He wants to study computer engineering in Harvard University [...]
Of COURSE he wants to go to Harvard. And he ought to fit in just fine.
He hasn't proved that he did a prdigious feat of programming. But he HAS proved that he can get the media to print a piece of preposterous hype as straight news.
Perfect for a CEO with a Harvard MBA.
[...] and eventually set up his own Internet or computer company.
David, that's an excelent post. You got all the points I wanted to make.
But I'll chime in anyway, with a real-world example that's a little closer to home for some of the Slashdot readers.
Change the question to:
Does the Computer Programming field need to be regulated?
A couple decades ago this question was being asked seriously. A private organization was set up to create a certification for computer programmers. The subtext appeared to be lobbying for laws banning programming for money by anyone who didn't have one of their certifications. Think of an "American Bar Association" for programmers. (I thought the original certification was called the Certified Data Professional or CDP, but see below.)
Of course the certification required extensive knowlege of the languages of the time. Such languages as Cobol and JCL.
This would be convenient for someone in a large corporation's personnel department when hiring for the accounting departments IT operation. (Except when setting salary, of course, since the shortage of "qualified" programmers would drive up the price.)
But can you IMAGINE what effect such a law would have had on the computing revolution?
Would there even BE a Unix, an Apple OS, a Linux, a gnu project, emacs, gcc, Perl, Bison, Java, C++, etc. if everyone had to learn Cobol and enough other stuff to do accounting apps, and get a cert, before they could be paid to hack in C or sell any software they'd written?
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Interestingly, what appears to be the same organization is still around, as a private-enterprise certification vendor. The web site says its current offering is "Certified Computing Professional" (CCP), and that it still maintains earlier certifications called "Certified Data Processor" (CDP), "Certified Systems Professional" (CSP) and "Certified Computer Programmer" (another CCP).
They're a decidedly technophobic bunch. You'd be surprised to see how many agencies in sizable cities still do their dispatching via cue cards and a bulletin board.
Cue cards and bulletin boards never crash.
(Well, maybe in a 7.1 earthquake. But one guy on each end can reboot a bulletin board in a couple seconds.)
What you need to do is put the electronic version online before or concurrently with the print version. See [several examples]
I like this scheme - for a while, as an experiment. Just think...
If you see a sudden jump in sales of the hardcopy book when the e-version comes out, it immediately discredits the theory that free softcopies (or even so-called "piracy") REDUCE the total sales of the hardcopy version by replacing more hardcopy sales than they generate.
So if we and Jim Baen are right, that free softcopy availablity INCREASES hardcopy sales, Bruce and Prentice Hall are doing us all a GREAT service by foregoing a little profit to prove it.
I pulled a similar stunt over a decade ago.
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I pulled a similar stunt over a decade ago.
Had an Altos 68000 Unix box. Made a very good space heater. Heat came out a 4" exhaust fan in the back.
So I got a couple drier vents, which use a 4" hose. Mounted one on a board that replaced a window, cut the other down to make a fan-to-hose adapter. Really cooled the room down.
Got one of those drier-heat-saver valves to switch it to exhausting into the room during the winter, too. B-)
I should think hearing voices would be the least of her problems. Wouldn't it get a little warm in there?
We're talking roughly the amount of power emitted by an 802.11 card, coming from an antenna miles away, not sitting next to a major radar antenna (or inside a microwave oven).
Does your lap get hot when you're Wi-Fiing on your laptop? Maybe you need an aluminum foil jockstrap. B-)
The oldest microwave-mind-control-ish item I recall is an original series twilight-zone episode.
Young lady (heiress?) living in a penthouse appartment is hearing voices. About to be dumped into the loony-bin - involuntarily. Turns out her penthouse apt is on the path of a new phone-company or something microwave link and she's picking up the traffic. A little shielding saves the day.
