I view the late 90s as an enormous aberration in history. The back catalogs of western music were basically thrown open to the public and there was just this frenzy of buying...
You've got it right. 1999 marks the peak of CD sales, and "big label" profit, and the "labels" have been trying to sell politicians and the public on the notion that this peak (which as you note is largely a back-catalog based windfall) is the "normal" financial state of the industry which must be restored (largely by legislation, certainly not innovation).
This is not unusual behavior for an industry - did you know that the U.S. farm industry (nearly all agribusiness mega-corps now) considers the unusually favorable prices of 1910-1914 to represent "normal" pricing (it is termed "parity") and regularly seeks price supports to drive prices up to that level?
An interesting side-note to the rapid adoption of CDs that I rarely see mentioned is that during the 1970s and 1980s the quality of manufactured LPs fell of a cliff. It became normal to buy a disk with gross defects.But with CDs, either the pressing was perfect or it didn't play at all. So the take over by CDs was partly due to the terrible quality of the LP product. It wasn't until the late 1990s that the "labels" found a way to ruin the quality of CDs - by volume compression. Was this also a factor in the decline of CD sales?
It's always seemed to me that the major hole in the Fermi paradox is the assumption that technologically advanced alien civilizations would be emitting signals we would recognize.
In common with authors the wrote the cited paper, and most commentators on the subject (and virtually everyone who claims to have a "resolution" for the Fermi Paradox), the above comment fails to understand the essence of the Fermi Paradox -- what actually makes it profoundly paradoxical.
The Fermi Paradox does not assume that "technologically advanced alien civilizations" (in general) "would be emitting signals we would recognize". The paradox lies in the fact that the Universe is a very big, and very old place and as far as we can tell none of them do (if they ever existed at all).
Are you proposing that there is some sort of the universal law of nature that decrees no civilization anywhere in the Universe will make detectable and recognizable signals of any kind, intentionally or unintentionally? After all it only takes one single ancient civilization anywhere to take a course of development that creates a detectable signal for any reason to overturn the Fermi Paradox.
Attempting to dismiss it by claiming that civilizations exist, but that no civilization ever makes human-detectable signals, begs the question (in one of the original and correct senses of the term): it attempts refutation by assuming an unsupported premise (in this case two of them) : 1) that they do exist, but and an arbitrary special universal law holds that prevents any from being detected.
Copyright was intended to as an incentive to create works which would eventually end up as public domain - it was intended to increase public domain. If you break that, don't you invalidate your copyright?
Some people complain about "piracy" as being theft, but given the original intent of copyright, isn't the entire history of the extensions of copyright AND DRM and the DMCA actually theft from the public?...
Right you are. The growing abuse of copyright that has been underway for four decades is in opposition of the express purpose and practice that is spelled out in no less a document than the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, Powers of Congress):
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
The whole notion of extending copyrights held by parties other than the originators indefinitely after the fact (and often after the originator is dead), clearly defies the constitutional basis of copyright in the first place.
After scanning through numerous comments here, I see none of them addressing whether the Times Online news article was reporting credible science or not.
There is at least one very hard-to-believe assertion in the article: "the most attractive parents were 26% less likely to have sons". This is an astonishing, immense deviation from the nearly even 50-50 split in sex ratios in births (it is actually 51-49, a consistent pattern everywhere). If you don't have some acquaintanceship with the history of attempts to alter the sex ratios, you may not realize how amazing a claim this really is. This is something humans have worked hard at manipulating since the dawn time, with essentially no success at all. The only effective means of altering "birth" sex ratios has been the extreme practice of infanticide, and now with prenatal sex identification techniques, sex-selection abortion.
If such a huge systematic deviation in sex ratios existed, one would expect to have had this to have been well established ages ago. One could not plausibly claim that people have not been paying attention to beautiful couples and their progeny.
On top of Charbax's very valid points, there's the matter of your 11 year old already (presumably) being an English speaking WIMP user.
What's important is how Sugar is adopted by a child who has never used a computer of any kind before, and especially one who doesn't speak any language in common with the implementors. (I don't know how successful this would be / has been - but it is the key measurement)
This raises an interesting point - are Sugar's designers right about this being a superior introduction to computing compared to the standard Xerox-Star/Macintosh/Windows/OS-X/Ubuntu/Xandros-easy UI family? Possibly... (if there is research to support this), but this NOT an issue of classic windowing UI (CWUI) vs Sugar, but of having Sugar as the only option and no CWUI at all, and a shaky OS stand-in, vs having Sugar plus a CWUI and a solid industry proven OS foundation?
