Gee, ya think the oil companies hold the patents on perpetual motion machines too? The real reason is that the market (customers) isn't convinced (and for good reason) that investing in an electric car is cost effective in the long run. Also, all that energy required to run an electric car has to come from somewhere - and it ain't gonna be from the overextended CA power grid.
Hydrogen is an interesting thing. If you take it from water, it's really just an energy storage means that can be transported via pipeline or truck. Unfortunately, it's a very small molecule and leaks thru about anything much easier than bigger molecule gases. Seems to that it can have brittlelization effects on metals or some other negative aspects in storgage and transport.
Hydrogen can also be acquired by 'cracking' hydrocarbons where it actually is a source of fuel rather than merely a storage means of energy. It can be used to feed fuel cells directly and it's evidently possible to have a small 'cracking' unit combined with a fuel cell to permit hydrocarbons to be processed into electricity.
Unfortunately, the 'clean burning' aspect of hydrogen is overtouted. It seems that when heat is involved, there is always some creation of less desirable molecules. What's worse, the main byproduct of hydrogen adds to the predominate greenhouse gas, the one far more responsible than co2 for our planet's temperatures.
As for gov. investing bunches of money, it's a very good thing they don't do more than the damage they're doing already. Such efforts help inferior approaches to compete in the market so as to crowd out superior ones. A good idea is one that is economically viable. An idea that is not economically viable (too costly) is one that is less efficient in the use of 'scarce resources'. when gov. takes assets (taxes us) and gives them to someone else (oftimes their buddies) so that their pals can compete (and enrich themselves) with inferior products - the market has been distorted. A possible case in point could be all those monies spent on gasohol enriching the archer daniels midland outfit.
Can hydrogen help? Probably. It might help provide a means of transporting energy from nuclear plants located in more desolate areas. It probably wont replace the oil economy because that's pretty much where any hydrogen energy has gotta come from - other than just being nuclear industry transportation means.
The Ford model T and Model A were pretty cool cars for their day. They revolutionized automobiles and pretty much gutted the buggy and buggy whip industries and they were all done by henry ford. I don't think I can fully appreciate or conceive of the ramifications that would still be upon us had the modern US gov. managed to stick their fingers into the auto industry back then to make the people's car. Suffice to say, the shelby mustang would probably be 1 or 2 horsepower and Huggies main product line would probably be disposable automotive solid pollution remediation products.
Distorted doesn't necessarily mean funny. What's more the distortion is spread over the spectrum to all facets of technology and society. Also, it seems the more graphic portrayals of things, the more distorted and erroneous it is. Starting with those idiotic special effects showing people getting blown across the room by being shot with a shotgun, back in the late 60s or early 70s, the more 'realistic' the portrayal, the less real it all started to become.
Now, over half the actors out there seem to get all of their reality from movies. They're total nitwitts.
Ideas have consequences and massive system failures tend to start from a few minor problems and/or design flaws which interact and grow into major catastrophes. Much of the growth is fueled by faulty information being transferred. This applies to civilizations as well as embedded systems.
Racists come from the bottom of their respective race's intellegence curve somewhere around and possibly lower than modern liberals.
Historically speaking, most of the great minds of the world migrated to the US, at least those capable of escaping their homelands. The great influx as world war II approached was ncredible.
The US has treated scientists better than elsewhere in the world, but relative to other areas, it's no wonder why it's hard to get people to go into it. Doctors (bio-plumbers) and lawyers tend to have much higher incomes (although doctors don't fair quite so well anymore due to the costs of protection from lawyers).
As in the root cause of war, our society suffers from the syndrome which can be summed up in one simple phrase: "It's easier to take than to make".
Unfortunately, pay or financial rewards is ultimately based on the productivity of an individual. That is what they produce that is valued by society. The guy responsible for providing a programming language (and a bunch of other products) that would work on whimp little sawed off computers succeeded in making billions, not only for himself but for a bunch of his coharts and made bunches of money for everyone that bravely invested early in that rickity behemoth whose alias is 'mickiesoft'. The impact or benefit provided by the guy who finally appears to discover the axion particle can, at present, mostly be measured in the number of students he helped to educate. Perhaps, his legacy will be far greater, but he'll not likely benefit from it nor will our current society.
From what I've seen over the years is the substantial increase in the education of foreign students in the science and engineering realm. Some learn and stay while others leave. What is absent in greater amounts now is domestic students. It seems they've opted to go into business, law or medicine.
There is also a limit to just how much a society can afford in the way of engineering and basic science. Of course, both are necessary to the very survival of the human race, with super viruses, asteroids and comets, super volcanoes and ultimately a sun which will fry the earth to a cinder some distant day. But, pure science doesn't harvest grain or put food on the table. The division of labor permits it to exist but not to take over.
Unfortunately, the destruction of our public education system has made it much harder to train scientists as well. Its conversion to an indoctrination system has had its effects on many as well.
physics has been dividing by 0 for a long time. It's all in how it's done. Then again, somewhere along the line people started getting confused over the observation/expectation that numbers correctly model the real world. Fortunately, they do to a great extent.
This article was even dumber than I expected it might be. Perhaps the problem is too many dumb-ass'ed coaches being allowed to teach mathematics in public schools.
It's too bad they didn't provide any actual information that this guy actually did something beyond defining o / o as 0 using the classical slash thru the 0 to distinguish between capital o's and a zero. Perhaps if the guy were clever and inventive, the 'nullity' could have been named the 'zoro' which is a little bit closer to this guy's ideal, don qui hote.
I wouldn't advise eating one. After all, we're being told every day there is a pending disaster of a hazmat nature with all those dead computers.
While maybe it's possible to do, I'm not at all convinced that is is a good thing to allow kids to have computers, at least not until they have the knowledge to design and program one (and I use the term design to mean circuit level, not plug boards into a box). Such efforts could result into creating a generation of vidiots, actually, we seem to already have one here in the US (shades of that shoddy sci-fi novel series Perry Rhodan). At best, it means the kids won't learn multiplication and long division or be able to truly create the basis of rational thought.
Some have considered that the creation of socialism/communism was actually a plot by capitalists to prevent the rise of competitors or the exploitation of natural resources in 3rd world countries. Perhaps this is the plot to prevent intellectual competition.
While it's true that computers could be used for improved education, it's also true that the they're also used for games and the creation of a virtual reality unrelated to reality.
Also, what happens when the technology changes? Is it time to create a new computer to give away to those who have insufficient productivity or opportunity to feed themselves? And, assuming the education part works, what will the world do with a generation of programmers and data entry clerks when it becomes necessary for most to become familar with shovels, lawn mowers, hammers and other tools needed to make a society function?
Somewhere back in paris hilton's ancestry, someone succeeded in working hard and earning lots of money. They deemed it important that paris receive some of this wealth, perhaps in an effort to prevent her from going into the only job her limited mental capacity was suited for. We owe a debt of gratitude to those ancestors who kept paris hilton out of politics. Too bad there was no one around to save the nation from teddy kennedy and Jay rockefeller or and no one to save the nation from john heinz. Then again, john edwards earned his ill-gotten loot the hard way, he had to lie to juries and conn them into making idiotic decisions that negatively impacted the state he was operating in.
Two things that negates totally any value of this study was the absence of income considerations and the nature of the political and economic systems involved. A poor welfare loafer could conceivably own a house and/or property that puts them ahead of some high income shyster lawyer who wastes all his income on leasing fancy cars, condos and memberships to country clubs. Also, about 1/6th of the world's population lives in china where they are slaves owned by the leaders and don't own anything of their own. That fact alone means that over 16% of the people in the world own nothing - and that no more than 84% of the worlds population own any thing at all. And, if you assume equal distribution among the rest, no more than 42% of the overall population could possibly own 50%.
What makes this number sort of interesting is that in order for a full 2% of the worlds population to own half, there must be a whole bunch of apparently average people in the US who have accumulated significant wealth considering that the standard of living here is significantly higher than virtually everywhere else.
Sometimes things are described a bit too simply. Radio antennas dont exist in a vaccuum. If there is a device, like a blinky light thingy, it's coupled to the antenna sufficiently to be absorbing energy. As such, it is possibly changing the antenna pattern or possibly the amount of energy actually being radiated. (this coupling is probably magnetic - a transformer so to say).
The net results may be that the cell phone is having to expend more battery power to properly hit the towers or in more remote locations could be the difference between establishing a comm link or not. Clearly, the blinky thingy is absorbing rf energy in order to blink and emit light.
