Telecom *services* are not a natural monopoly. Telecom *wires* are a natural monopoly. What we need to do is separate the service providers from the wire provider.
you can leverage the costs by having *more* than one regulation.
Read my post again and you'll realize that I already accounted for that. I gave a figure of $100,000 for implementing this TV regulation, but that assumes a testing lab exists, testing personnel are already there, and customs people are already checking all TV shipments. Otherwise the cost would easily be in the tens of millions (to build a lab, hire testers and administrators and customs inspectors).
You seem not to understand the scale of the problem. It's ultimately irrelevant whether the cost per regulation is $1 trillion or $100,000. Either way, the sheer number of regulations you would need to make to cover *every* part of the economy with equivalent effectiveness to an overall energy tax would bankrupt any government.
taxing per usage, not per consumption is also a common thing
The examples you gave split markets into three or four huge pieces at most. This proposed TV regulation is quite different: it targets a tiny section of a small piece of the economy. My point is that to cover the entire economy with regulations of this tiny scale would be both paralyzing to the economy and prohibitively expensive for government, and furthermore, would actually be *less* effective than a simple tax. Then you say:
nobody is talking about millions of regulations
... well then you're not talking about actually solving global warming. Instead you're talking about unfairly targeting tiny sections of the economy for burdensome regulations while everyone else gets a free pass to use energy as inefficiently as they like and global warming continues unabated.
What you're talking about a lobbyist's dream scenario! You'll see companies jumping all over each other to support regulations designed to save small amounts of energy while coincidentally driving their competitors out of business. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this legislation has received support from companies invested in LCD production and the opposition is funded by plasma manufacturers.
Technically all existing image CAPTCHA systems I know of fail the "CA" (completely automated) part; that is, they require humans to first classify a set of input images, and then only those images can be used in the test. What's needed is a way for computers to generate new images for the test on the fly.
Luckily modern video cards are designed for exactly this. Why not have a database of labeled 3D models instead of labeled images. For the test, present an image of the model rendered from an arbitrary perspective, with an arbitrary color scheme, on a colorful background. The test image can be completely different every time, even with a small number of 3D models. To break this CAPTCHA would require solving hard computer vision problems for which no out-of-the-box software exists.
I think that in this case max wattage regulation is good enough and it has not your stated problems: it is simple and cheap to enforce.
Sure, one regulation taken by itself never seems too burdensome. You'll need to run a certification program, probably with a testing lab to verify power consumption claims. You'll need people to run the tests. Maybe you already have a lab and qualified people, so you only need to pay wages. You'll need enforcement at customs to prevent imports of non-certified TVs. Maybe it'll cost $100,000 per year (a very conservative estimate). It's a drop in the bucket compared to the government's budget, right?
But this one regulation isn't going to solve global warming alone. Televisions are a tiny percentage of overall energy consumption. To solve global warming with this approach would require millions of regulations; regulations for every industry which uses energy, which is all of them. You're going to end up spending $trillions on a gigantic bureauocracy. Furthermore, you're going to need an army of experts to constantly keep these regulations up-to-date with the latest technology in each industry, or you risk stifling innovation with outdated regulation. There will also be no end of loopholes to deal with. This regulatory approach is fundamentally flawed; it's just not scalable.
I don't know how it works on the USA but in EU oil already has different taxes depending on type of usage at least on three groups
Yes, I believe US farms pay a different rate for oil also. What's your point? You're not going to solve global warming by dividing the world into three (or four, or a hundred) oil price groups. You need to evaluate every use of oil, of which there are millions, and rank them all in importance. The job is far bigger than any government; the only way to do it is with market forces. Increase the price and people will decide for themselves what's important and what they can live without.
Imagine regulations deciding how long people's showers could be, or how long they could use their hair dryer, or the temperature they could set their thermostats to. An energy tax could easily affect all of these things through routine market forces; individually regulating them is absurd. This is why I say separately regulating each type of energy use would be totalinarianism; I really mean every kind of energy use. Millions of regulations, one for each way you use energy throughout your day. If you really wanted to achieve through regulation what an energy tax would do, this is the kind of absurd regulation you would need.
