There is a theory, which I have heard articulated from time to time (although I don't know if there's a name for it or not) which says that right before a major event there is a lot of "chatter"; subtle yet distinct signs that something is about to happen, but which are too minor on their own to generate any attention. Once the event happens, in hindsight you can look back and recognize them. It's sort of a reverse butterfly-effect; the assumption is that no matter how good at being secretive you are, you will make some signs in the course of executing your plot, and some of those signs will percolate and be reported in papers somewhere. So you just need to know what to look for.
So basically what you might do, is take a big pattern-matching AI system, and "teach" it using the media records preceding other big terrorist events. 9/11, London, Madrid, etc. You have it comb through all the world media before those events, and see if you can find patterns, the little things that in retrospect might have alerted you that something was up. Then, thus primed with information and hopefully some patterns, you set it loose on the real-time news feeds.
In theory -- if the theory holds water, anyway -- the system might then be capable of giving you a warning of something big heading your way, picking up on stuff that a person might not recognize.
Anyway, I'm not sure if that's the theory that this particular system is going to try and use, but it's one idea that I've heard described; sort of as the 'holy grail' of machine-derived OSINT. More likely, you'd end up with a system that just gives you statistical summaries of the number of anti-US editorials in various countries or something. Useful for the State Department perhaps, but I'm not sure for preventing the next 9/11.
I don't really see where this is going. The public basically abandoned cartridge-based removable storage a few years ago; it reached its height with the Iomega Zip and was all downhill from there. (Actually this technology reminds me a little of the Zip; a thin, fragile, high-density storage media inside of a rigid case.) They would have to offer a lot more than just thinness to get the public to go back there.
Removable disks went out with a whimper, not with a bang, and the last few generations of them were pretty sorry. (Anyone remember the Castlewood Orb? Or any of the other HD-based removables? I do; the cost per MB was atrocious.)
Why would anyone want to move back to the days of proprietary cartridges and drives, when we've come so far from there? I'd much prefer improvements to the existing CD/DVD formats which preserve at least the physical format (allowing for easy backwards compatibility), if not the near-universal standardization.
it seems the appliances of yesteryear (at least the ones that are around and we remember, rather than the ones that sucked so much we got rid of them and forgot them), tended to be at the higher end of quality. (emphasis mine)
I think this is an important point to make as well. If you look around at appliances that are in use right now, it might seem like the further back in time you go, the more durably stuff was made.
Of course, this is because anything that's 30 years old and still working today, probably was built like a tank to begin with. If it hadn't been, it would have died a long time ago. Stuff made in the same era that wasn't as well-built is long since gone and forgotten, thus it doesn't get factored into the mental calculation.
Looking at what's around today is a heavily biased sample; of refrigerators made in 1980, only the good ones are left. Of ones made in 2003, both the good ones and the crap ones are left.
Also, there's another issue: devices which are really expensive are generally made better than ones which are cheap commodity goods. Take a look at some early microwave ovens, for example. They were insanely expensive -- the equivalent of thousands of dollars today. (The calculation is difficult since you also have to factor in that people were less willing to buy on credit as they are today, which creates a sort of mental cost deflation today.) As a consequence, they were well made. If you were going to spend a month's pay on an appliance, in cash, you were probably going to want something that was solid. The cost to get a well-made microwave was a small part of the purchase price of one in the early days of the technology.
Over time, as the cost of production decreased, models could be manufactured that cost less. These appealed to a different type of consumer, and the lower cost meant that people didn't necessarily want to pay extra to get one that was as heavily overbuilt. Today, you can get a microwave for less than a day's labor at minimum wage. It's not built like an Amana Radarange, but neither does it cost anything like it.
The quality devices are still out there -- I can tell you that if you shop around and are prepared to spend a few thousand dollars, you can get a microwave that's of nearly equivalent quality to an old Amana. (Say, a brand new Amana RC30S, list price $4,388.00) You'll be shopping in restaurant-supply stores, but they exist. So it's not as if we've lost the capability of producing equipment that's as well-built and reliable (in fact probably the same number of "good" microwaves are made now as then), it's just that there is a lot of relatively low-grade stuff manufactured as well, which clutters up the present-day marketplace to a casual observer.
You can see this pattern occur with microwaves and personal computers (ever picked up an IBM Model 5150? Talk about solid), as well as many other devices. Most things are built to a higher perceived quality when they represent a bigger fraction of a person's income. If you were willing to pay that fraction of your income/labor today, you could probably still buy that sort of quality, but few people want to.
Actually I have. I've been there more than once, in fact; I wouldn't describe the place as particularly friendly.
Ask yourself, what was the purpose of Ellis Island? Why didn't they just let the boats tie up at a pier in New York or New Jersey and let people off. That would be the more "welcoming" thing to do, if that had really been the U.S.'s principal motivation at the time.
Ellis Island existed principally because of the immigration rules I discussed above. It was a final check to make sure that not only were you basically healthy and disease-free, but that your papers were in good order, and that you had someone in the United States that was willing to vouch for you and keep you off of the public dole. (At times these rules were more relaxed than others, granted.)
If you were sick when you got to Ellis Island, you got put in quarantine; if you turned out to have a chronic or contagious disease (or what we'd today call a mental illness), you went back on the next ship to wherever you came over from. Admittedly the rejection rate was fairly low -- around 2% if I remember -- probably because few people who weren't in good health would attempt the trip in the first place.
