Has the U.S. ever assembled a militia? How would a militia be different from a national draft? Would gun ownership in the U.S. trump any ethical or religious objection to joining a militia?
Virginia has one. Current law says it consists of the national guard, the Virginia Defense Force and the "unorganized militia." It's unclear to me if just anyone can claim they are part of the "unorganized militia." The state code says the militia is "composed of the body of the people," which I supposed could mean anyone. Previously, during the colonial period, the militia was compulsory, but today it's all volunteer.
What you're getting paid to do is closer to implementing a breadth-first search in Java and all the required tree data structures with minimal errors in under 10 minutes than it is solving an academic problem over the course of 3-6 months with a teaching load.
This depends on the job. My current job is more of the latter and less of the former. Implementing data structures and algorithms at the undergraduate level is no better than a standardized test requiring rote memorization. For that kind of stuff, I can use an existing library or pull it out of a book. The real challenge comes with finding answers for problems that haven't been solved a dozen times over. Otherwise, it sounds like you ought to be hiring college interns.
I recently interviewed at a few companies that administered programming tests like this. I thought I would have performed better on the test as a sophomore or junior undergraduate than I would now with a graduate CS degree and several years of experience. Implementing breadth first search in Java (and all the required tree data structures) with minimal syntax errors in under 10 minutes is a lot like the BJ scene in Swordfish. It's no more than a puzzle with some added drama.
Companies that use tests like this will wind up hiring only people who can solve them, usually to the detriment of being able to solve large scale system design problems as well as being able to work as part of a team. Being able to solve problems that can't be figured out in an hour is one of the major differences between school and the real world. A CV of academic publications or a project portfolio will go a lot farther in my book when judging capability.
When I was looking to register my unusual last name as a domain, a squatter snapped it up before I could register it. I guess they troll whois lookups somehow. I now have ($name).org and ($name).net, but.com is registered to the squatter. For now, the.com site has some harmless ads, but I suppose that could change. The squatter also maintains a site which tries to extort "hosting" fees if you want to use one of the 2,000 domains he owns.
Several trademark owners filed complaints about this squatter (one of them was Google) and all of them won and had the domains transferred. The proceedings of each arbitration can be read online, and in each case, the squatter put up some ridiculous defenses which the arbiter easily shot down. According to the UDRP Wikipedia page, arbitration costs about $2-4k in legal fees. Since the domain doesn't host anything defamatory, it's not really worth the cost to try and get ownership, but if it did, I'd probably consider filing a dispute.
I work at a privately held FFRDC which hires a lot of scholarship for service graduates. I had no idea such a program even existed until I was hired a few months ago. It sounds like a great way to get a masters degree paid for (I graduated with a PhD which was funded by an NSF grant, but MS students are rarely that lucky). Like you said, a lot of the SFS graduates put in their two years and leave although FFRDC pay and benefits are significantly better than what the feds offer.
Isn't it enough that I went to college and built a solid base of good work I can point to that shows I can do the job?
No. That is not enough. I have interviewed many, many people with degrees in computer science who cannot write a program to sort an array of ten integers. Those with a "solid base of good work" often cannot explain any of it, and will eventually admit it was done as a team project.
If you want to work for me, you will have to prove you can write code by writing code.
Asking me in an interview to sort an array of ten integers has almost nothing to do with whatever work I'll be performing. It's a quaint little puzzle that's no better than using an SAT question to judge a prospective college student's future performance. There are people who study these programming puzzles for months so they can ace them in an interview, but these applicants' abilities to solve puzzle problems says nothing about their ability to work as a team or ability to work on long term projects involving millions of lines of code.
Instead, ask me all the details you want about large scale systems I've designed and implemented. Ask me how I would design and implement a particular system that's relevant to the job I'm applying for. Ask me about projects I've led. However, when I get the puzzle questions, I know the interviewer can't see the forest for the trees.
If all the countries who can, race to the moon as individuals, I'd expect there be a turfwar over the few areas that might have more value to a colony (like fighting over polar ice). It'd be a sad thing to expand the worst of our nature to the moon and make the sands of that distant void red with blood.
