This isn't people being irrational, it's just a question of people assigning logic to random data...
If you are interviewed for a job, and you are asked the hypothetical question "Would you take the job for $50/hour", and then are actually offered the job at $20/hour, you'll be very suspicious that something sneaky is going on, and may believe you can get more money out of the negotiation, EVEN THOUGH you would probably have been happy with a $20/hour job up-front. On the flip side, if the first number is ridiculously low, and the second is more reasonable, you have every reason to assume you're luck to get as much as you were first offered.
Obviously, if you KNOW that data is random, you realize that's not the case. However, if you think there's a human behind the scenes, trying to gauge your reactions, it makes some sense.
OTOH, some of these tactics are already used to intentionally manipulate people. Ridiculous MSRP prices, leading to "99% OFF" sales, and similar tricks. Come to think of it, I may have to try using this to re-negotiate my salary...
Do different radio waves travel the same distance in a vaccuum?
Not entirely... Higher frequencies will disperse less, so they can be broadcast in a much more narrow cone (see: high-gain antenna), so that a much stronger signal will arrive at the (much smaller) destination. Compare flashlight versus, eg., a laser, to see the difference.
OTOH, like on earth, lower frequencies will disperse around an obstacle, rather than being stopped entirely, so if there's any solid objects in the vacuum, the same principles apply as on earth.
As far as the range? You can make a microwave signal go light years and a HAM signal go a few feet (although, there will be some distortion for transmitting a signal over a distance shorter than the wavelength). The range is more of a function of signal power.
You're horribly wrong.
Distance has everything to do with frequency. You aren't going to have shortwave/ham radio skipping around the world with a 2.4GHz transmitter no matter how much power you put into it. Similarly, there's a reason WiFi is popular at 2.4Ghz but the higher 5Ghz band used with the now-forgotten 802.11a standard has been vastly less utilized.
Frequency determines how well a signal will disperse around obstacles, and therefore, whether it will work AT ALL if you don't have 100% line-of-sight between transmitter and receiver.
- Video. The PAL standard is better quality than NTSC (Never The Same Color), so why did the Americas adopt an inferior option?
NTSC (or more accurately the M system, as in NTSC-M) predates PAL by DECADES. NTSC-m was around from the beginning of TV, and had color added-in in a backwards compatible way. PAL was a color-only standard. PAL countries had to broadcast in both their old B&W standard, as well as PAL for a great many years, until they finally shut-off old B&W transmitters.
So you should be asking A) Why didn't other countries add color in a compatible way, and B) Why didn't they adopt they NTSC if they were going to switch to something incompatible anyways?
Add windshield wipers
Windshield wiper refills are trivially easy to cut to length.
- DVDs. Take away the PAL and NTSC thing, and you've still got to deal with the DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD-DL+R, DVD-DL-R, DVD-DD+R, DVD-DL-R, the majority not compatible with all burners, drives and/or players.
There's only one type of recordable CD-R, but never-the-less, compatibility issues were much more significant, with some players being unable to read burned discs. The 3% of players which can't read DVD-R / DVD+R is completely insignificant by comparison.
Yes, but as the chart shows, the energy density has a hell of a lot of margin.
"density" doesn't matter remotely near enough to make up for those 90% hydrogen losses.
Places where "density" matters tend to be small spots, like cell phones. If we're talking about large-scale usage, there's always enough room for batteries.
Well, to nitpick, this isn't true. ALSA has software mixing support courtesy of dmix, on almost all cards, and most distros used it by default for some time before PA use became widespread.
That's not a nit pick... That's reading comprehension failure.
You'll notice he was speaking in past-tense... Before hardware mixing was generally available, and well before ALSA was even around (and we were all MUCH HAPPIER before ALSA...).
All of them had worse backwards compatibility than PulseAudio.
Not true. Just about every audio app out there supports esound, not because it was first, but precisely because it's so similar to standard auto output.
And if you get an app that doesn't have ESD support, you use the esd wrapper, then it does...
