electron mobility [sucks] / chemical instability [sucks]
These are just areas where we will see the incremental improvement that Cringley described.
Hell, in 1988, when I bought my first CD player, the hard drive couldn't store even one track from a CD. Now my hard drive holds dozens of ripped CDs, in many cases uncompressed.
He's right - there's going to be an amazing convergence of new technology in the next decade: organic semiconductors, inkjet mass production, digital paper, amorphous photovoltaics, fuel cells, polymer electrolytes, bluetooth, broadcast power. It's going to be a cyberpunk's wet dream. Sure, the first things built using these advances are going to be large, slow and clumsy compared to their ultimate potential, but Bob's yeoman analogy is accurate for a reason. In another decade or two, the power of a modern laptop PC will be shrunken down to something you can fold up and stuff in your shirt pocket, and cost less than the shirt.
And it just may BE your shirt pocket. That's what Cringley probably knows but isn't saying - When it becomes that cheap to just "print" a computer, they'll be integrated into everything: refrigerators, automobiles, clothing, furniture, you name it. Sure, there will still be information appliances, but their purpose will evolve into enabling your coordination of all the other computers you will interact with throughout your day, from your own household accoutrements to public infrastructure to your employer and the internet at large.
It is going to make the world unrecognizeable.
Again.
And the amount of information that will need to be exchanged is going to make today's bandwidths look like trickles. Right now, we are at the knee of the exponential growth curve of the telecommunications market, and technology will keep up with demand as improvments in optical swithcing continue. Communication service is going to become more important than banking - hell, banking and finance has already become little more than information flowing around a network.
You want to be a part of it? Forget putting your money in the people who make computers. Invest in telecommunications, and the hardware that supports it. That's where the fortunes are going to be made.
I read that article several weeks ago (thanks to Robot Wisdom 'blog for the link) and was left with the distinct impression that the postal workers got at least as much amusement out of it as we did, if not more. Otherwise, many of those items probably would never have been delivered.
I wonder if this could also be used for holography: freeze the interference pattern into the material, and read it out later
Yes, and not necessarily for recording. In fact, I think it would lend itself more to spectroscopic analysis, especially at low light levels. Freeze light as it enters, integrating signal until you've collected enough to build up a useful signal to noise ratio. And the extremely high indices of refraction in the materials used would give you all the spectral resolution you ever need. Add a third dimension using holography and you have enough basis to do solid state hyperspectral imaging.
A big problem with spectroscopy and spectroradiometry is that when you get high spectral resolutions, you need insanely high signal to noise ratios, on the order of 10^3 or even 10^4, to do chemical analysis. This kind of phenomenon allows you to increase your signal without adding noise (well, beyond the inherent Poisson noise, N = S^0.5).
Re:light stopped? Or destroyed and re-emitted...
on
Stop, Light.
·
· Score: 2
How would you detect [a quantum-teleported copy]?
It would be obvious. The subject would continually complain about having his "molecules scattered about the universe," and perpetually goad his more logical, scientific colleagues with illogical references to emotion and heritage.
Somebody got their $11 Billion and is laughing all the way to the bank.
Are you in California? If so, take a look at Dynegy, Inc. - one of those somebodys. Specifically, Dynegy is threatening to sue YOUR power company because they can't charge you enough to pay what Dynegy charged them for wholesale power.
Of course, this slick, marketing produced website hides the fact that this company's business model is one of the most unethical in the modern economy: buy up power plants amidst state deregulation, and then throttle back the supply to the point of crisis, thereby driving up prices to extraordinary levels, and then suing utility companies who by law can't pass on these costs to their customers. This is as ethically bankrupt as the OPEC and DeBeers cartels and their manipulation of supply. Worse, because it threatens to pull the plug on business and industry. Electricity supplies, unlike oil and luxury supplies, are all or nothing.
