There should be all sorts of technical advantages to providing services on privately-owned media, completely out-of-band from internet service, but first the telephone industry and now television just insist on doing just about everything wrong and driving their customers to get what they want from that one pipe.
I started to write a longer top level about how refusal to support Clear QAM and forcing cables boxes on people with QAM capable TV's and forcing people to use cable company provided DVR's
Here, let me try to sum up for you:
All the satellite feeds cable companies use today are digital. The NTSC channels you get with basic cable are modulated in-house by your cable provider. The modulation takes a bit of effort and consumes quite a big chunk of bandwidth on the wire.
The digital channels take less effort on the provider's part (even when you include the encryption work) and consume far less bandwidth per channel (that's the point of digital to begin with), and yet the cable companies get away with charging obnoxiously more for access to them.
So... yeah. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.
De jure ambiguity is de facto prohibition. The difference between "can" and "must" is personal preference, which is why civil rights laws are necessary to combat culturally-rooted discrimination to begin with.
Maybe it's not prohibited directly, but maybe state law gives preferential treatment to married couples while simultaneously prohibiting gay marriage. Or maybe the agent you deal with today will let you do it, but the one you deal with tomorrow, or their superior, doesn't like the idea. Perhaps it's only allowed during the present political administration, serving at the whim of the electoral majority.
That's only true for the NES and its infamous mappers and select titles on other systems (e. g. SuperFX chip in Star Fox and Yoshi's Island), unless you're counting lithium batteries used for NV storage. Other than that, a cartridge is just a ROM chip with pin-out leads.
The cartridge was the medium of choice because of its solid-state durability and its ridiculously fast read times. Nobody planned on using the format to extend the Famicom's 1970's technology into the 1990's.
"Moderate Republicans?" Is that a Republican who thinks contraception is permissible by married women with the consent of their husband? Or one who would allow a Muslim to convert to Christianity rather than killing them outright? Heal gays rather than hang them? Use conventional munitions against Iran rather than nuking them outright?
In the party that put forward Sarah Palin in 2008 and packed Congress with Tea Party freshmen in 2010, just what exactly makes one a "moderate?"
Maybe the right to privacy we were told so much about has simply become old-fashioned, a barrier to progress.
The "right to privacy" you've been "told so much about" didn't really come into play in the United States until the Supreme Court was looking to overturn states laws banning contraception in Griswold v. Connecticut. Currently, we're looking at a GOP presidential primary where at least one of the major candidates would like to see that overturned outright, to be able to ban contraception specifically and other privacy protections generally.
It is better to have a device there than significantly off to the side, which demands a longer (relatively speaking) period of time where you are not looking directly at the road.
The same argument can be made for the center rear-view mirror, which is pretty much exactly as far away from your forward view as a center-mounted GPS. Of course, that mirror isn't quite so distracting...
Why would I have been driving so fast BACKWARDS as to worry about my phone becoming a projectile?
Do you know what happens to objects in motion in the event of sudden deceleration? Hint: It's not that they magically start traveling the opposite way.
relocating the GPS console to the driver's side directly in line of sight,
... therefore obstructing the driver's field of view...
and with a night heads-up display even better.
Now with even more glare!
By the way, if you already do this with your stand-alone unit, you might want to read the warnings in the instruction manual not to, since it will become a projectile in a collision.
As for forests, the Native Americans were surrounded by them, and probably did not plant most of them.
There were also less than 0.1% of the current population of the area, and they had little use for wood beyond using it as a basic structural material and occasional fuel for heat. Pre-Columbian Native Americans never mastered iron, and many never mastered bronze. Ductile, conductive iron takes a great deal of heat to refine, which deforested large swaths of Europe before the adoption of fossil fuels.
Modern processes that still rely on lumber (particularly paper) currently rely on dedicated tree farms, designed to produce trees of just the right species and age to optimize the process with the least use arable land.
If robots are more expensive than Chinese labor, why do we see things like this article?
Again: China is developing a middle class. As China exits the cheap-labor market, many more countries are willing and able to pick up the slack.
