Just out of curiosity, which of these countries are at a development-level comparable to USA ? Does even a single one of them have a GDP/person that's atleast 1/3rd of that in usa ?
Can you find me a country where wealth/person is atleast half of USA, and where homicide-rates are comparable ?
If you're happy to beat Kenya, then yeah, fine, more power to you.
It's easy enough to fix though. All you need to do is have actual in-school-exams that count for the majority of the grade.
It's not as if the Internet is magical - the essential quality that enables rampant cheating, is the fact that you're allowed to do the work in a environment where nobody knows if the candidate handing in the assignment, is the same person who wrote it.
Even without the Internet, students can and have cooperated with eachothers, if I am really good in subject A and you're really good in B, the logical choice is for me to write 2 essays on subject A, and for you to write 2 essays on subject B. We both get better grades, and the odds of being discovered as cheaters are miniscule, assuming each work is actually only ever turned in once. (the only cheating they've got any hope of discovering, is where blocks or entire essays are copied verbatim or near-verbatim from one paper to another)
Most people would surely not embrace it, but that's okay since nobody is suggesting sending most people.
If one person in a million would embrace it, we've got 6000 candidates, afterall. And they're only planning on sending 4 people, for the first mission. I actually think many would volunteer, likely thousands from USA alone.
4 is a little low, though, it's not enough people to be a community.
And in practice, layers 5 and 6 are pretty useless. Not that the functionality is, but that it's seldom seen as a function of the network proper, but instead handled in the app.
For example, today, remote-procedure-calls are frequently handled ontop of http, and don't even get me started on the "presentation" layer.
If you're planning to drive 400 miles in a day, and your vehicle has a range shorter than this -- you need a quick fill. (It'd be real inconvenient to be needing a 4-hour stop for a refuel)
But you really seldom stop at home after having driven a long distance, with intention of leaving again for another long drive in a few minutes.
A 5-hour charge at home -- and a 10 minute quick-charge at the high-capacity energy-station for longer trips, sounds fine to me.
Every time one trader buys, another sells. Like I said: it's a zero-sum game. The only way one trader can come out ahead, i.e. buy at a *better* than average time, and sell at a *better* than average time, is if another trader comes out behind, exactly equally much.
Thus you'd expect that 50% of traders come out ahead, and 50% come out behind. But it gets worse: there's fees associated with every transaction, so the real odds are more like 30% come out ahead, 70% come out behind. And you're more likely to come up behind the more often you trade. (since more frequent trading translates to bigger fees)
A *good*, as in genuinely upper-quartile trader, will still come out ahead, sure. But because of stuff like this, tilting the table in advantage of machines, odds that you, or any other individual small-time investor will be in that quartile, sinks all the time.
It's one of those games where the best way to win, is not to play at all. (notice that the game of speculation is distinct from the activity of INVESTING)
Translation: If the system is set up to favour those with 20ms response-times over those who are slower, it is dumb to play against that system when your response-time is a lot longer.
It's not really stealing, it's just favouring a certain type of trader (namely one who trades a lot, and is very fast)
It's logical that the stock-exchange would favour this sort of trader, afterall that's where they make their money. (never forget that the stock-exchange itself, is a business)
It's relevant to highly speculative robot-trader algorithms that try to make a profit by arbitraging sub-second timing-issues. But this is a zero-sum game: one trader can only gain $X by taking advantage of timing if other traders lose PRECISELY $X, so to the sum of traders, this is irrelevant.
Stock-exchanges, make a living trough fees. The fees are coupled with volume, i.e. a broker that has a larger volume of orders, will pay higher fees.
So lower latency is good for the stock-exchange, neutral for traders on equal grounds and negative for those suckers who play at daytrading. It -does- tilt the table towards those with machinery though, but the effect is irrelevant for traders who aren't extremely short-term.
In short: yet another reason to invest rather than speculate.
