Gold hasn't been the basis for our money in many, many, decades. And while there's some merit in having some common "thing" for currencies to be pegged to, gold has always seemed especially stupid. The US forced itself to do so from the 1950s until the early seventies, creating a situation where every country that was having financial problems could devalue its currency except the US itself, causing relatively substantial problems for the US itself.
(Why? Bizarrely, national pride. The 1950s-1970s version of the Gold Standard came because the major economies wanted a single currency to peg their currencies against. What they wanted was an independent currency called the "Bancor". The US vetoed this, as it felt it would diminish the importance of the dollar, and demanded they peg their currencies to the dollar instead, and in return would make sure the dollar was pegged to gold. More evidence, perhaps, that national pride can be a destructive, stupid, thing.)
Does it matter? The dollar is accepted for payment of taxes, ergo every adult American, even a paranoid goldbug, is going to accept dollars as payment, however reluctantly.
Why should the UK be given more weight? There's only one such country, not 19 such countries
Read it again. The UK was growing at an average of 2.4% per year for twenty years. New Zealand's economy shrank 7.6% in one year only. Not only is the UK's figure relevant to a longer period of time, but actually it's more likely to be a figure related to the high debt level the authors of the study were concerned about, rather than a blip that could have been caused by an unrelated bubble.
At the very least, you should be comparing growth of (1.024^20 * 100 - 100) = ~60% to -7.6%, rather than 2.4% to -7.6%.
Interesting, it's almost as if you've just jumped right into the middle of a conversation, taken a few words you see following one another, added an entirely different, barely related, context around them, and then decided to attack me and Netflix - on the apparent assumption that we both agree with one another AND we agree with those words used in their new context - on that basis.
OK, this is a reply to everyone who responded to me with a comment along the lines of "No, what you've said has been conclusively debunked. In my case, I want to keep my subscription anyway."
1. Drawing a conclusion by extrapolating your own requirements to those of "All Netflix customers" isn't a "Debunking". Otherwise the iPad is a stunning failure because I would never in a million years buy a shitty locked down oversized keyboardless computer.
2. Even it is true that the majority of Netflix customers would continue to subscribe for twelve months a year, rather than one month in every six, if DRM went away, what of it? Is the majority all? Is the majority even 99%? If 10% of Netflix customers pay one quarter of what you do, and suck 10x as much bandwidth, as they download considerably more than what you'd normally do over a few months simply so that they have copies of stuff on the off-chance they might want to watch it, isn't that going to cause a problem?
3. Most importantly: You've failed to put yourself in the position of a decision maker at Netflix, a company that sells unlimited access to a library on the understanding that the library ceases to be available when the user stops subscribing.
Now, that decision maker is going to be concerned about protecting the business model. And you might argue that DRM is (mostly, but none of you really come up with an argument that says "entirely") unnecessary to do that, but it certainly helps, and has a justification. So that decision maker is going to be pro-DRM. That's how it works.
While I believe Netflix wants DRM to protect their model, I don't think Nina Paley's experience means one thing or another.
Ms Paley was asking that her movie be streamed without DRM, which would mean it would be processed in a completely different way to Netflix's current catalog. I don't think Netflix is unreasonable in requiring everything be streamed the same way - I wouldn't be at all surprised if, in order to implement this, Netflix would have to update and release new versions of all of their Android/iOS/Wii clients, in addition to making changes to their Silverlight client.
And the reason for the request for putting up the message being denied is explained in her own post - Netflix has a strict "No bumpers" policy.
Netflix probably wants DRM too, FWIW. Remember their model is based upon people getting unlimited access to their library but paying by the month. If it were easy for their customers to simply download and save all the movies they're interested in over the space of a month, and then unsubscribe for a few months until the next time they see movies they're interested in, then the entire model would break down - less revenues received, and more money spent on bandwidth per month.
I'm wondering, actually, if the long term solution is in things like Cinavia, which, in theory, implements enough of the "checking the license in hardware" that the system (or one evolved from it) could conceivably be built into PCs and tablets without preventing the transportation and decoding part of the process being open source.
Of course, that wouldn't work today, it'd require the majority of monitors and tablets support the system to the point people find it difficult to get a device that doesn't have this built in, so it's not really going to work for Netflix today.
