Don't worry about it. Market forces will make it such that only the richest 3% of the population can afford the treatment.
Really? You think that many? I just might have a chance, then... See 3% is a very large number. It's practically mainstream. 3% of people means that you likely know 4-5 of them fairly well, enough to know where they live and the name of their dog.
As with all stories about incremental progress in solar cell there are still a few hurdles yet to overcome:
What's funny is that progress is almost always incremental, and we adjust to each of these changes easily so we don't notice the advances.
My 5-seat Saturn burns down the highway at 90 MPH, and gets over 30 MPG doing it, fully loaded, and has great handling all the way up. Try that in a 70's Comet. My dual-core laptop with 2 GB of RAM burns less power than an amazingly slower (but power efficient for its time!) K6-2 processor-based from 10 years ago. The concept of the Internet was mind-boggling 12 years ago when it was first introduced to me. Now, my 1.5 Mbit fixed IP DSL internet connection is ho hum by today's standards.
Progress is constant, slow, and incremental. But go back 10, 20, or 50 years and compare life then to today and you might be amazed. I don't imagine that Solar power will be any different.
Remember when a solar calculator was a big deal? Now, they're commonly available at the local $1 store. Nowadays, a 120-watt incandescent light bulb uses more electricity than virtually all the lights in my house, since the Compact Florescent bulbs I use everywhere are so efficient.
I recently added a 1,500 foot extension to my house. So, I'm a big energy waster, right?
Well, it looks like it actually REDUCES our energy consumption! Its got outer walls built with 2x6 instead of 2x4s, has double-paned windows, and over 2 FEET of insulation in the attic. Because of the double-pane windows, lighting needs are minimal, since we don't need to use lights during the day. The insulation is so good that when the doors/windows are closed, the temperature deviates by about 10 degrees through the day even though outside it has climbed to over 90 degrees. WOW! I don't think we'll even bother running the A/C in the older part of the house - to get comfortable, just go into the new extension!
A big part of making solar work will be in reducing our demand for power.
But I challenge you, still. Where am I wrong? You've made assertions, but NEVER have you actually challenged any of ideas I've presented.
Instead, you've maundered off into something that sounds vaguely socialistic (them business guys should...) without supporting your ideas.
If my posts are condescending, it's perhaps due to your apparent lack of understanding of what seem (to me) basic ideas of economics. Thus, I urge you to avail yourself of basic economic theory so that we can discuss this more intellectually?
Re: Microcredit:
i heard of it, and it is a new thing that is brought up to cope with the shortcomings of the capitalism system. if true capitalism was applied, no money would be given to small businesses who have less survival chance, Microcredit IS "capitalism". It's simply a method that has found collateral other than financial assetts to guarantee the loans. It is NOT socialism.
if there is more money than its value in the market, is market value drops. this is why the cash in swiss banks do not go into circulation to buy things, because it would inflate prices of top end items phenomenonally. And the point here, is...?
being forced to invest a percentage of its assets continually is not something that damages the shareholders or wealth. investment is the major factor in which innovation, expansion and growth is done. moreover, companies/people/philosophies which do NOT invest are totally at odds with the basics of capitalist system. capital dormant is capital wasted. capital invested is capital profiting and growing. this is it. there should be some measure against parties/groups who garner enough wealth, then pull this wealth of the economy, thereby wasting potential value. Gubbmint taxes company. Taxes pay for infrastructure that benefits all. Freeways. Roads. Electrical power. Courts. Schools. To some extent, feeding poor folks. That's how companies are forced to "invest its assetts" in the common good. Is this concept really so difficult to grasp?
It's not the company that builds roads, schools, and courts. It's not the company that pays for schooling. (that you'd do well to take advantage of) It's the 'gubbmint' (commonly spelled government) that does these things.
ultimately, it is the job of a business to feed the poor folks. No, it's the job of a business to generate wealth for its owners. Some of that wealth is siphoned off by the gubbmint to benefit the common good. Also, the business activities are regulated by the applicable gubbmint by a means called "laws".
the sole reason businesses exist is to improve life-standards of people. its operators, if you ask its owners. but, if the business is detrimental to people/groups other than its owners, ultimately a situation will result in that there will be contempt against that SNIP
blah blah blah blah blah/SNIP Do you run or manage in any companies? Cause if you do, I sure don't want to buy any stock in it. I'd strongly recommend that you go out and actually start your own business, make it successful. You'd learn alot about how that "real world" works.
there is NO country that in which a mega corp pays its taxes in full.
they always get some "benefits" and "discounts" in order to "spice up" some industry, (most natural as they are the ones funding the representative candidates' campaigns in any democratical system, and dictator in dictatorships) which in turn makes them pay phenomenonally less taxes in comparison to what the small business generates. That's a reflection of the intense concentration of wealth. It generates bazillions of times more tax revenue for the state to have Ford Motor Company open a plant locally than for you to start up a small business selling pet rocks.
