80km was the burnout altitude, not the peak altitude. It kept going up (coasting) after engine shutdown. Since it was a missile, it was a shallow trajectory, so it didn't go up a *lot* beyond that. I'm having trouble finding clear information on whether any of the German flights actually broke the 100km number. It is quite clear that the V-2 was capable of reaching space (if fired vertically); the US fired a large number of unmodified and slightly modified captured V-2 rockets shortly after the war. The third test on May 10, 1944 reached 112km altitude; some of the later launches went as high as 180km.
Remember that a significant fraction of your caloric expenditure is based upon resting metabolism and maintenance of your body tissues. I'm not a doctor, but it seems entirely plausible to me that what you eat has a significant impact on how your body handles the calories you're eating. So, I'm not disagreeing, I'm just saying that calories out = (exercise + baseline metabolism), and that the baseline metabolism isn't constant with respect to diet. So if you change not only how many calories, but what kind, you might end up needing more or less exercise in order to lose weight.
From personal, scientifically-measurable experience...It's done wonders for me.
The plural of anecdote is not data. It does not matter how thoroughly documented your anecdote is, it still is not data. In order to draw conclusions in a scientific manner, they must be based upon repeatable results (that means more than one, preferably lots more), and they must be falsifiable. Until you undertake to study large numbers of people and control for the many confounding factors, it is not science to claim you have a conclusion.
I haven't read the book, and I don't know what the author has actually done in the way of studies and meta-analyses of other studies, but what he is claiming to do is the exact thing you are not: he looked at many individual examples, combined them in a statistically valid fashion, and drew a scientifically defensible conclusion. It's entirely possible he's made mistakes or that he's otherwise wrong, or even that he's a fraud, but his claim is a scientific one and should be treated as such even if you don't happen to like it.
I'd say that's true up to a point. Dolphins aren't very likely to become a spacefaring race because of their lack of hands or other means of fine control. But have you looked at other species around us? When compared to some of the less-intelligent primates, it seems entirely plausible that something else might have developed into human levels of intelligence and tool use first. For example, have you seen videos of crows using tools? They've got comparable smarts and mechanical abilities to the smaller, less-intelligent primates. Rats and mice aren't nearly so intelligent, but they're hardly stupid either, and they have hands that could turn into viable manipulators for serious tool use.
My personal hunch is that if we meet another spacefaring race, it will look recognizably like something we've seen before. Two legs and two hands seems quite plausible, but I doubt it's required. I'd be surprised if they had more than a passing resemblance to people, though.
Do you have a reference for the sense of direction thing? (Not trying to criticize, I'm honestly curious -- it sounds plausible, but doesn't exactly line up with my impressions.)
My personal experience is that I have no more trouble with directions around noon than in the morning or evening. Of course, I have a bad sense of direction, but it's equally bad:) I think I have more trouble at night because things are dramatically different. Colors change, contrast changes, everything changes. In many ways it doesn't look like the same place. Interestingly, a couple times I've first been to a place at night, and then when returning in daylight my sense of direction has been thrown off. Not as badly as when trying to return at night to a place seen only in daylight, though.
Interestingly enough, that is exactly the relationship between GPS time and TAI. It's defined the other way, obviously, but GPS time does not have leap seconds, and the GPS signal includes the size of the correction needed so that receivers can display UTC time.
Besides, the value of units of measurement lies in their consistency. Changing the second is worse than leap years or leap seconds or leap hours, because any time someone needs a precise measurement, they turn to the second.
Leap years are to deal with correcting the length of the year, which isn't an integral number of days. Leap seconds are to deal with the fact that the length of a day changes slowly and at a variable rate. It's not the same problem at all.
One thing that few of these sorts of plans fail to discuss: is it actually cheaper? I really don't care whether the internet operates at 50% efficiency, 90% efficiency, or 20% efficiency -- all I care about is what the cheapest way to move a given number of bits is. If that's to build excess capacity, and run simple software on simple but fast routers, and only utilize the raw bandwidth at 50%, that's fine by me if it costs less than building the same network at 100% usage and half the raw bandwidth. It's obvious we can do better on the protocols, but what does that cost in terms of added router CPU power, memory, electricity consumption, etc?
As long as it's very clear to the customers what will or won't be throttled, and there exist options that treat all traffic equally, and things are priced competitively, I'm fine with throttled options existing. If it's cheaper to serve people throttled connections, and some people would rather pay for that, then by all means, serve those connections. If we start running into a bandwidth crunch, prices *should* go up as the basic form of rationing. I'll figure out what type of connection I want when I get there...