Google doesn't actually have much infrastructure out there and it's been able to cherry pick where to start building out (ie expect a high rate of return from the beginning.)
I'm not saying Google can't undercut AT&T in the long term, but it's going to take a very long time, and the figures will start looking worse if Google tries to build out into the suburbs.
Why would an overseas manufacturer cooperate with an FCC investigation that would hamper their ability to obtain new customers for their products?
A disgruntled employee of the company with the jammers (or maybe even a customer who doesn't want to be bothered by submitting his or her name and is fed up of constant call drops) seems way more likely.
Which ETF are you referring to? ETFs are a specific type of financial instrument that can only be obtained by the banks that sell them in exchange for the physical items they represent. What you're suggesting would have real consequences, as in people going to prison if it's true - even in Obamalookforwardworld. It's an extremely serious allegation.
You can transfer gold ETFs pretty easily. It's only a logistical problem if you think trading with gold means having to be physically holding it at the time of the transaction.
Which is not to say I encourage any of that. Like the GP says, the last 200 years of economics has taught us that a currency based on posession of a rare physical item is not actually that useful.
Fractional reserve banking is not "creating money out of air", contrary to paranoid-scaremongering-you-must-buy-my-book-to-survive-the-coming-financial-meltdown myth.
The reason banks can use FRB is because debt has a value. If a bank lends someone a million dollars, it isn't "out" a million dollars, because that debt is accompanied by, at the very least, a promise to pay that debt, and frequently physical collateral too. Want proof? The loan instrument itself is actually sellable - by the bank. The bank can go to third parties, and sell, for more than a million dollars (assuming the debt is to a good risk, and the amount to be repaid exceeds the million dollars loaned), the entire debt. Happens with mortgages all the time, and only becomes a problem if the bank misrepresents the riskiness of the debt (which is in large part what happened in 2008.)
Now, on the lowest level, FRB is simply a process whereby a bank can have only a fraction of the currency needed to represent its assets (because most of its assets are loans, etc.) How much currency the bank needs is simply the amount of actual cash people may need. If their reserve is too low, then they run an increased risk of having problems during a bank run, but by and large they're OK.
So... to get back to the original question. Yes, it's reasonable to suggest FRB might possibly be a way to get around Bitcoin's problem with scarcity. You would, however, have to encourage a large portion of the Bitcoin community, who by and large are the kind of people who think FRB is a terrible threat to the economy, to deposit their money in banks, and do a significant amount of transactions in the form of bank transfers (checks, credit card payments, etc) rather than by "physically" extracting their bitcoins from a bank and re-assigning their bitcoins to a third party.
I'm not convinced, not because it doesn't work in theory, but because the entire reason Bitcoins have "value" right now is because people see the current monetary system as too confusing and complicated, and see fraud behind pretty much every confusing concept. FRB is one of the concepts that's most controversial, it's exactly the kind of thing that gets people to buy books like "Fed out of control! 10 tips to use Bitcoins to avoid the coming financial holocaust!" So why would Bitcoin users start making heavy use of conventional banks?
I think the point that people are trying to get through to you is that you're wrong. Yes, you spent quite a bit of time to explain it, but no, you're wrong. Bitcoins are not backed by computing power. They hold no value of any type, intrinisic or otherwise, simply because they took a lot of power to make.
They are scarce because they take a lot of power to make, yes, that much is true. As such you can kinda sorta maybe say "OK, I'm going to create my own currency based upon this principle", but importantly you have to get buy in from other users based simply upon the notion that they want to trade this currency and nothing else. Buy a bitcoin and you are aware from the beginning that the only trade value it has is based upon the fact others - with as much influence as you - want to trade it.
Dollars? I know even if nobody else wanted to trade with me, I can pay my taxes with them (which means that others want to trade with me.) Gold? It can be melted down to make jewelry or Monster cables, at worst, and those are useful things people would buy.
There's just no comparison with Bitcoins. They're tulips for the modern economy, valuable only as long as people see them as valuable as a currency.
I don't think he's having rich people problems, it's just he's concerned that a (currently new) technology, once matured, could be used - even in a well meaning way - to track and compromise the privacy of ordinary people just going about their ordinary business, by third parties who feel they need the information to do their jobs. For example, a drone might be operated by a company that sells advertising, tracking things like what stores you go to and who your friends are, so that it can deliver advertising more appropriate to your interests.