The Wikipedia article on Ellis Island has a nice list of the various codes that would be chalked on rejected would-be immigrants, they ranged from being pregnant to having conjunctivitis, poor or absent travel papers, or a bad back.
America was not nearly as indiscriminate in terms of who it let in, even during the boom years of the 19th century, as most middle-school civics classes and politicans' rhetoric would have one believe. The U.S. had the good fortune of needing people at a time when millions of people in Europe needed a place to live, it is only natural that the two needs fulfilled each other.
The SK3 doesn't have WiFi, it's basically nothing but a regular phone with a QWERTY keyboard and email/IM software. Not a particularly fair comparison. A better one would be something like the Nokia N80, which has WiFi and retails for around $520, MSRP $900. (source)
But even just looking at the Sidekick, it'll run you $400+ if you can find an unlocked one from a legitimate retailer.
The phone is expensive, sure, but if you want the features it offers, it's basically on par with other similar devices. The question is how many people are that interested in having Wifi that they're willing to cough up 500+ bucks?
The only problem that I see, if the ISPs there are anything like the ISPs in the U.S., is that they engage in what I consider to be the razor's edge of false advertising. By selling you a 10Mb* pipe, they actually oversell their network. They don't have nearly the capacity it would take to let everyone use what they've sold them.
We need to stop this behavior. Yes, in the short run it might lead to prices increasing, but it would only be increasing back to the level of what they actually cost -- you don't get a 3Mb sustained transfer connection for $40 a month. You just don't.
A whole lot of problems would be solved if we just got rid of this basic misunderstanding, and forced companies to use a realistic measurement of throughput in their advertising. Then we'd start to see real competition for price and service.
Think about it and you'll realize the fallacy of your logic. If you allow the user to route anything as high priority, and limit the high priority bandwidth, you get precisely what we have now.
I don't think this is the case.
Suppose your connection was a 5Mb/s burst pipe, but had a high-QoS component of 128kb/s. The system would only allow you to send a certain amount of high-priority packets per second -- if you exceeded that, it would start throwing them away or just strip the QoS flag and send them as normal packets. The network backhauls would be built to allow simultaneous use of the high-QoS bandwidth, or at least build it to phone-company like standards. The rest of the 5Mb pipe would be shared and prone to degradation based on network conditions.
It would be up to you, the consumer, to decide what you want to use your 128k allocation of high-QoS for. If you want VoIP, one assumes that's what you'll want to do first. But if you want to make your porn download faster, good for you. It's your bandwidth, you can do what you want with it.
Just like now, where you can get a higher burst speed by paying more, you'd be able to buy more high-QoS packets by paying more too.
I wonder how many Slashdotters thought this when they see the editors screw up: "damn it, if you can run a blog with that much nonsense and be successfull, I can run one too!" and parted on their way to glory.
If by "glory" you mean "Digg," then at least a few.
the US gov't is far from welcoming the tired, poor and huddled masses anymore.
And we never did.
The whole "give us your tired, your sick" crap was just that, crap. The U.S. has never been particularly interested in taking refugees; exceptions to this are just that -- exceptions -- and not the rule.
I don't know what drives this constant temptation to embellish the past, but it wasn't this wonderful place of sunshine and light. Most of the people who were allowed to immigrate into the United States throughout its history weren't allowed in out of some sort of self-righteous pity, but because they were needed in order to meet the demand for labor. Lots of sick people got sent right back on the boats they came over on, and even if you were young and healthy, you still had to have someone willing to vouch for you here in the States before you were allowed in.
We need to stop deluding ourselves about our past immigration policies. While they may have ended up being more liberal than the rest of the Western world's at the time, that was only because Europe had more people than it knew what to do with, and the U.S. was starved for labor and people to tame the new lands it was in the midst of acquiring. As a nation we needed more people, and as a result we became more welcoming; the latter was a response to the former, not the other way around.
The needs of the United States have always been the driving force in our immigration policy historically; if it worked out well for the immigrants then all the better for them. It's mostly after the fact that people have congratulated themselves for being so high-minded.
Now it's disappointing to me as an American that our immigration process wasn't easier for your wife, who I am assuming is probably educated and employable -- in short, exactly the type of people we need to be encouraging to come here. However, I don't think that as a nation we should be guilt-tripping ourselves into rolling out a red carpet to everyone who needs a place to live, particularly to those without skills, for whom there is little demand today and less so in the future; we have never engaged in this historically, and there's no reason to start now.
I don't know where you were, but I think you're vastly overstating the durability of previous-generation automobiles and appliances.
Cars today are far more reliable than cars were 40 or 50 years ago. You can take pretty much any car today, and expect to get 100,000 miles out of it, properly maintained. This is not just Japanese cars, most domestic cars will last this long too. A whole lot of cars didn't used to have odometers that even went beyond 100k; it was just assumed that it would be scrapped by that point. Plus, they're more efficient, safer, and cost less in real-dollar terms. Not to mention a lower defect rate and less production waste. In short, you get a lot more for your dollar when you purchase a 2006 automobile than its 1956 equivalent.
Maintainance statistics on refrigerators I don't have as readily, but I'm willing to bet that you're viewing the past with some rose-colored glasses there, too. Most major appliances today will easily last ten years, in fact I'll bet that more of them are thrown away because they're no longer stylish, than because they actually break.
There are certain legitimate criticisms of the way a lot of mechancial devices are currently designed (sealed units, difficult to repair), however the upshot of this is that they're both more reliable, require less maintainance (when's the last time you had to have the coolant in your fridge topped off?), and far less expensive than they were in the past.
