The problem is that most sealed canisters and containers aren't mobile. Cars are.. and they tend to get crushed and damaged on a somewhat regular basis. While the container may fail slowly due to fatigue, corrosion, etc., the fault mode I'm concerned with in a vehicle is a several thousand joule point impact, which will typically rupture all but the sturdiest of containers, leading to catastrophic failure. It is possible to build a high pressure vessel that can withstand the forces in a high speed collision -- but they're very bulky, on the order of several hundred pounds of weight. In addition to the weight problem, there's also the crash safety factor -- modern cars are designed to crumple up to absorb an impact. Your sealed canister (by design necessity) can't absorb anything. There's no crush factor. For something weighing several hundred pounds... that's a serious problem.
Are they guilty of anti-trust issues if the algorithms put their results first, not due to manipulation, but due to popularity?
Not exactly. The entire premise of Google originally was to put results at the top that had the most links to pages which matched keywords and phrases the user entered. But as people started gaming the system by adding links to their site in forums like Slashdot, Reddit, etc., spamming the web to inflate their index rating, Google had to start tweaking the algorithms and making manual changes to attempt to exclude such attempts. In the process of doing this, the manual ranking of certain websites based on other factors (like traffic rankings on Alexis, etc.), became very complicated. In an attempt to monetize their search results as well as provide a way for monied interests to promote their websites without spamming the indexes, they introduced sponsored links, then google ad words, etc. But the spam continues, and so Google finally opted to manually tweak rankings of many vendors, including their own, to put them on the first 10 results consistently.
So yes, they are manipulating the results, but then... every search engine has to thanks to spammers trying to inflate their ranking.
Well guys, I don't know about you, but I have only one question: Is it a separate chip on the motherboard? Because if it is, I'm hosting SMC desoldering classes the day this thing hits the market. Who'd have thought the day would come when we'd have to modchip our own damn computers...
I am such a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. Thus, I take my leave to wallow in my sophomoric caricature of a man, having ripened my soul under the blistering gaze of.... girlintraining.
A tale of woe and amazement! And lo, the girl did blow the poor distraught man a kiss from across the digital divide, before twirling her hair and skipping away giggling...
Yearly, a single suburban home will produce several hundred pounds of lawn clippings, the primary components of which are cellulose and water. Other sources are ornamental tree trimmings, and waste paper pulp products.
I think you flunked earth sciences. The lawn needs those things; It composts and reduces to fertilizer for the next year. Same with leaves and such. The reason our crop yields are falling and most of our cities are basically slabs of clay with a few inches of top soil over the top is because we're constantly trimming, mowing, and raking away all the nutrients that the plants need to survive and replacing it with pesticides, synthetic fertilizer, and all manner of chemicals that are dangerous to us.
I'm not discounting the source: I'm simply pointing out it's already marked for a different use, courtesy mother nature. Ethanol is a supportive technology, like solar, wind, or hydroelectric. But it can't replace the fuels in our vehicles because there's no way to produce enough of it to completely offset oil. In fact, all the alternative energy technologies that are commercially feasible can't do it. It's called energy density, and so far we haven't been able to find a fuel that has both high energy density and a low conversion cost that can match dead dino fuel. Some of them have reached the point where they may be useful for daily commutes in an urban environment, but there is nothing yet created that I can put 80 pounds of it in my car and drive 400 miles, and then stop, wait for 5 minutes to refuel, and then continue. The few technologies that offer decent conversion efficiency and energy density usually have significant drawbacks. Natural gas, for example, has to be compressed to several hundred PSI in order to get a reasonable amount into a car. At those pressures, a hairline fracture in the tank will not only destroy the car, but anyone within a hundred feet of it... I'm not sure I like the idea of riding a bomb to work every day. That's just one example; there are many others, but they all suffer from the same physics problem: Energy density and conversion efficiency.
There is no way to ever produce enough to replace gasoline. Right now 40% of our corn stock is, by federal law, ground up and turned into Ethanol, and it manages to offset about 15% of gasoline. We could turn our entire yearly production of grown food into ethanol production and still fall short. It isn't a sustainable technology, no matter how much waste, byproduct, etc., is produced. There simply isn't enough land to make it. Oil took millions of years to create, and was formed from the organic waste of the entire planet. We'll have depleted that million-plus year stock in just under 100 years.
"In non "nerd" speak: This leak only matters if your PS3 is already hacked. If you updated your PS3 with any official update released in the past 8 months (3.60 or higher), nothing has changed. No free games for you."
Not entirely accurate: There aren't any free games for you today. But within the next few months, you can be sure firmware will be available to give you free games forever. Start downloading now, non-nerd.
Fundamentally, client-side security doesn't work. You can obscure the hell out of it and bury it deep within the system, but sooner or later, someone's gonna crack it. If they'd just let the damn homebrew people make backups of their games and install their own software, I doubt the mod community would have sprung up like this. They wanted access to the hardware, not pirated games. If they'd just locked up the portion of the system responsible for validating a game disk with some kind of TPM mechanism but left the possibility of running "unsigned" content, I doubt this breakthrough would have happened within the life of the product.