If you're a Californian, especially an influential lawmaker or businessperson, I recommend you send a nice little note to Dynegy and remind them that as the holder of a corporate license, they still have a moral and ethical responsibility to this nation and its people. And you might also want to mention that if they don't back off, they just might find their California facilities in the hands of the Governor, who has promised to exercise his powers of Eminient Domain if this crisis can't be resolved by playing nice.
Well, it could be sorted out properly straight off if the media would stop spouting corporate FUD like this. At least this reporter questions the premise - something very rare in these days of corporate bandwagon journalism.
Right now, I'm sitting here at work, designing state of the art satellites in the dark and the cold, the only heat coming from my twin Pentiums and the coffee pot, the only light coming from my monitor, while my power company and its sisters are defaulting on $11 BILLION in debt for money that they paid to... somebody.
Somebody got their $11 Billion and is laughing all the way to the bank. Meanwhile, the State of California is going to have to bail out the power companies for their debt to banks, who are also fat an happy on the interest. (Damn, I'd love to have just one day's interest on that much money.) Of course, the people who are making all of that money aren't in the spotlight - and they're the ones who are creating the problem by inflating the prices.
Jeebus H. Key-rist in a Sputtering Yellow Jalopy - this situation is exactly the kind of scenario that utility regulation was designed to avoid. There was a REASON for regulation, and apparently our lawmakers forgot what it was... well, now we're all being reminded.
I hope this proves once and for all we can't depend on the ethics and compassion of corporate interests to work for the public good. But of course, it won't.
That's also true in the beach communities in Southern CA like Ventura, Santa Monica, Newport Beach, Oceanside, San Diego, etc... the ocean marine layer keeps the temperatures quite mild during the summer, with the occasional exception of strong offshore desert winds. But North and South, when you get a few miles inland - Walnut Creek, Sacramento, San Gabriel Valley, Riverside, Rancho Bernardo - the climate in the summer demands air conditioning, and almost all homes built since the late 60's have central air.
Well, that certainly appears to be their intent. But I think that their own incompetence will be their salvation. Have we already forgotten the RIAA's digital watermarking "solution?"
The features listed in the article sound more like requirements than specifications. IOW, that's a wish list. They don't have the technology yet, and to implement some of the things they've listed would require alterations to just about every video-capable device in your home: cable box, TiVo, PC, CD/DVD device, VCR... I predict they'll still be wishing for a long time to come.
And besides, all you need to defeat the sort of protection they want is a set top box that strips the copy protection code from the signal and provides the output of your choice: digital or analog. Problem solved.
This whole thing, if not merely another example of journalistic exaggeration in pursuit of eyeballs, is at best a pipe dream by industry execs who have little if any clue about the technical implications of their requirements.
Anyone who's worked on the forward end of new product development has seen these kind of vaporspecs before - marketing exec's who have no blinkin' clue about the potentials or limitations of the technology come up with requirements driven solely by greed and the pursuit of market share. And before they even ask you how long till you can build one, they've already relabeled their requirements document a "specification" and are out selling the damn things...
The story mentions a 12% clickthru rate on the TacoBell interstitial that ran for a while last year on some site or another. The story also mentions that Unicast requires a "close" button on every interstitial. Now imagine if you could "close" commercials and move right on to the remainder of your programming. Would you watch any commercials?
I daresay that their 12% clickthru rate will drop to 0.12% with the combination of proxies and user intervention. Web users are not TV-watching couch potatoes, as they become experienced, they become more interactive, not less. And the more advertising interferes with their browsing, the more they will "interact" by finding a way to filter the annoyance.
Heck, the remote control proved that was even true with couch potatoes. Advertizers had to force TV stations to synchronise their commercial breaks in order to guarantee revenue for the slots. And now there's Tivo...
