By your logic, I believe everyone should drive around stretch hummers.
So what if it requires expensive infrastructure (far more road space) and is tremendously more inefficient. Everyone would be more comfortable and safer.
Clearly everyone should drive hummers as priuses also pollute and cause environmental damage in their creation.
Beyond that point, wireless power only makes sense in a few circumstances - namely when around something that is connected to the grid. You'll still need batteries, unless you expect planes, cars, parks, non-new age houses/cities, etc. to all have this wireless power.
And if you're talking about transmitting blanket wireless over entire cities...
1. It's tremendously inefficient. Physics will only allow it to be made so efficient, and that's still tremendously inefficient.
2. How will you keep track of who gets what energy? Oh yea, that's right, it's practically free, so there will be no worries.
3. Laptops and the like are getting much faster/more energy efficient. Even if this comes out tomorrow, it still won't be widely available for at least a decade. In the meantime, battery life will get better, so the impact won't be as great. Plugging in a computer at night isn't that big a deal.
4. We still haven't gotten high speed wireless yet. Wireless internet (802.11b) has been around for what, close to 9 years and we still haven't gotten anywhere close to providing 'free' or 'truly fast' internet, and coverage is still highly lacking - and wireless internet is relatively free and physics isn't against it.
If we developed cold fusion, it might be plausible. Of course when we develop such a plentiful energy source, we'll probably have developed a more efficient mobile power source, like fuel cells or http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/10/1821208 capacitors. Sorry to rain on your flying car. It'll be neat for certain applications, but I doubt it'll be something that important for laptops.
Part of the problem is what you listed. Another part of the problem is that it's not too far from the truth. There are a number of fields that more or less throw your resume out if you don't have a degree/good school on it.
We've also completely neglected trades which are necessary and profitable (electricians, mechanics, plumbers, etc.)
By pushing children to go to college when they shouldn't, we wind up with far too many B.A. degrees because they're easy and they're what they know. This is bad for a large number of reasons. 1. The cost for engineering/science vs a BA is typically within 10% at a given school. 2. The jobs almost always pay 20-50% less. 3. There's an increasing supply of these majors, so job competition will be fierce.
We need more teachers and so forth, and I don't disparage a solid background in the arts at all. Few nations advance off art, they advance off engineering and science.
So yea, it'll be painful if we don't start advocating more technical degrees and majors. The space and aeronautics fields are especially bare, with average age around 50-55.
Hopefully we can create a new wave of interest in science and technology, similar to the space race.
Oh wait...actually you're right. It can't be a laptop unless it comes with asbestos pants or its own carbonite chamber... sorry, my bad. Yea, it'd be completely ridiculous to build a 'laptop' like that.
Thank you for this. I've been saying it for a few years - this adminstration is too good at doing certain things for it to be incompetent.
There are a number of good individuals who have tried to stop it, and they've failed. If you play darts and hit the same exact point time and time again, you probably aren't horrible at darts, even if you score no points. You probably wanted to hit that point.
It's the same thing being used by McCain this time around. Palin was a horrible choice, except for being great at unifying the base and being a punching bag with a picture of a kitten on it. It's so easy to punch, but you look evil doing it. The relevant issues are ignored.
Bravo. The GOP seems to know it's base very well. I still have hope that more people are more intelligent and won't be persuaded by 'gut' feelings, but well... I can see it happening.
Honestly, there's a reason I don't generally go to buffets. I don't get my money's worth out of the trip, and I could go to another restaurant and get a better meal.
It actually makes sense to bill by a few definable metrics for internet usage. 1) Speed (Down or up) 2) Reliability (guarantee of speed and/or uptime) 3) Transfer
Yes, transfer makes sense. If it took you 3 hours to go 60 miles on the highway because of the bumper to bumper trucks on the highway, you'd demand something to get them off it. You'd demand more trains, or more expensive tolls for trucks, because they're using more.
The one reason I'd be hesitant about this is the lack of competition in the US internet market (which is one of the reasons for the problem in the first place). However nowhere else would you have someone who uses 100 times more of something pay the same price as someone else.
As a final thought, if everyone only paid per GB, it would be interesting. Mom and pop wouldn't mind 3-5$/gb, since their total bill would be maybe 20$, but other people would - and so most of their bandwidth would remain unused. They'd almost have to lower prices to increase demand. (or they'd strangle the internet and kill it in large sections of the US)
When one uses many web applications it is, or at least operating as a peer with the server.
I think the current OS is a indelible part of computing, certainly for the foreseeable future. Games, photo/video editing, programming, music, etc. are all programs that people like to have on a computer for bandwidth/latency/processing power reasons.
I also think people like storing their own content on their own machines.
That said, a modern computer is fairly useless without internet and is increasingly moving toward being application based with persistent data transfers. Chrome is setting out to create a platform for fast and safe execution of those applications. It does a substantial portion of a traditional OS's tasks. I'd say a hybrid broswer/OS is a decent summation of it. The fact that it runs on top of another OS doesn't disqualify it.
It's clearly unreasonable for Taggert Transcontinental to try to compete with the Chinese, who have such an advantage in human labor costs. The only way this could be possible is if a large government subsidy was given, especially given these trying national times. Besides we couldn't possibly compete with them; they're getting all their steel from Chinese factories, who clearly are too competitive*. We should get the UN involved and stop this outrageous, unfair progress. It's making us look bad and we can't possibly be expected to compete with a nation that has three times as many people.
