Apple sold over 3 million computers last quarter. About half of the computers they sell through their own stores are sold to people who have never owned a Mac before. There's no way that is driven entirely by people coming into close contact with art departments and music composers. There just aren't that many designers, composers, and video editors in the country; and as others have pointed out, not every designer, composer, or video editor uses a Mac (far from it).
Apple is a lifestyle brand now. The view that their growth is driven by the hard core of designers and fan boys is outdated. That is one reason, for instance, that Apple pulled out of the Macworld conference. They don't need it anymore. They're front-page news in major newspapers and have product placements in all the most popular shows, movies, and magazines. The people they reach through these channels will be the people this tablet is aimed at.
I remember when The North Face was just one of several manufacturers of high-end mountaineering clothing and equipment. Today some climbers still use and prefer TNF gear, but that's not the majority of their sales any more. Most of the down jackets they make today never make it past a cold day's walk. Likewise, most Macs sold today will never run Photoshop.
The problem with computerized handwriting recognition is that people expect it to work every time. When it doesn't, you have to somehow go in through another interface (keyboard for instance) to correct the faulty recognition. That's time-consuming and sort of kills the whole reason to be using the stylus in the first place.
Of course human handwriting recognition fails all the time too. People have trouble reading their own handwriting sometimes. But somehow, it's more frustrating when a $1000+ computer fails at it.
That is why handwriting recognition has never been a hit in the marketplace and likely never will be (at least for the foreseeable future). To meet most people's expectations, the computer would actually have to out-perform humans at recognizing handwriting--a tall order.
The only company that has ever had a successful handwriting-recognition product is Palm, and their secret was to invent a new alphabet that you had to learn. That way when the recognition failed, most people blamed themselves for not writing the new letters well enough. Graffiti solved a user-expectation problem as much as it solved a technical problem.
I work in politics and government and to give Apple much credit for this is sort of laughable. Let's just say that if they tried to patent it, there would be plenty of prior art.
Some people will look at this and think "that's why Apple is so successful at building buzz." It's only partly true. Every company leaks, but not every company gets a NY Times story and 100 blog echoes. The leaks work so well because Apple is a hot, popular company. They don't, by themselves, make Apple a hot, popular company.
Thom Yorke, the band's lead singer, explained in an online interview for Wired magazine that Radiohead would never have been able to pull off the stunt without years of support from its former label, Capitol EMI.
"The only reason that we could even get away with this is the fact that we'd actually gone through the whole mill of the business in the first place," Yorke said. "It's not supposed to be a model for anything else. It was simply a response to a situation. We're out of contract. We've spent a huge amount of money on this server. We have our own studio. What the hell else would we do? This is the obvious thing to do."
The biggest problem facing most "small independent artists" is not people downloading their songs - it's NOBODY downloading the songs. Most (95%) of the 100k+ albums released every year sell less than a hundred copies
You pivoted in that sentence. First you're talking about downloads, then you're talking about album sales. Not the same thing. There are plenty of bands whose music is widely downloaded or streamed, but who sell few albums. From the musicians' point of view, you've identified the problem perfectly.
The problem for most of these artists is that many of the traditional ways of discovering new music (radio, CD stores) have been bought up and monopolized by the majors. While the new media channels are available to everybody, getting "eyeballs" (OK, "ears") is still the hardest part.
It is much easier today for new bands to get exposure, thanks to music review sites like Pitchfork, services like Pandora or Spotify, discussion boards by the thousand, and of course MySpace, the original online home of independent musicians. Plus with MP3 players and smartphones, it's way easier to play a song for a friend whenever.
My brother is the drummer in a band signed to a mid-size label. They've put out several albums and tour nationally and internationally. Their songs have been streamed hundreds of thousands of times on their MySpace page. I'm sure there are torrents of them. Yet he still lives hand-to-mouth, working as a caterer and bike mechanic when he's not touring, living with friends. The lead singer makes ends meet by running a contracting business with his wife. They are not lacking for attention; what they are increasingly lacking are reliable ways to turn that attention into dollars.
