I've been continuously revising a mesh network design. There are two layers: hosts and map servers....
All of that is all well and good, but until the typical consumer internet connection doesn't just have upstream bandwidth equal to its downstream bandwidth but upstream bandwidth higher than its downstream bandwidth, it's not going to gain any traction at all.
Asymmetrical connections in the ISP's favor will forever prevent a decentralized web.
How do hundreds of people look at this kind of stuff and not notice?
Dozens of those people did notice. And kept their heads down and didn't make waves because fixing it would invoke C-level management because the inconsistent data had massive business implications. Or some such.
Whenever a developer doesn't fix something, look no further than management for the reason why.
And as long as that "free market" option is open to big companies that can afford to bleed money in one area to preserve profits overall, there will never be competition.
That "free market" option is illegal, and has been for very nearly 130 years. The Sherman Antitrust Act has been the law of the land since 1890, and reducing prices specifically to drive out a competitor is explicitly illegal.
Now if only the US Federal judiciary wasn't full of craven cowards for District Attorneys...
Note that the electric vehicle market - led by Tesla Motors - has taken off in the wake of Trump's election.
I don't know about the short term, but long term, this is a major boon for Tesla.
If incumbent auto manufacturers don't have to improve fuel efficiency, they can and will start coasting again, and not improving. They will stop looking at hybrids, plug-in or not, because they won't need them to meet efficiency requirements, which means their experience with battery electric vehicles will stop. Down the road, in 5 to 8 years, when oil prices have gone back up, people will be wanting electric cars, and the incumbents will have no more experience in making electrics than they do now, while Tesla will be much much better at it. GM will need yet another bailout (I'm sure GM senior management can maneuver their way into another $100 billion in debt by then—hookers and blow aren't free, ya know), while Tesla will be fine.
On one hand the welfare system, financially, is terribly inefficient, serving mainly as welfare for bureaucrats.
I'm not sure it's inefficient. The bureaucracy seems to be the perfect system for finding, accumulating, and retaining petty tyrants, so the rest of us don't have to deal with them very much.
I expect any plans to use hydrogen as transportation fuel to fail, unless that means of transportation is a rocket. It's just far easier and cheaper to cut out the hydrogen middle man and burn natural gas for cleaner running trucks.
Amusingly, SpaceX has no interest in hydrogen either. The BFR is being designed around the Raptor engine, which burns cryogenic methane.
Toyota's truck doesn't burn the hydrogen though. It's a hydrogen fuel-cell. More efficient than burning, but absurdly expensive, and uses precious metals in the fuel cells. It will vanish into history as soon as Tesla Semis are available in fleet numbers, since they will be cheaper, probably permanently.
Well-regulated at the time simply meant functioning normally, not the current administrative-state definition in use today. In other words, people were expected to be proficient with their guns.
It meant a good deal more than that. It meant that the militia should have a recognizable and functional chain of command, that every member's weapons should be functional and safe for the owner and his fellow militia members in the vicinity to fire, and that the chain of command should be able to establish the required logistics chain to keep the militia fed and clothed and housed and their waste disposed of.
In short, it's not a well regulated militia unless it could do everything an ancient Roman legion could do, but with guns.
Yes, all that poop on the streets, used syringes everywhere...
Too much to hope that the state of California will finally take steps and intervene in the clusterfuck that is San Francisco city government.
You can't tell me human feces in the street is legal at the state level. Every state, and especially western states outlawed it more than a century ago, and that was none too soon. The ancient Romans knew that human excrement in the street is a public health hazard, and San Francisco can't figure it out? It's time for California's state government to fire every one of those assholes calling themselves "city supervisors" and forcibly install a city government that will clean up the mess and keep it cleaned up.
I say this as someone who lives nowhere near California, yet has an interest, because what's happening in San Francisco is a disease vector that affects the entire continent. Clean up your shit, California, or we'll find some federal law to make you clean it up. You're not an island and what you're doing is not just stupid but outright dangerous.
There is no free market. These are government-granted monopolies. The local governments select a single cable and single phone company to service their area, and prohibit other companies from offering services.
Not in my state.
In Missouri, it is illegal, by state law, for any municipality, county, township, or other political subdivision to create a monopoly franchise agreement with any user of the public right of way. Missouri Revised Statues 67.1842.5.
On the other hand, Missouri also outlawed municipal broadband. Telco lobbyists were perfectly willing to allow theoretical "competition" that didn't actually exist, but moved very quickly to eliminate the very real possibility of actual competition materializing.
