>My work is my work. You have no rights to use it.
Absolutely wrong. Physical artifacts can be owned - information can not. That's why it's called "copy right", and not "intellectual property", which is just a term made up by corporate interests trying to extend their control.
Ideas cannot be taken, only shared. When you take something, you deprive the original owner of it - and it's not possible for me to deprive you of your idea short of killing you.
If you create an idea you can either keep it secret, or share it with the world. I have no right to your idea if you do not wish to share it. But once you share it with even one other person it's no longer only your idea, you have copied it, and now they have it too. To prevent further spread you have to put artificial limits on what they do with *their* copy of the idea , and you have no natural right to restrict what they do with their things.
You've obviously never browsed the Nintendo online store - lots of ancient games back up for sale, prewrapped in crappy emulators that lack any of the impressive features of your typical 20-year-old PC-based emulator.
Let's hear it for perpetual copyrights! Hip hip...*crickets chirping*.
As a creator you work a few years to make something, you typically make 90% of the total money in the first few years, and can then milk the long tail for a tiny trickle of residual income for decades afterwards while depriving society, including other creators, of the ability to use your work.
It's that last part I have a problem with - how is that in society's best interest? Because there's nothing sacred about copyright, it's an artificial gift from society, given to encourage creators to create more things. How exactly is that goal served by continuing to let you lock up your creation for another 90 years beyond when you've already extracted most of the total money you'll ever get from it?
Disney, in addition to being one of the major architects of the current near-perpetual copyright terms, is an excellent poster child of why it's a bad deal. An incredible number of their hits are retellings of much older stories, mostly unencumbered by copyright. From Sleeping Beauty to Moana those stories are all, at their roots, other people's creations, given new life by a new interpretation in new media. Why should Disney get to strip-mine other people's creations without giving anything back?
>But I don't see any other practical applications. Two big ones spring to mind - ones that were touted even in the early days. Both are institutional rather than technical, but that's rather the point.
The first already sees widespread use:
It can be a quick, cheap, and effective way to send money overseas, especially if the banking industry in one or both countries is colluding to charge outrageous fees for international money transfers. Or if there are government regulations restricting sending or receiving such transfers, or imposing disadvantageous official exchange rates. Any idiot willing to buy bitcoin for a fair price becomes an effective end-run around such abuse of power.
The second is a bit more pie-in-the-sky (though it has seen some real-world usage in extreme situations) and depends on the speculators eventually leaving the market after the usage has become widespread enough to make it a "real" currency with a relatively stable value:
It's a currency whose value can not be effectively manipulated by governments - those entities who routinely publicly conspire to create inflation in order to promote certain economic behaviors, or just because they're broke and allowed to print money. Either way, every dollar printed steals its value from everyone who has wealth stored in dollars.
It's not explicitly in the software spec, but it's pretty much an inevitable result of the incentive structure created by that spec.
In other words, the problem isn't in the algorithm itself, it's with the humans who behave exactly how the algorithm was designed to encourage them to behave. Which is to say... it' *is* the algorithm's fault - it's just in the part that runs on humans, rather than on computers.
Not quite - nothing in the spec inherently requires the amount of processing power to increase. Instead the difficulty of adding a new ledger page scales automatically so that new pages are added at a roughly constant rate (I want to say one every 14 minutes) no matter how much computing power is applied to the task.
Where the upward spiral comes in is in the incentive structure - adding a new page of transactions essentially requires computationally expensive gambling, and the faster pages are created, the lower your odds of "winning" in any given attempt to add your page and claim the reward (transaction fees offered by users, and at least early on, a steadily decreasing "page bounty" (aka "mining"), where one of the transactions you record is "$bounty_amount new money added to my account".)
So, by using more power you increase your odds of "winning" by the simple method of "buying more tickets" in the same amount of time. But when everyone does that, the rate at which new pages are added starts to increase, and the governing algorithm automatically lowers your odds of winning to compensate.
Long story short, if everyone agreed to cut their "mining" power to 1/100th of the current amount, the algorithm would automatically adapt and transaction rates would remain unchanged. Everyone would win, except the people selling mining hardware. Unfortunately, so long as the average cost of the electricity and amortized hardware required to add a new page is lower than the total reward, there's constant incentive for everyone to steadily increase the amount of power they're using.
