It is completely irrelevant how much CO2 could be saved by using nuclear, as it is too expensive.
What? CO2 saved doesn't matter? I thought that CO2 output was the ultimate threat to life on Earth, and reducing it was to be done at any cost!
Also, wind and solar keep promising to be cheaper than coal and any claim that nuclear could get cheaper as well is dismissed. Why can't nuclear get cheaper too? Is there some magical force in the universe preventing this? Nuclear is only going to get cheaper if people take it seriously as an alternative to coal.
If nuclear power is feared more than global warming then why should I fear global warming?
And it would be even more expensive, if it would be scaled up to have a global impact, because you would need to establish completely new fuel cycles.
Why would we need completely new fuel cycles? There's enough uranium on Earth to last until the sun consumes the planet.
For this reasons, it is not a solution for global warming.
Which is just another way of saying that global warming is not a threat.
I know, not in your alternate reality where facts don't matter.
Facts do matter. If all you have against nuclear power is that the technology is expensive and fuel is rare then let's invest in development. Kind of like how we invested in wind and solar.
Here's some facts, nuclear is already cheaper than wind in most places on Earth. There's a chart on this article that compares costs. http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
Facts show that nuclear is not too expensive. If nuclear is too expensive then so is wind and solar because nuclear is cheaper than both, and provably so.
We are running out of places to get cheap wind. In the USA we have onshore wind cheaper than nuclear but how long can that last? We're going to run out of good places for wind. And, we've barely begun to research new nuclear. We've been boiling water with nuclear power for decades. The next generation of nuclear is not likely to be bound by the limits that water imposes on efficiency, safety, and cost. We are getting real close to the limits on wind and solar. We are already seeing the price reductions in solar come at the cost of reduced efficiency.
Denmark imports electricity at 30 euro/MWh and exports at 20 euro/MWh. Germany does better with imports at 30 euro/MWh and exports at 27 euro/MWh. If Germany keeps shutting down reliable nuclear and replacing it with unreliable wind and solar the net export is likely to disappear, the price difference is most definitely going to spread, and this will cost Germany money. Perhaps Germany will remain a net exporter of electricity but they will have to pay their neighbors to take it.
These "environmentalists" like to talk about things being sustainable. This is not sustainable.
The majority of CO2 reductions from Germany in the past 25 years has been from shutting down old Soviet designed power plants that Germany inherited from reunification. If there are any of these inefficient power plants left then any future shutdowns will have diminishing returns on CO2 reductions. A large part of their current zero emission electricity is from currently operating nuclear power. Shutting them down will only increase their CO2 output since nothing has a lower CO2 footprint than nuclear. Wind and hydroelectric have marginally lower CO2 output if good spots are found. Germany ran out of rivers to dam long ago, and their optimal wind locations will only last so long before their CO2 output exceeds nuclear.
Did you just call a conversion to electric heat "wasteful"? I thought electric heat was the goal of every "green" energy plan? If people don't heat with electricity then what are they supposed to use?
Heating with coal, oil, or natural gas are presumably out, as those contribute to CO2 output. Are people supposed to burn wood for heat? That's going to go over real well once people find out how many trees would have to be cut down every winter.
Assuming a combined cycle natural gas plant (about 60% efficiency) and resistance heating (at 100% efficiency) and someone would be getting a total efficiency not much worse than a cheap natural draft natural gas furnace. Assuming an inefficient natural gas turbine at 30% efficiency (common for providing peak power) and a modern heat pump (with an "efficiency" of 300%) and people would be getting double the heat for fuel burned over a high efficiency natural gas furnace. If the electricity comes from nuclear power then the CO2 released from electric heat is next to nothing, and real cheap to install and run. If a nation limits itself to "green" energy like wind and solar then heat can only come from electricity. Electric heating makes sense regardless of the energy source.
Fixing these means starting over with a new generation of plants, but this restarts the learning curve.
Yes, that does mean largely starting over with the nuclear power learning curve. If we figure this out then we've solved the energy problem for all time. Uranium and thorium are so abundant, and provide so much energy per mass, that we will never run out. With wind and solar there is only so much land area that we can use to harness that energy. Wind and solar are so unreliable and dilute that it will be real easy to run out of land if those were our primary sources of energy.
Assuming wind and solar is cheaper than nuclear and coal, the growth in demand as more people in the world want to get to a standard of living that those in Europe enjoy will soon overwhelm the supply and prices will go up. There will be a point that wind and solar are not cheap any more. We will need to restart our investment in nuclear power at some point or we will put a self imposed cap on the global standard of living.
So where is the other 73% of their power coming from. Nuclear and natural gas?:Seems like a big amount for those.
Italy has banned the use of nuclear power in its borders. They'll just buy nuclear power from France.
Here's a recent article stating France and Italy plan to build a large HVDC line between the two nations so France can sell it's cheap nuclear power to Italy. http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
The article also states France plans to cap their nuclear output at current levels, allowing the share of nuclear to reduce from current 75% to 50%, with new growth in demand coming from unreliable energy like wind and solar. This does mean that France will be building new nuclear power plants to replace current plants as they reach end of life. I expect France to reverse their decision on capping nuclear power production, they just make too much money on selling electricity to its neighbors to stop now.
They'll just buy electricity made by nuclear power from France. Italy will be using nuclear power regardless. They have been for a long time now and their reliance on nuclear power will only increase as France builds more nuclear reactors and Italy shuts down their coal plants. Kind of like how Germany has been buying so much electricity from France to make up for their failure to provide for their electrical demand after shutting down their coal plants.
France gets over 70% of it's electricity from nuclear power. Europe runs on nuclear power because of what France exports. If Italy wants to close their coal plants in the next 10 years then they will have to increase their imports from France, burn a lot more expensive natural gas, or see the lights go out.
Italy needs to get over their fear of nuclear power real quick or see their electricity rates keep going up and up. Germany and Italy already have some of the highest electricity rates in the world, certainly high compared to the rest of Europe, and France has much cheaper electricity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Germany isn't the poster child, it's the town drunk to show people what not to do.
Someone went to the effort of creating exactly what you want, and you're not happy about that?
I don't think anyone has built exactly what I want, I've seen a handful that got close enough except for the price. The ones that got close cost somewhere in the $100 to $200 range when I have people giving me perfectly functional keyboards for free. It's hard to beat free. I have three keyboards on my desk at home and if I'm going to use this new keyboard layout then I'll need three of these keyboards or suffer the confusion of switching layouts constantly. Even then the layout would not match on my laptop. How can I get the keys in nice rows and columns on a laptop?
Just go build your own then.
Can't do that for $2. How can I expect to build my own keyboard that won't look like shit and be durable and not cost a small fortune? Then again, forget how it looks, it has to work and be durable for not a lot of money.
Oh, and I said three keyboards on my desk at home, not three computers. I have two KVM switches and three displays, it's not just a matter of getting a KVM switch and a new keyboard.
