optical detectors have a pretty limited duty cycle (meaning that high frequency light pulses would be next to impossible to detect...)
Hybrid avalanche photodiodes are able to respond to light pulses on a time scale of a few nanoseconds (billionths of a second). The theory of optical SETI is to use lasers with nanosecond ultra-high-power pulses. They are so bright, they will outshine the neighboring star (for a nanosecond) across the entire optical spectrum - no need to look for the right frequency.
It's much easier to generate a powerful radio signal than it is a bright light pulse
Uh yeah, petawatt (pulsed) lasers exist, show me a petawatt radio!
Optical extinction is a problem, but with the powers available, we can detect human-buildable lasers with human-buildable detectors over 1,000 LY. See: Optical SETI home page.
Having an MBA from a well-known business school is a significant helper in getting a start-up business funded...for reasons including prestige and old-boys/girls-network.
Of course, getting funding for a start-up is getting pretty tough, MBA or not.
An MBA doesn't mean you're hot stuff - it shows that you at least have a half a clue about how business works. Without actual management experience, it is not worth much. But add to it management experience, and building a successful team, and you've got something.
It was because the UN didn't want to interfere in Bosnia back in '94-'95 that so many civilians were killed.
No, it was because there were a bunch of greedy & racist people in Bosnia who were willing to kill others for land that so many civilians got killed. Same with Kosovo.
Now in Macedonia, we're finding that the Albanians are just as big bastards as Milosevic...
And we're supposed to send US troops to help these people? I'm reminded of a Star Trek episode with the "pseudo-war" between the two planets.
It isn't clear to me that SETI@Home would work even if there was intelligent life transmitting RF out there - the signal levels required for detection would be tremendous. We have no hope of finding accidental signals, and we ourselves could not generate a detectable signal aimed on purpose at the distances involved (and we are not sending them out on any regular basis either).
I don't buy this "they're gods, so they've got unlimited power". Optical SETI is a much better bet, and more within our technological grasp.
I went geocaching for the first time this weekend - it was way cool! I personally don't believe in using maps while geocaching though (other than perhaps very rough map on my Magellan MAP 330). If you knew where all the trails are, you'd not have such a great time in the rough. Plus, the search for the cache in the last 10-20 feet is almost half the fun.
If that was the case then there would have to be a gradual increase in prices as the supply started getting shorter. That did not happen. The prices all of a sudden spiked up tenfold despite the fact that CA used seven percent less energy this year and then last year.
They spiked for a bunch of reasons. First of all, user rates were capped by the government, so there was no "run up" for ratepayers, and utilities could not pass on higher wholesale electricity prices to ratepayers. And under the market rules, PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E were required to buy all of their power through the CalPX. They could not enter into forward long-term contracts for energy. When spot market wholesale prices increased because of power shortages and increasing generation costs, the utilities had no option but to purchase the high-priced power. Many independent power generators were reluctant to sell power to PG&E, and SCE because of their resulting financial troubles, and the uncertainty of receiving payment for the power sold.
Add on top of this an increase in natural gas prices.
Also, electricity does not have a linear demand curve, people are willing to pay whatever they have to in order to have the lights on, so as demand nears supply, the prices go up quickly. With a cap on rates, there was no "warning" to ratepayers.
The Cato Institute predicted the result of California "deregulation" in 1997!. It was not the creation of a free market in energy, but an attempt to look like doing so while maintaining a regulatory structure that eventually stuck it to the ratepayers.
I'll have to believe you about California using 7% less energy this year than last year, but the pricing of California electricity is about peak demand, not average demand. California's generation capability decreased 2 percent from 1990 through 1999, while retail sales increased by 11 percent. To meet its demand for power, California relies on about 7 to 11 gigawatts of out-of-state generation capability, of which a significant portion is produced by hydroelectric power in the northwestern United States. Reduced hydroelectric power generation caused by unusually low water levels in the northwest resulted in a reduction of imports to northern California. Path 15, the high voltage transmission line connecting southern California to northern California, became congested at times, reducing the flow of surplus electricity capacity in southern California to meet shortages in northern California. So I'll bet that power demand peaks were higher then supply more often this year than last.
There is not an infinite amount of money in some other dimension where it magically appears on this planet whenever we want it. It comes from turning natural resources into products.