I'm pretty sure that's what Schmidt is concerned about, anyway.
I wonder what happens to 'liberals' once they have to rationalise that away? I mean they don't like monopolies supposedly, but they surely don't mind that type of a monopoly, where they want gov't protection of their special union status and they want special obligations to be placed upon employers to force employers to deal with them (and sometimes exclusively with them).
As you're not a liberal, you probably have no idea what kind of contortions, redefinitions, and bizarre assumptions you're making in order to write the above statement.
Ironically, it could be argued that many of these games do, actually, teach the concept of working to save things so you can buy them... until the kid "cheats" by actually spending their parent's money on "Gold coins" or "Lifestyle Points" or whatever it is that the abstracted difficult-to-raise currency is.
I'm wondering if we will get a giant step forward in the next 50 years regarding leisure time. It's not unprecedented - we've gone (in jumps that took place over a few decades each) from "Almost always working" to the Industrial Revolution's 12 hour work day/6 day work week regime to the present day's 8 hours a day/5 days a week/10-30 days off per year (at least in the West.)
It's certainly not impossible to envisage us switching to a four day week at some point. Indeed, if I were setting up a major new company, I'd seriously consider that right from the get-go given the number of times I've walked through offices (of three different companies) and seen most of the staff lounging on Facebook or just having social chats with their co-workers (yet still able to be productive enough to get all their work done and justify their salary.)
Flying cars? Hmm. The concept is based more on the fact that making things fly was once considered a massive landmark in humanity's technological evolution, than on a practical need. It might, ironically, actually be worthwhile doing now in a way it wasn't previously, given that it may well be more fuel efficient per passenger than road based transport (think "line of sight vs zig zag routes"), as well as reducing or eliminating the need to build new roads, maintain most existing roads, etc.
Cheap flying vehicles aren't unknown, and many have few licensing issues - Microlights, for example, represent superb accessability for the air, being cheap (prices comparable to motorcycles), license free, and fuel efficient, but we haven't had a Jobsian "Let's eliminate the remaining few kinks associated with this and package this as a consumer product" push on concept yet.
What we do have today, that we didn't ever envisage and probably should have done, is a world wide distribution network for pornography. And if that isn't better than a flying car, well, I then what is?;-)
Honestly, I didn't feel after the Stevenote like I knew what the iPad was for any more than I felt I knew what Google Glasses was for after watching the video they produced. In fact, in many ways they're similar: devices that duplicate the functionality of an existing object (a laptop/netbook vs a smartphone) using a radically different user interface.
And just as I felt "Yeah, but the iPad's going to feel like crap the moment someone actually tries to do any serious writing or whatever on it", I felt "Yeah, Google Glasses is going to be a hell of a lot less interesting when it's being used in a cubicle at work for seven and a half hours a day, rather than when I skydive out of a plane and quickly take a picture and share it with seven friends using Google+"
The iPad comparison does seem apt. It appears, at any rate, to be a crappy way of doing the things it's advertised as being for compared to the existing tools for the job, but it may be slick enough, and its UI friendly enough, that it doesn't matter what it appears to be.
Good link. Most news reports have simply used "Internet cafes" as shorthand, and I was worried that the bill really was drafted widely enough to cover ordinary Internet cafes (Starbucks with terminals) type businesses. It does appear, however, that the law is focused on gambling, and a genuine Internet cafe - one where you buy time, and only time, to use a computer to connect to the net - will not be impacted by this law.
I don't think there are that many actual Internet Cafes (as opposed to "Internet Cafes") left, but this doesn't look like it's going to outlaw them.
Bitcoin does have an intrinsic value: the computing time it takes to mine a bitcoin.
That doesn't give it value, that merely contributes towards setting an upper limit. If it costs $1 (in terms of energy and human time) to mine a bitcoin, then a bitcoin's range can be anything from $0 to a little over $1. $0, of course, would normally be described as "lacking intrinsic value".
It can't be much more than $1 in that instance, because legions of Bitcoin miners can jump in and undercut such a price.
At the same time, it can easily be $0. Used toilet paper takes a certain amount of time and money to make, with a long supply chain starting with a tree being cut down and ending with the paper being covered in poo floating around in a toilet bowl waiting to be flushed. The fact it cost so much to make does not mean it has any value. Used toilet paper has no intrinsic value.
