Yep, micropayments are not practical at all.
It's pretty simple to work this out. Ask yourself how much is your phone bill? Let's say you only pay twenty bucks a month. Well, what exactly are you paying for here? Most people don't want to believe that they are paying for the billing infrastructure itself, but then you have to ask yourself exactly what does the billing infrastructure include? You can argue till dawn about the details, but I think a very reasonable argument can be made that more than half of your bill is simply to pay for the billing infrastructure if you include the hardware necessary to track the charges, the billing department itself and the associated labor as well as the service time spent arguing with the customers about billing problems over the phone, in the office and in court. The customer pays for these things. That's the name of the game. Bandwidth and equipment are not the primary cost to the phone company, the billing infrastructure and the associated services including the legal department necessary for settling fee disputes certainly is.
Micropayments are not the answer. No payment is the answer. If you think money is the answer to all of life's problems then perhaps you shouldn't be focusing on the web.
I wrote to the Mosix folks several years ago and asked about using Wine to run old Windows 3D apps on a cluster after getting it set up on RH. At that time, they said the problem with Wine in a cluster was that it required pooled memory resources. . . sound familiar.
Back then, there were expensive commercial interconnect systems --I don't think Infinniband was around then-- that did the job. But with the costs involved it made Mosix somewhat besides the point.
I may be wrong, but this could be the technology that allows Wine to rip the shit out of MS's price/performace ratio on Windows apps in a cluster since I've yet to see Mosix for Windows. I hope that's turns out to be the case anyway, but I was hoping for that years ago when GigE was on the horizon and it turned out to be a bit early. No big deal if this isn't it either. I can wait many more years.
I think the research part is a key point. You're absolutely right that the RIAA has made legal mistakes in the past and most likely will again in the future. It's not so hard to imagine that the RIAA makes a wrong move or even falls for a setup from some lawyer itching for a lawsuit. After all, there are some tortuous legal possibilities in the realm of P2P and copyright. Won't Verizon be open to becoming a co-defendent in a lawsuit for having aided the RIAA in some legal action that backfires? What if the format of Verizon's record keeping influenced the damages claimed? The details of when and what constitutes a record, how it is stored, and what makes it valid could become extrememly painful issues under cross examination. Verizon would have to defend themselves legally as they had provided legal evidence that had led to wrongful damages. The formatting and security of these records would be no casual issue.
Well, back to your point about research, yes, of course, Verizon has to be legally responsible which means they're going to need to do their own research as well. So it's not just a matter of keeping records, but also of making judgement calls about what is indeed legal and illegal and how the details of Verizon's own record keeping play out as evidence in each particular case. It's not longer possible to be naive about the user's data when you're actively supplying evidence for use in court.
But at that point, aren't we jeapordizing common carier status? If Verizon can judge copyright infringements, can't they judge obscenity too? How about hate speech? They are no longer common carriers once they claim to be able to make such decisions. In the past, they said it was not feasible for a common carrier to take on these burdens. If the court is insisting that ISPs cannot claim common carrier status, isn't this the end of the ISP business model?
Unless Verizon has some kind of immunity from prosecution --and it's hard to imagine how that could be arranged-- their own legal staff will have to make these kinds of decisions about the data their users distribute and recieve and the nature of the records that they will keep which would no longer allow them to claim common carrier status.
There's a knock at the door. Joe Sixpack goes to see who it is--
Joe: Well for heaven's sake. It's Georgie Nuorder. How are you. I haven't seen you since we closed the mortgage.
Georgie: Yeah, that's what I'm here about actually.
Joe: Oh, but we closed years ago. You got your money, didn't you?
Georgie: Yes, of course I got the money you paid at the time. But I found out you violated the contract.
Joe: What? What do you mean? I made all my payments on time. It's paid for.
Georgie: No, it's not that you didn't pay. I know you paid once. But apparently you've moved kids in as well. I can't let the kids live here too for the same price. And I wish that was the worst of it. But apparently these kids of yours are even having their friends over. Who knows how far this has gone, but it's got to stop right now.
In case you haven't heard, shared property of all sorts is considered piracy under the new national definition. The Federal Grand Jury for Homeland Security just ruled on this last week. I'm a bit suspicious how you haven't heard. It was all over CNN and MSNBC.
Joe: I'm not sure I saw anything about that. Is this the color code thing? There was this kid with no arms. ..but I can't say I rmember much about Homeland Security. I don't really pay attention to that mumbo jumbo.
Georgie: Well, you ought to pay more attention to current events instead of that terrorist propoganda. This is part of our goverment's broader move to straighten up all the loose ends in property law in order to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The fact is, you've got a hefty bill to pay for your thievery.
Joe: What? You didn't say anything about these limits when I bought the house. How can you come back and demand all these rights you never talked about when I first bought it. You're just making this stuff up out of thin air. How can you claim to own something you already sold to me?
Georgie: Well let's not play dumb Joe. Computer software has been sold like this for years now. I mean it's only logical that the kids have to buy their own houses. There's no such thing as a free lunch, is there? The law is on my side. I sold the house to you specifically, not to you and anybody you want to lend it to and their friends and aquaintances and so on. It's right there in writing plain as your face. There's only one signature on the contract. You signed the contract and only you. Nobody forced you and there is nowhere in the contract that specifically entitles you to share the property with other people. You're dilluting the value. It's thievery palin and simple. You thought the contract was a good deal then on the face of it and now you're trying to steal from my by taking twice, no three times what you paid for.
