I'm guessing you have no idea why this was done. Military people were exposed to radiation to see the effects even when there was a pretty good idea what the results would be and this seems wrong. The problem is that it was pretty clear in 1950 that the next war was less than 20 years away and would absolutely be fought with nuclear weapons, both tactical and strategic.
What would happen to an army that was getting nuked? Would they run away? Would they fall down puking? There were a lot of highly placed people that didn't have answers and leaders that were demanding answers. Could a mixed conventional/nuclear battlefield exist? Pretty much the answers were that such a mixed battlefield could not exist and any tactical nuclear exchange would lead to strategic exchanges. Plural. While the idea of "nuclear winter" proved to be false, it was pretty scary while it lasted.
We haven't had a major war since WW II when every indication said there would be one by 1970. Why not? Probably because none of the players at the time wanted to rule over a wasteland. Unfortunately, the new players don't seem to have a problem with that and at least some of them view life on Earth as a staging for the real event. So why worry about a wasteland - if it pushes you into paradise sooner then so be it.
Do you really blame the government for not wanting to be the purveyor of really, really bad news?
There is no such thing as unilateral disarmement, only a choice between fighting back and forfeit. Vietnam was won and the enemy defeated and then the plug was pulled to allow the North to walk in. We forfeited the lives and money that were spent.
We fought back against the Soviets. They declared they would bury the West and instituted actions to see that it would be accomplished eventually. Instead, they collapsed partly under the weight of maintaining a centrally controlled system with no choices for the population.
We have a choice with China - we can accept their goods in whatever form they want to send them to us, or we can fight back economically, politically and in every other way that is needed. So far, we are forfeiting and accepting whatever poison they are sending this week. Really, how many people have to die before we wake up and decide that relying on the Chinese for all manufacturing is a huge risk. And it isn't just manufacturing - the Chinese now control enough debt to be able to effectively dictate policy to the US. Could the US stand up to the Chinese if they decided to take over Taiwan now? Probably not.
We have a similar choice with Iran. They are going to build up until they have an unbeatable advantage in the Middle East. They have committed over and over to wiping out Israel and likely fighting a really nasty war with Saudia Arabia and anyone else not accepting their particular brand of Islam. The US can be Iran's friend and help them with this or we can be their enemy and try to stop them. There is no third alternative here.
In the 1600s it was pretty much impossible to sit on the sidelines in the conflicts between England, Spain and France. They had been fighting for control of the planet (as they saw it) for over 300 years. There wasn't a sideline then and there isn't today. Trying to be isolated and uninvolved is a mistake and it isn't effective.
In most parts of the US judges are elected in a lot of situations and otherwise appointed. Their qualifications need to be acceptable to the appointer and nobody else.
Judges that are elected also do not need to be lawyers - they just need to be elected in an election.
Basically, anyone can be a judge as long as people think you are judge material.
I agree with you, but we have to look at reality. Reality now is that it is all for free and there is no way to turn off the tap.
One person in Romainia or Bulgaria can buy a movie download with a stolen credit card, strip any attached DRM and post it for the rest of the world to download. They can do this from a web site that gets plenty of traffic and keep themselves going on ad revenue alone. Multiply this by 10,000 or so and it is all for free (ad supported courtesty of Google), all the time. There isn't any way of stopping it.
In the US we have maybe 40-50% of the population that does not have access to high speed Internet. Because of this they can't download music or movies and are actively supporting the media companies with their purchases. The rest of the population of the USA is either actively downloading or uninterested. A lot of the people downloading are younger, regardless of their income status. What this likely means for the future is that as the people without access and without interest (or knowledge about downloading) die off the revenue will steadily decrease for media companies.
We have grown up a generation that pretty much believes there is no reason not to download for free. Most of the people of my generation don't know anything about downloading stuff and wouldn't have any way to get started.
I think France is fighting a tidal wave with a teacup. They are going to be washed away.
Unilateral disarmement never works. If the other side wants to compete you can either compete or forfit. There are no other options. You might think you can choose to sit out, but there is no material difference between that and forfitting.
In theory, the USA has the greatest potential because (historically) you have had self-directed businesses that can rely on the stock market for capitialization and low taxes and low regulatory hurdles so a business can put incredible resources behind something that makes sense. There are plenty of examples of this happening where the government has stood aside while businesses gathered the capital and manpower to do really big things.
There was no government-financed support for transistors, lasers, integrated circuits or anything that led to the technology boom from 1950 to 1980 or so.
Where we are today is that everyone is looking to the government for direction and support. Solar power isn't practical on a large scale without massive government subsidies, so there are few businesses involved in this and some of the ones that are are pure scam. Electric cars might have a future, but there are so many regulations in place now that it is very difficult to manufacture anything involving those nasty things called "chemicals" that might get loose and destroy the environment - so other countries are building battery manufacturing plants and are fully prepared to sell the USA better, cheaper batteries while we fuss around. The result will be their batteries will always be better and cheaper.
The US Government is pretty much at the point of saying that China can have bigger, better, faster supercomputers because we will have bigger, better and likely more ponderous social support programs. The result will be a continuing slide towards 30-40% unemployment (we're at 20% now) and everything being made outside the USA. Hopefully, there will be plenty of jobs parking cars for foreign executives who come here to dictate terms.