Interestingly, this sort of thing would be entirely plausible with a non-multiplexed AM link. Something similar once happened quite a lot (and may still happen): A bit of corrosion on defective metal dental work will sometimes demodulate broadcast AM signals and pass enough of the current through the auditory nerve to stimulate it (or otherwise couple it to the hearing system somehow). Result: an untuned crystal set. In an area with a single strong AM station - hearing the program material (or at least the lower-frequency portions of it, which is good enough to recognize voices). In an area with multiple strong AM stations, a cacophony - like being in a crowd with everybody talking (or playing a transistor radio tuned to a different station) at once.
And, yes, sometimes people with such a problem end up under medical supervision for paranoia, rather than (or until) having their dental work fixed.
While there may have been a few one-channel AM microwave links in the early days, things quickly evolved. Phone company links were digital and multiplexed by the '60s (and I'm not sure they were EVER unmultiplexed AM), and studio-to-transmitter links were FM ditto.
I have often wondered how much of the tinfoil-hat mind-control mythos got started by the broadcast of that Twilight Zone episode. (See! The media ARE controlling people's minds with hidden broadcast signals...)
Have you ever tried to remove someone from a tree? As the older brother of five avid tree-climbers, let me assure you that it is QUITE difficult. Especially when they don't want to co-operate with the removal.
If someone opposed to the tree sitters were to girdle any tree with a tree-sitter in it, or drive a few copper nails into it, the tree dies.
Establish the precedent that sitting in a tree guarantees its death (while the ones around it are logged anyhow) and it makes the exercise counter-productive: If you negotiate, you MIGHT save it. If you sit in it, it dies.
I'm not advocating the strategy. But I notice that it has already been done to at least one famous old tree that someone sat in for years to save. (I believe it happened after the people who owned the tree agreed to let it live, too.) So I wonder if someone may already be using this approach.
For myself, I prefer tree sitters to tree spikers. The former just cause an island of obstruction (while keeping themselves out of other mischef for months). The latter plant boobytraps that maim and kill rank-and-file lumber workers. (Seems to fit the definition of "terrorist".)
Does anyone know if the Justice Department has already started anti-terrorist prosecutions against a tree-spiking environmental group and/or its contributors?
Eventually you will reach a limit on the size of the individual swtiches. The one the article gripes about appears to be the sloppy wave function of the electrons letting them tunnel across the junction. But matter is lumpy (quantized) and eventually you'll hit a just-a-few-atoms wall.
But there's more that can be done - in terms of geometry and organization.
Current chips are a single two-dimensional array of components (or sometimes a small number of layers). But build your gates and interconnects in 3-D and you can go farther on two fronts:
- Speeding up the individual functions a bit further. (The more complex, the more improvement).
- Combining a LARGE nubmer of parallel elements into a small space (so they can talk to each other quickly).
Back in the '70s I had a rap I'd do called "preposterous scale integration". Basic idea:
- Use diamond for the semiconducting material (because it conducts heat VERY well).
- Grow a LARGE sheet of it, writing the domain doping and interconnects with ion beams as you go.
- TEST the components as you go:
- Negative power lead is a slow (low accelleration voltage) electron beam.
- Positive power lead is a fast (high accelleration voltage beam) electron beam, causing secondary emission of more electrons than are in the beam.
- Test injection probes are smaller versions of the power leads.
- Test probe is a very slow electron beam, where the electrons turn around at the surface, and a positively-charged region will suck 'em to the chip. (These are all variants of electron microscope imaging hacks that were in use as far back as the 70s.)
- If a component fails, turn up the current, vaporize it, and deposit it again. Repeat until you have a good one.
- When you're done with the layer, don't stop. Deposit another layer, and another,... Keep this up until you are done. Laying out your gates for minimum signal run length means you end up with a cube, or something close to it.
- Apply power to two opposite faces of the cube. Use bus bars the size of the cube face - at least near the contact point - to minimize IR drop. Use a good conductor, like copper or silver.
- You need a LOT of cooling. So circulate cooling liquid in the buss bars. (Copper and silver are also good heat conductors, and water is a terrific heat carrier.)