It's shameful of you to try and deny it when it's staring you right in the face like that. Look, if we keep letting people like you get away with this stealing --and that's exactly what this is: it's a black and white case of right against wrong, good vs evil. If we let you have your way, the entire housing market will collapse in a few months. You've twisted your mind into believing you have a right to steal. You don't!
You've got to accept the fact that you're a thief for moving these kids in here without paying. The only way out is to pay what you owe. You've got to pay your way in this world Joe. It's the right thing to do.
Luckily, I'm a Christian and I want to be merciful as the teachings of Jesus tell us we ought to be and I will allow you to stay in your home and even to share your home with your children as long as you start paying me rent by the end of the month. That way we just might be able to avoid jail time. This is your lucky day my friend, but don't take my mercy for granted for my vengence against procrastinators is certain to be filled with wrath and rage. I am right and you are wrong and the sooner you get that into your head the bet
I wouldn't assume that even 90nm is as all set and ready to roll. Just because Infineon has already sold it to SMIC doesn't mean it's yesterday's news.
I read an article on EETimes last year where a researcher claimed to be finding an average of a few dozen bad circuits caused by mask problems in 130nm chips that were being cleared by fabs. He seemed to think that this problem was going to increase exponentially as processes were scaled down.
That doesn't mean it doesn't work, it's just that yield rates go down and the products that go out the door might not have the same durability levels we previously expected from ICs.
And, speaking of durability, I haven't seen any specs on the voltage they're going to be using, but I have to wonder about heat dissipation if they're remaining above one volt.
If they're dropping the voltage very low then the clock speed should be interesting. I notice the articles I could find on Google all talked about TFlops, but nobody seemed to have any GHz numbers to toss around.
I tend to think that what should be interesting below 90nm is FPGAs. If anybody is going to drastically re-write their software for performance, it seems like this is where it gets interesting. I have found that there is even a virtual FPGA core that you can use within an FPGA. Now that's got to be compelling for the software, networking mindset. Hell, that's art.
Well this is getting to be like a broken record and I missed this story when it was still on the front page, but this is important to me, so here goes one more time.
Patents have gotten out of hand again as they were before the Great Depression because of a very specific move in the federal courts made in the heady early days of the Reagan administration.
The big change is called the CAFC and it is a court system especially made to create and strengthen monopolies. I'd love to debate it if somebody would like to show evidence otherwise, but the people who know about it usually don't like to talk about it. So, I'll just mention it one more time for those of you who don't know about it.
Besides which, practically everything in the environment causes cancer, mutation or death in the right circumstances including the air we breathe.
People are smothered to death by pillows. If I write a good explicit narrative about someone being smothered by a pillow I'm sure I could convince thousands of mindless idiots to sign a petition to ban them, but obviously that's an emotional reaction to the rhetoric of a narrative rather than a reasonable approach to the dangers of pillow suffocation.
If you're referring to the SciAm article on these things a few years back, I don't recall anything about excessive G-force.
I believe the problem they had there was the lack of a suitably powerful laser. They were using C02 lasers in the SciAm tests I believe.
What I wonder is if the deuterium flouride lasers the military has suggested for the MIRACL program would be of use. It seems that the problem with those was that they took a long time to recharge after lasing so perhaps not.
Probably what we need is a particle beam, but that will make for an interesting passenger experience.
Here, you just buckle in and I'll fire her up. You'll be flying through the atmosphere in no time.
Court of Apeals of the Federal Circuit.
It's a special intellectual property appeals court that allows owners of intellectual property to try their cases in a manner convenient to their interest no matter where their lawsuits originate, ie an old boys club in DC. It was created right after Reagan came to power and was the cornerstone of the Service Ecomony vision that in conjunction with the mantra of deregulation would bring the US economy to new heights. It did, for awhile.
Sadly, those heights were at the top of the bubble that was created by those policies that intentionally reversed the "socialistic" policies of the New Deal era in which government carefully and tightly managed private competition with prejudice towards the public domain.
I also have a friend who is an Economist. Well, he's more of a statistician and programmer, but he's trained as an Economist as well.
According to him --and this jibes with the Encyclopedia Brittanica's article on the history of markets-- classical economics is an utter nonsense attemnpt to meld models that emerged with calculus together with the realities of the marketplace. Non-classical economics is often difficult to distinguish from socialism.
This bubble started in 1980s with the creation of the CAFC and the emphasis on corporate control of intellectual property and it won't end until we have massive reforms like we did in the 30s. Bush knows that, that's why he's happy to borrow money like there is no tomorrow. For his way of thinking, there is no tomorrow.
I have to agree that people really aren't that interested in video conferencing. It sounds good in theory, but in practice it's not that welcome.
And it's true that it was already possible for a long time. I put together a POTS based video conferencing solution for a school district around 1997 and as soon as the administration realized how much nudity and sexual services type activities were readily available once you had the equipment they decided it was liable to cause more problems that it would solve.
