From my understanding, the bomb itself is not that complicated. One of bombs dropped on Japan was pretty much a bullet of uranium fired into a core.
The sticking point is that its rather difficult to refine the uranium and then the plutonium used in more powerful bombs.
So if you have the industrial capacity to create the uranium, the bomb itself is quite simple to assemble. If Wikileaks had an article posted about "How to refine uranium with sea water, bottle of bleach, and a house hold blender" then I would be concerned.
Thinking in "James Bond" film mode for a moment, what happens IF some enemy lets off an EM pulse, what happens to your (over) reliance on technology?
I remember reading something online about the specs being requested by the military on one of these UAV aircraft before. One of the criteria being investigated is how well its stands up to an EMP attack or something natural like a lightning strike. The more worrying one was the spec requesting how well it stood up to a nuclear attack.
In that regard, the military does put a lot of effort into shielding their equipment from possible EMP attack especially on their billion dollar bombers which still aren't unmanned. I suspect the same effort will go into a UAV, but with the UAV it might be cheaper to just build another one since you don't have to retrain another pilot.
Sounds like a tank. And haven't retired generals criticized the DoD in the last couple of decades for developing the tank technology we wished that we had in World War II instead of concentrating on anti-guerilla strategy?
To be fair Iran has tanks... Whoops did I say Iran... I meant "possible future liberation targets" have tanks.
But in all seriousness, if the thing has anti-tank missiles on it, its not meant for anti-guerrilla warfare. There are a handful of countries that its intended for. Mostly the ones that start with an R or an C and both end with an A. If you haven't noticed the big ruckus about missile system in Europe and the re-escalation of military flights of the Tupolev bomber into international waters which means the cold war really isn't over as we thought.
What? Do they even have the medical means to do this in countries where overpopulation is the worst?
What you are saying is like going to a starving country in Africa and telling them they shouldn't eat so much because it causes obesity. Its not the problem! The problem is that there is no food!
his will mean that traditional diets will need to change - meat requires a lot of land to produce, and wastes a lot of energy in its production.
Why not grow meat in vats? Its already being done in experiments and if you don't mind the thought of it, it will generally taste just as good as the real thing.
The problem is that most people never think out of the box on these issues because they see problems as something that can only be solved with today's technology and not realize that in 5 years things will be completely different.
Yeah, peak oil and whatever other resource issues crop up will be a pain in the butt to deal with, but eventually they will be dealt with and the population will keep growing. Even the looming global disaster of fresh water is just a single technology breakthrough away from being an interesting historical footnote.
For the life of me I can't remember or find the source, but a particular person in the field of sociology had figured out if the current rate of population (which is still exponential) there would be more humans than atoms in 17,000 years which he concluded something has to give at one point between now and then.
The fact of the matter is that someday humans will have to stop having kids in order to make life comfortable for the living. In fact its arguable that mass death is often followed by times of economic prosperity such as the emergence of the middle class and renaissance after the black death of the middle ages. Now I'm not arguing for humans should die off but rather they should focus on accepting birth control as a societal norm until the individual is ready to actually have a child.
First thing that comes to mind is unbreakable encryption with a one-time pad.
If your devices were never off even by one second, then you could always know what time the other device is set to at all times.
Example... You're in the field and you need to use your laptop to communicate to another officers laptop while still possibly being eavesdropped by the enemy. Each laptop contains the same one time pad for a particular situation that expires after a certain amount of time (FFS you shouldn't be holding strategic level OTP encryption in something that could be captured) that you had received prior to deployment.
Now since both laptops have atomic clocks they could use that as the reference point of which pad to be using at a given moment. Of course the TCP/IP packets will have to time stamp a bit retroactively because of the slight lag delay in transfer of data, but that shouldn't be a problem due to each laptop knowing exactly what the other devices time and hence which one pad it at what time.
Now the OTPs might be rather large depending on the deployment time (like a 1gb text file), but as far as most people can tell the man in the middle attack is impossible to break a OTP as long as no one reuses any of the previous transmissions.