As information technology improves, there's going to come a point where the user has enough control to avoid the advertising he or she doesn't want to see. The only advertising a user will see is that which he or she has subscribed to. Therefore, advertisers would be smart if they started now figuring out how to make advertising that we want to see, instead of forcing interruptions upon us. You'll know we're there when an advertiser sues for the right to force their message upon some audience or another...
Well, I run the AdFilter proxu on my NT machine at the office, and it works pretty well filtering out banner ads.
But on the Macintosh machine at home, I haven't been able to find a decent http proxy to filter banner ads, so I've just suffered. Perhaps someone here can recommend a proxy for the Mac... that works.
There is a primal instinct within me that wants to grab a large club, run over there, and beat them repeatedly over the head, screaming "I'm right friggin HERE!"
Jeez, dude... chill! Have you ever considered that all your colleagues may be emailing you instead of talking to you because they're scared of you?
I had an officemate whose cubicle was one row over from mine, and she would ring my phone to ask me for lunch or something, even though I could hear her perfectly well if she spoke in a normal talking voice. In fact, I could get a rather bizzare stereo effect going... her phone voice in the left ear and her live voice in the right.
And yes, we were stuck with Lotus Bloats and WinNT 4.0.
The first spam message [in] 1994... was ap piece of Usenet spam.
And it's amazing to me how few people remember that event. At the time, it sent paroxysms of fear and loathing thru Usenet. And they were justified. With the exception of a few moderated groups, and some alt groups that rabidly protect their turf from spammers, Usenet is a wasteland of spam.
And at the time, the term 'spam' meant something completely different: an email denial of service attack, executed by sending the same message over and over and over again to the victim's inbox. Thus the reason the word was borrowed from the Monty Python's Flying Circus skit.
"One of the advantages of the message systems over letter mail was that... one could write tersely and type imperfectly...and the recipient took no offense... one could proceed immediately to the point without having to engage in small talk first..."
In other words, Email was so immensely popular and rapidly adopted among electrical and computer engineers precisely because they could communicate without having to engage in any social engineering whatsoever, or encounter another human being in any direct manner. How so typically engineer-like, in restrospect!
If all they were worried about was synthetic speech, then there wouldn't be the "you may not loan or give this away" restrictions.
It's a pretty easy inference from those restrictions that Adobe is trying to force anyone interested in getting e-Alice into getting it directly from them, and from no one else.
I'd love to see this taken to court. A healthy dose of mainstream public exposure is what's needed here to begin spreading the memetic antibodies against the trend of eroding fair use rights. I suggest we all stand outside the Adobe headquarters (it's next to the Hilton in downtown San Jose, right?) and read Alice in Wonderland aloud from our Glassbook Readers.
And even if it wasn't someone's name, art is publisher's jargon - a term for any illustration or photograph. Art vs. text. It is RISKy to infer any veracity from a directory spec.
...back to its roots and focusing on doing one thing, and doing it well.
umm... I wouldn't say it exactly does it well. The pre-1999 archives are still offline, and if you've ever tried to use deja.com to participate as a regular member of a newsgroup community, you know it bites.
The story I read on CNet yesterday speculated that the usenet side of Deja may yet be sold to someone else, so the boat hasn't stopped rocking yet.
And actually, that may be a good thing. If a parent with a steady profit can adopt Deja, then perhaps it'll stick around as a cornerstone of the internet. Right now, as a standalone business, Deja's long term prospects aren't encouraging.
With any luck, the new owner might actually pay for development of a more useable browsing UI. Now that Remarq has gone fee-only, there's no other free gateway between the Web and Usenet. You'd think that any of the major portals (Yahoo, About, AltaVista, Go, Netscape, etc.) would love to have Deja's gateway and archives as part of their services. What a jewel that would make!
Perhaps you just need to learn how to refine your searches better.
Sometimes you don't even have enough information to do a well-refined search. You don't even know the proper jargon to look for. In these cases, unranked search engines like NorthernLight or AltaVista are the worst thing you could use. Google is much better at this kind of search, even though your first few searches may just be spent finding out what your search terms should be.
