NanoBiotech? All Bio starts at the nano. Even the largest megafauna or the smallest single celled organism or even the alledged nanonbe subsceeluar oranisms arr composted of componenets that are self assembing entitities. This goes on right down to single proteins which are self assembling. All bio is at the nano-level. Might as well call is BaNanoTech.
There's more to the human book interaction than reading letters on a page. The idea of thumbing through a book either to scan it or to look for the page where something you recall is located is essential. I can't think of a single book I have read that I read page by page without thumbing through.
There truly is a muscle memory in addition to a photogrphic memory that can help you thumb back to a point in the text where you the thing you read previously is located. I know this from experience. I can frequently tell someone where on the page boundaries and about where in a book a certain picture or paragraph is located even though I did not really intend to memorize it.
Likewise in some books I bend the corners or insert sticky notes on margins. (Oddly to me some books are sacrosanct and I would never bend their corners). In text book I will pencil in corrections to mistkaes I find in fomulas.
A heavily used book develops natural breakpoints from the wear and tear so the naturally open to the critical information for you.
At Los Alamos National Lab, an early star wars prottype, the Beam aboard a rocket program launched a sub orbital sattelite that had electronic dissipating lots of heat for a short interval. Fans don't work well in space. And weight was a premium. The solution was to fill it with parafin. The parafin not only conducted the heat as a solid/liquid but it also has a phase change from solid to liquid which until the transition was 100% liquid clamped the electronics at the melting temperature of the wax. This required no circulation pumps.
Of course once it all melt then you are back to the steady state conduction of liquid parafin. But if you've ever made candles then you know that melting 8 gallons of wax on a stove burner can take a long time. If you can make that last say 12 hours--a work day-- and then let it cool down overnight you might never melt it all (or have two computers and play ping pong: one always cooling while the the other is heating).
Well yes I'll grant you that's a very nice feature: a consolidated trusted update agent. But C'mon? Google Pak is the best thing CES can come up with? Yes it was, and that's sad. None of the tech features offered at CES showed any integration besides this. Very tepid show this year. If apple just barely meets expectations they will again steal the innovation spotlight.
Clueless comment. If you watched the last Apple meeting they played they commerical before they brought in the intel speakers. It was their humble pie. In a way it was a compliment to intel too. Intel did have a heat problem and look at all the new processors: low power.
Now lets look at the CES show with it's tepid announcements. Google-pak? well okay make it easy for the unwashed to have a standard set of apps all the technorati have. Of course those or better have always come on apples so we can forgive all the apple owners with the WTF look on their faces. And some TV show downloads? hmmm whoopeee. What are they going to play them on, an Achos pocket brick? And then there's a flock of dull over prices ipod wanabees, that got scooped by the Nano and cant even compete on price.
In any case tommorrow all apple has to do to blow the pants off everyone is to announce, feature length movies available.mac starting tommorrow, and the intel processors availabel in march on ibooks and mac minis. For the pro-crowd they just need to stretch their pro-video and maybe throw in some eye candy like 32 inch displays or intel plasma display. Maybe announce a toshiba SED by august (probably not though). Apple wont announce much other pro stuff since that usually comes at the developers conf later in the year.
This year CES made it easy. everything at CES is so far behind the curve and unintegrated apple hardly has to do more than what people already expect and everyone will be happy. This is the first year there's no breathless anticipation. (though I'm mighty curious about the intels, since I'm a pro-user I'm not expecting anything for me this go-around).
The fact that the world currency is denomicated n dollars does give us some float, but the articel you cite has a feeble understanding of it.
First the current dollars in circulation outside are essentially sufficient for all transactions. We are not "printing new money" every year to meet that demand. Maybe a little to meet expanded use but not much compared to that in circualtion. What we do get is the float. that is anyone holding dollars is giving us an interest free loan on whatever was used to purchase those dollars. So you see it's not the actual dollar we make the profit on but rather the interest on that dollar we would have had to pay to get the goods on credit, which is much less. Eventually that dollar will be redeemed by the owner and at that point the loan ends, no more float.
Second, even that's a gross overstatement of the benefit we get from dollar denomination. People can easily denominate in dollars without actually having the dollars for the transaction. They can pay in gold, or euros or letters of credit. The total is figured in dollars but that does not make it the currency.
