Self regulation works wonders in a free market, however wired internet providers are often monopolies, often enforced by law, at least they are here in the USA, it's often illegal to lay down new fiber next to a competitor, just like it is for telephone lines and power lines. So obviously after the free market is completely destroyed, and regulation is entirely necessary.
This was why Verizon ans Google didn't wanna bother with regulating wireless, since there is still competition between at least 4 big companies, which seems pretty bad already. So obviously wired internet is in a much worse state, and it's seldom you have 4 high speed ISPs to choose from.
The idea of self regulation is that there is so much competition, regulation would stifle innovation.... clearly high speed internet is here and isn't dropping in price, so there isn't anymore innovation to stifle and regulators need to step in.
This is the exact reason why I got an N900, because it has Skype and SIP builtin. If you don't connect it to google voice the delay isn't that bad with Skype, although it's still noticeable,but I do live in Maine. Free SIP providers were pretty terrible.
However, I wanted text messages too, so google voice was my solution, but this doubles the call delay (lag), and made it SIP and Skype unusable, although the free text messaging worked great! So if you're willing to have a separate number for text and voice, since you can't really use Skype for texting, it's doable. Although the who knows how it will handle calls when you are driving at 70mph. And obviously if you go somewhere on vacation you need a new phone and phone number, which sucks a lot. It's like buying an electric car now, it's expensive and the service for it still sucks.
quivalent to dropping a 1 gramme mass approx. 1mm.
You mean 1 cm.
but I seem to recall it takes of the order of magnitude of 10^10 W/sq cm to do that.
The Sun's strength hitting the Earth is 0.1 W/cm^2. A simple magnifying glass, perhaps 10 sq cm can burn paper and plastic and rubber, so that's only 1 watt total focused. So it seems likely that 1kw focused AND coherent light would burn through. Don't forget that L.A.S.E.R. produces coherent light, which burns through things much more easily than incoherent sunlight.
The government doesn't see cash transactions, whenever you buy something with cash the government doesn't know about it. Unless they are tracking your cc sales they don't know about it either. If you earn a salary and your boss declares it, then they know, but any small business, or tip earners they don't know about.
This is why you just need a sales tax, then the government never knows what you earn and isn't involved in your economic affairs nearly as much. There would be no tax accountants, auditors... and there wouldn't be a million different types of investments that avoid taxes in different ways (ira's, 401k). You would just earn and invest your money, and pay sales taxes when you spend your hard earned money. Before it's spent it'll be in a bank for them to invest in new businesses instead of being taxed away immediately.
So the problem is government guaranteed loans, which allows students to rack up lots of debt, and lending institutions on Wallstreet can 'invest', in student loans. Hell it's guaranteed profit, who wouldn't. So instead of money being invested in profitable business, it's going to shitty public and private schools. And obviously it hasn't been working, crappy degrees, and high prices.
Without the loans, far fewer people could afford to waste money on useless degrees, and maybe finally tuitions would drop.
How is gasoline subsidized??? It's taxed, supposedly for road infrastructure. Perhaps you consider the tax breaks oil companies receive as a subsidy, although without tax breaks US companies would just have to pull out of foreign ventures, since they would be taxed twice.(50% foreign taxes plus 40% stateside taxes)
There is no need to subsidize airlines or trains, their prices need to go up. Stop taxing me for services I seldom use. You argument that there are more subsidies than I like, and that the government is spending more money than I think, is only a reason for me to whine more.
irrational? Gold is easily divisible, liquid, fungible, easily recognizable, and scarce. There has also never been a time in history when gold was suddenly unwanted. It's an excellent choice for money that is not controlled by governments and central banks.... it's freedom.
No, the tragedy was the result, the ability for the government to print such vast quantities of money, that instead of deflation, we have had inflation (couple %/yr, or an exponential increase in the money supply) for decades. Combined with fractional reserve banking, the money supply has exploded and diverted vast quantities of wealth to the government. We have lost something like 95% of the value of our dollar since '71, so the government has effectively taken and spent 95% of the combined value of the money supply. This along with high taxes has destroyed and misdirected capital and has resulted in our current predicament.