Now, you're saying a dollar doesn't have intrinsic value. Actually, by your criterion, it obviously does: it costs a little bit of money to print each dollar. It's not a lot, especially when many are "printed" by moving a decimal point on the Fed's balance sheet, but there's certainly a process that costs money involved in producing those extra dollar bills.
Moreover though, it doesn't matter. The organizations responsible for producing dollars have a monopoly on their production, they're not going to undercut each other if the price of a dollar becomes higher than the cost of collecting and recycling pieces of rag, bleaching them, and printing on them, and you don't get to set yourself up as a printer.
They have actual value because those monopolies won't increase the money supply unless the dollar is "overvalued" in some way (that is, people prefer to hang on to them rather than spend them.) They also have actual value because you can avoid going to prison by using them in certain ways. For example, Americans and other entities that engage in trade within the US can avoid going to prison for non-payment of taxes by giving the US government the legal assessment of taxes.
This doesn't mean that Bitcoins can't be traded, that they don't have perceived value, or anything like that. A quick look at eBay shows you can trade almost anything. But their cost of production is only one factor in their perceived value - they can become worthless overnight. They have no guaranteed intrinsic value. You cannot realistically hold on to one and say "This will always be worth enough for me to buy a beer or loaf of bread". It cost money to make, but so does used toilet paper.
Just because you created it to be free of regulation doesn't mean it can't and will be regulated. All you're doing, really, is (indirectly) raising the question: if the government starts being serious about regulating Bitcoins, could it cause the final collapse of the currency?
More than 90% of the population lives in areas served by wireline effectively-unmetered high speed broadband. As a commercial decision, making a games console that requires an always on Internet connection is 100% reasonable. You may "lose" approximately 10% of potential users, but the gains from a well designed console that makes effective use of the system are considerable and more than likely to overcome that fractional reduction in potential user base.
You may not like it yourself. You may be one of the loudmouths who thinks that the entire country should subsidize your ridiculously expensive choice of lifestyle, requiring the building out of infrastructure over large, unpopulated, areas, having people who live efficiently pay higher rates for virtually everything to cater for you.
But too bad. It's not about you. It's about what's commercially viable. There's no good reason to continue to have a games console require the use of fragile plastic discs in an environment in which more than 90% of the population has access to something better - something cheaper to support, more flexible for end users, and more convenient.
I hope Microsoft does this, I hope actually (though they won't) that they get rid of optical drives altogether, and quite honestly, I hope they actually make a point of justifying it by making it clear it is not their job to cater for people who want the benefits of living in the middle of nowhere, but none of the downsides.
And once they do that, I hope our politicians follow suit, repealing current zoning laws, increasing taxes for those living in low density areas, and ending the practice of making utilities charge the same prices for all customers, regardless of the burden they represent.
We could always count on WebKit being the universal web rendering engine across iOS and Android
...but only in a way that didn't matter. Not only have there always been minor differences in the ways iOS and Android Browser render things, but even on Android itself, the Android Browser app doesn't work in exactly the same way as the Android version of Chrome. Web site designers still have to test their work on both systems, and you can always tell that someone with a Mac has made the assumption you did when you browse to a mobile website and find that it's all messed up and unnavigatable on Android.
The funny thing is it wouldn't matter if the combination of mobile and HTML5 wasn't so cutting edge. Everyone's desperate to try out the new technologies just to produce something that sings on a mobile platform, and so the obscure and different is what developers focus on, resulting in, for example, one recent version of the Washington Post mobile site (since fixed) interpretting all "Touch events" on a page listing blog entries as being for the first blog entry, on Android Chrome. I'm guessing it worked great on iOS.
In particular on "fast" it is the opposite, it is slow because of the complexities of buffering and buffers being copied
I'm not entirely sure why you would waste a few minutes explaining why X.org is slow when it isn't, you know, slow.
Perhaps you can also tell us how a tea spoon of table salt will kill you instantly because it's half chlorine, or how most passengers of Delta Airlines are dead because they flew at 30,000 feet, and everyone knows that you don't survive a fall from that height.
