The cost of these things is around $2 today. It has almost nothing to do with making money off sales of adapters and EVERYTHING to do with people plugging the wrong adapter into some device.
You connect an 18 volt adapter to a cell phone and it fries the phone. You connect a 5 volt adapter to a notebook and it either does nothing or fries the adapter. In either case, there is a potential for fires and other liabilities. Just having it not work is enough for most manufacturers. You give people something that either will work or cannot be connected and you just reduced the likelyhood of (a) a support call or (b) a lawsuit.
The support calls are bad, but the lawsuits are much worse. Do you not believe that someone would sue because it was possible to connect the wrong adapter to some device and when this is done it would cause the device to burst into flames? Don't believe me? Connect 110VAC (or higher) to a cell phone and see what happens. If your average consumer could do this, someone would. And some lawyer would then get rich off suing the company that was dumb enough to make it possible.
This has almost nothing to do with making money off selling the adapters, which is almost a nusiance to most manufacturers. Which is why you can buy an OEM Dell power supply for $20 from China but buying from Dell will cost you $170. They don't really want to sell them at all, never mind they cost maybe $8 in quantity. Your cell phone charger is more like $2, but if you want to buy one from Motorola they will charge you $45. Again, they don't want to sell them at all.
And get all the devices to agree on a single power requirement so the same adapter could really be used for all of them? Unlikely. That would be a huge design constraint in some cases... in most of the others it would just limit the creativity of the designer. Good idea for notebooks? Sure. But it probably won't happen.
A "smart" power adapter that could output the proper voltage and current (not too much, not too little) for any possible consumer device would probably cost more than 100 "dumb" power adapters. Since your average human has less than 50 (probably less than 10), this would reflect a significant cost increase. Not only that, but more than one would be required - ever want to charge your cell phone and your iPod at the same time?
The primary obstacle has been every manufacturer building their device to accept a given range of power input and not wanting the device to be overloaded (or under supplied) insures that the correct adapter and only the correct adapter will fit. This makes sense for most people that aren't going to be able to determine this otherwise.
The bigger problem is that no matter what, "climate change" is a fact of life that we have yet to deal with. It is upon us for whatever reason.
Personally, I do not believe it is all human-caused and therefore cannot be stopped or deterred by any human action. I might be wrong, but it seems an awful lot like someone observing that each morning when they awaken the sun rises and therefore believes that it is their awakening that causes the sun to rise. Somewhat arrogant, perhaps?
The problem is that we have not built things in the last 100 years or so to account for even the possibility that the climate might be variable. Reluctantly we have begun to acknowledge that it might not be a good idea to build fragile structires in the path of hurricanes. We have yet to begin to acknowledge there might be a risk to building certain types of structures in areas frequented by tornados. The thought that sea levels might change is even further from anyone's mind.
The reality is that the climate has been remarkably calm and forgiving for the last 400 years or so. Much further back than we have detailed history of. What was the climate like in 1200 AD? How about 150 AD? 2500 BC? Sorry, but all we can do is guess from some very indistinct records. We have some evidence in ice cores, some historical documents and some biological evidence. As to where the sea levels were 4500 years ago we have no idea. Clearly, there have been changes because we know, for example, that the British Isles were connected to mainland Europe some time in the past.
Humans have been around for perhaps 4.5 million years, in one form or another. The Earth's climate has a history of hundreds of millions of years before that and again, we have only the faintest idea of what it was like.
Assuming the climate is going to be the same tomorrow as it was today is a reasonable expectation. Things do not change on that scale very quickly. However, assuming the climate will be the same in 100 years as it was 100 years ago is provably false over periods of time where we have pretty decent records. George Washington dragged heavy sledges across the frozen Delaware River which is impossible today because the river doesn't freeze.
Trying to terraform the Earth to keep the climate the same way it was before is a pointless and futile exercise. Beliving that humans can control the climate is an arrogant statement that is provably false. The climate is going to change and there is nothing we can do to change that fact. If you build your house at the beachfront, do not be surprised when the water level rises.
The problem is that making batteries involves the use of chemicals. This is a watchword for environmentalists, housewives and others deeply involved in the protection of children. Any one of these people knows that chemicals are dangerous to the environment and to people. It doesn't really matter what kind of chemicals, just hearing the word "chemicals" means it is dirty, dangerous and life-threatening.