Sony, like every other big corporation, doesn't understand how hackers think. They don't give a fuck about your games: They want to see the nifty hardware! They want to push it to its limits, make new stuff with it. These are creative people who are endlessly fascinated with how things work. They're bored engineers.
But management got the idea in their head that the hardware is also theirs, not the person who bought it, and they're the only ones that get to say what it does, how it does it, etc. In so doing, they pissed off about a half million people who have the time, patience, resources, and will to tear the damn thing apart piece by piece until it's theirs again. Guys, why couldn't you just let them have their fucking Linux on PS3?
While I'd love to blame an economic system for this, I feel the truth is more mundane: consumers are oblivious to what they are purchasing and are content to pay high prices for bad service.
"Today, I'd like to pay more for everything!," said no one ever. That's the same argument politicians use against the unemployed, but the names have been changed to protect the guilty: "They're just lazy and don't want to work", and then complain that unemployment is only high because of minimum wage laws. The truth is... a lot of people are working jobs they don't want to for less than they're worth because that's all that's available. It's supply and demand -- the price is set in the area near or at where those two curves meet. The price isn't the problem here -- not by itself. It's right where it should be... given market conditions. And I've never seen the price fall radically out of alignment with supply and demand in a stable market. Ever. If you can find me an example, step forward and collect millions in grant money for your economic research... because a lot of people would want to analyze that and figure out how the hell it happened. So let's talk about those market conditions.
Imagine if even 25% of the new phone buyers took a look at these plans and said, "Wow, that's a terrible option. I'm going to roll back to my old Nokia flip-phone and wait for industry to get its act together."
Collective bargaining. I covered this in another post on this thread, but briefly -- let's say it works. The company goes bankrupt because the price fell out of the bottom and their debts and such start to mount -- you can only cut so many corners, and 25% of corners is usually "I'm dead" in business. In steps the new guy, buys out all the infrastructure at a fraction of cost, and can charge a lower price because he's only paying maintenance cost, not installation costs. You get your 25%, and everybody's happy, right? Wrong. Eventually, the infrastructure will have to be replaced, or upgraded -- and there won't be money for that. Or maybe there will be, but who's going to do business in your area since they know they're going to have to up the price to cover the investment cost of new infrastructure? Nobody will. You've made your group a financial liability -- an unstable element. And so you'll have your cheap phones... but they'll be running on 5, 10, 20 year old infrastructure. Eventually, your neighbors will be sporting better plans, lower prices, etc., and you're still stuck with infrastructure that's out of date. In the end, you'll pay more.
If you want to fix the problem, you need to look at exclusive contracts, and how they work. I cover this elsewhere in this thread, so I won't repeat it again here.
You are correct, but only to a point. This isn't a "natural monopoly" situation because spectrum is (theoretically) a public resource. Nobody owns it, it's leased from the government under a set of rules... and cell phone spectrum operates using specific standards designed to be interoperable. So multiple economic agents can share the same resource (spectrum), since they're required by law to interoperate. And it's the same thing with land: While it is a limited resource, that's not what's keeping cell phone towers from popping up everywhere. You're only paying a few thousand dollars per year in most suburban areas in taxes for your house. The land itself is probably worth less than a quarter million. The cost of putting up and maintaining a tower, locating it on land of that value, will recoup costs in under ten years.
What's causing the monopoly is exclusive contracts. When a municipality allows, say, Verizon to throw up a tower, they're agreeing to let only Verizon put up towers in that area for a period of time. But it's not the towers that are the problem -- it's the land. It's the backbone... the wires that connect the tower to the main office. And if you're new, you're going to have to negotiate with your competitor for access to cables to get your data back. Unsurprisingly... this costs a lot, if they don't just say "No" flat out. Mind you, they never do that -- they just throw up so many hurdles and legal challenges that it's effectively the same thing.
Yeah, because it's easy for people to form collective buyer and seller pacts as individuals. Just walk over to your neighbor, and convince him to join your cause! Capitalism works because it depends on individual actors (you, your neighbor...) to make decisions about what would best benefit them. And usually, it does work. Sometimes it doesn't -- and when there's a market imbalance, it's usually the government's fault. And it is in this case -- exclusive contracts on spectrum use and land use keep competition out.
Getting together and collectively saying no doesn't change the terms of the contract... and even if you bankrupt them, someone else will come in, buy up the cables and towers they put up, and you'll be right back where you started. Yes, the price may come down because the new guy's getting the infrastructure at a fraction of the cost to build it. But who's going to lay new wire and towers after that? Eventually... you'll be out of date, and paying just as much (if not more) than the guys who didn't arrange a collective bargaining agreement.
The problem here is the exclusive contract as a financial instrument. If you want low prices... destroy them without delay.
