If you haven't seen most Japanese Phones, they tend to be larger on average than American cell phones. The iPhone is about the same size as most phones here in Japan. It is a little wider but thinner than most phones but it is very normal in terms of bulk(volume).
In fact one of my Japanese friends just brought home a 32gb iPhone two days ago. So I asked him why he bought the 32gb version vs the 16gb. For him at least it came down to comparing features of the iPhone vs other Japanese cell phones. He felt that the extra space allowed the iPhone to be a computer replacement. Why having having 32gb vs 16gb suddenly makes it into small computer vs a big cell phone, I don't know. He also said that softbank(a cell phone company here in Japan) is pricing the iPhone very competitively.
He feels he bought a small computer that can make calls and not really a cell phone. Maybe that is why... 16gb of storage for a computer would be nothing... but 32gb would be far better at least if you think of the iPhone as a small computer and not as a cell phone. That might be why the 32gb version is selling far more than the 16gb version.
Mainly because you wouldn't need any source code to do any of the localization. Not to say they wouldn't have access to development tools built for WoW or that they wouldn't have a very good idea how the game was put together internally.
They might even be able to take the WoW engine and mod it heavily into a new game... but the core would still but the same under all of those changes. I doubt they could even change game mechanics. But maybe they don't want to... It would look like a new game but have the feel of WoW. Which might be just what they are looking to do.
The problem with metered service is the downward cost of bandwidth over time. Ten years ago I remember paying about $1000 month for 3mbit of connectivity(At a data center). Today I could get 60-100Mbit of connectivity for the same cost. Bandwidth isn't like electricity, if it was it would have cost 10cents per kw/h in 1999 but today it would only cost 0.1cents per kw/h...
Any comparisons between Electricity and Bandwidth will always fail due to the massive downward cost of bandwidth. I would be fine with bandwidth metering or caps if they were tied to the real cost of providing the bandwidth. But I don't see how any system to measure this cost would be free of corruption or provide encouragement for infrastructure upgrades.
The real issue isn't that the government can't price a service correctly. If anything is unfair about the government providing services it's how they can cut through government policies and basically get stuff done if they want too. Granted, that isn't always the case... but at the very least the government tends not to have to worry about intervention at the same level(city/state/federal). In this case it's city gov vs TWC(backed by state gov) but at the city level once they wanted to deploy their own network they were able to do so.
The real question is why couldn't TWC compete? I think the answer to that is basically lack of focus and they are searching for short term profits. Any large Isp could kill a local network... really it wouldn't be hard. They could bring in so much bandwidth and price it cheaper than the local network. But they don't do so... they aren't willing to take the hit on the bottom line in the short term to lock up the area over the long term. If TWC was a local company that had the powers to do the same things as the Government and the outlook to give up short-term profits for a customer base over the long-term they wouldn't have any problems competing.
As much as you can complain about how Verizon FIOS service is a total lock-in. I think they have the winning move long term. They give you access to massive amounts of bandwidth today, they remove any current POTS service(the lock-in) and they have the headroom to grow in the future. This makes it possible for them to ALWAYS have the bandwidth advantage if they chose to pay for the upgrades. They have been willing to pay for a costly roll-out that should give them long-term benefits.
This really is a something that has been around for a long time. One of the most interesting uses I have found for it is; simulating the effects of satellite Wan connections. Most of these links have about 600ms of end-to-end latency and without something like this simple tc command it is difficult to simulate this without actually hooking up to a real satellite connection.
Other uses; I once bandwidth limited one of my old roommates. Every week I would shave a little bit more bandwidth off of his connection. I think I started at about 500kbit and by the end of the semester I had him down to about 16kbit. We were waiting to hear him say something about the slow Internet connection. The whole time he didn't say a word and he just assumed that his computer was slowly dieing on him. ^^
Is this the second major hole in the Standard Model? I know neutrinos having mass is sort of a hole. But this sounds like a much larger break with the Standard Model. Anyone following this have more information?
But when trees die most of that carbon that they have stored up gets put right back into the air as CO2 not all of it... but the majority. Forests aren't great long-term Carbon sinks.
Well, to give you an idea of the type of embedded hardware that is sometimes used in these routers... I was recently given the task of evaluating some Dsl chipsets because we wanted to add a native dsl port to one of our low end routers. It was really interesting, many of the chipsets had notices that said stuff like "The front-end needs to be reset every 24 hours to prevent an unrecoverable hardware failure".
Granted not all of this hardware is like this but much of it has known issues like this. Since this is home hardware the companies that make this hardware don't really care if you have to reboot it often.
