Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark.
We know that those other countries have lower levels of income inequality, so the "football field" is smaller, thus a smaller absolute difference could yield a greater relative difference.
Or the lower intergenerational mobility in the US could simply reveal a greater level of meritocracy combined with the high genetic heritability of IQ.
The actual study is a good read. Intergenerational mobility is notoriously tough to measure because of the small number of data points generally used due to the need to carefully track individuals, considering changing economic conditions, and trying to determine someone's lifetime income before they die (for example, all those unemployed college graduates in France and Spain, do you measure their income now or when they finally get a job?)
However total compensation per hour is rising, so you can't simply look at wages because tax laws are moving more and more pre-tax benefits out of wages (especially the rising cost of health insurance).
Some parts of New Jersey might have the oldest telephone cable plant in America, but the Northeast in general is probably not far behind.
This reminds me of when I worked for an early dial-up ISP in Greenbelt, MD. The phone lines were cloth-covered and put in around 1940. Most of the pairs we had barely worked, and the ones that did could barely keep up a 14.4 kbps connection. Bell Atlantic/Verizon (I forget who they were then) eventually came in with a fiber to the ISP and then we could do the 56k thing for most of our users, but anyone in the town itself on the other side of the CO switch had the 1940's pairs.
So what's the excuse for those of us who live in heavily populated urban areas and still receive crap service?
US local loop length are still very long in cities. I have a suspicion that during the "voice-only era" there was a lot of consolidation of central offices in the US, and that the technology to support long local loops for voice worked just fine. Now we are kind of stuck with the locations of those COs, but now we want to try to push data over the pairs.
1) Average US local loop length is 13,000 feet. 2) Typical ADSL downlink speeds at that length is 5 Mbps under the best scenario. 3) No surprise that "Two-thirds of US Internet connections are slower than 5 Mbps"
Now I have no idea why average US local loop length is 13,000 feet when the UK and France have average loop lengths of 10,000 feet (gets you 7 Mbps), and Germany and Italy have average loop lengths of 6,500 feet (gets you 14 Mbps). It might be a combination of more detached houses, population density, but I suspect path-dependency on the history of the telephone buildout and central office consolidation during the voice-only era may play a major role.
an IR rangefinder would be much more useful at avoiding colissions on your path,
The Kinect is an "IR rangefinder", but a cheap mass-produced one. Unlike the more expensive laser scanned parallax or time-of-flight sensors, it uses a special diffraction grating to produce a "structured light field" for a 2D camera to measure localized parallax.
There are also cheaper pulsed IR time-of-flight depth sensors coming on the market for home use, these could have higher spatial resolution.
The cool thing is that these things don't cost tens of thousands of dollars.
massive fan base was not represented by Nielsen ratings
Nielsen ratings make money (i.e. advertiser buy on them). "Viewers" do not. Note that this is my personal opinion, and not representative of any organization.
The relevant standards bodies have no interest in something like VP8.
SMPTE is an individual membership organization. I'm sure if an individual brought VP8 before SMPTE for standardization it would happen. SMPTE has a mixture of broadcast vendors and broadcast users of all kinds. There are some folks in SMPTE who are from companies with compression IP, but there are also plenty of other vendors represented in SMPTE that don't.
Of course, it would take time (like when SMPTE Standardized Windows Media Video as VC-1), but the result will be a well-defined specification that achieves interoperability.
Feel free to join SMPTE, show up at committee meetings, and do some standardization!
The problem is that we have about as much chance at getting developing countries to reduce GHG emissions as we do of making them "democracies" - or stopping them from producing illegal drugs.
After the reverse split the options were down to a total value of $257.
In fact the only people who generally make a ton of money from a start up are the founders. You can offer all kinds of stock options, but it is likely the company will eventually reach out for additional funding and everyone will get diluted to insignificance, except the founders who have a large ownership percentage to begin with. Something even the founders get diluted to nearly nothing (see "The Social Network").
I had options in a pre-dot-bust company that went public with a bump and later got bought out for cash, about the best kind of liquidity event you can think of. Made about $10,000. Nice, but not getting rich kind of nice. Not 11-hour days kind of nice.
Get you resume together and get another job ASAP. You boss is delusional, the company is going down. Nothing you can say to him is going to change those facts.
It will be easier for you to get a job before you are laid off.
