I use SprintPCS, and it s a good wireless mobile service, especially if you like flat rate pricing and no roaming (where Sprint has their own digital network). But the current Sprint wireless network will not replace wireline: Too little aggregate bandwith to the customer, different economics of mobility, etc. It might be able to compete with consumer phone service, but not DSL or CATV-based voice/data offerings.
Which is why Sprint is also doing ION, a DSL-based converged access product. In theory Sprint has the clout and lawyers to make ILECs come up with the local loops (unbundled network elements, or UNEs) and has the switches and backbone in place (does Sprint use their MSCs' switches for ION?) to provide lots of customers with a decent alternative. In theory, the economics of convergence (data + multiple phone lines) makes it attractive enough to rent local loops from the ILEC.
How do you fix it? There are several options. You could forget the crap and go back to heavy regulation.
You could, on the other hand, remove the local loop from the telephone companies.
This is what will happen, only not due to reregulation. The re-agglomerated Baby Bells (Adolescent Bells? scary) are unfocused, bipolar, and unmanageable. When CLECs (not the DLECs that are hurting so bad just now) bite deeper into their business customer base, they will have to focus: Put all the old corporate bureaucrats and unionized empolyees into a wireline "custodian" company, and focus on competing with the real CLEC competition, i.e. the IXCs, XO, Broadwing, etc., or spin those businesses out, too.
The big ILECs are staying ahead by playing the regulatory and merger game very well. After they are done with that, they still have to keep their high value customers from leaving.
Cell phone encryption works between the phone and the base station. It does not give you a secure call end-to-end. Moreover, you should check if the carrier even uses encryption on their network. The AT&T IS-136 system does not use the encryption capability in the Nokia handsets they sell their customers. If you have one of these very-common Nokia phones you can turn encryption on in the handset (using the option menus) and it will constantly warn you that encryption is not on for your calls. I bet it is optional on GSM networks, too.
One reason to hope phones get more intelligent is that they might get intelligent enough to enable access to the audio path and be programmable enough to run encryption in the phone. Now that will put a scare in the LEAs.
The main problem with "global law" is that it is of generally poorer quality than the law in most developed countries that have good constitutions. For example, the U.S. Constitution promotes copyright for the explicit purpose of getting material into the hands of the people. No mention of publisher's rights at all. Compare this with international copyright treaties, chock a block with ass coverage for publishers and middlemen of all stripes.
Not that the U.S., with the RIAA, MPOA, and DMCA is exactly innocent in the rape of the basic principals of copyright, but at least we have this document that was written 200+ years ago by people who were evidently a lot smarter and more honest than today's industry shills.
It would be great to be able to look to international law as a means of stregthening the great national constitutions of the world. Unfortunately, though, it mostly ends up strengthening police states and special interests.
I would think United Way is exactly what most readers of this forum would want to avoid. If you are in business, then the United Way is bad because it tends to give a lot of money to organizations that have anti-business agendas.
If you are a social progressive, United Way is probably too unfocused on your goals. It tends to be a clubby, inbred organization with a lot of inertia.
I don't know exectly who would be happy with the United Way. Give to what you believe in.
Oh and while we are picking nits, there is probably a more proper name for PHS, plus the U.S. variant of PHS which is used by *nobody*. I also forgot to break out the variants of analog cellular. Excuuuuuuuuuse me.
Oh geez! Yeah, there is an ISxxx name for the DoCoMo system, and probably for Nextel's, too, but these are the only major service providers using those systems. Ease up!
I use Sprint. Not perfect, but it mostly covers where I travel. I like the pricing, lack of a contract (can easily sell old phones on Ebay, or buy them cheaply used), and multiple phones on one plan.
Likes: Excellent audio quality. Many people think I'm on a land line. The CDMA spec is newer than GSM, and they spec'd better codecs than older systems. Also, long battery life.