Or at least that is how all of this talk about 3D sounds like to me... The industry feels like it needs something to bring people back into the movie house. Lets see, good movies at lower prices or 3D with the same crap movies and high prices. Guess which one they would like you to chose.
I didn't think it would change useage right now. But what about during the summer months. I have always thought that people getting home during the hotter part of the day would lead to increased useage from AC units. I have yet to see a study that used real world information to prove or dis-prove energy savings for Daylight Savings Time.
"Nuclear non-proliferation worked well, until Bush exited the system in 2003. Now there is no incentive to NOT go nuclear."
Well, the topic in question is space weaponization not Nuclear non-proliferation. Although the two topics do share some common themes it is not a valid compairsion. The Nuclear non-proliferation topic has many more variables. One thing is clear, the DPRK feels that having Nuclear Weapons are worth the problems they are currently causing for them. If you feel there is no incentive "to NOT go nuclear" you haven't been paying much attention to the news in the last few weeks. But that really isn't what I wanted to talk about.
"it would be relatively easy to blow up a few tons of shratnel in space and make it impossible for any satellites to exist for years"
You seem to be lacking knowledge of a few key points about orbital mechanics; to blow up a few tons of sharpnel in space you must place those few tons into orbit. Currently the list of countries that can do that is much smaller than the list of countries that have nuclear weapons. Even if you could get this material into orbit this would not knock-out all satellites. This could be effictive at causing problems for Low-Earth Orbiting(LEO) satallites. So you might cause problems for optical spy satallites (also the ISS) but most other millitary satallites would be uneffected because they are at much higher orbits. To use the same method of attack at higher orbits would require millions of tons of sharpnel. The real problem with this solution is that the only counties that could carry out this attack would also elminate their own spy satallites at LEO.
The second attack you have outlined here is also VERY implausible. I am going to forget that you said "rail-gun" because currently even the biggest rail guns can only shot projectiles that have masses in the range of a few grams at the speeds you need to hit an object in orbit. So must be talking about a VERY large gun that could launch projectiles to very high altitudes. Something in the range of 200-300 miles in height but such a gun would have to be very large (over 50 meters long) and at the same time your going to need to be able to point this gun in any direction to have a chance to hit a satallite that would come rather close to your ground position. If you can do all of this then your down to the VERY complex task of shotting an object moving at over 7 Km/sec.
"Even North Korea without a super gun (AFAIK), could use a nuclear-powered rocket and blast junk into space. A few 1kiloton timed explosions can achieve orbit if you don't care about the mess."
Since your talking about nuclear explosions you must be thinking about "Project Orion" style nuclear rockets. I would recommend reading the book "Project Orion" by George Dyson. Even the smallest Orion style nuclear rockets would require over 50 nuclear weapons to get into orbit. The technical requirements to put anything into orbit in this manner would be very steep for even a 1'st world country. And even then it would be far from a sure thing.
No country has ever left important resources totally undefended. Contrary to your assertions above; attacking objects in space is very hard to do. So up until resently many of our satallites have been safe because it is so hard to attack them. But now it's possible that some of these satallites will be attacked. So the US will move to protect them any way possible.
"You might as well waste another half-trillion $ on a failed anti-missile, missile system."
Well, even the highest estimates put the cost of the anti-missile system to be around $100 Billion. Not cheap any way you look at it and at least in this point I do agree with you; the current missle defence system is not effective. And for the most part the $100 Billion that only got us a likely ineffective system. If this system is going to useful something will need to be done. We should just drop this whole idea of using a "kinetic kill" system. It is too likely to miss and if this system is ever really needed (which I don't really think it will be) a miss == a nuke in a city.
Yeah, no doubt that WoW has a bigger following than FFxi but his point is somewhat valid. I don't really see anyone beating WoW's player base (over the next 2 years or so) but it could happen someday. Do I think that SE would beat them because they have a game that runs on PS3/Xbox and the PC, no way. But I think it's safe to say WoW would add more users if they supported the PS3/Xbox. I think multiplatform games are the wave of the future but WoW is a big success without multiplatform support. Being multiplatform only allows more people to buy the game. But the game has to drive people to buy it.
I play both WoW and FFxi. Both are good games but VERY differnet from each other. I will say that WoW is much more casual friendly. I am honestly surprised by the continued growth in population in FFxi. Sure I know alot of people that have quit the game for one reasion or another but it always seems like someone takes their place. The numbers I have seen online suggest that FFxi has had about a 50% growth in the last year or so. And that would jive with what I see in-game. And most of the new people aren't Japanese. I would say new people are about 70% NA and 30% EU. So what I guess I am getting at is that FFxi isn't even on the decline yet even though I agree that it does get much press and it has a much smaller player base than WoW (~700k vs ~6Mil).
p.s. one odd thing, about 40% of the people that I know who quit FFxi for WoW have since quit WoW and are playing FFxi again.
