I agree with the paywall fear, to some extent. It's annoying for previously free software that you got used to using, now suddenly is on a pay model. You can still use the previous version, there may even be a freeware version of the new paywalled mod, but now you're on-hook for money if you want to keep up with the latest with that software. That's really irritating because it feels like a bait and switch, if not handled properly.
Personally, I think it is a good thing that modders get paid for their mods, if they put enough effort into it. The market would then decide if the mod was worth the money. It is hard to go from free to paid, though, and I think personally, you either start charging from the beginning or you have to alter the mod so significantly that it is clear why it is now a paid mod. Going from free to play with to paying for the same functionality is always going to hit a wall psychologically.
As for who gets what cut, it really depends on the terms of the mod tools. Valve will get its cut, because it remains a distributor of game software no matter what is being offered. What does Bethesda get, however? While Bethesda built Skyrim and the mod tools, unless there were terms in the mod tools license for intellectual property for this scenario, I'd think their involvement would stop at the sale of Skyrim and tools.
Realistically, I think Bethesda may have certain rights, and they certainly should add specific rights in the future to their license agreements. Then modders can determine whether their time is well-spent on modding a Bethesda game, much like app writers can decide whether their efforts are best used to extend iOS or Android, or both.
It would be too bad to discourage high quality mods by charging too high a price for IP, but if companies like Bethesda come up with a sane payment schedule for such things, and if they offer services to go with those charges, then they can ask for their cut. I just wonder if that language exists in their mod tools license at this moment.
Let's be honest. It can often be a bit of a stretch to see how any particular CS class or concept impacts society in a way that seems meaningful. Mostly, that's because what CS does is very "behind the scenes". No one really understands how writing some code will help someone get clean water or child care or a lot of other things. In fact, proper use of computers can help with all of those things, and does so every day, but it doesn't do it directly.
I think when the day comes when we have robots doing NGO work out in the field, the field tech will get lots of respect from these sorts of people, but at the moment, most people just think of CS people as professionals sitting behind a desk, or people who want to create smartphone apps. While those are not inherently bad things to be doing, they aren't as direct or romantic.
That's also why you see "hacking" portrayed in movies as some people typing really fast at a keyboard. Filmmakers want computer work to *look* as dynamic as they know it should be. In the same way, females (apparently) are more frequently interested in things that they can do to get in there and be visibly contributing in a personal sort of way.
If there is a way we can make CS more directly and actively "present", I see no issue with that. It would help the field out in some respects.
However, the heart and soul of using computing is that you're working on a force-multiplier support system. You sit behind a desk, working behind the scenes on support systems, not because you want to, but because that's what you need to do to make this stuff work. If women don't want to get into a field that has that sort of work as a characteristic, I don't blame them, but at the same time, the field can't truly be changed to suit their preference. There's only so many NGO websites you can support directly. Things like Google or GPS apps or even silly general social networking stuff can be extremely helpful for these sorts of groups, and we need people to be working on those, even if they don't appear to be "societally meaningful" to those who don't understand their value.
So the question is, is it really that important to try and change a field to fit a set of people who are not all that interested in it? I agree with doing our best to remove "brogramming" characteristics, but the reality is that the removal of the Boy's Club atmosphere is tough when you don't have many females interested in the field to begin with. It's not a matter of missing opportunity as much as it is a matter of missing interest and I can't say that I think it is necessarily desirable to force that interest. Are we asking why nursing and being a school teacher isn't as attractive to males, even though both fields are extremely important?
Obama appointed the commissioners, but they're more independent than your usual government department. If Wheeler did Obama's bidding, it is likely because Wheeler and Obama were on the same page, not because Obama forced it.
And of course there is a difference between the two parties, just not one that makes any fundamental difference in the long run. They both want the government to be bigger, so much so that they will even occasionally steal from the other team's playbook to make it bigger. I don't actually think it is a conspiracy, per se, I just think it is a bunch of people who like exercising power, and by doing so at the Federal level, they drag more and more into its orbit. Centralized power, whether built on the basis of defense expenditures or entitlements, will eventually be used for the benefit of the opposite side.
A good-ish thing if he really takes that seriously. There's lots of people who work for the government these days who are more concerned with who will be paying them when they finish up in government.