Dislikes: Customer service. They screwed up my multi-phone billing. Took forever to get it resolved. If customer service call centers are hellish jobs, it is karmic justice. If you go outside of cities and off the Interstates, the coverage sucks. This is due to PCS having lower power and shorter range than TDMA. Maybe good if you worry about nuking your brain. I use a headset anyway.
I have tried lots of types of systems, and this is how I rank audio quality:
1. CDMA (Sprint, in the U.S.)
2. PHS (Japan)
3. DoCoMo (Japan)
4. tie: GSM and TDMA
6. Nextel (U.S. only?)
7. Analog cellular
Some people I know use smaller cellular companies that operate regional networks for the big guys and have reciprocal agreements on roaming. Thse can be cheaper, but one effect I have seen is that I often get a "try again later" message, indicating the carrier's voice mail system is out of ports. That's one way to cheap out on infrastructure. Also, depending on your carrier, you might not get through to an idle phone if the carrier cheaps out on cell capacity in congested areas or peak drive time. But I have never seen any comsumer comparisons that measure the ratio of users to network capacity.
The article did not mention it, but would this have implications for lithography, such as being able to expose a resist with very fine features, without using exotic technologies like X-rays?
MITRE, MIT Lincoln Labs, and the Draper Labs. Plus there is SAIC, which is employee owned, focuses on government contracts, and now runs what used to be Bellcore.
While you will find some of the bureucratization in these organizations that you find in government, you will also find people who would be sympathetic to open source. Being as these are well-establined outfits that regularly win contracts, these are good allies for the open source movement.
I don't think that says Greenspan favors no tax reduction. I think it says Greenspan thinks taxes should be reduced, if the budget is in balance, in order to hide the punchbowl from the Congress.
It is also ont the case that you can't unwind the Social Security treadmill. Opting out reduces the future burden. If it is done gradually, you pay current obligations as before.
In an era of surpluses, "debt reduction" is automatic: Government bonds come due, and if new bonds are not sold, debt goes down. But even this does not encompass the whole story: Economic growth reduces the precentage of GDP represented by a non-growing debt. Lower taxes mean more growth, which means debt reduction in relative terms.
View this in contrast with politicians who would "pay down the debt." I doubt they are even aware by what mechanism they would do this. Buy bonds on the market? Fine, but not neccssary. Restrained spending == debt reduction.
Lastly, without privatization of government pensions, government debt in the form of unfunded pension obligations would eventually overwhelm any debt reduction plan as the U.S. demographic tilts further toward old farts who have stopped smoking and just won't die as quick as they used to. Bush has a reasonable opt-out plan that will make my kids' retirement much much better than my own.
I think Greenspan can't be spun to sound like he is supporting Gore. It is pretty clear that, in order to contain inflation, he thinks it is far better for private citizens to save or spend as they choose than for government to spend in ways that are mostly unproductive.
The main question I have about fiber to the premises is that, with service providers being miserly about bandwidth on xDSL and cable modem systems, how will fiber make a difference? If your DSL provider has your bandwidth limited to 384k on a link that could go to 1.5 or 2Mbps symmetric, or even 9Mbps asymmetric downstream, why would fiber, which could take the last mile into gigabit territory, not have the same issues (other than that anyone running fiber would be a fool to be as miserly as the DSL providers are to this point).
The questions are:
1. Why do cable and DSL providers limit bandwidth and restrict servers?
2. Might there be some advanatge to not throttling last-mile bandwidth, such as a positive effect on peering economics for the ISP?
3. Could Napster and other P2P applications affect service provider economics - for better or worse?
Re:We both know there is more to D & D than that..
on
D&D Trailer
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· Score: 2
Oh I can't resist: "Crusaids? Isn't that what the 'don't ask don't tell' crusaders came down with?"
Or how about: "Didn't Willie Nelson's great great great great great great great... great grandfather play the Crusaids concerts to raise money for the crusaders?"
It is true that putting pot retailers in jail is a waste of resources. Probably counterproductive.
