So I recently had to find a free SQL DB so I could do "select * from sm1 where (times,command,descriptor) not in (select sm1.times,sm1.command,sm1.descriptor from sm1,sm2 where abs(sm1.times-sm2.times)1 and sm1.command=sm2.command and sm1.descriptor=sm2.descriptor);"
PostgreSQL was the choice, it was easy to install on my Mac, it rulez!
it seems to me that dogmatic, xenophobic, recidivist behaviour is on the rise worldwide
The US was just as xenophobic during the last period of high levels of immigration, for example see the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that banned Chinese immigration for 10 years. Or the Immigration Act of 1924 that had a quota system that reduced Italian immigration from 200,000 per year to 4,000 per year.
In 1882 a writer in Atlantic Monthly wrote: "Our era . . . of happy immunity from those social diseases which are the danger and the humiliation of Europe is passing away . . . every year brings the conditions of American labor into closer likeness to those of the Old World. An American species of socialism is inevitable." Doesn't this sound like our current concerns about Latin American immigration?
Wikipedia sez:Soil piping is a particular form of soil erosion that occurs below the soil surface. It is associated with levee and dam failure, as well as sink hole formation. Turbulent flow removes soil starting from the mouth of the seep flow and subsoil erosion advances upgradient.
By the way, if you dislike Objective C, try these Javascript frameworks for iPhone development: Titanium (which is cross-platform to some extent with Android) and PhoneGap.
This makes life as easy as navigator.camera.getPicture(getPicture_Success, null, options);
I don't care if Google's VP8 library is not strictly speaking open source (or even proprietary), just as long as the WebM format is described in a precise way in a public document, with no patents forbiding me to implement a codec.
The problem is, given current US intellectual property laws, no one can say for certain that there as "no patents forbidding me to implement a codec". That is up to the legal process. Active people in the IP space say that all modern digital video compression methods are probably covered by someone's patent. You could hire your own lawyer to do due diligence to try to see if there are any patents applicable (and perhaps Google did this), but there could be hundreds of thousands of broadly worded patents to examine, and it isn't a 100% certain thing. And maybe a patent troll would come after you, or maybe not, and maybe you'd win in court, or maybe not, or maybe you'd just pay them off to go home.
I personally feel that there should be a method where ANSI-recognized standards have a "patent clearing" period. Perhaps all IP holders get 1-2 years after publishing of a standard by an ANSI-certified standard development organization, you either have to step up and register that your patent is relevant to the standard or you can not claim IP violation by the use of that standard.
I know the free/open software world would love patent-free audio/video compression, but those of us in the professional video industry would just like to know whose patents we might be using and how much it might cost us when we use a standard like H.264. I can tell you that the trolls keep coming for video compression standards over 10 years old, even today!
In many large sectors of our economy (telecom, department stores, petroleum, and OS software are examples) there are only a few providers, and in many regions only one provider
What is your definition of "a few"? Just how many, exactly, do you want?
"Telecom" can refer to a number of things, but if you mean high-speed terrestrial IXC connectivity, in the US there is: AT&T, Level 3, Verizon Business, Global Crossing, Quest, Sprint, Saavis.
Department stores in the US: Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Barneys New York, Bergdorf Goodman, Belk, Kohl's, Bloomingdale's, Nordstrom, Lord & Taylor, Macy's, Dillard's, JC Penney, Sears and depending on your definition Target, Kmart, and Wal-Mart.
OS: Microsoft, Apple, Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Canonical, HP (Palm), Google, Wind River, LynuxWorks, Research In Motion, Mandriva, not to mention the many non-profits like the Symbian Foundation and Debian Project.
Petroleum is a global commodity. Gasoline is highly regulated, with specific mixtures required for very specific areas inside the US, but there are plenty of gasoline refiners in the US: BP, Shell, Citgo, ExxonMobil, Sunoco, Chevron, Valero, ConocoPhillips. We also import refined gasoline from Hess Corporation, Petroleos de Venezuela, Total S.A., Irving Oil, Rosneft, and Gazprom Neft.
unless you think that there's some sort of hugely repressive regulations that are keeping other players out of the market.
