I'm actually speaking from experience. I live in NYC and last year during Sandy we ran into many of the problems you describe. Business and Individuals in areas that still had power were setting out extension cords and power strips for people to recharge their phones. Mobile generators can be used for the same purpose (and growing up in Texas it was my experience that most people in isolated rural areas either already have a portable generator or know someone close by that does).
The NYC solution is fine for dense urban areas, the Texas solution is fine for sparse rural areas. But the US consists of much more than huge metropolis's and spare rural areas. Neither solution works too well for suburban areas (where there often won't be a block with power for a considerable distance) or semi-rural and low density areas (where can often have apartment complexes where you can't have a generator). (I live in area which faces both problems.) With the except of sparse rural areas, the POTS has proven itself to be a fairly robust system. Any potential successor has a high bar to match, and relying on the kindness of random strangers or for 'everyone' to have a generator fails to meet that bar.
All the last one did was piss away billions of dollars without returning much of anything. And no, before the fanbois bring it up, it didn't produce anything much in the way of spin-off technologies despite what decades of NASA propoganda would have you believe. (NASA piggybacked on the DoD right down the line - and weather and commsats would have happened without Mercury/Gemini/Apollo.) If you want to expand into space, pretty much the last thing you want is another sterile reality program.
True, but disasters that physically destroy the system's infrastructure and/or significant amounts of local structures are (on the scale of a given nation) very rare events, and highly localized even then (unless the nation is fairly small or the event unusually large). They're the very edge of edge cases.
Much more common are events the leave a given location or large portions of a region without power for hours to days - and in those cases, your cell is useless when the battery dies. (I'm covered, I have a generator. Not everyone does, or even lives where the can have one.) In my area, those events are actually quite common, occurring during winter storms about two years out of any given five. In every single event, the POTS has remained functional throughout.
POTS may be an old technology, but it's had many years and many opportunities to refine it's design and increase it's robustness... Cell phones and systems aren't nearly so reliable. (One of the reasons I still have my POTS even though I own a cell is that I'm in something of a coverage gap due to local geography.)
POTS, or 'Plain Old Telephone Service,' is the analog standard that allows the use of simple unpowered phone devices on the wire, with the phone company supplying ring and talk voltage [emphasis mine]. I cannot fault progress, in fact I'm part of the problem: I gave up my dial tone a couple years ago because I needed cell and could not afford to keep both. But what concerns me is, are we poised to dismantle systems that are capable of standing alone to keep communities and regions 'in-touch' with each other, in favor of systems that rely on centralized (and distant) points of failure?
We'd be replacing one highly centralized system with a different one. Hardly a problem in itself.
[Parent's emphasis retained]
If the current POTS were highly centralized - you'd have a point. But it isn't, it's widely distributed. The ring-and-talk voltage for my analog POTS phone comes from a phone center just a few miles away. Folks at the south end of the county have their own center, as do the folks at the north end of the county, etc... etc... (If an accident or disaster severs our links to the outside world, our local system continues to operate just fine.) Will this be true of an IP based network?
And that's the real key as to whether or not an IP based system is sufficient replacement for the POTS - will it provide equivalent support (I.E. will it continue to work even if I lose power to my house as the current system does), and will it fail (at the system level) as gracefully? While I doubt the POTS is entirely bulletproof, short of damage that physically destroys the system (which are rare event indeed, even on the national scale) it's robust as hell. After all, they've had over a century to refine the design.
You're missing something pretty critical with that analysis. In every for-profit business with viable competition, the path to maximum profits tends to be lowering costs. Unfortunately, outside of major cities, you will rarely find more than one hospital within a short enough distance to handle emergencies. In every for-profit business with few (if any) competitors, the path to maximum profits tends to be buying the competition and raising costs, lowering them only enough to bankrupt any new competitors that dare to enter the market.
Right - that's where in places that there is competition, costs are lowered... except they aren't. You haven't a clue as to what you're talking about.
Elective or cosmetic surgery isn't necessarily a natural monopoly:
True, but the examples you give aren't examples of "natural monopolies" either. They're so far from being examples, one suspects that you've no clue as to what the words mean.
The US healthcare system is mired in being a for-profit operation controlled by large multi-nationals and insurance companies.
They have no interest whatsoever in providing good health care, they care about maximizing corporate profits.