What would it take to convince you that robots can be used for mining, manufacturing, and for services
When it becomes the rule rather than the exception. When there are more robotic technicians in West Virginia than new cases of black lung.
if we truly wanted to do that at this point?
That is a logical fallacy at best. There is no vast conspiracy to defeat your idealistic vision, there are only the economic realities of efficiency and cost. The automation you envision will only happen when it becomes effective and inexpensive and not a moment before.
Citing examples in rapidly industrializing countries such as the "BRIC" group doesn't help your example either. Where are the robotic factories of Bangladesh?
What are "raw materials" but stuff collected from the surroundings?
Real life is not MineCraft. You don't just go out to your back yard, strike oil, throw a liter or two of it into the oven overnight and wake up to some new plastic.
That all said, it can be fun to do things and make stuff,
It can be fun to sew clothing. Working in a Saipan garment factory, not so much.
Check out Theodore Sturgeon's "The Skills of Xanadu" for a sci-fi exploration of the idea of making the gathering of materials "fun":
tl;dr
Also, how much "labor" does a tree do to grow? It is possible then in theory to use just water, CO2, and a little bit of soil to make amazing things that are mostly carbon.
How useful is just one tree? If you want enough trees to be able to do something useful with, all growing consistently strong and to a consistent quality, it takes quite a good deal of labor.
In general, one could make the same argument about software or content.
Neither of which you can eat.
When robotics are really cheap, what is the difference between writing free software to run material gathering robots and gathering materials for "free"?
Robotics are far more expensive than Chinese labor.
I might have agreed if you had not used the word "only".:-) How far we have fallen in our aspirations: http://www.fact-index.com/n/ne/next.html "By 1987 NeXT finished construction of a completely automated factory for their first product, the NeXTcube."
My "only" still stands. You forget where the raw materials used by the factory came from, as well as how the factory was built to begin with.
It's true that essentially slave human labor is still cheaper than robots in some applications (though fewer and fewer applications as even essentially dirt-cheap slaves kept in dormitories can't keep up with the quality robots can produce and they also take more management.)
And yet there is still plenty of work available for cheap Mexican immigrants. Agriculture in Georgia practically collapsed when they tried to improve immigration enforcement.
Do you think that "cashless society" implies that everything is bought on credit?
No, there's also debit cards.
In modern terms, "cashless society" necessarily means the introduction of a corporate middle-man to the transaction, one that invariably charges an extra per-transaction fee to the debtor, creditor, or both. That company is usually Visa or MasterCard, but whoever it is will end up skimming off of the top of each and every cashless transaction, further driving up costs for everything else.
"Cashless" is a luxury that comes with an associated cost, and the oligopoly currently most likely to collect that cost is the one between Visa and MasterCard.
by improving our subsistence economy (home robotics, 3D printers, solar panels, maybe LENR)
All require raw materials, none of which are "inherently fun" to obtain, especially not when it comes to obtaining useful quantities.
As a rule of thumb, if there are laws relating to something about "counterfeiting" or "unauthorized sharing", you are dealing with a system based around "artificial scarcity"
Money is used in exchange for labor. Labor takes up a person's time. A person's time is finite. One has only to look through the local obituary to realize that the scarcity is quite genuine.
We should be able to do better in the 21st century.
The 21st-century computer you composed this on is only possible because of people supplying raw materials and manufacturing in 19th-century conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
How many Danes survive if (...) Reykjavik (is) nuked?
All the ones not in Iceland, I'd assume.
So... Denmark was cool with that?
How can the carrier pigeons lift the cake?
There should be all sorts of technical advantages to providing services on privately-owned media, completely out-of-band from internet service, but first the telephone industry and now television just insist on doing just about everything wrong and driving their customers to get what they want from that one pipe.
I started to write a longer top level about how refusal to support Clear QAM and forcing cables boxes on people with QAM capable TV's and forcing people to use cable company provided DVR's
Here, let me try to sum up for you:
All the satellite feeds cable companies use today are digital. The NTSC channels you get with basic cable are modulated in-house by your cable provider. The modulation takes a bit of effort and consumes quite a big chunk of bandwidth on the wire.
