I see this "the PC industry was built on games" line frequently, and with all due respect I think it's dubious at best.
You're correct, of course. The PC industry was built on businesses, as they were the ones who could initially outlay the money. If the PC industry were built on games, IBM would never have made it into the market as decent game support only really came around after the XT era.
That being said, the home PC industry is and has been reliant on games for its development. Let's face it, you don't (err.. shouldn't) need 800MHz of processing power to run a spreadsheet program (unless you're running it on a completely bloated poorly self-monitoring OS, but that's another story) yet processor speeds keep jumping, but the only aps that really need those are the games.
Were it not for games, the PC Hardware industry would slow down fairly quickly.
Which exactly corresponds to what I mentioned about quality of life only having a weak correlation to economy.
The truth is, most of us do not operate on the economies of the scale which national economists judge worthy of consideration. Considering that the large scale economies grow at the expense of smaller ones, it suggests that the correlation may actually be negative when you look at the aggregate quality of life on a global scale.
Or in short, our "large-scale" economic growth is at the expense of quality of life, which is typically measured in "small-scale" economics.
I'm not arguing whether economics produce efficiency, I'm arguing whether it really produces a good quality of life for everyone.
Of course, the problem with economic growth is that it has only a weak correlation with quality of life.
Failure to grow economically doesn't mean people do without..it means people do without more.
After all, if a family lives out on a hobby farm, growing their own food and are basically self-sufficient - they add basically nothing to economic growth.
However, if one day dad slips in the field and lands on his head and they have to go to a doctor to get him fixed, then we see some growth in the GDP.
What if the injury turns out to be more serious than was originally thought? Dad won't be able to get back to the farm for a while. Mom has to get a job as a secretary to support the family. The GDP goes up again.
With mom at work and dad laid up, the family needs someone to look after the kids during the day. Daycare costs boost the GDP again.
The bills for dads medical costs start coming in and the insurance company is balking on payment. Now the family is forced to sell a chunk of their land to the neighboring commercial pig-farm to keep up with the bills and hire a lawyer. The GDP gets yet another boost.
Complications happen, dad's concussion turns into a coma. The court case is dragging on with documents being requested and shuttled all over the place. Mom is forced to sell the remainder of the farm and move to a rented apartment. The farm land is converted to an industrial factory. The GDP gets a boost every month as she pays her rent.
Dad dies. Now we have funeral expenses and a single low-skilled income earner trying to support herself and her kid. The economy loves it.. but what good has it done?
I think you *do* have a browser problem. The link in the story and the link in the response to your quote were both perfectly visible to me.
The text in question (without the link) is as follows:
"The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that a citizen has the right to express dissatifaction with the products or services of a company; in this case, an insurance company."
It's like a leashed dog. You hold the leash, the dog will pull on it. You let go, the dog will run around a bit then get tired and stop.
But how much damage does the dog do before it gets tired? Let a pitbull off the leash and you could have several people killed before it decides it's tired.
Let the media off the leash and you could have any number of things killed, such as local advertising as rates fly up, independant production companies as the distribution means are controlled, PVR manufacturing as the legislation is bought and the public is left uninformed or misinformed, democracy as the public is left without alternative information sources, etc.
Hopefully by the time the dog gets tired there's something left worth saving.
Unlike Microsoft, there's little evidence that the media companies have been actively squashing startups. The cost of entry into the broadcasting business is still so high that they don't need to.
Why a great pr0n filter? Just set up a.sex domain and have sexually related material limited to that domain. Have it cost some nominal fee to report a non-complying site. If one is reported, have some one take a look at it, determine if the complaint is valid, and if so, drop the DNS entry with no refund.
As for everyone arguing that moving power to the states will only mean that MS will resort to bribing them - remember who it is pushing for a weak settlement (Department of Justice and the White House) and who it is pushing for more extreme measures (the states and the states' Attorney Generals). This is direct evidence against that claim.
One could argue that this is actually evidence FOR this claim. Currently, the corps are bribing those government levels with the most power - the feds. Those they aren't bribing as much are standing against them.
By re-allocating power, how can you be sure it won't simply re-allocate the bribes?
Bullshit. Belief always comes into it, unless you happen to have run all the tests yourself. Case in point, you believe that this "evidence" about evolution that you've heard is true and correct.
Creationists, on the other hand, believe it is misinterpreted, wrong, or outright lies.