The reason you don't see very many older cars on American roads is not because they all die, but because we as a whole, don't like to drive them. Rather than driving them until they're actually at the end of their mechanical life, they either get sold to other countries (Mexico imports tons of used cars from the U.S.), or are cut up for parts or scrap rather than being reparied after some non-fatal damage. I suspect that in any major U.S. junkyard, you could very quickly put together enough parts to have a working automobile; it's simply not worth the labor for a skilled mechanic to do so. In other countries, or in the U.S. in the past under different economic conditions, this wouldn't be allowed to happen.
There are lots of things I'm nostalgic about the past for, but I have no illusions about the strides we've made in product engineering over the interim. That we've taken those engineering gains and used them to create a disposable culture is a social, not technological, problem.
Everyone knows that Rhode Island really isn't a state, it just a joke perpetuated by New Englanders on the rest of the country for their own amusement.
New England is really one state, it just gets twelve Senatorial votes and has a particularly byzantine internal tax code.
Yeah actually I'm considering purchasing one. (It's going to be either the HDTV-5500 or a DVICO FusionHDTV5, I started off looking at the latter but after discovering pcHDTV, I am leaning towards the former.) Need to get one before one of the Broadcast Flag bills sneaks through.
Actually I think the pcHDTV products are a good example of how a company can successfully produce and market hardware to the niche (Linux) market; it's a little bizarre that nobody has been able to do the same thing with wireless cards, or wasn't able to back when there were fewer of them on the market and early-adopters play a bigger role.
The only valid reason I can think of for wanting to read the kernel memory is to debug or otherwise inspect the state of the running kernel. Write access might be useful for some testing purposes, e.g. to create a particularly complex scenario and see what happens when it is allowed to run.
That is really of interest only to kernel hackers; it's certainly not something that Joe User needs to ever do. I assume that people doing work on the kernel have ways of debugging it and monitoring its memoryspace that gets around it's built in protections, or can just run the whole thing inside a VM where they can monitor all of its inputs and outputs directly.
Other than that I agree with you, there's no good reason even for root to be meddling about in there. However, I do understand that people who are used the "UNIX way" may balk at that philosophically; if you're used to the theory that root is God and root can do anything they want to any part of the system, it's a little off-putting to be told that anything is off-limits, even if it is "for your own good."
Make fun all you want, but I've said multiple times that the way Apple does peripheral hardware ought to be a model for Linux and any other non-Windows OS.
Back before I just threw in the towel and started drilling holes in my walls, I would have killed a man for a "Linux 802.11 Card." When you want a wireless card for your Mac, you go into a store, and you buy it. Note that I said "it," not "one." Because there's only one. (Okay, at some points there have been multiple, i.e. Airport vs. Airport Extreme, but most computers could only take one or the other.) Yeah, it costs more, but there's no messing around with anything.
I've wondered if maybe some Linux User's Group wanted to do this as a fund-raiser: do a bulk-purchase of some Linux-compatible peripheral (say a WL card or TV tuner) in OEM packaging, and then wrap it up with the appropriate drivers and sell it over the web at a 50-60% markup. I think you'd move product -- too often do you get recommendations for a product that works well, only to find that it's been discontinued or only sold in some other country, or it's nearly impossible to tell which products use it. (This was my experience finding Prism-based WL cards.)
Laugh all you want, but "choice" isn't always good, particularly when it means just having a high signal/noise ratio. Having one and only one hardware configuration available is better than having a thousand hardware configurations available, if only one or two of them works perfectly. In the first case, you have a 100% chance of getting the 'good' config, in the latter, you might as well buy Lotto tickets.
New music is a scarce resource. Recorded music is not. You can not treat recorded music using conventional economics and expect a sensible outcome.
This is the best point I've seen in this discussion so far.
I've tried to say this elsewhere, but never so succinctly. I think it's the absolute crux of the issue.
You don't need DRM and self-expiring songs in order to create a demand for new music. There will always be a demand for new music, because it's new. Even if you have the entire back-catalog of human civilization at your fingertips, you will still find a market for new music, new writing, and new visual art.
That market will probably be smaller than the market is right now, because today we make old recorded content artificially scarce (e.g., the point someone made about Motown earlier, how it's nearly impossible to find), thus creating a demand for new music which wouldn't otherwise exist.
But to say that in the absence of DRM that artists will just 'stop making music' is ridiculous. Some of them probably would, and this is a good thing because there is probably an overabundance of people in the content-creation industries right now anyway (due to the artificially inflated demand mentioned earlier). However some of them won't, and they'll be the ones feeding the public's insatiable desire for new stuff.
At least make it mandatory that media have to be deposited in DRM free format with some agency to make sure that the future will have access to todays cashcows (cash mice ? Mickey comes to mind), just in case congress at some remote point in the future decides that Walts estate has earned enough dough.
So basically... you want a Library, run by Congress...
(slaps head) I've got it! The Library of Congress!
Seriously though, that concept was one of the original motivations behind requiring materials registering for Copyright protection to send copies to be deposited there. The idea (or at least, my understanding of the idea) is that the copyright holder gets a monopoly on it, but in return society gets to keep a copy of it safe for later. And, it acts as a convenient record in case of dispute over who filed it first, etc.