When a capitalist says this, it's a hand wave. They're dismissing cost of entry into the market. And let me explain to you why cost of entry matters in telecommunications (or for that matter, any infrastructure industry)... First, limited resources. You need access to land to run cables. If you're wireless, you need to negotiate for spectrum. Both are controlled by someone else. And the law says they don't have to sell to you at a competitive price -- or any price, for that matter. They choose whether you get in the door or not... and they may just choose to charge you an arm and a leg. Municipalities sign exclusive contracts saying only your competitor can run cables in that area for a period of 5, 10, 20, even 50 years. Why, you ask? Because those companies tell the municipality if they don't agree, they won't do business with them. "Too risky. Need to protect our investment," they say.
And then there's spectrum. It's not all equal -- and how well your network does wirelessly still depends on finding land to put your towers up. Again, exclusive contracts -- they'll fuck you every time. You can't just ask J. Random home owner to host your tower.. he'd probably love the income, but the government has zoning regulations... oh, and exclusive contracts.
In fact, in every case where capitalism has failed in an infrastructure capacity, it's for that reason: Exclusive contracts. Exclusive rights. Exclusive. Not inclusive. Inclusive means competition, and we don't want that. Exclusive means "protected investment"... and "protected investment" means... you, the consumer, are gonna pay a premium. Not them, not the guys who forced you down this road. You. Because their money is more special than other people's money. Their money has a government stamp of approval.
So the next time you hear a capitalist say "induce competition," remind them that they're the ones that asked for the exclusive contracts. Afterall, it's good business, right? And for them... it is.
So, guys... how's that whole "Let the market decide" argument working out for you? Capitalism works great for non-critical, non-infrastructure goods and services... but when it gets its hands on something everybody needs, it's gonna take you to the cleaners. Every single time.
Your brain isn't a computer. You can't just upgrade the processor and it works 20% faster from that point on, but otherwise does the exact same stuff. Anytime you tweak something in a brain, any brain, you're making a tradeoff. You're getting one thing by giving up another. Millions of years of evolution have figured out the most efficient way to balance survival, intelligence, and metabolic conservation. You start tweaking that on your own, and while you might get something you want, and may not notice a downside right away -- eventually, one will become apparent. And it could be irreversible.
There was a drug used to treat anxiety a number of years ago... and it's still on the market... and some patients who were taking it had their symptoms re-appear (shaking, nervous facial tics, etc.)... so the doctors thought the underlying pathology had worsened and increased the dose. And this went on for several years -- the dose levels creeping slowly upwards to combat the apparently chronic and worsening underlying disease. And then one day, someone noticed a correlation: For this subset of patients, the drug was simultaniously the cause of, and the cure for, muscle twitching. And when the patients were taken off the drug, the symptoms were unbearable to watch... they'd flop about like a fish out of water. As it turns out, the drug turned what had been a mild problem into a permanent and severe neurological condition.
So the next time you get the notion in your head that tweaking your brain with chemicals, wires, magnets, or whatever else you happen to read about: Remember the law of unintended consequences. In biology, there is always a price to pay. Every evolutionary step is a tradeoff. Every. Single. One.
I can't imagine a world where perfectly healthy people feel the need to take addictive stimulants just to help them focus throughout the day.
You joke, but it's a serious problem. We have the fewest number of vacation days of any industrialized country, poor health care, and many of our poorer citizens work north of 50 hour work-weeks, some with two jobs, others balancing college and a full-time job (and still wind up hundreds of thousands in debt from student loans). We are literally working ourselves to death -- obesity rates are skyrocketing, and the average person consumes 2.25 cans of soda per day. Frankly, it's worse for you than smoking -- each of those cans is 130 calories, and then it amps your metabolism and simultaniously acts as a dieretic so your appetite increases. I read something about how the average American consumes something like 2,800 calories per day. My weight and build puts my daily consumption at around 1,500 calories a day... which means the average person consumes 86% more food than I do. And we pack in the stimulants, along with the pounds. Then to top it off, we don't get enough sleep because of our LCD screens, 26 hours of TV a week... our lifestyles are killing us.
Now, I have severe ADHD. I've been tested repeatedly by neuropsychologists, and there is no question I have it. I have to take it just to keep pace with this "Type A with rabies" culture I live in, and it isn't easy. The side effects aren't terribly pleasant either -- shaking, insomnia, anxiety... I can't understand why someone would want to deal with these effects unless they had to. People, strong stimulants aren't fun. They will give you energy, but at a cost -- the candle that burns twice as fast burns half as long. I have to take it, and it's expensive. And I don't take it on the weekends, or vacation, etc. I take as little as I can functionally get away with.
Please guys, I'm telling this to you as someone with the attention span of -- oh look, a kitty -- life is too short. Don't take medication you don't need. Please. It isn't worth it. You're young, and stupid, and your body can tolerate it now... but you're wearing it out faster, and it's for stupid silly shit that twenty years from now, you won't care about. Stop being obedient slaves and putting in 60 hour work weeks. Stop working yourself into an early grave. Go out, see friends, see family. Leave work in the office... don't take it home.