Sooner or later, evolution, like *every* scientific theory, falls back to a set of core beliefs. For a long time, a core belief was everything was newtonian, and there was scads of evidence to prove it. Until we started getting the evidence that there was something more.
Please remember that it is still called "Evolutionary Theory", and that 99% of what science has proven, science has later proven to be wrong.
Does this make it any less true? Maybe not.. but to say belief never comes into it is simply not being critical enough -- which is the exact same mistake that people claim Creationists are making.
The fundamental problem with arguments such as yours is that they miss a major point that motivates innovation:
The Motive for Profit (aka greed, being a meanie, etc).
And the fundamental problem with your argument is that profit has absolutely no connection to making people healthy.
Which is more profitable, a single pill that cures Parkinson's disease, or a chemical cocktail that Parkinson's disease sufferers have to take for the rest of their lives? Never assume that pharmaceutical companies are in the business of curing disease. They're in the business of making us take pills - if it happens to cure a disease or two along the way, well that's great.
Drug companies will tell you how hard it is to research, develop, implement, test, study, test, study, and finally sell a drug. It is a vastly expensive operation - usually returns on new drugs are measured over the period of 10-20 years or more.
Which is interesting considering that there's a few studies out there showing that the big Pharmacomps spend as much or more money on both marketing and administration as opposed to R&D.
I'd say government funding except that the government is a terrible researcher and very bad at coming up with new things.
Does it? You have facts for this or is it just the prevailing opinion? Even if it is, it certainly doesn't have to be. After all, it's not the management and marketing sections of a corporation that produce the drugs, it's the R&D people. If you assume the same benefits, pay, and penalties if nothing productive is come up with, how will an R&D person working for the government be any less effective than that same R&D person working for a corporation?
In addition, the government doesn't have a need (though it usually does, I'll admit) to provide things like lavish CEO perks or bribes/donations to politicians for things like patent rights.
Maybe we could do something like "waive your international patents and you pay no federal taxes" for the drug companies.
Unfortunately, most Pharmacomps pay no taxes anyway. It's all written off long before the feds get to them.
Hardly. Patents are litigated all the time. It is not that rare, and lawyers working at companies pay attention to case law. If they try to shake down a deep pocket organization for a patent infringement that is on weak ground, they are risking a countersuit, big time.
Which is fine.. so long as you're a deep pocket organization. What about the smaller universities?
Why not buy their cds instead of paying to download their mp3s? If you like them that much isn't it worth supporting them?
Shouldn't feed the trolls but..
1. They Might be Giants simply don't do much in the way of CD's anymore. They've gone to digital in a big way.
2. Emusic does support the artists. I don't know how much, but I do know that a portion of my money goes to the artists - that was a major requirement of mine when I signed up. I figure the amount can't be much less than they get from the labels anyway.
If you can find free, open source software that does what you want with the features you want.. you shouldn't pay for the shareware. I don't think anybody's arguing that.
However, if you use a shareware product because it has some feature (even if it's just an ease-of-use issue) that your free, open source alternative product doesn't, then you should be willing to compensate the author for the time they spent in putting that feature in.
The problem is, too many people think that they get to use the shareware *and* decide what price they're willing to pay for it (ie, $0). But the choice of what to charge and what people have to pay is up to the producer - s/he put the work in, after all. If s/he overcharges, people shouldn't use it. If people are using it, then they are agreeing with the author in its utility and must compensate the author what they demand.. otherwise the author has no incentive to continue producing.
Here's the point, kiddies...(pay attention now): You are given by me exactly how much money I intend to spend on your product, irregardless of whether a pirated version was available or not! If that amount is zero, than I never would have purchased your product anyway! You've gained nothing, but you've also lost nothing. You cannot base revenue projections on the assumption that I would purchase your product if no pirated version was available because this assumption doesn't take into consideration the fact that I might just decide to "do without".
Here's the point, jerk. If you're not willing to compensate the author what he thinks he deserves for the time and effort put into it, DO WITHOUT. Don't be an ass and say "well.. I wouldn't have paid for it anyway.." that's fine, but if you're not going to pay for it, respect the authors effort and don't use it. If you're using it, then you are agreeing with the author it's worth something. The valuation you put on it may differ, but that's NOT your choice until you're the producer.
And there is something lost, by the way.. it's incentive. The incentive for the author to produce anything else is lost. There are already several posts about people who made one shareware project and simply decided it's not worth it. So the next time you bitch about the quality of software, remember the blame goes directly to fuckwits like you.