I would say that I can't remember a single presidential veto that was a good thing in the past 50 years, but I can remember plenty of them that were bad. Checks and balances is a poor justification on this level, because the executive should not be overwriting the legislative in my opinion.
When the constitutions was written there were no political parties and there was more of a worry that the congress would be the overriding factor in a slide towards totalitarianism (after all it was the British parliament that more or less the ones sending the troops and not King George) and for the most part the first few US Presidents vetoed most things on the grounds they were "unconstitutional" and not because they just didn't like it.
Of course, the key problem today is that both congress and the President have acquired much more powers granted to either of them by the constitution and two major political parties have so much control that any reforms would be highly unlikely.
In that regard, the only solution would be a complete reform of the government towards a proportional parliamentary system with a Prime Minister (Head of Government dealing with internal matters) and a President (Head of State with foreign matters) therby diluting the overall authority of the President but at the same time make internal affairs more efficient.
However, I seriously doubt we'd have a constitutional convention for such a drastic change in my lifetime other than say something stupid like banning same sex marriage.
I have been pulled more than once over and every time I have been treated with respect. You're making huge generalizations. Most police and troopers are good people.
Hold on there! Anecdotal evidence a universal case does not make.
Personally, I've seen both but it really depended on where you live. Generally, in larger cities you'll see cops that are too busy deal with little things whereas smaller municipalities often have quotas simply to meet budgets.
However, there are always cases of high level corruption everywhere and I've heard some nightmare stories about NYC cops. The real reason you haven't met any bad cops is because you haven't traveled enough.
Companies older than 80 years old are not terribly uncommon.
Uncommon? The average lifespan of majority of modern companies is 10 years. In fact, companies that last longer than 100 years is quite rare.
People may look at companies like Coca Cola, Pepsi, Microsoft, and Apple but those major companies are actually quite lucky compared to the thousands of companies that go belly up or merge or get divested every year.
(And even then it doesn't necessarily solve it completely. A colony of robots can still spend most of its energy and resources just repairing the robots and building new ones, so that cost can still remain. Or worse yet, it may need more goods sent from Earth than some colonists would, because such robots would presumably be high tech and require lots of energy and a lot of different factories to produce. So it might still be cheaper to send a 20km ship full of colonists, which only need a couple of farms to live there.)
Ok. Here is the deal about space that makes trade a moot point.
Space is huge and has almost unlimited resources compared to earth and is quite ubiqutous.
Need energy? Put up solar panels. Need water? Go mine a comet. Need metal? Go mine an asteroid.
The key point is that space exploration will be pretty much like early colonization of America. You can't rely on shipments from a far away land and if its there you can take it if no other locals complain. And if they do... Well it depends on who brought their space gun.
I suppose Earth governments may dole colonial charters, but what happens if one of the colonists breaks the charter and starts taking more than they were granted? I suppose you could send an army and a governor up there, but often times with travel times of years and possibly decades... By the time the army gets there the situation would have changed or the other colonists would have suffered the tyrannical rule of whoever had sway over the colony.
Even then, you might even get "space pirates" who aren't colonialists but have no problem showing up at the local water mining facility to take something off the top and since space is so big, it will be difficult to find much less catch.
After a while, trade might be viable, but like the Americas in the 1500s you didn't get trade as we know it until the late 1700s when the Colonial governments were well established and the high seas were well patroled by the Royal navy.
Now, I don't see a dystopian future with pirates roaming the vast regions of space, but given human nature we will see plenty of humans taking advantage of other humans far away from home.
IT: We can't without Finance approval. Both you and your manager *know* that's the process. U: Thanks for nothing.
Umm... Has it ever occurred to you that if he had let you install it and then Microsoft shows up the next for an audit that the proverbial shit would hit the fan.
Its very unpleasant and Microsoft is very vigilant even among their best customers. One out of order copy could cause of a hefty fine and some downtime. The reason they have to ask finance is because finance has not given them the money to buy the license. If they gave you a copy without a license they are risking their job and possibly yours.