Drugs without side effects are like unicorns -- they don't exist. They all have risks. I have a cousin right now who's a pain pill junkie. They were prescribed by her doctor. She was told they were safe, and the addiction crept up on her slowly. Now, she's on parole for five years after getting so doped up she didn't know her head from her ass -- all on legally prescribed drugs at the doses prescribed by competent physicians -- and she did something stupid. And the thing is, she got out and went right back to doing it. Stimulants do the same thing to some people -- everyone has their drug of choice. Everyone. Not everyone has found it yet.
Now I'm not against recreational drugs; It's your choice. And if tomorrow they decided to hand out bottles of Adderall and Ritalin next to the aspirin, I wouldn't complain. It's your life, it's your body, it's your choice. But please people, think. Think long and hard about whether finishing that TPS report is really worth the extra minutes off your life, the high blood pressure, the sleepless nights, and the cold sweat when you're so amped you feel like there's a strange presence in the room with you, watching. Just ask yourself that. Choose well.
It's no longer about gaining user names / passwords to pron sites and finding out-dated wordpresses. Something like stuxnet has shown the dangers of the next level.
The method used to commit the crime should rarely be a significant issue in determining guilt. If your actions led directly to someone's death or injury, or was the proximate cause of the same, then you're guilty. We don't need new laws, or stiffer punishments based on the involvement of a computer -- if you hurt or killed someone, you should be punished on that basis. Whether it was with a gun or a keyboard, the result was the same... the only question then left for the jury to answer is whether it was accidental, negligent, reckless, or intentional.
I'll agree with your sentiment when corporate leaders are held to the same standard.
I won't. Torture is wrong, no matter whom it is directed against. Whether you're rich or poor, justice is supposed to be fair, impartial, and blind. Punishment should be based on what someone did, not who they are. Nobody should be put in solitary confinement or denied regular socialization for a prolonged duration. It's not a deterrent. It doesn't reform the person. It accomplishes absolutely nothing except the destruction of that person's humanity. If the punishment is to destroy someone, do it with a bullet, quickly... not taking their mind and humanity a piece at a time in some dark, forgotten room.
He's a member of the 1%. If there's anything I learned from OWS, it's that it's good for laws to be abused as long as the victims are acceptable targets.
Then you learned some bad lessons, man. "The rule of law does not mean that the protection of the law must be available only to a fortunate few or that the law should be allowed to be prostituted by vested interests for protecting and upholding the status quo under the guise of enforcement of civil and political rights. The poor too have civil and political rights and the rule of law is meant for them also, though today it exists only on paper and not in reality." - Supreme Court of India, PUDR v. Union of India (AIR 1982 SC 1473, 1477),
I'd think putting a hacker in general population would be worse, with all the rape, beatings and stabbings. Hackers could probably handle being alone a lot better.
That argument is patently absurd. That's like saying when a woman gets raped, it's not as bad because they can handle it better. It doesn't matter whether someone is better or worse equipped to handle violence and mistreatment -- it's still inhumane, and the person is still damaged after. Solitary confinement is torture; It's something no civilized society should tolerate. How we treat our most vulnerable and disadvantaged citizens is the true measure our own humanity.
1) Fire: You can build your entire machine on metal, that won't prevent the thing you are cutting from catching fire.
Nitrogen canister, regulator, pump to measure gas volume... enclosed container. Fire needs oxygen to burn.
2) Smoke: There's a reason most laser cutters have huge ventilation tubes. The laser will produce smoke, if you cut anything but wood it will be toxic smoke. Not good.
Seal the equipment in an air-tight chamber, vent it to atmosphere when safe or pass exhaust through activated-carbon.
3) Laser: 40 watts is 100 times the power needed to instantly blind you. Lasers of that power are dangerous even bouncing on non-reflective surfaces. The laser is probable IR so invisible too.
Safety interlocks to prevent chamber from being opened while laser is active; Viewing ports made of laser-safe safety glass to absorb specific wavelength of laser beam (same as the safety goggles you should know to wear...).
And IMHO the worst: The high-current high-voltage power source (10 KV or more) can instantly kill you.
Isolation transformer, sealed unit, zero-delay ground return fault interrupt from mains, capacitor buffered to smooth initial load during firing (which would otherwise trip the aforementioned). Proper grounding. Oh, and proper grounding. And proper. Fucking. Grounding.
Now you're right, these things are all dangerous and can kill you... but so can climbing into a hot tub if you're drunk. You can't make something perfectly safe, but you can make it reasonably safe. Your microwave also contains a power supply rated for similar voltages... and similar risks for body damage if the safeties are compromised.
Plenty of "civilized" governments exploit the fact that the population is largely unaware of the psychological effects of extended isolation.
Yeah, it destroys a person, utterly and completely. A few months of it a person can endure; But a year? Years? When they finally open that door, there won't be anything left but meat. The person will have long ago left. It's disgusting and inhumane. A bullet would be more compassionate.