Overall, are you pleased or disappointed at the way the Internet has developed since the early '90s?
Incredibly happy with the way the Internet has developed. My main nits are due to technology directions (such as NAT and multicast routing or lack thereof) that ended up going wrong despite good intentions, not business issues. In terms of government regulation, hands have been kept off, and free speech has ruled beyond my wildest dreams (in most countries, anyway).
In the early 90's, I didn't think I'd ever see a URL on the side of a bus. The first time I saw one, I was astonished.
I remember cold-calling companies for web sites, and they'd tell me "none of our customers would ever use the Internet".
I still find it incredible that I can watch high-resolution, full-frame rate movies in my home over the Net.
...then you should get a badass boat like this one, a 190 tons displacement, 37 meter costal patrol boat purchased by an early Internet pioneer from the Royal Navy.
I hope that the people in the USA are smart enough not to let their great land, the land of the free, to plunge into a chaos because of these isolated provocations.
This shooter was clearly a mentally unstable person who no one supports.
On the other hand, this article says:A number of banners at the rally stated support for Muhammad Mumtaz Qadri, accused of shooting the governor of Punjab province earlier this month. Qadri was a bodyguard for Gov. Salman Taseer, a liberal lawmaker who spoke out against the blasphemy laws.
Netflix doesn't cost them a lot of money, because of bandwidth. It costs them a lot of money, because people would rather ditch their cable television service in favor of Netflix.
Let's do an experiment. Canada has about 26 million broadband Internet users. Imagine one night, everyone is watching a streamed Netflix at 500 kbps on average. That is 13 Terabits per second, or 342 x OC-768 circuits. It just doesn't scale well.
Anyway, it won't matter once the Netflix Starz licensing deal comes to an end, as Netflix won't likely have much content after that.
without even attempting an analysis into why MySpace fell to Facebook.
What about Friendster? I remember liking Friendster until its servers starting slowing under the load for several months, making it unusable. It still has about 100 million users, mainly in Asian countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea.
MySpace, by the way, is hurting but with 81 million users it isn't quite dead yet either.
I have a strange feeling that there may be division among the social network sites by language and culture. For example, China's RenRen has 160 million users. The largely Latin America-dominated Hi5 has 50 million users.
1) The "Internet" does not exist. It is an idea. Like heaven.
2) Networks belong to the people who own them, generally corporate shareholders. Not to you.
3) Historically, it has worked out that paying customers want to purchase access to networks that exchange traffic with other networks using internetworking protocols. There have been plenty of bumps along the road (The CIX, peering disputes, DDOS, etc.) but it has generally worked out, because providing "Internet access" is what consumers want.
4) #3 only happened because of a continual fight to avoid Federal regulation of the Internet during the 1990s. We had a ton of threats (like the Communication Decency Act).
5) Localities typically grant monopoly franchises to copper pair, coax, and fiber last-mile providers. If you don't like your last-mile access, please go to your local franchise board rather than providing the Federal government with legislative weaponry they will no doubt use to tear up the Internet in the name of "net neutrality".
6) "Net neutrality", like porn, is in the eye of the beholder. Did I mention how much we fought against the Communications Decency Act? It was because porn is in the eye of the beholder.
Well, considering that the US government created the internet with taxpayer money using technologies developed at publicly funded institutions, it only seems fair that they should be able to regulate it.
It is true that the US government funded a few early notable networks as well as early research on internetworking protocols.
However angels, venture capital, and shareholders funded the actual NETWORKS that your packets are flowing on today.
Plus there are plenty of RFCs written by employees of private companies (such as RFC 2326 / RTSP or RFC 2328 / OSPF).
The reason the Internet is a success is that many of us fought AGAINST REGULATION in the 1990's.
Change capital gains to (Less then 1 day, 50% capital gains.)
Or perhaps corporations should consider offering a class of less-volatile shares. As far as I know, there is nothing stopping a company from issuing a class of shares that, for example, can not be sold for 24 hours after purchase. Many executives and founders are issued shares with significant restrictions on sales.
I would suspect such a class of shares would in general trade for less than the more flexible shares.
I am involved in an IPSec VPN over commodity "business cable modem" service to 200 sites across the US.
In general, 1% of sites are down at any time due to the cable provider.