"Well it will have to go before the board, which meets every 6 months or so. And you also have to [insert about 100 roadblocks and obstructionist measures here]."
Has it occurred to you that that is what the board told them to do? Obviously if such a trivial thing would be brought up to the board of directors, perhaps the BoD specifically berated them prior to your request that they were spending too much money on software licenses.
But honestly, if now what we have is a bunch of people who think that stealing is ok because that is what the Internet was designed to allow us to do
*sigh*
Do you know the difference between punching someone in the face or stabbing them dead
One is called assault and the other is called murder.
What you are describing as theft is most likley copyright infringement.
Neither is ok, but using the internet to copy copyrighted material is not theft but copyright violations which are judged and prosecuted under a wholly different set of laws.
Here is an example... You copyright a song that is whistled. It is catchy and one of the persons who hears it goes about his daily life and whistles to his hearts content and teaches others to whistle it as well. Absurd as it sounds, that violates copyright laws but your right to your whistling song is temporary for the sake "of useful arts and sciences" according to the constition and one day that song will be free to the public to whistle as much as they choose.
Now if it were theft of the same scenario, I suppose that would include an angry fan punching you in the stomach and forcing you to whistle against your will (theft of services) or removed actual profits that you made from your catch whistle directly from your bank account. Now that is theft... Again its the difference between manslaughter and murder.
If you ever end up on the wrong side of a jury, you'll hope the jurors know the difference.
As far as an Open Internet, one has to simply point at Iran and China as why regulation and lack of anonymity is a "bad thing".
The keyboard works, 100% of the time. Its easily understood. Its robust. It fails gracefully - you immediately see if you've made a mistake before submitting a command.
True, but they should be focusing on other methods of input.
This could be anything from the one handed keyboard, ear canal senor that detects tongue movement, or mouse cursor that follows eye movement.
Personally, I'd wouldn't mind having an electrode in my arm or back if it means I could use small muscle movements to input text and mouse movement but that might be a hard sell to the average joe.
Why they didn't figure something was up when the rest of the neighborhood was complaining, I don't know. It certainly couldn't have affected just my place.
I worked for one of the major US ISPs, and generally the layers of interdepartmental communications were so obscure there was nothing you could do.
In truth most of us loved outages because it meant we could tell the person that the problem was on our end and hang up and tell the next person. If it was a problem on the users end, then we'd have to do troubleshooting.
Now something the network guys just wouldn't tell us anything (often times we'd hear about fiber cuts through news sources before we heard it from them) and although we could petition them if we thought a suspected outage had occurred (like everyone from a particular town calls in at once) but all we could do was use a web form to communicate. No email... No phone number... And my manager nor his manager could directly communicate with them either.
On top of that, we were forced to always believe it was the customers end rather than the companies if no outage was posted. Sometimes we'd be sending reports for hours with no response and we were still forced to fully troubleshoot calls we damn well knew was not the fault of something on the customers end.
As far as I remember... Very little communication.
What exactly is the safe load level for a PST file?
About 1.9 GB on an older PST file and anymore will crap out.
Outlook 2003 and greater will allow 20gb files, but they become horrendously slow after 5 to 10 gb.
And yes.. People will store gigabytes of email on an exchange server... Usually when they are emailing large videos, photoshop files, or do Desktop publishing work. Though I wonder what the Whitehouse doing to take up that much space.
Certainaly it wasn't powerpoints on intelligence reports.
It'd be great if the HD-DVD fans took a clue from Toshiba and stopped trying to push a dead format. They're not doing anyone any favors.
To be fair, I suspect Blu-Ray won't outlive plain old DVD. Unless Sony starts dumping $20 Blu-ray players with $9.99 movies, the rest of the world who can't afford Hi-Def TVs and Sound systems will probaly be satisfied with plain old DVDs for quite sometime.
