Yes, and the low density of the production will make it much more difficult to obtain amounts needed without significant transportation effort to concentrate sufficient amounts.
So, they will switch from bombing oil wells to pipelines and rail junctions. Of course, they probably would hit those anyway.
Using food byproduct as fuel has had a very iffy record. I'm not against using meat oil or cow farts to run things, but it is definitely not the most efficient use of a military budget.
Then they need to attack the problem head-on, as an IP abuse or an overuse of toxic chemicals issue, and not try and use the weasel method of trying to turn everyone against GMO crops by making it seem like it is going to hurt or kill people or animals by itself.
I think the arguments made against Monsanto and others on how they abuse or are allowed to abuse their IP are spot on. What I have not been able to stomach is this idea that GMO crops are themselves evil.
I am deeply unhappy with the tactics used by Monsanto, but I think that *if* it is found that these studies are fraudulent, perhaps we'll be in a situation where at least one side isn't allowed to throw around FUD arguments that demonize GMO itself. Maybe the "good guys" will learn a valuable lesson about not trying to fight evil with fear.
Well, a thorium reactor is its own beast. Even normal uranium or plutonium fission reactors of conventional design could have extensive improvements.
And I should point out, we have made reasonable steps forward in reactor design. At least one navy is using them to power submarines and capital ships. The problem is that naval designs are not built to scale to the levels we'd need.
It's hard to be unabashedly proud of the relative progress that certain sources have made while watching nuclear power proceeding forward with it's hands tied behind its back due to extra regulation, laws designed to stop research, inability to secure private funding due to all of that, and simple FUD. It's a power source that has really bad PR and that matters a lot when it comes to your ability to be efficient. I just can't be as rosy about the advance of solar or wind or whatever when I see that they just aren't competing on the same field.
Well, I do agree with you that we aren't the supreme arbiters of what is possible in regard to physics.
In the defense of our primitive scientists, however, I would say that the models we currently have work so well that ditching them at the first sign of "unexpected behavior" is not really a good idea.
Additionally, given the age of the galaxy, there's really only two states that are overwhelmingly likely to be found in regard to Dyson Spheres: stars with completed Dyson Spheres and stars with no Dyson Sphere activity at all. The fact that we have found zero evidence for completed Dyson Spheres makes it significantly less likely that this is one in the process of being built, because even if it takes ages to build a sphere, it is unlikely to be constructed in the first place if it wasn't stable for some multiple of the build time. Otherwise, why build it?
None of that makes it impossible for this to be a sphere project in progress, but it would be a gigantic coincidence to find such a thing *first*.
That makes me wonder if, perhaps, what we are seeing is *not* a Dyson sphere, but instead, the material that might be used to build *something* is being moved into place. Presumably it will be easier to move the asteroids and such to the required locations/orbits and then disassemble them on site.
Of course, this probably is not a Dyson sphere, or even something built by intelligent life, but certainly the process of even starting to build one, or any megastructure for that matter, would look quite odd.
Not entirely true. Child mortality rates were definitely an issue before the 20th Century, but if you made it into your twenties, you'd probably live into your 50s or 60s. Not super old, but not exactly dying "young".
Now, you're probably right about not being able to feed seven billion people, but certain cultures like the Chinese had significant population densities for the period based on their agricultural techniques.
I do agree with you about the amount of change, one thing that strikes me is a quote that I remember seeing about art. Art changes faster in ten years in the modern West than it did in five thousand years of Egyptian history. People think of Egypt as being really old, which is true, but they forget that as a distinct civilized entity, it was really long lasting too. And if you look not just at art, but at their technological advancement, you can see it had a similar slow pace.
So, I do think that things are accelerating. There are some hard barriers like the speed of light and energy generation limits, so we may end up hitting a brick wall after some point, but in a few billion years of Earth's history, this is a very unique period. Its just that I think the human animal really hasn't seriously changed or evolved biologically yet, although it certainly could, if we keep finding ways to allow certain people to breed who wouldn't normally do so due to disadvantage or disinclination.