What is far, far more likely is each ebook will be purchased once, the DRM stripped and the resulting file posted in five or six different formats for the planet to freely download.
Publishers will continue because the non-Internet-savvy population will still be out there buying books, just like they are still buying CDs at Walmart. As these people age out of the population (i.e., die) less and less revenue will come in to publishers. It will be viewed as a non-profit activity publising (or writing) a book.
But we will have 500 years of back catalog to continue downloading from pirate sites pretty much forever.
I have personally broken two Kindle screens. I have managed to get them replaced under warranty - thanks, Amazon. A short fall to a relatively hard surface does it.
Another problem with the Kindle is the screen gradually darkens over time. I believe this apples to all eInk displays and not just the Kindle but also the Sony, Nook and everything else using eInk. It makes the device have a rather limited lifespan that is somewhere around 2-3 years. Much shorter than I originally expected.
I strongly recommend that you research the author Don Brown some more. While the names are similar, the writing style is not. Don Brown can let you have all the books you need for fighting off literature students pretty much for free - that is what Amazon charges periodically for the Kindle versions.
I'd say less than $1 a pallet-load is about right for physical books. And while eBooks are handy, Don's physical books are far more useful as Kindling.
Do you really understand how big a critical mass uranium bomb is? It is easy to make and the concepts have been pretty much disclosed and well tested. Should be easy, if you could get the uranium.
But you are looking at something that weighs 5,000 pounds at least. The Hiroshima bomb weighed more like 10,000 pounds. And this wasn't fancy instrumentation to see how well it worked. Just about all of the real creative work done since 1945 has focused on smaller, lighter subcritical mass weapons.
Yes, if someone wanted to wipe out New York City all it would take would be a 10,000 pound bomb in a ship. But most other delivery options are off the table. How many aircraft today can lift a 10,000 pound bomb?
I'd say this is the principal reason we don't have a nuclear arms club that includes every country. What would you do with such a thing if you had it? That and the fact that the amount of uranium required is quite a bit. Easy to get enough for a subcritical mass weapon, but hard to know what to do with it once you have it.
Guns? Well, there are clearly three sorts of people when it comes to guns: those that are frightened of them, those that know how and when to use them and those that are quite willing to use them anytime.
Nuclear weapons are a bit simpler. There are only two sorts of people when it comes to them: people that value this life and people that only value the afterlife. I'd say the folks that only value the afterlife are fucking dangerous and shouldn't be allowed to have anything more complicated than a safety razor.
The leaders in the USSR valued this life for themselves and their population too much to throw it away on the possibility of leading the world into a new era of socialist superiority. The leaders of Iran apparently value only the afterlife and likely consider killing someone as advancing them along the path to their reward. We have seen much evidence of this and nothing that contradicts this view.
The real question is how many people of the Muslim faith agree with that outlook. I don't care what they are praying about if they are afraid of losing their lives and the lives of their children. If they consider their lives better spent as martyrs and the lives of their children to be of no importance as long as they have a nice secure afterlife they are dangerous and unfit for the community of Man.
Oh, and Christians that only value the afterlife are equally as dangerous. It has nothing to do with the specific brand of religion, just the attitude towards the living and the attitude towards whatever possible afterlife you might believe in.
I believe what the poster was saying (and I agree with) is that as a State the USSR was unwilling to sacrifice its population to win a war against the US.
Iran clearly has no such compunctions. They are willing to sacrifice their population over an election. There are a number of other states and non-governmental groups that would be more than happy to start a nuclear war because regardless of the lives lost their ideology would survive.
Unfortunately, there is no technology that allows for remote sensing of nuclear materials in a bomb. At extremely close range you can (probably? hopefully?) detect some increase above background radiation and the US is counting heavily on that today. You cannot stand off in Earth orbit and detect even a big pile of unshielded uranium much less a subcritical mass bomb that is shielded.
Right now it seems Iran is a special case of thumbing their nose at the world and saying they are going to do whatever the heck they want regardless of what anyone says about it. Sanctions that affect the population aren't going to have much effect on the decision makers. This is likely to turn into a very nasty war because they are certainly going to take out Israel as soon as they have the capability to do so. Their leaders have said so, their national identity says so and they have never said that was off the table. So of course, Israel says they are going to take them out first. So far, I believe the US has requested they hold off but that state of affairs isn't going to last forever. If Israel gets hit - either as a first strike or as a result of not destroying every weapon in their first strike - the US will pretty much be committed to following up with a strike on Iran. Which then triggers the rest of the Muslim world declaring war on the US.
Frankly, I don't see a way out of it. Iran certainly isn't going to abandon their status as a Muslim theocratic nation whose obligation is to destroy the state of Israel. The US is certainly going to honor its committments to Israel. The rest of the Muslim world isn't going to stand by and watch millions of Muslims be killed.
Any 14 year-old could probably make an atomic bomb with a critical mass of uranium or plutonium. Such a bomb would be huge and require lots of shielding to be safe to handle - like attaching to an aircraft or loading into a shipping container.
On the other hand, what is required to detonate a subcritical mass is a little bit tricky. It is clearly possible because the US has thermonuclear weapons that are smaller than the core of the first atomic bombs. I'm not sure that A. Q. Khan even had that information, although he was US-trained.