Once the initial analog hurtle was jumped from VHS to DVD, there was no real need to go beyond that except those who had Hi-Def. Much like SCDs and mini-discs never took off, I personally believe Blu-Ray will be "good enough" until downloads, holographic discs, or solid state media takes off in 5 years. I still bet DVD will still outlast them for quite some time.
Just think of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD as the Laser Discs of the 21st century rather than VHS or Betamax. They're nice, but most people don't need them or will buy them except hardcore hi-def enthusiasts.
On the other hand, I'd rather have a government that does good things, like make medical care and education available to people who can't afford to pay for it, than one that's stagnant and unable to do anything.
The problem of the current system is that it is too centralized and would be better off power was somehow diluted to where people with 51% of the votes wouldn't be able to railroad the 49% who disagreed.
When you say "I'd rather have a government that does good things", you have to remember that "good" is a matter of personal opinion in most cases. I'm sure a large part of America would see banning abortion as "good" while another large portion of America would see that as "bad".
You could say the same about any other wedge issue... War in Iraq. Stem Cell research. Trade with China.
The point is that the current system and everyone around it feels that government "must do something" which ends up being 4-8 years of one person doing what they please and then perhaps someone else with a different view of what is good or bad does something else usually unilaterally without anyone else having much of a say except a filibuster.
They key point is that government is broke in how things are done, so the only way to fix it is to change the whole damn system. Maybe create a parliament with proportional representation and have a President and Vice president with veto power over the president in order to force compromise so that people aren't being railed roaded by those who hold a different opinion of what is good or bad.
where's the business plan? AOL is still a company. They gotta make money somehow...
After reports showed that online ads revenue was inflated (have you seen Google's stock price lately) it might not behoove AOL to worry about ad revenue as much as their name recognition.
Slashdot Mirror
From my understanding, the bomb itself is not that complicated. One of bombs dropped on Japan was pretty much a bullet of uranium fired into a core.
The sticking point is that its rather difficult to refine the uranium and then the plutonium used in more powerful bombs.
So if you have the industrial capacity to create the uranium, the bomb itself is quite simple to assemble. If Wikileaks had an article posted about "How to refine uranium with sea water, bottle of bleach, and a house hold blender" then I would be concerned.
Thinking in "James Bond" film mode for a moment, what happens IF some enemy lets off an EM pulse, what happens to your (over) reliance on technology?
I remember reading something online about the specs being requested by the military on one of these UAV aircraft before. One of the criteria being investigated is how well its stands up to an EMP attack or something natural like a lightning strike. The more worrying one was the spec requesting how well it stood up to a nuclear attack.
In that regard, the military does put a lot of effort into shielding their equipment from possible EMP attack especially on their billion dollar bombers which still aren't unmanned. I suspect the same effort will go into a UAV, but with the UAV it might be cheaper to just build another one since you don't have to retrain another pilot.
Sounds like a tank. And haven't retired generals criticized the DoD in the last couple of decades for developing the tank technology we wished that we had in World War II instead of concentrating on anti-guerilla strategy?
To be fair Iran has tanks... Whoops did I say Iran... I meant "possible future liberation targets" have tanks.
But in all seriousness, if the thing has anti-tank missiles on it, its not meant for anti-guerrilla warfare. There are a handful of countries that its intended for. Mostly the ones that start with an R or an C and both end with an A. If you haven't noticed the big ruckus about missile system in Europe and the re-escalation of military flights of the Tupolev bomber into international waters which means the cold war really isn't over as we thought.
Stop brining people back from the dead.
What? Do they even have the medical means to do this in countries where overpopulation is the worst?
What you are saying is like going to a starving country in Africa and telling them they shouldn't eat so much because it causes obesity. Its not the problem! The problem is that there is no food!
his will mean that traditional diets will need to change - meat requires a lot of land to produce, and wastes a lot of energy in its production.
Why not grow meat in vats? Its already being done in experiments and if you don't mind the thought of it, it will generally taste just as good as the real thing.
The problem is that most people never think out of the box on these issues because they see problems as something that can only be solved with today's technology and not realize that in 5 years things will be completely different.
