Actually, unless the employer has patents on it, or it is a direct line for line copy, he is free to re-invent the wheel, if it is a logical progression of the work.
No, he's not.
Other people are free to reinvent the wheel. HE is not free to reinvent the same wheel HE invented as a work-for-hire. That wheel is his employer's until somebody NOT in his employer's employ reinvents and releases it.
Is it theoretically possible to slow down light enough so that it takes a day, month or even a year or two to arrive at the other end of a material?
Maybe.
I recall seeing research indicating that you can and some researchers have. (Down to 38 MPH in 1999, for instance.) But it isn't practical for significant-scale energy storage or expected to become so any time soon.
Slashdot needs an "impractical tech idea" category for corralling all the all the grad students working on generating papers about their useless-but-interesting areas of research.
The problem with such a category is how hard it is to correctly predict WHICH ideas are impractical and which are the next world-changer. The market decides that. If your picks are right significantly more often than a random number generator you could use your leet skillz and invest your lunch money to become very very rich.
IMO the "cheap, efficient solar cell" will arrive just after the flying car. And the market is certainly resisting current $4-$5/watt retail prices.
What market are you in? Prices have been falling for a while. (Even your quoted numbers are significantly below the $10+ of a few years back, too.)
If you're willing to accept slight cosmetic defects you can currently get UL-approved panels in quantity for just under $2 or fine working panels without UL approval markings for about $1 (for projects where you don't need fire insurance or code approval).
That's bringing home-sized systems close to unsubsidized price breakeven with grid power for sunny suburban sites. Unlike the flying car, it's just the price-performance of panels, batteries, and inverter/control electronics that has been limiting mass solar power deployment. At prices up to those of recent times it is only a win where the cost of running grid power is high. That means new construction at remote sites without existing grid power, or small stuff like emergency phones, road signs, and lawn lights.
The constant announcement of research breakthroughs (on both panels and batteries) shows how much R&D money is being spent on improving the technology. This is good. Most of these things won't end up making it to market. They'll be too expensive or too fragile for commercialization, or replaced by something better. But, as with computers, semiconductors, and Moore's Law, the industry has reached the takeoff point. Some of the flood of innovations will combine to form a reasonably steady improvement ramp.
Computers went from buildings full of boxes and cabling managed by lab-coated initiates, through half-rack boxes built into lab equipment, through progressively smaller personal workstations, through automobile engine control, to replacing a handfull of switches and motors in everything from ovens and clothes washers to light timers. And this happened over the lifetime of the baby boom generation, not in a sudden event.
There was a stage where personal computers were only the hands of a few hobbyists, followed soon by a stage where it gradually became a common home office device or rich kid's toy before becoming ubiquitous. That's about where solar power is now.
And that's about the transition I expect it to take, in a similar time scale, if it's not eclipsed by something even better (like if polywell, focus, or some other fusion system works out and grid power prices drop drastically as a result).
Too bad the denialosphere doesn't have to live up to the same standards of integrity that scientists have to.
Too bad the AGW-promoting scientists didn't live up to it first.
If they'd made their data available in the first place, so others could check their work, we wouldn't be having this problem now.
Instead they tried to suppress debate and lost or corrupted the original data, to the point that if there IS a problem we won't be able to reliably document it.
That's very well put, but there is quite a lot more to creating the perfect storm than that.
No argument there. Fannie/Freddie and The Fed were certainly a big part of it.
In fact The Fed is THE underlying cause of inflation and the boom-bust cycle. The Fed's loans of funny-money, siphoning value out of the existing currency to hand out to its cronies, rips resources out of the productive economy and creates the malinvestment that ends up in a bust when there's nobody with real value saved to buy the long-term expensive stuff made by the people who borrowed to build it.
But each cycle is different in detail, as those burned by previous bubbles avoid those traps but fall into new ones.
In the grandfather posting I was addressing a not-well-understood detail that was central to the housing bubble - which involved the great-grandparent's observation that the "best and brightest talent" being diverted from tech to the financial system.
Languages maybe. Standard libraries, oh boy for sure.
From the man(3) page for the set of functions including gets():
BUGS
Never use gets(). Because it is impossible to tell without knowing the
data in advance how many characters gets() will read, and because gets()
will continue to store characters past the end of the buffer, it is
extremely dangerous to use. It has been used to break computer security.
Use fgets() instead.
gets() is the C standard library standard buffer overflow bug.
... seems to me that for many years the idea of slowing healing to prevent scar tissue formation has been in play. Now they want to generate more scar tissue through faster healing.
I suspect the "scar tissue" bit was from the news article author rather than the researchers. As I understand it (and I'm not a medical type either), quickly cleaning a wound and gluing it shut will lead to minimal scar tissue formation.