The routers to use the dark fiber, and the upgraded routers to use in-use fiber better, still count as infrastructure. And they aren't cheap. And we will need them.
Does that mean the internet is doomed? I doubt it. It's not impossible, but I'd want to see better evidence. Plenty of people have predicted the imminent death of the internet before.
That's done to an extent already. Legal fee awards in cases are normally capped to "reasonable" levels. When trying to determine what is reasonable, the opposing side's legal fees are considered directly relevant. If I'm asking for 50k in legal fees, you're going to have trouble complaining that my legal fees are unreasonable when you spent 100k on the same case. This was the direct cause of the interesting legal wrangling over whether or not the RIAA's legal billings would be revealed as part of the Foster case -- she was seeking legal fees, and the RIAA was contesting her fees as too high.
I'd much prefer to see it codified in a loser-pays system as you and the GP are suggesting, though.
I would think the best way to help the average Joe is to give his average lawyer a set of clearly-defined, well-argued precedents and examples to base the defense on. Having the precedents and example arguments be stronger will help more people in the long run than trying to help everyone at once.
There's no way the fund can help everyone directly; I imagine it will help more people in the long run by carefully choosing its battles and winning them well than by diluting its resources and helping lots of people who, while individually deserving, won't have the same multiplicative effect on the resources spent.
Really? Including in the case of the fraudulent medical devices? What about the fact that most of these people pray on the elderly? People whose children, in general, are no longer dependent upon them for support -- but who now have to watch as their parents get taken for fools, given fraudulent treatment, and refuse to seek proper medical attention, and as a result die painful deaths from treatable ailments? Is that really the kind of society you think we should live in, or even somehow a step to getting to such a society?
What you discuss is fundamentally the difference between a competitive market and an unregulated (or improperly regulated) market. Here in the US, there seems to be much confusion about the difference. The problem arises that in markets with heavy infrastructure costs, there is a "natural monopoly" -- that is, it is more efficient for only one company to build the infrastructure, so left to its own devices the market is dominated by a single monopoly player.
The solution is exactly what you describe. Separate the infrastructure from the service run on top of it, mandate fair pricing practices, and prohibit the infrastructure owners from abusing their monopoly to gain power in another market.
I believe the problem is not a failure of a free market, but rather a failure to create an environment in which a free market can exist. (Some libertarians and economists will disagree with me, but I don't think it makes sense to call a market free when there are significant restrictions on it, whether those restrictions are imposed by the government or a corporation. You can have a free market with a monopoly player, and you can have a free competitive market. But when a player in the market has power derived from an external source -- either the government, or a monopoly in some other market -- then that market is no longer free, regardless of whether it is the government imposing the restrictions or not. A semantic distinction, perhaps, but I think an important one.)
Why do many Americans have trouble seeing this? I don't know. Somehow many have trouble seeing this, and our politicians don't take it upon themselves to act responsibly when their constituency doesn't demand it. I would dearly love to know what other countries do differently that seemingly produces more competent politicians. (I realize none are perfect, but it keeps seeming that other countries manage to have smarter, more thoughtful politicians than the US normally does. With obvious exceptions all around.)
The biggest problem is, that the politicians doesn't provide new rules for the upcoming and inevitable two-class-medicine. They fear this topic, because there's no way not to discriminate some part of the population regarding certain healthcare services.
This is, unfortunately, the case. We as a society have reached (or perhaps are very fast approaching, but I think we're there) the point where we know how to spend more money (productively, not wastefully) taking care of sick people than it is actually worth doing, from a purely economic standpoint. We will eventually reach the point where we could spend the equivalent of our entire GDP on taking care of sick people. The result is that we have to start rationing. We can do it by denying procedures we think aren't worth it; we can do it by long waiting lists; we can do it by requiring that people pay for it themselves (either out of pocket or through private insurance) and denying the ones who can't. I'm sure there are other ways, but I'm sure that no way is particularly palatable. It's a very difficult problem, and one for which it is particularly difficult to produce sound-bite answers that politicians like.
I fear that the state of health care in the USA is only going to get worse for some time yet before things start improving.