It's VERY easy to make money in Wow. On all of the servers I have played on I have never been hurting for money. Heck I have a level 31 Druid on Twisting Nether and I am sitting on almost 450 Gold. Almost every item I have is blue and I have bought almost all of the gear I need until the low 50's. In all honesty if your having problems with money in Wow your doing something wrong. I would suggest looking at your AH and finding itmes that are easy to farm/get that sell for a good amount of money. You tend to find things that make money on if you look just a little bit. I am not saying that everyone will be able to get 450 by level 30 but you can have good gear without working too hard.
Do keep in mind that one of the major authors of of the No Child Left Behind Act was Senator Kennedy from Massachusetts. Last time I checked he was a Democrat and not exactly a fan of Bush. So blaiming the Republicans for the NCLB act is rather funny. Also just fyi it passed the house 381-41 and the senate 87-10.
Re:Doomsday can come only from governments
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Forecasting Doomsday
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· Score: 2, Informative
In order for extracting oil from, say, the tar sands to be profitable the price has to climb above a threshold, be it $100 or $200+.
Actually the real cost for extraction is about ~$23 a barrel. http://www.eenews.net/specialreports/tarsands/sr_t arsands1.htm I know some people that live up in that area. The whole area has been in a boom for the last 7-10 years... Canada will soon be an oil economy. Of course they will have to drop the Kyoto treaty do to the fact that getting at this oil requires burning some of it (to heat the sand and mineing the sand). Then again, afaik none of the Kyoto signatories are even close to stopping increased C02 emissions much less getting back to 1990 levels.
As I live in Northren Indiana I would think I that I would have heard about this "all natural" city. But it's news to me and even if it was true it I would bet it's one of the small towns around here. Not South Bend or Elkhart for sure...
I would just like to point out that your comment; "For a few billion dollars, which is about the cost of the next round of airline bailouts, they could build a decent national tran system" do you know how much has been spent on Amtrak? Only $44 Billion since 1971! And most of that much has been in the last 15 years. They have been trying to make a better passager rail system in this country for years now. Tried and failed...
One of the times that I did ride Amtrak cross-country I got seated next to an older English gentalman. On that 16 hour train ride I learned that he had worked on the rail system in the UK. I was VERY surprised to learn of the poor state (his words) of the railroad in the UK. When I asked him to explain, he said that passager trains are much better in the UK mainly because of population/rail mile traveled. But the UK(and most of Europe according to him) has a failing frieght rail system. And that if something dosen't change that the passager system will only become increasingly costly due to the fact that it will carry the whole burden of system maintence. To the point that only massive subsidies would keep the trains running. He said that Amtrak was costly because it was under used, but that if the frieght system tanked in the UK they would be spending 10 times Amtrak's costs just maintining the system.
Too bad that the ISS is in the wrong orbit to be useful for much manned exploration of the Moon or Mars. It doesn't look like Nasa is thinking about doing anything about this, it wouldn't be an easy thing to change but far cheaper than building a new station.
I don't see most of what your speculating on happening just because of cost. In order of least likely I would say.
1. Chips pluggable to the mobo like Atari cartridges to eight CPUs.
If anything, cpu's have had an increasing need for more I/O and power pins. This general trend would make it VERY hard for any cartridge based cpu form factor to ever be deployed. The fact that all Cpu vendors are moving towards putting the memory controller on the Cpu die only makes a cartridge system even less likely. Also I don't see standard systems (heck even most small-mid size servers) needing to be able to handle 32 threads(8 cpu's x 4 cores ).
2. Mobos as blades to passive backplanes
I don't see this happening just because of cost. It costs more to add the connectors to the backplane for the SBC and for add on cards than having a intergrated mobo. If anything industry is moving more and more towards an intergrated system where you have most of the base fuctions one board and you only need an addon card if you have a odd requirment (scsi, FC, etc).
3. Home blade servers and thin clients.
I think this could happen but most OS'es are going in directions that will make this less likely. Look at what Longhorn will need to run. These OS'es can't run on stripped down machines. Still something like a X-terminal could take off if it was easy to use. But this setup requires networks running everywhere, more common than it used to be but still not widespread in most homes.
4. Four cores standard
Say four threads of excution and I will agree with you that this will be the standard going forward. It might be 2 cores/2 threads per Cpu or 4 real cores but I think that four will be the number most systems will have.