The local gubbmint thinks that by cutting taxes a bit, they can better the lives of their constituents more than by raising taxes and having Ford open their plant somewhere else.
Favoritism? Unfair? Perhaps. And there are abuses, just like there's welfare fraud, theft, and illicit drug use. But it's not much different conceptually than the "buy large volume/cheap, sell low volume/profit" idealogy that drives virtually all of the commercial markets. And somehow, despite that fact, there are more small/medium sized businesses today than ever before, both in sheer volume, and as a percentage of GNP.
Technology lends more power to smaller folks, allowing smaller, agile companies that embrace newer technology to outcompete their older, larger, slower-moving competitors.
It's a trend that's been ongoing for hundreds of years, and the rate at which it's happening is accellerating.
in the extreme poor level, it fails. no enterpreurship there. Really? Maybe you have never heard of Micro-Credit? Seems that there's more innovation and entrepeneurship than you thought?
in the extreme rich level, it goes way out of balance. it was said to me before in college that all the stuff in the world that can be bought/valued by money couldnt meet the total value funds in swiss banks. hence, that money there was money without the possibility of buying something physical. Said by whom? Because very idea betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what supply/demand is all about. Money is a commodity, just like a banana. The value of any commodity is simply defined as what people would be willing to trade it for. If there is "more money" then its value drops.
There could never be more money than there is stuff to buy - since the value of the money would simply drop to match the amount of real wealth available. Ever wonder what inflation is?
the problem is, investment is not forced. major capital sets up monopolies, new companies, buys out competition, passes laws and gets more and more rich, the amount of funds in swiss banks go up, yet there is hunger in third world and small businesses in modern countries struggle. Yes. And one of the roles of governments is to preserve the openness of their marketplaces and prevent this from happening. In the United States, it's called "anti-trust law". Governments also need to look after the construction and preservation of common infrastructure (roads, schools, electricity, etc) that can be used to generate wealth. Poverty in the third world is a side-effect of their ineffective governments. It's the job of any business to create wealth for its shareholders/partners/owners. It's not the job of a business to feed poor folks.
In exchange for providing this infrastructure, educated workforce, and open marketplace, government exacts a toll called taxation.
capitalism works because it is applicable in small and medium business level. these two groups handle all the load of the system. So, you're saying that companies like Exxon or Wal-Mart don't create wealth? (Are you f**king nuts!?!) Didn't you say that you went to college? Or did you just happen to be AT a college when somebody talked to you?
Amazing that you could have missed so much of how the world around you actually works!
if the funds that piled up were forced to be invested with a percentage, than we would see real economic expansion and mega capitals' presence would be justifiable. See taxes. Compare notes to above comments about a government's role.
unfortunately i cant outright gather numbers about this idea. this is something i been thinking about for a short time now. Finally! Facts! Both of which are painfully obvious...
This is how progress works: if something is used massively world-wide, and something sucks about it, expect slow gradual transition, where the offending problems will be tucked away in a compatibility, emulation, translation layer and earth keeps spinning.
I can tell you, I see this first hand. My day job is a software company (I'm part owner) based around a product originally specified to be written in just 90 days. Now working on its 5th year of development, many of the original compromises in its construction are actively felt. It tracks information for students (grades, assignments, etc) and was originally written to handle some 100 curricula. But now we're at well over 3000, and growing fast. It was originally written for Windows 95, now supporting Windows 95/96/me/NT/XP as well as MacOSX 10.3/10.4 and all major flavors of Linux. The number of retrofits and massive redos to effect this is just amazing. It is far, far removed from the original product.
Yet, the basic design concepts and APIs from the original product remain, and are still enforced! Most of the calls from the original product are emulated with excellent compatibility despite all the translation layers and whatnot needed to make it all work. It's x86 all over again, and while it works well, it's certainly been a lesson for me in what "retro-compatible" really means!
I once saw a proposal for "None of the above". It would be always present on votes. It would be treated as a candidate. A vote for "None of the above" would disqualify any of those candidates from ever running for that office again, and force a re-election for that position.
Right now, people end up voting for the candidate that sucks the least. A "None of the above" vote would put the power back to the people, by giving them a safe "Cowboy Neal" option that actually might have some teeth.
Which is why the Republicrats would never go for it.
(Bittorrent is an ISP's friend because it can keep large amount of bulk data transfers within their network).
This is just retardedspeek. Who comes up with this kind of WTFery?
BitTorrent communicates with peers ALL OVER THE WORLD. That does NOT constitute keeping those data transfers "within their network" unless you actually mean "outside their network". See the spec: http://bittorrent.org/protocol.html
For a more efficient protocol that actually DOES cache transfers and cut external bandwidth usage, see NNTP. And don't pretend you can speak for your local ISP until you ARE your local ISP, and have ingested a healthy dose of reality.
Ever since the 1980s, SCSI was "better" than IDE. Remember when Macs had SCSI drives while peecees had the cheaper IDE drives? And which one won out in the marketplace?
