Absolutely. When I worked at a company that used McAfee, my machine would run incredibly slow at least three or four times a day. It was consistently McAfee taking up half the CPU and available RAM.
The first thing I do when any friend or family says "My computer is running so slow" is get rid of McAfee and replace it with AVG.
If you count the probable indirect death toll, one of the unintended consequences of the improved trade routes through Asia was the Black Death, which would make the Mongols the most destructive force ever in terms of human loss of life. Bugs coming out of obscure locations to kill millions due to improved travel capacity didn't begin with WWI, ebola, or SARS.
Stopping Mao from the policies that led to the Great Chinese Famine of 1958-63 would have saved 15 to 43 million lives. These policies included such idiocies as killing all the sparrows and small birds that allegedly ate crop seeds, which of course left crops vulnerable to the much more destructive insects; collectivization of farms in ways that put the most loyal rather than the most competent farmers in charge; refusing to use farming methods that were too bourgeoisie, and so on.
A touch-sensitive plant could be used for home or business security. It could be trained to sense contact at a certain threshold of pressure (e.g., a human footstep versus a breeze or a small animal) and summon support appropriately. Add some solar-powered electricity (or a gene splice with an electric eel) and it could zap the intruder.
Of course, there's only one thing they could call this application of the principle.
Robocrop.
Here, there's an AP story on Chavez recalling a governor for speaking against his policies.
Reporters Without Borders, also considered a liberal organization, reports several instances of censorship, including blocking entire topics from discussion. It lists Venezuela as 117 out of 179 in overall press freedom.
For me, Chavez is one of the less harmful dictators, but a populist dictator remains a dictator, and anybody who blocks freedom of speech and requires media to carry his opinions is a dictator.
Well, for one, in the US alone, more than half the population lives in a coastal area.
Even if just 10 percent are directly affected, that's still a large number of people.
In the US, can you imagine all the lawsuits and politics about how to move people, does the government have the right to do it, does the government have the obligation to do it, and who is going to pay for it?
For countries like Indonesia that are mostly islands, or in countries or areas that are largely below sea level, this could result in a major loss of housing and usable land.
Anything that changes ocean patterns could affect shipping and fishing, both of which would be major blows to the global and regional economies. If we lose major fish populations, that will increase food prices, and if shipping becomes riskier, that will affect the price of virtually everything.
It's a lot more than avoiding getting wet.
You pee with your left hand?
Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "golden touch."
Except for all the cases where it's not.
Almost all religious conflicts are, fundamentally, about allocation of resources and post-colonialism tensions. Muslims tend to live in previously colonized lands far more than any other religious group. Religion just makes a better-sounding cause for violence and is better as a way to influence the poor. Sure, you're suffering now, but you'll lack for nothing in Paradise if you just do what I tell you. The Crusades were as much about control of the Silk Roads and commerce as about religion, religion just made better sound bites.
Christian versus Christian (Northern Ireland). Ethnic and post-colonialism as much as anything,
Muslim-Jewish. Ongoing colonialism and ethnic.
Hindu versus Sikh (India). I don't know enough to say for certain what the post-colonialism factors are.
Catholic versus Buddhist (Vietnam and 1966 Buddhist uprising, also about resource allocation).
Serbian Orthodox Christian attacks on Bosnian Muslims. After the dissolution of the USSR, territorial and ethnic issues.
Christian versus animists (South Africa)
Buddhist versus Hindu (Sri Lanka).
The article mentions that the contractor was afraid to bring up problems.
That, plus the mentality from management that people who bring up problems are "troublemakers," "negative," "not team players," etc. (because they've put too much of their ego or political capital into a project) has got to be responsible for more disasters, large and small, than any other deadly combination.
I worked for a large nonprofit that blew money on doomed projects as though money grew on trees. Each time, it started with somebody, usually a contractor or somebody else who stood to gain from it, flattering the leadership that this was huge and visionary and would make or save them millions. Then the organizational mind control started, where everybody was saying that it was the greatest thing ever. Then the flawed project management started. Then when the cracks were obvious, people who pointed them out were vilified as naysayers. It was only the lower-downs who said anything because to rise, one had to be a "team player," and the organization was hierarchical enough that lower-downs were ignored. Then denial that there were problems, together with tossing more money at it (including adding more people to a software project at the last minute because that always works). Then even when the leadership [sic] team [sic] all realized there were problems, they all waited until the person responsible for the project was willing to concede defeat. because in a political environment, nobody wants to confront somebody who might retaliate
Those elements are the inevitable recipe for disaster for any project, but it's fear that drives virtually all of them. Fear of not looking good (note that the Congresscritter didn't yell about wasting taxpayer money, she yelled about being made to look bad), loss aversion, fear of admitting a mistake, fear of speaking up.
Pellerin was brave enough to do something technically illegal and scrape up the funds for servicing it.
That is what a leader does.
Privacy for the individual developed as a concept when we moved away from living in small settings where everybody knew your name, your family, your business, what you bought and sold, and so on, and where families lived in one or two rooms, to the big cities where anonymity was possible. Even in the big city,people had their privacy only through anonymity and technical limitations--very few organizations had the ability to identify individuals out of the crowd unless that individual had done something to draw attention and they had the resources to track them.
My guess is that the perceived right to privacy is going to disappear very soon that virtually any corporation can track individuals.
The biggest precedent for a perceived right disappearing because it's 1) possible and 2) desirable for a large/powerful enough group to make it disappear is actually sharing media.
Society at large used to think that media couldn't be shared without paying for it and that there was an inherent right of the manufacturer to control how books and music were distributed. But when books and music went to a digital and easily reproduced and easily shared format, for many individuals, probably even the majority, a lot of people perceive it as a right that belong to the individual, once it was possible. It started small-scale, with audio cassettes, and now is wide-scale online.
Now that information about the individual can be as easily gathered and shared, corporations and individuals are changing their perspective of privacy and their rights. Because an organization can gather data about individuals incredibly easily, it will, and share it equally easily. I'd estimate that in 50-100 years, individuals will have redress for data gathering only if they can prove direct harm, not whether it was done with or without their knowledge or consent.
I think that was one of the more optimistic aspects of the Trekverse, that people would be inspired to continue to work in order to be part of a great undertaking or for other intrinsic motivations. (I nearly said "greater enterprise" there but my shame module kicked in at the last minute.)
Not everybody might, but in all the population of the galaxy, you figure that even if fifteen percent of the population is interested in making discoveries, improving things, perpetuating making things by hand for the pleasure of craftsmanship, improving lives, and so on, that would provide more than enough researchers, engineers, doctors and counselors, peacekeepers, artists and artisans, archaeologists, authors, explorers, and so on.
I'm thinking of the people I know who, if they were suddenly handed enough money that they didn't have to earn a living, would still work in some way, either because they love what they're doing now or to follow some kind of other dream. There are people who would be engineers still, some would be world travelers, some would try their hand at writing, others would do volunteer work, while others would happily enjoy leisure.
A world without need wouldn't necessarily be a world without work, it would just be one where work would be optional.
Those who can, do; those who can't, write. Those who can't write work for the Bell Labs Record.
