Sure, remember the old AT&T with their One Rate plan? Basicallly, they oversold the entire network to the point where it was unusable except from between 1:30AM and 1:35AM when people had their alarms go off to be able to make phone calls again.
The problem with selling unlimited use is you better really have unlimited capacity - because it will attract new customers, so even if you could support your existing customers, you will get a ton new customers and have to support them. And the simple truth is, you can't. The bandwidth simply isn't available to do so on any existing wireless network. So you end up with a lot of unhappy customers - way, way more than you would have had with a plan that ensures limited data use that the infrastructure can support.
That is where we are today. There are far too many users and people capable of really exercising the network capacity to turn an unlimited plan loose.
Alex Jones is keeping up with his reputation, I am sure.
There is statement that the radioactive materials in one of the Japanese reactors could "spread throughout the world". Utter nonsense. Things are quite well contained now and there is little possibility of any fission reaction restarting. Yes, there is quite a bit of radioactive material at the site, but exactly how would it be spread? Much less, spread beyond a small area of Japan?
Even if 100% of the high-order radioactive materials were to be crushed into powder (which would be quite a feat in of itself) and dumped into the ocean, it would not be spread worldwide. Fishing might really suck for a long time around Japan, but that would be pretty much the extent of it.
We are not talking about a "On the Beach" scenario here, and never have been. The US and much of the world is at a crossroads today and if we abandon nuclear fission powered electrical generation, we will see a lot of natural gas used with commesurate CO2 emissions. Not necessarily a good thing. We are certainly going to see electricity shortages in the US soon, primarily because we haven't built anything major in the way of a power plant in a long time. Like 30-40 years. All that has been built have been sub-1000MW "peaker" plants that have been designed to operate for short periods of time when usage peaks. Of course all of those plants are running 24x7 today.
Do you like refrigeration for your food? I suggest thinking seriously about getting some sort of alternative electric source because the plug in the wall isn't going to be on 24x7 in the coming years.
So if you had a shop next to the train station with only a few hundred dollars of equipment they could sell discounted train tickets, right?
The problem with this sort of thing is there is no real need for a great deal of authentication on transit systems. If you are going to go to the trouble to forge tickets, you are probably no real threat the system's revenue because of the huge investment required. Once you become a real threat, you are going to get caught and the jail time will not be pretty. Most countries will add onto the charges of simply riding without paying a fair because this was done a lot and is "willful".
So, is being able to make forged tickets worth 10-15 years in prison? Who cares if they used a low-bidder for the authentication. It is good enough for 99.9999% of the population and is producing revenue. Would any sane individual decide that millions, tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of the local currency should be spent to "secure" the system? Sounds like complete idiocy to me.
Sure, the system is insecure, but so is every other system on the face of the planet. I'm sure using a forged ticket is already a crime, but all they have to do is make selling forged tickets a serious crime and the problem is a non-problem.
It takes a real paranoid person to think that someone would "just for fun" want to hack into a pacemaker. We haven't gotten over the idea that people are generally good and nobody would want to do this, even if they could.
The truth is that if you could kill someone with a mouseclick, you might - I don't care who you are, that is just the way people are in reality. We have operated under the assumption that "nobody would do this" for far too long.
The clear answer is that security has been an afterthought and still is for the most part. There is also the rather idealistic notion that such things are utterly beneath humans to do. What we have found on the Internet is pretty much nothing is "beneath" humans. If someone can get away with doing some mischief, they might do it. If they can do it anonymously, it is almost a dead certainty someone is going to do it if for no other reason than for laughs or bragging rights.
We are clearly starting to see the dark underside of humanity. The Internet has allowed a huge amount of anonymous and pseudo-anonymous activity and this has pretty much turned over the rock so everyone can see the squishy, many-legged stuff that is buried in the human psyche.
No, I don't think there is any putting the genii back in the bottle. This pretty much means we are going to need a huge program to revise software with the first thought being "How can this be misused for fun and profit?" and the second being "Given infinite time, assume any security will be broken - so how do we keep this from being used in a harmful manner?" This means computers are going to get a lot harder to use and a lot of things that can't be automated in this environment will go back to manual systems or systems that require in-person, hands-on control.
A "sustainable" planet is going to require a lot more effort than simply "population decline". If humanity can get together and decide that we have to have a sustainable planet ecology, we need to have maybe 500 million people at the most. 200 is probably more realistic. At that level dumping our own waste products will have a chance to naturally be processed and not be a hazard. With 6 billion people we will be drowning in our own wastes unless we "do something" about the problem and even the US and Western Europe have steadfastly held against doing anything in this area.
We are still dumping sewage sludge into the oceans and landfills.
So how do we get the population down to "sustainable" levels in say, 20 years? Well, if we killed a million people a day - call it 365.25 million people a year - it would take over 20 years to get there. I don't think we are going to have people just walk into gas chambers en mass to accomplish this goal.
"Sustainable" is an imaginary goal that cannot be accomplished and will not be accomplished. Therefore, we better plan on getting resources from off-planet and being able to spread the population around, at least a little. Resource acquisition from off planet is probably the highest priority.
This moving 10 million people away from Earth wouldn't make a dent in the problem? First, think about how many people will volunteer for such a plan and die trying - it is indeed dangerous. Then think about the children these young, adventureous people will not be having because they died. If we could put 10 million people on the Moon and Mars it would make a huge difference. And the next step would be the generation ship to Alpha Centauri.
Not only would it make a difference, it is a requirement unless you want to see the "sustainable" folks worse predictions of a population collapse come true.
One smoker in the group raises everyone's insurance costs in a group insurance situation. This means everyone's insurance either costs more, meaning people get paid less, or a more restrictive plan must be selected, meaning people have to pay more for health care.
Either way, it harms everyone in the group having one smoker that works for the company.
Why does it work this way? Because the way insurance rates are calculated have been legislated and regulated to the extent that you can't charge Charlie the smoker more than Harry the non-smoker in a group but you can raise the rates for the entire group. Small side effect of regulating the rates.
How about the company having to choose a much more restrictive health care plan because of the inclusion of one or more smokers into the group? That is going to affect every single employee, possibly right in their wallet.