It'd be far less environmentally to send those plants from a warmer climate to the colder climates than it would to just maintain them where they are
If it's true that it takes less energy to heat the greenhouse than ship the plants, then you have no problem at all! An energy tax would cause the price of shipping to go up more than the cost of heating, and thus your prices would stay lower than your competitors (who *must* ship their plants from their native habitats). Isn't it great how economics works?
So you consider a Watt used on a hospital diagnostic scanner should be taxed just the same as a Watt used on a 50" TV for the superbowl?
Yes. Not because I hate hospitals and love TVs, but because when you start extending that logic to other industries it quickly becomes unsustainable.
The amount of government bureaucracy required to separately evaluate and regulate every type of energy use would border on totalitarianism, and furthermore would be far less efficient than a simple tax on energy sources like oil, which instead of costing money would actually increase government revenue, which could then be used to subsidize hospitals, fund conservation efforts, etc.
You are wrong that there is no alternative. If the heating energy prices are truly prohibitive, you could locate your greenhouse in a more suitable climate and ship the plants. If regulations prevent that then the problem is with the regulations, not the energy tax.
Guess what? Reducing energy use hurts the economy. Glad you figured it out. However, you've missed the point. We're not choosing between "tax" and "no tax"; we're choosing between "energy tax" and "government regulation of specific industries like TV manufacturing". Both are harmful to the economy; the point is, an energy tax would be *less* harmful and far more effective than intrusive, micromanaging government regulation.
If the goal is to use less energy overall, the correct policy to implement would be a tax on energy. It's quite likely there are ways to decrease overall energy use that would be much more effective and efficient than changing what type of TVs we buy. A tax on energy would cause the market to start searching for those better ways to save energy. The largest energy consumers would be the hardest hit by the tax and the first to start conserving, which is exactly the right way to save the most energy with the least cost to society.
Politicians meddling with the business of TV manufacturers (about which they know very little) is about the least efficient way I can think of to actually conserve energy. Constructing a bureaocracy to regulate TVs wastes money unlike an energy tax which would actually increase government revenue (which could then fund conservation efforts). Targeting TVs instead of the largest energy consumers severely limits the amount of energy that could possibly be saved; an energy tax can be scaled up or down to reduce energy usage by almost any amount desired.
I guess what I mean is, picking a rotating frame doesn't make sense. Physics in rotating frames is different than physics in inertial frames because you have to add extra, complicated terms whose only purpose is to compensate for the rotation. Nobody does physics in rotating frames unless they're forced to.
I suppose since there's no theory of how a time machine would work, you could say that perhaps the physics of a time machine somehow natively works in rotating frames, and it wouldn't be less plausible than having a time machine in the first place. Trying to make a coherent argument about the physics of a time machine is like trying to construct a castle on a cloud.
if we set, say, London as our reference frame, there's no motion at all.
Not strictly true. London is rotating at the rate of slightly more than 1 revolution per day (see "Sidereal time" for why it's slightly more). Unlike translational motion, rotation is *not* relative. Rotating frames are not inertial.
Yes, I would be quite happy indeed if 59314 was fixed. However, the reason it's 8 years old and not fixed is the problem runs deeper than the UI chrome; it extends into the platform. An alert can happen anywhere in a website's code, and the stack can be filled with all manner of strange calls in and out of Mozilla's guts. Pausing the entire application until the alert is dismissed is easy, but if you tried to suspend one page and continue running others, all the half-finished calls waiting on the stack would cause problems.
I guess it would be fairly trivial to make alert() non-blocking since it doesn't require user input, but there are other dialogs that do require user input and to fix the exploitability of dialogs you have to fix them all. The real fix is either to make Mozilla's DOM completely thread safe and run pages on different threads, or go to a process separation model like Chrome and IE8.
Yet another reason to ban pop-ups. IMHO Javascript should not be allowed to create, close, move, resize, or in any other way affect OS-level windows, period. That includes modal dialogs like alert popups and that "do you really want to leave this page" dialog.