Unless Italy plans on building nuclear power plants they are not going to get rid of coal. I suppose with enough natural gas and importation of neighboring nations' coal and nuclear power they might be able to kick out their domestic coal in less than 10 years. They already pay a high price for their electricity, it's only going to get more expensive as they'll need to rely on expensive unreliable energy like wind and solar, expensive imported natural gas, and imported electricity.
What's even more laughable is the plan to use more electric cars. Maybe with "smart" timed chargers people can alleviate some of the issues with unreliable wind power at night but that's not likely to be enough, especially in the short time they've given themselves for the transition.
Has no one learned from Germany? Germany's heavy reliance on unreliable energy means having to export the excess electricity at a low price (sometimes at a loss) when the wind blows, only to have to import at a high price (often from France's nuclear reactors) when the wind calms. Germany's CO2 output reductions are more likely from the reduced demand than from the use of unreliable energy. I suspect the reduced demand was at least in part from the increased prices the ratepayers saw.
France has to be loving this. They have two neighbors in need of energy because they both abandoned nuclear and coal. France has a lot of nuclear power, and is building more. While France is splitting atoms we see that Germany has failed on the claim to abandon coal. Maybe they burn some wood chips with the coal to claim it's "green" but they are burning something in those coal plants. Maybe they are burning cash.
You just keep repeating that the USA has "too many" prisoners but give nothing to indicate that they should not be there. I did a quick search on what these people were convicted of doing and here's some rough percentages.
About 50% of the people in prison were convicted of a violent crime, that's rape/sexual assault, murder/manslaughter, robbery, and felony assault. I'd think most people would agree people belong in prison for some time for committing these crimes. The best means that I'd think to reduce their total number is to reduce their time in prison, but then maybe that'd be a bad idea. Maybe Americans are more violent than most European nations. I pointed out that violence tends to happen when incompatible cultures collide, which is more likely in the USA with it's variety of people compared to the more homogeneous Europe.
I estimate 15% are in prison for some drug crime. Making all currently illegal drugs legal would reduce the people in prison by 15% then. Perhaps legalizing drugs would do away with some gang warfare and reduce the violent crime count. Again, the USA is reviewing it's drug laws. I expect marijuana to be as legal as alcohol in 5 to 10 years. Perhaps some more sane laws on opiates in that time too.
I estimate 15% are in prison for some non-drug and non-violent crime. This would be things like DUI/DWI, theft, weapons possession, disorderly conduct, etc. Again, some of this might be related to drug laws as people steal to buy drugs or something.
About 20% are people in local jails awaiting trial. This might be related to poverty as they could not afford bail. Perhaps drugs and weapons violations again. Legalize drugs and reduce weapons crimes might cut this back.
The roughly 10% left (I know it adds up to more than 100% now, I'm estimating) is about 1/3rd immigration violations, 1/3rd youthful offenders, and 1/3rd other or unknown.
Perhaps Americans are just more violent. Best I can see we could cut our prison population in half with shorter sentences, drug and weapons law reform, and perhaps a few other reforms.
You mock the need for weapon possession law reform as the USA has lax laws on weapon possession. Well, Illinois, New York, and California have some very restrictive laws while Florida and Texas do not. I pick on those five states because they comprise half of the USA population. Fix the weapon laws in those three states, and some federal laws, and a lot of people could go free.
Seems to me the problem is that Americans are just more violent. Unless you have ideas on what to do about that then I'm finding it hard to see a way to reduce the USA prison population to a proportion equivalent to that of European nations.
The standard computer (QWERTY) keyboard is still the standard, and always will be.
I agree with you that they are standard and they will be difficult to replace but I so wish that we'd agree on something better. All I want is keyboards that don't have this stupid staggered layout. Put the keys in simple rows and columns. The reason the keys were staggered like that was so that the levers that attached the keys on old style typewriters needed them staggered so that the levers would not interfere with each other. Excepting people with rickets or something our fingers naturally move up and down in fairly straight lines, not this 10 degree slant up and to the left.
I do know that keyboards as I describe do exist but they cost far more than they should. I got a pile of keyboards on a fire sale for $2 each, and another pile for helping clean out a medical clinic's offices after they moved to a new building. These are all "broken" but since they were cheap as dirt I put up with this madness of a keyboard layout from the 1800s in 2017.
I'm not asking for a whole new layout, I wouldn't want that since I've learned to type on QWERTY. I would like the keys lined up in nice rows and columns to reduce typing fatigue though.
Proper encryption is indistinguishable from random noise. You are basically arguing in favor of "guilty until proven innocent", or rather you are arguing for "guilty period" because it would be impossible for me to prove that "jklhdsnvgndsrihgvsnsiertysirhdntsrdihgrdhig" is just a random string and is not some super secret encrypted message.
That's right. If I take random noise, perhaps point an antenna at the sun and record the RF from it, then send a copy of it to the people I need to communicate with, then we can use this noise as a one-time-pad for any communications between us. The means to use this one time pad doesn't need to be a digital file either. I can use that noise and overlay it on my voice and then play the audio on a radio transmission on a loop. The powers that be might get wise on me transmitting a code but it'd be hard to prove it wasn't just me putting in an erased tape into a player on accident or something equally innocent. I might get a reprimand, perhaps even punished severely, but the message will remain secure if the original pad recording was destroyed.
The English language is flexible enough that people speak in a kind of code all the time. This is a common trope in storytelling. Someone might be known to say something is "just peachy" when things are going bad. This person gets in trouble with the big bad in the story and will have to play like everything is all right if a familiar person comes to the door, calls on the phone, or whatever. The person under threat says everything is "just peachy" and the other person knows something is up, plays along, goes away, and comes back later with reinforcements. That's the simplest of codes, more complex ones can be used to give more detail.
There's real life examples of this with things like people blinking out Morse code, using subtle hand gestures, as well as creative usage of the English language. I took some courses on computer security and encryption and there are many ways to hide, obfuscate, and otherwise transmit data in a way that is impossible to distinguish from noise.
If I were the FBI, I'd keep the actual cell phone of a suspect, but give them back an identical looking cell phone....
Sounds like a good reason to keep my iPod with it's distinctive cracks on the screen and dent in the back. Good luck trying to pass off a different device as mine, or recreating the crack pattern close enough that I wouldn't notice the difference. This makes me wonder if there isn't a way to mark a device in a way that makes it easy to tell it's yours and yet difficult to replicate. I mean other than cracking the screen. Could someone pull the screen from my iPod, place it on another, and give me that to me and log the inputs to catch my passcode? I doubt it.
What of multiple passcodes? One code unlocks the phone as usual. Another displays an image that the owner picked out, so that one could punch in that code and not unlock it but would verify it's the same phone. A third one that erases the phone. Is there a something else someone might want?
