Not to sound like a shill, but TPG internet has just cut done some really cheap new plans - 20 gigs per months at 1.5/256, $49.95. I just switched, and the pings to gaming servers are slow during the evenings but for P2P it's surely faster than your 256/64 at all times, and pretty much full speed outside the 6-11 PM period...
Surveying the comments pages of Slashdot to judge political sentiments is about as accurate as those web polls for the candidates. Just because a group is noisy doesn't make it big. In my country, Australia, there is a very noisy section of the population (myself included) who vigorously opposed the US-Australia free trade agreement (for various reasons which are too complex to go into here). 98% of the public didn't care one way or the other.
In this particular case, I suspect the Kerry supporters aren't particularly interested in commenting because they don't expect much change on DMCA-related issues. For them there are much more important reasons for voting for Kerry - like not being a complete fucking moron who has managed to waste $200 billion dollars, a thousand lives, and every bit of goodwill the US had in the outside world, on an unnecessary and counterproductive war. Oh, and not be inclined to appoint more Antonin Scalias to the Supreme Court - that's a big one for many Democrats. Oh, and Kerry might help stop putting the federal government in ever-greater hock to the central banks of China and Japan.
If you're in a safe Republican or Democrat state, well, feel free to make your symbolic protest. But, please, if you're in a swing state, do the rest of the world a favour and cast a meaningful vote this time around? We're really counting on you lot to get it right this time.
That goes double for the lefties amongst you who are going to vote for Nader. Kerry isn't going to turn your country into the leftie paradise you dream of, sure. But at least the bloke isn't a messianic, militaristic moron who sends thousands of soldiers off to die to settle a family vendetta...
Winning conventional battles is the job of our military. Putting down insurgency and occupying countries is not.
I half agree with you. This was an insane, unnecessary war, and one the US should never have fought. But your assumption that military enemies of the US are going to conveniently form themselves into tight formations and line up to get their ass kicked seems a little naive.
Nobody is going to take the US head on in a conventional battle - guerilla warfare is much more likely. Therefore, maybe the US military (or their political leadership, more likely) should get their head out of their asses and realise that "nation-building" and counterinsurgency *is* going to be a vital part of their mission into the future, and they damn well better prepare for it.
It's going to be culturally difficult, though. I know I shouldn't generalise on limited anecdotal evidence, but I've seen a few US troops based in Germany. If they were deliberately trying to piss off their hosts they couldn't go about it much better. I can just imagine how their actions would have gone down in a country where they're really disliked.
They're attacking collaborators with the enemy just like every other insurgent/resistance/whatever movement - including ones that the US government, if not perhaps its citizens, have given tacit or explicit support to over the years. Afghanistan in the 80's, for instance.
While you have a point that the motivations of many of these guys aren't ones we should have sympathy with, their tactics are pretty much par for the course.
I don't care, call them terrorists, guerillas, a resistance movement, call them friggin holy warriors if you will. What I am trying to suggest to an American audience is that their military commanders have screwed up badly, and ought to be fired for their gross incompetence.
Given that much of the fault seems to sheet home to the civilians who ultimately tell the military what to do (ie the Bush administration) it follows that those people should also be fired.A very convenient opportunity to do so is coming up in a bit over a week.
It truly astounds me that there remains a distinct possibility that the American people won't do so.
The US military may have problems, but winning conventional battles isn't one of them. There is no evidence this is likely to change any time soon.
What it has demonstrated it's absolutely useless at is occupying a country and dealing with an insurgency. I'm no expert, but from what I've read a fair whack of blame should be placed on the political leadership that didn't do any planning for this. However, there is also an issue that the US doesn't train or prepare its military for such jobs. That's just asking for trouble.
Surely you're not taking the nuisance seriously enough. Wouldn't this be more proportionate to the annoyance caused? It worked for Michael Douglas in Falling Down...
The smallest turbines available weight around 1.5Kg, and are used for model aircraft, and they don't have to run for very long.
And, if I recall correctly, they use fuel very inefficiently; the fuel consumption is like nothing else you've ever seen. The friction losses on this thing would probably be far worse, so unless there's breakthroughs in the design elsewhere I'd be very surprised if you could carry enough fuel to keep the things powered up.