Have SpaceX make it - They'll have a sexy function EVA suit out in under a year for 1/10 the cost NASA would spend.
SpaceX already has a prototype. It went into space as part of the test payload for the Falcon Heavy launch. Starman was wearing it.
So yeah, under a year might actually be possible. They're well on the way. I assume they intended for passengers in Crewed Dragon capsules to be wearing it, and that project is due to be completed by the end of the year. (It will be late.)
Perhaps the way forward is straight out of science fiction: a matter compiler/3D printer-like approach, where an integrated circuit is built up an atom or a molecule at a time? Pure imagination on my part, but is it really out of our reach?
Neither science fiction nor your imagination. It's called a nanoassembler, and it was described fairly formally for the first time in Engines of Creation by K. Eric Drexler in 1986. People have been working on the concept ever since. It's still at the level of attempting to build the tools required to build the tools required to build the tools required to build the nanoassembler. Optimistically. It could be even worse than that. Shoving individual atoms and molecules around into the desired order is for all intents and purposes not a mechanical process. Electromagnetic forces are everything, at that scale, and atoms are very nearly unreal.
My first thought is what does ordering out of state mean? The fiber they own, the Right-a-ways they own, any contractual monoplies they own and existing service contracts they own are property with value. Will they be able to sell these assets? If not it's a seizure of private property.
Which is entirely legal in New York State. After Kelo v. City of New London several states amended their constitutions to prevent economic takings. Others passed laws forbidding it. New York did neither. If Charter refuses to do as ordered, NYS can and will use eminent domain to force them to, and they will succeed, very quickly by modern judicial standards, because of Kelo. It won't even make it out of federal circuit court.
FCC and the interstate commerce clause tells NY state to go fuck itself.
Neither has any bearing. Charter bought a legal entity that exists in New York State. They must comply with state law in the operations of that entity. They didn't. They lose.
I doubt they could force them to sell but even if they did Charter could tie them up in court for years.
New York State can force Charter to sell. It's called eminent domain, and it's an open and shut case in federal circuit court because the Supreme Court has already ruled on the subject recently. Charter could sue to prevent it. They would lose. They could appeal. The appeal would be denied. Kelo v. City of New London is settled case law. Takings for purely economic purposes are the law of the land, federally.
New York State was not one of the states that amended its constitution in response to Kelo. New York State did not even pass any state laws prohibiting economic development takings. New York State did not even pass the law that would have established a study committee to examine the possibility of prohibiting economic development takings.
And it was the Rehnquist court, a majority Conservative (big 'C') Supreme Court, that wrote that ruling.
So, what's the legal basis for that action? Seriously, revoking their charter to operate in NY is certainly within their power, but I can't see any way they can order the company to divest itself that way, if Charter-TWC don't want to do it.
Note, of course, that the Federal government has that power. Which in no way implies that the NY government has that power....
The state government has considerably more power than you know. If Charter doesn't do as its told, 100% of its infrastructure in New York State can be confiscated. It's called eminent domain, and the Supreme Court of the United States has already upheld its use for purely economic purposes. New York State could take control of every inch of cable Charter used to own in the state and either run it itself, or sell it off to any other company it chooses. This has already been litigated. There's nothing Charter could do to more than delay it. It could not be stopped.
Revoking their corporate charter is the least of Charter's worries.
Of course, they didn't automatically convert us over. They would still be happily charging me the $70 for 25Mbps if I hadn't taken the initiative after seeing the new price structure on their website.
I discovered that literally yesterday. I've been piddling along with 50 megabit for $65/month for years. Come to find out I should be getting 200 megabit for the same price, in my area.
You are still thinking too small; with the rise of molecular nanotechnology, even a trillion will be an absurdly small estimate. That will likely take a long while, but it is a near certainty if humanity doesn't render itself extinct in the coming years.
Molecular computing is one good way to render humanity extinct in the coming years.
[Queue the baseless "impossible" claims from small-minded fools, along with the inevitable fearmongering that comes with any transformative technology.]
Fearmongering? We already know what a molecular machine inimical to human life looks like. We call it a virus.
