A wide aspect 16:9 native display using an anamorphic DVD ("Made for wide screens") will increase your vertical resolution significantly. A proper 3:2 pulldown will help.
Honestly, more important than resolution is proper settings: sharpness, contrast, color, and the rest. My 32" 4:3 SDTV destroys most uncalibrated HDTVs in viewing quality.
How much of the delays in either format has to do with the actual demand for the format?
I've had HiDef for years -- not including just the monitors on my PCs. I've always been happy with upconverted video, and the variety of HD coming over cable is getting better every day. I'm in no rush to repurchase all the DVDs that I have in HD, especially when I'm happy taking an anamorphic DVD, upconverting it, and feeding my projector its native signal.
I'm likely one of their preferred targets, but I will definitely not be one of the first buyers -- probably the first time with new technology that I'll take a backseat at the release.
As for my household, I added a phone company (free market) provision that filters all unknown callers. No need for any government mandates there.
For the few calls I do get that report their phone number, I have all I need to track down an 800# and make it more costly for them to continue calling.
My lady and I have a tendency to purchase a LOT of music -- we've filled a few 400 disc changers in the past before going with a wholehouse MP3 distribution system.
Our reasons for buying less music is:
1. Dislike of Sony and the RIAA -- where we used to buy 3-4 CDs a week at Borders, we're lucky to buy even 1 a month because of their strongarm tactics. Until Borders starts carrying the popular indie bands in their area, we won't buy CDs. Some indie bands in our area have sold 2000+ CDs privately without record store support. If they expect to be part of my community, they better do more research.
2. Bigger support of the ma-and-pa brick and mortars. As our retail stores that we own lose business to the dotcoms and the super stores, we've found that by supporting other locally owned shops, we see more locally employed customers at our stores. It is the ultimate "outsourcing" to see your community spending money outside of the community to save on sales tax and maybe a 5% difference in price beyond that. 14% is still a huge savings, all from government coercion.
3. Income. Our income this year is about double the last 3, but our income in the last 6 months is down over 70%. I've been putting more of my income into real savings (gold, silver, property) to weather to storm ahead. I've also expanded my market from just-the-Midwest to the entire world, and I expect it will take a year or two to get back to my first half of 2005 income levels.
4. Quality. The quality of the mass produced records is terrible. I can't listen to the top 40 record stations at all -- every vocalist is enhanced, delay and reverb is worse than the 80s, and the compression destroys any fidelity that might have made it through the overproduction period. Garbage in, garbage out, garbage unbought.
5. Promotion. I don't feel any desire to pay $50 to see a concert of 3 bands I barely know. The indie scene is usually $6 to $12, I see 2 amazing bands and 3 new bands cutting their teeth. $2 beer, $4 calls instead of the big shows where we paid $14 for a drink recently ($110 per ticket). Without cheap promotion the records won't sell.
6. Collusion. Try to get tickets today to any popular show. The rules governing ticket scalping are created specifically to take care of the few scalpers who are licensed by the local government. It has made shows nearly impossible to attend to. One popular show we were willing to pay $60 per ticket for was sold almost entirely to 3 ticket scalpers.
7. No desire. There are so many new ways to be entertained (due to the web) that music-on-CD just won't cut it anymore. I've been talking to a local show producer who is finding better ways to stream live shows to the web in a high quality, high fidelity, well produced show. I can't wait for his work to come to fruition.
Whenever I received calls I didn't want, I'd spend a few seconds finding out what company ordered the call. Then I'd spend a few minutes calling the company's 800 # until I received a few employees. I figured the waste of my time probably incurred a few bucks loss on the company's books.
The DNC registry is very pro-megamarketer. They know how they can get around it, but they also know thatthe DNC registry keeps the new marketers out of the market. This is mercantilism at its finest: government sets rules that new companies can not meet, but the old ones who wrote the rules make sure that they have loopholes.
Don't think the DNC registry can be fixed -- it can only be fixed in the same way that boxing matches were fixed -- for both parties to profit more. The two parties here? The megamarketers and the government that panders to them.
Get a phone call you don't want? Call the company back and make sure you do it for double the damage you incurred. If 1.4 million people called DirecTV a few times each, they'd far exceed the measley "fine" that was charged.
All my relatives from Europe and India (I'm "bi"-racial) that came to this country to study took engineering classes, graduated with a decent engineering degree and fled back to their home country. A few pushed themselves too hard, graduated, and live on a couch in the U.S. in their parents' basement.
I believe I am the only one in my family that didn't do more than 1 semester of college, and from what I can tell at family gatherings, I'm the least stressed about the future. The Indians (and some Europeans) tend to get scared of everything the future might throw at them. Small wonder that they returned back home with their degrees -- who is counting them in the totals?