Yeah, peak oil and whatever other resource issues crop up will be a pain in the butt to deal with, but eventually they will be dealt with and the population will keep growing. Even the looming global disaster of fresh water is just a single technology breakthrough away from being an interesting historical footnote.
For the life of me I can't remember or find the source, but a particular person in the field of sociology had figured out if the current rate of population (which is still exponential) there would be more humans than atoms in 17,000 years which he concluded something has to give at one point between now and then.
The fact of the matter is that someday humans will have to stop having kids in order to make life comfortable for the living. In fact its arguable that mass death is often followed by times of economic prosperity such as the emergence of the middle class and renaissance after the black death of the middle ages. Now I'm not arguing for humans should die off but rather they should focus on accepting birth control as a societal norm until the individual is ready to actually have a child.
Erm... why?
First thing that comes to mind is unbreakable encryption with a one-time pad.
If your devices were never off even by one second, then you could always know what time the other device is set to at all times.
Example... You're in the field and you need to use your laptop to communicate to another officers laptop while still possibly being eavesdropped by the enemy. Each laptop contains the same one time pad for a particular situation that expires after a certain amount of time (FFS you shouldn't be holding strategic level OTP encryption in something that could be captured) that you had received prior to deployment.
Now since both laptops have atomic clocks they could use that as the reference point of which pad to be using at a given moment. Of course the TCP/IP packets will have to time stamp a bit retroactively because of the slight lag delay in transfer of data, but that shouldn't be a problem due to each laptop knowing exactly what the other devices time and hence which one pad it at what time.
Now the OTPs might be rather large depending on the deployment time (like a 1gb text file), but as far as most people can tell the man in the middle attack is impossible to break a OTP as long as no one reuses any of the previous transmissions.
I would say that I can't remember a single presidential veto that was a good thing in the past 50 years, but I can remember plenty of them that were bad. Checks and balances is a poor justification on this level, because the executive should not be overwriting the legislative in my opinion.
When the constitutions was written there were no political parties and there was more of a worry that the congress would be the overriding factor in a slide towards totalitarianism (after all it was the British parliament that more or less the ones sending the troops and not King George) and for the most part the first few US Presidents vetoed most things on the grounds they were "unconstitutional" and not because they just didn't like it.
Of course, the key problem today is that both congress and the President have acquired much more powers granted to either of them by the constitution and two major political parties have so much control that any reforms would be highly unlikely.
In that regard, the only solution would be a complete reform of the government towards a proportional parliamentary system with a Prime Minister (Head of Government dealing with internal matters) and a President (Head of State with foreign matters) therby diluting the overall authority of the President but at the same time make internal affairs more efficient.
However, I seriously doubt we'd have a constitutional convention for such a drastic change in my lifetime other than say something stupid like banning same sex marriage.
I have been pulled more than once over and every time I have been treated with respect. You're making huge generalizations. Most police and troopers are good people.
Hold on there! Anecdotal evidence a universal case does not make.
Personally, I've seen both but it really depended on where you live. Generally, in larger cities you'll see cops that are too busy deal with little things whereas smaller municipalities often have quotas simply to meet budgets.
However, there are always cases of high level corruption everywhere and I've heard some nightmare stories about NYC cops. The real reason you haven't met any bad cops is because you haven't traveled enough.
Technically SSD is both:
Reads faster (ie boots quickly, apps open faster)
Writes slower (ie files saves slower, page file churns sluggishly)
Companies older than 80 years old are not terribly uncommon.
Uncommon? The average lifespan of majority of modern companies is 10 years. In fact, companies that last longer than 100 years is quite rare.
People may look at companies like Coca Cola, Pepsi, Microsoft, and Apple but those major companies are actually quite lucky compared to the thousands of companies that go belly up or merge or get divested every year.
(And even then it doesn't necessarily solve it completely. A colony of robots can still spend most of its energy and resources just repairing the robots and building new ones, so that cost can still remain. Or worse yet, it may need more goods sent from Earth than some colonists would, because such robots would presumably be high tech and require lots of energy and a lot of different factories to produce. So it might still be cheaper to send a 20km ship full of colonists, which only need a couple of farms to live there.)