But I agree that NorthernLight is a very good backup site if the eminently qualified Google can't find what you're looking for.
And I have to observe that while I was using AltaVista, I would regularly see pr0n hits, nothing inconvenient, but they were there. But I never see them using Google.
Also, if I know the site but forgot the URL, and type into Google good keywords, Google always brings the site I want up on the first page, generally in the top 1 or 2 hits.
What do people expect from this movie, anyway? It's been obvious from day one that the Dungeons and Dragons movie was developed to appeal to the lowest common denominator of the fantasy market. So what? I'm still a regular RPG player, and I plan to see this movie, and I won't be disappointed, because I don't continually set impossibly high expectations for a medium that habitually disappoints.
That said, I'm still amazed that no one has adapted any of the TSR novels to the screen. Some of these are quite good (e.g., Prince of Lies, Cormyr), have plots simple enough to translate well to the screen, and I've been told that TSR/WotC/Hasbro makes more money from the novels than from any of the game aids. Where are the film versions? With the state of the art in CGI, and the proven appetite in the market for fantasy fare, what's the impediment?
With any luck, Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies will demonstrate that literary quality Fantasy will make money at the box office.
techno-capitalism" is just the current manifestation of the way American capitalism has always worked.
You mean the strategy of "charge as much as possible and deliver as little as you can get away with?" Yeah - and the market has come to accept it, too. I can remember the 70's, when Japanese auto imports began to claim more and more of the market. People were amazed at how much car they could get, and how reliable they were, for the price. The American consumer was unused to such value.
We still are. But then again, we have access to some of the best bargains on the planet.
There aren't many other places where a consumer can get as much for their dollar (or ruble or ecu or yuan) as we do. Sure, most "durable goods" aren't as durable as they should be. Maybe our electronic gizmos deliver function, but suffer flaws in the interface, utility, workmanship and/or materials. But at least we have access to them.
After the discussion of the influence Japan had on Detroit, it should come as no surprise that of all the commodities introduced since the industrial revolution, the auto, and its ancillary products, are the only things where the US consumer gets a real value for his money. Got $10k? If you shop smart, you can buy a car that will run reliably for more than 10 years, at over 25 mpg, with average annual maintenance costs of just a few hundred a year. That's a deal!
Need gas? It's the cheapest anywhere in the world except for places like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Auto services? At $40/year, AAA Membership is one of the best bargains in America. In very few other countries can an individual own and operate a car for such a small fraction of his income. The only better value an American will find is in pre-industrial products: food and apparel, primarily.
But consider this: In most places on this globe, people spend more of their income on sustenance than we Americans spend on our autos.
So although your thesis appears valid from an American's point of view, from a Ugandan's or Korean's perspective, it's trite at best.
Slashdot Mirror
These are just areas where we will see the incremental improvement that Cringley described.
Hell, in 1988, when I bought my first CD player, the hard drive couldn't store even one track from a CD. Now my hard drive holds dozens of ripped CDs, in many cases uncompressed.
And it just may BE your shirt pocket. That's what Cringley probably knows but isn't saying - When it becomes that cheap to just "print" a computer, they'll be integrated into everything: refrigerators, automobiles, clothing, furniture, you name it. Sure, there will still be information appliances, but their purpose will evolve into enabling your coordination of all the other computers you will interact with throughout your day, from your own household accoutrements to public infrastructure to your employer and the internet at large.
It is going to make the world unrecognizeable.
Again.
And the amount of information that will need to be exchanged is going to make today's bandwidths look like trickles. Right now, we are at the knee of the exponential growth curve of the telecommunications market, and technology will keep up with demand as improvments in optical swithcing continue. Communication service is going to become more important than banking - hell, banking and finance has already become little more than information flowing around a network.
You want to be a part of it? Forget putting your money in the people who make computers. Invest in telecommunications, and the hardware that supports it. That's where the fortunes are going to be made.
