I read the IJ page you linked to and the cases under it, and none of them support your assertion. Could you be more specific? Point out a case and offending quote?
IJ does tend to respresent a disproportionately large number of black litigants, especially when it comes to school choice (since minority-majority districts tend to NEED school choice the most) but also in fighting eminent domain abuse. The New York City commuter van companies they defended were all owned by blacks. What arguments do you have against specific cases?
Though the Institute for Justice is mostly into economic liberty (breaking government-sanctioned monopolies), protecting homeowners from eminent domain abuse (so the govt. can't force you to sell your property at whatever price so their favorite big developer can have a bigger parking lot), and defending school choice. That said, they're very good at what they do.
P4 no longer cooler operating than Athlon
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The new Thoroughbred Revision B Athlons (XP 2400+ and higher) made a significant drop in power consumption (1.65V core), while the 3GHz P4 guzzles more electrons than any Athlon (have you seen the heatsink Intel bundles with that thing?!). The Hammer series uses Silicon-On-Insulator technology to keep power consumption (heat) down, to the point that the larger Hammer core consumes about the same amount of power as the TBred RevB. AMD is gunning for the high-density rackmount market with the Opteron where efficient power use is critical. They'll get it too.
I have a dual CPU Athlon 2400+ box, 2GHz each, using Thermalright SLK800 heatsinks and 80mm adjustable fans set to 2500RPM. My temps are 41C/43C/42C (case/CPU1/CPU2) at the moment with about 25% CPU utilization. Power consumption (as measured by my UPS load monitor) is the same as the dual Athlon 1800+ chips (1.53GHz) the new CPUs replaced.
1) ASUS A7N8X Deluxe nForce2 chipset motherboard 2) Fastest Athlon XP you want to spend money on, Athlon XP 2400+ at minimum 3) Pair of Corsair DIMMs, PC3200C2 or higher, 256meg or 512meg each 4) Thermalright SK7 or SLK800 copper heatsink 5) Arctic Silver 3 thermal compound, follow the application instructions on their website 6) Fastest GeForce4 Ti (or Radeon 9700 Pro) that you want to spend money on, I'd go with one of the new Ti4200 8X cards and save up for the GeForceFX (next year) 7) Seagate Barracuda V 120gig IDE HD, the SATA version if it's available and has Linux drivers by the time you're ready to buy, alternatively a Seagate Cheetah 15K.3 SCSI drive and controller if you have way more money than me 8) Lian Li aluminum case of your choice 9) YS Tech rheostat (adjustable) 80mm fan for that Thermalright heatsink, or the highest RPM 80mm fan your ears can tolerate 10) Pioneer DVR-105 4x/2x DVD-R/RW drive, just because.
Substitute an ASUS A7M266-D and pair of Athlon XP 2400+ chips modded for MP operation (until the real MP 2400+'s are available) if you like. That's what I did. It's soooo nice. Make sure you get 266MHz FSB CPUs if you go this route as that's all the board supports.
If we didn't need SPARC binary compatibility for some of the libraries we don't have source code for I could probably convince the Powers That Be to take a look at this at work, especially since I could build a dual CPU Athlon 2400+ development box for cheap. (I have one at home. Real MP 2400+ chips should be available later this month, saving you the nuisance of hacking XP series chips.) Being able to use the same GTK+/GNOME GUI source for both Linux and Solaris development is very, very interesting. Windows has probably already won where I work, but who knows?
I'd go with MicronPC and their new Millenia 910a series. Their component selection is the best I've seen from the larger vendors (ie, 300W power supplies, which is entry-level by my standards but better than Dell), their support is supposed to be better than average, and nForce2-chipset systems rock. Select an Athlon XP 2400+ CPU or faster.
I custom-build all my own PCs, of course. I tell everyone else to buy from MicronPC. They then ignore me, buy from Dell, and then I explain to them in intricate detail why that was Bad while I straighten out their systems.
I'd like to see an Athlon, however, beat an Pentium 4 running Rhambus on an Intel mainboard in stability tests
AMD systems are just as stable as Intel systems, the main variable being the competence of whoever built the system. If you don't use a decent power supply, don't install Windows service packs and semi-current drivers, etc, you'll have an unstable system, just like the garbage Dell Optiplexes we spent considerable time debugging here at work. High-volume websites have been using Athlon MP systems for quite some time now without trouble. My custom-built Athlon MP and XP systems have been solid as well.