Well, of course that's their *intended* use. However, consider the problem of multiplying two 1000-bit integers. It's almost exactly analagous to multiply two 10-digit numbers on paper -- you use long multiplication. When those by hand, you'll find yourself doing 10*10 1-digit multiplication problems, and then 9 addition problems. Now imagine that instead of multiplying them 1 digit at a time, you had memorized the multiplication table out to 100x100, and were doing two digits at a time. You would now (effectively) be multiplying two 5-digit numbers, which requires 25 multiplications and 4 adds. (For example, you could do 1234*5678 as 1000*8 + 200*8 + 30*8 + 4*8 + 1000*70 +... +4*5000, or you could do it as 1200*78 + 34*78 + 1200*5600 + 34*5600. The latter way is much faster, provided you have the ability to operate on 2 digits at a time instead of one.
When trying to multiply 1000-bit numbers (or, in the case of prime95, much larger), on 32 bit hardware you multiply in blocks of 32 bits. Since the 80-bit floating point format provides for 64 bits of significand (the non-exponent part), you can simply ignore the exponent and use it to do 64 bit integer math (well, almost, but close enough for our purposes). When you can process twice as many bits per operation, you need 1/4 the operations. With a floating point unit capable of a comparable number of operations per second to the integer unit (I think this was the case; it's been too long since I followed architecture details for me to be sure), you'd get a 4x speed improvement. By the time you accounted for weird registers and having to convert numbers back and forth between 64-bit ints and 80-bit floats, you'd have less than a 4x improvement in practice, but it would still be quite large.
It doesn't have to be a geiger counter. There is plenty of randomness to be had in the exact timing of key presses, exact behavior of rotating media, incoming network information, etc etc. It can be harder to make use of (poor or unknown distribution, patterns that you might not know about), and it might be insecure (especially if it came from the network card), but there are plenty of physically derived things a modern computer can measure and generate randomness from with enough processing of the raw data.
In the past there have existed implementations of integer math that used the floating point unit. The only one I know of off hand is the Prime95 Mersenne prime search program. I imagine there are others, though. The reason for this is simply that the floating point units were faster -- more bits per operation. The x87 FPU instructions operate on 80 bit floating point numbers, compared to 32 bit integers (the floating point numbers can't use the exponent bits, but it's still more than 32 by a lot). If your code is sufficiently parallel, and you put forth the effort, there was a performance gain to be had. I don't know if this is still the case in modern CPUs (especially 64 bit ones), but it's entirely possible to do high-performance integer math on the floating point unit.
Why would insurance premiums behave differently from other products? Insurance companies compete on price like other companies. When a manufacturer finds a way to cut costs, that translates into lower prices so they can compete better; they don't simply raise their profit margins. In practice, the two aren't immediately connected, but they *are* connected over moderate lengths of time. If profit margins are high, people start looking at ways to make more money by lowering prices and getting more customers.
Of course, health insurance shows signs of not being a properly competitive market -- and monopolies and oligopolies do behave in the way you describe (somewhat; not completely). Which says to me that your argument is actually an argument that insurance should be turned into a more competitive marketplace, not an argument in favor of hindering their ability to charge appropriate premiums.
(And as I've said elsewhere, I think in the case of genetic risk factors, insurance should properly be provided by the government. It's a risk borne by society; you shouldn't be allowed to opt in or out of the pool after the dice are rolled, any more than you're allowed to sign up for auto insurance after getting in an accident and before filing a claim.)
Yes, that's not what mail is for. I personally get ruffled the wrong way when I see people generate insane overhead by latching binaries to mails instead of using sensible ways of transfer (like uploading to some server and sending the FTP link via mail), but that's how mail is being used.
So quit bitching and fix it. If that's what people want out of email, why should there be so much overhead involved? There's no technical reason that emailing a file should be a worse way of sending it than FTP. If it is, that's not the fault of the user.
(This isn't really directed at you personally, it just seems to me that too many people try to tell people how to use a tool, rather than looking at what tools people want to be using and making the tools work for that.)
Exactly. There are lots of things you could build today with old technology if you have the know-how. A valveless pulsejet engine is well within reach of early 19th century metalworking and fuel technology, for example, as is the airframe to fly it in -- but the techniques to make the engine, shape the wings, and control it weren't known.
The first major use of differential equations as relates to contruction wasn't until the construction of the Eiffel Tower, where they were used to calculate beam loading.
Artillery rockets have been around for hundreds of years, but the modern nozzle shape for a rocket wasn't used until the early 20th century.
The advancement of technology is inextricably linked to the understanding of how to use it.
Well, given the current structure of our insurance system, having it be open would be a really bad idea. Which is quite unfortunate. I was speaking to a more idealized case than the current US healthcare system.