Unless the free radicals from the activated die destroy too many of the growth factors from the ruptured cells and their matrix, of course. As I understand it, scar tissue is what you get when the stem cells can't figure out what tissue is SUPPOSED to go there, so they just make something strong to hold it together.
Also: The body can clean out some scar tissue later if they CAN figure it out later and the scar tissue wasn't too thick. That typically happens when the cut tissues are misaligned - i.e. due to swelling - or parts of the tissue are lost - which blocking post-traumatic infections can mitigate. So the sooner you get it cleaned and accurately closed (if you don't clean away the growth signaling chemicals), the less scarring.
Remember that an injured soldier typically takes three soldiers to remove him/her, whereas a dead soldier takes one. Injured soldiers are a real drain on tactical effectiveness,...
This is one of the main reasons that military weapons are designed to wound rather than kill. (Another being that, once the war is over, it's nice to have patched up as many as possible of the enemy wounded and thus have fewer killed and fewer grieving families pushing for future unfriendly relations between the countries or running multi-generation vendettas.)
Many states ban the use of the civilian (i.e. semiautomatic) "plowshare" versions of military assault rifles for hunting because they're too puny (and they're typically on the lower end of what's allowed where they are legal). The idea is to shock and kill the prey animal quickly, to minimize both its suffering and the chance it will run away to die elsewhere (or possibly live on with painful and crippling injuries).
Unlimited service isn't a right, it was just a trend that started when a price war broke out because there were far too many ISPs.
Nope.
Dialup computing services with pay-per-hour and/or other pay-per-resource-usage rates (such as CPU seconds) predated the Internet. As did email (which was free except for whatever you needed to do to connect to at least one other mail-excanging site).
The Internet (like email) began as an experiment and grew. The internet was started by building it on leased lines (paying the tellco a flat rate) and the sites themselves buying the boxes and doing the routing. It grew as military and educational institutions, along with the commercial entities doing business with them, hooked up on this unlimited (except for bandwidth bottlenecks and congestion).
By the time the congress changed the rules so anybody could play (and send spam - thanks, Al Gore), IP over ethernet was a major LAN technology and even some home computers had IP stacks in their OSes. So anybody who could sweet-talk a site with an internet connection into a feed could hang their high-end home machine on the net. This would typically be done with either a leased line (perhaps ISDN) or a local dialup line in an area with a flat-rate calling scheme. (You'd put in a second line at home and buy a modem, and maybe also pay for one more line and modem at your friendly feed - typically if it wasn't your company which wanted you online so they could sucker more work hours out of you at home or to get you to do your usenet reading off from company time.)
Then (now that it was legal) some enterprising people put together little ISPs (which I called "Mom-and-POPs"). They'd buy a computer, maybe a router, a terminal server, and a bunch of modems and lease a bunch of lines. Then you could sign up with them. Maybe you'd pay for 24/7 use of a line, maybe you'd pay less, or per-connect-hour, for shared access to an oversubscribed modem bank. But bandwidth charges were not typical: Use the width of your pipe if network congestion allowed it. (You'd typically also get a shell account on their machine, which would host netnews and give you an email account. You might have a storage quota, and using the account for compute-intensive stuff might be frowned upon.)
Of course the existing by-the-hour dialup computing services hooked up, as well, and offered netnews and other internet-based services, sometimes as an extra-cost option. But again the by-the-hour connect charge was an aberation, not the typical case, while the bandwidth was still all-you-could-eat.
The ISPs and the commercial backbones grew out of this. As they developed they cut various deals between each other over who paid who for what. But to the end users the bandwidth was still flat rate, limited only by the bandwidth of the last hop and congestion of the network behind it.
But as things grew the ISPs got folded into the telcos - who (as with the extra-charges for call waiting, three way calling, etc. which were just bits of software in their new switches) were on the lookout for ways to sell some trivial extra service and grab more revenue. And they rolled out fatter pipes that were massively oversubscribed / underprovisioned on the backhaul side, on the assumption that the users CURRENT usages patterns (mostly web browsing and email reading) would continue unchanged as technology advanced.
But tech DID advance - with VoIP, gaming, torrent file transfers, streaming,... Their underprovisioned networks were starting to congest and the services were directly competing with their own - both their previous services (such as POTS and/or Cable TV) or their new "value (and cost) added" offerings. THAT'S where you started getting throttling (both general and by type-of-service), dumping users who actually USED the full bandwidth, and calls for bandwidth-related pricing.
So unlimited bandwidth usage was the norm, while limited (by something other than the last-hop bandwidth or network congestion) and/or metered services are the innovation.
The powerco doesn't "rate limit" me depending on what I do with the electricity I use,...
You haven't gotten sucked into the "smart grid/meter/thermostat" thing, have you? (That's where the power company, among other things, suckers you into installing a remote-controlled thermostat that dials back your air conditioning during major grid peaks.)