On the other hand, the only thing proven to reduce crime is keeping habitual criminals in jail until they are too old for the game.
The real answer is we need enough jails to keep all the street thugs off the streets, no more, no less. Until we fix or delete the drug war, we are unlikely to know whether this is more or less tyhan we already have.
The problem with laws and treaties outlawing cracking tools is that making software illegal creates a broad category of thought-crime. If you ever wrote something someone asserted was a cracking tool, do your thoughts on the matter become illegal to express? It is far far better to make destructive actions punishable, as they mostly are under existing laws, than to encourage law enforcement to acquire ever more intrusive tools of enforcement, and to bring law enforcement into conflict with constitutional rights regarding warrants search and probable cause, which are already too weak.
OK, I researched this one. What matters in crime rate is the rate at which crimes are solved and criminals are locked up. Guns are a distant second in having an effect on crime, but, in fact, more guns does in general mean less crime. On the other hand, "violent society" seems to have nothing to do with it. If you have competent police and enough prisons that are not clogged with small time marijuana peddlars, you can play all the Doom you want, have guns or not, be religious or not, be rich or be poor, educated or illiterate (though illiterate police are unlikely to succeed), and your crime rate will be pretty low. The main arguments for guns are political, and that they have a unique ability to stop crimes as they are happening, which police cannot do in the vast majority of cases.
Even if I agreed about the social contract thing, and there is considerable evidence that the "diamond" is becoming flat, hollow, lethargic, and unsustainable in places where big fat ineffucienct and corrupt bureucracies have grown up, I would not vote for Al Gore.
It's the perfidy (stupid): Same lies, same sellout to, e.g. Russians selling nuclear stuff to Iran, or Russians pols and mobsters stealing the aid we send them, or sombody selling our nuke secrets to China. This is the biggest reason why, in a time of nearly unparalleled prosperity, the ruling party is losing. Charater does count: "loathing" the military traslates into some pinhead at Voice of America spiking a piece on the Cole bombing because those deaths do "not compare" to the Palestinian loss of life in the new Intifada.
Also, this Europhile thing is misplaced. Sure, I like blondes (and I am one), and SAABs, BMWs, and Mercedes are cool cars. IKEA makes cheap furniture that isn't ugly. But what about violent crime in gun-free London going out of control because you can be sure to be able to do a housebreak or a mugging without encountering a gun? What about ramapant mafias and endemic official corruption in southern and eastern Europe? What about the ever efficient and rational Germans going broke becuase their welfare state is unsustainable?
The real reason we are prosperous is that we have moderate taxes (that could be lower), pretty good rule of law (could be better), sanctity of contract (that is mostly enforceable), and private property (that could be better protected from bureaucrats). If we ever got freedom of choice in puclicly supported education, we would have a new Golden Age.
Two reasons: First, the whole "wealthiest 1%" is a red herring to distract from the fact that the "wealthiest" (some of us do not think of ourselves that way) 10% end up paying most of the rest of taxes, and the "wealthiest" 20% pay pretty much all taxes. This means you! The vast majority of Slashdot readers are the donkeys on which the rest of society, and especially the bureaucracy ride.
Reason number two is the mobility of capital. Don't like the price of government where you are? Move your economic activity elsewhere. This will happen more and more, and if the U.S. wants to continue being prosperous, it must compete against low-tax countries. When the wealthiest 1% leave (or hide their money in gold, art, overseas real estate, etc.), and the next 1%, and so on, it comes down to you pretty quickly.
Reason number three: no matter how poor you are, if you don't become an addict, get an education, work hard, get married, and live a stable life, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of you becoming at least middle class, and probably one of those tax donkeys the stoners and slackers get to ride on. Or, and the proverb goes: A Republican is a Democrat with a mortgage.
You might also ask yourself why envy is a sin, while zeal, closely related, is not.