I remember that Economist article and poll. You have to remember that the article itself says that it was an informal poll and that there was probably some bias. More importantly, though, the letter was signed by 368 economists; in contrast, the Economist poll was completed by only 56 economics professors, some of which did not even answer every question.
The Economist straw poll was done by randomly selecting the authors from economics journals. You are correct that it may not be representative of economists' views as a whole, as it represents only those economists who publish in those journals, and not everybody responded.
However, your argument that 364 self-selected economists is more representative than a survey of 56 (sort-of) randomly selected ones is just idiotic. If I asked 100 random Americans if they supported Kerry, that's not a terribly good way to judge who's going to win the Presidential election . But it's sure as hell better than asking the 2,509 delegates to the RNC.
Yes, it was just coincidence that the rose drastically (around 15%) under the last 5 Labor governments.
Let me guess, you don't remember what the interest rate was under Fraser, do you? Go and look it up. Then look up the history of interest rates over the whole of the Hawke-Keating era, not just the peak. Then look at *real* interest rates - rates after inflation. Oh, and then look at graphs of Australian interest rates versus global rates. The reason why absolute rates are low here now is because they are low everywhere, and inflation was brought under control by Keating (mainly through those high interest rates in the early 1990's, as well as the Accord keeping wage increases down). Then go and look at housing affordability, which is worse now than at any other time mainly due to the Reserve Bank leaving rates too low, incredibly irresponsible tax policies encouraging housing overinvestment over more productive investment, and the stupid bloody first home owners grant - all this has achieved is an enormous property bubble that has left people in a far worse position than Labor ever did if the economy tanks, which it will soon. As well as unemployment and inflation, a lot of people are going to be left with negative equity in their overgeared homes. Ever heard of negative equity? Let's just say it's left a lot of "aspirationals" sore and sorry for themselves during recessions in the past few decades. Oh, and go and do a bit of reading on a body called the Reserve Bank, and how *it* controls interest rates since reforms Labor did, not the government.
And, no, the Australian voting population are not idiots. They have voted on their self interest with the information readily available to them. They are just horribly ill-informed, and it's going to bite them (and by the sound of it you) in the arse.
I would be very surprised if Australian companies were any more or less vulnerable to hackers than any companies in any other modern Western country.
And the DPRK doesn't really want to piss us off - we are in a fairly unique position, as a close American ally that has diplomatic relations with the North Koreans. They may be tyrannical thugs, but they're not stupid either, and that diplomatic channel is surely worth more to them than hacking a few corporate websites.
As for Australia's defence and intelligence agencies, well, we're a branch office for America, and they let us in on a lot (but not all, obviously) of their stuff. That wouldn't happen unless the US agencies were comfortable that the only people that can hack in are, well, themselves...
Kerry has been practicing dumbing down his answers for everyone, not just youths. Even complex topics are not to be afforded a nuanced answer.
There's a good reason for that. The great mass of undecided voters are simply incapable of appreciating nuanced answers.
I'll give an example from our own recent national elections. Most Australians are on variable-rate mortgages - if general interest rates go up, their home loan repayments go up. That makes home loan interest rates a big political issue. In the recent Australian elections, the incumbent conservatives ran on the claim that interest rates would be lower if they were retained. This was rubbish, but to explain why it's rubbish is devilishly difficult to do in a campaign TV commercial to a bunch of economic illiterates.
The conservatives not only won, they won more seats than they held last time. Apparently, analysis of the area-by-area vote shows that their increased vote came almost exclusively from one-income families with big mortgages...who are about to cop it in the neck when interest rates do inevitably rise in the next couple of years.
Trust me, if somebody can build an intercontinental rocket that can do trans-Pacific or Australia (or more to the point South-East Asia) - Europe in an hour or two at a price that's even *vaguely* reasonable, there will be a demand.
The average Fortune 1000 CEO earned $8.3 million a year, way back in 2001. That's 22,000 USD per day. So, just in non-productive CEO time alone, sending the CEO to Australia costs 44,000 USD, on top of the 14,000 USD or so for the first-class return ticket. That's a big cost - not to mention that this technology offers the possibility of intercontinental day trips, something that is simply not possible now. There are people - not many, but some - for whom these features will be worth paying a lot of money for. Just like aircraft in their early days, in fact...