As for the whole story, it's yet another leak that eliminates one more method of catching the moderately stupid bad guys, in this case, mafia types of criminals. Anyone wondering why we ain't caught ben laden only has to go back to the new york times archives to find that they leaked our primary tracking mechanism to the world at large - and - evidently at least one ben laden follower appears to read the NYT also.
As for the paranoid schizos out there worried about big bro, maybe because you gotta joint in your pocket or some other high crime, your vanity and conceit is getting the best of you, because you ain't worth wasting scarce law enforcement/national security resources on you, even if buying that weed is funding organized crime and even foreign terrorist organizations.
Planned obsolescence is merely a marketing strategy which is extremely risky in nonmonopolistic market places. it is not a reality that we face regularly but rather as an anomoly from companies that likely won't be around long enough to expand. The engineering counterpart, or closest equivalent, is value engineering when applied as part of the marketing strategy. However, there are many techniques involved in planned obsolescence which do not involve value engineering and the terminology also applies to the notion of selling new and different products which make previous ones obsolete - such as dvd's versus vcr's.
As for fuzzy logic, except in a limited technical situation, it is really a buzz word used to describe an absence of logic and / or common sense.
Unlike the liberal mentality, some recognize reality as being a separate entity from the mind and that our perceptions of what should or shouldn't be have nothing to do with reality. Ascribing a bit of the anthropomorphic to it, momma nature does what she does and woe be to whomever violates her rules. This is why liberalism is actually a rather suicidal philosophy as currently practiced.
Conservatives do no hold a monopoly on reality or economic accuracy just as modern liberals do not have a monopoly on fantasy, not that bush is a conservative or even a libertarian. As far as I am aware, essentially all neocons are jews so I guess you're antisemetic as well.
As for companies, you're unusually right in a way which you do not comprehend. They serve humanity by providing products and services and for that they get paid. In the way you intended, well that's even more wrong than you assumed me to be. For one, you have no mechanism to actually determine what is good or bad for society. Hence, there is no way that a company or anyone else actually knows what is good or bad or whether they are or are not doing either.
When you finally understand that money is in fact an indicator of value to society and that companies who make money are considered by some fraction of society - their customer base - to be doing good for society by providing their services and products and those companies that aren't making money are not doing so. Of course this is a form of popular vote and subject to the vagaries, misinformation and perversions of the populace, not all products and services actually turn out to be good for society or for those who demand them. There again, there is no one who is going to successfully be able to determine what is good and what is bad in a fashion that will be found agreeable, regardless of just how oppressive the tyranny created might become.
Again, your total ignorance of the science of economics is overwhelming. You shouldn't have gotten out of highschool.
As for your pal at Bic, if he were worth his salt, he'd have gone into competition with his better steel razor that lasted longer and put them outa business, offering a cheap directly competitive product and a somewhat more expensive premium version. Maybe he got sacked over competency issues.
It's obvious you only use fuzzy logic as well as don't read too well. The word 'normally' has an impact on meaning in the first sentence. Judging by your attempts at adhom attacks, you seem to be suffereing from a bit of transference as well as a lack of communications ability.
You seem to think that a product life cycle is somehow normally planned to be artificially short and that great effort goes into this in most if not all products. You also think automakers are out to get you with psychology, or perhaps out to get poor dumb lemmings living in red states. It actually just boils down to trying to give the customer what they want, because if a company doesn't, no one buys their products.
---------- So, if I understand this, you are suggesting that bad design resulting from managerial stupidity is more likely than bad design resulting from greed. I wouldn't argue that stupidity is uncommon, but I would estimate that greed is no less, if perhaps much more common, especially in positions of power where such decisions are made. And given that I know of several examples of deliberate planned obsolescence, I don't find stupidity a convincing argument against greed. Especially since both can co-exist. Again, it's not a binary question. ------------
You also seem to have a 'greed' problem that indicates an apparent lack of knowledge and understanding of economics which is rather pandemic in the US and Europe now. Profit is what companies exist for. Without it, people that work there can't get paid and people that invest in it cannot get any reward for investing there. As for what profit is, as one tends towards the realm of commodities, profit tends to be very close to the difference between income - expenses of a better run company and a poorly run company.
Perhaps if you were willing to pay more money for a product that was better made then you wouldn't be complaining so much about apparently shoddy products. Think of all the great exercise one can get carrying around a 30 pound laptop that can survive being run over by an fully loaded 18 wheeler. Certainly that feature would be worth an extra $15000 to you for a laptop that could last 30 years - even though it's only got a maximum of 64m of memory and a 486 processor in it.
---------- In most projects, there is insufficient time and resources to properly complete it on time and in budget while achieving a perfectly designed product. That means there is not enough time to perfectly design the product and then proceed to design in flaws that will result in failures after the warranty period in order to create obsolescence.
This is trite logic which doesn't fit into the real world. And it's more binary logic again. What's with you? --I've seen managers bluster in and demand deleterious changes no matter how little time there is left to complete a project. Humans are quite flexible, both on the managerial and worker sides when it comes to winning an argument over how something ought to be done. We live in a fuzzy logic world, my friend. -------------
Sorry but it's not logic. In fact, it's based on many years of observation. In areas like biomed. pacemakers and the like, being first in the market with a new product means gaining about an additional 50% in total market share. Being second means never being able to reach 50% market share. BTW, managers demanding last minute changes has nothing to do with whether a project is already late or behind schedule or out of resources. Such efforts just put things further behind and more in debt.
--------- This complaint is just plain grasping, and it remains totally disconnected from reality. Designer scents and their use as I've described in the automotive world are not just some pet theory of mine. It's the way it's done. I even saw the manipulative psychology proudly described in a damned documentary. So. . , perhaps the automakers have spent a little more time and research than your half-baked type-1 response. ---------
Make up your mind. Either defects are normally designed in on purpose or defects are not normally designed in on purpose (mickie-soft being a major exception to my comment about seldom).
New car smell has nothing to do with the engineering design of the vehicle nor the functionality of it. Not even skunk fragrance lasts forever. I've never seen anyone get rid of a car because the smell subsided nor have I seen a vehicle fail because of it. I have seen new car smell available at the local car wash although I usually prefer strawberry or other fragrance.
I have seen weight as a critical design parameter and the example given of bolt holes versus flimsy screws might have been a requirement to meet the weight or perhaps it could have been a packaging change that failed to incorporate bolt holes with a multi-10s of thousands of dollars injection mold redesign compared to a flimsier alternative. Or, it's possible that a design criteria for ruggedness of that portion wasn't properly estimated.
In most projects, there is insufficient time and resources to properly complete it on time and in budget while achieving a perfectly designed product. That means there is not enough time to perfectly design the product and then proceed to design in flaws that will result in failures after the warranty period in order to create obsolescence.
As for your auto company creating new car smell molecules that last only a few months, with your assumption being that the smell is supposed to last for less time than it should or easily could, that's rather stupid if it's true. Considering that most people buy cars and keep them longer than 1 or 2 years, and that new car smell lasts only a fraction of a year, any competitor that creates a new car smell which lasts longer than that can create a perception that their products are superior and last longer - a factor which won't affect how long one keeps their car but if such nonsense matters to anyone, it will certainly steer them to the competition for their next car. Hence, unless one can make a car smell new for 1 to 2 years, possibly aggrevating people with sinus problems, the desire would be to design the smell to last for as long as possible.
I guess you qualify as type (1) in your ad hom insults. Perhaps you might live a happier life and more successful life if you learned to read a bit better and learned more about that which you do not know.
While there is always the exception, actually designing in defects on purpose is not really done. There are plenty of opportunities that exist for unintentional defects to crop in, oftimes, defects that can cost the company dearly in recalls and warranty repairs.
Sometimes good engineering takes a back seat to asthetics or perceived crucial specifications as well as cost considerations. After all, if people don't like something about a product, they tend to buy the competitor's product.
Usually, first products in a new market are rather low volume items and are oftimes built like tanks rather than hot air balloons. They tend to be inconvenient and costly, but they'll survive a nuclear blast. For super popular products, there are all sorts of new developments from all sorts of secondary suppliers. As the products start to become commodities, marketeers keep trying to come up with ideas to distinguish their product from everyone elses'. Thinner, lighter weight, pink with rounded corners, add this function/feature, combine that gizmo into this gizmo, anything to tip the scales in the customer's mind towards their product.
Net result is that many more people want hot air balloons than tanks. Hence, that's where the market goes. Engineers are required to push things to the limit or send out their resume as the company fails.
Ever wonder why engineered bridges come down or are brought down after less than 100 yrs, yet no one bothers to take down roman bridges built 2000 yrs ago?