Doubtful. The moon is a pretty big place. If we did actually establish separate bases up there, it's more likely the groups would cooperate a bit on their own. They're off in the middle of nowhere trying to survive in a place that could kill you in a second. Deliberately damaging anyone's equipment could easily kill off everyone. Turf wars are something you'd expect when there's a lot more infrastructure in place and specialized "security" people present who will obey inane kill orders from their host country.
If they intend to operate out of US ports, and provide anything that even looks remotely like passenger service (I.E. hosting staff for their clients) then they can't exit and re-enter the United States without visiting a "distant foreign port". Back in the day when there was tons of coastwise passenger transport, this protected US firms from foreign competition. Today it mostly means that Alaska cruises have to port at Victoria and Maratimes/East Coast cruises usually in Halifax. For Blueseed this is going to mean visiting Mexico between port visits to the US. (And they *will* either have to visit the US or sail across the Pacific Ocean for servicing - a ship can't stay at sea forever.
I believe you are talking about cabotage. Most of my understanding of this concept comes from how it applies within the airline industry, but I'm not sure exactly how this would work with the Blueseed concept. If the vessel were registered in the US, then this might sidestep the issue. However, I'm betting the customs and immigration authorities would then require all "passengers" on the ship to obtain US visas since they would be considered to be traveling between two points within the US.
Failed? I wouldn't call this failed. Furthermore, when considering piracy, in what cases have pirates come back with bigger guns? It's not just merchant vessels hiring PMCs to ward off pirates, but navies ranging from the US to India patrol the Indian Ocean. I can't imagine pirates would have bigger guns than they would. Make the risks of kidnapping too high and piracy will decline.
Soooo basically I give up my 4th amendment rights simply because I live in a town within 100 miles of the border?
How do you feel when you go through customs/security at an airport, get on a plane, and spend three hours flying at several hundred MPH over your country before you actually cross the border? What you're saying is that either the checkpoint should be on an infinitely small line between two countries, or perhaps several miles out to sea where international waters begin... or, no customs/security checks at all. Right? Please be specific.
The plane isn't going anywhere but to an airport, where the passengers pass through customs and immigration. To reverse the analogy, it's as if the checkpoint was on a highway that led to or from the border with no intersecting roads, towns, or other places to stop.
Nobody ever suggests this, but maybe just don't speed.
You've never driven in almost any downtown street where they've timed the lights to be green only if you're traveling 3-5 miles per hour over the speed limit. If you don't speed, you get stuck at almost every light.
The area where I live recently experienced a huge boom in population and development. Where there was nothing 5 years ago, there are now ~10 lights within about a mile and a half. The only way to not get stuck at every single one is to drive slightly over the speed limit.
> and even the Feds don't go demanding to see your Facebook profile.
That's probably because they don't need your permission in order to look at your profile. My understanding is that background checks by the FBI include a review of your online profiles - they just do it through a back channel that isn't public.
I've heard this from someone else who sought a job in law enforcement. I'm really skeptical though. In the case of this other individual, the interviewers brought up a topic that the interviewee believed could only have been obtained from viewing his private profile. However, I'm willing to guess that the interviewers obtained this information through other means than a Facebook backdoor and used it to scare the interviewee into becoming submissive and feeling powerless.
Finally, we can still study our lunar samples fourty years after they were brought back. Even if we had the capability to send a world-class lab to Mars today, we cannot send a lab from decades into the future.
In 40 years, we will certainly have technology that will allow for much better analysis. If we bring back samples, we will be able to analyze them with whatever new tools and sensors are invented decades after the mission. It's definitely much easier than continuously sending out probes with better hardware.
Looking at the most well rested and least, there's only a difference of like 4 minutes. Really, 4 minutes makes the difference between a good night's rest and being "sleep deprived?"
They don't show the standard deviation either, which could be huge.
It's not smug and superior. They simply have a different world view. It's your xenophobia and myopia that lead you to make that comment. If I could pay $8.00 a gallon for gas in exchange for the kind of mass transit they have in countries like London, Sweden, France, I would take that deal in a heartbeat. Right now, I have a 1.5 hour commute each way into Boston. I take the commuter rail and subway, both of which are great examples of crumbling infrastructure in the US. I suspect that diverting money from the morons driving up route 3 into boston every morning into cleaner, more efficient mass transit, would do a load of good for everyone involved.
