We should ask, why do we have 1080i and 720p? Because viewing tests showed that at three picture heights, these resolutions pretty much maxed out the human visual resolution. There was not much to be gained from increased resolution.
Now if you view closer than three picture heights, higher resolution becomes important...
The solution to hunger, as I am aware of, has never been to give them a computer. It's typically been to give them food and a source to make/grow/manufacture/whatever their own food.
Or perhaps get rid of the lame government (which may mean getting rid of the lame culture that supports the lame government).
As Amartya Sen pointed out "No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy."
Info point, my uncle and cousins in El Salvador (in the capital, San Salvador) all have DSL...if you want a job in Central America, check out my cousin's company: Tecoloco.
Here is the story: there were plenty of network efforts both by volunteers over modems and corporations largely over X.25. When I was in college, we had a Telenet connection to many other schools and a new-fanged "Internet" connection. The idea of hooking up networks was not a unique concept, but it is true that TCP/IP protocol (largely government funded) was in the right place at the right time (although we almost went ATM). There were several government-funded higher speed networks that took off at the same time that FIDO Net was linking the BBS world and UUCP was linking Unix boxes over modems. But it took privately built networks (UUNET, DIGEX, PSI) to bring the Internet to commercial businesses and non-university/non-military users. Commercial traffic was actually banned from the government-funded networks at first.
I was an early employee of one of the first major nationwide DS-3 speed ISPs. We never worried much about government regulation, because government had no real clue what we were doing. We had porn servers. We peered with whom we wanted to and under what circumstances we wanted to. No "net neutrality". And there were instances of peering conflict between networks, but eventually calm heads prevailed and the Internet survived intact.
I'll also give props to government-funded CERN for coming up with HTTP, and more importantly NCSA for coming up with the Mosaic web browser, but there was plenty of Internet going on (email, Usenet, Gopher, ftp, etc.) before the WWW.
Ive observed that most "Libertarian" or "libertarian" organizations are no more than corporate shills.
I think you'll find that corporations put far more money into lobbying for rents from government than the money they put into "Libertarian" organizations. The banking and auto maker bailout lobbying efforts themselves dwarf almost everything else.
Free Software - individuals freely choosing to give up traditional royalty-based copyrights. Libertarian-OK.
Government Mandate of Free Software for Government - a cost/benefit decision for taxpayers Libertarian-maybe-OK.
Net Neutrality - government mandating contract terms between ISPs and users, and possibly a slippery scope for greater Internet regulation. Libertarian-not-OK.
here is no reason that a poor person without insurance should have to pay $100 for a doctor's visit that costs $30 for Aetna (even if the poor person can haggle them down to $50 - assuming they are in the condition to haggle BEFORE the services are rendered).
FYI, a CVS Minuteclinic exam costs $62. You need no appointment, and they are open evenings and weekends.
I can say without a doubt that Kaiser Permanente is hated...for many reasons. All of the worst things you've heard about managed care/hmos, etc crystalled in one company.
I bet the "public option" will look very much the same...a "public option" will, like Kaiser, insist you take the "blue pill" that costs half the price.
Did the US regulators have similar concerns? If not, why not? If they're genuine concerns - they sound like it - why is it just the EU that's following them up?
Gee, I don't know why the EU is dragging its feet, maybe because SAP is based in Germany?
A half-dozen U.S. companies are producing seasonal flu vaccines this year, double the number from five years ago. In the late 1990s, the number of seasonal flu vaccine-makers dwindled to just two because excess capacity caused prices to fall to the $2-a-dose range. Today, seasonal flu dosages list for about $15 each at wholesale prices.
PREPA was passed in 2005 and dramatically reduced the liability of vaccine makers. Then Bush dropped $1 billion onto folks like GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis for R&D to speed up vaccine production (in fear of the Avian Flu).
How do vaccines stack up to "normal" drugs? Not much money in vaccines, but not insignificant either:
The U.S. vaccine industry, which also includes vaccines for cancer, accounted for $4.7 billion in annual sales last year. In the same period, Pfizer Inc. sold nearly $8 billion worth of the cholesterol drug Lipitor, and AstraZeneca PLC generated $6 billion in sales from its heartburn pill Nexium, according to industry reports.
