Orwell - "Weakness is strength".
Awesome. Never saw that before. Thanks!
"The piece that everyone forgets about this is that while the raw mineral resources themselves have some value, they have another feature that is extremely valuable, which is that they are outside of a deep gravity well."
And so we deduce that the resources, outside of the deep gravity well, are only valuable to communities living outside the deep gravity well. Ie, nobody. There is nothing up there worth something to people _down_here_.
I believe that this is a highly non-trivial bootstrapping problem. You need unimaginable technologies in orbit (power satellites? nano-materials that can only be built in zero-gravity?) to make it worthwhile to go up there and start the process. However, nobody will come up with those technologies until there is a huge industrial base in orbit... So it is impossible to get started.
Sorry to be a downer. (No pun intended.)
The organization says that the system "consists of an Intranet designed ultimately to replace the international Internet and to discriminate between ordinary citizens and the 'elite' (banks, ministries and big companies), which will continue to have access to the international Internet."
If that is accurate and if I follow your naming scheme correctly, in this case the "bad guys" want continued access to the wider world. It is the "ordinary citizens" who need to be "left alone" by the "good" guys. Did I get all that right?
It's a YouTube link. Not exactly going to be some graphically disgusting video. Unless you think Beyond Thunderdome is graphically disgusting.
Yes.
Unfortunately, within the academic world, the quality of publications on your CV is determined by the perceived quality of the venue (e.g., high-impact journals, low-acceptance conferences, etc.), as opposed to the quality of the actual work getting published.
This is true and unfortunate, but there is a serious lack of more accurate means of measurement. I'm curious - what do you suggest as a better way to compare 400 candidates applying for 4 jobs? Don't forget the most important constraint: you are not an expert in any of their fields.
you publish articles in prestigious journals so that others read your work.
No, no, no. In maths, cs and physics, that is what preprints are for. The journal process can take years -- it is much too slow to be used as a means of communication.
And a big part of how professors are judged for tenure is how many good articles did they publish in prestigious journals.
This part is correct. Classy journals are used by tenure and hiring committees as a way of measuring quality across sub-disciplines of a larger field.
PS: And, yes, there is always arXiv.org for pre-prints, where you can get most of the papers anyhow, if you are willing to take the risk.
What risk? What are you talking about? I'll guess: You think think that peer-review is a guarantee of correctness. If so: that is not the case.
This is a good opportunity to put Occam's razor to use. We know that in sudden, widespread disruptive events people loot.
They loot libraries? After a disaster I might loot a store, or an abandoned police station/military post, I guess, but a library? For books? "Hey, its the end of the world! Let's go snag some calculus textbooks!"
Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