And it's Rambus, not Rhambus.
Then again, I work at Best Buy, so I probably don't know what I'm talking about:)
Or you can build a dual processor Athlon system for less money. No need for HypedThreading.
It has been reported on various sites that Athlon XP 2400+ chips (2GHz, new Thoroughbred Revision B core) are trivial to mod for dual CPU operation and easily overclock to 2.25GHz (150MHz FSB, aka 300MHz DDR, which is the most my ASUS A7M266-D will allow) with proper cooling (Thermalright SLK800 being my favorite). The chips are under $200 apiece. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those...
Proper Athlon MP 2400+'s are due shortly I'd assume.
Because IA-64 requires a lot of work to support for mediocre results on an atrociously expensive platform that appears to be on a glide path to catastrophic failure. Those efforts could be more productively spent elsewhere.
Meanwhile, x86-64 is much simpler to support, the platform will be cost competitive with current top-of-the-line x86 systems, and you don't have to recompile all your programs if you don't want to. 4-way and 8-way multiprocessor systems ought to be semi-affordable too. In short, it's a far better philosophical and practical fit.
Simple. AMD crammed as much bad news as possible into Q3 and held up shipping their shiny new Athlon XP 2400+ and higher chips to distributors until the first day of Q4. Accordingly, Q4 revenues are going to be much higher than Q3, AMD's net loss will be considerably lower, and they'll hang in there just fine until the Opteron ships in early Q2 (late Q1?) next year.
AMD also took the unusual step of accelerating their changeover to 130nm and the new Thoroughbred Revision B core that those neato new 2400+ and higher chips use and letting old inventory burn off during the resulting downtime during the last two quarters.
I say "unusual" because Intel did just the opposite. They dumped lots of crippled 2GHz Celeron processors onto the market rather than shut down their old 180nm fabs and they brought lots of new 130nm capacity online. They have no prayer of finding buyers for all the chips they now have the capacity to build and the sales channels are choked with rapidly aging Intel inventory. Their ASPs are eroding and the Xeon line that sustains their profitability is going to get Hammered in about 6 months, assuming no Tier 1 OEMs grow a pair and start offering AMD Athlon MP servers and workstations before then.
Soooooo, AMD's future looks pretty good, depending on how badly Intel panics at the mess they've gotten themselves into.
But seriously, it would be more practical to found a new city in a sparsely populated zero-state-income-tax state and leave it at that. Build your apartment blocks, fiber-to-the-home networks, windmill/solar/nuclear power plants, decent public infrastructure in general (ie, roads designed to last, rail lines to the nearest major city/airport), and see who else decides to show up and build out the territory surrounding the city. Most of that infrastructure can be privately run, natch. If the cost of living stays low enough you'll minimize your radar signature to the federal government (lower pay but lower expenses == less federal tax paid and the same quality of life).
Until Armadillo Aerospace figures out how to do cheap space launches so we can build lunar colonies and/or terraform Mars, this will have to do.
Re:All I want for Christmas is my DVD writer...
on
Pioneer DVR-A05 Review
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· Score: 3, Informative
TDK 2x DVD-R spindle of 50, $125. So $2.50 per disc for name-brand blanks. I've been using the generic 2x DVD-R's on the same page without trouble (spindle of 25 for $45) on my DVR-A04 with dvdrecord under Red Hat 8. Non-2x-certified blanks are of course cheaper, but I don't burn enough discs to worry about that. I haven't tried burning DVD videos yet, I suspect my old Sony 530D deck won't like them, but new decks are cheap. Pinnacle's StudioDV 8 (Windoze) ought to be simple enough to use once I get time to play with it, I used v7 to burn VCDs.
Still another possibility -- that large numbers of families with autistic children had moved into California -- was discarded when it turned out that most children in both groups were born in California.
That's because the geeks who moved to California likely didn't marry until they got there. You've still got a self-selected community.