The digital channels take less effort on the provider's part (even when you include the encryption work) and consume far less bandwidth per channel (that's the point of digital to begin with), and yet the cable companies get away with charging obnoxiously more for access to them.
So... yeah. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.
De jure ambiguity is de facto prohibition. The difference between "can" and "must" is personal preference, which is why civil rights laws are necessary to combat culturally-rooted discrimination to begin with.
Maybe it's not prohibited directly, but maybe state law gives preferential treatment to married couples while simultaneously prohibiting gay marriage. Or maybe the agent you deal with today will let you do it, but the one you deal with tomorrow, or their superior, doesn't like the idea. Perhaps it's only allowed during the present political administration, serving at the whim of the electoral majority.
That's only true for the NES and its infamous mappers and select titles on other systems (e. g. SuperFX chip in Star Fox and Yoshi's Island), unless you're counting lithium batteries used for NV storage. Other than that, a cartridge is just a ROM chip with pin-out leads.
The cartridge was the medium of choice because of its solid-state durability and its ridiculously fast read times. Nobody planned on using the format to extend the Famicom's 1970's technology into the 1990's.
Prestige matters to their investors.
FTFY
"Moderate Republicans?" Is that a Republican who thinks contraception is permissible by married women with the consent of their husband? Or one who would allow a Muslim to convert to Christianity rather than killing them outright? Heal gays rather than hang them? Use conventional munitions against Iran rather than nuking them outright?
In the party that put forward Sarah Palin in 2008 and packed Congress with Tea Party freshmen in 2010, just what exactly makes one a "moderate?"
Republican, n:
A person who believes that every American is born with a mandate to love Jesus and murderously despise foreigners.
If you think that's an inaccurate statement, you haven't been paying attention to the primary debates.
DNA is a polymer, orders of magnitudes bigger than the molecules they're talking about
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gay_Adoption_Map_North_America.svg
The gay's tend not to have kids.
Not being able to adopt has some effect on that.
Murdoch has enough money to buy plausible deniability.
Maybe the right to privacy we were told so much about has simply become old-fashioned, a barrier to progress.
The "right to privacy" you've been "told so much about" didn't really come into play in the United States until the Supreme Court was looking to overturn states laws banning contraception in Griswold v. Connecticut. Currently, we're looking at a GOP presidential primary where at least one of the major candidates would like to see that overturned outright, to be able to ban contraception specifically and other privacy protections generally.
One's "backbone" is directly proportional to one's likelihood of making rent next month without this job.
Or at least that's my suspicion. In my own driver's ed course in the mid 1990's, at least, we were taught 9 & 3.
Oh, by the way...
It is better to have a device there than significantly off to the side, which demands a longer (relatively speaking) period of time where you are not looking directly at the road.
The same argument can be made for the center rear-view mirror, which is pretty much exactly as far away from your forward view as a center-mounted GPS. Of course, that mirror isn't quite so distracting...
Why would I have been driving so fast BACKWARDS as to worry about my phone becoming a projectile?
Do you know what happens to objects in motion in the event of sudden deceleration? Hint: It's not that they magically start traveling the opposite way.
Or, y'know, you could just get rear-ended.
My own independent research
We call those "anecdotes."
relocating the GPS console to the driver's side directly in line of sight,
... therefore obstructing the driver's field of view...
and with a night heads-up display even better.
Now with even more glare!
By the way, if you already do this with your stand-alone unit, you might want to read the warnings in the instruction manual not to, since it will become a projectile in a collision.
As for forests, the Native Americans were surrounded by them, and probably did not plant most of them.
There were also less than 0.1% of the current population of the area, and they had little use for wood beyond using it as a basic structural material and occasional fuel for heat. Pre-Columbian Native Americans never mastered iron, and many never mastered bronze. Ductile, conductive iron takes a great deal of heat to refine, which deforested large swaths of Europe before the adoption of fossil fuels.