If you ever want to try this, get one of those auto-pinging power-cyclers for the sites, as a power cycle of the cable modem seems to solve about 10-20% of the outage events.
"Here is a list of what Fox News viewers believe that just aint so:
91 percent believe the stimulus legislation lost jobs 72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit 72 percent believe the economy is getting worse 49 percent believe income taxes have gone up"
No economist can prove that the "stimulus" (exactly which one?) caused job gains or lost. They can speculate, but there is no control to the experiment. Money may have gone to hire various people, but then the unseen effects of the bill (such as fear of future high deficits) may have reduced aggregate demand and caused private job losses. Certainly if one looks at the unemployment rate graph, it certainly isn't clear that it helped much.
We don't know what effect the ACA will have on the deficit because that is in the future. The deficit is taxes in (which is related to total incomes) versus spending out. No one knows what that will be in the future (especially as the regulation of ACA seems to be changing on a day-to-day basis, see the Mini-Med plan rule changes). Again, all we have are predictions.
By the way, if anyone would like to bet that the Federal deficit will be lower in 2015 than now, I'll take that bet on the other side!
"The economy getting worse" is a qualitative statement, not a provable quantitative one. You could believe that GDP is rising, unemployment claims are dropping, yet the large number of mortgage-backed securities still in the banking sector have not yet been marked down to their true value, possibly leading to a second financial meltdown. Or you could be fearing inflation in the future due to quantitate easing, or you could be fearing US sovereign debt crisis due to large future deficits due to Medicare and Social Security costs.
"income taxes have gone up" is a true statement for me - I live in California. Federal rates are still going to go up at the end of the year unless a bill is passed.
Man, anyone else notice China drop like a rock circa 1960 and say, "Holy hell!"?
For a country that killed 20 to 40 million of its people through starvation (due to farm collectivization combined with insane internal politics) within living memory of many people still alive there, we should consider it a complete miracle that China has been able to morph into a 10%+ per year GDP growth country.
Slashdot Mirror
Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark.
We know that those other countries have lower levels of income inequality, so the "football field" is smaller, thus a smaller absolute difference could yield a greater relative difference.
Or the lower intergenerational mobility in the US could simply reveal a greater level of meritocracy combined with the high genetic heritability of IQ.
The actual study is a good read. Intergenerational mobility is notoriously tough to measure because of the small number of data points generally used due to the need to carefully track individuals, considering changing economic conditions, and trying to determine someone's lifetime income before they die (for example, all those unemployed college graduates in France and Spain, do you measure their income now or when they finally get a job?)
However total compensation per hour is rising, so you can't simply look at wages because tax laws are moving more and more pre-tax benefits out of wages (especially the rising cost of health insurance).
Some parts of New Jersey might have the oldest telephone cable plant in America, but the Northeast in general is probably not far behind.
This reminds me of when I worked for an early dial-up ISP in Greenbelt, MD. The phone lines were cloth-covered and put in around 1940. Most of the pairs we had barely worked, and the ones that did could barely keep up a 14.4 kbps connection. Bell Atlantic/Verizon (I forget who they were then) eventually came in with a fiber to the ISP and then we could do the 56k thing for most of our users, but anyone in the town itself on the other side of the CO switch had the 1940's pairs.
So what's the excuse for those of us who live in heavily populated urban areas and still receive crap service?
US local loop length are still very long in cities. I have a suspicion that during the "voice-only era" there was a lot of consolidation of central offices in the US, and that the technology to support long local loops for voice worked just fine. Now we are kind of stuck with the locations of those COs, but now we want to try to push data over the pairs.
1) Average US local loop length is 13,000 feet.
2) Typical ADSL downlink speeds at that length is 5 Mbps under the best scenario.
3) No surprise that "Two-thirds of US Internet connections are slower than 5 Mbps"
Now I have no idea why average US local loop length is 13,000 feet when the UK and France have average loop lengths of 10,000 feet (gets you 7 Mbps), and Germany and Italy have average loop lengths of 6,500 feet (gets you 14 Mbps). It might be a combination of more detached houses, population density, but I suspect path-dependency on the history of the telephone buildout and central office consolidation during the voice-only era may play a major role.
the structured light fields from one will interfere with another
Indeed, I think a better solution is a time-of-flight sensor such as pulsed IR phase or flash LIDAR.
an IR rangefinder would be much more useful at avoiding colissions on your path,
The Kinect is an "IR rangefinder", but a cheap mass-produced one. Unlike the more expensive laser scanned parallax or time-of-flight sensors, it uses a special diffraction grating to produce a "structured light field" for a 2D camera to measure localized parallax.