I doubt the reference will be lost. A lot of corporations have found it's easier to get the US government to either help create artificial mono/oligopolies or to get them to tax citizens/customers for them. See internet bandwidth, the banking/housing crisis, the airline industry...
*I know the Chinese subsidize their steel industry. This should at worst have no impact on us and in theory should be beneficial. (They tax their citizens to provide the world cheaper steel)
It looks to my untrained eye like google chrome is working on seriously pushing a web OS (or a hybrid browser/OS)
It'll also make for a damn solid browser, but a lot of the features they're looking to add are necessary for these things to really take off. They want things to be very stable, fast and secure. The first two are needed for wide scale user adoption, and the third is needed to become a long term standard. (and it's far easier to add from scratch than later on.)
They're also working on making it developer friendly it sounds.
I think the tabs on the top is a psychological differentiation - if you have one tab for streaming music and one for reading news, they're really doing two completely different things. I wouldn't be surprised to see subtabs (hopefully with separate processes) below for having x number of 'normal' tabs open.
Child Porn is already illegal to create or host in the first place in most countries around the world.
On the other hand what she is doing either is:
a) Illegal, in which case the government shouldn't be doing it, and she points this out.
b) Legal, in which case neither one is doing any wrong, though the government may be guilty of violating civil law. (breach of contract/duty to protect constituents)
c) Illegal for private citizens, legal for the government (like operating a police force). I'd find it hard to justify this one, given the nature of data and being public.
Suppose I take a bunch of public statements and infer something that is either legally confidential or just of a personal nature. Assuming I built my information on entirely legal information, I'm allowed to publish my findings. If you weren't many journalistic articles would never be allowed.
Also remember you can't punish a non-existential entity, such as a government or corporation. You can pursue civil actions and get damages, but no criminal actions can be levied against the entities, since they aren't persons. At best you could force the disbandment of a given entity, but you're really punishing the shareholders in that case.
Executives, workers, managers - they can all be held liable for actions of the corporation or government.
You're right. I'm sure that being in the USSR started with much better internet than us because of being communist.
It was the fact that their grocery stores were entirely unstocked that was the reason they failed. That when people came to America they wept the first time they saw one of our grocery stores, of just seeing row after row of food - they thought it was impossible for that to happen, and yet here it was, all over the country.
I assure you their infrastructure was horrible in 1989. I'm also guessing that they were more concerned about remedying the lack of grocery stores than the lack of internet in the early 90's. It could be that competition tends to force well... the best.
If milk was 10$ a half gallon in the U.S., then I can assure you that we'd have more cows, or we'd have goat milk or soy milk. The market would do that, because there's too much benefit to producing.
I'm not going to do the research on PPP, but I'm guessing that it's not large enough to make the difference of 5+ times more for 1/3rd the cost, nor is government subsidy (which as I pointed out, we give our telcoms - including some of those taxes on your phone/cable bills)
I attempted to compare apples to apples. The population density in NYC or LA has to be greater than the population density of any of those countries outside their cities. Nowhere did I mention our average broadband speed, which even in the best of states is under 5 mbps IIRC. I didn't mention the average (under 3 mpbs), and I certainly didn't mention Alaska (under 1 mpbs)
Now an above poster mentions that a former USSR country (Romania) gets 10-15 times faster actual download speeds (20/2) than a 20/5 person in the US, and pays 1/3 as much.
As for your argument about density - Romania's average density is 236/sq mi. There are 11 US states with a density greater than that, according to wikipedia.
In my opinion (not to disparage Romania at all), but when a country that was under Communist control until 20 years ago has better internet speeds for 1/3 the price of the US, it should be entirely unacceptable.
Since you like economics, you should know duopolies (which are what most local ISPs are) and oligopolies (nationwide ISPs) don't allocate resources efficiently in many cases and reduce consumer surplus.
I'm also pretty sure U.S. telecoms have been given subsidies and/or tax breaks in return for guarantees on broadband penetration and speed. For the most part, telecoms are years behind where they promised to be if they got said subsidies.
If there's anything else you have a question about, let me know.
Allow me to elaborate on the broadband issue. If you look at average and top speeds available in NYC, LA, Chicago, or any other major city, you'll find that they are 2-5 times slower than the average available to the whole country of Japan, South Korea, France and Sweeden.
The fastest speeds you can currently get from Verizon (via FiOS) are 50/20 (down/up), for which you'll pay $145 a month. This is below the average of what you'd get in the above countries, and I'm almost certain it costs 25-33% of the above rate.
A more reasonable 20/20 or 20/5 costs 70 or 57. The bottom line is that IF you can get the service, you'll pay 3-6 times the cost per mbps as you would in another country. One could argue that markup is to pay for further penetration, but eh... we're still well behind in internet speeds even in our metro areas.
To my knowledge Verizon offers the fastest service plans available for residential access, and I'm guessing their $/mbps is competitive as well. I'm glad that they're at least offering a 20/20 or a 50/20 package, but don't kid yourself - we're still pretty far behind in our coverage.
I doubt that they'll cost billions to destroy; atomic and chemical weapons created something that was toxic.
Mind control weapons shouldn't be any more costly to dispose of than a tank or gun. If it's electronic, it'll likely be things already found in today's electronics. Not exactly great for the environment, but not immediately toxic.