It may not be GeekSquad's operation, but this guy worked that way. I'm watching closely to see if he gets fired or if they keep him on after the busy Christmas season.
I do know of one really decent guy who works at GeekSquad in my town, and I've been thinking of stealing him once our business gets through the Jan/Feb dip. I make sure I meet most of the GeekSquad employees as often as possible to weed up the real entrepreneurs from the future ITT-commercial actors.
Of course, YMMV. One of my customers that left us has been VERY happy with GeekSquad, although I know (from talking with the employees down the chain) that they'll be coming back in a few months. Money saved doesn't always equate to profits made.
Re:The real 90s versus outdated 00s software
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Java Is So 90s
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· Score: 4, Insightful
LISP?;)
Re:The real 90s versus outdated 00s software
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Java Is So 90s
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You've never actually written python code have you?
Time preference forced me to stop coding years ago, except for things I knew I could "fix" quickly. Now that I can subcontract all my code to some anonymous programmer in who-knows-what-country and receive my code in minutes, I gave it up. My talents are better suited to things that earn a little bit more than $3 per hours:)
I've researched python though, and it seems like a God-send. Of course, marketing always sells products as salvation, so I'd probably have to talk to the programmers to see what they like and dislike about it. For me, I just need code that works, is commented properly, and is easily adapted down the line by whoever might be doing the job. I promise to look deeper into python:)
Africa has to deal with 4000 years of hatred, the US only has 300 years of it. I think I'll pick the country with less blood wars that continue to believe the leader is God-mandated. Err...
But the real move is that "Web 2.0" is rising rapidly, too, and will probably displace Java & J2EE as the primary job creator over the next two-three years.
My outsourcing friends in India and Poland are heavily involved in pushing the entire Web 2.0 idea to their subcontractors. Do you think the primary job creation will be in Western nations or the 2nd world countries?
Re:The real 90s versus outdated 00s software
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Java Is So 90s
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yeah and 640kb ram ought to be enough for anyone
Considering what I accomplished with 512kb of RAM for the first 10 years or so, I think I saw better programming during those days:)
different problems need different tools
I concur.
the day managers get that, there will be a big load of unemployeed peoples from marketing departments
(Tinfoil hat warning)
Sure, but these same companies that are "secretly" pushing for more bandwidth everywhere are also the companies that have control over Congressional decision-making. Once the bandwidth is everywhere, once it is cheap and once people are accustomed to AJAX-based applications, how long do you think it will be before the megacorps decide that we don't need to store anything on our hard drives but our browser's temporay internet files?
Re:The real 90s versus outdated 00s software
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Java Is So 90s
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The wrong thing about Java is the Virtual machine implementation. You can blame Sun for that. If Java is slow, grabs lots of memory and all that it is because of the virtual machine, not because of the language. A language is just a BNF diagram specification which describes the syntax of the program, and all of its reserved words.
You're right, and that's the first time I've been reprimanded by anyone for making that connection:) I really do hate the virtual machine implementation. Still, if you're the first person (out of hundreds over the years) to remind me that my hatred extends to the implementation and not the actual language, how many other people -- more powerful people -- are making that same mistaken connection?
I sort of like my idea -- return to Federalism. Let's disband the federal government of every unconstitutional law, organization and mandate. The individual States will likely recreate these organizations but with less red tape and bureaucracy. Some states might decide not to support certain federal laws that were incorporated through coercion (see "highway matching funds.")
When the States can compete, we'll see more trial and error in the various markets. We'll see States with more freedom and States with less freedom. I'm not asking for much, only disbanding the FDA, EPA, BATF, SEC, IRS, OSHA, FCC, FAA, DEA, FCC, CDC, FOMC, FEC and similar three and four-letter organizations that have no constitutional grounds for existence).
The real 90s versus outdated 00s software
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Java Is So 90s
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· Score: 4, Interesting
When I think of the 90s, I think of my days designing in RIPterm and uploading and downloading warez while chatting with Bimodem while trying to figure out the best initialization string to take advantage of the V.42 modem I used.
I definitely do not think of Java as a 90s scripting/programming language -- although I do get very frustrated when Java apps don't run properly on my PDA. I do think that Java is an outdated language that always seemed unfriendly to users and caused a lot of extra cost/headache to my customers when every software company we supported seemed to attempt to create a Java app to access their software engines.
