For what it's worth, though, it sounds like Ars' pay system has been doing very well.
Ripped from the front page without permission:
Although only a few days have passed since we broke new ground with our Ars Premier Membership subscription, I thought I'd post an update for y'all. It's going great! We expected it to be slow at first, but in all actuality, the numbers are growing steadily, and beyond our expectations for this early period.
To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever sucessfully launched a solar sail of that size. If they manage to get all the way through the development process and actually build something that works for $250M, I will be pretty impressed. NASA has certainly burned through more money with less result more than once.
A working solar sail design would be vastly useful in the development of space resources... after we make access to LEO cheap enough to make the technology relevant.
I don't doubt that Verizon sucks -- I'm just skeptical of your statement that getting sued is going to be good for Covad. Large company sues smaller company that happens to be in the right is not usually good news. Remember what happened to Aureal?
What sweet revenge for people like me that endured months of wrangling...
Uh... Did you read the article? Verizon is suing Covad, claiming that all those problems that Verizon is getting blamed for are actually Covad's fault. Sorry, no revenge today.
This smells like a solution looking for a problem. Or more accurately, it's a solution that does not match the problem that actually exists.
ADSL modems (at least; don't know about SDSL) aren't actually that expensive. They can be had (used) for $50-$100 if you do a little looking. They're aren't very complicated devices. The reason they cost alot is that the manufacturers currently are only supposed to sell to DSL providers: the end user can't just pick one up at CompukeSA, so the providers charge what they want.
So what I don't understand is, why would the providers ever go for something like this?
Oh yeah, and don't even think about netgaming on this system. Soundblasters have a bad habit of taking over the PCI bus as it is. I can't imagine this making it anything but worse.
I had a Silencer 275 for awhile, and they are MUCH quieter than 34dB. However, they don't move very much air, and I wasn't happy with my case temps under load.
So I bought one of PC Power's Thermalsense fans and used it to replace the PS fan. Now everything is nice and quiet when I'm just surfing, but the fan revs up when it's hot or when I'm gaming. I'm quite happy with it so far.
I'm planning on getting another one of these fan, amputating the temp sensor and putting it on a long extension wire, and using it as my case fan. The sensor will go up near the top of the case so that the fan will vary its speed based on the case temp, not on the temp of the incoming air.
The scalability of many small servers is great, but I would think they would run into a wall eventually due to the effort required to maintain all those machines. I mean, even if the failure rate is very low on a per machine-per time basis, if you have enough machines, you're going to wind up replacing multiple hard drive, cards, mobos etc every day. Their system is redundant enough that this doesn't affect performance, but there is a cost associated with the manpower required to do all that maintenance.
I just gotta wonder at what point they would get better overall efficiency by replacing all those little boxes with a couple of big iron mainframes.
There are electrically dissapative plastics available, although they may be expensive (dunno). And they look tinted, because there is a thin layer of metallic material sandwiched or bonded on.
Or, of course, you could consider the even larger issue of how to coerce things such that those two questions get closer to becoming the same..
Yes, that's a valid point to raise. But now you're talking about practical politics, rather than philosophy. My post was an attempt to frame the question philosophically. That's important, but frankly relatively easy to do. Bringing the reality of the situation into line with the theory is a much harder problem, and I don't have any answers for you. Sorry.:(
come on, our democracy pretty much works and it works historically better than any other system ever created...
This is pretty much true. Historical perspective is a great treatment for despair over the state of the world. However, I feel (as I believe you do) that better still isn't good enough. As I see it, we (humans) are doing better than we ever have before in history. However, we also have vastly more power now than we ever did before, which equates to an ability to screw things up on a grander scale than ever before (or, possibly, to achieve a near-Eden, if we do it right). I think human civilization is balanced on a razor's edge: if we fall off one side, we will be destroyed by war and/or ecological collapse; fall off the other side, and we descend into tyranny (with the same ultimate consequence; for all that our environmental record in this country is bad, the record of totalitarian states is much, much worse). If we walk the edge successfully, we may achieve a new, healthier and (hopefully) more stable state as a species.
Fuck all the ethical punditry. its the law that counts here.
I won't argue for a moment that most of the usage on Napster was legal under current laws. However, the real issue regarding copyright and IP is larger than "what is the law now?". The proper question is "what should the law be?". When circumstances change such that the cost of enforcing a particular law (whatever its merits under previous circumstances) includes the destruction of fair use rights, freedom from unlawful search and seizure, and freedom of speech, is the old law still good law?
If it becomes necessary to create a police state in order to enforce a particular law effectively, then there is a problem with that law.
This line of logic also applies to the issues of internet censorship and the drug war.
The "power crisis" in California is not a result of an inability to satisfy average demand; the problem is meeting peak demand.