Third even if it were the currency, people can print their own dollars. Not really print them but buy and sell options on dollars. This way they can trade in dollars without actualy having to hold dollars.
There's arguments that bio-gas costs more either economically or energetically than the contained fuel. Even if that were true it's not a good argument against it. Hydrogen fuels obviously "cost more" energetically too. They are chemical energy transport devices. But more to the point the source of that fuel might not neccessarily be oil but could be nuclear, wind (especially wind at night), solar, tidal, or waste by product heats. It could even come from the biosource itself. And that makes our fuel sources elastic and fungible. we are less dependent on the middle east, venuzuela, or pipelines.
That's a huge deal. oil prices are going up forever, and the cost of bio fuels can only go down as things like microbial conveversion become feasilble.
It makes a lot of sense to seed this now that it's close to break even and we are fighting wars for scarce oil.
You can see how this helps design circuits for shorts and opens. Start with a basic functional circuit that meets spec. The Extra element lets you put shorts across every element quicky to see what happens. and it lets you add in any element so see what it does as an open circuit. You can then see which terms in the analytic expression would damp any bad effects and add elements to move the damping within the required spec. Repeat until this process till you find a stable solution that can tolerate a short or open.
Professor Middlebrook at caltech was an innovator in an unusual field. Sattelite electronics. Since no repairman was coming they wanted robust electronics. He desigined circuits in which any component could fail as an open or a short and it would remain in spec. You know that's a remarkable achievement if you've ever desinged a circuit before. Notably you can't really do this using SPICE. Speice will tell you what comething does but not how to design it. To do that you need a really good sense of approximations of the mathematical formula a circuit represents to see which components are coupled in which terms. And you need one more trick. The ability to put in a new element bridging any two points and quickly see how it affects the cicuit in the presence of feedback. To do that he invented the "extra element theorem" which allows you to compute this in analytic form from just a couple simple calculations. They still don't teach this in stardard courses yet. You can find it in Vorperians text book, but that's it. If you want to learn it you gotta either go to the original research articles from the 70s.
These days kids are not taught to round. Instead you just do the compuations at absurdly large precision then on the last step round off. This way you don't accumulate systematic round-off error. It's good as long as you have the luxury of doing that. It used to be that C-programmers had a cavalier attitude of always writing the double-precision libraries first. Which is why Scientific programmers were initially slow to migrate from fortran.
These days it's not so true any more. First there's lots of good scientific C programmers now so the problem of parcimonius computation is well appreciated. Moreover the creation of math co-processing, vector calcualtions, and math co-processors often makes it counter-intuitive what to do.
For example it's quite likely that brute forcing a stiff calculation is double precision using a numeric co-processor will beat doing it in single precision with a few extra steps added to keep the precision in range. So being clever is not always helpful. people used to create math libraries that even cheated on using the full precision of the avialable floating point word size (sub-single precision accuracy) since it was fast (e.g. the radius libs for macintoshes) Pipelining adds more confusion, since the processor can be doing other stuff during those wait states for the higher precision. Vector code reverse this: if you are clever maybe shaving precision willlet you double the number of simultanoeus calcualtions.
In any case, what was once intuitive: minimal precision and clever rounding to avoid systematic errors means faster computation is no longer true.
Of course in the old days people learned to round early in life: no one wanted to use a 5 digit precision slide rule if you could use a 2 digit precision slide rule.
When you start going faster than the speed of light some joker with a faster warp engine in another dimension, the locals there are going to get pissed and start putting in transparent aluminum speedbumps and jersey barriers. They rip the tranny right out of your spaceship and knock your head on the ceiling faster than light. Your own grandpa will be shaking his rocket cane at you. Then we'll see who's boss, "mr what's-my-hurry".
It was paper money. untill you actually sell your shares, the price of the share has no value. If you ad bought at 1$ and it went up to 2$ and then back down to 1$ you have not actually lost 1$. So most of that billion loast came froma fake billion gained. On the other hand a small number of people bid it up to the high value on false pretenses and they indeed did lose when the stock went down. Exactly how much they lost is not clear till they sell.
Nothing new here that was not reported on slashdot four days ago.. Move along. or repost your incitefule or insightful comment. or someone elses if you karma whore.