It is 1,480 light years away. That means that at that rate, they probably finished the Dyson Sphere 800-900 years ago. Their fleet has been on the way to Earth since then, for sure.
That gives us maybe 500 years to build a fleet of starships with wave motion guns, and an army of humongous mecha.
Whatever ends up "winning" this debate will produce the best value per watt or least pollution per watt. Why? Because the winner will be the subject of research and improvements and the other will not. It almost doesn't even matter which source has the best absolute efficiency, because the improvements over what is currently possible will eclipse most of the arguments made either way.
And whoever wins will say, "see, I told you so," but I'm certain that given the right amount of time, we could make either one of these work.
That aside, there's too much FUD about nuclear out there. It is a power source we should be using and moving forward with design on, even if it isn't the solution to the global energy crisis. We need to keep researching and developing new and better designs. Nuclear power has a lot of uses and is a type of power generation that does not require specific environmental conditions in order to operate. That's why our farthest ranging space probes are using RTGs right now, and not solar panels. If anything, we need the option available, and to make it safe, we have to have good designs and experience operating those designs.
The reality is that there will be no single solution at all for the energy crisis until we're able to complete some sort of megaproject like a space-based solar collection swarm. We're only hurting ourselves pretending that we're going to be able to solve all our issues with one or two types of energy production.
Strictly speaking, it isn't the end of the world. However, two things:
Fewer people limits the amount of available labor. Until there is a lot more automation, the number of people is the productivity of the human race. And that is all sorts of labor: menial and knowledge-based.
Secondly, and less theoretically, fewer people in the younger generations to pay into social programs means that a greater burden is on the younger individuals every generation. This will eventually cause collapse unless there is some other way to spread the cost. That's a big deal for Europe.
I don't want to suggest that Muslims in Europe cannot or will not assimilate, but the Irish and even the Italians had more similarities to the population in the US at the time than the Muslims do with the Europeans now. And there was a great amount of both interest and motivation in assimilating back then because no one cared much whether cultures were being oppressed or not, so you assimilated or you failed to thrive.
Today, there's both larger cultural differences, mixed with more tolerance of other cultures which has the unfortunate side-effect of making it easier to resist assimilation.
While I can't really make a distinction of what culture is "better", I do know that mixing cultures which are resistant to intermixing and assimilation is a recipe for serious civil strife. That's a serious danger for the future of Europe if they can't find some way to cope with the influx peacefully.
Presumably you've never seen Zardoz. Even Connery couldn't make that watchable. Admittedly, it says more about just how bad the movie was than anything Connery did in it. Although, that costume....
That does make sense from a support perspective. Although, I'd probably slap an autoresponder on that mailbox that this person is no longer there and to contact support@evil.org. Maybe to ensure continuity of service, I'd manually monitor the mailbox for a few weeks and then delete it. You don't want to be responding to mails sent to sally@evil.org forever, even if they are proper support mails.
However, the person did say that they changed (not added) an alias to the mailbox, so I simply presumed that they only had one alias to the mailbox which led to the original question. Its not really that important, I was just curious about how that was happening.
And you can find leftist whackos who spout off things at the same level of insane if you look for them. I think the bias is more stark when I only hear about the Christian Right nutjobs.
Yes, there's some pretty nutty people on the Right, just as there are on any side with that this many people involved. I'm more worried when I don't hear about the other side's cartoon characters. It makes me think someone is leaving them out to try and suggest that they don't exist, which of course gives the other side a nice "reasonable" sounding narrative. That's a lot more insidious and bothers me a lot more.
There are quite reasonable people who are conservatives. They haven't been bought by big anything and they don't hate women or minorities (unless you have redefined "hate", of course). They just don't believe in certain programs as either effective towards the desired goals, or they feel that they have dangerous consequences. Those conservatives could be wrong to be sure, but every conservative I have personally met believes in evolution, and is willing to accept the concept of climate change. Some aren't even Christians, let alone fundamentalists. What they don't accept necessarily, is that the only solutions out there are the ones being suggested by the political left.