Ok. Here is the deal about space that makes trade a moot point.
Space is huge and has almost unlimited resources compared to earth and is quite ubiqutous.
Need energy? Put up solar panels.
Need water? Go mine a comet.
Need metal? Go mine an asteroid.
The key point is that space exploration will be pretty much like early colonization of America. You can't rely on shipments from a far away land and if its there you can take it if no other locals complain. And if they do... Well it depends on who brought their space gun.
I suppose Earth governments may dole colonial charters, but what happens if one of the colonists breaks the charter and starts taking more than they were granted? I suppose you could send an army and a governor up there, but often times with travel times of years and possibly decades... By the time the army gets there the situation would have changed or the other colonists would have suffered the tyrannical rule of whoever had sway over the colony.
Even then, you might even get "space pirates" who aren't colonialists but have no problem showing up at the local water mining facility to take something off the top and since space is so big, it will be difficult to find much less catch.
After a while, trade might be viable, but like the Americas in the 1500s you didn't get trade as we know it until the late 1700s when the Colonial governments were well established and the high seas were well patroled by the Royal navy.
Now, I don't see a dystopian future with pirates roaming the vast regions of space, but given human nature we will see plenty of humans taking advantage of other humans far away from home.
IT: We can't without Finance approval. Both you and your manager *know* that's the process.
U: Thanks for nothing.
Umm... Has it ever occurred to you that if he had let you install it and then Microsoft shows up the next for an audit that the proverbial shit would hit the fan.
Its very unpleasant and Microsoft is very vigilant even among their best customers. One out of order copy could cause of a hefty fine and some downtime. The reason they have to ask finance is because finance has not given them the money to buy the license. If they gave you a copy without a license they are risking their job and possibly yours.
"Well it will have to go before the board, which meets every 6 months or so. And you also have to [insert about 100 roadblocks and obstructionist measures here]."
Has it occurred to you that that is what the board told them to do? Obviously if such a trivial thing would be brought up to the board of directors, perhaps the BoD specifically berated them prior to your request that they were spending too much money on software licenses.
Does IT understand the value of business investments, legal contracts, general ledgers, due diligence, SEC problems, etc?
To be fair, one only has to look at the disaster going on in Wall Street right now to see that management doesn't either.
And they want John Romero back... Oh wait. Never mind, they said to keep him.
But honestly, if now what we have is a bunch of people who think that stealing is ok because that is what the Internet was designed to allow us to do
*sigh*
Do you know the difference between punching someone in the face or stabbing them dead
One is called assault and the other is called murder.
What you are describing as theft is most likley copyright infringement.
Neither is ok, but using the internet to copy copyrighted material is not theft but copyright violations which are judged and prosecuted under a wholly different set of laws.
Here is an example... You copyright a song that is whistled. It is catchy and one of the persons who hears it goes about his daily life and whistles to his hearts content and teaches others to whistle it as well. Absurd as it sounds, that violates copyright laws but your right to your whistling song is temporary for the sake "of useful arts and sciences" according to the constition and one day that song will be free to the public to whistle as much as they choose.
Now if it were theft of the same scenario, I suppose that would include an angry fan punching you in the stomach and forcing you to whistle against your will (theft of services) or removed actual profits that you made from your catch whistle directly from your bank account. Now that is theft... Again its the difference between manslaughter and murder.
If you ever end up on the wrong side of a jury, you'll hope the jurors know the difference.
As far as an Open Internet, one has to simply point at Iran and China as why regulation and lack of anonymity is a "bad thing".
The keyboard works, 100% of the time. Its easily understood. Its robust. It fails gracefully - you immediately see if you've made a mistake before submitting a command.
True, but they should be focusing on other methods of input.
This could be anything from the one handed keyboard, ear canal senor that detects tongue movement, or mouse cursor that follows eye movement.
