I read your second message, but in case you forgot, one can't go back on Slashdot and alter an earlier post to reflect new information. You wrote a very plain, no-caveats "5Mb/s is enough for a standard definition channel and 9Mb/s is enough for full HD." It's absurd to criticize a person for using the information you yourself give them, and then get mad at them later for not retroactively realizing this when you correct your own information.
The fault here is entirely yours, and I hope you can be grown up enough to acknowledge this. How would you like to find yourself involved in a conversation like:
Paleontologist: The dendrochronological records suggest that the first eruption occurred 9500 years ago and the second eruption 6500 years ago. Respondant: But I read that the eruptions were 2000 years apart. Paleontologist: I added some margin to be comfortable. The first record is from site A and the second from site B, and site B records are believed to be skewed by about a thousand years relative to site A. Can I see your data on when the eruptions were, precisely? Respondant: Oh, I have no clue when the eruptions were, personally. I was just stating that the numbers you gave don't make sense. Paleontologist: You can't compare a dendrochronology record from site A with one from site B without an adjustment factor. Respondant: I was simply going with the numbers that you gave me. You said "The dendrochronological records suggest that the first eruption occurred 9500 years ago and the second eruption 6500 years ago." Can't criticize me for using your numbers!:) Paleontologist: I guess my first post should not have assumed that everyone knows that dates for the first eruption usually come from site A and dates for the second eruption from site B. However I criticize you for not reading my second message where I clarified things. Respondant: (bangs head against wall)
In theory, concerning ordinance, they just need to induce enough current to set off the blasting cap. That's not a very high standard that the weapon has to meet.
Not only that, but it should be quite effective. The whole point of a blasting cap is to deliver enough energy in a single brief burst (aka, a lot more than the proportionally weak electric charge that ignites it). Wouldn't be surprised if a strong bolt of lightning like this could pack a punch similar to a blasting cap. Or at least set off an existing cap!
I actually conceived of this idea several years back, of laser-guided lightning bolts. I did some research and found that the idea was already being actively pursued. Now looks like it finally makes Slashdot.:) My favorite part is the freakishly straight line path the lightning takes until it nears its target.
One, Top Gear is an entertainment show and should not be relied on as a source of facts, and two, humans cannot produce artificial lightning with the intensity of normal lightning.
That said, that doesn't necessarily mean that the conclusion is wrong, but...
If they pay slave wages for H1B workers ("slum apartment building in Fremont full of imported H1B web coderz"), they're breaking the law. H1B workers legally must be paid within a certain percent of the average prevailing wage for an equivalent position in your area. And it would be a strange argument indeed to criticize a law using as your example people who aren't following it. If your problem is with enforcement, argue for greater enforcement, not changing the law, unless you have a *legal* example of what's wrong with H1B.
I was simply going with the numbers that you gave me. You said "5Mb/s is enough for a standard definition channel and 9Mb/s is enough for full HD". Can't criticize me for using your numbers!:)
How can "full HD" be so little of a bandwidth increase over standard def? Something's not right with that. Someone's playing loose with the definition of "full HD". It's probably 1920x1024, thus earning the label, but a low data rate per frame.
Yeah, cable service fleeces you in the US. Net and phone, too. It's crazy how much they try to make you pay. Over here, we just get fleeced on hardware;) I guess because we have higher rates of computer/net usage and computer/net proficiency in general (for example, IE is the number *three* browser here), they know that people will put up with paying high prices for hardware, but also that they'll work around things like TV or phone subscriptions if the price is too high.
Interesting - Roku doesn't sound like the same thing (as you mentioned, it goes through existing providers and is only on-demand; the myndlykill connects through Síminn and does both on-demand or live network TV), but it sounds close.
It literally means "picture key", although "mynd" ("picture", pronounced "MEEND") is also used to refer to video and "lykill" ("key", pronounced "LEE-kitl") can also be used for tools to open things up.
Here in Iceland I get my TV service through something called "myndlykill"; I don't know the English word for it, but it's a box with a Cat5 on the back that plugs into your hub and downloads channels from the net and yeilds an HDMI signal. Most people here have 50Mb/s or 100Mb/s optical fiber net connections so there's enough bandwidth for a good picture.