If they didn't, they could only have one application at a time play sound unless they had one of those relatively rare sound cards that had both hardware mixing and Linux support.
Not so much. SBLive! cards have been supported forever, and it didn't take long until the lowest-end sound chips included hardware mixing.
I think I was making a perfectly far comparison.. you can store energy for mobile application in a battery or in an ultracapacitor (worse) or in hydrogen (better).
Batteries and ultracapacitors include their own enclosures and are stable at room temperature.
Hydrogen, however, requires ultra massive tanks to store the stuff, immense amounts of energy to get it in there (cooling and pressurizing), it's immensely reactive and so will quickly destroy any container material, storage is simply impractical, and the conversion losses to and from it are HORRIBLE.
I encode all of my music as 256Kb/s AACs. For about 90% of it, I couldn't tell the difference between that and 128Kb/s. For about 90% of the remainder, I only can when I'm listening to it carefully. For the rest, it's jarring in a few places even when I'm only half-listening
All lossy frequency-domain audio codecs (which almost all of them are) are inherently going to introduce pre/post echo (and some other distortion) no matter how high the bitrate.
A time-domain codec, like MPEG-1 LayerII (MP2/Musicam) can faithfully and transparently reproduce even the most complex audio at about 192kbps. Download twolame (or even better, though incompatible: musepack) and see for yourself.
This is why some codecs like Dolby Digital (DD, AC-3, A/52) while generally frequency-domain codecs, will switch to a time-domain method when there are enough bits to allow for it.
There's a bunch of countries out there where if you get admitted into a university, the government picks up the tuition bill, period.
Forget "countries". College tuition varies wildly from state to state in the US.
Here in California, the state university system is very well funded.
Community ("Junior") College (first 2 years of college) is extremely cheap, to the point of being nearly free... Now, you're still responsible for buying the books, which can add up, but the internet has stepped in and dramatically reduced the price of those as well. Not to mention the really hard-up can just stay on campus as they work and use one of several copies in the school library. That will get you up to an Associates Degree.
4-year colleges within the state university system (as opposed to private uni's) are also so inexpensive that you can work your way through college with a simple (part-time, minimum wage) job, without starving, without having to save-up for years, and without going deeply into debt.
Now, if you don't want to be in the state university system, and instead want the name on your degree to be from some extra-prestigious private university, I'm not going to shed a tear for you.
If your state doesn't have a similarly good public education system:
1) complain to the state government, don't bitch about the big bad USA. 2) Move to a state that does for a year to get residency, then take full advantage of the educational opportunities. You'll probably find the state is a lot better in many other ways as well, and want to stay.
Excellent, timely medical care is something she (and I, until I moved to the USA) take for granted, without any "recission", or "previously established medical condition" nonsense.
Recision and pre-existing conditions are only an issue in the private health insurance market. If you get your insurance through your employer, which (by far) most Americans do, neither issue is relevant.
If you are retired, disabled, or unemployed, you are almost certainly covered my Medicare, which is also a highly respectable medical-care program.
It's only those who are in-between who have problems... Those who only work part-time, are self employed, and make money but barely eek out a living, who fall through the cracks of the US system, because they just weren't so prevalent decades ago when the system was put together. It's something that needs to be address, and will be, fairly soon.
Your POV on the subject vastly exaggerates the problems in the US, and completely ignores the numerous problem with the NIH in the UK.
if all the educated people are leaving the US, wouldn't that be a good old regular brain drain and not a reverse brain drain?
Actually, it's a small decrease in the amount of brain drain. It's not as if all foreigners are going home, it's just a larger number than before. Brain drain to the US is still alive and well.
You are "weird" if some narrow pursuit makes up the majority of your life. Be it programming, stamp collecting, keeping up with fashion, or memorizing baseball statistics. It naturally makes your interests rather narrow and much too extreme for average people to understand.
The non-weird people are those with a well-rounded life, and (generally) moderate or mediocre marketable skills (if any). I know plenty of normal people who make minimum wage... Very few (though some) who are in the top 5%.