I can't think of any console that offered a processor upgrade off the top of my head (the Jaguar maybe?).
In the 16-bit era some game cartridges included extra processors which were more powerful than the CPU in the actual console, for example Star Fox for SNES and Virtua Racing for Genesis. Also, the 32X was essentially a processor upgrade for the Genesis, but it failed in the marketplace.
Well, when you have a user base in the dozens, and operating the UI is the user's entire job, it doesn't have to be intuitive or even easy. It's cheaper to teach a few dozen guys how to use a bad UI than it is to design and program a really good UI.
Honestly, the UI in the video didn't seem too bad though (from a 10-second impression). Sure it was ugly but it seemed to have useful features for the operator; did you notice when the guy dragged the line of scrimmage past the first down marker it automatically reset the first down marker to +10 yards?
I hear this argument all the time. The problem with this argument is that as soon as a DRM scheme is broken, software is written to make breaking it as easy as clicking a single button. A DRM scheme is either broken or not broken; there's no middle ground where it's merely "difficult".
Furthermore, I'd argue that what makes locks effective is not the difficulty in opening them per se; most locks are actually not difficult to open. Heck in many cases all you need to do is break a window which could hardly be called difficult. What makes locks effective is that they are socially unacceptable to bypass. If someone sees you picking a lock or breaking a window they'll call the police. It's the social consequences of getting caught that really prevent people from doing it, or even spending the minimal time it takes to learn how. With DRM, there's nobody watching you except the computer; there are no social consequences for breaking it.
there's more that one route to get to wherever you're going
Not at the beginning and end of your journey. In the middle you can choose between different long-haul options, but in the "last mile" of the network (roads or pipes or wires) it just doesn't make sense to have multiple competing providers. For wires and pipes it's possible though inefficient, but for roads it's just plain impossible to have multiple networks serving every location. How would the market solve the "last mile" problem?
Do you really believe roads are not a natural monopoly? I consider myself quite libertarian, but I do believe that certain infrastructure like roads, sewer, water, and wires (power and telecom) are natural monopolies. I do agree that the term is overused, however, and you have to be *extremely* careful about how you define the monopolies. For example telecom *services* are *not* a natural monopoly; today the service providers own the wires and it's a huge problem that shouldn't be obscured by calling telecom a "natural monopoly". Only the wires are a natural monopoly. It's easy to see this by analogy to roads and transportation services: the Department of Transportation has a natural monopoly on roads but the Postal Service should not and does not have a monopoly on transportation services, and as a result we have an abundance of competition in FedEx, UPS, etc resulting in reasonable prices.
BTW, I definitely wouldn't agree with the AC below who claimed Microsoft is a natural monopoly. Microsoft is a monopoly created by copyright, which is itself a monopoly explicitly granted by the government and not "natural" at all.
Actually Facebook's valuation is nominally $15 billion (according to Microsoft's investment) so all they need to do is win 15 more of these lawsuits and it'll be almost justified:-)
I'm sorry, what is your point? Nothing prevents you from patenting an algorithm *before* using it to win the prize. In fact, according to the section you quoted, you could even wait and file for the patent a year *after* winning the prize and publishing the algorithm.
Actually Netflix closes nothing off. In fact, in order to receive the prize, the winner must publish their algorithm to the public. The winner could easily open-source the entire thing, or OTOH they're also free to patent it out the wazoo and start pimping it out. The only condition Netflix imposes is that Netflix gets a non-exclusive license to use the algorithm in exchange for the prize money, which is eminently reasonable.
Do you have a reference as to how non-competes are not enforcable in Austin, TX? A cursory Google search seems to suggest that non-competes are, in fact, enforcable in Texas.
The new part is now Google can index PDFs that have no text, only embedded images, via OCR. These are pretty common as a way of posting scanned multi-page documents online; for example many older academic papers are posted this way. Google Scholar should become more useful due to this.
Right. And similarly, Javascript can't read data directly from your GPS or WiFi card. It can only get the position data that you explicitly pick to send to the site. It's completely analagous.