There are also cheaper pulsed IR time-of-flight depth sensors coming on the market for home use, these could have higher spatial resolution.
The cool thing is that these things don't cost tens of thousands of dollars.
massive fan base was not represented by Nielsen ratings
Nielsen ratings make money (i.e. advertiser buy on them). "Viewers" do not. Note that this is my personal opinion, and not representative of any organization.
The relevant standards bodies have no interest in something like VP8.
SMPTE is an individual membership organization. I'm sure if an individual brought VP8 before SMPTE for standardization it would happen. SMPTE has a mixture of broadcast vendors and broadcast users of all kinds. There are some folks in SMPTE who are from companies with compression IP, but there are also plenty of other vendors represented in SMPTE that don't.
Of course, it would take time (like when SMPTE Standardized Windows Media Video as VC-1), but the result will be a well-defined specification that achieves interoperability.
Feel free to join SMPTE, show up at committee meetings, and do some standardization!
The problem is that we have about as much chance at getting developing countries to reduce GHG emissions as we do of making them "democracies" - or stopping them from producing illegal drugs.
After the reverse split the options were down to a total value of $257.
In fact the only people who generally make a ton of money from a start up are the founders. You can offer all kinds of stock options, but it is likely the company will eventually reach out for additional funding and everyone will get diluted to insignificance, except the founders who have a large ownership percentage to begin with. Something even the founders get diluted to nearly nothing (see "The Social Network").
I had options in a pre-dot-bust company that went public with a bump and later got bought out for cash, about the best kind of liquidity event you can think of. Made about $10,000. Nice, but not getting rich kind of nice. Not 11-hour days kind of nice.
Get you resume together and get another job ASAP. You boss is delusional, the company is going down. Nothing you can say to him is going to change those facts.
It will be easier for you to get a job before you are laid off.
[from a former start-up veteran]
I do not want, and therefore to not have, any sort of walled garden type device.
I do want a walled garden device - if it aids in me not getting a virus or spyware on my cell phone!
Overall, are you pleased or disappointed at the way the Internet has developed since the early '90s?
Incredibly happy with the way the Internet has developed. My main nits are due to technology directions (such as NAT and multicast routing or lack thereof) that ended up going wrong despite good intentions, not business issues. In terms of government regulation, hands have been kept off, and free speech has ruled beyond my wildest dreams (in most countries, anyway).
In the early 90's, I didn't think I'd ever see a URL on the side of a bus. The first time I saw one, I was astonished.
I remember cold-calling companies for web sites, and they'd tell me "none of our customers would ever use the Internet".
I still find it incredible that I can watch high-resolution, full-frame rate movies in my home over the Net.
...then you should get a badass boat like this one, a 190 tons displacement, 37 meter costal patrol boat purchased by an early Internet pioneer from the Royal Navy.
I hope that the people in the USA are smart enough not to let their great land, the land of the free, to plunge into a chaos because of these isolated provocations.
This shooter was clearly a mentally unstable person who no one supports.
On the other hand, this article says: A number of banners at the rally stated support for Muhammad Mumtaz Qadri, accused of shooting the governor of Punjab province earlier this month. Qadri was a bodyguard for Gov. Salman Taseer, a liberal lawmaker who spoke out against the blasphemy laws.
Netflix doesn't cost them a lot of money, because of bandwidth. It costs them a lot of money, because people would rather ditch their cable television service in favor of Netflix.
Let's do an experiment. Canada has about 26 million broadband Internet users. Imagine one night, everyone is watching a streamed Netflix at 500 kbps on average. That is 13 Terabits per second, or 342 x OC-768 circuits. It just doesn't scale well.
Anyway, it won't matter once the Netflix Starz licensing deal comes to an end, as Netflix won't likely have much content after that.
without even attempting an analysis into why MySpace fell to Facebook.
What about Friendster? I remember liking Friendster until its servers starting slowing under the load for several months, making it unusable. It still has about 100 million users, mainly in Asian countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea.
MySpace, by the way, is hurting but with 81 million users it isn't quite dead yet either.
