Who is actually getting the payout from the "mobile OS netbook tax"? Are they applying it to non-Windows machines under the assumption that you will install an illegal copy of Windows on it? Or does it even matter?
The only trouble with that confidence is that in the case of both shuttle disasters, it was not fundamentally difficult technology or circumstances but poor design & politics, and old parts & bad communication that caused them. While I'm sure there were cases of senseless politicians sending ill-equipped ships to sea in the fifteenth century, I'm pretty sure fundamental inadequacies of technology (navigation, weather prediction, construction) explain the majority of disasters. In the case of the shuttle, we could have avoided them, but we didn't. It's the program management that deserves most of the blame, yes, but you can still argue that with better technology (that was available at the time), the problems would never have arisen.
My technique doesn't require judging the speed, just looking at the length of the line at the moment. Statistically, this means that more people will go through the fast lane, thus at any given time you are more likely to pick the fast lane, if indeed one lane is faster than the other.
Special cases, of course, include lines so slow that people defect into other lines, causing that line to be artificially shortened, and lines where it is difficult to tell the exact length. Of course this is an oversimplification of what actually goes on in our heads, but it's a convenient theory to try.
On average, and entirely unsurprisingly, one time in three you'll be in the fastest line; one time in three, you'll be in the slowest line.
While I agree with the rest of your post, this isn't quite right. In actuality, each person picks a line based on how long it is at the moment. By this criteria, the probability that you will pick a given line is proportional to the speed of the line, and you will most likely pick a faster line.
You could of course use a different measure of efficiency, such as measuring the square of each customer's wait time to approximate frustration. Then in certain circumstances (like banks, where transactions can take a long time) the single-queue system dramatically reduces the "cost" of the system.
You forgot
Google: 33, 32, 33. I have no idea how they pulled that off, maybe it got stuck in some kind of recursion.
NASA: 6, 36, 56. Even Google knows rocket science is complicated.
Hulu: 81, 17, 1. Now we know what they expect of the mainstream television audience.:P
There's nothing rational about time-of-day metering. Taken to the extreme, it can only lead to an absurd dystopia in which one third of your workforce operates during each of the three eight-hour shifts so that you keep your power and Internet bills down.
I have no argument that your doomsday scenario would be ridiculously harmful to society. But most things are harmful when taken to extremes--even sleeping, eating, and breathing. Therefore a more rational argument is in order.
I would like to point out that when not taken to such an extreme, demand-based pricing gives customers a reasonable incentive to avoid non-essential traffic during peak hours. Some services, such as offsite backups or bittorrent seeding, could obviously be done at off-peak times (but already are in most cases). This allows the provider to accurately gauge how much peak capacity is really needed and optimize network upgrades accordingly, keeping costs down for everyone.
In your dystopia, time-of-day pricing has altered user behavior to the point where network load is constant and the network operates at peak efficiency all the time. This assumes that, prior to the behavior change, the cost of putting all your usage during "peak" hours was more than the cost of operating on a shift-based schedule, which would be totally impossible for many businesses' actual operations, never mind basic health and welfare. I doubt peak rates could be raised that high without causing some kind of revolt among the populace.
The caveat, of course, is whether today's ISPs would actually use time-of-day pricing to benefit consumers, or simply use it as another price-gouging mechanism. I wouldn't put it past them to actually attempt to create just such a dystopia if given the chance.
As a footnote, many mass transit systems use peak-pricing on their fares to debatable effect: on the one hand, they raise more money from the essentially captive group of daily commuters with 9x5 jobs. On the other hand, they give what amounts to discounted fares to tourists and others who travel during the off-periods, making recreational use more affordable and keeping drivers unfamiliar with the city off the streets. However, this only works because the peak customers have no alternative comparable in convenience or cost, despite the fare hikes, and leaves them feeling exploited.
That only happens when peak hour pricing is below the market clearing rate.
Wait a second, "peak hour pricing"? This is America, we don't use rational market-based approaches to match unlimited demand to limited resources. That would be SOCIALISM!!!
According to your pedantry, "access" implies burst rate, while "connection" implies continuous rate, but the result is the same. How can you possibly have high speed access with the gateway links this congested? You only get high speed access to their "preferred providers" (stealing a term from health insurance) and everything else is gonna be slow. Since the definition of the Internet is "everything", no exceptions, you clearly do not have high speed access to the Internet. Unless the service is advertised as a "limited package" when you buy it, they are clearly engaging in false marketing.
Speaking as a controls engineer, they have obviously not done much digital controls. You have to worry about things like sampling rate, aliasing, round-off error, and digital noise introduced into the (inescapably) analog parts of the circuit. For a simple system, a properly-designed analog controller is much easier to implement, and has advantages like "infinite" sampling rate, graceful failure modes, white (gaussian) noise as opposed to odd frequencies introduced by sampling and clock frequencies, and no programming bugs or crashes.