What do you think a local cable monopoly charter is? It is keeping other players out of the market. And it is done for political reasons, and the people making those decisions in local government are often corrupt.
Vorbis has about the same quality per bit as AAC (unlike theora vs h264), and it's established long enough to not have patent issues.
Age is not an issue, MPEG-2 still has patent issues! The issue is that Vorbis has not been adopted by enough deep pockets for the patent trolls to come out yet. Already they are licking their lips over VP8.
Is the USA really that far behind the curve, or is there another explanation?
1) Yes, the USA is really that far behind the curve
2) The explanation is mainly longer local loop lengths. Average US local loops are over 4 km, compared with 3 km in the UK and France, or under 2 km in Germany and Italy. And unlike most European countries, almost no loops in the US are under 1.5 km, and the US is one of the few countries to have significant numbers of loops (10% of customers) over 5.5 km. This means much slower DSL and cable.
3) Another element is that the US has 60% of housing stock detached houses. For example, the UK has only 25%, meaning more of the houses are multiple-dwelling-units, which means higher cable-per-duct density. Higher duct density means lower construction and repair cost. Also this rules out fiber-to-the-multiple-dwelling-unit for most Americans.
It's not just that, we've deregulated our economy to the point that there's virtually no competition left.
What is your definition of "no competition left", in such a way that your statement can be backed up with data? I think that most deregulated industries have significant competition. Certainly the trucking and airline industries are more highly competitive today than before their deregulation in the 1970s, and that is backed up with lower trucking rates and ticket prices.
All the push from the libertarians for a "free market" has put us back to the days of robber barons running our country.
I think you will find the local terrestrial telecommunications industry, which is actually often non-competitive, to be highly regulated by federal, state, and local laws, not really a "libertarian" situation at all.
There's issues with what servers you use. So suppose your ISP gives you a high physical rate connection, 100mbit say. However they have it set up so it is more or less a bigass WAN, they don't have the bandwidth to their providers to back up that kind of rate.
The problem is the US is that long local loop lengths (often over 4,000 feet) are the limiting bandwidth factor.
Does this report on broadband offer any broader insights on Net Neutrality? Would instituting such a regime increase the gap between the US and other countries, or would it widen it and why?
It is likely that much of the difference is due to longer local loop lengths in the US and incumbency of copper. To the extent that Net Neutrality regulations would reduce local provider profitability on capital, they would be less likely to build more COs/POPs to reduce copper distances or install new fiber-to-the-home.
I have been told to document all inventions we come up with at work, even if they are something we would prefer one of our vendors to implement, because if we don't, another vendor could claim it is their IP and keep our vendor from using it.
But you like writing, and do that instead of making widgets. So the economy hobbles along at 40 units/day.
This is a misunderstanding of basic economic theory. Utility is personal, it is not communal. If I value my life of writing combined with possibly a smaller income, that is maximizing my utility. Moreover, planned economies fail because utility is personal, a government cannot dictate your utility function, you do.
According to standard comparative advantage, we should both be making widgets
This requires a priori knowledge that I am best at making widgets. Maybe I am better at something else, only your racist mind can't fathom that. Or perhaps along comes a new piece of technology (such as steam locomotives, the cotton gin, etc.) that suddenly makes me more efficient at doing something else, which I would certainly think about and perhaps change my job, but you are enslaving me, so I can't. Infact, I might want to work for a more efficient employer who can afford to pay me more, but you enslave me and keep me from making free market choices.
The key is the freedom of the slave to maximize their utility.
But perhaps you would prefer that we were all slaves under a planned economy by all-knowing leaders?
Arguments against slavery should be based entirely on the immorality of slavery.
Morality is a fine argument as well. But there are also economic consequences.
Morals don't come from God, they come from reality, there is a reason why we seek individual freedom, it must have provided an evolutionary advantage, most likely through the ability of maximizing personal utility, which maximized group output.
Ants don't have this issue, instead of forming complex thoughts and achieving individual specialization through a personal and evolving analysis of the world, they are specialized early in life by fairly specific genetic and chemical messengers.