While that example might not say much, what says much more is that digicams are everywhere for very little money at all and very few people actually use them. If you seriously want to have a video enhanced conversation and you have DSL or cable, all you have to do is set up a webcam and make a phone call. Despite the simplicity of this solution, nobody bothers.
The savings they claim by using VoIP have to be considered in comparison to a long distance calling card. I could talk for literally weeks on end from the US to Taiwan for US$200. If I didn't already have three unused webcams sitting around the house I could buy another one for thirty bucks. It would be hard to justify buying one of these things for more than fifty bucks.
Thank ya kindly.
Ya got to get some mud on your boots to get some clams, thanks for the clam.
In the process of searching for Geoffery Landis' thoughts on the matter I came across some interesting stuff in Google news regarding active mechanical supports to a structure. This was precisely my point. The suggestion that the strength of a material cannot be mechanically enhanced flies in the face of dozens if not thousands of real world examples. Thanks again Bob. You helped narrow things down with that tip. Next time the topic comes up, I'll be ready with some links, facts and figures.
Uhm. . . SARS is just a nasty pneumonia. People are acting like it's an aerosol form of AIDS or Ebola and that everybody who gets it inevitably dies. But in fact, it's already been well reported that most people who get SARS recover in a few weeks.
I don't think you can compare a nasty flu strain to Chernobyl. The hype is because everybody was waiting to find out it had something to do with Saddam and at this point it's obvious that it doesn't and that Bush's whole cabinet is full of paranoid maniacs who are prepared to kill over rumors.
Good thing they give the troops amphetamines too. I'm sure they're shooting responsibly. Reuters would tell you if they were just shooting like mad at . . . oh nevermind.
I've been following HighLift for months now and I am very clear about the idea of the nanotube and I think it's great. And I totally understand and have read that a steel CABLE will not work.
But if you read what I wrote, you might notice I very specifically indicate that this would not be a CABLE. It's not that I didn't read up on this stuff. This is a novel idea as far as Slashdot posts on space elevators and because I've read every post in the archives which is obviously not true for even a tiny minority of the people posting today.
Oh well, whatever. No big deal. This story didn't get a tenth of the posts the earlier ones did. I thought I was going to be addressing people who knew better as earlier HighLift stories brought out tons of Physics PhDs. I guess they're all watching the news.
I'm pleased somebody found the post funny, but I was attempting to seriously raise a point that I'm quite curious about.
The original question was a bit mixed up. Building up and building down deserve to be treated seperately as the issue is already a source of much confusion.
Building down from orbit does seem like a cool way to go except for the obvious problem of transporting the materials. But assumuming that you were willing to commit the resources, it seems like you could easily increase the tensile stength of any material by adding flexible buffers, the simplest example being spring loaded joints. Using the analogy of a chain, if every link was spring loaded, you would be adding enormous mechanical strength to the chain. Of course you'de adding weight and complexity as well, but a spring loaded chain is quite a simplified version of something that might be practical in this application.
The point that keeps running through my mind is that you must be able to add tensile strength by design where it doesn't exist otherwise. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems there are many real world examples where this is true.
But let's skip the building down side for the moment and turn back to the tower of Babel part which is where the real fun is. Instead of asking is this possible, let me rephrase the question thuswise: What's the best possible metal tower design strengthwise.
Is it a simple octet strut or is it more complex?
I admit this is off-topic, but I've been dying for a new space elevator story so I could ask this question again. I was too late for the last one. Excuse me while I repost what I wrote belatedly after missing the last one a few weeks ago.
I am a big fan of HighLift and the tiny nanotube thread, but I'm just not convinced that a steel tower is impossible given the right geometry. (Note, I'm not suggesting the ascii below is such a geometry, it's just to illustrate the point)
Sure, maybe a steel cable could never work, but at some scale it must be possible to build up a tower or, alternately, to build down a beam of of interconnected steel tubes.
Building down it seems we could use steel beams made of elaborate geometries like we see in some space frame construction. The members could be spring loaded to distribute stresses therby adding vast amounts of tensile strength. Just because the material itself lacks tensile strength over a given length, that doesn't mean all structures composed of that material would share that property.
A mass of steel triangles or other geometries is not not as elegant as using a single strand of nanotube composites, but it uses existing materials in plentiful supply at a good price.
At some scale a steel mesh tower must be capable of reaching into the edges of the atmosphere. They're building 500 meter buildings left front and center all over Asia. It would only be necessary to stack up a few hundred of them in an octet "truss" type formation to make a nice dent in a trip to orbit.
|X| |X| |X| |X| |X| |X| |X| |X| |X| |X|
Now this rather homely ASCII art is not meant to be a prototype, but you get the idea. Replace each leg of an X with a 500meter steel tower and you could easily imagine a ten kilometer tower. Sure, that's not even close to orbit, but it's higher than Everest. At some scale this has to make a dent in the cost of launching to orbit if you build up from the ground.
Of course coming down from space instead of builduing up you have the issue of materials transport. But I think it's got to be possible even with steel.
Okay, I ended the above post a bit too heavy handedly, what with Gates being such a charity fiend. But the thing about the Xerox consent decree is really something to think about.