If you buy and sell 20 times today, each time with the table tilted a tenth of a promille against you, you'll on the average lose 2 promille, plus the fees. This doesn't sound like much, but a trader that does this 200 days a year, will have lost 20% of his profit to the tilted table. (if his flat-table profits where less than 20%, he'd thus run a minus)
Meanwhile, the investor, who holds stock on the average 5 years, will also lose a tenth of a promille in every transaction, but since he's got 2 transactions in 5 years, that works out to 0.4 transactions/year -- thus his loss relative to the flat table is 0.4 * 0.01% = 0.004% pro year, which is irrelevant.
Here's the thing: every territory is under the rule of whomever shows up with the most guns.
Laws are only tangentially relevant.
A satelite, or a territory is dumb anyway, because to be any use, either one would need a link to the rest of the internet -- and they'd need to get that from some nation -- at which point the LINK is subject to the jurisdiction of that nation.
The "warmed-by-rf" hypothesis is so implausible it's not even laughable.
Are you telling me that having a -one- watt omnidirectional rf-transmitter 10-100 feet from my head, will provide any measureable heating of anything ?
We're not talking raising the temperature one degree here, more like 0.000000001 degree.
If you put a 100W directional transmitter 5 feet away, sure, you'd feel the heat, similar to sitting close to a very weak oven.
But that's not the energy-levels we're talking of here.
"I really don't care that the president does X - but nevertheless I'm going to bring it up and mention it as an example of.... what exactly I don't know, but pay attention: I'm sure as hell not critiquing him for it."
Doesn't really work, you know ?
If you consider something truly irrelevant: why then mention it at all ?
You still overestimate a lot of businessess. I'm not talking primarily the multi-billion ones here. Remember that a large part of the population works for businesses with less than 20 employees, where the it-department is often a single guy with no formal qualifications whatsoever.
You're lucky if he can give a comprehensible answer to what a "file-format" is, or what "compatibility" means.
There are a LOT of copies of Excel and Word that never use even a fraction of a percent of the capability. Hell, you need only look at the school of my father. Full office-copies for every employee (even the cleaning-ladies), and nobody except the it-teacher knows how to do anything more complex than make text bold in word, and use basic arithmethic in Excel. Yes I know, schools get a discount, that's not the point.
The point is, you're nuts if you think that even a majority of companies who use ms-office do so as a result of a conscious *choice*.
There -are- businesses which use Excel for the features. That is, they use features that are hard to use, or nonexistant in OpenOffice.
But there are -also- a lot of businesses that use Excel because, honestly, they've never honestly considered the fact that there even exists alternatives. Many of them never use formulas more advanced than basic arithmethic and perhaps SUM(..) - but nevertheless fork over the cash for Excel for their entire staff.
The former can't easily swap, but the latter could. And there's a lot of excel noobs, for every Excel guru, out there.
You work 1/3rd of all the hours in a year ? 8 hours a day 365 days a year, no days off, never a day of vacation, nor a single day of sickness or other absence, ever ?
In the real world, people who work fulltime work perhaps 1/5th of the time, not a third.
But that's not required. Even just staying ONE year behind the curve as in "never buy a game that's been on the market for less than a year" is sufficient to generally get the games at half the price, or less.
I do this. It works splendid. Bioshock is $14-$19 now, and it's just as much fun as it was when it was $59. At the moment I'm playing uncharted 2, which came out slightly over a year ago. I got it for $35 - and that was the "game of the year edition" that includes add-ons that those buying it at $59 a year ago would have to shell out $30 for. $35 is a lot cheaper than $89.
And it's not as if this is an old, crappy, last-generation game. Progress in gaming is fast. But not fast enough to make a one-year-old game obsolete.
Pretty much all consumer-goods are "inessential" - that by itself is no indication of anything. If it was, Coca Cola, Apple, Starbucks and basically anyone who sells any kind of luxury-goods, would be worth zip.
I think that's overdoing it -- though absolutely zero protections would be preferable to the current situation for many industries.