The actual criterion to measure music reproduction against is not the theoretical best reproduction of the recording. What does that mean, anyway? You want to hear what was going on in a modern recording studio? No, you want to hear music. Music is dynamics, both large-scale, as in how loud is loud, and how soft is soft, and small-scale, as in reproducing the "attack" in a single note. All this talk of frequencies beyond the range of normally measurable human hearing has a slight effect on this at best.
CDs are great becuase they removed a transducer from one end of the playback process: no need for a needle or a tape head. Now you get the signal, and, most importantly, the dynamics of the signal nearly perfectly. Now you need speakers that can take this dynamic range to your ears.
Most speakers, especially most small speakers, fail to do this. They may be "accurate" in terms of response to the range of frequencies put through them, But that won't reproduce the performance, which is in the dynamics. You can A/B test them endlessly against each other, and find interesting and subtle differences, but here is the real test: Take a pianist and a real concert grand piano, and some recordings of a piano, and see if the speakers you think are perfect can fool you into thinking they are the piano. Usually, there is no contest. Any idiot half deaf from a thrash metal concert could tell the difference, because the piano puts so much energy into the air that very few loudspeakers can come close. The piano shakes the floor, makes the windows rattle, and you can feel it in your bones. By contrast, even really good speakers make it sound as if the lid is shut and there is a pile of coats on top of the paino. There is no way a small speaker can do what a piano, cello, bass fiddle, tympani, baritone horn, etc. can do. Put them in a concert hall together, and you have a real challenge.
I would much rather have a pair of Klipschorns (if I only had a room with corners) than a pair of similarly priced near-audiophile conventional speakers even though the K-horns would no doubt be hideously less linear. They would be efficient enough to come close to reproducing the dynamics of real musical instruments. The fact is, no two pianos have the same response up and down the scale, nor the same resonances either, nor do two rooms, so why worry about getting close to absolute linearity? The same argument holds even more as music gets more complex: An orchestra can be close miced, or not, recorded in long takes, or cut and pasted from small snippets, multitracked or not, etc. All those engineering decisions make absolute reproduction a joke. Reproduction of what? I'd rather hear how hard those bows are coming down on those strings. That is where the information is.
It is not at all clear that non-commercial copying is illegal. Non commercial copying was made explicitly legal (nevermind the Constitutional argument about non-enumerated rights). Which makes the DMCA doubly sneaky as an end run around fair use without directly trying to repeal it.
Hopefully backlash on the copyright clause abuse of the DMCA and Sonny Bono law will sink all the stupid laws that abuse the commerce clause, too.
A friend of mine recounted that a friend of his hired a nanny from a Caribean island. She was a fine nanny, the kids were happy, the house was clean, but every now and then, this guy, who was pretty much a prototypical yuppie, and kind of anal about his stuff, would find that one of his $100 kitchen knives had the point broken off.
he asked the nanny if she did anything unusual with the knives. No, she said. Were the knives unfamiliar to her? No, they were familar - perfectly ordinary - and worked quite well, she said. Since the nanny was unable to explain how it happened, he watched the nanny prepare a meal every now and then, just to see if he could discern whether she was flinging the knives into the sink, or doing something dangerous with them that might cause the points to break off. On the contrary: she handled then with great care, washing them immediately after use, drying them, and putting them straight back into the knife block. He was utterly puzzled.
One day, the nanny made tuna salad sandwiches for the kids, and this guy happened to stop in at home at lunchtime that day. To his horror, he observed the nanny take a beatiful German stainless steel chef's knife and plunge it into the tuna can, proceeding to sort of saw the lid off.
So there are still places where can openers are considered unneccessary.
To put in in perspective, if Internet traffic doubles every 4 months, we need terabit routers in 2002, if it doubles every 12 months, we need terabit routers too far into the future to matter to the investors in terabit router companies (nevermind petabit).