It occurs to me that even illiterate third world children would ultimately benefit from familiarity with the UI paradigms used in every other computer they may ever encounter in their lives.
Eeepc consumes 10x more power and costs upwards 2x as much. Not sunlight readable, not sand/water proof, not shock proof, not mesh networkable so many other things that are absolutely required in those places the 1.2 Million OLPC laptops have so far been delivered.
The only possibly valid point in the above critical response, is the issue of power (if it is reinterpreted to refer only to processor power). Could a virtually identical XO run a stripped down version of Linux instead of a pure-Sugar solution? (Homer's voice: mmmm... pure sugar solution).
I think the answer is probably yes. The Atom processor in the Eee PC is four times faster than the Geode in the XO, but the Atom is also enormous overkill for the XO application. I know for a fact that Linux is quite usable on old hardware much slower than the Atom. The XO does not need to be a Eee PC clone in terms of performance; the usability issue that caused the XO to be abandoned by my test population (of one) was its UI/usability not its performance.
I am in an excellent position to evaluate this issue, having purchased one of the first XO OLPCs through the give-one-get-one (GOGO) program for an 11 year old child, and then obtained an Asus Eee PC netbook running Xandros Linux (a window-ized interface to Debian Linux, along the lines of Ubuntu).
The 11-year old's verdict: thumbs down for Sugar, thumbs-up for Xandros. She gave up with fiddling on the XO after a few weeks, but loves to use the Eee PC. As the network support resource for my household, I can further point out that Sugar shipped with unusable wireless security (WEP only), which some months later was upgraded to WPA, but with this fatal flaw: every time the computer is powered up the user has to reenter the entire passphrase to get wireless access. Since a rather lengthy and obscure passphrase had been previously selected to provide household network security, this was an intolerable nuisance to an 11-year old. And dumbing-down the household security for the convenience of one cheap product is unacceptable to this network support resource.
Perhaps the passphrase remembering problem has since been fixed (since the XO is not used by its target audience any more I am not inclined to upgrade the OS to test it) but it illustrates the fatal problem with the Sugar approach: writing a decent OS is hard work, and taking a quick and dirty stab at it gives a foundation of sand for the whole offering. Absolutely they should have run a solid robust proven OS (Linux) for the system, adding on what ever they felt was needed.,/p>
The first is Ukraine, which inherited some fraction of the Soviet stockpile, which they turned over to Russia in exchange
(IIRC) for Russia assuming Ukraine's portion of the Soviet Union's international debt and various treaty obligations.
...
Make that four historical examples, since Belarus and Kazakhstan also hosted Soviet nuclear weapons. In fact, IIRC, Kazakhstan was the last to have its missiles removed since they were the huge SS-18s, the mainstay of the Soviet arsenal.
Reasonable proof? Even the Hawaiians are saying that his birth certificate is not that of a native born Hawaiian. Notice the difference between these two "Certificate of Live Birth"? http://honolulu.craigslist.org/oah/pol/1236913553.html
The highest government official in Hawaii charged with maintaining public health records, Dr. Chiyome Leinaala Fukino, Director of Health for the State of Hawai'i, has officially issued a determination based on his personal examination of Obama's original birth certificate that he was born in Hawaii. You can read the official statement yourself.
Considering that there are several energy storage technologies that are already being used for grid power storage in different places, or are under serious consideration for that role, asserting that there is no way wind could be used as the only energy source is, shall we say, overblown? (:-))
Now if you want to argue that this is not the most economical method of meeting world energy demands in a non-polluting manner, then you would be on firmer ground. But all of the following technologies for energy storage are already in use for grid storage: pumped water, batteries and flywheels. Also under active development are hydrogen electrolysis/fuel cell systems, and compressed air and superconducting storage remain possibilities.
There is a huge difference between, "more expensive" and (by implication of "no way") impossible or even "forever impractical."
Guy geeks should brush up on their Harry Potter and attend Azkatraz 2009 in San Francisco July 18-21!
Who would attend an annual Harry Potter convention, you may ask? After attending a recent one with my wife, a rapid Harry potter fan, I discovered the answer.
The typical attendee is a geeky someone who was introduced to the first Harry Potter book, a juvenile literature read, in 1997 at age 10 or so. This person then grew up with the series, and matured as the books themselves matured, and is now 22 or so. Oh, and nearly all of these people are females.
So next month there is convention of several thousand women geeks in their late teens and early twenties in San Franciso. Hmmm.