If the owner of the phone plays like nothing is wrong on unlocking it with a kill code then the FBI may be destroying evidence, not the owner, by entering it on the original device. Certainly the FBI won't fall for that? If they do then they might just destroy the evidence that they were looking for. Create a back up of the device first? Sure, but now the person is wise that someone tried switching devices and will never enter the right code on anything.
If the FBI can impose a requirement that every phone maker must use an encryption they they have keys for then people can just install an app that uses it's own encryption. If there is a mandate that such encryption not be published on walled garden software sites like the Apple and Google stores then people will jail break their phones to install what they want. Maybe the FBI then mandates that the phones not be capable of being jail broken. Well, Apple and the cell phone service providers have been trying that for a long time, good luck with that. Assuming they are successful then people will buy secure phones on a black market, or develop non-phone devices for their secure data. Whatever law the FBI will want passed to allow themselves to access private data on electronic devices there will be some other technique to get around it. It doesn't even take electronics to create an encrypted document. People have been doing ciphers with pen and paper for a long time.
You know what is worse than turkey bacon? Beef bacon. From the name you think it is combining two delicious things into one, got to be good right? Wrong. It is so very wrong, but around here has pretty much displaced turkey bacon as the safe breakfast food that anyone can eat choice at hotel buffets and the like (they don't seem to consider Hindus in that analysis).
If restaurants had to adhere to the dietary requirements of every religion in the world then they'd be able to serve nothing. Something has to give unless there is a sufficient number of non-conflicting dietary standards that a hotel could have a restaurant, or group of restaurants, that it would make sense to have multiple separate kitchens to satisfy them all. If all the restaurant served was beef bacon and beef sausages as meat for breakfast then perhaps the Hindus need to be satisfied with the omelets and cheesy potatoes for protein. Hopefully for supper there will be a chicken dinner on the menu.
Without all that bacon grease what will those hillbillies use to cook their... well, everything?
My sister married one of those hillbillies, he calls himself that. My sister complains about the abundance of greasy foods since they moved out to new jobs where the mountains have a blue hue to them.
It's like if someone came in to hospital bleeding profusely from every orifice. Clearly that's only a symptom so until someone spells out what the disease is, you should send him away.
With your example the patient has "too much" bleeding, so we stop the bleeding as much as we can while looking for the cause. We don't care much where we stop the bleeding, or which blood cells escape, because blood is blood and people need it to live. With "too much" prisoners we have people, not all identical blood cells. We care very much about which ones we let go. Until we can identify which ones don't belong there it's in our best interests to keep them there.
Yes, maybe Americans are much more crooked than anyone else.
Or maybe Americans take law enforcement more seriously. I remember seeing a documentary where a police detective in the Soviet Union, that was trained in the USA, went to his superiors about a string of murders. He saw similarities in the murders and offered the possibility that they were the cause of a single serial killer, not independent crimes. He wanted permission to collect these cases into one so that they'd have a better chance of finding the murderer. The response was that serial killers were an American problem, there are no serial killers in the Soviet Union, and therefore he was not allowed to treat them as a single case.
Maybe the USA just has a better track record of finding the criminals and punishing them. Perhaps this is because American law enforcement is not required to uphold party doctrine and/or some sort of idea on genetic superiority but instead hold to the idea that people be held to account for their crimes.
Now you're beginning to admit the problem. I didn't say it would be easy to fix. There are most likely many interlinked causes plenty of which I don't recognise. However, the symptom is so bad that clearly something is badly wrong.
The symptom is that the USA imprisons more people than other nations. That's an arbitrary measure. Unless there is some indication of wrongdoing then it's really hard to tell if there is a problem. There's a lot of things that lead to crime. Having people with differing cultures and ideas does lead to problems, we see that in other nations as well. The USA is quite the mix of cultures, there will be friction from that and that can spark criminal behaviors in some. You won't see this in the much more culturally homogeneous nations. Getting more sane immigration laws should help some with that. Poverty can lead to crime, we can address that. If you can give specific cases of people that don't belong in prison then we can look into those. Just saying that there are "too many" does not help.
Let's take another example of a complaint of being "too many". People complain that there are "too many" white Christian heterosexual males in... well everything. Unless someone can explain the problem more precisely, and not simply using the solution of just replacing them with black lesbian Muslims, is not helping. The USA has the idea of judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. If there's too many white Christian males in Congress and too many black lesbian Muslims in prison then maybe it's because those people in prison made poor choices and those in Congress made better choices.
How many people belong in prison, as a proportion of the population, is arbitrary. The people that belong are those that broke the law. If you can point to a law that is problematic, and you gave an example, then we can look at that, and we are. If you see a problem in the system, then we can discuss that too. Claiming that private prisons is a cause is quite laughable when in a nation where people have the rights to vote, raise their concerns with the government, trial by jury, and so many other rights protected in law. The private prisons cannot simply bypass the process of law to get more pr
Or, they're saying that they can't access these devices to lull criminals into a false sense of complacency.
Let's think this through. We have an FBI that can actually access incriminating evidence but chooses to keep that to themselves. To what end? For this theory to work the FBI would have to knowingly let some of the worst criminals go on committing crimes.
Perhaps they have already looked into these devices and determined that nothing is incriminating on them but claim publicly that they have not looked but believe that that if they could look that something of value might be there. This means keeping cases open when someone in the FBI knows that they don't have enough evidence to bring a case, the evidence on the device clears the accused, or incriminates someone else.
Maybe the times that they look and find something useful the FBI concocts a "parallel construction" to disguise the fact that they can read these encrypted devices. That means that they can convict criminals they find rather than let them free. Because letting criminals go to commit crimes later reflects poorly on the FBI they are going to want to imprison those that pose a threat to society. Letting criminals go to commit serious crimes not only reflects poorly on the FBI on the whole but also on the individuals that decide, seemingly arbitrarily, which criminals they let go to potentially harm others. That's just being fucked in the head.
Unless these criminals they allow free do not actually pose a threat to society, because they've already preselected the worst-of-the-worst and convicted them by evidence from parallel construction, then there's no real threat posed. If there is a real threat, because the FBI needs the threat to exist and so releases criminals to create the threat, and they get the back door in encryption that they want so badly then what happens? Now, with the hobbled encryption in place the FBI must admit that they can now access these devices, or at least future devices with hobbled encryption, and the criminals now know that they cannot trust the encryption on any commodity device.
Once criminals know that an off the shelf iPhone, or whatever, does not protect them from FBI snooping then they will simply move to some kind of encryption that the FBI has not hobbled in law. Encryption really isn't that hard. There's enough material out there on encryption right now that most anyone with some undergraduate level math and computer science training could implement something that the FBI could not break. If you make having unbreakable encryption a crime then only criminals will have unbreakable encryption.
