There are two problems with consumer electronics. First of all, it is an extremely competitive market where if you aren't directly competing with the others in your market you are left behind. There isn't room for most consumer electronics companies to bring a brand-new, untested, product to market on their own. If it flops it could kill off the company. Yes, the margins in that business are that thin.
The second problem is that no matter how cheaply you think you could make something, the folks really building this stuff will be forced to make it cheaper. If you think it could be made for $800 and sold for $1600 then likely as not it would actually be made for $100 and sold for $2000. Of course, the manufacturer would only get maybe $200 for the unit, if that. Of course we are talking about it being dumbed down in hardware and having huge requirements in the software to make up for whatever the hardware lacks. But that is how mass market consumer electronics works. Today we have DVD players selling for $40 which cost $5 to manufacture. All through the sales channel everyone is taking their cut and the retailer is lucky to get 10% of the selling price. But if you aren't feeding the channel, you simply have no sales - nobody is going to work for free.
Look at other examples in the consumer electronics world. This does not include fancy phones and computers today because they aren't really mass-market items. Look at stuff that Walmart sells. Check out the TV they are sellilng for $600 - it is probably not costing the manufacturer more than about $60 to make it. Maybe not even $30.
So the problem is if it can't be made for $100 it is simply going to drive the price to the end user up and up. Will consumers pay that for a radio? Not most of them, so now you are in Apple territory - high cost products that are of a very specialized nature that only a few consumers will buy. Apple was able to pull it off because of their branding and a huge amount of marketing money behind the products. It paid off for them. So far, it really hasn't paid off for anyone else. And most companies are very, very risk adverse these days.
If you could educate people in that way it would be really nice. This is similar to the idea of sitting down and saying "I will think brilliant thoughts today". It doesn't work.
There are some people with the brain construction to manipulate abstract symbols and the rest can't. Somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of the population can do it. This means they can do higher math, things like computer programming and pretty much anything where you are manipulating symbols instead of real objects.
The remainder of the population, which could be as high as 60%, can't do it and they cannot be trained to do it. No amount of education is going to make them be able to do it. It is like trying to get a colorblind person to recognize the color green. Their brain isn't wired that way.
What does that mean? Well, it means these people can be perfectly successful in doing plenty of things that need doing, such as most of the trades. They can work in a factory doing just about anything on the factory floor. But they cannot push figures around in a spreadsheet when the figures represent something else. As long as what they are manipulating is a concrete object or at least something they can see in front of them they can do it. Abstract symbols? Nope. If it involves moving an icon around which represents something else, they are going to have lots of trouble with it. It doesn't have anything to do with "intelligence" either, so you can't just say these people are stupid and pass them by that way.
Most educators have known this for maybe 60-70 years or so. Some of them have come out and said it but it is a dangerous thing to say in current educational circles.
What we are doing is attempting to remake society in a way that will exclude the portion of the population that can't manipulate abstract symbols. We want to remake the factory floor so it is controlled from a remote station where the user pushes around little icons. We want to have airplanes that are flown by moving little icons around from a remote location. We want everyone to be a "knowledge worker" and uses fancy 3D displays to control things in the real world. Well, we are setting ourselves up for a huge problem where as much as 60% of the population isn't going to be able to interact with things that way. There is no training, no education and no familiarization that will fix this problem. The only way to do it is to really have people interacting with real physical objects. If we do not have jobs like that, we are going to have a huge segment of the population that someone is just going to have to take care of. For their entire lives.
Let's see... today in California marijuana is more-or-less legal. It is currently not taxed by the government, although that may change. The selling price is approximately the same as the street price from illegal sources in Chicago.
These things together mean that the pro-legalization folks have not a clue. When marijuana sales are taxed, and they will be perhaps by state, local and federal governments, the prices will rise to accomodate the new taxes. This will mean that legal marijuana will be somewhat more expensive than the illegal imports.
It is unlikely that the people buying marijuana will be swayed by the "patrotic" aspects of buying more expensive legal weed than cheaper illegal weed. I suspect that the same economics apply to cocaine.
Other drugs, like heroin, might work out a lot differently. Maybe the right answer is to get everyone that has an addictive personality - one subject to being addicted to anything from gambling to drugs - hooked on heroin. It would be cheaper and heroin addicts are a lot easier to manage.
Only if the minimum wage is universally enforced. If it isn't and one country has it and another one does not then it is meaningless.
Same thing goes if the US were to have a trade agreement with China, India or Chad that workers had to be paid $10 an hour. A French company could go in, get the goods produced with workers being paid $0.30 an hour and ship them to the US - there would be nothing wrong with that and it would not violate any trade agreements.
You see, if there is a possibility of arbitrage it will happen. You can't stop it without having one set of rules that equally applies the world over. Which means no more soverign governments - one world, one government, one set of rules. Of course in today's world that is absurd, right?
Except the "99%" might just decide it would be fun to try and vote it in. The fact that it would actually be unworkable long-term is meaningless to a mob and what we have today is a mob struggling mightily for mob rule.
The only way "globalism" works is for there to be a single government with one set of rules for everyone. If you don't have that you will have China devaluing its currency to drive prices lower. You will have Mexican workers being paid $2 a day in Mexico and being paid $6 an hour in the US - of course there will be stream of people coming across for $6 an hour!
Whereever there is the possibility for arbitrage you are going to find someone to put a deal together. Arbitrage is simply taking advantage of dissimilar prices, so they only way to eliminate it is to make sure all the prices for labor and goods are the same. In the world today we cannot enforce all the rules being equal.