That's a phrase we used to see in the headlines all the time in the 70s, but ever since the 80s it has all but disappeared from the front page because it is no longer an issue. It's no longer an issue because the government we've chosen has no interest in protecting the public domain. Relecting on PARC should be time of reflecting on this fact.
Try googling Xerox consent decree and you will discover that Xerox neither mistakenly gave away nor generosly gave up their technology --they were forced by the government. That's government as in by the people of the people for the people. Too bad we gave up on that form of government in the US.
The public domain has to be taken by force, it always has been and always will be. There is no room for charity in monoploly plans.
That last point about verb conjugation really caught my eye. I was just called in to consult for a local school that was going to buy a software essay grader.
I asked the representative of the well-known international educational agency if something similar to her very pricey product was available for free. They wanted me there to ask the tough questions after all.
She hit the roof going off on the years of research, gaggles of PhDs and zillions of dollars etc etc. She needs ten minutes to cough up all the buzzwords they had stuffed into her. The summary is this thing is so damned smart, it truly "understands" human writing.
Well fair enough. So later that night I go to her own agency's web site and find a damning internally written, though publicly available, critique of the thing that gives samples of how to give it the ol' pinball tilt effect. The gist of it was just write a few good sentences similar to the topic and then cut and paste them over and over. The more times the better.
Whoa, that's intelligent?
And don't get the wrong idea, there were plenty of other examples. This was clearly work in progress despite the stunning price tag.
I mean I don't blame them for trying to make a buck. I pretend to sell software too. But despite needing a whole Gig of RAM they aint even close.
I have no doubt AI is possible, but until we're dealing with input data as rich as the human senses in real time, it seems a bit far fetched to imagine that we can achieve it. Isn't Intel or IBM that insists that PCs will have the intelligence of bumblebees about the time we hit the useful end of the CMOS process? I've yet to see a bumblebee grade an essay.
Alright, I should have been more specific, the issue at hand is not like a national ID with the feds giving you a number for life that tracks you and holds you accountable for every little thing you do. Rather, it's about whether LOCAL, this is the key point here, utilities could be allowed to use their existing wire infrastructures to which they already own the right-of-way to offer broadband services.
In that case, then if your electricity utility kicked you for sending spam you could hook up with the water utilities. And the cable and DSL and satellite ISPs would still be there too. It's just another option. It's not less options, it's more options.
People whine that it's a potential confilct of first ammendment rights to have the government carrying their data, but here's a perfect example why the government is the best ISP one could imagine.
The fact that Sony is closing down existing profitable CRT lines now instead of later makes me a bit suspicious.
But in the mean time for those of you who want to keep your CRT as long as possible. I recommend the following:
If you wake up one day and your CRT monitor won't come to life, try soldering an ATX power switch onto the solder posts of the old monitor switch on the back of the monitor main board. I just did that to this monitor I'm typing on last week after it died following months of eratic behavior and it's good as new.
Fun tricks like that make me less concerned about whether there is price fixing or not. As long as idiots want to buy them and give me their old CRTs, I'm all for it.
Obviously I'm in the minority here, but I tend to think the more reasonable answer to the desktop space crunch is a bigger desk, not a thinner monitor. I've got a really big desk at home and I'm in the process of making a monster sized one.
I realize the bigger desk technique isn't always feasable, so those folks can send their ugly ol' seventeen, nineteen and twenty-one inch CRTs my way.
I tend to assume it's part of human nature to desire change. I assume nano would enable things to be created and destroyed faster than ever. Of course even without nano that kind of future is in the cards.
While we don't tend to think of steel as high tech anymore, there is a school of thought that suggests the impacts of steel on architecture have only begun to be felt. What we've seen so far are only primitive first steps compared to what we will inevitably end up with as we continue to create new steel for cars and appliances while simultaneously recycling existing stocks.
This steady accumulation of steel and other metals will eventually make them the first choices for architecture as they have already become in many cases. This should eventually lead to a follow on effect of making buildings and even entire cities recyclable.
And while it looks like I'm getting way off topic here, it's not as far as it seems. After all, wireless and wired infratructures are interdependent for a real global Internet and the wired infrastructure is very much about the nature of architecture.
Perhaps I've just had some mad twist of luck, but I have an el cheapo Lexmark I bought last November and I've refilled the original black cartridge ten times and the color three times without seeing any problems anywhere. That's an enormous amount of printing and the refill ink I've used so far amounts to about fifteen bucks. Is it only the expensive models that have this "feature?"
The somewhat self-assembling nature of P2P networks got me thinking about little swarms of tiny clean up robots. Instead of a hunanoid robot, it seems what would be more useful and simpler for things like household or even commercial maintenanc is a network of small robots relying on each other for various specialized functions sort of like cells in a larger organism.
It seems like you almost have to forego the android approach and go this way to get automated maintenance workers financially feasible because there will be certain parts that will tend to wear out much faster than others. It's the nature of the clean up game that many of the parts are consumeables.
While my musings on P2P were rather far from the goal, this sounds quite a bit closer. I know some fugly buildings in a town not far from here that could really use a good scrub down.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, micropayments are not practical at all.