I honestly think this should be reprinted in the WSJ, as many savvy investors have no idea what happened the past two years, and you've just about summed it up as clearly and as concisely as I've ever seen or heard.
Thanks.
If it does get reprinted I hope it gets edited a bit. I posted that without proofreading it and it has a few language oopsies, like repeated phrases and pronoun reference ambiguities.
Sound like a reprise of the poor junior currency trader at a bank who hit the wrong key, swapping "sell" and "buy" on a trade offer, then lost a few billion in a flurry of trades trying to make up his losses on the error.
Wall Street has attracted the best and the brightest of all of our people, math PhD's,... Our most brilliant citizens are pulled into Wall Street as "quants"... And to do what? To game the system in favor of their wealthy masters at the expense of the middle classes.
Then the PHBs misunderstand and misapply the PHDs' work, and the whole thing comes crashing down on them.
Case in point: Mortgage-backed securities.
Risk on such things is hard to estimate, because it takes a lot of investigation and skull-sweat to evaluate the risk on each mortgage. Evaluating the risk on a bundle of mortgages was so much work it was not practical.
Then the young math whiz proved that price of mortgages was very strongly correlated with risk, and came up with a formula that, given price, estimated risk very well. (Well, DUH! They're correlated because smart buyers and sellers were researching the mortgages, determining the risk, and basing their trading prices on them.)
THen the PHBs came up with something like bonds backed by a "basket of mortgages" (to "average out the risk of individual defaults). Buy the bonds (to finance the mortgages), get paid dividends from the borrowers' payments. Sell THREE sets of bonds against each "basket" of mortgages, with missed payments coming out of the dividends of the third, then the second, then the first, so investors could get different prices and risk/reward tradeoffs from the same basket. So far so good...
But to sell these bonds they needed a rating. So they talked the rating companies into using the shiny new risk-estimating tool to rate them. Oops! Any controls engineer who understands these bonds and the market will recognize that this substituted a positive feedback loop for the signal from the real world. Higher price -> lower risk estimate -> higher price... (The guy who did the original work said not to use it this way - but nobody listened. And he moved on to other things.)
And now that they could get a rating they could get a rating from reputable companies they could sell a bunch of these bonds. So they could buy up mortgages to make more. So this raised the demand for mortgages, which raised the price. The positive feedback loop was kicked off with a big up-push, the ratings went sky high, the prices of the bonds climbed, and the bubble was on.
With the price skyrocketing more people wanted to buy in. So the demand for mortgages went through the roof. Banks and the like could sell any mortgage they could write, even to "NINJA" borrowers with no income, job, or assets. Who cares if some of the loans in the basket are "subprime"? The price says the aggregate risk is low and it will all average out, right?
So the bubble blew up bigger and bigger, with developers building more houses that were bought by more subprime borrowers with more and more unconventional mortgages - until finally there were enough defaults to actually cause problems.
The last straw was probably because a gas price hike made the commute expensive enough that people commuting between big cities and the "executive homes" tightly clustered in former farmers' fields a two-hour commute away from their job could no longer afford both the gas and the payments.
So enough mortgages defaulted that some of the bonds were doing worse than expected. So the demand for them went down. Oops! The positive feedback loop was still in place and it finally got a signal strong enough to get it out of saturation. Lower demand -> lower price -> higher risk estimate -> lower rating -> lower price. Rinse and repeat. Prices for mortgages drop, interest rates rise, more defaults, more positive feedback.
And thus the subprime mortgage market collapsed.
(Then the government throws a trillion or so of our money into pumping it back up...)
Now stock market guys are used to this sort of thing: It's the old chartist vs. value investor dichotomy. Every so often somebody finds a
Are you retarded? The FCC just "determines" Internet Access is a telecom service so it can regulate it. Seriously?
Seriously.
But they'd then have to scrap the current Cable Modem Order and rework it, probably reclassifying cable modem service as either cable service or (most likely) telecommunication service. This would reopen an issue between the FCC and the Ninth Circus and other federal courts over things like granting competitors wholesale access to cable companies' data transport. That would imply a claim to be able to regulate the transport level of the internet, turn (non-virtual) ISPs into common carriers, etc.
... The more you claim to have in reserves the more you can pump and sell and the more money you make.
it's in every OPEC country's best interest to overstate their reserves. and of course, nobody outside of aramco is allowed to actually independently verify those numbers.
Only in their SHORT term interest. Presuming the resource will get sucked into actual shortage before technology replaces it the price will eventually skyrocket. At that point having a bunch left could bring in enough to pay for the lost opportunity cost of not having the money earlier.
Solutions to AGW are good, even if AGW turns out to be wrong.