Yea no shit, and don't forget how that you are also being taxed to give subsidies to hybrid vehicles and other alternative fuel research that is still too expensive.
So actually the government could just step out of the way, and I'll buy a $20,000 regular car, and pay less taxes. 50mbit connections in the US???? That's very rare, and still new and therefore expensive.
So in conclusion, expensive, new technology, and government subsidies that misdirect YOUR money are the burdens. However these aren't burdens, these are just stupid things few people waste their money on. When the technology matures it's cheap, effective, and does provide benefit.
Remember back when having a two income family really put you on top. Then everyone started to do it and the economy adjusted. Now you need that just to get by. We need to do that in reverse then keep going!
It was the other way around, the economy started sucking to the point that you needed both people to work. More people working = more production and a richer society. Going off the gold standard in '73 made the dollar fall by ~60% overnight, and that's why you need two people to work now. Hell minimum wage was $1.50, or 1.5oz of silver, which is about $40 right now. Blame the government for destroying and squandering our wealth through inflation.
The US oil companies sell what? Heating oil and gasoline for cars, how does a Thorium reactor power Chinese automobiles?
Natural gas is much much cheaper than nuclear, even solar is cheaper. China just has assloads of cash and a lack of energy, so they are building 1 coal power plant per week, plus nuclear, plus solar, plus hydro, and they still can't keep up. Check the Uranium prices, they already went up 10 fold in the last decade, whereas solar is the exact opposite, it keeps getting cheaper.
I'm all for putting nuclear reactors in cargo ships, but it's too expensive for electricity. I guess your argument is that we waste even more money building alternative energy projects that have no economic benefit, but actually make everyone poorer. You do know we already have insanely high subsidies for alternative energy projects.
What would work the best is to increase the tax 10fold on gasoline and natural gas, that would spur innovation in alternative energy, and also leave us broke. The market is working just fine, there are hybrids and electric cars and alternative fuels already being sold. The problem is that they are expensive and often less reliable/powerful/useable than the fossil fuel alternatives. Just give it a couple more years, and the market will pick the best new technology..... that is unless we have your way, where the government gets to pick the winners and losers, and siphons untold billions away from investment by interfering in the market.
That's not to say the government can't help, it could give some patents to the public, like the NiMH battery patent. Those batteries effectively double the range of electric cars, but like you said, here the oil companies are colluding to keep you stuck on oil. Of course it's never talked about, even tho this could make a huge positive impact immediately without costing the taxpayer a penny. Instead the government does as you suggest, pour billions into battery research in hopes to maybe create a battery 75% as good as the one already patented....utter bullshit.
Actually it's worse when things are closer. Focusing plane waves must only bend/reflect the light a little, and a simple parabolic mirror will do. But when you aren't in the far distant limit, the light is still expanding outward, like the light from a candle, in all directions. Now you need something MORE angled than a parabolic mirror, you need to bend the light MORE, so the limit is hit even sooner. This is widely studied, and there are plenty of theoretically sound models taking into account your specific lenses.
The semiconductor manufacturing uses near field photolithography for ages where they routinely create features smaller than the diffraction limit.
What exactly do you mean by this? They often use photomasks, shorter wavelengths, or narrow slits at very close range, so the light has no time to spread out. The LIMIT is what you can focus, so perhaps you can't focus your laser to 10nm, but you can just shoot lots of light through a 10nm gap, and it'll burn a 10nm, hole. Now if they were using a laser 1m away, no photomasks, and actually focused it (completely focused) to 10nm, then they would have broke the limit.
If Nokia can't fix Microsoft, it might a long painful road towards demise. Let's all hope it's OSS that wins, and not something even more closed than Microsoft. It would be a painful irony if OSS's efforts resulted in the demise of MS, and instead of an Android win, an Apple win from DRM on software, combined with closed hardware
And my N900 could have had such a beautiful future, but if MS can make their phone as nice as their Xbox and an easy to program for, it may have a beautiful future, if they stop attacking OSS for their phone.