Erm, who knows what specializations, investments and technological developments? We're talking about a time when you were lucky to halve most of your children live past 12.
Are you saying that some African Americans during the time of slavery would have been unable of creating specializations, investments, and technological developments if they were freed?
What about Benjamin Banneker astronomer, mathematician, surveyor, almanac author, and clockmaker, or someone like George Carver born at the end of slavery who was a scientist, botanist, educator, and inventor.
I want to comment on Received Signal Strength, Eb/N0, Es/N0, SNR, etc.
A commercial data receiver is NOT a professional test system. I did a lot of testing on satellite receivers, and what I know is that the SNR numbers you get from commercial receivers represent the ability of that receiver (antenna, front end, demodulator) to receive the signal under your current noise floor and interference situation. The SNR numbers you get may be correlated with actual SNR, but it is not exact.
For example, if you applied thermal noise equally to two different receivers, they may read two different SNRs because one is better than the other one at handling the noise. I found that one receiver reported better SNR numbers handling applied high-level thermal noise (an unrealistic scenario for satellite), and another reported better numbers when I keep the noise floor at a normal level and dropping the signal (typical for satellite rain fades). This is despite the fact that the "actual" SNR was the same in both scenarios.
If you had a piece of test equipment that could accurately plot a spectrogram, identify the signal level, and identify the noise floor, then you have an accurate measurement.
Interference is not much of a problem for satellite receivers as our antennas have huge directional gain, but I suspect that 3G and other land terrestrial mobile receive systems will be highly affected by interference (both direct and intermodulation) as well as multi-path interference.
My suggestion is if you can only test with commercial receivers, use the ones for testing that you intend to use for operations, as numbers gathered from another device may not correlate well with your actual operational device experience.
I think most people have the wrong idea about the "Butterfly Effect." IIRC, the weather scientists were talking about the precision with which they would need to know air movement to make longer term predictions. i.e. the longer the forecast the more digits of precision are needed in your measurement. They were referring to the level of precision and not to butterflies causing a tornado or other such nonsense.
I think this paper says that the butterfly/tornado link came directly from Edward Norton Lorenz, an American mathematician and meteorologist, and a pioneer of chaos theory:
In the title of a talk given by Lorenz at the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in December, 1972, the butterfly made its first appearance: ''Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?'' In this talk, Lorenz raised the fundamental issue: ''The question which really interests us is whether they (the butterflies) can do even this--whether, for example, two particular weather situations differing by as little as the immediate influence of a single butterfly will generally after sufficient time evolve into two situations differing by as much as the presence of a tornado. In more technical language, is the behavior of the atmosphere unstable with respect to perturbations of small amplitude?''
No, it was not optimal, because slaves did not have the freedom of choice to maximize their utility. Who knows what specializations, investments, and technological developments they could have made if they were paid?
Most of the issues addressed in the summary actually result from the fact that top US universities are insanely expensive.
Student net cost of college is much less than the "sticker price". Just like at a car dealer, price discrimination goes on in college. Those who can pay (or are unwilling to explore the aid options) pay full, those who can't pay less.
This article claims "At public four-year colleges the average net price is about $1,600 (compared with a list price of $7,020). At private four-year colleges, it's about $11,900, compared with a list tuition price of $26,273" and "The net tuition price paid by students at public two-year college has been declining steadily for at least 15 years, after adjusting for inflation. At public and private four-year colleges, the average net price is lower this year than it was five years earlier -- despite significant increases in published prices."
Slashdot Mirror
So I recently had to find a free SQL DB so I could do "select * from sm1 where (times,command,descriptor) not in (select sm1.times,sm1.command,sm1.descriptor from sm1,sm2 where abs(sm1.times-sm2.times)1 and sm1.command=sm2.command and sm1.descriptor=sm2.descriptor);"
PostgreSQL was the choice, it was easy to install on my Mac, it rulez!
it seems to me that dogmatic, xenophobic, recidivist behaviour is on the rise worldwide
The US was just as xenophobic during the last period of high levels of immigration, for example see the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that banned Chinese immigration for 10 years. Or the Immigration Act of 1924 that had a quota system that reduced Italian immigration from 200,000 per year to 4,000 per year.