Attempting to explain to people in these groups that their glass of water contains "chemicals" will get you a lecture on the safety of drinking water in the US and the amount of pollutants that are being added to the water every day. Trying to focus the discussion back on "chemicals" like oxygen and hydrogen is a complete waste of time.
Trying to build a battery factory in the US will be met with thousands of people like this that will do their utmost to delay and defeat any measures to build such a plant. Eventually, the backers of such a plan - including the government - will give up and build it in Mexico or Singapore. Because it is not possible to build such a plant today in the US.
Sorry, but it isn't going to happen here. And no amount of money can make it happen. The people obstructing its being built aren't interested in being paid off. They know it is their lives and the lives of all of our children they are fighting for.
(a) When Mr. Government Man says to the person at the telco "Well, Form XYZ34B/NS3 says we don't need a court order, you just have to comply." and hands over a copy of a evidently properly signed and executed form XYZ34B/NS3 who the heck is going to say "No"? Because should anyone do that, the next is to bring out form ABC37Q/VR5 which says a failure to comply with XYZ34B/NS3 can possibly result in a 34 year prison term. Of course it is all BS, but it is BS conducted from a position of untimate authority. Upon someone that really doesn't know.
(b) In the US I am not aware of any legislation that says you have any such "right to privacy". There are some pretty weird interpretations of the 14th Amendment that when suitabily tortured seem to come up with something that sounds like a "right to privacy" in the right situations. But outside of Roe V. Wade, I've never heard of anyone in a legal sense asserting a true "right to privacy". You might get somewhere saying it is an illegal search violating the 4th Amendment, but I think they have that covered. At least that argument has been fought over already and lost as far as the telco monitoring is concerned.
You are conflating the spammer with the spam contractor. The spammer doesn't see any replies and has no interest in what the response rate might be. The spam contractor probably learns after the first attempt that spam doesn't really work. And moves on to other, more intrusive marketing techniques.
The problem is the spammer's services are in constant demand. Ever day some new folks decide to cash in on the potential of email marketing. They pay the spammer. As long as they are paying, the spammer has a wonderful business model.
The problem is that SpamCop treats pretty much all spam reports as golden information to be relied upon. So intelligent computer user purchases something on the Web, gets an emailed receipt and reports it as spam. This, being the one and only report, does not carry much weight but it is indeed logged and counted.
Following this savvy computer user #2 signs up for a mailing list and for some reason then reports all said mailings as spam to SpamCop. Now we have a trend - obviously this organization is a den of spammers.
Because rule #1 in the anti-spam world is "Spammers Lie", there is no point in trying to contact anyone about the behavior of the dedicated team of zealots behind SpamCop. They are anonymous, uncontactable and uncaring. Their mission is to stamp out spam in all forms and anything that is emailed that is not specifically desired at the time it is received is clearly spam. This definition covers just about anything, including receipts, mailing list sign up confirmations and subscribed-to mailings. Even those that are personalized including the date the user signed up and confirmed the subscription embedded in the email.
Email is fundamentally unusable for contacting people unless you have a prior relationship with them and they know who you are. Anything else, you may as well assume they are behind a whiltelist filter that blocks all incoming email. There is virtually no point in sending email to people unless it is their job to receive and respond to sales prospect email. Even then, you may discover they have an agressive spam filter that blocks your email. And when this filter is implemented by their outsourced email provider, nothing is going to get your email read.
If this is happening in the US, well, sorry. The parents have already decided that control of their children needs to be in the school's hands. They just do not have the interest or the motivation any longer.
The problem with that is if the employer can choose to eliminate union-staffed positions in favor of non-union staff then the union goes out the door. So the way to eliminate this problem is to make the union mandatory - the employment place becomes a "union shop".
The problem then is employees can opt out by going down the street to some other place and do the same work. Simple - you force all the employers in a given area to be a "union shop". That is how it works in the US. There are no choices once the union is voted in and there are indeed government agencies that ensure these rules are followed.
Yes, and the unions can't allow GM to renig on their obligations to pay benched staff, pay for very rich pensions and pay for ongoing eternal healthcare for retired employees.
All of this was fine in the 1960's when these clauses were put into the union contracts. Things change. Union contracts do not. About the only way out for GM is really to declare bankrupcy with court oversight drop the pension and ongoing healthcare requirements. Of course that then negates much of the benefit the union provided to the members for the last 30-40 years.