- The other four faces are for I/O. Use semiconductor lasers, photodiodes, and fiber optics light-pipes. You can COVER the faces with fibers. Put your drive electronics and SerDeses in the layer just under the pipes - or dope the index of refraction of the diamond to make a light-pipe into the depths and distribute them throughout the volume.
- Diamond is stable up to very high temperatures, but you need to protect it from air when it gets hot (or it will burn). So put it in a bottle with an inert gas just in case. Limitiing temperature structurally is about where it starts going over into graphite, so you can let it get up to a dull red glow (if your I/O is at some bluer color and that temperature doesn't create too much thermal noise).
- How big can you get? Square-cube law limits your I/O-to-computation ratio, since the I/O is on four faces that go with the square of the linear dimension, the computation goes (approximately) with the volume, or the cube of the dimension. The cooling-to-gate ratio suffers a similar square-cube issue (plus a linear penalty for power losses from the internal distribution busses). You also have an interconnect penalty - as you get bigger you have to give a higher fraction of your volume to power and signal lines (or signal repeaters), but this actually improves the square-cube problems. Finally, construction time is about proportional to number of computational elements. So let's pull a number out of nowhere and say two meters on a side.
Of course the punch line is what the device would look like:
- A six-foot cube of diamond.
- Glowing cherry red.
- In a glass bottle of inert gas.
- Supported by water-cooled silver bus bars.
- And connected to everything else by an enormous number of glass fiber light-pipes.
In other words, the kind of thing you'd expect to be the ship's brain in a late model Sklyark spacecraft, from one of George O. Smith's golden-age science fiction novels. B-)
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This rap was always entertainment rather than a serious proposal, and is no doubt buggy. For instance: I hear doping diamond is a bit problematic. And these days I'd suggest doing chip-under-construction powering and testing using physical contacts and JTAG fullscan or a variant of the CrossCheck array, rather than (or to suplement) the electron beams.
But I hope the point is made that, for parallizable tasks at least, we still have a LONG way to go with improved geometry before we finally hit the wall.
... if the cable modem/DSL providers... [built] secure WiFi routers into all of their cable modems, and offer[ed] wireless access anywhere within their service area.
GREAT idea!
It would also serve as a firewalled wireless hub for the home network, with no additional hardware.
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Of course that's almost exactly what the volunteers are putting together at this very moment, but without requiring passing users to be subscribers (much to the consternation of the ISPs). B-)
I can imagine a similar volunteer-based system, where a cheap home hub comes stock with a firewall and a traffic shaper, so the owner's machines get their fill and passers-by can use the remainder. Plug it into the DSL or Cable modem, SHTTP to its configuration page and tell it which machines are yours, and you're up.
Isn't the range on ethernet only a couple hundred feet?
The later variants of ethernet (including gigabit and WiFi) have hacks to expand the range (which was limited in the 10 and 100 Mbit versions by an interaction of packet size, inter-packet gap, and clocking variations).
As for WiFi's radio range (due to power and antenna limits), you can easily get >10 miles in a point-to-point link by using a directional antenna at one or both ends.
This is not STRICTLY legal, because the directional antenna concentrates the power in a tight beam, which is thus more intense, and one of the limits is on the intensity (rather than the overall power). The focussed beam can thus interfere with other stations farther away in the preferred direction.
But the Fed has shown no sign of trying to actually enforce that limit - despite the appearance of commercial operations selling equipment for the purpose and/or setting up commercial ISPs with links based on the hack.
And it's probably appropriate to allow it: While the directional antenna lets you compete with stations farther away in the preferred direction, it does so by weakening your signal (and your reception) in other directions. The two effects approximately balance out, and you're left making significant bandwidth competition in about the same area with a directional antenna as with an omnidirectional.
Even better: Directional antennas tend to be more heavily used in the boonies, where the spaces-between tend to be empty of users, and where wired ISPs are too expensive to be practical.
The internet would have grow 10x per year if end users can get 10Mbits up and down for $20 a month. Just think what people will do if they can download and upload at 10Mbits
The current bandwith and price actually slow down the economy and telecom
Quite. And that's what we call the "last mile" problem.
