To get a DOD bid contract, Apple would be forced to develop a USER FIELD REPLACEABLE battery and any firmware updates would not "brick" the radio once the military unlocked it. Nah, they would probably just make the entire unit disposable. Logistically, it's simpler to do that and only have one supply chain, than to have to supply both the units themselves *and* the replaceable batteries.
Lots of things in combat zones are moving towards single-use. It's an ecological disaster, but so's war in general.
I tend to wonder exactly how we'd find a halfway-decent, objective way of deciding what would be in the "basket" of commodities, and how often that basket would change -- didn't they have to change the Consumer Price Index not that long ago, because it was filled with stuff that most people don't purchase anymore? I'd be a bit concerned that if you put the control over what goes in the 'basket' into political hands, there would be a lot of temptation to gerrymander it for various ends. Whatever goods you put in the basket would tend to be price-stablized (some might say distorted), because in addition to trading as commodities, they'd also trade as quasi-currency. I'm not sure what effect that would have if you included a food crop or a consumable good (say, oil or coal) in it, but it seems like it could get interesting.
I've heard that some smaller countries have their national currencies pegged to a basket of major currencies; e.g., ten Banana Republician Dollars is worth four Euros, two GBPs, 5000 JPY, and three USD. This means that their central bank has to maintain a more complicated reserve (they have to have some of each currency, instead of just having USD, or Euros, or whatever), but it protects them against fluctuations in one currency in particular. A commodity-based system wouldn't be that different, conceptually.
IANAE, The corollary is that the mortgage must be for an amount that is very close to the value of that asset. If you have massive over estimates of property values due to something like a real estate bubble, once the bubble burst the revaluation throws the system out of whack. Banks says they have X dollars but due to over valuation they actually only have Y% of X dollars where Y is 100. If there is a crash like that and a simultaneous extreme cash call from the banks actual creditors (their customers) then the whole system collapses. Completely agree, and I definitely did not mean to in any way defend current lending practices. If a bank allows someone to borrow money without sufficient collateral (either in terms of real, liquidable assets, or in an income stream), they are creating money with nothing behind it. That is very bad.
However I think a return to full-reserve banking would be a treatment that's worse than the disease, at least as it currently stands. We need to banks more responsible for the loans they write, and strongly discourage them from lending out money to people who can't repay it. We need to accept, as a society, that not everyone has a right to a huge house financed with an even bigger mortgage. And we need to take a very hard look at the unsecured-loan industry that's financing much of the nation's consumer debt (in the form of either straightforward loans or credit cards).
But a return to full-cash-reserve banking would probably just dry up the supply of capital that the economy needs, and unless it was done worldwide and at once (not a chance), it would probably just result in a further influx of foreign capital.
I agree with you on some of the dangers of inflation; however, I disagree about the nature of "value" in an asset.
Something can have substantial value, even if it's not the sort of thing you can leave sitting around idle and come back to later.
A tractor has substantial value not in the same way a pile of gold bricks does, but because it performs a function. It represents a potential income stream to a farmer, which is why a farmer might want to own one. Thus the farmer goes to a bank and takes out a loan against the tractor, in order to purchase it. For the bank to make this loan, they want to ensure that the farmer isn't an idiot, and that he'll pay back the value of the tractor either faster than it depreciates (or he has some other assets that won't depreciate as quickly, in order to secure the loan). If they think this is the case, they can then go and create a pile of 'tractor-dollars', dollars that are backed by that tractor. Those dollars only stay in the system until the farmer pays off the loan, and assuming the loan was intelligently made, there should never be more tractor-dollars sloshing around than the tractor is actually worth (either in literal terms or as an income stream).
The same holds true for a factory, or anything else that helps create an income stream. Just because it's not a stable asset doesn't mean it's valueless; as long as you can predict the depreciation, you can still use it as collateral, and if you can use it as collateral, you can use it as the basis for new money. (As long as you trust the government to enforce the lien and let the bank repossess it, of course -- the real basis for debt banking is the threat of force by people with guns.)
I also agree that banks have been supremely irresponsible with their lending practices, but I don't think that full-reserve banking is really the best solution. There are rules that need substantial tightening, but there's nothing inherently wrong with letting a bank use mortgaged assets as part of its reserves, as long as the value of those assets over time is computed, the loans made accordingly, and there's a iron-hard willingness by the government to liquidate those assets in the event of a default by the borrower.
Bankers are able to create money to lend far in excess of what is actually backed by real assets, meaning money from depositors, gold, silver, goats, or whatever. When a bank lends money that's backed by someone's mortgage, it's backed by a very "real asset": the mortgaged property.
It's not an asset that the bank can keep in its vault (how would you fit it in there, exactly?), but it's a bank asset nonetheless. If the borrower fails to repay the loan, the bank gets the house.
As long as the government is around and is willing to enforce liens, those are all very real assets, and I don't see a problem in using them as a basis for a currency.