How are quantum states coming into the discussion here? We're talking about solute levels of neurotransmitters and connection paths, not quantum-entangled particles.
Not that easy. Localized water depths / land heights are often changing, and entire regions can be rising or subsiding. When you're looking to measure millimeters per year or even fractions of a millimeter against a background of tides, waves, storms, etc, you need precision.
The concept you're having trouble with is known as hysteresis - that is, to oversimplify, a delay between a cause and its effect. In this case, "cause" can be something like "add water to ocean" and effect can be something like "water gets evenly distributed around the globe". Yes, of course gravity wants to equalize out the heights of all of the Earth's oceans (although it hates it when I anthropomorphize it;) ). But that takes time; it's not instant, no more than is it instant that the water in a mountain river after a rain ends up in the ocean, even though that's where gravity is going to take it eventually. Meanwhile, a localized region can have all kinds of various inputs (such as rivers) and outputs (such as evaporation) which act on it fast enough to be more than noise against the rate at which gravity moves things toward equalization.
What I "wish for" in this field is the ability to A) accurately and completely model the behavior of neurons, not just at a snapshot in time but as they evolve over time, at scales sufficient to model the entire human brain; B) the ability to simultaneously read all of the necessary state data from every neuron in the brain (neurotransmitter levels, connections, etc) to feed into the simulation, and C) the ability to feedback to each neuron in kind data from the simulation, altering neurotransmitter levels and potentially linkages as well in kind.
I'm not just thinking brain-machine interfaces. You can do that acceptably with a couple hundred to a couple thousand neural probes. I want the full integration into the system of existing human beings, to the point where you could progressively shut down neurons in the person's brain and replace the "data" being sent to the rest of the brain with data from simulating that neuron, all the way to the point that said individual has seamlessly integrated itself into the simulation and no longer exists as a thinking entity in the physical world. Of course, you could simply clone the individual (at will, really, once they're digital), but that leads to troubling issues of consciousness. I think most people would view it as a moral problem if you just cloned a person's brain and then shot the person. A slow, progressive integration seems much more acceptable.
Of course, reading and modifying multiple pieces of data for the entire brain at once sounds like a massive challenge. Seems to me that you need to have a bunch of tiny components (for lack of a better word - don't want to narrow it down by specifying "molecules", "nanomachines", or whatnot) which are passive transmitters (for example, but not specifically limited to, RF, using the input energy of the probe/command signal to power the return) that are individually addressable (for example, random self-assembly of nanoantennas for input and for output, with the connection between input and output modulated by a series of functional groups which reflect status of the neural environment in which they lie). And of course, if certain signals were given, such components would need to be able to induce a change in their neural environment, for example, by expressing a catalyst.
You wouldn't need to know where any particular "component" ended up in the brain; you just simply need to be able to address them uniquely and lump the ones which are yielding the same data into the same simulated neuron representation. Ideally one would like to address all components from outside the brain, but that may prove impractical to rapidly transmit so much data in a limited amount of spectrum; it may require a network of small transmitter/receivers scattered throughout the brain which process data in and out and condense it as much as possible to keep the bandwidth down.
Basically, you wish for Skynet, I wish for full brain-machine integration.;)
Depends. Harpa had the volume pretty well set. But after a concert series at Gamli Gaukurinn one time my ears were ringing for over a week. Great music, but not worth it.
Nothing could be more different from Seattle than Baton Rouge.
Again, amazing that you actually believe that. Oh, hey, people in Baton Rouge speak french-tinted English! What a difference! Except here in Reykjavík we speak *Icelandic*. You think it's hard to understand Cajun, try *Icelandic*. Oh, hey, people in Baton Rouge eat creole food like jambalaya and gumbo and pralines! Yeah, except here in Reykjavík people eat rotted shark, boiled sheep heads, and whale. Hey, In Baton Rouge the terrain is flatter and hotter than in Seattle. Here in Reykjavík, there's a *geyser* a couple hundred meters from my office and I live on a lava flow. Hey, people in Louisiana often like to carry guns, while they're not as popular in Seattle. Here in Reykjavík it's illegal to own *pepper spray* and the police have only used tear gas twice in the history of the country. Hey, Seattle tends to have a stronger feminist movement than Baton Rouge. Here in Iceland, we have a lesbian prime minister and strip clubs are illegal
I'm sorry, you're just tiny tints of variation on "American" compared to actual international cultural differences.