The wifi thing is a red herring. The real use of this is when it is paired with a GPS unit for real-time updates. Imagine turn-by-turn directions with voice prompts in Google Maps. Or a web app that can run on your GPS-equipped phone and track your workout runs. Or a location-aware social network that automatically knows which friends are near you right now, without requiring a client app installation. It's just breaking down more barriers between native apps and web apps.
Slashdot Mirror
Telecom *services* are not a natural monopoly. Telecom *wires* are a natural monopoly. What we need to do is separate the service providers from the wire provider.
Read my post again and you'll realize that I already accounted for that. I gave a figure of $100,000 for implementing this TV regulation, but that assumes a testing lab exists, testing personnel are already there, and customs people are already checking all TV shipments. Otherwise the cost would easily be in the tens of millions (to build a lab, hire testers and administrators and customs inspectors).
You seem not to understand the scale of the problem. It's ultimately irrelevant whether the cost per regulation is $1 trillion or $100,000. Either way, the sheer number of regulations you would need to make to cover *every* part of the economy with equivalent effectiveness to an overall energy tax would bankrupt any government.
The examples you gave split markets into three or four huge pieces at most. This proposed TV regulation is quite different: it targets a tiny section of a small piece of the economy. My point is that to cover the entire economy with regulations of this tiny scale would be both paralyzing to the economy and prohibitively expensive for government, and furthermore, would actually be *less* effective than a simple tax. Then you say:
... well then you're not talking about actually solving global warming. Instead you're talking about unfairly targeting tiny sections of the economy for burdensome regulations while everyone else gets a free pass to use energy as inefficiently as they like and global warming continues unabated.
What you're talking about a lobbyist's dream scenario! You'll see companies jumping all over each other to support regulations designed to save small amounts of energy while coincidentally driving their competitors out of business. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this legislation has received support from companies invested in LCD production and the opposition is funded by plasma manufacturers.
Technically all existing image CAPTCHA systems I know of fail the "CA" (completely automated) part; that is, they require humans to first classify a set of input images, and then only those images can be used in the test. What's needed is a way for computers to generate new images for the test on the fly.
Luckily modern video cards are designed for exactly this. Why not have a database of labeled 3D models instead of labeled images. For the test, present an image of the model rendered from an arbitrary perspective, with an arbitrary color scheme, on a colorful background. The test image can be completely different every time, even with a small number of 3D models. To break this CAPTCHA would require solving hard computer vision problems for which no out-of-the-box software exists.
Sure, one regulation taken by itself never seems too burdensome. You'll need to run a certification program, probably with a testing lab to verify power consumption claims. You'll need people to run the tests. Maybe you already have a lab and qualified people, so you only need to pay wages. You'll need enforcement at customs to prevent imports of non-certified TVs. Maybe it'll cost $100,000 per year (a very conservative estimate). It's a drop in the bucket compared to the government's budget, right?
But this one regulation isn't going to solve global warming alone. Televisions are a tiny percentage of overall energy consumption. To solve global warming with this approach would require millions of regulations; regulations for every industry which uses energy, which is all of them. You're going to end up spending $trillions on a gigantic bureauocracy. Furthermore, you're going to need an army of experts to constantly keep these regulations up-to-date with the latest technology in each industry, or you risk stifling innovation with outdated regulation. There will also be no end of loopholes to deal with. This regulatory approach is fundamentally flawed; it's just not scalable.
Yes, I believe US farms pay a different rate for oil also. What's your point? You're not going to solve global warming by dividing the world into three (or four, or a hundred) oil price groups. You need to evaluate every use of oil, of which there are millions, and rank them all in importance. The job is far bigger than any government; the only way to do it is with market forces. Increase the price and people will decide for themselves what's important and what they can live without.
Imagine regulations deciding how long people's showers could be, or how long they could use their hair dryer, or the temperature they could set their thermostats to. An energy tax could easily affect all of these things through routine market forces; individually regulating them is absurd. This is why I say separately regulating each type of energy use would be totalinarianism; I really mean every kind of energy use. Millions of regulations, one for each way you use energy throughout your day. If you really wanted to achieve through regulation what an energy tax would do, this is the kind of absurd regulation you would need.