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The problem is that most sealed canisters and containers aren't mobile. Cars are.. and they tend to get crushed and damaged on a somewhat regular basis. While the container may fail slowly due to fatigue, corrosion, etc., the fault mode I'm concerned with in a vehicle is a several thousand joule point impact, which will typically rupture all but the sturdiest of containers, leading to catastrophic failure. It is possible to build a high pressure vessel that can withstand the forces in a high speed collision -- but they're very bulky, on the order of several hundred pounds of weight. In addition to the weight problem, there's also the crash safety factor -- modern cars are designed to crumple up to absorb an impact. Your sealed canister (by design necessity) can't absorb anything. There's no crush factor. For something weighing several hundred pounds... that's a serious problem.
That's a "HAS a big problem" thing.
Problem, n.: A feature. -- The New Ballmer Dictionary
Are they guilty of anti-trust issues if the algorithms put their results first, not due to manipulation, but due to popularity?
Not exactly. The entire premise of Google originally was to put results at the top that had the most links to pages which matched keywords and phrases the user entered. But as people started gaming the system by adding links to their site in forums like Slashdot, Reddit, etc., spamming the web to inflate their index rating, Google had to start tweaking the algorithms and making manual changes to attempt to exclude such attempts. In the process of doing this, the manual ranking of certain websites based on other factors (like traffic rankings on Alexis, etc.), became very complicated. In an attempt to monetize their search results as well as provide a way for monied interests to promote their websites without spamming the indexes, they introduced sponsored links, then google ad words, etc. But the spam continues, and so Google finally opted to manually tweak rankings of many vendors, including their own, to put them on the first 10 results consistently.
So yes, they are manipulating the results, but then... every search engine has to thanks to spammers trying to inflate their ranking.
Well guys, I don't know about you, but I have only one question: Is it a separate chip on the motherboard? Because if it is, I'm hosting SMC desoldering classes the day this thing hits the market. Who'd have thought the day would come when we'd have to modchip our own damn computers...
I am such a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. Thus, I take my leave to wallow in my sophomoric caricature of a man, having ripened my soul under the blistering gaze of.... girlintraining.
A tale of woe and amazement! And lo, the girl did blow the poor distraught man a kiss from across the digital divide, before twirling her hair and skipping away giggling...
Yearly, a single suburban home will produce several hundred pounds of lawn clippings, the primary components of which are cellulose and water. Other sources are ornamental tree trimmings, and waste paper pulp products.
I think you flunked earth sciences. The lawn needs those things; It composts and reduces to fertilizer for the next year. Same with leaves and such. The reason our crop yields are falling and most of our cities are basically slabs of clay with a few inches of top soil over the top is because we're constantly trimming, mowing, and raking away all the nutrients that the plants need to survive and replacing it with pesticides, synthetic fertilizer, and all manner of chemicals that are dangerous to us.
I'm not discounting the source: I'm simply pointing out it's already marked for a different use, courtesy mother nature. Ethanol is a supportive technology, like solar, wind, or hydroelectric. But it can't replace the fuels in our vehicles because there's no way to produce enough of it to completely offset oil. In fact, all the alternative energy technologies that are commercially feasible can't do it. It's called energy density, and so far we haven't been able to find a fuel that has both high energy density and a low conversion cost that can match dead dino fuel. Some of them have reached the point where they may be useful for daily commutes in an urban environment, but there is nothing yet created that I can put 80 pounds of it in my car and drive 400 miles, and then stop, wait for 5 minutes to refuel, and then continue. The few technologies that offer decent conversion efficiency and energy density usually have significant drawbacks. Natural gas, for example, has to be compressed to several hundred PSI in order to get a reasonable amount into a car. At those pressures, a hairline fracture in the tank will not only destroy the car, but anyone within a hundred feet of it... I'm not sure I like the idea of riding a bomb to work every day. That's just one example; there are many others, but they all suffer from the same physics problem: Energy density and conversion efficiency.
Another side effect of broken optimization is a tendancy for some of its users to think they're funny...
There is no way to ever produce enough to replace gasoline. Right now 40% of our corn stock is, by federal law, ground up and turned into Ethanol, and it manages to offset about 15% of gasoline. We could turn our entire yearly production of grown food into ethanol production and still fall short. It isn't a sustainable technology, no matter how much waste, byproduct, etc., is produced. There simply isn't enough land to make it. Oil took millions of years to create, and was formed from the organic waste of the entire planet. We'll have depleted that million-plus year stock in just under 100 years.
"In non "nerd" speak: This leak only matters if your PS3 is already hacked. If you updated your PS3 with any official update released in the past 8 months (3.60 or higher), nothing has changed. No free games for you."
Not entirely accurate: There aren't any free games for you today. But within the next few months, you can be sure firmware will be available to give you free games forever. Start downloading now, non-nerd.
Fundamentally, client-side security doesn't work. You can obscure the hell out of it and bury it deep within the system, but sooner or later, someone's gonna crack it. If they'd just let the damn homebrew people make backups of their games and install their own software, I doubt the mod community would have sprung up like this. They wanted access to the hardware, not pirated games. If they'd just locked up the portion of the system responsible for validating a game disk with some kind of TPM mechanism but left the possibility of running "unsigned" content, I doubt this breakthrough would have happened within the life of the product.