And besides, we sysadmins are much more normal than you programmers (freaks!).
What are the benefits of paying many hundreds of billions per year to the elderly at the expense of everyone else?
Having waves of elderly people homeless is a huge cost to the public. So much so that the minimal amount of money they get from social security is actually a reduction in government spending on them.
Both programs are growing at a rate that threatens the solvency of the US.
Social security is just fine. Medicare is a huge problem which threatens to bankrupt the US. However, Medicare is just one segment of the overall problem of ballooning medical costs, which lead to 9 out of 10 bankruptcies, and a huge segment of the US population uninsured. It's a much bigger problem which needs to be addressed. Getting rid of medicare, and leaving the elderly to use the emergency room as their only medical care, will be vastly more expensive, not less. "Don't get sick, and if you do get sick: die quickly." doesn't work.
Why try to dump more money into education when it's clear (from the fact that education costs are increasing faster than the rate of inflation and the increasing intellectual weakness of college graduates) that too much money is already being pumped into education?
The money spent on K-12 education, adjusted for inflation, is 30% lower than it was 30 years ago, (per-capita/per-student).
For the rest of your "do we..." questions I'll just say: The experts have all resoundingly said, YES WE DO., and you've provided NO evidence to support your claim that we don't, so I will summarily dismiss you out of hand, as your comment deserves.
How is it costing us LESS money to keep the banks afloat so that housing prices can stay artificially inflated, maintaining an artificial bubble at great expense?
Bubble? Where the hell do you live? Housing prices around here are 1/5th what they were just a few years ago. That's lower than pre-bubble prices, while the population has been growing the whole time.
How is it costing us LESS to spend resources on WAR, which is not an investment but money tossed in to a blackhole never to be recovered?
Well, A) Going to war with Afghanistan earlier would have prevented the destruction of the World Trade Center, which cost an obscene amount of money. B) South Korea is a strong ally, and a valuable trading partner (while North Korea is not), so the US is apparently making money back on that war.
How is it costing us LESS to pay people NOT to do things?
If you're referring to social security, that's quite easy. It's been shown, time and time again, that the homeless are such a draw on the public that paying them just enough NOT to be homeless is a huge savings for us all.
And that's BESIDES the humanitarian side of things (minimal social safety net), which almost all Americans firmly believe in.
Government balance sheets aren't "in the red" due to a lack of money, it's due to a lack of restraint.
"Restraint" implies something desired, but totally unnecessary.
When you go deeply in debt paying for college, it's not a "lack of restraint" that put you in that bad situation, but an investment, which may or may not pay off.
So why is the government so roundly critized for similarly trying to get the education dollars remotely back up to where they were (per-capita) 30+ years ago?
I guess NASA represents a lack of restraint as well. Roads, too. As well as all forms of public transit.
The government exists specifically to pay for all those things which we all find beneficial to society, and would be impractical to do individually, or otherwise piecemeal.
And even those areas of flagrant fraud and waste, while requiring a fix, won't come close to making up the national deficit. The bailout money, while significant this year, will barely be noticeable average over the decades between major bailouts, AND would presumably end up costing everyone far more money, if that money wasn't spent where and when it was needed.
It's only on/. that the rabid libertarian sentiment doesn't get you laughed out of the room. It's idiotic on it's face.
Personally I would like to see someone design something like tor that would be limited to text based protocols like IRC, Usenet, etc.
Both Usenet and E-Mail are text-only mediums. You'll note there is NO binary data in e-mails or in Usenet posts. Therefore, it's impossible to transfer pornography through usenet or e-mail. Problem solved.
Note: Whatever you do, DON'T read about uuenc/base64/yEnc or other encoding. It doesn't exist I say!
It doesn't matter how strictly you control the data channel. If you restrict the channel to 7-bit contents, people will use 7-bit encoding for their binary data. If it can only transmit/receive 2 characters (let's say: Q and Y), I will STILL be able to transfer binary data over it, quite easily. You'll add some more overhead, but if the channel is otherwise fast enough, it's well worth it.