Re:From an embarrassed Windows user
on
Wired Talks Wine
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· Score: 1
It would seem to me the obvious reason is this: Because Linux+WINE are Free Software
Free as in speech?
Joe User doesn't know the difference. And to be horribly honest,
if it's less convenient than what he already has, he probably wouldn't care.
Free as in beer?
Joe User can't tell -- his Windows came bundled with his computer.
And even if he could tell, good freaking luck getting the Windows money back.
So the question remains;
Why would a Windows user go to the trouble of installing Linux+WINE just to get what they already have (working Win32 apps and games)?
I'm no engineer, but what little reading on it I've done suggests it works like this:
Think about your normal physical line. It sends data in a sequential form.. first a 1, then a 0 , then a 1, then a 0 and so on. Now admitted, it does this ridiculously fast but it's still sequential. (This is a huge simplification, btw, but it's the general gist)
Now UWB is using a whole bunch of frequencies to send those ones and zeros, but each frequency carres a different bit. So the first frequency carries a 0, the second carries a 0, the third carries a 1, the fourth carries another 1, and so on. The trick is, it sends these all at the same time and it's up to the receiver to not only know exactly WHEN those frequencies will be carrying information to it, but put them together into the proper sequence of bits.
It's the difference between getting hit by a steady, narrow stream of water, and getting hit by a single tidal wave. They'll both get you wet, but one will do it a lot faster.
So that's the faster.
The cheaper is that a physical line requires a way to code and decode the information and.. well.. a physical line. Which means you have to pay for the line, you have to pay for running line through cities and into people's houses, you have to pay for when a bad weatherstorm comes and a tree busts the line, you have to pay licensing fees to lay all this line, etc.
UWB requires a more sophisticated coder and decoder, but since it doesn't require a line and microchips are so cheap these days, this comes out to be a much lower cost - especially if the FCC lets it go unregulated.
Now as to how it avoids interfering with each other, I really don't know, because if you have enough of these devices, you would think that sooner or later *some* of them in the same area will be sending at the same time.
The odds aren't even *that* good.
on
Lindows Reviewed
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· Score: 1
Actually, if you ask 100 people off the street what operating system their computers run, you'll be lucky if you get 95 of them that use computers, never mind have one.
Of those that do, at least a third won't know what you mean by "operating system". You'll get answers including Word, Dell, and AOL among others.
Are these people really going to buy into a system that doesn't run everything they're used to as well as their current one, costs nearly as much, but hey, it's not made by a company called Microsoft.
Hell, most of them won't even buy counterfeit Levi's if they can avoid it. "It's not the real thing, it's not as good."
Well, you know what AOL is hoping for in a forward looking remedy is forcing MS to include AOL on every OEM desktop, while letting them out from their contract to use IE for it.
What I'd like to see as a forward looking remedy is to make MS include a copy of competing browsers on the desktop and in the default install - but I'm just saying that because I'd love to see MS start paying megabucks to Opera - and get a free copy while I'm at it.:-)
Re:Choose Examples Carefully
on
Browsing Alone
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· Score: 2
Let's just hope it's a case of fools seldom differing rather than great minds thinking alike.
Nobody said that 'bonding' was breaking.
on
Browsing Alone
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· Score: 2
Which is exactly what Jon is ranting about.
The part that's disappearing is not social bonds, but social bridges.
Sure, the gay person manages to get support from other gays outside his community, and so doesn't even need to get involved with the community. At the same time however, the gay pulling out of community is thus allowing the community to not have to deal with the idea that their might be gays in their midst.
Nobody's arguing that the net allows you to communicate with people of like interests and thoughts - but what it also does is make it so that you don't have to deal with those who don't have like interests or thoughts if you don't want.
At least, not until you walk outside and get strung up to a fence and stoned to death by those who haven't learned how to deal with differences.
Sure, for the industrial revolution, it turned out that the changes worked out okay.
Of course, other societies haven't been so lucky. The Romans are the prime example. A society that grew so wealthy, fat, inward looking, and of particular relevance, internally divided - they didn't see the invaders at the gate until it was too late, literally.
There is little to suggest that the same can't or won't happen to us.
Like the Romans, we are the most powerful economic and military force in the world. Like the Romans, we use that to get what we need and want - often with no care for any of the consequences that don't immediately affect us.