Running a bundle of fibers thousands of miles across forests, streams, deserts, and mountains is expensive.
But running A HUNDRED MILLION fibers, coaxes, or high-quality twisted pair bundles a hundred to two thousand feet, through some of the most expensive and built up real-estate in the world, to a hundred million separate endpoints, costs an ASTRONOMICAL amount of money. And then you have to undersell a competitor who ALREADY HAS a copper pair or coax INSTALLED to most of homes in question. That's copper that was already paid for, back when he was running a regulated monopoly (or bought the bankrupt cable company).
The backbones were built at least partly on the assumption that the a cheap last-mile broadband connection would be available. It seemed reasonable at the time: DSL and digital cable were already working. Local phone service was being deregulated and competition was expected. Killer apps were already being developed that would result in mass demand for broadband: Digital broadcasting, digital audio and video content distribution, audio- and video-on-demand (central archive "movie rental", "jukebox", and time-shifted broadcasts), internet telephony.
But the regulatory regime created an incentive structure that broke it all:
1) The ILECs (Incumbent Local {phone} Exchange Carriers) were simultaneously allowed to provide DSL and required to lease cheap copper to their own competition (both DSL and phone) at price-capped levels.
2) The cable companies ended up in the hands of a couple media conglomerates.
3) Copyright was expanded.
1) is why DSL is nearly a phone-company monopoly, with monopoly-style service and prices.
The ILECs had, decades ago, installed copper to service the number of phones they expected to be installed - assuming the pair would be used for phones and they would remain a monopoly carrier. The copper wasn't all suitable for even 1Mbps downstream ADSL, while the stocks were already running low (with everybody installing extra phones for modems, FAX machines, and the teenage kids...) even before they had to rent 'em to the competition at below replacement cost.
So as the good pairs ran out, guess whether the ILEC would rent the remainder to a CLEC or give it to one of its own DSL customers. And if they have to install new ones and are required to rent them to their own competition at less than cost (making up the difference from their own customers' bills), of COURSE they won't install any more.
So DSL is pretty much stuck with the existing pairs until the rules change. The ILECs get the good pairs while the CLECs get maintainence trouble (including "disappearing pairs" when an ILEC installer steals one for a new ILEC customer - then the ILEC repairman steals a DIFFERENT one to complete the repair call on the first, and loop forever). Thus almost all the CLECs are dead (a notable exception is Covad, which renegotiated its debt and is still limping along), leaving the old "phone company" ILECs running the DSL show.
And the ILECs really didn't want to sell DSL in the first place. It was a low-profit service they had to offer as part of a deregulation deal, in order to be allowed back into the long-distance business. At the time long-distance was where the money was.
But then several competing long-haul fiber carriers finished their networks and started competing for the same customers - leading to a price war that sucked all the profit out of long distance, killed off many of the new upstarts (who didn't get the revenue to pay off their investors), and crashed the telecom equipment market. (This is the "telecom crash".) Meanwhile, el-cheapo carriers started selling compressed packet phone service, over either their own fat pipes or the internet, and the price tanked even worse.
So the ILECs aren't getting the long-distance profits that were supposed to pay for the DSL rollout. And once you've got your DSL line, maybe you'll use internet phone calls to cut your regional long-distance bill. And if they ever DO put in more copper they have to rent it to their competitors at a loss. Is it any wonder they're in no hurry to get you a DSL line?
2) Cable is a cute system when you only have a few customers. You can serve them cheaply from the head-end. But the bandwidth is shared. Add more customers, the quality of service for each drops. (And one customer who actually USES the bandwidth he bought can wreck it for everybody else on his branch.)
You can fix it, at least somewhat, by splitting up the big tree into a bunch of branches, running fiber to the cutpoints, and treating each branch as a separate tree for the digital service. (Like putting in more, smaller, cells in a cellphone network.) And you can deal with the "power users" by throttling the users (if you can get away with such consumer fraud), then moving the hogs to a different channel (with better QOS and a higher price). And you can sick the FBI onto the uncappers...