Nevertheless, more parents of younger children reported constipation and vomiting, which they attributed to complications from the measles vaccine. Wheat allergies were also more frequent. But none of these differences fully explain the increase in autism cases in California, Dr. Byrd said.
Interesting, since I fit the profile for Asperger's and I remember vomiting quite a bit when I was little. I was having all sorts of stomach trouble until recently when I discovered that cutting out refined sugar from my diet cured that (sugar feeds yeast, mix Coke/desserts with fresh bread/pizza crust and kaboom!). Fruits and veggies keep things moving;-). No need to get militant about diet, just cut out the obvious stuff (soft drinks, candy, donuts, and all that). As a bonus I shed my excess weight with no additional effort and I'm a lot less lethargic. I suspect that this has no influence on Asperger's/Autism but autism might cause or merely corrolate with allergies and other problems as side effects?
Hmm, trophy wives would be a good defense against having children with full spectrum autism;-).
After spending so much time and effort bashing the Megahurtz Myth, there's no way they'd go with Intel P4 chips and their performence killing 20 stage pipeline.
OTOH, they might go x86-64 on the AMD Hammer series. Gobs of memory bandwidth, excellent FPU, high clockspeed and VERY high performence. Plus, by targeting x86-64 as their starting point, they get both optimized performence AND by definition don't run on 32-bit chips, so there's less whining from users about not running on their 32-bit generic PCs. They can go 8-way multiprocessor economically with the Opteron series too.
I cut waaaay back on the refined sugar, as in no more sugary soft drinks, candy, cakes, and all that, and dropped 1-2 pounds/week for several weeks, wound up stabilizing about 20 pounds lighter, about where I ought to be. And I stopped getting sick stomach, which used to be a big problem. Mix sugar with yeast (fresh bread, pizza crust, etc) and Bad Things happen. (My homepage is waaay out of date and somewhat inaccurate in case anyone bothers reading it.)
Other than cutting out the refined sugar I didn't do a whole lot. I still go through most of a bad of Doritos or Sun Chips a week (not quite as fattening as potato chips but far from health food), I still eat pizza... turned out to be pretty easy to stick to. I should excercise just to build muscle mass and feel better, 10 minute brisk walks around the neighborhood help noticibly but I skip them way too much... anyhow, Refined Sugar Is Bad.
A few rounds of UT:2003 do wonders in terms of waking me up too. Heh. Too bad games are banned at work:-).
You could set up a page that would display all the businesses within range of your GPS location, highlighting various offers from each, and linked to the shop's full site. Anyone clueful enough to pay for higher-bandwidth access can handle bookmarks and is probably a caffeine addict:-). Focus on convenience and instant gratification over price. If the ad frames were well done paying users might actually leave them on and simply enjoy the higher bandwidth, but I wouldn't bet a business on that.
Local-only network access... actually, that dovetails nicely with the approach the Seattle Wireless crew came up with. They're building an open local network and leaving it up to other folks to build Internet gateways that interface to the local network, which may or may not be free-as-in-beer. If you're mostly interested in geographically local info you don't particularly need Internet access, and if you can work out peering agreements for traffic between adjacent local nets, that works too. If businesses could be talked into paying for access points at their sites (cheap commodity hardware) and not have to worry about the recurring cost of Internet bandwidth... very, very interesting.
Latency wouldn't necessarily be too bad, so long as there's no more than half a dozen hops before you get to a hardline (or your destination).
The real use of banner and popup ads on most sites is as a grating annoyance to encourage people to buy subscriptions so they can turn off the fscking ads.
It worked on me for Weather Underground, but they're cool and only $5/year, so I don't mind.
Use bandwidth shaping to choke the cheapskates to 64Kbps (paid subscribers get more).
Have the option to send your picture along with your GPS coords to the coffee shop so they'll have a better chance of finding you.
See if any local radio stations want pay the hardware costs to webcast over IP Multicast, assuming a) you can get around the RIAA bull----, and b) IP Multicast will actually work for this situation. (I'm utterly unfamiliar with implementing multicast, I just think it's a good idea. There's got to be a way to retransmit 20Mbps HDTV datastreams on gigabit hardline networks.) Might work great for local talk/public/college radio.