Having traveled to each of these places and speaking with some of the locals I can say that it isn't as good as you make it out to be. The mass transit systems in London, Stockholm, and Paris are on par with most large US cities, including Boston. Also, these places have a very high cost of living and plenty of people make the same 1.5 hour commute into the city like you do.
Taiwan might be a better example. It meets your criteria of people moving to a particular place to declare sovereignty (or at least freedom from Communist rule). However, they have had difficulty in getting other nations to recognize their sovereignty, but if they didn't claim sovereignty over mainland China I wonder if things would be different.
Meh, I'd much rather someone sold a car without all the extras. Even if you don't have the extra, the added cost of supporting the option of many of the add-ons makes cars cost a lot. I'm sure it's possible to make a $5000 car that meets all safety and emission requirements, but I guess nobody is interested in buying a vehicle. Everyone wants to buy a lifestyle.
This makes me wonder...if the camera breaks, am I then mandated to get it fixed or fail my next inspection? What if it costs several grand to get a broken camera fixed or replaced?
Using something purely because "everybody else already does" and then claiming that as a strong supporting reason for using it, as opposed to just showing some folks other options and maybe letting them decide if they want to give it a shot, strikes me as disingenuous.
Isn't this the one of the key premises of online social networking? Why join a social networking site if nobody else is using it? It's great if something else works for you, but berating others who make a different choice isn't going to solve anything.
Speaking of mail servers, of course there's a minimum time investment required to learn some basics first. The same applies to virtually anything we do in life, whether it's driving a car, learning to cook a steak, getting through high school, getting a college degree, tying your shoes, etc. With the amazing amount of step by step documentation available for virtually any kind of mail server config you want, that time investment is not substantial. To get a basic setup working does not require weeks worth of cramming. It requires maybe an evening or two of reading some docs and following simple instructions. If you don't want to do that, there are options like Zimbra that essentially boil down to "run this installer, log into the web interface, add whatever accounts you want, and you're done." Either way, it's pretty painless, thanks to the work of countless others who have taken the time to build nice things and write nice docs for them.
I'm still going to argue that a layman will have extreme difficulty in setting up and maintaining a mail server, even if he/she had several free weeks to do nothing else but figure it out. More power to you for running your own mail server, but if you hadn't chosen a technical profession or hobby, I doubt you would even know where to start or that it was even possible. If you know what you're doing, it's always easy.
Just using three degrees of separation from me, tens of thousands of people are using IRC at any given moment. Go further out in terms of separation and the number is much, much higher. Where did you get the idea that nobody uses IRC any more?
With some quick googling, IRC has reached a maximum of 500k simultaneous users, which is 0.5% of Facebook's 500 million. So, all else being equal, if I were looking to contact someone, the probability would be much, much higher that I find them on Facebook than IRC. In terms of population, we're talking about the difference between a medium sized city and something larger than both North America or Western Europe.
Email is a different story -- you can try to host your own mail server but it's a huge PITA to set up SPF records and whatnot to keep your outgoing mail from getting bounced.
How is one TXT or SPF record in DNS a huge PITA? It's incredibly simple. I host my own mail, along with mail for a bunch of other people and organizations. It's not that difficult, and my mail doesn't get bounced. My total involvement with my mail servers amounts to perhaps one hour per month, the total time taken to install security updates and make sure automated backups are running properly. If you don't want to invest this minimum
of effort, that's fine, but please don't use the excuse that it's too difficult.
One hour per month ignores the time and effort it took to learn enough to be able to set up a box as a mail server, whether that was spread out over your entire lifetime or crammed into a few weeks.
These are protocols, not services. They enable communication, but they don't provide it. Furthermore, nobody uses IRC or Usenet anymore, illustrating that popularity is the limiting factor. Email is a different story -- you can try to host your own mail server but it's a huge PITA to set up SPF records and whatnot to keep your outgoing mail from getting bounced. You're pretty much stuck with one of a handful of email providers.
Except that the Internet is not controlled by that one ISP, only your connection to it. No matter how you connect to Facebook, it is a communication system that is controlled entirely by one company. That is the difference here.