The only reason you need a precious-metal currency is when you don't have a functional government that enforces contracts. If you have doubts in the government's ability or willingness to enforce the lien and throw a defaulting borrower out so that the bank can take their house, then you have a problem, and the bank ought not to consider that loan as an asset anymore. (But without a functional government you have some other fairly serious problems, to the point where I'd suggest that the best currency is probably 5.56mm rifle rounds, not silver certificates.)
That's an interesting video, and not a bad introduction to how the banking system actually works (as opposed to the oversimplified "they lend out your deposits..." view that most people get as youngsters and never really question). However, I'm not sure that its attempt to spin 'money as debt' as a bad thing is really true.
If we were stuck on a gold or silver standard, we'd be in real trouble: there just isn't that much gold or silver around to make a a very good currency. We need a currency that can grow as the amount of real assets in circulation grows -- as we as a society and civilization create more valuable stuff, we need a way to pay for it. The debt money system uses all those real assets as the basis for its value, rather than an arbitrarily chosen precious metal.
In effect, the debt money system, though complicated, is a lot more 'real' than a gold standard. Gold is only valuable because it's shiny and pleasant to look at and you can beat it into useful shapes and it's been used as money for a long time. You can't eat it, you can't live in it, you can't plow a field with it -- aside from some applications in the jewelry and electronics industries, you can't do much of anything with it. But a house, that has real value. A factory has value. A John Deere tractor has value. When people borrow money to pay for these things, the money is created and the newly-created money is backed by the pledged asset. So when I buy a house for $250k, two hundred and fifty thousand new dollars are created, but those dollars are backed by my house; they are, in one sense, actually my house, floating around out there. And then I work, and pay the loan principle back, and basically suck those 'house-dollars' back out of the market and put them back into my house.
Once you get around the mental shock of realizing that the system doesn't work the way you thought it did, there's a certain elegance to the system. Money is created and destroyed as it's needed to pay for things, rather than there being some fixed amount of it floating around. When we need a lot of capital, it appears; when we don't (and pay off our loans), it goes away. With a fixed amount of gold, you'd have massive inflation/deflation cycles as prices changed in response to the amount of available currency.
Where you run into serious problems are when banks start making loans to people who don't have enough real assets behind them to cover the amount of money that's being created. IMO, this should be illegal, or at the very least the banks should be held directly responsible for ensuring that the loans they're making are backed by something (real property, or an income stream). If they don't, then they're magicking money into existence that has nothing behind it, and letting it out into the market. That's dangerous business, and the source of our current credit problems.
While you're at it.. sue the drivers of the cars with the patent-infringing wiper motor. They're obviously benefiting from the innovation without having compensated the patent-holder. They can, actually, do exactly this. "Use" of an infringing device is considered infringement. Generally, patentholders don't bother to go after end users of consumer product, because it's wringing blood from a stone and really terrible PR, but they sometimes threaten it as a way to discourage use of a possibly-infringing product. (Cf. Anti-Ford ads taken out by competitors alleging that Ford's products infringed the Selden patent.)
Torrenting a recording is a completely different animal than burning a copy of a friend's cd. Um, you want to explain that a little bit? Because I don't see any particular reason why it is.
Why is everyone so concerned about a company having their URL history? I mean, they already have your searches(google), your email(gmail) and your documents(google docs), what does it matter? Because it's another thing the authorities can subpoena -- or just take, without all that messy paperwork -- and comb through to find things to go after you with.
The way the laws are these days, even if you're Mother Teresa, you're probably doing something illegal, even if you don't think of it as illegal or even realize it. (Ever downloaded VLC or Handbrake? Bought discount smokes? Played a little online poker? Bought something without paying your state's sales tax?) Sure, the FBI normally has bigger fish to fry than you and me, but there's no reason that'll always be the case. The tools that are used for terrorism now will be used for narcotics tomorrow, and copyright enforcement the day after that, and eventually it'll trickle down until it's being used against something you're doing. And information compiled in databases has a tendency to stick around (at least, when it's not being misplaced or stolen). Your browsing habits today could come back to seriously haunt you in a decade or two.
And it's not just the government that you have to worry about, or Google's official policy as a corporation. You also have to consider how much the people who actually deal with this data are paid. How much would it cost to get one of them to give someone malicious access to the database? A whole lot less than the database would be worth, I suspect. Even if you're not doing anything illegal (which, again, I doubt; most people break a half-dozen laws before they get to work in the morning), you're a rare person if there's not something going on in your life that you'd prefer to keep private. Medical conditions, sexual preferences... it all sounds like good opportunities for extortion to me.
There aren't really any analogues in the pre-computer world to the size and scope of databases like Google's, in terms of both the breadth and depth of information it could contain on individuals. This is not something that we have much societal experience with, and the limited track record we do have is decidedly mixed. It's not especially paranoid to want to take a "wait and see" approach.