The simple truth of the matter is that X.org is fast. It's awesome. Windows, running on equivalent hardware, tends to run exactly the same software with the same or less responsiveness. Games? I'm still blown away by being able to run GTA-IV on this crappy mobile chipset as fast under Ubuntu (with the overheads of Wine, including its DirectX to OpenGL translator) as it is under Windows.
Perhaps your efforts might be better devoted to asking the question "If it's as fucked up as I think it is, how come it's so damned fast?"
Slashdot Mirror
Gold hasn't been the basis for our money in many, many, decades. And while there's some merit in having some common "thing" for currencies to be pegged to, gold has always seemed especially stupid. The US forced itself to do so from the 1950s until the early seventies, creating a situation where every country that was having financial problems could devalue its currency except the US itself, causing relatively substantial problems for the US itself.
(Why? Bizarrely, national pride. The 1950s-1970s version of the Gold Standard came because the major economies wanted a single currency to peg their currencies against. What they wanted was an independent currency called the "Bancor". The US vetoed this, as it felt it would diminish the importance of the dollar, and demanded they peg their currencies to the dollar instead, and in return would make sure the dollar was pegged to gold. More evidence, perhaps, that national pride can be a destructive, stupid, thing.)
Does it matter? The dollar is accepted for payment of taxes, ergo every adult American, even a paranoid goldbug, is going to accept dollars as payment, however reluctantly.
Read it again. The UK was growing at an average of 2.4% per year for twenty years. New Zealand's economy shrank 7.6% in one year only. Not only is the UK's figure relevant to a longer period of time, but actually it's more likely to be a figure related to the high debt level the authors of the study were concerned about, rather than a blip that could have been caused by an unrelated bubble.
At the very least, you should be comparing growth of (1.024^20 * 100 - 100) = ~60% to -7.6%, rather than 2.4% to -7.6%.
Interesting, it's almost as if you've just jumped right into the middle of a conversation, taken a few words you see following one another, added an entirely different, barely related, context around them, and then decided to attack me and Netflix - on the apparent assumption that we both agree with one another AND we agree with those words used in their new context - on that basis.
OK, this is a reply to everyone who responded to me with a comment along the lines of "No, what you've said has been conclusively debunked. In my case, I want to keep my subscription anyway."
1. Drawing a conclusion by extrapolating your own requirements to those of "All Netflix customers" isn't a "Debunking". Otherwise the iPad is a stunning failure because I would never in a million years buy a shitty locked down oversized keyboardless computer.
2. Even it is true that the majority of Netflix customers would continue to subscribe for twelve months a year, rather than one month in every six, if DRM went away, what of it? Is the majority all? Is the majority even 99%? If 10% of Netflix customers pay one quarter of what you do, and suck 10x as much bandwidth, as they download considerably more than what you'd normally do over a few months simply so that they have copies of stuff on the off-chance they might want to watch it, isn't that going to cause a problem?
3. Most importantly: You've failed to put yourself in the position of a decision maker at Netflix, a company that sells unlimited access to a library on the understanding that the library ceases to be available when the user stops subscribing.
Now, that decision maker is going to be concerned about protecting the business model. And you might argue that DRM is (mostly, but none of you really come up with an argument that says "entirely") unnecessary to do that, but it certainly helps, and has a justification. So that decision maker is going to be pro-DRM. That's how it works.
While I believe Netflix wants DRM to protect their model, I don't think Nina Paley's experience means one thing or another.
Ms Paley was asking that her movie be streamed without DRM, which would mean it would be processed in a completely different way to Netflix's current catalog. I don't think Netflix is unreasonable in requiring everything be streamed the same way - I wouldn't be at all surprised if, in order to implement this, Netflix would have to update and release new versions of all of their Android/iOS/Wii clients, in addition to making changes to their Silverlight client.
And the reason for the request for putting up the message being denied is explained in her own post - Netflix has a strict "No bumpers" policy.
Netflix probably wants DRM too, FWIW. Remember their model is based upon people getting unlimited access to their library but paying by the month. If it were easy for their customers to simply download and save all the movies they're interested in over the space of a month, and then unsubscribe for a few months until the next time they see movies they're interested in, then the entire model would break down - less revenues received, and more money spent on bandwidth per month.