You see modularity as the future but if you look back at the last 15-20 years of the computer industry the trend has been away from modularity. When I got my first PC it had a sound card, I/O card, Video Card, Cd-rom card and Network card. Now in my main machine if it didn't have Scsi I would only have a Video card and everything else is built into the mobo. At one time built-in was only low quality stuff. Now you get good sound/networking/firewire (not even talking about how all systems come with Ide/Sata on board) for way less than you can buy cards to add those. Sure some people want/need +$200 sound cards but not many. Integration is the future not modularity even if people like you and I would love to see modular systems, but I don't think we would really want to pay for them.
Actually, your both right. The SSME's are shutdown every flight before they eject the main tank and do the final orbital burn. The numbers that the other poster in talking about shutting down a SSME when it is failing. They shutdown just fine when they are working correctly(which is no small feat in itself). But the numbers I saw about 10 years ago said that about 40-50% of the time shutting down a failing SSME would lead to a catostrophic failure. I belive this has been improved on in since I saw these numbers.
So, your both right. The SSME were designed to be shutdown. But when an SSME fails the same shutdown steps can lead to the SSME to fail catostrophicly. Still 30-40%(the current numbers) is better than letting the SSME run a failed mode. The SSME has been one of the most reliable liquid fule rocket moters ever. But that doesn't say that shutting down a failed engin is the same thing as shutting down a working engin.
Actually, you do have a right to somebody's work. Copyright and the "Public Domain" are inseparable; you can't have one without the other. Look at it this way; copyright makes it unlawful to copy stuff without the permission of the creator. But copyright expires, what happens when a work is no longer covered under copyright? Answer it enters the public domain at which point anyone can make an unlimited number of copies without the permission of the creator. All copyright does is keep works from entering Public domain when they are first published. So the Public does have a right to see all works enter the public domain. The only thing that is at issue when a work enters the public domain. If you want to say that Public Domain is a bad thing go right ahead. But keep in mind the Public does have a right to all works eventually.
Also, property rights are a very different set of laws and have no direct comparison to the topic of copyright/PD.
You just hit on one of the big things I disliked about Bush, he was all for pissing people off to save the Big steel plants. Note I said big steel plants, many smaller more efficient plants are turning out cheap steel and making money. But the big plants (like the ones about 40 miles away) are done. Most of the plants are shutting down as they should have about 10-20 years ago. So the free-market works when you let it, but policital issues always get in the way economics. Bush wanted to save the workers jobs at the mills and that is why he put tarrifs on steel imports. In the end all he did was pissoff other countries and make it so they had jobs for another year or so.
But don't say that the US doesn't do alot to cut-back or restrict pollution. Look at car emmison standards in Cal (and the rest of the country by default because no big Car maker will restrict a new type of car to sale only outside of Californa ), they are some the toughest in the world. I can think of a many sports cars that will never be sold (outside of import shops) in the US because of emmisions. If the US didn't have laws tough laws (if they need to tougher is the whole debate in this thread) poeple would do stuff as cheap as possible. And much of the time efficent and clean systems are not the cheapest. Do you think any coal power plant in the US would have Sulfer Dioxide scrubbers if they weren't forced to have them.
When cheaper method is found to do something it will be implemented; It doesn't matter it cheaper because it's more efficent or for some other outside reason. If you want to look at the total productivity of the US vs other Nations you find that in almost every industry it's very hard to match the US. I am not saying it's not possible just that we tend to have more money and willingness to implent new solutions when it helps make us more money. In the case of envorimental issues many times the goverment raises costs (on companies) by having laws forcing good behavior so a new solution might not be as cheap as it would otherwise be.
note, it's 5;15 am my time. What I am saying might not be that clear or organized and I am sure I have lots of language problmes in this post, it's late and I just want to goto bed...:|
To get anything done in washington a simple majority is never enough to do anything that is even the least bit controversial. Just look at all of the problems Bush has had getting judges apointed in the Senate. The republicans have been unable to stop the filibuster on some of those reviews for months/years. And its not too hard to keep bills off of the floor all you have to do is tie the bill up in comities. If happens all of the time.
I would buy your arrgument if the Republicans ( or Democrats ) had a supper majority of both the House and Senate and controlled most of the comities. But until that happens; and I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you; you can't just say that one party or the other can do whatever they want.
I was thinking about this the other day, and I want to be clear I am not in ANY WAY suggesting that anyone acts on what I am about to say. The only way that we will ever see the original movies is if Lucas dies. He might not want to put out the original movies on any new format but I am sure that his estate will. It's sad but true, I think we can all yell at him until we are blue in the face and we will never see the originals...