Not much, the RC toy chopper for $10 more has a gryo and autostability control and are supposedly amazingly stable and easy to fly....or so I have heard, as I also have not ventured outside to the mall to see them in action.
Anytime you slip out of a helicopter, I think it's bad. But I do agree, I would enjoy falling 1000ft or so much more than being cut up by a blade, and then falling.
Helicopter are inherently unstable because the gyro (the blades) are on top, so they are very hard to fly. If you put the blades at the bottom, like they did with this, the stability is utterly amazing.
This is why you need charter schools, because when you send your kid to private school, it's not like they reimburse you for all the taxes you are paying towards public school.
Steam was the main reason I buying video games. Other software download services were often no better or worse than a torrent download, only keeping your game available to download for a yr or two, allowing a certain number of downloads, and not offering updates.
Steam offered a service well beyond any what torrent site did. Constantly updated games, unlimited downloads, as well as a friend network built in, like xbox live. This, combined with very good deals on games, made me think it worthwhile to purchase games on steam. Honestly, it's sad that a service as good as Steam or Itunes is something unique, as it really just offers the things I would expect. If the music industry hadn't been a-holes about licensing, there would have been services similar to itunes right after napster appeared, and if they didn't try raping you, and allowed cheaper music, like $5 albums, they could have had a real chance at stemming the music piracy.
What for? To sell all the games that run on linux?
Steam did DRM correctly, log in and download and play your games anywhere. You can play your game on multiple computers, just not at the same time.... which is exactly what one license is for! Valve ant-cheat got rid of hackers, keeping the games fun to play. Steam basically saved PC gaming.
Slashdot Mirror
Self regulation works wonders in a free market, however wired internet providers are often monopolies, often enforced by law, at least they are here in the USA, it's often illegal to lay down new fiber next to a competitor, just like it is for telephone lines and power lines. So obviously after the free market is completely destroyed, and regulation is entirely necessary.
This was why Verizon ans Google didn't wanna bother with regulating wireless, since there is still competition between at least 4 big companies, which seems pretty bad already. So obviously wired internet is in a much worse state, and it's seldom you have 4 high speed ISPs to choose from.
The idea of self regulation is that there is so much competition, regulation would stifle innovation.... clearly high speed internet is here and isn't dropping in price, so there isn't anymore innovation to stifle and regulators need to step in.
It's not that they don't "let" you, the N900 doesn't have an antenna for 3G from ATT, the only other GSM provider in the USA.
This is the exact reason why I got an N900, because it has Skype and SIP builtin. If you don't connect it to google voice the delay isn't that bad with Skype, although it's still noticeable,but I do live in Maine. Free SIP providers were pretty terrible.
However, I wanted text messages too, so google voice was my solution, but this doubles the call delay (lag), and made it SIP and Skype unusable, although the free text messaging worked great! So if you're willing to have a separate number for text and voice, since you can't really use Skype for texting, it's doable. Although the who knows how it will handle calls when you are driving at 70mph. And obviously if you go somewhere on vacation you need a new phone and phone number, which sucks a lot. It's like buying an electric car now, it's expensive and the service for it still sucks.
quivalent to dropping a 1 gramme mass approx. 1mm.
You mean 1 cm.
but I seem to recall it takes of the order of magnitude of 10^10 W/sq cm to do that.
The Sun's strength hitting the Earth is 0.1 W/cm^2. A simple magnifying glass, perhaps 10 sq cm can burn paper and plastic and rubber, so that's only 1 watt total focused. So it seems likely that 1kw focused AND coherent light would burn through. Don't forget that L.A.S.E.R. produces coherent light, which burns through things much more easily than incoherent sunlight.
The government doesn't see cash transactions, whenever you buy something with cash the government doesn't know about it. Unless they are tracking your cc sales they don't know about it either. If you earn a salary and your boss declares it, then they know, but any small business, or tip earners they don't know about.