It's a data *set*, but a data*base* is designed to efficiently look up information based on various criteria, which bitcoin decidedly does NOT. A database is typically also easy to modify as needed - while the whole point of a blockchain is that it's *extremely* difficult to modify.
A vaguely similar comparison would be an Excel spreadsheet, or even a PDF file - lots of data, and unlike a blockchain it's (potentially) organized neatly. Still not a database though, it's just not designed for that job.
A blockchain such as used by Bitcoin is basically just a distributed log file with strict rules that make it difficult to add another page, and almost impossible to tamper with old pages since one of the rules is that every new page must contain a reference to the last page, along with its secure checksum. Any attempt to tamper with an old page pretty much requires that you replace every newer page as well. THAT is the power of blockchain - it creates an extremely tamper-resistant log file that can be distributed around the world without having to trust anyone involved.
Bitcoin builds upon that by using the log file to record cryptographically signed bitcoin transactions. "Replay" all the transactions recorded since the very first page was added, and you can calculate the current balance in any given account. There's lots of other implementation details, but that's the 1000' overview.
It's as true as imagining there's only one culture of modern Americans. Obviously false, but true enough for the sort of details that will survive a thousand years of unwritten history.
Well, you're going to be aiming at a moving target regardless, and the steeper the slow, the less the angular speed of the satellite as seen from the surface station. It's actually hardest to keep a tight focus on the satellite when it's directly above you, and gets easier the further away it gets.
You probably do want a directional signal though, both to minimize interference with other signals, and to minimize the power consumed. And it may well be that the satellites will all be aimed straight and only cover the area immediately beneath them out to an area large enough to prevent gaps as the constellation moves.
But if not -
At 1000km up the horizon is asec( (6371km+1000km)/6371km) = ~30 degrees away (as measured from Earth's center), so the satellite will have line of sight with a given spot on (flat) ground for 60 degrees of arc, or 1/6 of its total orbital period. Or alternately, it will have line-of-sight with a circle on the ground about 6700 km across, barring ground-level obstructions.
And let's see, ISS has a period of 93 minutes at an altitude of about 410km, while Kepler's Law states p^2/d^3=constant, so p2 = p1*sqrt(d2^3/d1^3) = 93*(7371/6781 )^(3/2) = 105min (hmm, thought the difference would be bigger) And so you'll have line-of-sight with any given satellite for about 18 minutes.
Not that much when you get right down to it, so a vertical transmission may well be the plan, just for ease of implementation and avoiding cross-talk. That'd mean changing satellites every minute or so though.
Is it? Where do they make any reference to the *genetics* of the original people, rather than their culture? The only things I saw any reference to was their cultural practices.
The weakness is that most people don't *really* want to watch X, they just want to watch "something like X" (genre, quality, etc), and the competitor's options are good enough. Sure, there's a few long-lived franchises with dedicated fans (Star Trek, Simpsons, sports) that might go where they need to get their fix, but it's going to be really hard to attract new fans to your network.
I mean if NBC makes a great new show I hear about, it's unlikely I'm going to pay for an NBC streaming subscription for JUST that show, and my existing streaming providers probably offer several shows that scratch a similar itch. At best I'll wait until I'm bored with the library of my current providers, and drop one of them for NBC for a while, until I get bored with them and move on to someone else.
I suspect it will prove more profitable to continue (or revert to) establishing cross-licensing agreements so that popular shows are available on many platforms. Yeah, maybe neither NBC or Netflix makes as much money from me watching one of their shows on the other's network - but there's almost always going to be a MUCH larger population of people on other networks than on the one making the show, unless most people sign up for most networks - which seems very unlikely. Better to make 30% of the money from 5x as many people - which means either cross-licensing, or charging such a low subscription fee that it's hardly worth the overhead.
Agreed. Unless you're *really* dedicated to having a massive amount of choice available (which psychologists have shown tends to actually decrease satisfaction), the biggest problem I see with only having 1-2 streaming providers is that after a while you've watched most of their content that you're interested in - but at that point you can drop them and sign up for someone else for a year or two until you've watched as much of them as you like, and the original streamer's library has some new content. Juggle several sites like that, and you've got all the interesting content you could want at your fingertips.
The big weakness of that strategy is "must see TV" - but I suspect there's FAR less of that than the producers would like to believe. Sports, if you're into that. Disney perhaps, just because they've been such a cultural touch-stone for so long. And then...? No one I can think of off-hand. Streaming has changed the way people watch TV, there's no longer community-building water-cooler talk about last nights episode of XYZ, and without that it's just entertainment. One show is as good as any other of similar genre and quality.