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If you haven't seen most Japanese Phones, they tend to be larger on average than American cell phones. The iPhone is about the same size as most phones here in Japan. It is a little wider but thinner than most phones but it is very normal in terms of bulk(volume).
In fact one of my Japanese friends just brought home a 32gb iPhone two days ago. So I asked him why he bought the 32gb version vs the 16gb. For him at least it came down to comparing features of the iPhone vs other Japanese cell phones. He felt that the extra space allowed the iPhone to be a computer replacement. Why having having 32gb vs 16gb suddenly makes it into small computer vs a big cell phone, I don't know. He also said that softbank(a cell phone company here in Japan) is pricing the iPhone very competitively.
He feels he bought a small computer that can make calls and not really a cell phone. Maybe that is why... 16gb of storage for a computer would be nothing... but 32gb would be far better at least if you think of the iPhone as a small computer and not as a cell phone. That might be why the 32gb version is selling far more than the 16gb version.
Mainly because you wouldn't need any source code to do any of the localization. Not to say they wouldn't have access to development tools built for WoW or that they wouldn't have a very good idea how the game was put together internally.
They might even be able to take the WoW engine and mod it heavily into a new game... but the core would still but the same under all of those changes. I doubt they could even change game mechanics. But maybe they don't want to... It would look like a new game but have the feel of WoW. Which might be just what they are looking to do.
The problem with metered service is the downward cost of bandwidth over time. Ten years ago I remember paying about $1000 month for 3mbit of connectivity(At a data center). Today I could get 60-100Mbit of connectivity for the same cost. Bandwidth isn't like electricity, if it was it would have cost 10cents per kw/h in 1999 but today it would only cost 0.1cents per kw/h...
Any comparisons between Electricity and Bandwidth will always fail due to the massive downward cost of bandwidth. I would be fine with bandwidth metering or caps if they were tied to the real cost of providing the bandwidth. But I don't see how any system to measure this cost would be free of corruption or provide encouragement for infrastructure upgrades.
The real issue isn't that the government can't price a service correctly. If anything is unfair about the government providing services it's how they can cut through government policies and basically get stuff done if they want too. Granted, that isn't always the case... but at the very least the government tends not to have to worry about intervention at the same level(city/state/federal). In this case it's city gov vs TWC(backed by state gov) but at the city level once they wanted to deploy their own network they were able to do so.
The real question is why couldn't TWC compete? I think the answer to that is basically lack of focus and they are searching for short term profits. Any large Isp could kill a local network... really it wouldn't be hard. They could bring in so much bandwidth and price it cheaper than the local network. But they don't do so... they aren't willing to take the hit on the bottom line in the short term to lock up the area over the long term. If TWC was a local company that had the powers to do the same things as the Government and the outlook to give up short-term profits for a customer base over the long-term they wouldn't have any problems competing.
As much as you can complain about how Verizon FIOS service is a total lock-in. I think they have the winning move long term. They give you access to massive amounts of bandwidth today, they remove any current POTS service(the lock-in) and they have the headroom to grow in the future. This makes it possible for them to ALWAYS have the bandwidth advantage if they chose to pay for the upgrades. They have been willing to pay for a costly roll-out that should give them long-term benefits.
This really is a something that has been around for a long time. One of the most interesting uses I have found for it is; simulating the effects of satellite Wan connections. Most of these links have about 600ms of end-to-end latency and without something like this simple tc command it is difficult to simulate this without actually hooking up to a real satellite connection.
Other uses; I once bandwidth limited one of my old roommates. Every week I would shave a little bit more bandwidth off of his connection. I think I started at about 500kbit and by the end of the semester I had him down to about 16kbit. We were waiting to hear him say something about the slow Internet connection. The whole time he didn't say a word and he just assumed that his computer was slowly dieing on him. ^^
Is this the second major hole in the Standard Model? I know neutrinos having mass is sort of a hole. But this sounds like a much larger break with the Standard Model. Anyone following this have more information?
But when trees die most of that carbon that they have stored up gets put right back into the air as CO2 not all of it... but the majority. Forests aren't great long-term Carbon sinks.
Well, to give you an idea of the type of embedded hardware that is sometimes used in these routers... I was recently given the task of evaluating some Dsl chipsets because we wanted to add a native dsl port to one of our low end routers. It was really interesting, many of the chipsets had notices that said stuff like "The front-end needs to be reset every 24 hours to prevent an unrecoverable hardware failure".
Granted not all of this hardware is like this but much of it has known issues like this. Since this is home hardware the companies that make this hardware don't really care if you have to reboot it often.