In 1882 a writer in Atlantic Monthly wrote: "Our era . . . of happy immunity from those social diseases which are the danger and the humiliation of Europe is passing away . . . every year brings the conditions of American labor into closer likeness to those of the Old World. An American species of socialism is inevitable." Doesn't this sound like our current concerns about Latin American immigration?
Wikipedia sez: Soil piping is a particular form of soil erosion that occurs below the soil surface. It is associated with levee and dam failure, as well as sink hole formation. Turbulent flow removes soil starting from the mouth of the seep flow and subsoil erosion advances upgradient.
By the way, if you dislike Objective C, try these Javascript frameworks for iPhone development: Titanium (which is cross-platform to some extent with Android) and PhoneGap.
This makes life as easy as navigator.camera.getPicture(getPicture_Success, null, options);
I don't care if Google's VP8 library is not strictly speaking open source (or even proprietary), just as long as the WebM format is described in a precise way in a public document, with no patents forbiding me to implement a codec.
The problem is, given current US intellectual property laws, no one can say for certain that there as "no patents forbidding me to implement a codec". That is up to the legal process. Active people in the IP space say that all modern digital video compression methods are probably covered by someone's patent. You could hire your own lawyer to do due diligence to try to see if there are any patents applicable (and perhaps Google did this), but there could be hundreds of thousands of broadly worded patents to examine, and it isn't a 100% certain thing. And maybe a patent troll would come after you, or maybe not, and maybe you'd win in court, or maybe not, or maybe you'd just pay them off to go home.
I personally feel that there should be a method where ANSI-recognized standards have a "patent clearing" period. Perhaps all IP holders get 1-2 years after publishing of a standard by an ANSI-certified standard development organization, you either have to step up and register that your patent is relevant to the standard or you can not claim IP violation by the use of that standard.
I know the free/open software world would love patent-free audio/video compression, but those of us in the professional video industry would just like to know whose patents we might be using and how much it might cost us when we use a standard like H.264. I can tell you that the trolls keep coming for video compression standards over 10 years old, even today!
Indeed, Activision Blizzard, with revenues of $4 billion last year, is big enough for patent trolls....if they actually use Vorbis.
In many large sectors of our economy (telecom, department stores, petroleum, and OS software are examples) there are only a few providers, and in many regions only one provider
What is your definition of "a few"? Just how many, exactly, do you want?
"Telecom" can refer to a number of things, but if you mean high-speed terrestrial IXC connectivity, in the US there is: AT&T, Level 3, Verizon Business, Global Crossing, Quest, Sprint, Saavis.
Department stores in the US: Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Barneys New York, Bergdorf Goodman, Belk, Kohl's, Bloomingdale's, Nordstrom, Lord & Taylor, Macy's, Dillard's, JC Penney, Sears and depending on your definition Target, Kmart, and Wal-Mart.
OS: Microsoft, Apple, Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Canonical, HP (Palm), Google, Wind River, LynuxWorks, Research In Motion, Mandriva, not to mention the many non-profits like the Symbian Foundation and Debian Project.
Petroleum is a global commodity. Gasoline is highly regulated, with specific mixtures required for very specific areas inside the US, but there are plenty of gasoline refiners in the US: BP, Shell, Citgo, ExxonMobil, Sunoco, Chevron, Valero, ConocoPhillips. We also import refined gasoline from Hess Corporation, Petroleos de Venezuela, Total S.A., Irving Oil, Rosneft, and Gazprom Neft.
unless you think that there's some sort of hugely repressive regulations that are keeping other players out of the market.
What do you think a local cable monopoly charter is? It is keeping other players out of the market. And it is done for political reasons, and the people making those decisions in local government are often corrupt.
This article screams out for an xkcd strip!
Vorbis has about the same quality per bit as AAC (unlike theora vs h264), and it's established long enough to not have patent issues.
Age is not an issue, MPEG-2 still has patent issues! The issue is that Vorbis has not been adopted by enough deep pockets for the patent trolls to come out yet. Already they are licking their lips over VP8.