Think back to the dotcoms of the late 90s. It's not that hard to grow an audience by giving things away to people; but audiences are worthless if there is no reliable mechanism to turn them into dollars.
My brother is a lesser-known artist, a drummer in a band signed to a small label (Fat Wreck Chords), who have produced several albums. I think it's very easy for techies here on Slashdot to opine about how piracy actually helps lesser-known artists, but the reality is that it is becoming more and more difficult to develop any sort of middle-class living as a musical artist (as opposed to fee-for-service session player). Pirated tracks can help "blow up" the rare act that makes it big, but this is the musical equivalent of making it from the street court to the NBA...doesn't happen 99+% of the time. It used to be that musicians could make an ok living from being moderately popular, but that is less and less true.
Even with the increased interest driven by pirated music, touring constantly is a terrible life which produces not much money. It has been hell on my brother's relationships with girlfriends, friends, and family. Think of the worst business travel schedule of the busiest tech consultant, but replace planes with a van or bus, and hotels with bunks or floors, and subtract most of the salary. His shows are attended by thousands of people, but he has to work 2 other jobs when at home (catering and bike mechanic), rents a room from a friend, and can barely afford health insurance.
Look up the recent history of The Roots, now the resident band on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. This is a well-known, popular, Grammy-winning hip-hop band that has been around for many years, and they were starting to struggle to the point that they took on the TV show gig.
Maybe some people will say that this is his choice and he should just choose a different career path if he can't make it big. The problem with that is that it cedes musical art to the few lottery-winner bands. Where do the niches go? How can new acts survive long enough to grow an audience?
Many, many people get MBA degrees--many more than get engineering degrees. Some of these MBA holders make a lot of money in business management--more than most engineers. But most people with MBAs do not make a lot of money. And, many managers who find business success hold technical degrees. Business management darling Jack Welch, for instance, held a BS, MS, and PhD in chemical engineering.
The best path to getting rich in the U.S. is to manage a successful business--yours or someone else's. This is a path that is just as open to engineers as anyone else, MBA or not. Plenty of engineers rise into management.
Centralization is to some extent the direct result of specialization within society. Nuclear power is extremely complex and to work in it, one needs highly specialized training. The direct result is that only a small subset of the population will ever be able to build and operate nuclear power plants, and thus nuclear power generation will always be highly centralized. The same is true of coal power or natural gas power generation, or, for that matter, food and clothing production. The less time I spend managing these things myself, the more time available to me to improve in my own chosen area of specialization.
I've used Macs since I had a Mac Classic on my desk in college, and MS operating systems since DOS, and I think OS X Leopard is the best OS I've ever used. To me, features like column view, Quick Look, and Expose are much more powerful and useful than one-window-per-folder fields of icons--I don't miss the strictly spatial paradigm. Finder as browser more closely matches how I think about interacting with a computer now.
I don't, I run as user, reserving the admin account for administering the computer. It's safer, and I can do this because OS X runs all software just fine as user (unlike Windows for many years).
So, yeah, I get the password request for every software install. In fact, that's the whole point of running as a user.
Maybe Apple's success is all marketing, but guess what, marketing is part of business too, and for the past decade Apple has been extremely good at business. This is not an engineering or originality award.
Sure, there's a lot of baked-in angst about evil corporate/military humans vs. pure innocent nature. But even more insidious is how it seeks to reinforce how special and awesome we humans are in the universe. The natives don't kill Sully because of a semi-mystical sign that seems to signify that he is special. Later, after only 3 months of training, he is able do all the things that Navi warriors with many years of training can do. Shortly after that he can exceed their greatest legends, unite the clans, call on the gods for help, and win the day.
This is the most implausible aspect of a very implausible plot! We're shown throughout the movie that the Pandoran biology is interwoven in incredibly complex ways--an interdependent ecosystem that developed over millions of years. And we're asked to believe that a human driving an avatar can rise to the top of it in a matter of months. (Obviously because we are so special.)
