value tomorrow.
I personally think that stockpiling stuff out of paranoia of some sort of collapse is dumb, but if you're going to do it, at least stockpile stuff that will be useful in said collapse - non-perishable food, manufactured goods that are of direct value in a collapse situation, supplies and knowledge to help rebuild parts of society, etc.
If I was NASA, I'd be paranoid primarily about errors in transmitted data and especially firmware updates. God only knows how many types of cosmic, solar, and martian radiation and interference are between us and the rover, just waiting to throw a few bit errors into your new firmware. I'd sign the whole thing with a private key at NASA, corresponding to a public key pre-loaded into the rover and verified about 5 times, and have the rover master controller verify the signature multiple times before writing it just to make sure that it couldn't possibly have been corrupted in any way in transit to the rover. That alone would make it pretty close to impossible to hack. Split up the private key among a few different people in NASA just to make sure it can't be stolen, accidentally leaked, or have some rouge fool/spy try to load some firmware that hasn't gone through NASA's full verification process, and it's also about as secure as you could possibly make it against any kind of hacking.
Well damn, you have enough interesting content to make me break my usual rule of not responding to ACs, or at least not getting into debates with them.
Interesting that CDMA tech can do that, but I've never heard of anybody actually using it. I guess the carriers don't exactly encourage it.
Storing contact on SIM cards really takes me back; I don't think I've used that in a very long time, if ever. They can do it, but it's so primitive now - just a name and a phone number per entry. Even my old Symbain smartphones from back in 2005 had much more sophisticated contact systems, with multiple classified phone numbers per contact.
I was a bit suspicious of that, actually. They say it was being driven by a person at the time, but then it's gotta be pretty heavily in their interest to say so. Nobody's sorted out yet what the legal consequences are for a self-driving car self-driving itself into an accident and Google may not want to be the ones to find out just yet. Even in Nevada, where they just made it explicitly legal to have self-driving cars, there's never been a real test of the legal system in case of an accident with them. Who knows what could happen in California? I could see Google wanting to claim it was being driven normally and paying everyone involved to shut up about it.
They've also got to want to make it appear as if their self-driving system is safe. I don't think the general public would be very understanding of cars with the usual software development cycle of test it 'til it crashes, fix what caused the crash, repeat until you think it's release quality.
Decriminalization is nice for the end users, but it doesn't make a difference as far as large-scale organized crime. To destroy the cartels, you have to legalize the entire supply chain. They aren't really legal if you can't point to legit corporations who grow, process, and ship the stuff by the ton, with full legal protection against theft, fraud, etc. From the perspective of the organization doing the production and distribution, taxes and legal compliance are a pain in the butt, but it beats having to maintain a private security force to protect your interests and operating in a highly unpredictable environment where your product could be stolen at any time, and your only recourse is to figure out who probably did it yourself and send your own private army after them.
It's ultimately about the money. Yes, there's dirty people and organizations in the drug trade, and they aren't going to become saints overnight when you legalize it. But legalizing it, and doing a decent job of defending the legal trade in it, would deprive these gangs of something like 90% of their money (yes I just made that number up). In what world is it not worthwhile to eliminate the majority of your opponent's funding? With the loss of their only really highly profitable operation, the larger organizations will probably dissolve into a bunch of smallish bands that don't coordinate their operations. The violence may get worse for a short time as the smaller chunks that manage to retain some sort of group cohesion may try to get into kidnapping and whatnot, but that's much less profitable and much easier for law enforcement to root out. Long-term, it can only be a good thing.
Actually, it just might, depending on how fast you drink it, what else you've eaten recently, and what your tolerance to alcohol is. Though the type of person who has a full liter of vodka next to them and could actually drink it all has a better chance of handling it.
I mostly agree with you, but I'd actually mod GP up if I hadn't posted already. I believe that opinions I disagree with should be widely seen and thoroughly shredded, all in public. I usually only mod down stuff that's either totally incoherent or offtopic, uses way too many personal attacks, or is so obviously wrong and offensive that it could only be trolling.
From what I understand of the system, it isn't practical for them.
There's no easy way to ID the sellers since Bitcoin and Tor have strong anonymity and the material drops can be anywhere and be changed as often as the seller wants. The best you could do would be to start making buys, try to ID the shipping location, hope the seller is lazy enough to not mix it up much, then camp out undercover there and try to ID the shipper in person. Lots of work and money for pretty small-time results, and usually the seller is far away, maybe even in another country. Investigation by law enforcement agencies with jurisdiction over both places or inter-department cooperation usually only happens for pretty big-time stuff.
For the buyer, they would at least have an address for them, but the site has a reputation system, so it'd be hard to pull off more than one or two busts per account. Pulling off any busts at all might also be tough, since it's hard to prove that any one particular person paid for it or was intended to receive it. There's most of the problems with busting suppliers too, except that the amounts of money and product are even smaller, and the buyers may be all over the world.