Is the USA really that far behind the curve, or is there another explanation?
1) Yes, the USA is really that far behind the curve
2) The explanation is mainly longer local loop lengths. Average US local loops are over 4 km, compared with 3 km in the UK and France, or under 2 km in Germany and Italy. And unlike most European countries, almost no loops in the US are under 1.5 km, and the US is one of the few countries to have significant numbers of loops (10% of customers) over 5.5 km. This means much slower DSL and cable.
3) Another element is that the US has 60% of housing stock detached houses. For example, the UK has only 25%, meaning more of the houses are multiple-dwelling-units, which means higher cable-per-duct density. Higher duct density means lower construction and repair cost. Also this rules out fiber-to-the-multiple-dwelling-unit for most Americans.
It's not just that, we've deregulated our economy to the point that there's virtually no competition left.
What is your definition of "no competition left", in such a way that your statement can be backed up with data? I think that most deregulated industries have significant competition. Certainly the trucking and airline industries are more highly competitive today than before their deregulation in the 1970s, and that is backed up with lower trucking rates and ticket prices.
All the push from the libertarians for a "free market" has put us back to the days of robber barons running our country.
I think you will find the local terrestrial telecommunications industry, which is actually often non-competitive, to be highly regulated by federal, state, and local laws, not really a "libertarian" situation at all.
There's issues with what servers you use. So suppose your ISP gives you a high physical rate connection, 100mbit say. However they have it set up so it is more or less a bigass WAN, they don't have the bandwidth to their providers to back up that kind of rate.
The problem is the US is that long local loop lengths (often over 4,000 feet) are the limiting bandwidth factor.
Does this report on broadband offer any broader insights on Net Neutrality? Would instituting such a regime increase the gap between the US and other countries, or would it widen it and why?
It is likely that much of the difference is due to longer local loop lengths in the US and incumbency of copper. To the extent that Net Neutrality regulations would reduce local provider profitability on capital, they would be less likely to build more COs/POPs to reduce copper distances or install new fiber-to-the-home.
I have been told to document all inventions we come up with at work, even if they are something we would prefer one of our vendors to implement, because if we don't, another vendor could claim it is their IP and keep our vendor from using it.
So what is a "paid Tweet"?
If Barack Obama tweets about politics, and he is paid to be the President of the USA, is that a "paid tweet"?
But you like writing, and do that instead of making widgets. So the economy hobbles along at 40 units/day.
This is a misunderstanding of basic economic theory. Utility is personal, it is not communal. If I value my life of writing combined with possibly a smaller income, that is maximizing my utility. Moreover, planned economies fail because utility is personal, a government cannot dictate your utility function, you do.
According to standard comparative advantage, we should both be making widgets
This requires a priori knowledge that I am best at making widgets. Maybe I am better at something else, only your racist mind can't fathom that. Or perhaps along comes a new piece of technology (such as steam locomotives, the cotton gin, etc.) that suddenly makes me more efficient at doing something else, which I would certainly think about and perhaps change my job, but you are enslaving me, so I can't. Infact, I might want to work for a more efficient employer who can afford to pay me more, but you enslave me and keep me from making free market choices.
The key is the freedom of the slave to maximize their utility.
But perhaps you would prefer that we were all slaves under a planned economy by all-knowing leaders?
Arguments against slavery should be based entirely on the immorality of slavery.
Morality is a fine argument as well. But there are also economic consequences.
Morals don't come from God, they come from reality, there is a reason why we seek individual freedom, it must have provided an evolutionary advantage, most likely through the ability of maximizing personal utility, which maximized group output.
Ants don't have this issue, instead of forming complex thoughts and achieving individual specialization through a personal and evolving analysis of the world, they are specialized early in life by fairly specific genetic and chemical messengers.
Erm, who knows what specializations, investments and technological developments? We're talking about a time when you were lucky to halve most of your children live past 12.
Are you saying that some African Americans during the time of slavery would have been unable of creating specializations, investments, and technological developments if they were freed?