It's not hostility to immigration. It's illegal immigration. I think you would find that a lot of right wingers on the forefront of the illegal immigration charge have a lot of H1-B employees with engineering degrees wondering why they have to jump through so many hoops to be a citizen when evidentally a bunch of illiterate crop pickers get to be citizens after sneaking across the border.
Agreed; the people who get really screwed by the current immigration system are the people who play by the rules. It's quite perverse: if you're coming here to do a job that's one major capital investment away from being done by a robot and you don't really care about breaking the law, we practically roll out the welcome mat. Come on in, get yourself a driver's license, etc.
But if you're well-educated, law-abiding, and are looking to work in a sector where we really need smart people in the future, you can plan on spending thousands of dollars and years of your life getting in. And people will probably assume you're here illegally anyway, depending on where you're from.
And we wonder why things aren't looking rosy: with incentives like these, why are the outcomes at all surprising?
This is true. However, if you gave out cost-plus contracts without well-defined metrics, you'd have people screaming at you for throwing money away, subsiding the M-I complex at taxpayer expense, etc. etc.
There's a razor's edge in between, for funding applied science while also being fiscally responsible (or at least keeping the people who'd like that money for themselves off your back). I'm not sure there are any quick fixes.
I messed up with the versions. The one I was thinking of, and that I had held back upgrading until I had to because of the Nano, was 4.7, not 6.0.4. Apple introduced a 5-connection limit to the music-sharing feature in 4.7.1.
6.0.4 was nice because it was the last stable version before they changed the interface (IMO, for the worse) with version 7, but it had already had the sharing features gutted.
So if you don't have any devices that require a newer version and you don't care about the Apple Store, the version to use is from the pre-4.7.1 days. Unfortunately I think Apple pulled it from its download page; you can get 4.7.1 (the crippled one) but I can't find 4.7.0.
The backup system is definitely a step forward, but the interface "improvements" are not. Hell, even MacWorld thought that they were 'too pretty' to be useful in its review, and MacWorld usually hangs on Apple's every word.
The number of Apple updates that have actually been steps backwards in terms of features lately has been disappointing. Personally I think iTunes hit a high water mark with version 6.0.4 or 6.0.5 and went downhill from there; everything since then has been crappier interfaces and additional cashflow for Apple, at the expense of features that the music companies didn't like, but were great for users. If it wasn't for the fact that my iPod Nano absolutely *required* iTunes 7 (for no particularly good reason, except that it's a good way to force users to upgrade), I'd never have upgraded.
The saving grace of Apple is that when they make a mistake, they usually realize and fix it pretty quickly, but the direction they're heading as a company just isn't doing it for me as much anymore.
But you're right, we need to address the problems of our own people first before we go saving everyone else in the world. On the other hand, in the US poor is when you only have one TV set and no cable. There are many people who live below the poverty line that own a home, and who have a car. Only because we allow people to borrow money far in excess of their ability to ever repay it. You can be poor and still appear to be making it, but at the expense of a massive debt load. The economic conditions which made this possible are ending, and in the foreseeable future I think it will become dramatically harder for people at the bottom end of the economic ladder to borrow money.
It'll probably be a while before you see a famine in the U.S., like you sometimes see in Africa or parts of Asia, but without cheap credit there are definitely parts of the U.S. that could look like the countries that the OLPC is designed for (which is *not* really sub-Saharan Africa).
The solutions to the problem in the U.S. are going to be tough and long-term, and unfortunately neither political party seems interested in really doing anything about it. The Republicans want to ignore it and keep raking in profits, and the Democrats want to throw quick money at the problem and alleviate their guilt-ridden consciences. The will to make substantial investments in infrastructure and education just doesn't seem to be there yet.
Many US Universities (Including MIT) are happy with grades from those exams. So happy that you are not asked to pay school fees if you can run or jump.
I don't know what MIT is doing, and I'm not contradicting you about wherever you went, but I don't think that's typical. At least at my alma mater, they don't care where you came from, but they want to see some sort of standardized test score. In fact, they tend to rely on them more heavily for foreign students, who typically don't get an opportunity to interview in-person, and who may be coming from a radically different educational background than a U.S. student. (Which means the admissions officer can't look at their transcript and really know what it means, in the same way someone very familiar with high schools in a particular region of the U.S. can.) Foreign students usually also have to take the TOEFL and get some minimum score.
I also distinctly recall that there was no financial aid offered to foreign students; it was a strictly cash-on-the-barrel-head operation (in some cases, literally *cash*, although I don't expect that happens anymore).
I think that the extent to which universities roll out the red carpet to foreigners is usually overestimated by many U.S. students; coming here to study ain't no picnic.
Picking a few schools more or less at random, I see that testing for non-U.S. students is de rigueur at William and Mary, Caltech (which offers some financial aid to foreign students, but admission is not need-blind), and Duke. They seem to vary a little on whether the TOEFL is required or just encouraged, but except for a short note on Duke's page about an exemption from the SAT for students coming from countries where it isn't offered, there's no acceptance of alternative national tests in lieu of the usual SAT/ACT. I think that's more an exception than a rule.