A "white people suck" story is one in which the non-whites beat the whites themselves. In "Avatar" it would have meant that the Navi succeed without Jake or in spite of him. Instead what we have is a messiah fantasy driven by guilt, call it "white" guilt or "corporate" guilt. Jake is overcome by his conscience, but he then overcomes his conscience and absolves his guilt by becoming a divine instrument of deliverance.
I was disappointed because the movie had so much potential. There's a scene where Jake is talking to his camera and realizing he is having trouble keeping straight who he is. That's a huge idea that is explored in only the most shallow way. Imagine what Charlie Kaufmann could do with that concept.
I think it's more likely that they'll go without the "i", and just call it Slate. The Times editor said "slate." Yeah they've registered islate domains, but companies defensively register domains near their product name all the time.
Google may have delisted a few pages. I wonder if it happens in situations where they could have been concerned about (or maybe faced) legal action. Note that the Chester example is a person in the UK, about whom were written harmful things that are untrue. I believe the UK has libel laws that strongly favor the complainant.
In many cases what Google has done is updated their algorithm. This is not the same as delisting, as the content is still findable. For instance it was not long before the monkey image of Michelle Obama was no longer on the first page for a GIS of "Michelle Obama." However if you searched "Michelle Obama monkey," it was the very first result. From the point of view of Google, this is probably an improvement to their product. IIRC when they defused the "miserable failure" Googlebomb of George W. Bush, many Googlebombs were shuffled out of the top spots as well.
Google says their mission is to organize the world's information and make it findable. My guess is that they are firmly on the side of "search represents general relevance" rather than "search reflects online popularity at that moment in time." I think people too easily fall into thinking about how Google works, rather than what its ideal results should be. If I opened a history book 30 years from now and looked up "Michelle Obama" in the index, it would not make sense for that monkey image to be the illustration.
Restaurants make money by turning tables. A customer sitting at a table sipping coffee for 2 hours over lunch might prevent several other people from getting a seat and ordering a full lunch.
I haven't seen a full McDonalds for years though. My guess is that they looked at their numbers, saw that there were almost always open seats, and figured they had more to gain than lose.
By severity I meant the mortality rate of the disease itself is no higher than a typical seasonal flu. Agree that early action helped limit the size and/or speed of the outbreak.
The main thing to keep in mind is that there are really only a few nations with the capability and money to address an asteroid impact threat--it doesn't matter what everyone else thinks. And you might not even need all of them, depending on who you get in a "coalition of the willing." The U.S., the E.U., and Japan are very close allies and that's more than half of the world's spacefaring capability right there.
In addition, nations work much more closely together on some issues than on others. Look at the intense international coordination in addressing the financial crisis. Look at the response to H1N1 (which turned out to be an over-response, but the severity was not known at the beginning). Scientists in particular cooperate very well over national borders, and orbital mechanics is much simpler to independently verify and communicate than global climate. Once people know where to look, any serious astronomer could independently confirm an impact trajectory.
The "old people have nothing to lose" argument gets trotted out all the time, but in practice most people get more conservative and cautious as they age, and have families they care about. Besides in a democracy if the public is alarmed then politicians will act regardless of what they think personally--or get voted out of office. No American president is going to sit on his (or her) hands as an asteroid strikes, because of some treaty.
Illegal wiretaps are nasty invasions of privacy and are a wrong that the U.S. government committed. You can read about and debate them in thousands of blog posts and news articles, none of which are censored. That's how you know about it. The same cannot be said of many things within China.
Cultural relativism is the most lazy mental posture there is. "Hey, we're all different and about equally evil." Then it's ok to drift through life, I guess?
Humans and human institutions make mistakes and commit evil acts sometimes--including the U.S. The value of the U.S. system is the freedom to acknowledge, publicize, and debate them, and effect change. Since 2006 we've switched out the leadership of our legislative and executive branches--against the will of the incumbents. Of course I won't be surprised if you apply a similar cultural relativistic point of view to that too: "both parties are the same, they're equally evil." How convenient.