More people would be willing to run tor nodes because they wouldn't have to donate as much bandwidth
Donate as much or as little bandwidth as you want with TOR. Throttle it down to dial-up speeds, or do heavy traffic shaping so burty traffic gets a very high priority, and sustained transfers get slowed drastically. Of course, like above, once you impose those arbitrary limits, some software will come along to make the latter traffic perform more like the former...
Just because they happen to use GCC to build their binaries does not make GCC integral to any of them. Several compilers exist out there, and there's often work done to ensure programs can be compiled with ICC, and others.
And it should be pointed out that the major BSDs are all directing their effort into improving BSD-licensed compilers so that they can eliminate GCC all-together. Not only is GCC NOT an important part of the underlying software, but it has now become a major hindrance... Everyone's put up with the bugs, insane political decisions, and horrible design for long enough. FreeBSD can now be compiled entirely with Clang/LLVM, and OpenBSD with PCC. It seems likely GCC will be replaced in the not-to-distant future.
even for esstentials like power and water, i think if you choose to live in the middle of no where, your on your own.
So, the one, most dense city on the planet should get everything, and the rest of us should be left out because we aren't providing the most rewarding cost/profit scenario for the utilities?
Even New York, NY can't compare with the population density of several Asian cities. Oh well, no running water for you... Move to a real city if you want service!
In fact, the difference between ISPs falling over themselves to provide service for a given area, versus letting the infrastructure rot, has very little to do with population density, and much more to do with the disposable income of its residents. I know several cities which aren't expecting to get FIOS for the foreseeable future, even though they've got a larger population, and higher density, than the neighboring city when already has FIOS.
Personally, I'd recomend compelling universal coverage, if only for consistency. There are no end of stories of cheap broadband available in a city, but NOT if you're in area X, just because you're across a particular street, on the far side of a lot, etc. The telcos are monopolies, and they know they can string you along for as long as they want before getting around to providing you service, and you won't (can't) just go elsewhere for the service.
'm kinda curious though, how well does his theory apply to a small team of skilled workers, like say a programming team or surgical department?
I have no idea how you plan to apply a theory about management and promotion to a group small enough that there is essentially no management or promotion.
Sociopath's aren't necessarily a bad thing. They'll do whatever they have to for their benefit. If their benefit happens to benefit the company, SYNERGY! Symbiosis. Everyone's happy, capitalism works.
It works out, because even if some leeches find a way to benefit from what is disadvantageous to the company, there's someone higher-up who more directly benefits from the success of the company, and will either push the leeches in the right direction, or throw them out. The system works.
It only falls apart when the company is big enough that leeches go unnoticed higher up the chain.
I must admit that the corporate world is slowly turning me into a sociopath as well. I have lots of things that need to get done, diplomacy takes forever, and the brutally honest (naive) approach gets you in trouble. So, whatever simple tricks will get things going, in the direction they need to go, are fair game.
Yes, it takes a special balance of pathologies to make someone a manager, and when dealing with them, the only way to go is at least slightly dishonest manipulation. The standard forms of motivation that work with normal human beings just don't work with the collection of neuroses that coalesces into the form of a manager.
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This isn't people being irrational, it's just a question of people assigning logic to random data...
If you are interviewed for a job, and you are asked the hypothetical question "Would you take the job for $50/hour", and then are actually offered the job at $20/hour, you'll be very suspicious that something sneaky is going on, and may believe you can get more money out of the negotiation, EVEN THOUGH you would probably have been happy with a $20/hour job up-front. On the flip side, if the first number is ridiculously low, and the second is more reasonable, you have every reason to assume you're luck to get as much as you were first offered.
Obviously, if you KNOW that data is random, you realize that's not the case. However, if you think there's a human behind the scenes, trying to gauge your reactions, it makes some sense.