Thank you for being honest rather than jumping on the Hate America bandwagon. Yeah, we're not perfect, but we're a hell of a lot better than most of the rest of the world. The US, western Europe, and a handful of other countries are about as free as us, but most of the rest of the world is a clusterfuck of corrupt dictators enforcing all sorts of censorship. Give the UN control of the internet, when China and Russia and Iran and every other tin-pot dictator out there have equal say? No thanks, it'd be locked down tight in no time flat. If you think the things the US has pulled are bad, you ain't seen nothing compared to what would happen if these guys had control of things. I hadn't thought of Brazil as particularly bad, but you live there, so I'll take your word for it.
I always thought it was funny that so many people think it's just fine when every other country in the world looks out for itself and its own interests first, but the USA is supposed to give up its own interests to promote whatever somebody thinks is the "greater good", and thinking that the USA should look out for itself first is "the most extreme form of patriotic idiocy imaginable". What country do you live in, and when was the last time that country ever gave up anything really important for the greater good?
Meanwhile, anyone who actually supports western values like free speech, democracy, capitalism, etc ought to acknowledge that the US actually has given the world a tremendous good though defeating the Soviet Union and Communism, though we did it primarily for our own benefit. Funny how, at the time they existed, the USSR was an unbeatable colossus, but now that the US was able to destroy them without a single shot fired, the same people want to pretend that they never existed and were never a threat to world freedom. Lots of things were done that weren't pretty at the time, but the end result is much better for everyone than if we had let the USSR take whatever it wanted with no resistance or fought a hot war with them.
I'd chalk it up to the all carriers suck mindset. Any wireless carrier you can name, you can find lots and lots of people who hate their guts, usually for reasons that don't really justify the hate. I switched off of AT&T to Verizon because at the time AT&T didn't have any good Android phones, now I just switched back to AT&T (well, a prepaid SIM card on AT&T's network) because I wanted a Galaxy Nexus so that I could use stock android and get updates right away and Verizon screwed theirs up - 6 month wait for even trivial bug-fix updates.
Felt like doing my best at a mobile tech summary, and here seems as good a place as any:
One common mix-up is between air interfaces and complete cellular systems. CDMA and TDMA are both types of air interfaces - how the phone and the tower actually communicate with each other. CDMA is also used to refer to a complete cellular system which was originally based on the CDMA air interface. GSM also refers to a complete cellular system, whose original incarnation, usually known as 2G, was based on a TDMA air interface. Near as I can tell, it's pretty much universally known that CDMA air interfaces are vastly more efficient than TDMA, but the actual cellular systems have leapfrogged other a bunch of times.
I think GSM started out doing data on a separate TDMA frequency called GPRS, which worked, but was pretty slow and inefficient. CDMA started doing data over it's same frequencies, which was a bit faster and much more efficient. Then GSM came up with EDGE to improve speed, and then CDMA came up with CDMA2000, and then GSM switched to WCDMA/UTMS, which actually used a CDMA air interface, and CDMA switched to EVDO, reaching the peak of 3G. LTE is the next-gen air interface, using a OFDM air interface and otherwise is based on the GSM system, and as far as I can tell, everybody is switching to it. Hopefully, in 5-10 years or so, all the carriers worldwide will use LTE and all of the phones will have LTE basebands that cover all of the frequencies everybody is using, and you'll be able to take any device anywhere in the world and use it.
For various marketing reasons that don't make much objective sense, most of the world ended up standardizing on GSM long ago and only a few countries used systems based on the original CDMA technology, which is why if you have a CDMA phone, you're pretty much boned on international roaming.
And the AndroidFormums post that the AC below me posted is a rip-off of this USS Clueless post: http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/10/GSM3G.shtml which does have a really good explanation of why CDMA is much better than TDMA.
A real city, complete with homes and businesses and some industry. If they can't do that, then that power source will never be good for more than a few percent of national power usage.
In Denmark, we passed the 15% mark some years ago. But I guess we live in a fantasy world.
I think your position is silly - the future of renewable power sources isn't in being disconnected from the grid, au contraire. From what I can find, people who've actually done some real calculations on this say that it's possible to rely 100% on renewable sources without excessive costs. And why wouldn't it be, we have the tech.
So, you say that my position is silly, and then say basically the same thing? I'm not saying to disconnect from the grid because that's the future, but because it proves that your power source is actually capable of providing continuous power without being backed up by conventional power plants on a minute-to-minute basis. Yeah, if you want to be all nit-picky, no power source is really 24/7/365, which is why we have a grid, but can your new power source at least power a city for, let's say, a month without any interruptions or backup from conventional power, including drawing power from and sending excess power to the grid? Can it limit its downtime to planned maintenance only?