It's been an interesting trek from mickiesofts 8k basic for the altair 8800 computer to windows xp. At least a significant fraction of mickiesoft's success must be directly attributed to their incompetence though. Other factors included being in the right place at the right time, a few good decisions and a few less than nice things.
How ibm and apple and other competitors managed to do worse is amazing. Gates and associates pretty much blundered their way to success and that startup massive industry needed something, anything, in order to succeed or even to exist.
While gates probably put the industry ahead by 12-18 months at some points in history, I suspect that the overall score is well into the negative by now, at least in the software arena.
Perhaps the one most important contribution of mickiesoft and bill gates is the advancements in hardware, processor speed and disk and memory size. Mickiesofts, bloated, slow software and OS's after the advent of windows virtually forced the hardware industry to dramatically increase the speed of processors and memory size.
When msDos was king, the notion of a 386 computer was considered by many to be too powerful for a desktop and was a waste in such applications. Shades of exploding bodies if passenger train speeds ever reached 45 miles per hour. Try to run windows 3.1 on a 386/33!
Perhaps the most telling indicator of the mickiesoft technology is that the leading competitor to windows is unix. The basis of Unix is substantially the work product of a 'lost' generation of physics graduates trying to learn how to program. It appears that the reason why windows emulators on unix (or Linux) have not wiped out windows altogether seems to be the difficulty in properly simulating window's bugs in such programs as Wine.
The word planet predates science. The transition from savant to scientist occurred at the point in time when resolution and accuracy became measured, long after the word planet was in use. Actually, this was after the time the metric system was created.
Planet is not a scientific term or definition. It means wanderer, something than moves with respect to the 'fixed' stars. It is also something than people could see.
It was much later that science came in and discovered that these wanderers appeared to be bodies like earth revolving around the sun, some with moons.
Pluto is such a body. It takes a decent telescope to see it, but it does move with respect to the fixed stars and it can be seen. Since planet is a word borrowed from popular usage, it seems a bit uppity on the part of the IAU to attempt to make it a scientific term and to strike down on the flimsiest of excuses, an object that has been referred to as a planet for a generation.
The excuse used was it didn't clear out the region of its orbit of other debris. Hey, guess what! Neither have other planets, including planet earth - at least not totally. And, consider that planet earth has traversed its own orbit many times more than pluto being so far out. Also, it seems that there is perhaps a bias of giving more area to orbits further out. We are 1 a.u. from the sun and in that a.u., there are two additional planets, mercury and venus. It's almost looking like they expect pluto's region of clearing must be several a.u. in size.
This action by the AIU appears to be a poorly thought out and potentially costly effort to change popular perceptions rather than to deal in science. It also raises questions of international politics being involved since Pluto was discovered by an American.
If the AIU wants to set up categories and they want to use names from the popular culture for its scientific terms, then it needs to live with it.
Pluto fills the bill of a wandering object that can be seen. What's more important is that it was declared to be a planet sometime back. It even fills most of the bill for the scientific definitions - but that's irrelevent. A planet is a planet because we say it is. Are there more bodies out there that should be? Probably so - as long as they can be seen, even through a telescope.
Are there rogue planets out in space? No! There are Primordial particles, perhaps on their way to becoming planets but more likely on their way to becoming stars - but with a long way to go. But ultimately, they cannot be seen traveling across the sky with respect to the fixed stars. Note there really are no such thing as fixed stars - but their motions are rather small and take years to identify - hence they appear fixed - at least to the naked eye.
The free market, what you probably erroneously call capitalism, is actually human interaction in society. It is momma nature at work among men and works as surely as all of her other endeavours. If you violate momma natures laws of gravity - or attempt to - you will pay the price. If you do so in ecomonics, same thing, you will suffer the consequences, and as with gravity the consequences can be potentially deadly, not just inconvenient.
When you attempt to manipulate economics, you're attempting to thwart momma nature's laws. When you set up to manipulate pricing by taxing to achieve a 'social goal', you are in fact distorting the free market and causing decisions to be made based on erroneous data - sorta like most of the hoopla concerning global warming. This causes misallocations of scarce resources and inefficiencies in the system.
Our economy is tied to energy, period. There is infrastructure and technology associated with the particular type(s) of energy in use. The net result of raising the cost of the energy for which the infrastructure exists is essentially infationary, the cost of virtually all things rise. Unfortunately, the cost of labor will not rise that significantly. Ultimately, if the situation is severely impacted, those not productive enough cannot survive without assistance. When the number of those who are not productive enough to survive are carried on the backs of those who still can, this added load leads ultimately to their collapse as well.
As for fuel standards, there are severe limits on what one can accomplish. we're rather close to them at present. Additional reductions in weight of vehicles is reducing safety as well as driving up production costs. Ford and GM sell to customers who can choose what they want. When they don't figure out what the customers are wanting this year, they take a big hit.
When OPEC formed and artificially drove up the price of oil back in the 70s, the US auto makers took it on the chin when the public wanted something different or decided they had to buy something different.
It's amazing that any sane person would distrust corporations yet assume that government is more trustworthy than corporations. It's a cognitive dissonance or dissassociation from reality that defies logic. Governments are the modern slave plantation corporations of the 20th and 21st centuries.
As for Al's convenient lie movie, it's all about getting al his own slave plantation.
If the current matter density estimates are accurate, then at the current value of around the equivalent of 6 hydrogen atoms per cubic meter, then there should be a schwarzchild radius of around 14 billion light yrs - a mere coincidence with the current notion of our universe's size?
One should wonder if when we look at possible black hole whether or not any of our understood laws of physics work inside its schwartzchild radius - assuming it has one (isn't spinning). Now one perhaps should wonder if our universe is inside a schwartzchild radius too, whether or not our understanding of the laws of physics applies to outside of our giant black hole. Perhaps the comedy Men In Black had it right - maybe our universe is inside the pendant on a cat's collar.
One of the concerns that seems to never enter in is just what is going to be the distance traveled by the photon before it is reabsorbed and re-emitted and can that affect the close coupling?
Somehow things seem just a little bit perverse to consider that photon being emitted from acrosss the universe finally arriving into a ccd sensor on planet earth. Does anyone here believe that the emitting atom or photon sends out a pilot wave throughout the universe which travels into the future billions of years to determine that planet earth will be precisely at point xxx with a telescope and sensor pointed in the right direction in order to capture this just emitted photon and then send back through space and time that xxx marks the spot - head that way?????
It's almost as if time and space don't really exist in any sort of fashion we observe/interpret and that the universe is a fricken computer simulation.
Einstein's spooky action at a distance sounds just a little too weird for comfort.
Maybe shedding some additonal light on the subject might just undo some of the weirdness.
Actually the original SDI triad was substantially pragmatic and short term practical. Of course some of it was actually disinformation intended to subvert existing soviet strategies - and it worked. One of the triad pillars was simple SAMs and phalynx type guns - to protect missile silos and other expected targets. Another of the pillars was some large satellites that were basically gattling guns firing shotgun pellets - something that could have kept space flight virutally impossible for years. The third pillar was the new technology, powerful ground based lasers and satellites with adaptive optics on reflectors - something that would have prevented the typical BS sci-fi scenario of commandeering a massive remotely controlled weapon in space.
The purpose of SDI was to prove excellent protection agains an accidental launch - or a launch by terrorists or puny little states like north korea. It was also intended to throw in a massive amount of uncertainty into a possible first strike by the soviets or red china. By creating the uncertainty in the outcome, it diminished what ever likelihood there was of a first strike decision being made.
The soviets were quite a different opponent than we are seeing now. To keep their socialist workers paradise afloat, they needed to conquer, rape and pillage resources from new 'client' states. The US was in the way but was also the major prize. The desire on their part was to be able to convincingly deliver a 'checkmate' - a 'surrender or die' ultimatum in order to achieve a surrender.
What we have now in Iran and the radical islam cult which may now even be approaching mainstream islam in scope, is rather different than the soviets who were more akin to being a modern version of vikings. The radical islam types are more like the alien opponents in Independence Day.
As such, the deterence part of SDI is of far less significance for this enemy. What's worse, diplomacy only works when they want to buy time to get better prepared to destroy us. The radicals have been creating a culture of death that significantly exceeds that of the wwii kamakazee.
Seems like you got it backwards. defense contractors live and die at the whims of politicians. What you're claiming is the equivalent of claiming an armed mugger holding a weapon is at the mercy of his unarmed victim. The power held over the politician is - give us a contract or your district will have 12,000 new unemployed technology people.
Then again, what should one expect from one of the crowd that evidently believes man cannot survive fast train rides because the body will explode if it travels over 40 mph.