Except... there's not a shred of evidence this is true. Doubly so since in every other for-profit business, the path to maximum profits seems to universally be to ower costs to the consumer in order to attract a larger market share - while the medical sector's model seems to be to increase costs and drive away customers. The problems with your claim are further highlighted by what's been happening in the fields of cosmetic and elective surgeries and eye care surgery, which show the expected competition, reduced costs, and rapid innovation cycles. (Heck, they're even offering financing now.)
We need somebody famous and who isn't an intellectual and doesn't have any credentials but with no pretensions (someone like a Letterman or a Foxworthy) to speak out in a voice that will be heard and tell everyone the obvious: the emperor is butt nekkid. Because they're popular celebrities every one will take their opinions as truth.
There, fixed that for you. And what's the latest on the Kardashians?
Might as well give them something that's easier for you to support, isn't what their friends and much of the rest of the family use, limits their software choices, and makes them further dependent on you.
There, fixed that for you.
I don't know about your family or that of the OP... but mine would not be grateful for such a 'gift'. It's like giving them clothes that fit me, in my favorite colors, or CD's of all my favorite music - with complete disregard for their tastes.
They are rapidly approaching the end of their hype.
*Yawn* Slashdot has been predicting the imminent end of Facebook since about thirty seconds after it first became available to the general public - almost ten years on, and it still hasn't happened. If/when Facebook crashes Slashdot will crow about how they've been 'right all along', conveniently forgetting that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
We tried to organize a resistance to this; You seem to have already forgotten Occupy Wall Street.
ROTFLMAO. Seriously? You think the ludicrous play acting 'protest' of the Occupy movement was resistance? Child, you have no fucking idea what you're talking about. The Occupy movement was no more resistance than I'm Captain Kirk. The Occupy movement was a fucking joke, it's been forgotten because it was nothing to remember.
So let me be very, very clear on this point: The majority are fed up. We've tried rebelling. But when we see every attempt to organize for social change squashed and people jailed and stripped of their assets... it tends to have a chilling effect on future protest.
Let me be very clear on two points: First, you haven't tried rebelling. You've stood around on street corners and in parks vaguely hoping that slogans and Facebook image memes would somehow magically create change. Second, you haven't organized for social change either.
Police today come at protesters sideways... for every tear gas canister lobbed into a crowd, there's fifty more people having their door busted in on bogus drug warrants, or police sent to find something, anything, to detain those involved.
You make me wish my retirement funds were invested in tinfoil stocks. You've created a 'rebellion' from whole cloth, and invented a vast conspiracy to put down your little Facebook game as if it were some 'threat'.
Office space in Cupertino leases at about $35/sq. ft./year so for the proposed upfront cost they could lease 500 square feet for each employee for twenty years and not have to pay for the structural maintenance, landscaping etc.
True. But the lowered cost of leasing comes with the increased costs of having employees scattered all over hell and back.
It takes a genius to find the pearls among that crap, and Monty Python were without doubt just such geniuses. But even so, what they brought back still required a fair bit of sifting.
To be fair, that's because a good deal of what they brought back was cultural or topical or both... things which don't bear much repetition, don't export well, and generally age very badly.
Space is vast, and the ability of dissidents and frontiersmen to charge out into it and carve life from cold balls of rock gives hope to all those who despair of the cause of freedom here on Earth.
It's nobodies fault but their own that the "dissidents and frontiersmen" live in a world so totally disconnected from reality. And seriously, if it's choice between providing a foundation for proper exploration and expansion and feeding the childish fantasies of the "dissidents and frontiersmen"... well, it's no choice really. Screw them. It's past time the grew up.
The problem is that lunar dust isn't like earth dust. Earth dust consists largely of organic materials (which are relatively soft) and well worn non-organic materials (which are relatively rounded). Lunar dust is something entirely - it's all non-organic and it's very little worn, meaning it's abrasive as hell. This means that if there's any relative movement or wiping, it simply abrades ordinary dust seals away. (Very quickly in fact - the Apollo astronauts suits were badly damaged after only a few hours of exposure.) Keeping lunar dust out is like keeping sand out, which is a much harder task.
A number of obvious approaches occur - for example - cut a small plug of shell with a plug cutter.
Plugs are pretty much useless. A clam's shell is essentially a cross-section of a tree - it's growth 'rings' starting at the center (the hinge) and running out to the rim. All a plug gets you is a sample of a small number of the rings.
"Musk said it will be about five years before the company builds its pickup however, giving it time to focus on another hurdle: breaking into the pickup market. Texas is where trucks rule, and Texas, as we know, is the Bermuda Triangle for Tesla."