"Better technology" is usually only superior when you don't consider cost. Cheaper is a definite plus. And so we see that for most cases, IDE beat SCSI, ISA beat MCA, and USB beat Firewire.
Remember that "best" rarely beats "good enough for cheap". Witness WalMart, Microsoft, and (soon) Linux. USB is cheaper than Firewire, and passes the "good enough" metric. Despite the advantages of Firewire, I'm charging my cell phone on this laptop's data port in a hotel about 100 miles away from home. I'm not using Firewire to do this - I'm using the USB ports.
Compare that to 43,800 hours that you could easily get with an electric motor with the capacity to run for just 5 years 24x7.
Yeah, you're happy. But airplanes are too expensive to be available to the common man. Few people have the $18,000 to rebuild your 182, let alone the $325,000 to rebuild your King Air. Result? Your beloved 182 costs something like 5x the cost per hour to operate as an average car, and has a safety record that's considerably worse. Statistically, single-engine piston planes are somewhere between a car and a motorcycle in safety per hour, somewhat closer to a car in safety per mile of travel due to the higher travel speed.
Anything that improves this mediocre record is a good thing.
Full Disclosure: I'm a solo pilot due to take my checkride sometime before the end of April, according to my CFI. I love flying, and am trying to figure out how to make it make financial sense as the father of 6 kids despite my 6-figure income.
One of the biggest problems with smaller aircraft is reliability. Simply put, piston engines are not as reliable as jet engines. They must be rebuilt every 2,000 hours of flight under the best circumstances. And, with smaller planes at slower speeds, jets just don't make sense.
Turboprop engines are a good middle ground for mid-sized planes starting at the 12-seat size or so, but are very expensive for the smallest aircraft. (2 and 4 seaters)
Electric motors, other the other hand, can be incredibly reliable. If designed for it, they have just a single moving part, and can run continuously, 24x7x365 for many years without issues. This kind of reliability in a small plane would be just incredible!
Maybe so, but it is running much slower than DOSEMU or DOSBOX does in Linux here, which are probably written in C or C++, with possibly some assembly;
DOSEMU and DOSBOX both are not hardware emulators - they are a reverse-engineering of software that runs on otherwise identical hardware. They are, therefore, unsuitable for comparison.
Since Java run as bytecode on any number of H/W platforms, this is more like SoftPC on a Mac 68k - software truly emulating hardware. (Yes, you could run this X86 emulator on x86 - but it would also run on Sparc with comparable speed)
Motherboard sound isn't that great, but who has really great computer speakers anyway? What ordinary user even swapped his speakers from the craptastic freebies that came with his Dell?
Perhaps most telling...
Some years ago, I put together a comprehensive MP3 collection. (Thanks, Napster!) I itched to play my bounty on a quality sound system. My favorite MP3 was "Amazing Grace" by Destiny's Child. It is and was a thing of beauty.
So I spent some money. $200 on a nice subwoofer. $350 on some nice bookshelf speakers. $250 on a mid-range receiver. And $50 on a Creative Live! sound card.
It was a big moment - I queued up "Amazing Grace" with my newly aquired sound system. And it actually sounded WORSE! I could hear all kinds of distortion, and it had a sort of empty, "hollow" sound.
WTF?!?!?! I preferred my crappy sound system to this nice, crisp, 300-watt sound system?
I checked over the sound system piece by piece.
It wasn't the subwoofer.
It wasn't the bookshelf speakers.
It wasn't the receiver.
It wasn't even the sound card. (thought you had it, didn't ya?)
It was the crappy 128-bit MP3. The CD is oh, so much better.
Today, my MP3s get played off an AC-97 sound card on a cheap-ass motherboard (AMD K6-2) made in 1998. It sounds no different than the SB Live! card. Oh, and don't bother with MP3s less than 192 - the sound difference between 128 (awful) and 192 Kbps (indistinguishable from CD) is just amazing.
This is technology that's been under development for several years now. I've been watching this since about 2002 or so - and it was well-developed then.
Just because YOU don't hear about it doesn't make it unheard of. Perhaps you need to embroaden your perspective a tad?
Case in point- Using almost exclusively freeware and extremely cheap hardware, I've been able to create and build a company that needs only TWO employees to run ( http://www.rlt.com/ [rlt.com] ). And it makes a good income for both of us. Both of us are IT capable. Both of us know how to use digital technologies to our advantage.
Hear here!
I've managed to build a company (as the CTO) that manages some 70 schools and school districts - grades, attendance, massive quantities of paperwork, etc.
Our hardware is midline, Linux-based. We recently assumed a customer who had a big, expensive software package that ours replaced. All of their data was loaded onto a single server, and works fine, where the server's resources are shared with many other districts.
The kicker is that they had a cluster of 8 late-model machines to keep their old software going, and performance was always a problem!