After the media started humping to protect the soviets' strategy, it's no wonder that most people never understood what the original SDI was about. Evidently, things haven't changed much in that regard despite the radical increase in the need for it.
If man were intended to fly, he'd be born with a propeller beanie already attached to his head.
We cannot explore and conquer space with lawyers around. Leave the sharks at home - better yet - send them to our greatest economic competitors - that'll put a stop to their competitiveness.
Personally, it seems like the speeds being considered are way too off the mark. Perhaps electrostatic repulsion linear motors might offer a way to speed up and slow down. After all, there's lots of high voltage energy associated with going thru the atmosphere and ionosphere. I wonder if it's environmentally safe to not use insulating tether cable? Quick, get the lawyers to make the scientific determination before it's too late. Such construction could cause the earth's magnetic field to stop or even reverse in only a few thousand years.
As long as there is cheap oil, more expensive alternatives will languish because they are economically unfeasible. Economies and societies that survive are the ones which maximize their efficiency and using inefficient sources of energy (from an economic perspective) are going to be worse off. Attempts to use gov. to force the issue will likely distort the situation to the point where inferior alternatives will crowd out superior ones, making everyone worse off.
What will likely happen is the creation of synthetic fuels to suppliment and possibly replace the naturally occuring ones. I seem to recall new zealand starting a commercil biodiesel enterprise based on sewage treatment. After all, starting with 'cheaper' raw materials to achieve a quality product can help provide profit to the corporation.
As for those eeeevil oil companies - you better look again, they are energy companies. They will adopt to what energy will be sold, regardless of whether the country or the world is better off or worse off because of the choice of energy. As for oil company greed, I think they are a poor investment in stock because they underperform - that is to say - they don't make as much as companies in most other industries. Although by percentage they make relatively little, in dollars, they make a lot because they are rather big, but with lots of costly infrastructure.
As such, they must live in the real world, make correct decisions and be aware of their environment, unlike enviro whackos who live in the world of 'wouldn't it be nice if' To a significant extent, one's pay is related to their contributions to society. Oil execs make big bucks, envirowhackos often don't even make peanuts. Unfortunately, contributions is a two edged word with both positive and negative sides. Hence, not all who 'contribute' to society do so in a positive way.
It's ironic that the oil companies, so hated by the envirowhackos and many others are the ones most directly responsible for making it possible for these malcontents to live rather comfortable lives and make their tiny and rather negative contributions to society.
What makes you think that there is some 'catastrophic' amount? Also, what makes you think that if there is a 'catastrophic' amount that it is not a function of other more predominant greenhouse gases such as water vapor and hence is not a unique value? What makes you think that the status quo is a viable value or that keeping it unchanged is possible - even to the extent that all mankind is eliminated? What makes you think there is a 'threshold'?
So far as global warming and cooling goes, what are the effects of clouds? What are the causes of cloud formation? What are the effects of earth's magnetic field and the effects of the solar magnetic field on cloud formation? Does that have anything to do with the 11 yr sunspot cycle and cosmic ray flux into the atmosphere?
Sorry, but the proponents have already proclaimed that the sun has nothing to do with global warming. That means they have suborned science to a political agenda.
Who are you to determine what is the 'normal' amount of co2 in the atmosphere?
Much of this climate change guff is based on forensics, not on laboritory experiment. Models are based on our inputs and understanding of the basics. Hence, it is circular to think that they will lead to better understanding of the fundamentals.
From my crude observations, colder weather sees a decline in insect activity. Many die off and many go into lower activity states. Considering that the amount of insects in mass significantly exceeds the amount of people (in mass) and that the metobolisms of very small critters are much higher per mass than of larger critters, one would then come to realize that the co2 and methane production of insects would be lower when cold and higher when warm.
It seems that most whackos forget that vegetation requires co2 to live. The need increases while warm and decreases in the cold. Of course living vegetation eventually gives up it co2 once it is dead and decayed. What this implies is that some, if not most of the additional production of co2 is being sunk in new vegetation between warming and cooling cycles.
And, considering bacteria is actually the largest biomass on the planet - what effect is it having? Are these being included in any model?
If there is new co2 in the atmosphere, where is it coming from? If we exhale, it's coming from the organic food we ate. If we burn fossil fuels - hey - it's coming from plants that absorbed it out of the air in the first place, back before the plant died and became fossil fuel. Or, if you believe in the myth that oil comes from squished rotted dynosaurs - well - then it still came from the plants those critters ate.
New co2 comes from space and volcanic erruptions. Why is the earth not like venus, apparently in a co2 hothouse with an atmosphere of a thousand psi, mostly from co2? It's because most of our co2 is locked away in sedimentary rock - limestone. Of course venus is a bit closer to the sun also, but hey, we're being told by the whackos that the sun - a variable star on all time scales (and fortunately not a cataclysmic variable) - has no effect.
As for negative effects, there are too many people with little sense and lots of power who now think that this cockeyed, human - caused global warming theory is proven fact. AND, they're starting to do something about it!
The odds are that the actions which will be taken, will be morally reprehensible, punishable by the most severe penalties in 'normal' times, and, most likely have far more detrimental effects than any possible positive effects. Of all the lifeforms on earth, present and past, man is the only one that has created technology. If the current life on planet earth is to survive, we will need even more technology to deal with preventable catastrophes such as asteroid and comet impacts, which have been implicated in mass extinctions in the past, every few tens of millions of years. These are far in excess of the typical more short term cycles of global warming and cooling - of which, we apparently are already over extended in the warming cycle.
The dems will go after whomever they think needs to be punished the most for supporting repubs and whomever they think are not supporting them sufficiently with campaign donations. I find it hard to believe that gates actually supported repubs over dems as he is far closer ideologically to the dems. Pragmatism perhaps.
As for mickiesoft, I don't care how they price their semiworthless junk. If it were less bug ridden and of higher quality, there'd be plenty of cheap knock-offs and add-ins like Wine. Every time the price goes up for window's, we're just that much closer for a company with a competent programming staff to decide to take on a window's compatible product that will run all window's programming just like windows, run it more efficiently - faster with less overhead - run without crashing regularly and be virtually immune to attack.
Probably the biggest problem with creating a knock-off is the difficulty in emulating the bugs in windows that many applications have had to work around.
It should say something to most every thinking individual that linux - substantially the product of one person originally - based upon the unix learning how to program efforts of a lost generation of young physicists etc. - is comparable and even superior to (in some ways) the product of mickiesoft's professional programmers. Imagine what might be done with a well led group of some really quality professionals.
If the prices continue to rise, the incentive to do so will as well. It may well be the risk of a price war with mickiesoft that has kept it from happening already.
if 5 yrs doesn't make technology obsolete - it's a small appliance? I guess the abrams m1a1 must be a toaster. It's got microprocessor technology in place that I haven't seen used since the early 80s.
like using Winders (or just about any mickie-soft) based applications in general, outsourcing code out of country can tend to be a really bad idea with long term negative consequences. Other approaches such as around the clock team program that follows the sun also is a bad idea. However, the thought of saving a buck tends to entice most people, even if it costs them twenty.
Risk include quite a variety of problems, ranging from security concerns to competency and even system design uniformity and consistancy. Also, when programming for part of a system, the further a programmer is from knowing and understanding the full system and how his piece fits in, the less likely he is to recognize or overcome inherent specifications flaws.
Sabotage and theft of secrets should be the most serious concerns. It's just plain easier to monitor and screen people and maintain secure facilities in the US, near the main resources of those doing security. Also, where there is better living conditions and higher saleries and more patriotic (to the US) individuals, there is less impetus for such activities.
Despite the rough equivalence between societies of the few top notch performers and the disparity in average public school learning - with the US on the short end of a long stick, there is often a disparity in the average to well above average arena where the merit pay entices US programmers/engineers to work and study harder to become more proficient than their other counterparts whose socialist environment offers nothing for merit.
Finally, money spent overseas has no economic accelerator/multiplier effect. It just leaves our economy and winds up circulating in other economies.
I guess the old butterfly ballots were also biased against the dems in their primary districts. Maybe they shoulda tried the #2 pencil approach instead of going higher tech.
I would imagine if there were shenanigans going on in a democrat controlled area that some idiot changed the adjustment the wrong way.
Then again, maybe there is a problem inherent in the machines. It might be that all the preplanned leftist dem complaints about voting in florida last time may have backfired. It might just be that using an intellegent machine to try to vote a nonintellegent choice may have created biases. But, never fear, the left doesn't believe in popular elections for other than their candidates so they'll fix the problem when they get in power.