The problem with "walking away" is the whole point of a union environment is there are no non-union choices. The minute you give employees (i.e. union members) a choice between union dues or keeping their money, they often choose keeping the money. Employers can then choose as well.
No, the only way unions work is where every employer is a "union shop" and there are no choices.
Check out the current state of the highway system sometime. It is suffering from a serious lack of investment. This is the fate of just about all government monopolies. They aren't in control of their funding and nobody is going to invest in them apart from the government. The result is a cash-strapped operation that is just barely hanging on.
Check out the current state of bridges in the US sometime. Most were built in the 1960s when the government was interested. Most were last maintained in the 1970s when there was some money to do it. Sorry, no new bridges since then for most of the country.
Government owned local data infrastructure is actually a pretty good idea.
What people don't understand with this idea is that there is a very simple sequence of events that would be an utter disaster:
Government enters the data carrier business.
Regulations and tariffs control the data carrier business.
Other businesses exit the data carrier business, leaving it to government and government-sponsored entities.
Step 3 leaves the government holding the bag for the entire data infrastructure in the US. The reason is simple - in a regulated environment nobody is going to make the kind of money that attracts VC capital. There was no competition for long distance telephone service until the regulations were nearly eliminated for this very same reason.
Do you believe the government would not enact regulation to level the playing field between different infrastructure-supplying entities? Gosh, that would be a major difference all right. It would be different than any other activity the government has ever entered into. I suppose if the government was simply competing on price, service and services with all other carriers the other carriers might not decide to take their marbles and call it a day. But without regulation and all that goes with it, all you would have is another competitor in the field only this one would be using tax money to compete against commercial businesses.
No, we'd get the regulation. And end up with a government monopoly. That nobody else would want any part of.
I believe a description of this appeared in several books by Robert Heinlein. Coded stickers on the outside of the object being sent identified the location in a fashion that could be handled automatically. Maybe not with 1908 technology, but almost certainly by 1940. Today, we would use a 2D bar code and a laser scanner. By 1940 you had 6-minute faxing which could be adapted for specialized coding for locations using motors and phototubes.
Also, you would certainly handle manual routing like USPS and UPS do today. You do background, drug and credit checks out the wazoo on people working in those locations. And then search them coming in and going out. And in 1908 your average Joe was far, far more trustworthy than today. People thought the law meant something and nice people just didn't do things that led to trouble with the law.
All Linux needs is a dedicated hardware manufacturer that is creating complete solutions for users in hardware and software. For example, the entire OS X, iTunes, iPud, iTunes store solution. Where are the applications like that?
Part of the problem is that it would be rather expensive to engineer a car to meet 50 different emission standards. Nobody, except the state's showing their control, wants that.
So why not make it meet the strictest standards? Partly because it just keeps pushing the costs higher for stuff nobody needs in the other 49 states. There is also nothing that suggests there would be one "strictest" standard.
California was allowed to set requirements that no other state had for quite a while. In the beginning it required reworking and adjusting a car that was imported into California before it could be sold there. So you would see cars selling for $3,000 to $5,000 higher in California. Should you be so silly as to buy a car in Arizona when you were a California resident you would be faced with paying that extra amount to have the car modified before it could be licensed. So in a way, we have tried this already and it was a disaster. It might have helped out air quality in California or it might not have. Nobody really knows.
I'd say the biggest problem would be conflicting requirements between states. If this was allowed, and so far the Federal Government hasn't made it clear that such state level regulation would never be allowed, you would have a different set of hardware for each state for each car. Sure, California could have their regulations but there would be nothing to prevent Nevada from having different and mutually exclusive requirements.
The only sensible way is to have one Federal standard. It works for car owners, it works for car manufacturers and it can work for everyone else as well. The problem seems to be enacting some realistic legislation at the Federal level.
Also, it isn't going to help if some states are allowed to regulate batteries for electric and hybrid cars. Not long ago California prevented sales of cars with lots and lots of lead-acid batteries in them because of the hazards of both lead and acid. I do not know what the state of things are today, but there are plenty of people doing electric car conversions using lead-acid batteries. I suspect it is not legal to buy, sell, modify or license such a car today in California. There is no reason to think that other states will be any more forgiving about toxic pollutants if each state is allowed to pass their own regulations.
So what is the NSA chartered to do exactly? I thought it was eavesdropping on all foreign communications, especially those where one end is in the USA. And hasn't it been that way since the NSA was created in 1952?