Yeah, well it's not necessarily fear of regulation...
In Europe, most governments recognize significantly more rights to privacy for their citizens than the US does.
I read that article several weeks ago (thanks to Robot Wisdom 'blog for the link) and was left with the distinct impression that the postal workers got at least as much amusement out of it as we did, if not more. Otherwise, many of those items probably would never have been delivered.
Yes, and not necessarily for recording. In fact, I think it would lend itself more to spectroscopic analysis, especially at low light levels. Freeze light as it enters, integrating signal until you've collected enough to build up a useful signal to noise ratio. And the extremely high indices of refraction in the materials used would give you all the spectral resolution you ever need. Add a third dimension using holography and you have enough basis to do solid state hyperspectral imaging.
A big problem with spectroscopy and spectroradiometry is that when you get high spectral resolutions, you need insanely high signal to noise ratios, on the order of 10^3 or even 10^4, to do chemical analysis. This kind of phenomenon allows you to increase your signal without adding noise (well, beyond the inherent Poisson noise, N = S^0.5).
It would be obvious. The subject would continually complain about having his "molecules scattered about the universe," and perpetually goad his more logical, scientific colleagues with illogical references to emotion and heritage.
Are you in California? If so, take a look at Dynegy, Inc. - one of those somebodys. Specifically, Dynegy is threatening to sue YOUR power company because they can't charge you enough to pay what Dynegy charged them for wholesale power.
Of course, this slick, marketing produced website hides the fact that this company's business model is one of the most unethical in the modern economy: buy up power plants amidst state deregulation, and then throttle back the supply to the point of crisis, thereby driving up prices to extraordinary levels, and then suing utility companies who by law can't pass on these costs to their customers. This is as ethically bankrupt as the OPEC and DeBeers cartels and their manipulation of supply. Worse, because it threatens to pull the plug on business and industry. Electricity supplies, unlike oil and luxury supplies, are all or nothing.
If you're a Californian, especially an influential lawmaker or businessperson, I recommend you send a nice little note to Dynegy and remind them that as the holder of a corporate license, they still have a moral and ethical responsibility to this nation and its people. And you might also want to mention that if they don't back off, they just might find their California facilities in the hands of the Governor, who has promised to exercise his powers of Eminient Domain if this crisis can't be resolved by playing nice.
Well, it could be sorted out properly straight off if the media would stop spouting corporate FUD like this. At least this reporter questions the premise - something very rare in these days of corporate bandwagon journalism.
Right now, I'm sitting here at work, designing state of the art satellites in the dark and the cold, the only heat coming from my twin Pentiums and the coffee pot, the only light coming from my monitor, while my power company and its sisters are defaulting on $11 BILLION in debt for money that they paid to... somebody.
Somebody got their $11 Billion and is laughing all the way to the bank. Meanwhile, the State of California is going to have to bail out the power companies for their debt to banks, who are also fat an happy on the interest. (Damn, I'd love to have just one day's interest on that much money.) Of course, the people who are making all of that money aren't in the spotlight - and they're the ones who are creating the problem by inflating the prices.
Jeebus H. Key-rist in a Sputtering Yellow Jalopy - this situation is exactly the kind of scenario that utility regulation was designed to avoid. There was a REASON for regulation, and apparently our lawmakers forgot what it was... well, now we're all being reminded.
I hope this proves once and for all we can't depend on the ethics and compassion of corporate interests to work for the public good. But of course, it won't.
That's also true in the beach communities in Southern CA like Ventura, Santa Monica, Newport Beach, Oceanside, San Diego, etc... the ocean marine layer keeps the temperatures quite mild during the summer, with the occasional exception of strong offshore desert winds. But North and South, when you get a few miles inland - Walnut Creek, Sacramento, San Gabriel Valley, Riverside, Rancho Bernardo - the climate in the summer demands air conditioning, and almost all homes built since the late 60's have central air.