For this ruse to stand you'd need a lot of people in on it. How would the FBI keep this secret? When, not if, this comes out then they will look criminally incompetent or criminally insane. They run the risk of people like Snowden taking this secret and running with it. They might reveal it publicly to make the FBI look like criminals. They might take it to some not so friendly nation like Russia, China, or North Korea, and keep this quiet so that they can use this ability to break encryption on commodity devices so that they can scoop up state and industrial secrets. They might run to some non-state entity and reveal to them how to break into commodity devices, and snoop in on public officials and private individuals for what can only be more criminal acts. To stop this the FBI would have to reveal that the current encryption we have is broken and must be fixed or these real and actual threats to public safety will have a tool that they can use against the FBI, including the ability to blackmail the FBI. The FBI might be able to save face and create some plausible story that "proves" they didn't have the ability to break current encryption.
I see no end game where the FBI "wins" in this. If they get their backdoor then the ruse ends. If they keep quiet on their ability to break current encryption then they have to be letting real crimi
The USA isn't a superpower. Hasn't been for a long time. It's a megapower, we've surpassed superpower status. And the USA is the only megapower.
How many aircraft carriers are there in the world with a displacement over 100,000 tons? Eleven. How many of those does the USA own? Eleven. Each one carries about 60 jet fighters, and each jet can carry about 8 tons of weapons. That's just the start of the military power.
To back up that military is an economic power that produces 20% of the world's wealth. I couldn't find the numbers real quick but I recall it would take the next four nations combined to compare to the USA in military and economic might.
I'm pretty sure that the USA is above superpower status, and is alone in that status.
If pumped storage hydroelectric is not useful in actual practice then why is there, according to the US Department of Energy, 51 active pumped storage hydroelectric projects as of 2014?
If the Raccoon Mountain project was just a demonstrator built 40 years ago then why is it still in operation? Why did they bother to repair it 5 years ago? Why build 50 more in the USA if Raccoon Mountain was "merely proven technology" but not "actually useful in practice"?
So, we agree it is a proven technology. It is also useful in practice. We've built plenty of them in the USA, and we are building more. You said to look if other utilities built any more after Raccoon Mountain. I see that they did. Therefore, according to your argument, pumped storage hydro is useful in practice.
What you describe sounds a lot like the "deplatforming" tactic that's been employed by so many. A university will deny a student group to invite a speaker to campus. The university defends itself with the claim that it's not denying the person an ability to speak, only denying the platform on their campus.
Let me ask you something, how many times does a person have to be denied a platform before it becomes censorship? At what point is the denial of a platform a denial of the right to speak freely? You can give this all the spin you want, it's still censorship and is a threat to people's freedom to speak freely.
YouTube has been charged with changing the terms of their services arbitrarily for a long time now. If YouTube wants to remain in business then people need to be able to know the terms of service beforehand and YouTube needs to hold up their end of the deal. This "deplatforming" nonsense is just bad business.
Is Google legally required to provide a platform to speak? Depending on the contract signed they may in fact be obligated to carry this content.
Again, at a minimum this behavior by Google is getting them some bad press. I can understand their desire to keep content on the publicly accessible portions limited to something that might get a PG or PG-13 rating in a movie theater, that's good business. What bothers me is the obvious political slant of their decisions to deny certain people access to this platform and their denial of any censorship. They can keep the slant all they like, but they need to be open about it so that their customers, viewers and content creators, know what kind of product that they are getting.
What, precisely, did we do to these nations? I mean, why do you believe that they are attacking us?
The USA has a large enough military to crush any nation it chooses and yet we don't. We have embassies all over the world, like any other nation. If some nation has a grievance against us they can start talks in these embassies in their own nation or that of a neutral third party. Have you actually listened to their demands?
These nations don't ask that we leave them alone. They want us dead. Take North Korea as an example, what do they want? The Kim family wants to rule the world, and they can't do that so long as we have our troops in South Korea and Japan. Take your pick of Muslim nations, what do they want? They want the world to bow to Mecca. That's not going to happen so long as America is able to defend itself. What about Russia? They want to restore the Soviet Union, where the sun never sets on their empire.
The USA is hated because we live free from their rule. They attack us over the internet because they cannot drop bombs on our heads. We've been fighting off Muslim invaders since before America was even a nation. The Barbary Wars were fought to keep these Muslims from taking American ships and enslaving the passengers and crew. They attacked us because they attacked everyone that didn't pay tribute.
Tell me, how should the only megapower on Earth be acting right now? What do you believe we should be doing to stop their attacks? I believe these attacks will not stop so long as free people stand to oppose communism and Islam. We can stop the attacks but that would mean destroying them or submitting to their rule. I don't like the status quo but it's better than the alternatives.
Building a dock that supports the HDMI alternate mode on USB-C does sound like an interesting project but I'm not sure how useful it would be. There would have to be computers, tablets, and such that support the HDMI mode for this to plug into. Am I supposed to get in the business of building Android phones and tablets too?
If I had a laptop or something that supported HDMI with Ethernet over USB-C then I would also be in the market for a dock like I described. I'd be interested in just the USB-C/HDMI cable it'd need just because of the potential for it to be a host-to-host cable that I crave, by using the Ethernet channel as I described earlier.
I did a quick look for an Android device that might support HDMI alternate mode on USB-C and all I found were devices that did not list what alternate modes it used for video, and ones that stated explicitly that it used DisplayPort to HDMI conversion for video. Just trying to find a passive USB-C to HDMI cable came up empty, since if those existed then I'd know I could find devices that got at least halfway with HDMI natively on the USB-C port, even if it didn't support the Ethernet channel.
Existing DisplayPort docks are already pretty cheap and anything based off of HDMI will be hobbled by lacking any USB 3 and having an Ethernet port that tops out at 100bT. For it to sell their would have to be devices that support it and it'd have to be cheap enough to make up for it's lowered specs compared to existing docks with HDMI, like what Apple offers for it's laptops.
1. Private prison companies (along with prison guard unions) lobby the various state governments for harsher penalties for victimless crimes like drug use and prostitution and such.
Well, they are doing a terrible job at that because marijuana is now legal in some form in 30 states, that's well over half of the population. I suspect it's closer to 3/4ths than 1/2 but I'm not going to do the math right now. That's not saying we don't have a long way to go yet for removing these victimless crimes but if the goal is to pass more laws to create more prisoners then they seem to be losing a lot of ground on that lately.
Lobbyists and unions don't vote, people do. If people are tired of seeing innocent family and friends go to prison then they will use the ballot box to get them out. There's also the soapbox and the jury box. Let's just leave that last box to defend our liberty out of this, we're far from using the cartridge box right now.
Slashdot Mirror
It is completely irrelevant how much CO2 could be saved by using nuclear, as it is too expensive.
What? CO2 saved doesn't matter? I thought that CO2 output was the ultimate threat to life on Earth, and reducing it was to be done at any cost!
Also, wind and solar keep promising to be cheaper than coal and any claim that nuclear could get cheaper as well is dismissed. Why can't nuclear get cheaper too? Is there some magical force in the universe preventing this? Nuclear is only going to get cheaper if people take it seriously as an alternative to coal.