Now if it's a drug in gaseous form, it may be a bit worse, but even then something that is mostly safe for human consumption probably won't hurt the environment too much.
For all the reasons that you mention, it makes me very glad Google is around. In general they're responsible for opening up a lot of markets that would otherwise not happen.
Youtube doesn't make much money, but it enables other online video companies a respite because everyone targets youtube. Of course all this online video creates a huge demand for increased bandwidth. It creates more videos, since they can now be uploaded, and it creates more data that needs to be searched.
Even if Google doesn't make money directly, they make money indirectly, either one degree away (providing bandwidth, if they decide to enter this market) or two degrees away (providing search for competitors or other businesses needing to sort this data)
All in all it's very refreshing to see a company that competes, and isn't afraid of helping 'competitors' because it knows that it can make money off them. It is the antithesis of the anti-net neutrality argument. All this video we have to transport will kill us. We hate that we'll have a higher demand for our service! Stop online video!
I may be misunderstanding what you mean, but wouldn't searching for multiple tags be essentially the same?
For example, if I want to search for all my final work (to back up), i can search for the 'final' tag.
If I want to search for all my English finals, I'd search 'final' + 'english'. All those in freshmen year add + 'freshmen' or '[actual year]'
You could even set up associative tags if you wish. Do something like 99 > 1999 > freshmen, which might imply levels in tags (for example 99 could be a year of a sports player, so you wouldn't want to associate 1999 with it). Generally freshmen would be a strict subset of 1999 tags (or 1995/1999 if you want HS/college). Thus if you tag something freshmen, it's also tagged 1999 and 99. Of course you could use something to make ignore associations for a given search.
This is making it far more complicated than it has to be (and too complicated to be easily accepted by most people), but if I'm understanding you right there is very little (if anything) that you can do with folders that you can't do with tagging. The reverse is true, however one is easier for the vast majority of cases. You can write most of an OS in a logical programming language, but it's much much easier to do with an imperative language.
I agree that the look of what i saw was pretty messy, but I think we'll see far more interest in making computers 'elegant' for the end users in the future. Enabling a relatively computer literate person to do what *nix power users can do by stringing together 10 programs. Of course it will require 20 times the resources to do this, but it's where technology is heading. After all, you didn't really think 4 GB was enough for anyone, did you?
Intangible products still have labor costs associated with them, as well as any physical facilities used. Various government regulations (taxes, tariffs, etc.) can also increase price.
As for your understanding of markets... you do realize a market is any way of dividing a group of potential consumers, be it age, wealth, sex, geographic region or business/personal. Charging more in one market than another is market segmentation, and producers drool at the thought of perfect market segmentation.
Any price they charge is 'what the market will bear', and their goal is to capture as much consumer surplus as possible. If Europeans are willing to pay 50-100% more for the software, they must still be deriving some benefit from said software, even if not as if they purchased if at US prices. The only area you can argue this isn't the case is pre-loaded software that you have to buy to own a computer, but chances are the EU allows people to avoid paying MS for vista if they intend to use *nix.
The reverse is also true. Many Asian countries often have IP that is 10-30% the price of the US because the market won't support a higher price. Lower overall consumer benefit from said products and (arguably mostly) rampant piracy make this the case. There's a fairly large US market for international editions of college textbooks. If someone can manage to get a physical product from one country to the other, I'd imagine a digital product would be even easier.
Finally, I suggest Atlas Shrugged. BooHoo, someone's made a unique product and isn't selling it at a cost I'd like to pay. Beyond necessities, this really isn't the companies problem. If enough consumers feel the same way, prices will drop, a competitor will emerge, or people will find another way to get what they deem they need.
You can witness this happening with the music industry. Consumers found an alternative and the market was forced to adapt.
You're not exactly right about decomposition of organic matter. I recall reading that people were able to pull out a package of hotdogs years old, and they were still in a completely recognizable form.
The various conditions found near the bottoms of landfills tend to preserve organic matter quite well; we're kinda working on making oil (over hundreds of thousands of years), rather than dirt or similar that might come from regular decomposition. I suspect the biggest reason is the lack of oxygen shortly after they're buried.
Still, disposing of organic matter is probably quite a bit easier than actually separating the many inorganic types of waste, or finding a way of crushing up a monitor and the small amounts of each element.
Bringing up salt water - there are a lot of minerals dissolved in the ocean.
There are also a ton of minerals contained in our trash dumps.
As others have pointed out, the solution is alternative elements or recycling. Once again almost all of humanity's current problems could be solved with a cheap enough energy. Energy would obviously be solved, water would be solved (desalinization), and if that was practical enough, food would be solved (since water is a key issue with not being able to produce crops. If the new source was comparatively clean (compared to the new demands for energy), pollution would also be solved.
I suppose getting the solution used at optometrist's offices to dilate the pupils is straight out. I mean a drug purposefully designed to do it vs touting pot as a cure for everything. Each and every time people choose the pot. Hippies.
For those who haven't experienced these drops, they reduce the iris to a sliver (~2 mm). Short of living in a cave for a few days, I don't know if you can dilate your pupil that much naturally. Needless to say driving afterward is generally painful.
He might be referring to the fact that blizzard doesn't seem to do terribly well on the console side; ghost got canceled, and I haven't heard anywhere close to the same kind of praise for things like lost vikings as for SC, WC and Diablo.