OTOH, some of these tactics are already used to intentionally manipulate people. Ridiculous MSRP prices, leading to "99% OFF" sales, and similar tricks. Come to think of it, I may have to try using this to re-negotiate my salary...
No, Jesus gets 10Gigabit internet.
mdash!
&mkay;
Not entirely... Higher frequencies will disperse less, so they can be broadcast in a much more narrow cone (see: high-gain antenna), so that a much stronger signal will arrive at the (much smaller) destination. Compare flashlight versus, eg., a laser, to see the difference.
OTOH, like on earth, lower frequencies will disperse around an obstacle, rather than being stopped entirely, so if there's any solid objects in the vacuum, the same principles apply as on earth.
You're horribly wrong.
Distance has everything to do with frequency. You aren't going to have shortwave/ham radio skipping around the world with a 2.4GHz transmitter no matter how much power you put into it. Similarly, there's a reason WiFi is popular at 2.4Ghz but the higher 5Ghz band used with the now-forgotten 802.11a standard has been vastly less utilized.
Frequency determines how well a signal will disperse around obstacles, and therefore, whether it will work AT ALL if you don't have 100% line-of-sight between transmitter and receiver.
NTSC (or more accurately the M system, as in NTSC-M) predates PAL by DECADES. NTSC-m was around from the beginning of TV, and had color added-in in a backwards compatible way. PAL was a color-only standard. PAL countries had to broadcast in both their old B&W standard, as well as PAL for a great many years, until they finally shut-off old B&W transmitters.
So you should be asking A) Why didn't other countries add color in a compatible way, and B) Why didn't they adopt they NTSC if they were going to switch to something incompatible anyways?
Windshield wiper refills are trivially easy to cut to length.
There's only one type of recordable CD-R, but never-the-less, compatibility issues were much more significant, with some players being unable to read burned discs. The 3% of players which can't read DVD-R / DVD+R is completely insignificant by comparison.
"density" doesn't matter remotely near enough to make up for those 90% hydrogen losses.
Places where "density" matters tend to be small spots, like cell phones. If we're talking about large-scale usage, there's always enough room for batteries.
That's not a nit pick... That's reading comprehension failure.
You'll notice he was speaking in past-tense... Before hardware mixing was generally available, and well before ALSA was even around (and we were all MUCH HAPPIER before ALSA...).
Not true. Just about every audio app out there supports esound, not because it was first, but precisely because it's so similar to standard auto output.
And if you get an app that doesn't have ESD support, you use the esd wrapper, then it does...
Not so much. SBLive! cards have been supported forever, and it didn't take long until the lowest-end sound chips included hardware mixing.
Batteries and ultracapacitors include their own enclosures and are stable at room temperature.
Hydrogen, however, requires ultra massive tanks to store the stuff, immense amounts of energy to get it in there (cooling and pressurizing), it's immensely reactive and so will quickly destroy any container material, storage is simply impractical, and the conversion losses to and from it are HORRIBLE.
All lossy frequency-domain audio codecs (which almost all of them are) are inherently going to introduce pre/post echo (and some other distortion) no matter how high the bitrate.
A time-domain codec, like MPEG-1 LayerII (MP2/Musicam) can faithfully and transparently reproduce even the most complex audio at about 192kbps. Download twolame (or even better, though incompatible: musepack) and see for yourself.
This is why some codecs like Dolby Digital (DD, AC-3, A/52) while generally frequency-domain codecs, will switch to a time-domain method when there are enough bits to allow for it.
Forget "countries". College tuition varies wildly from state to state in the US.
Here in California, the state university system is very well funded.
Community ("Junior") College (first 2 years of college) is extremely cheap, to the point of being nearly free... Now, you're still responsible for buying the books, which can add up, but the internet has stepped in and dramatically reduced the price of those as well. Not to mention the really hard-up can just stay on campus as they work and use one of several copies in the school library. That will get you up to an Associates Degree.