Additionally, our administration overhead is VERY low - backups are performed regularly, off-site, with dual-network redundancy, and it's all fully automatic! (thanks shell scripts!) At every stage of the game, our servers and software are carefully set up to exhibit "positive dynamic stability" - they should just "do the right thing" without alot of guss.
This can be hard to do, but is ohhh so worth it when you start to scale upwards!!! I read once somewhere that this concept is called "autonomic computing". Sounds nice, eh?
everyone in the intellectual property business pulls damages out of thier ass... that's standard operating procedure. the IP business is about selling stuff that doesn't really exist... it's stuff you pull it out of your ass and sell to other people.
Perhaps your tune would change some if you'd spent a full year of your life, working 8-12 hour days pulling a full novel "out of your ass".
clearly, if someone distributes your imaginary product without your authorization, you can sue them for all of the imaginary sales that you have lost out on.
Except that, if you spent a year planning, writing, and editing the book, you'd hardly call it "imaginary". And if it really was imaginary, why would anybody else care to copy it?
Oh wait a minute, it's not imaginary?
as long as we are working in the realm of the imagination, you might as well imagine big and try to jack google for a billion dollars.
Viacom invests many millions of dollars to produce these shows "out of their ass". Clearly, their shit really doesn't stink since so many people want a piece of it. What Viacom should be focusing on, though, is how they can grab the YouTube phenomenon and run with it, rather than try to stop it.
No one wants to have a separate tank that we need to remember to fill-up, and the 10% increase provided by water just isn't enough. This is the same story except it's ethanol, not as easy to find as water, and it's 25% better mpg instead of 10%.
Which makes no sense at all, since people will drive across town (burning gas the whole way) to buy gasoline that's $0.10 per gallon cheaper (net savings per 10 gallon tank: $1) but they won't put free water, no trip across town, to save $3 per tank? ($3/gallon, 10% of 10 gallons)
And, saving 25% is about the difference in fuel economy between my full-sized, 8-seater van (for the wife and 6 kids) and my much smaller, 5-seater getabout Saturn SL2. (22 MPG vs 30 MPG Hwy) I'd spend a buck or so for that.
"We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason."
So long as any business retains this right, they can hang up on you for any reason or no reason at all. But, I'd guess it works something like this:
1) Take the top 0.05% of the user base.
2) Calculate how much they cost you.
3) Calculate how much they pay you.
4) if (2)-(3) 0 then sendletter();
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Really, if you are in the top 0.05% of users, you are a statistical anomaly. If you get cut off, nobody else is going to care all that much. There aren't enough of you to matter, and you cost way more than you pay them.
So why would they keep you?
Give me all the self-righteous BS about "unlimited downloads" but if you'll check, you'll find it's now "unmetered" downloads, or "unlimited download speed", both of which are another thing entirely.
Want truly uncapped d/l speed? Buy your own DS3. Start your own business if you think you can do better. Otherwise, shut yer yapping.
In the United States, it's not illegal to be a monopoly. But, once a monopoly, what was once a competitive advantage becomes criminal conduct.
As a business owner, I'll leverage every advantage I can to the detriment of my competitors, including (but not limited to) absorbing the losses in one marketplace in order to ensure the profits in another, and utilizing my commercial strength in an area to negotiate an advantageous relationship with other vendors.
But in the United States, once you've become a "monopoly", many things that were once expected become criminal actions.
Apple can (and should) leverage their dominance in the music distribution scene to their advantage. As a publicly traded company, it's their fiduciary responsibility to make as money as they can figure out how to do. But if the dominance of the Apple juggernaut continues for much longer, they'll be branded a "monopoly", and then things get pretty complicated pretty fast.
No, I don't think they are a monopoly. (I just bought a Creative Zen to replace my dead iPod, and I'm much happier with the result) But their dominance is... dominating.
The FAA keeps what is by far the world's busiest civil air transportation system running with a remarkably good safety record. Every time you go to the airport, get on your plane, fly to your destination, get off your plane, and nothing else happens, you have the FAA to thank for it.
As a private pilot, I can happily support this. Really. Air traffic control is excellent, and available just about everywhere in the USA. Navigation aids (VOR, etc) are available just about anywhere that you'd ever want to fly, ATC is widely available just about anywhere that might resemble a proximity to civilization.
Not that I agree with every one of their decisions, and there are certainly warts here and there, but it really is generally a well thought-out and well enforced system with an excellent safety record.
Think about it: some small, 2-seat private plane crashes somewhere 3 states away, and it's frequently on the 6 o'clocke news. But it's unlikely that you would even find out about a similar-sized automobile that fatally crashes one block from your house.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry about it. Market forces will make it such that only the richest 3% of the population can afford the treatment.
Really? You think that many? I just might have a chance, then... See 3% is a very large number. It's practically mainstream. 3% of people means that you likely know 4-5 of them fairly well, enough to know where they live and the name of their dog.
As with all stories about incremental progress in solar cell there are still a few hurdles yet to overcome:
What's funny is that progress is almost always incremental, and we adjust to each of these changes easily so we don't notice the advances.