The problem here is that there are no open source voting machines on the market at this time. So what is going to happen? In most cases they can't be since the OS is closed source. Moreover, federal certification is no longer just for stand alone voting machines but requires the whole "system" of vote counting and vote merging software to be certified. So even when the vote counters could be open source the vote databases may not be. Diebolds run on windows CE, ES&S ivotronics probably run on windows CE, ES&S opscans run on Qnix, sequoia touchscreen kiosks run on some undisclosed proprietary software and the ballot database software runs on windows. No word what Sequoia Optek/insights run on but again the ballot data bases run on windows.
thus these companies can't open their source since it's not theirs to open.
Accupol is built on linux and java so it could in principle be open source at their discretion. But because the accupols are cobbled together from mainly commodity components the company investors is averse to open sourcing their only real IP.
Not sure about avante and harte and unilect but it appears they contain windows software.
OVC is the only system truly designed with open source in mind. But it's not ready for sale yet.
What's evil about this one is not that someone couldlure you to a rigged speical website but that they can reach out and get you. For example, they can just take out a banner add from double click and have this rigged jpeg displayed on tens of millions of computers. Or they could post it as a picture on FLikkr and hope it gets into the rotation for a picture of the day. get it into google images. Post it on a bulliten board that allows thumbnail jpegs. Lots of ways to get the code onto trusted web sites.
or Is the original healline post for this thread written in gibberish enhanced by misappropriation of terms and conflation of concepts? How is trusting the unofficial patch conceptually related to "trustworthy computing" and why should packet spanning make it invulenrable to filtering?
Once the average connection exceeds the speed and latency needed to run a decent sized screen owning your own computer will be pointless. And having faster connections will be unnseccessary since there's nothing you could do with the added bandwidth not already available on the screen.
As SunRays demonstrate you can send a nice sized screen over a modes sized pipe. But even if you wanted a screen so large and updating so quickly that you needed a FULL TIME 1.6GB pipe this will be cheap in the future. Meanwhile in the future your computer sits on a 160 Terrabyte trunkline, something you could nevee afford in your house. Your essentially in instantaneous connection to the whole world. Everywhere you go your computer comes with you since any terminal is your computer's desktop. It would be foolish to want to have your own computer on a slower connection at that point.
How could anyone say that more bandwidth won't find applications? It's dumbfoundingly stupid.
On the other hand page loads are not really set by the connection speed. After about 40K per second it's the servers and the latency that sets the download speed. That's one reason why things like google's "secret" data-center-in-a-shipping-container project will be important to frontloading content closer to the destination.
We have yet to reach a point where one can replace a desktop with a thin client or dumb terminal. But Sun's sunray show this is indeed possible if you have enough bandwith for the video connection. Outside of high performance LANs you can't do this. But with ubiquitous high speed connections of the future only a fool would actually want to own and maintain his own computer. It'll be a paradigm shift enabled by fast connections.
Ironically, the answer to "do you own it" may becoming to be yes. Historically you own the hardware and liscense the software. But with the resurregence of the propriatery platform such as the Xbox 360, the PSP, and apple commputer, they no longer care if you own or liscence the software since it only runs on their machine. So going to a software ownership model might be just fine with them. With propretary hardware and the rise of platform locked DRM they can even inhibit re-sales of the software. (note copying it for re-sale is normally illegal, but reselling your own copy after you not be possible if it was platform locked.)
Furthermore, this sort of cost structure where software is property can and will be gotten around by leasing software. There will be two ways this can be done. First software itself may be come ephemral with the rise of web-apps and web-served desktops. Second, how does one count the actual per-seat liscences of a time-shared server based application? Third, it can simply be normal software that is leased. That is some holding company in the bahamas hold all the licenses and rents them to you. You own nothing.
Another issue is the convergence of Operating systems, scripting, and applications. Is Firefox the app or the OS that the java/javascript program runs on. Is the OS really part of the firmware or is it the software. As computers move towards embedded entities the latter question gets blurred. You PDA and cell phone's OS are not prceptually general purpose operating systems they are more like firmware.