What if AGW is true but it's all that's holding off an ice age?
What if AGW is true but the temperature rise would be an enormous boon rather than a disaster?
What if a "solution" is attempted that so totally drains humanity's resources and capabilities that 85% of the world's population dies of starvation and disease due to the economic collapse?
What if a "solution" is attempted that lowers the temperature for a while but so drains humanity's resources (as above) that when we figure out a BETTER and LONG TERM solution in another decade or so we no longer have the means to implement it?
What if AGW is false but our "solution" CREATES a runaway climate change and extinction event?
I could go on for pages.
No, solutions to AGW are not necessarily good even if AGW turns out to be true. And if it turns out to be false and we impoverish and decimate humanity over a myth we'll be the prize fools of all time.
The issue with "climategate" is not whether they guessed right, nor that they used poor methodology. The issue is that they corrupted the scientific process to hide the data from those who could do a better job - and corrupted the historic databases so, now that they've been found out any future work will have to be done with less data and possibly forged data. Meanwhile we have nothing but belief to go on. We don't know if there IS a problem or, if it exists, what it is.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." Now we are back to square one.
Theres a few sites on the net that look at the corporate backgrounds of most of Fox's "Experts". Almost all of them are in some way linked to the corporations they comment positively on...
Given that the way you become an expert in something is to do a lot of it, and these corporations are the ones that do it, it's hardly surprising that the experts in the subject tend to have ties to the companies in question.
And it's also hardly a surprise that the "experts" who testify against the companies in question tend to either have little experience in the field or to be government funded academics - both of which have similar conflicts of interest. The former get support from others opposed to the corporations' activities, the latter have an incentive to keep their government sponsors happy, which involved promoting the expansion of their power.
Expertise - real or perceived - comes with life experience that tends to create conflict of interest and always creates the perception of it.
This is similar to the phenomenon of "regulatory capture" - where the governmental organizations with oversight authority for an industry hire experts in the industry - and end up with people who have ties to the companies and/or an incentive to regulate in their favor to avoid crashing their own careers and/or to get a cushy payoff job once they leave the regulatory organization.
Because you'll always find the perception of conflict of interest when dealing with an "expert" you'll have to make your own determination whether any given one of them has the integrity to tell the truth rather to look out for his own interests, and has the knowledge to know what the truth is.
Why a new proprietary optical transport when there are already standards-based transports that do the job just fine?
Or is this just a cheap, short-range, optical ethernet transceiver with a new connector, cabling system, and optics-integrated interface chip?
Two fibers would be consistent with using integrated LEDs for transmitters rather than separate lasers and/or using two frequencies to go bi-directional on one fiber. For short range you don't need coherent light or single-mode fiber.
You do realize that cable television was an analog signal that required a special box to decode for years...
Actually it mostly needed the special box just to tune it - frequency shift the normally-structured 6 MHz bandwidth TV signal to a frequency where the TV would receive it.
Early "premium channels" were "encrypted" by inserting a strong but narrow-band interfering signal in an otherwise empty slot in the signal, near the sound carrier. This would intermittently "capture" the FM sound decoder and paint bars across the video, jamming the picture and sound. Subscribers had a narrow-band notch filter installed in their feeds to remove it.
(There were other systems, too, including one used on "air" channels which selectively lowered the strength of the vertical and horizontal sync signals to below the level of the video. A subcarrier in the sound provided the information necessary to identify and boost the sync signals back to normal.)
a zettabyte isn't ROUGHLY a million petabytes - it is EXACTLY a million petabytes, that being its definition, and all.
Depends on whether you're using SI & IEC units (Z/zeta- and Zi/zebi- for 1000^7 / 1024^7) or extrapolating JEDEC (which would come up with Z/zeta- for 1024^7).
... a capture device could be places over the "leak", the buoyant oil channeled to a surface collector and pumped out.
I hear they're working on it. Big concrete dome or box to be sunk over the blown well. Don't recall how many tons and how big, but it's HEAVY and BIG. Once it's in place it collects the oil before it gets a chance to get around the opening and the oil's buoyancy keeps it in the pipe - entraining a small amount of seawater (and perhaps insufficiently cautious sea life) to be separated later. As long as they remove the oil as fast as it comes out of the bore hole they should get essentially all of it.
The trap is already built but it takes time to get it to the site, position it, and sink it.
One of the cute things about the Book of Revelations is that you can ALWAYS read current events into it as the signs and portents of the end times. This has been going on for well over a thousand years.
If you believe in it, shouldn't you also believe in the part that says nobody will know the time in advance?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, unless the employer has patents on it, or it is a direct line for line copy, he is free to re-invent the wheel, if it is a logical progression of the work.
No, he's not.