Finding primary sources in print is hard and extremely time-consuming, and requires access to a big library. Completely agree. It's totally beyond the scope of most students in public primary and secondary schools, and probably most college students who aren't at a big university.
However, this is where Wikipedia is better than Britannica. In a Britannica article, you usually get a few print sources as references. In a Wikipedia article, you usually get a ton of references, and many of them are electronic (and if it's a recent event, many of them are both electronic and primary sources, e.g. links to news sources).
Take, for example, the WP article on George Washington. It has 49 direct citations, most of which are to sources that are available both freely and electronically. And many of those are to well-respected institutions that you could cite directly (the LOC, the Smithsonian, etc.). And beyond that, there's a separate list of suggested reading, which includes electronic versions of George's actual writings, a short biography published in the NY Times, and a collection of primary-source material related to slavery in Philadelphia by the Independence Hall Association. In five minutes, starting with the WP article, I turned up more primary and citable secondary sources than I probably could have found in an afternoon's worth of searching in a good library.
That, to me, is the real strength of Wikipedia. Regardless of its strengths or weaknesses as a source itself, it is an excellent portal to a vast quantity of electronic information, available to anyone with an Internet connection. While a student forced to use nothing but paper sources is hobbled by the size of their school's library -- which is almost always directly proportional to the wealth of the area they live in and the importance that the community places on education -- allowing student to use (good) electronic sources narrows the gap considerably, provided both have access to the Internet to begin with.
Yes, "subtracting" one side of the balanced circuit from the others is another way to think about it. That's more consistent with how modern transistorized or op-amp based circuits work.
E.g., if you think of the signals on the '+' wire to be (A+N), where A is audio and N is noise, then the signal on the '-' wire is (-A+N). Subtracting the two signals, say via a difference amplifier, gives you (A+N)-(-A+N) = 2A.
I always tend to think about balanced circuits conceptually, as the current flow through the transformers, canceling out the common-mode because of the nature of a transformer, but some people prefer to think about them purely in mathematical terms, or as adding and subtracting signals. Either way works.
Yes, kids use Brittannica as a primary source, along with other Encyclopedias. People don't start citing research papers or hard data until college (and even then, only in Grad School for a lot of colleges - sad huh?). The reason it's acceptable, is because the Encyclopedia companies try to ensure all the information is accurate, and then print it. It can't be vandalized later, so it's generally more trustworthy than wikipedia is assuming it's not a really old edition. You say this as if it's a fact carved in stone, that can't be changed. If Wikipedia replaced Britannica for initial research, but teachers stick to their guns about not accepting it as an actual source (which they should not), perhaps it will force more students to start doing real research at a younger age. Using Britannica as a source seems just as inherently lazy as using Wikipedia, and I don't think that should be acceptable even at the high-school level.
It's not like it's especially hard to drill down to real sources from most WP articles. Most controversial ones have citations, or at least a list of suggested reading, near the bottom. (And some articles, like ones on particular recent events, have direct links to primary source material, which you don't typically get in a traditional encyclopedia entry.) In some ways, it's a lot easier to begin doing real research from WP than it is from Britannica, and I think WP does a better job of encouraging skepticism and fact-checking skills.
The 'true software receivers' are interesting, but ultimately I think they're overkill once you get out of the HF bands. Maybe this will be one of those 'who needs more than 128k?' comments, but I really don't see any reason why you need to sample the RF directly when you're dealing with VHF or UHF, it just seems excessive. If you want to digitize a 1GHz input, you're going to need to sample it at least 2GHz, and probably significantly higher if you want to do any cool DSP-type stuff. That's gotta start doing nasty things to the system's power consumption.
The satellite communications people have been using block downconverters for decades; every pizza-box satellite dish has one, to take the incoming signal from the feedhorn and drop it down to a level that can be sent down the coax to the set-top box without huge line losses. Some of them can work on fairly broad frequency ranges (like several GHz at once, for some of the Ku-band ones), and are real engineering marvels.
That seems like a much more practical approach for cellphones than a direct-digitization one. I don't know if you'd be able to make one block downconverter/upconverter that would cover all the bands currently used by GSM phones (800-1200 MHz, I think?), but if not, it would be the only part you'd need to change when designing for one region vs another. As long as it used the same IF output, the SDR would only have to be designed around one frequency range, and could be heavily optimized in order to improve battery life.
Don't they also call those 'lightning rods'? Surprisingly enough, people with radio towers have thought of that already, and have ways of mitigating the issue. Getting a lightning strike to your tower is no fun, but if it's properly grounded and isolated, at most it usually means replacing your antennas and feedline, and maybe a few of the tower components, if that. (Of course if you don't bond, ground, and isolate properly, it can mean replacing your house.)