4-year colleges within the state university system (as opposed to private uni's) are also so inexpensive that you can work your way through college with a simple (part-time, minimum wage) job, without starving, without having to save-up for years, and without going deeply into debt.
Now, if you don't want to be in the state university system, and instead want the name on your degree to be from some extra-prestigious private university, I'm not going to shed a tear for you.
If your state doesn't have a similarly good public education system:
1) complain to the state government, don't bitch about the big bad USA.
2) Move to a state that does for a year to get residency, then take full advantage of the educational opportunities. You'll probably find the state is a lot better in many other ways as well, and want to stay.
Recision and pre-existing conditions are only an issue in the private health insurance market. If you get your insurance through your employer, which (by far) most Americans do, neither issue is relevant.
If you are retired, disabled, or unemployed, you are almost certainly covered my Medicare, which is also a highly respectable medical-care program.
It's only those who are in-between who have problems... Those who only work part-time, are self employed, and make money but barely eek out a living, who fall through the cracks of the US system, because they just weren't so prevalent decades ago when the system was put together. It's something that needs to be address, and will be, fairly soon.
Your POV on the subject vastly exaggerates the problems in the US, and completely ignores the numerous problem with the NIH in the UK.
Actually, it's a small decrease in the amount of brain drain. It's not as if all foreigners are going home, it's just a larger number than before. Brain drain to the US is still alive and well.
You are "weird" if some narrow pursuit makes up the majority of your life. Be it programming, stamp collecting, keeping up with fashion, or memorizing baseball statistics. It naturally makes your interests rather narrow and much too extreme for average people to understand.
The non-weird people are those with a well-rounded life, and (generally) moderate or mediocre marketable skills (if any). I know plenty of normal people who make minimum wage... Very few (though some) who are in the top 5%.
And besides, we sysadmins are much more normal than you programmers (freaks!).
By all means... Prove it!
Having waves of elderly people homeless is a huge cost to the public. So much so that the minimal amount of money they get from social security is actually a reduction in government spending on them.
Social security is just fine. Medicare is a huge problem which threatens to bankrupt the US. However, Medicare is just one segment of the overall problem of ballooning medical costs, which lead to 9 out of 10 bankruptcies, and a huge segment of the US population uninsured. It's a much bigger problem which needs to be addressed. Getting rid of medicare, and leaving the elderly to use the emergency room as their only medical care, will be vastly more expensive, not less. "Don't get sick, and if you do get sick: die quickly." doesn't work.
The money spent on K-12 education, adjusted for inflation, is 30% lower than it was 30 years ago, (per-capita/per-student).
For the rest of your "do we..." questions I'll just say: The experts have all resoundingly said, YES WE DO., and you've provided NO evidence to support your claim that we don't, so I will summarily dismiss you out of hand, as your comment deserves.
Bubble? Where the hell do you live? Housing prices around here are 1/5th what they were just a few years ago. That's lower than pre-bubble prices, while the population has been growing the whole time.
Well, A) Going to war with Afghanistan earlier would have prevented the destruction of the World Trade Center, which cost an obscene amount of money. B) South Korea is a strong ally, and a valuable trading partner (while North Korea is not), so the US is apparently making money back on that war.
If you're referring to social security, that's quite easy. It's been shown, time and time again, that the homeless are such a draw on the public that paying them just enough NOT to be homeless is a huge savings for us all.
And that's BESIDES the humanitarian side of things (minimal social safety net), which almost all Americans firmly believe in.
"Restraint" implies something desired, but totally unnecessary.
When you go deeply in debt paying for college, it's not a "lack of restraint" that put you in that bad situation, but an investment, which may or may not pay off.
So why is the government so roundly critized for similarly trying to get the education dollars remotely back up to where they were (per-capita) 30+ years ago?
I guess NASA represents a lack of restraint as well.
Roads, too. As well as all forms of public transit.
The government exists specifically to pay for all those things which we all find beneficial to society, and would be impractical to do individually, or otherwise piecemeal.