If nuclear power is feared more than global warming then why should I fear global warming?
And it would be even more expensive, if it would be scaled up to have a global impact, because you would need to establish completely new fuel cycles.
Why would we need completely new fuel cycles? There's enough uranium on Earth to last until the sun consumes the planet.
For this reasons, it is not a solution for global warming.
Which is just another way of saying that global warming is not a threat.
I know, not in your alternate reality where facts don't matter.
Facts do matter. If all you have against nuclear power is that the technology is expensive and fuel is rare then let's invest in development. Kind of like how we invested in wind and solar.
Here's some facts, nuclear is already cheaper than wind in most places on Earth. There's a chart on this article that compares costs.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
Facts show that nuclear is not too expensive. If nuclear is too expensive then so is wind and solar because nuclear is cheaper than both, and provably so.
We are running out of places to get cheap wind. In the USA we have onshore wind cheaper than nuclear but how long can that last? We're going to run out of good places for wind. And, we've barely begun to research new nuclear. We've been boiling water with nuclear power for decades. The next generation of nuclear is not likely to be bound by the limits that water imposes on efficiency, safety, and cost. We are getting real close to the limits on wind and solar. We are already seeing the price reductions in solar come at the cost of reduced efficiency.
Germany pays subsidies for wind and solar only to export the electricity at low prices so it's not a complete loss. Not only low prices but negative, as in paying people to take it so the grid remains stable. They are bankrupting themselves.
http://fortune.com/2017/03/14/...
https://www.technologyreview.c...
http://euanmearns.com/getting-...
http://www.windpowermonthly.co...
Denmark imports electricity at 30 euro/MWh and exports at 20 euro/MWh. Germany does better with imports at 30 euro/MWh and exports at 27 euro/MWh. If Germany keeps shutting down reliable nuclear and replacing it with unreliable wind and solar the net export is likely to disappear, the price difference is most definitely going to spread, and this will cost Germany money. Perhaps Germany will remain a net exporter of electricity but they will have to pay their neighbors to take it.
These "environmentalists" like to talk about things being sustainable. This is not sustainable.
How about you link to an article that doesn't use five year old data?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...
http://notrickszone.com/2017/1...
https://www.cleanenergywire.or...
The majority of CO2 reductions from Germany in the past 25 years has been from shutting down old Soviet designed power plants that Germany inherited from reunification. If there are any of these inefficient power plants left then any future shutdowns will have diminishing returns on CO2 reductions. A large part of their current zero emission electricity is from currently operating nuclear power. Shutting them down will only increase their CO2 output since nothing has a lower CO2 footprint than nuclear. Wind and hydroelectric have marginally lower CO2 output if good spots are found. Germany ran out of rivers to dam long ago, and their optimal wind locations will only last so long before their CO2 output exceeds nuclear.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/u...
I know the link I provided is from a nuclear power advocacy site, they only compiled data from other sources and funded no studies themselves.
Did you just call a conversion to electric heat "wasteful"? I thought electric heat was the goal of every "green" energy plan? If people don't heat with electricity then what are they supposed to use?
Heating with coal, oil, or natural gas are presumably out, as those contribute to CO2 output. Are people supposed to burn wood for heat? That's going to go over real well once people find out how many trees would have to be cut down every winter.
Assuming a combined cycle natural gas plant (about 60% efficiency) and resistance heating (at 100% efficiency) and someone would be getting a total efficiency not much worse than a cheap natural draft natural gas furnace. Assuming an inefficient natural gas turbine at 30% efficiency (common for providing peak power) and a modern heat pump (with an "efficiency" of 300%) and people would be getting double the heat for fuel burned over a high efficiency natural gas furnace. If the electricity comes from nuclear power then the CO2 released from electric heat is next to nothing, and real cheap to install and run. If a nation limits itself to "green" energy like wind and solar then heat can only come from electricity. Electric heating makes sense regardless of the energy source.
Fixing these means starting over with a new generation of plants, but this restarts the learning curve.
Yes, that does mean largely starting over with the nuclear power learning curve. If we figure this out then we've solved the energy problem for all time. Uranium and thorium are so abundant, and provide so much energy per mass, that we will never run out. With wind and solar there is only so much land area that we can use to harness that energy. Wind and solar are so unreliable and dilute that it will be real easy to run out of land if those were our primary sources of energy.
Assuming wind and solar is cheaper than nuclear and coal, the growth in demand as more people in the world want to get to a standard of living that those in Europe enjoy will soon overwhelm the supply and prices will go up. There will be a point that wind and solar are not cheap any more. We will need to restart our investment in nuclear power at some point or we will put a self imposed cap on the global standard of living.
So where is the other 73% of their power coming from. Nuclear and natural gas? :Seems like a big amount for those.
Italy has banned the use of nuclear power in its borders. They'll just buy nuclear power from France.
Here's a recent article stating France and Italy plan to build a large HVDC line between the two nations so France can sell it's cheap nuclear power to Italy.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
The article also states France plans to cap their nuclear output at current levels, allowing the share of nuclear to reduce from current 75% to 50%, with new growth in demand coming from unreliable energy like wind and solar. This does mean that France will be building new nuclear power plants to replace current plants as they reach end of life. I expect France to reverse their decision on capping nuclear power production, they just make too much money on selling electricity to its neighbors to stop now.
Italy doesn't have nuclear, is actually illegal.
They'll just buy electricity made by nuclear power from France. Italy will be using nuclear power regardless. They have been for a long time now and their reliance on nuclear power will only increase as France builds more nuclear reactors and Italy shuts down their coal plants. Kind of like how Germany has been buying so much electricity from France to make up for their failure to provide for their electrical demand after shutting down their coal plants.
According to the CIA France is the largest exporter of electricity by a large margin.
https://www.cia.gov/library/pu...
France gets over 70% of it's electricity from nuclear power. Europe runs on nuclear power because of what France exports. If Italy wants to close their coal plants in the next 10 years then they will have to increase their imports from France, burn a lot more expensive natural gas, or see the lights go out.
Italy needs to get over their fear of nuclear power real quick or see their electricity rates keep going up and up. Germany and Italy already have some of the highest electricity rates in the world, certainly high compared to the rest of Europe, and France has much cheaper electricity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Germany isn't the poster child, it's the town drunk to show people what not to do.
Someone went to the effort of creating exactly what you want, and you're not happy about that?
I don't think anyone has built exactly what I want, I've seen a handful that got close enough except for the price. The ones that got close cost somewhere in the $100 to $200 range when I have people giving me perfectly functional keyboards for free. It's hard to beat free. I have three keyboards on my desk at home and if I'm going to use this new keyboard layout then I'll need three of these keyboards or suffer the confusion of switching layouts constantly. Even then the layout would not match on my laptop. How can I get the keys in nice rows and columns on a laptop?
Just go build your own then.