Other people are free to reinvent the wheel. HE is not free to reinvent the same wheel HE invented as a work-for-hire. That wheel is his employer's until somebody NOT in his employer's employ reinvents and releases it.
Is it theoretically possible to slow down light enough so that it takes a day, month or even a year or two to arrive at the other end of a material?
Maybe.
I recall seeing research indicating that you can and some researchers have. (Down to 38 MPH in 1999, for instance.) But it isn't practical for significant-scale energy storage or expected to become so any time soon.
No Bob Shaw style "slow glass" this week.
Agree with the bulk of your post but ...
Slashdot needs an "impractical tech idea" category for corralling all the all the grad students working on generating papers about their useless-but-interesting areas of research.
The problem with such a category is how hard it is to correctly predict WHICH ideas are impractical and which are the next world-changer. The market decides that. If your picks are right significantly more often than a random number generator you could use your leet skillz and invest your lunch money to become very very rich.
IMO the "cheap, efficient solar cell" will arrive just after the flying car. And the market is certainly resisting current $4-$5/watt retail prices.
What market are you in? Prices have been falling for a while. (Even your quoted numbers are significantly below the $10+ of a few years back, too.)
If you're willing to accept slight cosmetic defects you can currently get UL-approved panels in quantity for just under $2 or fine working panels without UL approval markings for about $1 (for projects where you don't need fire insurance or code approval).
That's bringing home-sized systems close to unsubsidized price breakeven with grid power for sunny suburban sites. Unlike the flying car, it's just the price-performance of panels, batteries, and inverter/control electronics that has been limiting mass solar power deployment. At prices up to those of recent times it is only a win where the cost of running grid power is high. That means new construction at remote sites without existing grid power, or small stuff like emergency phones, road signs, and lawn lights.
The constant announcement of research breakthroughs (on both panels and batteries) shows how much R&D money is being spent on improving the technology. This is good. Most of these things won't end up making it to market. They'll be too expensive or too fragile for commercialization, or replaced by something better. But, as with computers, semiconductors, and Moore's Law, the industry has reached the takeoff point. Some of the flood of innovations will combine to form a reasonably steady improvement ramp.
Computers went from buildings full of boxes and cabling managed by lab-coated initiates, through half-rack boxes built into lab equipment, through progressively smaller personal workstations, through automobile engine control, to replacing a handfull of switches and motors in everything from ovens and clothes washers to light timers. And this happened over the lifetime of the baby boom generation, not in a sudden event.
There was a stage where personal computers were only the hands of a few hobbyists, followed soon by a stage where it gradually became a common home office device or rich kid's toy before becoming ubiquitous. That's about where solar power is now.
And that's about the transition I expect it to take, in a similar time scale, if it's not eclipsed by something even better (like if polywell, focus, or some other fusion system works out and grid power prices drop drastically as a result).
Too bad the denialosphere doesn't have to live up to the same standards of integrity that scientists have to.
Too bad the AGW-promoting scientists didn't live up to it first.
If they'd made their data available in the first place, so others could check their work, we wouldn't be having this problem now.
Instead they tried to suppress debate and lost or corrupted the original data, to the point that if there IS a problem we won't be able to reliably document it.
Sorry, that's not "science".
That's very well put, but there is quite a lot more to creating the perfect storm than that.
No argument there. Fannie/Freddie and The Fed were certainly a big part of it.
In fact The Fed is THE underlying cause of inflation and the boom-bust cycle. The Fed's loans of funny-money, siphoning value out of the existing currency to hand out to its cronies, rips resources out of the productive economy and creates the malinvestment that ends up in a bust when there's nobody with real value saved to buy the long-term expensive stuff made by the people who borrowed to build it.
But each cycle is different in detail, as those burned by previous bubbles avoid those traps but fall into new ones.
In the grandfather posting I was addressing a not-well-understood detail that was central to the housing bubble - which involved the great-grandparent's observation that the "best and brightest talent" being diverted from tech to the financial system.
Languages maybe. Standard libraries, oh boy for sure.
From the man(3) page for the set of functions including gets():
gets() is the C standard library standard buffer overflow bug.
They mention a special light source. Is this a UV acrylic chemistry?
Same idea but using a die that produces the triggering catalytic chemical event when activated by a particular narrow band of GREEN light.
... seems to me that for many years the idea of slowing healing to prevent scar tissue formation has been in play. Now they want to generate more scar tissue through faster healing.
I suspect the "scar tissue" bit was from the news article author rather than the researchers. As I understand it (and I'm not a medical type either), quickly cleaning a wound and gluing it shut will lead to minimal scar tissue formation.
Unless the free radicals from the activated die destroy too many of the growth factors from the ruptured cells and their matrix, of course. As I understand it, scar tissue is what you get when the stem cells can't figure out what tissue is SUPPOSED to go there, so they just make something strong to hold it together.