Also, I gather there would also be a market for really fast package delivery, which could theoretically carry even higher per-kilogram costs. Imagine if a crucial part is required to resume production at a major automotive plant. How much is a day's lost production worth?
Further to this, one thing I *do* know about GA's is that you need a fitness function to evaluate the output. With codecs, the ultimate fitness function is somebody watching the video and judging how good it looks, and that can't be automated (because the whole point is how the video is perceived by a human). Hence, I would be very dubious that GA's are much use in creating a video codec.
I doubt we're going to see antimatter cheap enough to be more than a research material for decades, but when we can turn it into devices which make it impossible for anyone to field an army it essentially makes conventional warfare into suicide. Isn't that what you wanted?
That's essentially what America has already. The response of its enemies? Developing nuclear weapons of their own, and resorting to terrorism...
There are two problems with this plan: making antimatter is exceedingly costly, and storing it safely is rather a problem.
To keep a nuclear weapon from exploding is relatively straightforward, because you have to actively push it together with explosives to make it do so. By contrast, an antimatter device desperately "wants" to explode, and you have to constantly work to keep it from doing so. The article briefly mentions the idea of storing antimatter as "positronium" putting a positron and an electron in orbit round each other. I'm no physicist, but creating a material sounds like an astounding technical feat, and there still remains the question of how stable it is.
The second point is that there is no antimatter available to us in nature; we have to make it in a particle accelerator. This is exceedingly inefficient; from what I've current accelerators are about 0.000004% efficient at doing this. According to the linked paper, physicists think they can improve this to about 0.01% with extrapolations of existing technology. Even that makes the cost of producing explosives purely using matter-antimatter reactions prohibitive.
As has been said a number of times on this thread, it makes much more sense to use antimatter as a trigger for a fusion reaction. This would provide a scalable, lightweight, and fallout-free (or almost so) weapon at orders of magnitude less expense. The containment problem would still be a serious issue, but the amount of antimatter you'd need to contain would be far, far smaller.
The reason why Australians don't speed on freeways is very simple. There are likely to be speed cameras on them, and there is zero tolerance given - if you do 105 on a 100 freeway, you'll get a ticket, and if you do it often enough you'll lose your license.
Of course, Australia is empty enough that there are plenty of roads where you're unlikely to meet other traffic, let alone police... let's just say I don't take the freeway when I go to visit my parents.
I don't know where you get your danger statistics on Australia's freeways, though. Could you point me to a reference?
Try driving in Germany some time; most people drive at 100mph-plus on the autobahns. You soon learn that 60mph (or whatever the highway speed limit in your jurisdiction is) is not some magic number above which a car turns from a safe device into an imminent disaster area.
I knew Nick Barnes when he was a postgraduate at the University of Melbourne and I was an undergrad, and a mate of mine is going to NICTA to become his PhD student. He's been involved in Melbourne University's Robocup team at times, amongst other projects.
Deep down in his heart of hearts, I'm sure Nick knows perfectly well that trying to use computer vision to read road signs is at best a temporary hack for a legacy system. However, it's a nice application to show to wowser politicians to get them to fund his real interest - computer vision algorithms.
It's the same reason why a lot of American scientists take money from the armed forces; they're neutral at best about the application, but it's a great way to get funding.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to sound like a shill, but TPG internet has just cut done some really cheap new plans - 20 gigs per months at 1.5/256, $49.95. I just switched, and the pings to gaming servers are slow during the evenings but for P2P it's surely faster than your 256/64 at all times, and pretty much full speed outside the 6-11 PM period...
In this particular case, I suspect the Kerry supporters aren't particularly interested in commenting because they don't expect much change on DMCA-related issues. For them there are much more important reasons for voting for Kerry - like not being a complete fucking moron who has managed to waste $200 billion dollars, a thousand lives, and every bit of goodwill the US had in the outside world, on an unnecessary and counterproductive war. Oh, and not be inclined to appoint more Antonin Scalias to the Supreme Court - that's a big one for many Democrats. Oh, and Kerry might help stop putting the federal government in ever-greater hock to the central banks of China and Japan.