That is true to some extent. There are two caveats. First, every exchange in a free market is an increase in wealth to both the buyer and the seller. This is a basic rule of economics, buyers pay less than they value an item at, and sellers ask for more than they value an item at. So we could all become billionaires...
But more on your point, humanity increases the availability of natural resources through the use of human intelligence. Your comment about "hitting a brick wall" will not happen as long as humans are free to come up with new ideas to solve problems, and there is an existing free market to properly value resources.
I highly suggest a reading of Julian Simone's work The Ultimate Resource which discusses how natural resource "shortages" have always been predicted, yet never actually happen because increasing value of scarce resources motivate people to think of new ways of obtaining those resources.
Of course, there are market externalities, such as global atmospheric resources, that cannot be represented in our existing law as private resources. So this doesn't mean that all environmental laws are bad. But we should be very careful that the costs of an environmental law is not larger than the benefit (e.g., millions dead each year because of malaria due to DDT ban, etc.)
Cato regularly speaks out against Republican attacks on liberty as well as Democratic ones. The Democrats do tend to be overachievers in this department, but the Republicans sure can do it as well.
Cato is a bit more realistic than, say, the Libertarian Party. It is my impression that the Cato folks assume that there is little chance of an effective third-party in the US, and that working to provide facts to the two existing parties and the public is the best way to move forward.
The average life expectancy in 1900 was 47 years. Today it is 77, and rising.
The infant-mortality rate has dropped from 1 in 10 to 1 in 150.
"Poor" Americans today have routine access to a quality of housing, food, health care, consumer products, entertainment, communications and transportation that even the Vanderbilts, Carnegies and Rockefellers could only dream of.
A farmer a century ago could produce only one-hundredth of what his counterpart is capable of growing and harvesting today.
In the 19th century, almost all teenagers toiled in factories or fields. Now, 9 in 10 attend high school.
Today's Americans have three times more leisure time than their great-grandparents did.
The price of food relative to wages has plummeted: In the early part of this century the average American had to work two hours to earn enough to purchase a chicken, compared with 20 minutes today.
If that isn't enough, the percentage of Americans holding shares in those "evil corporations" has skyrocketed to over 43%, a 126% increase in the last 15 years, and has increased for all income levels (workers are becoming capitalists). Our houses are getting larger and larger, despite price per square foot going down. In the 1950's, 50% of Americans did not have indoor plumbing. Now even those in poverty do, along with a refrigerator, VCR, and one or two televisions.
the profits of the five largest american companies FOR ONE YEAR would feed the starving in africa for decades
Unfortunately, their shareholders probably want to keep the money for their 401K's.
If all the socialist Slashdotter's sold their computers and sent the money to Africa, you could probably feed all the poor in one country for a year. So go ahead, do it!
I have Verizon DSL with PPPoe (PPP over Ethernet) and it sounds like you do to. Just purchase a DSL router that says it works with PPPoe (Linksys, for instance). Then just plug all your computers into the router, and put in your PPPoe username and password.
Trust me, you'll be much happier with a router than the "WinPoET".
BTW, I get 400-500kbps down and 40kbps up with the $40/month self-install-on-your-own-phone-line Verizon DSL. It did take four months for me to get it, evidently Verizon was slow in deploying DSLAMs. I could have gotten $100/month Covad service faster if I really wanted it.
"energy markets, like most commodity markets, are subject to boom and bust cycles. Energy prices after adjusting for inflation have been plummeting more or less for 15 years. Investors took money out of production and exploration budgets because profits were hard to come by. The bust suddenly ended last year, catching almost everyone by surprise, and the boom is now on. Investors are scrambling to expand supply, but capital investments take time...High prices = high profits = increased investment = price declines."
"...we're currently in the midst of a power-plant construction boom, with some 90,000 megawatts of new electricity capacity scheduled to come on line by 2002 and a staggering 150,000-200,000 megawatts by 2004. This will not only burst the electricity-price bubble but will probably produce an electricity glut in the near future. Similarly, so many billions are flooding into the natural-gas market today that futures contracts are being made at half the price of today's wholesale spot price. And high gasoline profit margins are inducing foreign refineries to enter the American market for the first time in decades and bringing new investment in domestic refining capacity as well. Barring some unforeseen supply disruption in the refining sector, gasoline prices will actually begin to decline slowly but steadily as the summer wears on."
But then again, so are oil, coal, and nuclear power
People forget about the dangers of our existing fossil fuel based electrictal generation system in the US.
