Not all bits have equal significance. Example: Suppose I have a perfect-fidelity 30-second recording of a pure 440 Hz sine wave. On a CD this would require 16 bytes/channel * 2 channels/sample * 44,100 samples/second * 30 seconds = 42,336,000 bits.
This same signal can be compressed to the formula "L(t)=R(t)=sin(440*(2*pi)*t)*u(30-t)" (where u(t) is the unit step function { 0, t=0 }). Using string representation, this compressed version requires 25 bytes, or 280 bits. In other words, we eliminated 151,199 of every 151,200 bits—and the compressed version actually has better fidelity than the CD version, since it can be losslessly decoded to an arbitrarily high sampling rate.
This is obviously a contrived example, but it suffices to demonstrate the reducing the bitrate, even drastically, does not have to negatively impact the quality of the audio.
Since you have to pay for the glass up front, but can distribute the cost of the fuel over the entire 12 years, you have to take interest into account when determining the ROI. Specifically, you would need to save about $290 over 12 years, minimum, to break even on a $250 up-front investment at the extremely conservative savings-account return of 1.30% APR.
There's nothing involuntary about a cartel. You might have a point should someone manage to monopolize all the available raw materials necessary for life (i.e. air, water, land), but that's merely a "life-boat situation" and not relevant to everyday economics or social policy. Naturally the normal rules tend to be bent or broken when sheer survival is forced to take priority over all other considerations.
Complaining about a cartel or monopoly on a service, though, is ridiculous unless the cartel in question is forcibly preventing others from offering the same service—in which case we're not talking about capitalism. Monopolies and cartels can only exist in the service domain to the extent that no one can force another to provide them with a service. Arguing against that kind of "monopoly" is equivalent to arguing for outright slavery, just as arguing against the "monopoly" granted over specific property by the rights of ownership is equivalent to arguing for theft. Individuals have the right to withhold their labor (or property), generally or in any specific circumstance, and individually or as a group ("cartel"). This is essential to the proper function of the system, and not a flaw to be corrected.
"Common sense" is nothing more than the mass of background assumptions you picked up by osmosis while growing up and never bothered to challenge. Lots of it is perfectly logical, for obvious reasons, but other parts are nothing more than oft-repeated lies.
What about the former shareholder who sold stock early, not having had access to information showing that the stock was undervalued? Or how about the new shareholder who did not have the information to know that the stock was overvalued?
I agree with you in general—particularly regarding agents' (trusted insiders) duty toward their principals (the shareholders at large)—but this part makes no sense. In what way would someone else's trades prevent an existing shareholder from selling too early? If they were inclined to sell at the current price it seems to me that they would sell regardless of any insider trading. Any attempt to buy up stock at the lower price would signal other investors to anticipate a price increase, making them less likely to sell.
The same is true in reverse when the shares are overvalued; anyone inclined to buy the overvalued shares would simply have purchased them from someone else, and any significant degree of insider selling should signal other investors that the price will soon be falling, resulting in a more rapid price correction and thus a more efficient market.
The problem with insider trading has nothing to do with some investors having better information than others. That's true of every trade, and the vast majority of the time is nothing to worry about. Finding ways to get more timely and trustworthy information than your competitors is central to trade in general, and giving people incentives to discover and act on this information is one of the main functions of a market.
No, the problem with insider trading is when one or more agents—e.g. the hired managers of a business—take advantage of their position to influence stock prices (directly or indirectly) for their own private benefit to the detriment of their principal(s) (the shareholders as a group). In order for insider trading to occur it is necessary but not sufficient that trade occur on the basis of unpublicized information; the trades must also be the result of someone abusing their position of trust within the company.
It is meaningless to talk of "victims" and "injuries" resulting from price fluctuations apart from the agent/principle relationship. As with anything else, you have a property right in your shares of the company, not their estimated monetary value, which is nothing more than what other people currently happen to think the shares are worth. A reduction in the stock's bid price is not an injury; if it were then any other action with the potential to reduce the share price would also be an injury, including simply selling your shares and publishing true statements which cast a company in an unfavorable light. The very concept of market-based pricing would be impossible under such conditions.