Sony, like every other big corporation, doesn't understand how hackers think. They don't give a fuck about your games: They want to see the nifty hardware! They want to push it to its limits, make new stuff with it. These are creative people who are endlessly fascinated with how things work. They're bored engineers.
But management got the idea in their head that the hardware is also theirs, not the person who bought it, and they're the only ones that get to say what it does, how it does it, etc. In so doing, they pissed off about a half million people who have the time, patience, resources, and will to tear the damn thing apart piece by piece until it's theirs again. Guys, why couldn't you just let them have their fucking Linux on PS3?
While I'd love to blame an economic system for this, I feel the truth is more mundane: consumers are oblivious to what they are purchasing and are content to pay high prices for bad service.
"Today, I'd like to pay more for everything!," said no one ever. That's the same argument politicians use against the unemployed, but the names have been changed to protect the guilty: "They're just lazy and don't want to work", and then complain that unemployment is only high because of minimum wage laws. The truth is... a lot of people are working jobs they don't want to for less than they're worth because that's all that's available. It's supply and demand -- the price is set in the area near or at where those two curves meet. The price isn't the problem here -- not by itself. It's right where it should be... given market conditions. And I've never seen the price fall radically out of alignment with supply and demand in a stable market. Ever. If you can find me an example, step forward and collect millions in grant money for your economic research... because a lot of people would want to analyze that and figure out how the hell it happened. So let's talk about those market conditions.
Imagine if even 25% of the new phone buyers took a look at these plans and said, "Wow, that's a terrible option. I'm going to roll back to my old Nokia flip-phone and wait for industry to get its act together."
Collective bargaining. I covered this in another post on this thread, but briefly -- let's say it works. The company goes bankrupt because the price fell out of the bottom and their debts and such start to mount -- you can only cut so many corners, and 25% of corners is usually "I'm dead" in business. In steps the new guy, buys out all the infrastructure at a fraction of cost, and can charge a lower price because he's only paying maintenance cost, not installation costs. You get your 25%, and everybody's happy, right? Wrong. Eventually, the infrastructure will have to be replaced, or upgraded -- and there won't be money for that. Or maybe there will be, but who's going to do business in your area since they know they're going to have to up the price to cover the investment cost of new infrastructure? Nobody will. You've made your group a financial liability -- an unstable element. And so you'll have your cheap phones... but they'll be running on 5, 10, 20 year old infrastructure. Eventually, your neighbors will be sporting better plans, lower prices, etc., and you're still stuck with infrastructure that's out of date. In the end, you'll pay more.
If you want to fix the problem, you need to look at exclusive contracts, and how they work. I cover this elsewhere in this thread, so I won't repeat it again here.
You are correct, but only to a point. This isn't a "natural monopoly" situation because spectrum is (theoretically) a public resource. Nobody owns it, it's leased from the government under a set of rules... and cell phone spectrum operates using specific standards designed to be interoperable. So multiple economic agents can share the same resource (spectrum), since they're required by law to interoperate. And it's the same thing with land: While it is a limited resource, that's not what's keeping cell phone towers from popping up everywhere. You're only paying a few thousand dollars per year in most suburban areas in taxes for your house. The land itself is probably worth less than a quarter million. The cost of putting up and maintaining a tower, locating it on land of that value, will recoup costs in under ten years.
What's causing the monopoly is exclusive contracts. When a municipality allows, say, Verizon to throw up a tower, they're agreeing to let only Verizon put up towers in that area for a period of time. But it's not the towers that are the problem -- it's the land. It's the backbone... the wires that connect the tower to the main office. And if you're new, you're going to have to negotiate with your competitor for access to cables to get your data back. Unsurprisingly... this costs a lot, if they don't just say "No" flat out. Mind you, they never do that -- they just throw up so many hurdles and legal challenges that it's effectively the same thing.
Yeah, because it's easy for people to form collective buyer and seller pacts as individuals. Just walk over to your neighbor, and convince him to join your cause! Capitalism works because it depends on individual actors (you, your neighbor...) to make decisions about what would best benefit them. And usually, it does work. Sometimes it doesn't -- and when there's a market imbalance, it's usually the government's fault. And it is in this case -- exclusive contracts on spectrum use and land use keep competition out.
Getting together and collectively saying no doesn't change the terms of the contract... and even if you bankrupt them, someone else will come in, buy up the cables and towers they put up, and you'll be right back where you started. Yes, the price may come down because the new guy's getting the infrastructure at a fraction of the cost to build it. But who's going to lay new wire and towers after that? Eventually... you'll be out of date, and paying just as much (if not more) than the guys who didn't arrange a collective bargaining agreement.
The problem here is the exclusive contract as a financial instrument. If you want low prices... destroy them without delay.
Introduce competition.