Can't do that for $2. How can I expect to build my own keyboard that won't look like shit and be durable and not cost a small fortune? Then again, forget how it looks, it has to work and be durable for not a lot of money.
Oh, and I said three keyboards on my desk at home, not three computers. I have two KVM switches and three displays, it's not just a matter of getting a KVM switch and a new keyboard.
Unless Italy plans on building nuclear power plants they are not going to get rid of coal. I suppose with enough natural gas and importation of neighboring nations' coal and nuclear power they might be able to kick out their domestic coal in less than 10 years. They already pay a high price for their electricity, it's only going to get more expensive as they'll need to rely on expensive unreliable energy like wind and solar, expensive imported natural gas, and imported electricity.
What's even more laughable is the plan to use more electric cars. Maybe with "smart" timed chargers people can alleviate some of the issues with unreliable wind power at night but that's not likely to be enough, especially in the short time they've given themselves for the transition.
Has no one learned from Germany? Germany's heavy reliance on unreliable energy means having to export the excess electricity at a low price (sometimes at a loss) when the wind blows, only to have to import at a high price (often from France's nuclear reactors) when the wind calms. Germany's CO2 output reductions are more likely from the reduced demand than from the use of unreliable energy. I suspect the reduced demand was at least in part from the increased prices the ratepayers saw.
France has to be loving this. They have two neighbors in need of energy because they both abandoned nuclear and coal. France has a lot of nuclear power, and is building more. While France is splitting atoms we see that Germany has failed on the claim to abandon coal. Maybe they burn some wood chips with the coal to claim it's "green" but they are burning something in those coal plants. Maybe they are burning cash.
You just keep repeating that the USA has "too many" prisoners but give nothing to indicate that they should not be there. I did a quick search on what these people were convicted of doing and here's some rough percentages.
About 50% of the people in prison were convicted of a violent crime, that's rape/sexual assault, murder/manslaughter, robbery, and felony assault. I'd think most people would agree people belong in prison for some time for committing these crimes. The best means that I'd think to reduce their total number is to reduce their time in prison, but then maybe that'd be a bad idea. Maybe Americans are more violent than most European nations. I pointed out that violence tends to happen when incompatible cultures collide, which is more likely in the USA with it's variety of people compared to the more homogeneous Europe.
I estimate 15% are in prison for some drug crime. Making all currently illegal drugs legal would reduce the people in prison by 15% then. Perhaps legalizing drugs would do away with some gang warfare and reduce the violent crime count. Again, the USA is reviewing it's drug laws. I expect marijuana to be as legal as alcohol in 5 to 10 years. Perhaps some more sane laws on opiates in that time too.
I estimate 15% are in prison for some non-drug and non-violent crime. This would be things like DUI/DWI, theft, weapons possession, disorderly conduct, etc. Again, some of this might be related to drug laws as people steal to buy drugs or something.
About 20% are people in local jails awaiting trial. This might be related to poverty as they could not afford bail. Perhaps drugs and weapons violations again. Legalize drugs and reduce weapons crimes might cut this back.
The roughly 10% left (I know it adds up to more than 100% now, I'm estimating) is about 1/3rd immigration violations, 1/3rd youthful offenders, and 1/3rd other or unknown.
Perhaps Americans are just more violent. Best I can see we could cut our prison population in half with shorter sentences, drug and weapons law reform, and perhaps a few other reforms.
You mock the need for weapon possession law reform as the USA has lax laws on weapon possession. Well, Illinois, New York, and California have some very restrictive laws while Florida and Texas do not. I pick on those five states because they comprise half of the USA population. Fix the weapon laws in those three states, and some federal laws, and a lot of people could go free.
Seems to me the problem is that Americans are just more violent. Unless you have ideas on what to do about that then I'm finding it hard to see a way to reduce the USA prison population to a proportion equivalent to that of European nations.
Yes.
For kids, heroin is also a great pacifier.
Sure is. The problem now is that since the kids got bigger they keep stealing my stash.
The standard computer (QWERTY) keyboard is still the standard, and always will be.
I agree with you that they are standard and they will be difficult to replace but I so wish that we'd agree on something better. All I want is keyboards that don't have this stupid staggered layout. Put the keys in simple rows and columns. The reason the keys were staggered like that was so that the levers that attached the keys on old style typewriters needed them staggered so that the levers would not interfere with each other. Excepting people with rickets or something our fingers naturally move up and down in fairly straight lines, not this 10 degree slant up and to the left.
I do know that keyboards as I describe do exist but they cost far more than they should. I got a pile of keyboards on a fire sale for $2 each, and another pile for helping clean out a medical clinic's offices after they moved to a new building. These are all "broken" but since they were cheap as dirt I put up with this madness of a keyboard layout from the 1800s in 2017.
I'm not asking for a whole new layout, I wouldn't want that since I've learned to type on QWERTY. I would like the keys lined up in nice rows and columns to reduce typing fatigue though.
Proper encryption is indistinguishable from random noise. You are basically arguing in favor of "guilty until proven innocent", or rather you are arguing for "guilty period" because it would be impossible for me to prove that "jklhdsnvgndsrihgvsnsiertysirhdntsrdihgrdhig" is just a random string and is not some super secret encrypted message.
That's right. If I take random noise, perhaps point an antenna at the sun and record the RF from it, then send a copy of it to the people I need to communicate with, then we can use this noise as a one-time-pad for any communications between us. The means to use this one time pad doesn't need to be a digital file either. I can use that noise and overlay it on my voice and then play the audio on a radio transmission on a loop. The powers that be might get wise on me transmitting a code but it'd be hard to prove it wasn't just me putting in an erased tape into a player on accident or something equally innocent. I might get a reprimand, perhaps even punished severely, but the message will remain secure if the original pad recording was destroyed.
The English language is flexible enough that people speak in a kind of code all the time. This is a common trope in storytelling. Someone might be known to say something is "just peachy" when things are going bad. This person gets in trouble with the big bad in the story and will have to play like everything is all right if a familiar person comes to the door, calls on the phone, or whatever. The person under threat says everything is "just peachy" and the other person knows something is up, plays along, goes away, and comes back later with reinforcements. That's the simplest of codes, more complex ones can be used to give more detail.
There's real life examples of this with things like people blinking out Morse code, using subtle hand gestures, as well as creative usage of the English language. I took some courses on computer security and encryption and there are many ways to hide, obfuscate, and otherwise transmit data in a way that is impossible to distinguish from noise.
If I were the FBI, I'd keep the actual cell phone of a suspect, but give them back an identical looking cell phone. ...
Sounds like a good reason to keep my iPod with it's distinctive cracks on the screen and dent in the back. Good luck trying to pass off a different device as mine, or recreating the crack pattern close enough that I wouldn't notice the difference. This makes me wonder if there isn't a way to mark a device in a way that makes it easy to tell it's yours and yet difficult to replicate. I mean other than cracking the screen. Could someone pull the screen from my iPod, place it on another, and give me that to me and log the inputs to catch my passcode? I doubt it.