Does it matter? To you, the end user, the end result is the same. A service is provided to you by a monopolist.
No, the fact that Facebook has made no substantial effort at being interoperable with any other system is what creates a barrier to entry.
Diaspora comes readily to mind here. It's open source and decentralized, yet nobody uses it because everyone that wants online social networking already uses Facebook. More to the point, if Facebook were to suddenly change course and allow you to host your own data and provide an open, decentralized service, would you then consider using it?
"I am not on Facebook"; if your friends refuse to talk to you because you do not use Facebook, then I would reevaluate your relationship with them. Why give in to Facebook's attempt to take control of the world's communication, especially when we have so many systems that are not controlled by any one party?
Which communication modalities aren't under the control of a monopolist? Snail mail is dominated by the postal service. For the longest time, in the US, phone service was only available through AT&T, but today with wireless, you've got a whopping 4 choices. Internet access is also pretty much the same -- you're lucky if you have more than one ISP to choose from.
However, I would argue that mail, phone service, etc. have little competition because of the high infrastructure cost for a new competitor. Facebook is different in that the large interconnected user base is what creates the barrier to entry.
Before federal deregulation, Southwest flew entirely within Texas so that it could set its own fares and schedules. I think PSA did the same thing by flying only within California. I could certainly see this happening again if the states and the feds go to war over the TSA. If you fly across state lines or fly international, you've got to go through the TSA first, but if you stay within your own state, you don't.
I wasn't sure if the GPS was reliable enough thats why I used the word "may". You could simply plug it into a car charger for the battery issue.
This research paper uses GPS in combination with the phone camera to detect traffic light state (green, red) and determine optimal driving speed (so I assume that GPS is accurate enough):
They also allow the phone to collaborate with phones in other nearby vehicles to form a real time map of traffic light states, again to compute an optimal driving speed.
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Has the U.S. ever assembled a militia? How would a militia be different from a national draft? Would gun ownership in the U.S. trump any ethical or religious objection to joining a militia?
Virginia has one. Current law says it consists of the national guard, the Virginia Defense Force and the "unorganized militia." It's unclear to me if just anyone can claim they are part of the "unorganized militia." The state code says the militia is "composed of the body of the people," which I supposed could mean anyone. Previously, during the colonial period, the militia was compulsory, but today it's all volunteer.
What you're getting paid to do is closer to implementing a breadth-first search in Java and all the required tree data structures with minimal errors in under 10 minutes than it is solving an academic problem over the course of 3-6 months with a teaching load.
This depends on the job. My current job is more of the latter and less of the former. Implementing data structures and algorithms at the undergraduate level is no better than a standardized test requiring rote memorization. For that kind of stuff, I can use an existing library or pull it out of a book. The real challenge comes with finding answers for problems that haven't been solved a dozen times over. Otherwise, it sounds like you ought to be hiring college interns.
I recently interviewed at a few companies that administered programming tests like this. I thought I would have performed better on the test as a sophomore or junior undergraduate than I would now with a graduate CS degree and several years of experience. Implementing breadth first search in Java (and all the required tree data structures) with minimal syntax errors in under 10 minutes is a lot like the BJ scene in Swordfish. It's no more than a puzzle with some added drama.
Companies that use tests like this will wind up hiring only people who can solve them, usually to the detriment of being able to solve large scale system design problems as well as being able to work as part of a team. Being able to solve problems that can't be figured out in an hour is one of the major differences between school and the real world. A CV of academic publications or a project portfolio will go a lot farther in my book when judging capability.
When I was looking to register my unusual last name as a domain, a squatter snapped it up before I could register it. I guess they troll whois lookups somehow. I now have ($name).org and ($name).net, but .com is registered to the squatter. For now, the .com site has some harmless ads, but I suppose that could change. The squatter also maintains a site which tries to extort "hosting" fees if you want to use one of the 2,000 domains he owns.
Several trademark owners filed complaints about this squatter (one of them was Google) and all of them won and had the domains transferred. The proceedings of each arbitration can be read online, and in each case, the squatter put up some ridiculous defenses which the arbiter easily shot down. According to the UDRP Wikipedia page, arbitration costs about $2-4k in legal fees. Since the domain doesn't host anything defamatory, it's not really worth the cost to try and get ownership, but if it did, I'd probably consider filing a dispute.