Fiber to the splitter and cable to the home is a nice compromise. (Like "fiber to the curb" and copper to the home for longer-range or higher speed DSL.) But it's a lot more expensive than the original almost-free-money service they had been counting on.
Meanwhile, they're MEDIA conglomerates. They're REALLY in this business to sell you network TV, cable premium channels, and pay-per-view, then turn around and sell your "eyeball time" to the advertisers. The LAST thing they want is for you to shift those eyeballs to a broadcast medium they DON'T control, which doesn't pay them as much as your current viewing habits, and which might be selling the very product they created without paying them their fees.
So they have little incentive to provide cheap broadband. They only have to do better than the ILEC's DSL operation to make SOME money. But why push hard on a service that may end up costing them more money than it generates - either in problem-solving buildouts or loss of revenue elsewhere in the empire?
3) Meanwhile, the content providers are in a panic. They have the idea that digital distribution means perfect cheap copies, and to them that means piracy. So they don't want their stuff available digitally AT ALL unless they have a stranglehold on it. Thus they're not interested in rolling out a digital distribution network of their own.
They're also parts of the media conglomerates, who get major bux from broadcast outlets. Broadcast media has THE highest return-on-investment of ANY industry. The LAST thing they want (as a media conglomerate) is competition from low-budget upstarts enabled by the new technology.
With the Napster case and DMCA and CARP and the like, they've put the spike in both pirate and legal internet content distribution that's outside their control. And they have no incentive to roll out their own operations.
So the content-distribution bandwidth demand didn't happen. The internet has degenerated into the equivalent of commercial catalogs, billboards, and bulk mail, and while nerds may still want it, joe-middle-america is NOT chomping at the bit for bandwidth and waving money at the first guy to provide it.
Without demand for the last mile you don't get the cycle of expansion of supply, economy of scale, competition, and price drops. And the last mile remains a bottleneck.
For the big cities and towns, is there any reason not to pull fiber through the sewer system?
They're doing it even as we post. The fibers themselves are perfectly happy to run through sewers. (Splices, and the people who make them, are a bit more problematic.)
Of course you'd PREFER to run it thorugh a conduit where you don't have to be hip-deep in running shit to work on it.
And most homeowners would PREFER to have somebody string his fiber-to-the-home in a new conduit-to-the-curbside-box or down from a pole and through the wall than up the 30-years-of-shit sewer pipe and out a floor drain...
But it can be done. And it may be desirable if the price is right.
This article is just a reminder of how wasteful people were back in the DOT COM boom days. I'm sure that stories like these can be run in many major US cities.
Actually, this article is just another case of the media being sensationalist while either completely misunderstanding the situation or deliberately misconstruing it to hammer it into the current propaganda "template".
Virtually all of the fiber is SUPPOSED to be dark at this point. It's a side-effect of minimizing cost. Consider:
If you're going to do, say, a national fiber backbone network, you have to run a fiber loop around THE WHOLE COUNTRY, plus runs back-and-forth to hit all the major non-edge cities. As you go you lay conduit in the trench, pull fiber through the conduit, and splice it.
The cost of the fiber is NOTHING compared to the cost of the trench. You can put a WHOLE BUNCH of fibers in a single jacket, so the cost of the pull is the same. The cost of the splices is non-trivial and part of it is per-fiber-spliced, but it's STILL tiny compared to the trench.
So, how many fibers are you going to pull and splice?
It takes two fibers to make a section of the link, one for signals each way. That pair of fibers can carry (at the current top-of-the-line rate) about ten billion bits per second. That's 129,024 simultaneous uncompressed phone calls, or over a gigabyte/second of data traffic.
Now suppose you were only planning ahead for a couple years, and figured one pair would be enough. So you only buried one pair. And you got enough customers signed up IN ADVANCE to just about fill it. And you went to hook it up and found that somewhere between SF and LA there was a break. Are you going to dig up a third of the west coast again to fix the break? Of COURSE not! You're going to bury EXTRA FIBERS in the first place, and use a spare fiber. But suppose you have only one spare pair and your main fiber is full - that's 50% dark fiber! CNN Headline News screams "Half the fibers in the country are dark! Oh, the waste! Oh the horror!"