When a capitalist says this, it's a hand wave. They're dismissing cost of entry into the market. And let me explain to you why cost of entry matters in telecommunications (or for that matter, any infrastructure industry)... First, limited resources. You need access to land to run cables. If you're wireless, you need to negotiate for spectrum. Both are controlled by someone else. And the law says they don't have to sell to you at a competitive price -- or any price, for that matter. They choose whether you get in the door or not... and they may just choose to charge you an arm and a leg. Municipalities sign exclusive contracts saying only your competitor can run cables in that area for a period of 5, 10, 20, even 50 years. Why, you ask? Because those companies tell the municipality if they don't agree, they won't do business with them. "Too risky. Need to protect our investment," they say.
And then there's spectrum. It's not all equal -- and how well your network does wirelessly still depends on finding land to put your towers up. Again, exclusive contracts -- they'll fuck you every time. You can't just ask J. Random home owner to host your tower.. he'd probably love the income, but the government has zoning regulations... oh, and exclusive contracts.
In fact, in every case where capitalism has failed in an infrastructure capacity, it's for that reason: Exclusive contracts. Exclusive rights. Exclusive. Not inclusive. Inclusive means competition, and we don't want that. Exclusive means "protected investment"... and "protected investment" means... you, the consumer, are gonna pay a premium. Not them, not the guys who forced you down this road. You. Because their money is more special than other people's money. Their money has a government stamp of approval.
So the next time you hear a capitalist say "induce competition," remind them that they're the ones that asked for the exclusive contracts. Afterall, it's good business, right? And for them... it is.
So, guys... how's that whole "Let the market decide" argument working out for you? Capitalism works great for non-critical, non-infrastructure goods and services... but when it gets its hands on something everybody needs, it's gonna take you to the cleaners. Every single time.
What's wrong with improving the wetware directly?
Your brain isn't a computer. You can't just upgrade the processor and it works 20% faster from that point on, but otherwise does the exact same stuff. Anytime you tweak something in a brain, any brain, you're making a tradeoff. You're getting one thing by giving up another. Millions of years of evolution have figured out the most efficient way to balance survival, intelligence, and metabolic conservation. You start tweaking that on your own, and while you might get something you want, and may not notice a downside right away -- eventually, one will become apparent. And it could be irreversible.
There was a drug used to treat anxiety a number of years ago... and it's still on the market... and some patients who were taking it had their symptoms re-appear (shaking, nervous facial tics, etc.)... so the doctors thought the underlying pathology had worsened and increased the dose. And this went on for several years -- the dose levels creeping slowly upwards to combat the apparently chronic and worsening underlying disease. And then one day, someone noticed a correlation: For this subset of patients, the drug was simultaniously the cause of, and the cure for, muscle twitching. And when the patients were taken off the drug, the symptoms were unbearable to watch... they'd flop about like a fish out of water. As it turns out, the drug turned what had been a mild problem into a permanent and severe neurological condition.
So the next time you get the notion in your head that tweaking your brain with chemicals, wires, magnets, or whatever else you happen to read about: Remember the law of unintended consequences. In biology, there is always a price to pay. Every evolutionary step is a tradeoff. Every. Single. One.
You missed my point: The fact that some people have better tolerances than others is not license for greater mistreatment of those people.
I can't imagine a world where perfectly healthy people feel the need to take addictive stimulants just to help them focus throughout the day.
You joke, but it's a serious problem. We have the fewest number of vacation days of any industrialized country, poor health care, and many of our poorer citizens work north of 50 hour work-weeks, some with two jobs, others balancing college and a full-time job (and still wind up hundreds of thousands in debt from student loans). We are literally working ourselves to death -- obesity rates are skyrocketing, and the average person consumes 2.25 cans of soda per day. Frankly, it's worse for you than smoking -- each of those cans is 130 calories, and then it amps your metabolism and simultaniously acts as a dieretic so your appetite increases. I read something about how the average American consumes something like 2,800 calories per day. My weight and build puts my daily consumption at around 1,500 calories a day... which means the average person consumes 86% more food than I do. And we pack in the stimulants, along with the pounds. Then to top it off, we don't get enough sleep because of our LCD screens, 26 hours of TV a week... our lifestyles are killing us.
Now, I have severe ADHD. I've been tested repeatedly by neuropsychologists, and there is no question I have it. I have to take it just to keep pace with this "Type A with rabies" culture I live in, and it isn't easy. The side effects aren't terribly pleasant either -- shaking, insomnia, anxiety... I can't understand why someone would want to deal with these effects unless they had to. People, strong stimulants aren't fun. They will give you energy, but at a cost -- the candle that burns twice as fast burns half as long. I have to take it, and it's expensive. And I don't take it on the weekends, or vacation, etc. I take as little as I can functionally get away with.
Please guys, I'm telling this to you as someone with the attention span of -- oh look, a kitty -- life is too short. Don't take medication you don't need. Please. It isn't worth it. You're young, and stupid, and your body can tolerate it now... but you're wearing it out faster, and it's for stupid silly shit that twenty years from now, you won't care about. Stop being obedient slaves and putting in 60 hour work weeks. Stop working yourself into an early grave. Go out, see friends, see family. Leave work in the office... don't take it home.