If you want to put a bomb in a shipping container, the Hiroshima bomb would be good enough. If you want to put a bomb into an Amazon box and ship it somewhere in the US that might require a bit more expertise and that is much harder to come by.
I think the problem that a lot of people have with Avatar is that it follows a well-known theme (or meme) that has been pretty much completely explored. There isn't a lot of new traction you can get with this sort of story.
Except, moving it to an alien environment you can get some really slick graphics.
Yes, the story is familiar. Most stories are going to be for people over 12 years old. If you cannot appreciate the way a familiar story is played out I guess Shakespear is an utter failure as well. Not that Avatar is comparable to Shakespear, but a familiar story line has been used by playwrites for centuries.
Avatar was also (hopelessly) mired in the idea of the soulless American corporation. Short term profits and a complete disregard for anything else. Considering this was supposed to be a couple hundred years in the future I would think things would have moved past that or we wouldn't be exploring planets around other stars.
If we wanted to build a Saturn V rocket today it could not be done. The original design is gone. In order to make something that was similar it would require a complete redesign and likely as not end up costing 10 or even 100 times as much. The original made use of much cheaper labor and people that didn't mind getting their hands dirty. Today, the design would be reviewed for ecological soundness and it wouldn't pass muster.
The experts that had been working with rocket engines since the late 1940s worked on the Saturn V. Today there is nobody that knows anywhere near as much about rocket engines left. While the main engines for the Shuttle are somewhat of a marvel, I doubt they could be reproduced today either. The people resources simply aren't there - it would take 10 years of experimentation and learning about rockets.
For the abstract collection of utterly uninteresting and unusable knowledge, robot probes make a lot of sense. It isn't like we are ever going to make use of any of the information that is collected.
That is the primary distinction between sending some robotic machine there and a sending a human - the human is likely the first step towards using the knowledge that is gained. Assume that a robot probe found clear and incontrovertable evidence of life on Mars - what comes next? More robots? More than likely it is an article in a science journal saying "We found it, we don't have to go back now."
We have pretty much made the decision to spend money on social programs rather than science and exploration. A few nerdy rich guys can do whatever they want, but as for spreading humanity off the planet Earth that just isn't going to happen. Ever. We have made the decision and the wealth required to do it is being dedicated now and for the rest of the time humanity has left on Earth. You aren't ever going to assemble the political will and get people to agree to take fewer handouts from their governments. Those handouts are important and in no way will they ever be decreased.
You see the difference between human exploration and sending robots? One is abstract science which fulfills no particular need and the other is exploration. Perhaps exploration where the finding out of certain abstract scientific facts makes the difference between life and death in some remote and hostile place.
Right now we can safely spend a few pennies on abstract science while ensuring bread and circuses for the masses. The idea of spending dollars or even tens of dollars for exploration is out of the question.
When the following generation looks at the folks that came before and sneers that they are old, outmoded and do not have the necessary mental capacity to understand the "new way" re-inventing the wheel is a sad but necessary part of the process.
Most of what is considered to be recent developments in computer science has foundations if not actual implementations in the years before 1970. It may be in a different context, but the same problems have been solved, and are being solved again.
I don't think it is a choice - it is absolutely necessary for people to re-invent the wheel every few years. It is either that or slide backwards as old methods that work are discarded. We are either going to replace them (usually with the same old methods, eventually) or give up and accept less.
GPS requires 3 satellites for a 2-D fix (lat & long) and 4 satellites for a 3-D fix including altitude. Having more than 4 can be nice and may improve things a little, but without SA turned on you can get a fix that is accurate to a small number of meters with 3 satellites.
Where Skyhook comes in is speeding up time to first fix. You start with the GPS receiver "cold" and no ephemeris and it can take minutes to have a fix. Now, if you are able to plug into the GPS algorithym a good approximation of your location you can drop that time to 10 seconds or less. This is extremely important for power-constrained cell phones where the GPS isn't running all the time. This makes having the GPS receiver turned off except when needed practical from a user experience.
The issue for a software developer is that if $1000 is spent on their software vs. beer and pretzels the software developer benefits.
The economy as a whole is likely unaffected, except perhaps that out-of-work software developers are more more difficult to deal with than out-of-work beer and pretzel makers.
So if you are interested in software developers, piracy has a direct and easily felt (although not so easily measured) impact. If you are trying to measure the impact on the economy as a whole you are likely wasting your time because the economy is a lot bigger than just software developers or beer and pretzel sales. Or even software and beer and pretzel sales all together.
Personally, as a software developer I'm a lot more interested in revenue from software sales and its impact on my life. I am less affected if people stop spending so much on beer and pretzels although it would be a shame if they disappeared entirely from the marketplace.
Well, I suppose as long as you aren't in the business of producing software this is a great argument.
I'd say the argument also applies to houses. Currently in the US there is a surplus of houses, so many that cities are bulldozing them to prevent their use by squatters, gangbangers and drug dealers. Also, we just had a huge crisis because the bond rating people decided to ignore reality and rate bonds AAA no matter what. The result was a huge influx of money into the housing market which has now disappeared. So how about if we fix this by just declaring houses to be free now? There are plenty to go around and this would eliminate any sort of "mortgage crisis".
This would then free up money for other things that are more important to the economy than a bunch of old dusty houses.