ITER is going to be the testbed for the technology needed to make a commercial fusion reactor possible. The unsolved problems each have potential solutions to them, each of which will need to be tested. After ITER, the next step is a prototype reactor, one which incorporates the technology developed during the testing process. The step after that is commercial power generators.
This correct, but I wanted to point out the crucial difference between ITER and the NIF. The NIF is not anything close to a testbed for commercial fusion, it is simply an attempt to achieve a break-even plasma condition and produce an energy output in the 10-100 megajoule range. Tokamak type magnetic fusion systems achieved these milestones 12-15 years ago, using technologies directly relevant to commercial scale systems (i.e. superconducting magnets, plasma heating techniques etc.).
NIF will, once it is actually operating and has reached its operating goals (which can take many years to work up to), will simply be a physics experiment (or lab-scale nuclear explosion generator). The technology used to create the implosion (glass laser) is a dead end for producing power. A system using some time of particle beam driver will be needed to create a useful testbed that has some hope of eventual commercialization, but this type of system is just at the "vu-graph" stage. No equivalent system has yet been planned using particle beam technology. Given the 15 year construction time these facilities appear to require, it would appear that an ICF (inertial confinement fusion) system equivalent to what MCF (magnetic confinement fusion) achieved 12-15 years ago (10-100 megajoules with commercializable technologies) won't be available for 15-20 more years. ICF is more than a (human) generation behind MCF.
On Windows systems CapsLock doesn't even "caps lock" it is instead really "invert case", a feature that never existed on any typewriter. I have never in my life wanted to "invert case" while typing. Has anyone else?
If one actually reads the article, and in particular looks carefully at Figure 1, which compares the different modes of transportation, the allegedly counterintuitive results are absent.
What is actually shows:
ALL of the rail options investigated beat out ALL of the aircraft, with the sole exception of "large aircraft" being marginally better than "SF Muni" light rail. Now if you can take a 747 across downtown San Francisco, do tell me where the stops are because I want to try it for sure.
All mass transit options (with the sole exception of Off Peak Urban Diesel Bus) beats the pant off all of the conventional gasoline road vehicles (sedan, pickup and SUV). It would be better perhaps if they had presented an average for buses instead of just the best and worst case (Peak Urban Diesel Bus beats the pants off everything else) since one does not usually operate a bus line only at peak hours, and never only at off peak hours.
In short: if you are looking for surprising counter-intuitive results, you'll have to look elsewhere. This really just confirms the truth in conventional wisdom.
Addressing this from the standpoint of having a proper controlled substance rescheduling of cannabis down from Schedule I to Schedule V (the DEA itself lists 100% pure THC at only Schedule III !), in accordance with the actual regulations and science:
Say what? Let me analyse this point by point...
Strengthen our democracy: How, by making people sit around their bong every night discussing the problems of the world? Like.. "Man... link um.. why do they fold those papers around those little sticks of gum? Can't they see we need to save some trees? Besides they taste terrible when folding a joint, their just disgusting."
When government regulations are flagrantly abused to maintain the power and budget of one organization (the DEA) this clearly undermines the meaning of democratic government. If the government writes regulations, it should follow them.
Promote efficiency: Get real, Marijuana and efficiency in the same sentence? Last I knew all my childhood friends were doing nothing with their lives. Just sitting around getting high with no aspirations in life. Several are dead from accidents, suicide, some perpetually in rehab clinics, and all living life day-t-day. Efficiency is not the first word on my mind.
When I consider pouring billions of dollars into a bottomless pit based on abuse of regulations and scorn of scientific evidence, efficiency is the FIRST word on my mind!
Making government more transparent: Ok, Marijuana is hallucinogenic for some people, but I doubt that the Government is going to get any more transparent that way.
Obeying regulations and enforcing them in a logical evidence-based manner is essential to transparent government.
Collaborative: Ok, lets get this one definition straight. We are talking about the Government being more collaborative, not people sitting around talking about fantasies while smoking joints. How is legalizing Marijuana going to get the Government to improve on their collaboration skills?
Recent polls on medical marijuana show nation public support at the level of 72% in favor and 21% opposed. Paying attention to the overwhelming majority of Americans today is the essence of collaborative (as opposed to imperial or authoritarian) federal government.
This is a simple matter of paying attention to science and obeying the law as written.
The rules for Schedule I are:
A) The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse.
(B) The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.
C) There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision.
The best available scientific and medical evidence and opinion clearly shows that criteria B and C do not apply (the US Institute of Medicine refuted B a decade ago, for example). The only way one can claim A applies is via a circular argument: all cannabis use DEFINED as abuse, therefore it has a high potential for abuse.
If the rules of classification are objectively and scientifically applied the it would rank no higher than Schedule IV!