The ARRL has whole books devoted to the subject, and there's over a century of collective experience in putting up very tall radio towers; it's not exactly cutting-edge stuff.
I think the FCC actually ruled on the "pizza question" about 10 years or so ago, and said it was allowable as long as what you were buying was purely for personal use. I suspect if you ask around on some of the Ham newsgroups on Usenet somebody can quote chapter and verse, but IIRC a food order via the 'patch on your way home is OK, but using it in lieu of a cellphone to make a business call is not.
The problem with extending this to the internet is the prohibitions on encryption. Even if your Amazon order is acceptable, the encryption it uses to make the transaction safe is NOT OK. The FCC has not granted any exceptions to the encryption/encipherment rules, except for the very narrowly defined case of satellite command-and-control. They don't even let people encrypt traffic in order to comply with HIPAA rules in disaster/medical situations.
So, the way the rules are now, if you did have an 802.11 link operating in the section of the ISM band that's also an Amateur band (which is only a subset of the channels that most Part 15 devices use), you could legally operate under Part 97 rules, including power up to 1kw ERP if you really needed it, BUT you'd have to find a way to disable ALL encryption. So no SSH, no SSL/TLS, nothing: probably not even encrypted password handshakes. Everything has to be plaintext or you can't operate under Part 97, and you're back to Part 15 and its measly 100mW limits and antenna prohibitions. (Though I'm not sure where they draw the line on cryptographic authentication, since it's not really designed to obscure the meaning of anything; that seems like it'd be OK.)
That's the thing that makes using a highpower 802.11 system unattractive to me, at least as an everyday Internet connection.
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Lots of things in combat zones are moving towards single-use. It's an ecological disaster, but so's war in general.
That's not a bad idea.
I tend to wonder exactly how we'd find a halfway-decent, objective way of deciding what would be in the "basket" of commodities, and how often that basket would change -- didn't they have to change the Consumer Price Index not that long ago, because it was filled with stuff that most people don't purchase anymore? I'd be a bit concerned that if you put the control over what goes in the 'basket' into political hands, there would be a lot of temptation to gerrymander it for various ends. Whatever goods you put in the basket would tend to be price-stablized (some might say distorted), because in addition to trading as commodities, they'd also trade as quasi-currency. I'm not sure what effect that would have if you included a food crop or a consumable good (say, oil or coal) in it, but it seems like it could get interesting.
I've heard that some smaller countries have their national currencies pegged to a basket of major currencies; e.g., ten Banana Republician Dollars is worth four Euros, two GBPs, 5000 JPY, and three USD. This means that their central bank has to maintain a more complicated reserve (they have to have some of each currency, instead of just having USD, or Euros, or whatever), but it protects them against fluctuations in one currency in particular. A commodity-based system wouldn't be that different, conceptually.
However I think a return to full-reserve banking would be a treatment that's worse than the disease, at least as it currently stands. We need to banks more responsible for the loans they write, and strongly discourage them from lending out money to people who can't repay it. We need to accept, as a society, that not everyone has a right to a huge house financed with an even bigger mortgage. And we need to take a very hard look at the unsecured-loan industry that's financing much of the nation's consumer debt (in the form of either straightforward loans or credit cards).
But a return to full-cash-reserve banking would probably just dry up the supply of capital that the economy needs, and unless it was done worldwide and at once (not a chance), it would probably just result in a further influx of foreign capital.
I agree with you on some of the dangers of inflation; however, I disagree about the nature of "value" in an asset.
Something can have substantial value, even if it's not the sort of thing you can leave sitting around idle and come back to later.
A tractor has substantial value not in the same way a pile of gold bricks does, but because it performs a function. It represents a potential income stream to a farmer, which is why a farmer might want to own one. Thus the farmer goes to a bank and takes out a loan against the tractor, in order to purchase it. For the bank to make this loan, they want to ensure that the farmer isn't an idiot, and that he'll pay back the value of the tractor either faster than it depreciates (or he has some other assets that won't depreciate as quickly, in order to secure the loan). If they think this is the case, they can then go and create a pile of 'tractor-dollars', dollars that are backed by that tractor. Those dollars only stay in the system until the farmer pays off the loan, and assuming the loan was intelligently made, there should never be more tractor-dollars sloshing around than the tractor is actually worth (either in literal terms or as an income stream).
The same holds true for a factory, or anything else that helps create an income stream. Just because it's not a stable asset doesn't mean it's valueless; as long as you can predict the depreciation, you can still use it as collateral, and if you can use it as collateral, you can use it as the basis for new money. (As long as you trust the government to enforce the lien and let the bank repossess it, of course -- the real basis for debt banking is the threat of force by people with guns.)
I also agree that banks have been supremely irresponsible with their lending practices, but I don't think that full-reserve banking is really the best solution. There are rules that need substantial tightening, but there's nothing inherently wrong with letting a bank use mortgaged assets as part of its reserves, as long as the value of those assets over time is computed, the loans made accordingly, and there's a iron-hard willingness by the government to liquidate those assets in the event of a default by the borrower.