Unfortunately, the LoC hasn't done a very good job at keeping up with the times. First, depositing materials there isn't required anymore to get copyright protection, which was probably a mistake to change. Although having an automatic copyright does help the "little guy" from time to time, it seems like we could make it a requirement that if you're going to make more than 10,000 copies of something and want copyright protection, that you have to send in 5 copies or whatever to the LoC.
I think restrictions on what formats are admissible is also a good idea. When the LoC was founded, really the only "format" around was words on printed paper. It's pretty universal, assuming you can read the language, and the preservation of paper is well understood, if fairly complicated. Today we have a plethora of formats for storing similar content, and many of them aren't easily accessible. I would definitely support making a number of formats officially recognized, say ink-on-cotton-paper, ASCII text, analog audio on 78s or LPs, and PCM audio on CD. Video would be a little harder, but I'm sure we could come up with something. Each standard would have to be fully documented.
Then, with the originals in hand, digitize and copy everything. The past has shown that the key to preservation is replication; the more copies exist of something, the better chance it has of surviving into the future. Preserving things in this way would require a constant and never-ending commitment of funds to continue to copy the collection forward using the best-available technology, but I think that the preservation of our culture -- arguably the legacy of our entire civilization -- is worth the expense.
It's a sad state the world is in, when a potentially beautiful thing like this is primarily sought after for it's military applications
Yeah, I tell you, the whole place started going downhill with that "fire" business, and it's been going to hell in a handbasket ever since "steel."
When has a new technology ever not been put to some immediate military use? The only motivators more powerful than wanting to kill each other, in terms of stimulating technological development, are probably laziness and a desire for physical comfort. In any case, more resources have been poured behind more research because of military applications than as a result of pure curiosity.
That's not to say that their use is a good thing -- I'm not engaging in the broken window fallacy here -- just pointing out that a whole lot of stuff today only exists because the resources were allocated to its development because someone thought it would come in handy during the next war.
Except that the proposed design accelerates the payload around in a circle -- using magnets arranged inside a torus -- not a long straight runway. I doubt a linear runway would be practical; it would just be too long. The advantage of a torus is you can keep using the same magnets to accelerate the payload, over and over, until you've reached sufficient speed to let it fly.
Unless the circle was ridiculously large (probably the size of a continent or better), you're not going to be able to get up to escape velocity before you'd (as a human being) would be crushed by the effects of the centripetal acceleration.
I'm not going to do the math right now, but I'm pretty confident that of the 6,000 Gs they're quoting, most of them are in the radial direction and not in the tangential, so that even if you brought the payload up to speed slowly, you'd still be crushed. It would be just like being in a centrifuge.
To be fair the tax treatment of dividends in the US was quite poor and encourage companies to avoid providing dividends.
Bingo. The tax structure in the U.S. favors gains in the share price over dividends, so as an investor, I would prefer that a company reinvest its profits (thereby hopefully raising the share price later) than give me the profit as a dividend, so that the government can come and screw me for most of it. Prior to 2003, there were situations you could get into where the tax rate on dividends could be twice that of capital gains. It's been ameliorated somewhat by the Tax Act of '03, but I think it's still somewhat more advantageous to have a capital gain than a dividend in the same dollar amount. (And even if it's not, many investors think that it is, which has the same effect.)
If you treated dividends the same way as capital gains are now -- or better yet, if you just treated all of them like simple income -- you would probably see investors demand different things from the companies that they hold, and the companies would respond eventually.
The real question is how do you want to encourage companies to be? Do you want to encourage reinvestment (and large-scale infrastructure development), or do you want to favor leaner "cash cow" corporations, which make a profit and turn it over to the investors more directly? I don't think that either route is clearly superior universally.
Because OpenOffice doesn't come in a box that you can buy down at Tesco?
Even people I know who are reasonably proficent with computers don't think of stuff that you can download for free as "real" software. They're too used to getting crummy little spyware-laced utilities that way. If it comes in a cardboard box with a CD in a case inside, then it's real, it's commercial.
I think it's easy to underestimate the hesitance many people have in believing anything that's being given away can possibly be any good. We've been conditioned our whole lives to ask "what's the catch?" whenever something "free" is being given away.
Even if Tesco's product is inferior, by virtue of the fact that it's being sold as a physical object in a B&M store, it'll seem more 'official' to a lot of people.
I'm not sure this is true. Lots of home users want to be able to open documents that they might get emailed, or find on the web. There is a lot of content floating around out there in MS Word format; to limit a product to only people who don't care about any level of interoperability (besides producing printed output) is aiming for a very small market segment. Even schoolkids are going to need that, if only so they can work on something with a school computer (almost certainly using Word, whether it's a Mac or Windows box) and bring it home.
The people who don't care about interoperability at all are basically your non-internet-connected Grandmas; people for whom the computer is just a fancy typewriter. While there may be a few of them left, I think it's a declining segment of the market. Not exactly where I'd want to be positioning my product.
Not being able to open MS Word documents is going to be a major disadvantage of an alternative office suite. Aside from paper, and perhaps HTML and raw text, MS Word is probably the most common format for written documents out there. I think you underestimate the number of times "regular users" want to be able to put in a floppy disk and edit a document that they've worked on with another computer.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's a little more subtle than that.
There is a theory, which I have heard articulated from time to time (although I don't know if there's a name for it or not) which says that right before a major event there is a lot of "chatter"; subtle yet distinct signs that something is about to happen, but which are too minor on their own to generate any attention. Once the event happens, in hindsight you can look back and recognize them. It's sort of a reverse butterfly-effect; the assumption is that no matter how good at being secretive you are, you will make some signs in the course of executing your plot, and some of those signs will percolate and be reported in papers somewhere. So you just need to know what to look for.