A nuclear reactor simply converts mass to energy, very inefficiently. So just by virtue of running it, you are losing fuel mass. There's no free lunch.
In the absolute best case for an energy source, you could convert mass directly to energy, and use that to power your quantum drive. But if you can convert mass directly to energy, you can just dump that energy out the back in the form of photons and get the exact same level of thrust...maybe more if your quantum drive has any inefficiencies. So I don't really see how this would be any more useful than a photon drive. In either case the hard part is the energy source, not the drive mechanism.
They've also refused to disclose their raw data, or even a list of what data they used.
Let's pick on GISTEMP since they've open-sourced their analysis code. From their site:
The current analysis uses surface air temperatures measurements from the following data sets: the unadjusted data of the Global Historical Climatology Network (Peterson and Vose, 1997 and 1998), United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) data, and SCAR (Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research) data from Antarctic stations.
They've gone as far as ignoring FOIA requests to the point where NASA will soon be facing litigation.
The FOIA requests do not request data or data sources. CEI is asking for documentation, such as memos or e-mail, of discussions related to several topics including RealClimate.org and the error McIntyre discovered. Read it in their own words.
They can open-source all the algorithms they want, but without showing their data, it's completely useless.
Now that you have the data as well, we look forward to your analysis.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple sold over 3 million computers last quarter. About half of the computers they sell through their own stores are sold to people who have never owned a Mac before. There's no way that is driven entirely by people coming into close contact with art departments and music composers. There just aren't that many designers, composers, and video editors in the country; and as others have pointed out, not every designer, composer, or video editor uses a Mac (far from it).
Apple is a lifestyle brand now. The view that their growth is driven by the hard core of designers and fan boys is outdated. That is one reason, for instance, that Apple pulled out of the Macworld conference. They don't need it anymore. They're front-page news in major newspapers and have product placements in all the most popular shows, movies, and magazines. The people they reach through these channels will be the people this tablet is aimed at.
I remember when The North Face was just one of several manufacturers of high-end mountaineering clothing and equipment. Today some climbers still use and prefer TNF gear, but that's not the majority of their sales any more. Most of the down jackets they make today never make it past a cold day's walk. Likewise, most Macs sold today will never run Photoshop.
Microsoft has already announced that they'll ship a Mac version of Outlook with their next release of Office for Mac:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/aug09/08-13MacOutlookPR.mspx?rss_fdn=Press%20Releases
If it works well, this might allow me to drop the PC I keep in my office and just use my iMac.
The problem with computerized handwriting recognition is that people expect it to work every time. When it doesn't, you have to somehow go in through another interface (keyboard for instance) to correct the faulty recognition. That's time-consuming and sort of kills the whole reason to be using the stylus in the first place.
Of course human handwriting recognition fails all the time too. People have trouble reading their own handwriting sometimes. But somehow, it's more frustrating when a $1000+ computer fails at it.
That is why handwriting recognition has never been a hit in the marketplace and likely never will be (at least for the foreseeable future). To meet most people's expectations, the computer would actually have to out-perform humans at recognizing handwriting--a tall order.
The only company that has ever had a successful handwriting-recognition product is Palm, and their secret was to invent a new alphabet that you had to learn. That way when the recognition failed, most people blamed themselves for not writing the new letters well enough. Graffiti solved a user-expectation problem as much as it solved a technical problem.
In the case of today, I would guess:
the competitor is Microsoft
and
the partners are Verizon (more) and TV networks (for content)
I work in politics and government and to give Apple much credit for this is sort of laughable. Let's just say that if they tried to patent it, there would be plenty of prior art.
Some people will look at this and think "that's why Apple is so successful at building buzz." It's only partly true. Every company leaks, but not every company gets a NY Times story and 100 blog echoes. The leaks work so well because Apple is a hot, popular company. They don't, by themselves, make Apple a hot, popular company.