Analog controllers for simple linear systems (like telescope mirrors) are in virtually every spacecraft ever launched for precisely those reasons. Only recently has the push for miniaturization driven some simple systems into digital FPGA controllers.
One has to wonder just how effective they will be in this at all -- taking down sites of random law firms is one thing, but a million/billion-dollar web service is another. They have orders of magnitude more infrastructure and are designed to handle traffic overloads.
The problem is what will happen in monopoly broadband markets. If there is no competition, they can still jack up the per MB rates so they get the same amount of revenue, or even higher until the network congestion is reduced because it costs so much to use. There is no infrastructure improvement incentive there, and no market forces to lower the price.
Maybe the FCC should limit the use of per-MB pricing to areas where there is actual competition and to no-cancellation-fee service. This would include most mobile services but exclude fixed installations in places where per-MB pricing would do more harm than good. It might even give an incentive for companies and governments to revoke some monopolies.
Sure it will reduce the time of flight, but if you think the security lines for airplanes are long...
Actually, you could do this pretty easily by taking something like SpaceShipOne and sticking it on a Falcon rocket first stage. Rocket halfway up to orbit, then glide down semi-ballistically.
As far as I know, the equipment on the pads is owned and operated by NASA but the land itself is owned and secured by the Air Force. All the shuttle pilots are Air Force too, only the specialist astronauts are NASA employees. It's really not that surprising when you think about it.
I appreciate your well-considered argument. Just two more things:
(1) It's not your passenger's choice if he is drunk, underage, or otherwise incapacitated. And what if you offer to pick up a friend at the airport and he doesn't know you have no airbags until you get there? Should he turn you away and call a cab? Of course not, because the risk is only of statistic significance. But for that very reason, decreasing the number of cars without airbags will lower total fatalities, and the cost of having airbags in every car is justified by the lives and expense saved on a nationwide scale. A reasonable cost analysis for new regulation is certainly in order.
(2) If cars are too expensive for anyone to buy, then only rich people will have new cars, or at least normal people won't own three or four. That means fewer cars on the road, and fewer accidents. Problem solved!
Evolutionarily, if lots of women want to have sex with you it would be stupid to say no. Some of them will manage to raise your children, and you won't have to do any of the work! Nevermind that it's her second (more reliable) husband that actually helps raise the kid, or else he/she grows up without the benefit of a father. But all in all seems like a good deal, as long as there are enough responsible guys around to pick up the slack.
I think they've seen a similar kind of behavior in this one kind of lizard: there are basically three distinct sub-species of males, all with different colorings and mating strategies. The different strategies have different levels of success in different situations--one is large and aggressive, one is medium-sized and romantic, and one is small and cunning, or something like that. But the dynamic of three different kinds of males courting all the (identical) females gives the species an advantage and ability to adapt.
Thankfully I'm in Maryland, but I do drive 12 miles on the Capitol Beltway every day. Having grown up here, I'm used to it, but I remember driving on the eastern shore once and thinking, "Hey, why isn't anybody driving in the left lane? Where'd all this empty space come from?"
if you want to save a few bucks and go for a car with less safety features, go for it, but realize that you are putting your life and the lives everyone else on the road in more danger.
FTFY.
If you enjoy fattening foods in excess, you are putting a few years of your life at risk, but for a person who loves eating fattening foods, they might prefer that.
Then shouldn't they have to pay higher insurance rates to make up for 15 years of diabetes treatment? Yet nobody wants to "discriminate" in health care costs based on personal decisions--thus making your personal decisions everyone else's problem. If that's the case, why shouldn't we regulate it?
The government's role is to... ensure that people aren't going around killing each other
That's exactly what safety regulations are for. Many mandated safety features contribute directly to protecting people other than the owner of the vehicle--anti-lock brakes, rear-window brake lights, and now back-up cameras. Airbags and seatbelts are a choice for the owner of the car, but his passengers would be put at risk as well and might not even be aware of it, or have another option. Even if you really don't care that you and your passengers die in what could have been a non-fatal crash, the people in the other car have to live with the trauma of killing someone.
It would be great if everyone could make their choices without affecting everyone else, but it's not the 16th century anymore. There will always be people who cut every corner and take every risk they can, and those are the people that our tax dollars have to scrape off the pavement when reality hits. The regulations are there to protect the rest of us from douchebags like that.
Slashdot Mirror
'How could you possibly think typing "import skynet" was a good idea?' (it's the mouseover)
Who is actually getting the payout from the "mobile OS netbook tax"? Are they applying it to non-Windows machines under the assumption that you will install an illegal copy of Windows on it? Or does it even matter?
She was having an affair with her abusive ex-husband. What integrity?