Yes, the insurance rates go up a lot - sometimes 50-100% - because of a smoker being in the group.
The problem is when health insurance rates depend on 100% non-smoking group. If you have a single smoker in the group the rates go up for the group, not just that employee. This is a result of the elimination of risk factors from being used in computing rates. Once you take the risk calculation out you are left with the insurance company being left with pretty much an open-ended fund that needs to be paid into. So they are going to do every nasty thing in the book to try to "manage" the situation.
This is how insurance works. Insurance is a gamble where the company bets they are going to collect more in premiums than the people are going to run up in costs. There are folks that sit around all day and calculate the odds of various people getting cancer and the like so it works out really well - they can tell you with a couple of percentage points what your risk of getting cancer is at a certain age and other risk factors. Like smoking.
However, in the last couple of years the government has pretty much mandated the risk calculation out of the picture. This means that insurance isn't insurance anymore but is instead some kind of savings plan where you pay into it and then take money out later. Problem is, today there is very little control the insurance company has over what is coming in, so they are desperately trying to manage what is going out, often by finding some trick so they can deny coverage. It was a logical outcome of removing the control over premiums based on risk and anyone with a brain could have forseen it coming.
So now that the insurance company can't rate people hire for most real risks they get to do whatever they can on what is left. One of those is smoking. So if a business, any business, wants to keep their health insurance rates down - which they pretty much have to do - they have to weed out all of the smokers. Most of the other real risks, like the chances of women becoming pregnant, have been legislated away from rate calculations. How about stuff like sickle-cell? Nope, can't rate based on that today either - that would be racial discrimination.
So you end up with the system like it is, at least for a few more years. Obamacare is going to make it single-payer, probably by the end of 2015 or so when we see how many people are thrown onto government subsidies because of employers dropping health care insurance. They have to - they can be fined out of existance if they offer health care insurance and employees choose to not go with it - the fine is like 2 or 3 times the cost of providing insurance.. There is a fine for not offering health insurance, but it is about 10% of the cost of the insurance, so everyone will simply drop it.
What it comes down to is pretty simple. The US will be converted to a single-payer system directly funded by taxpayers. This will be the outcome of Obamacare because by the end of 2014 no major employer will be offering health insurance to employees. This will put the burden 100% on the government through the "exchanges" and subsidies. Sounds good, doesn't it?
Well, under that system if I am paying for your health care and you are paying for mine then it is indeed my business what you are smoking or shooting up, as it is your business what I am doing. There is no more "privacy" involved because clearly anyone doing things that directly affect their health need treatment to get them to stop doing them. Treatment can be anything from a nicotine patch and a quitting program to a long stay at a "residential treatment facility".
Sure, you can complain, but it isn't going to do any good. You are talking about a minority of people taking a chunk out of the government budget for private purposes. How? Simple, if cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and it is expensive to treat, then anyone smoking has their hand in every taxpayer's pocket. No way out of this when the government is using tax money to run the health care system.
How other countries avoid this isn't clear but it is clearly a cultural thing. In the US this is exactly how it is going to go down. Right now private employers are controlling health insurance costs so the effects are localized. Starting in 2014 with employers no longer in the health insurance game, it will be all of our problems and the effects will not be localized.
Unfortunately, in the Islamic faith - or at least certain divisions of it - any comment that is against Mohammed is in fact a incitement to violence. This isn't just shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater, this is equivalent to shouting "Gas all the Jews" in a temple during services.
These folks have it drummed into their heads from birth that anyone insulting Mohammed deserves death. I believe it is in the Haditha (however one spells it) which are the documents that came after the Koran that apply to Islam - again, at least some sects. Because of this it is very difficult to have anything like a reasonable discussion about the topic. It also follows that many nations that have anything like hate speech laws and laws against incitement to violence are going to have to pass laws treating the denigration of Mohammed the same way that "String up that nigger" or "Gas all the Jews" is treated today.
The US probably isn't going to escape this without some really objectionable laws being passed. Europe and Australia are most of the way there already.
The problems with the list of ingredients are legion. You have the situations where the same physical thing has seventeen different names, some sounding nasty while others not so much. You then get into not listing real stuff just "artificial color and flavors" because it falls beneath the regulated minimum quantity. Then there is just plain secret stuff that isn't listed at all. You don't really think that Pepsi listed either cocaine or pepsin when it had it in it do you? How do you know that there still isn't cocaine in CocaCola?
The regulations are meaningless because there is zero enforcement. There are no inspectors to do the inspecting and there isn't even any followup testing. There is some level of confidence building, but in no way is this assuring food safety.
This is the main problem with such regulations. They are imaginary.
I thought most food crops today were hybridized such that they did not produce viable seeds. To get viable seeds you had to go back to the hybrid seed provider (DeKalbe, maybe?) and buy new seeds.
For example, buy an orange in the store, take the seeds out and plant them. You will get a tree, but never any oranges. Try the same thing with nearly every item in the produce section at the store. Nothing sold today will produce viable seeds.
So I am left wondering why Monsanto didn't take one more step in making these seeds hybrids that were not viable.
There is probably justification for calling many "hybrid" crops today as genetically modified. That pretty much means that nearl 100% of today's food crops are GM in one way or another.
If you are concerned only with genetic manipulations that have been done in the last 20 years or so, you are probably missing the boat. The manipulations of plant genome over the last 150 years have been quite extreme and there are examples of creating non-viable forms. There is no indication that this sort of manipulation has ceased. So what do we do if a university creates a hybrid corn that seems to be ideal but has a nasty side effect? There isn't any formalized testing procedure for food crops, so creating corn that promotes cancer after 10 years is entirely possible - and it could easily spread throughout the entire food ecosystem.
The question then comes in, what constitutes adequate testing? Clearly we can see examples in nature that say even 20 years isn't enough. What needs to be tested? Well, considering that many hybridizations are just enhancing natural processes like cross-pollenization, it should be obvious that changes are going to happen whether we want them to or not. So how do we protect food crops from change? Short answer, unfortunately, is we cannot. We are going to have to either roll with the changes however they occur or we are going to have to move to a 100% synthesized food supply where the exact nature of it is 100% known and controlled.