What about Benjamin Banneker astronomer, mathematician, surveyor, almanac author, and clockmaker, or someone like George Carver born at the end of slavery who was a scientist, botanist, educator, and inventor.
Most Canadians have let that go much as the US let the burning of Washington DC by the British go.
I'm glad YOU are over it, I'm still pissed over the Battle of Bladensburg.
I want to comment on Received Signal Strength, Eb/N0, Es/N0, SNR, etc.
A commercial data receiver is NOT a professional test system. I did a lot of testing on satellite receivers, and what I know is that the SNR numbers you get from commercial receivers represent the ability of that receiver (antenna, front end, demodulator) to receive the signal under your current noise floor and interference situation. The SNR numbers you get may be correlated with actual SNR, but it is not exact.
For example, if you applied thermal noise equally to two different receivers, they may read two different SNRs because one is better than the other one at handling the noise. I found that one receiver reported better SNR numbers handling applied high-level thermal noise (an unrealistic scenario for satellite), and another reported better numbers when I keep the noise floor at a normal level and dropping the signal (typical for satellite rain fades). This is despite the fact that the "actual" SNR was the same in both scenarios.
If you had a piece of test equipment that could accurately plot a spectrogram, identify the signal level, and identify the noise floor, then you have an accurate measurement.
Interference is not much of a problem for satellite receivers as our antennas have huge directional gain, but I suspect that 3G and other land terrestrial mobile receive systems will be highly affected by interference (both direct and intermodulation) as well as multi-path interference.
My suggestion is if you can only test with commercial receivers, use the ones for testing that you intend to use for operations, as numbers gathered from another device may not correlate well with your actual operational device experience.
I think most people have the wrong idea about the "Butterfly Effect." IIRC, the weather scientists were talking about the precision with which they would need to know air movement to make longer term predictions. i.e. the longer the forecast the more digits of precision are needed in your measurement. They were referring to the level of precision and not to butterflies causing a tornado or other such nonsense.
I think this paper says that the butterfly/tornado link came directly from Edward Norton Lorenz, an American mathematician and meteorologist, and a pioneer of chaos theory:
In the title of a talk given by Lorenz at the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in December, 1972, the butterfly made its first appearance: ''Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?'' In this talk, Lorenz raised the fundamental issue: ''The question which really interests us is whether they (the butterflies) can do even this--whether, for example, two particular weather situations differing by as little as the immediate influence of a single butterfly will generally after sufficient time evolve into two situations differing by as much as the presence of a tornado. In more technical language, is the behavior of the atmosphere unstable with respect to perturbations of small amplitude?''
Why do we trust the German government (or any EU government, for that matter) with this data more than we trust Google?
When has the German government ever used information on its citizens for something bad? Oh, yeah, I remember now....
Maybe it comes for the fact that Canada lacked a Blitz or Pearl Harbor.
Oh yes they did, the American invasion of Canada (1775)....
It was optimal for its time.
No, it was not optimal, because slaves did not have the freedom of choice to maximize their utility. Who knows what specializations, investments, and technological developments they could have made if they were paid?
You cannot calculate an optimal economic situation, you can only allow the market to self-organize to achieve it.
Again, this is basic neoclassical stuff. Didn't you have economics in college??? ;)
Most of the issues addressed in the summary actually result from the fact that top US universities are insanely expensive.
Student net cost of college is much less than the "sticker price". Just like at a car dealer, price discrimination goes on in college. Those who can pay (or are unwilling to explore the aid options) pay full, those who can't pay less.
This article claims "At public four-year colleges the average net price is about $1,600 (compared with a list price of $7,020). At private four-year colleges, it's about $11,900, compared with a list tuition price of $26,273" and "The net tuition price paid by students at public two-year college has been declining steadily for at least 15 years, after adjusting for inflation. At public and private four-year colleges, the average net price is lower this year than it was five years earlier -- despite significant increases in published prices."
Where are these technical schools that the economists refer to?
Here are some Lincoln Tech, Universal Tech, Penn Foster.
Plenty of auto repairmen and HVAC experts make a reasonable amount of money!