I'm wondering, actually, if the long term solution is in things like Cinavia, which, in theory, implements enough of the "checking the license in hardware" that the system (or one evolved from it) could conceivably be built into PCs and tablets without preventing the transportation and decoding part of the process being open source.
Of course, that wouldn't work today, it'd require the majority of monitors and tablets support the system to the point people find it difficult to get a device that doesn't have this built in, so it's not really going to work for Netflix today.
Google doesn't actually have much infrastructure out there and it's been able to cherry pick where to start building out (ie expect a high rate of return from the beginning.)
I'm not saying Google can't undercut AT&T in the long term, but it's going to take a very long time, and the figures will start looking worse if Google tries to build out into the suburbs.
Why would an overseas manufacturer cooperate with an FCC investigation that would hamper their ability to obtain new customers for their products?
A disgruntled employee of the company with the jammers (or maybe even a customer who doesn't want to be bothered by submitting his or her name and is fed up of constant call drops) seems way more likely.
Well, that's just a matter of education. I expect my daughter to be an expert in Jackson Structured Programming by the time she's seven.
Wait, he died?
Which ETF are you referring to? ETFs are a specific type of financial instrument that can only be obtained by the banks that sell them in exchange for the physical items they represent. What you're suggesting would have real consequences, as in people going to prison if it's true - even in Obamalookforwardworld. It's an extremely serious allegation.
You can transfer gold ETFs pretty easily. It's only a logistical problem if you think trading with gold means having to be physically holding it at the time of the transaction.
Which is not to say I encourage any of that. Like the GP says, the last 200 years of economics has taught us that a currency based on posession of a rare physical item is not actually that useful.
Fractional reserve banking is not "creating money out of air", contrary to paranoid-scaremongering-you-must-buy-my-book-to-survive-the-coming-financial-meltdown myth.
The reason banks can use FRB is because debt has a value. If a bank lends someone a million dollars, it isn't "out" a million dollars, because that debt is accompanied by, at the very least, a promise to pay that debt, and frequently physical collateral too. Want proof? The loan instrument itself is actually sellable - by the bank. The bank can go to third parties, and sell, for more than a million dollars (assuming the debt is to a good risk, and the amount to be repaid exceeds the million dollars loaned), the entire debt. Happens with mortgages all the time, and only becomes a problem if the bank misrepresents the riskiness of the debt (which is in large part what happened in 2008.)
Now, on the lowest level, FRB is simply a process whereby a bank can have only a fraction of the currency needed to represent its assets (because most of its assets are loans, etc.) How much currency the bank needs is simply the amount of actual cash people may need. If their reserve is too low, then they run an increased risk of having problems during a bank run, but by and large they're OK.
So... to get back to the original question. Yes, it's reasonable to suggest FRB might possibly be a way to get around Bitcoin's problem with scarcity. You would, however, have to encourage a large portion of the Bitcoin community, who by and large are the kind of people who think FRB is a terrible threat to the economy, to deposit their money in banks, and do a significant amount of transactions in the form of bank transfers (checks, credit card payments, etc) rather than by "physically" extracting their bitcoins from a bank and re-assigning their bitcoins to a third party.
I'm not convinced, not because it doesn't work in theory, but because the entire reason Bitcoins have "value" right now is because people see the current monetary system as too confusing and complicated, and see fraud behind pretty much every confusing concept. FRB is one of the concepts that's most controversial, it's exactly the kind of thing that gets people to buy books like "Fed out of control! 10 tips to use Bitcoins to avoid the coming financial holocaust!" So why would Bitcoin users start making heavy use of conventional banks?
I think the point that people are trying to get through to you is that you're wrong. Yes, you spent quite a bit of time to explain it, but no, you're wrong. Bitcoins are not backed by computing power. They hold no value of any type, intrinisic or otherwise, simply because they took a lot of power to make.
They are scarce because they take a lot of power to make, yes, that much is true. As such you can kinda sorta maybe say "OK, I'm going to create my own currency based upon this principle", but importantly you have to get buy in from other users based simply upon the notion that they want to trade this currency and nothing else. Buy a bitcoin and you are aware from the beginning that the only trade value it has is based upon the fact others - with as much influence as you - want to trade it.
Dollars? I know even if nobody else wanted to trade with me, I can pay my taxes with them (which means that others want to trade with me.) Gold? It can be melted down to make jewelry or Monster cables, at worst, and those are useful things people would buy.