It's not the hop distance that's relevant to gaming and high-frequency trading though, but the full end-to-end latency So, let's see where breakeven point is:
By land, great-circle effective distance = 1.5 *angle * 6400km By 1000km altitude orbital great-circle = angle*7400km + 2*1000km
So, for any link greater than about 5600km the satellite link will effectively be shorter than for great-circle fiber.
And that's assuming the signal to-from Earth is directly vertical, it gets even better if you're transmitting diagonally - if you're sending a signal 1000km up at either end, you could as easily send it up at a 45 degree angle so it travels 1000km horizontally as well using only twice the power (or directional antenna gain), and reduce the last 2000km of each end to only 1400 km, shaving off a total of 1200km, and bringing the break-even point down to 4400km.
And of course, that's still compared to a great-circle fiber connection, which is typically only relevant if you can make a single-hop connection (and not necessarily even then). Once you have to start bouncing around to follow the network topology the actual distance traveled increases rapidly.
"in a vacuum" is implied any time other qualifiers are left out. That's the only common reference point (and the inevitable virtual particles are *part of* that vacuum). Much like all gravitational potential energy is always measured as negative in space, because the energy at infinite distance is the only common reference that makes sense to use as zero.
> a bird 1100 km up will never be faster than a fiber 30km long on the ground.
Not for 30km, but for 10's of thousands of kilometers, as is relevant to trading between international markets, yes it will. The key is that light travels about 47% faster in vacuum than in fiber-optic cables.
I'm not so sure about the disadvantage. There's plenty of microwave/radio spectrum to which clouds are transparent, and the power from thunderstorm radio noise, while broad-spectrum, is heavily concentrated at lower frequencies.
Fair enough about England - but how much truly *wild* forest did Scotland have? I honestly don't know. Not a whole lot of total land area there to begin with, and I'm reminded of a friend's description of her time in Switzerland - lots of forests, but you can't even take a shit under a tree without someone walking past.
Done. The only racial references I see are "NIMBY white people" and your response, and white people anywhere in the world are all pretty much guaranteed to have their cultural roots in Europe. While modern Americans of any non-native ancestry can go a step further and attribute a great deal of their culture specifically to Britain (and Spain, in the West and South), whose colonial influence heavily dominated the socio-political landscape of the early colonies, and continues to strongly dominate the national culture.
Both race and culture flow along family lines. To the point that pretty much everything commonly ascribed to "race" is actually cultural rather than genetic, aside from skin color and a few hair and facial features. Pretty much nothing else has any strong genetic basis.
Natives mostly didn't live in teepees until the Europeans drove them out of the lush areas onto the plains. Pretty much everything in the popular image of Natives is based on the plains Indian cultures created in response to European invasion. Teepees, warrior-culture, buffalo-hunting, etc. were all minor features in pre-European Americans.
And their stuff cost them just as much life-energy to accumulate as our stuff does today - we have all sorts of stuff because it's mostly made by machines and metal tools, which both greatly reduce the cost. They had to make all their stuff all by hand using only bone and stone tools.
>Problem is, fiber on the ground is faster as the distance is shorter. The distance is shorter, but the speed is much slower - typical fiber optic cable has a refractive index of 1.467, which means that light travels 46.7% faster through vacuum than cable.
The distance between end-points doesn't change, but the path between them does.
And going via satellite is potentially much lower than any other alternative, at least to get halfway around the world - after all, the speed of light in a straight line through vacuum is pretty much the limit, nothing else can be faster. And you can't send signals in a straight line on Earth - the Earth gets in the way. Realistically you've only got line-of-site of 80km or so - even at 10,000 feet altitude that only increases to ~200 km
At 1000km up, a satellite would have direct line-of-site with other satellites up to... 2 * asec( (6371km+1000km)/6371km) = ~60 degrees away So best case of 3 hops to get a signal half-way around the world, assuming communication lasers can be tightly enough focused to be useful at a distance of 7371km (because 60* separation = equilateral triangle with the Earth's center.)