So basically what you might do, is take a big pattern-matching AI system, and "teach" it using the media records preceding other big terrorist events. 9/11, London, Madrid, etc. You have it comb through all the world media before those events, and see if you can find patterns, the little things that in retrospect might have alerted you that something was up. Then, thus primed with information and hopefully some patterns, you set it loose on the real-time news feeds.
In theory -- if the theory holds water, anyway -- the system might then be capable of giving you a warning of something big heading your way, picking up on stuff that a person might not recognize.
Anyway, I'm not sure if that's the theory that this particular system is going to try and use, but it's one idea that I've heard described; sort of as the 'holy grail' of machine-derived OSINT. More likely, you'd end up with a system that just gives you statistical summaries of the number of anti-US editorials in various countries or something. Useful for the State Department perhaps, but I'm not sure for preventing the next 9/11.
I don't really see where this is going. The public basically abandoned cartridge-based removable storage a few years ago; it reached its height with the Iomega Zip and was all downhill from there. (Actually this technology reminds me a little of the Zip; a thin, fragile, high-density storage media inside of a rigid case.) They would have to offer a lot more than just thinness to get the public to go back there.
Removable disks went out with a whimper, not with a bang, and the last few generations of them were pretty sorry. (Anyone remember the Castlewood Orb? Or any of the other HD-based removables? I do; the cost per MB was atrocious.)
Why would anyone want to move back to the days of proprietary cartridges and drives, when we've come so far from there? I'd much prefer improvements to the existing CD/DVD formats which preserve at least the physical format (allowing for easy backwards compatibility), if not the near-universal standardization.
And in terms of data transmission, how many of these can we cram into a station wagon?
it seems the appliances of yesteryear (at least the ones that are around and we remember, rather than the ones that sucked so much we got rid of them and forgot them), tended to be at the higher end of quality. (emphasis mine)
I think this is an important point to make as well. If you look around at appliances that are in use right now, it might seem like the further back in time you go, the more durably stuff was made.
Of course, this is because anything that's 30 years old and still working today, probably was built like a tank to begin with. If it hadn't been, it would have died a long time ago. Stuff made in the same era that wasn't as well-built is long since gone and forgotten, thus it doesn't get factored into the mental calculation.
Looking at what's around today is a heavily biased sample; of refrigerators made in 1980, only the good ones are left. Of ones made in 2003, both the good ones and the crap ones are left.
Also, there's another issue: devices which are really expensive are generally made better than ones which are cheap commodity goods. Take a look at some early microwave ovens, for example. They were insanely expensive -- the equivalent of thousands of dollars today. (The calculation is difficult since you also have to factor in that people were less willing to buy on credit as they are today, which creates a sort of mental cost deflation today.) As a consequence, they were well made. If you were going to spend a month's pay on an appliance, in cash, you were probably going to want something that was solid. The cost to get a well-made microwave was a small part of the purchase price of one in the early days of the technology.
Over time, as the cost of production decreased, models could be manufactured that cost less. These appealed to a different type of consumer, and the lower cost meant that people didn't necessarily want to pay extra to get one that was as heavily overbuilt. Today, you can get a microwave for less than a day's labor at minimum wage. It's not built like an Amana Radarange, but neither does it cost anything like it.
The quality devices are still out there -- I can tell you that if you shop around and are prepared to spend a few thousand dollars, you can get a microwave that's of nearly equivalent quality to an old Amana. (Say, a brand new Amana RC30S, list price $4,388.00) You'll be shopping in restaurant-supply stores, but they exist. So it's not as if we've lost the capability of producing equipment that's as well-built and reliable (in fact probably the same number of "good" microwaves are made now as then), it's just that there is a lot of relatively low-grade stuff manufactured as well, which clutters up the present-day marketplace to a casual observer.
You can see this pattern occur with microwaves and personal computers (ever picked up an IBM Model 5150? Talk about solid), as well as many other devices. Most things are built to a higher perceived quality when they represent a bigger fraction of a person's income. If you were willing to pay that fraction of your income/labor today, you could probably still buy that sort of quality, but few people want to.
Actually I have. I've been there more than once, in fact; I wouldn't describe the place as particularly friendly.
Ask yourself, what was the purpose of Ellis Island? Why didn't they just let the boats tie up at a pier in New York or New Jersey and let people off. That would be the more "welcoming" thing to do, if that had really been the U.S.'s principal motivation at the time.
Ellis Island existed principally because of the immigration rules I discussed above. It was a final check to make sure that not only were you basically healthy and disease-free, but that your papers were in good order, and that you had someone in the United States that was willing to vouch for you and keep you off of the public dole. (At times these rules were more relaxed than others, granted.)
If you were sick when you got to Ellis Island, you got put in quarantine; if you turned out to have a chronic or contagious disease (or what we'd today call a mental illness), you went back on the next ship to wherever you came over from. Admittedly the rejection rate was fairly low -- around 2% if I remember -- probably because few people who weren't in good health would attempt the trip in the first place.
The Wikipedia article on Ellis Island has a nice list of the various codes that would be chalked on rejected would-be immigrants, they ranged from being pregnant to having conjunctivitis, poor or absent travel papers, or a bad back.
America was not nearly as indiscriminate in terms of who it let in, even during the boom years of the 19th century, as most middle-school civics classes and politicans' rhetoric would have one believe. The U.S. had the good fortune of needing people at a time when millions of people in Europe needed a place to live, it is only natural that the two needs fulfilled each other.