But do you, as the visionary building a network, think that the traffic is NOT going to increase in the future? If it doubles next year, do you want to light up another fiber? Or DIG ANOTHER TRENCH?
So of COURSE you spend a few extra percent up front. You bury a BIG BUNDLE of fibers. (You also bury a few extra conduits, so you can pull more, or rent-or-sell one to some OTHER networking upstart who wants to pull his own fiber, once you're safely established.)
So you're going to have a bunch of extra fibers. But how many do you light up? Answer: As few as possible. The boxes to light them up are NOT cheap. (Repeaters aren't muchFigure 1/8 million for a minimal TDM only box, over a meg for for a fully-loaded router.) But (unlike digging trenches) they are subject to Moore's Law improvements. Wait 18 months and your suppliers can get you twice the bits for the buck. So you buy expandable boxes (again to save costs later) but leave most of the slots empty.
And now you have most of the fibers dark, until the traffic expands enough for you to buy more cards and shove 'em into the boxes to light up the rest of the fibers.
So you have MOST of your fibers dark. And even reserving a few for spares you can light up most of 'em with paying traffic. But HOW MANY should you have?
The common wisdom at the time was that the Internet bandwidth needs were growing by a factor of 10 per year, and would continue that way for a while. If you have 95% dark fiber now, (and the bright fiber is at capacity), in one year you'd have half of it lit, and in another three months you'd hit the wall, and be frantically throttling links, upspeeding them with new technology, and getting out the cable-pullers and trenchers again. The bandwidth glut becomes a bandwidth crunch.
Turns out 10x/year was a myth, based on the explosive growth for the first couple years after the Internet was opened up to general users. The actual number is closer to 2x - which means today's 95% dark fiber means we don't have to get out the pullers and trenchers for a bit over a decade - and maybe longer if we go to higher speed over existing fibers.
Same situation in the metro networks - except that you're talking about digging up ALL THE STREETS OF ALL THE CITIES, TOWNS, AND VILLAGES. Then doing it again in a few years if you didn't lay enough up front.
It just makes you think.... How much stuff is out there that is just undocumented? How much wasted technology is out there that will never be found.
This is well known in the industry. It's just that the media are clueless.
I've been looking hard for evidence of this statistic in my home town of about 100,000 for well over a year. In that time only two reports of defensive brandishing made the papers.
Unfortunately, papers are NOT an unbiased sample. You have both political agendas biasing reportage (sometimes up front and open - like TimeLife's editorial policy that the time for reportage is over and the time for advocacy is at hand) and the "dog bites man is not news, man bites dog IS news" phenomenon.
Additionally, even if the newspaper reports it all, a successful self-defense-with-gun usually will not even make the police blotter. Typical scenario (in the 90% range if I recall correctly) is:
- Crook threatens citizen.
- Citizen pulls gun.
- Crook runs away.
- Citizen can now:
a) Report the incident (and probably make trouble for himself)
b) Go on his way.
and typically choses b).
That is why there was so much confusion about the number of self-defenses-with-gun - until researchers (starting with Kleck) actually started ASKING people whether they'd ever defended themselves, got a big surprise, and did additional careful research to confirm the findings (including work that DIDN'T involve just asking).
Interestingly, if you compare shootings by US civilian and police, you'll find that the civilians are MUCH less likely to shoot somebody they shouldn't - by a factor of more than five.
That stat actually refers to shootings where the shooter believed he was legally entitled to shoot. (My post may have made it sould like it included crooks shooting victims.)
[guns carried by police] are considered a "last resort" the idea is that if all other means fail than they can be used.
Same here in the US - both for police and for citizens.
In most states you can only shoot at the bad guy when your life is in immediate threat. (In a few places you can still shoot to stop him from running off with your stuff or to stop an attack on SOMEONE else. On the other hand, in some you must retreat unless you're unable to do so - even in your own home.) And while the rules are sometimes a little different for the police than for the citizens, the basic idea is usually the same.