Offer paid subscribers the option of turning off the ads. That way, the cheapskate users can't complain too much.
Neat GPS tie-in: click on an ad for a nearby coffee shop, send them your GPS coordinates with your order (paid by credit card or PayPal), and they'll deliver for a fee based on your distance from the shop.
Palm Beach County suffers from massive corruption. From this report (using the Google.html cache because house.gov's.pdf crashes IE6 for some reason):
By a dramatic margin, the group most victimized in the Florida voting was African American Republicans. The new findings are stunning: African American Republicans who voted in Florida were in excess of 50 times more likely than the average African American to have had a ballot declared invalid because it was spoiled. Spoiled ballot rates also much higher for white Republicans than either white Democrats or African-American Democrats.
Remember kids, Democrats run Palm Beach County, they designed the "butterfly ballot", and yet somehow everything that went wrong in the 2000 election is all the Republicans fault. Yeah, right.
Machine voting might fix things, but if we can't see the source code I wouldn't trust it, not from these folks. Open Source is our best shot at addressing the trust issue.
1) Salaries for the.com workers 2) State and Federal taxes on the salaries of those.com workers, plus capital gains taxes on cashed-in stock. High income, very few deductions, and heavily concentrated in high-tax states like the People's State of California: it's enough to give any tax-and-spend politician a woody. 3) Insane property rents, because they were concentrated in high cost of living states. 4) Advertising, marketing, lawyers. 5) A distant fifth: gear, now largely obsolete.
#2 and #3 persuaded me to stay in Michigan rather than head West during the boom. I figured the additional money I'd make would be confiscated by the much higher tax profile and ridiculous cost of housing.
That and I just didn't want to move, but it looks prescient in retrospect:-).
Slashdot Mirror
I read the IJ page you linked to and the cases under it, and none of them support your assertion. Could you be more specific? Point out a case and offending quote?
IJ does tend to respresent a disproportionately large number of black litigants, especially when it comes to school choice (since minority-majority districts tend to NEED school choice the most) but also in fighting eminent domain abuse. The New York City commuter van companies they defended were all owned by blacks. What arguments do you have against specific cases?
There is.
Though the Institute for Justice is mostly into economic liberty (breaking government-sanctioned monopolies), protecting homeowners from eminent domain abuse (so the govt. can't force you to sell your property at whatever price so their favorite big developer can have a bigger parking lot), and defending school choice. That said, they're very good at what they do.
The new Thoroughbred Revision B Athlons (XP 2400+ and higher) made a significant drop in power consumption (1.65V core), while the 3GHz P4 guzzles more electrons than any Athlon (have you seen the heatsink Intel bundles with that thing?!). The Hammer series uses Silicon-On-Insulator technology to keep power consumption (heat) down, to the point that the larger Hammer core consumes about the same amount of power as the TBred RevB. AMD is gunning for the high-density rackmount market with the Opteron where efficient power use is critical. They'll get it too.
I have a dual CPU Athlon 2400+ box, 2GHz each, using Thermalright SLK800 heatsinks and 80mm adjustable fans set to 2500RPM. My temps are 41C/43C/42C (case/CPU1/CPU2) at the moment with about 25% CPU utilization. Power consumption (as measured by my UPS load monitor) is the same as the dual Athlon 1800+ chips (1.53GHz) the new CPUs replaced.
1) ASUS A7N8X Deluxe nForce2 chipset motherboard
2) Fastest Athlon XP you want to spend money on, Athlon XP 2400+ at minimum
3) Pair of Corsair DIMMs, PC3200C2 or higher, 256meg or 512meg each
4) Thermalright SK7 or SLK800 copper heatsink
5) Arctic Silver 3 thermal compound, follow the application instructions on their website
6) Fastest GeForce4 Ti (or Radeon 9700 Pro) that you want to spend money on, I'd go with one of the new Ti4200 8X cards and save up for the GeForceFX (next year)
7) Seagate Barracuda V 120gig IDE HD, the SATA version if it's available and has Linux drivers by the time you're ready to buy, alternatively a Seagate Cheetah 15K.3 SCSI drive and controller if you have way more money than me
8) Lian Li aluminum case of your choice
9) YS Tech rheostat (adjustable) 80mm fan for that Thermalright heatsink, or the highest RPM 80mm fan your ears can tolerate
10) Pioneer DVR-105 4x/2x DVD-R/RW drive, just because.
