Was it the same radio station that helped a lady kill herself by offering a prize for drinking a bunch of water and not urinating?
I don't think that we, as a society, are doing a particularly wonderful job, but pointing out that people are allowed to act like morons isn't really a scathing rebuke.
The tax system might not be perfect, but there isn't really any way to argue that it is biased against the bottom (you can argue that it isn't biased enough against the top, but that's pretty different).
O.K., looking, I see I made a bad assumption about what symbols are.
Anyway, and again, this is from a non expert, I don't think the Shannon theorem cares about implementation details; from that, I would bet that they only way you can get your 16 bit symbols (with a low enough error rate) is to send them for a longer period of time.
Being less than 50% as convenient is something wrong (I get 16*25mpg=400mpt). And that's with today's expensive batteries, not with batteries suitable for putting in a consumer vehicle in 1995.
In addition to the recharge time, batteries aren't nearly as portable as gasoline (think running out of gas and just pouring in a gallon or two; pretty handy, how far is a 20 or 50 pound battery going to go?).
I'm not an expert (I just know that the theorem I linked exists), but I think you are going in circles. The modems operate at 64000 bits, meaning you can encode 8000 symbols of 8 bits each. If you change your symbols to encode 16 bits, you are only going to manage to transfer 4000 of them. Basically, the fundamental unit of transfer is the bit, so you can't encode your way to a faster pipe. You can encode more efficiently and decrease the amount of information you send through the pipe, but that's compression, not really a faster transfer rate.
Note that compression algorithms work by reducing the number of bits used to represent each symbol, not by increasing the number of bits represented by a symbol (viewing compressed data 8 bits at a time is essentially meaningless).
I'd pay $50 (this doesn't seem hilariously low given 5 years and a reasonable size) for a thin screen that I could set on my desk and use as an input device. I'm not sure I would use it for anything in the long run, but I would pay $50 just to try it.
Thinking about it, a programmable input screen seems like a great addition to a keyboard and mouse (for selecting options in photoshop or a game or whatever). Rough gestures for doing things like zooming in on an image also seem pretty natural (spinning a finger in a circle is a lot more natural than spinning a mouse).
You are asking for a little bit more than a faster modem, you are asking for current information theory to be discarded (perhaps you know this, perhaps you don't).
The safety of the storage isn't always the only, or the most important, consideration. Storing strong passwords in your wallet is probably better overall security than storing weak passwords in your head.
Also, it might help your ENGINEERING CHALLENGE to know that the 56kbps limit is the telco equipment, not the modem:
Lehman was at least as much symptom as it was cause. There was an enormous amount of miss-priced risk in the system, and even with a rescue, it would have all needed to be repriced to account for the fact that Lehman was in failure (a rescue is just a different type of failure...).
Something like Keepass or Password Safe provides decent middle ground; the encryption is reliable enough that someone taking the file isn't a big deal, and if you are worried about malware stealing the passwords while they are decrypted, then you shouldn't be using that password on that computer anyway.
Sure, it's a phrasing thing. The improvements to the business do end up in reduced costs for the customer, but the business isn't paying for the costs, it is eliminating them, or structuring them more efficiently.
The top 40% of taxpayers pay 85% of taxes. The other 60% of taxpayers probably receive government services over and above the 15% of taxes that they pay.
Government bailouts are the incredibly wealthy screwing over the merely well off, not the poor.
And people bought them by the millions. I suppose a person could partition their brain and pretend that Americans aren't ultimately responsible for the tax laws in the U.S.
Also, internal combustion engines are pretty efficient for what they are going to be, all the blather about how the auto companies failed to innovate is just that, blather. If you want acceleration, you need cubic inches. Cubic inches burn fuel. If you mandate hundreds of pounds of safety equipment, it will reduce efficiency.
I guess there is an argument to be made about electric vehicles, but I probably won't buy it, batteries are not there yet (despite nice increases over the last 20 years...).
Does Friedman even draw any conclusions? I read some of the book you speak of, but it didn't go anywhere and I stopped. As far as I could tell, he spent hundreds of pages bloviating about how cheap communications and cheap shipping lead to increased labor competition (well ho-ly shit, really?).