The features listed in the article sound more like requirements than specifications. IOW, that's a wish list. They don't have the technology yet, and to implement some of the things they've listed would require alterations to just about every video-capable device in your home: cable box, TiVo, PC, CD/DVD device, VCR... I predict they'll still be wishing for a long time to come.
And besides, all you need to defeat the sort of protection they want is a set top box that strips the copy protection code from the signal and provides the output of your choice: digital or analog. Problem solved.
This whole thing, if not merely another example of journalistic exaggeration in pursuit of eyeballs, is at best a pipe dream by industry execs who have little if any clue about the technical implications of their requirements.
Anyone who's worked on the forward end of new product development has seen these kind of vaporspecs before - marketing exec's who have no blinkin' clue about the potentials or limitations of the technology come up with requirements driven solely by greed and the pursuit of market share. And before they even ask you how long till you can build one, they've already relabeled their requirements document a "specification" and are out selling the damn things...
The story mentions a 12% clickthru rate on the TacoBell interstitial that ran for a while last year on some site or another. The story also mentions that Unicast requires a "close" button on every interstitial. Now imagine if you could "close" commercials and move right on to the remainder of your programming. Would you watch any commercials?
I daresay that their 12% clickthru rate will drop to 0.12% with the combination of proxies and user intervention. Web users are not TV-watching couch potatoes, as they become experienced, they become more interactive, not less. And the more advertising interferes with their browsing, the more they will "interact" by finding a way to filter the annoyance.
Heck, the remote control proved that was even true with couch potatoes. Advertizers had to force TV stations to synchronise their commercial breaks in order to guarantee revenue for the slots. And now there's Tivo...
As information technology improves, there's going to come a point where the user has enough control to avoid the advertising he or she doesn't want to see. The only advertising a user will see is that which he or she has subscribed to. Therefore, advertisers would be smart if they started now figuring out how to make advertising that we want to see, instead of forcing interruptions upon us. You'll know we're there when an advertiser sues for the right to force their message upon some audience or another...
But on the Macintosh machine at home, I haven't been able to find a decent http proxy to filter banner ads, so I've just suffered. Perhaps someone here can recommend a proxy for the Mac... that works.
Is this gonna be a stand up fight, sir, or just another bug hunt?
Jeez, dude... chill! Have you ever considered that all your colleagues may be emailing you instead of talking to you because they're scared of you?
I had an officemate whose cubicle was one row over from mine, and she would ring my phone to ask me for lunch or something, even though I could hear her perfectly well if she spoke in a normal talking voice. In fact, I could get a rather bizzare stereo effect going... her phone voice in the left ear and her live voice in the right.
And yes, we were stuck with Lotus Bloats and WinNT 4.0.
And it's amazing to me how few people remember that event. At the time, it sent paroxysms of fear and loathing thru Usenet. And they were justified. With the exception of a few moderated groups, and some alt groups that rabidly protect their turf from spammers, Usenet is a wasteland of spam.
And at the time, the term 'spam' meant something completely different: an email denial of service attack, executed by sending the same message over and over and over again to the victim's inbox. Thus the reason the word was borrowed from the Monty Python's Flying Circus skit.
In other words, Email was so immensely popular and rapidly adopted among electrical and computer engineers precisely because they could communicate without having to engage in any social engineering whatsoever, or encounter another human being in any direct manner. How so typically engineer-like, in restrospect!
It's a pretty easy inference from those restrictions that Adobe is trying to force anyone interested in getting e-Alice into getting it directly from them, and from no one else.
I'd love to see this taken to court. A healthy dose of mainstream public exposure is what's needed here to begin spreading the memetic antibodies against the trend of eroding fair use rights. I suggest we all stand outside the Adobe headquarters (it's next to the Hilton in downtown San Jose, right?) and read Alice in Wonderland aloud from our Glassbook Readers.