If I could sell a 750 year long growth curve to a venture capitalist, I'd be stylin'. Note that if Internet traffic doubles every four months for 750 years, we will use up all the energy in the universe just to flip bits.
the problem in such projections is that we do not include fairly foreseeable events, such as population growth slowing (it is already stopped or in reverse in some countries), agriculture expanding into the oceans, or that we will find burning oil as quaint a burning wood in a far shorter interval than than these projections cover. How many of you out there know how your great grandfather took care of his horses, what it cost him, what waste was generated, how it was disposed of, or what would have happened had we not stopped using horses for transportation? Now project that ignornace into the unknowable future, multiply by 7, and the results should be quite clear.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why Sprint is also doing ION, a DSL-based converged access product. In theory Sprint has the clout and lawyers to make ILECs come up with the local loops (unbundled network elements, or UNEs) and has the switches and backbone in place (does Sprint use their MSCs' switches for ION?) to provide lots of customers with a decent alternative. In theory, the economics of convergence (data + multiple phone lines) makes it attractive enough to rent local loops from the ILEC.
The big ILECs are staying ahead by playing the regulatory and merger game very well. After they are done with that, they still have to keep their high value customers from leaving.
One reason to hope phones get more intelligent is that they might get intelligent enough to enable access to the audio path and be programmable enough to run encryption in the phone. Now that will put a scare in the LEAs.
Not that the U.S., with the RIAA, MPOA, and DMCA is exactly innocent in the rape of the basic principals of copyright, but at least we have this document that was written 200+ years ago by people who were evidently a lot smarter and more honest than today's industry shills.
It would be great to be able to look to international law as a means of stregthening the great national constitutions of the world. Unfortunately, though, it mostly ends up strengthening police states and special interests.
If you are a social progressive, United Way is probably too unfocused on your goals. It tends to be a clubby, inbred organization with a lot of inertia.
I don't know exectly who would be happy with the United Way. Give to what you believe in.
Oh and while we are picking nits, there is probably a more proper name for PHS, plus the U.S. variant of PHS which is used by *nobody*. I also forgot to break out the variants of analog cellular. Excuuuuuuuuuse me.
Oh geez! Yeah, there is an ISxxx name for the DoCoMo system, and probably for Nextel's, too, but these are the only major service providers using those systems. Ease up!
Likes: Excellent audio quality. Many people think I'm on a land line. The CDMA spec is newer than GSM, and they spec'd better codecs than older systems. Also, long battery life.
Dislikes: Customer service. They screwed up my multi-phone billing. Took forever to get it resolved. If customer service call centers are hellish jobs, it is karmic justice. If you go outside of cities and off the Interstates, the coverage sucks. This is due to PCS having lower power and shorter range than TDMA. Maybe good if you worry about nuking your brain. I use a headset anyway.
I have tried lots of types of systems, and this is how I rank audio quality:
1. CDMA (Sprint, in the U.S.)
2. PHS (Japan)
3. DoCoMo (Japan)
4. tie: GSM and TDMA
6. Nextel (U.S. only?)
7. Analog cellular
Some people I know use smaller cellular companies that operate regional networks for the big guys and have reciprocal agreements on roaming. Thse can be cheaper, but one effect I have seen is that I often get a "try again later" message, indicating the carrier's voice mail system is out of ports. That's one way to cheap out on infrastructure. Also, depending on your carrier, you might not get through to an idle phone if the carrier cheaps out on cell capacity in congested areas or peak drive time. But I have never seen any comsumer comparisons that measure the ratio of users to network capacity.
The article did not mention it, but would this have implications for lithography, such as being able to expose a resist with very fine features, without using exotic technologies like X-rays?
While you will find some of the bureucratization in these organizations that you find in government, you will also find people who would be sympathetic to open source. Being as these are well-establined outfits that regularly win contracts, these are good allies for the open source movement.
Cool, a "(Score:3, Troll)" You don't see one of those every day.
It is also ont the case that you can't unwind the Social Security treadmill. Opting out reduces the future burden. If it is done gradually, you pay current obligations as before.