I'm pretty happy it didn't go through. That may not make me happy about the government, but I'm happy about anything that kept that abomination of a deal from happening. This is a legitimate cause for celebration, even if it doesn't really mark a significant change. Most systems are at least a little corrupt, so it is a fine thing to see a good decision come about sometimes from that mess.
There's no need to be skeptical. No rule is without exceptions. He could easily be good intentioned in this case and still not really disprove the rule of regulatory capture.
Of course, you're right that he could have a reason that this particular merger met his ire. He may have a job lined up with a competitor. Maybe Comcast pissed him off when he was on the phone with them once. Maybe his friends at the country club don't like Comcast.
Still, he could easily have been annoyed about how transparently bad the arguments that Comcast and Time Warner Cable made were. I mean, just listening to the commercials they were hitting us with and how they tried to somehow convince people that Comcast, one of the most hated companies in America, is somehow going to be good for us because they planned on implementing Net Neutrality without being told to (a line that went away right after the Title II changes). As if they could be forced to keep that promise after they merged with TWC. And gee whiz, they sometimes give away internet to poor kids, which I'm sure no one else has ever thought of, ever. Right.
The downside is that you'd have to have 1.4 million people who are perfectly positioned to take advantage of these devices with sufficient reaction time to be able to get to them, and sufficient warning time to know to try and find one. And once they did, you'd probably have two people trying to fight their way into one, while another at a less useful location was completely unused.
In the same vein, nuclear bomb shelters were an iffy idea even if you ended up being able to get to them and use them, but they never really addressed the issue of what happened if you got nuked while you were at work or school, or if you were on vacation. They only really made sense when tensions raised publicly and for a protracted period of time. Most ICBM attacks would have been done pre-emptively with very little time for even the military to react. You *might* be able to get to your shelter if you were at home, awake, and happened to have your TV or radio on or your neighbors clued you in.
A 7 billion dollar seawall could not only save a lot of property, it could potentially save more than 1.4 million people because it heads off the problem at the most likely point of attack instead of relying on positioning of people in relation to an escape pod.
This sort of thing could be useful, but only in high risk scenarios like the iceberg one where you know you have a high risk of needing it, and you also don't need to leave the near vicinity of the object (or even leave the object at all).
That idea just reminds me of people building nuclear bomb shelters in their backyard. Kind of cool if you want a clubhouse, but not completely thought out for their actual use, really.
The Himalayas are there because they are on a plate boundary where one plate is colliding with another. At this one, instead of subduction, we have collision and uplift. And this uplift we happen to call the Himalayas.
I'm surprised that there aren't *more* earthquakes of high intensity there.
It will be blamed on both Obama and the Republicans, the frackers, the socialists, the global warming deniers, the ecoterrorists, and the NIMBY crowd. And of course, they're all at fault as part of the One World Conspiracy.
"As the representative of the Chinese government, I can categorically deny the Chinese government's use of Baidu for a highly effective attack on GitHub. We did not make use of this capacity, which can be used to quickly and efficiently shut down any networked target at will.
As China is a responsible citizen of the world, we would never use specially trained teams of professional PLA hackers to provide a demonstration of our significant power.
Although China is a global superpower and leader in computer science education, and we certainly have the ability to call down multiple, simultaneous, and devastating defensive DDoS's, (a tactic that we refer to as the Great Worker's and Peasants' Rain of Steel), we are a peace loving nation who does not resort to aggression to pursue our policies.
We condemn in the strongest terms this attack, although we do note its effectiveness and our preparation to do battle on these terms, if such a thing was necessary to maintain the sovereignty of the People's Republic of China from similar aggression.
I suppose, but I'd rather take my time asking you your knowledge of key libraries and interfaces and more complicated concepts, rather than asking you to code me a sort.
If you really wanted to test someone's rote memorization of the Big O notation values of various algorithms, then just ask them to give you some examples of n or n log n or whatever. You do need to understand the reason that a sort is better than another, and it's nice to have a set of sorts handy for general purpose use, but really, is that what you want to ask about in a limited time?
I usually don't bother. You can look that shit up in books or on the net. More to the point, you should be looking up that shit on the internet if you need to code your own, because there is a decent chance someone has written a better sort or search algorithm for the type of data or structures that you are working with than the ones you memorized in CS 101 for general purpose utilization. You're a developer, not a CS academic researcher. Go to the net, check the benchmarks on some libraries and then get back to coding the actual special sauce of your business.
Why? Linux didn't come from some company. It came from one person, originally. That person happened to be a male Finn, but it could have been a black woman who was interested in writing operating systems.