Or at least that is how all of this talk about 3D sounds like to me... The industry feels like it needs something to bring people back into the movie house. Lets see, good movies at lower prices or 3D with the same crap movies and high prices. Guess which one they would like you to chose.
I didn't think it would change useage right now. But what about during the summer months. I have always thought that people getting home during the hotter part of the day would lead to increased useage from AC units. I have yet to see a study that used real world information to prove or dis-prove energy savings for Daylight Savings Time.
"Nuclear non-proliferation worked well, until Bush exited the system in 2003. Now there is no incentive to NOT go nuclear."
Well, the topic in question is space weaponization not Nuclear non-proliferation. Although the two topics do share some common themes it is not a valid compairsion. The Nuclear non-proliferation topic has many more variables. One thing is clear, the DPRK feels that having Nuclear Weapons are worth the problems they are currently causing for them. If you feel there is no incentive "to NOT go nuclear" you haven't been paying much attention to the news in the last few weeks. But that really isn't what I wanted to talk about.
"it would be relatively easy to blow up a few tons of shratnel in space and make it impossible for any satellites to exist for years"
You seem to be lacking knowledge of a few key points about orbital mechanics; to blow up a few tons of sharpnel in space you must place those few tons into orbit. Currently the list of countries that can do that is much smaller than the list of countries that have nuclear weapons. Even if you could get this material into orbit this would not knock-out all satellites. This could be effictive at causing problems for Low-Earth Orbiting(LEO) satallites. So you might cause problems for optical spy satallites (also the ISS) but most other millitary satallites would be uneffected because they are at much higher orbits. To use the same method of attack at higher orbits would require millions of tons of sharpnel. The real problem with this solution is that the only counties that could carry out this attack would also elminate their own spy satallites at LEO.
The second attack you have outlined here is also VERY implausible. I am going to forget that you said "rail-gun" because currently even the biggest rail guns can only shot projectiles that have masses in the range of a few grams at the speeds you need to hit an object in orbit. So must be talking about a VERY large gun that could launch projectiles to very high altitudes. Something in the range of 200-300 miles in height but such a gun would have to be very large (over 50 meters long) and at the same time your going to need to be able to point this gun in any direction to have a chance to hit a satallite that would come rather close to your ground position. If you can do all of this then your down to the VERY complex task of shotting an object moving at over 7 Km/sec.
"Even North Korea without a super gun (AFAIK), could use a nuclear-powered rocket and blast junk into space. A few 1kiloton timed explosions can achieve orbit if you don't care about the mess."
Since your talking about nuclear explosions you must be thinking about "Project Orion" style nuclear rockets. I would recommend reading the book "Project Orion" by George Dyson. Even the smallest Orion style nuclear rockets would require over 50 nuclear weapons to get into orbit. The technical requirements to put anything into orbit in this manner would be very steep for even a 1'st world country. And even then it would be far from a sure thing.
No country has ever left important resources totally undefended. Contrary to your assertions above; attacking objects in space is very hard to do. So up until resently many of our satallites have been safe because it is so hard to attack them. But now it's possible that some of these satallites will be attacked. So the US will move to protect them any way possible.
"You might as well waste another half-trillion $ on a failed anti-missile, missile system."
Well, even the highest estimates put the cost of the anti-missile system to be around $100 Billion. Not cheap any way you look at it and at least in this point I do agree with you; the current missle defence system is not effective. And for the most part the $100 Billion that only got us a likely ineffective system. If this system is going to useful something will need to be done. We should just drop this whole idea of using a "kinetic kill" system. It is too likely to miss and if this system is ever really needed (which I don't really think it will be) a miss == a nuke in a city.
Yeah, no doubt that WoW has a bigger following than FFxi but his point is somewhat valid. I don't really see anyone beating WoW's player base (over the next 2 years or so) but it could happen someday. Do I think that SE would beat them because they have a game that runs on PS3/Xbox and the PC, no way. But I think it's safe to say WoW would add more users if they supported the PS3/Xbox. I think multiplatform games are the wave of the future but WoW is a big success without multiplatform support. Being multiplatform only allows more people to buy the game. But the game has to drive people to buy it.
I play both WoW and FFxi. Both are good games but VERY differnet from each other. I will say that WoW is much more casual friendly. I am honestly surprised by the continued growth in population in FFxi. Sure I know alot of people that have quit the game for one reasion or another but it always seems like someone takes their place. The numbers I have seen online suggest that FFxi has had about a 50% growth in the last year or so. And that would jive with what I see in-game. And most of the new people aren't Japanese. I would say new people are about 70% NA and 30% EU. So what I guess I am getting at is that FFxi isn't even on the decline yet even though I agree that it does get much press and it has a much smaller player base than WoW (~700k vs ~6Mil).
p.s. one odd thing, about 40% of the people that I know who quit FFxi for WoW have since quit WoW and are playing FFxi again.