The registry also suffers from the common problem of all single-use binary formats: you can't examine or manage it with existing tools. For example, how would you go about comparing two copies of the registry for incremental changes (without first exporting both to plain text)? Can you place it into any of the excellent free, off-the-shelf version control systems, and still take full advantage of their change tracking and merging features?
The mass of plain-text configuration files used on Unix systems may have some flaws--they could certainly be made more uniform--but at least you have a wide variety of general-purpose tools available to help manage the complexity. With the registry you have... RegEdit. That's fine for reading and writing specific keys, but not much else.
Are you really so naive as to think that IRC and Usenet can only be used to transfer plain text? Ever hear of uuencoding (encoding binary data as base-64 text)? Some (old) SMTP systems are limited to 7-bit ASCII; that doesn't stop anyone from using them to transfer binary attachments.
All you've done is made the network less efficient, without limiting how it can be used.
They aren't slavery any more than hiring a contractor to do your kitchen is slavery.
The contractor is accepting the obligation voluntarily in exchange for his/her pay. That is a significant difference which you are deliberately ignoring. Obligations you accept of you own free will are fine. Obligations imposed on you against your will are not.
Participating in a society is a social contract, with obligations to maintain and improve that society.
If there is such a thing as a "social contract", it is a contract of adhesion imposed on people involuntarily—from well before the age at which people are customarily considered competent to enter into contracts—and not accepted of their own free will. In short, the "social contract" you refer to is nothing which even you would recognize as a legally-binding form of contract in any other context.
In any event, the concept of the "social contract" proves too much. If you can impose one involuntary obligation on others in the name of a "social contract" then you can impose any involuntary obligation, including outright slavery. One could easily argue that what you would consider "real" slavery is merely part of the social contract, and that those born into slavery have an obligation to accept their place in society. It is just as ridiculous to claim that some nebulous "social contract" obligates you to forfeit a portion of your property rights to the government as it would be to claim that the same "contract" obligates you to forfeit a portion of your rights of self-ownership.
You could say that, but it wouldn't be accurate. Citizens don't need help from an organization specializing in coercion "to provide for each other in an efficient and cost effective manner." Private charitable organizations would be more than sufficient for that. The only unique element the government brings to the table is the use of force, which ensures a less efficient and cost-effective solution when you consider all the participants and not just those in favor of the program.
So the subsidies take the form of state-granted monopolies. That contradicts my point how, exactly? People are still being forced to pay for unwanted services, and now subsidized Internet access, due to the state-enforced lack of competition.
My water and sewer connections are provided via the municipal water department, and I'm billed for their costs on a quarterly basis. I do not expect anyone else to cover my costs, whatever my financial situation; these are no more "rights" than Internet access. To the extent that they may be considered as such in other areas, the same argument applies: someone is being unnecessarily and unjustly coerced to provide them at a subsidized rate.
You're right. They aren't synonyms. Clairvoyance is "the power or faculty of discerning objects not present to the senses" or "ability to perceive matters beyond the range of ordinary perception", according to Marriam-Webster, whereas precognition is specifically the ability to perceive the future.
However, I never claimed they were synonyms. Future events are among those "matters beyond the range of ordinary perception", so precognition necessarily implies clairvoyance.
The right to free speech and the right to bear arms are both natural by-products of the right to own property (incl. self-ownership), so there's no point in considering them separately. The "right" to a fair trial isn't really a right at all, but rather a procedure which allows those who follow it to absolve themselves of guilt in the eyes of society should they happen to respond in apparent self-defense to a perceived injury and later discover that their response was unfounded. They're still in the wrong, and liable to make reparations, but holding a fair trial protects them from accusations of malicious intent and the corresponding possibility of retribution in kind.