My point is that if, for example, the major server farms in the Bay Area started generating their own power using clean, efficient systems such the Capstone microturbine or fuel cells, it would go a long way towards relieving the shortage. The server farms win because they get a reliable source of clean power that they can control (so if they have enough capacity, they are safe from rolling blackouts). The public wins because, with the peak demand reduced, the impact of the "crisis" would be much reduced. They win again because they are spared the waste and wait associated with the long, drawn-out process of getting a new megagenerator plant built. Mostly the ones that lose are the power utilities who now have to deal with competition from their former customers that is more agile, more efficient, and more responsive than they are. Thus they (the utilities) have a strong incentive to throw as many regulatory roadblocks up as they can.
The power shortages that CA faces are due largely to the fact that, after deregulation, the utility companies decided to sell off a bunch of their plants and buy the extra power from the free market, and pocket the difference in price. Sometimes, a little regulation is a good thing.
A little regulation is also often a dangerous thing. The situation you have identified is half the problem, but only half. First of all, it's not a free market in power: there are all kinds of restrictions on the buying and selling of power, up to and including the requirement that all power trading be done in a particular building (talk about mistaking the market for the marketplace!). Secondly, while they partially deregulated the supply side of the equation, they did not deregulate the demand side. PG&E is now bankrupt because they were buying power at hugely inflated rates (largely from their parent company) but were forbidden from passing most of those costs on to their customers. There have been rate hikes, but they don't even begin to reflect the increase costs of power. The result is that the market system, in which supply, demand and price form a self-regulating feedback loop (i.e. supply is less than demand, price goes up, people conserve, demand goes down, prices come down) is broken.
The power crisis in California is not a market failure, it is a political policy failure. The problem is that the market has not been allowed to function.
A big one, especially out here in California, is wide-scale implementation of distributed power generation. Generating power on-site isn't a problem, but if you want to hook into the grid and sell your surplus, you have to descend into the morass of regulations that govern power utilities. And the "deregulation" of the power industry was anything but -- it was just a legal reorganization driven by a variety of special interst groups (and because the SIGs ranged from power utilities to environmentalists, the reorganization wasn't even coherent).
Distributed power generation has tremendous potential advantages, most notable being the reduction in line loss (which can be up to 40%) and better load/demand balancing.
Wireless telecom is another big one, which has been mentioned. The FCC sold out the American people bigtime on that one.
The laws governing private rocketry used to be extremely restrictive. They've gotten ALOT better in the last five years, although they're hardly perfect. The bigger government impediment is the government's involvement in the launch industry as a competitor. Not that they are competitive in terms of cost or anything else, but it has a big psychological effect on companies that might otherwise be willing to invest in development in the field.
As far as genetic engineering goes, I'm just as glad that there is regulatory oversight, even if it is inefficient and cumbersome. Genengineering is one of those genies that can't be put back in the bottle if it gets out, and I know just enough biology and chemistry to know just how little we truly understand about how the genetic code really works. For example, we just now figured out that humans have many, many fewer genes than we thought, which has forced us to totally rethink our theories about how these relatively few genes can encode enough information to build a people. It seems likely that that timing of expression and synergistic effect play a much larger role than we previously thought. Bottom line: this is NOT a well understood, mature science.
Oh yeah, and let's not forget nuclear power. Although nukes suffer a public image problem that is probably even more of an impediment than the regulatory restrictions. Which is a shame, because it is now possible to build a reactor that can't melt down no matter what. These reactors aren't as efficient as the older, hotter designs, but so what. Of course, there's still this small matter of waste disposal... But now we're back to the discussion of private rocketry:).
I don't want my government funding a way for sick little kids trying to get their fix or porn everyday at school.
God forbid kids should be curious about sex. There is obviously something wrong with any child who is curious and intrigued by this great adult mystery.
You know, maybe if our culture would just lighten up a bit on the whole sex thing, we'd have fewer sex obsessed freaks running around. And if (horrors!) there were actually cultural institutions that allowed teenagers to get their rocks off in a safe and healthy way, maybe it would be possible for a 15-year-old to think about something other than sex for ten minutes at a time.
Question: Can you point me to a relatively inexpensive (like less than $25) ethernet surge supressor. All the ones I found so far are $50-$100.
On a related note, do you know of any UPS's with integral RJ-11 connectors that can pass through a DSL signal without screwing it up. My system is currently vulnerable to surges through the DSL line, and I want to fix that.
I was reading about someone who built their own home, and in addition to wiring it for 100V-60hz, Cat5, and audio, he installed a second completely separate power system supplying 12volts DC.
You know what that means, of course: no more $&*@(%^ wall warts! And it eliminates the power waste associated with all those little tiny inefficient transformers (ever notice how hot those damn things get?)