His current spiel is that the government should spend billions of dollars on people in garages, and then physics will go away (photovoltaics have reasonable conversion efficiency, the issue is that they are expensive to produce; that isn't particularly likely to be solved in a garage, as opposed to a high volume production facility; biofuels other than algae don't make energy sense, and even if it is cost competitive, algae needs to happen at nearly unimaginable scales, not in backyards). Basically, he doesn't have an answer, he is just shouting the obvious question, and it seems to be a pattern.
The goal of most (that should be all, but some people aren't very bright) businesses is to get the customer to pay for all expenses, and then some more. Based on that, the customer generally pays for everything, one way or another.
Just to head off some replies: even a business that isn't wildly focused on maximizing profits should at least try to earn a small profit (otherwise, it should organize as a non-profit for the tax advantages).
Also, burning (and packaging and mailing...) a bunch of DVDs isn't necessarily cheap/quick/easy, so it breaks down pretty quickly as the number of stores increases.
It depends on what you call a niche. "People looking for an improved Perl" is arguably a niche. I'm not trying to quibble, I see what you are saying, that the current Perl community is looking elsewhere (or entrenching on 5).
I guess I was trying to point out that the base community will probably be big enough to sustain Perl 6, so the size relative to other communities isn't something to be concerned about (which is somewhat different than being concerned that the community won't be big enough to provide X).
Just for the sake of argument, I don't think that human intellect is particularly comparable to information captured in a software program. There might be a 'yet' in there.
Actually, it doesn't matter. In a world where millions of people are providing software for hundreds of millions of other people, being a niche player is perfectly viable.
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Was it the same radio station that helped a lady kill herself by offering a prize for drinking a bunch of water and not urinating?
I don't think that we, as a society, are doing a particularly wonderful job, but pointing out that people are allowed to act like morons isn't really a scathing rebuke.
The top 1% by income (which isn't necessarily, and probably isn't, the richest 1%) still pay 25% of all taxes (and the top 10% by income pay half):
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/88xx/doc8885/EffectiveTaxRates.shtml#1011535
The tax system might not be perfect, but there isn't really any way to argue that it is biased against the bottom (you can argue that it isn't biased enough against the top, but that's pretty different).
O.K., looking, I see I made a bad assumption about what symbols are.
Anyway, and again, this is from a non expert, I don't think the Shannon theorem cares about implementation details; from that, I would bet that they only way you can get your 16 bit symbols (with a low enough error rate) is to send them for a longer period of time.
He just bobbles. Knocks 'em dead.
Being less than 50% as convenient is something wrong (I get 16*25mpg=400mpt). And that's with today's expensive batteries, not with batteries suitable for putting in a consumer vehicle in 1995.
In addition to the recharge time, batteries aren't nearly as portable as gasoline (think running out of gas and just pouring in a gallon or two; pretty handy, how far is a 20 or 50 pound battery going to go?).
I'm not an expert (I just know that the theorem I linked exists), but I think you are going in circles. The modems operate at 64000 bits, meaning you can encode 8000 symbols of 8 bits each. If you change your symbols to encode 16 bits, you are only going to manage to transfer 4000 of them. Basically, the fundamental unit of transfer is the bit, so you can't encode your way to a faster pipe. You can encode more efficiently and decrease the amount of information you send through the pipe, but that's compression, not really a faster transfer rate.
Note that compression algorithms work by reducing the number of bits used to represent each symbol, not by increasing the number of bits represented by a symbol (viewing compressed data 8 bits at a time is essentially meaningless).
I'd pay $50 (this doesn't seem hilariously low given 5 years and a reasonable size) for a thin screen that I could set on my desk and use as an input device. I'm not sure I would use it for anything in the long run, but I would pay $50 just to try it.
Thinking about it, a programmable input screen seems like a great addition to a keyboard and mouse (for selecting options in photoshop or a game or whatever). Rough gestures for doing things like zooming in on an image also seem pretty natural (spinning a finger in a circle is a lot more natural than spinning a mouse).