What of multiple passcodes? One code unlocks the phone as usual. Another displays an image that the owner picked out, so that one could punch in that code and not unlock it but would verify it's the same phone. A third one that erases the phone. Is there a something else someone might want?
If the owner of the phone plays like nothing is wrong on unlocking it with a kill code then the FBI may be destroying evidence, not the owner, by entering it on the original device. Certainly the FBI won't fall for that? If they do then they might just destroy the evidence that they were looking for. Create a back up of the device first? Sure, but now the person is wise that someone tried switching devices and will never enter the right code on anything.
If the FBI can impose a requirement that every phone maker must use an encryption they they have keys for then people can just install an app that uses it's own encryption. If there is a mandate that such encryption not be published on walled garden software sites like the Apple and Google stores then people will jail break their phones to install what they want. Maybe the FBI then mandates that the phones not be capable of being jail broken. Well, Apple and the cell phone service providers have been trying that for a long time, good luck with that. Assuming they are successful then people will buy secure phones on a black market, or develop non-phone devices for their secure data. Whatever law the FBI will want passed to allow themselves to access private data on electronic devices there will be some other technique to get around it. It doesn't even take electronics to create an encrypted document. People have been doing ciphers with pen and paper for a long time.
This is simply not a war that the FBI can win.
You know what is worse than turkey bacon? Beef bacon. From the name you think it is combining two delicious things into one, got to be good right? Wrong. It is so very wrong, but around here has pretty much displaced turkey bacon as the safe breakfast food that anyone can eat choice at hotel buffets and the like (they don't seem to consider Hindus in that analysis).
If restaurants had to adhere to the dietary requirements of every religion in the world then they'd be able to serve nothing. Something has to give unless there is a sufficient number of non-conflicting dietary standards that a hotel could have a restaurant, or group of restaurants, that it would make sense to have multiple separate kitchens to satisfy them all. If all the restaurant served was beef bacon and beef sausages as meat for breakfast then perhaps the Hindus need to be satisfied with the omelets and cheesy potatoes for protein. Hopefully for supper there will be a chicken dinner on the menu.
Let the bacon jokes begin...
Without all that bacon grease what will those hillbillies use to cook their... well, everything?
My sister married one of those hillbillies, he calls himself that. My sister complains about the abundance of greasy foods since they moved out to new jobs where the mountains have a blue hue to them.
It's like if someone came in to hospital bleeding profusely from every orifice. Clearly that's only a symptom so until someone spells out what the disease is, you should send him away.
With your example the patient has "too much" bleeding, so we stop the bleeding as much as we can while looking for the cause. We don't care much where we stop the bleeding, or which blood cells escape, because blood is blood and people need it to live. With "too much" prisoners we have people, not all identical blood cells. We care very much about which ones we let go. Until we can identify which ones don't belong there it's in our best interests to keep them there.
Yes, maybe Americans are much more crooked than anyone else.
Or maybe Americans take law enforcement more seriously. I remember seeing a documentary where a police detective in the Soviet Union, that was trained in the USA, went to his superiors about a string of murders. He saw similarities in the murders and offered the possibility that they were the cause of a single serial killer, not independent crimes. He wanted permission to collect these cases into one so that they'd have a better chance of finding the murderer. The response was that serial killers were an American problem, there are no serial killers in the Soviet Union, and therefore he was not allowed to treat them as a single case.
Maybe the USA just has a better track record of finding the criminals and punishing them. Perhaps this is because American law enforcement is not required to uphold party doctrine and/or some sort of idea on genetic superiority but instead hold to the idea that people be held to account for their crimes.
Now you're beginning to admit the problem. I didn't say it would be easy to fix. There are most likely many interlinked causes plenty of which I don't recognise. However, the symptom is so bad that clearly something is badly wrong.
The symptom is that the USA imprisons more people than other nations. That's an arbitrary measure. Unless there is some indication of wrongdoing then it's really hard to tell if there is a problem. There's a lot of things that lead to crime. Having people with differing cultures and ideas does lead to problems, we see that in other nations as well. The USA is quite the mix of cultures, there will be friction from that and that can spark criminal behaviors in some. You won't see this in the much more culturally homogeneous nations. Getting more sane immigration laws should help some with that. Poverty can lead to crime, we can address that. If you can give specific cases of people that don't belong in prison then we can look into those. Just saying that there are "too many" does not help.
Let's take another example of a complaint of being "too many". People complain that there are "too many" white Christian heterosexual males in... well everything. Unless someone can explain the problem more precisely, and not simply using the solution of just replacing them with black lesbian Muslims, is not helping. The USA has the idea of judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. If there's too many white Christian males in Congress and too many black lesbian Muslims in prison then maybe it's because those people in prison made poor choices and those in Congress made better choices.
How many people belong in prison, as a proportion of the population, is arbitrary. The people that belong are those that broke the law. If you can point to a law that is problematic, and you gave an example, then we can look at that, and we are. If you see a problem in the system, then we can discuss that too. Claiming that private prisons is a cause is quite laughable when in a nation where people have the rights to vote, raise their concerns with the government, trial by jury, and so many other rights protected in law. The private prisons cannot simply bypass the process of law to get more pr
Or, they're saying that they can't access these devices to lull criminals into a false sense of complacency.
Let's think this through. We have an FBI that can actually access incriminating evidence but chooses to keep that to themselves. To what end? For this theory to work the FBI would have to knowingly let some of the worst criminals go on committing crimes.
Perhaps they have already looked into these devices and determined that nothing is incriminating on them but claim publicly that they have not looked but believe that that if they could look that something of value might be there. This means keeping cases open when someone in the FBI knows that they don't have enough evidence to bring a case, the evidence on the device clears the accused, or incriminates someone else.
Maybe the times that they look and find something useful the FBI concocts a "parallel construction" to disguise the fact that they can read these encrypted devices. That means that they can convict criminals they find rather than let them free. Because letting criminals go to commit crimes later reflects poorly on the FBI they are going to want to imprison those that pose a threat to society. Letting criminals go to commit serious crimes not only reflects poorly on the FBI on the whole but also on the individuals that decide, seemingly arbitrarily, which criminals they let go to potentially harm others. That's just being fucked in the head.
Unless these criminals they allow free do not actually pose a threat to society, because they've already preselected the worst-of-the-worst and convicted them by evidence from parallel construction, then there's no real threat posed. If there is a real threat, because the FBI needs the threat to exist and so releases criminals to create the threat, and they get the back door in encryption that they want so badly then what happens? Now, with the hobbled encryption in place the FBI must admit that they can now access these devices, or at least future devices with hobbled encryption, and the criminals now know that they cannot trust the encryption on any commodity device.