Substitute an ASUS A7M266-D and pair of Athlon XP 2400+ chips modded for MP operation (until the real MP 2400+'s are available) if you like. That's what I did. It's soooo nice. Make sure you get 266MHz FSB CPUs if you go this route as that's all the board supports.
Sun says Sol9 is Linux compatible. They also include many of our favorite Open Source apps, and many of those are Sun supported.
If we didn't need SPARC binary compatibility for some of the libraries we don't have source code for I could probably convince the Powers That Be to take a look at this at work, especially since I could build a dual CPU Athlon 2400+ development box for cheap. (I have one at home. Real MP 2400+ chips should be available later this month, saving you the nuisance of hacking XP series chips.) Being able to use the same GTK+/GNOME GUI source for both Linux and Solaris development is very, very interesting. Windows has probably already won where I work, but who knows?
I'd go with MicronPC and their new Millenia 910a series. Their component selection is the best I've seen from the larger vendors (ie, 300W power supplies, which is entry-level by my standards but better than Dell), their support is supposed to be better than average, and nForce2-chipset systems rock. Select an Athlon XP 2400+ CPU or faster.
I custom-build all my own PCs, of course. I tell everyone else to buy from MicronPC. They then ignore me, buy from Dell, and then I explain to them in intricate detail why that was Bad while I straighten out their systems.
From the release notes:
NOTE: The OpenGL driver can use AMD 3DNow! enhanced opcodes as well
and - due to design - does not need a kernel patch for AMD 3DNow!.
Now that's the kind of thing I like to see.
I'd like to see an Athlon, however, beat an Pentium 4 running Rhambus on an Intel mainboard in stability tests
:)
:-)
AMD systems are just as stable as Intel systems, the main variable being the competence of whoever built the system. If you don't use a decent power supply, don't install Windows service packs and semi-current drivers, etc, you'll have an unstable system, just like the garbage Dell Optiplexes we spent considerable time debugging here at work. High-volume websites have been using Athlon MP systems for quite some time now without trouble. My custom-built Athlon MP and XP systems have been solid as well.
And it's Rambus, not Rhambus.
Then again, I work at Best Buy, so I probably don't know what I'm talking about
Yup
Fine, read this and pick out a prebuilt Athlon MP 2200+ server for your server farm. It's STILL better/cheaper than buying a 3GHz P4.
Or you can build a dual processor Athlon system for less money. No need for HypedThreading.
It has been reported on various sites that Athlon XP 2400+ chips (2GHz, new Thoroughbred Revision B core) are trivial to mod for dual CPU operation and easily overclock to 2.25GHz (150MHz FSB, aka 300MHz DDR, which is the most my ASUS A7M266-D will allow) with proper cooling (Thermalright SLK800 being my favorite). The chips are under $200 apiece. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those...
Proper Athlon MP 2400+'s are due shortly I'd assume.
Because IA-64 requires a lot of work to support for mediocre results on an atrociously expensive platform that appears to be on a glide path to catastrophic failure. Those efforts could be more productively spent elsewhere.
Meanwhile, x86-64 is much simpler to support, the platform will be cost competitive with current top-of-the-line x86 systems, and you don't have to recompile all your programs if you don't want to. 4-way and 8-way multiprocessor systems ought to be semi-affordable too. In short, it's a far better philosophical and practical fit.
...that I can correct. It's the choice of CPU that bugs me. Put in an Athlon XP, Best Buy, and we'll talk.
Simple. AMD crammed as much bad news as possible into Q3 and held up shipping their shiny new Athlon XP 2400+ and higher chips to distributors until the first day of Q4. Accordingly, Q4 revenues are going to be much higher than Q3, AMD's net loss will be considerably lower, and they'll hang in there just fine until the Opteron ships in early Q2 (late Q1?) next year.
AMD also took the unusual step of accelerating their changeover to 130nm and the new Thoroughbred Revision B core that those neato new 2400+ and higher chips use and letting old inventory burn off during the resulting downtime during the last two quarters.