The only PC game they botched was a WC spinoff, lord of the clans (or something), which was never actually released since they couldn't make it nearly perfect.
In general blizzard has the track record of pixar. Valve, Nintendo, and Square Enix release good games, but every PC game Blizzard releases is pretty much game of the year material. Their expansion packs are game of the year material.
I suppose you haven't seen the salary that plumbers, electricians, mechanics, etc. make. It's a mistake to call these professions anything other than a necessary part of the economy, and one that is unable to be outsourced unless robots become very common.
I also know a carpenter/handyman who probably didn't do that well in school. Tell him what you want done though, and he'll have the angles and lengths figured out faster than you will, usually without writing anything down. It is a serious mistake to assume most people don't have a significant competitive advantage in one area or another, or that what HS intelligence tests is the only thing in the world that means anything.
Plus with the huge emphasis on college, many of these fields are understaffed. If you have to wait a few days+ to get that toilet or shower of yours fixed, you can bet that they aren't at the poverty level. Once source I looked at has starting salary around 20k, with median salary around 45k. Even starting salary is above the poverty line for a family of 3.
While it's unfortunately true more often than not, there are certainly some good high school teachers out there; ones who teach because they enjoy teaching, or were inspired by a good teacher. Teachers have to go through at least 4 years of college (and I think usually 5-6), so they aren't exactly the bottom of the barrel.
Unfortunately I view the ever increasing politics involved in being a teacher coupled with the diminishing amount of authority they have to actually do something as key issues. Teachers have little authority to break the mold at many schools, and even if they do break it in a positive way, they may very well get reprimanded for breaking rules, or encouraging unsafe behavior. It's unfortunate, but after a few such occurrences they're likely to stop trying, even if the student's are learning exceptionally well. Money speaks volumes.
Personally I view the solutions as either increasing salaries (and standards to which teachers are upheld) or decreasing class sizes. Decreasing class sizes would likely be more practicable and effective; there is a limit to how many students even a great teacher can teach, one-on-one time is key to helping/encouraging students, and it allows for both more class offerings and better differentiation between intelligence levels. Lumping too many students into one class makes the stupid ones feel even worse when they can't keep up, while the smarter students are bored.
There's little doubt that innate intelligence can overcome brute force, but the incredibly crucial part is the ability to build upon previous generations work and to work collaboratively.
Termite and ant colonies are examples of this. There was a group of scientists who injected a mound with concrete, and when they excavated it, the inner area was dozens of cubic meters. Large nests can protrude 9 meters above the surface while the underground area can extend 25 meters. The nests are climate controlled, including ventilation and are somehow protected against rain.
All this from an insect that few would call intelligent. Compared to the relative size it dwarfs all but the largest cities man has built. General intelligence is nice, but even if we had 10 times the processing power of our current brains, but had to learn everything from scratch each time, I doubt anyone would ever get past the iron age. There is only so much one can do with a lifetime.
Also humans don't have a great deal of general intelligence it seems. There is a great deal of our brains dedicated to social interactions and emotions. If we ran with a simpler set of social interactions, I have no doubt the average human would make Einstein look like an idiot regarding physics. Some evidence of this can be found in individuals with certain mental 'defects', like autism, which are able to master a task well beyond what most other humans can hope to, even with intense effort.
Finally... it really depends on what you mean by control. Vermin and bacteria spring to mind as creatures that exist nearly everywhere, despite our best efforts to eliminate many of them. Yes, we thrive with the most purpose and with the fastest increases (hence the idea of a singularity), but we are not the only species to thrive on this planet.
In honesty, I don't really see the point of greatly expanding space travel at this point. Yes, Mars would be nice, but in terms of travel past the asteroid belt, there's really not much to be gained due to the massive amounts of time required, even if you do manage to get to 99% of the speed of light.
Imagine you get to 99% of the speed of light. You launch a ship. It would hardly be impossible for 25 years to go by and we have another physics revolution, where we understand how to go faster than light (or at least appear to) and to build a ship that arrives at the destination years before the first ship does.
Not to sound too sci-fi for people, but as the above poster points out, the laws of physics are far more restrictive for traveling than for computation. It is highly unlikely that even if we do develop a way to cheaply achieve 5 times the speed of light that interstellar commerce would be economically effective, and so you'd wind up with two pretty much independent civilizations, with one having a huge industrial advantage. There will be no spice or amazing new material on this new planet - atoms are atoms, and we've found all that can be natural. Any unnatural material could very likely be created easier in this solar system than transporting it in ships 4+ light years.
This ignores that it would be far more effective to sent a digital human to do that job. However if we've gotten to that point, there's really no need for expansion, as humanity wouldn't really consume resources, other than raw atoms which would be needed to expand computational power, and raw atoms are quite common in the universe. If humanity turned even a fraction of a cubic mile of matter into a highly advanced computer of some sort, it would be be beyond our comprehension. If you turned the moon into a computer, it would likely be able to trivially break our current 'laws' of physics. It could simulate the entirety of life on earth, from creation to now in minutes, if that.
If the singularity happens, it will be as beyond the comprehension of us at present as our thoughts to that of a bacteria. For all we know, Earth could be a mere flicker in such an entity, a mere collection of 'particles' designed to produce an outcome to some problem, or the equivalent of a dream.
Slashdot Mirror
By your logic, I believe everyone should drive around stretch hummers.