The right to own property, in turn, is an inevitable consequence of scarcity. Ownership is, at its essence, the right to use something, or more precisely the right to use it up. Absence of formal property rights would not change the fact that only one individual can effectively use a given item of property at a time; the only way to avoid denying others use of the property is for no one to use it at all, which is inherently self-defeating. Given that someone must have the right to use the property, the traditional homesteading & contractual transfer system of allocating property rights is the least arbitrary and most consistent system available, which leaves the least room for disagreement and conflict.
There's also the argument of reciprocation: if you argue that rights aren't universal, that others do not have the rights you claim for yourself, then others can make the same argument against you. On the other hand, if rights are universal, then you cannot argue that others do not have the right to free speech, property, etc. while simultaneously claiming these rights for yourself. By making a claim to free speech (which by itself may be offensive to some) you must simultaneously argue that others have a right to speak in ways others may find offensive; by claiming a right to the property you say you need to survive (minimal food, water, air) and which you desire but do not need (clothes, shelter, etc.) you must simultaneously argue that others have a right to their property.
Perhaps a better question is "Who do they plan to coerce to provide this 'right'?" Internet access doesn't just grow on trees, you know.
I know they're demanding that it be "reasonably priced", not "free", but given that no one has stepped up thus far to offer it at these "reasonable" prices it's fair to conclude that doing so is not cost-effective. That means it has to be subsidized, which means someone--probably a lot of someones--are going to end up forced to pay for services they don't need or want or even believe they benefit from, whatever others might say.
... if the goal was to use as little power as possible, we'd just lock the processor in "slow mode".
Not necessarily. You also have to consider that higher performance settings may allow the processor to complete its task(s) and return to a minimal-power idle configuration more quickly, for an overall improvement in average power consumption. It all depends on the power/performance ratios for each performance level and the amount of overhead involved in switching between them. Plus, of course, a bit of clairvoyance in accurately predicting future requirements.
If your DNA is part of that identity proof, how long is it going to be before companies start looking through the sequence for markers, and decide that your car insurance rate is going to be 3X as high as mine because you have a marker that indicates you might be slightly more predisposed to narcilepsy?
Insurance is not meant to subsidize high-risk individuals; programs that are intended to do so are known as charities. Both have their rightful place. If I was expected to carry 3X the risk which you present, then I would certainly expect to pay 3X the premiums you do, and whether my higher risk is by choice or by circumstances out of my control is entirely irrelevant. No one can force you to provide the information or material required to develop precise, personalized risk estimates, of course, but refusal to do so should be taken as evidence that you already consider yourself to be high-risk, justifying accordingly high premiums.
Their approach is what a former FCC chairman has called "regulatory capitalism,"...
The traditional term for this situation is "regulatory capture", where the incumbent organizations learn to take advantage of (and even gain influence over) regulations in their field to inhibit competition. It is well known that regulations tend to make profit harder to come by, all else being equal; what is not quite so well known is that regulations tend to make things even more difficult for upstart competitors than for the established providers who have had time to learn all the tricks of the trade (and all the regulatory loopholes).
"Regulatory capitalism", on the other hand, is a contradiction in terms.
Precisely. Which is why it didn't work until they changed their point-of-origin to the new planet.
This is a point that bothered me during the show. In every prior case, the point of origin has been the one symbol on the DHD/stargate which isn't a constellation, and when a DHD or gate is moved to a new planet the symbol doesn't change. For that matter, there were two original Earth-based DHDs with different symbols. These points all argue for the point-of-origin being a cosmetic placeholder for "wherever the gate is right now". So (a) why would it make any difference what symbol they used for the point of origin, and (b) how did they input a symbol into the DHD which shouldn't have been on the DHD's keys in the first place?
If they'd said it was just another constellation, that would make sense in the context of a code rather than an address. However, they claimed it was still the point of origin, and showed the symbol from Ra's Earth gate (which wasn't even on Earth when the Ancients were here) on the monitor.