I think Java has (had?) some features that made it easier to program in, especially for not-so-wise programmers. The automatic garbage collection allowed my guys to make quick fixes without worrying about memory management (I am being sarcastic here, I had some real dumb asses subcontracting some of my work). The speed of Java was great too (still sarcastic), and the consistency of the output code was always a positive (yes, still sarcastic).
I guess my big concern with LAMP is what the hell is the P? PHP? Python? Perl? They're all very powerful and they all have their own positives and negatives in regards to quick scripting solutions, but all of them still allow bad programs to churn our badly written programs. I'm guessing that is the trade-off: the more complex programs you can write, the more likely you are to see badly written programs.
It is very hard not to be sarcastic when talking about Java. Every CEO of every company I consulted with loved to spew the big tech words, and Java haunted me for years. I'm glad I don't hear it anymore -- should I thank the dotbomb for that?
In the long run, I think the 90s client-server systems will come back into use. Software companies have every reason to move back to controlling their applications and charging for use rather than licensing the code out to end users. I seriously believe the push for faster cable modems and DSL to the home is through the software developers (and music and video publishers) in order to just stream everything rather than offer the user the ability of unlimited copying. Once you have 2MB WiFi nation wide, there is no need to ever store your programs or your media anymore, right?
On a related note, anybody wanna take a crack at defending capitalism anymore?
I will.
Capitalism is providing no regulation or public funding for a market. Mercantilism is providing corporate welfare for favored company. Lincoln fought a war to protect his mercantilist dreams. Congress today runs the mercantilist ship, with the Executive branch profiting from the warfare state. You have Congress doling out corporate welfare with the Executive's warfare manipulations.
Don't confuse a free market with a regulated one. Capitalism is merely the process of billions of consumers and producers making unique trades that create common values that can change on a whim, but the entire process still runs. Mercantilism is stealing from the majority to support a minority that the majority didn't want to support at the price they were asking.
Because the wires wouldn't have gotten run without eminent domain.
Prove this. The original telegraphy and radiotelegraphy was created without government funding or mandate. The railroads that were built with private dollars and private aquisition of land were quickly regulated in order to control the procedures (and incorporate taxes), but the telegraphy lines were privately funded and controlled.
We believe we need government to help with communications because we've always had them around. I see many of the pushes for better and faster communications happening outside of government regulation and control. Sure (D)ARPA created the Internet, but it was private businesses that took it lightyears ahead. Government comes around with standards, but the protocols that continue to build on old protocols are invented by competitive companies.
Government regulations hold us back. I lived in a town when I grew up that didn't mandate Ma Bell (we had a tiny local phone company called Centel) and my local phone company had no problem providing me with dry pairs between my house and my friends' houses. We had our own very basic phone system going back then, secondary to the telephone company. Centel was even trying to allow other companies to run their own phone lines (this is back in 1986-1989 or so), so that they could do the same in Ameritech's market. Who prevented this? Local governments.
Alright, but not on wires running across my property. How's that for "better access?"
Microwave direct connections make this concern invalid.
You'd need new routing protocols (to distinguish between normal and "special" packets) and possibly a whole new DNS server structure (to tell which URL is in whose network). It has the potential to break IPv4 (at least) entirely.
I'm sure Amazon and Slashdot would gladly jump on this network and lose all their users. I'm sure users that get on this network that can't connect to Amazon and Slashdot would just roll over and live with it. Anyone who attempts to break IPv4 would find themselves in a very lonely micronetwork.
Again: if the telcos can't force people to sell easements, there is no network, or at least none without obnoxiously high pricing (in order to all the prices asked for by the milllions of property owners nationwide).
Easements that are now unnecessary. Sure, over the past 100 years maybe you can argue you needed eminent domain, but I believe it could have been performed much faster without it. It would have been much more expensive, but this would have pushed inventors to find cheaper solutions through radiotelegraphy. Eminent domain hasn't solved any problems, all it does is force the public to pay for things that the free market would still find solutions to. Oh, and it helps pay off the cronies, too.
Seriously, in your little anarcho-capitalist wet dream, I'm charging per packet to not put my shovel through the wire.
And there would be 5 other wires ready to back it up. Or a microwave direct connect. Or a radiotelegraphy unidirectional signal. Or a satellite signal. There is no stopping the flow of information at a single point, not with the Internet. Back in the BBS days, you could have blown up my house. Today that would only stop one person, not billions.
Actually, I read slashdot and post to slashdot from a packet network -- GPRS. Good luck getting comcast or SBC to try to affect that:)
Your point is well taken, but my point is that there is so much competition and so many access points to the bigger Internet, there is no single point of failure except ICANN.