I work at a privately held FFRDC which hires a lot of scholarship for service graduates. I had no idea such a program even existed until I was hired a few months ago. It sounds like a great way to get a masters degree paid for (I graduated with a PhD which was funded by an NSF grant, but MS students are rarely that lucky). Like you said, a lot of the SFS graduates put in their two years and leave although FFRDC pay and benefits are significantly better than what the feds offer.
I'm even more eager for Trolling Tuna, which will usher in the year of Linux on the desktop.
In Soviet Russia, tuna trolls you!
Isn't it enough that I went to college and built a solid base of good work I can point to that shows I can do the job?
No. That is not enough. I have interviewed many, many people with degrees in computer science who cannot write a program to sort an array of ten integers. Those with a "solid base of good work" often cannot explain any of it, and will eventually admit it was done as a team project.
If you want to work for me, you will have to prove you can write code by writing code.
Asking me in an interview to sort an array of ten integers has almost nothing to do with whatever work I'll be performing. It's a quaint little puzzle that's no better than using an SAT question to judge a prospective college student's future performance. There are people who study these programming puzzles for months so they can ace them in an interview, but these applicants' abilities to solve puzzle problems says nothing about their ability to work as a team or ability to work on long term projects involving millions of lines of code.
Instead, ask me all the details you want about large scale systems I've designed and implemented. Ask me how I would design and implement a particular system that's relevant to the job I'm applying for. Ask me about projects I've led. However, when I get the puzzle questions, I know the interviewer can't see the forest for the trees.
If all the countries who can, race to the moon as individuals, I'd expect there be a turfwar over the few areas that might have more value to a colony (like fighting over polar ice). It'd be a sad thing to expand the worst of our nature to the moon and make the sands of that distant void red with blood.
Doubtful. The moon is a pretty big place. If we did actually establish separate bases up there, it's more likely the groups would cooperate a bit on their own. They're off in the middle of nowhere trying to survive in a place that could kill you in a second. Deliberately damaging anyone's equipment could easily kill off everyone. Turf wars are something you'd expect when there's a lot more infrastructure in place and specialized "security" people present who will obey inane kill orders from their host country.
Sounds like Antarctica.
If they intend to operate out of US ports, and provide anything that even looks remotely like passenger service (I.E. hosting staff for their clients) then they can't exit and re-enter the United States without visiting a "distant foreign port". Back in the day when there was tons of coastwise passenger transport, this protected US firms from foreign competition. Today it mostly means that Alaska cruises have to port at Victoria and Maratimes/East Coast cruises usually in Halifax. For Blueseed this is going to mean visiting Mexico between port visits to the US. (And they *will* either have to visit the US or sail across the Pacific Ocean for servicing - a ship can't stay at sea forever.
I believe you are talking about cabotage. Most of my understanding of this concept comes from how it applies within the airline industry, but I'm not sure exactly how this would work with the Blueseed concept. If the vessel were registered in the US, then this might sidestep the issue. However, I'm betting the customs and immigration authorities would then require all "passengers" on the ship to obtain US visas since they would be considered to be traveling between two points within the US.
Somebody over there is feeling desperate to "Metro-ize" Firefox. Or something.
I think you just coined a term that we're going to be using quite a bit in the next few years...
Failed? I wouldn't call this failed. Furthermore, when considering piracy, in what cases have pirates come back with bigger guns? It's not just merchant vessels hiring PMCs to ward off pirates, but navies ranging from the US to India patrol the Indian Ocean. I can't imagine pirates would have bigger guns than they would. Make the risks of kidnapping too high and piracy will decline.
Soooo basically I give up my 4th amendment rights simply because I live in a town within 100 miles of the border?
How do you feel when you go through customs/security at an airport, get on a plane, and spend three hours flying at several hundred MPH over your country before you actually cross the border? What you're saying is that either the checkpoint should be on an infinitely small line between two countries, or perhaps several miles out to sea where international waters begin ... or, no customs/security checks at all. Right? Please be specific.