It's VERY easy to make money in Wow. On all of the servers I have played on I have never been hurting for money. Heck I have a level 31 Druid on Twisting Nether and I am sitting on almost 450 Gold. Almost every item I have is blue and I have bought almost all of the gear I need until the low 50's. In all honesty if your having problems with money in Wow your doing something wrong. I would suggest looking at your AH and finding itmes that are easy to farm/get that sell for a good amount of money. You tend to find things that make money on if you look just a little bit. I am not saying that everyone will be able to get 450 by level 30 but you can have good gear without working too hard.
Do keep in mind that one of the major authors of of the No Child Left Behind Act was Senator Kennedy from Massachusetts. Last time I checked he was a Democrat and not exactly a fan of Bush. So blaiming the Republicans for the NCLB act is rather funny. Also just fyi it passed the house 381-41 and the senate 87-10.
In order for extracting oil from, say, the tar sands to be profitable the price has to climb above a threshold, be it $100 or $200+.
t arsands1.htm I know some people that live up in that area. The whole area has been in a boom for the last 7-10 years... Canada will soon be an oil economy. Of course they will have to drop the Kyoto treaty do to the fact that getting at this oil requires burning some of it (to heat the sand and mineing the sand). Then again, afaik none of the Kyoto signatories are even close to stopping increased C02 emissions much less getting back to 1990 levels.
Actually the real cost for extraction is about ~$23 a barrel. http://www.eenews.net/specialreports/tarsands/sr_
As I live in Northren Indiana I would think I that I would have heard about this "all natural" city. But it's news to me and even if it was true it I would bet it's one of the small towns around here. Not South Bend or Elkhart for sure...
I would just like to point out that your comment; "For a few billion dollars, which is about the cost of the next round of airline bailouts, they could build a decent national tran system" do you know how much has been spent on Amtrak? Only $44 Billion since 1971! And most of that much has been in the last 15 years. They have been trying to make a better passager rail system in this country for years now. Tried and failed...
One of the times that I did ride Amtrak cross-country I got seated next to an older English gentalman. On that 16 hour train ride I learned that he had worked on the rail system in the UK. I was VERY surprised to learn of the poor state (his words) of the railroad in the UK. When I asked him to explain, he said that passager trains are much better in the UK mainly because of population/rail mile traveled. But the UK(and most of Europe according to him) has a failing frieght rail system. And that if something dosen't change that the passager system will only become increasingly costly due to the fact that it will carry the whole burden of system maintence. To the point that only massive subsidies would keep the trains running. He said that Amtrak was costly because it was under used, but that if the frieght system tanked in the UK they would be spending 10 times Amtrak's costs just maintining the system.
Too bad that the ISS is in the wrong orbit to be useful for much manned exploration of the Moon or Mars. It doesn't look like Nasa is thinking about doing anything about this, it wouldn't be an easy thing to change but far cheaper than building a new station.
I don't see most of what your speculating on happening just because of cost. In order of least likely I would say.
1. Chips pluggable to the mobo like Atari cartridges to eight CPUs.
If anything, cpu's have had an increasing need for more I/O and power pins. This general trend would make it VERY hard for any cartridge based cpu form factor to ever be deployed. The fact that all Cpu vendors are moving towards putting the memory controller on the Cpu die only makes a cartridge system even less likely. Also I don't see standard systems (heck even most small-mid size servers) needing to be able to handle 32 threads(8 cpu's x 4 cores ).
2. Mobos as blades to passive backplanes
I don't see this happening just because of cost. It costs more to add the connectors to the backplane for the SBC and for add on cards than having a intergrated mobo. If anything industry is moving more and more towards an intergrated system where you have most of the base fuctions one board and you only need an addon card if you have a odd requirment (scsi, FC, etc).
3. Home blade servers and thin clients.
I think this could happen but most OS'es are going in directions that will make this less likely. Look at what Longhorn will need to run. These OS'es can't run on stripped down machines. Still something like a X-terminal could take off if it was easy to use. But this setup requires networks running everywhere, more common than it used to be but still not widespread in most homes.
4. Four cores standard
Say four threads of excution and I will agree with you that this will be the standard going forward. It might be 2 cores/2 threads per Cpu or 4 real cores but I think that four will be the number most systems will have.