If the government chooses to compete with telecom companies, the result will clearly be telecom companies exiting the ISP business as it would no longer be profitable in a highly regulated environment.
How many postal services offering letter delivery are there?
Simple answer - limit technology to a level which does no harm. Anything after about 1900 or so is going to create pollution and harm. No escaping it really. Are we ready to bite that bullet? If you want the Earth to be a pristine paradise you better start thinking this way.
ALl of the Internet is fraud, or at least the part that people pay attention to. It is almost impossible to police it because about all you can do is track things back to a computer, if you are lucky. It is not possible to connect anything to an individual - without the individual's cooperation.
So fraud will always be with us. And if you trust anything you read on the Internet you are just being naive. Anything that pretends to be unbiased news is put out by people with their own agenda. Anything that pretends to be "informative" is advertising.
In 1850 there were no nuclear power plants. There were no coal generating plants.
Everything was powered by either wood burning stoves or the sun. Period. Of course, there were only about 200 million people on the planet then, but that is about the limit for true sustainability. True sustainability means that natural processes reclaim all wastes and no wastes accumulate. That is how it was in 1850 or so.
By 1900 there were too many people and too many horses - large cities were being buried in horse manure. Nope, about 1850 is the limit. If we want "sustainable" that is pretty much the target. And then we can forget about getting resources from off-planet - they won't be needed.
It will be somewhat difficult to get the population down to 200 million people. If Al Gore is leading them, do you think the excess people will follow?
Build power lines? High voltage transmission lines? You have got to be kidding.
Everyone (or at least everyone that reads lots of conspiracy theory stuff on the Internet) knows that power lines cause infertility, mental retardation, and a host of other maladies. No way is anyone going to build more of these things unless it is somewhere where there are no humans or animals and never likely to be either of them. Ever. Maybe in Antartica but certainly not in the USA.
The first proposal won't make it past the environmental impact study.
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The cost of these things is around $2 today. It has almost nothing to do with making money off sales of adapters and EVERYTHING to do with people plugging the wrong adapter into some device.
You connect an 18 volt adapter to a cell phone and it fries the phone. You connect a 5 volt adapter to a notebook and it either does nothing or fries the adapter. In either case, there is a potential for fires and other liabilities. Just having it not work is enough for most manufacturers. You give people something that either will work or cannot be connected and you just reduced the likelyhood of (a) a support call or (b) a lawsuit.
The support calls are bad, but the lawsuits are much worse. Do you not believe that someone would sue because it was possible to connect the wrong adapter to some device and when this is done it would cause the device to burst into flames? Don't believe me? Connect 110VAC (or higher) to a cell phone and see what happens. If your average consumer could do this, someone would. And some lawyer would then get rich off suing the company that was dumb enough to make it possible.
This has almost nothing to do with making money off selling the adapters, which is almost a nusiance to most manufacturers. Which is why you can buy an OEM Dell power supply for $20 from China but buying from Dell will cost you $170. They don't really want to sell them at all, never mind they cost maybe $8 in quantity. Your cell phone charger is more like $2, but if you want to buy one from Motorola they will charge you $45. Again, they don't want to sell them at all.
And get all the devices to agree on a single power requirement so the same adapter could really be used for all of them? Unlikely. That would be a huge design constraint in some cases... in most of the others it would just limit the creativity of the designer. Good idea for notebooks? Sure. But it probably won't happen.
A "smart" power adapter that could output the proper voltage and current (not too much, not too little) for any possible consumer device would probably cost more than 100 "dumb" power adapters. Since your average human has less than 50 (probably less than 10), this would reflect a significant cost increase. Not only that, but more than one would be required - ever want to charge your cell phone and your iPod at the same time?
The primary obstacle has been every manufacturer building their device to accept a given range of power input and not wanting the device to be overloaded (or under supplied) insures that the correct adapter and only the correct adapter will fit. This makes sense for most people that aren't going to be able to determine this otherwise.
I'm afraid you're fighting a losing battle...
In many countries a government agency has the exclusive right to produce maps. Attempting to compete with the government results in being shut down.
Is it not the right of a country to determine who shall make maps?
The bigger problem is that no matter what, "climate change" is a fact of life that we have yet to deal with. It is upon us for whatever reason.