No flu shots for healthy kids The United States Public Health Service Monday announced that healthy children between 3 and 18 will be left out of the nationwide swine flu immunization program because of a vaccine shortage. (1976)
Of course, the truth is that the US Public Health Service has been involved in vaccine production since the beginning, but my understanding is that it is true that the Federal Government "sets" the price by purchasing a large amount of vaccine for distribution. PREPA passed in 2005 limits the liability exposure of vaccine producers by removing the right to a jury trial for persons injured by a covered vaccine, and was supposed to help sure up the market for vaccine.
The university attendance rate over there must be exceptionally low?
In 2007, 27% of Americans had a bachelor degree or higher, and 54% had "some college or more" which includes associate degrees and those who attempted college but failed. 10% of Americans have a degree beyond the bachelors.
84% of Americans have graduated from high school.
In an international comparison in 2000, 37% of Americans have reached a "tertiary" level of education, compared with 29% in Australia.
Are the doctors and lawyers the ones who can't repay their student loans?
No, more like Music Education and Performance Arts majors ($33k/yr. starting salary), foreign language majors ($38k), English majors ($40k), journalists ($41k), communication majors ($42k), art & design majors ($43k). That is, if they can get a job in the first place.
Doctors and layers do need to pay ~$15k year to repay their loans, but most are making way over $100k, with medical specialists making way over $200k.
I didn't pay for my education (although these days if you don't go to Scotland you pay something in the UK - it's a *lot* less than over here in the US though). I gave the UK about 10 years of higher taxes as a result - probably less than they were expecting
So you did pay for your education (at least part of it, before you left the country). Nothing is "free", NHS and UK colleges are taxpayer funded, and if you are a college graduate you are likely to be paying more for your education through taxes than someone who didn't go to college would pay for your education due to progressive tax rates.
Obviously skipping the country is not sustainable, so if a lot of people start doing it, European countries with "free" college education may require minimum "dwell times" after graduation.
This, or something else truly 3D (as opposed to stereo tech), will no doubt be scalable.
Spinning mirror technology is not scalable. Now if the large spinning mirror could be converted to a flat plane of a large number of small light steering devices (MEMS, electrowetting manipulation of optical films, digital light deflectors, etc), then it would be scalable.
As a US citizen, going into the Netherlands this year was very enjoyable. Entering the UK was OK, although clearly a lot of people from Pakistan and Africa were being forced to sit around and wait for something (perhaps visas, I wasn't about to ask).
Entering the US has sucked every time. Either 1) you get yelled at or 2) things are totally unorganized, huge lines form, and no one is there to organize them.
I am just embarrassed every time I come back to the US by our customs operations.
I think a big challenge to these holographic schemes is that LTO keeps ramping up, and thus an archive market for non-tape solutions never opens up. LTO-4 now holds 800 GB, and when LTO-5 comes out it wil be 1.6 TB.
Obama, having grown up in Chicago, seems to think that by having the kids in school longer, they will have less chances to get in trouble. Seems like a reasonable conclusion to me.
How about Obama, having used illegal drugs but was never convicted for it, should realize that the world would not have been better off if he had gone to jail, and instead consider ending the War on Drugs that funds the violence of the gangs that distract our students?
verybody benefits from having educated people around. The former is why private schools are seductive to many, but the latter is why we should embrace education as a public good - external to the market - and support/fix our existing socialized system.
No one is saying that public funds could not go to pay students to attend privately operated schools.
In the Netherlands, around 70% of primary and secondary pupils attend private independent schools. The schools are (mostly) funded by block grants for staff and operation costs by the government. Parents are free to choose any Dutch school, no assignment is made.
When "No child left behind" passed, know what it did? It cut the schools funding even further, when they already didn't have enough money for books and other things.
No element of "No Child Left Behind" reduces funding for particular schools. It might require a failing school to develop a plan to improve, may allow students to transfer to non-failing schools, or may shut the school down.
Perhaps your school district decided to reduce spending. In which case, one gets what one expects from a socialist monopoly...
Slashdot Mirror
720p ought to be enough for just about anybody.
We should ask, why do we have 1080i and 720p? Because viewing tests showed that at three picture heights, these resolutions pretty much maxed out the human visual resolution. There was not much to be gained from increased resolution.
Now if you view closer than three picture heights, higher resolution becomes important...
Digital Cinema 4K is defined as 4096×2160 progressive (compare with ATSC HDTV standards 1920x1080 interlaced or 1280x720 progressive).
The Sony SRX-T110 4K projector costs around $114k, not a million!
To Amartya Sen: Really? Are you sure? I hope you weren't a history major.
You have a counter-example?
The solution to hunger, as I am aware of, has never been to give them a computer. It's typically been to give them food and a source to make/grow/manufacture/whatever their own food.