The solution is to cut back on the "globalism" in a big way. If the option simply does not exist to exploit African workers to do work for US entities then we no longer care that the Africans are being paid $0.30 a day for their labor - which may be appropriate for their cost of living. Similarly, if it costs $100 to ship a DVD player from China to the US then the fact that it cost $5 to manufacturer it in China is no longer relevant. So how do we get back there? War is probably the only reasonable way to do it. If every ship from China could be carrying a city-destroying nuclear weapon the US would block the ships. If every shipment of food from Africa to France could be poisoned, France would go back to supporting farmers and stop importing food at prices cheaper than French farmers can grow it.
The alternative is one tyrant that takes over the world. Soon I think the workers of the world will consider this to be a reasonable solution.
The BSA works on behalf of their member organizations and ONLY their member organizations. This means that Microsoft, Adobe and a few others have their services but anyone else does not. So unless they are using a Microsoft Spamming tool or one from Adobe it doesn't matter if they are pirating it or not. Essentally, nobody cares unless you are one of the select few belonging to the BSA.
As to distributing CP, all that is needed is some kind of hint - "Daddy, I saw pictures of naked kids on Uncle Fred's computer" and local law enforcement has enough probable cause to sieze computers. Now don't say I didn't warn you but turning in false accusations to harrass and intimidate someone is frowned upon rather severely.
Yes, and considering the value of the relationship you can sue to collect your $0. The "agreed terms" are certainly being abrogated but you do not have anything of value happening here.
A court is more likely to fine you for wasting their time.
You misunderstand the function of the government. If we wanted an "efficient" government we would have 100x the laws we currently have. The government would be able to pass new funding resolutions, new laws, new regulations on the content of food, etc., etc., etc. and they woudl be able to do this very very quickly. Hundreds of news laws each week.
Instead, what we have is a system that is designed to provide gridlock, obstructionism and anything but efficiency. The very notion of a bicameral debating society insures that little is going to get done unless it is really, really important and everyone agrees right away. So we have endless periods where they find something that people can agree upon, like naming a post office after some dead person. And every once in a while a new law actually does get passed, usually by the slimmest of margins.
This is the way it is supposed to work, and if it wasn't working so incredibly inefficiently we would all be in lots of trouble. Dictatorships are efficient. Monarchies can be efficient, until they get bogged down with endless ministers and advisors. Parlimentory systems are never efficient and anytime you have a bicameral system you know it was designed from the beginning with a lack of efficiency in mind.
The problem with building a large powerplant in the middle of nowhere is that you have a huge problem with getting the electricity to somewhere where it can be used. These little things called transmission lines have losses. They are also viewed by an extremely vocal minority as extremely hazardous and this minority will do anything to insure that they are not constructed.
This is why the "smart grid" idea on a small scale (variable pricing, remote controlled electric meters) will work but the idea of new superconducting transmission lines is pure fantasy. Today you have utility companies actually contemplating running cables through lakes to avoid the lines being visible so the protesters don't gather chanting under the lines.
Electricity doesn't travel well and is really does need to be generated near where it is used. Trying to put nuclear plants somewhere where they cannot be seen and treating every plant as a direct threat to a population center is a mistake. The plants do need to be safe and this is possible to do. We also need to stop utilties building plants designed with a 20-year lifespan and then leaving the plant standing for all time as a hazardous waste site for someone to clean up in 100 years. A nuclear plant should be designed with a far longer lifespan from the beginning.
The other option is the "1850 solution" or the "Amish solution". Turn it off. Turn it all off. We will all be safe and things will be far less polluting. But there will be few, if any computers and the candle companies will really make out well.
All it would take is to raise the price of electricity to $100 a KWh.
I've been in Germany and there are two explanations for what you see there with solar panels: electric prices are really, really high or there are tremendous subsidies for solar panels, such large subsidies that it is basically free to install. Either of these techniques would probably work in the US, but really high prices would be far simpler in our current times. The government could add a $99.88 tax per KWh (considering much of the country is paying $0.12 a KWh now) and anyone with a spare $30,000 would have a big array of solar panels on their roof in a few months.
Traveling through Germany you see homes and businesses with $100,000 or more (US prices) of solar installations all over. Not just a few places but quite widespread. What would push a small business (like a lumberyard or plumbing warehouse) to spend $100,000 on a solar installation? Well, I suppose it could be an extremely unreliable electric power system as well, but my guess is that it is either subsidy or insane pricing of electricity.
We could push for that in the US. It would mean that electricity would become a luxury overnight and candle sales would skyrocket, but we could be 55% renewable in a short period of time easily. It is all a matter of priorities.
Another benefit of Blackberry is the device security check itself. Try "rooting" a BB handset. When it boots, the on-board security check will fail. Try installing a trojan - easy because BB allows installation of any signed Java application - and again it will fail at boot-time.
I suppose if you tried for a long time you might figure out what they are checking and be able to sneak something malicious in without tripping the security check. However, it is telling that nobody has done it yet even with huge incentives for stealing email, passwords and all sort of other stuff from high-end corporate executives. Wouldn't someone in China really like to get a copy of some VP's email at Cisco? Sure they would. Except it hasn't happened yet and is unlikely to ever happen.