Interestingly, if you compare shootings by US civilian and police, you'll find that the civilians are MUCH less likely to shoot somebody they shouldn't - by a factor of more than five. This despite the fact that civilians shoot more crooks than cops, by a factor of more than two.
(Which is not to say that US cops are incompetent trigger-happy bunglers. Police arrive on the scene of the dispute and have to figure out which of the combatants is the crook and which the victim, while the citizen under attack already knows. And citizens, once they've pulled the gun and stopped the attack, can (usually must) retreat when police are supposed to advance, subdue, and arrest.)
... the reactor was built *in* Mathews House, under the bed of one of the builders...... the reactor was *not* dismantled... Fred found it in the back of his truck, still running, a few months later.
Their original material was thorium, from the inside of some old vacuum tubes (although their first plan involved americium from ordinary hardware-store smoke detectors).
I take it the "breeder reactor" was a "reactor" in terms of producing a slow-but-nontrivial nuclear reaction, perhaps a series of decaying chains when excited by ambient neutrons, rather than the usual meaning of "producing a long-term self-sustaining chain reaction"
Communists (Soviets and their fellow travellers worldwide, especially Comintern) used "Fascist" as a broad brush with which to stain any rightist opponents, from actual Fascists (Nazis, Falangists, etc.) to moderates.
Much as members of the western left wing do, even today.
It's particularly ludicrous given that the real NAZIs were self-proclaimed "national socialists". (But it's normal, since the worst fights are typically between different sects of the same ideology.)
Note that "national socialism" wasn't a propaganda distortion like "democratic republic" (which itself would be redundant). Look into the origins of NAZIism and you'll find something eerily similar to the new-age left, right down to natural foods/health fads/vegitarianism, consensus decision-making, green-style environmentalism, animal rights, mysticism (including "crystals"), and so on.
These weren't just extraneous factors, either, but led, by easy steps, to some of the well-known pathologies of the NAZIs. For instance:
Consensus politics (decision-making by near-unanimous consent of the group) led to dictatorship:
The group doesn't do anything as a group except when everybody is onboard. This leads to paralysis if anybody disagrees. So social pressure mechanisms are developed to encourage individuals to consent to, or even support, group activities perceived as popular despite personal reservations.
Once mechanisms to force consensus are in place, a well-perceived and glib "leader" can get his whole group to actively engage in (or avoid) anything he wants, by describing it as good, right, and popular, (or bad/wrong/unpopular) and refusing to consent to any other choice.
(Note that, unlike the strident demagogue of WW II Allied propaganda films, Hitler was perceived, in pre-war Germany, as quite the popular cuddly-bear. As a result, as with Clinton, his followers were willing to ignore, or disbelieve claims of, even blatant misbehavior in either his public actions and policies or persoanl life.)
Add control of the media or support from its decision-makers: Now contrasting views aren't heard (or are smeared when they can't be completely suppressed). This strengthens the perception of consensus - especially among the lawmakers (who are largely cut off from their actual constituents and tend to give excessive weight toe news stories).
Thus the popular, glib, "leader" ends up completely running the show. Once in charge he consolidates by changing the institutions so they answer directly to him and actively suppress his opposition.
Animal rights lead to medical experiments on humans in death camps:
First: Animal research is suppressed.
Second: Medical research is done on retarded humans. The taboo is broken and a precedent established that "subhuman" people are less important that animals and fair game for medical research.
Third: Various outgroups - typically those with a cohesive culture of their own that insulates them from consensus-forcing - are defined as "subhuman". Examples: Homosexuals, Pagans, Labor-unionists, Gypsies, Jews, Communists (and other socialists with a different agenda).
Fourth: The "subhuman" "problems" are excluded from society and their opinions suppressed. Progressively more draconian measures are applied to "solve" the "problem" of their presence.
Fifth: Medical research is done on these allegedly "subhuman" out-group members.
And so on.