I've never worked at a place like you describe, nor would I want to.
I've worked for a number of American companies, and have described the sort of things my starfsmannafélag does to many others in America, and for none of them has there been anything like it. And Icelanders who I know who've worked for American companies describe the same thing and have noticed the same cultural differences.
But hey, the next time you work for an Icelandic company so that you actually have a comparison point, feel free to weigh in on the topic.
Going from Baton Rouge to Seattle is probably as much of a cultural shift as going from Bonn to Reykjavik.
Amazing that most Americans actually believe stuff like that. I'm assuming you've never been to either Bonn or Reykjavík.
For example, you're very lucky if you suffer from psychological problems (e.g. depression) and your boss gives a shit - most likely he'd tell you to get your shit in order and not let it affect your job or to quit.
Interesting. Iceland has a lot of the "freedom for children" aspects in Switzerland, but doesn't have that side of the picture, at least in my experience. There's a lot more "banding together". I made the "mistake" of telling one of my coworkers that I had left at meeting at one point so people wouldn't see me cry (I had had a lot of bad stuff happen in a row, the most recent at the time being watching a man nearly die of a heart attack, gasping for breath in front of me in my apartment because he overworked himself helping me move and I didn't know how to call emergency services). My coworker told my boss, who called me into his office, told me I didn't have to stick around that day, but I could if I wanted to be around people, whichever I preferred, and that he'd make sure that the company paid for a psychologist for me to see.
Is there not much bonding between members of a company, or is it just employees vs. management? Here it's like we're all on one team. The American work culture seems strange to people here where coworkers sometimes undercut each other and often don't do anything with each other when they don't have to. Here the starfsmannafélag pays for "extracurricular" company activities almost every week, whether it's a mountain-climbing expedition, "disco bowling", going to the theater or a play, going out to a nice dinner, etc. Back before the economic crisis, starfsmannafélög would sometimes do things like overseas vacations together.
There is a protectionist culture in the northeast and far west, but no such shared culture in the Deep South or midwest,
I grew up in Texas, went to school in Indiana, and lived in Iowa for a decade. I now live in Iceland. The way kids are raised here is nothing like the way kids are raised in the US south or midwest. It's not a "we'll call the kids inside if it starts raining" culture, it's a "we'll call the kids inside if the winds are so strong that they can't stand up anymore" culture. Not an exaggeration, by the way.
Kids here are given a great deal of freedom. Parents take them everywhere and let them do their own thing. Random example: I was at a party meeting attended by the prime minister, where the speaker was talking about the reduced unemployment rate under Samfylkingin leadership, and there were little kids running around the room playing. But I guess kids here are used to it, because while I see them often, and often doing their own thing, rarely do they come across as disruptive, whether they're at a meeting, in an office, you name it. And people involve them where not inappropriate - for example, if you see a little kid up on stage at a concert with one of their band-member parents, the kid might well end up introducing the next song.
An example, related to concerts: I was at Iceland's equivalent of Madison Square Garden - Harpa. Up on stage was Kimono, a heavy metal band headed by a transsexual rocker. And in the front row of such a concert? Little kids there with their parents, ages ranging from maybe 2-6. Between songs the lead singer even took the time to explain to the kids the names of the instruments being played. And the best part is, few people here see anything unusual about any aspect of that situation;) Heck, one school up north held "Skálmöld Day" (Skálmöld being an Icelandic heavy metal band), where all the little kids came dressed in appropriate attire, rocked out to their music during class, etc. The educational theme of the week was violence and lawlessness, so she thought their music would fit perfectly. Of course!:)
Of course it goes without question that you'd take your kids to Hinsegin Dagur ("Queer Pride", Reykjavík's LGBT pride fest - one of if not the largest annual festivals in the country, attended by 1/3rd of the country's population). What's so weird about that?