That is probably the biggest single advantage of BlackBerry - you can distribute the handsets to people that get their PC compromised in 2 hours of reading email and not have any worries about what they are doing with their phones. And this doesn't mean the phones are locked down to prevent the user from doing anything with them, although that is possible as well.
This is one area where BlackBerry wins completely over Android which has been compromised several times even through the Android app store. I don't think Apple is completely immune to this kind of problem either, but so far the app store has been filtering out bad stuff pretty well.
The problem today is that students are led to believe they must have a college education in order to get a "real" job. Hiring managers are led to believe this as well, so we have college-educated people doing laborer's jobs. The truth of the matter is that it makes the hiring manager's job easier to filter resumes for only college graduates even when hiring a truck driver.
The reality part of this is that there is a fairly simple division that can be made in the general cateogory of employment in the world today. There are jobs that require the abstract manipulation of symbols and there are jobs that do not. Being a cashier at McDonald's does not require this ability whereas punching numbers into a CNC machine in order to make a complex part does - at least to understand what you are doing. This isn't something simple like the ability to do long division or read German labels on a machine. This is fundamental to the way society works today and it is something that has been proven that it can't be trained into a person. Either you have the ability or you do not. If you do not have it, you are not going to be able to be a computer programmer. You can also write off other careers like writing music that would not seem at first glance to be related.
One of the great retraining fallacies is that you can take a laid-off truck driver and teach them to be a computer programmer. If the subject has the capacity for abstract symbol manipulation they will easily grasp the concept of programming and be able to succeed at it. However, if the subject does not have this mental ability they are simply going to be frustrated to no end and never see the point. It has nothing to do with intelligence, although there is some argument that intelligence is related to this ability. But I do not want to equate the lack of this ability with someone being "stupid" or "smart" - it literally has nothing to do with it.
What we are doing today is setting up people going into college for a huge failure. If we indeed push everyone towards college regardless of their abilities they will not succeed and, more importantly, their failure will become our failure as a society. There is certainly the scenario of the potentially productive laborer or tradesman being put into a position where they cannot succeed and considering themselves to be a failure for life. This doesn't do anyone any good, not the person themselves, not the education system and not anywhere where they might work.
Read about this some more, find out more and stop pushing people into college when they don't need it, want it or even should have it.
Until we come to grips with this and stop trying to fit everyone into the same "knowledge worker" cubbyhole there are going to be severe problems. We will have college graduates which are incapable of finding a job they can actually do. We will have companies hiring people on the basis of a degree and pushing them along a track that they are not only not suited for but incapable of succeeding at. I would suspect a significant number of suicides can be traced to this sort of situation because given what people are taught today, there is no way out for someone caught up in this.
Remember that Poland's government was pretty much brought down by labor unions. The US government is aware of this example and is pretty committed to making sure it doesn't happen here.
At a commodity level it is simply about who has the biggest distribution channel and who can get the stuff made for the lowest cost, probably somewhere in China. Since it is all commodity stuff there really isn't a secret about drivers, firmware or manufacturing.
Move up the scale a little bit to real managed servers with fault-tolerant redundant parts and real diagnostics and you have left the commodity vendors behind. And now there is a considerable value difference between Vendor A's approach and Vendor B's approach. You also have the situation where Vendor A's stuff integrates well with Vendor C but not Vendor B.
Google set a somewhat different standard for building a data center and doing it totally with commodity hardware. Cheap commodity hardware. As far as I know, this example has not been replicated by anyone large. I suspect a significant portion of Google's effort in building a data center this way was dealing with non-fault-tolerant hardware and systems with no management and/or diagnostics. It means stuff is going to go down at random times and you just have to deal with it by pulling the whole unit. I guess it works for them. I suspect most other data center level operations really aren't run as a distributed cluster where the cluster is fault-tolerant but the pieces are not. We are still pretty much at the beginning of clustering and fault-tolerant systems with complete fallover support as far as the mainstream is concerned.
Understand that if a company is supplying nothing but commodity hardware (think the low end of Dell), they can be immediately replaced with any other commodity supplyer. Which is why Dell is getting out of the commodity PC business - there is no value proposition in it. On the other hand, Dell supplying servers which are not commodity hardware but using lots of custom parts and firmware means (a) they can supply much higher value to the data center and (b) they are not easily replaced by competitors that do not have matching parts and firmware. Making that level of hardware "open" is suicide because then you have turned your high value hardware into a commodity with no value at all.
You are describing things that the Australian government could do to rescue QANTAS, not something QANTAS could do itself.
In the US such moves would be illegal and in violation of WTO requirements. In short, can't be done. I don't know if Australia has put themselves over the same barrel, but if they have then you have the answer.
The fact that other countries routinely violate WTO requirements and block imports from the US isn't really relevant. Well, it might be if anyone in the US thought they could get away with defying the WTO. But so far it is clear that the US government believes that we need the WTO and we should just keep hoping that other WTO member countries will someday soon stop violating the rules. Someday. Soon. Hopefully.
I don't see any relief coming before a big crash. Once the US has reached third-world status we won't be importing anything anymore and our currency will be worthless. China will just have to understand that the debt cannot ever be repaid and accept the Western third of the US in exchange. I wouldn't be opening a Falong Gong chapter in LA anytime soon if I were you.
Why not just deal with it directly so we can fill up cars, trucks, buses, trains and airplanes with MAGMA instead of petroleum products? The waste products are simply heat and rocks. It might be a bit of a problem disposing of warm rocks from an airplane but with little parachutes it shouldn't be a problem.