Unfortunately, this also has the effect of allowing the right-wing nutjobs more airtime, and Trump's campaign rolling over more moderate Republicans shows just where that is going. The media loves Trump because he's quotable and reinforces their own internal narrative about how conservatives "really are", but at the same time, they're giving people like him more power than they would otherwise have and causing the polarization that they seem to be constantly crying about at every turn.
The part where you made an over-generalization about "The Cloud" and reliability because you don't like the buzzword involved.
You certainly can and *should* expect reliability from the Cloud. And it is possible to deliver it because, in the end, "The Cloud" is simply centralized administration of "things", which works just fine in things that are not "The Cloud".
My point is that this particular company has not, but in general, it could be done and if the benefits exist, we should pursue providers who can provide that.
I believe it should absolutely be spelled out, if only because as a boss, I don't hire people to fire them, I want them to be successful so all of us are successful. That is more than enough reason to spell it out.
However, I just think that making the company bear the burden by default isn't really fair. There's too many ways to get sued out there and a company is a much juicer target than just about any private individual. I also have a low tolerance for people who aren't making the effort to be aware of their surroundings and or who lack boundaries, so perhaps that is showing through as well.
First, internal networks are managed by your company and their network admins. The network admins will inspect traffic to ensure that the network is working properly and there are no attacks or other bad behavior going on which reduces the usefulness of their network resources. You have zero expectation of privacy over a corporate network because there is no way that they can afford to give you any. If the network admins are trying to do their jobs and you have a "private" conversation on their equipment, then they could get in trouble for accidentally coming across your "private conversation" if that was not allowable. That's ridiculous.
Second, having these sorts of conversations over company networks opens the company to intrusion by law enforcement and other groups who may decide to force your company into supporting their investigation, thus tying up valuable administrator time in fetching logs and other fun hassles. Did your employee threaten his girlfriend which resulted in abuse complaints?
Third, and more directly job related. In certain jobs, no one cares what you do, as long as you get your tasks done in a certain amount of time.
However, what if I had an employee who told me that he absolutely could not do two tasks because those tasks just took way too much time to do, so he could only do one? Then what happens when I discover he spends four hours a day chatting and arguing with his girlfriend? And what if I discovered he was not only not doing his job, but being an asshole to his girlfriend? Sure, I don't get to make decisions on his personal life, but if he's a) not doing his work and b) an asshole to boot, then I don't care to have this person work for me. He's irresponsible and an asshole. And he clearly has no boundaries.
Trust me, I know people have personal conversations at work. I have as well, although I have strongly encouraged my friends and family to not call me to make chit chat at work. However, there has to be a limit, and there are jobs where your time at work is actually money. Keep it to a minimum and keep it on your personal devices.
Shouldn't changing the alias to the mailbox have kept anyone from the previous user from being able to reach that inbox? Or were your employees stupid enough to give out their email to their friends as "support@evil.org"?
That's not sexism, your sister is just working for a bunch of dicks. Tell her to get a new job. Waiting for an opening in a company is a shitty way of getting a promotion these days. That's why you switch jobs. If they really want her to stay on, they'll kick this guy upstairs to some sort of oversight position and let your sister the do the job. If they believe she's replaceable, then there is no guarantee their promises to her will stick. They'll just hire some other old man to take the position.
Vacation is something you want your team to take, and I am strongly considering requiring my team to take mandatory vacations this year, both for oversight purposes, but also because they are fucking useless when burnt out. So am I, for that matter.
However, we don't nor should we shovel our entire budget at it. I think we have adequate money going against terrorists, if we increased the efficiency of the spending, we'd probably even be able to cut the budget and get the same result.
Bringing some telescopes, studying nuclear delivery systems, and setting up coordination is not a bad use of a few tens of millions of dollars.
Open code turns hardware into even more of a commodity where they start racing toward the bottom in price. No one in the hardware business really wants that. Inter-operability between products per some agreement? Sure. Open hardware. Good luck.