It's not all fun and games. For example, kids often start working earlier, too. But in general, they're not sheltered from the world like American kids are, even in the south and midwest. It's a different culture over here.
The problem here is that visible light doesn't pass through walls and that the range is short, not that it's directional. I don't see what's wrong with directional, so long as the direction of the antenna can be rapidly digitally reconfigured (and yes, such antennas exist). Seems an obvious way to free up spectrum in the future - data is only being transmitted (apart from weak sidebands) in the direction it's needed.
The obvious downside you'll get to is that you'll *normally* have a clear line of sight, but you *could* have other devices transmitting along the same path, so you can't just assume that you have sole access to a particular path and chunk of spectrum. And of course you need to have an omnidirectional broadcast phase at the beginning to figure out what tower/hub/etc you want to talk to and where it is. So there's a lot of "negotiation" that needs to occur.
Once nice thing about directional transmission is that you can pack a lot more power in it over longer distances without risking frotzing every electronic device in the area (aka, like a HERF gun), and it doesn't take nearly much energy input to have a given transmission energy level at a fixed distance away from the source. The obvious downside is that putting a lot of power into a tight beam could prove just as disruptive to any unlucky electronic devices that simply happen to be in the path (aka, still like a HERF gun), so it still doesn't solve your problem on its own. If you wanted to take advantage of this, there'd have to be new standards for any vulnerable electronics to communicate with a transmitter (presumably passively, to minimize cost) and warn the device of its presence; transmission power levels on transmitters would have to remain limited until such time as "unsafe" electronics are effectively phased out.
I actually wrote a sci-fi novel based in part on the topic once, lol. A core part of the plot involved an unknown entity or group of entities breaking into diverse computer systems with no known vulnerabilities, even systems that weren't net connected. The actual method being used was hacking cell towers and reflashing their hardware to override the power transmission level failsafes, then using carefully selected frequencies to induce an "inverse tempest attack", remotely writing and executing code by attacking a particular vulnerable bus on a particular common hardware component in the target devices.
Slashdot Mirror
Not in net joules, though. Z-machine does, what, about 10MJ? Strong lightning bolts are measured in GJ.
I read your second message, but in case you forgot, one can't go back on Slashdot and alter an earlier post to reflect new information. You wrote a very plain, no-caveats "5Mb/s is enough for a standard definition channel and 9Mb/s is enough for full HD." It's absurd to criticize a person for using the information you yourself give them, and then get mad at them later for not retroactively realizing this when you correct your own information.
The fault here is entirely yours, and I hope you can be grown up enough to acknowledge this. How would you like to find yourself involved in a conversation like:
Paleontologist: The dendrochronological records suggest that the first eruption occurred 9500 years ago and the second eruption 6500 years ago. :)
Respondant: But I read that the eruptions were 2000 years apart.
Paleontologist: I added some margin to be comfortable. The first record is from site A and the second from site B, and site B records are believed to be skewed by about a thousand years relative to site A. Can I see your data on when the eruptions were, precisely?
Respondant: Oh, I have no clue when the eruptions were, personally. I was just stating that the numbers you gave don't make sense.
Paleontologist: You can't compare a dendrochronology record from site A with one from site B without an adjustment factor.
Respondant: I was simply going with the numbers that you gave me. You said "The dendrochronological records suggest that the first eruption occurred 9500 years ago and the second eruption 6500 years ago." Can't criticize me for using your numbers!
Paleontologist: I guess my first post should not have assumed that everyone knows that dates for the first eruption usually come from site A and dates for the second eruption from site B. However I criticize you for not reading my second message where I clarified things.
Respondant: (bangs head against wall)
That's what you're doing.
In theory, concerning ordinance, they just need to induce enough current to set off the blasting cap. That's not a very high standard that the weapon has to meet.
Not only that, but it should be quite effective. The whole point of a blasting cap is to deliver enough energy in a single brief burst (aka, a lot more than the proportionally weak electric charge that ignites it). Wouldn't be surprised if a strong bolt of lightning like this could pack a punch similar to a blasting cap. Or at least set off an existing cap!
I actually conceived of this idea several years back, of laser-guided lightning bolts. I did some research and found that the idea was already being actively pursued. Now looks like it finally makes Slashdot. :) My favorite part is the freakishly straight line path the lightning takes until it nears its target.