In short, trying to "know" about GM is pointless. We aren't in control of our food supply and changes are going to creep in. Cross-pollination and hybridization can create as much havoc as GM and we have had people playing around with those in very uninformed ways for over a hundred years.
54 MPG for real-world drivers is almost certainly an imaginary number. How a car maker gets there is something like a lot of 27MPG cars and an equal number of infinite MPG electric-only cars.
Now, the electric only cars are impractical for any real distance and that does effect the marketability of these cars. However, with enough government-supplied (taxpayer provided) subsidies for buying an EV, many people can justify one in their driveway, the price just has to be right. As Chevy is finding out, $40,000 is not the right price.
There might be some huge improvement in battery technology, but something that would increase the range of an EV to 400 miles (the effective range of nearly all gas powered vehicles today) is unlikely. Similarly, it is unlikely any sort of extremely rapid charge (flat to full in 10 minutes) is unlikely. So that means we are talking about a marketing problem, not a technical one.
Would a future Congress and President decide to throw billions at the "EV problem" to allow a carmaker to meet the new mileage standard? Maybe, especially if it meant otherwise backing down from the standard completely.
No, a fleet of gasoline-powered cars that actually achieve 54MPG is unlikely in the US. Bringing high-mileage diesel cars to the US is equally unlikely. I think trying to convert the US car buyers over to micro-cars (like the Smart car) would be a much tougher sell than getting people to buy 200-mile range EVs that needed to charge overnight. So I would bet heavily on a government subsidized program pushing EVs.
The real question is going to be what that does to the electric grid. No way we are ready for even 10% of the cars to be EV today - we simply do not have the generation capacity. Oh, and such cars are going to charge at home at night, so any solar PV system is useless. I do not see suburbs putting up wind turbines between houses, so we are going to have a real electric supply problem.
The idea that electric power is being produced far, far away is part of the problem. In the US we are losing 5-10% of the electric power generated simply due to transmission line losses and conversion losses. The voltage is ramped up for the transmission line and then dropped down for more local distribution. All of this takes energy. I believe your average distance from generation to consumption in the US today is hundreds of miles which takes a big chunk out of what is finally distributed.
But in the NIMBY world this is highly desirable - we don't want to see these things.
Remember, just because you can't see the smokestack doesn't mean you are not affected by it. While "out of sight, out of mind" may work for small children it should not govern how we think about pollution and pollution controls.
Sure, it would be interesting. Except that the US has been shaped by well over a hundred years of development which has been focused on separating living from working. You could almost say that people don't like looking at the same view from where they work as where they live. So, the US has been made into a place where you work somewhere and live somewhere else, preferably quite some distance.
You can say this isn't efficient, but the highest efficency would be to have your office in your home. Second highest would be to live in a big building that was shared by the office. Both of these scenarios have been tried and they do not work well. Home-based offices are OK for some people, but others simply cannot function without interaction with others and a separation between "home" and "work". In the 1960s a number of buildings were built with the concept of living and working withing the same building or group of buildings and it never worked - in Chicago both the Hancock tower and Marina City were built with this concept. I'm sure it has been tried elsewhere too, and failed.
In the US the cities have proven to be very expensive to maintain and police as well as being a dumping ground for undesirables. With less investment in infrastructure nobody wants to have a family in the inner city and in most cases even the outlying parts are far less desirable in terms of schools and other infrastructure. So anyone with a family is going to want to be in the suburbs because that is where the infrastructure is being spent on. Also the crime rates in US cities are far, far higher than in the suburbs as a general rule although I am sure there are some exceptions. Again, nobody with a family wants to live in a city unless they have no choice.
All of this makes for living withing bicycle distance of work a difficult to achieve goal for the US. The problems are different in Europe but there is still a tremendous amount of commuting traffic in places like Germany which tends to indicate that the desired separation between work and home isn't just a US phenomenon.
So not only is it not going to happen in the US for any more than very small fraction of people, nobody really wants it to happen anyway.
What exactly do you do with a schoolbus driver that is high? Once it is legal to use but not legal to do some things while high what happens to current job filtering where they disallow drug users completely?
Obviously, what happens is the people that have no sense continue to not use sense. While there are a lot of people that can sensibly use alchohol and drugs, check out the changes in class roster between the first day of freshman classes and the start of the 2nd semester at any large state university. You hand some people freedom to get high and drunk and they exercise that right to the limit. University of Illinois (one I know about) loses at least 25% of the freshman class the first semester and has for 20+ years. It is just something they live with.
This is not a problem that is experienced in other countries, at least not to the level it is in the US. Which is why they can have all the legalized drugs they want in Europe.
For the US it has nothing to do with allowing open legal use and standing by to watch lots of responsible use. It is all about employers having to scrap drug testing because drugs are suddenly legal to use. It is all about there being no such thing as responsible use for maybe 20% of the population of the US. If you don't fall into that category, great, but do not discount the fact that plenty of people do. Far, far more than we want to have showing us a fine example.
While the use of cannabis is mostly harmless, when used responsibly.
I don't know anyone that I would consider uses cannabis "responsibly". The whole idea is to put "responsible" in a little box and shove it under the couch or out in back by the trash cans. Leastwise until Monday. Maybe Tuesday on some weeks and those aren't the usual Federal Monday holidays.
The vast majority will not pay for content. I don't know anyone who pays for music any longer - they just grab what they want for free.
Why are the media companies making money today? Because they are receiving payments in lucrative markets where promotion has value and they have a huge segment of the population either scared to download or incapable of it because of lack of connectivity. Unfortunately, both groups are pretty much confined to 40+ years of age and in many places it is more like 60+. These people will be moving out of purchasing stuff like this fairly soon - when was the last time you saw Granny using the pay-per-view at the rest home?
Music is a joke today. It has zero value and in most places this is recognized. There are no more "record stores" - about the only place left selling CDs is WalMart and the CD section is biggest in poor areas where people do not have Internet connectivity at home. Sure, if you want to spend money there are many places to do so - but virtually nobody is spending. Everyone points to iTunes as a big success, except they have maybe 2% of the download traffic. Sure, they are doing fine with the service because it fills a need for the folks that can't (or won't) pirate. But do not believe for a second that even Apple expects people to fill a 64GB iPod with paid-for music.