Coal fired plants release more radioactivity into the atmosphere than nuclear plants. Coal-fired plants operate at far higher temperatures and pressures than nuclear, and the risk of explosion is far greater. There have been more deaths in the United States with coal-fired plant accidents than with nuclear-plant accidents. Coal-fired plants require a significant transportation system (railway, barge/dock) to feed the plant. A nuclear plant can be fed for 18 months with a single delivery by a flatbed truck.
the energy crisis is a myth, except in California, where the crisis was created not by a lack of resources but by a botched deregulation
The "Energy Crisis" in California is simple: there is more demand than supply. It has little to do with deregulation.
Had there not been deregulation, I bet there still would not have been new power plants built (enviromental BANAism) and artificial electricity price caps in place, just like the current situation.
Californians are (finally) going to have to pay the price for not building new powerplants. Of course, had true deregulation brought the actual cost of California energy to the ratepayers 10 years ago, I bet there would have been more public support (and more demand from power companies) for building new power plants.
As they often say on Usenet, TANSTAAFL.
However, California is only one state that disconnected the link between demand and supply. Expect that in other states whose regulatory bodies have tried to unliaterally "turn off economics" that there will be similar problems.
All people who declare war on humanity (as I did that night) are great. We all have good intentions. But we're always wrong. There is no way to win the war on humanity.
MOD THIS UP!!!! I wish all the neo-anarchists protesting humanity finally linking up around the world would understand this.
Economic analysis of open source (such as this one and this one) come to the conclusion that open source software is often a loss-leader for individuals to advance their careers, or for corporations to sell support, hardware (e.g. VA Linux), hard copies (Red Hat), or books.
I think that we do also need to keep in mind that by significantly reducing the price-of-entry of computers and servers, open source expands the number of people and companies using computers and the Internet, which itself is often a return on the time investment, and drives plenty of for-profit business.
Chinease government folks know that if their people start longing for more and more of western culture their country will end in ruin...
Millions have already been killed by Chinese government.
China is run by a small group of people who control power by terror, their desire for China to be stable extends only to their own wellbeing, and thus they will steal, kill, or do whatever they want to.
A review of major antitrust suits (Standard Oil, American Tobacco, and Alcoa, etc.) reveals that the accused firms monopolized or "restrained" trade; on the contrary, the firms expanded outputs enormously, innovated continuously, and generally lowered prices for consumers.
Add to that the indictment of US Steel and IBM, which never lead to a finding of monopoly, but transfered millions of dollars from production to lawyers.
Now the ILECs ("Baby Bells")... they ARE a coercive monopoly, granted by your local government. Why can't I take my State to court for antitrust violations?
This, uh, "editorial" took me back, oh, all of two days ago as I watched crowds of dirty, disorganized hippies play drums while the powerful forces of capitalism and western politics gathered to insure that as the Global Economy proceeded, Nice Guys would continue to finish last.
Keep in mind, Western Capitalism made it possible for us to have life so good, we have time to worry about people getting high! (Or time to go from protest to protest...)
Instead of protesting the best thing the US has given to the world, maybe those kids should protest the worst thing the US has given to the world, the War on Drugs. I'd join them, and so would many Americans, judging from recent polls.
Infact, it is the War on Drugs that has kept a stanglehold on the Mexican economy. It has done so by totally corrupting government at all levels. Capitalism can't work with corrupt governments (infact, many economists argue that governments that support uniform and effective enforcement of property and contract law is more necessary than free trade for economic improvement in developing countries.)
Elsewhere in Latin Ameria, the War on Drugs supports the last serious guerilla war there by keeping the FARC in business. Drug money is replacing US/USSR covert military support.
Would you rather have another Chernobyl, or another Venus?
Re:Light and Heat Your Pool for Free!
on
Fission in a Box
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· Score: 2
Not only do you get power for your house, but as a by-product, you can use the waste heat to heat your pool, and the Cerenkov radiation will light it at night!
Just don't go in the deep end!
Actually, looking into an operating nuclear reactor is an eye-opening experience. If you live near a university with a reactor, chances are they have a tour of it every now and then. It becomes far less scary when you can see it.
The narrowing of radio options is reasonable when you consider the technology of radio. There is no way to reasonably target micro-niches with radio, as a broadcast medium that is not on-demand or interactive. It is tough to prove the details about who is listening. The radio stations with the largest audience (in a wide demographic) can charge the most for advertising.