One, Top Gear is an entertainment show and should not be relied on as a source of facts, and two, humans cannot produce artificial lightning with the intensity of normal lightning.
That said, that doesn't necessarily mean that the conclusion is wrong, but...
If they pay slave wages for H1B workers ("slum apartment building in Fremont full of imported H1B web coderz"), they're breaking the law. H1B workers legally must be paid within a certain percent of the average prevailing wage for an equivalent position in your area. And it would be a strange argument indeed to criticize a law using as your example people who aren't following it. If your problem is with enforcement, argue for greater enforcement, not changing the law, unless you have a *legal* example of what's wrong with H1B.
I was simply going with the numbers that you gave me. You said "5Mb/s is enough for a standard definition channel and 9Mb/s is enough for full HD". Can't criticize me for using your numbers! :)
Oh, I have no clue how much bandwidth the device uses. All I can say is that is that 9 MB/s isn't that much of an improvement over 5Mb/s ;)
How can "full HD" be so little of a bandwidth increase over standard def? Something's not right with that. Someone's playing loose with the definition of "full HD". It's probably 1920x1024, thus earning the label, but a low data rate per frame.
How is that "weasel words"? That's plain English. "Such as" means "an example is coming". Do I need to define the word "example" for you as well?
Yeah, cable service fleeces you in the US. Net and phone, too. It's crazy how much they try to make you pay. Over here, we just get fleeced on hardware ;) I guess because we have higher rates of computer/net usage and computer/net proficiency in general (for example, IE is the number *three* browser here), they know that people will put up with paying high prices for hardware, but also that they'll work around things like TV or phone subscriptions if the price is too high.
Interesting - Roku doesn't sound like the same thing (as you mentioned, it goes through existing providers and is only on-demand; the myndlykill connects through Síminn and does both on-demand or live network TV), but it sounds close.
It literally means "picture key", although "mynd" ("picture", pronounced "MEEND") is also used to refer to video and "lykill" ("key", pronounced "LEE-kitl") can also be used for tools to open things up.
Here in Iceland I get my TV service through something called "myndlykill"; I don't know the English word for it, but it's a box with a Cat5 on the back that plugs into your hub and downloads channels from the net and yeilds an HDMI signal. Most people here have 50Mb/s or 100Mb/s optical fiber net connections so there's enough bandwidth for a good picture.
How are quantum states coming into the discussion here? We're talking about solute levels of neurotransmitters and connection paths, not quantum-entangled particles.
Do you know the meaning of the phrase "such as"?
Read the paper if you care about the actual specifics.
Not that easy. Localized water depths / land heights are often changing, and entire regions can be rising or subsiding. When you're looking to measure millimeters per year or even fractions of a millimeter against a background of tides, waves, storms, etc, you need precision.
The concept you're having trouble with is known as hysteresis - that is, to oversimplify, a delay between a cause and its effect. In this case, "cause" can be something like "add water to ocean" and effect can be something like "water gets evenly distributed around the globe". Yes, of course gravity wants to equalize out the heights of all of the Earth's oceans (although it hates it when I anthropomorphize it ;) ). But that takes time; it's not instant, no more than is it instant that the water in a mountain river after a rain ends up in the ocean, even though that's where gravity is going to take it eventually. Meanwhile, a localized region can have all kinds of various inputs (such as rivers) and outputs (such as evaporation) which act on it fast enough to be more than noise against the rate at which gravity moves things toward equalization.
We wished for skynet? Wow, you're really metal. ;)
What I "wish for" in this field is the ability to A) accurately and completely model the behavior of neurons, not just at a snapshot in time but as they evolve over time, at scales sufficient to model the entire human brain; B) the ability to simultaneously read all of the necessary state data from every neuron in the brain (neurotransmitter levels, connections, etc) to feed into the simulation, and C) the ability to feedback to each neuron in kind data from the simulation, altering neurotransmitter levels and potentially linkages as well in kind.