Also: The body can clean out some scar tissue later if they CAN figure it out later and the scar tissue wasn't too thick. That typically happens when the cut tissues are misaligned - i.e. due to swelling - or parts of the tissue are lost - which blocking post-traumatic infections can mitigate. So the sooner you get it cleaned and accurately closed (if you don't clean away the growth signaling chemicals), the less scarring.
Remember that an injured soldier typically takes three soldiers to remove him/her, whereas a dead soldier takes one. Injured soldiers are a real drain on tactical effectiveness, ...
This is one of the main reasons that military weapons are designed to wound rather than kill. (Another being that, once the war is over, it's nice to have patched up as many as possible of the enemy wounded and thus have fewer killed and fewer grieving families pushing for future unfriendly relations between the countries or running multi-generation vendettas.)
Many states ban the use of the civilian (i.e. semiautomatic) "plowshare" versions of military assault rifles for hunting because they're too puny (and they're typically on the lower end of what's allowed where they are legal). The idea is to shock and kill the prey animal quickly, to minimize both its suffering and the chance it will run away to die elsewhere (or possibly live on with painful and crippling injuries).
Unlimited service isn't a right, it was just a trend that started when a price war broke out because there were far too many ISPs.
Nope.
Dialup computing services with pay-per-hour and/or other pay-per-resource-usage rates (such as CPU seconds) predated the Internet. As did email (which was free except for whatever you needed to do to connect to at least one other mail-excanging site).
The Internet (like email) began as an experiment and grew. The internet was started by building it on leased lines (paying the tellco a flat rate) and the sites themselves buying the boxes and doing the routing. It grew as military and educational institutions, along with the commercial entities doing business with them, hooked up on this unlimited (except for bandwidth bottlenecks and congestion).
By the time the congress changed the rules so anybody could play (and send spam - thanks, Al Gore), IP over ethernet was a major LAN technology and even some home computers had IP stacks in their OSes. So anybody who could sweet-talk a site with an internet connection into a feed could hang their high-end home machine on the net. This would typically be done with either a leased line (perhaps ISDN) or a local dialup line in an area with a flat-rate calling scheme. (You'd put in a second line at home and buy a modem, and maybe also pay for one more line and modem at your friendly feed - typically if it wasn't your company which wanted you online so they could sucker more work hours out of you at home or to get you to do your usenet reading off from company time.)
Then (now that it was legal) some enterprising people put together little ISPs (which I called "Mom-and-POPs"). They'd buy a computer, maybe a router, a terminal server, and a bunch of modems and lease a bunch of lines. Then you could sign up with them. Maybe you'd pay for 24/7 use of a line, maybe you'd pay less, or per-connect-hour, for shared access to an oversubscribed modem bank. But bandwidth charges were not typical: Use the width of your pipe if network congestion allowed it. (You'd typically also get a shell account on their machine, which would host netnews and give you an email account. You might have a storage quota, and using the account for compute-intensive stuff might be frowned upon.)
Of course the existing by-the-hour dialup computing services hooked up, as well, and offered netnews and other internet-based services, sometimes as an extra-cost option. But again the by-the-hour connect charge was an aberation, not the typical case, while the bandwidth was still all-you-could-eat.
The ISPs and the commercial backbones grew out of this. As they developed they cut various deals between each other over who paid who for what. But to the end users the bandwidth was still flat rate, limited only by the bandwidth of the last hop and congestion of the network behind it.
But as things grew the ISPs got folded into the telcos - who (as with the extra-charges for call waiting, three way calling, etc. which were just bits of software in their new switches) were on the lookout for ways to sell some trivial extra service and grab more revenue. And they rolled out fatter pipes that were massively oversubscribed / underprovisioned on the backhaul side, on the assumption that the users CURRENT usages patterns (mostly web browsing and email reading) would continue unchanged as technology advanced.
But tech DID advance - with VoIP, gaming, torrent file transfers, streaming, ... Their underprovisioned networks were starting to congest and the services were directly competing with their own - both their previous services (such as POTS and/or Cable TV) or their new "value (and cost) added" offerings. THAT'S where you started getting throttling (both general and by type-of-service), dumping users who actually USED the full bandwidth, and calls for bandwidth-related pricing.
So unlimited bandwidth usage was the norm, while limited (by something other than the last-hop bandwidth or network congestion) and/or metered services are the innovation.
The powerco doesn't "rate limit" me depending on what I do with the electricity I use, ...
You haven't gotten sucked into the "smart grid/meter/thermostat" thing, have you? (That's where the power company, among other things, suckers you into installing a remote-controlled thermostat that dials back your air conditioning during major grid peaks.)
I honestly think this should be reprinted in the WSJ, as many savvy investors have no idea what happened the past two years, and you've just about summed it up as clearly and as concisely as I've ever seen or heard.