So the natural evolution of things is to consolidate stations of similar musical taste, and eventually the stations within a local area will become "orthogonal." Their listenership is determined by the fact that listeners of one station will probably enjoy none or few of the other stations.
For instance, in DC, we have one dancy/uptempo pop station, one urban-rap-pop soul station, one crunchy/grungy modern rock station, one old-school-rock station, and a mix station. I usually listen to the dancy station, and rarely listen to the others. We might have a country station, but I'm 100% orthogonal to that myself:)
Radio broadcast is, by definition, a mass-broadcast-medium. You need large audiences to make it pay off. So you need to not only consolidate audiences over a single city's spectrum, but over multiple cities.
Now where does regulation come in? Spectrum should be auction-leased by the FCC for whatever use the leaser would like (AM/FM/digital/cellular/etc.). The auction would determine the true value of the spectrum leased. That would move "cellular" Internet (such as Ricochet) forward.
In the end, our dream of a 20 independent stations per FM band is not possible unless the government runs the radio stations. However, we have the reality of a limitless number of Internet radio stations. I never listen to radio at home, only Shoutcast. I'd love to listen in my car, but there is no high-speed ubiquitous wireless Internet service in DC yet.
Let's also keep in mind that satellite radio will launch this year to give us 100 stations spanning an incredible variety of musical tastes: jazz, gospel, tejano, caribbean, rock en espanol, christian adult, christian teen, techno, not to mention the PBS News Hour, CSPAN, NASCAR, BBC World Service, etc.
According to neo-classical (aka what is usually taught now) microeconomics, competition exists even in a monopolized market
This is why Windows is getting better and better. If there really was an uncompetitive OS monopoly, Microsoft would have had no reason to add additional technology to the original Windows (perhaps to do uprgades to make people pay more). But let's face it, Win98 was a significant technological improvement over the original Windows, and Win2K is a significant technological improvement over WinNT.
Infact, I'll go out on a limb, and say that Win2K was probably driven by the fear of Linux and other PC-based UNI*ces.
Slashdot Mirror
optical detectors have a pretty limited duty cycle (meaning that high frequency light pulses would be next to impossible to detect...)
Hybrid avalanche photodiodes are able to respond to light pulses on a time scale of a few nanoseconds (billionths of a second). The theory of optical SETI is to use lasers with nanosecond ultra-high-power pulses. They are so bright, they will outshine the neighboring star (for a nanosecond) across the entire optical spectrum - no need to look for the right frequency.
It's much easier to generate a powerful radio signal than it is a bright light pulse
Uh yeah, petawatt (pulsed) lasers exist, show me a petawatt radio!
Optical extinction is a problem, but with the powers available, we can detect human-buildable lasers with human-buildable detectors over 1,000 LY. See: Optical SETI home page.
Having an MBA from a well-known business school is a significant helper in getting a start-up business funded...for reasons including prestige and old-boys/girls-network.
Of course, getting funding for a start-up is getting pretty tough, MBA or not.
An MBA doesn't mean you're hot stuff - it shows that you at least have a half a clue about how business works. Without actual management experience, it is not worth much. But add to it management experience, and building a successful team, and you've got something.
It was because the UN didn't want to interfere in Bosnia back in '94-'95 that so many civilians were killed.
No, it was because there were a bunch of greedy & racist people in Bosnia who were willing to kill others for land that so many civilians got killed. Same with Kosovo.
Now in Macedonia, we're finding that the Albanians are just as big bastards as Milosevic...
And we're supposed to send US troops to help these people? I'm reminded of a Star Trek episode with the "pseudo-war" between the two planets.
It isn't clear to me that SETI@Home would work even if there was intelligent life transmitting RF out there - the signal levels required for detection would be tremendous. We have no hope of finding accidental signals, and we ourselves could not generate a detectable signal aimed on purpose at the distances involved (and we are not sending them out on any regular basis either).
I don't buy this "they're gods, so they've got unlimited power". Optical SETI is a much better bet, and more within our technological grasp.
I thought that TCP "spoofing" eliminated some of the slowdown...of course you are right that "interactive" things above layer 3 are a problem.
I went geocaching for the first time this weekend - it was way cool! I personally don't believe in using maps while geocaching though (other than perhaps very rough map on my Magellan MAP 330). If you knew where all the trails are, you'd not have such a great time in the rough. Plus, the search for the cache in the last 10-20 feet is almost half the fun.