Handling magma shouldn't be that difficult - sort of a big super insulated coffee mug would be required. Of course, we could get real fancy and move to something like magnetic suspension in a vacuum eventually.
This would also solve power problems for many portable devices by simply using a small Stirling engine running off the heat of a small amount of magma. Of course, proper insulation is going to be required as this brings a whole new dimension to the idea of a hot notebook computer in your lap. But the "battery" life could be a few days instead of only hours. How small could a thermal-to-electric conversion system be? Could we have magma-powered iPhones soon?
I do suggest watching the movie Crack in the World, a 1965 movie about tapping magma for an unlimited source of power for the world. Our friends at Google have made this available to everyone who might be interested.
There is a substantial body of opinion that humans, without any sort of goal to strive for, will simply sit and stare at the horizon. Or something. Playing games on computers might be an answer, but it is doubtful that it would be at all satisfying.
Nope, without a goal most people will likely just do nothing at all. And that includes eating and reproducing. The end result of a scenario like that is the end of the human race.
The "Star Trek" universe seems to have conquered that with the substitution of exploration and commerce continuing. But you have to realize that for every Zephram Cochran there are 20 or 30 Harry Mudds. If there is a purpose to commerce then maybe, but just maybe, there is a chance for the human race. Confined to Planet Earth I suspect it would be difficult if not impossible to create such goals and commerce would be dead.
There has been a great deal of fiction dedicated to exploring this and most of it did not have a happy ending.
The warhead on a Titan II missle was also 9 megatons, just for reference. Not sure if it was the same design, but 9 megatons wasn't really all that large a weapon. While it may be the largest weapon deployed, the Russians had a test device that would have yielded 100 megatons.
I suspect a far more interesting value for nuclear weapon ratings would be the effective blast radius, both as an airburst and at ground level. 9 megatons might be something that would wipe out an entire large metropolitan area, or it might be something that would just take out a city center. The difference is significant.
In today's climate, it is unlikely any state-level actor would really want to take out an entire metropolitan area. And certainly, anything that would be able to be moved by non-state-level actors would be unlikely to have a yield big enough to do that.
The problem comes when the HR person reads the post about someone being a pedophile and right then and there pushes the CV into the bin. Why should they take the risk that this person could possibly somehow actually be a pedophile or that they would be subject to future allegations of being one? No way. The safe way out is to assume they might be and consider one of the other candidates for the job.
It doesn't matter what the credibility of the poster might be. It is the fact that it was posted and found.
The problem with absolute freedom with limited credibility is that unfortunately the Internet is being used by people that do not assume such things not to be credible. You have the HR problem - they Google someone and find 12 damaging posts in random forums and assume this means the prospective candidate for the new management position isn't suitable. Of course, nobody in HR ever would admit that this is the reason for the rejection, they just don't return phone calls or give a reason.
Yes, this sort of thing is happening today and there is little or no defense against it.
It isn't a question of banning anything, it is a matter of prosecuting violators. In the US hate speech is something that by itself isn't banned but it leads to enhanced penalties.
So, while you might get 10 years in prison for shooting someone if you shoot them while shouting a racial epithet you might get 15 years or life. There is no question about "banning" anything - prosecutors love it because including a hate speech enhancement really convinces the jury that the person they are convicting is a real scumbag.
Easy to do. Everyone wants to give students loans because they are federally guaranteed.
Of course, the question is, how do two people rack up $1,000,000 in legitimate education expenses? Are we talking about someplace where it is $50,000 a year and they spent 10 years getting a couple of graduate degrees? Yes, such a thing is possible but I have trouble blaming the system as this is out-and-out gaming it with the intent of running out on the debt.
Of course, a system that allows it probably deserves it. I suppose more people should be encouraged to do this because it will stop the absurd mechanism where by such things happen.
Excuse me, but what would happen today if there was 24 hours notice of a hurricane coming to Miami? Well, you would think that we would secure all of the buildings, board up all the windows so they don't break and evacuate the population, right?
Wrong. 24 hours would be a start but not anywhere near enough time to evacuate any major population center. More people would die from the evacuation than could possibly be killed by the hurricane no matter what kind it might be. There is not a hope in the world of boarding up enough windows to make any meaningful difference in glass breakage.
So what would happen? Nothing. Nothing at all. Probably some attempt would be made to keep the whole thing quiet and not encourage people to evacuate where they would be killed on the roads or trapped in their cars. It was studied extensively in the 1950s and 1960s when the concept of a limited nuclear war was being bandied about. Attempting to evacuate a major city at that time was pretty much ruled out as being wildly impractical - it would take many days. Today, with less train service, it would probably take more than a week.
So any sort of warning would simply not be acted upon in any meaningful manner. There isn't anything that can be done about such things as earthquakes or hurricanes except maybe tell people to stay indoors. Maybe keep them out of tall buildings, except the tall buildings are probably much safer than small apartment buildings and most individual homes.
The problem is going to come a lot sooner than the next generation. China is going to be running the US budget shortly.
Have you seen what happens when a startup business gets venture capital funding? The VC group brings in their own accountant to oversee things and make sure the money isn't being spent frivously. Well, think of China as the VC group that is supporting the US today. It is only a matter of time until they want a seat on the board and their accountants overseeing and approving everything.
Will the US go to war to stop that? Almost certainly not. We will become a chattle state of China if we don't get our financial house in order real soon now.