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80km was the burnout altitude, not the peak altitude. It kept going up (coasting) after engine shutdown. Since it was a missile, it was a shallow trajectory, so it didn't go up a *lot* beyond that. I'm having trouble finding clear information on whether any of the German flights actually broke the 100km number. It is quite clear that the V-2 was capable of reaching space (if fired vertically); the US fired a large number of unmodified and slightly modified captured V-2 rockets shortly after the war. The third test on May 10, 1944 reached 112km altitude; some of the later launches went as high as 180km.
Depending on your definitions, the Germans were first. The V-2 was suborbital, though obviously unmanned.
Remember that a significant fraction of your caloric expenditure is based upon resting metabolism and maintenance of your body tissues. I'm not a doctor, but it seems entirely plausible to me that what you eat has a significant impact on how your body handles the calories you're eating. So, I'm not disagreeing, I'm just saying that calories out = (exercise + baseline metabolism), and that the baseline metabolism isn't constant with respect to diet. So if you change not only how many calories, but what kind, you might end up needing more or less exercise in order to lose weight.
From personal, scientifically-measurable experience...It's done wonders for me.
The plural of anecdote is not data. It does not matter how thoroughly documented your anecdote is, it still is not data. In order to draw conclusions in a scientific manner, they must be based upon repeatable results (that means more than one, preferably lots more), and they must be falsifiable. Until you undertake to study large numbers of people and control for the many confounding factors, it is not science to claim you have a conclusion.
I haven't read the book, and I don't know what the author has actually done in the way of studies and meta-analyses of other studies, but what he is claiming to do is the exact thing you are not: he looked at many individual examples, combined them in a statistically valid fashion, and drew a scientifically defensible conclusion. It's entirely possible he's made mistakes or that he's otherwise wrong, or even that he's a fraud, but his claim is a scientific one and should be treated as such even if you don't happen to like it.
I'd say that's true up to a point. Dolphins aren't very likely to become a spacefaring race because of their lack of hands or other means of fine control. But have you looked at other species around us? When compared to some of the less-intelligent primates, it seems entirely plausible that something else might have developed into human levels of intelligence and tool use first. For example, have you seen videos of crows using tools? They've got comparable smarts and mechanical abilities to the smaller, less-intelligent primates. Rats and mice aren't nearly so intelligent, but they're hardly stupid either, and they have hands that could turn into viable manipulators for serious tool use.
My personal hunch is that if we meet another spacefaring race, it will look recognizably like something we've seen before. Two legs and two hands seems quite plausible, but I doubt it's required. I'd be surprised if they had more than a passing resemblance to people, though.
Do you have a reference for the sense of direction thing? (Not trying to criticize, I'm honestly curious -- it sounds plausible, but doesn't exactly line up with my impressions.)
My personal experience is that I have no more trouble with directions around noon than in the morning or evening. Of course, I have a bad sense of direction, but it's equally bad :) I think I have more trouble at night because things are dramatically different. Colors change, contrast changes, everything changes. In many ways it doesn't look like the same place. Interestingly, a couple times I've first been to a place at night, and then when returning in daylight my sense of direction has been thrown off. Not as badly as when trying to return at night to a place seen only in daylight, though.
Interestingly enough, that is exactly the relationship between GPS time and TAI. It's defined the other way, obviously, but GPS time does not have leap seconds, and the GPS signal includes the size of the correction needed so that receivers can display UTC time.
If nothing else, we'd stimulate the living hell out of the world's economy.
This is the broken window fallacy, nothing more.
Besides, the value of units of measurement lies in their consistency. Changing the second is worse than leap years or leap seconds or leap hours, because any time someone needs a precise measurement, they turn to the second.
Leap years are to deal with correcting the length of the year, which isn't an integral number of days. Leap seconds are to deal with the fact that the length of a day changes slowly and at a variable rate. It's not the same problem at all.
One thing that few of these sorts of plans fail to discuss: is it actually cheaper? I really don't care whether the internet operates at 50% efficiency, 90% efficiency, or 20% efficiency -- all I care about is what the cheapest way to move a given number of bits is. If that's to build excess capacity, and run simple software on simple but fast routers, and only utilize the raw bandwidth at 50%, that's fine by me if it costs less than building the same network at 100% usage and half the raw bandwidth. It's obvious we can do better on the protocols, but what does that cost in terms of added router CPU power, memory, electricity consumption, etc?
As long as it's very clear to the customers what will or won't be throttled, and there exist options that treat all traffic equally, and things are priced competitively, I'm fine with throttled options existing. If it's cheaper to serve people throttled connections, and some people would rather pay for that, then by all means, serve those connections. If we start running into a bandwidth crunch, prices *should* go up as the basic form of rationing. I'll figure out what type of connection I want when I get there...