Now as for the tax happer bussinesses: what a steaming load of standard baloney. Everytime someone suggests taxing this or that some imbecile says no that will hurt bussinesses or hurt this or that. It's counter intuitive but the ideal taxation system taxes EVERY SINGLE THING IT POSSIBLY CAN. The only thing that matters in the end are two things 1) how much money do you need to raise. With any governent system in the end you need to raise $X and to do so you rasie rates till you get $X. So if you tax everthing then the tax rate on each thing is small. In the end on average everyone pays the same $X/NumPersons no matter what the tax STRUCTURE. Thus I might end up paying more for software due to taxes but I will pay less for food and gas and dividend and revenue. 2) The second thing that matters is if the tax structure causes a policy that alters the societal or economic structure in a way perceived as negative.
The latter could be interepreted in the case of software as possibly affecting bussinesses in a negative way. Generally taxes that tax fix cost, required items tend to impact small entities more than taxes on scalable/marginal items. the classic example is food taxes hurting poor people more than rich people. In the end however one needs to consider the tax basket not the individual components of the tax structure. For example, luxury taxes and progressive income taxes can easily offest food taxes. Some taxes are easier to assess fairly. SOmetime you want weakly regressive taxes as in instrument of social policy.
for example, perhaps tenessee is actually concerned about having too much white collar employment or a lack of competativeness in some industrial aream and wants thus to shift costs from blue collar (softwareless) jobs to white collar jobs. Having a lot of different sorts of taxes one can utilize as a means of setting coarse grained economic policy is highly desirable. Thus this whining about it hurting bussinesses is stupid.
The L.A. Times is reporting that Warner Music Group disclosed that "As part of an industrywide investigation concerning pricing of digital music downloads, we received a subpoena from Atty. Gen. Spitzer's office..,". N.Y atty. Gen Eliot Spitzer, fresh from multi-million dollar settlements in the radio payola law suits against the industry giants, is now examining if there is collusion on the wholesale price of digital music. Spitzer is also at the heart of the recent 50 million dollar lawsuit by the Beatles against EMI. It's hard to say if this helps or hurt's Apples case for a 99cent price cap on downloads.
Slashdot Mirror
NanoBiotech? All Bio starts at the nano. Even the largest megafauna or the smallest single celled organism or even the alledged nanonbe subsceeluar oranisms arr composted of componenets that are self assembing entitities. This goes on right down to single proteins which are self assembling. All bio is at the nano-level. Might as well call is BaNanoTech.
There's more to the human book interaction than reading letters on a page. The idea of thumbing through a book either to scan it or to look for the page where something you recall is located is essential. I can't think of a single book I have read that I read page by page without thumbing through.
There truly is a muscle memory in addition to a photogrphic memory that can help you thumb back to a point in the text where you the thing you read previously is located. I know this from experience. I can frequently tell someone where on the page boundaries and about where in a book a certain picture or paragraph is located even though I did not really intend to memorize it.
Likewise in some books I bend the corners or insert sticky notes on margins. (Oddly to me some books are sacrosanct and I would never bend their corners). In text book I will pencil in corrections to mistkaes I find in fomulas.
A heavily used book develops natural breakpoints from the wear and tear so the naturally open to the critical information for you.
At Los Alamos National Lab, an early star wars prottype, the Beam aboard a rocket program launched a sub orbital sattelite that had electronic dissipating lots of heat for a short interval. Fans don't work well in space. And weight was a premium. The solution was to fill it with parafin. The parafin not only conducted the heat as a solid/liquid but it also has a phase change from solid to liquid which until the transition was 100% liquid clamped the electronics at the melting temperature of the wax. This required no circulation pumps.
Of course once it all melt then you are back to the steady state conduction of liquid parafin. But if you've ever made candles then you know that melting 8 gallons of wax on a stove burner can take a long time. If you can make that last say 12 hours--a work day-- and then let it cool down overnight you might never melt it all (or have two computers and play ping pong: one always cooling while the the other is heating).
Well yes I'll grant you that's a very nice feature: a consolidated trusted update agent. But C'mon? Google Pak is the best thing CES can come up with? Yes it was, and that's sad. None of the tech features offered at CES showed any integration besides this. Very tepid show this year. If apple just barely meets expectations they will again steal the innovation spotlight.
Clueless comment. If you watched the last Apple meeting they played they commerical before they brought in the intel speakers. It was their humble pie. In a way it was a compliment to intel too. Intel did have a heat problem and look at all the new processors: low power.