It's pretty simple to work this out. Ask yourself how much is your phone bill? Let's say you only pay twenty bucks a month. Well, what exactly are you paying for here? Most people don't want to believe that they are paying for the billing infrastructure itself, but then you have to ask yourself exactly what does the billing infrastructure include? You can argue till dawn about the details, but I think a very reasonable argument can be made that more than half of your bill is simply to pay for the billing infrastructure if you include the hardware necessary to track the charges, the billing department itself and the associated labor as well as the service time spent arguing with the customers about billing problems over the phone, in the office and in court. The customer pays for these things. That's the name of the game. Bandwidth and equipment are not the primary cost to the phone company, the billing infrastructure and the associated services including the legal department necessary for settling fee disputes certainly is.
Micropayments are not the answer. No payment is the answer. If you think money is the answer to all of life's problems then perhaps you shouldn't be focusing on the web.
I wrote to the Mosix folks several years ago and asked about using Wine to run old Windows 3D apps on a cluster after getting it set up on RH. At that time, they said the problem with Wine in a cluster was that it required pooled memory resources. . . sound familiar.
Back then, there were expensive commercial interconnect systems --I don't think Infinniband was around then-- that did the job. But with the costs involved it made Mosix somewhat besides the point.
I may be wrong, but this could be the technology that allows Wine to rip the shit out of MS's price/performace ratio on Windows apps in a cluster since I've yet to see Mosix for Windows. I hope that's turns out to be the case anyway, but I was hoping for that years ago when GigE was on the horizon and it turned out to be a bit early. No big deal if this isn't it either. I can wait many more years.
I think the research part is a key point. You're absolutely right that the RIAA has made legal mistakes in the past and most likely will again in the future. It's not so hard to imagine that the RIAA makes a wrong move or even falls for a setup from some lawyer itching for a lawsuit. After all, there are some tortuous legal possibilities in the realm of P2P and copyright. Won't Verizon be open to becoming a co-defendent in a lawsuit for having aided the RIAA in some legal action that backfires? What if the format of Verizon's record keeping influenced the damages claimed? The details of when and what constitutes a record, how it is stored, and what makes it valid could become extrememly painful issues under cross examination. Verizon would have to defend themselves legally as they had provided legal evidence that had led to wrongful damages. The formatting and security of these records would be no casual issue.
Well, back to your point about research, yes, of course, Verizon has to be legally responsible which means they're going to need to do their own research as well. So it's not just a matter of keeping records, but also of making judgement calls about what is indeed legal and illegal and how the details of Verizon's own record keeping play out as evidence in each particular case. It's not longer possible to be naive about the user's data when you're actively supplying evidence for use in court.
But at that point, aren't we jeapordizing common carier status? If Verizon can judge copyright infringements, can't they judge obscenity too? How about hate speech? They are no longer common carriers once they claim to be able to make such decisions. In the past, they said it was not feasible for a common carrier to take on these burdens. If the court is insisting that ISPs cannot claim common carrier status, isn't this the end of the ISP business model?
Unless Verizon has some kind of immunity from prosecution --and it's hard to imagine how that could be arranged-- their own legal staff will have to make these kinds of decisions about the data their users distribute and recieve and the nature of the records that they will keep which would no longer allow them to claim common carrier status.
There's a knock at the door. Joe Sixpack goes to see who it is--
.but I can't say I rmember much about Homeland Security. I don't really pay attention to that mumbo jumbo.
Joe: Well for heaven's sake. It's Georgie Nuorder. How are you. I haven't seen you since we closed the mortgage.
Georgie: Yeah, that's what I'm here about actually.
Joe: Oh, but we closed years ago. You got your money, didn't you?
Georgie: Yes, of course I got the money you paid at the time. But I found out you violated the contract.
Joe: What? What do you mean? I made all my payments on time. It's paid for.
Georgie: No, it's not that you didn't pay. I know you paid once. But apparently you've moved kids in as well. I can't let the kids live here too for the same price. And I wish that was the worst of it. But apparently these kids of yours are even having their friends over. Who knows how far this has gone, but it's got to stop right now.
In case you haven't heard, shared property of all sorts is considered piracy under the new national definition. The Federal Grand Jury for Homeland Security just ruled on this last week. I'm a bit suspicious how you haven't heard. It was all over CNN and MSNBC.
Joe: I'm not sure I saw anything about that. Is this the color code thing? There was this kid with no arms. .
Georgie: Well, you ought to pay more attention to current events instead of that terrorist propoganda. This is part of our goverment's broader move to straighten up all the loose ends in property law in order to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The fact is, you've got a hefty bill to pay for your thievery.
Joe: What? You didn't say anything about these limits when I bought the house. How can you come back and demand all these rights you never talked about when I first bought it. You're just making this stuff up out of thin air. How can you claim to own something you already sold to me?
Georgie: Well let's not play dumb Joe. Computer software has been sold like this for years now. I mean it's only logical that the kids have to buy their own houses. There's no such thing as a free lunch, is there? The law is on my side. I sold the house to you specifically, not to you and anybody you want to lend it to and their friends and aquaintances and so on. It's right there in writing plain as your face. There's only one signature on the contract. You signed the contract and only you. Nobody forced you and there is nowhere in the contract that specifically entitles you to share the property with other people. You're dilluting the value. It's thievery palin and simple. You thought the contract was a good deal then on the face of it and now you're trying to steal from my by taking twice, no three times what you paid for.