So what if it requires expensive infrastructure (far more road space) and is tremendously more inefficient. Everyone would be more comfortable and safer.
Clearly everyone should drive hummers as priuses also pollute and cause environmental damage in their creation.
Beyond that point, wireless power only makes sense in a few circumstances - namely when around something that is connected to the grid. You'll still need batteries, unless you expect planes, cars, parks, non-new age houses/cities, etc. to all have this wireless power.
And if you're talking about transmitting blanket wireless over entire cities...
1. It's tremendously inefficient. Physics will only allow it to be made so efficient, and that's still tremendously inefficient.
2. How will you keep track of who gets what energy? Oh yea, that's right, it's practically free, so there will be no worries.
3. Laptops and the like are getting much faster/more energy efficient. Even if this comes out tomorrow, it still won't be widely available for at least a decade. In the meantime, battery life will get better, so the impact won't be as great. Plugging in a computer at night isn't that big a deal.
4. We still haven't gotten high speed wireless yet. Wireless internet (802.11b) has been around for what, close to 9 years and we still haven't gotten anywhere close to providing 'free' or 'truly fast' internet, and coverage is still highly lacking - and wireless internet is relatively free and physics isn't against it.
If we developed cold fusion, it might be plausible. Of course when we develop such a plentiful energy source, we'll probably have developed a more efficient mobile power source, like fuel cells or http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/10/1821208 capacitors. Sorry to rain on your flying car. It'll be neat for certain applications, but I doubt it'll be something that important for laptops.
Part of the problem is what you listed. Another part of the problem is that it's not too far from the truth. There are a number of fields that more or less throw your resume out if you don't have a degree/good school on it.
We've also completely neglected trades which are necessary and profitable (electricians, mechanics, plumbers, etc.)
By pushing children to go to college when they shouldn't, we wind up with far too many B.A. degrees because they're easy and they're what they know. This is bad for a large number of reasons.
1. The cost for engineering/science vs a BA is typically within 10% at a given school.
2. The jobs almost always pay 20-50% less.
3. There's an increasing supply of these majors, so job competition will be fierce.
We need more teachers and so forth, and I don't disparage a solid background in the arts at all. Few nations advance off art, they advance off engineering and science.
So yea, it'll be painful if we don't start advocating more technical degrees and majors. The space and aeronautics fields are especially bare, with average age around 50-55.
Hopefully we can create a new wave of interest in science and technology, similar to the space race.
it's a laptop.
It's got too many GPUs to be a laptop!
Oh wait...actually you're right. It can't be a laptop unless it comes with asbestos pants or its own carbonite chamber... sorry, my bad. Yea, it'd be completely ridiculous to build a 'laptop' like that.
Thank you for this. I've been saying it for a few years - this adminstration is too good at doing certain things for it to be incompetent.
There are a number of good individuals who have tried to stop it, and they've failed. If you play darts and hit the same exact point time and time again, you probably aren't horrible at darts, even if you score no points. You probably wanted to hit that point.
It's the same thing being used by McCain this time around. Palin was a horrible choice, except for being great at unifying the base and being a punching bag with a picture of a kitten on it. It's so easy to punch, but you look evil doing it. The relevant issues are ignored.
Bravo. The GOP seems to know it's base very well. I still have hope that more people are more intelligent and won't be persuaded by 'gut' feelings, but well... I can see it happening.
Honestly, there's a reason I don't generally go to buffets. I don't get my money's worth out of the trip, and I could go to another restaurant and get a better meal.
It actually makes sense to bill by a few definable metrics for internet usage.
1) Speed (Down or up)
2) Reliability (guarantee of speed and/or uptime)
3) Transfer
Yes, transfer makes sense. If it took you 3 hours to go 60 miles on the highway because of the bumper to bumper trucks on the highway, you'd demand something to get them off it. You'd demand more trains, or more expensive tolls for trucks, because they're using more.
The one reason I'd be hesitant about this is the lack of competition in the US internet market (which is one of the reasons for the problem in the first place). However nowhere else would you have someone who uses 100 times more of something pay the same price as someone else.
As a final thought, if everyone only paid per GB, it would be interesting. Mom and pop wouldn't mind 3-5$/gb, since their total bill would be maybe 20$, but other people would - and so most of their bandwidth would remain unused. They'd almost have to lower prices to increase demand. (or they'd strangle the internet and kill it in large sections of the US)
http://ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php?d=20080804
Not sure if that was a reference or not...
Also this was apparently news about a month ago. (At least achievements)
When one uses many web applications it is, or at least operating as a peer with the server.
I think the current OS is a indelible part of computing, certainly for the foreseeable future. Games, photo/video editing, programming, music, etc. are all programs that people like to have on a computer for bandwidth/latency/processing power reasons.
I also think people like storing their own content on their own machines.
That said, a modern computer is fairly useless without internet and is increasingly moving toward being application based with persistent data transfers. Chrome is setting out to create a platform for fast and safe execution of those applications. It does a substantial portion of a traditional OS's tasks. I'd say a hybrid broswer/OS is a decent summation of it. The fact that it runs on top of another OS doesn't disqualify it.
It's clearly unreasonable for Taggert Transcontinental to try to compete with the Chinese, who have such an advantage in human labor costs. The only way this could be possible is if a large government subsidy was given, especially given these trying national times. Besides we couldn't possibly compete with them; they're getting all their steel from Chinese factories, who clearly are too competitive*. We should get the UN involved and stop this outrageous, unfair progress. It's making us look bad and we can't possibly be expected to compete with a nation that has three times as many people.