What makes me a bit cynical about it is that I've seen lots of articles where City X proclaims that they're now 100% renewable, but what they really did is build a wind tower whose max output matches the city's max draw, but they're still on the grid. They don't say exactly how much power the wind tower is really producing and how often they have to draw power from or send power to outside sources - probably lots, considering that they have no power storage capability.
I'm not trying to hate on alternative power source, but you gotta prove that they work on a large scale. Calculations are nice, but it doesn't mean much if you can't back it up with real-world results. I'm not trying to stop anybody from doing anything - if you think you can make it really work, then go ahead and do it. Prove that it works, and I'll put my own money into it, but don't take my tax dollars to spend on a half-assed pipe dream that doesn't really fix anything.
Disagree. There are lots of jobs out there where your role is to basically wait for something to happen, and if it does happen, handle it. They may even be pretty highly paid and important jobs, depending on what "something happening" is what exactly what "handling it" involves. I'd say that the guys responsible for handling an incoming nuclear missile attack are pretty damn important. There's not many things where it's more important that they be handled properly if they happen, or that we hope they don't ever actually happen.
I'm inclined to say that these guys can slack off however they please on duty as long as they can be at their station ready to go in under a minute or so. And give 'em a separate computer for movies and websurfing so they don't risk messing up the one that controls trying to intercept incoming nuclear missiles.
Exactly, the power output definitions are completely different. A 1GW-rated nuclear plant will produce 1GW 24/7/365, rain or shine. The solar panels are rated 1GW peak. Real instant output depends on a bunch of stuff, like sunlight intensity and angle and how dirty the panels are - were they installed with a 2-axis gimbal system to keep them constantly pointed directly at the sun, or just sitting on the ground? And is there some mechanism to clean them off regularly? Take that stuff into account and the need to produce power day and night no matter what the weather, and your capital expenditures go way, way up, and effective output goes way, way down.
I'll believe that solar power (or wind or whatever else) is practical worldwide when somebody manages to power a small-medium city with that exclusively, completely off the national grid. A real city, complete with homes and businesses and some industry. If they can't do that, then that power source will never be good for more than a few percent of national power usage.
Whoever wrote that, and most of the people commenting here, just don't seem to understand how the social networking market works. This is a market like computer OSes, with very strong network effect (Facebook is valuable because everyone you know is on it) and lock-in (if you've posted a lot of content to Facebook, you can't move it to Google+ or some other network easily). Back in the early days of social media, when Myspace, Facebook, Friendster, and god knows what else were all small and in competition to get the handful of geeky early-adopter types, you could win over your competitors by having superior features and site design. Those effects weren't there yet because no site had a critical mass yet - nobody had enough content set up that they would find it annoying to switch to a new site, and the only people on it were probably a few of your geeky early-adopter friends who you could also get to switch easily.
It isn't like that anymore. Facebook has that critical mass, most importantly in the form of hundreds of millions of non-tech-savvy people on it. It's a virtuous cycle - people go to Facebook because it has the people and the content, which tends to give it even more people and more content to draw in yet more users. Competitors have no chance to break that. Doesn't matter how much money you throw at promoting it or how many cool features you have, you'll never break their lock. I'm not saying that Facebook will be around and dominant forever, but it'll require the fundamental market that they're in becoming irrelevant for some reason to dethrone them. Kind of like Microsoft dominates the desktop OS market - you'll never beat them for desktop OS dominance, but you have a shot at making them irrelevant by changing the market - switch everything people want to do to the web and the cloud, where the device OS doesn't matter, and/or get people to switch to a whole new class of devices where Microsoft's strengths don't apply, like phones and tablets.
Just having Angry Birds on their platform isn't that impressive, but it shows that the team behind the platform at least understands that if you want to be successful in today's mobile world, you must have an app store with a competitive number and variety of apps. They've got a hell of a long way to go to compete with the major players, but at least they're not completely delusional... well, at least not in that way. The idea of a small player breaking into the market at this point... well, I'll wish them luck, but they have their work cut out for them.
Not sure where you are, but I'm in the US, where Nokia smartphones were basically nonexistent on carriers since about 2006 or so for some reason. Even so, I recognized that Symbian was the best phone OS at the time, and paid hundreds of dollars more for imported, unlocked Nokia smartphones. The N85 was my last one, don't remember exactly when that was. Trouble is, iPhone and Android came out a year or two before it. At the time, they were both kinda lame compared to the capabilities of top-end Symbian phones, but they both kept getting better, and Symbian pretty much stood still, with the few new features that were added feeling half-assed and tacked on. By the time it was time to replace the N85, Symbian was looking like a joke (I don't think that Ovi app store ever had more than 10-20 apps in it), and I switched to a HTC Hero/Droid Eris, and have never looked back. At least regarding Symbian, the memo just confirmed what I, and most other US Nokia users, already knew - Symbian had sunk to being completely non-competitive in the smartphone market and showed no sign of ever being able to improve.