It's shameful of you to try and deny it when it's staring you right in the face like that. Look, if we keep letting people like you get away with this stealing --and that's exactly what this is: it's a black and white case of right against wrong, good vs evil. If we let you have your way, the entire housing market will collapse in a few months. You've twisted your mind into believing you have a right to steal. You don't!
You've got to accept the fact that you're a thief for moving these kids in here without paying. The only way out is to pay what you owe. You've got to pay your way in this world Joe. It's the right thing to do.
Luckily, I'm a Christian and I want to be merciful as the teachings of Jesus tell us we ought to be and I will allow you to stay in your home and even to share your home with your children as long as you start paying me rent by the end of the month. That way we just might be able to avoid jail time. This is your lucky day my friend, but don't take my mercy for granted for my vengence against procrastinators is certain to be filled with wrath and rage. I am right and you are wrong and the sooner you get that into your head the bet
I wouldn't assume that even 90nm is as all set and ready to roll. Just because Infineon has already sold it to SMIC doesn't mean it's yesterday's news.
I read an article on EETimes last year where a researcher claimed to be finding an average of a few dozen bad circuits caused by mask problems in 130nm chips that were being cleared by fabs. He seemed to think that this problem was going to increase exponentially as processes were scaled down.
That doesn't mean it doesn't work, it's just that yield rates go down and the products that go out the door might not have the same durability levels we previously expected from ICs.
And, speaking of durability, I haven't seen any specs on the voltage they're going to be using, but I have to wonder about heat dissipation if they're remaining above one volt.
If they're dropping the voltage very low then the clock speed should be interesting. I notice the articles I could find on Google all talked about TFlops, but nobody seemed to have any GHz numbers to toss around.
I tend to think that what should be interesting below 90nm is FPGAs. If anybody is going to drastically re-write their software for performance, it seems like this is where it gets interesting. I have found that there is even a virtual FPGA core that you can use within an FPGA. Now that's got to be compelling for the software, networking mindset. Hell, that's art.
Well this is getting to be like a broken record and I missed this story when it was still on the front page, but this is important to me, so here goes one more time.
Patents have gotten out of hand again as they were before the Great Depression because of a very specific move in the federal courts made in the heady early days of the Reagan administration.
The big change is called the CAFC and it is a court system especially made to create and strengthen monopolies. I'd love to debate it if somebody would like to show evidence otherwise, but the people who know about it usually don't like to talk about it. So, I'll just mention it one more time for those of you who don't know about it.
Besides which, practically everything in the environment causes cancer, mutation or death in the right circumstances including the air we breathe.
People are smothered to death by pillows. If I write a good explicit narrative about someone being smothered by a pillow I'm sure I could convince thousands of mindless idiots to sign a petition to ban them, but obviously that's an emotional reaction to the rhetoric of a narrative rather than a reasonable approach to the dangers of pillow suffocation.
If you're referring to the SciAm article on these things a few years back, I don't recall anything about excessive G-force.
I believe the problem they had there was the lack of a suitably powerful laser. They were using C02 lasers in the SciAm tests I believe.
What I wonder is if the deuterium flouride lasers the military has suggested for the MIRACL program would be of use. It seems that the problem with those was that they took a long time to recharge after lasing so perhaps not.
Probably what we need is a particle beam, but that will make for an interesting passenger experience.
Here, you just buckle in and I'll fire her up. You'll be flying through the atmosphere in no time.
Court of Apeals of the Federal Circuit.
It's a special intellectual property appeals court that allows owners of intellectual property to try their cases in a manner convenient to their interest no matter where their lawsuits originate, ie an old boys club in DC. It was created right after Reagan came to power and was the cornerstone of the Service Ecomony vision that in conjunction with the mantra of deregulation would bring the US economy to new heights. It did, for awhile.
Sadly, those heights were at the top of the bubble that was created by those policies that intentionally reversed the "socialistic" policies of the New Deal era in which government carefully and tightly managed private competition with prejudice towards the public domain.
I also have a friend who is an Economist. Well, he's more of a statistician and programmer, but he's trained as an Economist as well.
According to him --and this jibes with the Encyclopedia Brittanica's article on the history of markets-- classical economics is an utter nonsense attemnpt to meld models that emerged with calculus together with the realities of the marketplace. Non-classical economics is often difficult to distinguish from socialism.
This bubble started in 1980s with the creation of the CAFC and the emphasis on corporate control of intellectual property and it won't end until we have massive reforms like we did in the 30s. Bush knows that, that's why he's happy to borrow money like there is no tomorrow. For his way of thinking, there is no tomorrow.
I have to agree that people really aren't that interested in video conferencing. It sounds good in theory, but in practice it's not that welcome.
And it's true that it was already possible for a long time. I put together a POTS based video conferencing solution for a school district around 1997 and as soon as the administration realized how much nudity and sexual services type activities were readily available once you had the equipment they decided it was liable to cause more problems that it would solve.