The SK3 doesn't have WiFi, it's basically nothing but a regular phone with a QWERTY keyboard and email/IM software. Not a particularly fair comparison. A better one would be something like the Nokia N80, which has WiFi and retails for around $520, MSRP $900. (source)
But even just looking at the Sidekick, it'll run you $400+ if you can find an unlocked one from a legitimate retailer.
The phone is expensive, sure, but if you want the features it offers, it's basically on par with other similar devices. The question is how many people are that interested in having Wifi that they're willing to cough up 500+ bucks?
This is how the market is supposed to work.
The only problem that I see, if the ISPs there are anything like the ISPs in the U.S., is that they engage in what I consider to be the razor's edge of false advertising. By selling you a 10Mb* pipe, they actually oversell their network. They don't have nearly the capacity it would take to let everyone use what they've sold them.
We need to stop this behavior. Yes, in the short run it might lead to prices increasing, but it would only be increasing back to the level of what they actually cost -- you don't get a 3Mb sustained transfer connection for $40 a month. You just don't.
A whole lot of problems would be solved if we just got rid of this basic misunderstanding, and forced companies to use a realistic measurement of throughput in their advertising. Then we'd start to see real competition for price and service.
* (very small type) Burst speed
Think about it and you'll realize the fallacy of your logic. If you allow the user to route anything as high priority, and limit the high priority bandwidth, you get precisely what we have now.
I don't think this is the case.
Suppose your connection was a 5Mb/s burst pipe, but had a high-QoS component of 128kb/s. The system would only allow you to send a certain amount of high-priority packets per second -- if you exceeded that, it would start throwing them away or just strip the QoS flag and send them as normal packets. The network backhauls would be built to allow simultaneous use of the high-QoS bandwidth, or at least build it to phone-company like standards. The rest of the 5Mb pipe would be shared and prone to degradation based on network conditions.
It would be up to you, the consumer, to decide what you want to use your 128k allocation of high-QoS for. If you want VoIP, one assumes that's what you'll want to do first. But if you want to make your porn download faster, good for you. It's your bandwidth, you can do what you want with it.
Just like now, where you can get a higher burst speed by paying more, you'd be able to buy more high-QoS packets by paying more too.
I wonder how many Slashdotters thought this when they see the editors screw up: "damn it, if you can run a blog with that much nonsense and be successfull, I can run one too!" and parted on their way to glory.
If by "glory" you mean "Digg," then at least a few.
I'm sure you over in the USA don't have standards of governance all that far behind the rest of the western world.
God, you're funny.
Must be that dry European humor that I'm always hearing about. I almost couldn't tell that you were joking.
the US gov't is far from welcoming the tired, poor and huddled masses anymore.
And we never did.
The whole "give us your tired, your sick" crap was just that, crap. The U.S. has never been particularly interested in taking refugees; exceptions to this are just that -- exceptions -- and not the rule.
I don't know what drives this constant temptation to embellish the past, but it wasn't this wonderful place of sunshine and light. Most of the people who were allowed to immigrate into the United States throughout its history weren't allowed in out of some sort of self-righteous pity, but because they were needed in order to meet the demand for labor. Lots of sick people got sent right back on the boats they came over on, and even if you were young and healthy, you still had to have someone willing to vouch for you here in the States before you were allowed in.
We need to stop deluding ourselves about our past immigration policies. While they may have ended up being more liberal than the rest of the Western world's at the time, that was only because Europe had more people than it knew what to do with, and the U.S. was starved for labor and people to tame the new lands it was in the midst of acquiring. As a nation we needed more people, and as a result we became more welcoming; the latter was a response to the former, not the other way around.
The needs of the United States have always been the driving force in our immigration policy historically; if it worked out well for the immigrants then all the better for them. It's mostly after the fact that people have congratulated themselves for being so high-minded.
Now it's disappointing to me as an American that our immigration process wasn't easier for your wife, who I am assuming is probably educated and employable -- in short, exactly the type of people we need to be encouraging to come here. However, I don't think that as a nation we should be guilt-tripping ourselves into rolling out a red carpet to everyone who needs a place to live, particularly to those without skills, for whom there is little demand today and less so in the future; we have never engaged in this historically, and there's no reason to start now.
The Republicans want to include all the embryos, but just wait until the Democrats get done including all the dead people...
(insert dead baby joke here)
I don't know where you were, but I think you're vastly overstating the durability of previous-generation automobiles and appliances.
Cars today are far more reliable than cars were 40 or 50 years ago. You can take pretty much any car today, and expect to get 100,000 miles out of it, properly maintained. This is not just Japanese cars, most domestic cars will last this long too. A whole lot of cars didn't used to have odometers that even went beyond 100k; it was just assumed that it would be scrapped by that point. Plus, they're more efficient, safer, and cost less in real-dollar terms. Not to mention a lower defect rate and less production waste. In short, you get a lot more for your dollar when you purchase a 2006 automobile than its 1956 equivalent.
Maintainance statistics on refrigerators I don't have as readily, but I'm willing to bet that you're viewing the past with some rose-colored glasses there, too. Most major appliances today will easily last ten years, in fact I'll bet that more of them are thrown away because they're no longer stylish, than because they actually break.