Movies still take so long for Joe Sixpack to download that even if he had the computer equipment and the Internet connection he would not. So Joe has no choice but to spend money - but the pirates are getting a stronger and stronger foothold which means movies are making it into the $5 bin at WalMart earlier and earlier.
The prices might fall, but this is going to be a last-ditch desperation move not the introduction of a new nirvana of low, low prices. When the prices start coming down you can expect to see the 20-disc collections being advertised late nite on cable channels. Everyone will see there is no future revenue coming so it will be a huge push to grab what little there is left.
What happens after that?? Good question. Personally, I think we will see more and more productions like Yentl - Barbra Striesand paid for that because (a) she had the money and (b) she wanted to make it. Nobody else would have cast a 40+ year old woman as a teenager, but she did for herself. OK, it was a good gamble and I believe the movie made money - but the point is she would have done it even if it would have made $0. Who do you think paid for "The Expendibles" - right, Stallone. We are going to see more and more of this because it will be known from the beginning that movies aren't going to be making money.
Right after the ego productions will be the ad placements where Coke pays for a 90 minute movie showing everyone drinking Coke and dissing Pepsi. You can't imagine what lengths the ad placements will go to and it will be obvious and disgusting to most people. But enough will watch that it will be a whole new genre of ad-supported movies.
After that? Maybe patronage where some rich guy pays to have a movie made about his wonderful life. Maybe government-sponsored films where we get to see how wonderful life in the military is or how awful your life might turn out if you don't put down that joint RIGHT NOW!!! The point is, the revenue will be gone in a lot less than ten years and maybe less than five. A lot of people - millions - will be out of work because of this and the ripple effects throughout the economy. But the pirates will have won the day and the whole catalog from the last hundred years or so will be online and available for free.
Just don't expect anything more to come along anytime soon. Least not of any quality. Think Yentl and Reefer Madness and those the are high points.
The biggest problem with a worldwide release of a movie is the big question - what do you allow in?
In the US a pair of tits will get you an R rating instantly - which is fine, if that is the audience you are shooting for. If you want a PG-13 movie for the US audience, you have to cut the tits. Or, in a R movie in the US you can show female pubic hair - except if you want to release the movie in Japan that would instantly have it blocked. There are other rules for EU countries as well.
And then there are the other markets. Have a scene where someone is holding a Bible in a courtroom? Such a movie cannot be distributed in an Islamic country, or at least most of them. Want a movie where the hero is wearing a turban? Good luck
It gets absurd. They thought they could capture this in eight bits with DVD region coding, but that wasn't really sufficient. What it means today is pretty much anything outside the US gets stuck with everything being cut that could possibly be objectionable to anyone, anywhere. Maybe the US version is less chopped but think about a movie made for an adult EU audience - they are going to have to cut it for the US!
The fact that the entertainment industry at all levels has to deal with this is silly and it throws a lot of extra costs into it. I am pretty sure it is filtering into games today as well. Certainly music has had some run-ins with this sort of issue. The problem is there is no worldwide standard and there isn't going to be any time soon - certainly not until someone like SPECTRE takes over the planet and declares themselves to be Dictator for Life.
Having held (and fired) several Glock pistols, there are two parts to these guns: the grip and frame of the gun and then the part that comes off: slide, barrel, receiver, spring, etc. The part that comes off the frame is all metal, every bit of it and is pretty weighty. The frame and grip are plastic and are quite light, at least compared to a all-metal behemoth like a 1911.
Yes, you can easily tell the difference between a loaded and unloaded Glock - the weight distribution is very different and unloaded it is topheavy. A 1911 with seven.45s in an all metal frame is a very different proposition.
What is questionable is the grounds on which this company violated a contract with no solid legal basis for doing so.
Ever read an equipment lease agreement? I mean the sort where you are leasing a copier or some piece of industrial machinery, not a car or an apartment. They didn't violate the contract, they simply exercised their rights under the contract - the lease agreement.
Most of the time there is at least one clause that says if you are using the leased equipment in a manner contrary to what the lessor believes is the correct use they can come and get it. They need to be able to confidently resell the equipment when the lease is over and they can't if you aren't being nice with their equipment. Most of the time this is nonsense and nobody pays any attention to it - who is going to "misuse" a copier? But if you are leasing a color copier and they find out you are trying to print money with it, they will come and get it.
Well, if you ever access any sort of financial system, be it a bank, trading account, Ebay, etc. you might be concerned that you are the one doing it rather than someone else doing it "for" you. Similarly, if folks in a particularly nasty government start getting messages implying that the sender is going to be using a rifle to start taking down members of the government, you might like it if there was a solid way of saying that it wasn't you even though the messages claim to be from you.
Even simpler - how about if a female coworker starts getting raunchy messages from you, only it isn't really you. Today, that can land you in a lot of trouble in most Western countries and there may be very little you can do about it. Claiming you are innocent with no evidence may not get you very far and certainly in the US sexual harrassment is a "guilty until proven innocent" sort of crime.
Sure, it might be nice if we could just assume that everyone is who they claim to be without any further validation. Unfortunately, the last 15 years or so of the "public" Internet at large have proven that if there is a way to create mayhem online it will be done. If I can untraceably steal your money, I will do so and so will most of the other people on the planet - so the challenge is making sure it isn't untraceable. Today, that is a pretty big deterrent for most people - but not all which is why people lose millions of dollars online.
Right now less technical people are quite willing to believe just about anything online and trust they are communicating with people and businesses that are who they claim to be. The more technically oriented have learned to trust nothing and no one and believe that online the rule is fraud, fraud, fraud. This difference in belief is being exploited every day and is working out really well for criminals. We are reaching a point where a small fraction of people are fed up with the criminals and having to assume that everyone is a fraud. Something is going to be done about this and you can either be part of the solution or part of the problem.
Most people are going be coming squarely down on the side of being part of the problem. And the criminals love it.
Apple could not have gotten data from MapQuest or Garmin as they are licensees of Navteq data and they can't resell it.
Microsoft has been integrating Navteq and GDT data for a long time and may have some of their own as well. But again, they can't relicense the parts they do not own.