Thom Yorke, the band's lead singer, explained in an online interview for Wired magazine that Radiohead would never have been able to pull off the stunt without years of support from its former label, Capitol EMI.
"The only reason that we could even get away with this is the fact that we'd actually gone through the whole mill of the business in the first place," Yorke said. "It's not supposed to be a model for anything else. It was simply a response to a situation. We're out of contract. We've spent a huge amount of money on this server. We have our own studio. What the hell else would we do? This is the obvious thing to do."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122006767
The biggest problem facing most "small independent artists" is not people downloading their songs - it's NOBODY downloading the songs. Most (95%) of the 100k+ albums released every year sell less than a hundred copies
You pivoted in that sentence. First you're talking about downloads, then you're talking about album sales. Not the same thing. There are plenty of bands whose music is widely downloaded or streamed, but who sell few albums. From the musicians' point of view, you've identified the problem perfectly.
The problem for most of these artists is that many of the traditional ways of discovering new music (radio, CD stores) have been bought up and monopolized by the majors. While the new media channels are available to everybody, getting "eyeballs" (OK, "ears") is still the hardest part.
It is much easier today for new bands to get exposure, thanks to music review sites like Pitchfork, services like Pandora or Spotify, discussion boards by the thousand, and of course MySpace, the original online home of independent musicians. Plus with MP3 players and smartphones, it's way easier to play a song for a friend whenever.
My brother is the drummer in a band signed to a mid-size label. They've put out several albums and tour nationally and internationally. Their songs have been streamed hundreds of thousands of times on their MySpace page. I'm sure there are torrents of them. Yet he still lives hand-to-mouth, working as a caterer and bike mechanic when he's not touring, living with friends. The lead singer makes ends meet by running a contracting business with his wife. They are not lacking for attention; what they are increasingly lacking are reliable ways to turn that attention into dollars.
Think back to the dotcoms of the late 90s. It's not that hard to grow an audience by giving things away to people; but audiences are worthless if there is no reliable mechanism to turn them into dollars.
My brother is a lesser-known artist, a drummer in a band signed to a small label (Fat Wreck Chords), who have produced several albums. I think it's very easy for techies here on Slashdot to opine about how piracy actually helps lesser-known artists, but the reality is that it is becoming more and more difficult to develop any sort of middle-class living as a musical artist (as opposed to fee-for-service session player). Pirated tracks can help "blow up" the rare act that makes it big, but this is the musical equivalent of making it from the street court to the NBA...doesn't happen 99+% of the time. It used to be that musicians could make an ok living from being moderately popular, but that is less and less true.
Even with the increased interest driven by pirated music, touring constantly is a terrible life which produces not much money. It has been hell on my brother's relationships with girlfriends, friends, and family. Think of the worst business travel schedule of the busiest tech consultant, but replace planes with a van or bus, and hotels with bunks or floors, and subtract most of the salary. His shows are attended by thousands of people, but he has to work 2 other jobs when at home (catering and bike mechanic), rents a room from a friend, and can barely afford health insurance.
Look up the recent history of The Roots, now the resident band on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. This is a well-known, popular, Grammy-winning hip-hop band that has been around for many years, and they were starting to struggle to the point that they took on the TV show gig.
Maybe some people will say that this is his choice and he should just choose a different career path if he can't make it big. The problem with that is that it cedes musical art to the few lottery-winner bands. Where do the niches go? How can new acts survive long enough to grow an audience?
I always thought my sig was just a joke.
Many, many people get MBA degrees--many more than get engineering degrees. Some of these MBA holders make a lot of money in business management--more than most engineers. But most people with MBAs do not make a lot of money. And, many managers who find business success hold technical degrees. Business management darling Jack Welch, for instance, held a BS, MS, and PhD in chemical engineering.
The best path to getting rich in the U.S. is to manage a successful business--yours or someone else's. This is a path that is just as open to engineers as anyone else, MBA or not. Plenty of engineers rise into management.