And even if it wasn't someone's name, art is publisher's jargon - a term for any illustration or photograph. Art vs. text. It is RISKy to infer any veracity from a directory spec.
OK, I did. Its coverage is rather thin, and the browsing interface is worse than Deja's.
But at least it's there. Thx for the lead.
umm... I wouldn't say it exactly does it well. The pre-1999 archives are still offline, and if you've ever tried to use deja.com to participate as a regular member of a newsgroup community, you know it bites.
The story I read on CNet yesterday speculated that the usenet side of Deja may yet be sold to someone else, so the boat hasn't stopped rocking yet.
And actually, that may be a good thing. If a parent with a steady profit can adopt Deja, then perhaps it'll stick around as a cornerstone of the internet. Right now, as a standalone business, Deja's long term prospects aren't encouraging.
With any luck, the new owner might actually pay for development of a more useable browsing UI. Now that Remarq has gone fee-only, there's no other free gateway between the Web and Usenet. You'd think that any of the major portals (Yahoo, About, AltaVista, Go, Netscape, etc.) would love to have Deja's gateway and archives as part of their services. What a jewel that would make!
Sometimes you don't even have enough information to do a well-refined search. You don't even know the proper jargon to look for. In these cases, unranked search engines like NorthernLight or AltaVista are the worst thing you could use. Google is much better at this kind of search, even though your first few searches may just be spent finding out what your search terms should be.
But I agree that NorthernLight is a very good backup site if the eminently qualified Google can't find what you're looking for.
And I have to observe that while I was using AltaVista, I would regularly see pr0n hits, nothing inconvenient, but they were there. But I never see them using Google.
Also, if I know the site but forgot the URL, and type into Google good keywords, Google always brings the site I want up on the first page, generally in the top 1 or 2 hits.
That said, I'm still amazed that no one has adapted any of the TSR novels to the screen. Some of these are quite good (e.g., Prince of Lies, Cormyr), have plots simple enough to translate well to the screen, and I've been told that TSR/WotC/Hasbro makes more money from the novels than from any of the game aids. Where are the film versions? With the state of the art in CGI, and the proven appetite in the market for fantasy fare, what's the impediment?
With any luck, Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies will demonstrate that literary quality Fantasy will make money at the box office.
You mean the strategy of "charge as much as possible and deliver as little as you can get away with?" Yeah - and the market has come to accept it, too. I can remember the 70's, when Japanese auto imports began to claim more and more of the market. People were amazed at how much car they could get, and how reliable they were, for the price. The American consumer was unused to such value.
We still are. But then again, we have access to some of the best bargains on the planet. There aren't many other places where a consumer can get as much for their dollar (or ruble or ecu or yuan) as we do. Sure, most "durable goods" aren't as durable as they should be. Maybe our electronic gizmos deliver function, but suffer flaws in the interface, utility, workmanship and/or materials. But at least we have access to them.
After the discussion of the influence Japan had on Detroit, it should come as no surprise that of all the commodities introduced since the industrial revolution, the auto, and its ancillary products, are the only things where the US consumer gets a real value for his money. Got $10k? If you shop smart, you can buy a car that will run reliably for more than 10 years, at over 25 mpg, with average annual maintenance costs of just a few hundred a year. That's a deal!
Need gas? It's the cheapest anywhere in the world except for places like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Auto services? At $40/year, AAA Membership is one of the best bargains in America. In very few other countries can an individual own and operate a car for such a small fraction of his income. The only better value an American will find is in pre-industrial products: food and apparel, primarily.
But consider this: In most places on this globe, people spend more of their income on sustenance than we Americans spend on our autos.
So although your thesis appears valid from an American's point of view, from a Ugandan's or Korean's perspective, it's trite at best.
Yeah, but if you payed proper attention to quality control when you made the jam you wouldn't have to spend any time sorting out the bugs afterwards.