Not the pathetic little strings of code that infest a half-assed user environment written in Redmond, but bundles of molecular machinery that exist for the sole purpose of hijacking other molecular machines and forcing them to do its bidding, to the point of eventually killing the host. Viruses are real, viruses are deadly, and purpose-built molecular nanotechnology can duplicate their functionality, and you'd better hope your nanotechnology-enhanced immune system has all the latest antibodies to deal with the threats you will be exposed to every second of every day. It's not fearmongering if what you're afraid of literally already exists and has entire government departments devoted to dealing with the threat (CDC, ECDC, CCDC, etc.).
Personally, I'm getting really sick of hearing lawyers state 'He reacted in the way he was trained.' As though the police department training is to blame for lack of common sense, lack of knowledge of the law, and general lack of humanity.
Worse.
Police department training has been publicly acknowledged to teach police (I refuse to call them "officers") to protect themselves first and foremost. Their safety is always paramount, and that's flat out bogus. With great power comes great responsibility. You get the uniform, the badge, and the gun, so you can damn well put the public's safety first, or quit the fucking job.
They've been playing the "it's a dangerous job" card for decades, when it's not even in the top 10, and personally I'm sick of it. If it was ACTUALLY dangerous, that'd be one thing, but it's not and we know it.
In other words their is uncertainty no matter what... the good and the bad news with AI is that you can begin to quantify that uncertainty. So image recognition is good news for improving accuracy over human perception, but bad news if it is either misunderstood or willfully abused to create the misconception of 100% accuracy.
Given how both fingerprints and DNA matching have been painted with the 100% accurate brush (unjustifiably), I expect facial recognition will be too.
The whole fear of the government compiling a list of gun owners is laughable; if a future government wanted to confiscate everyone's guns, they could simply buy a list of gun owners from a commercial data broker.
Public libraries are one of the great things about America...free to all, no questions asked.
Thanks in large part to robber baron guilt. Given that we're busily descending into a new Gilded Age, I guess the libraries in America can look forward to a new contruction boom—in 2080 or so. (It takes a while to fully complete those continent-straddling trusts.)
Slashdot Mirror
I've been continuously revising a mesh network design. There are two layers: hosts and map servers. ...
All of that is all well and good, but until the typical consumer internet connection doesn't just have upstream bandwidth equal to its downstream bandwidth but upstream bandwidth higher than its downstream bandwidth, it's not going to gain any traction at all.
Asymmetrical connections in the ISP's favor will forever prevent a decentralized web.
How do hundreds of people look at this kind of stuff and not notice?
Dozens of those people did notice. And kept their heads down and didn't make waves because fixing it would invoke C-level management because the inconsistent data had massive business implications. Or some such.
Whenever a developer doesn't fix something, look no further than management for the reason why.
And as long as that "free market" option is open to big companies that can afford to bleed money in one area to preserve profits overall, there will never be competition.
That "free market" option is illegal, and has been for very nearly 130 years. The Sherman Antitrust Act has been the law of the land since 1890, and reducing prices specifically to drive out a competitor is explicitly illegal.
Now if only the US Federal judiciary wasn't full of craven cowards for District Attorneys...
Note that the electric vehicle market - led by Tesla Motors - has taken off in the wake of Trump's election.
I don't know about the short term, but long term, this is a major boon for Tesla.
If incumbent auto manufacturers don't have to improve fuel efficiency, they can and will start coasting again, and not improving. They will stop looking at hybrids, plug-in or not, because they won't need them to meet efficiency requirements, which means their experience with battery electric vehicles will stop. Down the road, in 5 to 8 years, when oil prices have gone back up, people will be wanting electric cars, and the incumbents will have no more experience in making electrics than they do now, while Tesla will be much much better at it. GM will need yet another bailout (I'm sure GM senior management can maneuver their way into another $100 billion in debt by then—hookers and blow aren't free, ya know), while Tesla will be fine.
The top income bracket (the 1%) pulls in about $2 trillion dollars.
Why are you only considering natural persons? Corporations are people too! What's 0.001% of Apple's revenue?
On one hand the welfare system, financially, is terribly inefficient, serving mainly as welfare for bureaucrats.
I'm not sure it's inefficient. The bureaucracy seems to be the perfect system for finding, accumulating, and retaining petty tyrants, so the rest of us don't have to deal with them very much.
I expect any plans to use hydrogen as transportation fuel to fail, unless that means of transportation is a rocket. It's just far easier and cheaper to cut out the hydrogen middle man and burn natural gas for cleaner running trucks.
Amusingly, SpaceX has no interest in hydrogen either. The BFR is being designed around the Raptor engine, which burns cryogenic methane.