Einstein couldn't get a job as a professor, so he joined the Patent Office. Did that stop him from devising special and general relativity?
Sure, writing code for companies is the well trod path for coding, but you don't need that in the age of Open Source to get your good code out there. If you have what it takes, you can make it happen. It will take work, but that work pays off much more than being lumped in some group who needs an opportunity spoon-fed to them.
Yes, it could cause what we'd think of as a "nuclear winter". Which is really how it would do most of it's global damage. The ashfall would also be off the charts, but likely confined to North America.
Basically take the entire Yellowstone park, dig out every cubic centimeter of dirt and rocks from the surface down to the lava reservoir and just throw all of that into the stratosphere. All at once. Of course you don't want to be in the radius where the heavy stuff starts coming down on you, and that will probably be a number of entire states under significant debris.
The rest of the world will merely need to deal with the sun being blotted out for a few years. This is what happened when Mount Tambora erupted which was only a "normal" VEI-7 eruption. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1...
Note that they are supposed to be 1/10,000ish year events. Thereabouts, that seems sort of high. While Yellowstone might not go off any time soon, there are other places that might much sooner.
The Toba eruption about 74,000 years ago is thought to have caused a genetic bottleneck in humans were we were cut down to the mere tens of thousands of people in the entire world.
Toba being principally responsible for this bottleneck is disputed, but it should also be pointed out that humans at that time were fairly mobile, so their strategy for survival would probably not be possible for most of us. Our ancestors at the time didn't rely on agriculture and with humans only in the millions in population, we could have probably foraged and moved.
Humans today... well let's just say that our urban populations would not have the ability to switch hunting grounds.
I'm not sure any of the known calderas are actually thought to be ready to blow in the near future, but Yellowstone was supposed to go off in 600,000ish year intervals and I believe we're overdue. It doesn't mean it will go off any time soon, just that it's starting to look like it is time again, assuming that the characteristics of the lava reservoir are similar to last time.
It would probably not cause humans to go extinct, but it could come close. It would probably be the equivalent of a fairly substantial nuclear war.
Deaths would be in the billions, although mostly from secondary effects like crop failure and disease. And yeah, you could kiss the Western USA goodbye.
Even with a few trucks in the yard, they probably made better use of those trucks than the people in the city made of the disposable crap that they use and throw away every day. Those specific trucks, going on what I used to see on farms, can be anywhere from 10 to 50 years old, depending on the farmer's ability to repair them enough so that they keep running.
The question is, then, why would any one care the Romney paid no taxes, assuming that what he did was legal?
We pass laws for tax breaks for specific reasons, like encouraging this, or discouraging that. If Romney reduced is tax due to zero, then didn't those programs simply do what they were supposed to? If not, shouldn't we attack the programs and not the person who is just doing those things that the law was crafted to encourage him to do?
If some rich guy paid no tax in return for opening ten orphanages, are we still going to complain he paid no taxes? Is he a saint, or is he an evil tax avoider?
Depends on how much extraction can actually affect things, but I'd say that the longer it was before the quake was "supposed to happen", the less likely it would be that an extraction event could cause it.
In other words, can we actually undermine 100 years worth of stability with what we are doing now? I don't actually know, but I do know that geologic forces tend to be measured in terms that make human capabilities look positively Mickey Mouse.
In places like California, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake is a less than 100 year event. So in those places, you could certainly get a 7.0 earthquake for less effort. Could you frack your way to a 7.0 in a much more geologically stable area? The answer is likely, "No".
Pakistan is *allowing* us to do this. Do you really think they are not? Pakistan has nuclear weapons, they may have more trouble getting their big gun to us, but they could do it. Sure, we'd turn their urban areas into radioactive glass if they did use them on us, but don't think for a second that they are a powerless puppet state unable to deal with parity with the Big Bad USA.
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I agree with the paywall fear, to some extent. It's annoying for previously free software that you got used to using, now suddenly is on a pay model. You can still use the previous version, there may even be a freeware version of the new paywalled mod, but now you're on-hook for money if you want to keep up with the latest with that software. That's really irritating because it feels like a bait and switch, if not handled properly.
Personally, I think it is a good thing that modders get paid for their mods, if they put enough effort into it. The market would then decide if the mod was worth the money. It is hard to go from free to paid, though, and I think personally, you either start charging from the beginning or you have to alter the mod so significantly that it is clear why it is now a paid mod. Going from free to play with to paying for the same functionality is always going to hit a wall psychologically.