I can't seem to find it anymore, but there was a really good post by the Symbian-Guru blog about how he was ditching Nokia entirely because their latest top-end device - the N97 at the time - was hopelessly awful. That's a guy who busted his butt for years with no compensation to promote Nokia in the US, and he was driven to switch by how bad their latest smartphone OS was compared to the competition.
What's really strange is how, in those early smartphone days, Nokia/Symbian seemed to be popular in western Europe, but was practically unheard-of in the US. The success of iPhone and Android says to me that US consumers did want smartphones, but the market made it hard enough to get Nokias that competitors sprung up to make their own alternative, which ended up being much better than Symbian ever was.
That's exactly what I recommend to any basic users I talk to - a blanket policy of never ever follow any links in any email. Using only bookmarks eliminates a whole bunch of attack types.
I thought of the idea a while back, and I'm sure plenty of other people have too. It's really cool in a way, but I doubt it would ever be practical. The main problems I thought of:
Cost. It would have to be ungodly expensive by any measure, both to build and to operate. Could there ever be enough people willing to pay enough money to get, say, from NY to LA, faster than anything else to justify it? And it isn't very flexible either compared to air travel. If some other part of, say, NY, gets much more popular, then you can just build a new airport and reroute flights as needed. If you're using these giant vacuum tubes, you'd have to re-drill half of the run.
How tough it is to keep the tube in vacuum? We don't have any good way to estimate that now. Might need several high-grade vacuum pumps per mile that draw lots of power. It's pretty single-point-of-failure too - any significant air leak anywhere on the entire run, and any trains going fast enough to make such a system worth the trouble would probably be completely destroyed. It isn't just an air-resistance problem - unless the tube is much, much bigger than the train, then all of that air would be forced through the relatively small area between the train and the tube, thus much higher pressure spikes that would probably compromise any structure, and once you get the first crack, the whole thing will disintegrate real quick under the 6k MPH winds, leaving everything and everyone in the train as a stain on the walls over the course of a few hundred miles.
Handling sounds tough too. Like loading, unloading, servicing, turning them around, etc. You'd need lots of really good pressure seals that will stand up to many thousands of cycles with passengers doing all sorts of wacky things to them, and lots of elaborate procedures carefully followed. Getting trains into pressure for service (or do we have service techs in space suits?), loading and unloading passengers and cargo though some kind of airlock/jetbridge thing. Make a mistake anywhere, and you either pressurize the tube, destroying any trains travelling in it at the time, or suffocate all of the passengers in a train. Hope you never have a train break down in the middle of the line either.
I generally support gay rights, but I've always been a little meh on the idea of gay marriage. What I'd really like to hear is for a gay marriage advocate to explain to me why polygamy should be illegal yet gay marriage should be legal. If we should let two guys or two girls get married because they really love each other and want to be together forever and all of that, then why shouldn't we let a guy marry two or three or more girls (or whatever other combination you can think of) if they all really love each other and want to be together in that way? It isn't something completely absurd like marrying dogs or cars or something - there have been and still are many societies where polygamy is normal and accepted and widely practiced. So why not?
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You'll have that same problem pretty much no matter what you do, unless you go whole-hog and set up a hidden server on Tor. Yeah, the Cloud will cut you off if somebody with enough pull leans on them. Switch to running your own leased server, and the leasing company will pull your plug. Run your own servers in your own home/office/lair, and either your ISP will pull the plug, or you'll get raided directly. Or both. Run or lease servers in some other country, and they'll pressure that country and try to take your domain name too.
But then, why worry so much? Publishing top-secret info from major countries is always risky. Don't do that if you aren't prepared to take the heat. It's kinda like asking how to hide from the police after you've killed somebody - yeah it's hard, because it's supposed to be, so don't do that.
If anything like that ever happened, I'd figure that manufactured goods would be orders of magnitude more valuable than any raw materials. Especially ones that are relatively easy to get, like lead. Scavenging or mining lead would be pretty easy, not so much to have the infrastructure just for casting decent quality bullets, much less quality jacketed bullets, casings, powder, primers, and putting them together into consistent and reliable live ammunition.