Or perhaps get rid of the lame government (which may mean getting rid of the lame culture that supports the lame government).
As Amartya Sen pointed out "No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy."
Info point, my uncle and cousins in El Salvador (in the capital, San Salvador) all have DSL...if you want a job in Central America, check out my cousin's company: Tecoloco.
Explain, in your own words, how the internet as it is presently could possibly have come to exist under a Libertarian political structure
You ever hear of FIDO Net? Or UUCP? Or for that matter Telenet?
Here is the story: there were plenty of network efforts both by volunteers over modems and corporations largely over X.25. When I was in college, we had a Telenet connection to many other schools and a new-fanged "Internet" connection. The idea of hooking up networks was not a unique concept, but it is true that TCP/IP protocol (largely government funded) was in the right place at the right time (although we almost went ATM). There were several government-funded higher speed networks that took off at the same time that FIDO Net was linking the BBS world and UUCP was linking Unix boxes over modems. But it took privately built networks (UUNET, DIGEX, PSI) to bring the Internet to commercial businesses and non-university/non-military users. Commercial traffic was actually banned from the government-funded networks at first.
I was an early employee of one of the first major nationwide DS-3 speed ISPs. We never worried much about government regulation, because government had no real clue what we were doing. We had porn servers. We peered with whom we wanted to and under what circumstances we wanted to. No "net neutrality". And there were instances of peering conflict between networks, but eventually calm heads prevailed and the Internet survived intact.
I'll also give props to government-funded CERN for coming up with HTTP, and more importantly NCSA for coming up with the Mosaic web browser, but there was plenty of Internet going on (email, Usenet, Gopher, ftp, etc.) before the WWW.
Ive observed that most "Libertarian" or "libertarian" organizations are no more than corporate shills.
I think you'll find that corporations put far more money into lobbying for rents from government than the money they put into "Libertarian" organizations. The banking and auto maker bailout lobbying efforts themselves dwarf almost everything else.
Free Software - individuals freely choosing to give up traditional royalty-based copyrights. Libertarian-OK.
Government Mandate of Free Software for Government - a cost/benefit decision for taxpayers Libertarian-maybe-OK.
Net Neutrality - government mandating contract terms between ISPs and users, and possibly a slippery scope for greater Internet regulation. Libertarian-not-OK.
here is no reason that a poor person without insurance should have to pay $100 for a doctor's visit that costs $30 for Aetna (even if the poor person can haggle them down to $50 - assuming they are in the condition to haggle BEFORE the services are rendered).
FYI, a CVS Minuteclinic exam costs $62. You need no appointment, and they are open evenings and weekends.
I can say without a doubt that Kaiser Permanente is hated...for many reasons. All of the worst things you've heard about managed care/hmos, etc crystalled in one company.
I bet the "public option" will look very much the same...a "public option" will, like Kaiser, insist you take the "blue pill" that costs half the price.
Did the US regulators have similar concerns? If not, why not? If they're genuine concerns - they sound like it - why is it just the EU that's following them up?
Gee, I don't know why the EU is dragging its feet, maybe because SAP is based in Germany?
So can someone point to a real problem that has actually occurred that "Net Neutrality" would fix?
The reason this country has gone from 20+ flu vaccine manufacturers a decade ago to 2 today is because it's so unprofitable.
Not sure about that:
A half-dozen U.S. companies are producing seasonal flu vaccines this year, double the number from five years ago. In the late 1990s, the number of seasonal flu vaccine-makers dwindled to just two because excess capacity caused prices to fall to the $2-a-dose range. Today, seasonal flu dosages list for about $15 each at wholesale prices.
PREPA was passed in 2005 and dramatically reduced the liability of vaccine makers. Then Bush dropped $1 billion onto folks like GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis for R&D to speed up vaccine production (in fear of the Avian Flu).
How do vaccines stack up to "normal" drugs? Not much money in vaccines, but not insignificant either:
The U.S. vaccine industry, which also includes vaccines for cancer, accounted for $4.7 billion in annual sales last year. In the same period, Pfizer Inc. sold nearly $8 billion worth of the cholesterol drug Lipitor, and AstraZeneca PLC generated $6 billion in sales from its heartburn pill Nexium, according to industry reports.
Only 5 years ago, Vaccine shortages were unheard of.