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There are two problems with consumer electronics. First of all, it is an extremely competitive market where if you aren't directly competing with the others in your market you are left behind. There isn't room for most consumer electronics companies to bring a brand-new, untested, product to market on their own. If it flops it could kill off the company. Yes, the margins in that business are that thin.
The second problem is that no matter how cheaply you think you could make something, the folks really building this stuff will be forced to make it cheaper. If you think it could be made for $800 and sold for $1600 then likely as not it would actually be made for $100 and sold for $2000. Of course, the manufacturer would only get maybe $200 for the unit, if that. Of course we are talking about it being dumbed down in hardware and having huge requirements in the software to make up for whatever the hardware lacks. But that is how mass market consumer electronics works. Today we have DVD players selling for $40 which cost $5 to manufacture. All through the sales channel everyone is taking their cut and the retailer is lucky to get 10% of the selling price. But if you aren't feeding the channel, you simply have no sales - nobody is going to work for free.
Look at other examples in the consumer electronics world. This does not include fancy phones and computers today because they aren't really mass-market items. Look at stuff that Walmart sells. Check out the TV they are sellilng for $600 - it is probably not costing the manufacturer more than about $60 to make it. Maybe not even $30.
So the problem is if it can't be made for $100 it is simply going to drive the price to the end user up and up. Will consumers pay that for a radio? Not most of them, so now you are in Apple territory - high cost products that are of a very specialized nature that only a few consumers will buy. Apple was able to pull it off because of their branding and a huge amount of marketing money behind the products. It paid off for them. So far, it really hasn't paid off for anyone else. And most companies are very, very risk adverse these days.
If you could educate people in that way it would be really nice. This is similar to the idea of sitting down and saying "I will think brilliant thoughts today". It doesn't work.
There are some people with the brain construction to manipulate abstract symbols and the rest can't. Somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of the population can do it. This means they can do higher math, things like computer programming and pretty much anything where you are manipulating symbols instead of real objects.
The remainder of the population, which could be as high as 60%, can't do it and they cannot be trained to do it. No amount of education is going to make them be able to do it. It is like trying to get a colorblind person to recognize the color green. Their brain isn't wired that way.
What does that mean? Well, it means these people can be perfectly successful in doing plenty of things that need doing, such as most of the trades. They can work in a factory doing just about anything on the factory floor. But they cannot push figures around in a spreadsheet when the figures represent something else. As long as what they are manipulating is a concrete object or at least something they can see in front of them they can do it. Abstract symbols? Nope. If it involves moving an icon around which represents something else, they are going to have lots of trouble with it. It doesn't have anything to do with "intelligence" either, so you can't just say these people are stupid and pass them by that way.
Most educators have known this for maybe 60-70 years or so. Some of them have come out and said it but it is a dangerous thing to say in current educational circles.
What we are doing is attempting to remake society in a way that will exclude the portion of the population that can't manipulate abstract symbols. We want to remake the factory floor so it is controlled from a remote station where the user pushes around little icons. We want to have airplanes that are flown by moving little icons around from a remote location. We want everyone to be a "knowledge worker" and uses fancy 3D displays to control things in the real world. Well, we are setting ourselves up for a huge problem where as much as 60% of the population isn't going to be able to interact with things that way. There is no training, no education and no familiarization that will fix this problem. The only way to do it is to really have people interacting with real physical objects. If we do not have jobs like that, we are going to have a huge segment of the population that someone is just going to have to take care of. For their entire lives.
Let's see... today in California marijuana is more-or-less legal. It is currently not taxed by the government, although that may change. The selling price is approximately the same as the street price from illegal sources in Chicago.
These things together mean that the pro-legalization folks have not a clue. When marijuana sales are taxed, and they will be perhaps by state, local and federal governments, the prices will rise to accomodate the new taxes. This will mean that legal marijuana will be somewhat more expensive than the illegal imports.
It is unlikely that the people buying marijuana will be swayed by the "patrotic" aspects of buying more expensive legal weed than cheaper illegal weed. I suspect that the same economics apply to cocaine.
Other drugs, like heroin, might work out a lot differently. Maybe the right answer is to get everyone that has an addictive personality - one subject to being addicted to anything from gambling to drugs - hooked on heroin. It would be cheaper and heroin addicts are a lot easier to manage.
Only if the minimum wage is universally enforced. If it isn't and one country has it and another one does not then it is meaningless.
Same thing goes if the US were to have a trade agreement with China, India or Chad that workers had to be paid $10 an hour. A French company could go in, get the goods produced with workers being paid $0.30 an hour and ship them to the US - there would be nothing wrong with that and it would not violate any trade agreements.
You see, if there is a possibility of arbitrage it will happen. You can't stop it without having one set of rules that equally applies the world over. Which means no more soverign governments - one world, one government, one set of rules. Of course in today's world that is absurd, right?
Except the "99%" might just decide it would be fun to try and vote it in. The fact that it would actually be unworkable long-term is meaningless to a mob and what we have today is a mob struggling mightily for mob rule.
The only way "globalism" works is for there to be a single government with one set of rules for everyone. If you don't have that you will have China devaluing its currency to drive prices lower. You will have Mexican workers being paid $2 a day in Mexico and being paid $6 an hour in the US - of course there will be stream of people coming across for $6 an hour!
Whereever there is the possibility for arbitrage you are going to find someone to put a deal together. Arbitrage is simply taking advantage of dissimilar prices, so they only way to eliminate it is to make sure all the prices for labor and goods are the same. In the world today we cannot enforce all the rules being equal.