There's just no comparison with Bitcoins. They're tulips for the modern economy, valuable only as long as people see them as valuable as a currency.
I don't think he's having rich people problems, it's just he's concerned that a (currently new) technology, once matured, could be used - even in a well meaning way - to track and compromise the privacy of ordinary people just going about their ordinary business, by third parties who feel they need the information to do their jobs. For example, a drone might be operated by a company that sells advertising, tracking things like what stores you go to and who your friends are, so that it can deliver advertising more appropriate to your interests.
I'm pretty sure that's what Schmidt is concerned about, anyway.
As you're not a liberal, you probably have no idea what kind of contortions, redefinitions, and bizarre assumptions you're making in order to write the above statement.
Ironically, it could be argued that many of these games do, actually, teach the concept of working to save things so you can buy them... until the kid "cheats" by actually spending their parent's money on "Gold coins" or "Lifestyle Points" or whatever it is that the abstracted difficult-to-raise currency is.
I'm wondering if we will get a giant step forward in the next 50 years regarding leisure time. It's not unprecedented - we've gone (in jumps that took place over a few decades each) from "Almost always working" to the Industrial Revolution's 12 hour work day/6 day work week regime to the present day's 8 hours a day/5 days a week/10-30 days off per year (at least in the West.)
It's certainly not impossible to envisage us switching to a four day week at some point. Indeed, if I were setting up a major new company, I'd seriously consider that right from the get-go given the number of times I've walked through offices (of three different companies) and seen most of the staff lounging on Facebook or just having social chats with their co-workers (yet still able to be productive enough to get all their work done and justify their salary.)
Flying cars? Hmm. The concept is based more on the fact that making things fly was once considered a massive landmark in humanity's technological evolution, than on a practical need. It might, ironically, actually be worthwhile doing now in a way it wasn't previously, given that it may well be more fuel efficient per passenger than road based transport (think "line of sight vs zig zag routes"), as well as reducing or eliminating the need to build new roads, maintain most existing roads, etc.
Cheap flying vehicles aren't unknown, and many have few licensing issues - Microlights, for example, represent superb accessability for the air, being cheap (prices comparable to motorcycles), license free, and fuel efficient, but we haven't had a Jobsian "Let's eliminate the remaining few kinks associated with this and package this as a consumer product" push on concept yet.
What we do have today, that we didn't ever envisage and probably should have done, is a world wide distribution network for pornography. And if that isn't better than a flying car, well, I then what is? ;-)
Honestly, I didn't feel after the Stevenote like I knew what the iPad was for any more than I felt I knew what Google Glasses was for after watching the video they produced. In fact, in many ways they're similar: devices that duplicate the functionality of an existing object (a laptop/netbook vs a smartphone) using a radically different user interface.
And just as I felt "Yeah, but the iPad's going to feel like crap the moment someone actually tries to do any serious writing or whatever on it", I felt "Yeah, Google Glasses is going to be a hell of a lot less interesting when it's being used in a cubicle at work for seven and a half hours a day, rather than when I skydive out of a plane and quickly take a picture and share it with seven friends using Google+"
The iPad comparison does seem apt. It appears, at any rate, to be a crappy way of doing the things it's advertised as being for compared to the existing tools for the job, but it may be slick enough, and its UI friendly enough, that it doesn't matter what it appears to be.
Good link. Most news reports have simply used "Internet cafes" as shorthand, and I was worried that the bill really was drafted widely enough to cover ordinary Internet cafes (Starbucks with terminals) type businesses. It does appear, however, that the law is focused on gambling, and a genuine Internet cafe - one where you buy time, and only time, to use a computer to connect to the net - will not be impacted by this law.
I don't think there are that many actual Internet Cafes (as opposed to "Internet Cafes") left, but this doesn't look like it's going to outlaw them.
That doesn't give it value, that merely contributes towards setting an upper limit. If it costs $1 (in terms of energy and human time) to mine a bitcoin, then a bitcoin's range can be anything from $0 to a little over $1. $0, of course, would normally be described as "lacking intrinsic value".
It can't be much more than $1 in that instance, because legions of Bitcoin miners can jump in and undercut such a price.