As for who gets what cut, it really depends on the terms of the mod tools. Valve will get its cut, because it remains a distributor of game software no matter what is being offered. What does Bethesda get, however? While Bethesda built Skyrim and the mod tools, unless there were terms in the mod tools license for intellectual property for this scenario, I'd think their involvement would stop at the sale of Skyrim and tools.
Realistically, I think Bethesda may have certain rights, and they certainly should add specific rights in the future to their license agreements. Then modders can determine whether their time is well-spent on modding a Bethesda game, much like app writers can decide whether their efforts are best used to extend iOS or Android, or both.
It would be too bad to discourage high quality mods by charging too high a price for IP, but if companies like Bethesda come up with a sane payment schedule for such things, and if they offer services to go with those charges, then they can ask for their cut. I just wonder if that language exists in their mod tools license at this moment.
Let's be honest. It can often be a bit of a stretch to see how any particular CS class or concept impacts society in a way that seems meaningful. Mostly, that's because what CS does is very "behind the scenes". No one really understands how writing some code will help someone get clean water or child care or a lot of other things. In fact, proper use of computers can help with all of those things, and does so every day, but it doesn't do it directly.
I think when the day comes when we have robots doing NGO work out in the field, the field tech will get lots of respect from these sorts of people, but at the moment, most people just think of CS people as professionals sitting behind a desk, or people who want to create smartphone apps. While those are not inherently bad things to be doing, they aren't as direct or romantic.
That's also why you see "hacking" portrayed in movies as some people typing really fast at a keyboard. Filmmakers want computer work to *look* as dynamic as they know it should be. In the same way, females (apparently) are more frequently interested in things that they can do to get in there and be visibly contributing in a personal sort of way.
If there is a way we can make CS more directly and actively "present", I see no issue with that. It would help the field out in some respects.
However, the heart and soul of using computing is that you're working on a force-multiplier support system. You sit behind a desk, working behind the scenes on support systems, not because you want to, but because that's what you need to do to make this stuff work. If women don't want to get into a field that has that sort of work as a characteristic, I don't blame them, but at the same time, the field can't truly be changed to suit their preference. There's only so many NGO websites you can support directly. Things like Google or GPS apps or even silly general social networking stuff can be extremely helpful for these sorts of groups, and we need people to be working on those, even if they don't appear to be "societally meaningful" to those who don't understand their value.
So the question is, is it really that important to try and change a field to fit a set of people who are not all that interested in it? I agree with doing our best to remove "brogramming" characteristics, but the reality is that the removal of the Boy's Club atmosphere is tough when you don't have many females interested in the field to begin with. It's not a matter of missing opportunity as much as it is a matter of missing interest and I can't say that I think it is necessarily desirable to force that interest. Are we asking why nursing and being a school teacher isn't as attractive to males, even though both fields are extremely important?
"Undressly is like Tinder... but for undressing!"
I think they really might have a good handle on their particular market segment.
Obama appointed the commissioners, but they're more independent than your usual government department. If Wheeler did Obama's bidding, it is likely because Wheeler and Obama were on the same page, not because Obama forced it.
And of course there is a difference between the two parties, just not one that makes any fundamental difference in the long run. They both want the government to be bigger, so much so that they will even occasionally steal from the other team's playbook to make it bigger. I don't actually think it is a conspiracy, per se, I just think it is a bunch of people who like exercising power, and by doing so at the Federal level, they drag more and more into its orbit. Centralized power, whether built on the basis of defense expenditures or entitlements, will eventually be used for the benefit of the opposite side.
A good-ish thing if he really takes that seriously. There's lots of people who work for the government these days who are more concerned with who will be paying them when they finish up in government.
I'm pretty happy it didn't go through. That may not make me happy about the government, but I'm happy about anything that kept that abomination of a deal from happening. This is a legitimate cause for celebration, even if it doesn't really mark a significant change. Most systems are at least a little corrupt, so it is a fine thing to see a good decision come about sometimes from that mess.
There's no need to be skeptical. No rule is without exceptions. He could easily be good intentioned in this case and still not really disprove the rule of regulatory capture.
Of course, you're right that he could have a reason that this particular merger met his ire. He may have a job lined up with a competitor. Maybe Comcast pissed him off when he was on the phone with them once. Maybe his friends at the country club don't like Comcast.