The solution is to cut back on the "globalism" in a big way. If the option simply does not exist to exploit African workers to do work for US entities then we no longer care that the Africans are being paid $0.30 a day for their labor - which may be appropriate for their cost of living. Similarly, if it costs $100 to ship a DVD player from China to the US then the fact that it cost $5 to manufacturer it in China is no longer relevant. So how do we get back there? War is probably the only reasonable way to do it. If every ship from China could be carrying a city-destroying nuclear weapon the US would block the ships. If every shipment of food from Africa to France could be poisoned, France would go back to supporting farmers and stop importing food at prices cheaper than French farmers can grow it.
The alternative is one tyrant that takes over the world. Soon I think the workers of the world will consider this to be a reasonable solution.
The BSA works on behalf of their member organizations and ONLY their member organizations. This means that Microsoft, Adobe and a few others have their services but anyone else does not. So unless they are using a Microsoft Spamming tool or one from Adobe it doesn't matter if they are pirating it or not. Essentally, nobody cares unless you are one of the select few belonging to the BSA.
As to distributing CP, all that is needed is some kind of hint - "Daddy, I saw pictures of naked kids on Uncle Fred's computer" and local law enforcement has enough probable cause to sieze computers. Now don't say I didn't warn you but turning in false accusations to harrass and intimidate someone is frowned upon rather severely.
Yes, and considering the value of the relationship you can sue to collect your $0. The "agreed terms" are certainly being abrogated but you do not have anything of value happening here.
A court is more likely to fine you for wasting their time.
You misunderstand the function of the government. If we wanted an "efficient" government we would have 100x the laws we currently have. The government would be able to pass new funding resolutions, new laws, new regulations on the content of food, etc., etc., etc. and they woudl be able to do this very very quickly. Hundreds of news laws each week.
Instead, what we have is a system that is designed to provide gridlock, obstructionism and anything but efficiency. The very notion of a bicameral debating society insures that little is going to get done unless it is really, really important and everyone agrees right away. So we have endless periods where they find something that people can agree upon, like naming a post office after some dead person. And every once in a while a new law actually does get passed, usually by the slimmest of margins.
This is the way it is supposed to work, and if it wasn't working so incredibly inefficiently we would all be in lots of trouble. Dictatorships are efficient. Monarchies can be efficient, until they get bogged down with endless ministers and advisors. Parlimentory systems are never efficient and anytime you have a bicameral system you know it was designed from the beginning with a lack of efficiency in mind.
I think the one constant has been the porn industry.
The problem with building a large powerplant in the middle of nowhere is that you have a huge problem with getting the electricity to somewhere where it can be used. These little things called transmission lines have losses. They are also viewed by an extremely vocal minority as extremely hazardous and this minority will do anything to insure that they are not constructed.
This is why the "smart grid" idea on a small scale (variable pricing, remote controlled electric meters) will work but the idea of new superconducting transmission lines is pure fantasy. Today you have utility companies actually contemplating running cables through lakes to avoid the lines being visible so the protesters don't gather chanting under the lines.
Electricity doesn't travel well and is really does need to be generated near where it is used. Trying to put nuclear plants somewhere where they cannot be seen and treating every plant as a direct threat to a population center is a mistake. The plants do need to be safe and this is possible to do. We also need to stop utilties building plants designed with a 20-year lifespan and then leaving the plant standing for all time as a hazardous waste site for someone to clean up in 100 years. A nuclear plant should be designed with a far longer lifespan from the beginning.
The other option is the "1850 solution" or the "Amish solution". Turn it off. Turn it all off. We will all be safe and things will be far less polluting. But there will be few, if any computers and the candle companies will really make out well.
All it would take is to raise the price of electricity to $100 a KWh.
I've been in Germany and there are two explanations for what you see there with solar panels: electric prices are really, really high or there are tremendous subsidies for solar panels, such large subsidies that it is basically free to install. Either of these techniques would probably work in the US, but really high prices would be far simpler in our current times. The government could add a $99.88 tax per KWh (considering much of the country is paying $0.12 a KWh now) and anyone with a spare $30,000 would have a big array of solar panels on their roof in a few months.
Traveling through Germany you see homes and businesses with $100,000 or more (US prices) of solar installations all over. Not just a few places but quite widespread. What would push a small business (like a lumberyard or plumbing warehouse) to spend $100,000 on a solar installation? Well, I suppose it could be an extremely unreliable electric power system as well, but my guess is that it is either subsidy or insane pricing of electricity.
We could push for that in the US. It would mean that electricity would become a luxury overnight and candle sales would skyrocket, but we could be 55% renewable in a short period of time easily. It is all a matter of priorities.
Another benefit of Blackberry is the device security check itself. Try "rooting" a BB handset. When it boots, the on-board security check will fail. Try installing a trojan - easy because BB allows installation of any signed Java application - and again it will fail at boot-time.
I suppose if you tried for a long time you might figure out what they are checking and be able to sneak something malicious in without tripping the security check. However, it is telling that nobody has done it yet even with huge incentives for stealing email, passwords and all sort of other stuff from high-end corporate executives. Wouldn't someone in China really like to get a copy of some VP's email at Cisco? Sure they would. Except it hasn't happened yet and is unlikely to ever happen.