Toyota's truck doesn't burn the hydrogen though. It's a hydrogen fuel-cell. More efficient than burning, but absurdly expensive, and uses precious metals in the fuel cells. It will vanish into history as soon as Tesla Semis are available in fleet numbers, since they will be cheaper, probably permanently.
Well-regulated at the time simply meant functioning normally, not the current administrative-state definition in use today. In other words, people were expected to be proficient with their guns.
It meant a good deal more than that. It meant that the militia should have a recognizable and functional chain of command, that every member's weapons should be functional and safe for the owner and his fellow militia members in the vicinity to fire, and that the chain of command should be able to establish the required logistics chain to keep the militia fed and clothed and housed and their waste disposed of.
In short, it's not a well regulated militia unless it could do everything an ancient Roman legion could do, but with guns.
Yes, all that poop on the streets, used syringes everywhere...
Too much to hope that the state of California will finally take steps and intervene in the clusterfuck that is San Francisco city government.
You can't tell me human feces in the street is legal at the state level. Every state, and especially western states outlawed it more than a century ago, and that was none too soon. The ancient Romans knew that human excrement in the street is a public health hazard, and San Francisco can't figure it out? It's time for California's state government to fire every one of those assholes calling themselves "city supervisors" and forcibly install a city government that will clean up the mess and keep it cleaned up.
I say this as someone who lives nowhere near California, yet has an interest, because what's happening in San Francisco is a disease vector that affects the entire continent. Clean up your shit, California, or we'll find some federal law to make you clean it up. You're not an island and what you're doing is not just stupid but outright dangerous.
There is no free market. These are government-granted monopolies. The local governments select a single cable and single phone company to service their area, and prohibit other companies from offering services.
Not in my state.
In Missouri, it is illegal, by state law, for any municipality, county, township, or other political subdivision to create a monopoly franchise agreement with any user of the public right of way. Missouri Revised Statues 67.1842.5.
On the other hand, Missouri also outlawed municipal broadband. Telco lobbyists were perfectly willing to allow theoretical "competition" that didn't actually exist, but moved very quickly to eliminate the very real possibility of actual competition materializing.
The idea that we'll have an operational space station in lunar orbit in 2025 is kind of a bit unrealistic right now.
Elon could do it by 2020
Given Apollo-era scale funding..... yeah, probably. I don't think I'd want to stay overnight in it though.
Speak for yourself. I keep a portable, unfoldable fire shelter in my car.
Too many wet years followed by a dry year. Basically you'd be safer if you lived in drought conditions all the time.
Have SpaceX make it - They'll have a sexy function EVA suit out in under a year for 1/10 the cost NASA would spend.
SpaceX already has a prototype. It went into space as part of the test payload for the Falcon Heavy launch. Starman was wearing it.
So yeah, under a year might actually be possible. They're well on the way. I assume they intended for passengers in Crewed Dragon capsules to be wearing it, and that project is due to be completed by the end of the year. (It will be late.)
Perhaps the way forward is straight out of science fiction: a matter compiler/3D printer-like approach, where an integrated circuit is built up an atom or a molecule at a time? Pure imagination on my part, but is it really out of our reach?
Neither science fiction nor your imagination. It's called a nanoassembler, and it was described fairly formally for the first time in Engines of Creation by K. Eric Drexler in 1986. People have been working on the concept ever since. It's still at the level of attempting to build the tools required to build the tools required to build the tools required to build the nanoassembler. Optimistically. It could be even worse than that. Shoving individual atoms and molecules around into the desired order is for all intents and purposes not a mechanical process. Electromagnetic forces are everything, at that scale, and atoms are very nearly unreal.
My first thought is what does ordering out of state mean? The fiber they own, the Right-a-ways they own, any contractual monoplies they own and existing service contracts they own are property with value. Will they be able to sell these assets? If not it's a seizure of private property.
Which is entirely legal in New York State. After Kelo v. City of New London several states amended their constitutions to prevent economic takings. Others passed laws forbidding it. New York did neither. If Charter refuses to do as ordered, NYS can and will use eminent domain to force them to, and they will succeed, very quickly by modern judicial standards, because of Kelo. It won't even make it out of federal circuit court.
FCC and the interstate commerce clause tells NY state to go fuck itself.
Neither has any bearing. Charter bought a legal entity that exists in New York State. They must comply with state law in the operations of that entity. They didn't. They lose.
I doubt they could force them to sell but even if they did Charter could tie them up in court for years.