The plane isn't going anywhere but to an airport, where the passengers pass through customs and immigration. To reverse the analogy, it's as if the checkpoint was on a highway that led to or from the border with no intersecting roads, towns, or other places to stop.
Nobody ever suggests this, but maybe just don't speed.
You've never driven in almost any downtown street where they've timed the lights to be green only if you're traveling 3-5 miles per hour over the speed limit. If you don't speed, you get stuck at almost every light.
The area where I live recently experienced a huge boom in population and development. Where there was nothing 5 years ago, there are now ~10 lights within about a mile and a half. The only way to not get stuck at every single one is to drive slightly over the speed limit.
> and even the Feds don't go demanding to see your Facebook profile.
That's probably because they don't need your permission in order to look at your profile. My understanding is that background checks by the FBI include a review of your online profiles - they just do it through a back channel that isn't public.
I've heard this from someone else who sought a job in law enforcement. I'm really skeptical though. In the case of this other individual, the interviewers brought up a topic that the interviewee believed could only have been obtained from viewing his private profile. However, I'm willing to guess that the interviewers obtained this information through other means than a Facebook backdoor and used it to scare the interviewee into becoming submissive and feeling powerless.
Finally, we can still study our lunar samples fourty years after they were brought back. Even if we had the capability to send a world-class lab to Mars today, we cannot send a lab from decades into the future.
In 40 years, we will certainly have technology that will allow for much better analysis. If we bring back samples, we will be able to analyze them with whatever new tools and sensors are invented decades after the mission. It's definitely much easier than continuously sending out probes with better hardware.
Looking at the most well rested and least, there's only a difference of like 4 minutes. Really, 4 minutes makes the difference between a good night's rest and being "sleep deprived?"
They don't show the standard deviation either, which could be huge.
It's not smug and superior. They simply have a different world view. It's your xenophobia and myopia that lead you to make that comment. If I could pay $8.00 a gallon for gas in exchange for the kind of mass transit they have in countries like London, Sweden, France, I would take that deal in a heartbeat. Right now, I have a 1.5 hour commute each way into Boston. I take the commuter rail and subway, both of which are great examples of crumbling infrastructure in the US. I suspect that diverting money from the morons driving up route 3 into boston every morning into cleaner, more efficient mass transit, would do a load of good for everyone involved.
Having traveled to each of these places and speaking with some of the locals I can say that it isn't as good as you make it out to be. The mass transit systems in London, Stockholm, and Paris are on par with most large US cities, including Boston. Also, these places have a very high cost of living and plenty of people make the same 1.5 hour commute into the city like you do.
Taiwan might be a better example. It meets your criteria of people moving to a particular place to declare sovereignty (or at least freedom from Communist rule). However, they have had difficulty in getting other nations to recognize their sovereignty, but if they didn't claim sovereignty over mainland China I wonder if things would be different.
Meh, I'd much rather someone sold a car without all the extras. Even if you don't have the extra, the added cost of supporting the option of many of the add-ons makes cars cost a lot. I'm sure it's possible to make a $5000 car that meets all safety and emission requirements, but I guess nobody is interested in buying a vehicle. Everyone wants to buy a lifestyle.
This makes me wonder...if the camera breaks, am I then mandated to get it fixed or fail my next inspection? What if it costs several grand to get a broken camera fixed or replaced?
Using something purely because "everybody else already does" and then claiming that as a strong supporting reason for using it, as opposed to just showing some folks other options and maybe letting them decide if they want to give it a shot, strikes me as disingenuous.
Isn't this the one of the key premises of online social networking? Why join a social networking site if nobody else is using it? It's great if something else works for you, but berating others who make a different choice isn't going to solve anything.
Speaking of mail servers, of course there's a minimum time investment required to learn some basics first. The same applies to virtually anything we do in life, whether it's driving a car, learning to cook a steak, getting through high school, getting a college degree, tying your shoes, etc. With the amazing amount of step by step documentation available for virtually any kind of mail server config you want, that time investment is not substantial. To get a basic setup working does not require weeks worth of cramming. It requires maybe an evening or two of reading some docs and following simple instructions. If you don't want to do that, there are options like Zimbra that essentially boil down to "run this installer, log into the web interface, add whatever accounts you want, and you're done." Either way, it's pretty painless, thanks to the work of countless others who have taken the time to build nice things and write nice docs for them.