That is probably the biggest single advantage of BlackBerry - you can distribute the handsets to people that get their PC compromised in 2 hours of reading email and not have any worries about what they are doing with their phones. And this doesn't mean the phones are locked down to prevent the user from doing anything with them, although that is possible as well.
This is one area where BlackBerry wins completely over Android which has been compromised several times even through the Android app store. I don't think Apple is completely immune to this kind of problem either, but so far the app store has been filtering out bad stuff pretty well.
The problem today is that students are led to believe they must have a college education in order to get a "real" job. Hiring managers are led to believe this as well, so we have college-educated people doing laborer's jobs. The truth of the matter is that it makes the hiring manager's job easier to filter resumes for only college graduates even when hiring a truck driver.
The reality part of this is that there is a fairly simple division that can be made in the general cateogory of employment in the world today. There are jobs that require the abstract manipulation of symbols and there are jobs that do not. Being a cashier at McDonald's does not require this ability whereas punching numbers into a CNC machine in order to make a complex part does - at least to understand what you are doing. This isn't something simple like the ability to do long division or read German labels on a machine. This is fundamental to the way society works today and it is something that has been proven that it can't be trained into a person. Either you have the ability or you do not. If you do not have it, you are not going to be able to be a computer programmer. You can also write off other careers like writing music that would not seem at first glance to be related.
One of the great retraining fallacies is that you can take a laid-off truck driver and teach them to be a computer programmer. If the subject has the capacity for abstract symbol manipulation they will easily grasp the concept of programming and be able to succeed at it. However, if the subject does not have this mental ability they are simply going to be frustrated to no end and never see the point. It has nothing to do with intelligence, although there is some argument that intelligence is related to this ability. But I do not want to equate the lack of this ability with someone being "stupid" or "smart" - it literally has nothing to do with it.
What we are doing today is setting up people going into college for a huge failure. If we indeed push everyone towards college regardless of their abilities they will not succeed and, more importantly, their failure will become our failure as a society. There is certainly the scenario of the potentially productive laborer or tradesman being put into a position where they cannot succeed and considering themselves to be a failure for life. This doesn't do anyone any good, not the person themselves, not the education system and not anywhere where they might work.
Read about this some more, find out more and stop pushing people into college when they don't need it, want it or even should have it.
Until we come to grips with this and stop trying to fit everyone into the same "knowledge worker" cubbyhole there are going to be severe problems. We will have college graduates which are incapable of finding a job they can actually do. We will have companies hiring people on the basis of a degree and pushing them along a track that they are not only not suited for but incapable of succeeding at. I would suspect a significant number of suicides can be traced to this sort of situation because given what people are taught today, there is no way out for someone caught up in this.
Remember that Poland's government was pretty much brought down by labor unions. The US government is aware of this example and is pretty committed to making sure it doesn't happen here.
At a commodity level it is simply about who has the biggest distribution channel and who can get the stuff made for the lowest cost, probably somewhere in China. Since it is all commodity stuff there really isn't a secret about drivers, firmware or manufacturing.
Move up the scale a little bit to real managed servers with fault-tolerant redundant parts and real diagnostics and you have left the commodity vendors behind. And now there is a considerable value difference between Vendor A's approach and Vendor B's approach. You also have the situation where Vendor A's stuff integrates well with Vendor C but not Vendor B.
Google set a somewhat different standard for building a data center and doing it totally with commodity hardware. Cheap commodity hardware. As far as I know, this example has not been replicated by anyone large. I suspect a significant portion of Google's effort in building a data center this way was dealing with non-fault-tolerant hardware and systems with no management and/or diagnostics. It means stuff is going to go down at random times and you just have to deal with it by pulling the whole unit. I guess it works for them. I suspect most other data center level operations really aren't run as a distributed cluster where the cluster is fault-tolerant but the pieces are not. We are still pretty much at the beginning of clustering and fault-tolerant systems with complete fallover support as far as the mainstream is concerned.
Understand that if a company is supplying nothing but commodity hardware (think the low end of Dell), they can be immediately replaced with any other commodity supplyer. Which is why Dell is getting out of the commodity PC business - there is no value proposition in it. On the other hand, Dell supplying servers which are not commodity hardware but using lots of custom parts and firmware means (a) they can supply much higher value to the data center and (b) they are not easily replaced by competitors that do not have matching parts and firmware. Making that level of hardware "open" is suicide because then you have turned your high value hardware into a commodity with no value at all.
You are describing things that the Australian government could do to rescue QANTAS, not something QANTAS could do itself.
In the US such moves would be illegal and in violation of WTO requirements. In short, can't be done. I don't know if Australia has put themselves over the same barrel, but if they have then you have the answer.
The fact that other countries routinely violate WTO requirements and block imports from the US isn't really relevant. Well, it might be if anyone in the US thought they could get away with defying the WTO. But so far it is clear that the US government believes that we need the WTO and we should just keep hoping that other WTO member countries will someday soon stop violating the rules. Someday. Soon. Hopefully.
I don't see any relief coming before a big crash. Once the US has reached third-world status we won't be importing anything anymore and our currency will be worthless. China will just have to understand that the debt cannot ever be repaid and accept the Western third of the US in exchange. I wouldn't be opening a Falong Gong chapter in LA anytime soon if I were you.
Why not just deal with it directly so we can fill up cars, trucks, buses, trains and airplanes with MAGMA instead of petroleum products? The waste products are simply heat and rocks. It might be a bit of a problem disposing of warm rocks from an airplane but with little parachutes it shouldn't be a problem.