While that example might not say much, what says much more is that digicams are everywhere for very little money at all and very few people actually use them. If you seriously want to have a video enhanced conversation and you have DSL or cable, all you have to do is set up a webcam and make a phone call. Despite the simplicity of this solution, nobody bothers.
The savings they claim by using VoIP have to be considered in comparison to a long distance calling card. I could talk for literally weeks on end from the US to Taiwan for US$200. If I didn't already have three unused webcams sitting around the house I could buy another one for thirty bucks. It would be hard to justify buying one of these things for more than fifty bucks.
Thank ya kindly.
Ya got to get some mud on your boots to get some clams, thanks for the clam.
In the process of searching for Geoffery Landis' thoughts on the matter I came across some interesting stuff in Google news regarding active mechanical supports to a structure. This was precisely my point. The suggestion that the strength of a material cannot be mechanically enhanced flies in the face of dozens if not thousands of real world examples. Thanks again Bob. You helped narrow things down with that tip. Next time the topic comes up, I'll be ready with some links, facts and figures.
Uhm. . . SARS is just a nasty pneumonia. People are acting like it's an aerosol form of AIDS or Ebola and that everybody who gets it inevitably dies. But in fact, it's already been well reported that most people who get SARS recover in a few weeks.
I don't think you can compare a nasty flu strain to Chernobyl. The hype is because everybody was waiting to find out it had something to do with Saddam and at this point it's obvious that it doesn't and that Bush's whole cabinet is full of paranoid maniacs who are prepared to kill over rumors.
Good thing they give the troops amphetamines too. I'm sure they're shooting responsibly. Reuters would tell you if they were just shooting like mad at . . . oh nevermind.
I've been following HighLift for months now and I am very clear about the idea of the nanotube and I think it's great. And I totally understand and have read that a steel CABLE will not work.
But if you read what I wrote, you might notice I very specifically indicate that this would not be a CABLE. It's not that I didn't read up on this stuff. This is a novel idea as far as Slashdot posts on space elevators and because I've read every post in the archives which is obviously not true for even a tiny minority of the people posting today.
Oh well, whatever. No big deal. This story didn't get a tenth of the posts the earlier ones did. I thought I was going to be addressing people who knew better as earlier HighLift stories brought out tons of Physics PhDs. I guess they're all watching the news.
I'm pleased somebody found the post funny, but I was attempting to seriously raise a point that I'm quite curious about.
The original question was a bit mixed up. Building up and building down deserve to be treated seperately as the issue is already a source of much confusion.
Building down from orbit does seem like a cool way to go except for the obvious problem of transporting the materials. But assumuming that you were willing to commit the resources, it seems like you could easily increase the tensile stength of any material by adding flexible buffers, the simplest example being spring loaded joints. Using the analogy of a chain, if every link was spring loaded, you would be adding enormous mechanical strength to the chain. Of course you'de adding weight and complexity as well, but a spring loaded chain is quite a simplified version of something that might be practical in this application.
The point that keeps running through my mind is that you must be able to add tensile strength by design where it doesn't exist otherwise. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems there are many real world examples where this is true.
But let's skip the building down side for the moment and turn back to the tower of Babel part which is where the real fun is. Instead of asking is this possible, let me rephrase the question thuswise: What's the best possible metal tower design strengthwise.
Is it a simple octet strut or is it more complex?
I admit this is off-topic, but I've been dying for a new space elevator story so I could ask this question again. I was too late for the last one. Excuse me while I repost what I wrote belatedly after missing the last one a few weeks ago.
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I am a big fan of HighLift and the tiny nanotube thread, but I'm just not convinced that a steel tower is impossible given the right geometry. (Note, I'm not suggesting the ascii below is such a geometry, it's just to illustrate the point)
Sure, maybe a steel cable could never work, but at some scale it must be possible to build up a tower or, alternately, to build down a beam of of interconnected steel tubes.
Building down it seems we could use steel beams made of elaborate geometries like we see in some space frame construction. The members could be spring loaded to distribute stresses therby adding vast amounts of tensile strength. Just because the material itself lacks tensile strength over a given length, that doesn't mean all structures composed of that material would share that property.
A mass of steel triangles or other geometries is not not as elegant as using a single strand of nanotube composites, but it uses existing materials in plentiful supply at a good price.
At some scale a steel mesh tower must be capable of reaching into the edges of the atmosphere. They're building 500 meter buildings left front and center all over Asia. It would only be necessary to stack up a few hundred of them in an octet "truss" type formation to make a nice dent in a trip to orbit.
|X|
|X|
|X|
|X|
|X|
|X|
|X|
|X|
|X|
|X
Now this rather homely ASCII art is not meant to be a prototype, but you get the idea. Replace each leg of an X with a 500meter steel tower and you could easily imagine a ten kilometer tower. Sure, that's not even close to orbit, but it's higher than Everest. At some scale this has to make a dent in the cost of launching to orbit if you build up from the ground.
Of course coming down from space instead of builduing up you have the issue of materials transport. But I think it's got to be possible even with steel.
Okay, I ended the above post a bit too heavy handedly, what with Gates being such a charity fiend. But the thing about the Xerox consent decree is really something to think about.