It's not an asset that the bank can keep in its vault (how would you fit it in there, exactly?), but it's a bank asset nonetheless. If the borrower fails to repay the loan, the bank gets the house.
As long as the government is around and is willing to enforce liens, those are all very real assets, and I don't see a problem in using them as a basis for a currency.
The only reason you need a precious-metal currency is when you don't have a functional government that enforces contracts. If you have doubts in the government's ability or willingness to enforce the lien and throw a defaulting borrower out so that the bank can take their house, then you have a problem, and the bank ought not to consider that loan as an asset anymore. (But without a functional government you have some other fairly serious problems, to the point where I'd suggest that the best currency is probably 5.56mm rifle rounds, not silver certificates.)
That's an interesting video, and not a bad introduction to how the banking system actually works (as opposed to the oversimplified "they lend out your deposits..." view that most people get as youngsters and never really question). However, I'm not sure that its attempt to spin 'money as debt' as a bad thing is really true.
If we were stuck on a gold or silver standard, we'd be in real trouble: there just isn't that much gold or silver around to make a a very good currency. We need a currency that can grow as the amount of real assets in circulation grows -- as we as a society and civilization create more valuable stuff, we need a way to pay for it. The debt money system uses all those real assets as the basis for its value, rather than an arbitrarily chosen precious metal.
In effect, the debt money system, though complicated, is a lot more 'real' than a gold standard. Gold is only valuable because it's shiny and pleasant to look at and you can beat it into useful shapes and it's been used as money for a long time. You can't eat it, you can't live in it, you can't plow a field with it -- aside from some applications in the jewelry and electronics industries, you can't do much of anything with it. But a house, that has real value. A factory has value. A John Deere tractor has value. When people borrow money to pay for these things, the money is created and the newly-created money is backed by the pledged asset. So when I buy a house for $250k, two hundred and fifty thousand new dollars are created, but those dollars are backed by my house; they are, in one sense, actually my house, floating around out there. And then I work, and pay the loan principle back, and basically suck those 'house-dollars' back out of the market and put them back into my house.
Once you get around the mental shock of realizing that the system doesn't work the way you thought it did, there's a certain elegance to the system. Money is created and destroyed as it's needed to pay for things, rather than there being some fixed amount of it floating around. When we need a lot of capital, it appears; when we don't (and pay off our loans), it goes away. With a fixed amount of gold, you'd have massive inflation/deflation cycles as prices changed in response to the amount of available currency.
Where you run into serious problems are when banks start making loans to people who don't have enough real assets behind them to cover the amount of money that's being created. IMO, this should be illegal, or at the very least the banks should be held directly responsible for ensuring that the loans they're making are backed by something (real property, or an income stream). If they don't, then they're magicking money into existence that has nothing behind it, and letting it out into the market. That's dangerous business, and the source of our current credit problems.
This is not particularly new. People have been saying for a long time now that when it comes to the legal system, sometimes the winning move is not to play.
The way the laws are these days, even if you're Mother Teresa, you're probably doing something illegal, even if you don't think of it as illegal or even realize it. (Ever downloaded VLC or Handbrake? Bought discount smokes? Played a little online poker? Bought something without paying your state's sales tax?) Sure, the FBI normally has bigger fish to fry than you and me, but there's no reason that'll always be the case. The tools that are used for terrorism now will be used for narcotics tomorrow, and copyright enforcement the day after that, and eventually it'll trickle down until it's being used against something you're doing. And information compiled in databases has a tendency to stick around (at least, when it's not being misplaced or stolen). Your browsing habits today could come back to seriously haunt you in a decade or two.
And it's not just the government that you have to worry about, or Google's official policy as a corporation. You also have to consider how much the people who actually deal with this data are paid. How much would it cost to get one of them to give someone malicious access to the database? A whole lot less than the database would be worth, I suspect. Even if you're not doing anything illegal (which, again, I doubt; most people break a half-dozen laws before they get to work in the morning), you're a rare person if there's not something going on in your life that you'd prefer to keep private. Medical conditions, sexual preferences
There aren't really any analogues in the pre-computer world to the size and scope of databases like Google's, in terms of both the breadth and depth of information it could contain on individuals. This is not something that we have much societal experience with, and the limited track record we do have is decidedly mixed. It's not especially paranoid to want to take a "wait and see" approach.
I bet we wouldn't have half the problems we do now if people just stopped automatically trusting everything they see.
It's not hostility to immigration. It's illegal immigration. I think you would find that a lot of right wingers on the forefront of the illegal immigration charge have a lot of H1-B employees with engineering degrees wondering why they have to jump through so many hoops to be a citizen when evidentally a bunch of illiterate crop pickers get to be citizens after sneaking across the border.