More than half the prisoners are due to our insane war on drugs.
Q: Did you vote for a Presidential candidate that was for the insane War on Drugs, or against it?
If you voted for a Presidential candidate that was for the War on Drugs, maybe you are INSANE!
If that was the case then there would have to be a gradual increase in prices as the supply started getting shorter. That did not happen. The prices all of a sudden spiked up tenfold despite the fact that CA used seven percent less energy this year and then last year.
They spiked for a bunch of reasons. First of all, user rates were capped by the government, so there was no "run up" for ratepayers, and utilities could not pass on higher wholesale electricity prices to ratepayers. And under the market rules, PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E were required to buy all of their power through the CalPX. They could not enter into forward long-term contracts for energy. When spot market wholesale prices increased because of power shortages and increasing generation costs, the utilities had no option but to purchase the high-priced power. Many independent power generators were reluctant to sell power to PG&E, and SCE because of their resulting financial troubles, and the uncertainty of receiving payment for the power sold.
Add on top of this an increase in natural gas prices.
Also, electricity does not have a linear demand curve, people are willing to pay whatever they have to in order to have the lights on, so as demand nears supply, the prices go up quickly. With a cap on rates, there was no "warning" to ratepayers.
The Cato Institute predicted the result of California "deregulation" in 1997!. It was not the creation of a free market in energy, but an attempt to look like doing so while maintaining a regulatory structure that eventually stuck it to the ratepayers.
I'll have to believe you about California using 7% less energy this year than last year, but the pricing of California electricity is about peak demand, not average demand. California's generation capability decreased 2 percent from 1990 through 1999, while retail sales increased by 11 percent. To meet its demand for power, California relies on about 7 to 11 gigawatts of out-of-state generation capability, of which a significant portion is produced by hydroelectric power in the northwestern United States. Reduced hydroelectric power generation caused by unusually low water levels in the northwest resulted in a reduction of imports to northern California. Path 15, the high voltage transmission line connecting southern California to northern California, became congested at times, reducing the flow of surplus electricity capacity in southern California to meet shortages in northern California. So I'll bet that power demand peaks were higher then supply more often this year than last.
There is not an infinite amount of money in some other dimension where it magically appears on this planet whenever we want it. It comes from turning natural resources into products.
That is true to some extent. There are two caveats. First, every exchange in a free market is an increase in wealth to both the buyer and the seller. This is a basic rule of economics, buyers pay less than they value an item at, and sellers ask for more than they value an item at. So we could all become billionaires...
But more on your point, humanity increases the availability of natural resources through the use of human intelligence. Your comment about "hitting a brick wall" will not happen as long as humans are free to come up with new ideas to solve problems, and there is an existing free market to properly value resources.
I highly suggest a reading of Julian Simone's work The Ultimate Resource which discusses how natural resource "shortages" have always been predicted, yet never actually happen because increasing value of scarce resources motivate people to think of new ways of obtaining those resources.
Of course, there are market externalities, such as global atmospheric resources, that cannot be represented in our existing law as private resources. So this doesn't mean that all environmental laws are bad. But we should be very careful that the costs of an environmental law is not larger than the benefit (e.g., millions dead each year because of malaria due to DDT ban, etc.)
Yes, the Cato Institute is so Republican...that's why they sponsored Beyond Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policies, Are Republicans Locked in a Cold-War Mindset?, and Republicans and Democrats Are in It for the Money, the Power, the Prestige.
Cato regularly speaks out against Republican attacks on liberty as well as Democratic ones. The Democrats do tend to be overachievers in this department, but the Republicans sure can do it as well.
Cato is a bit more realistic than, say, the Libertarian Party. It is my impression that the Cato folks assume that there is little chance of an effective third-party in the US, and that working to provide facts to the two existing parties and the public is the best way to move forward.
Of course, conservatives are just another brand of government-conquers-all-except-my-pet-concern-lik
Do you have new statistics to show everything is hunky-dory and we should leave things as they are?