That goes double for the lefties amongst you who are going to vote for Nader. Kerry isn't going to turn your country into the leftie paradise you dream of, sure. But at least the bloke isn't a messianic, militaristic moron who sends thousands of soldiers off to die to settle a family vendetta...
The House is unlikely this time around, but it's certainly not beyond the realms of possibility they'll take back the Senate.
I half agree with you. This was an insane, unnecessary war, and one the US should never have fought. But your assumption that military enemies of the US are going to conveniently form themselves into tight formations and line up to get their ass kicked seems a little naive.
Nobody is going to take the US head on in a conventional battle - guerilla warfare is much more likely. Therefore, maybe the US military (or their political leadership, more likely) should get their head out of their asses and realise that "nation-building" and counterinsurgency *is* going to be a vital part of their mission into the future, and they damn well better prepare for it.
It's going to be culturally difficult, though. I know I shouldn't generalise on limited anecdotal evidence, but I've seen a few US troops based in Germany. If they were deliberately trying to piss off their hosts they couldn't go about it much better. I can just imagine how their actions would have gone down in a country where they're really disliked.
While you have a point that the motivations of many of these guys aren't ones we should have sympathy with, their tactics are pretty much par for the course.
Given that much of the fault seems to sheet home to the civilians who ultimately tell the military what to do (ie the Bush administration) it follows that those people should also be fired.A very convenient opportunity to do so is coming up in a bit over a week.
It truly astounds me that there remains a distinct possibility that the American people won't do so.
What it has demonstrated it's absolutely useless at is occupying a country and dealing with an insurgency. I'm no expert, but from what I've read a fair whack of blame should be placed on the political leadership that didn't do any planning for this. However, there is also an issue that the US doesn't train or prepare its military for such jobs. That's just asking for trouble.
In the real White House, we know that Dick Cheney's the one giving the orders to Bush the Lesser... :/
Surely you're not taking the nuisance seriously enough. Wouldn't this be more proportionate to the annoyance caused? It worked for Michael Douglas in Falling Down...
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for...
Who the hell are these guys, what makes them experts on voting, and more to the point who the hell is paying them to do this?
And, if I recall correctly, they use fuel very inefficiently; the fuel consumption is like nothing else you've ever seen. The friction losses on this thing would probably be far worse, so unless there's breakthroughs in the design elsewhere I'd be very surprised if you could carry enough fuel to keep the things powered up.
The Economist straw poll was done by randomly selecting the authors from economics journals. You are correct that it may not be representative of economists' views as a whole, as it represents only those economists who publish in those journals, and not everybody responded.
However, your argument that 364 self-selected economists is more representative than a survey of 56 (sort-of) randomly selected ones is just idiotic. If I asked 100 random Americans if they supported Kerry, that's not a terribly good way to judge who's going to win the Presidential election . But it's sure as hell better than asking the 2,509 delegates to the RNC.
Basic economics and statistics training in the education system, for starters.
Let me guess, you don't remember what the interest rate was under Fraser, do you? Go and look it up. Then look up the history of interest rates over the whole of the Hawke-Keating era, not just the peak. Then look at *real* interest rates - rates after inflation. Oh, and then look at graphs of Australian interest rates versus global rates. The reason why absolute rates are low here now is because they are low everywhere, and inflation was brought under control by Keating (mainly through those high interest rates in the early 1990's, as well as the Accord keeping wage increases down). Then go and look at housing affordability, which is worse now than at any other time mainly due to the Reserve Bank leaving rates too low, incredibly irresponsible tax policies encouraging housing overinvestment over more productive investment, and the stupid bloody first home owners grant - all this has achieved is an enormous property bubble that has left people in a far worse position than Labor ever did if the economy tanks, which it will soon. As well as unemployment and inflation, a lot of people are going to be left with negative equity in their overgeared homes. Ever heard of negative equity? Let's just say it's left a lot of "aspirationals" sore and sorry for themselves during recessions in the past few decades. Oh, and go and do a bit of reading on a body called the Reserve Bank, and how *it* controls interest rates since reforms Labor did, not the government.
And, no, the Australian voting population are not idiots. They have voted on their self interest with the information readily available to them. They are just horribly ill-informed, and it's going to bite them (and by the sound of it you) in the arse.