A somewhat more practical idea would be to just make cars free. There are hundreds of thousands of people that get paid to make cars in the US and in the current economy they are in jeopardy of losing their jobs because there are so few cars being sold. How about if we just give them away? Then there would be full employment for people making and servicing cars and it would free up some money for buying other stuff.
Sounds pretty practical to me. Maybe the government should step in and pay software developers so piracy can continue and while they are at it pay for all the cars that are made so they can be free as well.
The problem is that mostly what BSA is concerned with is piracy in businesses.
A business that is using a pirate version of Microsoft Word would very likely continue to use Microsoft Word no matter what, even if it cost something. Same goes for most things that are really useful in a business environment.
Photoshop is somewhat questionable - there are a lot of people that download it because it is there and free. If they had to pay their modest requirements might actually be fulfilled with Paint.
Now, the pirate version of software to rip CDs is probably not so valuable, but the BSA doesn't track that sort of thing.
A significant part of the subprime problem came from the bond rating agencies, like Moody's. They rated bonds based on mortgages that were almost certain to default as AAA, or investment grade. This made is possible for pension funds and others that demand fixed-income financial instruments with virtually a guarantee of stability to invest in this sort of bond.
Other folks then took out insurance on the bonds for little or no money at all because obviously these were "investment grade" bonds. So the insurance paid off handsomely when the loans default and the investors lose everything - since they aren't the ones holding the insurance.
Once it got around that it was possible to package up a passle of these soon-to-default loans and pass them off on unsuspecting folks as being quality bonds virtually everyone wanted to get into the act. It was easy money. At that point "mortgage brokers" could get money from many different sources based on the ease of getting the mortgage-backed bonds sold. They had no liability if the mortgage went bad, because it was sold off to someone else. The brokers got a hefty commission for loan origination and there was no control on this - nor should there really be at that level.
This is what everyone seems to be missing. What new regulations are there on the bond rating agencies? None. What will prevent another round of this taking place next week? Nothing. What is going to happen when the mortgage defaults percolate up to the bonds that pension funds invested in? The funds will go bankrupt, as will states and municipalities that invested in these bonds. Nothing has been done about the bonds themselves.
We have introduced a bunch of nearly irrelevant regulations that affect banks and some large financial institutions but none of this addresses the origin of the problem. If someone is standing on a street corner passing out checks for $1000 people will take them, no matter what. This is basically what happened in 2003-2006 and while the guy has gone to lunch there is nothing to keep him from coming back. And when the money starts flowing again, we will be right back where we were before when this "crisis" started.
Modern thinking is that concensus forms truth and that perception is reality.
This pretty much comes down to "what I see is real, what you see is irrelevent to my reality".
And then in keeping with the Wiki concept, if 100 people agree that white is black, then we can all share a common reality where white is black. The fact that you perceive white as not black is significant to you, but it doesn't change the truth that white is black to our group. Your truth is just a little different but the two are not mutually exclusive. There is room for all truths.
This is pretty much the current academic philosophy in a very simplified form.
There is another problem with paper - it is slow. Al Gore was announced as the winner in 2000 by CBS long before Florida was done counting.
What do you think the result would be in 2012 if Obama was announced as the winner at midnight and then at 2:00 AM the real results were in an Sarah Palin was then announced as the winner? With all the newspapers saying Obama won but the TV news in the morning saying Palin won. There would be rioting and people killed.
I know for a fact that the first Obamite that got in my face would be bruised. And a lot of those people can't help but getting in your face, it is who they are.
So, how do you think this problem should be handled, considering the 1st Amendment pretty much lets the TV news make up anything they want if there are no official results?
You have hit on the reason for electronic voting, or at least some sort of automation. The TV and cable news services require immediate results because if they do not get them from official sources they will make them up.
CBS announced Al Gore as the winner in 2000 around 1:00 AM Eastern time. Lots of people went to bed after that and woke up with the election undecided. The result was these people "knew" the election had been stolen because CBS told them who the winner was before they went to bed. The next time this happens there will likely be rioting in the streets with stuff getting burned.
You can't pass a law shutting off the TV news - it is against the 1st Amendment. So in the US there really is no choice - immediate results and as accurate as they can be. Immediate takes precedence, with accuracy being sort of a followon. Because if they don't have official results, there will be made-up exit-poll derived results announced.
Sure, it would be nice if you could just shut off the news for a while, but that isn't going to happen.
I think your numbers are a little off. I do not know anyone under 30 that will pay for music anymore. It is all there for free, for the taking, so they do just that - take.
Movies? A few people will buy DVDs rather than download but not too many.
Now, the people over 30 and especially over 40 are still buying, paying and paying. They don't know how to download and will often ask someone to help them out to get some song or movie free. They might have the new 50Gb/sec cable internet connection that they use to play games and read email but they have no idea what software to use (and what not to use) to download a movie or a song.
Today, at least in the US, these are the people that are continuing to pay for content. The younger people? Forget about them, they aren't going to pay. In 10-20 years this will have changed quite a bit. Nobody will be paying because all the old people will have been aged out of the system. The new older generation will be folks that grew up with the Internet and the idea of swapping floppies and copying games.