Star Trek and Star Wars are similar in this regard: the problem isn't actual collisions, but rather the effect that gravity has on warp fields / hyperspace. Get too close to anything with sufficient mass to affect the FTL drive and Bad Things Happen. In Star Trek the warp bubble, and anything inside it, gets pulled into the gravity well, never to return; in Star Wars gravity distorts the correspondence between hyperspace and real space in unpredictable ways, and interferes with the separation between hyperspace and the bubble of real space maintained inside the ship's hyper field.
In Star Trek it's impossible for there to be an actual collision between a ship under warp drive and an object in normal space, since the warp drive works by creating a complete separation between the real universe and anything inside the warp field. This is tempered somewhat by an EM "bleed-through" effect when multiple, overlapping warp fields are employed, which is why—aside from the first few attempts at warp travel with a single field—those inside the ship can see the outside universe. (There is some inconsistency on this point, however.)
That would be interesting. I haven't seen the pilot episode myself yet, so I was basing my argument on the SG-1 and SG Atlantis episodes. On the other hand, I do recall a few episodes where they were able to dial a (fixed) gate which wasn't in orbit of a planet... the Ori super-gate, for example, and all the gates making up their "Midway Station" corridor between Earth and Atlantis. In these cases, however, they always knew exactly where the remote gate was in space.
The main problem would be that the gate has to know the precise physical location of the remote gate's planet to establish a lock. The gate address isn't an arbitrary identifier, but rather a set of spatial coordinates giving the location of the planet--as of when the gate system was set up--which the DHD translates into current coordinates to account for interstellar drift. That's why they could only dial Abydos originally; the Earth gate's translation tables were some 10,000 years out of date, and only Abydos and a few other planets were close enough to have remained at nearly the same location relative to Earth. To connect with a moving gate would seem to require that (a) the DHDs are somehow kept apprised of the target gate's location, or (b) the dialer knows the location and is able to bypass the DHD and input physical coordinates directly.
In the red-sky episode the situation was caused by the wormhole passing directly through the sun; there was no disconnection. They attempted to fix the problem by disconnecting the wormhole at a specific time, but the implication at the end is that it didn't work--it just gave the Asgard an opportunity to intervene without getting caught and risking the Protected Planet treaty. One might ask why they thought it might work, but then their understanding of the gate system evolves over time. Anyway, in the episode where Teal'c was trapped in the buffer the remote stargate was actually destroyed, not just disconnected, so the situation isn't exactly the same.
As for transporting whole objects: The gate does transport objects in discrete packets, but any object which has already been partly dematerialized at the time it disconnects is split at the event horizon. The dematerialized part is transmitted as-is, followed by a completion code, and the part outside the gate is left behind. Where "discrete packets" comes in is that no part of the object is materialized on the other side until that completion code is received (which is where Teal'c problem came from--with the remote gate destroyed just after he passed through there was no completion code, and--absent a real DHD to compensate--he was never materialized). No object is ever partially materialized on two planets at the same time.
First, the gates only work one way (per connection) in regard to matter transport, so they'd have to open it from the planet, not to the planet--and the ship itself would need to be in orbit of a planet itself to establish contact (otherwise it has no address). Second, the gates aren't simple conduits; only elementary particles can actually travel through the wormhole, so the purpose of the gate (besides opening the wormhole) is dematerializing objects for transport and rematerializing them on the other side. The gate itself discriminates between different kinds of objects, and presents a certain amount of resistance at the event horizon to differentiate between an object being sent through (e.g. a human) and accidental contact (e.g. atmosphere)--see the "water gate" episode for a clear example of this, or any of the several episodes where they open a connection between a planet-based gate and one in space--so just opening the gate wouldn't be sufficient to bring air across; something would have to force it through. The gate also transports objects in discrete "packets", fully dematerializing each object before transmitting it, which isn't really consistent with transporting an unbounded mass of air.
Assuming they could send someone across to open the gate from the other side, however, they could package up some air in containers and send the containers back, air and all. The gates will readily transport air, provided it's enclosed in something.
Slashdot Mirror
A better question would be "Why shouldn't you be able to create a car that locks out 3rd-party replacement parts and upgrades?"