They will need to be forced to allow open hardware by some means or development. It is not in their interests to do so otherwise, and so far they cannot be forced to.
The problem is that the Cold War, for all the fear and all of the decades, is only the very first breaths of the baby that the Manhattan Project produced. MAD worked because there was fear of nuclear bombs far and above what they actually are. Eventually that mystique will fade.
I believe that use of nuclear weapons in the future isn't a threat, it's a certainty. It may well start off small, but eventually, enough could be used over time to effectively turn the world into the place we all feared as a long war eventually throws around smaller, but larger numbers of fusion weapons.
We could all go up in a big fireball, with a nuclear winter after that, but I don't think it will go that way. There will be some terrorist attacks here and there. Perhaps some small tactical uses. Eventually someone will get into a conventional war that they turn the tables on with some tactical weapons. There quite possibly wouldn't be a strategic exchange in the manner in which we feared, just a series of lesser atrocities that (combined with radiation) progressively shit up the planet.
My biggest hope is that escalation is not guaranteed. Of course, a real fear is that someone realizes this and decides that nuclear weapons are an acceptable threat.
The biggest concern is that such weapons get into the hands of people who don't care about the future of the planet or humanity. In that sense, the Soviet Communists were dangerous and paranoid, but were not actually looking to use those weapons. A group like ISIS would do their utmost to nuke a city whenever they could, knowing full well what the result would be.
Again, I think we need to understand our future in the context of the use of nuclear weapons and plan for that. In that sense, I don't mean duck and cover drills, I mean, cleanup, evacuation plans, disaster recovery programs, and ultimately the ability to get humans off this planet. Too many people think that a nuclear war is the end of the world. It isn't. Even if Doomsday happens on one day, a greater portion of humanity will survive the end of the world. It's what happens after that which will determine the fate of the species.
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Yes, and the low density of the production will make it much more difficult to obtain amounts needed without significant transportation effort to concentrate sufficient amounts.
So, they will switch from bombing oil wells to pipelines and rail junctions. Of course, they probably would hit those anyway.
Using food byproduct as fuel has had a very iffy record. I'm not against using meat oil or cow farts to run things, but it is definitely not the most efficient use of a military budget.
Then they need to attack the problem head-on, as an IP abuse or an overuse of toxic chemicals issue, and not try and use the weasel method of trying to turn everyone against GMO crops by making it seem like it is going to hurt or kill people or animals by itself.
I think the arguments made against Monsanto and others on how they abuse or are allowed to abuse their IP are spot on. What I have not been able to stomach is this idea that GMO crops are themselves evil.
I am deeply unhappy with the tactics used by Monsanto, but I think that *if* it is found that these studies are fraudulent, perhaps we'll be in a situation where at least one side isn't allowed to throw around FUD arguments that demonize GMO itself. Maybe the "good guys" will learn a valuable lesson about not trying to fight evil with fear.
Well, a thorium reactor is its own beast. Even normal uranium or plutonium fission reactors of conventional design could have extensive improvements.
And I should point out, we have made reasonable steps forward in reactor design. At least one navy is using them to power submarines and capital ships. The problem is that naval designs are not built to scale to the levels we'd need.
It's hard to be unabashedly proud of the relative progress that certain sources have made while watching nuclear power proceeding forward with it's hands tied behind its back due to extra regulation, laws designed to stop research, inability to secure private funding due to all of that, and simple FUD. It's a power source that has really bad PR and that matters a lot when it comes to your ability to be efficient. I just can't be as rosy about the advance of solar or wind or whatever when I see that they just aren't competing on the same field.
Well, I do agree with you that we aren't the supreme arbiters of what is possible in regard to physics.
In the defense of our primitive scientists, however, I would say that the models we currently have work so well that ditching them at the first sign of "unexpected behavior" is not really a good idea.