Once criminals know that an off the shelf iPhone, or whatever, does not protect them from FBI snooping then they will simply move to some kind of encryption that the FBI has not hobbled in law. Encryption really isn't that hard. There's enough material out there on encryption right now that most anyone with some undergraduate level math and computer science training could implement something that the FBI could not break. If you make having unbreakable encryption a crime then only criminals will have unbreakable encryption.
For this ruse to stand you'd need a lot of people in on it. How would the FBI keep this secret? When, not if, this comes out then they will look criminally incompetent or criminally insane. They run the risk of people like Snowden taking this secret and running with it. They might reveal it publicly to make the FBI look like criminals. They might take it to some not so friendly nation like Russia, China, or North Korea, and keep this quiet so that they can use this ability to break encryption on commodity devices so that they can scoop up state and industrial secrets. They might run to some non-state entity and reveal to them how to break into commodity devices, and snoop in on public officials and private individuals for what can only be more criminal acts. To stop this the FBI would have to reveal that the current encryption we have is broken and must be fixed or these real and actual threats to public safety will have a tool that they can use against the FBI, including the ability to blackmail the FBI. The FBI might be able to save face and create some plausible story that "proves" they didn't have the ability to break current encryption.
I see no end game where the FBI "wins" in this. If they get their backdoor then the ruse ends. If they keep quiet on their ability to break current encryption then they have to be letting real crimi
The USA isn't a superpower. Hasn't been for a long time. It's a megapower, we've surpassed superpower status. And the USA is the only megapower.
How many aircraft carriers are there in the world with a displacement over 100,000 tons? Eleven. How many of those does the USA own? Eleven. Each one carries about 60 jet fighters, and each jet can carry about 8 tons of weapons. That's just the start of the military power.
To back up that military is an economic power that produces 20% of the world's wealth. I couldn't find the numbers real quick but I recall it would take the next four nations combined to compare to the USA in military and economic might.
I'm pretty sure that the USA is above superpower status, and is alone in that status.
If pumped storage hydroelectric is not useful in actual practice then why is there, according to the US Department of Energy, 51 active pumped storage hydroelectric projects as of 2014?
https://www.energy.gov/sites/p...
If the Raccoon Mountain project was just a demonstrator built 40 years ago then why is it still in operation? Why did they bother to repair it 5 years ago? Why build 50 more in the USA if Raccoon Mountain was "merely proven technology" but not "actually useful in practice"?
So, we agree it is a proven technology. It is also useful in practice. We've built plenty of them in the USA, and we are building more. You said to look if other utilities built any more after Raccoon Mountain. I see that they did. Therefore, according to your argument, pumped storage hydro is useful in practice.
What you describe sounds a lot like the "deplatforming" tactic that's been employed by so many. A university will deny a student group to invite a speaker to campus. The university defends itself with the claim that it's not denying the person an ability to speak, only denying the platform on their campus.
Let me ask you something, how many times does a person have to be denied a platform before it becomes censorship? At what point is the denial of a platform a denial of the right to speak freely? You can give this all the spin you want, it's still censorship and is a threat to people's freedom to speak freely.
YouTube has been charged with changing the terms of their services arbitrarily for a long time now. If YouTube wants to remain in business then people need to be able to know the terms of service beforehand and YouTube needs to hold up their end of the deal. This "deplatforming" nonsense is just bad business.
Is Google legally required to provide a platform to speak? Depending on the contract signed they may in fact be obligated to carry this content.
Again, at a minimum this behavior by Google is getting them some bad press. I can understand their desire to keep content on the publicly accessible portions limited to something that might get a PG or PG-13 rating in a movie theater, that's good business. What bothers me is the obvious political slant of their decisions to deny certain people access to this platform and their denial of any censorship. They can keep the slant all they like, but they need to be open about it so that their customers, viewers and content creators, know what kind of product that they are getting.
What, precisely, did we do to these nations? I mean, why do you believe that they are attacking us?
The USA has a large enough military to crush any nation it chooses and yet we don't. We have embassies all over the world, like any other nation. If some nation has a grievance against us they can start talks in these embassies in their own nation or that of a neutral third party. Have you actually listened to their demands?
These nations don't ask that we leave them alone. They want us dead. Take North Korea as an example, what do they want? The Kim family wants to rule the world, and they can't do that so long as we have our troops in South Korea and Japan. Take your pick of Muslim nations, what do they want? They want the world to bow to Mecca. That's not going to happen so long as America is able to defend itself. What about Russia? They want to restore the Soviet Union, where the sun never sets on their empire.
The USA is hated because we live free from their rule. They attack us over the internet because they cannot drop bombs on our heads. We've been fighting off Muslim invaders since before America was even a nation. The Barbary Wars were fought to keep these Muslims from taking American ships and enslaving the passengers and crew. They attacked us because they attacked everyone that didn't pay tribute.
Tell me, how should the only megapower on Earth be acting right now? What do you believe we should be doing to stop their attacks? I believe these attacks will not stop so long as free people stand to oppose communism and Islam. We can stop the attacks but that would mean destroying them or submitting to their rule. I don't like the status quo but it's better than the alternatives.
Building a dock that supports the HDMI alternate mode on USB-C does sound like an interesting project but I'm not sure how useful it would be. There would have to be computers, tablets, and such that support the HDMI mode for this to plug into. Am I supposed to get in the business of building Android phones and tablets too?
If I had a laptop or something that supported HDMI with Ethernet over USB-C then I would also be in the market for a dock like I described. I'd be interested in just the USB-C/HDMI cable it'd need just because of the potential for it to be a host-to-host cable that I crave, by using the Ethernet channel as I described earlier.
I did a quick look for an Android device that might support HDMI alternate mode on USB-C and all I found were devices that did not list what alternate modes it used for video, and ones that stated explicitly that it used DisplayPort to HDMI conversion for video. Just trying to find a passive USB-C to HDMI cable came up empty, since if those existed then I'd know I could find devices that got at least halfway with HDMI natively on the USB-C port, even if it didn't support the Ethernet channel.
Existing DisplayPort docks are already pretty cheap and anything based off of HDMI will be hobbled by lacking any USB 3 and having an Ethernet port that tops out at 100bT. For it to sell their would have to be devices that support it and it'd have to be cheap enough to make up for it's lowered specs compared to existing docks with HDMI, like what Apple offers for it's laptops.
1. Private prison companies (along with prison guard unions) lobby the various state governments for harsher penalties for victimless crimes like drug use and prostitution and such.
Well, they are doing a terrible job at that because marijuana is now legal in some form in 30 states, that's well over half of the population. I suspect it's closer to 3/4ths than 1/2 but I'm not going to do the math right now. That's not saying we don't have a long way to go yet for removing these victimless crimes but if the goal is to pass more laws to create more prisoners then they seem to be losing a lot of ground on that lately.
Lobbyists and unions don't vote, people do. If people are tired of seeing innocent family and friends go to prison then they will use the ballot box to get them out. There's also the soapbox and the jury box. Let's just leave that last box to defend our liberty out of this, we're far from using the cartridge box right now.