So the choices are a lot more limited than you might think.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, remember the old AT&T with their One Rate plan? Basicallly, they oversold the entire network to the point where it was unusable except from between 1:30AM and 1:35AM when people had their alarms go off to be able to make phone calls again.
The problem with selling unlimited use is you better really have unlimited capacity - because it will attract new customers, so even if you could support your existing customers, you will get a ton new customers and have to support them. And the simple truth is, you can't. The bandwidth simply isn't available to do so on any existing wireless network. So you end up with a lot of unhappy customers - way, way more than you would have had with a plan that ensures limited data use that the infrastructure can support.
That is where we are today. There are far too many users and people capable of really exercising the network capacity to turn an unlimited plan loose.
Alex Jones is keeping up with his reputation, I am sure.
There is statement that the radioactive materials in one of the Japanese reactors could "spread throughout the world". Utter nonsense. Things are quite well contained now and there is little possibility of any fission reaction restarting. Yes, there is quite a bit of radioactive material at the site, but exactly how would it be spread? Much less, spread beyond a small area of Japan?
Even if 100% of the high-order radioactive materials were to be crushed into powder (which would be quite a feat in of itself) and dumped into the ocean, it would not be spread worldwide. Fishing might really suck for a long time around Japan, but that would be pretty much the extent of it.
We are not talking about a "On the Beach" scenario here, and never have been. The US and much of the world is at a crossroads today and if we abandon nuclear fission powered electrical generation, we will see a lot of natural gas used with commesurate CO2 emissions. Not necessarily a good thing. We are certainly going to see electricity shortages in the US soon, primarily because we haven't built anything major in the way of a power plant in a long time. Like 30-40 years. All that has been built have been sub-1000MW "peaker" plants that have been designed to operate for short periods of time when usage peaks. Of course all of those plants are running 24x7 today.
Do you like refrigeration for your food? I suggest thinking seriously about getting some sort of alternative electric source because the plug in the wall isn't going to be on 24x7 in the coming years.
So if you had a shop next to the train station with only a few hundred dollars of equipment they could sell discounted train tickets, right?
The problem with this sort of thing is there is no real need for a great deal of authentication on transit systems. If you are going to go to the trouble to forge tickets, you are probably no real threat the system's revenue because of the huge investment required. Once you become a real threat, you are going to get caught and the jail time will not be pretty. Most countries will add onto the charges of simply riding without paying a fair because this was done a lot and is "willful".
So, is being able to make forged tickets worth 10-15 years in prison? Who cares if they used a low-bidder for the authentication. It is good enough for 99.9999% of the population and is producing revenue. Would any sane individual decide that millions, tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of the local currency should be spent to "secure" the system? Sounds like complete idiocy to me.
Sure, the system is insecure, but so is every other system on the face of the planet. I'm sure using a forged ticket is already a crime, but all they have to do is make selling forged tickets a serious crime and the problem is a non-problem.
It takes a real paranoid person to think that someone would "just for fun" want to hack into a pacemaker. We haven't gotten over the idea that people are generally good and nobody would want to do this, even if they could.
The truth is that if you could kill someone with a mouseclick, you might - I don't care who you are, that is just the way people are in reality. We have operated under the assumption that "nobody would do this" for far too long.
The clear answer is that security has been an afterthought and still is for the most part. There is also the rather idealistic notion that such things are utterly beneath humans to do. What we have found on the Internet is pretty much nothing is "beneath" humans. If someone can get away with doing some mischief, they might do it. If they can do it anonymously, it is almost a dead certainty someone is going to do it if for no other reason than for laughs or bragging rights.
We are clearly starting to see the dark underside of humanity. The Internet has allowed a huge amount of anonymous and pseudo-anonymous activity and this has pretty much turned over the rock so everyone can see the squishy, many-legged stuff that is buried in the human psyche.
No, I don't think there is any putting the genii back in the bottle. This pretty much means we are going to need a huge program to revise software with the first thought being "How can this be misused for fun and profit?" and the second being "Given infinite time, assume any security will be broken - so how do we keep this from being used in a harmful manner?" This means computers are going to get a lot harder to use and a lot of things that can't be automated in this environment will go back to manual systems or systems that require in-person, hands-on control.
A "sustainable" planet is going to require a lot more effort than simply "population decline". If humanity can get together and decide that we have to have a sustainable planet ecology, we need to have maybe 500 million people at the most. 200 is probably more realistic. At that level dumping our own waste products will have a chance to naturally be processed and not be a hazard. With 6 billion people we will be drowning in our own wastes unless we "do something" about the problem and even the US and Western Europe have steadfastly held against doing anything in this area.
We are still dumping sewage sludge into the oceans and landfills.
So how do we get the population down to "sustainable" levels in say, 20 years? Well, if we killed a million people a day - call it 365.25 million people a year - it would take over 20 years to get there. I don't think we are going to have people just walk into gas chambers en mass to accomplish this goal.
"Sustainable" is an imaginary goal that cannot be accomplished and will not be accomplished. Therefore, we better plan on getting resources from off-planet and being able to spread the population around, at least a little. Resource acquisition from off planet is probably the highest priority.
This moving 10 million people away from Earth wouldn't make a dent in the problem? First, think about how many people will volunteer for such a plan and die trying - it is indeed dangerous. Then think about the children these young, adventureous people will not be having because they died. If we could put 10 million people on the Moon and Mars it would make a huge difference. And the next step would be the generation ship to Alpha Centauri.
Not only would it make a difference, it is a requirement unless you want to see the "sustainable" folks worse predictions of a population collapse come true.
One smoker in the group raises everyone's insurance costs in a group insurance situation. This means everyone's insurance either costs more, meaning people get paid less, or a more restrictive plan must be selected, meaning people have to pay more for health care.
Either way, it harms everyone in the group having one smoker that works for the company.
Why does it work this way? Because the way insurance rates are calculated have been legislated and regulated to the extent that you can't charge Charlie the smoker more than Harry the non-smoker in a group but you can raise the rates for the entire group. Small side effect of regulating the rates.
How about the company having to choose a much more restrictive health care plan because of the inclusion of one or more smokers into the group? That is going to affect every single employee, possibly right in their wallet.
Yes, the insurance rates go up a lot - sometimes 50-100% - because of a smoker being in the group.