Today, it might be 60% that are downloading and 40% that are still paying. But this is going to shift over time to much closer to 90%/10%. This is what the music and movie companies are fearful of and rightly so - they just aren't going to get anymore revenue.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing you have no idea why this was done. Military people were exposed to radiation to see the effects even when there was a pretty good idea what the results would be and this seems wrong. The problem is that it was pretty clear in 1950 that the next war was less than 20 years away and would absolutely be fought with nuclear weapons, both tactical and strategic.
What would happen to an army that was getting nuked? Would they run away? Would they fall down puking? There were a lot of highly placed people that didn't have answers and leaders that were demanding answers. Could a mixed conventional/nuclear battlefield exist? Pretty much the answers were that such a mixed battlefield could not exist and any tactical nuclear exchange would lead to strategic exchanges. Plural. While the idea of "nuclear winter" proved to be false, it was pretty scary while it lasted.
We haven't had a major war since WW II when every indication said there would be one by 1970. Why not? Probably because none of the players at the time wanted to rule over a wasteland. Unfortunately, the new players don't seem to have a problem with that and at least some of them view life on Earth as a staging for the real event. So why worry about a wasteland - if it pushes you into paradise sooner then so be it.
Do you really blame the government for not wanting to be the purveyor of really, really bad news?
There is no such thing as unilateral disarmement, only a choice between fighting back and forfeit. Vietnam was won and the enemy defeated and then the plug was pulled to allow the North to walk in. We forfeited the lives and money that were spent.
We fought back against the Soviets. They declared they would bury the West and instituted actions to see that it would be accomplished eventually. Instead, they collapsed partly under the weight of maintaining a centrally controlled system with no choices for the population.
We have a choice with China - we can accept their goods in whatever form they want to send them to us, or we can fight back economically, politically and in every other way that is needed. So far, we are forfeiting and accepting whatever poison they are sending this week. Really, how many people have to die before we wake up and decide that relying on the Chinese for all manufacturing is a huge risk. And it isn't just manufacturing - the Chinese now control enough debt to be able to effectively dictate policy to the US. Could the US stand up to the Chinese if they decided to take over Taiwan now? Probably not.
We have a similar choice with Iran. They are going to build up until they have an unbeatable advantage in the Middle East. They have committed over and over to wiping out Israel and likely fighting a really nasty war with Saudia Arabia and anyone else not accepting their particular brand of Islam. The US can be Iran's friend and help them with this or we can be their enemy and try to stop them. There is no third alternative here.
In the 1600s it was pretty much impossible to sit on the sidelines in the conflicts between England, Spain and France. They had been fighting for control of the planet (as they saw it) for over 300 years. There wasn't a sideline then and there isn't today. Trying to be isolated and uninvolved is a mistake and it isn't effective.
In most parts of the US judges are elected in a lot of situations and otherwise appointed. Their qualifications need to be acceptable to the appointer and nobody else.
Judges that are elected also do not need to be lawyers - they just need to be elected in an election.
Basically, anyone can be a judge as long as people think you are judge material.
I agree with you, but we have to look at reality. Reality now is that it is all for free and there is no way to turn off the tap.
One person in Romainia or Bulgaria can buy a movie download with a stolen credit card, strip any attached DRM and post it for the rest of the world to download. They can do this from a web site that gets plenty of traffic and keep themselves going on ad revenue alone. Multiply this by 10,000 or so and it is all for free (ad supported courtesty of Google), all the time. There isn't any way of stopping it.
In the US we have maybe 40-50% of the population that does not have access to high speed Internet. Because of this they can't download music or movies and are actively supporting the media companies with their purchases. The rest of the population of the USA is either actively downloading or uninterested. A lot of the people downloading are younger, regardless of their income status. What this likely means for the future is that as the people without access and without interest (or knowledge about downloading) die off the revenue will steadily decrease for media companies.
We have grown up a generation that pretty much believes there is no reason not to download for free. Most of the people of my generation don't know anything about downloading stuff and wouldn't have any way to get started.
I think France is fighting a tidal wave with a teacup. They are going to be washed away.
Unilateral disarmement never works. If the other side wants to compete you can either compete or forfit. There are no other options. You might think you can choose to sit out, but there is no material difference between that and forfitting.
In theory, the USA has the greatest potential because (historically) you have had self-directed businesses that can rely on the stock market for capitialization and low taxes and low regulatory hurdles so a business can put incredible resources behind something that makes sense. There are plenty of examples of this happening where the government has stood aside while businesses gathered the capital and manpower to do really big things.
There was no government-financed support for transistors, lasers, integrated circuits or anything that led to the technology boom from 1950 to 1980 or so.
Where we are today is that everyone is looking to the government for direction and support. Solar power isn't practical on a large scale without massive government subsidies, so there are few businesses involved in this and some of the ones that are are pure scam. Electric cars might have a future, but there are so many regulations in place now that it is very difficult to manufacture anything involving those nasty things called "chemicals" that might get loose and destroy the environment - so other countries are building battery manufacturing plants and are fully prepared to sell the USA better, cheaper batteries while we fuss around. The result will be their batteries will always be better and cheaper.
The US Government is pretty much at the point of saying that China can have bigger, better, faster supercomputers because we will have bigger, better and likely more ponderous social support programs. The result will be a continuing slide towards 30-40% unemployment (we're at 20% now) and everything being made outside the USA. Hopefully, there will be plenty of jobs parking cars for foreign executives who come here to dictate terms.