View this in contrast with politicians who would "pay down the debt." I doubt they are even aware by what mechanism they would do this. Buy bonds on the market? Fine, but not neccssary. Restrained spending == debt reduction.
Lastly, without privatization of government pensions, government debt in the form of unfunded pension obligations would eventually overwhelm any debt reduction plan as the U.S. demographic tilts further toward old farts who have stopped smoking and just won't die as quick as they used to. Bush has a reasonable opt-out plan that will make my kids' retirement much much better than my own.
I think Greenspan can't be spun to sound like he is supporting Gore. It is pretty clear that, in order to contain inflation, he thinks it is far better for private citizens to save or spend as they choose than for government to spend in ways that are mostly unproductive.
The questions are:
1. Why do cable and DSL providers limit bandwidth and restrict servers?
2. Might there be some advanatge to not throttling last-mile bandwidth, such as a positive effect on peering economics for the ISP?
3. Could Napster and other P2P applications affect service provider economics - for better or worse?
Or how about: "Didn't Willie Nelson's great great great great great great great ... great grandfather play the Crusaids concerts to raise money for the crusaders?"
On the other hand, the only thing proven to reduce crime is keeping habitual criminals in jail until they are too old for the game.
The real answer is we need enough jails to keep all the street thugs off the streets, no more, no less. Until we fix or delete the drug war, we are unlikely to know whether this is more or less tyhan we already have.
The problem with laws and treaties outlawing cracking tools is that making software illegal creates a broad category of thought-crime. If you ever wrote something someone asserted was a cracking tool, do your thoughts on the matter become illegal to express? It is far far better to make destructive actions punishable, as they mostly are under existing laws, than to encourage law enforcement to acquire ever more intrusive tools of enforcement, and to bring law enforcement into conflict with constitutional rights regarding warrants search and probable cause, which are already too weak.
OK, I researched this one. What matters in crime rate is the rate at which crimes are solved and criminals are locked up. Guns are a distant second in having an effect on crime, but, in fact, more guns does in general mean less crime. On the other hand, "violent society" seems to have nothing to do with it. If you have competent police and enough prisons that are not clogged with small time marijuana peddlars, you can play all the Doom you want, have guns or not, be religious or not, be rich or be poor, educated or illiterate (though illiterate police are unlikely to succeed), and your crime rate will be pretty low. The main arguments for guns are political, and that they have a unique ability to stop crimes as they are happening, which police cannot do in the vast majority of cases.
Two corrections, the Cole memo was from the State Department, and that would be "publicly." See! I am a victim of public schools! Who do I sue?
It's the perfidy (stupid): Same lies, same sellout to, e.g. Russians selling nuclear stuff to Iran, or Russians pols and mobsters stealing the aid we send them, or sombody selling our nuke secrets to China. This is the biggest reason why, in a time of nearly unparalleled prosperity, the ruling party is losing. Charater does count: "loathing" the military traslates into some pinhead at Voice of America spiking a piece on the Cole bombing because those deaths do "not compare" to the Palestinian loss of life in the new Intifada.
Also, this Europhile thing is misplaced. Sure, I like blondes (and I am one), and SAABs, BMWs, and Mercedes are cool cars. IKEA makes cheap furniture that isn't ugly. But what about violent crime in gun-free London going out of control because you can be sure to be able to do a housebreak or a mugging without encountering a gun? What about ramapant mafias and endemic official corruption in southern and eastern Europe? What about the ever efficient and rational Germans going broke becuase their welfare state is unsustainable?
The real reason we are prosperous is that we have moderate taxes (that could be lower), pretty good rule of law (could be better), sanctity of contract (that is mostly enforceable), and private property (that could be better protected from bureaucrats). If we ever got freedom of choice in puclicly supported education, we would have a new Golden Age.