.mac starting tommorrow, and the intel processors availabel in march on ibooks and mac minis. For the pro-crowd they just need to stretch their pro-video and maybe throw in some eye candy like 32 inch displays or intel plasma display. Maybe announce a toshiba SED by august (probably not though). Apple wont announce much other pro stuff since that usually comes at the developers conf later in the year.
Now lets look at the CES show with it's tepid announcements. Google-pak? well okay make it easy for the unwashed to have a standard set of apps all the technorati have. Of course those or better have always come on apples so we can forgive all the apple owners with the WTF look on their faces. And some TV show downloads? hmmm whoopeee. What are they going to play them on, an Achos pocket brick? And then there's a flock of dull over prices ipod wanabees, that got scooped by the Nano and cant even compete on price.
In any case tommorrow all apple has to do to blow the pants off everyone is to announce, feature length movies available
This year CES made it easy. everything at CES is so far behind the curve and unintegrated apple hardly has to do more than what people already expect and everyone will be happy. This is the first year there's no breathless anticipation. (though I'm mighty curious about the intels, since I'm a pro-user I'm not expecting anything for me this go-around).
The fact that the world currency is denomicated n dollars does give us some float, but the articel you cite has a feeble understanding of it.
First the current dollars in circulation outside are essentially sufficient for all transactions. We are not "printing new money" every year to meet that demand. Maybe a little to meet expanded use but not much compared to that in circualtion. What we do get is the float. that is anyone holding dollars is giving us an interest free loan on whatever was used to purchase those dollars. So you see it's not the actual dollar we make the profit on but rather the interest on that dollar we would have had to pay to get the goods on credit, which is much less. Eventually that dollar will be redeemed by the owner and at that point the loan ends, no more float.
Second, even that's a gross overstatement of the benefit we get from dollar denomination. People can easily denominate in dollars without actually having the dollars for the transaction. They can pay in gold, or euros or letters of credit. The total is figured in dollars but that does not make it the currency.
Third even if it were the currency, people can print their own dollars. Not really print them but buy and sell options on dollars. This way they can trade in dollars without actualy having to hold dollars.
The article is fundamentally mistaken.
There's arguments that bio-gas costs more either economically or energetically than the contained fuel. Even if that were true it's not a good argument against it. Hydrogen fuels obviously "cost more" energetically too. They are chemical energy transport devices. But more to the point the source of that fuel might not neccessarily be oil but could be nuclear, wind (especially wind at night), solar, tidal, or waste by product heats. It could even come from the biosource itself. And that makes our fuel sources elastic and fungible. we are less dependent on the middle east, venuzuela, or pipelines.
That's a huge deal. oil prices are going up forever, and the cost of bio fuels can only go down as things like microbial conveversion become feasilble.
It makes a lot of sense to seed this now that it's close to break even and we are fighting wars for scarce oil.
Woo...It's gonna Suk Huang to be in his shoes. Okay bad puns , Juvenile. (But on slashdot those get positive mod points!)
You can see how this helps design circuits for shorts and opens. Start with a basic functional circuit that meets spec. The Extra element lets you put shorts across every element quicky to see what happens. and it lets you add in any element so see what it does as an open circuit. You can then see which terms in the analytic expression would damp any bad effects and add elements to move the damping within the required spec. Repeat until this process till you find a stable solution that can tolerate a short or open.
unlimited risk can be an incentive too.
Professor Middlebrook at caltech was an innovator in an unusual field. Sattelite electronics. Since no repairman was coming they wanted robust electronics. He desigined circuits in which any component could fail as an open or a short and it would remain in spec. You know that's a remarkable achievement if you've ever desinged a circuit before. Notably you can't really do this using SPICE. Speice will tell you what comething does but not how to design it. To do that you need a really good sense of approximations of the mathematical formula a circuit represents to see which components are coupled in which terms. And you need one more trick. The ability to put in a new element bridging any two points and quickly see how it affects the cicuit in the presence of feedback. To do that he invented the "extra element theorem" which allows you to compute this in analytic form from just a couple simple calculations. They still don't teach this in stardard courses yet. You can find it in Vorperians text book, but that's it. If you want to learn it you gotta either go to the original research articles from the 70s.
Hey, You want to be my bank? I'm going to keep depoiting 0.5 cents and withdrawing pennies. How you treat 0.5 matters. You are rounding up.
your algorithm always rounts 0.5 up.