Vaccine Shortage Halts Inoculation (1955)
Polio Clinics Delayed By New Vaccine Shortage (1962)
No flu shots for healthy kids The United States Public Health Service Monday announced that healthy children between 3 and 18 will be left out of the nationwide swine flu immunization program because of a vaccine shortage. (1976)
Experts can't explain flu vaccine shortage (1980)
Of course, the truth is that the US Public Health Service has been involved in vaccine production since the beginning, but my understanding is that it is true that the Federal Government "sets" the price by purchasing a large amount of vaccine for distribution. PREPA passed in 2005 limits the liability exposure of vaccine producers by removing the right to a jury trial for persons injured by a covered vaccine, and was supposed to help sure up the market for vaccine.
The university attendance rate over there must be exceptionally low?
In 2007, 27% of Americans had a bachelor degree or higher, and 54% had "some college or more" which includes associate degrees and those who attempted college but failed. 10% of Americans have a degree beyond the bachelors.
84% of Americans have graduated from high school.
In an international comparison in 2000, 37% of Americans have reached a "tertiary" level of education, compared with 29% in Australia.
Currently 68.6% of recent high school graduates were attending college in October 2008.
So it appears that college cost may be less of a problem than it may appear...
Are the doctors and lawyers the ones who can't repay their student loans?
No, more like Music Education and Performance Arts majors ($33k/yr. starting salary), foreign language majors ($38k), English majors ($40k), journalists ($41k), communication majors ($42k), art & design majors ($43k). That is, if they can get a job in the first place.
Doctors and layers do need to pay ~$15k year to repay their loans, but most are making way over $100k, with medical specialists making way over $200k.
I didn't pay for my education (although these days if you don't go to Scotland you pay something in the UK - it's a *lot* less than over here in the US though). I gave the UK about 10 years of higher taxes as a result - probably less than they were expecting
So you did pay for your education (at least part of it, before you left the country). Nothing is "free", NHS and UK colleges are taxpayer funded, and if you are a college graduate you are likely to be paying more for your education through taxes than someone who didn't go to college would pay for your education due to progressive tax rates.
Obviously skipping the country is not sustainable, so if a lot of people start doing it, European countries with "free" college education may require minimum "dwell times" after graduation.
This, or something else truly 3D (as opposed to stereo tech), will no doubt be scalable.
Spinning mirror technology is not scalable. Now if the large spinning mirror could be converted to a flat plane of a large number of small light steering devices (MEMS, electrowetting manipulation of optical films, digital light deflectors, etc), then it would be scalable.
I argue that many standard class libraries (especially Java) are too complex. There is too much inheritance going on at the expense of ease-of-use.
As a US citizen, going into the Netherlands this year was very enjoyable. Entering the UK was OK, although clearly a lot of people from Pakistan and Africa were being forced to sit around and wait for something (perhaps visas, I wasn't about to ask).
Entering the US has sucked every time. Either 1) you get yelled at or 2) things are totally unorganized, huge lines form, and no one is there to organize them.
I am just embarrassed every time I come back to the US by our customs operations.
I think a big challenge to these holographic schemes is that LTO keeps ramping up, and thus an archive market for non-tape solutions never opens up. LTO-4 now holds 800 GB, and when LTO-5 comes out it wil be 1.6 TB.
Thank you for teaching us that being stupid is the way to make people laugh, to win friends and influence people.
Dude, 1.6 billion people watch "House". The US dominates the global entertainment market. It pays some bills...
Obama, having grown up in Chicago, seems to think that by having the kids in school longer, they will have less chances to get in trouble. Seems like a reasonable conclusion to me.
How about Obama, having used illegal drugs but was never convicted for it, should realize that the world would not have been better off if he had gone to jail, and instead consider ending the War on Drugs that funds the violence of the gangs that distract our students?
verybody benefits from having educated people around. The former is why private schools are seductive to many, but the latter is why we should embrace education as a public good - external to the market - and support/fix our existing socialized system.
No one is saying that public funds could not go to pay students to attend privately operated schools.
In the Netherlands, around 70% of primary and secondary pupils attend private independent schools. The schools are (mostly) funded by block grants for staff and operation costs by the government. Parents are free to choose any Dutch school, no assignment is made.
When "No child left behind" passed, know what it did? It cut the schools funding even further, when they already didn't have enough money for books and other things.
No element of "No Child Left Behind" reduces funding for particular schools. It might require a failing school to develop a plan to improve, may allow students to transfer to non-failing schools, or may shut the school down.
Perhaps your school district decided to reduce spending. In which case, one gets what one expects from a socialist monopoly...