The logic of scheduling Cannabis at Schedule IV (or V) is further shown by the DEA itself - by scheduling pure 100% THC at Schedule III. Clearly a preparation that is only about 10% as potent should have a lower ranking. One should note that Schedule V consists entirely of drugs with higher rankings (from I down to III) in reduced potency preparations.
This is simply a matter of getting science and reason back into regulation. Regrettably the DEA has been given a pass on these by both parties form the very beginning.
Fusion power was expected to have replaced nuclear by the year 2000. It's now 2009, and it's still more than 30 years in the future. A slippage of one year per year consistently for the last 40 years does not bode well.
The situation is actually much worse than this. Controlled thermonuclear research began in the 1950s with Project Sherwood, at that time it was expected that fusion power was a problem that would be cracked in ten years. Around 1970, it was expected that commercial fusion power would be on line in 2000 (i.e. 30 years). Right now no projections have a commercial plant operating before about 2050 (i.e. 40 years). So the time until commercial fusion power is a strictly increasing function if time.
But maybe there is room for optimism since the rate of increase seems to be declining....
The end comment (and its reference) is indeed quite wrong, and not only because the availability of this resource has peaked.
The claim is There's a case to be made that raising the CAFE won't save oil or reduce greenhouse gases. Why? Because improvements in fuel economy effectively make fuel less expensive, and when costs fall, demand tends to rise.
The argument supposes that U.S. auto fleet mileage is "driving" the world-wide price of oil. It has been decades since this might have been true (if it ever was). The rising demand for oil by the rapidly developing economies of China and India swamps any influence of U.S. auto mileage. These nations are more than capable of sucking up any slack that declining U.S. consumption might generate.
So why make more efficient cars? Well, to cut how much money we export to the totalitarian states in the Middle East, Venezuela, and Russia, to the detriment of the U.S. economy, for one. Because no matter how good pollution controls are, burning less gas makes them even better for another. And, for any world wide program to reduce oil demand, and carbon emissions, every major player must get on board, and the U.S., being the biggest player, must inevitably lead.
Vista Home Basic Retail is around $180... Regardless of the legality of system builder licenses, the cost of Vista is nowhere near $400, and it was dishonest of the original poster who stated this to suggest otherwise.
According to Microsoft the retail price of Vista Business is $300, which I submit is indeed somewhere near $400 (being 75% of that latter figure, Vista Ultimate is $320). I suggest that the Business version is the appropriate version for comparison since it is the version without artificial crippling of OS functions (but without the extra media apps of Ultimate).
Comparing discounter prices for crippled OS versions is hardly a fair comparison to (presumably) full price fully featured OS/2. But I wouldn't claim that the poster was being dishonest to suggest that it was.
Not going to happen but, just as in the trust-busting days of yore, only a self-policing solution (the break-up of the corporation into separate businesses) will work.
And of course Jerry Pournelle is a thoroughly unbiased source of information about his great deeds.
Ahem. Seriously now. Anyone who is familiar with Jerry Pournelle (hearing him speak, reading his various columns, etc.) should readily apprehend that he is a relentless self-promoter. This is no doubt an essential part of his success, but nothing he says about his accomplishments can be taken at face value.
For those seriously interested in the question of how the USSR came undone, I recommend reading The Disintegration of the Soviet Economic System by Ellman and Kontorovich.
In reading this detailed account of how things fell apart you will note that no SDI-related military spending is even mentioned. Soviet military spending was a major factor in the collapse, but this spending had exceeded 20% of the GNP in the 60s and stayed there up until the very end. It was the Soviet leadership's own choice to do this. Reagan has nothing to do with it.
The oil price collapse and Gorbachev's attempt to restructure were the reasons for the collapse coming when it did. Restructuring tore down the old inefficient command system, but failed to replace it with anything effective.
Those who cite claims by former Soviet leaders that SDI was responsible (rather than their own failures) probably also believe the claims of G. W. Bush and company that no mistakes were made in bringing the U.S. to its current crises.
My worst environment was revising code on a UNIVAC 1230 in the late 1980s in a metal shack out in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The source code had been lost years earlier, so one had to patch object code using toggle switches to enter data one bit at a time.
But it make this more challenging the tape decks were ex-Navy warship units - armor-plated and weighing over a ton. Unlike on board the ship, the drives were not bolted down to a metal deck, but just sitting on a plywood floor. Each tape deck unit had three tape drives that slid out. The kicker - you had to remember never to pull out more than one drive at a time, and to lock each in place when it was closed. Otherwise the armor-plated deck would tip over and crush you to death.