The only trouble with that confidence is that in the case of both shuttle disasters, it was not fundamentally difficult technology or circumstances but poor design & politics, and old parts & bad communication that caused them. While I'm sure there were cases of senseless politicians sending ill-equipped ships to sea in the fifteenth century, I'm pretty sure fundamental inadequacies of technology (navigation, weather prediction, construction) explain the majority of disasters. In the case of the shuttle, we could have avoided them, but we didn't. It's the program management that deserves most of the blame, yes, but you can still argue that with better technology (that was available at the time), the problems would never have arisen.
My technique doesn't require judging the speed, just looking at the length of the line at the moment. Statistically, this means that more people will go through the fast lane, thus at any given time you are more likely to pick the fast lane, if indeed one lane is faster than the other.
Special cases, of course, include lines so slow that people defect into other lines, causing that line to be artificially shortened, and lines where it is difficult to tell the exact length. Of course this is an oversimplification of what actually goes on in our heads, but it's a convenient theory to try.
On average, and entirely unsurprisingly, one time in three you'll be in the fastest line; one time in three, you'll be in the slowest line.
While I agree with the rest of your post, this isn't quite right. In actuality, each person picks a line based on how long it is at the moment. By this criteria, the probability that you will pick a given line is proportional to the speed of the line, and you will most likely pick a faster line.
You could of course use a different measure of efficiency, such as measuring the square of each customer's wait time to approximate frustration. Then in certain circumstances (like banks, where transactions can take a long time) the single-queue system dramatically reduces the "cost" of the system.
And the "best" schools aren't necessarily the most expensive schools. That is another important distinction to make.
You forgot :P
Google: 33, 32, 33. I have no idea how they pulled that off, maybe it got stuck in some kind of recursion.
NASA: 6, 36, 56. Even Google knows rocket science is complicated.
Hulu: 81, 17, 1. Now we know what they expect of the mainstream television audience.
There's nothing rational about time-of-day metering. Taken to the extreme, it can only lead to an absurd dystopia in which one third of your workforce operates during each of the three eight-hour shifts so that you keep your power and Internet bills down.
I have no argument that your doomsday scenario would be ridiculously harmful to society. But most things are harmful when taken to extremes--even sleeping, eating, and breathing. Therefore a more rational argument is in order.
I would like to point out that when not taken to such an extreme, demand-based pricing gives customers a reasonable incentive to avoid non-essential traffic during peak hours. Some services, such as offsite backups or bittorrent seeding, could obviously be done at off-peak times (but already are in most cases). This allows the provider to accurately gauge how much peak capacity is really needed and optimize network upgrades accordingly, keeping costs down for everyone.
In your dystopia, time-of-day pricing has altered user behavior to the point where network load is constant and the network operates at peak efficiency all the time. This assumes that, prior to the behavior change, the cost of putting all your usage during "peak" hours was more than the cost of operating on a shift-based schedule, which would be totally impossible for many businesses' actual operations, never mind basic health and welfare. I doubt peak rates could be raised that high without causing some kind of revolt among the populace.
The caveat, of course, is whether today's ISPs would actually use time-of-day pricing to benefit consumers, or simply use it as another price-gouging mechanism. I wouldn't put it past them to actually attempt to create just such a dystopia if given the chance.
As a footnote, many mass transit systems use peak-pricing on their fares to debatable effect: on the one hand, they raise more money from the essentially captive group of daily commuters with 9x5 jobs. On the other hand, they give what amounts to discounted fares to tourists and others who travel during the off-periods, making recreational use more affordable and keeping drivers unfamiliar with the city off the streets. However, this only works because the peak customers have no alternative comparable in convenience or cost, despite the fare hikes, and leaves them feeling exploited.
No can do, I have FIOS. So far they haven't given me a reason to dig into the contract since I signed up.
I would probably do the same if I were in your position, but I would make sure I could quit after six months without a huge penalty...
That only happens when peak hour pricing is below the market clearing rate.
Wait a second, "peak hour pricing"? This is America, we don't use rational market-based approaches to match unlimited demand to limited resources. That would be SOCIALISM!!!
According to your pedantry, "access" implies burst rate, while "connection" implies continuous rate, but the result is the same. How can you possibly have high speed access with the gateway links this congested? You only get high speed access to their "preferred providers" (stealing a term from health insurance) and everything else is gonna be slow. Since the definition of the Internet is "everything", no exceptions, you clearly do not have high speed access to the Internet. Unless the service is advertised as a "limited package" when you buy it, they are clearly engaging in false marketing.
Very good point. I should have RTFA.
Analog is not precise enough (people think).