This is why you just need a sales tax, then the government never knows what you earn and isn't involved in your economic affairs nearly as much. There would be no tax accountants, auditors... and there wouldn't be a million different types of investments that avoid taxes in different ways (ira's, 401k). You would just earn and invest your money, and pay sales taxes when you spend your hard earned money. Before it's spent it'll be in a bank for them to invest in new businesses instead of being taxed away immediately.
And that was easily solved, just kill the HDDVD standard completely.
So the problem is government guaranteed loans, which allows students to rack up lots of debt, and lending institutions on Wallstreet can 'invest', in student loans. Hell it's guaranteed profit, who wouldn't. So instead of money being invested in profitable business, it's going to shitty public and private schools. And obviously it hasn't been working, crappy degrees, and high prices.
Without the loans, far fewer people could afford to waste money on useless degrees, and maybe finally tuitions would drop.
How is gasoline subsidized??? It's taxed, supposedly for road infrastructure. Perhaps you consider the tax breaks oil companies receive as a subsidy, although without tax breaks US companies would just have to pull out of foreign ventures, since they would be taxed twice.(50% foreign taxes plus 40% stateside taxes) There is no need to subsidize airlines or trains, their prices need to go up. Stop taxing me for services I seldom use. You argument that there are more subsidies than I like, and that the government is spending more money than I think, is only a reason for me to whine more.
irrational? Gold is easily divisible, liquid, fungible, easily recognizable, and scarce. There has also never been a time in history when gold was suddenly unwanted. It's an excellent choice for money that is not controlled by governments and central banks.... it's freedom.
No, the tragedy was the result, the ability for the government to print such vast quantities of money, that instead of deflation, we have had inflation (couple %/yr, or an exponential increase in the money supply) for decades. Combined with fractional reserve banking, the money supply has exploded and diverted vast quantities of wealth to the government. We have lost something like 95% of the value of our dollar since '71, so the government has effectively taken and spent 95% of the combined value of the money supply. This along with high taxes has destroyed and misdirected capital and has resulted in our current predicament.
That really doesn't make any sense at all
Yea no shit, and don't forget how that you are also being taxed to give subsidies to hybrid vehicles and other alternative fuel research that is still too expensive. So actually the government could just step out of the way, and I'll buy a $20,000 regular car, and pay less taxes. 50mbit connections in the US???? That's very rare, and still new and therefore expensive.
So in conclusion, expensive, new technology, and government subsidies that misdirect YOUR money are the burdens. However these aren't burdens, these are just stupid things few people waste their money on. When the technology matures it's cheap, effective, and does provide benefit.
Remember back when having a two income family really put you on top. Then everyone started to do it and the economy adjusted. Now you need that just to get by. We need to do that in reverse then keep going!
It was the other way around, the economy started sucking to the point that you needed both people to work. More people working = more production and a richer society. Going off the gold standard in '73 made the dollar fall by ~60% overnight, and that's why you need two people to work now. Hell minimum wage was $1.50, or 1.5oz of silver, which is about $40 right now. Blame the government for destroying and squandering our wealth through inflation.
lol, excellent point, I won't be recommending that anymore.
The US oil companies sell what? Heating oil and gasoline for cars, how does a Thorium reactor power Chinese automobiles?
Natural gas is much much cheaper than nuclear, even solar is cheaper. China just has assloads of cash and a lack of energy, so they are building 1 coal power plant per week, plus nuclear, plus solar, plus hydro, and they still can't keep up. Check the Uranium prices, they already went up 10 fold in the last decade, whereas solar is the exact opposite, it keeps getting cheaper.
I'm all for putting nuclear reactors in cargo ships, but it's too expensive for electricity. I guess your argument is that we waste even more money building alternative energy projects that have no economic benefit, but actually make everyone poorer. You do know we already have insanely high subsidies for alternative energy projects.