You see modularity as the future but if you look back at the last 15-20 years of the computer industry the trend has been away from modularity. When I got my first PC it had a sound card, I/O card, Video Card, Cd-rom card and Network card. Now in my main machine if it didn't have Scsi I would only have a Video card and everything else is built into the mobo. At one time built-in was only low quality stuff. Now you get good sound/networking/firewire (not even talking about how all systems come with Ide/Sata on board) for way less than you can buy cards to add those. Sure some people want/need +$200 sound cards but not many. Integration is the future not modularity even if people like you and I would love to see modular systems, but I don't think we would really want to pay for them.
Actually, your both right. The SSME's are shutdown every flight before they eject the main tank and do the final orbital burn. The numbers that the other poster in talking about shutting down a SSME when it is failing. They shutdown just fine when they are working correctly(which is no small feat in itself). But the numbers I saw about 10 years ago said that about 40-50% of the time shutting down a failing SSME would lead to a catostrophic failure. I belive this has been improved on in since I saw these numbers.
So, your both right. The SSME were designed to be shutdown. But when an SSME fails the same shutdown steps can lead to the SSME to fail catostrophicly. Still 30-40%(the current numbers) is better than letting the SSME run a failed mode. The SSME has been one of the most reliable liquid fule rocket moters ever. But that doesn't say that shutting down a failed engin is the same thing as shutting down a working engin.
Actually, you do have a right to somebody's work. Copyright and the "Public Domain" are inseparable; you can't have one without the other. Look at it this way; copyright makes it unlawful to copy stuff without the permission of the creator. But copyright expires, what happens when a work is no longer covered under copyright? Answer it enters the public domain at which point anyone can make an unlimited number of copies without the permission of the creator. All copyright does is keep works from entering Public domain when they are first published. So the Public does have a right to see all works enter the public domain. The only thing that is at issue when a work enters the public domain. If you want to say that Public Domain is a bad thing go right ahead. But keep in mind the Public does have a right to all works eventually.
Also, property rights are a very different set of laws and have no direct comparison to the topic of copyright/PD.
You just hit on one of the big things I disliked about Bush, he was all for pissing people off to save the Big steel plants. Note I said big steel plants, many smaller more efficient plants are turning out cheap steel and making money. But the big plants (like the ones about 40 miles away) are done. Most of the plants are shutting down as they should have about 10-20 years ago. So the free-market works when you let it, but policital issues always get in the way economics. Bush wanted to save the workers jobs at the mills and that is why he put tarrifs on steel imports. In the end all he did was pissoff other countries and make it so they had jobs for another year or so.
:|
But don't say that the US doesn't do alot to cut-back or restrict pollution. Look at car emmison standards in Cal (and the rest of the country by default because no big Car maker will restrict a new type of car to sale only outside of Californa ), they are some the toughest in the world. I can think of a many sports cars that will never be sold (outside of import shops) in the US because of emmisions. If the US didn't have laws tough laws (if they need to tougher is the whole debate in this thread) poeple would do stuff as cheap as possible. And much of the time efficent and clean systems are not the cheapest. Do you think any coal power plant in the US would have Sulfer Dioxide scrubbers if they weren't forced to have them.
When cheaper method is found to do something it will be implemented; It doesn't matter it cheaper because it's more efficent or for some other outside reason. If you want to look at the total productivity of the US vs other Nations you find that in almost every industry it's very hard to match the US. I am not saying it's not possible just that we tend to have more money and willingness to implent new solutions when it helps make us more money. In the case of envorimental issues many times the goverment raises costs (on companies) by having laws forcing good behavior so a new solution might not be as cheap as it would otherwise be.
note, it's 5;15 am my time. What I am saying might not be that clear or organized and I am sure I have lots of language problmes in this post, it's late and I just want to goto bed...
To get anything done in washington a simple majority is never enough to do anything that is even the least bit controversial. Just look at all of the problems Bush has had getting judges apointed in the Senate. The republicans have been unable to stop the filibuster on some of those reviews for months/years. And its not too hard to keep bills off of the floor all you have to do is tie the bill up in comities. If happens all of the time.
I would buy your arrgument if the Republicans ( or Democrats ) had a supper majority of both the House and Senate and controlled most of the comities. But until that happens; and I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you; you can't just say that one party or the other can do whatever they want.
I was thinking about this the other day, and I want to be clear I am not in ANY WAY suggesting that anyone acts on what I am about to say. The only way that we will ever see the original movies is if Lucas dies. He might not want to put out the original movies on any new format but I am sure that his estate will. It's sad but true, I think we can all yell at him until we are blue in the face and we will never see the originals...