I favor a balanced approach. Say a decade of protection, similar to todays copyright, but with an explicit exception for private noncomercial copying, and for copying needed to format or timeshift a protected work, or to preserve it.
One problem is, that this is much too LONG for some stuff, like software, while perhaps too short for some classes of works. Hell, if you look at games, the curve is even steeper. A typical $59 game falls to $19 in 2 years, suggesting that there's little comercial value in games over 5 years old. (there'll always be exceptions - monkey island is still making money - but the exceptions shouldn't define the laws)
Both true, and nontrue. Yeah, universities aren't teaching the newest-and-hottest in Programming 101. But nor do they need to.
Thing is, the fundamental concepts do NOT move quickly. Not at all. To the contrary, if I had a dime for every Ruby on Rails app I've seen that, for example, essentially re-implements the filesystem - poorly - I could probably afford a bigmac by now.
They tend to repeat ALL the mistakes too. Some examples ? If you're organizing stuff in a tree-structure, what do you do about stuff that logically belong 2 or more places ? Do you reinvent windows "shortcuts" (which don't work well), or do you engineer your basic structure to allow an object to have more than one place in the tree (i.e. the unix-way). If the latter, do you allow hardlinking to directories, and if yes, how many of the 17 problems that causes, does your app have ? What about locking of resources ? What about permissions ? Deadlocks ? Cache coherency ?
Thing is, problems tend to show up again, at different levels. Several of the problems I've mentioned above go deeper, in some cases down to the hardware-level. (SMP-systems with separate cache for each core, needs to deal with cache-coherency) then it gets repeated at each layer. The OS needs to deal with cache-coherency. As do various systems for speeding up high-level scripting-languages, say the Zend-Optimizer for php. And lastly, you'll discover, the very same concepts are useful, indeed required, if you're (for example) caching objects in memcached way up in the stratosphere of a webservice.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
If you think modern web-apps, have nothing to learn from the time-sharing systems of yesteryear, you'll end up solving the same problems they solved back then, the painful way: by repeating the same mistakes.
This is true. Nevertheless, motorists take up a disproportionate fraction of space and inconvenience, relative to other sorts of downtown transport. 2 cars, usually with 2 people in them, take up as much space as a bus, which averages a lot more than 2 passengers. And you can have -many- people walk or bike on a lot smaller space than that used by the same people in individual cars.
Also, cars make a lot of noise and local pollution, significantly more than biking or walking.
True, there's minimum energy-requirements. But they depend on the technology. The energy required to lift something to geosynchronous orbit, is about 15Kwh/kg so the lower bound for energy-costs, is the price of 15Kwh. In practice, it's likely to be atleast an order of magnitude more, even with a space-elevator.
But relatively speaking, energy gets cheaper all the time. I can buy aproximately 400Kwh worth of electric energy, with what I earn for one hour of working, if you plotted Kwh/average_work_hour for the last 100 years, you'd see a very steeply rising curve.
Even if we say that price is an order of magnitude more than electric cost, we're still talking 150Kwh/kg. If I can spend a week after having lifted 1000kg up there, this means I need to pay for 150.000Kwh -- which presently would cost me slighly over one months pay.
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Just out of curiosity, which of these countries are at a development-level comparable to USA ? Does even a single one of them have a GDP/person that's atleast 1/3rd of that in usa ?
Can you find me a country where wealth/person is atleast half of USA, and where homicide-rates are comparable ?
If you're happy to beat Kenya, then yeah, fine, more power to you.
Surely it must be more than a measly 1800 megatons ? Let's try...
E = mc^2
The idiot weighs 80kgs, and he'll annihiliate with an equal amount of matter of the opposite type, thus bringing the total to 160 kg.
c is aproximately 300.000.000 m/s
So we get E = 160 * 3000000000^2 = 144000 petajoules
Now, a megaton is 4.2 Petajoules. So we get 144000/4.2 = 3500 megatons.