Of course, it was an easy and obvious thing for him to do, since his home was also off grid, and most solar/wind/etc generators produce DC.
What about the case in which photorealistic child porn is made with CGI? This is probably not happening quite yet, since photorealistic CGI (e.g. Phantom Menace quality) is still out of the reach of the average consumer. Give it 5-10 years, though, and it'll be relatively easy and therefor common.
Not necessarily. For example, it is pretty widely accepted (both by psychologists and by women's activists) that rape (by adults, of adults) is much more about control and domination than it is about sex.
Yeah, yeah, I'm cynical too. But I happened to have reason to read a (recently published) marketing textbook recently. It was duller than ditchwater, but the one interesting thing was the discussion of the transition from a marketing-as-sales focus to a marketing-as-customer-service focus. The book was stating, in no uncertain terms, that:
1) This transition has been occuring slowly but steadily over the last two decades or so.
2) This transition will continue to accelerate, driven in part by the new opportunities and threats created by the internet.
The discussion of this effect was not by any means the central point of the book -- it was an honest-to-gods marketing textbook, not a sociological rant. But sometimes it sounded erriely like the Cluetrain Manifesto.
The book in question is "A Framework for Marketing Management" by Kostler, for what it's worth.
Slashdot Mirror
Ripped from the front page without permission:
Although only a few days have passed since we broke new ground with our Ars Premier Membership subscription, I thought I'd post an update for y'all. It's going great! We expected it to be slow at first, but in all actuality, the numbers are growing steadily, and beyond our expectations for this early period.
A working solar sail design would be vastly useful in the development of space resources... after we make access to LEO cheap enough to make the technology relevant .
I don't doubt that Verizon sucks -- I'm just skeptical of your statement that getting sued is going to be good for Covad. Large company sues smaller company that happens to be in the right is not usually good news. Remember what happened to Aureal?
Uh... Did you read the article? Verizon is suing Covad, claiming that all those problems that Verizon is getting blamed for are actually Covad's fault. Sorry, no revenge today.
Actually, you can have your cake and eat it too. Business does not have to rape the environment to turn a profit.
Must be handy to be able to see in the dark, eh? Care to tell us where you went for the eyeball upgrade?
ADSL modems (at least; don't know about SDSL) aren't actually that expensive. They can be had (used) for $50-$100 if you do a little looking. They're aren't very complicated devices. The reason they cost alot is that the manufacturers currently are only supposed to sell to DSL providers: the end user can't just pick one up at CompukeSA, so the providers charge what they want.
So what I don't understand is, why would the providers ever go for something like this?
Oh yeah, and don't even think about netgaming on this system. Soundblasters have a bad habit of taking over the PCI bus as it is. I can't imagine this making it anything but worse.
So I bought one of PC Power's Thermalsense fans and used it to replace the PS fan. Now everything is nice and quiet when I'm just surfing, but the fan revs up when it's hot or when I'm gaming. I'm quite happy with it so far.
I'm planning on getting another one of these fan, amputating the temp sensor and putting it on a long extension wire, and using it as my case fan. The sensor will go up near the top of the case so that the fan will vary its speed based on the case temp, not on the temp of the incoming air.
I just gotta wonder at what point they would get better overall efficiency by replacing all those little boxes with a couple of big iron mainframes.
There are electrically dissapative plastics available, although they may be expensive (dunno). And they look tinted, because there is a thin layer of metallic material sandwiched or bonded on.
Yes, that's a valid point to raise. But now you're talking about practical politics, rather than philosophy. My post was an attempt to frame the question philosophically. That's important, but frankly relatively easy to do. Bringing the reality of the situation into line with the theory is a much harder problem, and I don't have any answers for you. Sorry. :(
come on, our democracy pretty much works and it works historically better than any other system ever created...
This is pretty much true. Historical perspective is a great treatment for despair over the state of the world. However, I feel (as I believe you do) that better still isn't good enough. As I see it, we (humans) are doing better than we ever have before in history. However, we also have vastly more power now than we ever did before, which equates to an ability to screw things up on a grander scale than ever before (or, possibly, to achieve a near-Eden, if we do it right). I think human civilization is balanced on a razor's edge: if we fall off one side, we will be destroyed by war and/or ecological collapse; fall off the other side, and we descend into tyranny (with the same ultimate consequence; for all that our environmental record in this country is bad, the record of totalitarian states is much, much worse). If we walk the edge successfully, we may achieve a new, healthier and (hopefully) more stable state as a species.
Good luck to us.
I won't argue for a moment that most of the usage on Napster was legal under current laws. However, the real issue regarding copyright and IP is larger than "what is the law now?". The proper question is "what should the law be?". When circumstances change such that the cost of enforcing a particular law (whatever its merits under previous circumstances) includes the destruction of fair use rights, freedom from unlawful search and seizure, and freedom of speech, is the old law still good law?