Oh, and there were rattlesnakes outside. The deadliest species - Mojave Greens.
Slashdot Mirror
I view the late 90s as an enormous aberration in history. The back catalogs of western music were basically thrown open to the public and there was just this frenzy of buying...
You've got it right. 1999 marks the peak of CD sales, and "big label" profit, and the "labels" have been trying to sell politicians and the public on the notion that this peak (which as you note is largely a back-catalog based windfall) is the "normal" financial state of the industry which must be restored (largely by legislation, certainly not innovation).
This is not unusual behavior for an industry - did you know that the U.S. farm industry (nearly all agribusiness mega-corps now) considers the unusually favorable prices of 1910-1914 to represent "normal" pricing (it is termed "parity") and regularly seeks price supports to drive prices up to that level?
An interesting side-note to the rapid adoption of CDs that I rarely see mentioned is that during the 1970s and 1980s the quality of manufactured LPs fell of a cliff. It became normal to buy a disk with gross defects.But with CDs, either the pressing was perfect or it didn't play at all. So the take over by CDs was partly due to the terrible quality of the LP product. It wasn't until the late 1990s that the "labels" found a way to ruin the quality of CDs - by volume compression. Was this also a factor in the decline of CD sales?
It's always seemed to me that the major hole in the Fermi paradox is the assumption that technologically advanced alien civilizations would be emitting signals we would recognize.
In common with authors the wrote the cited paper, and most commentators on the subject (and virtually everyone who claims to have a "resolution" for the Fermi Paradox), the above comment fails to understand the essence of the Fermi Paradox -- what actually makes it profoundly paradoxical.
The Fermi Paradox does not assume that "technologically advanced alien civilizations" (in general) "would be emitting signals we would recognize". The paradox lies in the fact that the Universe is a very big, and very old place and as far as we can tell none of them do (if they ever existed at all).
Are you proposing that there is some sort of the universal law of nature that decrees no civilization anywhere in the Universe will make detectable and recognizable signals of any kind, intentionally or unintentionally? After all it only takes one single ancient civilization anywhere to take a course of development that creates a detectable signal for any reason to overturn the Fermi Paradox.
Attempting to dismiss it by claiming that civilizations exist, but that no civilization ever makes human-detectable signals, begs the question (in one of the original and correct senses of the term): it attempts refutation by assuming an unsupported premise (in this case two of them) : 1) that they do exist, but and an arbitrary special universal law holds that prevents any from being detected.
...
Copyright was intended to as an incentive to create works which would eventually end up as public domain - it was intended to increase public domain. If you break that, don't you invalidate your copyright?
Some people complain about "piracy" as being theft, but given the original intent of copyright, isn't the entire history of the extensions of copyright AND DRM and the DMCA actually theft from the public?...
Right you are. The growing abuse of copyright that has been underway for four decades is in opposition of the express purpose and practice that is spelled out in no less a document than the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, Powers of Congress):
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
The whole notion of extending copyrights held by parties other than the originators indefinitely after the fact (and often after the originator is dead), clearly defies the constitutional basis of copyright in the first place.
After scanning through numerous comments here, I see none of them addressing whether the Times Online news article was reporting credible science or not.
There is at least one very hard-to-believe assertion in the article: "the most attractive parents were 26% less likely to have sons". This is an astonishing, immense deviation from the nearly even 50-50 split in sex ratios in births (it is actually 51-49, a consistent pattern everywhere). If you don't have some acquaintanceship with the history of attempts to alter the sex ratios, you may not realize how amazing a claim this really is. This is something humans have worked hard at manipulating since the dawn time, with essentially no success at all. The only effective means of altering "birth" sex ratios has been the extreme practice of infanticide, and now with prenatal sex identification techniques, sex-selection abortion.
If such a huge systematic deviation in sex ratios existed, one would expect to have had this to have been well established ages ago. One could not plausibly claim that people have not been paying attention to beautiful couples and their progeny.
So, I suspect this is "junk science".
On top of Charbax's very valid points, there's the matter of your 11 year old already (presumably) being an English speaking WIMP user.
What's important is how Sugar is adopted by a child who has never used a computer of any kind before, and especially one who doesn't speak any language in common with the implementors. (I don't know how successful this would be / has been - but it is the key measurement)
This raises an interesting point - are Sugar's designers right about this being a superior introduction to computing compared to the standard Xerox-Star/Macintosh/Windows/OS-X/Ubuntu/Xandros-easy UI family? Possibly... (if there is research to support this), but this NOT an issue of classic windowing UI (CWUI) vs Sugar, but of having Sugar as the only option and no CWUI at all, and a shaky OS stand-in, vs having Sugar plus a CWUI and a solid industry proven OS foundation?