Additionally, given the age of the galaxy, there's really only two states that are overwhelmingly likely to be found in regard to Dyson Spheres: stars with completed Dyson Spheres and stars with no Dyson Sphere activity at all. The fact that we have found zero evidence for completed Dyson Spheres makes it significantly less likely that this is one in the process of being built, because even if it takes ages to build a sphere, it is unlikely to be constructed in the first place if it wasn't stable for some multiple of the build time. Otherwise, why build it?
None of that makes it impossible for this to be a sphere project in progress, but it would be a gigantic coincidence to find such a thing *first*.
That makes me wonder if, perhaps, what we are seeing is *not* a Dyson sphere, but instead, the material that might be used to build *something* is being moved into place. Presumably it will be easier to move the asteroids and such to the required locations/orbits and then disassemble them on site.
Of course, this probably is not a Dyson sphere, or even something built by intelligent life, but certainly the process of even starting to build one, or any megastructure for that matter, would look quite odd.
Not entirely true. Child mortality rates were definitely an issue before the 20th Century, but if you made it into your twenties, you'd probably live into your 50s or 60s. Not super old, but not exactly dying "young".
Now, you're probably right about not being able to feed seven billion people, but certain cultures like the Chinese had significant population densities for the period based on their agricultural techniques.
I do agree with you about the amount of change, one thing that strikes me is a quote that I remember seeing about art. Art changes faster in ten years in the modern West than it did in five thousand years of Egyptian history. People think of Egypt as being really old, which is true, but they forget that as a distinct civilized entity, it was really long lasting too. And if you look not just at art, but at their technological advancement, you can see it had a similar slow pace.
So, I do think that things are accelerating. There are some hard barriers like the speed of light and energy generation limits, so we may end up hitting a brick wall after some point, but in a few billion years of Earth's history, this is a very unique period. Its just that I think the human animal really hasn't seriously changed or evolved biologically yet, although it certainly could, if we keep finding ways to allow certain people to breed who wouldn't normally do so due to disadvantage or disinclination.
It is 1,480 light years away. That means that at that rate, they probably finished the Dyson Sphere 800-900 years ago. Their fleet has been on the way to Earth since then, for sure.
That gives us maybe 500 years to build a fleet of starships with wave motion guns, and an army of humongous mecha.
Whatever ends up "winning" this debate will produce the best value per watt or least pollution per watt. Why? Because the winner will be the subject of research and improvements and the other will not. It almost doesn't even matter which source has the best absolute efficiency, because the improvements over what is currently possible will eclipse most of the arguments made either way.
And whoever wins will say, "see, I told you so," but I'm certain that given the right amount of time, we could make either one of these work.
That aside, there's too much FUD about nuclear out there. It is a power source we should be using and moving forward with design on, even if it isn't the solution to the global energy crisis. We need to keep researching and developing new and better designs. Nuclear power has a lot of uses and is a type of power generation that does not require specific environmental conditions in order to operate. That's why our farthest ranging space probes are using RTGs right now, and not solar panels. If anything, we need the option available, and to make it safe, we have to have good designs and experience operating those designs.
The reality is that there will be no single solution at all for the energy crisis until we're able to complete some sort of megaproject like a space-based solar collection swarm. We're only hurting ourselves pretending that we're going to be able to solve all our issues with one or two types of energy production.
Strictly speaking, it isn't the end of the world. However, two things:
Fewer people limits the amount of available labor. Until there is a lot more automation, the number of people is the productivity of the human race. And that is all sorts of labor: menial and knowledge-based.
Secondly, and less theoretically, fewer people in the younger generations to pay into social programs means that a greater burden is on the younger individuals every generation. This will eventually cause collapse unless there is some other way to spread the cost. That's a big deal for Europe.
I take it that you missed "Jackass". Same material, slightly higher concept.
I don't want to suggest that Muslims in Europe cannot or will not assimilate, but the Irish and even the Italians had more similarities to the population in the US at the time than the Muslims do with the Europeans now. And there was a great amount of both interest and motivation in assimilating back then because no one cared much whether cultures were being oppressed or not, so you assimilated or you failed to thrive.
Today, there's both larger cultural differences, mixed with more tolerance of other cultures which has the unfortunate side-effect of making it easier to resist assimilation.