Add in the worst-case scenario of relaying to a satellite directly overhead at both ends, and you've got a total transmission distance of 3*7371km+2*1000km = ~24,000 km with 5 total hops to get a signal halfway around the planet. 80ms of travel time
Compared to the ideal great-circle fiber-optic line on Earth, which would be 20,000km, or 67ms. Except for one tiny detail - light travels about 1.467x faster in a vacuum than through a fiber-optic cable, so really that'd take 98ms
So, light-speed delays alone could give a satellite link a ~20% transmission latency advantage over point-to-point surface fiber. And of course real fiber isn't laid point-to-point, so add even more advantage for every turn the signal has to take.
But transmission delay is only half the problem, you also add delays at every hop as the signal is processed by the router and waits in queues to be resent - getting a 200ms ping to somewhere halfway around the world would actually be quite impressive - New York to Tokyo averages about 215ms, and that's only a bit over 1/4 of the way around the world.
There's a reasonable justification for a cultural component though - by the time the US was colonized by Britain, the British no longer had any wild forests, and hadn't for a long time. The cultural knowledge of how to live within nature had long been lost, replaced with colonialism and unsustainable environmental exploitation. And really, that applies to virtually all of the early colonizers - lumber was one of the chief exports of the American colonies. U.S. cultural was from it's inception a colonially amplified version of European's bent toward domination and exploitation.
Meanwhile, the Americas lacked any significant surface metal deposits to enable a transition out of the stone age, which shaped how many other technologies developed. They also lacked any animals larger than dogs amenable to becoming domesticated beasts of burden - neither elk nor buffalo are easily broken to the plow, and both are far more dangerous than Europe's pre-domesticated horses.
So, in the Americas humans were environmentally restricted to stone tools and manual labor, which made outright domination of the environment (and their neighbors) far more difficult, and led to the development of cultural practices that focused much more heavily on understanding and working with nature rather than forcibly bending it to their will. Both in the short-term, and the long - certainly Europe had little to offer to compare to the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy (one which we based much of the U.S. Constitution) philosophy that the consequences of decisions should be considered unto the seventh generation. It's not by accident that early Europeans discovered American forests lush with fruit and nut trees - the natives had already been care-taking them for millenia.
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>My work is my work. You have no rights to use it.
Absolutely wrong. Physical artifacts can be owned - information can not. That's why it's called "copy right", and not "intellectual property", which is just a term made up by corporate interests trying to extend their control.
Ideas cannot be taken, only shared. When you take something, you deprive the original owner of it - and it's not possible for me to deprive you of your idea short of killing you.
If you create an idea you can either keep it secret, or share it with the world. I have no right to your idea if you do not wish to share it. But once you share it with even one other person it's no longer only your idea, you have copied it, and now they have it too. To prevent further spread you have to put artificial limits on what they do with *their* copy of the idea , and you have no natural right to restrict what they do with their things.
So does a text file todo list.
You've obviously never browsed the Nintendo online store - lots of ancient games back up for sale, prewrapped in crappy emulators that lack any of the impressive features of your typical 20-year-old PC-based emulator.
Let's hear it for perpetual copyrights! Hip hip...*crickets chirping*.
As a creator you work a few years to make something, you typically make 90% of the total money in the first few years, and can then milk the long tail for a tiny trickle of residual income for decades afterwards while depriving society, including other creators, of the ability to use your work.
It's that last part I have a problem with - how is that in society's best interest? Because there's nothing sacred about copyright, it's an artificial gift from society, given to encourage creators to create more things. How exactly is that goal served by continuing to let you lock up your creation for another 90 years beyond when you've already extracted most of the total money you'll ever get from it?
Disney, in addition to being one of the major architects of the current near-perpetual copyright terms, is an excellent poster child of why it's a bad deal. An incredible number of their hits are retellings of much older stories, mostly unencumbered by copyright. From Sleeping Beauty to Moana those stories are all, at their roots, other people's creations, given new life by a new interpretation in new media. Why should Disney get to strip-mine other people's creations without giving anything back?
Depends on the cryptocurrency. For most of them, before and since Bitcoin was unveiled, the answer is a surround "Not a chance!"
Very few people want to eliminate banks, most of them just want to *become* the bank. That's far more lucrative.
>But I don't see any other practical applications.
Two big ones spring to mind - ones that were touted even in the early days. Both are institutional rather than technical, but that's rather the point.
The first already sees widespread use:
It can be a quick, cheap, and effective way to send money overseas, especially if the banking industry in one or both countries is colluding to charge outrageous fees for international money transfers. Or if there are government regulations restricting sending or receiving such transfers, or imposing disadvantageous official exchange rates. Any idiot willing to buy bitcoin for a fair price becomes an effective end-run around such abuse of power.