There are certain legitimate criticisms of the way a lot of mechancial devices are currently designed (sealed units, difficult to repair), however the upshot of this is that they're both more reliable, require less maintainance (when's the last time you had to have the coolant in your fridge topped off?), and far less expensive than they were in the past.
The reason you don't see very many older cars on American roads is not because they all die, but because we as a whole, don't like to drive them. Rather than driving them until they're actually at the end of their mechanical life, they either get sold to other countries (Mexico imports tons of used cars from the U.S.), or are cut up for parts or scrap rather than being reparied after some non-fatal damage. I suspect that in any major U.S. junkyard, you could very quickly put together enough parts to have a working automobile; it's simply not worth the labor for a skilled mechanic to do so. In other countries, or in the U.S. in the past under different economic conditions, this wouldn't be allowed to happen.
There are lots of things I'm nostalgic about the past for, but I have no illusions about the strides we've made in product engineering over the interim. That we've taken those engineering gains and used them to create a disposable culture is a social, not technological, problem.
Everyone knows that Rhode Island really isn't a state, it just a joke perpetuated by New Englanders on the rest of the country for their own amusement.
New England is really one state, it just gets twelve Senatorial votes and has a particularly byzantine internal tax code.
Yeah actually I'm considering purchasing one. (It's going to be either the HDTV-5500 or a DVICO FusionHDTV5, I started off looking at the latter but after discovering pcHDTV, I am leaning towards the former.) Need to get one before one of the Broadcast Flag bills sneaks through.
Actually I think the pcHDTV products are a good example of how a company can successfully produce and market hardware to the niche (Linux) market; it's a little bizarre that nobody has been able to do the same thing with wireless cards, or wasn't able to back when there were fewer of them on the market and early-adopters play a bigger role.
The only valid reason I can think of for wanting to read the kernel memory is to debug or otherwise inspect the state of the running kernel. Write access might be useful for some testing purposes, e.g. to create a particularly complex scenario and see what happens when it is allowed to run.
That is really of interest only to kernel hackers; it's certainly not something that Joe User needs to ever do. I assume that people doing work on the kernel have ways of debugging it and monitoring its memoryspace that gets around it's built in protections, or can just run the whole thing inside a VM where they can monitor all of its inputs and outputs directly.
Other than that I agree with you, there's no good reason even for root to be meddling about in there. However, I do understand that people who are used the "UNIX way" may balk at that philosophically; if you're used to the theory that root is God and root can do anything they want to any part of the system, it's a little off-putting to be told that anything is off-limits, even if it is "for your own good."
Make fun all you want, but I've said multiple times that the way Apple does peripheral hardware ought to be a model for Linux and any other non-Windows OS.
Back before I just threw in the towel and started drilling holes in my walls, I would have killed a man for a "Linux 802.11 Card." When you want a wireless card for your Mac, you go into a store, and you buy it. Note that I said "it," not "one." Because there's only one. (Okay, at some points there have been multiple, i.e. Airport vs. Airport Extreme, but most computers could only take one or the other.) Yeah, it costs more, but there's no messing around with anything.
I've wondered if maybe some Linux User's Group wanted to do this as a fund-raiser: do a bulk-purchase of some Linux-compatible peripheral (say a WL card or TV tuner) in OEM packaging, and then wrap it up with the appropriate drivers and sell it over the web at a 50-60% markup. I think you'd move product -- too often do you get recommendations for a product that works well, only to find that it's been discontinued or only sold in some other country, or it's nearly impossible to tell which products use it. (This was my experience finding Prism-based WL cards.)
Laugh all you want, but "choice" isn't always good, particularly when it means just having a high signal/noise ratio. Having one and only one hardware configuration available is better than having a thousand hardware configurations available, if only one or two of them works perfectly. In the first case, you have a 100% chance of getting the 'good' config, in the latter, you might as well buy Lotto tickets.
I have no proof of this, but I suspect that the Linspire PC was at least in part, a threat to Microsoft on the part of Walmart.
It wouldn't surprise me if it got brought up as a bargaining chip in some negotiation over Walmart's allowed margin on Office or Windows XP.
I said they're in bed with each other, not that they don't have a little lover's quarrel once in a while.
New music is a scarce resource. Recorded music is not. You can not treat recorded music using conventional economics and expect a sensible outcome.
This is the best point I've seen in this discussion so far.
I've tried to say this elsewhere, but never so succinctly. I think it's the absolute crux of the issue.
You don't need DRM and self-expiring songs in order to create a demand for new music. There will always be a demand for new music, because it's new. Even if you have the entire back-catalog of human civilization at your fingertips, you will still find a market for new music, new writing, and new visual art.
That market will probably be smaller than the market is right now, because today we make old recorded content artificially scarce (e.g., the point someone made about Motown earlier, how it's nearly impossible to find), thus creating a demand for new music which wouldn't otherwise exist.
But to say that in the absence of DRM that artists will just 'stop making music' is ridiculous. Some of them probably would, and this is a good thing because there is probably an overabundance of people in the content-creation industries right now anyway (due to the artificially inflated demand mentioned earlier). However some of them won't, and they'll be the ones feeding the public's insatiable desire for new stuff.
At least make it mandatory that media have to be deposited in DRM free format with some agency to make sure that the future will have access to todays cashcows (cash mice ? Mickey comes to mind), just in case congress at some remote point in the future decides that Walts estate has earned enough dough.
... you want a Library, run by Congress ...
So basically
(slaps head) I've got it! The Library of Congress!