Agreed; the people who get really screwed by the current immigration system are the people who play by the rules. It's quite perverse: if you're coming here to do a job that's one major capital investment away from being done by a robot and you don't really care about breaking the law, we practically roll out the welcome mat. Come on in, get yourself a driver's license, etc.
But if you're well-educated, law-abiding, and are looking to work in a sector where we really need smart people in the future, you can plan on spending thousands of dollars and years of your life getting in. And people will probably assume you're here illegally anyway, depending on where you're from.
And we wonder why things aren't looking rosy: with incentives like these, why are the outcomes at all surprising?
This is true. However, if you gave out cost-plus contracts without well-defined metrics, you'd have people screaming at you for throwing money away, subsiding the M-I complex at taxpayer expense, etc. etc.
There's a razor's edge in between, for funding applied science while also being fiscally responsible (or at least keeping the people who'd like that money for themselves off your back). I'm not sure there are any quick fixes.
Interesting. So that's what happened to MT-DAAPD...
You can sometimes get dramatic speed improvements by disabling the Dashboard entirely. See http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macosxhints/2005/08/disabledashboard/index.php for how to do it.
I have a dual-proc G5 machine and I disable Dashboard, just because I don't use the thing and have never found it really useful.
I messed up with the versions. The one I was thinking of, and that I had held back upgrading until I had to because of the Nano, was 4.7, not 6.0.4. Apple introduced a 5-connection limit to the music-sharing feature in 4.7.1.
6.0.4 was nice because it was the last stable version before they changed the interface (IMO, for the worse) with version 7, but it had already had the sharing features gutted.
So if you don't have any devices that require a newer version and you don't care about the Apple Store, the version to use is from the pre-4.7.1 days. Unfortunately I think Apple pulled it from its download page; you can get 4.7.1 (the crippled one) but I can't find 4.7.0.
Wikipedia has a good page on iTunes Version History: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_version_history).
The backup system is definitely a step forward, but the interface "improvements" are not. Hell, even MacWorld thought that they were 'too pretty' to be useful in its review, and MacWorld usually hangs on Apple's every word.
The number of Apple updates that have actually been steps backwards in terms of features lately has been disappointing. Personally I think iTunes hit a high water mark with version 6.0.4 or 6.0.5 and went downhill from there; everything since then has been crappier interfaces and additional cashflow for Apple, at the expense of features that the music companies didn't like, but were great for users. If it wasn't for the fact that my iPod Nano absolutely *required* iTunes 7 (for no particularly good reason, except that it's a good way to force users to upgrade), I'd never have upgraded.
The saving grace of Apple is that when they make a mistake, they usually realize and fix it pretty quickly, but the direction they're heading as a company just isn't doing it for me as much anymore.
It'll probably be a while before you see a famine in the U.S., like you sometimes see in Africa or parts of Asia, but without cheap credit there are definitely parts of the U.S. that could look like the countries that the OLPC is designed for (which is *not* really sub-Saharan Africa).
The solutions to the problem in the U.S. are going to be tough and long-term, and unfortunately neither political party seems interested in really doing anything about it. The Republicans want to ignore it and keep raking in profits, and the Democrats want to throw quick money at the problem and alleviate their guilt-ridden consciences. The will to make substantial investments in infrastructure and education just doesn't seem to be there yet.
Many US Universities (Including MIT) are happy with grades from those exams. So happy that you are not asked to pay school fees if you can run or jump.
I don't know what MIT is doing, and I'm not contradicting you about wherever you went, but I don't think that's typical. At least at my alma mater, they don't care where you came from, but they want to see some sort of standardized test score. In fact, they tend to rely on them more heavily for foreign students, who typically don't get an opportunity to interview in-person, and who may be coming from a radically different educational background than a U.S. student. (Which means the admissions officer can't look at their transcript and really know what it means, in the same way someone very familiar with high schools in a particular region of the U.S. can.) Foreign students usually also have to take the TOEFL and get some minimum score.
I also distinctly recall that there was no financial aid offered to foreign students; it was a strictly cash-on-the-barrel-head operation (in some cases, literally *cash*, although I don't expect that happens anymore).
I think that the extent to which universities roll out the red carpet to foreigners is usually overestimated by many U.S. students; coming here to study ain't no picnic.
Picking a few schools more or less at random, I see that testing for non-U.S. students is de rigueur at William and Mary, Caltech (which offers some financial aid to foreign students, but admission is not need-blind), and Duke. They seem to vary a little on whether the TOEFL is required or just encouraged, but except for a short note on Duke's page about an exemption from the SAT for students coming from countries where it isn't offered, there's no acceptance of alternative national tests in lieu of the usual SAT/ACT. I think that's more an exception than a rule.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at.
Finding primary sources in print is hard and extremely time-consuming, and requires access to a big library. Completely agree. It's totally beyond the scope of most students in public primary and secondary schools, and probably most college students who aren't at a big university.