Personally, I do not believe it is all human-caused and therefore cannot be stopped or deterred by any human action. I might be wrong, but it seems an awful lot like someone observing that each morning when they awaken the sun rises and therefore believes that it is their awakening that causes the sun to rise. Somewhat arrogant, perhaps?
The problem is that we have not built things in the last 100 years or so to account for even the possibility that the climate might be variable. Reluctantly we have begun to acknowledge that it might not be a good idea to build fragile structires in the path of hurricanes. We have yet to begin to acknowledge there might be a risk to building certain types of structures in areas frequented by tornados. The thought that sea levels might change is even further from anyone's mind.
The reality is that the climate has been remarkably calm and forgiving for the last 400 years or so. Much further back than we have detailed history of. What was the climate like in 1200 AD? How about 150 AD? 2500 BC? Sorry, but all we can do is guess from some very indistinct records. We have some evidence in ice cores, some historical documents and some biological evidence. As to where the sea levels were 4500 years ago we have no idea. Clearly, there have been changes because we know, for example, that the British Isles were connected to mainland Europe some time in the past.
Humans have been around for perhaps 4.5 million years, in one form or another. The Earth's climate has a history of hundreds of millions of years before that and again, we have only the faintest idea of what it was like.
Assuming the climate is going to be the same tomorrow as it was today is a reasonable expectation. Things do not change on that scale very quickly. However, assuming the climate will be the same in 100 years as it was 100 years ago is provably false over periods of time where we have pretty decent records. George Washington dragged heavy sledges across the frozen Delaware River which is impossible today because the river doesn't freeze.
Trying to terraform the Earth to keep the climate the same way it was before is a pointless and futile exercise. Beliving that humans can control the climate is an arrogant statement that is provably false. The climate is going to change and there is nothing we can do to change that fact. If you build your house at the beachfront, do not be surprised when the water level rises.
The problem is that making batteries involves the use of chemicals. This is a watchword for environmentalists, housewives and others deeply involved in the protection of children. Any one of these people knows that chemicals are dangerous to the environment and to people. It doesn't really matter what kind of chemicals, just hearing the word "chemicals" means it is dirty, dangerous and life-threatening.
Attempting to explain to people in these groups that their glass of water contains "chemicals" will get you a lecture on the safety of drinking water in the US and the amount of pollutants that are being added to the water every day. Trying to focus the discussion back on "chemicals" like oxygen and hydrogen is a complete waste of time.
Trying to build a battery factory in the US will be met with thousands of people like this that will do their utmost to delay and defeat any measures to build such a plant. Eventually, the backers of such a plan - including the government - will give up and build it in Mexico or Singapore. Because it is not possible to build such a plant today in the US.
Sorry, but it isn't going to happen here. And no amount of money can make it happen. The people obstructing its being built aren't interested in being paid off. They know it is their lives and the lives of all of our children they are fighting for.
(a) When Mr. Government Man says to the person at the telco "Well, Form XYZ34B/NS3 says we don't need a court order, you just have to comply." and hands over a copy of a evidently properly signed and executed form XYZ34B/NS3 who the heck is going to say "No"? Because should anyone do that, the next is to bring out form ABC37Q/VR5 which says a failure to comply with XYZ34B/NS3 can possibly result in a 34 year prison term. Of course it is all BS, but it is BS conducted from a position of untimate authority. Upon someone that really doesn't know.
(b) In the US I am not aware of any legislation that says you have any such "right to privacy". There are some pretty weird interpretations of the 14th Amendment that when suitabily tortured seem to come up with something that sounds like a "right to privacy" in the right situations. But outside of Roe V. Wade, I've never heard of anyone in a legal sense asserting a true "right to privacy". You might get somewhere saying it is an illegal search violating the 4th Amendment, but I think they have that covered. At least that argument has been fought over already and lost as far as the telco monitoring is concerned.
You are conflating the spammer with the spam contractor. The spammer doesn't see any replies and has no interest in what the response rate might be. The spam contractor probably learns after the first attempt that spam doesn't really work. And moves on to other, more intrusive marketing techniques.
The problem is the spammer's services are in constant demand. Ever day some new folks decide to cash in on the potential of email marketing. They pay the spammer. As long as they are paying, the spammer has a wonderful business model.
The problem is that SpamCop treats pretty much all spam reports as golden information to be relied upon. So intelligent computer user purchases something on the Web, gets an emailed receipt and reports it as spam. This, being the one and only report, does not carry much weight but it is indeed logged and counted.