It's because they are a Monopoly. It's because you, the customer, doesn't have any other reasonable choice if you don't want to go with them. It's because in return for being allowed to be a monopoly that they have to play by different rules than the open market. You take your choice of monopoly or open market, but once you make it quit yer complaining about the rules you initially agreed to follow!
Government is the only monopoly in this picture. They rent their monopoly powers to others, though.
How are the telcos a monopoly? I have a cable modem, my friend across the country has one. A little free VoIP software and we've forgotten about the telco. If they want to overregulate my DSL connection, I can go back to using a dial-up ISP seperate from them (and take advantage of the unlimited $20 package).
The freedoms the Internet reinforces are causing people to rethink the costs that used to be commonplace. Dialing your aunt long distance more than once a year was unheard of, now we can chat with her all day long for barely pennies. Sending an instant e-mail through FidoNet sometimes took 3 days for a reply, now it takes moments. Any company who thinks they can back-up the common actions of billions of users is in for a big surprise.
No matter how much control they receive through government force, they can't stop the process that billion of users are familiar with. Sure, the telcos likely control an enormous quantity of users' endpoints, but we will always have cable and dial-up (which isn't affected like DSL is as you can pick any ISP to dial into).
There just isn't the motivation of users for better service when many users can get 50K/s downloads over a $20 DSL or cable line. If they truly want to disrupt Internet connections to major endpoints and expect to blackmail or start some racketeering (with government approval), they'll find themselves losing users left and right.
The only way that U.S. Congress can facilitate a "total control takeover" would be to tax the smaller ISPs out of existance. Sure, this can happen, but I don't see 180 million users in the U.S. accepting a price increase -- even if it will help prevent terrorism or win the battle against the Communists or stop the Reich from spreading throughout Europe. There is no mandate from the market to break apart what works right now, and nothing government can do short of making themselves bigger tyrants will change that.
No single company has the money to invest or support a seperate Internet over the long run. There are too many ISPs and backbone providers competing in the open market.
Telcos can try to create their own Internet, but how long would it last if users can't get to sites they've commonly accesses? Google and Slashdot and other popular sites can refuse to pay the telco premium charges, and the users will bail.
They should have tried this a decade ago. Too little, too late.
It confuses me as to why Congress should have any say in companies creating additional networks. Interstate commerce clause? What a joke.
If companies want to try to create supernets for their customers to better access each other, I say allow them to. I can not imagine any supernet subverting the Internet in any way. If an ISP decides to slow down traffic to non-ISP destinations, you're going to see user backlash. I've changed ISPs over the years due to bad routing (or repeatedly failed routing) and I know some of my non-techie friends have done the same.
These supernets would just be a second backbone connecting their network together, correct? I think this is a great idea, especially for corporations that can not afford their own backbone connections for remote offices. If my companies could connect quickly through a secondary network at no additional cost (or lower cost), I'd jump on it immediately.
I just can't understand why Congress has any say in what companies do with their own property. They're already providing for the "public need" and they should be free to supplement the "public need" for what other users are demanding/needing.
I think it can be argued that the FOMC can be partially to blame for the speculative bubble that occured. They destroyed savings by forcing interests rates to the bare minimum (lower than COLA), printed new free money left and right, and offered millions of Americans extra money at very little cost. When people are given all this "free" money at low interest rates, they tend not to value it as much and generally take higher risks. Once the market started to move up (possibly because the first owners of the new money invested in the IPOs), the suckers at the back-end of the inflationary cycle followed suit. Guess who takes their money out once the open market turns into a bubble market?
The Austrian School of Economic thought predicts these bubble/busts due to the inflationary cycle caused by the FOMC and other central banking cartels.
I have very little knowledge of or interaction with autism or autistics.
The one "big" autism situation I'm familiar with was a family friend who had 2 children, vaccinated and both autistic. Child 3 had neither. Of course, you can't extrapolate from this, but it id get me thinking.
When I was young (up to 13) I was extremely nervous/twitchy. My doctor said it could be mercury, where some people are more sensitive than others. Other doctors refuted the idea, and as I aged the symptoms went away or decreased significantly. At 13 I did try some chelation mumbo-jumbo (San Fran China Man I called the herbalist). Maybe it worked, maybe it didn't.
I do think there is some link. Maybe not everyone. Maybe a 3rd unknown.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for saving me time with that reply :)
A few notes:
A wide aspect 16:9 native display using an anamorphic DVD ("Made for wide screens") will increase your vertical resolution significantly. A proper 3:2 pulldown will help.
Honestly, more important than resolution is proper settings: sharpness, contrast, color, and the rest. My 32" 4:3 SDTV destroys most uncalibrated HDTVs in viewing quality.