If it becomes necessary to create a police state in order to enforce a particular law effectively, then there is a problem with that law.
This line of logic also applies to the issues of internet censorship and the drug war.
My point is that if, for example, the major server farms in the Bay Area started generating their own power using clean, efficient systems such the Capstone microturbine or fuel cells, it would go a long way towards relieving the shortage. The server farms win because they get a reliable source of clean power that they can control (so if they have enough capacity, they are safe from rolling blackouts). The public wins because, with the peak demand reduced, the impact of the "crisis" would be much reduced. They win again because they are spared the waste and wait associated with the long, drawn-out process of getting a new megagenerator plant built. Mostly the ones that lose are the power utilities who now have to deal with competition from their former customers that is more agile, more efficient, and more responsive than they are. Thus they (the utilities) have a strong incentive to throw as many regulatory roadblocks up as they can.
The power shortages that CA faces are due largely to the fact that, after deregulation, the utility companies decided to sell off a bunch of their plants and buy the extra power from the free market, and pocket the difference in price. Sometimes, a little regulation is a good thing.
A little regulation is also often a dangerous thing. The situation you have identified is half the problem, but only half. First of all, it's not a free market in power: there are all kinds of restrictions on the buying and selling of power, up to and including the requirement that all power trading be done in a particular building (talk about mistaking the market for the marketplace!). Secondly, while they partially deregulated the supply side of the equation, they did not deregulate the demand side. PG&E is now bankrupt because they were buying power at hugely inflated rates (largely from their parent company) but were forbidden from passing most of those costs on to their customers. There have been rate hikes, but they don't even begin to reflect the increase costs of power. The result is that the market system, in which supply, demand and price form a self-regulating feedback loop (i.e. supply is less than demand, price goes up, people conserve, demand goes down, prices come down) is broken.
The power crisis in California is not a market failure, it is a political policy failure. The problem is that the market has not been allowed to function.
Distributed power generation has tremendous potential advantages, most notable being the reduction in line loss (which can be up to 40%) and better load/demand balancing.
Wireless telecom is another big one, which has been mentioned. The FCC sold out the American people bigtime on that one.
The laws governing private rocketry used to be extremely restrictive. They've gotten ALOT better in the last five years, although they're hardly perfect. The bigger government impediment is the government's involvement in the launch industry as a competitor. Not that they are competitive in terms of cost or anything else, but it has a big psychological effect on companies that might otherwise be willing to invest in development in the field.
As far as genetic engineering goes, I'm just as glad that there is regulatory oversight, even if it is inefficient and cumbersome. Genengineering is one of those genies that can't be put back in the bottle if it gets out, and I know just enough biology and chemistry to know just how little we truly understand about how the genetic code really works. For example, we just now figured out that humans have many, many fewer genes than we thought, which has forced us to totally rethink our theories about how these relatively few genes can encode enough information to build a people. It seems likely that that timing of expression and synergistic effect play a much larger role than we previously thought. Bottom line: this is NOT a well understood, mature science.
Oh yeah, and let's not forget nuclear power. Although nukes suffer a public image problem that is probably even more of an impediment than the regulatory restrictions. Which is a shame, because it is now possible to build a reactor that can't melt down no matter what. These reactors aren't as efficient as the older, hotter designs, but so what. Of course, there's still this small matter of waste disposal... But now we're back to the discussion of private rocketry :).
God forbid kids should be curious about sex. There is obviously something wrong with any child who is curious and intrigued by this great adult mystery.
You know, maybe if our culture would just lighten up a bit on the whole sex thing, we'd have fewer sex obsessed freaks running around. And if (horrors!) there were actually cultural institutions that allowed teenagers to get their rocks off in a safe and healthy way, maybe it would be possible for a 15-year-old to think about something other than sex for ten minutes at a time.
On a related note, do you know of any UPS's with integral RJ-11 connectors that can pass through a DSL signal without screwing it up. My system is currently vulnerable to surges through the DSL line, and I want to fix that.
Thanks
You know what that means, of course: no more $&*@(%^ wall warts! And it eliminates the power waste associated with all those little tiny inefficient transformers (ever notice how hot those damn things get?)
Of course, it was an easy and obvious thing for him to do, since his home was also off grid, and most solar/wind/etc generators produce DC.
How do you feel about that?
Child porn may well be similar.
1) This transition has been occuring slowly but steadily over the last two decades or so.
2) This transition will continue to accelerate, driven in part by the new opportunities and threats created by the internet.
The discussion of this effect was not by any means the central point of the book -- it was an honest-to-gods marketing textbook, not a sociological rant. But sometimes it sounded erriely like the Cluetrain Manifesto.
The book in question is "A Framework for Marketing Management" by Kostler, for what it's worth.