I'm not just thinking brain-machine interfaces. You can do that acceptably with a couple hundred to a couple thousand neural probes. I want the full integration into the system of existing human beings, to the point where you could progressively shut down neurons in the person's brain and replace the "data" being sent to the rest of the brain with data from simulating that neuron, all the way to the point that said individual has seamlessly integrated itself into the simulation and no longer exists as a thinking entity in the physical world. Of course, you could simply clone the individual (at will, really, once they're digital), but that leads to troubling issues of consciousness. I think most people would view it as a moral problem if you just cloned a person's brain and then shot the person. A slow, progressive integration seems much more acceptable.
Of course, reading and modifying multiple pieces of data for the entire brain at once sounds like a massive challenge. Seems to me that you need to have a bunch of tiny components (for lack of a better word - don't want to narrow it down by specifying "molecules", "nanomachines", or whatnot) which are passive transmitters (for example, but not specifically limited to, RF, using the input energy of the probe/command signal to power the return) that are individually addressable (for example, random self-assembly of nanoantennas for input and for output, with the connection between input and output modulated by a series of functional groups which reflect status of the neural environment in which they lie). And of course, if certain signals were given, such components would need to be able to induce a change in their neural environment, for example, by expressing a catalyst.
You wouldn't need to know where any particular "component" ended up in the brain; you just simply need to be able to address them uniquely and lump the ones which are yielding the same data into the same simulated neuron representation. Ideally one would like to address all components from outside the brain, but that may prove impractical to rapidly transmit so much data in a limited amount of spectrum; it may require a network of small transmitter/receivers scattered throughout the brain which process data in and out and condense it as much as possible to keep the bandwidth down.
Basically, you wish for Skynet, I wish for full brain-machine integration. ;)
Depends. Harpa had the volume pretty well set. But after a concert series at Gamli Gaukurinn one time my ears were ringing for over a week. Great music, but not worth it.
Nothing could be more different from Seattle than Baton Rouge.
Again, amazing that you actually believe that. Oh, hey, people in Baton Rouge speak french-tinted English! What a difference! Except here in Reykjavík we speak *Icelandic*. You think it's hard to understand Cajun, try *Icelandic*. Oh, hey, people in Baton Rouge eat creole food like jambalaya and gumbo and pralines! Yeah, except here in Reykjavík people eat rotted shark, boiled sheep heads, and whale. Hey, In Baton Rouge the terrain is flatter and hotter than in Seattle. Here in Reykjavík, there's a *geyser* a couple hundred meters from my office and I live on a lava flow. Hey, people in Louisiana often like to carry guns, while they're not as popular in Seattle. Here in Reykjavík it's illegal to own *pepper spray* and the police have only used tear gas twice in the history of the country. Hey, Seattle tends to have a stronger feminist movement than Baton Rouge. Here in Iceland, we have a lesbian prime minister and strip clubs are illegal
I'm sorry, you're just tiny tints of variation on "American" compared to actual international cultural differences.
I've worked for a number of American companies, and have described the sort of things my starfsmannafélag does to many others in America, and for none of them has there been anything like it. And Icelanders who I know who've worked for American companies describe the same thing and have noticed the same cultural differences.
But hey, the next time you work for an Icelandic company so that you actually have a comparison point, feel free to weigh in on the topic.
Amazing that most Americans actually believe stuff like that. I'm assuming you've never been to either Bonn or Reykjavík.
Um, you've never seen a storm in Iceland before I take it. If you think you're likely to be killed by being exposed outside in a storm in the US...
Interesting. Iceland has a lot of the "freedom for children" aspects in Switzerland, but doesn't have that side of the picture, at least in my experience. There's a lot more "banding together". I made the "mistake" of telling one of my coworkers that I had left at meeting at one point so people wouldn't see me cry (I had had a lot of bad stuff happen in a row, the most recent at the time being watching a man nearly die of a heart attack, gasping for breath in front of me in my apartment because he overworked himself helping me move and I didn't know how to call emergency services). My coworker told my boss, who called me into his office, told me I didn't have to stick around that day, but I could if I wanted to be around people, whichever I preferred, and that he'd make sure that the company paid for a psychologist for me to see.