Personally, I'd wouldn't mind having an electrode in my arm or back if it means I could use small muscle movements to input text and mouse movement but that might be a hard sell to the average joe.
Why they didn't figure something was up when the rest of the neighborhood was complaining, I don't know. It certainly couldn't have affected just my place.
I worked for one of the major US ISPs, and generally the layers of interdepartmental communications were so obscure there was nothing you could do.
In truth most of us loved outages because it meant we could tell the person that the problem was on our end and hang up and tell the next person. If it was a problem on the users end, then we'd have to do troubleshooting.
Now something the network guys just wouldn't tell us anything (often times we'd hear about fiber cuts through news sources before we heard it from them) and although we could petition them if we thought a suspected outage had occurred (like everyone from a particular town calls in at once) but all we could do was use a web form to communicate. No email... No phone number... And my manager nor his manager could directly communicate with them either.
On top of that, we were forced to always believe it was the customers end rather than the companies if no outage was posted. Sometimes we'd be sending reports for hours with no response and we were still forced to fully troubleshoot calls we damn well knew was not the fault of something on the customers end.
As far as I remember... Very little communication.
What exactly is the safe load level for a PST file?
About 1.9 GB on an older PST file and anymore will crap out.
Outlook 2003 and greater will allow 20gb files, but they become horrendously slow after 5 to 10 gb.
And yes.. People will store gigabytes of email on an exchange server... Usually when they are emailing large videos, photoshop files, or do Desktop publishing work. Though I wonder what the Whitehouse doing to take up that much space.
Certainaly it wasn't powerpoints on intelligence reports.
It'd be great if the HD-DVD fans took a clue from Toshiba and stopped trying to push a dead format. They're not doing anyone any favors.
To be fair, I suspect Blu-Ray won't outlive plain old DVD. Unless Sony starts dumping $20 Blu-ray players with $9.99 movies, the rest of the world who can't afford Hi-Def TVs and Sound systems will probaly be satisfied with plain old DVDs for quite sometime.
Once the initial analog hurtle was jumped from VHS to DVD, there was no real need to go beyond that except those who had Hi-Def. Much like SCDs and mini-discs never took off, I personally believe Blu-Ray will be "good enough" until downloads, holographic discs, or solid state media takes off in 5 years. I still bet DVD will still outlast them for quite some time.
Just think of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD as the Laser Discs of the 21st century rather than VHS or Betamax. They're nice, but most people don't need them or will buy them except hardcore hi-def enthusiasts.
On the other hand, I'd rather have a government that does good things, like make medical care and education available to people who can't afford to pay for it, than one that's stagnant and unable to do anything.
The problem of the current system is that it is too centralized and would be better off power was somehow diluted to where people with 51% of the votes wouldn't be able to railroad the 49% who disagreed.
When you say "I'd rather have a government that does good things", you have to remember that "good" is a matter of personal opinion in most cases. I'm sure a large part of America would see banning abortion as "good" while another large portion of America would see that as "bad".
You could say the same about any other wedge issue... War in Iraq. Stem Cell research. Trade with China.
The point is that the current system and everyone around it feels that government "must do something" which ends up being 4-8 years of one person doing what they please and then perhaps someone else with a different view of what is good or bad does something else usually unilaterally without anyone else having much of a say except a filibuster.
They key point is that government is broke in how things are done, so the only way to fix it is to change the whole damn system. Maybe create a parliament with proportional representation and have a President and Vice president with veto power over the president in order to force compromise so that people aren't being railed roaded by those who hold a different opinion of what is good or bad.
But I doubt that will happen anytime soon...
"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." -Cardinal Richelieu
If you helped install it, then you should learn to shut up on sites like this.
Its no secret.
Most Central Offices for the telcos have them so I suppose wireless would have them too.
where's the business plan? AOL is still a company. They gotta make money somehow...
After reports showed that online ads revenue was inflated (have you seen Google's stock price lately) it might not behoove AOL to worry about ad revenue as much as their name recognition.