How much of the delays in either format has to do with the actual demand for the format?
I've had HiDef for years -- not including just the monitors on my PCs. I've always been happy with upconverted video, and the variety of HD coming over cable is getting better every day. I'm in no rush to repurchase all the DVDs that I have in HD, especially when I'm happy taking an anamorphic DVD, upconverting it, and feeding my projector its native signal.
I'm likely one of their preferred targets, but I will definitely not be one of the first buyers -- probably the first time with new technology that I'll take a backseat at the release.
I'll do that.
As for my household, I added a phone company (free market) provision that filters all unknown callers. No need for any government mandates there.
For the few calls I do get that report their phone number, I have all I need to track down an 800# and make it more costly for them to continue calling.
My lady and I have a tendency to purchase a LOT of music -- we've filled a few 400 disc changers in the past before going with a wholehouse MP3 distribution system.
Our reasons for buying less music is:
1. Dislike of Sony and the RIAA -- where we used to buy 3-4 CDs a week at Borders, we're lucky to buy even 1 a month because of their strongarm tactics. Until Borders starts carrying the popular indie bands in their area, we won't buy CDs. Some indie bands in our area have sold 2000+ CDs privately without record store support. If they expect to be part of my community, they better do more research.
2. Bigger support of the ma-and-pa brick and mortars. As our retail stores that we own lose business to the dotcoms and the super stores, we've found that by supporting other locally owned shops, we see more locally employed customers at our stores. It is the ultimate "outsourcing" to see your community spending money outside of the community to save on sales tax and maybe a 5% difference in price beyond that. 14% is still a huge savings, all from government coercion.
3. Income. Our income this year is about double the last 3, but our income in the last 6 months is down over 70%. I've been putting more of my income into real savings (gold, silver, property) to weather to storm ahead. I've also expanded my market from just-the-Midwest to the entire world, and I expect it will take a year or two to get back to my first half of 2005 income levels.
4. Quality. The quality of the mass produced records is terrible. I can't listen to the top 40 record stations at all -- every vocalist is enhanced, delay and reverb is worse than the 80s, and the compression destroys any fidelity that might have made it through the overproduction period. Garbage in, garbage out, garbage unbought.
5. Promotion. I don't feel any desire to pay $50 to see a concert of 3 bands I barely know. The indie scene is usually $6 to $12, I see 2 amazing bands and 3 new bands cutting their teeth. $2 beer, $4 calls instead of the big shows where we paid $14 for a drink recently ($110 per ticket). Without cheap promotion the records won't sell.
6. Collusion. Try to get tickets today to any popular show. The rules governing ticket scalping are created specifically to take care of the few scalpers who are licensed by the local government. It has made shows nearly impossible to attend to. One popular show we were willing to pay $60 per ticket for was sold almost entirely to 3 ticket scalpers.
7. No desire. There are so many new ways to be entertained (due to the web) that music-on-CD just won't cut it anymore. I've been talking to a local show producer who is finding better ways to stream live shows to the web in a high quality, high fidelity, well produced show. I can't wait for his work to come to fruition.
Whenever I received calls I didn't want, I'd spend a few seconds finding out what company ordered the call. Then I'd spend a few minutes calling the company's 800 # until I received a few employees. I figured the waste of my time probably incurred a few bucks loss on the company's books.
The DNC registry is very pro-megamarketer. They know how they can get around it, but they also know thatthe DNC registry keeps the new marketers out of the market. This is mercantilism at its finest: government sets rules that new companies can not meet, but the old ones who wrote the rules make sure that they have loopholes.
Don't think the DNC registry can be fixed -- it can only be fixed in the same way that boxing matches were fixed -- for both parties to profit more. The two parties here? The megamarketers and the government that panders to them.
Get a phone call you don't want? Call the company back and make sure you do it for double the damage you incurred. If 1.4 million people called DirecTV a few times each, they'd far exceed the measley "fine" that was charged.
You beat me to this point!
All my relatives from Europe and India (I'm "bi"-racial) that came to this country to study took engineering classes, graduated with a decent engineering degree and fled back to their home country. A few pushed themselves too hard, graduated, and live on a couch in the U.S. in their parents' basement.
I believe I am the only one in my family that didn't do more than 1 semester of college, and from what I can tell at family gatherings, I'm the least stressed about the future. The Indians (and some Europeans) tend to get scared of everything the future might throw at them. Small wonder that they returned back home with their degrees -- who is counting them in the totals?
It may not be GeekSquad's operation, but this guy worked that way. I'm watching closely to see if he gets fired or if they keep him on after the busy Christmas season.