I'm not a hardcore economics geek or anything, but the argument that I've found the most persuasive is that gold and other fixed-supply currencies are a bad idea because the economy itself is growing and increasing it's value. If your currency supply is fixed and your overall economic value is growing, then you get deflation, which discourages people from spending or investing their money because letting it just sit there will increase its value just as fast as investing it would. Apparanly, you get a nasty boom-bust cycle when large economic activity creates lots of extra wealth, but the money supply is fixed so it all deflates, then nobody wants to spend anymore, and the economy crashes again until total wealth drops back down to where it makes sense to invest again. I'm not completely sure if it's true, but I've heard that the whole European colonial period really came about because the societies at the time were creating lots of extra wealth and they had to find more gold to represent that wealth in order to avoid deflation, and it seems to make a kind of sense.
Essentially, to have a economy that it stable in the long term, you must inflate your currency at a controlled pace to create low but positive inflation. Thus, you must have a Fiat currency, and it basically has to be controlled by the Government.
Also persuasive is that we have hundreds of countries with all sorts of governments and economic policies. If the gold standard was such a great idea, then wouldn't some country somewhere try it and out-compete everyone else, or at least their neighbors/local rivals?
Now whether recent government have done a lousy job of running the economy and the currency, that's a whole different argument...
Gold doesn't have any more intrinsic value than any other form of currency - from US Treasuries to Bitcoins. Just like everything else, it has value only because we think it does. Storing gold for an apocalypse of some sort doesn't make much sense - gold only protects you from a very specific kind of economic collapse (massive inflation). And even that is only worthwhile if enough of a modern economy remains in existence for there to be people willing to create things that do have intrinsic value (food, medicine, shelter, assorted luxuries, etc) in exchange for bits of shiny rocks that may or may not have any value tomorrow.
I personally think that stockpiling stuff out of paranoia of some sort of collapse is dumb, but if you're going to do it, at least stockpile stuff that will be useful in said collapse - non-perishable food, manufactured goods that are of direct value in a collapse situation, supplies and knowledge to help rebuild parts of society, etc.
If I was NASA, I'd be paranoid primarily about errors in transmitted data and especially firmware updates. God only knows how many types of cosmic, solar, and martian radiation and interference are between us and the rover, just waiting to throw a few bit errors into your new firmware. I'd sign the whole thing with a private key at NASA, corresponding to a public key pre-loaded into the rover and verified about 5 times, and have the rover master controller verify the signature multiple times before writing it just to make sure that it couldn't possibly have been corrupted in any way in transit to the rover. That alone would make it pretty close to impossible to hack. Split up the private key among a few different people in NASA just to make sure it can't be stolen, accidentally leaked, or have some rouge fool/spy try to load some firmware that hasn't gone through NASA's full verification process, and it's also about as secure as you could possibly make it against any kind of hacking.
Well damn, you have enough interesting content to make me break my usual rule of not responding to ACs, or at least not getting into debates with them.
Interesting that CDMA tech can do that, but I've never heard of anybody actually using it. I guess the carriers don't exactly encourage it.
Storing contact on SIM cards really takes me back; I don't think I've used that in a very long time, if ever. They can do it, but it's so primitive now - just a name and a phone number per entry. Even my old Symbain smartphones from back in 2005 had much more sophisticated contact systems, with multiple classified phone numbers per contact.
I was a bit suspicious of that, actually. They say it was being driven by a person at the time, but then it's gotta be pretty heavily in their interest to say so. Nobody's sorted out yet what the legal consequences are for a self-driving car self-driving itself into an accident and Google may not want to be the ones to find out just yet. Even in Nevada, where they just made it explicitly legal to have self-driving cars, there's never been a real test of the legal system in case of an accident with them. Who knows what could happen in California? I could see Google wanting to claim it was being driven normally and paying everyone involved to shut up about it.
They've also got to want to make it appear as if their self-driving system is safe. I don't think the general public would be very understanding of cars with the usual software development cycle of test it 'til it crashes, fix what caused the crash, repeat until you think it's release quality.
Decriminalization is nice for the end users, but it doesn't make a difference as far as large-scale organized crime. To destroy the cartels, you have to legalize the entire supply chain. They aren't really legal if you can't point to legit corporations who grow, process, and ship the stuff by the ton, with full legal protection against theft, fraud, etc. From the perspective of the organization doing the production and distribution, taxes and legal compliance are a pain in the butt, but it beats having to maintain a private security force to protect your interests and operating in a highly unpredictable environment where your product could be stolen at any time, and your only recourse is to figure out who probably did it yourself and send your own private army after them.
It's ultimately about the money. Yes, there's dirty people and organizations in the drug trade, and they aren't going to become saints overnight when you legalize it. But legalizing it, and doing a decent job of defending the legal trade in it, would deprive these gangs of something like 90% of their money (yes I just made that number up). In what world is it not worthwhile to eliminate the majority of your opponent's funding? With the loss of their only really highly profitable operation, the larger organizations will probably dissolve into a bunch of smallish bands that don't coordinate their operations. The violence may get worse for a short time as the smaller chunks that manage to retain some sort of group cohesion may try to get into kidnapping and whatnot, but that's much less profitable and much easier for law enforcement to root out. Long-term, it can only be a good thing.