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Gee, ya think the oil companies hold the patents on perpetual motion machines too? The real reason is that the market (customers) isn't convinced (and for good reason) that investing in an electric car is cost effective in the long run. Also, all that energy required to run an electric car has to come from somewhere - and it ain't gonna be from the overextended CA power grid.
Hydrogen is an interesting thing. If you take it from water, it's really just an energy storage means that can be transported via pipeline or truck. Unfortunately, it's a very small molecule and leaks thru about anything much easier than bigger molecule gases. Seems to that it can have brittlelization effects on metals or some other negative aspects in storgage and transport.
Hydrogen can also be acquired by 'cracking' hydrocarbons where it actually is a source of fuel rather than merely a storage means of energy. It can be used to feed fuel cells directly and it's evidently possible to have a small 'cracking' unit combined with a fuel cell to permit hydrocarbons to be processed into electricity.
Unfortunately, the 'clean burning' aspect of hydrogen is overtouted. It seems that when heat is involved, there is always some creation of less desirable molecules. What's worse, the main byproduct of hydrogen adds to the predominate greenhouse gas, the one far more responsible than co2 for our planet's temperatures.
As for gov. investing bunches of money, it's a very good thing they don't do more than the damage they're doing already. Such efforts help inferior approaches to compete in the market so as to crowd out superior ones. A good idea is one that is economically viable. An idea that is not economically viable (too costly) is one that is less efficient in the use of 'scarce resources'. when gov. takes assets (taxes us) and gives them to someone else (oftimes their buddies) so that their pals can compete (and enrich themselves) with inferior products - the market has been distorted. A possible case in point could be all those monies spent on gasohol enriching the archer daniels midland outfit.
Can hydrogen help? Probably. It might help provide a means of transporting energy from nuclear plants located in more desolate areas. It probably wont replace the oil economy because that's pretty much where any hydrogen energy has gotta come from - other than just being nuclear industry transportation means.
The Ford model T and Model A were pretty cool cars for their day. They revolutionized automobiles and pretty much gutted the buggy and buggy whip industries and they were all done by henry ford. I don't think I can fully appreciate or conceive of the ramifications that would still be upon us had the modern US gov. managed to stick their fingers into the auto industry back then to make the people's car. Suffice to say, the shelby mustang would probably be 1 or 2 horsepower and Huggies main product line would probably be disposable automotive solid pollution remediation products.
Distorted doesn't necessarily mean funny. What's more the distortion is spread over the spectrum to all facets of technology and society. Also, it seems the more graphic portrayals of things, the more distorted and erroneous it is. Starting with those idiotic special effects showing people getting blown across the room by being shot with a shotgun, back in the late 60s or early 70s, the more 'realistic' the portrayal, the less real it all started to become.
Now, over half the actors out there seem to get all of their reality from movies. They're total nitwitts.
Ideas have consequences and massive system failures tend to start from a few minor problems and/or design flaws which interact and grow into major catastrophes. Much of the growth is fueled by faulty information being transferred. This applies to civilizations as well as embedded systems.
Racists come from the bottom of their respective race's intellegence curve somewhere around and possibly lower than modern liberals.
Historically speaking, most of the great minds of the world migrated to the US, at least those capable of escaping their homelands. The great influx as world war II approached was ncredible.
The US has treated scientists better than elsewhere in the world, but relative to other areas, it's no wonder why it's hard to get people to go into it. Doctors (bio-plumbers) and lawyers tend to have much higher incomes (although doctors don't fair quite so well anymore due to the costs of protection from lawyers).
As in the root cause of war, our society suffers from the syndrome which can be summed up in one simple phrase: "It's easier to take than to make".
Unfortunately, pay or financial rewards is ultimately based on the productivity of an individual. That is what they produce that is valued by society. The guy responsible for providing a programming language (and a bunch of other products) that would work on whimp little sawed off computers succeeded in making billions, not only for himself but for a bunch of his coharts and made bunches of money for everyone that bravely invested early in that rickity behemoth whose alias is 'mickiesoft'. The impact or benefit provided by the guy who finally appears to discover the axion particle can, at present, mostly be measured in the number of students he helped to educate. Perhaps, his legacy will be far greater, but he'll not likely benefit from it nor will our current society.
From what I've seen over the years is the substantial increase in the education of foreign students in the science and engineering realm. Some learn and stay while others leave. What is absent in greater amounts now is domestic students. It seems they've opted to go into business, law or medicine.
There is also a limit to just how much a society can afford in the way of engineering and basic science. Of course, both are necessary to the very survival of the human race, with super viruses, asteroids and comets, super volcanoes and ultimately a sun which will fry the earth to a cinder some distant day. But, pure science doesn't harvest grain or put food on the table. The division of labor permits it to exist but not to take over.
Unfortunately, the destruction of our public education system has made it much harder to train scientists as well. Its conversion to an indoctrination system has had its effects on many as well.
physics has been dividing by 0 for a long time. It's all in how it's done. Then again, somewhere along the line people started getting confused over the observation/expectation that numbers correctly model the real world. Fortunately, they do to a great extent.
This article was even dumber than I expected it might be. Perhaps the problem is too many dumb-ass'ed coaches being allowed to teach mathematics in public schools.
It's too bad they didn't provide any actual information that this guy actually did something beyond defining o / o as 0 using the classical slash thru the 0 to distinguish between capital o's and a zero. Perhaps if the guy were clever and inventive, the 'nullity' could have been named the 'zoro' which is a little bit closer to this guy's ideal, don qui hote.
I wouldn't advise eating one. After all, we're being told every day there is a pending disaster of a hazmat nature with all those dead computers.
While maybe it's possible to do, I'm not at all convinced that is is a good thing to allow kids to have computers, at least not until they have the knowledge to design and program one (and I use the term design to mean circuit level, not plug boards into a box). Such efforts could result into creating a generation of vidiots, actually, we seem to already have one here in the US (shades of that shoddy sci-fi novel series Perry Rhodan). At best, it means the kids won't learn multiplication and long division or be able to truly create the basis of rational thought.
Some have considered that the creation of socialism/communism was actually a plot by capitalists to prevent the rise of competitors or the exploitation of natural resources in 3rd world countries. Perhaps this is the plot to prevent intellectual competition.
While it's true that computers could be used for improved education, it's also true that the they're also used for games and the creation of a virtual reality unrelated to reality.
Also, what happens when the technology changes? Is it time to create a new computer to give away to those who have insufficient productivity or opportunity to feed themselves? And, assuming the education part works, what will the world do with a generation of programmers and data entry clerks when it becomes necessary for most to become familar with shovels, lawn mowers, hammers and other tools needed to make a society function?
Somewhere back in paris hilton's ancestry, someone succeeded in working hard and earning lots of money. They deemed it important that paris receive some of this wealth, perhaps in an effort to prevent her from going into the only job her limited mental capacity was suited for. We owe a debt of gratitude to those ancestors who kept paris hilton out of politics. Too bad there was no one around to save the nation from teddy kennedy and Jay rockefeller or and no one to save the nation from john heinz. Then again, john edwards earned his ill-gotten loot the hard way, he had to lie to juries and conn them into making idiotic decisions that negatively impacted the state he was operating in.
Two things that negates totally any value of this study was the absence of income considerations and the nature of the political and economic systems involved. A poor welfare loafer could conceivably own a house and/or property that puts them ahead of some high income shyster lawyer who wastes all his income on leasing fancy cars, condos and memberships to country clubs. Also, about 1/6th of the world's population lives in china where they are slaves owned by the leaders and don't own anything of their own. That fact alone means that over 16% of the people in the world own nothing - and that no more than 84% of the worlds population own any thing at all. And, if you assume equal distribution among the rest, no more than 42% of the overall population could possibly own 50%.
What makes this number sort of interesting is that in order for a full 2% of the worlds population to own half, there must be a whole bunch of apparently average people in the US who have accumulated significant wealth considering that the standard of living here is significantly higher than virtually everywhere else.
Sometimes things are described a bit too simply. Radio antennas dont exist in a vaccuum. If there is a device, like a blinky light thingy, it's coupled to the antenna sufficiently to be absorbing energy. As such, it is possibly changing the antenna pattern or possibly the amount of energy actually being radiated. (this coupling is probably magnetic - a transformer so to say).
The net results may be that the cell phone is having to expend more battery power to properly hit the towers or in more remote locations could be the difference between establishing a comm link or not. Clearly, the blinky thingy is absorbing rf energy in order to blink and emit light.