Centralization is to some extent the direct result of specialization within society. Nuclear power is extremely complex and to work in it, one needs highly specialized training. The direct result is that only a small subset of the population will ever be able to build and operate nuclear power plants, and thus nuclear power generation will always be highly centralized. The same is true of coal power or natural gas power generation, or, for that matter, food and clothing production. The less time I spend managing these things myself, the more time available to me to improve in my own chosen area of specialization.
I've used Macs since I had a Mac Classic on my desk in college, and MS operating systems since DOS, and I think OS X Leopard is the best OS I've ever used. To me, features like column view, Quick Look, and Expose are much more powerful and useful than one-window-per-folder fields of icons--I don't miss the strictly spatial paradigm. Finder as browser more closely matches how I think about interacting with a computer now.
I don't, I run as user, reserving the admin account for administering the computer. It's safer, and I can do this because OS X runs all software just fine as user (unlike Windows for many years).
So, yeah, I get the password request for every software install. In fact, that's the whole point of running as a user.
Maybe Apple's success is all marketing, but guess what, marketing is part of business too, and for the past decade Apple has been extremely good at business. This is not an engineering or originality award.
Sure, there's a lot of baked-in angst about evil corporate/military humans vs. pure innocent nature. But even more insidious is how it seeks to reinforce how special and awesome we humans are in the universe. The natives don't kill Sully because of a semi-mystical sign that seems to signify that he is special. Later, after only 3 months of training, he is able do all the things that Navi warriors with many years of training can do. Shortly after that he can exceed their greatest legends, unite the clans, call on the gods for help, and win the day.
This is the most implausible aspect of a very implausible plot! We're shown throughout the movie that the Pandoran biology is interwoven in incredibly complex ways--an interdependent ecosystem that developed over millions of years. And we're asked to believe that a human driving an avatar can rise to the top of it in a matter of months. (Obviously because we are so special.)
A "white people suck" story is one in which the non-whites beat the whites themselves. In "Avatar" it would have meant that the Navi succeed without Jake or in spite of him. Instead what we have is a messiah fantasy driven by guilt, call it "white" guilt or "corporate" guilt. Jake is overcome by his conscience, but he then overcomes his conscience and absolves his guilt by becoming a divine instrument of deliverance.
I was disappointed because the movie had so much potential. There's a scene where Jake is talking to his camera and realizing he is having trouble keeping straight who he is. That's a huge idea that is explored in only the most shallow way. Imagine what Charlie Kaufmann could do with that concept.
I think it's more likely that they'll go without the "i", and just call it Slate. The Times editor said "slate." Yeah they've registered islate domains, but companies defensively register domains near their product name all the time.
True but I did not use the word pandemic.
Google may have delisted a few pages. I wonder if it happens in situations where they could have been concerned about (or maybe faced) legal action. Note that the Chester example is a person in the UK, about whom were written harmful things that are untrue. I believe the UK has libel laws that strongly favor the complainant.
In many cases what Google has done is updated their algorithm. This is not the same as delisting, as the content is still findable. For instance it was not long before the monkey image of Michelle Obama was no longer on the first page for a GIS of "Michelle Obama." However if you searched "Michelle Obama monkey," it was the very first result. From the point of view of Google, this is probably an improvement to their product. IIRC when they defused the "miserable failure" Googlebomb of George W. Bush, many Googlebombs were shuffled out of the top spots as well.
Google says their mission is to organize the world's information and make it findable. My guess is that they are firmly on the side of "search represents general relevance" rather than "search reflects online popularity at that moment in time." I think people too easily fall into thinking about how Google works, rather than what its ideal results should be. If I opened a history book 30 years from now and looked up "Michelle Obama" in the index, it would not make sense for that monkey image to be the illustration.
Restaurants make money by turning tables. A customer sitting at a table sipping coffee for 2 hours over lunch might prevent several other people from getting a seat and ordering a full lunch.
I haven't seen a full McDonalds for years though. My guess is that they looked at their numbers, saw that there were almost always open seats, and figured they had more to gain than lose.