What is far, far more likely is each ebook will be purchased once, the DRM stripped and the resulting file posted in five or six different formats for the planet to freely download.
Publishers will continue because the non-Internet-savvy population will still be out there buying books, just like they are still buying CDs at Walmart. As these people age out of the population (i.e., die) less and less revenue will come in to publishers. It will be viewed as a non-profit activity publising (or writing) a book.
But we will have 500 years of back catalog to continue downloading from pirate sites pretty much forever.
Glass.
I have personally broken two Kindle screens. I have managed to get them replaced under warranty - thanks, Amazon. A short fall to a relatively hard surface does it.
Another problem with the Kindle is the screen gradually darkens over time. I believe this apples to all eInk displays and not just the Kindle but also the Sony, Nook and everything else using eInk. It makes the device have a rather limited lifespan that is somewhere around 2-3 years. Much shorter than I originally expected.
I strongly recommend that you research the author Don Brown some more. While the names are similar, the writing style is not. Don Brown can let you have all the books you need for fighting off literature students pretty much for free - that is what Amazon charges periodically for the Kindle versions.
I'd say less than $1 a pallet-load is about right for physical books. And while eBooks are handy, Don's physical books are far more useful as Kindling.
Do you really understand how big a critical mass uranium bomb is? It is easy to make and the concepts have been pretty much disclosed and well tested. Should be easy, if you could get the uranium.
But you are looking at something that weighs 5,000 pounds at least. The Hiroshima bomb weighed more like 10,000 pounds. And this wasn't fancy instrumentation to see how well it worked. Just about all of the real creative work done since 1945 has focused on smaller, lighter subcritical mass weapons.
Yes, if someone wanted to wipe out New York City all it would take would be a 10,000 pound bomb in a ship. But most other delivery options are off the table. How many aircraft today can lift a 10,000 pound bomb?
I'd say this is the principal reason we don't have a nuclear arms club that includes every country. What would you do with such a thing if you had it? That and the fact that the amount of uranium required is quite a bit. Easy to get enough for a subcritical mass weapon, but hard to know what to do with it once you have it.
Guns? Well, there are clearly three sorts of people when it comes to guns: those that are frightened of them, those that know how and when to use them and those that are quite willing to use them anytime.
Nuclear weapons are a bit simpler. There are only two sorts of people when it comes to them: people that value this life and people that only value the afterlife. I'd say the folks that only value the afterlife are fucking dangerous and shouldn't be allowed to have anything more complicated than a safety razor.
The leaders in the USSR valued this life for themselves and their population too much to throw it away on the possibility of leading the world into a new era of socialist superiority. The leaders of Iran apparently value only the afterlife and likely consider killing someone as advancing them along the path to their reward. We have seen much evidence of this and nothing that contradicts this view.
The real question is how many people of the Muslim faith agree with that outlook. I don't care what they are praying about if they are afraid of losing their lives and the lives of their children. If they consider their lives better spent as martyrs and the lives of their children to be of no importance as long as they have a nice secure afterlife they are dangerous and unfit for the community of Man.
Oh, and Christians that only value the afterlife are equally as dangerous. It has nothing to do with the specific brand of religion, just the attitude towards the living and the attitude towards whatever possible afterlife you might believe in.
I believe what the poster was saying (and I agree with) is that as a State the USSR was unwilling to sacrifice its population to win a war against the US.
Iran clearly has no such compunctions. They are willing to sacrifice their population over an election. There are a number of other states and non-governmental groups that would be more than happy to start a nuclear war because regardless of the lives lost their ideology would survive.
Unfortunately, there is no technology that allows for remote sensing of nuclear materials in a bomb. At extremely close range you can (probably? hopefully?) detect some increase above background radiation and the US is counting heavily on that today. You cannot stand off in Earth orbit and detect even a big pile of unshielded uranium much less a subcritical mass bomb that is shielded.
Right now it seems Iran is a special case of thumbing their nose at the world and saying they are going to do whatever the heck they want regardless of what anyone says about it. Sanctions that affect the population aren't going to have much effect on the decision makers. This is likely to turn into a very nasty war because they are certainly going to take out Israel as soon as they have the capability to do so. Their leaders have said so, their national identity says so and they have never said that was off the table. So of course, Israel says they are going to take them out first. So far, I believe the US has requested they hold off but that state of affairs isn't going to last forever. If Israel gets hit - either as a first strike or as a result of not destroying every weapon in their first strike - the US will pretty much be committed to following up with a strike on Iran. Which then triggers the rest of the Muslim world declaring war on the US.
Frankly, I don't see a way out of it. Iran certainly isn't going to abandon their status as a Muslim theocratic nation whose obligation is to destroy the state of Israel. The US is certainly going to honor its committments to Israel. The rest of the Muslim world isn't going to stand by and watch millions of Muslims be killed.
Any 14 year-old could probably make an atomic bomb with a critical mass of uranium or plutonium. Such a bomb would be huge and require lots of shielding to be safe to handle - like attaching to an aircraft or loading into a shipping container.
On the other hand, what is required to detonate a subcritical mass is a little bit tricky. It is clearly possible because the US has thermonuclear weapons that are smaller than the core of the first atomic bombs. I'm not sure that A. Q. Khan even had that information, although he was US-trained.