I have a strange feeling that there may be division among the social network sites by language and culture. For example, China's RenRen has 160 million users. The largely Latin America-dominated Hi5 has 50 million users.
1) The "Internet" does not exist. It is an idea. Like heaven.
2) Networks belong to the people who own them, generally corporate shareholders. Not to you.
3) Historically, it has worked out that paying customers want to purchase access to networks that exchange traffic with other networks using internetworking protocols. There have been plenty of bumps along the road (The CIX, peering disputes, DDOS, etc.) but it has generally worked out, because providing "Internet access" is what consumers want.
4) #3 only happened because of a continual fight to avoid Federal regulation of the Internet during the 1990s. We had a ton of threats (like the Communication Decency Act).
5) Localities typically grant monopoly franchises to copper pair, coax, and fiber last-mile providers. If you don't like your last-mile access, please go to your local franchise board rather than providing the Federal government with legislative weaponry they will no doubt use to tear up the Internet in the name of "net neutrality".
6) "Net neutrality", like porn, is in the eye of the beholder. Did I mention how much we fought against the Communications Decency Act? It was because porn is in the eye of the beholder.
Well, considering that the US government created the internet with taxpayer money using technologies developed at publicly funded institutions, it only seems fair that they should be able to regulate it.
It is true that the US government funded a few early notable networks as well as early research on internetworking protocols.
However angels, venture capital, and shareholders funded the actual NETWORKS that your packets are flowing on today.
Plus there are plenty of RFCs written by employees of private companies (such as RFC 2326 / RTSP or RFC 2328 / OSPF).
The reason the Internet is a success is that many of us fought AGAINST REGULATION in the 1990's.
Change capital gains to (Less then 1 day, 50% capital gains.)
Or perhaps corporations should consider offering a class of less-volatile shares. As far as I know, there is nothing stopping a company from issuing a class of shares that, for example, can not be sold for 24 hours after purchase. Many executives and founders are issued shares with significant restrictions on sales.
I would suspect such a class of shares would in general trade for less than the more flexible shares.
You're telling me it can have the power needed to do something like this
Likely this is using "the cloud" for the processing - meaning you have to be network connected to use it.
I am involved in an IPSec VPN over commodity "business cable modem" service to 200 sites across the US.
In general, 1% of sites are down at any time due to the cable provider.
If you ever want to try this, get one of those auto-pinging power-cyclers for the sites, as a power cycle of the cable modem seems to solve about 10-20% of the outage events.
TFA says:
"Here is a list of what Fox News viewers believe that just aint so:
91 percent believe the stimulus legislation lost jobs
72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit
72 percent believe the economy is getting worse
49 percent believe income taxes have gone up"
No economist can prove that the "stimulus" (exactly which one?) caused job gains or lost. They can speculate, but there is no control to the experiment. Money may have gone to hire various people, but then the unseen effects of the bill (such as fear of future high deficits) may have reduced aggregate demand and caused private job losses. Certainly if one looks at the unemployment rate graph, it certainly isn't clear that it helped much.
We don't know what effect the ACA will have on the deficit because that is in the future. The deficit is taxes in (which is related to total incomes) versus spending out. No one knows what that will be in the future (especially as the regulation of ACA seems to be changing on a day-to-day basis, see the Mini-Med plan rule changes). Again, all we have are predictions.
By the way, if anyone would like to bet that the Federal deficit will be lower in 2015 than now, I'll take that bet on the other side!
"The economy getting worse" is a qualitative statement, not a provable quantitative one. You could believe that GDP is rising, unemployment claims are dropping, yet the large number of mortgage-backed securities still in the banking sector have not yet been marked down to their true value, possibly leading to a second financial meltdown. Or you could be fearing inflation in the future due to quantitate easing, or you could be fearing US sovereign debt crisis due to large future deficits due to Medicare and Social Security costs.
"income taxes have gone up" is a true statement for me - I live in California. Federal rates are still going to go up at the end of the year unless a bill is passed.
Man, anyone else notice China drop like a rock circa 1960 and say, "Holy hell!"?
For a country that killed 20 to 40 million of its people through starvation (due to farm collectivization combined with insane internal politics) within living memory of many people still alive there, we should consider it a complete miracle that China has been able to morph into a 10%+ per year GDP growth country.