What would work the best is to increase the tax 10fold on gasoline and natural gas, that would spur innovation in alternative energy, and also leave us broke. The market is working just fine, there are hybrids and electric cars and alternative fuels already being sold. The problem is that they are expensive and often less reliable/powerful/useable than the fossil fuel alternatives. Just give it a couple more years, and the market will pick the best new technology..... that is unless we have your way, where the government gets to pick the winners and losers, and siphons untold billions away from investment by interfering in the market.
That's not to say the government can't help, it could give some patents to the public, like the NiMH battery patent. Those batteries effectively double the range of electric cars, but like you said, here the oil companies are colluding to keep you stuck on oil. Of course it's never talked about, even tho this could make a huge positive impact immediately without costing the taxpayer a penny. Instead the government does as you suggest, pour billions into battery research in hopes to maybe create a battery 75% as good as the one already patented....utter bullshit.
Actually it's worse when things are closer. Focusing plane waves must only bend/reflect the light a little, and a simple parabolic mirror will do. But when you aren't in the far distant limit, the light is still expanding outward, like the light from a candle, in all directions. Now you need something MORE angled than a parabolic mirror, you need to bend the light MORE, so the limit is hit even sooner. This is widely studied, and there are plenty of theoretically sound models taking into account your specific lenses.
Wiki link
The semiconductor manufacturing uses near field photolithography for ages where they routinely create features smaller than the diffraction limit.
What exactly do you mean by this? They often use photomasks, shorter wavelengths, or narrow slits at very close range, so the light has no time to spread out. The LIMIT is what you can focus, so perhaps you can't focus your laser to 10nm, but you can just shoot lots of light through a 10nm gap, and it'll burn a 10nm, hole. Now if they were using a laser 1m away, no photomasks, and actually focused it (completely focused) to 10nm, then they would have broke the limit.
Apparently their must be an app that alters your GPS data so it looks like you are going slower. Hopefully the poster tells us which app it is.
And my N900 could have had such a beautiful future, but if MS can make their phone as nice as their Xbox and an easy to program for, it may have a beautiful future, if they stop attacking OSS for their phone.
After finally reaching the mythical level of 11 (and I thought only amps went to 11), it is finally time for a movie and retirement.
Not much, the RC toy chopper for $10 more has a gryo and autostability control and are supposedly amazingly stable and easy to fly....or so I have heard, as I also have not ventured outside to the mall to see them in action.
Anytime you slip out of a helicopter, I think it's bad. But I do agree, I would enjoy falling 1000ft or so much more than being cut up by a blade, and then falling.
Helicopter are inherently unstable because the gyro (the blades) are on top, so they are very hard to fly. If you put the blades at the bottom, like they did with this, the stability is utterly amazing.
This is why you need charter schools, because when you send your kid to private school, it's not like they reimburse you for all the taxes you are paying towards public school.
Steam was the main reason I buying video games. Other software download services were often no better or worse than a torrent download, only keeping your game available to download for a yr or two, allowing a certain number of downloads, and not offering updates.
Steam offered a service well beyond any what torrent site did. Constantly updated games, unlimited downloads, as well as a friend network built in, like xbox live. This, combined with very good deals on games, made me think it worthwhile to purchase games on steam. Honestly, it's sad that a service as good as Steam or Itunes is something unique, as it really just offers the things I would expect. If the music industry hadn't been a-holes about licensing, there would have been services similar to itunes right after napster appeared, and if they didn't try raping you, and allowed cheaper music, like $5 albums, they could have had a real chance at stemming the music piracy.
What for? To sell all the games that run on linux?
Steam did DRM correctly, log in and download and play your games anywhere. You can play your game on multiple computers, just not at the same time.... which is exactly what one license is for!
Valve ant-cheat got rid of hackers, keeping the games fun to play. Steam basically saved PC gaming.
It flat out beats Calc for advanced functionality.
And that's if you ignore that VBA is built into excel, which makes it something far more powerful than OpenOffice.