Modern processes that still rely on lumber (particularly paper) currently rely on dedicated tree farms, designed to produce trees of just the right species and age to optimize the process with the least use arable land.
If robots are more expensive than Chinese labor, why do we see things like this article?
Again: China is developing a middle class. As China exits the cheap-labor market, many more countries are willing and able to pick up the slack.
What would it take to convince you that robots can be used for mining, manufacturing, and for services
When it becomes the rule rather than the exception. When there are more robotic technicians in West Virginia than new cases of black lung.
if we truly wanted to do that at this point?
That is a logical fallacy at best. There is no vast conspiracy to defeat your idealistic vision, there are only the economic realities of efficiency and cost. The automation you envision will only happen when it becomes effective and inexpensive and not a moment before.
Citing examples in rapidly industrializing countries such as the "BRIC" group doesn't help your example either. Where are the robotic factories of Bangladesh?
What are "raw materials" but stuff collected from the surroundings?
Real life is not MineCraft. You don't just go out to your back yard, strike oil, throw a liter or two of it into the oven overnight and wake up to some new plastic.
That all said, it can be fun to do things and make stuff,
It can be fun to sew clothing. Working in a Saipan garment factory, not so much.
Check out Theodore Sturgeon's "The Skills of Xanadu" for a sci-fi exploration of the idea of making the gathering of materials "fun":
tl;dr
Also, how much "labor" does a tree do to grow? It is possible then in theory to use just water, CO2, and a little bit of soil to make amazing things that are mostly carbon.
How useful is just one tree? If you want enough trees to be able to do something useful with, all growing consistently strong and to a consistent quality, it takes quite a good deal of labor.
In general, one could make the same argument about software or content.
Neither of which you can eat.
When robotics are really cheap, what is the difference between writing free software to run material gathering robots and gathering materials for "free"?
Robotics are far more expensive than Chinese labor.
I might have agreed if you had not used the word "only". :-) How far we have fallen in our aspirations:
http://www.fact-index.com/n/ne/next.html
"By 1987 NeXT finished construction of a completely automated factory for their first product, the NeXTcube."
My "only" still stands. You forget where the raw materials used by the factory came from, as well as how the factory was built to begin with.
It's true that essentially slave human labor is still cheaper than robots in some applications (though fewer and fewer applications as even essentially dirt-cheap slaves kept in dormitories can't keep up with the quality robots can produce and they also take more management.)
And yet there is still plenty of work available for cheap Mexican immigrants. Agriculture in Georgia practically collapsed when they tried to improve immigration enforcement.
But in any case, things are changing:
"Foxconn to rely more on robots; could use 1 million in 3 years"
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/01/us-foxconn-robots-idUSTRE77016B20110801
That has more to do with the rise of a Chinese middle class than any global phenomena. There's still Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam...
Do you think that "cashless society" implies that everything is bought on credit?
No, there's also debit cards.
In modern terms, "cashless society" necessarily means the introduction of a corporate middle-man to the transaction, one that invariably charges an extra per-transaction fee to the debtor, creditor, or both. That company is usually Visa or MasterCard, but whoever it is will end up skimming off of the top of each and every cashless transaction, further driving up costs for everything else.
"Cashless" is a luxury that comes with an associated cost, and the oligopoly currently most likely to collect that cost is the one between Visa and MasterCard.
by improving our subsistence economy (home robotics, 3D printers, solar panels, maybe LENR)
All require raw materials, none of which are "inherently fun" to obtain, especially not when it comes to obtaining useful quantities.
As a rule of thumb, if there are laws relating to something about "counterfeiting" or "unauthorized sharing", you are dealing with a system based around "artificial scarcity"
Money is used in exchange for labor. Labor takes up a person's time. A person's time is finite. One has only to look through the local obituary to realize that the scarcity is quite genuine.
We should be able to do better in the 21st century.
The 21st-century computer you composed this on is only possible because of people supplying raw materials and manufacturing in 19th-century conditions.
You've created a metroid! You've doomed us all!