My 5-seat Saturn burns down the highway at 90 MPH, and gets over 30 MPG doing it, fully loaded, and has great handling all the way up. Try that in a 70's Comet. My dual-core laptop with 2 GB of RAM burns less power than an amazingly slower (but power efficient for its time!) K6-2 processor-based from 10 years ago. The concept of the Internet was mind-boggling 12 years ago when it was first introduced to me. Now, my 1.5 Mbit fixed IP DSL internet connection is ho hum by today's standards.
Progress is constant, slow, and incremental. But go back 10, 20, or 50 years and compare life then to today and you might be amazed. I don't imagine that Solar power will be any different.
Remember when a solar calculator was a big deal? Now, they're commonly available at the local $1 store. Nowadays, a 120-watt incandescent light bulb uses more electricity than virtually all the lights in my house, since the Compact Florescent bulbs I use everywhere are so efficient.
I recently added a 1,500 foot extension to my house. So, I'm a big energy waster, right?
Well, it looks like it actually REDUCES our energy consumption! Its got outer walls built with 2x6 instead of 2x4s, has double-paned windows, and over 2 FEET of insulation in the attic. Because of the double-pane windows, lighting needs are minimal, since we don't need to use lights during the day. The insulation is so good that when the doors/windows are closed, the temperature deviates by about 10 degrees through the day even though outside it has climbed to over 90 degrees. WOW! I don't think we'll even bother running the A/C in the older part of the house - to get comfortable, just go into the new extension!
A big part of making solar work will be in reducing our demand for power.
Sorry you couldn't hack it. Debates can be tough.
But I challenge you, still. Where am I wrong? You've made assertions, but NEVER have you actually challenged any of ideas I've presented.
Instead, you've maundered off into something that sounds vaguely socialistic (them business guys should...) without supporting your ideas.
If my posts are condescending, it's perhaps due to your apparent lack of understanding of what seem (to me) basic ideas of economics. Thus, I urge you to avail yourself of basic economic theory so that we can discuss this more intellectually?
I agree!
In fact, if all food that was cloned had to be labelled as such, people would very quickly "get over it" and desensitize.
Then, it's game over for the anti-clonistas.
other than financial assetts to guarantee the loans. It is NOT socialism. if there is more money than its value in the market, is market value drops. this is why the cash in swiss banks do not go into circulation to buy things, because it would inflate prices of top end items phenomenonally. And the point here, is...? being forced to invest a percentage of its assets continually is not something that damages the shareholders or wealth. investment is the major factor in which innovation, expansion and growth is done. moreover, companies/people/philosophies which do NOT invest are totally at odds with the basics of capitalist system. capital dormant is capital wasted. capital invested is capital profiting and growing. this is it. there should be some measure against parties/groups who garner enough wealth, then pull this wealth of the economy, thereby wasting potential value. Gubbmint taxes company. Taxes pay for infrastructure that benefits all. Freeways. Roads. Electrical power. Courts. Schools. To some extent, feeding poor folks. That's how companies are forced to "invest its assetts" in the common good. Is this concept really so difficult to grasp?
It's not the company that builds roads, schools, and courts. It's not the company that pays for schooling. (that you'd do well to take advantage of) It's the 'gubbmint' (commonly spelled government) that does these things. ultimately, it is the job of a business to feed the poor folks. No, it's the job of a business to generate wealth for its owners. Some of that wealth is siphoned off by the gubbmint to benefit the common good. Also, the business activities are regulated by the applicable gubbmint by a means called "laws". the sole reason businesses exist is to improve life-standards of people. its operators, if you ask its owners. but, if the business is detrimental to people/groups other than its owners, ultimately a situation will result in that there will be contempt against that SNIP
blah blah blah blah blah
they always get some "benefits" and "discounts" in order to "spice up" some industry, (most natural as they are the ones funding the representative candidates' campaigns in any democratical system, and dictator in dictatorships) which in turn makes them pay phenomenonally less taxes in comparison to what the small business generates. That's a reflection of the intense concentration of wealth. It generates bazillions of times more tax revenue for the state to have Ford Motor Company open a plant locally than for you to start up a small business selling pet rocks.
The local gubbmint thinks that by cutting taxes a bit, they can better the lives of their constituents more than by raising taxes and having Ford open their plant somewhere else.
Favoritism? Unfair? Perhaps. And there are abuses, just like there's welfare fraud, theft, and illicit drug use. But it's not much different conceptually than the "buy large volume/cheap, sell low volume/profit" idealogy that drives virtually all of the commercial markets. And somehow, despite that fact, there are more small/medium sized businesses today than ever before, both in sheer volume, and as a percentage of GNP.
Technology lends more power to smaller folks, allowing smaller, agile companies that embrace newer technology to outcompete their older, larger, slower-moving competitors.
It's a trend that's been ongoing for hundreds of years, and the rate at which it's happening is accellerating.