While I can't really make a distinction of what culture is "better", I do know that mixing cultures which are resistant to intermixing and assimilation is a recipe for serious civil strife. That's a serious danger for the future of Europe if they can't find some way to cope with the influx peacefully.
Presumably you've never seen Zardoz. Even Connery couldn't make that watchable. Admittedly, it says more about just how bad the movie was than anything Connery did in it. Although, that costume....
That does make sense from a support perspective. Although, I'd probably slap an autoresponder on that mailbox that this person is no longer there and to contact support@evil.org. Maybe to ensure continuity of service, I'd manually monitor the mailbox for a few weeks and then delete it. You don't want to be responding to mails sent to sally@evil.org forever, even if they are proper support mails.
However, the person did say that they changed (not added) an alias to the mailbox, so I simply presumed that they only had one alias to the mailbox which led to the original question. Its not really that important, I was just curious about how that was happening.
And you can find leftist whackos who spout off things at the same level of insane if you look for them. I think the bias is more stark when I only hear about the Christian Right nutjobs.
Yes, there's some pretty nutty people on the Right, just as there are on any side with that this many people involved. I'm more worried when I don't hear about the other side's cartoon characters. It makes me think someone is leaving them out to try and suggest that they don't exist, which of course gives the other side a nice "reasonable" sounding narrative. That's a lot more insidious and bothers me a lot more.
There are quite reasonable people who are conservatives. They haven't been bought by big anything and they don't hate women or minorities (unless you have redefined "hate", of course). They just don't believe in certain programs as either effective towards the desired goals, or they feel that they have dangerous consequences. Those conservatives could be wrong to be sure, but every conservative I have personally met believes in evolution, and is willing to accept the concept of climate change. Some aren't even Christians, let alone fundamentalists. What they don't accept necessarily, is that the only solutions out there are the ones being suggested by the political left.
Unfortunately, this also has the effect of allowing the right-wing nutjobs more airtime, and Trump's campaign rolling over more moderate Republicans shows just where that is going. The media loves Trump because he's quotable and reinforces their own internal narrative about how conservatives "really are", but at the same time, they're giving people like him more power than they would otherwise have and causing the polarization that they seem to be constantly crying about at every turn.
I am not a millennial. I am not even a millennial's parent.
The part where you made an over-generalization about "The Cloud" and reliability because you don't like the buzzword involved.
You certainly can and *should* expect reliability from the Cloud. And it is possible to deliver it because, in the end, "The Cloud" is simply centralized administration of "things", which works just fine in things that are not "The Cloud".
My point is that this particular company has not, but in general, it could be done and if the benefits exist, we should pursue providers who can provide that.
I believe it should absolutely be spelled out, if only because as a boss, I don't hire people to fire them, I want them to be successful so all of us are successful. That is more than enough reason to spell it out.
However, I just think that making the company bear the burden by default isn't really fair. There's too many ways to get sued out there and a company is a much juicer target than just about any private individual. I also have a low tolerance for people who aren't making the effort to be aware of their surroundings and or who lack boundaries, so perhaps that is showing through as well.
Three things.
First, internal networks are managed by your company and their network admins. The network admins will inspect traffic to ensure that the network is working properly and there are no attacks or other bad behavior going on which reduces the usefulness of their network resources. You have zero expectation of privacy over a corporate network because there is no way that they can afford to give you any. If the network admins are trying to do their jobs and you have a "private" conversation on their equipment, then they could get in trouble for accidentally coming across your "private conversation" if that was not allowable. That's ridiculous.
Second, having these sorts of conversations over company networks opens the company to intrusion by law enforcement and other groups who may decide to force your company into supporting their investigation, thus tying up valuable administrator time in fetching logs and other fun hassles. Did your employee threaten his girlfriend which resulted in abuse complaints?
Third, and more directly job related. In certain jobs, no one cares what you do, as long as you get your tasks done in a certain amount of time.