I'm still going to argue that a layman will have extreme difficulty in setting up and maintaining a mail server, even if he/she had several free weeks to do nothing else but figure it out. More power to you for running your own mail server, but if you hadn't chosen a technical profession or hobby, I doubt you would even know where to start or that it was even possible. If you know what you're doing, it's always easy.
Just using three degrees of separation from me, tens of thousands of people are using IRC at any given moment. Go further out in terms of separation and the number is much, much higher. Where did you get the idea that nobody uses IRC any more?
With some quick googling, IRC has reached a maximum of 500k simultaneous users, which is 0.5% of Facebook's 500 million. So, all else being equal, if I were looking to contact someone, the probability would be much, much higher that I find them on Facebook than IRC. In terms of population, we're talking about the difference between a medium sized city and something larger than both North America or Western Europe.
Email is a different story -- you can try to host your own mail server but it's a huge PITA to set up SPF records and whatnot to keep your outgoing mail from getting bounced.
How is one TXT or SPF record in DNS a huge PITA? It's incredibly simple. I host my own mail, along with mail for a bunch of other people and organizations. It's not that difficult, and my mail doesn't get bounced. My total involvement with my mail servers amounts to perhaps one hour per month, the total time taken to install security updates and make sure automated backups are running properly. If you don't want to invest this minimum of effort, that's fine, but please don't use the excuse that it's too difficult.
One hour per month ignores the time and effort it took to learn enough to be able to set up a box as a mail server, whether that was spread out over your entire lifetime or crammed into a few weeks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC
These are protocols, not services. They enable communication, but they don't provide it. Furthermore, nobody uses IRC or Usenet anymore, illustrating that popularity is the limiting factor. Email is a different story -- you can try to host your own mail server but it's a huge PITA to set up SPF records and whatnot to keep your outgoing mail from getting bounced. You're pretty much stuck with one of a handful of email providers.
Except that the Internet is not controlled by that one ISP, only your connection to it. No matter how you connect to Facebook, it is a communication system that is controlled entirely by one company. That is the difference here.
Does it matter? To you, the end user, the end result is the same. A service is provided to you by a monopolist.
No, the fact that Facebook has made no substantial effort at being interoperable with any other system is what creates a barrier to entry.
Diaspora comes readily to mind here. It's open source and decentralized, yet nobody uses it because everyone that wants online social networking already uses Facebook. More to the point, if Facebook were to suddenly change course and allow you to host your own data and provide an open, decentralized service, would you then consider using it?
"I am not on Facebook"; if your friends refuse to talk to you because you do not use Facebook, then I would reevaluate your relationship with them. Why give in to Facebook's attempt to take control of the world's communication, especially when we have so many systems that are not controlled by any one party?
Which communication modalities aren't under the control of a monopolist? Snail mail is dominated by the postal service. For the longest time, in the US, phone service was only available through AT&T, but today with wireless, you've got a whopping 4 choices. Internet access is also pretty much the same -- you're lucky if you have more than one ISP to choose from.
However, I would argue that mail, phone service, etc. have little competition because of the high infrastructure cost for a new competitor. Facebook is different in that the large interconnected user base is what creates the barrier to entry.
Before federal deregulation, Southwest flew entirely within Texas so that it could set its own fares and schedules. I think PSA did the same thing by flying only within California. I could certainly see this happening again if the states and the feds go to war over the TSA. If you fly across state lines or fly international, you've got to go through the TSA first, but if you stay within your own state, you don't.
I wasn't sure if the GPS was reliable enough thats why I used the word "may". You could simply plug it into a car charger for the battery issue.
This research paper uses GPS in combination with the phone camera to detect traffic light state (green, red) and determine optimal driving speed (so I assume that GPS is accurate enough):
http://www.princeton.edu/~ekoukoum/SignalGuru.html
They also allow the phone to collaborate with phones in other nearby vehicles to form a real time map of traffic light states, again to compute an optimal driving speed.