I doubt the reference will be lost. A lot of corporations have found it's easier to get the US government to either help create artificial mono/oligopolies or to get them to tax citizens/customers for them. See internet bandwidth, the banking/housing crisis, the airline industry...
*I know the Chinese subsidize their steel industry. This should at worst have no impact on us and in theory should be beneficial. (They tax their citizens to provide the world cheaper steel)
It looks to my untrained eye like google chrome is working on seriously pushing a web OS (or a hybrid browser/OS)
It'll also make for a damn solid browser, but a lot of the features they're looking to add are necessary for these things to really take off. They want things to be very stable, fast and secure. The first two are needed for wide scale user adoption, and the third is needed to become a long term standard. (and it's far easier to add from scratch than later on.)
They're also working on making it developer friendly it sounds.
I think the tabs on the top is a psychological differentiation - if you have one tab for streaming music and one for reading news, they're really doing two completely different things. I wouldn't be surprised to see subtabs (hopefully with separate processes) below for having x number of 'normal' tabs open.
Child Porn is already illegal to create or host in the first place in most countries around the world.
On the other hand what she is doing either is:
a) Illegal, in which case the government shouldn't be doing it, and she points this out.
b) Legal, in which case neither one is doing any wrong, though the government may be guilty of violating civil law. (breach of contract/duty to protect constituents)
c) Illegal for private citizens, legal for the government (like operating a police force). I'd find it hard to justify this one, given the nature of data and being public.
Suppose I take a bunch of public statements and infer something that is either legally confidential or just of a personal nature. Assuming I built my information on entirely legal information, I'm allowed to publish my findings. If you weren't many journalistic articles would never be allowed.
Also remember you can't punish a non-existential entity, such as a government or corporation. You can pursue civil actions and get damages, but no criminal actions can be levied against the entities, since they aren't persons. At best you could force the disbandment of a given entity, but you're really punishing the shareholders in that case.
Executives, workers, managers - they can all be held liable for actions of the corporation or government.
You're right. I'm sure that being in the USSR started with much better internet than us because of being communist.
It was the fact that their grocery stores were entirely unstocked that was the reason they failed. That when people came to America they wept the first time they saw one of our grocery stores, of just seeing row after row of food - they thought it was impossible for that to happen, and yet here it was, all over the country.
I assure you their infrastructure was horrible in 1989. I'm also guessing that they were more concerned about remedying the lack of grocery stores than the lack of internet in the early 90's. It could be that competition tends to force well... the best.
As for your grasp on economics...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Monopoly-surpluses.svg
If milk was 10$ a half gallon in the U.S., then I can assure you that we'd have more cows, or we'd have goat milk or soy milk. The market would do that, because there's too much benefit to producing.
I'm not going to do the research on PPP, but I'm guessing that it's not large enough to make the difference of 5+ times more for 1/3rd the cost, nor is government subsidy (which as I pointed out, we give our telcoms - including some of those taxes on your phone/cable bills)
I attempted to compare apples to apples. The population density in NYC or LA has to be greater than the population density of any of those countries outside their cities. Nowhere did I mention our average broadband speed, which even in the best of states is under 5 mbps IIRC. I didn't mention the average (under 3 mpbs), and I certainly didn't mention Alaska (under 1 mpbs)
Now an above poster mentions that a former USSR country (Romania) gets 10-15 times faster actual download speeds (20/2) than a 20/5 person in the US, and pays 1/3 as much.
As for your argument about density - Romania's average density is 236/sq mi. There are 11 US states with a density greater than that, according to wikipedia.
In my opinion (not to disparage Romania at all), but when a country that was under Communist control until 20 years ago has better internet speeds for 1/3 the price of the US, it should be entirely unacceptable.
Since you like economics, you should know duopolies (which are what most local ISPs are) and oligopolies (nationwide ISPs) don't allocate resources efficiently in many cases and reduce consumer surplus.
I'm also pretty sure U.S. telecoms have been given subsidies and/or tax breaks in return for guarantees on broadband penetration and speed. For the most part, telecoms are years behind where they promised to be if they got said subsidies.
If there's anything else you have a question about, let me know.
Allow me to elaborate on the broadband issue. If you look at average and top speeds available in NYC, LA, Chicago, or any other major city, you'll find that they are 2-5 times slower than the average available to the whole country of Japan, South Korea, France and Sweeden.
The fastest speeds you can currently get from Verizon (via FiOS) are 50/20 (down/up), for which you'll pay $145 a month. This is below the average of what you'd get in the above countries, and I'm almost certain it costs 25-33% of the above rate.
A more reasonable 20/20 or 20/5 costs 70 or 57. The bottom line is that IF you can get the service, you'll pay 3-6 times the cost per mbps as you would in another country. One could argue that markup is to pay for further penetration, but eh... we're still well behind in internet speeds even in our metro areas.
To my knowledge Verizon offers the fastest service plans available for residential access, and I'm guessing their $/mbps is competitive as well. I'm glad that they're at least offering a 20/20 or a 50/20 package, but don't kid yourself - we're still pretty far behind in our coverage.
I doubt that they'll cost billions to destroy; atomic and chemical weapons created something that was toxic.