Following this savvy computer user #2 signs up for a mailing list and for some reason then reports all said mailings as spam to SpamCop. Now we have a trend - obviously this organization is a den of spammers.
Because rule #1 in the anti-spam world is "Spammers Lie", there is no point in trying to contact anyone about the behavior of the dedicated team of zealots behind SpamCop. They are anonymous, uncontactable and uncaring. Their mission is to stamp out spam in all forms and anything that is emailed that is not specifically desired at the time it is received is clearly spam. This definition covers just about anything, including receipts, mailing list sign up confirmations and subscribed-to mailings. Even those that are personalized including the date the user signed up and confirmed the subscription embedded in the email.
Email is fundamentally unusable for contacting people unless you have a prior relationship with them and they know who you are. Anything else, you may as well assume they are behind a whiltelist filter that blocks all incoming email. There is virtually no point in sending email to people unless it is their job to receive and respond to sales prospect email. Even then, you may discover they have an agressive spam filter that blocks your email. And when this filter is implemented by their outsourced email provider, nothing is going to get your email read.
If this is happening in the US, well, sorry. The parents have already decided that control of their children needs to be in the school's hands. They just do not have the interest or the motivation any longer.
The problem with that is if the employer can choose to eliminate union-staffed positions in favor of non-union staff then the union goes out the door. So the way to eliminate this problem is to make the union mandatory - the employment place becomes a "union shop".
The problem then is employees can opt out by going down the street to some other place and do the same work. Simple - you force all the employers in a given area to be a "union shop". That is how it works in the US. There are no choices once the union is voted in and there are indeed government agencies that ensure these rules are followed.
Yes, and the unions can't allow GM to renig on their obligations to pay benched staff, pay for very rich pensions and pay for ongoing eternal healthcare for retired employees.
All of this was fine in the 1960's when these clauses were put into the union contracts. Things change. Union contracts do not. About the only way out for GM is really to declare bankrupcy with court oversight drop the pension and ongoing healthcare requirements. Of course that then negates much of the benefit the union provided to the members for the last 30-40 years.
The problem with "walking away" is the whole point of a union environment is there are no non-union choices. The minute you give employees (i.e. union members) a choice between union dues or keeping their money, they often choose keeping the money. Employers can then choose as well.
No, the only way unions work is where every employer is a "union shop" and there are no choices.
Check out the current state of the highway system sometime. It is suffering from a serious lack of investment. This is the fate of just about all government monopolies. They aren't in control of their funding and nobody is going to invest in them apart from the government. The result is a cash-strapped operation that is just barely hanging on.
Check out the current state of bridges in the US sometime. Most were built in the 1960s when the government was interested. Most were last maintained in the 1970s when there was some money to do it. Sorry, no new bridges since then for most of the country.
Government owned local data infrastructure is actually a pretty good idea.
What people don't understand with this idea is that there is a very simple sequence of events that would be an utter disaster:
Step 3 leaves the government holding the bag for the entire data infrastructure in the US. The reason is simple - in a regulated environment nobody is going to make the kind of money that attracts VC capital. There was no competition for long distance telephone service until the regulations were nearly eliminated for this very same reason.
Do you believe the government would not enact regulation to level the playing field between different infrastructure-supplying entities? Gosh, that would be a major difference all right. It would be different than any other activity the government has ever entered into. I suppose if the government was simply competing on price, service and services with all other carriers the other carriers might not decide to take their marbles and call it a day. But without regulation and all that goes with it, all you would have is another competitor in the field only this one would be using tax money to compete against commercial businesses.
No, we'd get the regulation. And end up with a government monopoly. That nobody else would want any part of.
I believe a description of this appeared in several books by Robert Heinlein. Coded stickers on the outside of the object being sent identified the location in a fashion that could be handled automatically. Maybe not with 1908 technology, but almost certainly by 1940. Today, we would use a 2D bar code and a laser scanner. By 1940 you had 6-minute faxing which could be adapted for specialized coding for locations using motors and phototubes.
Also, you would certainly handle manual routing like USPS and UPS do today. You do background, drug and credit checks out the wazoo on people working in those locations. And then search them coming in and going out. And in 1908 your average Joe was far, far more trustworthy than today. People thought the law meant something and nice people just didn't do things that led to trouble with the law.