Like the Romans, divisions between those with power and those without are growing, those without are kept busy with bread and circuses, those with are kept busy creating better circuses and controlling their own power structure.
Like the Romans, participation in the larger
civilization systems are dropping, and increasingly small and diverse groups are forming, strengthening, and working against other similar groups within our society.
Like the Romans, the power held over people's every day lives is growing, and people in the society are increasingly resenting the ways power is being used.
Meanwhile, we in Western Civilization are vastly outnumbered, and those in other civilizations are increasingly turning their eyes toward injustices (real or percieved) that we have perpetrated on them.
Every generation some Malthus predicts doom and gloom, and is wrong and short sighted.
It's kind of like the parable of the boy who cried wolf. The thing that most people forget is the wolf did come at the end.
The difference here is, in Canada we believe in education for EVERYONE, or at least for the most possible. Not money, nor family connections, matter.
At least, we like to think so, and our government sure likes to tell us so. Too bad the statistics say otherwise. Basically, if you're poor, you have only half the chance of attending university of someone who's rich. That may be better odds than the states, it may not, but it definitely doesn't fit with the "money doesn't make a difference" line.
As for tuitions, Canadian university tuitions work out to about the same as many US universities and colleges. In fact, unless they're going to a University away from home, the average American student can wind up paying less thanks to the larger number of scholarship/grant programs available.
Of course, if you're Canadian, you can work on changing this. Start with your MLA and be sure to send a copy on to your MP. If enough people bring the issue up to the electeds, maybe they'll finally start doing something about it.
He doesn't say it's.cda,
He said it's whatever comes on the shiny round things.. which whatever it is, even if it changes, still IS on shiny round things.
Bugs are useless unless you can get the information out of them at some point.
If they're continually transmitting, it's a dead giveaway. So you passively record for the most part, then on occasion you transmit what you've recorded in a highly concentrated micro-burst, probably not audible to human ears. However, this burst is going to set up waves on *some* frequency or other. If you don't have the right decryption hardware available, you just get this strange burst of.. well.. static.
The Free Trade they were quite willing to be reciprocal about, but besides which, free trade is not something we do reciprocally.. check out the number of tariffs, duties, and other protections we have on the books for our farmers.
Compare the subsidies we supply our farmers with the lack thereof Canada supplies theirs with, yet if they try and raise a fuss about it, we slap on lumber taxes of 19%.
Slashdot Mirror
I see this "the PC industry was built on games" line frequently, and with all due respect I think it's dubious at best.
You're correct, of course. The PC industry was built on businesses, as they were the ones who could initially outlay the money. If the PC industry were built on games, IBM would never have made it into the market as decent game support only really came around after the XT era.
That being said, the home PC industry is and has been reliant on games for its development. Let's face it, you don't (err.. shouldn't) need 800MHz of processing power to run a spreadsheet program (unless you're running it on a completely bloated poorly self-monitoring OS, but that's another story) yet processor speeds keep jumping, but the only aps that really need those are the games.
Were it not for games, the PC Hardware industry would slow down fairly quickly.
Which exactly corresponds to what I mentioned about quality of life only having a weak correlation to economy.
The truth is, most of us do not operate on the economies of the scale which national economists judge worthy of consideration. Considering that the large scale economies grow at the expense of smaller ones, it suggests that the correlation may actually be negative when you look at the aggregate quality of life on a global scale.
Or in short, our "large-scale" economic growth is at the expense of quality of life, which is typically measured in "small-scale" economics.
I'm not arguing whether economics produce efficiency, I'm arguing whether it really produces a good quality of life for everyone.
Of course, the problem with economic growth is that it has only a weak correlation with quality of life.
Failure to grow economically doesn't mean people do without..it means people do without more.
After all, if a family lives out on a hobby farm, growing their own food and are basically self-sufficient - they add basically nothing to economic growth.
However, if one day dad slips in the field and lands on his head and they have to go to a doctor to get him fixed, then we see some growth in the GDP.
What if the injury turns out to be more serious than was originally thought? Dad won't be able to get back to the farm for a while. Mom has to get a job as a secretary to support the family. The GDP goes up again.
With mom at work and dad laid up, the family needs someone to look after the kids during the day. Daycare costs boost the GDP again.
The bills for dads medical costs start coming in and the insurance company is balking on payment. Now the family is forced to sell a chunk of their land to the neighboring commercial pig-farm to keep up with the bills and hire a lawyer. The GDP gets yet another boost.