The problem is when health insurance rates depend on 100% non-smoking group. If you have a single smoker in the group the rates go up for the group, not just that employee. This is a result of the elimination of risk factors from being used in computing rates. Once you take the risk calculation out you are left with the insurance company being left with pretty much an open-ended fund that needs to be paid into. So they are going to do every nasty thing in the book to try to "manage" the situation.
This is how insurance works. Insurance is a gamble where the company bets they are going to collect more in premiums than the people are going to run up in costs. There are folks that sit around all day and calculate the odds of various people getting cancer and the like so it works out really well - they can tell you with a couple of percentage points what your risk of getting cancer is at a certain age and other risk factors. Like smoking.
However, in the last couple of years the government has pretty much mandated the risk calculation out of the picture. This means that insurance isn't insurance anymore but is instead some kind of savings plan where you pay into it and then take money out later. Problem is, today there is very little control the insurance company has over what is coming in, so they are desperately trying to manage what is going out, often by finding some trick so they can deny coverage. It was a logical outcome of removing the control over premiums based on risk and anyone with a brain could have forseen it coming.
So now that the insurance company can't rate people hire for most real risks they get to do whatever they can on what is left. One of those is smoking. So if a business, any business, wants to keep their health insurance rates down - which they pretty much have to do - they have to weed out all of the smokers. Most of the other real risks, like the chances of women becoming pregnant, have been legislated away from rate calculations. How about stuff like sickle-cell? Nope, can't rate based on that today either - that would be racial discrimination.
So you end up with the system like it is, at least for a few more years. Obamacare is going to make it single-payer, probably by the end of 2015 or so when we see how many people are thrown onto government subsidies because of employers dropping health care insurance. They have to - they can be fined out of existance if they offer health care insurance and employees choose to not go with it - the fine is like 2 or 3 times the cost of providing insurance.. There is a fine for not offering health insurance, but it is about 10% of the cost of the insurance, so everyone will simply drop it.
What it comes down to is pretty simple. The US will be converted to a single-payer system directly funded by taxpayers. This will be the outcome of Obamacare because by the end of 2014 no major employer will be offering health insurance to employees. This will put the burden 100% on the government through the "exchanges" and subsidies. Sounds good, doesn't it?
Well, under that system if I am paying for your health care and you are paying for mine then it is indeed my business what you are smoking or shooting up, as it is your business what I am doing. There is no more "privacy" involved because clearly anyone doing things that directly affect their health need treatment to get them to stop doing them. Treatment can be anything from a nicotine patch and a quitting program to a long stay at a "residential treatment facility".
Sure, you can complain, but it isn't going to do any good. You are talking about a minority of people taking a chunk out of the government budget for private purposes. How? Simple, if cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and it is expensive to treat, then anyone smoking has their hand in every taxpayer's pocket. No way out of this when the government is using tax money to run the health care system.
How other countries avoid this isn't clear but it is clearly a cultural thing. In the US this is exactly how it is going to go down. Right now private employers are controlling health insurance costs so the effects are localized. Starting in 2014 with employers no longer in the health insurance game, it will be all of our problems and the effects will not be localized.
Unfortunately, in the Islamic faith - or at least certain divisions of it - any comment that is against Mohammed is in fact a incitement to violence. This isn't just shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater, this is equivalent to shouting "Gas all the Jews" in a temple during services.
These folks have it drummed into their heads from birth that anyone insulting Mohammed deserves death. I believe it is in the Haditha (however one spells it) which are the documents that came after the Koran that apply to Islam - again, at least some sects. Because of this it is very difficult to have anything like a reasonable discussion about the topic. It also follows that many nations that have anything like hate speech laws and laws against incitement to violence are going to have to pass laws treating the denigration of Mohammed the same way that "String up that nigger" or "Gas all the Jews" is treated today.
The US probably isn't going to escape this without some really objectionable laws being passed. Europe and Australia are most of the way there already.
The problems with the list of ingredients are legion. You have the situations where the same physical thing has seventeen different names, some sounding nasty while others not so much. You then get into not listing real stuff just "artificial color and flavors" because it falls beneath the regulated minimum quantity. Then there is just plain secret stuff that isn't listed at all. You don't really think that Pepsi listed either cocaine or pepsin when it had it in it do you? How do you know that there still isn't cocaine in CocaCola?
The regulations are meaningless because there is zero enforcement. There are no inspectors to do the inspecting and there isn't even any followup testing. There is some level of confidence building, but in no way is this assuring food safety.
This is the main problem with such regulations. They are imaginary.
I thought most food crops today were hybridized such that they did not produce viable seeds. To get viable seeds you had to go back to the hybrid seed provider (DeKalbe, maybe?) and buy new seeds.
For example, buy an orange in the store, take the seeds out and plant them. You will get a tree, but never any oranges. Try the same thing with nearly every item in the produce section at the store. Nothing sold today will produce viable seeds.
So I am left wondering why Monsanto didn't take one more step in making these seeds hybrids that were not viable.
There is probably justification for calling many "hybrid" crops today as genetically modified. That pretty much means that nearl 100% of today's food crops are GM in one way or another.
If you are concerned only with genetic manipulations that have been done in the last 20 years or so, you are probably missing the boat. The manipulations of plant genome over the last 150 years have been quite extreme and there are examples of creating non-viable forms. There is no indication that this sort of manipulation has ceased. So what do we do if a university creates a hybrid corn that seems to be ideal but has a nasty side effect? There isn't any formalized testing procedure for food crops, so creating corn that promotes cancer after 10 years is entirely possible - and it could easily spread throughout the entire food ecosystem.
The question then comes in, what constitutes adequate testing? Clearly we can see examples in nature that say even 20 years isn't enough. What needs to be tested? Well, considering that many hybridizations are just enhancing natural processes like cross-pollenization, it should be obvious that changes are going to happen whether we want them to or not. So how do we protect food crops from change? Short answer, unfortunately, is we cannot. We are going to have to either roll with the changes however they occur or we are going to have to move to a 100% synthesized food supply where the exact nature of it is 100% known and controlled.