I can prove that I bought a copy of Windows 98! My registration key is
FCKGW....
in the extreme poor level, it fails. no enterpreurship there. Really? Maybe you have never heard of Micro-Credit? Seems that there's more innovation and entrepeneurship than you thought? in the extreme rich level, it goes way out of balance. it was said to me before in college that all the stuff in the world that can be bought/valued by money couldnt meet the total value funds in swiss banks. hence, that money there was money without the possibility of buying something physical. Said by whom? Because very idea betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what supply/demand is all about. Money is a commodity, just like a banana. The value of any commodity is simply defined as what people would be willing to trade it for. If there is "more money" then its value drops.
There could never be more money than there is stuff to buy - since the value of the money would simply drop to match the amount of real wealth available. Ever wonder what inflation is? the problem is, investment is not forced. major capital sets up monopolies, new companies, buys out competition, passes laws and gets more and more rich, the amount of funds in swiss banks go up, yet there is hunger in third world and small businesses in modern countries struggle. Yes. And one of the roles of governments is to preserve the openness of their marketplaces and prevent this from happening. In the United States, it's called "anti-trust law". Governments also need to look after the construction and preservation of common infrastructure (roads, schools, electricity, etc) that can be used to generate wealth. Poverty in the third world is a side-effect of their ineffective governments. It's the job of any business to create wealth for its shareholders/partners/owners. It's not the job of a business to feed poor folks.
In exchange for providing this infrastructure, educated workforce, and open marketplace, government exacts a toll called taxation. capitalism works because it is applicable in small and medium business level. these two groups handle all the load of the system. So, you're saying that companies like Exxon or Wal-Mart don't create wealth? (Are you f**king nuts!?!) Didn't you say that you went to college? Or did you just happen to be AT a college when somebody talked to you?
Amazing that you could have missed so much of how the world around you actually works! if the funds that piled up were forced to be invested with a percentage, than we would see real economic expansion and mega capitals' presence would be justifiable. See taxes. Compare notes to above comments about a government's role. unfortunately i cant outright gather numbers about this idea. this is something i been thinking about for a short time now. Finally! Facts! Both of which are painfully obvious...
This is how progress works: if something is used massively world-wide, and something sucks about it, expect slow gradual transition, where the offending problems will be tucked away in a compatibility, emulation, translation layer and earth keeps spinning.
I can tell you, I see this first hand. My day job is a software company (I'm part owner) based around a product originally specified to be written in just 90 days. Now working on its 5th year of development, many of the original compromises in its construction are actively felt. It tracks information for students (grades, assignments, etc) and was originally written to handle some 100 curricula. But now we're at well over 3000, and growing fast. It was originally written for Windows 95, now supporting Windows 95/96/me/NT/XP as well as MacOSX 10.3/10.4 and all major flavors of Linux. The number of retrofits and massive redos to effect this is just amazing. It is far, far removed from the original product.
Yet, the basic design concepts and APIs from the original product remain, and are still enforced! Most of the calls from the original product are emulated with excellent compatibility despite all the translation layers and whatnot needed to make it all work. It's x86 all over again, and while it works well, it's certainly been a lesson for me in what "retro-compatible" really means!
I once saw a proposal for "None of the above". It would be always present on votes. It would be treated as a candidate. A vote for "None of the above" would disqualify any of those candidates from ever running for that office again, and force a re-election for that position.
Right now, people end up voting for the candidate that sucks the least. A "None of the above" vote would put the power back to the people, by giving them a safe "Cowboy Neal" option that actually might have some teeth.
Which is why the Republicrats would never go for it.
(Bittorrent is an ISP's friend because it can keep large amount of bulk data transfers within their network).
This is just retardedspeek. Who comes up with this kind of WTFery?
BitTorrent communicates with peers ALL OVER THE WORLD. That does NOT constitute keeping those data transfers "within their network" unless you actually mean "outside their network". See the spec: http://bittorrent.org/protocol.html
For a more efficient protocol that actually DOES cache transfers and cut external bandwidth usage, see NNTP. And don't pretend you can speak for your local ISP until you ARE your local ISP, and have ingested a healthy dose of reality.
Bah.
Ever since the 1980s, SCSI was "better" than IDE. Remember when Macs had SCSI drives while peecees had the cheaper IDE drives? And which one won out in the marketplace?
"Better technology" is usually only superior when you don't consider cost. Cheaper is a definite plus. And so we see that for most cases, IDE beat SCSI, ISA beat MCA, and USB beat Firewire.
Remember that "best" rarely beats "good enough for cheap". Witness WalMart, Microsoft, and (soon) Linux. USB is cheaper than Firewire, and passes the "good enough" metric. Despite the advantages of Firewire, I'm charging my cell phone on this laptop's data port in a hotel about 100 miles away from home. I'm not using Firewire to do this - I'm using the USB ports.
Yeah, I can just see the so-called 'executives' at work:
... Profit!!
I'm bigger!
Yeah? I'm bigger times ten!