The latter portion of this statement seems to be an editorial comment by the submitter - not a statement by Musk. That being said, the submitter doesn't seem to have bothered to Google - Texas is the single largest consumer of pickup trucks, but sales there only account for sixteen percent of total US sales. Seems to me that you could build quite a sizable and profitable pickup truck business without ever selling one in Texas.
Light trucks are also dying in part because stow-n-go seating is now so common in mini-vans. When you can fold away the rear seat and load in a dozen bags of compost, or fold down both seats and get a sheet of plywood in... while still having a vehicle that can haul the family around, a puppy truck becomes a lot less attractive. (Note that sales of light trucks have been dropping for more than a decade - there's more to it than recent changes to CAFE.)
The Liedenfrost Effect only really causes problems when you have to remove a great deal of heat very rapidly without pumps - I.E. inside a boiler. Inside a PC, it's very unlikely to be a problem. The same goes for cavitation, it's only a problem when there's a large number of bubbles forming and collapsing very rapidly or if there is a high pressure differential. Inside a PC, these conditions are unlikely to obtain and are thus unlikely to be a problem. (Not to mention, current PC's have constant vibration due to fans, hard drives, CD/DVD players, etc... and don't seem to suffer from any problems.)
Slashdot Mirror
The NYC solution is fine for dense urban areas, the Texas solution is fine for sparse rural areas. But the US consists of much more than huge metropolis's and spare rural areas. Neither solution works too well for suburban areas (where there often won't be a block with power for a considerable distance) or semi-rural and low density areas (where can often have apartment complexes where you can't have a generator). (I live in area which faces both problems.) With the except of sparse rural areas, the POTS has proven itself to be a fairly robust system. Any potential successor has a high bar to match, and relying on the kindness of random strangers or for 'everyone' to have a generator fails to meet that bar.
For $DIETY's sake why ?
All the last one did was piss away billions of dollars without returning much of anything. And no, before the fanbois bring it up, it didn't produce anything much in the way of spin-off technologies despite what decades of NASA propoganda would have you believe. (NASA piggybacked on the DoD right down the line - and weather and commsats would have happened without Mercury/Gemini/Apollo.) If you want to expand into space, pretty much the last thing you want is another sterile reality program.
True, but disasters that physically destroy the system's infrastructure and/or significant amounts of local structures are (on the scale of a given nation) very rare events, and highly localized even then (unless the nation is fairly small or the event unusually large). They're the very edge of edge cases.
Much more common are events the leave a given location or large portions of a region without power for hours to days - and in those cases, your cell is useless when the battery dies. (I'm covered, I have a generator. Not everyone does, or even lives where the can have one.) In my area, those events are actually quite common, occurring during winter storms about two years out of any given five. In every single event, the POTS has remained functional throughout.
POTS may be an old technology, but it's had many years and many opportunities to refine it's design and increase it's robustness... Cell phones and systems aren't nearly so reliable. (One of the reasons I still have my POTS even though I own a cell is that I'm in something of a coverage gap due to local geography.)
[Parent's emphasis retained]
If the current POTS were highly centralized - you'd have a point. But it isn't, it's widely distributed. The ring-and-talk voltage for my analog POTS phone comes from a phone center just a few miles away. Folks at the south end of the county have their own center, as do the folks at the north end of the county, etc... etc... (If an accident or disaster severs our links to the outside world, our local system continues to operate just fine.) Will this be true of an IP based network?
And that's the real key as to whether or not an IP based system is sufficient replacement for the POTS - will it provide equivalent support (I.E. will it continue to work even if I lose power to my house as the current system does), and will it fail (at the system level) as gracefully? While I doubt the POTS is entirely bulletproof, short of damage that physically destroys the system (which are rare event indeed, even on the national scale) it's robust as hell. After all, they've had over a century to refine the design.
Right - that's where in places that there is competition, costs are lowered... except they aren't. You haven't a clue as to what you're talking about.
True, but the examples you give aren't examples of "natural monopolies" either. They're so far from being examples, one suspects that you've no clue as to what the words mean.
Except... there's not a shred of evidence this is true. Doubly so since in every other for-profit business, the path to maximum profits seems to universally be to ower costs to the consumer in order to attract a larger market share - while the medical sector's model seems to be to increase costs and drive away customers. The problems with your claim are further highlighted by what's been happening in the fields of cosmetic and elective surgeries and eye care surgery, which show the expected competition, reduced costs, and rapid innovation cycles. (Heck, they're even offering financing now.)