By severity I meant the mortality rate of the disease itself is no higher than a typical seasonal flu. Agree that early action helped limit the size and/or speed of the outbreak.
The main thing to keep in mind is that there are really only a few nations with the capability and money to address an asteroid impact threat--it doesn't matter what everyone else thinks. And you might not even need all of them, depending on who you get in a "coalition of the willing." The U.S., the E.U., and Japan are very close allies and that's more than half of the world's spacefaring capability right there.
In addition, nations work much more closely together on some issues than on others. Look at the intense international coordination in addressing the financial crisis. Look at the response to H1N1 (which turned out to be an over-response, but the severity was not known at the beginning). Scientists in particular cooperate very well over national borders, and orbital mechanics is much simpler to independently verify and communicate than global climate. Once people know where to look, any serious astronomer could independently confirm an impact trajectory.
The "old people have nothing to lose" argument gets trotted out all the time, but in practice most people get more conservative and cautious as they age, and have families they care about. Besides in a democracy if the public is alarmed then politicians will act regardless of what they think personally--or get voted out of office. No American president is going to sit on his (or her) hands as an asteroid strikes, because of some treaty.
In the long run, nothing is safe.
- China has the Great Firewall.
- The US has illegal wiretaps.
Tiananmen Square vs. Tiananmen Square
Illegal wiretaps are nasty invasions of privacy and are a wrong that the U.S. government committed. You can read about and debate them in thousands of blog posts and news articles, none of which are censored. That's how you know about it. The same cannot be said of many things within China.
Cultural relativism is the most lazy mental posture there is. "Hey, we're all different and about equally evil." Then it's ok to drift through life, I guess?
Humans and human institutions make mistakes and commit evil acts sometimes--including the U.S. The value of the U.S. system is the freedom to acknowledge, publicize, and debate them, and effect change. Since 2006 we've switched out the leadership of our legislative and executive branches--against the will of the incumbents. Of course I won't be surprised if you apply a similar cultural relativistic point of view to that too: "both parties are the same, they're equally evil." How convenient.
A nuclear reactor simply converts mass to energy, very inefficiently. So just by virtue of running it, you are losing fuel mass. There's no free lunch.
In the absolute best case for an energy source, you could convert mass directly to energy, and use that to power your quantum drive. But if you can convert mass directly to energy, you can just dump that energy out the back in the form of photons and get the exact same level of thrust...maybe more if your quantum drive has any inefficiencies. So I don't really see how this would be any more useful than a photon drive. In either case the hard part is the energy source, not the drive mechanism.
They've also refused to disclose their raw data, or even a list of what data they used.
Let's pick on GISTEMP since they've open-sourced their analysis code. From their site:
The current analysis uses surface air temperatures measurements from the following data sets: the unadjusted data of the Global Historical Climatology Network (Peterson and Vose, 1997 and 1998), United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) data, and SCAR (Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research) data from Antarctic stations.
Links to these data sources are provided in the documentation of their freely available analysis software:
Basic data set: GHCN - ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2
v2.mean.Z (data file)
v2.temperature.inv.Z (station information file)
For US: USHCN - ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2/monthly
9641C_200907_F52.avg.gz
ushcn-v2-stations.txt
For Antarctica: SCAR - http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/READER/surface/stationpt.html
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/READER/temperature.html
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/READER/aws/awspt.html
For Hohenpeissenberg - http://members.lycos.nl/ErrenWijlens/co2/t_hohenpeissenberg_200306.txt
complete record for this rural station
(thanks to Hans Erren who reported it to GISS on July 16, 2003)
They've gone as far as ignoring FOIA requests to the point where NASA will soon be facing litigation.
The FOIA requests do not request data or data sources. CEI is asking for documentation, such as memos or e-mail, of discussions related to several topics including RealClimate.org and the error McIntyre discovered. Read it in their own words.
They can open-source all the algorithms they want, but without showing their data, it's completely useless.
Now that you have the data as well, we look forward to your analysis.