Hmm, looks like my initial intuition was off: you're right. 1700 megatons for the idiot. (and double that if you include the matter he reacts with)
It's easy enough to fix though. All you need to do is have actual in-school-exams that count for the majority of the grade.
It's not as if the Internet is magical - the essential quality that enables rampant cheating, is the fact that you're allowed to do the work in a environment where nobody knows if the candidate handing in the assignment, is the same person who wrote it.
Even without the Internet, students can and have cooperated with eachothers, if I am really good in subject A and you're really good in B, the logical choice is for me to write 2 essays on subject A, and for you to write 2 essays on subject B. We both get better grades, and the odds of being discovered as cheaters are miniscule, assuming each work is actually only ever turned in once. (the only cheating they've got any hope of discovering, is where blocks or entire essays are copied verbatim or near-verbatim from one paper to another)
Most people would surely not embrace it, but that's okay since nobody is suggesting sending most people.
If one person in a million would embrace it, we've got 6000 candidates, afterall. And they're only planning on sending 4 people, for the first mission.
I actually think many would volunteer, likely thousands from USA alone.
4 is a little low, though, it's not enough people to be a community.
And in practice, layers 5 and 6 are pretty useless. Not that the functionality is, but that it's seldom seen as a function of the network proper, but instead handled in the app.
For example, today, remote-procedure-calls are frequently handled ontop of http, and don't even get me started on the "presentation" layer.
Yeah, the ratio is nuts.
With 14 megabits, you can slurp 1.5MB/second, or 90MB/minute. A single hour of full-throttle-use can be over 5GB.
In short, the cap says, you can use your connection to the limit 12 hours a month, or 20 minutes a day.
That's irrelevant.
If you're planning to drive 400 miles in a day, and your vehicle has a range shorter than this -- you need a quick fill. (It'd be real inconvenient to be needing a 4-hour stop for a refuel)
But you really seldom stop at home after having driven a long distance, with intention of leaving again for another long drive in a few minutes.
A 5-hour charge at home -- and a 10 minute quick-charge at the high-capacity energy-station for longer trips, sounds fine to me.
This is true, offcourse. But I think what many people say when they say "diet" is "weight reduction"
And *that* doesn't need to be a permanent thing. You need to eat a balanced and healthy diet for life.
But you only need to reduce weight for a period, until you're normal-weight.
Then again, if you'd not allowed yourself to become overweight in the first place, you'd not need weight-reduction either.
Every time one trader buys, another sells. Like I said: it's a zero-sum game. The only way one trader can come out ahead, i.e. buy at a *better* than average time, and sell at a *better* than average time, is if another trader comes out behind, exactly equally much.
Thus you'd expect that 50% of traders come out ahead, and 50% come out behind. But it gets worse: there's fees associated with every transaction, so the real odds are more like 30% come out ahead, 70% come out behind. And you're more likely to come up behind the more often you trade. (since more frequent trading translates to bigger fees)
A *good*, as in genuinely upper-quartile trader, will still come out ahead, sure. But because of stuff like this, tilting the table in advantage of machines, odds that you, or any other individual small-time investor will be in that quartile, sinks all the time.
It's one of those games where the best way to win, is not to play at all. (notice that the game of speculation is distinct from the activity of INVESTING)
Not quite.
Translation: If the system is set up to favour those with 20ms response-times over those who are slower, it is dumb to play against that system when your response-time is a lot longer.
It's not really stealing, it's just favouring a certain type of trader (namely one who trades a lot, and is very fast)
It's logical that the stock-exchange would favour this sort of trader, afterall that's where they make their money. (never forget that the stock-exchange itself, is a business)
No idea. You tell me, in your third language.
Trade-speed is irrelevant to investors.
It's relevant to highly speculative robot-trader algorithms that try to make a profit by arbitraging sub-second timing-issues. But this is a zero-sum game: one trader can only gain $X by taking advantage of timing if other traders lose PRECISELY $X, so to the sum of traders, this is irrelevant.