It occurs to me that even illiterate third world children would ultimately benefit from familiarity with the UI paradigms used in every other computer they may ever encounter in their lives.
Eeepc consumes 10x more power and costs upwards 2x as much. Not sunlight readable, not sand/water proof, not shock proof, not mesh networkable so many other things that are absolutely required in those places the 1.2 Million OLPC laptops have so far been delivered.
The only possibly valid point in the above critical response, is the issue of power (if it is reinterpreted to refer only to processor power). Could a virtually identical XO run a stripped down version of Linux instead of a pure-Sugar solution? (Homer's voice: mmmm... pure sugar solution).
I think the answer is probably yes. The Atom processor in the Eee PC is four times faster than the Geode in the XO, but the Atom is also enormous overkill for the XO application. I know for a fact that Linux is quite usable on old hardware much slower than the Atom. The XO does not need to be a Eee PC clone in terms of performance; the usability issue that caused the XO to be abandoned by my test population (of one) was its UI/usability not its performance.
I am in an excellent position to evaluate this issue, having purchased one of the first XO OLPCs through the give-one-get-one (GOGO) program for an 11 year old child, and then obtained an Asus Eee PC netbook running Xandros Linux (a window-ized interface to Debian Linux, along the lines of Ubuntu).
The 11-year old's verdict: thumbs down for Sugar, thumbs-up for Xandros. She gave up with fiddling on the XO after a few weeks, but loves to use the Eee PC. As the network support resource for my household, I can further point out that Sugar shipped with unusable wireless security (WEP only), which some months later was upgraded to WPA, but with this fatal flaw: every time the computer is powered up the user has to reenter the entire passphrase to get wireless access. Since a rather lengthy and obscure passphrase had been previously selected to provide household network security, this was an intolerable nuisance to an 11-year old. And dumbing-down the household security for the convenience of one cheap product is unacceptable to this network support resource.
Perhaps the passphrase remembering problem has since been fixed (since the XO is not used by its target audience any more I am not inclined to upgrade the OS to test it) but it illustrates the fatal problem with the Sugar approach: writing a decent OS is hard work, and taking a quick and dirty stab at it gives a foundation of sand for the whole offering. Absolutely they should have run a solid robust proven OS (Linux) for the system, adding on what ever they felt was needed.,/p>
Dummy! You are forgetting the finalizing step, where you bake it in a kiln. After that it is water-impervious.
There are two historical examples.
The first is Ukraine, which inherited some fraction of the Soviet stockpile, which they turned over to Russia in exchange (IIRC) for Russia assuming Ukraine's portion of the Soviet Union's international debt and various treaty obligations.
...
Make that four historical examples, since Belarus and Kazakhstan also hosted Soviet nuclear weapons. In fact, IIRC, Kazakhstan was the last to have its missiles removed since they were the huge SS-18s, the mainstay of the Soviet arsenal.
This is nonsense.
Reasonable proof? Even the Hawaiians are saying that his birth certificate is not that of a native born Hawaiian. Notice the difference between these two "Certificate of Live Birth"? http://honolulu.craigslist.org/oah/pol/1236913553.html
The highest government official in Hawaii charged with maintaining public health records, Dr. Chiyome Leinaala Fukino, Director of Health for the State of Hawai'i, has officially issued a determination based on his personal examination of Obama's original birth certificate that he was born in Hawaii. You can read the official statement yourself.
Considering that there are several energy storage technologies that are already being used for grid power storage in different places, or are under serious consideration for that role, asserting that there is no way wind could be used as the only energy source is, shall we say, overblown? (:-))
Now if you want to argue that this is not the most economical method of meeting world energy demands in a non-polluting manner, then you would be on firmer ground. But all of the following technologies for energy storage are already in use for grid storage: pumped water, batteries and flywheels. Also under active development are hydrogen electrolysis/fuel cell systems, and compressed air and superconducting storage remain possibilities.
There is a huge difference between, "more expensive" and (by implication of "no way") impossible or even "forever impractical."
Guy geeks should brush up on their Harry Potter and attend Azkatraz 2009 in San Francisco July 18-21!
Who would attend an annual Harry Potter convention, you may ask? After attending a recent one with my wife, a rapid Harry potter fan, I discovered the answer.
The typical attendee is a geeky someone who was introduced to the first Harry Potter book, a juvenile literature read, in 1997 at age 10 or so. This person then grew up with the series, and matured as the books themselves matured, and is now 22 or so. Oh, and nearly all of these people are females.