The second is a bit more pie-in-the-sky (though it has seen some real-world usage in extreme situations) and depends on the speculators eventually leaving the market after the usage has become widespread enough to make it a "real" currency with a relatively stable value:
It's a currency whose value can not be effectively manipulated by governments - those entities who routinely publicly conspire to create inflation in order to promote certain economic behaviors, or just because they're broke and allowed to print money. Either way, every dollar printed steals its value from everyone who has wealth stored in dollars.
I should qualify that with "as used by Bitcoin and similar proof-of-work blockchains"
It's not explicitly in the software spec, but it's pretty much an inevitable result of the incentive structure created by that spec.
In other words, the problem isn't in the algorithm itself, it's with the humans who behave exactly how the algorithm was designed to encourage them to behave. Which is to say... it' *is* the algorithm's fault - it's just in the part that runs on humans, rather than on computers.
Not quite - nothing in the spec inherently requires the amount of processing power to increase. Instead the difficulty of adding a new ledger page scales automatically so that new pages are added at a roughly constant rate (I want to say one every 14 minutes) no matter how much computing power is applied to the task.
Where the upward spiral comes in is in the incentive structure - adding a new page of transactions essentially requires computationally expensive gambling, and the faster pages are created, the lower your odds of "winning" in any given attempt to add your page and claim the reward (transaction fees offered by users, and at least early on, a steadily decreasing "page bounty" (aka "mining"), where one of the transactions you record is "$bounty_amount new money added to my account".)
So, by using more power you increase your odds of "winning" by the simple method of "buying more tickets" in the same amount of time. But when everyone does that, the rate at which new pages are added starts to increase, and the governing algorithm automatically lowers your odds of winning to compensate.
Long story short, if everyone agreed to cut their "mining" power to 1/100th of the current amount, the algorithm would automatically adapt and transaction rates would remain unchanged. Everyone would win, except the people selling mining hardware. Unfortunately, so long as the average cost of the electricity and amortized hardware required to add a new page is lower than the total reward, there's constant incentive for everyone to steadily increase the amount of power they're using.
It's a data *set*, but a data*base* is designed to efficiently look up information based on various criteria, which bitcoin decidedly does NOT. A database is typically also easy to modify as needed - while the whole point of a blockchain is that it's *extremely* difficult to modify.
A vaguely similar comparison would be an Excel spreadsheet, or even a PDF file - lots of data, and unlike a blockchain it's (potentially) organized neatly. Still not a database though, it's just not designed for that job.
A blockchain such as used by Bitcoin is basically just a distributed log file with strict rules that make it difficult to add another page, and almost impossible to tamper with old pages since one of the rules is that every new page must contain a reference to the last page, along with its secure checksum. Any attempt to tamper with an old page pretty much requires that you replace every newer page as well. THAT is the power of blockchain - it creates an extremely tamper-resistant log file that can be distributed around the world without having to trust anyone involved.
Bitcoin builds upon that by using the log file to record cryptographically signed bitcoin transactions. "Replay" all the transactions recorded since the very first page was added, and you can calculate the current balance in any given account. There's lots of other implementation details, but that's the 1000' overview.
It's as true as imagining there's only one culture of modern Americans. Obviously false, but true enough for the sort of details that will survive a thousand years of unwritten history.
Well, you're going to be aiming at a moving target regardless, and the steeper the slow, the less the angular speed of the satellite as seen from the surface station. It's actually hardest to keep a tight focus on the satellite when it's directly above you, and gets easier the further away it gets.
You probably do want a directional signal though, both to minimize interference with other signals, and to minimize the power consumed. And it may well be that the satellites will all be aimed straight and only cover the area immediately beneath them out to an area large enough to prevent gaps as the constellation moves.
But if not -
At 1000km up the horizon is asec( (6371km+1000km)/6371km) = ~30 degrees away (as measured from Earth's center), so the satellite will have line of sight with a given spot on (flat) ground for 60 degrees of arc, or 1/6 of its total orbital period. Or alternately, it will have line-of-sight with a circle on the ground about 6700 km across, barring ground-level obstructions.
And let's see, ISS has a period of 93 minutes at an altitude of about 410km, while Kepler's Law states p^2/d^3=constant, so
p2 = p1*sqrt(d2^3/d1^3) = 93*(7371/6781 )^(3/2) = 105min (hmm, thought the difference would be bigger)
And so you'll have line-of-sight with any given satellite for about 18 minutes.