At the same time, it can easily be $0. Used toilet paper takes a certain amount of time and money to make, with a long supply chain starting with a tree being cut down and ending with the paper being covered in poo floating around in a toilet bowl waiting to be flushed. The fact it cost so much to make does not mean it has any value. Used toilet paper has no intrinsic value.
Now, you're saying a dollar doesn't have intrinsic value. Actually, by your criterion, it obviously does: it costs a little bit of money to print each dollar. It's not a lot, especially when many are "printed" by moving a decimal point on the Fed's balance sheet, but there's certainly a process that costs money involved in producing those extra dollar bills.
Moreover though, it doesn't matter. The organizations responsible for producing dollars have a monopoly on their production, they're not going to undercut each other if the price of a dollar becomes higher than the cost of collecting and recycling pieces of rag, bleaching them, and printing on them, and you don't get to set yourself up as a printer.
They have actual value because those monopolies won't increase the money supply unless the dollar is "overvalued" in some way (that is, people prefer to hang on to them rather than spend them.) They also have actual value because you can avoid going to prison by using them in certain ways. For example, Americans and other entities that engage in trade within the US can avoid going to prison for non-payment of taxes by giving the US government the legal assessment of taxes.
This doesn't mean that Bitcoins can't be traded, that they don't have perceived value, or anything like that. A quick look at eBay shows you can trade almost anything. But their cost of production is only one factor in their perceived value - they can become worthless overnight. They have no guaranteed intrinsic value. You cannot realistically hold on to one and say "This will always be worth enough for me to buy a beer or loaf of bread". It cost money to make, but so does used toilet paper.
Just because you created it to be free of regulation doesn't mean it can't and will be regulated. All you're doing, really, is (indirectly) raising the question: if the government starts being serious about regulating Bitcoins, could it cause the final collapse of the currency?
What a complete load of crap. Seriously.
More than 90% of the population lives in areas served by wireline effectively-unmetered high speed broadband. As a commercial decision, making a games console that requires an always on Internet connection is 100% reasonable. You may "lose" approximately 10% of potential users, but the gains from a well designed console that makes effective use of the system are considerable and more than likely to overcome that fractional reduction in potential user base.
You may not like it yourself. You may be one of the loudmouths who thinks that the entire country should subsidize your ridiculously expensive choice of lifestyle, requiring the building out of infrastructure over large, unpopulated, areas, having people who live efficiently pay higher rates for virtually everything to cater for you.
But too bad. It's not about you. It's about what's commercially viable. There's no good reason to continue to have a games console require the use of fragile plastic discs in an environment in which more than 90% of the population has access to something better - something cheaper to support, more flexible for end users, and more convenient.
I hope Microsoft does this, I hope actually (though they won't) that they get rid of optical drives altogether, and quite honestly, I hope they actually make a point of justifying it by making it clear it is not their job to cater for people who want the benefits of living in the middle of nowhere, but none of the downsides.
And once they do that, I hope our politicians follow suit, repealing current zoning laws, increasing taxes for those living in low density areas, and ending the practice of making utilities charge the same prices for all customers, regardless of the burden they represent.
The funny thing is it wouldn't matter if the combination of mobile and HTML5 wasn't so cutting edge. Everyone's desperate to try out the new technologies just to produce something that sings on a mobile platform, and so the obscure and different is what developers focus on, resulting in, for example, one recent version of the Washington Post mobile site (since fixed) interpretting all "Touch events" on a page listing blog entries as being for the first blog entry, on Android Chrome. I'm guessing it worked great on iOS.
I'm not entirely sure why you would waste a few minutes explaining why X.org is slow when it isn't, you know, slow.
Perhaps you can also tell us how a tea spoon of table salt will kill you instantly because it's half chlorine, or how most passengers of Delta Airlines are dead because they flew at 30,000 feet, and everyone knows that you don't survive a fall from that height.
The simple truth of the matter is that X.org is fast. It's awesome. Windows, running on equivalent hardware, tends to run exactly the same software with the same or less responsiveness. Games? I'm still blown away by being able to run GTA-IV on this crappy mobile chipset as fast under Ubuntu (with the overheads of Wine, including its DirectX to OpenGL translator) as it is under Windows.
Perhaps your efforts might be better devoted to asking the question "If it's as fucked up as I think it is, how come it's so damned fast?"