So next month there is convention of several thousand women geeks in their late teens and early twenties in San Franciso. Hmmm.
Do I need to draw y'all a map?
ITER is going to be the testbed for the technology needed to make a commercial fusion reactor possible. The unsolved problems each have potential solutions to them, each of which will need to be tested. After ITER, the next step is a prototype reactor, one which incorporates the technology developed during the testing process. The step after that is commercial power generators.
This correct, but I wanted to point out the crucial difference between ITER and the NIF. The NIF is not anything close to a testbed for commercial fusion, it is simply an attempt to achieve a break-even plasma condition and produce an energy output in the 10-100 megajoule range. Tokamak type magnetic fusion systems achieved these milestones 12-15 years ago, using technologies directly relevant to commercial scale systems (i.e. superconducting magnets, plasma heating techniques etc.).
NIF will, once it is actually operating and has reached its operating goals (which can take many years to work up to), will simply be a physics experiment (or lab-scale nuclear explosion generator). The technology used to create the implosion (glass laser) is a dead end for producing power. A system using some time of particle beam driver will be needed to create a useful testbed that has some hope of eventual commercialization, but this type of system is just at the "vu-graph" stage. No equivalent system has yet been planned using particle beam technology. Given the 15 year construction time these facilities appear to require, it would appear that an ICF (inertial confinement fusion) system equivalent to what MCF (magnetic confinement fusion) achieved 12-15 years ago (10-100 megajoules with commercializable technologies) won't be available for 15-20 more years. ICF is more than a (human) generation behind MCF.
On Windows systems CapsLock doesn't even "caps lock" it is instead really "invert case", a feature that never existed on any typewriter. I have never in my life wanted to "invert case" while typing. Has anyone else?
If one actually reads the article, and in particular looks carefully at Figure 1, which compares the different modes of transportation, the allegedly counterintuitive results are absent.
What is actually shows:
In short: if you are looking for surprising counter-intuitive results, you'll have to look elsewhere. This really just confirms the truth in conventional wisdom.
Addressing this from the standpoint of having a proper controlled substance rescheduling of cannabis down from Schedule I to Schedule V (the DEA itself lists 100% pure THC at only Schedule III !), in accordance with the actual regulations and science:
Say what? Let me analyse this point by point...
Strengthen our democracy: How, by making people sit around their bong every night discussing the problems of the world? Like.. "Man... link um.. why do they fold those papers around those little sticks of gum? Can't they see we need to save some trees? Besides they taste terrible when folding a joint, their just disgusting."
When government regulations are flagrantly abused to maintain the power and budget of one organization (the DEA) this clearly undermines the meaning of democratic government. If the government writes regulations, it should follow them.
Promote efficiency: Get real, Marijuana and efficiency in the same sentence? Last I knew all my childhood friends were doing nothing with their lives. Just sitting around getting high with no aspirations in life. Several are dead from accidents, suicide, some perpetually in rehab clinics, and all living life day-t-day. Efficiency is not the first word on my mind.
When I consider pouring billions of dollars into a bottomless pit based on abuse of regulations and scorn of scientific evidence, efficiency is the FIRST word on my mind!
Making government more transparent: Ok, Marijuana is hallucinogenic for some people, but I doubt that the Government is going to get any more transparent that way.
Obeying regulations and enforcing them in a logical evidence-based manner is essential to transparent government.
Collaborative: Ok, lets get this one definition straight. We are talking about the Government being more collaborative, not people sitting around talking about fantasies while smoking joints. How is legalizing Marijuana going to get the Government to improve on their collaboration skills?
Recent polls on medical marijuana show nation public support at the level of 72% in favor and 21% opposed. Paying attention to the overwhelming majority of Americans today is the essence of collaborative (as opposed to imperial or authoritarian) federal government.
This is a simple matter of paying attention to science and obeying the law as written.
The rules for Schedule I are:
A) The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse.
(B) The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.
C) There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision.
The best available scientific and medical evidence and opinion clearly shows that criteria B and C do not apply (the US Institute of Medicine refuted B a decade ago, for example). The only way one can claim A applies is via a circular argument: all cannabis use DEFINED as abuse, therefore it has a high potential for abuse.
If the rules of classification are objectively and scientifically applied the it would rank no higher than Schedule IV!
The logic of scheduling Cannabis at Schedule IV (or V) is further shown by the DEA itself - by scheduling pure 100% THC at Schedule III. Clearly a preparation that is only about 10% as potent should have a lower ranking. One should note that Schedule V consists entirely of drugs with higher rankings (from I down to III) in reduced potency preparations.