The routers to use the dark fiber, and the upgraded routers to use in-use fiber better, still count as infrastructure. And they aren't cheap. And we will need them.
Does that mean the internet is doomed? I doubt it. It's not impossible, but I'd want to see better evidence. Plenty of people have predicted the imminent death of the internet before.
That's done to an extent already. Legal fee awards in cases are normally capped to "reasonable" levels. When trying to determine what is reasonable, the opposing side's legal fees are considered directly relevant. If I'm asking for 50k in legal fees, you're going to have trouble complaining that my legal fees are unreasonable when you spent 100k on the same case. This was the direct cause of the interesting legal wrangling over whether or not the RIAA's legal billings would be revealed as part of the Foster case -- she was seeking legal fees, and the RIAA was contesting her fees as too high.
I'd much prefer to see it codified in a loser-pays system as you and the GP are suggesting, though.
I would think the best way to help the average Joe is to give his average lawyer a set of clearly-defined, well-argued precedents and examples to base the defense on. Having the precedents and example arguments be stronger will help more people in the long run than trying to help everyone at once.
There's no way the fund can help everyone directly; I imagine it will help more people in the long run by carefully choosing its battles and winning them well than by diluting its resources and helping lots of people who, while individually deserving, won't have the same multiplicative effect on the resources spent.
Really? Including in the case of the fraudulent medical devices? What about the fact that most of these people pray on the elderly? People whose children, in general, are no longer dependent upon them for support -- but who now have to watch as their parents get taken for fools, given fraudulent treatment, and refuse to seek proper medical attention, and as a result die painful deaths from treatable ailments? Is that really the kind of society you think we should live in, or even somehow a step to getting to such a society?
What you discuss is fundamentally the difference between a competitive market and an unregulated (or improperly regulated) market. Here in the US, there seems to be much confusion about the difference. The problem arises that in markets with heavy infrastructure costs, there is a "natural monopoly" -- that is, it is more efficient for only one company to build the infrastructure, so left to its own devices the market is dominated by a single monopoly player.
The solution is exactly what you describe. Separate the infrastructure from the service run on top of it, mandate fair pricing practices, and prohibit the infrastructure owners from abusing their monopoly to gain power in another market.
I believe the problem is not a failure of a free market, but rather a failure to create an environment in which a free market can exist. (Some libertarians and economists will disagree with me, but I don't think it makes sense to call a market free when there are significant restrictions on it, whether those restrictions are imposed by the government or a corporation. You can have a free market with a monopoly player, and you can have a free competitive market. But when a player in the market has power derived from an external source -- either the government, or a monopoly in some other market -- then that market is no longer free, regardless of whether it is the government imposing the restrictions or not. A semantic distinction, perhaps, but I think an important one.)
Why do many Americans have trouble seeing this? I don't know. Somehow many have trouble seeing this, and our politicians don't take it upon themselves to act responsibly when their constituency doesn't demand it. I would dearly love to know what other countries do differently that seemingly produces more competent politicians. (I realize none are perfect, but it keeps seeming that other countries manage to have smarter, more thoughtful politicians than the US normally does. With obvious exceptions all around.)
The biggest problem is, that the politicians doesn't provide new rules for the upcoming and inevitable two-class-medicine. They fear this topic, because there's no way not to discriminate some part of the population regarding certain healthcare services.
This is, unfortunately, the case. We as a society have reached (or perhaps are very fast approaching, but I think we're there) the point where we know how to spend more money (productively, not wastefully) taking care of sick people than it is actually worth doing, from a purely economic standpoint. We will eventually reach the point where we could spend the equivalent of our entire GDP on taking care of sick people. The result is that we have to start rationing. We can do it by denying procedures we think aren't worth it; we can do it by long waiting lists; we can do it by requiring that people pay for it themselves (either out of pocket or through private insurance) and denying the ones who can't. I'm sure there are other ways, but I'm sure that no way is particularly palatable. It's a very difficult problem, and one for which it is particularly difficult to produce sound-bite answers that politicians like.
I fear that the state of health care in the USA is only going to get worse for some time yet before things start improving.