Drugs without side effects are like unicorns -- they don't exist. They all have risks. I have a cousin right now who's a pain pill junkie. They were prescribed by her doctor. She was told they were safe, and the addiction crept up on her slowly. Now, she's on parole for five years after getting so doped up she didn't know her head from her ass -- all on legally prescribed drugs at the doses prescribed by competent physicians -- and she did something stupid. And the thing is, she got out and went right back to doing it. Stimulants do the same thing to some people -- everyone has their drug of choice. Everyone. Not everyone has found it yet.
Now I'm not against recreational drugs; It's your choice. And if tomorrow they decided to hand out bottles of Adderall and Ritalin next to the aspirin, I wouldn't complain. It's your life, it's your body, it's your choice. But please people, think. Think long and hard about whether finishing that TPS report is really worth the extra minutes off your life, the high blood pressure, the sleepless nights, and the cold sweat when you're so amped you feel like there's a strange presence in the room with you, watching. Just ask yourself that. Choose well.
It's no longer about gaining user names / passwords to pron sites and finding out-dated wordpresses. Something like stuxnet has shown the dangers of the next level.
The method used to commit the crime should rarely be a significant issue in determining guilt. If your actions led directly to someone's death or injury, or was the proximate cause of the same, then you're guilty. We don't need new laws, or stiffer punishments based on the involvement of a computer -- if you hurt or killed someone, you should be punished on that basis. Whether it was with a gun or a keyboard, the result was the same... the only question then left for the jury to answer is whether it was accidental, negligent, reckless, or intentional.
I'll agree with your sentiment when corporate leaders are held to the same standard.
I won't. Torture is wrong, no matter whom it is directed against. Whether you're rich or poor, justice is supposed to be fair, impartial, and blind. Punishment should be based on what someone did, not who they are. Nobody should be put in solitary confinement or denied regular socialization for a prolonged duration. It's not a deterrent. It doesn't reform the person. It accomplishes absolutely nothing except the destruction of that person's humanity. If the punishment is to destroy someone, do it with a bullet, quickly... not taking their mind and humanity a piece at a time in some dark, forgotten room.
He's a member of the 1%. If there's anything I learned from OWS, it's that it's good for laws to be abused as long as the victims are acceptable targets.
Then you learned some bad lessons, man. "The rule of law does not mean that the protection of the law must be available only to a fortunate few or that the law should be allowed to be prostituted by vested interests for protecting and upholding the status quo under the guise of enforcement of civil and political rights. The poor too have civil and political rights and the rule of law is meant for them also, though today it exists only on paper and not in reality." - Supreme Court of India, PUDR v. Union of India (AIR 1982 SC 1473, 1477),
I'd think putting a hacker in general population would be worse, with all the rape, beatings and stabbings. Hackers could probably handle being alone a lot better.
That argument is patently absurd. That's like saying when a woman gets raped, it's not as bad because they can handle it better. It doesn't matter whether someone is better or worse equipped to handle violence and mistreatment -- it's still inhumane, and the person is still damaged after. Solitary confinement is torture; It's something no civilized society should tolerate. How we treat our most vulnerable and disadvantaged citizens is the true measure our own humanity.
1) Fire: You can build your entire machine on metal, that won't prevent the thing you are cutting from catching fire.
Nitrogen canister, regulator, pump to measure gas volume... enclosed container. Fire needs oxygen to burn.
2) Smoke: There's a reason most laser cutters have huge ventilation tubes. The laser will produce smoke, if you cut anything but wood it will be toxic smoke. Not good.
Seal the equipment in an air-tight chamber, vent it to atmosphere when safe or pass exhaust through activated-carbon.
3) Laser: 40 watts is 100 times the power needed to instantly blind you. Lasers of that power are dangerous even bouncing on non-reflective surfaces. The laser is probable IR so invisible too.
Safety interlocks to prevent chamber from being opened while laser is active; Viewing ports made of laser-safe safety glass to absorb specific wavelength of laser beam (same as the safety goggles you should know to wear...).
And IMHO the worst: The high-current high-voltage power source (10 KV or more) can instantly kill you.
Isolation transformer, sealed unit, zero-delay ground return fault interrupt from mains, capacitor buffered to smooth initial load during firing (which would otherwise trip the aforementioned). Proper grounding. Oh, and proper grounding. And proper. Fucking. Grounding.
Now you're right, these things are all dangerous and can kill you... but so can climbing into a hot tub if you're drunk. You can't make something perfectly safe, but you can make it reasonably safe. Your microwave also contains a power supply rated for similar voltages... and similar risks for body damage if the safeties are compromised.
Plenty of "civilized" governments exploit the fact that the population is largely unaware of the psychological effects of extended isolation.
Yeah, it destroys a person, utterly and completely. A few months of it a person can endure; But a year? Years? When they finally open that door, there won't be anything left but meat. The person will have long ago left. It's disgusting and inhumane. A bullet would be more compassionate.
If so, then that would be crossing the line.
Yeah... fingering a keyboard and embarassing some corporation is certainly a crime worthy of punishment equal to manslaughter. /snark