Just because a wrong decision has been made in the past doesn't mean we have to repeat that mistake in the present.
Not all bits have equal significance. Example: Suppose I have a perfect-fidelity 30-second recording of a pure 440 Hz sine wave. On a CD this would require 16 bytes/channel * 2 channels/sample * 44,100 samples/second * 30 seconds = 42,336,000 bits.
This same signal can be compressed to the formula "L(t)=R(t)=sin(440*(2*pi)*t)*u(30-t)" (where u(t) is the unit step function { 0, t=0 }). Using string representation, this compressed version requires 25 bytes, or 280 bits. In other words, we eliminated 151,199 of every 151,200 bits—and the compressed version actually has better fidelity than the CD version, since it can be losslessly decoded to an arbitrarily high sampling rate.
This is obviously a contrived example, but it suffices to demonstrate the reducing the bitrate, even drastically, does not have to negatively impact the quality of the audio.
Since you have to pay for the glass up front, but can distribute the cost of the fuel over the entire 12 years, you have to take interest into account when determining the ROI. Specifically, you would need to save about $290 over 12 years, minimum, to break even on a $250 up-front investment at the extremely conservative savings-account return of 1.30% APR.
You forgot "benevolent".
There's nothing involuntary about a cartel. You might have a point should someone manage to monopolize all the available raw materials necessary for life (i.e. air, water, land), but that's merely a "life-boat situation" and not relevant to everyday economics or social policy. Naturally the normal rules tend to be bent or broken when sheer survival is forced to take priority over all other considerations.
Complaining about a cartel or monopoly on a service, though, is ridiculous unless the cartel in question is forcibly preventing others from offering the same service—in which case we're not talking about capitalism. Monopolies and cartels can only exist in the service domain to the extent that no one can force another to provide them with a service. Arguing against that kind of "monopoly" is equivalent to arguing for outright slavery, just as arguing against the "monopoly" granted over specific property by the rights of ownership is equivalent to arguing for theft. Individuals have the right to withhold their labor (or property), generally or in any specific circumstance, and individually or as a group ("cartel"). This is essential to the proper function of the system, and not a flaw to be corrected.
"Common sense" is nothing more than the mass of background assumptions you picked up by osmosis while growing up and never bothered to challenge. Lots of it is perfectly logical, for obvious reasons, but other parts are nothing more than oft-repeated lies.
What about the former shareholder who sold stock early, not having had access to information showing that the stock was undervalued? Or how about the new shareholder who did not have the information to know that the stock was overvalued?
I agree with you in general—particularly regarding agents' (trusted insiders) duty toward their principals (the shareholders at large)—but this part makes no sense. In what way would someone else's trades prevent an existing shareholder from selling too early? If they were inclined to sell at the current price it seems to me that they would sell regardless of any insider trading. Any attempt to buy up stock at the lower price would signal other investors to anticipate a price increase, making them less likely to sell.
The same is true in reverse when the shares are overvalued; anyone inclined to buy the overvalued shares would simply have purchased them from someone else, and any significant degree of insider selling should signal other investors that the price will soon be falling, resulting in a more rapid price correction and thus a more efficient market.
The problem with insider trading has nothing to do with some investors having better information than others. That's true of every trade, and the vast majority of the time is nothing to worry about. Finding ways to get more timely and trustworthy information than your competitors is central to trade in general, and giving people incentives to discover and act on this information is one of the main functions of a market.
No, the problem with insider trading is when one or more agents—e.g. the hired managers of a business—take advantage of their position to influence stock prices (directly or indirectly) for their own private benefit to the detriment of their principal(s) (the shareholders as a group). In order for insider trading to occur it is necessary but not sufficient that trade occur on the basis of unpublicized information; the trades must also be the result of someone abusing their position of trust within the company.