Still, he could easily have been annoyed about how transparently bad the arguments that Comcast and Time Warner Cable made were. I mean, just listening to the commercials they were hitting us with and how they tried to somehow convince people that Comcast, one of the most hated companies in America, is somehow going to be good for us because they planned on implementing Net Neutrality without being told to (a line that went away right after the Title II changes). As if they could be forced to keep that promise after they merged with TWC. And gee whiz, they sometimes give away internet to poor kids, which I'm sure no one else has ever thought of, ever. Right.
The downside is that you'd have to have 1.4 million people who are perfectly positioned to take advantage of these devices with sufficient reaction time to be able to get to them, and sufficient warning time to know to try and find one. And once they did, you'd probably have two people trying to fight their way into one, while another at a less useful location was completely unused.
In the same vein, nuclear bomb shelters were an iffy idea even if you ended up being able to get to them and use them, but they never really addressed the issue of what happened if you got nuked while you were at work or school, or if you were on vacation. They only really made sense when tensions raised publicly and for a protracted period of time. Most ICBM attacks would have been done pre-emptively with very little time for even the military to react. You *might* be able to get to your shelter if you were at home, awake, and happened to have your TV or radio on or your neighbors clued you in.
A 7 billion dollar seawall could not only save a lot of property, it could potentially save more than 1.4 million people because it heads off the problem at the most likely point of attack instead of relying on positioning of people in relation to an escape pod.
This sort of thing could be useful, but only in high risk scenarios like the iceberg one where you know you have a high risk of needing it, and you also don't need to leave the near vicinity of the object (or even leave the object at all).
That idea just reminds me of people building nuclear bomb shelters in their backyard. Kind of cool if you want a clubhouse, but not completely thought out for their actual use, really.
The Himalayas are there because they are on a plate boundary where one plate is colliding with another. At this one, instead of subduction, we have collision and uplift. And this uplift we happen to call the Himalayas.
I'm surprised that there aren't *more* earthquakes of high intensity there.
It will be blamed on both Obama and the Republicans, the frackers, the socialists, the global warming deniers, the ecoterrorists, and the NIMBY crowd. And of course, they're all at fault as part of the One World Conspiracy.
Just don't blame for me, I voted for Kodos.
"As the representative of the Chinese government, I can categorically deny the Chinese government's use of Baidu for a highly effective attack on GitHub. We did not make use of this capacity, which can be used to quickly and efficiently shut down any networked target at will.
As China is a responsible citizen of the world, we would never use specially trained teams of professional PLA hackers to provide a demonstration of our significant power.
Although China is a global superpower and leader in computer science education, and we certainly have the ability to call down multiple, simultaneous, and devastating defensive DDoS's, (a tactic that we refer to as the Great Worker's and Peasants' Rain of Steel), we are a peace loving nation who does not resort to aggression to pursue our policies.
We condemn in the strongest terms this attack, although we do note its effectiveness and our preparation to do battle on these terms, if such a thing was necessary to maintain the sovereignty of the People's Republic of China from similar aggression.
Thank you."
I suppose, but I'd rather take my time asking you your knowledge of key libraries and interfaces and more complicated concepts, rather than asking you to code me a sort.
If you really wanted to test someone's rote memorization of the Big O notation values of various algorithms, then just ask them to give you some examples of n or n log n or whatever. You do need to understand the reason that a sort is better than another, and it's nice to have a set of sorts handy for general purpose use, but really, is that what you want to ask about in a limited time?
I usually don't bother. You can look that shit up in books or on the net. More to the point, you should be looking up that shit on the internet if you need to code your own, because there is a decent chance someone has written a better sort or search algorithm for the type of data or structures that you are working with than the ones you memorized in CS 101 for general purpose utilization. You're a developer, not a CS academic researcher. Go to the net, check the benchmarks on some libraries and then get back to coding the actual special sauce of your business.
Why? Linux didn't come from some company. It came from one person, originally. That person happened to be a male Finn, but it could have been a black woman who was interested in writing operating systems.
Einstein couldn't get a job as a professor, so he joined the Patent Office. Did that stop him from devising special and general relativity?
Sure, writing code for companies is the well trod path for coding, but you don't need that in the age of Open Source to get your good code out there. If you have what it takes, you can make it happen. It will take work, but that work pays off much more than being lumped in some group who needs an opportunity spoon-fed to them.