And even those areas of flagrant fraud and waste, while requiring a fix, won't come close to making up the national deficit. The bailout money, while significant this year, will barely be noticeable average over the decades between major bailouts, AND would presumably end up costing everyone far more money, if that money wasn't spent where and when it was needed.
It's only on /. that the rabid libertarian sentiment doesn't get you laughed out of the room. It's idiotic on it's face.
Both Usenet and E-Mail are text-only mediums. You'll note there is NO binary data in e-mails or in Usenet posts. Therefore, it's impossible to transfer pornography through usenet or e-mail. Problem solved.
Note: Whatever you do, DON'T read about uuenc/base64/yEnc or other encoding. It doesn't exist I say!
It doesn't matter how strictly you control the data channel. If you restrict the channel to 7-bit contents, people will use 7-bit encoding for their binary data. If it can only transmit/receive 2 characters (let's say: Q and Y), I will STILL be able to transfer binary data over it, quite easily. You'll add some more overhead, but if the channel is otherwise fast enough, it's well worth it.
Donate as much or as little bandwidth as you want with TOR. Throttle it down to dial-up speeds, or do heavy traffic shaping so burty traffic gets a very high priority, and sustained transfers get slowed drastically. Of course, like above, once you impose those arbitrary limits, some software will come along to make the latter traffic perform more like the former...
Just because they happen to use GCC to build their binaries does not make GCC integral to any of them. Several compilers exist out there, and there's often work done to ensure programs can be compiled with ICC, and others.
And it should be pointed out that the major BSDs are all directing their effort into improving BSD-licensed compilers so that they can eliminate GCC all-together. Not only is GCC NOT an important part of the underlying software, but it has now become a major hindrance... Everyone's put up with the bugs, insane political decisions, and horrible design for long enough. FreeBSD can now be compiled entirely with Clang/LLVM, and OpenBSD with PCC. It seems likely GCC will be replaced in the not-to-distant future.
So, the one, most dense city on the planet should get everything, and the rest of us should be left out because we aren't providing the most rewarding cost/profit scenario for the utilities?
Even New York, NY can't compare with the population density of several Asian cities. Oh well, no running water for you... Move to a real city if you want service!
In fact, the difference between ISPs falling over themselves to provide service for a given area, versus letting the infrastructure rot, has very little to do with population density, and much more to do with the disposable income of its residents. I know several cities which aren't expecting to get FIOS for the foreseeable future, even though they've got a larger population, and higher density, than the neighboring city when already has FIOS.
Personally, I'd recomend compelling universal coverage, if only for consistency. There are no end of stories of cheap broadband available in a city, but NOT if you're in area X, just because you're across a particular street, on the far side of a lot, etc. The telcos are monopolies, and they know they can string you along for as long as they want before getting around to providing you service, and you won't (can't) just go elsewhere for the service.
I have no idea how you plan to apply a theory about management and promotion to a group small enough that there is essentially no management or promotion.
Lots of things which are "well known" and "common knowledge" also happen to be false...
Sociopath's aren't necessarily a bad thing. They'll do whatever they have to for their benefit. If their benefit happens to benefit the company, SYNERGY! Symbiosis. Everyone's happy, capitalism works.
It works out, because even if some leeches find a way to benefit from what is disadvantageous to the company, there's someone higher-up who more directly benefits from the success of the company, and will either push the leeches in the right direction, or throw them out. The system works.
It only falls apart when the company is big enough that leeches go unnoticed higher up the chain.
I must admit that the corporate world is slowly turning me into a sociopath as well. I have lots of things that need to get done, diplomacy takes forever, and the brutally honest (naive) approach gets you in trouble. So, whatever simple tricks will get things going, in the direction they need to go, are fair game.
Yes, it takes a special balance of pathologies to make someone a manager, and when dealing with them, the only way to go is at least slightly dishonest manipulation. The standard forms of motivation that work with normal human beings just don't work with the collection of neuroses that coalesces into the form of a manager.