Actually, it just might, depending on how fast you drink it, what else you've eaten recently, and what your tolerance to alcohol is. Though the type of person who has a full liter of vodka next to them and could actually drink it all has a better chance of handling it.
I mostly agree with you, but I'd actually mod GP up if I hadn't posted already. I believe that opinions I disagree with should be widely seen and thoroughly shredded, all in public. I usually only mod down stuff that's either totally incoherent or offtopic, uses way too many personal attacks, or is so obviously wrong and offensive that it could only be trolling.
From what I understand of the system, it isn't practical for them.
There's no easy way to ID the sellers since Bitcoin and Tor have strong anonymity and the material drops can be anywhere and be changed as often as the seller wants. The best you could do would be to start making buys, try to ID the shipping location, hope the seller is lazy enough to not mix it up much, then camp out undercover there and try to ID the shipper in person. Lots of work and money for pretty small-time results, and usually the seller is far away, maybe even in another country. Investigation by law enforcement agencies with jurisdiction over both places or inter-department cooperation usually only happens for pretty big-time stuff.
For the buyer, they would at least have an address for them, but the site has a reputation system, so it'd be hard to pull off more than one or two busts per account. Pulling off any busts at all might also be tough, since it's hard to prove that any one particular person paid for it or was intended to receive it. There's most of the problems with busting suppliers too, except that the amounts of money and product are even smaller, and the buyers may be all over the world.
Thank you for being honest rather than jumping on the Hate America bandwagon. Yeah, we're not perfect, but we're a hell of a lot better than most of the rest of the world. The US, western Europe, and a handful of other countries are about as free as us, but most of the rest of the world is a clusterfuck of corrupt dictators enforcing all sorts of censorship. Give the UN control of the internet, when China and Russia and Iran and every other tin-pot dictator out there have equal say? No thanks, it'd be locked down tight in no time flat. If you think the things the US has pulled are bad, you ain't seen nothing compared to what would happen if these guys had control of things. I hadn't thought of Brazil as particularly bad, but you live there, so I'll take your word for it.
I always thought it was funny that so many people think it's just fine when every other country in the world looks out for itself and its own interests first, but the USA is supposed to give up its own interests to promote whatever somebody thinks is the "greater good", and thinking that the USA should look out for itself first is "the most extreme form of patriotic idiocy imaginable". What country do you live in, and when was the last time that country ever gave up anything really important for the greater good?
Meanwhile, anyone who actually supports western values like free speech, democracy, capitalism, etc ought to acknowledge that the US actually has given the world a tremendous good though defeating the Soviet Union and Communism, though we did it primarily for our own benefit. Funny how, at the time they existed, the USSR was an unbeatable colossus, but now that the US was able to destroy them without a single shot fired, the same people want to pretend that they never existed and were never a threat to world freedom. Lots of things were done that weren't pretty at the time, but the end result is much better for everyone than if we had let the USSR take whatever it wanted with no resistance or fought a hot war with them.
I'd chalk it up to the all carriers suck mindset. Any wireless carrier you can name, you can find lots and lots of people who hate their guts, usually for reasons that don't really justify the hate. I switched off of AT&T to Verizon because at the time AT&T didn't have any good Android phones, now I just switched back to AT&T (well, a prepaid SIM card on AT&T's network) because I wanted a Galaxy Nexus so that I could use stock android and get updates right away and Verizon screwed theirs up - 6 month wait for even trivial bug-fix updates.
Felt like doing my best at a mobile tech summary, and here seems as good a place as any:
One common mix-up is between air interfaces and complete cellular systems. CDMA and TDMA are both types of air interfaces - how the phone and the tower actually communicate with each other. CDMA is also used to refer to a complete cellular system which was originally based on the CDMA air interface. GSM also refers to a complete cellular system, whose original incarnation, usually known as 2G, was based on a TDMA air interface. Near as I can tell, it's pretty much universally known that CDMA air interfaces are vastly more efficient than TDMA, but the actual cellular systems have leapfrogged other a bunch of times.
I think GSM started out doing data on a separate TDMA frequency called GPRS, which worked, but was pretty slow and inefficient. CDMA started doing data over it's same frequencies, which was a bit faster and much more efficient. Then GSM came up with EDGE to improve speed, and then CDMA came up with CDMA2000, and then GSM switched to WCDMA/UTMS, which actually used a CDMA air interface, and CDMA switched to EVDO, reaching the peak of 3G. LTE is the next-gen air interface, using a OFDM air interface and otherwise is based on the GSM system, and as far as I can tell, everybody is switching to it. Hopefully, in 5-10 years or so, all the carriers worldwide will use LTE and all of the phones will have LTE basebands that cover all of the frequencies everybody is using, and you'll be able to take any device anywhere in the world and use it.