I do know of one really decent guy who works at GeekSquad in my town, and I've been thinking of stealing him once our business gets through the Jan/Feb dip. I make sure I meet most of the GeekSquad employees as often as possible to weed up the real entrepreneurs from the future ITT-commercial actors.
Of course, YMMV. One of my customers that left us has been VERY happy with GeekSquad, although I know (from talking with the employees down the chain) that they'll be coming back in a few months. Money saved doesn't always equate to profits made.
LISP? ;)
You've never actually written python code have you?
:)
:)
Time preference forced me to stop coding years ago, except for things I knew I could "fix" quickly. Now that I can subcontract all my code to some anonymous programmer in who-knows-what-country and receive my code in minutes, I gave it up. My talents are better suited to things that earn a little bit more than $3 per hours
I've researched python though, and it seems like a God-send. Of course, marketing always sells products as salvation, so I'd probably have to talk to the programmers to see what they like and dislike about it. For me, I just need code that works, is commented properly, and is easily adapted down the line by whoever might be doing the job. I promise to look deeper into python
Africa has to deal with 4000 years of hatred, the US only has 300 years of it. I think I'll pick the country with less blood wars that continue to believe the leader is God-mandated. Err...
But the real move is that "Web 2.0" is rising rapidly, too, and will probably displace Java & J2EE as the primary job creator over the next two-three years.
My outsourcing friends in India and Poland are heavily involved in pushing the entire Web 2.0 idea to their subcontractors. Do you think the primary job creation will be in Western nations or the 2nd world countries?
yeah and 640kb ram ought to be enough for anyone
:)
Considering what I accomplished with 512kb of RAM for the first 10 years or so, I think I saw better programming during those days
different problems need different tools
I concur.
the day managers get that, there will be a big load of unemployeed peoples from marketing departments
(Tinfoil hat warning)
Sure, but these same companies that are "secretly" pushing for more bandwidth everywhere are also the companies that have control over Congressional decision-making. Once the bandwidth is everywhere, once it is cheap and once people are accustomed to AJAX-based applications, how long do you think it will be before the megacorps decide that we don't need to store anything on our hard drives but our browser's temporay internet files?
The wrong thing about Java is the Virtual machine implementation. You can blame Sun for that. If Java is slow, grabs lots of memory and all that it is because of the virtual machine, not because of the language. A language is just a BNF diagram specification which describes the syntax of the program, and all of its reserved words.
:) I really do hate the virtual machine implementation. Still, if you're the first person (out of hundreds over the years) to remind me that my hatred extends to the implementation and not the actual language, how many other people -- more powerful people -- are making that same mistaken connection?
You're right, and that's the first time I've been reprimanded by anyone for making that connection
I sort of like my idea -- return to Federalism. Let's disband the federal government of every unconstitutional law, organization and mandate. The individual States will likely recreate these organizations but with less red tape and bureaucracy. Some states might decide not to support certain federal laws that were incorporated through coercion (see "highway matching funds.")
When the States can compete, we'll see more trial and error in the various markets. We'll see States with more freedom and States with less freedom. I'm not asking for much, only disbanding the FDA, EPA, BATF, SEC, IRS, OSHA, FCC, FAA, DEA, FCC, CDC, FOMC, FEC and similar three and four-letter organizations that have no constitutional grounds for existence).
When I think of the 90s, I think of my days designing in RIPterm and uploading and downloading warez while chatting with Bimodem while trying to figure out the best initialization string to take advantage of the V.42 modem I used.
I definitely do not think of Java as a 90s scripting/programming language -- although I do get very frustrated when Java apps don't run properly on my PDA. I do think that Java is an outdated language that always seemed unfriendly to users and caused a lot of extra cost/headache to my customers when every software company we supported seemed to attempt to create a Java app to access their software engines.
I think Java has (had?) some features that made it easier to program in, especially for not-so-wise programmers. The automatic garbage collection allowed my guys to make quick fixes without worrying about memory management (I am being sarcastic here, I had some real dumb asses subcontracting some of my work). The speed of Java was great too (still sarcastic), and the consistency of the output code was always a positive (yes, still sarcastic).
I guess my big concern with LAMP is what the hell is the P? PHP? Python? Perl? They're all very powerful and they all have their own positives and negatives in regards to quick scripting solutions, but all of them still allow bad programs to churn our badly written programs. I'm guessing that is the trade-off: the more complex programs you can write, the more likely you are to see badly written programs.
It is very hard not to be sarcastic when talking about Java. Every CEO of every company I consulted with loved to spew the big tech words, and Java haunted me for years. I'm glad I don't hear it anymore -- should I thank the dotbomb for that?