Yeah? I'm bigger times a thousand!
Yeah? I'm bigger times a million!
Yeah? I'm bigger times a million million!
Yeah? I'm bigger times a million billion trillion!
Yeah? I'm bigger times infinity!
And then
The time it takes to travel 1300 kilometers at 300km/hour: 4.33 hours. So you were off by a substantial amount of time - 2 hours and 20 minutes or so.
I think you forgot this part:
(assuming 300 KPH and slowing down for the occasional towns/crossings)
How many mass transit options have you taken that took you direct from source to final destination? Not many that I've taken...
Compare that to 43,800 hours that you could easily get with an electric motor with the capacity to run for just 5 years 24x7.
Yeah, you're happy. But airplanes are too expensive to be available to the common man. Few people have the $18,000 to rebuild your 182, let alone the $325,000 to rebuild your King Air. Result? Your beloved 182 costs something like 5x the cost per hour to operate as an average car, and has a safety record that's considerably worse. Statistically, single-engine piston planes are somewhere between a car and a motorcycle in safety per hour, somewhat closer to a car in safety per mile of travel due to the higher travel speed.
Anything that improves this mediocre record is a good thing.
Full Disclosure: I'm a solo pilot due to take my checkride sometime before the end of April, according to my CFI. I love flying, and am trying to figure out how to make it make financial sense as the father of 6 kids despite my 6-figure income.
One of the biggest problems with smaller aircraft is reliability. Simply put, piston engines are not as reliable as jet engines. They must be rebuilt every 2,000 hours of flight under the best circumstances. And, with smaller planes at slower speeds, jets just don't make sense.
Turboprop engines are a good middle ground for mid-sized planes starting at the 12-seat size or so, but are very expensive for the smallest aircraft. (2 and 4 seaters)
Electric motors, other the other hand, can be incredibly reliable. If designed for it, they have just a single moving part, and can run continuously, 24x7x365 for many years without issues. This kind of reliability in a small plane would be just incredible!
Maybe so, but it is running much slower than DOSEMU or DOSBOX does in Linux here, which are probably written in C or C++, with possibly some assembly;
DOSEMU and DOSBOX both are not hardware emulators - they are a reverse-engineering of software that runs on otherwise identical hardware. They are, therefore, unsuitable for comparison.
Since Java run as bytecode on any number of H/W platforms, this is more like SoftPC on a Mac 68k - software truly emulating hardware. (Yes, you could run this X86 emulator on x86 - but it would also run on Sparc with comparable speed)
Motherboard sound isn't that great, but who has really great computer speakers anyway? What ordinary user even swapped his speakers from the craptastic freebies that came with his Dell?
Perhaps most telling...
Some years ago, I put together a comprehensive MP3 collection. (Thanks, Napster!) I itched to play my bounty on a quality sound system. My favorite MP3 was "Amazing Grace" by Destiny's Child. It is and was a thing of beauty.
So I spent some money. $200 on a nice subwoofer. $350 on some nice bookshelf speakers. $250 on a mid-range receiver. And $50 on a Creative Live! sound card.
It was a big moment - I queued up "Amazing Grace" with my newly aquired sound system. And it actually sounded WORSE! I could hear all kinds of distortion, and it had a sort of empty, "hollow" sound.
WTF?!?!?! I preferred my crappy sound system to this nice, crisp, 300-watt sound system?
I checked over the sound system piece by piece.
It wasn't the subwoofer.
It wasn't the bookshelf speakers.
It wasn't the receiver.
It wasn't even the sound card. (thought you had it, didn't ya?)
It was the crappy 128-bit MP3. The CD is oh, so much better.
Today, my MP3s get played off an AC-97 sound card on a cheap-ass motherboard (AMD K6-2) made in 1998. It sounds no different than the SB Live! card. Oh, and don't bother with MP3s less than 192 - the sound difference between 128 (awful) and 192 Kbps (indistinguishable from CD) is just amazing.
This is technology that's been under development for several years now. I've been watching this since about 2002 or so - and it was well-developed then.
Just because YOU don't hear about it doesn't make it unheard of. Perhaps you need to embroaden your perspective a tad?
Case in point- Using almost exclusively freeware and extremely cheap hardware, I've been able to create and build a company that needs only TWO employees to run ( http://www.rlt.com/ [rlt.com] ). And it makes a good income for both of us. Both of us are IT capable. Both of us know how to use digital technologies to our advantage.
Hear here!
I've managed to build a company (as the CTO) that manages some 70 schools and school districts - grades, attendance, massive quantities of paperwork, etc.
Our hardware is midline, Linux-based. We recently assumed a customer who had a big, expensive software package that ours replaced. All of their data was loaded onto a single server, and works fine, where the server's resources are shared with many other districts.
The kicker is that they had a cluster of 8 late-model machines to keep their old software going, and performance was always a problem!