I say "unusual" because Intel did just the opposite. They dumped lots of crippled 2GHz Celeron processors onto the market rather than shut down their old 180nm fabs and they brought lots of new 130nm capacity online. They have no prayer of finding buyers for all the chips they now have the capacity to build and the sales channels are choked with rapidly aging Intel inventory. Their ASPs are eroding and the Xeon line that sustains their profitability is going to get Hammered in about 6 months, assuming no Tier 1 OEMs grow a pair and start offering AMD Athlon MP servers and workstations before then.
Soooooo, AMD's future looks pretty good, depending on how badly Intel panics at the mess they've gotten themselves into.
Hoth?
But seriously, it would be more practical to found a new city in a sparsely populated zero-state-income-tax state and leave it at that. Build your apartment blocks, fiber-to-the-home networks, windmill/solar/nuclear power plants, decent public infrastructure in general (ie, roads designed to last, rail lines to the nearest major city/airport), and see who else decides to show up and build out the territory surrounding the city. Most of that infrastructure can be privately run, natch. If the cost of living stays low enough you'll minimize your radar signature to the federal government (lower pay but lower expenses == less federal tax paid and the same quality of life).
Until Armadillo Aerospace figures out how to do cheap space launches so we can build lunar colonies and/or terraform Mars, this will have to do.
TDK 2x DVD-R spindle of 50, $125. So $2.50 per disc for name-brand blanks. I've been using the generic 2x DVD-R's on the same page without trouble (spindle of 25 for $45) on my DVR-A04 with dvdrecord under Red Hat 8. Non-2x-certified blanks are of course cheaper, but I don't burn enough discs to worry about that. I haven't tried burning DVD videos yet, I suspect my old Sony 530D deck won't like them, but new decks are cheap. Pinnacle's StudioDV 8 (Windoze) ought to be simple enough to use once I get time to play with it, I used v7 to burn VCDs.
Still another possibility -- that large numbers of families with autistic children had moved into California -- was discarded when it turned out that most children in both groups were born in California.
;-). No need to get militant about diet, just cut out the obvious stuff (soft drinks, candy, donuts, and all that). As a bonus I shed my excess weight with no additional effort and I'm a lot less lethargic. I suspect that this has no influence on Asperger's/Autism but autism might cause or merely corrolate with allergies and other problems as side effects?
;-).
That's because the geeks who moved to California likely didn't marry until they got there. You've still got a self-selected community.
Nevertheless, more parents of younger children reported constipation and vomiting, which they attributed to complications from the measles vaccine. Wheat allergies were also more frequent. But none of these differences fully explain the increase in autism cases in California, Dr. Byrd said.
Interesting, since I fit the profile for Asperger's and I remember vomiting quite a bit when I was little. I was having all sorts of stomach trouble until recently when I discovered that cutting out refined sugar from my diet cured that (sugar feeds yeast, mix Coke/desserts with fresh bread/pizza crust and kaboom!). Fruits and veggies keep things moving
Hmm, trophy wives would be a good defense against having children with full spectrum autism
In some places a powerful family will control elections making certain that they remain in power for generations.
Yeah, and it doesn't even require being a Kennedy, though that does seem to help.
Sometimes the results can be pretty freakish, though. Just look at the followup to Senator Al Gore Sr., VP Al Gore Jr. Scary.
After spending so much time and effort bashing the Megahurtz Myth, there's no way they'd go with Intel P4 chips and their performence killing 20 stage pipeline.
OTOH, they might go x86-64 on the AMD Hammer series. Gobs of memory bandwidth, excellent FPU, high clockspeed and VERY high performence. Plus, by targeting x86-64 as their starting point, they get both optimized performence AND by definition don't run on 32-bit chips, so there's less whining from users about not running on their 32-bit generic PCs. They can go 8-way multiprocessor economically with the Opteron series too.
I cut waaaay back on the refined sugar, as in no more sugary soft drinks, candy, cakes, and all that, and dropped 1-2 pounds/week for several weeks, wound up stabilizing about 20 pounds lighter, about where I ought to be. And I stopped getting sick stomach, which used to be a big problem. Mix sugar with yeast (fresh bread, pizza crust, etc) and Bad Things happen. (My homepage is waaay out of date and somewhat inaccurate in case anyone bothers reading it.)