Mind control weapons shouldn't be any more costly to dispose of than a tank or gun. If it's electronic, it'll likely be things already found in today's electronics. Not exactly great for the environment, but not immediately toxic.
Now if it's a drug in gaseous form, it may be a bit worse, but even then something that is mostly safe for human consumption probably won't hurt the environment too much.
For all the reasons that you mention, it makes me very glad Google is around. In general they're responsible for opening up a lot of markets that would otherwise not happen.
Youtube doesn't make much money, but it enables other online video companies a respite because everyone targets youtube. Of course all this online video creates a huge demand for increased bandwidth. It creates more videos, since they can now be uploaded, and it creates more data that needs to be searched.
Even if Google doesn't make money directly, they make money indirectly, either one degree away (providing bandwidth, if they decide to enter this market) or two degrees away (providing search for competitors or other businesses needing to sort this data)
All in all it's very refreshing to see a company that competes, and isn't afraid of helping 'competitors' because it knows that it can make money off them. It is the antithesis of the anti-net neutrality argument. All this video we have to transport will kill us. We hate that we'll have a higher demand for our service! Stop online video!
I may be misunderstanding what you mean, but wouldn't searching for multiple tags be essentially the same?
For example, if I want to search for all my final work (to back up), i can search for the 'final' tag.
If I want to search for all my English finals, I'd search 'final' + 'english'. All those in freshmen year add + 'freshmen' or '[actual year]'
You could even set up associative tags if you wish. Do something like 99 > 1999 > freshmen, which might imply levels in tags (for example 99 could be a year of a sports player, so you wouldn't want to associate 1999 with it). Generally freshmen would be a strict subset of 1999 tags (or 1995/1999 if you want HS/college). Thus if you tag something freshmen, it's also tagged 1999 and 99. Of course you could use something to make ignore associations for a given search.
This is making it far more complicated than it has to be (and too complicated to be easily accepted by most people), but if I'm understanding you right there is very little (if anything) that you can do with folders that you can't do with tagging. The reverse is true, however one is easier for the vast majority of cases. You can write most of an OS in a logical programming language, but it's much much easier to do with an imperative language.
I agree that the look of what i saw was pretty messy, but I think we'll see far more interest in making computers 'elegant' for the end users in the future. Enabling a relatively computer literate person to do what *nix power users can do by stringing together 10 programs. Of course it will require 20 times the resources to do this, but it's where technology is heading. After all, you didn't really think 4 GB was enough for anyone, did you?
Intangible products still have labor costs associated with them, as well as any physical facilities used. Various government regulations (taxes, tariffs, etc.) can also increase price.
As for your understanding of markets... you do realize a market is any way of dividing a group of potential consumers, be it age, wealth, sex, geographic region or business/personal. Charging more in one market than another is market segmentation, and producers drool at the thought of perfect market segmentation.
Any price they charge is 'what the market will bear', and their goal is to capture as much consumer surplus as possible. If Europeans are willing to pay 50-100% more for the software, they must still be deriving some benefit from said software, even if not as if they purchased if at US prices. The only area you can argue this isn't the case is pre-loaded software that you have to buy to own a computer, but chances are the EU allows people to avoid paying MS for vista if they intend to use *nix.
The reverse is also true. Many Asian countries often have IP that is 10-30% the price of the US because the market won't support a higher price. Lower overall consumer benefit from said products and (arguably mostly) rampant piracy make this the case. There's a fairly large US market for international editions of college textbooks. If someone can manage to get a physical product from one country to the other, I'd imagine a digital product would be even easier.
Finally, I suggest Atlas Shrugged. BooHoo, someone's made a unique product and isn't selling it at a cost I'd like to pay. Beyond necessities, this really isn't the companies problem. If enough consumers feel the same way, prices will drop, a competitor will emerge, or people will find another way to get what they deem they need.
You can witness this happening with the music industry. Consumers found an alternative and the market was forced to adapt.
You're not exactly right about decomposition of organic matter. I recall reading that people were able to pull out a package of hotdogs years old, and they were still in a completely recognizable form.
The various conditions found near the bottoms of landfills tend to preserve organic matter quite well; we're kinda working on making oil (over hundreds of thousands of years), rather than dirt or similar that might come from regular decomposition. I suspect the biggest reason is the lack of oxygen shortly after they're buried.
Still, disposing of organic matter is probably quite a bit easier than actually separating the many inorganic types of waste, or finding a way of crushing up a monitor and the small amounts of each element.
Bringing up salt water - there are a lot of minerals dissolved in the ocean.
There are also a ton of minerals contained in our trash dumps.
As others have pointed out, the solution is alternative elements or recycling. Once again almost all of humanity's current problems could be solved with a cheap enough energy. Energy would obviously be solved, water would be solved (desalinization), and if that was practical enough, food would be solved (since water is a key issue with not being able to produce crops. If the new source was comparatively clean (compared to the new demands for energy), pollution would also be solved.
I suppose getting the solution used at optometrist's offices to dilate the pupils is straight out. I mean a drug purposefully designed to do it vs touting pot as a cure for everything. Each and every time people choose the pot. Hippies.
For those who haven't experienced these drops, they reduce the iris to a sliver (~2 mm). Short of living in a cave for a few days, I don't know if you can dilate your pupil that much naturally. Needless to say driving afterward is generally painful.
He might be referring to the fact that blizzard doesn't seem to do terribly well on the console side; ghost got canceled, and I haven't heard anywhere close to the same kind of praise for things like lost vikings as for SC, WC and Diablo.