Complications happen, dad's concussion turns into a coma. The court case is dragging on with documents being requested and shuttled all over the place. Mom is forced to sell the remainder of the farm and move to a rented apartment. The farm land is converted to an industrial factory. The GDP gets a boost every month as she pays her rent.
Dad dies. Now we have funeral expenses and a single low-skilled income earner trying to support herself and her kid. The economy loves it.. but what good has it done?
I think you *do* have a browser problem. The link in the story and the link in the response to your quote were both perfectly visible to me.
The text in question (without the link) is as follows:
"The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that a citizen has the right to express dissatifaction with the products or services of a company; in this case, an insurance company."
It's like a leashed dog. You hold the leash, the dog will pull on it. You let go, the dog will run around a bit then get tired and stop.
But how much damage does the dog do before it gets tired? Let a pitbull off the leash and you could have several people killed before it decides it's tired.
Let the media off the leash and you could have any number of things killed, such as local advertising as rates fly up, independant production companies as the distribution means are controlled, PVR manufacturing as the legislation is bought and the public is left uninformed or misinformed, democracy as the public is left without alternative information sources, etc.
Hopefully by the time the dog gets tired there's something left worth saving.
This would be an entirely legal monopoly though.
Unlike Microsoft, there's little evidence that the media companies have been actively squashing startups. The cost of entry into the broadcasting business is still so high that they don't need to.
Why a great pr0n filter? Just set up a .sex domain and have sexually related material limited to that domain. Have it cost some nominal fee to report a non-complying site. If one is reported, have some one take a look at it, determine if the complaint is valid, and if so, drop the DNS entry with no refund.
As for everyone arguing that moving power to the states will only mean that MS will resort to bribing them - remember who it is pushing for a weak settlement (Department of Justice and the White House) and who it is pushing for more extreme measures (the states and the states' Attorney Generals). This is direct evidence against that claim.
One could argue that this is actually evidence FOR this claim. Currently, the corps are bribing those government levels with the most power - the feds. Those they aren't bribing as much are standing against them.
By re-allocating power, how can you be sure it won't simply re-allocate the bribes?
Bullshit. Belief always comes into it, unless you happen to have run all the tests yourself. Case in point, you believe that this "evidence" about evolution that you've heard is true and correct.
Creationists, on the other hand, believe it is misinterpreted, wrong, or outright lies.
Sooner or later, evolution, like *every* scientific theory, falls back to a set of core beliefs. For a long time, a core belief was everything was newtonian, and there was scads of evidence to prove it. Until we started getting the evidence that there was something more.
Please remember that it is still called "Evolutionary Theory", and that 99% of what science has proven, science has later proven to be wrong.
Does this make it any less true? Maybe not.. but to say belief never comes into it is simply not being critical enough -- which is the exact same mistake that people claim Creationists are making.
The fundamental problem with arguments such as yours is that they miss a major point that motivates innovation:
The Motive for Profit (aka greed, being a meanie, etc).
And the fundamental problem with your argument is that profit has absolutely no connection to making people healthy.
Which is more profitable, a single pill that cures Parkinson's disease, or a chemical cocktail that Parkinson's disease sufferers have to take for the rest of their lives? Never assume that pharmaceutical companies are in the business of curing disease. They're in the business of making us take pills - if it happens to cure a disease or two along the way, well that's great.
Drug companies will tell you how hard it is to research, develop, implement, test, study, test, study, and finally sell a drug. It is a vastly expensive operation - usually returns on new drugs are measured over the period of 10-20 years or more.
Which is interesting considering that there's a few studies out there showing that the big Pharmacomps spend as much or more money on both marketing and administration as opposed to R&D.
I'd say government funding except that the government is a terrible researcher and very bad at coming up with new things.
Does it? You have facts for this or is it just the prevailing opinion? Even if it is, it certainly doesn't have to be. After all, it's not the management and marketing sections of a corporation that produce the drugs, it's the R&D people. If you assume the same benefits, pay, and penalties if nothing productive is come up with, how will an R&D person working for the government be any less effective than that same R&D person working for a corporation?
In addition, the government doesn't have a need (though it usually does, I'll admit) to provide things like lavish CEO perks or bribes/donations to politicians for things like patent rights.
Maybe we could do something like "waive your international patents and you pay no federal taxes" for the drug companies.
Unfortunately, most Pharmacomps pay no taxes anyway. It's all written off long before the feds get to them.