Reason number two is the mobility of capital. Don't like the price of government where you are? Move your economic activity elsewhere. This will happen more and more, and if the U.S. wants to continue being prosperous, it must compete against low-tax countries. When the wealthiest 1% leave (or hide their money in gold, art, overseas real estate, etc.), and the next 1%, and so on, it comes down to you pretty quickly.
Reason number three: no matter how poor you are, if you don't become an addict, get an education, work hard, get married, and live a stable life, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of you becoming at least middle class, and probably one of those tax donkeys the stoners and slackers get to ride on. Or, and the proverb goes: A Republican is a Democrat with a mortgage.
You might also ask yourself why envy is a sin, while zeal, closely related, is not.
CDs are great becuase they removed a transducer from one end of the playback process: no need for a needle or a tape head. Now you get the signal, and, most importantly, the dynamics of the signal nearly perfectly. Now you need speakers that can take this dynamic range to your ears.
Most speakers, especially most small speakers, fail to do this. They may be "accurate" in terms of response to the range of frequencies put through them, But that won't reproduce the performance, which is in the dynamics. You can A/B test them endlessly against each other, and find interesting and subtle differences, but here is the real test: Take a pianist and a real concert grand piano, and some recordings of a piano, and see if the speakers you think are perfect can fool you into thinking they are the piano. Usually, there is no contest. Any idiot half deaf from a thrash metal concert could tell the difference, because the piano puts so much energy into the air that very few loudspeakers can come close. The piano shakes the floor, makes the windows rattle, and you can feel it in your bones. By contrast, even really good speakers make it sound as if the lid is shut and there is a pile of coats on top of the paino. There is no way a small speaker can do what a piano, cello, bass fiddle, tympani, baritone horn, etc. can do. Put them in a concert hall together, and you have a real challenge.
I would much rather have a pair of Klipschorns (if I only had a room with corners) than a pair of similarly priced near-audiophile conventional speakers even though the K-horns would no doubt be hideously less linear. They would be efficient enough to come close to reproducing the dynamics of real musical instruments. The fact is, no two pianos have the same response up and down the scale, nor the same resonances either, nor do two rooms, so why worry about getting close to absolute linearity? The same argument holds even more as music gets more complex: An orchestra can be close miced, or not, recorded in long takes, or cut and pasted from small snippets, multitracked or not, etc. All those engineering decisions make absolute reproduction a joke. Reproduction of what? I'd rather hear how hard those bows are coming down on those strings. That is where the information is.
Hopefully backlash on the copyright clause abuse of the DMCA and Sonny Bono law will sink all the stupid laws that abuse the commerce clause, too.
he asked the nanny if she did anything unusual with the knives. No, she said. Were the knives unfamiliar to her? No, they were familar - perfectly ordinary - and worked quite well, she said. Since the nanny was unable to explain how it happened, he watched the nanny prepare a meal every now and then, just to see if he could discern whether she was flinging the knives into the sink, or doing something dangerous with them that might cause the points to break off. On the contrary: she handled then with great care, washing them immediately after use, drying them, and putting them straight back into the knife block. He was utterly puzzled.
One day, the nanny made tuna salad sandwiches for the kids, and this guy happened to stop in at home at lunchtime that day. To his horror, he observed the nanny take a beatiful German stainless steel chef's knife and plunge it into the tuna can, proceeding to sort of saw the lid off.
So there are still places where can openers are considered unneccessary.
If I could sell a 750 year long growth curve to a venture capitalist, I'd be stylin'. Note that if Internet traffic doubles every four months for 750 years, we will use up all the energy in the universe just to flip bits.
the problem in such projections is that we do not include fairly foreseeable events, such as population growth slowing (it is already stopped or in reverse in some countries), agriculture expanding into the oceans, or that we will find burning oil as quaint a burning wood in a far shorter interval than than these projections cover. How many of you out there know how your great grandfather took care of his horses, what it cost him, what waste was generated, how it was disposed of, or what would have happened had we not stopped using horses for transportation? Now project that ignornace into the unknowable future, multiply by 7, and the results should be quite clear.