There, fixed that for you. And what's the latest on the Kardashians?
There, fixed that for you.
I don't know about your family or that of the OP... but mine would not be grateful for such a 'gift'. It's like giving them clothes that fit me, in my favorite colors, or CD's of all my favorite music - with complete disregard for their tastes.
*Yawn* Slashdot has been predicting the imminent end of Facebook since about thirty seconds after it first became available to the general public - almost ten years on, and it still hasn't happened. If/when Facebook crashes Slashdot will crow about how they've been 'right all along', conveniently forgetting that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
I know a fellow who has been researching UFO's, Bigfoot, and Astrology since the 1960's - all things just as fanciful as space based solar power.
The painting is in the public domain - a recently taken photograph is not. The two are not the same thing.
ROTFLMAO. Seriously? You think the ludicrous play acting 'protest' of the Occupy movement was resistance? Child, you have no fucking idea what you're talking about. The Occupy movement was no more resistance than I'm Captain Kirk. The Occupy movement was a fucking joke, it's been forgotten because it was nothing to remember.
Let me be very clear on two points: First, you haven't tried rebelling. You've stood around on street corners and in parks vaguely hoping that slogans and Facebook image memes would somehow magically create change. Second, you haven't organized for social change either.
You make me wish my retirement funds were invested in tinfoil stocks. You've created a 'rebellion' from whole cloth, and invented a vast conspiracy to put down your little Facebook game as if it were some 'threat'.
True. But the lowered cost of leasing comes with the increased costs of having employees scattered all over hell and back.
To be fair, that's because a good deal of what they brought back was cultural or topical or both... things which don't bear much repetition, don't export well, and generally age very badly.
It's nobodies fault but their own that the "dissidents and frontiersmen" live in a world so totally disconnected from reality. And seriously, if it's choice between providing a foundation for proper exploration and expansion and feeding the childish fantasies of the "dissidents and frontiersmen"... well, it's no choice really. Screw them. It's past time the grew up.
The problem is that lunar dust isn't like earth dust. Earth dust consists largely of organic materials (which are relatively soft) and well worn non-organic materials (which are relatively rounded). Lunar dust is something entirely - it's all non-organic and it's very little worn, meaning it's abrasive as hell. This means that if there's any relative movement or wiping, it simply abrades ordinary dust seals away. (Very quickly in fact - the Apollo astronauts suits were badly damaged after only a few hours of exposure.) Keeping lunar dust out is like keeping sand out, which is a much harder task.
Bullshit. Reduced premiums mean their coverage is more attractive than the other guys, which attracts more customers.
(Of course you don't care what other people say, that means you have to face facts.)
Which would be.... pretty much pointless because you wouldn't learn anything useful.
Plugs are pretty much useless. A clam's shell is essentially a cross-section of a tree - it's growth 'rings' starting at the center (the hinge) and running out to the rim. All a plug gets you is a sample of a small number of the rings.
Not on this planet.
On this planet, falling sales aren't recent - they go back over a decade.
"Musk said it will be about five years before the company builds its pickup however, giving it time to focus on another hurdle: breaking into the pickup market. Texas is where trucks rule, and Texas, as we know, is the Bermuda Triangle for Tesla."
The latter portion of this statement seems to be an editorial comment by the submitter - not a statement by Musk. That being said, the submitter doesn't seem to have bothered to Google - Texas is the single largest consumer of pickup trucks, but sales there only account for sixteen percent of total US sales. Seems to me that you could build quite a sizable and profitable pickup truck business without ever selling one in Texas.
Light trucks are also dying in part because stow-n-go seating is now so common in mini-vans. When you can fold away the rear seat and load in a dozen bags of compost, or fold down both seats and get a sheet of plywood in... while still having a vehicle that can haul the family around, a puppy truck becomes a lot less attractive. (Note that sales of light trucks have been dropping for more than a decade - there's more to it than recent changes to CAFE.)
You do realize that physical proximity != internet proximity?
The Liedenfrost Effect only really causes problems when you have to remove a great deal of heat very rapidly without pumps - I.E. inside a boiler. Inside a PC, it's very unlikely to be a problem. The same goes for cavitation, it's only a problem when there's a large number of bubbles forming and collapsing very rapidly or if there is a high pressure differential. Inside a PC, these conditions are unlikely to obtain and are thus unlikely to be a problem. (Not to mention, current PC's have constant vibration due to fans, hard drives, CD/DVD players, etc... and don't seem to suffer from any problems.)