It is meaningless to talk of "victims" and "injuries" resulting from price fluctuations apart from the agent/principle relationship. As with anything else, you have a property right in your shares of the company, not their estimated monetary value, which is nothing more than what other people currently happen to think the shares are worth. A reduction in the stock's bid price is not an injury; if it were then any other action with the potential to reduce the share price would also be an injury, including simply selling your shares and publishing true statements which cast a company in an unfavorable light. The very concept of market-based pricing would be impossible under such conditions.
The registry also suffers from the common problem of all single-use binary formats: you can't examine or manage it with existing tools. For example, how would you go about comparing two copies of the registry for incremental changes (without first exporting both to plain text)? Can you place it into any of the excellent free, off-the-shelf version control systems, and still take full advantage of their change tracking and merging features?
The mass of plain-text configuration files used on Unix systems may have some flaws--they could certainly be made more uniform--but at least you have a wide variety of general-purpose tools available to help manage the complexity. With the registry you have ... RegEdit. That's fine for reading and writing specific keys, but not much else.
Are you really so naive as to think that IRC and Usenet can only be used to transfer plain text? Ever hear of uuencoding (encoding binary data as base-64 text)? Some (old) SMTP systems are limited to 7-bit ASCII; that doesn't stop anyone from using them to transfer binary attachments.
All you've done is made the network less efficient, without limiting how it can be used.
They aren't slavery any more than hiring a contractor to do your kitchen is slavery.
The contractor is accepting the obligation voluntarily in exchange for his/her pay. That is a significant difference which you are deliberately ignoring. Obligations you accept of you own free will are fine. Obligations imposed on you against your will are not.
Participating in a society is a social contract, with obligations to maintain and improve that society.
If there is such a thing as a "social contract", it is a contract of adhesion imposed on people involuntarily—from well before the age at which people are customarily considered competent to enter into contracts—and not accepted of their own free will. In short, the "social contract" you refer to is nothing which even you would recognize as a legally-binding form of contract in any other context.
In any event, the concept of the "social contract" proves too much. If you can impose one involuntary obligation on others in the name of a "social contract" then you can impose any involuntary obligation, including outright slavery. One could easily argue that what you would consider "real" slavery is merely part of the social contract, and that those born into slavery have an obligation to accept their place in society. It is just as ridiculous to claim that some nebulous "social contract" obligates you to forfeit a portion of your property rights to the government as it would be to claim that the same "contract" obligates you to forfeit a portion of your rights of self-ownership.
You could say that, but it wouldn't be accurate. Citizens don't need help from an organization specializing in coercion "to provide for each other in an efficient and cost effective manner." Private charitable organizations would be more than sufficient for that. The only unique element the government brings to the table is the use of force, which ensures a less efficient and cost-effective solution when you consider all the participants and not just those in favor of the program.
So the subsidies take the form of state-granted monopolies. That contradicts my point how, exactly? People are still being forced to pay for unwanted services, and now subsidized Internet access, due to the state-enforced lack of competition.
My water and sewer connections are provided via the municipal water department, and I'm billed for their costs on a quarterly basis. I do not expect anyone else to cover my costs, whatever my financial situation; these are no more "rights" than Internet access. To the extent that they may be considered as such in other areas, the same argument applies: someone is being unnecessarily and unjustly coerced to provide them at a subsidized rate.
You're right. They aren't synonyms. Clairvoyance is "the power or faculty of discerning objects not present to the senses" or "ability to perceive matters beyond the range of ordinary perception", according to Marriam-Webster, whereas precognition is specifically the ability to perceive the future.
However, I never claimed they were synonyms. Future events are among those "matters beyond the range of ordinary perception", so precognition necessarily implies clairvoyance.
The right to free speech and the right to bear arms are both natural by-products of the right to own property (incl. self-ownership), so there's no point in considering them separately. The "right" to a fair trial isn't really a right at all, but rather a procedure which allows those who follow it to absolve themselves of guilt in the eyes of society should they happen to respond in apparent self-defense to a perceived injury and later discover that their response was unfounded. They're still in the wrong, and liable to make reparations, but holding a fair trial protects them from accusations of malicious intent and the corresponding possibility of retribution in kind.