This is simply a matter of getting science and reason back into regulation. Regrettably the DEA has been given a pass on these by both parties form the very beginning.
Fusion power was expected to have replaced nuclear by the year 2000. It's now 2009, and it's still more than 30 years in the future. A slippage of one year per year consistently for the last 40 years does not bode well.
The situation is actually much worse than this. Controlled thermonuclear research began in the 1950s with Project Sherwood, at that time it was expected that fusion power was a problem that would be cracked in ten years. Around 1970, it was expected that commercial fusion power would be on line in 2000 (i.e. 30 years). Right now no projections have a commercial plant operating before about 2050 (i.e. 40 years). So the time until commercial fusion power is a strictly increasing function if time.
But maybe there is room for optimism since the rate of increase seems to be declining....
The end comment (and its reference) is indeed quite wrong, and not only because the availability of this resource has peaked.
The claim is There's a case to be made that raising the CAFE won't save oil or reduce greenhouse gases. Why? Because improvements in fuel economy effectively make fuel less expensive, and when costs fall, demand tends to rise.
The argument supposes that U.S. auto fleet mileage is "driving" the world-wide price of oil. It has been decades since this might have been true (if it ever was). The rising demand for oil by the rapidly developing economies of China and India swamps any influence of U.S. auto mileage. These nations are more than capable of sucking up any slack that declining U.S. consumption might generate.
So why make more efficient cars? Well, to cut how much money we export to the totalitarian states in the Middle East, Venezuela, and Russia, to the detriment of the U.S. economy, for one. Because no matter how good pollution controls are, burning less gas makes them even better for another. And, for any world wide program to reduce oil demand, and carbon emissions, every major player must get on board, and the U.S., being the biggest player, must inevitably lead.
Don't forget physicist Ibn al-Haitham Al Hazan, one of my favorite classical Muslim scientists.
Vista Home Basic Retail is around $180 ... Regardless of the legality of system builder licenses, the cost of Vista is nowhere near $400, and it was dishonest of the original poster who stated this to suggest otherwise.
According to Microsoft the retail price of Vista Business is $300, which I submit is indeed somewhere near $400 (being 75% of that latter figure, Vista Ultimate is $320). I suggest that the Business version is the appropriate version for comparison since it is the version without artificial crippling of OS functions (but without the extra media apps of Ultimate).
Comparing discounter prices for crippled OS versions is hardly a fair comparison to (presumably) full price fully featured OS/2. But I wouldn't claim that the poster was being dishonest to suggest that it was.
Not going to happen but, just as in the trust-busting days of yore, only a self-policing solution (the break-up of the corporation into separate businesses) will work.
And of course Jerry Pournelle is a thoroughly unbiased source of information about his great deeds.
Ahem. Seriously now. Anyone who is familiar with Jerry Pournelle (hearing him speak, reading his various columns, etc.) should readily apprehend that he is a relentless self-promoter. This is no doubt an essential part of his success, but nothing he says about his accomplishments can be taken at face value.
Quite correct.
For those seriously interested in the question of how the USSR came undone, I recommend reading The Disintegration of the Soviet Economic System by Ellman and Kontorovich.
In reading this detailed account of how things fell apart you will note that no SDI-related military spending is even mentioned. Soviet military spending was a major factor in the collapse, but this spending had exceeded 20% of the GNP in the 60s and stayed there up until the very end. It was the Soviet leadership's own choice to do this. Reagan has nothing to do with it.
The oil price collapse and Gorbachev's attempt to restructure were the reasons for the collapse coming when it did. Restructuring tore down the old inefficient command system, but failed to replace it with anything effective.
Those who cite claims by former Soviet leaders that SDI was responsible (rather than their own failures) probably also believe the claims of G. W. Bush and company that no mistakes were made in bringing the U.S. to its current crises.
My worst environment was revising code on a UNIVAC 1230 in the late 1980s in a metal shack out in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The source code had been lost years earlier, so one had to patch object code using toggle switches to enter data one bit at a time.
But it make this more challenging the tape decks were ex-Navy warship units - armor-plated and weighing over a ton. Unlike on board the ship, the drives were not bolted down to a metal deck, but just sitting on a plywood floor. Each tape deck unit had three tape drives that slid out. The kicker - you had to remember never to pull out more than one drive at a time, and to lock each in place when it was closed. Otherwise the armor-plated deck would tip over and crush you to death.
Oh, and there were rattlesnakes outside. The deadliest species - Mojave Greens.