If it's true that it takes less energy to heat the greenhouse than ship the plants, then you have no problem at all! An energy tax would cause the price of shipping to go up more than the cost of heating, and thus your prices would stay lower than your competitors (who *must* ship their plants from their native habitats). Isn't it great how economics works?
Yes. Not because I hate hospitals and love TVs, but because when you start extending that logic to other industries it quickly becomes unsustainable.
The amount of government bureaucracy required to separately evaluate and regulate every type of energy use would border on totalitarianism, and furthermore would be far less efficient than a simple tax on energy sources like oil, which instead of costing money would actually increase government revenue, which could then be used to subsidize hospitals, fund conservation efforts, etc.
You are wrong that there is no alternative. If the heating energy prices are truly prohibitive, you could locate your greenhouse in a more suitable climate and ship the plants. If regulations prevent that then the problem is with the regulations, not the energy tax.
Guess what? Reducing energy use hurts the economy. Glad you figured it out. However, you've missed the point. We're not choosing between "tax" and "no tax"; we're choosing between "energy tax" and "government regulation of specific industries like TV manufacturing". Both are harmful to the economy; the point is, an energy tax would be *less* harmful and far more effective than intrusive, micromanaging government regulation.
If the goal is to use less energy overall, the correct policy to implement would be a tax on energy. It's quite likely there are ways to decrease overall energy use that would be much more effective and efficient than changing what type of TVs we buy. A tax on energy would cause the market to start searching for those better ways to save energy. The largest energy consumers would be the hardest hit by the tax and the first to start conserving, which is exactly the right way to save the most energy with the least cost to society.
Politicians meddling with the business of TV manufacturers (about which they know very little) is about the least efficient way I can think of to actually conserve energy. Constructing a bureaocracy to regulate TVs wastes money unlike an energy tax which would actually increase government revenue (which could then fund conservation efforts). Targeting TVs instead of the largest energy consumers severely limits the amount of energy that could possibly be saved; an energy tax can be scaled up or down to reduce energy usage by almost any amount desired.
I guess what I mean is, picking a rotating frame doesn't make sense. Physics in rotating frames is different than physics in inertial frames because you have to add extra, complicated terms whose only purpose is to compensate for the rotation. Nobody does physics in rotating frames unless they're forced to.
I suppose since there's no theory of how a time machine would work, you could say that perhaps the physics of a time machine somehow natively works in rotating frames, and it wouldn't be less plausible than having a time machine in the first place. Trying to make a coherent argument about the physics of a time machine is like trying to construct a castle on a cloud.
Not strictly true. London is rotating at the rate of slightly more than 1 revolution per day (see "Sidereal time" for why it's slightly more). Unlike translational motion, rotation is *not* relative. Rotating frames are not inertial.
Yes, I would be quite happy indeed if 59314 was fixed. However, the reason it's 8 years old and not fixed is the problem runs deeper than the UI chrome; it extends into the platform. An alert can happen anywhere in a website's code, and the stack can be filled with all manner of strange calls in and out of Mozilla's guts. Pausing the entire application until the alert is dismissed is easy, but if you tried to suspend one page and continue running others, all the half-finished calls waiting on the stack would cause problems.
I guess it would be fairly trivial to make alert() non-blocking since it doesn't require user input, but there are other dialogs that do require user input and to fix the exploitability of dialogs you have to fix them all. The real fix is either to make Mozilla's DOM completely thread safe and run pages on different threads, or go to a process separation model like Chrome and IE8.
Yet another reason to ban pop-ups. IMHO Javascript should not be allowed to create, close, move, resize, or in any other way affect OS-level windows, period. That includes modal dialogs like alert popups and that "do you really want to leave this page" dialog.
In the 16-bit era some game cartridges included extra processors which were more powerful than the CPU in the actual console, for example Star Fox for SNES and Virtua Racing for Genesis. Also, the 32X was essentially a processor upgrade for the Genesis, but it failed in the marketplace.