Hardly. Patents are litigated all the time. It is not that rare, and lawyers working at companies pay attention to case law. If they try to shake down a deep pocket organization for a patent infringement that is on weak ground, they are risking a countersuit, big time.
Which is fine.. so long as you're a deep pocket organization. What about the smaller universities?
Why not buy their cds instead of paying to download their mp3s? If you like them that much isn't it worth supporting them?
Shouldn't feed the trolls but..
1. They Might be Giants simply don't do much in the way of CD's anymore. They've gone to digital in a big way.
2. Emusic does support the artists. I don't know how much, but I do know that a portion of my money goes to the artists - that was a major requirement of mine when I signed up. I figure the amount can't be much less than they get from the labels anyway.
If you can find free, open source software that does what you want with the features you want.. you shouldn't pay for the shareware. I don't think anybody's arguing that.
However, if you use a shareware product because it has some feature (even if it's just an ease-of-use issue) that your free, open source alternative product doesn't, then you should be willing to compensate the author for the time they spent in putting that feature in.
The problem is, too many people think that they get to use the shareware *and* decide what price they're willing to pay for it (ie, $0). But the choice of what to charge and what people have to pay is up to the producer - s/he put the work in, after all. If s/he overcharges, people shouldn't use it. If people are using it, then they are agreeing with the author in its utility and must compensate the author what they demand.. otherwise the author has no incentive to continue producing.
Here's the point, kiddies...(pay attention now): You are given by me exactly how much money I intend to spend on your product, irregardless of whether a pirated version was available or not! If that amount is zero, than I never would have purchased your product anyway! You've gained nothing, but you've also lost nothing. You cannot base revenue projections on the assumption that I would purchase your product if no pirated version was available because this assumption doesn't take into consideration the fact that I might just decide to "do without".
Here's the point, jerk. If you're not willing to compensate the author what he thinks he deserves for the time and effort put into it, DO WITHOUT. Don't be an ass and say "well.. I wouldn't have paid for it anyway.." that's fine, but if you're not going to pay for it, respect the authors effort and don't use it. If you're using it, then you are agreeing with the author it's worth something. The valuation you put on it may differ, but that's NOT your choice until you're the producer.
And there is something lost, by the way.. it's incentive. The incentive for the author to produce anything else is lost. There are already several posts about people who made one shareware project and simply decided it's not worth it. So the next time you bitch about the quality of software, remember the blame goes directly to fuckwits like you.
It would seem to me the obvious reason is this: Because Linux+WINE are Free Software
Free as in speech?
Joe User doesn't know the difference. And to be horribly honest,
if it's less convenient than what he already has, he probably wouldn't care.
Free as in beer?
Joe User can't tell -- his Windows came bundled with his computer.
And even if he could tell, good freaking luck getting the Windows money back.
So the question remains;
Why would a Windows user go to the trouble of installing Linux+WINE just to get what they already have (working Win32 apps and games)?
I'm no engineer, but what little reading on it I've done suggests it works like this:
Think about your normal physical line. It sends data in a sequential form.. first a 1, then a 0 , then a 1, then a 0 and so on. Now admitted, it does this ridiculously fast but it's still sequential. (This is a huge simplification, btw, but it's the general gist)
Now UWB is using a whole bunch of frequencies to send those ones and zeros, but each frequency carres a different bit. So the first frequency carries a 0, the second carries a 0, the third carries a 1, the fourth carries another 1, and so on. The trick is, it sends these all at the same time and it's up to the receiver to not only know exactly WHEN those frequencies will be carrying information to it, but put them together into the proper sequence of bits.
It's the difference between getting hit by a steady, narrow stream of water, and getting hit by a single tidal wave. They'll both get you wet, but one will do it a lot faster.
So that's the faster.
The cheaper is that a physical line requires a way to code and decode the information and.. well.. a physical line. Which means you have to pay for the line, you have to pay for running line through cities and into people's houses, you have to pay for when a bad weatherstorm comes and a tree busts the line, you have to pay licensing fees to lay all this line, etc.
UWB requires a more sophisticated coder and decoder, but since it doesn't require a line and microchips are so cheap these days, this comes out to be a much lower cost - especially if the FCC lets it go unregulated.
Now as to how it avoids interfering with each other, I really don't know, because if you have enough of these devices, you would think that sooner or later *some* of them in the same area will be sending at the same time.