However, what if I had an employee who told me that he absolutely could not do two tasks because those tasks just took way too much time to do, so he could only do one? Then what happens when I discover he spends four hours a day chatting and arguing with his girlfriend? And what if I discovered he was not only not doing his job, but being an asshole to his girlfriend? Sure, I don't get to make decisions on his personal life, but if he's a) not doing his work and b) an asshole to boot, then I don't care to have this person work for me. He's irresponsible and an asshole. And he clearly has no boundaries.
Trust me, I know people have personal conversations at work. I have as well, although I have strongly encouraged my friends and family to not call me to make chit chat at work. However, there has to be a limit, and there are jobs where your time at work is actually money. Keep it to a minimum and keep it on your personal devices.
Shouldn't changing the alias to the mailbox have kept anyone from the previous user from being able to reach that inbox? Or were your employees stupid enough to give out their email to their friends as "support@evil.org"?
That's not sexism, your sister is just working for a bunch of dicks. Tell her to get a new job. Waiting for an opening in a company is a shitty way of getting a promotion these days. That's why you switch jobs. If they really want her to stay on, they'll kick this guy upstairs to some sort of oversight position and let your sister the do the job. If they believe she's replaceable, then there is no guarantee their promises to her will stick. They'll just hire some other old man to take the position.
Vacation is something you want your team to take, and I am strongly considering requiring my team to take mandatory vacations this year, both for oversight purposes, but also because they are fucking useless when burnt out. So am I, for that matter.
There's nothing wrong with the Cloud for this. We cede of a lot of things to centralized generation and control.
What needs to happen is that these services to be reliable and mature, which this product clearly is not yet.
You know, you shouldn't mind, if your asteroid has nothing to hide, planetary citizen.
Terrorism is a threat.
However, we don't nor should we shovel our entire budget at it. I think we have adequate money going against terrorists, if we increased the efficiency of the spending, we'd probably even be able to cut the budget and get the same result.
Bringing some telescopes, studying nuclear delivery systems, and setting up coordination is not a bad use of a few tens of millions of dollars.
Open code turns hardware into even more of a commodity where they start racing toward the bottom in price. No one in the hardware business really wants that. Inter-operability between products per some agreement? Sure. Open hardware. Good luck.
They will need to be forced to allow open hardware by some means or development. It is not in their interests to do so otherwise, and so far they cannot be forced to.
The problem is that the Cold War, for all the fear and all of the decades, is only the very first breaths of the baby that the Manhattan Project produced. MAD worked because there was fear of nuclear bombs far and above what they actually are. Eventually that mystique will fade.
I believe that use of nuclear weapons in the future isn't a threat, it's a certainty. It may well start off small, but eventually, enough could be used over time to effectively turn the world into the place we all feared as a long war eventually throws around smaller, but larger numbers of fusion weapons.
We could all go up in a big fireball, with a nuclear winter after that, but I don't think it will go that way. There will be some terrorist attacks here and there. Perhaps some small tactical uses. Eventually someone will get into a conventional war that they turn the tables on with some tactical weapons. There quite possibly wouldn't be a strategic exchange in the manner in which we feared, just a series of lesser atrocities that (combined with radiation) progressively shit up the planet.
My biggest hope is that escalation is not guaranteed. Of course, a real fear is that someone realizes this and decides that nuclear weapons are an acceptable threat.
The biggest concern is that such weapons get into the hands of people who don't care about the future of the planet or humanity. In that sense, the Soviet Communists were dangerous and paranoid, but were not actually looking to use those weapons. A group like ISIS would do their utmost to nuke a city whenever they could, knowing full well what the result would be.
Again, I think we need to understand our future in the context of the use of nuclear weapons and plan for that. In that sense, I don't mean duck and cover drills, I mean, cleanup, evacuation plans, disaster recovery programs, and ultimately the ability to get humans off this planet. Too many people think that a nuclear war is the end of the world. It isn't. Even if Doomsday happens on one day, a greater portion of humanity will survive the end of the world. It's what happens after that which will determine the fate of the species.