Additionally, our administration overhead is VERY low - backups are performed regularly, off-site, with dual-network redundancy, and it's all fully automatic! (thanks shell scripts!) At every stage of the game, our servers and software are carefully set up to exhibit "positive dynamic stability" - they should just "do the right thing" without alot of guss.
This can be hard to do, but is ohhh so worth it when you start to scale upwards!!! I read once somewhere that this concept is called "autonomic computing". Sounds nice, eh?
everyone in the intellectual property business pulls damages out of thier ass... that's standard operating procedure. the IP business is about selling stuff that doesn't really exist... it's stuff you pull it out of your ass and sell to other people.
Perhaps your tune would change some if you'd spent a full year of your life, working 8-12 hour days pulling a full novel "out of your ass".
clearly, if someone distributes your imaginary product without your authorization, you can sue them for all of the imaginary sales that you have lost out on.
Except that, if you spent a year planning, writing, and editing the book, you'd hardly call it "imaginary". And if it really was imaginary, why would anybody else care to copy it?
Oh wait a minute, it's not imaginary?
as long as we are working in the realm of the imagination, you might as well imagine big and try to jack google for a billion dollars.
Viacom invests many millions of dollars to produce these shows "out of their ass". Clearly, their shit really doesn't stink since so many people want a piece of it. What Viacom should be focusing on, though, is how they can grab the YouTube phenomenon and run with it, rather than try to stop it.
No one wants to have a separate tank that we need to remember to fill-up, and the 10% increase provided by water just isn't enough. This is the same story except it's ethanol, not as easy to find as water, and it's 25% better mpg instead of 10%.
Which makes no sense at all, since people will drive across town (burning gas the whole way) to buy gasoline that's $0.10 per gallon cheaper (net savings per 10 gallon tank: $1) but they won't put free water, no trip across town, to save $3 per tank? ($3/gallon, 10% of 10 gallons)
And, saving 25% is about the difference in fuel economy between my full-sized, 8-seater van (for the wife and 6 kids) and my much smaller, 5-seater getabout Saturn SL2. (22 MPG vs 30 MPG Hwy) I'd spend a buck or so for that.
"We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason."
So long as any business retains this right, they can hang up on you for any reason or no reason at all. But, I'd guess it works something like this:
1) Take the top 0.05% of the user base.
2) Calculate how much they cost you.
3) Calculate how much they pay you.
4) if (2)-(3) 0 then sendletter();
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Really, if you are in the top 0.05% of users, you are a statistical anomaly. If you get cut off, nobody else is going to care all that much. There aren't enough of you to matter, and you cost way more than you pay them.
So why would they keep you?
Give me all the self-righteous BS about "unlimited downloads" but if you'll check, you'll find it's now "unmetered" downloads, or "unlimited download speed", both of which are another thing entirely.
Want truly uncapped d/l speed? Buy your own DS3. Start your own business if you think you can do better. Otherwise, shut yer yapping.
As a private pilot, this is one that I wrote a while back for my own purposes.
Text message the airport identifier of most any US airport to a@dwet.ent or a@effortlessis.com. (Verizon seems to have a problem with dwet.net)
EG:
to: a@dwet.net
subject: -blank-
ksfo
This will return weather forecasts for San Fransisco airport (ksfo).
Try it!
In the United States, it's not illegal to be a monopoly. But, once a monopoly, what was once a competitive advantage becomes criminal conduct.
As a business owner, I'll leverage every advantage I can to the detriment of my competitors, including (but not limited to) absorbing the losses in one marketplace in order to ensure the profits in another, and utilizing my commercial strength in an area to negotiate an advantageous relationship with other vendors.
But in the United States, once you've become a "monopoly", many things that were once expected become criminal actions.
Apple can (and should) leverage their dominance in the music distribution scene to their advantage. As a publicly traded company, it's their fiduciary responsibility to make as money as they can figure out how to do. But if the dominance of the Apple juggernaut continues for much longer, they'll be branded a "monopoly", and then things get pretty complicated pretty fast.
No, I don't think they are a monopoly. (I just bought a Creative Zen to replace my dead iPod, and I'm much happier with the result) But their dominance is... dominating.
Apple needs to tread a bit carefully, methinks.
The FAA keeps what is by far the world's busiest civil air transportation system running with a remarkably good safety record. Every time you go to the airport, get on your plane, fly to your destination, get off your plane, and nothing else happens, you have the FAA to thank for it.
As a private pilot, I can happily support this. Really. Air traffic control is excellent, and available just about everywhere in the USA. Navigation aids (VOR, etc) are available just about anywhere that you'd ever want to fly, ATC is widely available just about anywhere that might resemble a proximity to civilization.
Not that I agree with every one of their decisions, and there are certainly warts here and there, but it really is generally a well thought-out and well enforced system with an excellent safety record.
Think about it: some small, 2-seat private plane crashes somewhere 3 states away, and it's frequently on the 6 o'clocke news. But it's unlikely that you would even find out about a similar-sized automobile that fatally crashes one block from your house.