Seriously though, that concept was one of the original motivations behind requiring materials registering for Copyright protection to send copies to be deposited there. The idea (or at least, my understanding of the idea) is that the copyright holder gets a monopoly on it, but in return society gets to keep a copy of it safe for later. And, it acts as a convenient record in case of dispute over who filed it first, etc.
Unfortunately, the LoC hasn't done a very good job at keeping up with the times. First, depositing materials there isn't required anymore to get copyright protection, which was probably a mistake to change. Although having an automatic copyright does help the "little guy" from time to time, it seems like we could make it a requirement that if you're going to make more than 10,000 copies of something and want copyright protection, that you have to send in 5 copies or whatever to the LoC.
I think restrictions on what formats are admissible is also a good idea. When the LoC was founded, really the only "format" around was words on printed paper. It's pretty universal, assuming you can read the language, and the preservation of paper is well understood, if fairly complicated. Today we have a plethora of formats for storing similar content, and many of them aren't easily accessible. I would definitely support making a number of formats officially recognized, say ink-on-cotton-paper, ASCII text, analog audio on 78s or LPs, and PCM audio on CD. Video would be a little harder, but I'm sure we could come up with something. Each standard would have to be fully documented.
Then, with the originals in hand, digitize and copy everything. The past has shown that the key to preservation is replication; the more copies exist of something, the better chance it has of surviving into the future. Preserving things in this way would require a constant and never-ending commitment of funds to continue to copy the collection forward using the best-available technology, but I think that the preservation of our culture -- arguably the legacy of our entire civilization -- is worth the expense.
It's a sad state the world is in, when a potentially beautiful thing like this is primarily sought after for it's military applications
Yeah, I tell you, the whole place started going downhill with that "fire" business, and it's been going to hell in a handbasket ever since "steel."
When has a new technology ever not been put to some immediate military use? The only motivators more powerful than wanting to kill each other, in terms of stimulating technological development, are probably laziness and a desire for physical comfort. In any case, more resources have been poured behind more research because of military applications than as a result of pure curiosity.
That's not to say that their use is a good thing -- I'm not engaging in the broken window fallacy here -- just pointing out that a whole lot of stuff today only exists because the resources were allocated to its development because someone thought it would come in handy during the next war.
Except that the proposed design accelerates the payload around in a circle -- using magnets arranged inside a torus -- not a long straight runway. I doubt a linear runway would be practical; it would just be too long. The advantage of a torus is you can keep using the same magnets to accelerate the payload, over and over, until you've reached sufficient speed to let it fly.
Unless the circle was ridiculously large (probably the size of a continent or better), you're not going to be able to get up to escape velocity before you'd (as a human being) would be crushed by the effects of the centripetal acceleration.
I'm not going to do the math right now, but I'm pretty confident that of the 6,000 Gs they're quoting, most of them are in the radial direction and not in the tangential, so that even if you brought the payload up to speed slowly, you'd still be crushed. It would be just like being in a centrifuge.
To be fair the tax treatment of dividends in the US was quite poor and encourage companies to avoid providing dividends.
Bingo. The tax structure in the U.S. favors gains in the share price over dividends, so as an investor, I would prefer that a company reinvest its profits (thereby hopefully raising the share price later) than give me the profit as a dividend, so that the government can come and screw me for most of it. Prior to 2003, there were situations you could get into where the tax rate on dividends could be twice that of capital gains. It's been ameliorated somewhat by the Tax Act of '03, but I think it's still somewhat more advantageous to have a capital gain than a dividend in the same dollar amount. (And even if it's not, many investors think that it is, which has the same effect.)
If you treated dividends the same way as capital gains are now -- or better yet, if you just treated all of them like simple income -- you would probably see investors demand different things from the companies that they hold, and the companies would respond eventually.
The real question is how do you want to encourage companies to be? Do you want to encourage reinvestment (and large-scale infrastructure development), or do you want to favor leaner "cash cow" corporations, which make a profit and turn it over to the investors more directly? I don't think that either route is clearly superior universally.
Because OpenOffice doesn't come in a box that you can buy down at Tesco?
Even people I know who are reasonably proficent with computers don't think of stuff that you can download for free as "real" software. They're too used to getting crummy little spyware-laced utilities that way. If it comes in a cardboard box with a CD in a case inside, then it's real, it's commercial.
I think it's easy to underestimate the hesitance many people have in believing anything that's being given away can possibly be any good. We've been conditioned our whole lives to ask "what's the catch?" whenever something "free" is being given away.
Even if Tesco's product is inferior, by virtue of the fact that it's being sold as a physical object in a B&M store, it'll seem more 'official' to a lot of people.
I'm not sure this is true. Lots of home users want to be able to open documents that they might get emailed, or find on the web. There is a lot of content floating around out there in MS Word format; to limit a product to only people who don't care about any level of interoperability (besides producing printed output) is aiming for a very small market segment. Even schoolkids are going to need that, if only so they can work on something with a school computer (almost certainly using Word, whether it's a Mac or Windows box) and bring it home.
The people who don't care about interoperability at all are basically your non-internet-connected Grandmas; people for whom the computer is just a fancy typewriter. While there may be a few of them left, I think it's a declining segment of the market. Not exactly where I'd want to be positioning my product.
Not being able to open MS Word documents is going to be a major disadvantage of an alternative office suite. Aside from paper, and perhaps HTML and raw text, MS Word is probably the most common format for written documents out there. I think you underestimate the number of times "regular users" want to be able to put in a floppy disk and edit a document that they've worked on with another computer.