New York State can force Charter to sell. It's called eminent domain, and it's an open and shut case in federal circuit court because the Supreme Court has already ruled on the subject recently. Charter could sue to prevent it. They would lose. They could appeal. The appeal would be denied. Kelo v. City of New London is settled case law. Takings for purely economic purposes are the law of the land, federally.
New York State was not one of the states that amended its constitution in response to Kelo. New York State did not even pass any state laws prohibiting economic development takings. New York State did not even pass the law that would have established a study committee to examine the possibility of prohibiting economic development takings.
And it was the Rehnquist court, a majority Conservative (big 'C') Supreme Court, that wrote that ruling.
So, what's the legal basis for that action? Seriously, revoking their charter to operate in NY is certainly within their power, but I can't see any way they can order the company to divest itself that way, if Charter-TWC don't want to do it.
Note, of course, that the Federal government has that power. Which in no way implies that the NY government has that power....
The state government has considerably more power than you know. If Charter doesn't do as its told, 100% of its infrastructure in New York State can be confiscated. It's called eminent domain, and the Supreme Court of the United States has already upheld its use for purely economic purposes. New York State could take control of every inch of cable Charter used to own in the state and either run it itself, or sell it off to any other company it chooses. This has already been litigated. There's nothing Charter could do to more than delay it. It could not be stopped.
Revoking their corporate charter is the least of Charter's worries.
Of course, they didn't automatically convert us over. They would still be happily charging me the $70 for 25Mbps if I hadn't taken the initiative after seeing the new price structure on their website.
I discovered that literally yesterday. I've been piddling along with 50 megabit for $65/month for years. Come to find out I should be getting 200 megabit for the same price, in my area.
Telcos are evil.
You are still thinking too small; with the rise of molecular nanotechnology, even a trillion will be an absurdly small estimate. That will likely take a long while, but it is a near certainty if humanity doesn't render itself extinct in the coming years.
Molecular computing is one good way to render humanity extinct in the coming years.
[Queue the baseless "impossible" claims from small-minded fools, along with the inevitable fearmongering that comes with any transformative technology.]
Fearmongering? We already know what a molecular machine inimical to human life looks like. We call it a virus.
Not the pathetic little strings of code that infest a half-assed user environment written in Redmond, but bundles of molecular machinery that exist for the sole purpose of hijacking other molecular machines and forcing them to do its bidding, to the point of eventually killing the host. Viruses are real, viruses are deadly, and purpose-built molecular nanotechnology can duplicate their functionality, and you'd better hope your nanotechnology-enhanced immune system has all the latest antibodies to deal with the threats you will be exposed to every second of every day. It's not fearmongering if what you're afraid of literally already exists and has entire government departments devoted to dealing with the threat (CDC, ECDC, CCDC, etc.).
Personally, I'm getting really sick of hearing lawyers state 'He reacted in the way he was trained.' As though the police department training is to blame for lack of common sense, lack of knowledge of the law, and general lack of humanity.
Worse.
Police department training has been publicly acknowledged to teach police (I refuse to call them "officers") to protect themselves first and foremost. Their safety is always paramount, and that's flat out bogus. With great power comes great responsibility. You get the uniform, the badge, and the gun, so you can damn well put the public's safety first, or quit the fucking job.
They've been playing the "it's a dangerous job" card for decades, when it's not even in the top 10, and personally I'm sick of it. If it was ACTUALLY dangerous, that'd be one thing, but it's not and we know it.
In other words their is uncertainty no matter what... the good and the bad news with AI is that you can begin to quantify that uncertainty. So image recognition is good news for improving accuracy over human perception, but bad news if it is either misunderstood or willfully abused to create the misconception of 100% accuracy.
Given how both fingerprints and DNA matching have been painted with the 100% accurate brush (unjustifiably), I expect facial recognition will be too.
Hilarity ensues.
The whole fear of the government compiling a list of gun owners is laughable; if a future government wanted to confiscate everyone's guns, they could simply buy a list of gun owners from a commercial data broker.
I assume ATF has already done this.
Public libraries are one of the great things about America...free to all, no questions asked.
Thanks in large part to robber baron guilt. Given that we're busily descending into a new Gilded Age, I guess the libraries in America can look forward to a new contruction boom—in 2080 or so. (It takes a while to fully complete those continent-straddling trusts.)
Sorry about the word-nazism, but this stuff really grates on me.
Never apologize for being a grammar Nazi. Lesser beings must be corrected!