Yes, it could cause what we'd think of as a "nuclear winter". Which is really how it would do most of it's global damage. The ashfall would also be off the charts, but likely confined to North America.
Basically take the entire Yellowstone park, dig out every cubic centimeter of dirt and rocks from the surface down to the lava reservoir and just throw all of that into the stratosphere. All at once. Of course you don't want to be in the radius where the heavy stuff starts coming down on you, and that will probably be a number of entire states under significant debris.
The rest of the world will merely need to deal with the sun being blotted out for a few years. This is what happened when Mount Tambora erupted which was only a "normal" VEI-7 eruption. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1...
Spoilers: The Year Without A Summer (1816) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y...
A supervolcano is VEI-8+
Note that they are supposed to be 1/10,000ish year events. Thereabouts, that seems sort of high. While Yellowstone might not go off any time soon, there are other places that might much sooner.
The Toba eruption about 74,000 years ago is thought to have caused a genetic bottleneck in humans were we were cut down to the mere tens of thousands of people in the entire world.
Toba being principally responsible for this bottleneck is disputed, but it should also be pointed out that humans at that time were fairly mobile, so their strategy for survival would probably not be possible for most of us. Our ancestors at the time didn't rely on agriculture and with humans only in the millions in population, we could have probably foraged and moved.
Humans today... well let's just say that our urban populations would not have the ability to switch hunting grounds.
I'm not sure any of the known calderas are actually thought to be ready to blow in the near future, but Yellowstone was supposed to go off in 600,000ish year intervals and I believe we're overdue. It doesn't mean it will go off any time soon, just that it's starting to look like it is time again, assuming that the characteristics of the lava reservoir are similar to last time.
It would probably not cause humans to go extinct, but it could come close. It would probably be the equivalent of a fairly substantial nuclear war.
Deaths would be in the billions, although mostly from secondary effects like crop failure and disease. And yeah, you could kiss the Western USA goodbye.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow.
This had better end in a Steel Cage match.
PC Survivor Series. Make it happen.
Actually, probably not. They'll just find another evil dance partner.
"I didn't know what to make of the Comcast - Time Warner merger, but then I dug deeper. "
"How so?"
"You know my crippled mother? She really wanted to watch Game of Thrones, and Comcast remains committed to showing Game of Thrones."
"I did not know that."
"Yeah, and you know cute little Sally?"
"The stripper down at the club?"
"Yeah. Comcast has committed to showing soft core porn between the hours of 2 and 4 am."
"I remember that's something she's really been aspiring to do."
"And if the Comcast merger goes through, she might well get her chance."
"Hmm. I guess I have a lot to think about."
Even with a few trucks in the yard, they probably made better use of those trucks than the people in the city made of the disposable crap that they use and throw away every day. Those specific trucks, going on what I used to see on farms, can be anywhere from 10 to 50 years old, depending on the farmer's ability to repair them enough so that they keep running.
The question is, then, why would any one care the Romney paid no taxes, assuming that what he did was legal?
We pass laws for tax breaks for specific reasons, like encouraging this, or discouraging that. If Romney reduced is tax due to zero, then didn't those programs simply do what they were supposed to? If not, shouldn't we attack the programs and not the person who is just doing those things that the law was crafted to encourage him to do?
If some rich guy paid no tax in return for opening ten orphanages, are we still going to complain he paid no taxes? Is he a saint, or is he an evil tax avoider?
Depends on how much extraction can actually affect things, but I'd say that the longer it was before the quake was "supposed to happen", the less likely it would be that an extraction event could cause it.
In other words, can we actually undermine 100 years worth of stability with what we are doing now? I don't actually know, but I do know that geologic forces tend to be measured in terms that make human capabilities look positively Mickey Mouse.
In places like California, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake is a less than 100 year event. So in those places, you could certainly get a 7.0 earthquake for less effort. Could you frack your way to a 7.0 in a much more geologically stable area? The answer is likely, "No".
Disclaimer: I think we need to stay the fuck out of there.
Too late.
Pakistan is *allowing* us to do this. Do you really think they are not? Pakistan has nuclear weapons, they may have more trouble getting their big gun to us, but they could do it. Sure, we'd turn their urban areas into radioactive glass if they did use them on us, but don't think for a second that they are a powerless puppet state unable to deal with parity with the Big Bad USA.