In short, trying to "know" about GM is pointless. We aren't in control of our food supply and changes are going to creep in. Cross-pollination and hybridization can create as much havoc as GM and we have had people playing around with those in very uninformed ways for over a hundred years.
54 MPG for real-world drivers is almost certainly an imaginary number. How a car maker gets there is something like a lot of 27MPG cars and an equal number of infinite MPG electric-only cars.
Now, the electric only cars are impractical for any real distance and that does effect the marketability of these cars. However, with enough government-supplied (taxpayer provided) subsidies for buying an EV, many people can justify one in their driveway, the price just has to be right. As Chevy is finding out, $40,000 is not the right price.
There might be some huge improvement in battery technology, but something that would increase the range of an EV to 400 miles (the effective range of nearly all gas powered vehicles today) is unlikely. Similarly, it is unlikely any sort of extremely rapid charge (flat to full in 10 minutes) is unlikely. So that means we are talking about a marketing problem, not a technical one.
Would a future Congress and President decide to throw billions at the "EV problem" to allow a carmaker to meet the new mileage standard? Maybe, especially if it meant otherwise backing down from the standard completely.
No, a fleet of gasoline-powered cars that actually achieve 54MPG is unlikely in the US. Bringing high-mileage diesel cars to the US is equally unlikely. I think trying to convert the US car buyers over to micro-cars (like the Smart car) would be a much tougher sell than getting people to buy 200-mile range EVs that needed to charge overnight. So I would bet heavily on a government subsidized program pushing EVs.
The real question is going to be what that does to the electric grid. No way we are ready for even 10% of the cars to be EV today - we simply do not have the generation capacity. Oh, and such cars are going to charge at home at night, so any solar PV system is useless. I do not see suburbs putting up wind turbines between houses, so we are going to have a real electric supply problem.
The idea that electric power is being produced far, far away is part of the problem. In the US we are losing 5-10% of the electric power generated simply due to transmission line losses and conversion losses. The voltage is ramped up for the transmission line and then dropped down for more local distribution. All of this takes energy. I believe your average distance from generation to consumption in the US today is hundreds of miles which takes a big chunk out of what is finally distributed.
But in the NIMBY world this is highly desirable - we don't want to see these things.
Remember, just because you can't see the smokestack doesn't mean you are not affected by it. While "out of sight, out of mind" may work for small children it should not govern how we think about pollution and pollution controls.
Sure, it would be interesting. Except that the US has been shaped by well over a hundred years of development which has been focused on separating living from working. You could almost say that people don't like looking at the same view from where they work as where they live. So, the US has been made into a place where you work somewhere and live somewhere else, preferably quite some distance.
You can say this isn't efficient, but the highest efficency would be to have your office in your home. Second highest would be to live in a big building that was shared by the office. Both of these scenarios have been tried and they do not work well. Home-based offices are OK for some people, but others simply cannot function without interaction with others and a separation between "home" and "work". In the 1960s a number of buildings were built with the concept of living and working withing the same building or group of buildings and it never worked - in Chicago both the Hancock tower and Marina City were built with this concept. I'm sure it has been tried elsewhere too, and failed.
In the US the cities have proven to be very expensive to maintain and police as well as being a dumping ground for undesirables. With less investment in infrastructure nobody wants to have a family in the inner city and in most cases even the outlying parts are far less desirable in terms of schools and other infrastructure. So anyone with a family is going to want to be in the suburbs because that is where the infrastructure is being spent on. Also the crime rates in US cities are far, far higher than in the suburbs as a general rule although I am sure there are some exceptions. Again, nobody with a family wants to live in a city unless they have no choice.
All of this makes for living withing bicycle distance of work a difficult to achieve goal for the US. The problems are different in Europe but there is still a tremendous amount of commuting traffic in places like Germany which tends to indicate that the desired separation between work and home isn't just a US phenomenon.
So not only is it not going to happen in the US for any more than very small fraction of people, nobody really wants it to happen anyway.
What exactly do you do with a schoolbus driver that is high? Once it is legal to use but not legal to do some things while high what happens to current job filtering where they disallow drug users completely?
Obviously, what happens is the people that have no sense continue to not use sense. While there are a lot of people that can sensibly use alchohol and drugs, check out the changes in class roster between the first day of freshman classes and the start of the 2nd semester at any large state university. You hand some people freedom to get high and drunk and they exercise that right to the limit. University of Illinois (one I know about) loses at least 25% of the freshman class the first semester and has for 20+ years. It is just something they live with.
This is not a problem that is experienced in other countries, at least not to the level it is in the US. Which is why they can have all the legalized drugs they want in Europe.
For the US it has nothing to do with allowing open legal use and standing by to watch lots of responsible use. It is all about employers having to scrap drug testing because drugs are suddenly legal to use. It is all about there being no such thing as responsible use for maybe 20% of the population of the US. If you don't fall into that category, great, but do not discount the fact that plenty of people do. Far, far more than we want to have showing us a fine example.
While the use of cannabis is mostly harmless, when used responsibly.
I don't know anyone that I would consider uses cannabis "responsibly". The whole idea is to put "responsible" in a little box and shove it under the couch or out in back by the trash cans. Leastwise until Monday. Maybe Tuesday on some weeks and those aren't the usual Federal Monday holidays.
The vast majority will not pay for content. I don't know anyone who pays for music any longer - they just grab what they want for free.
Why are the media companies making money today? Because they are receiving payments in lucrative markets where promotion has value and they have a huge segment of the population either scared to download or incapable of it because of lack of connectivity. Unfortunately, both groups are pretty much confined to 40+ years of age and in many places it is more like 60+. These people will be moving out of purchasing stuff like this fairly soon - when was the last time you saw Granny using the pay-per-view at the rest home?
Music is a joke today. It has zero value and in most places this is recognized. There are no more "record stores" - about the only place left selling CDs is WalMart and the CD section is biggest in poor areas where people do not have Internet connectivity at home. Sure, if you want to spend money there are many places to do so - but virtually nobody is spending. Everyone points to iTunes as a big success, except they have maybe 2% of the download traffic. Sure, they are doing fine with the service because it fills a need for the folks that can't (or won't) pirate. But do not believe for a second that even Apple expects people to fill a 64GB iPod with paid-for music.