That's a phrase we used to see in the headlines all the time in the 70s, but ever since the 80s it has all but disappeared from the front page because it is no longer an issue. It's no longer an issue because the government we've chosen has no interest in protecting the public domain. Relecting on PARC should be time of reflecting on this fact.
Try googling Xerox consent decree and you will discover that Xerox neither mistakenly gave away nor generosly gave up their technology --they were forced by the government. That's government as in by the people of the people for the people. Too bad we gave up on that form of government in the US.
The public domain has to be taken by force, it always has been and always will be. There is no room for charity in monoploly plans.
That last point about verb conjugation really caught my eye. I was just called in to consult for a local school that was going to buy a software essay grader.
I asked the representative of the well-known international educational agency if something similar to her very pricey product was available for free. They wanted me there to ask the tough questions after all.
She hit the roof going off on the years of research, gaggles of PhDs and zillions of dollars etc etc. She needs ten minutes to cough up all the buzzwords they had stuffed into her. The summary is this thing is so damned smart, it truly "understands" human writing.
Well fair enough. So later that night I go to her own agency's web site and find a damning internally written, though publicly available, critique of the thing that gives samples of how to give it the ol' pinball tilt effect. The gist of it was just write a few good sentences similar to the topic and then cut and paste them over and over. The more times the better.
Whoa, that's intelligent?
And don't get the wrong idea, there were plenty of other examples. This was clearly work in progress despite the stunning price tag.
I mean I don't blame them for trying to make a buck. I pretend to sell software too. But despite needing a whole Gig of RAM they aint even close.
I have no doubt AI is possible, but until we're dealing with input data as rich as the human senses in real time, it seems a bit far fetched to imagine that we can achieve it. Isn't Intel or IBM that insists that PCs will have the intelligence of bumblebees about the time we hit the useful end of the CMOS process? I've yet to see a bumblebee grade an essay.
Alright, I should have been more specific, the issue at hand is not like a national ID with the feds giving you a number for life that tracks you and holds you accountable for every little thing you do. Rather, it's about whether LOCAL, this is the key point here, utilities could be allowed to use their existing wire infrastructures to which they already own the right-of-way to offer broadband services.
In that case, then if your electricity utility kicked you for sending spam you could hook up with the water utilities. And the cable and DSL and satellite ISPs would still be there too. It's just another option. It's not less options, it's more options.
People whine that it's a potential confilct of first ammendment rights to have the government carrying their data, but here's a perfect example why the government is the best ISP one could imagine.
The fact that Sony is closing down existing profitable CRT lines now instead of later makes me a bit suspicious.
But in the mean time for those of you who want to keep your CRT as long as possible. I recommend the following:
If you wake up one day and your CRT monitor won't come to life, try soldering an ATX power switch onto the solder posts of the old monitor switch on the back of the monitor main board. I just did that to this monitor I'm typing on last week after it died following months of eratic behavior and it's good as new.
Fun tricks like that make me less concerned about whether there is price fixing or not. As long as idiots want to buy them and give me their old CRTs, I'm all for it.
Obviously I'm in the minority here, but I tend to think the more reasonable answer to the desktop space crunch is a bigger desk, not a thinner monitor. I've got a really big desk at home and I'm in the process of making a monster sized one.
I realize the bigger desk technique isn't always feasable, so those folks can send their ugly ol' seventeen, nineteen and twenty-one inch CRTs my way.
I tend to assume it's part of human nature to desire change. I assume nano would enable things to be created and destroyed faster than ever. Of course even without nano that kind of future is in the cards.
While we don't tend to think of steel as high tech anymore, there is a school of thought that suggests the impacts of steel on architecture have only begun to be felt. What we've seen so far are only primitive first steps compared to what we will inevitably end up with as we continue to create new steel for cars and appliances while simultaneously recycling existing stocks.
This steady accumulation of steel and other metals will eventually make them the first choices for architecture as they have already become in many cases. This should eventually lead to a follow on effect of making buildings and even entire cities recyclable.
And while it looks like I'm getting way off topic here, it's not as far as it seems. After all, wireless and wired infratructures are interdependent for a real global Internet and the wired infrastructure is very much about the nature of architecture.
Perhaps I've just had some mad twist of luck, but I have an el cheapo Lexmark I bought last November and I've refilled the original black cartridge ten times and the color three times without seeing any problems anywhere. That's an enormous amount of printing and the refill ink I've used so far amounts to about fifteen bucks. Is it only the expensive models that have this "feature?"
The somewhat self-assembling nature of P2P networks got me thinking about little swarms of tiny clean up robots. Instead of a hunanoid robot, it seems what would be more useful and simpler for things like household or even commercial maintenanc is a network of small robots relying on each other for various specialized functions sort of like cells in a larger organism.
It seems like you almost have to forego the android approach and go this way to get automated maintenance workers financially feasible because there will be certain parts that will tend to wear out much faster than others. It's the nature of the clean up game that many of the parts are consumeables.
While my musings on P2P were rather far from the goal, this sounds quite a bit closer. I know some fugly buildings in a town not far from here that could really use a good scrub down.