Actually, if you ask 100 people off the street what operating system their computers run, you'll be lucky if you get 95 of them that use computers, never mind have one.
Of those that do, at least a third won't know what you mean by "operating system". You'll get answers including Word, Dell, and AOL among others.
Are these people really going to buy into a system that doesn't run everything they're used to as well as their current one, costs nearly as much, but hey, it's not made by a company called Microsoft.
Hell, most of them won't even buy counterfeit Levi's if they can avoid it. "It's not the real thing, it's not as good."
Well, you know what AOL is hoping for in a forward looking remedy is forcing MS to include AOL on every OEM desktop, while letting them out from their contract to use IE for it.
:-)
What I'd like to see as a forward looking remedy is to make MS include a copy of competing browsers on the desktop and in the default install - but I'm just saying that because I'd love to see MS start paying megabucks to Opera - and get a free copy while I'm at it.
Let's just hope it's a case of fools seldom differing rather than great minds thinking alike.
Which is exactly what Jon is ranting about.
The part that's disappearing is not social bonds, but social bridges.
Sure, the gay person manages to get support from other gays outside his community, and so doesn't even need to get involved with the community. At the same time however, the gay pulling out of community is thus allowing the community to not have to deal with the idea that their might be gays in their midst.
Nobody's arguing that the net allows you to communicate with people of like interests and thoughts - but what it also does is make it so that you don't have to deal with those who don't have like interests or thoughts if you don't want.
At least, not until you walk outside and get strung up to a fence and stoned to death by those who haven't learned how to deal with differences.
Sure, for the industrial revolution, it turned out that the changes worked out okay.
Of course, other societies haven't been so lucky. The Romans are the prime example. A society that grew so wealthy, fat, inward looking, and of particular relevance, internally divided - they didn't see the invaders at the gate until it was too late, literally.
There is little to suggest that the same can't or won't happen to us.
Like the Romans, we are the most powerful economic and military force in the world. Like the Romans, we use that to get what we need and want - often with no care for any of the consequences that don't immediately affect us.
Like the Romans, divisions between those with power and those without are growing, those without are kept busy with bread and circuses, those with are kept busy creating better circuses and controlling their own power structure.
Like the Romans, participation in the larger
civilization systems are dropping, and increasingly small and diverse groups are forming, strengthening, and working against other similar groups within our society.
Like the Romans, the power held over people's every day lives is growing, and people in the society are increasingly resenting the ways power is being used.
Meanwhile, we in Western Civilization are vastly outnumbered, and those in other civilizations are increasingly turning their eyes toward injustices (real or percieved) that we have perpetrated on them.
Every generation some Malthus predicts doom and gloom, and is wrong and short sighted.
It's kind of like the parable of the boy who cried wolf. The thing that most people forget is the wolf did come at the end.
The difference here is, in Canada we believe in education for EVERYONE, or at least for the most possible. Not money, nor family connections, matter.
At least, we like to think so, and our government sure likes to tell us so. Too bad the statistics say otherwise. Basically, if you're poor, you have only half the chance of attending university of someone who's rich. That may be better odds than the states, it may not, but it definitely doesn't fit with the "money doesn't make a difference" line.
As for tuitions, Canadian university tuitions work out to about the same as many US universities and colleges. In fact, unless they're going to a University away from home, the average American student can wind up paying less thanks to the larger number of scholarship/grant programs available.
Of course, if you're Canadian, you can work on changing this. Start with your MLA and be sure to send a copy on to your MP. If enough people bring the issue up to the electeds, maybe they'll finally start doing something about it.
He doesn't say it's .cda,
He said it's whatever comes on the shiny round things.. which whatever it is, even if it changes, still IS on shiny round things.
Bugs are useless unless you can get the information out of them at some point.
If they're continually transmitting, it's a dead giveaway. So you passively record for the most part, then on occasion you transmit what you've recorded in a highly concentrated micro-burst, probably not audible to human ears. However, this burst is going to set up waves on *some* frequency or other. If you don't have the right decryption hardware available, you just get this strange burst of.. well.. static.
The Free Trade they were quite willing to be reciprocal about, but besides which, free trade is not something we do reciprocally.. check out the number of tariffs, duties, and other protections we have on the books for our farmers.
Compare the subsidies we supply our farmers with the lack thereof Canada supplies theirs with, yet if they try and raise a fuss about it, we slap on lumber taxes of 19%.