As for the whole story, it's yet another leak that eliminates one more method of catching the moderately stupid bad guys, in this case, mafia types of criminals. Anyone wondering why we ain't caught ben laden only has to go back to the new york times archives to find that they leaked our primary tracking mechanism to the world at large - and - evidently at least one ben laden follower appears to read the NYT also.
As for the paranoid schizos out there worried about big bro, maybe because you gotta joint in your pocket or some other high crime, your vanity and conceit is getting the best of you, because you ain't worth wasting scarce law enforcement/national security resources on you, even if buying that weed is funding organized crime and even foreign terrorist organizations.
Planned obsolescence is merely a marketing strategy which is extremely risky in nonmonopolistic market places. it is not a reality that we face regularly but rather as an anomoly from companies that likely won't be around long enough to expand. The engineering counterpart, or closest equivalent, is value engineering when applied as part of the marketing strategy. However, there are many techniques involved in planned obsolescence which do not involve value engineering and the terminology also applies to the notion of selling new and different products which make previous ones obsolete - such as dvd's versus vcr's.
As for fuzzy logic, except in a limited technical situation, it is really a buzz word used to describe an absence of logic and / or common sense.
Unlike the liberal mentality, some recognize reality as being a separate entity from the mind and that our perceptions of what should or shouldn't be have nothing to do with reality. Ascribing a bit of the anthropomorphic to it, momma nature does what she does and woe be to whomever violates her rules. This is why liberalism is actually a rather suicidal philosophy as currently practiced.
Conservatives do no hold a monopoly on reality or economic accuracy just as modern liberals do not have a monopoly on fantasy, not that bush is a conservative or even a libertarian. As far as I am aware, essentially all neocons are jews so I guess you're antisemetic as well.
As for companies, you're unusually right in a way which you do not comprehend. They serve humanity by providing products and services and for that they get paid. In the way you intended, well that's even more wrong than you assumed me to be. For one, you have no mechanism to actually determine what is good or bad for society. Hence, there is no way that a company or anyone else actually knows what is good or bad or whether they are or are not doing either.
When you finally understand that money is in fact an indicator of value to society and that companies who make money are considered by some fraction of society - their customer base - to be doing good for society by providing their services and products and those companies that aren't making money are not doing so. Of course this is a form of popular vote and subject to the vagaries, misinformation and perversions of the populace, not all products and services actually turn out to be good for society or for those who demand them. There again, there is no one who is going to successfully be able to determine what is good and what is bad in a fashion that will be found agreeable, regardless of just how oppressive the tyranny created might become.
Again, your total ignorance of the science of economics is overwhelming. You shouldn't have gotten out of highschool.
As for your pal at Bic, if he were worth his salt, he'd have gone into competition with his better steel razor that lasted longer and put them outa business, offering a cheap directly competitive product and a somewhat more expensive premium version. Maybe he got sacked over competency issues.
It's obvious you only use fuzzy logic as well as don't read too well. The word 'normally' has an impact on meaning in the first sentence. Judging by your attempts at adhom attacks, you seem to be suffereing from a bit of transference as well as a lack of communications ability.
You seem to think that a product life cycle is somehow normally planned to be artificially short and that great effort goes into this in most if not all products. You also think automakers are out to get you with psychology, or perhaps out to get poor dumb lemmings living in red states. It actually just boils down to trying to give the customer what they want, because if a company doesn't, no one buys their products.
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So, if I understand this, you are suggesting that bad design resulting from managerial stupidity is more likely than bad design resulting from greed. I wouldn't argue that stupidity is uncommon, but I would estimate that greed is no less, if perhaps much more common, especially in positions of power where such decisions are made. And given that I know of several examples of deliberate planned obsolescence, I don't find stupidity a convincing argument against greed. Especially since both can co-exist. Again, it's not a binary question.
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You also seem to have a 'greed' problem that indicates an apparent lack of knowledge and understanding of economics which is rather pandemic in the US and Europe now. Profit is what companies exist for. Without it, people that work there can't get paid and people that invest in it cannot get any reward for investing there. As for what profit is, as one tends towards the realm of commodities, profit tends to be very close to the difference between income - expenses of a better run company and a poorly run company.
Perhaps if you were willing to pay more money for a product that was better made then you wouldn't be complaining so much about apparently shoddy products. Think of all the great exercise one can get carrying around a 30 pound laptop that can survive being run over by an fully loaded 18 wheeler. Certainly that feature would be worth an extra $15000 to you for a laptop that could last 30 years - even though it's only got a maximum of 64m of memory and a 486 processor in it.
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In most projects, there is insufficient time and resources to properly complete it on time and in budget while achieving a perfectly designed product. That means there is not enough time to perfectly design the product and then proceed to design in flaws that will result in failures after the warranty period in order to create obsolescence.
This is trite logic which doesn't fit into the real world. And it's more binary logic again. What's with you? --I've seen managers bluster in and demand deleterious changes no matter how little time there is left to complete a project. Humans are quite flexible, both on the managerial and worker sides when it comes to winning an argument over how something ought to be done. We live in a fuzzy logic world, my friend.
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Sorry but it's not logic. In fact, it's based on many years of observation. In areas like biomed. pacemakers and the like, being first in the market with a new product means gaining about an additional 50% in total market share. Being second means never being able to reach 50% market share. BTW, managers demanding last minute changes has nothing to do with whether a project is already late or behind schedule or out of resources. Such efforts just put things further behind and more in debt.
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This complaint is just plain grasping, and it remains totally disconnected from reality. Designer scents and their use as I've described in the automotive world are not just some pet theory of mine. It's the way it's done. I even saw the manipulative psychology proudly described in a damned documentary. So. . , perhaps the automakers have spent a little more time and research than your half-baked type-1 response.
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I never said automa
Make up your mind. Either defects are normally designed in on purpose or defects are not normally designed in on purpose (mickie-soft being a major exception to my comment about seldom).
New car smell has nothing to do with the engineering design of the vehicle nor the functionality of it. Not even skunk fragrance lasts forever. I've never seen anyone get rid of a car because the smell subsided nor have I seen a vehicle fail because of it. I have seen new car smell available at the local car wash although I usually prefer strawberry or other fragrance.
I have seen weight as a critical design parameter and the example given of bolt holes versus flimsy screws might have been a requirement to meet the weight or perhaps it could have been a packaging change that failed to incorporate bolt holes with a multi-10s of thousands of dollars injection mold redesign compared to a flimsier alternative. Or, it's possible that a design criteria for ruggedness of that portion wasn't properly estimated.
In most projects, there is insufficient time and resources to properly complete it on time and in budget while achieving a perfectly designed product. That means there is not enough time to perfectly design the product and then proceed to design in flaws that will result in failures after the warranty period in order to create obsolescence.
As for your auto company creating new car smell molecules that last only a few months, with your assumption being that the smell is supposed to last for less time than it should or easily could, that's rather stupid if it's true. Considering that most people buy cars and keep them longer than 1 or 2 years, and that new car smell lasts only a fraction of a year, any competitor that creates a new car smell which lasts longer than that can create a perception that their products are superior and last longer - a factor which won't affect how long one keeps their car but if such nonsense matters to anyone, it will certainly steer them to the competition for their next car. Hence, unless one can make a car smell new for 1 to 2 years, possibly aggrevating people with sinus problems, the desire would be to design the smell to last for as long as possible.
I guess you qualify as type (1) in your ad hom insults. Perhaps you might live a happier life and more successful life if you learned to read a bit better and learned more about that which you do not know.
While there is always the exception, actually designing in defects on purpose is not really done. There are plenty of opportunities that exist for unintentional defects to crop in, oftimes, defects that can cost the company dearly in recalls and warranty repairs.
Sometimes good engineering takes a back seat to asthetics or perceived crucial specifications as well as cost considerations. After all, if people don't like something about a product, they tend to buy the competitor's product.
Usually, first products in a new market are rather low volume items and are oftimes built like tanks rather than hot air balloons. They tend to be inconvenient and costly, but they'll survive a nuclear blast. For super popular products, there are all sorts of new developments from all sorts of secondary suppliers. As the products start to become commodities, marketeers keep trying to come up with ideas to distinguish their product from everyone elses'. Thinner, lighter weight, pink with rounded corners, add this function/feature, combine that gizmo into this gizmo, anything to tip the scales in the customer's mind towards their product.
Net result is that many more people want hot air balloons than tanks. Hence, that's where the market goes. Engineers are required to push things to the limit or send out their resume as the company fails.
Ever wonder why engineered bridges come down or are brought down after less than 100 yrs, yet no one bothers to take down roman bridges built 2000 yrs ago?