Stock-exchanges, make a living trough fees. The fees are coupled with volume, i.e. a broker that has a larger volume of orders, will pay higher fees.
So lower latency is good for the stock-exchange, neutral for traders on equal grounds and negative for those suckers who play at daytrading. It -does- tilt the table towards those with machinery though, but the effect is irrelevant for traders who aren't extremely short-term.
In short: yet another reason to invest rather than speculate.
If you buy and sell 20 times today, each time with the table tilted a tenth of a promille against you, you'll on the average lose 2 promille, plus the fees. This doesn't sound like much, but a trader that does this 200 days a year, will have lost 20% of his profit to the tilted table. (if his flat-table profits where less than 20%, he'd thus run a minus)
Meanwhile, the investor, who holds stock on the average 5 years, will also lose a tenth of a promille in every transaction, but since he's got 2 transactions in 5 years, that works out to 0.4 transactions/year -- thus his loss relative to the flat table is 0.4 * 0.01% = 0.004% pro year, which is irrelevant.
Here's the thing: every territory is under the rule of whomever shows up with the most guns.
Laws are only tangentially relevant.
A satelite, or a territory is dumb anyway, because to be any use, either one would need a link to the rest of the internet -- and they'd need to get that from some nation -- at which point the LINK is subject to the jurisdiction of that nation.
lightbulbs are pretty nondirectional, atleast most of them. If you stand 5 feet away from a pretty narrow-beam 100W spotlight - you *can* feel it.
The "warmed-by-rf" hypothesis is so implausible it's not even laughable.
Are you telling me that having a -one- watt omnidirectional rf-transmitter 10-100 feet from my head, will provide any measureable heating of anything ?
We're not talking raising the temperature one degree here, more like 0.000000001 degree.
If you put a 100W directional transmitter 5 feet away, sure, you'd feel the heat, similar to sitting close to a very weak oven.
But that's not the energy-levels we're talking of here.
"I really don't care that the president does X - but nevertheless I'm going to bring it up and mention it as an example of .... what exactly I don't know, but pay attention: I'm sure as hell not critiquing him for it."
Doesn't really work, you know ?
If you consider something truly irrelevant: why then mention it at all ?
You still overestimate a lot of businessess. I'm not talking primarily the multi-billion ones here. Remember that a large part of the population works for businesses with less than 20 employees, where the it-department is often a single guy with no formal qualifications whatsoever.
You're lucky if he can give a comprehensible answer to what a "file-format" is, or what "compatibility" means.
There are a LOT of copies of Excel and Word that never use even a fraction of a percent of the capability. Hell, you need only look at the school of my father. Full office-copies for every employee (even the cleaning-ladies), and nobody except the it-teacher knows how to do anything more complex than make text bold in word, and use basic arithmethic in Excel. Yes I know, schools get a discount, that's not the point.
The point is, you're nuts if you think that even a majority of companies who use ms-office do so as a result of a conscious *choice*.
The thing is, there are all sorts.
There -are- businesses which use Excel for the features. That is, they use features that are hard to use, or nonexistant in OpenOffice.
But there are -also- a lot of businesses that use Excel because, honestly, they've never honestly considered the fact that there even exists alternatives. Many of them never use formulas more advanced than basic arithmethic and perhaps SUM(..) - but nevertheless fork over the cash for Excel for their entire staff.
The former can't easily swap, but the latter could. And there's a lot of excel noobs, for every Excel guru, out there.
Yes, roughly 1/3. It's called a shift
You work 1/3rd of all the hours in a year ? 8 hours a day 365 days a year, no days off, never a day of vacation, nor a single day of sickness or other absence, ever ?
In the real world, people who work fulltime work perhaps 1/5th of the time, not a third.
But that's not required. Even just staying ONE year behind the curve as in "never buy a game that's been on the market for less than a year" is sufficient to generally get the games at half the price, or less.