Thanks.
If it does get reprinted I hope it gets edited a bit. I posted that without proofreading it and it has a few language oopsies, like repeated phrases and pronoun reference ambiguities.
Sound like a reprise of the poor junior currency trader at a bank who hit the wrong key, swapping "sell" and "buy" on a trade offer, then lost a few billion in a flurry of trades trying to make up his losses on the error.
Wall Street has attracted the best and the brightest of all of our people, math PhD's, ... Our most brilliant citizens are pulled into Wall Street as "quants" ... And to do what? To game the system in favor of their wealthy masters at the expense of the middle classes.
Then the PHBs misunderstand and misapply the PHDs' work, and the whole thing comes crashing down on them.
Case in point: Mortgage-backed securities.
Risk on such things is hard to estimate, because it takes a lot of investigation and skull-sweat to evaluate the risk on each mortgage. Evaluating the risk on a bundle of mortgages was so much work it was not practical.
Then the young math whiz proved that price of mortgages was very strongly correlated with risk, and came up with a formula that, given price, estimated risk very well. (Well, DUH! They're correlated because smart buyers and sellers were researching the mortgages, determining the risk, and basing their trading prices on them.)
THen the PHBs came up with something like bonds backed by a "basket of mortgages" (to "average out the risk of individual defaults). Buy the bonds (to finance the mortgages), get paid dividends from the borrowers' payments. Sell THREE sets of bonds against each "basket" of mortgages, with missed payments coming out of the dividends of the third, then the second, then the first, so investors could get different prices and risk/reward tradeoffs from the same basket. So far so good...
But to sell these bonds they needed a rating. So they talked the rating companies into using the shiny new risk-estimating tool to rate them. Oops! Any controls engineer who understands these bonds and the market will recognize that this substituted a positive feedback loop for the signal from the real world. Higher price -> lower risk estimate -> higher price... (The guy who did the original work said not to use it this way - but nobody listened. And he moved on to other things.)
And now that they could get a rating they could get a rating from reputable companies they could sell a bunch of these bonds. So they could buy up mortgages to make more. So this raised the demand for mortgages, which raised the price. The positive feedback loop was kicked off with a big up-push, the ratings went sky high, the prices of the bonds climbed, and the bubble was on.
With the price skyrocketing more people wanted to buy in. So the demand for mortgages went through the roof. Banks and the like could sell any mortgage they could write, even to "NINJA" borrowers with no income, job, or assets. Who cares if some of the loans in the basket are "subprime"? The price says the aggregate risk is low and it will all average out, right?
So the bubble blew up bigger and bigger, with developers building more houses that were bought by more subprime borrowers with more and more unconventional mortgages - until finally there were enough defaults to actually cause problems.
The last straw was probably because a gas price hike made the commute expensive enough that people commuting between big cities and the "executive homes" tightly clustered in former farmers' fields a two-hour commute away from their job could no longer afford both the gas and the payments.
So enough mortgages defaulted that some of the bonds were doing worse than expected. So the demand for them went down. Oops! The positive feedback loop was still in place and it finally got a signal strong enough to get it out of saturation. Lower demand -> lower price -> higher risk estimate -> lower rating -> lower price. Rinse and repeat. Prices for mortgages drop, interest rates rise, more defaults, more positive feedback.
And thus the subprime mortgage market collapsed.
(Then the government throws a trillion or so of our money into pumping it back up...)
Now stock market guys are used to this sort of thing: It's the old chartist vs. value investor dichotomy. Every so often somebody finds a
Are you retarded? The FCC just "determines" Internet Access is a telecom service so it can regulate it. Seriously?
Seriously.
But they'd then have to scrap the current Cable Modem Order and rework it, probably reclassifying cable modem service as either cable service or (most likely) telecommunication service. This would reopen an issue between the FCC and the Ninth Circus and other federal courts over things like granting competitors wholesale access to cable companies' data transport. That would imply a claim to be able to regulate the transport level of the internet, turn (non-virtual) ISPs into common carriers, etc.
There are a lot of worms in that can.
... The more you claim to have in reserves the more you can pump and sell and the more money you make.
it's in every OPEC country's best interest to overstate their reserves. and of course, nobody outside of aramco is allowed to actually independently verify those numbers.
Only in their SHORT term interest. Presuming the resource will get sucked into actual shortage before technology replaces it the price will eventually skyrocket. At that point having a bunch left could bring in enough to pay for the lost opportunity cost of not having the money earlier.
Solutions to AGW are good, even if AGW turns out to be wrong.
What if AGW is true but it's all that's holding off an ice age?
What if AGW is true but the temperature rise would be an enormous boon rather than a disaster?