Not that much when you get right down to it, so a vertical transmission may well be the plan, just for ease of implementation and avoiding cross-talk. That'd mean changing satellites every minute or so though.
Is it? Where do they make any reference to the *genetics* of the original people, rather than their culture? The only things I saw any reference to was their cultural practices.
The weakness is that most people don't *really* want to watch X, they just want to watch "something like X" (genre, quality, etc), and the competitor's options are good enough. Sure, there's a few long-lived franchises with dedicated fans (Star Trek, Simpsons, sports) that might go where they need to get their fix, but it's going to be really hard to attract new fans to your network.
I mean if NBC makes a great new show I hear about, it's unlikely I'm going to pay for an NBC streaming subscription for JUST that show, and my existing streaming providers probably offer several shows that scratch a similar itch. At best I'll wait until I'm bored with the library of my current providers, and drop one of them for NBC for a while, until I get bored with them and move on to someone else.
I suspect it will prove more profitable to continue (or revert to) establishing cross-licensing agreements so that popular shows are available on many platforms. Yeah, maybe neither NBC or Netflix makes as much money from me watching one of their shows on the other's network - but there's almost always going to be a MUCH larger population of people on other networks than on the one making the show, unless most people sign up for most networks - which seems very unlikely. Better to make 30% of the money from 5x as many people - which means either cross-licensing, or charging such a low subscription fee that it's hardly worth the overhead.
Agreed. Unless you're *really* dedicated to having a massive amount of choice available (which psychologists have shown tends to actually decrease satisfaction), the biggest problem I see with only having 1-2 streaming providers is that after a while you've watched most of their content that you're interested in - but at that point you can drop them and sign up for someone else for a year or two until you've watched as much of them as you like, and the original streamer's library has some new content. Juggle several sites like that, and you've got all the interesting content you could want at your fingertips.
The big weakness of that strategy is "must see TV" - but I suspect there's FAR less of that than the producers would like to believe. Sports, if you're into that. Disney perhaps, just because they've been such a cultural touch-stone for so long. And then...? No one I can think of off-hand. Streaming has changed the way people watch TV, there's no longer community-building water-cooler talk about last nights episode of XYZ, and without that it's just entertainment. One show is as good as any other of similar genre and quality.
It's not the hop distance that's relevant to gaming and high-frequency trading though, but the full end-to-end latency
So, let's see where breakeven point is:
By land, great-circle effective distance = 1.5 *angle * 6400km
By 1000km altitude orbital great-circle = angle*7400km + 2*1000km
1.5 *angle * 6400km = angle*7400km + 2000km
angle*6400 = angle*4900 + 1300
angle*1500=1300
angle=0.87
equivalent great-circle distance = 6400*0.87 = 5,600km
So, for any link greater than about 5600km the satellite link will effectively be shorter than for great-circle fiber.
And that's assuming the signal to-from Earth is directly vertical, it gets even better if you're transmitting diagonally - if you're sending a signal 1000km up at either end, you could as easily send it up at a 45 degree angle so it travels 1000km horizontally as well using only twice the power (or directional antenna gain), and reduce the last 2000km of each end to only 1400 km, shaving off a total of 1200km, and bringing the break-even point down to 4400km.
And of course, that's still compared to a great-circle fiber connection, which is typically only relevant if you can make a single-hop connection (and not necessarily even then). Once you have to start bouncing around to follow the network topology the actual distance traveled increases rapidly.
"in a vacuum" is implied any time other qualifiers are left out. That's the only common reference point (and the inevitable virtual particles are *part of* that vacuum). Much like all gravitational potential energy is always measured as negative in space, because the energy at infinite distance is the only common reference that makes sense to use as zero.
> a bird 1100 km up will never be faster than a fiber 30km long on the ground.
Not for 30km, but for 10's of thousands of kilometers, as is relevant to trading between international markets, yes it will. The key is that light travels about 47% faster in vacuum than in fiber-optic cables.
I'm not so sure about the disadvantage. There's plenty of microwave/radio spectrum to which clouds are transparent, and the power from thunderstorm radio noise, while broad-spectrum, is heavily concentrated at lower frequencies.
Fair enough about England - but how much truly *wild* forest did Scotland have? I honestly don't know. Not a whole lot of total land area there to begin with, and I'm reminded of a friend's description of her time in Switzerland - lots of forests, but you can't even take a shit under a tree without someone walking past.