These days kids are not taught to round. Instead you just do the compuations at absurdly large precision then on the last step round off. This way you don't accumulate systematic round-off error. It's good as long as you have the luxury of doing that. It used to be that C-programmers had a cavalier attitude of always writing the double-precision libraries first. Which is why Scientific programmers were initially slow to migrate from fortran.
These days it's not so true any more. First there's lots of good scientific C programmers now so the problem of parcimonius computation is well appreciated. Moreover the creation of math co-processing, vector calcualtions, and math co-processors often makes it counter-intuitive what to do.
For example it's quite likely that brute forcing a stiff calculation is double precision using a numeric co-processor will beat doing it in single precision with a few extra steps added to keep the precision in range. So being clever is not always helpful. people used to create math libraries that even cheated on using the full precision of the avialable floating point word size (sub-single precision accuracy) since it was fast (e.g. the radius libs for macintoshes) Pipelining adds more confusion, since the processor can be doing other stuff during those wait states for the higher precision. Vector code reverse this: if you are clever maybe shaving precision willlet you double the number of simultanoeus calcualtions.
In any case, what was once intuitive: minimal precision and clever rounding to avoid systematic errors means faster computation is no longer true.
Of course in the old days people learned to round early in life: no one wanted to use a 5 digit precision slide rule if you could use a 2 digit precision slide rule.
When you start going faster than the speed of light some joker with a faster warp engine in another dimension, the locals there are going to get pissed and start putting in transparent aluminum speedbumps and jersey barriers. They rip the tranny right out of your spaceship and knock your head on the ceiling faster than light. Your own grandpa will be shaking his rocket cane at you. Then we'll see who's boss, "mr what's-my-hurry".
It was paper money. untill you actually sell your shares, the price of the share has no value. If you ad bought at 1$ and it went up to 2$ and then back down to 1$ you have not actually lost 1$. So most of that billion loast came froma fake billion gained. On the other hand a small number of people bid it up to the high value on false pretenses and they indeed did lose when the stock went down. Exactly how much they lost is not clear till they sell.
Nothing new here that was not reported on slashdot four days ago.. Move along. or repost your incitefule or insightful comment. or someone elses if you karma whore.
The problem here is that there are no open source voting machines on the market at this time. So what is going to happen?
In most cases they can't be since the OS is closed source. Moreover, federal certification is no longer just for stand alone voting machines but requires the whole "system" of vote counting and vote merging software to be certified. So even when the vote counters could be open source the vote databases may not be. Diebolds run on windows CE, ES&S ivotronics probably run on windows CE, ES&S opscans run on Qnix, sequoia touchscreen kiosks run on some undisclosed proprietary software and the ballot database software runs on windows. No word what Sequoia Optek/insights run on but again the ballot data bases run on windows.
thus these companies can't open their source since it's not theirs to open.
Accupol is built on linux and java so it could in principle be open source at their discretion. But because the accupols are cobbled together from mainly commodity components the company investors is averse to open sourcing their only real IP.
Not sure about avante and harte and unilect but it appears they contain windows software.
OVC is the only system truly designed with open source in mind. But it's not ready for sale yet.
It's a carbon copy Reboot of this slashdot article.
Ladies and gentlemen this post does not make sense
What's evil about this one is not that someone couldlure you to a rigged speical website but that they can reach out and get you. For example, they can just take out a banner add from double click and have this rigged jpeg displayed on tens of millions of computers. Or they could post it as a picture on FLikkr and hope it gets into the rotation for a picture of the day. get it into google images. Post it on a bulliten board that allows thumbnail jpegs. Lots of ways to get the code onto trusted web sites.
or Is the original healline post for this thread written in gibberish enhanced by misappropriation of terms and conflation of concepts? How is trusting the unofficial patch conceptually related to "trustworthy computing" and why should packet spanning make it invulenrable to filtering?
Once the average connection exceeds the speed and latency needed to run a decent sized screen owning your own computer will be pointless. And having faster connections will be unnseccessary since there's nothing you could do with the added bandwidth not already available on the screen.