In the long run, I think the 90s client-server systems will come back into use. Software companies have every reason to move back to controlling their applications and charging for use rather than licensing the code out to end users. I seriously believe the push for faster cable modems and DSL to the home is through the software developers (and music and video publishers) in order to just stream everything rather than offer the user the ability of unlimited copying. Once you have 2MB WiFi nation wide, there is no need to ever store your programs or your media anymore, right?
On a related note, anybody wanna take a crack at defending capitalism anymore?
I will.
Capitalism is providing no regulation or public funding for a market. Mercantilism is providing corporate welfare for favored company. Lincoln fought a war to protect his mercantilist dreams. Congress today runs the mercantilist ship, with the Executive branch profiting from the warfare state. You have Congress doling out corporate welfare with the Executive's warfare manipulations.
Don't confuse a free market with a regulated one. Capitalism is merely the process of billions of consumers and producers making unique trades that create common values that can change on a whim, but the entire process still runs. Mercantilism is stealing from the majority to support a minority that the majority didn't want to support at the price they were asking.
Because the wires wouldn't have gotten run without eminent domain.
Prove this. The original telegraphy and radiotelegraphy was created without government funding or mandate. The railroads that were built with private dollars and private aquisition of land were quickly regulated in order to control the procedures (and incorporate taxes), but the telegraphy lines were privately funded and controlled.
We believe we need government to help with communications because we've always had them around. I see many of the pushes for better and faster communications happening outside of government regulation and control. Sure (D)ARPA created the Internet, but it was private businesses that took it lightyears ahead. Government comes around with standards, but the protocols that continue to build on old protocols are invented by competitive companies.
Government regulations hold us back. I lived in a town when I grew up that didn't mandate Ma Bell (we had a tiny local phone company called Centel) and my local phone company had no problem providing me with dry pairs between my house and my friends' houses. We had our own very basic phone system going back then, secondary to the telephone company. Centel was even trying to allow other companies to run their own phone lines (this is back in 1986-1989 or so), so that they could do the same in Ameritech's market. Who prevented this? Local governments.
Alright, but not on wires running across my property. How's that for "better access?"
Microwave direct connections make this concern invalid.
You'd need new routing protocols (to distinguish between normal and "special" packets) and possibly a whole new DNS server structure (to tell which URL is in whose network). It has the potential to break IPv4 (at least) entirely.
I'm sure Amazon and Slashdot would gladly jump on this network and lose all their users. I'm sure users that get on this network that can't connect to Amazon and Slashdot would just roll over and live with it. Anyone who attempts to break IPv4 would find themselves in a very lonely micronetwork.
Again: if the telcos can't force people to sell easements, there is no network, or at least none without obnoxiously high pricing (in order to all the prices asked for by the milllions of property owners nationwide).
Easements that are now unnecessary. Sure, over the past 100 years maybe you can argue you needed eminent domain, but I believe it could have been performed much faster without it. It would have been much more expensive, but this would have pushed inventors to find cheaper solutions through radiotelegraphy. Eminent domain hasn't solved any problems, all it does is force the public to pay for things that the free market would still find solutions to. Oh, and it helps pay off the cronies, too.
Seriously, in your little anarcho-capitalist wet dream, I'm charging per packet to not put my shovel through the wire.
And there would be 5 other wires ready to back it up. Or a microwave direct connect. Or a radiotelegraphy unidirectional signal. Or a satellite signal. There is no stopping the flow of information at a single point, not with the Internet. Back in the BBS days, you could have blown up my house. Today that would only stop one person, not billions.
Actually, I read slashdot and post to slashdot from a packet network -- GPRS. Good luck getting comcast or SBC to try to affect that :)
Your point is well taken, but my point is that there is so much competition and so many access points to the bigger Internet, there is no single point of failure except ICANN.
It's because they are a Monopoly. It's because you, the customer, doesn't have any other reasonable choice if you don't want to go with them. It's because in return for being allowed to be a monopoly that they have to play by different rules than the open market. You take your choice of monopoly or open market, but once you make it quit yer complaining about the rules you initially agreed to follow!
Government is the only monopoly in this picture. They rent their monopoly powers to others, though.
How are the telcos a monopoly? I have a cable modem, my friend across the country has one. A little free VoIP software and we've forgotten about the telco. If they want to overregulate my DSL connection, I can go back to using a dial-up ISP seperate from them (and take advantage of the unlimited $20 package).