It's been an interesting trek from mickiesofts 8k basic for the altair 8800 computer to windows xp. At least a significant fraction of mickiesoft's success must be directly attributed to their incompetence though. Other factors included being in the right place at the right time, a few good decisions and a few less than nice things.
How ibm and apple and other competitors managed to do worse is amazing. Gates and associates pretty much blundered their way to success and that startup massive industry needed something, anything, in order to succeed or even to exist.
While gates probably put the industry ahead by 12-18 months at some points in history, I suspect that the overall score is well into the negative by now, at least in the software arena.
Perhaps the one most important contribution of mickiesoft and bill gates is the advancements in hardware, processor speed and disk and memory size. Mickiesofts, bloated, slow software and OS's after the advent of windows virtually forced the hardware industry to dramatically increase the speed of processors and memory size.
When msDos was king, the notion of a 386 computer was considered by many to be too powerful for a desktop and was a waste in such applications. Shades of exploding bodies if passenger train speeds ever reached 45 miles per hour. Try to run windows 3.1 on a 386/33!
Perhaps the most telling indicator of the mickiesoft technology is that the leading competitor to windows is unix. The basis of Unix is substantially the work product of a 'lost' generation of physics graduates trying to learn how to program. It appears that the reason why windows emulators on unix (or Linux) have not wiped out windows altogether seems to be the difficulty in properly simulating window's bugs in such programs as Wine.
The word planet predates science. The transition from savant to scientist occurred at the point in time when resolution and accuracy became measured, long after the word planet was in use. Actually, this was after the time the metric system was created.
Planet is not a scientific term or definition. It means wanderer, something than moves with respect to the 'fixed' stars. It is also something than people could see.
It was much later that science came in and discovered that these wanderers appeared to be bodies like earth revolving around the sun, some with moons.
Pluto is such a body. It takes a decent telescope to see it, but it does move with respect to the fixed stars and it can be seen. Since planet is a word borrowed from popular usage, it seems a bit uppity on the part of the IAU to attempt to make it a scientific term and to strike down on the flimsiest of excuses, an object that has been referred to as a planet for a generation.
The excuse used was it didn't clear out the region of its orbit of other debris. Hey, guess what! Neither have other planets, including planet earth - at least not totally. And, consider that planet earth has traversed its own orbit many times more than pluto being so far out. Also, it seems that there is perhaps a bias of giving more area to orbits further out. We are 1 a.u. from the sun and in that a.u., there are two additional planets, mercury and venus. It's almost looking like they expect pluto's region of clearing must be several a.u. in size.
This action by the AIU appears to be a poorly thought out and potentially costly effort to change popular perceptions rather than to deal in science. It also raises questions of international politics being involved since Pluto was discovered by an American.
If the AIU wants to set up categories and they want to use names from the popular culture for its scientific terms, then it needs to live with it.
Pluto fills the bill of a wandering object that can be seen. What's more important is that it was declared to be a planet sometime back. It even fills most of the bill for the scientific definitions - but that's irrelevent. A planet is a planet because we say it is. Are there more bodies out there that should be? Probably so - as long as they can be seen, even through a telescope.
Are there rogue planets out in space? No! There are Primordial particles, perhaps on their way to becoming planets but more likely on their way to becoming stars - but with a long way to go. But ultimately, they cannot be seen traveling across the sky with respect to the fixed stars. Note there really are no such thing as fixed stars - but their motions are rather small and take years to identify - hence they appear fixed - at least to the naked eye.
Wrongo,
The free market, what you probably erroneously call capitalism, is actually human interaction in society. It is momma nature at work among men and works as surely as all of her other endeavours. If you violate momma natures laws of gravity - or attempt to - you will pay the price. If you do so in ecomonics, same thing, you will suffer the consequences, and as with gravity the consequences can be potentially deadly, not just inconvenient.
When you attempt to manipulate economics, you're attempting to thwart momma nature's laws. When you set up to manipulate pricing by taxing to achieve a 'social goal', you are in fact distorting the free market and causing decisions to be made based on erroneous data - sorta like most of the hoopla concerning global warming. This causes misallocations of scarce resources and inefficiencies in the system.
Our economy is tied to energy, period. There is infrastructure and technology associated with the particular type(s) of energy in use. The net result of raising the cost of the energy for which the infrastructure exists is essentially infationary, the cost of virtually all things rise. Unfortunately, the cost of labor will not rise that significantly. Ultimately, if the situation is severely impacted, those not productive enough cannot survive without assistance. When the number of those who are not productive enough to survive are carried on the backs of those who still can, this added load leads ultimately to their collapse as well.
As for fuel standards, there are severe limits on what one can accomplish. we're rather close to them at present. Additional reductions in weight of vehicles is reducing safety as well as driving up production costs. Ford and GM sell to customers who can choose what they want. When they don't figure out what the customers are wanting this year, they take a big hit.
When OPEC formed and artificially drove up the price of oil back in the 70s, the US auto makers took it on the chin when the public wanted something different or decided they had to buy something different.
It's amazing that any sane person would distrust corporations yet assume that government is more trustworthy than corporations. It's a cognitive dissonance or dissassociation from reality that defies logic. Governments are the modern slave plantation corporations of the 20th and 21st centuries.
As for Al's convenient lie movie, it's all about getting al his own slave plantation.
If the current matter density estimates are accurate, then at the current value of around the equivalent of 6 hydrogen atoms per cubic meter, then there should be a schwarzchild radius of around 14 billion light yrs - a mere coincidence with the current notion of our universe's size?
One should wonder if when we look at possible black hole whether or not any of our understood laws of physics work inside its schwartzchild radius - assuming it has one (isn't spinning). Now one perhaps should wonder if our universe is inside a schwartzchild radius too, whether or not our understanding of the laws of physics applies to outside of our giant black hole. Perhaps the comedy Men In Black had it right - maybe our universe is inside the pendant on a cat's collar.
One of the concerns that seems to never enter in is just what is going to be the distance traveled by the photon before it is reabsorbed and re-emitted and can that affect the close coupling?
Somehow things seem just a little bit perverse to consider that photon being emitted from acrosss the universe finally arriving into a ccd sensor on planet earth. Does anyone here believe that the emitting atom or photon sends out a pilot wave throughout the universe which travels into the future billions of years to determine that planet earth will be precisely at point xxx with a telescope and sensor pointed in the right direction in order to capture this just emitted photon and then send back through space and time that xxx marks the spot - head that way?????
It's almost as if time and space don't really exist in any sort of fashion we observe/interpret and that the universe is a fricken computer simulation.
Einstein's spooky action at a distance sounds just a little too weird for comfort.
Maybe shedding some additonal light on the subject might just undo some of the weirdness.
Actually the original SDI triad was substantially pragmatic and short term practical. Of course some of it was actually disinformation intended to subvert existing soviet strategies - and it worked. One of the triad pillars was simple SAMs and phalynx type guns - to protect missile silos and other expected targets. Another of the pillars was some large satellites that were basically gattling guns firing shotgun pellets - something that could have kept space flight virutally impossible for years. The third pillar was the new technology, powerful ground based lasers and satellites with adaptive optics on reflectors - something that would have prevented the typical BS sci-fi scenario of commandeering a massive remotely controlled weapon in space.
The purpose of SDI was to prove excellent protection agains an accidental launch - or a launch by terrorists or puny little states like north korea. It was also intended to throw in a massive amount of uncertainty into a possible first strike by the soviets or red china. By creating the uncertainty in the outcome, it diminished what ever likelihood there was of a first strike decision being made.
The soviets were quite a different opponent than we are seeing now. To keep their socialist workers paradise afloat, they needed to conquer, rape and pillage resources from new 'client' states. The US was in the way but was also the major prize. The desire on their part was to be able to convincingly deliver a 'checkmate' - a 'surrender or die' ultimatum in order to achieve a surrender.
What we have now in Iran and the radical islam cult which may now even be approaching mainstream islam in scope, is rather different than the soviets who were more akin to being a modern version of vikings. The radical islam types are more like the alien opponents in Independence Day.
As such, the deterence part of SDI is of far less significance for this enemy. What's worse, diplomacy only works when they want to buy time to get better prepared to destroy us. The radicals have been creating a culture of death that significantly exceeds that of the wwii kamakazee.
Seems like you got it backwards. defense contractors live and die at the whims of politicians. What you're claiming is the equivalent of claiming an armed mugger holding a weapon is at the mercy of his unarmed victim. The power held over the politician is - give us a contract or your district will have 12,000 new unemployed technology people.
Then again, what should one expect from one of the crowd that evidently believes man cannot survive fast train rides because the body will explode if it travels over 40 mph.