Is there not much bonding between members of a company, or is it just employees vs. management? Here it's like we're all on one team. The American work culture seems strange to people here where coworkers sometimes undercut each other and often don't do anything with each other when they don't have to. Here the starfsmannafélag pays for "extracurricular" company activities almost every week, whether it's a mountain-climbing expedition, "disco bowling", going to the theater or a play, going out to a nice dinner, etc. Back before the economic crisis, starfsmannafélög would sometimes do things like overseas vacations together.
I grew up in Texas, went to school in Indiana, and lived in Iowa for a decade. I now live in Iceland. The way kids are raised here is nothing like the way kids are raised in the US south or midwest. It's not a "we'll call the kids inside if it starts raining" culture, it's a "we'll call the kids inside if the winds are so strong that they can't stand up anymore" culture. Not an exaggeration, by the way.
Kids here are given a great deal of freedom. Parents take them everywhere and let them do their own thing. Random example: I was at a party meeting attended by the prime minister, where the speaker was talking about the reduced unemployment rate under Samfylkingin leadership, and there were little kids running around the room playing. But I guess kids here are used to it, because while I see them often, and often doing their own thing, rarely do they come across as disruptive, whether they're at a meeting, in an office, you name it. And people involve them where not inappropriate - for example, if you see a little kid up on stage at a concert with one of their band-member parents, the kid might well end up introducing the next song.
An example, related to concerts: I was at Iceland's equivalent of Madison Square Garden - Harpa. Up on stage was Kimono, a heavy metal band headed by a transsexual rocker. And in the front row of such a concert? Little kids there with their parents, ages ranging from maybe 2-6. Between songs the lead singer even took the time to explain to the kids the names of the instruments being played. And the best part is, few people here see anything unusual about any aspect of that situation ;) Heck, one school up north held "Skálmöld Day" (Skálmöld being an Icelandic heavy metal band), where all the little kids came dressed in appropriate attire, rocked out to their music during class, etc. The educational theme of the week was violence and lawlessness, so she thought their music would fit perfectly. Of course! :)
Of course it goes without question that you'd take your kids to Hinsegin Dagur ("Queer Pride", Reykjavík's LGBT pride fest - one of if not the largest annual festivals in the country, attended by 1/3rd of the country's population). What's so weird about that?
It's not all fun and games. For example, kids often start working earlier, too. But in general, they're not sheltered from the world like American kids are, even in the south and midwest. It's a different culture over here.
And I really like it.
The problem here is that visible light doesn't pass through walls and that the range is short, not that it's directional. I don't see what's wrong with directional, so long as the direction of the antenna can be rapidly digitally reconfigured (and yes, such antennas exist). Seems an obvious way to free up spectrum in the future - data is only being transmitted (apart from weak sidebands) in the direction it's needed.
The obvious downside you'll get to is that you'll *normally* have a clear line of sight, but you *could* have other devices transmitting along the same path, so you can't just assume that you have sole access to a particular path and chunk of spectrum. And of course you need to have an omnidirectional broadcast phase at the beginning to figure out what tower/hub/etc you want to talk to and where it is. So there's a lot of "negotiation" that needs to occur.
Once nice thing about directional transmission is that you can pack a lot more power in it over longer distances without risking frotzing every electronic device in the area (aka, like a HERF gun), and it doesn't take nearly much energy input to have a given transmission energy level at a fixed distance away from the source. The obvious downside is that putting a lot of power into a tight beam could prove just as disruptive to any unlucky electronic devices that simply happen to be in the path (aka, still like a HERF gun), so it still doesn't solve your problem on its own. If you wanted to take advantage of this, there'd have to be new standards for any vulnerable electronics to communicate with a transmitter (presumably passively, to minimize cost) and warn the device of its presence; transmission power levels on transmitters would have to remain limited until such time as "unsafe" electronics are effectively phased out.
I actually wrote a sci-fi novel based in part on the topic once, lol. A core part of the plot involved an unknown entity or group of entities breaking into diverse computer systems with no known vulnerabilities, even systems that weren't net connected. The actual method being used was hacking cell towers and reflashing their hardware to override the power transmission level failsafes, then using carefully selected frequencies to induce an "inverse tempest attack", remotely writing and executing code by attacking a particular vulnerable bus on a particular common hardware component in the target devices.