The only PC game they botched was a WC spinoff, lord of the clans (or something), which was never actually released since they couldn't make it nearly perfect.
In general blizzard has the track record of pixar. Valve, Nintendo, and Square Enix release good games, but every PC game Blizzard releases is pretty much game of the year material. Their expansion packs are game of the year material.
I suppose you haven't seen the salary that plumbers, electricians, mechanics, etc. make. It's a mistake to call these professions anything other than a necessary part of the economy, and one that is unable to be outsourced unless robots become very common.
I also know a carpenter/handyman who probably didn't do that well in school. Tell him what you want done though, and he'll have the angles and lengths figured out faster than you will, usually without writing anything down. It is a serious mistake to assume most people don't have a significant competitive advantage in one area or another, or that what HS intelligence tests is the only thing in the world that means anything.
Plus with the huge emphasis on college, many of these fields are understaffed. If you have to wait a few days+ to get that toilet or shower of yours fixed, you can bet that they aren't at the poverty level. Once source I looked at has starting salary around 20k, with median salary around 45k. Even starting salary is above the poverty line for a family of 3.
While it's unfortunately true more often than not, there are certainly some good high school teachers out there; ones who teach because they enjoy teaching, or were inspired by a good teacher. Teachers have to go through at least 4 years of college (and I think usually 5-6), so they aren't exactly the bottom of the barrel.
Unfortunately I view the ever increasing politics involved in being a teacher coupled with the diminishing amount of authority they have to actually do something as key issues. Teachers have little authority to break the mold at many schools, and even if they do break it in a positive way, they may very well get reprimanded for breaking rules, or encouraging unsafe behavior. It's unfortunate, but after a few such occurrences they're likely to stop trying, even if the student's are learning exceptionally well. Money speaks volumes.
Personally I view the solutions as either increasing salaries (and standards to which teachers are upheld) or decreasing class sizes. Decreasing class sizes would likely be more practicable and effective; there is a limit to how many students even a great teacher can teach, one-on-one time is key to helping/encouraging students, and it allows for both more class offerings and better differentiation between intelligence levels. Lumping too many students into one class makes the stupid ones feel even worse when they can't keep up, while the smarter students are bored.
There's little doubt that innate intelligence can overcome brute force, but the incredibly crucial part is the ability to build upon previous generations work and to work collaboratively.
Termite and ant colonies are examples of this. There was a group of scientists who injected a mound with concrete, and when they excavated it, the inner area was dozens of cubic meters. Large nests can protrude 9 meters above the surface while the underground area can extend 25 meters. The nests are climate controlled, including ventilation and are somehow protected against rain.
All this from an insect that few would call intelligent. Compared to the relative size it dwarfs all but the largest cities man has built. General intelligence is nice, but even if we had 10 times the processing power of our current brains, but had to learn everything from scratch each time, I doubt anyone would ever get past the iron age. There is only so much one can do with a lifetime.
Also humans don't have a great deal of general intelligence it seems. There is a great deal of our brains dedicated to social interactions and emotions. If we ran with a simpler set of social interactions, I have no doubt the average human would make Einstein look like an idiot regarding physics. Some evidence of this can be found in individuals with certain mental 'defects', like autism, which are able to master a task well beyond what most other humans can hope to, even with intense effort.
Finally... it really depends on what you mean by control. Vermin and bacteria spring to mind as creatures that exist nearly everywhere, despite our best efforts to eliminate many of them. Yes, we thrive with the most purpose and with the fastest increases (hence the idea of a singularity), but we are not the only species to thrive on this planet.
In honesty, I don't really see the point of greatly expanding space travel at this point. Yes, Mars would be nice, but in terms of travel past the asteroid belt, there's really not much to be gained due to the massive amounts of time required, even if you do manage to get to 99% of the speed of light.
Imagine you get to 99% of the speed of light. You launch a ship. It would hardly be impossible for 25 years to go by and we have another physics revolution, where we understand how to go faster than light (or at least appear to) and to build a ship that arrives at the destination years before the first ship does.
Not to sound too sci-fi for people, but as the above poster points out, the laws of physics are far more restrictive for traveling than for computation. It is highly unlikely that even if we do develop a way to cheaply achieve 5 times the speed of light that interstellar commerce would be economically effective, and so you'd wind up with two pretty much independent civilizations, with one having a huge industrial advantage. There will be no spice or amazing new material on this new planet - atoms are atoms, and we've found all that can be natural. Any unnatural material could very likely be created easier in this solar system than transporting it in ships 4+ light years.
This ignores that it would be far more effective to sent a digital human to do that job. However if we've gotten to that point, there's really no need for expansion, as humanity wouldn't really consume resources, other than raw atoms which would be needed to expand computational power, and raw atoms are quite common in the universe. If humanity turned even a fraction of a cubic mile of matter into a highly advanced computer of some sort, it would be be beyond our comprehension. If you turned the moon into a computer, it would likely be able to trivially break our current 'laws' of physics. It could simulate the entirety of life on earth, from creation to now in minutes, if that.
If the singularity happens, it will be as beyond the comprehension of us at present as our thoughts to that of a bacteria. For all we know, Earth could be a mere flicker in such an entity, a mere collection of 'particles' designed to produce an outcome to some problem, or the equivalent of a dream.