I do this. It works splendid. Bioshock is $14-$19 now, and it's just as much fun as it was when it was $59. At the moment I'm playing uncharted 2, which came out slightly over a year ago. I got it for $35 - and that was the "game of the year edition" that includes add-ons that those buying it at $59 a year ago would have to shell out $30 for. $35 is a lot cheaper than $89.
And it's not as if this is an old, crappy, last-generation game. Progress in gaming is fast. But not fast enough to make a one-year-old game obsolete.
Pretty much all consumer-goods are "inessential" - that by itself is no indication of anything. If it was, Coca Cola, Apple, Starbucks and basically anyone who sells any kind of luxury-goods, would be worth zip.
I think that's overdoing it -- though absolutely zero protections would be preferable to the current situation for many industries.
I favor a balanced approach. Say a decade of protection, similar to todays copyright, but with an explicit exception for private noncomercial copying, and for copying needed to format or timeshift a protected work, or to preserve it.
One problem is, that this is much too LONG for some stuff, like software, while perhaps too short for some classes of works. Hell, if you look at games, the curve is even steeper. A typical $59 game falls to $19 in 2 years, suggesting that there's little comercial value in games over 5 years old. (there'll always be exceptions - monkey island is still making money - but the exceptions shouldn't define the laws)
Both true, and nontrue. Yeah, universities aren't teaching the newest-and-hottest in Programming 101. But nor do they need to.
Thing is, the fundamental concepts do NOT move quickly. Not at all. To the contrary, if I had a dime for every Ruby on Rails app I've seen that, for example, essentially re-implements the filesystem - poorly - I could probably afford a bigmac by now.
They tend to repeat ALL the mistakes too. Some examples ? If you're organizing stuff in a tree-structure, what do you do about stuff that logically belong 2 or more places ? Do you reinvent windows "shortcuts" (which don't work well), or do you engineer your basic structure to allow an object to have more than one place in the tree (i.e. the unix-way). If the latter, do you allow hardlinking to directories, and if yes, how many of the 17 problems that causes, does your app have ? What about locking of resources ? What about permissions ? Deadlocks ? Cache coherency ?
Thing is, problems tend to show up again, at different levels. Several of the problems I've mentioned above go deeper, in some cases down to the hardware-level. (SMP-systems with separate cache for each core, needs to deal with cache-coherency) then it gets repeated at each layer. The OS needs to deal with cache-coherency. As do various systems for speeding up high-level scripting-languages, say the Zend-Optimizer for php. And lastly, you'll discover, the very same concepts are useful, indeed required, if you're (for example) caching objects in memcached way up in the stratosphere of a webservice.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
If you think modern web-apps, have nothing to learn from the time-sharing systems of yesteryear, you'll end up solving the same problems they solved back then, the painful way: by repeating the same mistakes.
This is true. Nevertheless, motorists take up a disproportionate fraction of space and inconvenience, relative to other sorts of downtown transport. 2 cars, usually with 2 people in them, take up as much space as a bus, which averages a lot more than 2 passengers. And you can have -many- people walk or bike on a lot smaller space than that used by the same people in individual cars.
Also, cars make a lot of noise and local pollution, significantly more than biking or walking.
True, there's minimum energy-requirements. But they depend on the technology. The energy required to lift something to geosynchronous orbit, is about 15Kwh/kg so the lower bound for energy-costs, is the price of 15Kwh. In practice, it's likely to be atleast an order of magnitude more, even with a space-elevator.
But relatively speaking, energy gets cheaper all the time. I can buy aproximately 400Kwh worth of electric energy, with what I earn for one hour of working, if you plotted Kwh/average_work_hour for the last 100 years, you'd see a very steeply rising curve.
Even if we say that price is an order of magnitude more than electric cost, we're still talking 150Kwh/kg. If I can spend a week after having lifted 1000kg up there, this means I need to pay for 150.000Kwh -- which presently would cost me slighly over one months pay.