You are asking for a little bit more than a faster modem, you are asking for current information theory to be discarded (perhaps you know this, perhaps you don't).
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_limit )
The safety of the storage isn't always the only, or the most important, consideration. Storing strong passwords in your wallet is probably better overall security than storing weak passwords in your head.
Also, it might help your ENGINEERING CHALLENGE to know that the 56kbps limit is the telco equipment, not the modem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem#Using_digital_lines_and_PCM_.28V.90.2F92.29
(DSL works by using different equipment...)
It seems more correct to say that your computer has 780 random passwords.
Lehman was at least as much symptom as it was cause. There was an enormous amount of miss-priced risk in the system, and even with a rescue, it would have all needed to be repriced to account for the fact that Lehman was in failure (a rescue is just a different type of failure...).
Something like Keepass or Password Safe provides decent middle ground; the encryption is reliable enough that someone taking the file isn't a big deal, and if you are worried about malware stealing the passwords while they are decrypted, then you shouldn't be using that password on that computer anyway.
Sure, it's a phrasing thing. The improvements to the business do end up in reduced costs for the customer, but the business isn't paying for the costs, it is eliminating them, or structuring them more efficiently.
The top 40% of taxpayers pay 85% of taxes. The other 60% of taxpayers probably receive government services over and above the 15% of taxes that they pay.
Government bailouts are the incredibly wealthy screwing over the merely well off, not the poor.
And people bought them by the millions. I suppose a person could partition their brain and pretend that Americans aren't ultimately responsible for the tax laws in the U.S.
Also, internal combustion engines are pretty efficient for what they are going to be, all the blather about how the auto companies failed to innovate is just that, blather. If you want acceleration, you need cubic inches. Cubic inches burn fuel. If you mandate hundreds of pounds of safety equipment, it will reduce efficiency.
I guess there is an argument to be made about electric vehicles, but I probably won't buy it, batteries are not there yet (despite nice increases over the last 20 years...).
Does Friedman even draw any conclusions? I read some of the book you speak of, but it didn't go anywhere and I stopped. As far as I could tell, he spent hundreds of pages bloviating about how cheap communications and cheap shipping lead to increased labor competition (well ho-ly shit, really?).
His current spiel is that the government should spend billions of dollars on people in garages, and then physics will go away (photovoltaics have reasonable conversion efficiency, the issue is that they are expensive to produce; that isn't particularly likely to be solved in a garage, as opposed to a high volume production facility; biofuels other than algae don't make energy sense, and even if it is cost competitive, algae needs to happen at nearly unimaginable scales, not in backyards). Basically, he doesn't have an answer, he is just shouting the obvious question, and it seems to be a pattern.
The goal of most (that should be all, but some people aren't very bright) businesses is to get the customer to pay for all expenses, and then some more. Based on that, the customer generally pays for everything, one way or another.
Just to head off some replies: even a business that isn't wildly focused on maximizing profits should at least try to earn a small profit (otherwise, it should organize as a non-profit for the tax advantages).
How manageable is the risk on Everest?
The different death rates for climbers and sherpas at least suggests that a lot of climbers don't get it right.
You should try a magic plant, to keep the angrys away.
Also, burning (and packaging and mailing...) a bunch of DVDs isn't necessarily cheap/quick/easy, so it breaks down pretty quickly as the number of stores increases.
It depends on what you call a niche. "People looking for an improved Perl" is arguably a niche. I'm not trying to quibble, I see what you are saying, that the current Perl community is looking elsewhere (or entrenching on 5).
I guess I was trying to point out that the base community will probably be big enough to sustain Perl 6, so the size relative to other communities isn't something to be concerned about (which is somewhat different than being concerned that the community won't be big enough to provide X).
I was mostly making a joke.
Just for the sake of argument, I don't think that human intellect is particularly comparable to information captured in a software program. There might be a 'yet' in there.
Actually, it doesn't matter. In a world where millions of people are providing software for hundreds of millions of other people, being a niche player is perfectly viable.
Oh yeah, coal and horse shit are an environmental wonderland just waiting to happen.
If you start using buildings that are designed by computers, they will really be designed by programmers.
Which is terrifying.