Movies still take so long for Joe Sixpack to download that even if he had the computer equipment and the Internet connection he would not. So Joe has no choice but to spend money - but the pirates are getting a stronger and stronger foothold which means movies are making it into the $5 bin at WalMart earlier and earlier.
The prices might fall, but this is going to be a last-ditch desperation move not the introduction of a new nirvana of low, low prices. When the prices start coming down you can expect to see the 20-disc collections being advertised late nite on cable channels. Everyone will see there is no future revenue coming so it will be a huge push to grab what little there is left.
What happens after that?? Good question. Personally, I think we will see more and more productions like Yentl - Barbra Striesand paid for that because (a) she had the money and (b) she wanted to make it. Nobody else would have cast a 40+ year old woman as a teenager, but she did for herself. OK, it was a good gamble and I believe the movie made money - but the point is she would have done it even if it would have made $0. Who do you think paid for "The Expendibles" - right, Stallone. We are going to see more and more of this because it will be known from the beginning that movies aren't going to be making money.
Right after the ego productions will be the ad placements where Coke pays for a 90 minute movie showing everyone drinking Coke and dissing Pepsi. You can't imagine what lengths the ad placements will go to and it will be obvious and disgusting to most people. But enough will watch that it will be a whole new genre of ad-supported movies.
After that? Maybe patronage where some rich guy pays to have a movie made about his wonderful life. Maybe government-sponsored films where we get to see how wonderful life in the military is or how awful your life might turn out if you don't put down that joint RIGHT NOW!!! The point is, the revenue will be gone in a lot less than ten years and maybe less than five. A lot of people - millions - will be out of work because of this and the ripple effects throughout the economy. But the pirates will have won the day and the whole catalog from the last hundred years or so will be online and available for free.
Just don't expect anything more to come along anytime soon. Least not of any quality. Think Yentl and Reefer Madness and those the are high points.
The biggest problem with a worldwide release of a movie is the big question - what do you allow in?
In the US a pair of tits will get you an R rating instantly - which is fine, if that is the audience you are shooting for. If you want a PG-13 movie for the US audience, you have to cut the tits. Or, in a R movie in the US you can show female pubic hair - except if you want to release the movie in Japan that would instantly have it blocked. There are other rules for EU countries as well.
And then there are the other markets. Have a scene where someone is holding a Bible in a courtroom? Such a movie cannot be distributed in an Islamic country, or at least most of them. Want a movie where the hero is wearing a turban? Good luck
It gets absurd. They thought they could capture this in eight bits with DVD region coding, but that wasn't really sufficient. What it means today is pretty much anything outside the US gets stuck with everything being cut that could possibly be objectionable to anyone, anywhere. Maybe the US version is less chopped but think about a movie made for an adult EU audience - they are going to have to cut it for the US!
The fact that the entertainment industry at all levels has to deal with this is silly and it throws a lot of extra costs into it. I am pretty sure it is filtering into games today as well. Certainly music has had some run-ins with this sort of issue. The problem is there is no worldwide standard and there isn't going to be any time soon - certainly not until someone like SPECTRE takes over the planet and declares themselves to be Dictator for Life.
Having held (and fired) several Glock pistols, there are two parts to these guns: the grip and frame of the gun and then the part that comes off: slide, barrel, receiver, spring, etc. The part that comes off the frame is all metal, every bit of it and is pretty weighty. The frame and grip are plastic and are quite light, at least compared to a all-metal behemoth like a 1911.
Yes, you can easily tell the difference between a loaded and unloaded Glock - the weight distribution is very different and unloaded it is topheavy. A 1911 with seven .45s in an all metal frame is a very different proposition.
What is questionable is the grounds on which this company violated a contract with no solid legal basis for doing so.
Ever read an equipment lease agreement? I mean the sort where you are leasing a copier or some piece of industrial machinery, not a car or an apartment. They didn't violate the contract, they simply exercised their rights under the contract - the lease agreement.
Most of the time there is at least one clause that says if you are using the leased equipment in a manner contrary to what the lessor believes is the correct use they can come and get it. They need to be able to confidently resell the equipment when the lease is over and they can't if you aren't being nice with their equipment. Most of the time this is nonsense and nobody pays any attention to it - who is going to "misuse" a copier? But if you are leasing a color copier and they find out you are trying to print money with it, they will come and get it.
Sounds like pretty much the same thing here.
Well, if you ever access any sort of financial system, be it a bank, trading account, Ebay, etc. you might be concerned that you are the one doing it rather than someone else doing it "for" you. Similarly, if folks in a particularly nasty government start getting messages implying that the sender is going to be using a rifle to start taking down members of the government, you might like it if there was a solid way of saying that it wasn't you even though the messages claim to be from you.
Even simpler - how about if a female coworker starts getting raunchy messages from you, only it isn't really you. Today, that can land you in a lot of trouble in most Western countries and there may be very little you can do about it. Claiming you are innocent with no evidence may not get you very far and certainly in the US sexual harrassment is a "guilty until proven innocent" sort of crime.
Sure, it might be nice if we could just assume that everyone is who they claim to be without any further validation. Unfortunately, the last 15 years or so of the "public" Internet at large have proven that if there is a way to create mayhem online it will be done. If I can untraceably steal your money, I will do so and so will most of the other people on the planet - so the challenge is making sure it isn't untraceable. Today, that is a pretty big deterrent for most people - but not all which is why people lose millions of dollars online.
Right now less technical people are quite willing to believe just about anything online and trust they are communicating with people and businesses that are who they claim to be. The more technically oriented have learned to trust nothing and no one and believe that online the rule is fraud, fraud, fraud. This difference in belief is being exploited every day and is working out really well for criminals. We are reaching a point where a small fraction of people are fed up with the criminals and having to assume that everyone is a fraud. Something is going to be done about this and you can either be part of the solution or part of the problem.
Most people are going be coming squarely down on the side of being part of the problem. And the criminals love it.
Apple could not have gotten data from MapQuest or Garmin as they are licensees of Navteq data and they can't resell it.
Microsoft has been integrating Navteq and GDT data for a long time and may have some of their own as well. But again, they can't relicense the parts they do not own.
So the choices are a lot more limited than you might think.