If you want to put a bomb in a shipping container, the Hiroshima bomb would be good enough. If you want to put a bomb into an Amazon box and ship it somewhere in the US that might require a bit more expertise and that is much harder to come by.
I think the problem that a lot of people have with Avatar is that it follows a well-known theme (or meme) that has been pretty much completely explored. There isn't a lot of new traction you can get with this sort of story.
Except, moving it to an alien environment you can get some really slick graphics.
Yes, the story is familiar. Most stories are going to be for people over 12 years old. If you cannot appreciate the way a familiar story is played out I guess Shakespear is an utter failure as well. Not that Avatar is comparable to Shakespear, but a familiar story line has been used by playwrites for centuries.
Avatar was also (hopelessly) mired in the idea of the soulless American corporation. Short term profits and a complete disregard for anything else. Considering this was supposed to be a couple hundred years in the future I would think things would have moved past that or we wouldn't be exploring planets around other stars.
If we wanted to build a Saturn V rocket today it could not be done. The original design is gone. In order to make something that was similar it would require a complete redesign and likely as not end up costing 10 or even 100 times as much. The original made use of much cheaper labor and people that didn't mind getting their hands dirty. Today, the design would be reviewed for ecological soundness and it wouldn't pass muster.
The experts that had been working with rocket engines since the late 1940s worked on the Saturn V. Today there is nobody that knows anywhere near as much about rocket engines left. While the main engines for the Shuttle are somewhat of a marvel, I doubt they could be reproduced today either. The people resources simply aren't there - it would take 10 years of experimentation and learning about rockets.
For the abstract collection of utterly uninteresting and unusable knowledge, robot probes make a lot of sense. It isn't like we are ever going to make use of any of the information that is collected.
That is the primary distinction between sending some robotic machine there and a sending a human - the human is likely the first step towards using the knowledge that is gained. Assume that a robot probe found clear and incontrovertable evidence of life on Mars - what comes next? More robots? More than likely it is an article in a science journal saying "We found it, we don't have to go back now."
We have pretty much made the decision to spend money on social programs rather than science and exploration. A few nerdy rich guys can do whatever they want, but as for spreading humanity off the planet Earth that just isn't going to happen. Ever. We have made the decision and the wealth required to do it is being dedicated now and for the rest of the time humanity has left on Earth. You aren't ever going to assemble the political will and get people to agree to take fewer handouts from their governments. Those handouts are important and in no way will they ever be decreased.
You see the difference between human exploration and sending robots? One is abstract science which fulfills no particular need and the other is exploration. Perhaps exploration where the finding out of certain abstract scientific facts makes the difference between life and death in some remote and hostile place.
Right now we can safely spend a few pennies on abstract science while ensuring bread and circuses for the masses. The idea of spending dollars or even tens of dollars for exploration is out of the question.
When the following generation looks at the folks that came before and sneers that they are old, outmoded and do not have the necessary mental capacity to understand the "new way" re-inventing the wheel is a sad but necessary part of the process.
Most of what is considered to be recent developments in computer science has foundations if not actual implementations in the years before 1970. It may be in a different context, but the same problems have been solved, and are being solved again.
I don't think it is a choice - it is absolutely necessary for people to re-invent the wheel every few years. It is either that or slide backwards as old methods that work are discarded. We are either going to replace them (usually with the same old methods, eventually) or give up and accept less.
GPS requires 3 satellites for a 2-D fix (lat & long) and 4 satellites for a 3-D fix including altitude. Having more than 4 can be nice and may improve things a little, but without SA turned on you can get a fix that is accurate to a small number of meters with 3 satellites.
Where Skyhook comes in is speeding up time to first fix. You start with the GPS receiver "cold" and no ephemeris and it can take minutes to have a fix. Now, if you are able to plug into the GPS algorithym a good approximation of your location you can drop that time to 10 seconds or less. This is extremely important for power-constrained cell phones where the GPS isn't running all the time. This makes having the GPS receiver turned off except when needed practical from a user experience.
The issue for a software developer is that if $1000 is spent on their software vs. beer and pretzels the software developer benefits.
The economy as a whole is likely unaffected, except perhaps that out-of-work software developers are more more difficult to deal with than out-of-work beer and pretzel makers.
So if you are interested in software developers, piracy has a direct and easily felt (although not so easily measured) impact. If you are trying to measure the impact on the economy as a whole you are likely wasting your time because the economy is a lot bigger than just software developers or beer and pretzel sales. Or even software and beer and pretzel sales all together.
Personally, as a software developer I'm a lot more interested in revenue from software sales and its impact on my life. I am less affected if people stop spending so much on beer and pretzels although it would be a shame if they disappeared entirely from the marketplace.
Well, I suppose as long as you aren't in the business of producing software this is a great argument.
I'd say the argument also applies to houses. Currently in the US there is a surplus of houses, so many that cities are bulldozing them to prevent their use by squatters, gangbangers and drug dealers. Also, we just had a huge crisis because the bond rating people decided to ignore reality and rate bonds AAA no matter what. The result was a huge influx of money into the housing market which has now disappeared. So how about if we fix this by just declaring houses to be free now? There are plenty to go around and this would eliminate any sort of "mortgage crisis".
This would then free up money for other things that are more important to the economy than a bunch of old dusty houses.