All Linux needs is a dedicated hardware manufacturer that is creating complete solutions for users in hardware and software. For example, the entire OS X, iTunes, iPud, iTunes store solution. Where are the applications like that?
Get some and we can talk.
Part of the problem is that it would be rather expensive to engineer a car to meet 50 different emission standards. Nobody, except the state's showing their control, wants that.
So why not make it meet the strictest standards? Partly because it just keeps pushing the costs higher for stuff nobody needs in the other 49 states. There is also nothing that suggests there would be one "strictest" standard.
California was allowed to set requirements that no other state had for quite a while. In the beginning it required reworking and adjusting a car that was imported into California before it could be sold there. So you would see cars selling for $3,000 to $5,000 higher in California. Should you be so silly as to buy a car in Arizona when you were a California resident you would be faced with paying that extra amount to have the car modified before it could be licensed. So in a way, we have tried this already and it was a disaster. It might have helped out air quality in California or it might not have. Nobody really knows.
I'd say the biggest problem would be conflicting requirements between states. If this was allowed, and so far the Federal Government hasn't made it clear that such state level regulation would never be allowed, you would have a different set of hardware for each state for each car. Sure, California could have their regulations but there would be nothing to prevent Nevada from having different and mutually exclusive requirements.
The only sensible way is to have one Federal standard. It works for car owners, it works for car manufacturers and it can work for everyone else as well. The problem seems to be enacting some realistic legislation at the Federal level.
Also, it isn't going to help if some states are allowed to regulate batteries for electric and hybrid cars. Not long ago California prevented sales of cars with lots and lots of lead-acid batteries in them because of the hazards of both lead and acid. I do not know what the state of things are today, but there are plenty of people doing electric car conversions using lead-acid batteries. I suspect it is not legal to buy, sell, modify or license such a car today in California. There is no reason to think that other states will be any more forgiving about toxic pollutants if each state is allowed to pass their own regulations.
So what is the NSA chartered to do exactly? I thought it was eavesdropping on all foreign communications, especially those where one end is in the USA. And hasn't it been that way since the NSA was created in 1952?
If the government chooses to compete with telecom companies, the result will clearly be telecom companies exiting the ISP business as it would no longer be profitable in a highly regulated environment.
How many postal services offering letter delivery are there?
FTK is useless for CDs and DVDs. It is focused on hard drive and thumb drives.
Check out http://www.infinadyne.com/cddvd_diagnostic.html - it recovers video directly. And we know how to deal with discs that do not mount because of a damaged lead-in.
Yes, we are going to be talking with the Santa Cruz DA and police about this.
The backup process is simple and works the same as for DVDs - if someone won't give you another one, reach out and take one.
Simple answer - limit technology to a level which does no harm. Anything after about 1900 or so is going to create pollution and harm. No escaping it really. Are we ready to bite that bullet? If you want the Earth to be a pristine paradise you better start thinking this way.
ALl of the Internet is fraud, or at least the part that people pay attention to. It is almost impossible to police it because about all you can do is track things back to a computer, if you are lucky. It is not possible to connect anything to an individual - without the individual's cooperation.
So fraud will always be with us. And if you trust anything you read on the Internet you are just being naive. Anything that pretends to be unbiased news is put out by people with their own agenda. Anything that pretends to be "informative" is advertising.
In 1850 there were no nuclear power plants. There were no coal generating plants.
Everything was powered by either wood burning stoves or the sun. Period. Of course, there were only about 200 million people on the planet then, but that is about the limit for true sustainability. True sustainability means that natural processes reclaim all wastes and no wastes accumulate. That is how it was in 1850 or so.
By 1900 there were too many people and too many horses - large cities were being buried in horse manure. Nope, about 1850 is the limit. If we want "sustainable" that is pretty much the target. And then we can forget about getting resources from off-planet - they won't be needed.
It will be somewhat difficult to get the population down to 200 million people. If Al Gore is leading them, do you think the excess people will follow?
Build power lines? High voltage transmission lines? You have got to be kidding.
Everyone (or at least everyone that reads lots of conspiracy theory stuff on the Internet) knows that power lines cause infertility, mental retardation, and a host of other maladies. No way is anyone going to build more of these things unless it is somewhere where there are no humans or animals and never likely to be either of them. Ever. Maybe in Antartica but certainly not in the USA.
The first proposal won't make it past the environmental impact study.