It's Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years
If that isn't enough, the percentage of Americans holding shares in those "evil corporations" has skyrocketed to over 43%, a 126% increase in the last 15 years, and has increased for all income levels (workers are becoming capitalists). Our houses are getting larger and larger, despite price per square foot going down. In the 1950's, 50% of Americans did not have indoor plumbing. Now even those in poverty do, along with a refrigerator, VCR, and one or two televisions.
the profits of the five largest american companies FOR ONE YEAR would feed the starving in africa for decades
Unfortunately, their shareholders probably want to keep the money for their 401K's.
If all the socialist Slashdotter's sold their computers and sent the money to Africa, you could probably feed all the poor in one country for a year. So go ahead, do it!
I have Verizon DSL with PPPoe (PPP over Ethernet) and it sounds like you do to. Just purchase a DSL router that says it works with PPPoe (Linksys, for instance). Then just plug all your computers into the router, and put in your PPPoe username and password.
Trust me, you'll be much happier with a router than the "WinPoET".
BTW, I get 400-500kbps down and 40kbps up with the $40/month self-install-on-your-own-phone-line Verizon DSL. It did take four months for me to get it, evidently Verizon was slow in deploying DSLAMs. I could have gotten $100/month Covad service faster if I really wanted it.
I suggest reading Just say "No" to Energy Plan from the Cato Institute. Here are some quick blurbs from the commentary:
"energy markets, like most commodity markets, are subject to boom and bust cycles. Energy prices after adjusting for inflation have been plummeting more or less for 15 years. Investors took money out of production and exploration budgets because profits were hard to come by. The bust suddenly ended last year, catching almost everyone by surprise, and the boom is now on. Investors are scrambling to expand supply, but capital investments take time...High prices = high profits = increased investment = price declines."
"...we're currently in the midst of a power-plant construction boom, with some 90,000 megawatts of new electricity capacity scheduled to come on line by 2002 and a staggering 150,000-200,000 megawatts by 2004. This will not only burst the electricity-price bubble but will probably produce an electricity glut in the near future. Similarly, so many billions are flooding into the natural-gas market today that futures contracts are being made at half the price of today's wholesale spot price. And high gasoline profit margins are inducing foreign refineries to enter the American market for the first time in decades and bringing new investment in domestic refining capacity as well. Barring some unforeseen supply disruption in the refining sector, gasoline prices will actually begin to decline slowly but steadily as the summer wears on."
But then again, so are oil, coal, and nuclear power
People forget about the dangers of our existing fossil fuel based electrictal generation system in the US.
Coal fired plants release more radioactivity into the atmosphere than nuclear plants. Coal-fired plants operate at far higher temperatures and pressures than nuclear, and the risk of explosion is far greater. There have been more deaths in the United States with coal-fired plant accidents than with nuclear-plant accidents. Coal-fired plants require a significant transportation system (railway, barge/dock) to feed the plant. A nuclear plant can be fed for 18 months with a single delivery by a flatbed truck.
the energy crisis is a myth, except in California, where the crisis was created not by a lack of resources but by a botched deregulation
The "Energy Crisis" in California is simple: there is more demand than supply. It has little to do with deregulation.
Had there not been deregulation, I bet there still would not have been new power plants built (enviromental BANAism) and artificial electricity price caps in place, just like the current situation.
Californians are (finally) going to have to pay the price for not building new powerplants. Of course, had true deregulation brought the actual cost of California energy to the ratepayers 10 years ago, I bet there would have been more public support (and more demand from power companies) for building new power plants.
As they often say on Usenet, TANSTAAFL.
However, California is only one state that disconnected the link between demand and supply. Expect that in other states whose regulatory bodies have tried to unliaterally "turn off economics" that there will be similar problems.
All people who declare war on humanity (as I did that night) are great. We all have good intentions. But we're always wrong. There is no way to win the war on humanity.
MOD THIS UP!!!! I wish all the neo-anarchists protesting humanity finally linking up around the world would understand this.
Economic analysis of open source (such as this one and this one) come to the conclusion that open source software is often a loss-leader for individuals to advance their careers, or for corporations to sell support, hardware (e.g. VA Linux), hard copies (Red Hat), or books.
I think that we do also need to keep in mind that by significantly reducing the price-of-entry of computers and servers, open source expands the number of people and companies using computers and the Internet, which itself is often a return on the time investment, and drives plenty of for-profit business.
Chinease government folks know that if their people start longing for more and more of western culture their country will end in ruin...
Millions have already been killed by Chinese government.
China is run by a small group of people who control power by terror, their desire for China to be stable extends only to their own wellbeing, and thus they will steal, kill, or do whatever they want to.