:-).
Other than cutting out the refined sugar I didn't do a whole lot. I still go through most of a bad of Doritos or Sun Chips a week (not quite as fattening as potato chips but far from health food), I still eat pizza... turned out to be pretty easy to stick to. I should excercise just to build muscle mass and feel better, 10 minute brisk walks around the neighborhood help noticibly but I skip them way too much... anyhow, Refined Sugar Is Bad.
A few rounds of UT:2003 do wonders in terms of waking me up too. Heh. Too bad games are banned at work
You could set up a page that would display all the businesses within range of your GPS location, highlighting various offers from each, and linked to the shop's full site. Anyone clueful enough to pay for higher-bandwidth access can handle bookmarks and is probably a caffeine addict :-). Focus on convenience and instant gratification over price. If the ad frames were well done paying users might actually leave them on and simply enjoy the higher bandwidth, but I wouldn't bet a business on that.
Local-only network access... actually, that dovetails nicely with the approach the Seattle Wireless crew came up with. They're building an open local network and leaving it up to other folks to build Internet gateways that interface to the local network, which may or may not be free-as-in-beer. If you're mostly interested in geographically local info you don't particularly need Internet access, and if you can work out peering agreements for traffic between adjacent local nets, that works too. If businesses could be talked into paying for access points at their sites (cheap commodity hardware) and not have to worry about the recurring cost of Internet bandwidth... very, very interesting.
Latency wouldn't necessarily be too bad, so long as there's no more than half a dozen hops before you get to a hardline (or your destination).
The real use of banner and popup ads on most sites is as a grating annoyance to encourage people to buy subscriptions so they can turn off the fscking ads.
It worked on me for Weather Underground, but they're cool and only $5/year, so I don't mind.
Three more ideas:
Use bandwidth shaping to choke the cheapskates to 64Kbps (paid subscribers get more).
Have the option to send your picture along with your GPS coords to the coffee shop so they'll have a better chance of finding you.
See if any local radio stations want pay the hardware costs to webcast over IP Multicast, assuming a) you can get around the RIAA bull----, and b) IP Multicast will actually work for this situation. (I'm utterly unfamiliar with implementing multicast, I just think it's a good idea. There's got to be a way to retransmit 20Mbps HDTV datastreams on gigabit hardline networks.) Might work great for local talk/public/college radio.
Offer paid subscribers the option of turning off the ads. That way, the cheapskate users can't complain too much.
Neat GPS tie-in: click on an ad for a nearby coffee shop, send them your GPS coordinates with your order (paid by credit card or PayPal), and they'll deliver for a fee based on your distance from the shop.
OK, maybe that's a bit too geeky...
Palm Beach County suffers from massive corruption. From this report (using the Google .html cache because house.gov's .pdf crashes IE6 for some reason):
By a dramatic margin, the group most victimized in the Florida voting was African American Republicans. The new findings are stunning: African American Republicans who voted in Florida were in excess of 50 times more likely than the average African American to have had a ballot declared invalid because it was spoiled. Spoiled ballot rates also much higher for white Republicans than either white Democrats or African-American Democrats.
Remember kids, Democrats run Palm Beach County, they designed the "butterfly ballot", and yet somehow everything that went wrong in the 2000 election is all the Republicans fault. Yeah, right.
Machine voting might fix things, but if we can't see the source code I wouldn't trust it, not from these folks. Open Source is our best shot at addressing the trust issue.
1) Salaries for the .com workers .com workers, plus capital gains taxes on cashed-in stock. High income, very few deductions, and heavily concentrated in high-tax states like the People's State of California: it's enough to give any tax-and-spend politician a woody.
:-).
2) State and Federal taxes on the salaries of those
3) Insane property rents, because they were concentrated in high cost of living states.
4) Advertising, marketing, lawyers.
5) A distant fifth: gear, now largely obsolete.
#2 and #3 persuaded me to stay in Michigan rather than head West during the boom. I figured the additional money I'd make would be confiscated by the much higher tax profile and ridiculous cost of housing.
That and I just didn't want to move, but it looks prescient in retrospect