Well, when you have a user base in the dozens, and operating the UI is the user's entire job, it doesn't have to be intuitive or even easy. It's cheaper to teach a few dozen guys how to use a bad UI than it is to design and program a really good UI.
Honestly, the UI in the video didn't seem too bad though (from a 10-second impression). Sure it was ugly but it seemed to have useful features for the operator; did you notice when the guy dragged the line of scrimmage past the first down marker it automatically reset the first down marker to +10 yards?
I hear this argument all the time. The problem with this argument is that as soon as a DRM scheme is broken, software is written to make breaking it as easy as clicking a single button. A DRM scheme is either broken or not broken; there's no middle ground where it's merely "difficult".
Furthermore, I'd argue that what makes locks effective is not the difficulty in opening them per se; most locks are actually not difficult to open. Heck in many cases all you need to do is break a window which could hardly be called difficult. What makes locks effective is that they are socially unacceptable to bypass. If someone sees you picking a lock or breaking a window they'll call the police. It's the social consequences of getting caught that really prevent people from doing it, or even spending the minimal time it takes to learn how. With DRM, there's nobody watching you except the computer; there are no social consequences for breaking it.
Not at the beginning and end of your journey. In the middle you can choose between different long-haul options, but in the "last mile" of the network (roads or pipes or wires) it just doesn't make sense to have multiple competing providers. For wires and pipes it's possible though inefficient, but for roads it's just plain impossible to have multiple networks serving every location. How would the market solve the "last mile" problem?
Do you really believe roads are not a natural monopoly? I consider myself quite libertarian, but I do believe that certain infrastructure like roads, sewer, water, and wires (power and telecom) are natural monopolies. I do agree that the term is overused, however, and you have to be *extremely* careful about how you define the monopolies. For example telecom *services* are *not* a natural monopoly; today the service providers own the wires and it's a huge problem that shouldn't be obscured by calling telecom a "natural monopoly". Only the wires are a natural monopoly. It's easy to see this by analogy to roads and transportation services: the Department of Transportation has a natural monopoly on roads but the Postal Service should not and does not have a monopoly on transportation services, and as a result we have an abundance of competition in FedEx, UPS, etc resulting in reasonable prices.
BTW, I definitely wouldn't agree with the AC below who claimed Microsoft is a natural monopoly. Microsoft is a monopoly created by copyright, which is itself a monopoly explicitly granted by the government and not "natural" at all.
Actually Facebook's valuation is nominally $15 billion (according to Microsoft's investment) so all they need to do is win 15 more of these lawsuits and it'll be almost justified :-)
I'm sorry, what is your point? Nothing prevents you from patenting an algorithm *before* using it to win the prize. In fact, according to the section you quoted, you could even wait and file for the patent a year *after* winning the prize and publishing the algorithm.
Actually Netflix closes nothing off. In fact, in order to receive the prize, the winner must publish their algorithm to the public. The winner could easily open-source the entire thing, or OTOH they're also free to patent it out the wazoo and start pimping it out. The only condition Netflix imposes is that Netflix gets a non-exclusive license to use the algorithm in exchange for the prize money, which is eminently reasonable.
Do you have a reference as to how non-competes are not enforcable in Austin, TX? A cursory Google search seems to suggest that non-competes are, in fact, enforcable in Texas.
The new part is now Google can index PDFs that have no text, only embedded images, via OCR. These are pretty common as a way of posting scanned multi-page documents online; for example many older academic papers are posted this way. Google Scholar should become more useful due to this.
Right. And similarly, Javascript can't read data directly from your GPS or WiFi card. It can only get the position data that you explicitly pick to send to the site. It's completely analagous.
The wifi thing is a red herring. The real use of this is when it is paired with a GPS unit for real-time updates. Imagine turn-by-turn directions with voice prompts in Google Maps. Or a web app that can run on your GPS-equipped phone and track your workout runs. Or a location-aware social network that automatically knows which friends are near you right now, without requiring a client app installation. It's just breaking down more barriers between native apps and web apps.