For various marketing reasons that don't make much objective sense, most of the world ended up standardizing on GSM long ago and only a few countries used systems based on the original CDMA technology, which is why if you have a CDMA phone, you're pretty much boned on international roaming.
And the AndroidFormums post that the AC below me posted is a rip-off of this USS Clueless post: http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/10/GSM3G.shtml which does have a really good explanation of why CDMA is much better than TDMA.
A real city, complete with homes and businesses and some industry. If they can't do that, then that power source will never be good for more than a few percent of national power usage.
In Denmark, we passed the 15% mark some years ago. But I guess we live in a fantasy world.
I think your position is silly - the future of renewable power sources isn't in being disconnected from the grid, au contraire. From what I can find, people who've actually done some real calculations on this say that it's possible to rely 100% on renewable sources without excessive costs. And why wouldn't it be, we have the tech.
So, you say that my position is silly, and then say basically the same thing? I'm not saying to disconnect from the grid because that's the future, but because it proves that your power source is actually capable of providing continuous power without being backed up by conventional power plants on a minute-to-minute basis. Yeah, if you want to be all nit-picky, no power source is really 24/7/365, which is why we have a grid, but can your new power source at least power a city for, let's say, a month without any interruptions or backup from conventional power, including drawing power from and sending excess power to the grid? Can it limit its downtime to planned maintenance only?
What makes me a bit cynical about it is that I've seen lots of articles where City X proclaims that they're now 100% renewable, but what they really did is build a wind tower whose max output matches the city's max draw, but they're still on the grid. They don't say exactly how much power the wind tower is really producing and how often they have to draw power from or send power to outside sources - probably lots, considering that they have no power storage capability.
I'm not trying to hate on alternative power source, but you gotta prove that they work on a large scale. Calculations are nice, but it doesn't mean much if you can't back it up with real-world results. I'm not trying to stop anybody from doing anything - if you think you can make it really work, then go ahead and do it. Prove that it works, and I'll put my own money into it, but don't take my tax dollars to spend on a half-assed pipe dream that doesn't really fix anything.
Disagree. There are lots of jobs out there where your role is to basically wait for something to happen, and if it does happen, handle it. They may even be pretty highly paid and important jobs, depending on what "something happening" is what exactly what "handling it" involves. I'd say that the guys responsible for handling an incoming nuclear missile attack are pretty damn important. There's not many things where it's more important that they be handled properly if they happen, or that we hope they don't ever actually happen.
I'm inclined to say that these guys can slack off however they please on duty as long as they can be at their station ready to go in under a minute or so. And give 'em a separate computer for movies and websurfing so they don't risk messing up the one that controls trying to intercept incoming nuclear missiles.
Exactly, the power output definitions are completely different. A 1GW-rated nuclear plant will produce 1GW 24/7/365, rain or shine. The solar panels are rated 1GW peak. Real instant output depends on a bunch of stuff, like sunlight intensity and angle and how dirty the panels are - were they installed with a 2-axis gimbal system to keep them constantly pointed directly at the sun, or just sitting on the ground? And is there some mechanism to clean them off regularly? Take that stuff into account and the need to produce power day and night no matter what the weather, and your capital expenditures go way, way up, and effective output goes way, way down.
I'll believe that solar power (or wind or whatever else) is practical worldwide when somebody manages to power a small-medium city with that exclusively, completely off the national grid. A real city, complete with homes and businesses and some industry. If they can't do that, then that power source will never be good for more than a few percent of national power usage.
Whoever wrote that, and most of the people commenting here, just don't seem to understand how the social networking market works. This is a market like computer OSes, with very strong network effect (Facebook is valuable because everyone you know is on it) and lock-in (if you've posted a lot of content to Facebook, you can't move it to Google+ or some other network easily). Back in the early days of social media, when Myspace, Facebook, Friendster, and god knows what else were all small and in competition to get the handful of geeky early-adopter types, you could win over your competitors by having superior features and site design. Those effects weren't there yet because no site had a critical mass yet - nobody had enough content set up that they would find it annoying to switch to a new site, and the only people on it were probably a few of your geeky early-adopter friends who you could also get to switch easily.
It isn't like that anymore. Facebook has that critical mass, most importantly in the form of hundreds of millions of non-tech-savvy people on it. It's a virtuous cycle - people go to Facebook because it has the people and the content, which tends to give it even more people and more content to draw in yet more users. Competitors have no chance to break that. Doesn't matter how much money you throw at promoting it or how many cool features you have, you'll never break their lock. I'm not saying that Facebook will be around and dominant forever, but it'll require the fundamental market that they're in becoming irrelevant for some reason to dethrone them. Kind of like Microsoft dominates the desktop OS market - you'll never beat them for desktop OS dominance, but you have a shot at making them irrelevant by changing the market - switch everything people want to do to the web and the cloud, where the device OS doesn't matter, and/or get people to switch to a whole new class of devices where Microsoft's strengths don't apply, like phones and tablets.