After the media started humping to protect the soviets' strategy, it's no wonder that most people never understood what the original SDI was about. Evidently, things haven't changed much in that regard despite the radical increase in the need for it.
If man were intended to fly, he'd be born with a propeller beanie already attached to his head.
We cannot explore and conquer space with lawyers around. Leave the sharks at home - better yet - send them to our greatest economic competitors - that'll put a stop to their competitiveness.
Personally, it seems like the speeds being considered are way too off the mark. Perhaps electrostatic repulsion linear motors might offer a way to speed up and slow down. After all, there's lots of high voltage energy associated with going thru the atmosphere and ionosphere. I wonder if it's environmentally safe to not use insulating tether cable? Quick, get the lawyers to make the scientific determination before it's too late. Such construction could cause the earth's magnetic field to stop or even reverse in only a few thousand years.
As long as there is cheap oil, more expensive alternatives will languish because they are economically unfeasible. Economies and societies that survive are the ones which maximize their efficiency and using inefficient sources of energy (from an economic perspective) are going to be worse off. Attempts to use gov. to force the issue will likely distort the situation to the point where inferior alternatives will crowd out superior ones, making everyone worse off.
What will likely happen is the creation of synthetic fuels to suppliment and possibly replace the naturally occuring ones. I seem to recall new zealand starting a commercil biodiesel enterprise based on sewage treatment. After all, starting with 'cheaper' raw materials to achieve a quality product can help provide profit to the corporation.
As for those eeeevil oil companies - you better look again, they are energy companies. They will adopt to what energy will be sold, regardless of whether the country or the world is better off or worse off because of the choice of energy. As for oil company greed, I think they are a poor investment in stock because they underperform - that is to say - they don't make as much as companies in most other industries. Although by percentage they make relatively little, in dollars, they make a lot because they are rather big, but with lots of costly infrastructure.
As such, they must live in the real world, make correct decisions and be aware of their environment, unlike enviro whackos who live in the world of 'wouldn't it be nice if' To a significant extent, one's pay is related to their contributions to society. Oil execs make big bucks, envirowhackos often don't even make peanuts. Unfortunately, contributions is a two edged word with both positive and negative sides. Hence, not all who 'contribute' to society do so in a positive way.
It's ironic that the oil companies, so hated by the envirowhackos and many others are the ones most directly responsible for making it possible for these malcontents to live rather comfortable lives and make their tiny and rather negative contributions to society.
What makes you think that there is some 'catastrophic' amount? Also, what makes you think that if there is a 'catastrophic' amount that it is not a function of other more predominant greenhouse gases such as water vapor and hence is not a unique value? What makes you think that the status quo is a viable value or that keeping it unchanged is possible - even to the extent that all mankind is eliminated? What makes you think there is a 'threshold'?
So far as global warming and cooling goes, what are the effects of clouds? What are the causes of cloud formation? What are the effects of earth's magnetic field and the effects of the solar magnetic field on cloud formation? Does that have anything to do with the 11 yr sunspot cycle and cosmic ray flux into the atmosphere?
Sorry, but the proponents have already proclaimed that the sun has nothing to do with global warming. That means they have suborned science to a political agenda.
Who are you to determine what is the 'normal' amount of co2 in the atmosphere?
Much of this climate change guff is based on forensics, not on laboritory experiment. Models are based on our inputs and understanding of the basics. Hence, it is circular to think that they will lead to better understanding of the fundamentals.
From my crude observations, colder weather sees a decline in insect activity. Many die off and many go into lower activity states. Considering that the amount of insects in mass significantly exceeds the amount of people (in mass) and that the metobolisms of very small critters are much higher per mass than of larger critters, one would then come to realize that the co2 and methane production of insects would be lower when cold and higher when warm.
It seems that most whackos forget that vegetation requires co2 to live. The need increases while warm and decreases in the cold. Of course living vegetation eventually gives up it co2 once it is dead and decayed. What this implies is that some, if not most of the additional production of co2 is being sunk in new vegetation between warming and cooling cycles.
And, considering bacteria is actually the largest biomass on the planet - what effect is it having? Are these being included in any model?
If there is new co2 in the atmosphere, where is it coming from? If we exhale, it's coming from the organic food we ate. If we burn fossil fuels - hey - it's coming from plants that absorbed it out of the air in the first place, back before the plant died and became fossil fuel. Or, if you believe in the myth that oil comes from squished rotted dynosaurs - well - then it still came from the plants those critters ate.
New co2 comes from space and volcanic erruptions. Why is the earth not like venus, apparently in a co2 hothouse with an atmosphere of a thousand psi, mostly from co2? It's because most of our co2 is locked away in sedimentary rock - limestone. Of course venus is a bit closer to the sun also, but hey, we're being told by the whackos that the sun - a variable star on all time scales (and fortunately not a cataclysmic variable) - has no effect.
As for negative effects, there are too many people with little sense and lots of power who now think that this cockeyed, human - caused global warming theory is proven fact. AND, they're starting to do something about it!
The odds are that the actions which will be taken, will be morally reprehensible, punishable by the most severe penalties in 'normal' times, and, most likely have far more detrimental effects than any possible positive effects. Of all the lifeforms on earth, present and past, man is the only one that has created technology. If the current life on planet earth is to survive, we will need even more technology to deal with preventable catastrophes such as asteroid and comet impacts, which have been implicated in mass extinctions in the past, every few tens of millions of years. These are far in excess of the typical more short term cycles of global warming and cooling - of which, we apparently are already over extended in the warming cycle.
The dems will go after whomever they think needs to be punished the most for supporting repubs and whomever they think are not supporting them sufficiently with campaign donations. I find it hard to believe that gates actually supported repubs over dems as he is far closer ideologically to the dems. Pragmatism perhaps.
As for mickiesoft, I don't care how they price their semiworthless junk. If it were less bug ridden and of higher quality, there'd be plenty of cheap knock-offs and add-ins like Wine. Every time the price goes up for window's, we're just that much closer for a company with a competent programming staff to decide to take on a window's compatible product that will run all window's programming just like windows, run it more efficiently - faster with less overhead - run without crashing regularly and be virtually immune to attack.
Probably the biggest problem with creating a knock-off is the difficulty in emulating the bugs in windows that many applications have had to work around.
It should say something to most every thinking individual that linux - substantially the product of one person originally - based upon the unix learning how to program efforts of a lost generation of young physicists etc. - is comparable and even superior to (in some ways) the product of mickiesoft's professional programmers. Imagine what might be done with a well led group of some really quality professionals.
If the prices continue to rise, the incentive to do so will as well. It may well be the risk of a price war with mickiesoft that has kept it from happening already.
if 5 yrs doesn't make technology obsolete - it's a small appliance? I guess the abrams m1a1 must be a toaster. It's got microprocessor technology in place that I haven't seen used since the early 80s.
like using Winders (or just about any mickie-soft) based applications in general, outsourcing code out of country can tend to be a really bad idea with long term negative consequences. Other approaches such as around the clock team program that follows the sun also is a bad idea. However, the thought of saving a buck tends to entice most people, even if it costs them twenty.
Risk include quite a variety of problems, ranging from security concerns to competency and even system design uniformity and consistancy. Also, when programming for part of a system, the further a programmer is from knowing and understanding the full system and how his piece fits in, the less likely he is to recognize or overcome inherent specifications flaws.
Sabotage and theft of secrets should be the most serious concerns. It's just plain easier to monitor and screen people and maintain secure facilities in the US, near the main resources of those doing security. Also, where there is better living conditions and higher saleries and more patriotic (to the US) individuals, there is less impetus for such activities.
Despite the rough equivalence between societies of the few top notch performers and the disparity in average public school learning - with the US on the short end of a long stick, there is often a disparity in the average to well above average arena where the merit pay entices US programmers/engineers to work and study harder to become more proficient than their other counterparts whose socialist environment offers nothing for merit.
Finally, money spent overseas has no economic accelerator/multiplier effect. It just leaves our economy and winds up circulating in other economies.
I guess the old butterfly ballots were also biased against the dems in their primary districts. Maybe they shoulda tried the #2 pencil approach instead of going higher tech.
I would imagine if there were shenanigans going on in a democrat controlled area that some idiot changed the adjustment the wrong way.
Then again, maybe there is a problem inherent in the machines. It might be that all the preplanned leftist dem complaints about voting in florida last time may have backfired. It might just be that using an intellegent machine to try to vote a nonintellegent choice may have created biases. But, never fear, the left doesn't believe in popular elections for other than their candidates so they'll fix the problem when they get in power.