The freedoms the Internet reinforces are causing people to rethink the costs that used to be commonplace. Dialing your aunt long distance more than once a year was unheard of, now we can chat with her all day long for barely pennies. Sending an instant e-mail through FidoNet sometimes took 3 days for a reply, now it takes moments. Any company who thinks they can back-up the common actions of billions of users is in for a big surprise.
No matter how much control they receive through government force, they can't stop the process that billion of users are familiar with. Sure, the telcos likely control an enormous quantity of users' endpoints, but we will always have cable and dial-up (which isn't affected like DSL is as you can pick any ISP to dial into).
There just isn't the motivation of users for better service when many users can get 50K/s downloads over a $20 DSL or cable line. If they truly want to disrupt Internet connections to major endpoints and expect to blackmail or start some racketeering (with government approval), they'll find themselves losing users left and right.
The only way that U.S. Congress can facilitate a "total control takeover" would be to tax the smaller ISPs out of existance. Sure, this can happen, but I don't see 180 million users in the U.S. accepting a price increase -- even if it will help prevent terrorism or win the battle against the Communists or stop the Reich from spreading throughout Europe. There is no mandate from the market to break apart what works right now, and nothing government can do short of making themselves bigger tyrants will change that.
No single company has the money to invest or support a seperate Internet over the long run. There are too many ISPs and backbone providers competing in the open market.
Telcos can try to create their own Internet, but how long would it last if users can't get to sites they've commonly accesses? Google and Slashdot and other popular sites can refuse to pay the telco premium charges, and the users will bail.
They should have tried this a decade ago. Too little, too late.
It confuses me as to why Congress should have any say in companies creating additional networks. Interstate commerce clause? What a joke.
If companies want to try to create supernets for their customers to better access each other, I say allow them to. I can not imagine any supernet subverting the Internet in any way. If an ISP decides to slow down traffic to non-ISP destinations, you're going to see user backlash. I've changed ISPs over the years due to bad routing (or repeatedly failed routing) and I know some of my non-techie friends have done the same.
These supernets would just be a second backbone connecting their network together, correct? I think this is a great idea, especially for corporations that can not afford their own backbone connections for remote offices. If my companies could connect quickly through a secondary network at no additional cost (or lower cost), I'd jump on it immediately.
I just can't understand why Congress has any say in what companies do with their own property. They're already providing for the "public need" and they should be free to supplement the "public need" for what other users are demanding/needing.
I think it can be argued that the FOMC can be partially to blame for the speculative bubble that occured. They destroyed savings by forcing interests rates to the bare minimum (lower than COLA), printed new free money left and right, and offered millions of Americans extra money at very little cost. When people are given all this "free" money at low interest rates, they tend not to value it as much and generally take higher risks. Once the market started to move up (possibly because the first owners of the new money invested in the IPOs), the suckers at the back-end of the inflationary cycle followed suit. Guess who takes their money out once the open market turns into a bubble market?
The Austrian School of Economic thought predicts these bubble/busts due to the inflationary cycle caused by the FOMC and other central banking cartels.
I have a friend living the GeekSquad life. I'd never hire him as he believes in their process to fix lockups:
1. It must be this unsupported software: remove Firefox or any F/OSS.
2. It is a virus, your AV is no good, purchase Norton CoverYourAss v9.6 for $49.95.
3. The AV doesn't perform a deep clean by itself, we can run one for $24.95.
4. You need a bigger hard drive, w recommend Norton Ghost to copy it. $199.95 + $49.95.
5. We should install the drive. $24.95 + $8.95 wrist strap.
6. We should run ghost for you, $19.95.
7. You need USB 2.0 ports for your mouse to run faster, $49.95 plus $24.95 installation.
8. Your hard drive cables are old belt style, you needbthe snappy round cables, $29.95 plus $9.95 installation.
9. Your video board is old, the ATI MegaWow XL is only $199.95.
10. You should probably buy one of our Compaq BusinessPro by HP combinations, you burned your TCP/IP converter with static.
I pop open the discarded PC, replace the processor fan and blow out the case. All is fine - $30.
Thanks for that insight.
I have very little knowledge of or interaction with autism or autistics.
The one "big" autism situation I'm familiar with was a family friend who had 2 children, vaccinated and both autistic. Child 3 had neither. Of course, you can't extrapolate from this, but it id get me thinking.
When I was young (up to 13) I was extremely nervous/twitchy. My doctor said it could be mercury, where some people are more sensitive than others. Other doctors refuted the idea, and as I aged the symptoms went away or decreased significantly. At 13 I did try some chelation mumbo-jumbo (San Fran China Man I called the herbalist). Maybe it worked, maybe it didn't.
I do think there is some link. Maybe not everyone. Maybe a 3rd unknown.