Dictatorial control is no match for democracy.
Read some antitrust history
A review of major antitrust suits (Standard Oil, American Tobacco, and Alcoa, etc.) reveals that the accused firms monopolized or "restrained" trade; on the contrary, the firms expanded outputs enormously, innovated continuously, and generally lowered prices for consumers.
Add to that the indictment of US Steel and IBM, which never lead to a finding of monopoly, but transfered millions of dollars from production to lawyers.
Now the ILECs ("Baby Bells")... they ARE a coercive monopoly, granted by your local government. Why can't I take my State to court for antitrust violations?
This, uh, "editorial" took me back, oh, all of two days ago as I watched crowds of dirty, disorganized hippies play drums while the powerful forces of capitalism and western politics gathered to insure that as the Global Economy proceeded, Nice Guys would continue to finish last.
Keep in mind, Western Capitalism made it possible for us to have life so good, we have time to worry about people getting high! (Or time to go from protest to protest...)
Instead of protesting the best thing the US has given to the world, maybe those kids should protest the worst thing the US has given to the world, the War on Drugs. I'd join them, and so would many Americans, judging from recent polls.
Infact, it is the War on Drugs that has kept a stanglehold on the Mexican economy. It has done so by totally corrupting government at all levels. Capitalism can't work with corrupt governments (infact, many economists argue that governments that support uniform and effective enforcement of property and contract law is more necessary than free trade for economic improvement in developing countries.)
Elsewhere in Latin Ameria, the War on Drugs supports the last serious guerilla war there by keeping the FARC in business. Drug money is replacing US/USSR covert military support.
FREE TRADE should include FREE TRADE OF DRUGS.
Would you rather have another Chernobyl, or another Venus?
Not only do you get power for your house, but as a by-product, you can use the waste heat to heat your pool, and the Cerenkov radiation will light it at night!
Just don't go in the deep end!
Actually, looking into an operating nuclear reactor is an eye-opening experience. If you live near a university with a reactor, chances are they have a tour of it every now and then. It becomes far less scary when you can see it.
The narrowing of radio options is reasonable when you consider the technology of radio. There is no way to reasonably target micro-niches with radio, as a broadcast medium that is not on-demand or interactive. It is tough to prove the details about who is listening. The radio stations with the largest audience (in a wide demographic) can charge the most for advertising.
:)
So the natural evolution of things is to consolidate stations of similar musical taste, and eventually the stations within a local area will become "orthogonal." Their listenership is determined by the fact that listeners of one station will probably enjoy none or few of the other stations.
For instance, in DC, we have one dancy/uptempo pop station, one urban-rap-pop soul station, one crunchy/grungy modern rock station, one old-school-rock station, and a mix station. I usually listen to the dancy station, and rarely listen to the others. We might have a country station, but I'm 100% orthogonal to that myself
Radio broadcast is, by definition, a mass-broadcast-medium. You need large audiences to make it pay off. So you need to not only consolidate audiences over a single city's spectrum, but over multiple cities.
Now where does regulation come in? Spectrum should be auction-leased by the FCC for whatever use the leaser would like (AM/FM/digital/cellular/etc.). The auction would determine the true value of the spectrum leased. That would move "cellular" Internet (such as Ricochet) forward.
In the end, our dream of a 20 independent stations per FM band is not possible unless the government runs the radio stations. However, we have the reality of a limitless number of Internet radio stations. I never listen to radio at home, only Shoutcast. I'd love to listen in my car, but there is no high-speed ubiquitous wireless Internet service in DC yet.
Let's also keep in mind that satellite radio will launch this year to give us 100 stations spanning an incredible variety of musical tastes: jazz, gospel, tejano, caribbean, rock en espanol, christian adult, christian teen, techno, not to mention the PBS News Hour, CSPAN, NASCAR, BBC World Service, etc.
According to neo-classical (aka what is usually taught now) microeconomics, competition exists even in a monopolized market
This is why Windows is getting better and better. If there really was an uncompetitive OS monopoly, Microsoft would have had no reason to add additional technology to the original Windows (perhaps to do uprgades to make people pay more). But let's face it, Win98 was a significant technological improvement over the original Windows, and Win2K is a significant technological improvement over WinNT.
Infact, I'll go out on a limb, and say that Win2K was probably driven by the fear of Linux and other PC-based UNI*ces.