Well, of course that's their *intended* use. However, consider the problem of multiplying two 1000-bit integers. It's almost exactly analagous to multiply two 10-digit numbers on paper -- you use long multiplication. When those by hand, you'll find yourself doing 10*10 1-digit multiplication problems, and then 9 addition problems. Now imagine that instead of multiplying them 1 digit at a time, you had memorized the multiplication table out to 100x100, and were doing two digits at a time. You would now (effectively) be multiplying two 5-digit numbers, which requires 25 multiplications and 4 adds. (For example, you could do 1234*5678 as 1000*8 + 200*8 + 30*8 + 4*8 + 1000*70 + ... +4*5000, or you could do it as 1200*78 + 34*78 + 1200*5600 + 34*5600. The latter way is much faster, provided you have the ability to operate on 2 digits at a time instead of one.
When trying to multiply 1000-bit numbers (or, in the case of prime95, much larger), on 32 bit hardware you multiply in blocks of 32 bits. Since the 80-bit floating point format provides for 64 bits of significand (the non-exponent part), you can simply ignore the exponent and use it to do 64 bit integer math (well, almost, but close enough for our purposes). When you can process twice as many bits per operation, you need 1/4 the operations. With a floating point unit capable of a comparable number of operations per second to the integer unit (I think this was the case; it's been too long since I followed architecture details for me to be sure), you'd get a 4x speed improvement. By the time you accounted for weird registers and having to convert numbers back and forth between 64-bit ints and 80-bit floats, you'd have less than a 4x improvement in practice, but it would still be quite large.
It doesn't have to be a geiger counter. There is plenty of randomness to be had in the exact timing of key presses, exact behavior of rotating media, incoming network information, etc etc. It can be harder to make use of (poor or unknown distribution, patterns that you might not know about), and it might be insecure (especially if it came from the network card), but there are plenty of physically derived things a modern computer can measure and generate randomness from with enough processing of the raw data.
In the past there have existed implementations of integer math that used the floating point unit. The only one I know of off hand is the Prime95 Mersenne prime search program. I imagine there are others, though. The reason for this is simply that the floating point units were faster -- more bits per operation. The x87 FPU instructions operate on 80 bit floating point numbers, compared to 32 bit integers (the floating point numbers can't use the exponent bits, but it's still more than 32 by a lot). If your code is sufficiently parallel, and you put forth the effort, there was a performance gain to be had. I don't know if this is still the case in modern CPUs (especially 64 bit ones), but it's entirely possible to do high-performance integer math on the floating point unit.
Why would insurance premiums behave differently from other products? Insurance companies compete on price like other companies. When a manufacturer finds a way to cut costs, that translates into lower prices so they can compete better; they don't simply raise their profit margins. In practice, the two aren't immediately connected, but they *are* connected over moderate lengths of time. If profit margins are high, people start looking at ways to make more money by lowering prices and getting more customers.
Of course, health insurance shows signs of not being a properly competitive market -- and monopolies and oligopolies do behave in the way you describe (somewhat; not completely). Which says to me that your argument is actually an argument that insurance should be turned into a more competitive marketplace, not an argument in favor of hindering their ability to charge appropriate premiums.
(And as I've said elsewhere, I think in the case of genetic risk factors, insurance should properly be provided by the government. It's a risk borne by society; you shouldn't be allowed to opt in or out of the pool after the dice are rolled, any more than you're allowed to sign up for auto insurance after getting in an accident and before filing a claim.)
Yes, that's not what mail is for. I personally get ruffled the wrong way when I see people generate insane overhead by latching binaries to mails instead of using sensible ways of transfer (like uploading to some server and sending the FTP link via mail), but that's how mail is being used.
So quit bitching and fix it. If that's what people want out of email, why should there be so much overhead involved? There's no technical reason that emailing a file should be a worse way of sending it than FTP. If it is, that's not the fault of the user.
(This isn't really directed at you personally, it just seems to me that too many people try to tell people how to use a tool, rather than looking at what tools people want to be using and making the tools work for that.)
What, like this?
Exactly. There are lots of things you could build today with old technology if you have the know-how. A valveless pulsejet engine is well within reach of early 19th century metalworking and fuel technology, for example, as is the airframe to fly it in -- but the techniques to make the engine, shape the wings, and control it weren't known.
The first major use of differential equations as relates to contruction wasn't until the construction of the Eiffel Tower, where they were used to calculate beam loading.
Artillery rockets have been around for hundreds of years, but the modern nozzle shape for a rocket wasn't used until the early 20th century.
The advancement of technology is inextricably linked to the understanding of how to use it.
Well, given the current structure of our insurance system, having it be open would be a really bad idea. Which is quite unfortunate. I was speaking to a more idealized case than the current US healthcare system.