As SunRays demonstrate you can send a nice sized screen over a modes sized pipe. But even if you wanted a screen so large and updating so quickly that you needed a FULL TIME 1.6GB pipe this will be cheap in the future. Meanwhile in the future your computer sits on a 160 Terrabyte trunkline, something you could nevee afford in your house. Your essentially in instantaneous connection to the whole world. Everywhere you go your computer comes with you since any terminal is your computer's desktop. It would be foolish to want to have your own computer on a slower connection at that point.
And 640K should be enough for anyone right?
How could anyone say that more bandwidth won't find applications? It's dumbfoundingly stupid.
On the other hand page loads are not really set by the connection speed. After about 40K per second it's the servers and the latency that sets the download speed. That's one reason why things like google's "secret" data-center-in-a-shipping-container project will be important to frontloading content closer to the destination.
We have yet to reach a point where one can replace a desktop with a thin client or dumb terminal. But Sun's sunray show this is indeed possible if you have enough bandwith for the video connection.
Outside of high performance LANs you can't do this. But with ubiquitous high speed connections of the future only a fool would actually want to own and maintain his own computer. It'll be a paradigm shift enabled by fast connections.
Ironically, the answer to "do you own it" may becoming to be yes. Historically you own the hardware and liscense the software. But with the resurregence of the propriatery platform such as the Xbox 360, the PSP, and apple commputer, they no longer care if you own or liscence the software since it only runs on their machine. So going to a software ownership model might be just fine with them. With propretary hardware and the rise of platform locked DRM they can even inhibit re-sales of the software. (note copying it for re-sale is normally illegal, but reselling your own copy after you not be possible if it was platform locked.)
Furthermore, this sort of cost structure where software is property can and will be gotten around by leasing software. There will be two ways this can be done. First software itself may be come ephemral with the rise of web-apps and web-served desktops. Second, how does one count the actual per-seat liscences of a time-shared server based application? Third, it can simply be normal software that is leased. That is some holding company in the bahamas hold all the licenses and rents them to you. You own nothing.
Another issue is the convergence of Operating systems, scripting, and applications. Is Firefox the app or the OS that the java/javascript program runs on. Is the OS really part of the firmware or is it the software. As computers move towards embedded entities the latter question gets blurred. You PDA and cell phone's OS are not prceptually general purpose operating systems they are more like firmware.
Now as for the tax happer bussinesses: what a steaming load of standard baloney. Everytime someone suggests taxing this or that some imbecile says no that will hurt bussinesses or hurt this or that. It's counter intuitive but the ideal taxation system taxes EVERY SINGLE THING IT POSSIBLY CAN. The only thing that matters in the end are two things 1) how much money do you need to raise. With any governent system in the end you need to raise $X and to do so you rasie rates till you get $X. So if you tax everthing then the tax rate on each thing is small. In the end on average everyone pays the same $X/NumPersons no matter what the tax STRUCTURE. Thus I might end up paying more for software due to taxes but I will pay less for food and gas and dividend and revenue. 2) The second thing that matters is if the tax structure causes a policy that alters the societal or economic structure in a way perceived as negative.
The latter could be interepreted in the case of software as possibly affecting bussinesses in a negative way. Generally taxes that tax fix cost, required items tend to impact small entities more than taxes on scalable/marginal items. the classic example is food taxes hurting poor people more than rich people. In the end however one needs to consider the tax basket not the individual components of the tax structure. For example, luxury taxes and progressive income taxes can easily offest food taxes. Some taxes are easier to assess fairly. SOmetime you want weakly regressive taxes as in instrument of social policy.
for example, perhaps tenessee is actually concerned about having too much white collar employment or a lack of competativeness in some industrial aream and wants thus to shift costs from blue collar (softwareless) jobs to white collar jobs. Having a lot of different sorts of taxes one can utilize as a means of setting coarse grained economic policy is highly desirable. Thus this whining about it hurting bussinesses is stupid.
The L.A. Times is reporting that Warner Music Group disclosed that "As part of an industrywide investigation concerning pricing of digital music downloads, we received a subpoena from Atty. Gen. Spitzer's office..,". N.Y atty. Gen Eliot Spitzer, fresh from multi-million dollar settlements in the radio payola law suits against the industry giants, is now examining if there is collusion on the wholesale price of digital music. Spitzer is also at the heart of the recent 50 million dollar lawsuit by the Beatles against EMI. It's hard to say if this helps or hurt's Apples case for a 99cent price cap on downloads.