And the DPRK doesn't really want to piss us off - we are in a fairly unique position, as a close American ally that has diplomatic relations with the North Koreans. They may be tyrannical thugs, but they're not stupid either, and that diplomatic channel is surely worth more to them than hacking a few corporate websites.
As for Australia's defence and intelligence agencies, well, we're a branch office for America, and they let us in on a lot (but not all, obviously) of their stuff. That wouldn't happen unless the US agencies were comfortable that the only people that can hack in are, well, themselves...
There's a good reason for that. The great mass of undecided voters are simply incapable of appreciating nuanced answers.
I'll give an example from our own recent national elections. Most Australians are on variable-rate mortgages - if general interest rates go up, their home loan repayments go up. That makes home loan interest rates a big political issue. In the recent Australian elections, the incumbent conservatives ran on the claim that interest rates would be lower if they were retained. This was rubbish, but to explain why it's rubbish is devilishly difficult to do in a campaign TV commercial to a bunch of economic illiterates.
The conservatives not only won, they won more seats than they held last time. Apparently, analysis of the area-by-area vote shows that their increased vote came almost exclusively from one-income families with big mortgages...who are about to cop it in the neck when interest rates do inevitably rise in the next couple of years.
The average Fortune 1000 CEO earned $8.3 million a year, way back in 2001. That's 22,000 USD per day. So, just in non-productive CEO time alone, sending the CEO to Australia costs 44,000 USD, on top of the 14,000 USD or so for the first-class return ticket. That's a big cost - not to mention that this technology offers the possibility of intercontinental day trips, something that is simply not possible now. There are people - not many, but some - for whom these features will be worth paying a lot of money for. Just like aircraft in their early days, in fact...
Also, I gather there would also be a market for really fast package delivery, which could theoretically carry even higher per-kilogram costs. Imagine if a crucial part is required to resume production at a major automotive plant. How much is a day's lost production worth?
Further to this, one thing I *do* know about GA's is that you need a fitness function to evaluate the output. With codecs, the ultimate fitness function is somebody watching the video and judging how good it looks, and that can't be automated (because the whole point is how the video is perceived by a human). Hence, I would be very dubious that GA's are much use in creating a video codec.
That's essentially what America has already. The response of its enemies? Developing nuclear weapons of their own, and resorting to terrorism...
To keep a nuclear weapon from exploding is relatively straightforward, because you have to actively push it together with explosives to make it do so. By contrast, an antimatter device desperately "wants" to explode, and you have to constantly work to keep it from doing so. The article briefly mentions the idea of storing antimatter as "positronium" putting a positron and an electron in orbit round each other. I'm no physicist, but creating a material sounds like an astounding technical feat, and there still remains the question of how stable it is.
The second point is that there is no antimatter available to us in nature; we have to make it in a particle accelerator. This is exceedingly inefficient; from what I've current accelerators are about 0.000004% efficient at doing this. According to the linked paper, physicists think they can improve this to about 0.01% with extrapolations of existing technology. Even that makes the cost of producing explosives purely using matter-antimatter reactions prohibitive.
As has been said a number of times on this thread, it makes much more sense to use antimatter as a trigger for a fusion reaction. This would provide a scalable, lightweight, and fallout-free (or almost so) weapon at orders of magnitude less expense. The containment problem would still be a serious issue, but the amount of antimatter you'd need to contain would be far, far smaller.
Of course, Australia is empty enough that there are plenty of roads where you're unlikely to meet other traffic, let alone police... let's just say I don't take the freeway when I go to visit my parents.
I don't know where you get your danger statistics on Australia's freeways, though. Could you point me to a reference?
Try driving in Germany some time; most people drive at 100mph-plus on the autobahns. You soon learn that 60mph (or whatever the highway speed limit in your jurisdiction is) is not some magic number above which a car turns from a safe device into an imminent disaster area.
Deep down in his heart of hearts, I'm sure Nick knows perfectly well that trying to use computer vision to read road signs is at best a temporary hack for a legacy system. However, it's a nice application to show to wowser politicians to get them to fund his real interest - computer vision algorithms.
It's the same reason why a lot of American scientists take money from the armed forces; they're neutral at best about the application, but it's a great way to get funding.