Just having Angry Birds on their platform isn't that impressive, but it shows that the team behind the platform at least understands that if you want to be successful in today's mobile world, you must have an app store with a competitive number and variety of apps. They've got a hell of a long way to go to compete with the major players, but at least they're not completely delusional... well, at least not in that way. The idea of a small player breaking into the market at this point... well, I'll wish them luck, but they have their work cut out for them.
Not sure where you are, but I'm in the US, where Nokia smartphones were basically nonexistent on carriers since about 2006 or so for some reason. Even so, I recognized that Symbian was the best phone OS at the time, and paid hundreds of dollars more for imported, unlocked Nokia smartphones. The N85 was my last one, don't remember exactly when that was. Trouble is, iPhone and Android came out a year or two before it. At the time, they were both kinda lame compared to the capabilities of top-end Symbian phones, but they both kept getting better, and Symbian pretty much stood still, with the few new features that were added feeling half-assed and tacked on. By the time it was time to replace the N85, Symbian was looking like a joke (I don't think that Ovi app store ever had more than 10-20 apps in it), and I switched to a HTC Hero/Droid Eris, and have never looked back. At least regarding Symbian, the memo just confirmed what I, and most other US Nokia users, already knew - Symbian had sunk to being completely non-competitive in the smartphone market and showed no sign of ever being able to improve.
I can't seem to find it anymore, but there was a really good post by the Symbian-Guru blog about how he was ditching Nokia entirely because their latest top-end device - the N97 at the time - was hopelessly awful. That's a guy who busted his butt for years with no compensation to promote Nokia in the US, and he was driven to switch by how bad their latest smartphone OS was compared to the competition.
What's really strange is how, in those early smartphone days, Nokia/Symbian seemed to be popular in western Europe, but was practically unheard-of in the US. The success of iPhone and Android says to me that US consumers did want smartphones, but the market made it hard enough to get Nokias that competitors sprung up to make their own alternative, which ended up being much better than Symbian ever was.
That's exactly what I recommend to any basic users I talk to - a blanket policy of never ever follow any links in any email. Using only bookmarks eliminates a whole bunch of attack types.
I thought of the idea a while back, and I'm sure plenty of other people have too. It's really cool in a way, but I doubt it would ever be practical. The main problems I thought of:
Cost. It would have to be ungodly expensive by any measure, both to build and to operate. Could there ever be enough people willing to pay enough money to get, say, from NY to LA, faster than anything else to justify it? And it isn't very flexible either compared to air travel. If some other part of, say, NY, gets much more popular, then you can just build a new airport and reroute flights as needed. If you're using these giant vacuum tubes, you'd have to re-drill half of the run.
How tough it is to keep the tube in vacuum? We don't have any good way to estimate that now. Might need several high-grade vacuum pumps per mile that draw lots of power. It's pretty single-point-of-failure too - any significant air leak anywhere on the entire run, and any trains going fast enough to make such a system worth the trouble would probably be completely destroyed. It isn't just an air-resistance problem - unless the tube is much, much bigger than the train, then all of that air would be forced through the relatively small area between the train and the tube, thus much higher pressure spikes that would probably compromise any structure, and once you get the first crack, the whole thing will disintegrate real quick under the 6k MPH winds, leaving everything and everyone in the train as a stain on the walls over the course of a few hundred miles.
Handling sounds tough too. Like loading, unloading, servicing, turning them around, etc. You'd need lots of really good pressure seals that will stand up to many thousands of cycles with passengers doing all sorts of wacky things to them, and lots of elaborate procedures carefully followed. Getting trains into pressure for service (or do we have service techs in space suits?), loading and unloading passengers and cargo though some kind of airlock/jetbridge thing. Make a mistake anywhere, and you either pressurize the tube, destroying any trains travelling in it at the time, or suffocate all of the passengers in a train. Hope you never have a train break down in the middle of the line either.
I generally support gay rights, but I've always been a little meh on the idea of gay marriage. What I'd really like to hear is for a gay marriage advocate to explain to me why polygamy should be illegal yet gay marriage should be legal. If we should let two guys or two girls get married because they really love each other and want to be together forever and all of that, then why shouldn't we let a guy marry two or three or more girls (or whatever other combination you can think of) if they all really love each other and want to be together in that way? It isn't something completely absurd like marrying dogs or cars or something - there have been and still are many societies where polygamy is normal and accepted and widely practiced. So why not?