Speaking as a controls engineer, they have obviously not done much digital controls. You have to worry about things like sampling rate, aliasing, round-off error, and digital noise introduced into the (inescapably) analog parts of the circuit. For a simple system, a properly-designed analog controller is much easier to implement, and has advantages like "infinite" sampling rate, graceful failure modes, white (gaussian) noise as opposed to odd frequencies introduced by sampling and clock frequencies, and no programming bugs or crashes.
Analog controllers for simple linear systems (like telescope mirrors) are in virtually every spacecraft ever launched for precisely those reasons. Only recently has the push for miniaturization driven some simple systems into digital FPGA controllers.
One has to wonder just how effective they will be in this at all -- taking down sites of random law firms is one thing, but a million/billion-dollar web service is another. They have orders of magnitude more infrastructure and are designed to handle traffic overloads.
The problem is what will happen in monopoly broadband markets. If there is no competition, they can still jack up the per MB rates so they get the same amount of revenue, or even higher until the network congestion is reduced because it costs so much to use. There is no infrastructure improvement incentive there, and no market forces to lower the price.
Maybe the FCC should limit the use of per-MB pricing to areas where there is actual competition and to no-cancellation-fee service. This would include most mobile services but exclude fixed installations in places where per-MB pricing would do more harm than good. It might even give an incentive for companies and governments to revoke some monopolies.
Sure it will reduce the time of flight, but if you think the security lines for airplanes are long...
Actually, you could do this pretty easily by taking something like SpaceShipOne and sticking it on a Falcon rocket first stage. Rocket halfway up to orbit, then glide down semi-ballistically.
As far as I know, the equipment on the pads is owned and operated by NASA but the land itself is owned and secured by the Air Force. All the shuttle pilots are Air Force too, only the specialist astronauts are NASA employees. It's really not that surprising when you think about it.
I appreciate your well-considered argument. Just two more things:
(1) It's not your passenger's choice if he is drunk, underage, or otherwise incapacitated. And what if you offer to pick up a friend at the airport and he doesn't know you have no airbags until you get there? Should he turn you away and call a cab? Of course not, because the risk is only of statistic significance. But for that very reason, decreasing the number of cars without airbags will lower total fatalities, and the cost of having airbags in every car is justified by the lives and expense saved on a nationwide scale. A reasonable cost analysis for new regulation is certainly in order.
(2) If cars are too expensive for anyone to buy, then only rich people will have new cars, or at least normal people won't own three or four. That means fewer cars on the road, and fewer accidents. Problem solved!
Evolutionarily, if lots of women want to have sex with you it would be stupid to say no. Some of them will manage to raise your children, and you won't have to do any of the work! Nevermind that it's her second (more reliable) husband that actually helps raise the kid, or else he/she grows up without the benefit of a father. But all in all seems like a good deal, as long as there are enough responsible guys around to pick up the slack.
I think they've seen a similar kind of behavior in this one kind of lizard: there are basically three distinct sub-species of males, all with different colorings and mating strategies. The different strategies have different levels of success in different situations--one is large and aggressive, one is medium-sized and romantic, and one is small and cunning, or something like that. But the dynamic of three different kinds of males courting all the (identical) females gives the species an advantage and ability to adapt.
Or, get a research job that gives you an excuse to hang out in casino bars more often.
Thankfully I'm in Maryland, but I do drive 12 miles on the Capitol Beltway every day. Having grown up here, I'm used to it, but I remember driving on the eastern shore once and thinking, "Hey, why isn't anybody driving in the left lane? Where'd all this empty space come from?"
But no matter what, we're always pro-generalizations and pro-stereotypes.
if you want to save a few bucks and go for a car with less safety features, go for it, but realize that you are putting your life and the lives everyone else on the road in more danger.
FTFY.
If you enjoy fattening foods in excess, you are putting a few years of your life at risk, but for a person who loves eating fattening foods, they might prefer that.
Then shouldn't they have to pay higher insurance rates to make up for 15 years of diabetes treatment? Yet nobody wants to "discriminate" in health care costs based on personal decisions--thus making your personal decisions everyone else's problem. If that's the case, why shouldn't we regulate it?
The government's role is to ... ensure that people aren't going around killing each other
That's exactly what safety regulations are for. Many mandated safety features contribute directly to protecting people other than the owner of the vehicle--anti-lock brakes, rear-window brake lights, and now back-up cameras. Airbags and seatbelts are a choice for the owner of the car, but his passengers would be put at risk as well and might not even be aware of it, or have another option. Even if you really don't care that you and your passengers die in what could have been a non-fatal crash, the people in the other car have to live with the trauma of killing someone.
It would be great if everyone could make their choices without affecting everyone else, but it's not the 16th century anymore. There will always be people who cut every corner and take every risk they can, and those are the people that our tax dollars have to scrape off the pavement when reality hits. The regulations are there to protect the rest of us from douchebags like that.