However, this is where Wikipedia is better than Britannica. In a Britannica article, you usually get a few print sources as references. In a Wikipedia article, you usually get a ton of references, and many of them are electronic (and if it's a recent event, many of them are both electronic and primary sources, e.g. links to news sources).
Take, for example, the WP article on George Washington. It has 49 direct citations, most of which are to sources that are available both freely and electronically. And many of those are to well-respected institutions that you could cite directly (the LOC, the Smithsonian, etc.). And beyond that, there's a separate list of suggested reading, which includes electronic versions of George's actual writings, a short biography published in the NY Times, and a collection of primary-source material related to slavery in Philadelphia by the Independence Hall Association. In five minutes, starting with the WP article, I turned up more primary and citable secondary sources than I probably could have found in an afternoon's worth of searching in a good library.
That, to me, is the real strength of Wikipedia. Regardless of its strengths or weaknesses as a source itself, it is an excellent portal to a vast quantity of electronic information, available to anyone with an Internet connection. While a student forced to use nothing but paper sources is hobbled by the size of their school's library -- which is almost always directly proportional to the wealth of the area they live in and the importance that the community places on education -- allowing student to use (good) electronic sources narrows the gap considerably, provided both have access to the Internet to begin with.
Yes, "subtracting" one side of the balanced circuit from the others is another way to think about it. That's more consistent with how modern transistorized or op-amp based circuits work.
E.g., if you think of the signals on the '+' wire to be (A+N), where A is audio and N is noise, then the signal on the '-' wire is (-A+N). Subtracting the two signals, say via a difference amplifier, gives you (A+N)-(-A+N) = 2A.
I always tend to think about balanced circuits conceptually, as the current flow through the transformers, canceling out the common-mode because of the nature of a transformer, but some people prefer to think about them purely in mathematical terms, or as adding and subtracting signals. Either way works.
It's not like it's especially hard to drill down to real sources from most WP articles. Most controversial ones have citations, or at least a list of suggested reading, near the bottom. (And some articles, like ones on particular recent events, have direct links to primary source material, which you don't typically get in a traditional encyclopedia entry.) In some ways, it's a lot easier to begin doing real research from WP than it is from Britannica, and I think WP does a better job of encouraging skepticism and fact-checking skills.
The 'true software receivers' are interesting, but ultimately I think they're overkill once you get out of the HF bands. Maybe this will be one of those 'who needs more than 128k?' comments, but I really don't see any reason why you need to sample the RF directly when you're dealing with VHF or UHF, it just seems excessive. If you want to digitize a 1GHz input, you're going to need to sample it at least 2GHz, and probably significantly higher if you want to do any cool DSP-type stuff. That's gotta start doing nasty things to the system's power consumption.
The satellite communications people have been using block downconverters for decades; every pizza-box satellite dish has one, to take the incoming signal from the feedhorn and drop it down to a level that can be sent down the coax to the set-top box without huge line losses. Some of them can work on fairly broad frequency ranges (like several GHz at once, for some of the Ku-band ones), and are real engineering marvels.
That seems like a much more practical approach for cellphones than a direct-digitization one. I don't know if you'd be able to make one block downconverter/upconverter that would cover all the bands currently used by GSM phones (800-1200 MHz, I think?), but if not, it would be the only part you'd need to change when designing for one region vs another. As long as it used the same IF output, the SDR would only have to be designed around one frequency range, and could be heavily optimized in order to improve battery life.
The ARRL has whole books devoted to the subject, and there's over a century of collective experience in putting up very tall radio towers; it's not exactly cutting-edge stuff.
I think the FCC actually ruled on the "pizza question" about 10 years or so ago, and said it was allowable as long as what you were buying was purely for personal use. I suspect if you ask around on some of the Ham newsgroups on Usenet somebody can quote chapter and verse, but IIRC a food order via the 'patch on your way home is OK, but using it in lieu of a cellphone to make a business call is not.
The problem with extending this to the internet is the prohibitions on encryption. Even if your Amazon order is acceptable, the encryption it uses to make the transaction safe is NOT OK. The FCC has not granted any exceptions to the encryption/encipherment rules, except for the very narrowly defined case of satellite command-and-control. They don't even let people encrypt traffic in order to comply with HIPAA rules in disaster/medical situations.
So, the way the rules are now, if you did have an 802.11 link operating in the section of the ISM band that's also an Amateur band (which is only a subset of the channels that most Part 15 devices use), you could legally operate under Part 97 rules, including power up to 1kw ERP if you really needed it, BUT you'd have to find a way to disable ALL encryption. So no SSH, no SSL/TLS, nothing: probably not even encrypted password handshakes. Everything has to be plaintext or you can't operate under Part 97, and you're back to Part 15 and its measly 100mW limits and antenna prohibitions. (Though I'm not sure where they draw the line on cryptographic authentication, since it's not really designed to obscure the meaning of anything; that seems like it'd be OK.)
That's the thing that makes using a highpower 802.11 system unattractive to me, at least as an everyday Internet connection.