Handling magma shouldn't be that difficult - sort of a big super insulated coffee mug would be required. Of course, we could get real fancy and move to something like magnetic suspension in a vacuum eventually.
This would also solve power problems for many portable devices by simply using a small Stirling engine running off the heat of a small amount of magma. Of course, proper insulation is going to be required as this brings a whole new dimension to the idea of a hot notebook computer in your lap. But the "battery" life could be a few days instead of only hours. How small could a thermal-to-electric conversion system be? Could we have magma-powered iPhones soon?
I do suggest watching the movie Crack in the World, a 1965 movie about tapping magma for an unlimited source of power for the world. Our friends at Google have made this available to everyone who might be interested.
There is a substantial body of opinion that humans, without any sort of goal to strive for, will simply sit and stare at the horizon. Or something. Playing games on computers might be an answer, but it is doubtful that it would be at all satisfying.
Nope, without a goal most people will likely just do nothing at all. And that includes eating and reproducing. The end result of a scenario like that is the end of the human race.
The "Star Trek" universe seems to have conquered that with the substitution of exploration and commerce continuing. But you have to realize that for every Zephram Cochran there are 20 or 30 Harry Mudds. If there is a purpose to commerce then maybe, but just maybe, there is a chance for the human race. Confined to Planet Earth I suspect it would be difficult if not impossible to create such goals and commerce would be dead.
There has been a great deal of fiction dedicated to exploring this and most of it did not have a happy ending.
The warhead on a Titan II missle was also 9 megatons, just for reference. Not sure if it was the same design, but 9 megatons wasn't really all that large a weapon. While it may be the largest weapon deployed, the Russians had a test device that would have yielded 100 megatons.
I suspect a far more interesting value for nuclear weapon ratings would be the effective blast radius, both as an airburst and at ground level. 9 megatons might be something that would wipe out an entire large metropolitan area, or it might be something that would just take out a city center. The difference is significant.
In today's climate, it is unlikely any state-level actor would really want to take out an entire metropolitan area. And certainly, anything that would be able to be moved by non-state-level actors would be unlikely to have a yield big enough to do that.
The problem comes when the HR person reads the post about someone being a pedophile and right then and there pushes the CV into the bin. Why should they take the risk that this person could possibly somehow actually be a pedophile or that they would be subject to future allegations of being one? No way. The safe way out is to assume they might be and consider one of the other candidates for the job.
It doesn't matter what the credibility of the poster might be. It is the fact that it was posted and found.
The problem with absolute freedom with limited credibility is that unfortunately the Internet is being used by people that do not assume such things not to be credible. You have the HR problem - they Google someone and find 12 damaging posts in random forums and assume this means the prospective candidate for the new management position isn't suitable. Of course, nobody in HR ever would admit that this is the reason for the rejection, they just don't return phone calls or give a reason.
Yes, this sort of thing is happening today and there is little or no defense against it.
It isn't a question of banning anything, it is a matter of prosecuting violators. In the US hate speech is something that by itself isn't banned but it leads to enhanced penalties.
So, while you might get 10 years in prison for shooting someone if you shoot them while shouting a racial epithet you might get 15 years or life. There is no question about "banning" anything - prosecutors love it because including a hate speech enhancement really convinces the jury that the person they are convicting is a real scumbag.
Easy to do. Everyone wants to give students loans because they are federally guaranteed.
Of course, the question is, how do two people rack up $1,000,000 in legitimate education expenses? Are we talking about someplace where it is $50,000 a year and they spent 10 years getting a couple of graduate degrees? Yes, such a thing is possible but I have trouble blaming the system as this is out-and-out gaming it with the intent of running out on the debt.
Of course, a system that allows it probably deserves it. I suppose more people should be encouraged to do this because it will stop the absurd mechanism where by such things happen.
Excuse me, but what would happen today if there was 24 hours notice of a hurricane coming to Miami? Well, you would think that we would secure all of the buildings, board up all the windows so they don't break and evacuate the population, right?
Wrong. 24 hours would be a start but not anywhere near enough time to evacuate any major population center. More people would die from the evacuation than could possibly be killed by the hurricane no matter what kind it might be. There is not a hope in the world of boarding up enough windows to make any meaningful difference in glass breakage.
So what would happen? Nothing. Nothing at all. Probably some attempt would be made to keep the whole thing quiet and not encourage people to evacuate where they would be killed on the roads or trapped in their cars. It was studied extensively in the 1950s and 1960s when the concept of a limited nuclear war was being bandied about. Attempting to evacuate a major city at that time was pretty much ruled out as being wildly impractical - it would take many days. Today, with less train service, it would probably take more than a week.
So any sort of warning would simply not be acted upon in any meaningful manner. There isn't anything that can be done about such things as earthquakes or hurricanes except maybe tell people to stay indoors. Maybe keep them out of tall buildings, except the tall buildings are probably much safer than small apartment buildings and most individual homes.
The problem is going to come a lot sooner than the next generation. China is going to be running the US budget shortly.
Have you seen what happens when a startup business gets venture capital funding? The VC group brings in their own accountant to oversee things and make sure the money isn't being spent frivously. Well, think of China as the VC group that is supporting the US today. It is only a matter of time until they want a seat on the board and their accountants overseeing and approving everything.
Will the US go to war to stop that? Almost certainly not. We will become a chattle state of China if we don't get our financial house in order real soon now.