Done. The only racial references I see are "NIMBY white people" and your response, and white people anywhere in the world are all pretty much guaranteed to have their cultural roots in Europe. While modern Americans of any non-native ancestry can go a step further and attribute a great deal of their culture specifically to Britain (and Spain, in the West and South), whose colonial influence heavily dominated the socio-political landscape of the early colonies, and continues to strongly dominate the national culture.
Both race and culture flow along family lines. To the point that pretty much everything commonly ascribed to "race" is actually cultural rather than genetic, aside from skin color and a few hair and facial features. Pretty much nothing else has any strong genetic basis.
Natives mostly didn't live in teepees until the Europeans drove them out of the lush areas onto the plains. Pretty much everything in the popular image of Natives is based on the plains Indian cultures created in response to European invasion. Teepees, warrior-culture, buffalo-hunting, etc. were all minor features in pre-European Americans.
And their stuff cost them just as much life-energy to accumulate as our stuff does today - we have all sorts of stuff because it's mostly made by machines and metal tools, which both greatly reduce the cost. They had to make all their stuff all by hand using only bone and stone tools.
>Problem is, fiber on the ground is faster as the distance is shorter.
The distance is shorter, but the speed is much slower - typical fiber optic cable has a refractive index of 1.467, which means that light travels 46.7% faster through vacuum than cable.
The distance between end-points doesn't change, but the path between them does.
And going via satellite is potentially much lower than any other alternative, at least to get halfway around the world - after all, the speed of light in a straight line through vacuum is pretty much the limit, nothing else can be faster. And you can't send signals in a straight line on Earth - the Earth gets in the way. Realistically you've only got line-of-site of 80km or so - even at 10,000 feet altitude that only increases to ~200 km
At 1000km up, a satellite would have direct line-of-site with other satellites up to...
2 * asec( (6371km+1000km)/6371km) = ~60 degrees away
So best case of 3 hops to get a signal half-way around the world, assuming communication lasers can be tightly enough focused to be useful at a distance of 7371km (because 60* separation = equilateral triangle with the Earth's center.)
Add in the worst-case scenario of relaying to a satellite directly overhead at both ends, and you've got a total transmission distance of 3*7371km+2*1000km = ~24,000 km with 5 total hops to get a signal halfway around the planet. 80ms of travel time
Compared to the ideal great-circle fiber-optic line on Earth, which would be 20,000km, or 67ms. Except for one tiny detail - light travels about 1.467x faster in a vacuum than through a fiber-optic cable, so really that'd take 98ms
So, light-speed delays alone could give a satellite link a ~20% transmission latency advantage over point-to-point surface fiber. And of course real fiber isn't laid point-to-point, so add even more advantage for every turn the signal has to take.
But transmission delay is only half the problem, you also add delays at every hop as the signal is processed by the router and waits in queues to be resent - getting a 200ms ping to somewhere halfway around the world would actually be quite impressive - New York to Tokyo averages about 215ms, and that's only a bit over 1/4 of the way around the world.
There's a reasonable justification for a cultural component though - by the time the US was colonized by Britain, the British no longer had any wild forests, and hadn't for a long time. The cultural knowledge of how to live within nature had long been lost, replaced with colonialism and unsustainable environmental exploitation. And really, that applies to virtually all of the early colonizers - lumber was one of the chief exports of the American colonies. U.S. cultural was from it's inception a colonially amplified version of European's bent toward domination and exploitation.
Meanwhile, the Americas lacked any significant surface metal deposits to enable a transition out of the stone age, which shaped how many other technologies developed. They also lacked any animals larger than dogs amenable to becoming domesticated beasts of burden - neither elk nor buffalo are easily broken to the plow, and both are far more dangerous than Europe's pre-domesticated horses.
So, in the Americas humans were environmentally restricted to stone tools and manual labor, which made outright domination of the environment (and their neighbors) far more difficult, and led to the development of cultural practices that focused much more heavily on understanding and working with nature rather than forcibly bending it to their will. Both in the short-term, and the long - certainly Europe had little to offer to compare to the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy (one which we based much of the U.S. Constitution) philosophy that the consequences of decisions should be considered unto the seventh generation. It's not by accident that early Europeans discovered American forests lush with fruit and nut trees - the natives had already been care-taking them for millenia.