What if a "solution" is attempted that so totally drains humanity's resources and capabilities that 85% of the world's population dies of starvation and disease due to the economic collapse?
What if a "solution" is attempted that lowers the temperature for a while but so drains humanity's resources (as above) that when we figure out a BETTER and LONG TERM solution in another decade or so we no longer have the means to implement it?
What if AGW is false but our "solution" CREATES a runaway climate change and extinction event?
I could go on for pages.
No, solutions to AGW are not necessarily good even if AGW turns out to be true. And if it turns out to be false and we impoverish and decimate humanity over a myth we'll be the prize fools of all time.
The issue with "climategate" is not whether they guessed right, nor that they used poor methodology. The issue is that they corrupted the scientific process to hide the data from those who could do a better job - and corrupted the historic databases so, now that they've been found out any future work will have to be done with less data and possibly forged data. Meanwhile we have nothing but belief to go on. We don't know if there IS a problem or, if it exists, what it is.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." Now we are back to square one.
Theres a few sites on the net that look at the corporate backgrounds of most of Fox's "Experts". Almost all of them are in some way linked to the corporations they comment positively on ...
Given that the way you become an expert in something is to do a lot of it, and these corporations are the ones that do it, it's hardly surprising that the experts in the subject tend to have ties to the companies in question.
And it's also hardly a surprise that the "experts" who testify against the companies in question tend to either have little experience in the field or to be government funded academics - both of which have similar conflicts of interest. The former get support from others opposed to the corporations' activities, the latter have an incentive to keep their government sponsors happy, which involved promoting the expansion of their power.
Expertise - real or perceived - comes with life experience that tends to create conflict of interest and always creates the perception of it.
This is similar to the phenomenon of "regulatory capture" - where the governmental organizations with oversight authority for an industry hire experts in the industry - and end up with people who have ties to the companies and/or an incentive to regulate in their favor to avoid crashing their own careers and/or to get a cushy payoff job once they leave the regulatory organization.
Because you'll always find the perception of conflict of interest when dealing with an "expert" you'll have to make your own determination whether any given one of them has the integrity to tell the truth rather to look out for his own interests, and has the knowledge to know what the truth is.
No, it's not an open source license. You get to see the source code, but you have no rights beyond that. Preparing derivative works is not allowed.
Which means that looking at it "contaminates" the developers with knowledge of proprietary code.
If this article were about the the code itself, rather than the lack of support on Microsoft's end, I'd hang an "itsatrap" tag on it.
IMHO we're better off if the site DOES go away.
Why a new proprietary optical transport when there are already standards-based transports that do the job just fine?
Or is this just a cheap, short-range, optical ethernet transceiver with a new connector, cabling system, and optics-integrated interface chip?
Two fibers would be consistent with using integrated LEDs for transmitters rather than separate lasers and/or using two frequencies to go bi-directional on one fiber. For short range you don't need coherent light or single-mode fiber.
You do realize that cable television was an analog signal that required a special box to decode for years...
Actually it mostly needed the special box just to tune it - frequency shift the normally-structured 6 MHz bandwidth TV signal to a frequency where the TV would receive it.
Early "premium channels" were "encrypted" by inserting a strong but narrow-band interfering signal in an otherwise empty slot in the signal, near the sound carrier. This would intermittently "capture" the FM sound decoder and paint bars across the video, jamming the picture and sound. Subscribers had a narrow-band notch filter installed in their feeds to remove it.
(There were other systems, too, including one used on "air" channels which selectively lowered the strength of the vertical and horizontal sync signals to below the level of the video. A subcarrier in the sound provided the information necessary to identify and boost the sync signals back to normal.)
a zettabyte isn't ROUGHLY a million petabytes - it is EXACTLY a million petabytes, that being its definition, and all.
Depends on whether you're using SI & IEC units (Z/zeta- and Zi/zebi- for 1000^7 / 1024^7) or extrapolating JEDEC (which would come up with Z/zeta- for 1024^7).
... a capture device could be places over the "leak", the buoyant oil channeled to a surface collector and pumped out.
I hear they're working on it. Big concrete dome or box to be sunk over the blown well. Don't recall how many tons and how big, but it's HEAVY and BIG. Once it's in place it collects the oil before it gets a chance to get around the opening and the oil's buoyancy keeps it in the pipe - entraining a small amount of seawater (and perhaps insufficiently cautious sea life) to be separated later. As long as they remove the oil as fast as it comes out of the bore hole they should get essentially all of it.
The trap is already built but it takes time to get it to the site, position it, and sink it.
Has our thirst for oil unleashed an apocalypse?
One of the cute things about the Book of Revelations is that you can ALWAYS read current events into it as the signs and portents of the end times. This has been going on for well over a thousand years.
If you believe in it, shouldn't you also believe in the part that says nobody will know the time in advance?