A somewhat more practical idea would be to just make cars free. There are hundreds of thousands of people that get paid to make cars in the US and in the current economy they are in jeopardy of losing their jobs because there are so few cars being sold. How about if we just give them away? Then there would be full employment for people making and servicing cars and it would free up some money for buying other stuff.
Sounds pretty practical to me. Maybe the government should step in and pay software developers so piracy can continue and while they are at it pay for all the cars that are made so they can be free as well.
The problem is that mostly what BSA is concerned with is piracy in businesses.
A business that is using a pirate version of Microsoft Word would very likely continue to use Microsoft Word no matter what, even if it cost something. Same goes for most things that are really useful in a business environment.
Photoshop is somewhat questionable - there are a lot of people that download it because it is there and free. If they had to pay their modest requirements might actually be fulfilled with Paint.
Now, the pirate version of software to rip CDs is probably not so valuable, but the BSA doesn't track that sort of thing.
A significant part of the subprime problem came from the bond rating agencies, like Moody's. They rated bonds based on mortgages that were almost certain to default as AAA, or investment grade. This made is possible for pension funds and others that demand fixed-income financial instruments with virtually a guarantee of stability to invest in this sort of bond.
Other folks then took out insurance on the bonds for little or no money at all because obviously these were "investment grade" bonds. So the insurance paid off handsomely when the loans default and the investors lose everything - since they aren't the ones holding the insurance.
Once it got around that it was possible to package up a passle of these soon-to-default loans and pass them off on unsuspecting folks as being quality bonds virtually everyone wanted to get into the act. It was easy money. At that point "mortgage brokers" could get money from many different sources based on the ease of getting the mortgage-backed bonds sold. They had no liability if the mortgage went bad, because it was sold off to someone else. The brokers got a hefty commission for loan origination and there was no control on this - nor should there really be at that level.
This is what everyone seems to be missing. What new regulations are there on the bond rating agencies? None. What will prevent another round of this taking place next week? Nothing. What is going to happen when the mortgage defaults percolate up to the bonds that pension funds invested in? The funds will go bankrupt, as will states and municipalities that invested in these bonds. Nothing has been done about the bonds themselves.
We have introduced a bunch of nearly irrelevant regulations that affect banks and some large financial institutions but none of this addresses the origin of the problem. If someone is standing on a street corner passing out checks for $1000 people will take them, no matter what. This is basically what happened in 2003-2006 and while the guy has gone to lunch there is nothing to keep him from coming back. And when the money starts flowing again, we will be right back where we were before when this "crisis" started.
Modern thinking is that concensus forms truth and that perception is reality.
This pretty much comes down to "what I see is real, what you see is irrelevent to my reality".
And then in keeping with the Wiki concept, if 100 people agree that white is black, then we can all share a common reality where white is black. The fact that you perceive white as not black is significant to you, but it doesn't change the truth that white is black to our group. Your truth is just a little different but the two are not mutually exclusive. There is room for all truths.
This is pretty much the current academic philosophy in a very simplified form.
There is another problem with paper - it is slow. Al Gore was announced as the winner in 2000 by CBS long before Florida was done counting.
What do you think the result would be in 2012 if Obama was announced as the winner at midnight and then at 2:00 AM the real results were in an Sarah Palin was then announced as the winner? With all the newspapers saying Obama won but the TV news in the morning saying Palin won. There would be rioting and people killed.
I know for a fact that the first Obamite that got in my face would be bruised. And a lot of those people can't help but getting in your face, it is who they are.
So, how do you think this problem should be handled, considering the 1st Amendment pretty much lets the TV news make up anything they want if there are no official results?
You have hit on the reason for electronic voting, or at least some sort of automation. The TV and cable news services require immediate results because if they do not get them from official sources they will make them up.
CBS announced Al Gore as the winner in 2000 around 1:00 AM Eastern time. Lots of people went to bed after that and woke up with the election undecided. The result was these people "knew" the election had been stolen because CBS told them who the winner was before they went to bed. The next time this happens there will likely be rioting in the streets with stuff getting burned.
You can't pass a law shutting off the TV news - it is against the 1st Amendment. So in the US there really is no choice - immediate results and as accurate as they can be. Immediate takes precedence, with accuracy being sort of a followon. Because if they don't have official results, there will be made-up exit-poll derived results announced.
Sure, it would be nice if you could just shut off the news for a while, but that isn't going to happen.
I think your numbers are a little off. I do not know anyone under 30 that will pay for music anymore. It is all there for free, for the taking, so they do just that - take.
Movies? A few people will buy DVDs rather than download but not too many.
Now, the people over 30 and especially over 40 are still buying, paying and paying. They don't know how to download and will often ask someone to help them out to get some song or movie free. They might have the new 50Gb/sec cable internet connection that they use to play games and read email but they have no idea what software to use (and what not to use) to download a movie or a song.
Today, at least in the US, these are the people that are continuing to pay for content. The younger people? Forget about them, they aren't going to pay. In 10-20 years this will have changed quite a bit. Nobody will be paying because all the old people will have been aged out of
the system. The new older generation will be folks that grew up with the Internet and the idea of swapping floppies and copying games.
Today, it might be 60% that are downloading and 40% that are still paying. But this is going to shift over time to much closer to 90%/10%. This is what the music and movie companies are fearful of and rightly so - they just aren't going to get anymore revenue.