The right to own property, in turn, is an inevitable consequence of scarcity. Ownership is, at its essence, the right to use something, or more precisely the right to use it up. Absence of formal property rights would not change the fact that only one individual can effectively use a given item of property at a time; the only way to avoid denying others use of the property is for no one to use it at all, which is inherently self-defeating. Given that someone must have the right to use the property, the traditional homesteading & contractual transfer system of allocating property rights is the least arbitrary and most consistent system available, which leaves the least room for disagreement and conflict.
There's also the argument of reciprocation: if you argue that rights aren't universal, that others do not have the rights you claim for yourself, then others can make the same argument against you. On the other hand, if rights are universal, then you cannot argue that others do not have the right to free speech, property, etc. while simultaneously claiming these rights for yourself. By making a claim to free speech (which by itself may be offensive to some) you must simultaneously argue that others have a right to speak in ways others may find offensive; by claiming a right to the property you say you need to survive (minimal food, water, air) and which you desire but do not need (clothes, shelter, etc.) you must simultaneously argue that others have a right to their property.
Perhaps a better question is "Who do they plan to coerce to provide this 'right'?" Internet access doesn't just grow on trees, you know.
I know they're demanding that it be "reasonably priced", not "free", but given that no one has stepped up thus far to offer it at these "reasonable" prices it's fair to conclude that doing so is not cost-effective. That means it has to be subsidized, which means someone--probably a lot of someones--are going to end up forced to pay for services they don't need or want or even believe they benefit from, whatever others might say.
... if the goal was to use as little power as possible, we'd just lock the processor in "slow mode".
Not necessarily. You also have to consider that higher performance settings may allow the processor to complete its task(s) and return to a minimal-power idle configuration more quickly, for an overall improvement in average power consumption. It all depends on the power/performance ratios for each performance level and the amount of overhead involved in switching between them. Plus, of course, a bit of clairvoyance in accurately predicting future requirements.
If your DNA is part of that identity proof, how long is it going to be before companies start looking through the sequence for markers, and decide that your car insurance rate is going to be 3X as high as mine because you have a marker that indicates you might be slightly more predisposed to narcilepsy?
Insurance is not meant to subsidize high-risk individuals; programs that are intended to do so are known as charities. Both have their rightful place. If I was expected to carry 3X the risk which you present, then I would certainly expect to pay 3X the premiums you do, and whether my higher risk is by choice or by circumstances out of my control is entirely irrelevant. No one can force you to provide the information or material required to develop precise, personalized risk estimates, of course, but refusal to do so should be taken as evidence that you already consider yourself to be high-risk, justifying accordingly high premiums.
Their approach is what a former FCC chairman has called "regulatory capitalism," ...
The traditional term for this situation is "regulatory capture", where the incumbent organizations learn to take advantage of (and even gain influence over) regulations in their field to inhibit competition. It is well known that regulations tend to make profit harder to come by, all else being equal; what is not quite so well known is that regulations tend to make things even more difficult for upstart competitors than for the established providers who have had time to learn all the tricks of the trade (and all the regulatory loopholes).
"Regulatory capitalism", on the other hand, is a contradiction in terms.
Precisely. Which is why it didn't work until they changed their point-of-origin to the new planet.
This is a point that bothered me during the show. In every prior case, the point of origin has been the one symbol on the DHD/stargate which isn't a constellation, and when a DHD or gate is moved to a new planet the symbol doesn't change. For that matter, there were two original Earth-based DHDs with different symbols. These points all argue for the point-of-origin being a cosmetic placeholder for "wherever the gate is right now". So (a) why would it make any difference what symbol they used for the point of origin, and (b) how did they input a symbol into the DHD which shouldn't have been on the DHD's keys in the first place?
If they'd said it was just another constellation, that would make sense in the context of a code rather than an address. However, they claimed it was still the point of origin, and showed the symbol from Ra's Earth gate (which wasn't even on Earth when the Ancients were here) on the monitor.
Star Trek and Star Wars are similar in this regard: the problem isn't actual collisions, but rather the effect that gravity has on warp fields / hyperspace. Get too close to anything with sufficient mass to affect the FTL drive and Bad Things Happen. In Star Trek the warp bubble, and anything inside it, gets pulled into the gravity well, never to return; in Star Wars gravity distorts the correspondence between hyperspace and real space in unpredictable ways, and interferes with the separation between hyperspace and the bubble of real space maintained inside the ship's hyper field.
In Star Trek it's impossible for there to be an actual collision between a ship under warp drive and an object in normal space, since the warp drive works by creating a complete separation between the real universe and anything inside the warp field. This is tempered somewhat by an EM "bleed-through" effect when multiple, overlapping warp fields are employed, which is why—aside from the first few attempts at warp travel with a single field—those inside the ship can see the outside universe. (There is some inconsistency on this point, however.)
That would be interesting. I haven't seen the pilot episode myself yet, so I was basing my argument on the SG-1 and SG Atlantis episodes. On the other hand, I do recall a few episodes where they were able to dial a (fixed) gate which wasn't in orbit of a planet... the Ori super-gate, for example, and all the gates making up their "Midway Station" corridor between Earth and Atlantis. In these cases, however, they always knew exactly where the remote gate was in space.
The main problem would be that the gate has to know the precise physical location of the remote gate's planet to establish a lock. The gate address isn't an arbitrary identifier, but rather a set of spatial coordinates giving the location of the planet--as of when the gate system was set up--which the DHD translates into current coordinates to account for interstellar drift. That's why they could only dial Abydos originally; the Earth gate's translation tables were some 10,000 years out of date, and only Abydos and a few other planets were close enough to have remained at nearly the same location relative to Earth. To connect with a moving gate would seem to require that (a) the DHDs are somehow kept apprised of the target gate's location, or (b) the dialer knows the location and is able to bypass the DHD and input physical coordinates directly.
In the red-sky episode the situation was caused by the wormhole passing directly through the sun; there was no disconnection. They attempted to fix the problem by disconnecting the wormhole at a specific time, but the implication at the end is that it didn't work--it just gave the Asgard an opportunity to intervene without getting caught and risking the Protected Planet treaty. One might ask why they thought it might work, but then their understanding of the gate system evolves over time. Anyway, in the episode where Teal'c was trapped in the buffer the remote stargate was actually destroyed, not just disconnected, so the situation isn't exactly the same.
As for transporting whole objects: The gate does transport objects in discrete packets, but any object which has already been partly dematerialized at the time it disconnects is split at the event horizon. The dematerialized part is transmitted as-is, followed by a completion code, and the part outside the gate is left behind. Where "discrete packets" comes in is that no part of the object is materialized on the other side until that completion code is received (which is where Teal'c problem came from--with the remote gate destroyed just after he passed through there was no completion code, and--absent a real DHD to compensate--he was never materialized). No object is ever partially materialized on two planets at the same time.
First, the gates only work one way (per connection) in regard to matter transport, so they'd have to open it from the planet, not to the planet--and the ship itself would need to be in orbit of a planet itself to establish contact (otherwise it has no address). Second, the gates aren't simple conduits; only elementary particles can actually travel through the wormhole, so the purpose of the gate (besides opening the wormhole) is dematerializing objects for transport and rematerializing them on the other side. The gate itself discriminates between different kinds of objects, and presents a certain amount of resistance at the event horizon to differentiate between an object being sent through (e.g. a human) and accidental contact (e.g. atmosphere)--see the "water gate" episode for a clear example of this, or any of the several episodes where they open a connection between a planet-based gate and one in space--so just opening the gate wouldn't be sufficient to bring air across; something would have to force it through. The gate also transports objects in discrete "packets", fully dematerializing each object before transmitting it, which isn't really consistent with transporting an unbounded mass of air.
Assuming they could send someone across to open the gate from the other side, however, they could package up some air in containers and send the containers back, air and all. The gates will readily transport air, provided it's enclosed in something.