For a month of sleepless nights try reading _The Occult Roots of NAZIism_ and _The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich_ in rapid succession. B-(
what are the conciquences of having all these waves being beamed and bounced around the world? Radar.. Radio.. TV.. Microwaves.. Cell Phones.. Wireless Internet.. and God knows what the military is REALLY using up in alaska [fas.org].. ect.. ect.. ect.
With respect to the tinfoil hat, read up on:
- the inverse square law (i.e. they're REAL weak except right near the transmitter - why don't cell phones run the antenna out the BOTTOM of the handset?) and
- the skin effect (high frequency stuff doesn't penetrate well into things that conduct {like skin}, due to canceling currents induced near the surface of the conductor).
Then consider that radio photons are individually too non-energetic to break a chemical bond - so you need to add 'em up to cause damage. That happens in three ways:
- Structures that are conductive (relative to their environment) and somewhere close to half the wavelength.
- Really strong fields (so the resistive heating adds up)
- Really REALLY strong fields (so the electric field from the coherent individual photons adds up to more than the ionization potential of the bond to be broken.
what are the long long term effects to the earth?
Probably about zilch. Strong audio-frequency voltages in the earth might make earthquakes happen a little earlier than without. Maybe a slight effect on weather if really strong microwaves drive the ionosphere non-linear (and cause all sorts of OTHER havoc to communication). A few insects have log-periodic structures that MIGHT be antennas, leading to speculation that they might directly sense extreme microwaves or near infrared as radio signals - so these bugs might get confused. Just about any other effect amounts to a microscopic increase in thermal pollution in whatever structure absorbs the signal.
If Ralsky's email address collection operation includes a bot that sucks down email address from web sites - and doesn't honor robots.txt file entries - the above posting will put Ralsky's lawyer on Ralsky's mailing lists. B-)
You're right, it is, and that's a protection that email should enjoy as well.
No, it should not.
Mail fraud is a federal offense because it misuses a FEDERAL SERVICE. That gives the government a nexus to come down on it in a draconian fashion - and also to come down on OTHER uses of the service, like for speech the government doesn't like (i.e. porn). Try to protect email as MAIL and you let the federal censorship camel's nose into the tent.
The way email SHOULD be protected is the same way your fax machine is protected against unsolicted faxes.
The cases are virtually identical: The email and fax spammers both misuse a private interstate communication network to consume your resources (connect time, machine time, fax paper/disk space, eyeball time, etc.) without your permission, reducing its utility and sometimes delaying or causing the loss of other, solicted messages.
This man suffers from a common human ailment. He does not have the ability to see what he does as wrong. Everyone else is a rube for him to exploit. He (in his own mind) can do whatever he wants, but if someone dares try the same stunt on him, they're going DOWN.
It's called a Dogbert [dilbert.com] complex.
Actually, at least according to one of the experts on the subject, if it's inborn it's called "psychopathy" and if it's learned it's called "sociopathy". (Operationally the two are indistinguishable, and other experts use them interchangably or make slightly different distinctions.)
Approximately 1 in 100 (1 in 50 to 1 in 200) are psychopaths - though some of 'em compensate by learning a moral code by rote. Others go on to be crooks, used car salesmen, spammers, crackers, and politicians. B-)
Slashdot Mirror
He wants to study computer engineering in Harvard University [...]
Of COURSE he wants to go to Harvard. And he ought to fit in just fine.
He hasn't proved that he did a prdigious feat of programming. But he HAS proved that he can get the media to print a piece of preposterous hype as straight news.
Perfect for a CEO with a Harvard MBA.
[...] and eventually set up his own Internet or computer company.
See?
David, that's an excelent post. You got all the points I wanted to make.
But I'll chime in anyway, with a real-world example that's a little closer to home for some of the Slashdot readers.
Change the question to:
Does the Computer Programming field need to be regulated?
A couple decades ago this question was being asked seriously. A private organization was set up to create a certification for computer programmers. The subtext appeared to be lobbying for laws banning programming for money by anyone who didn't have one of their certifications. Think of an "American Bar Association" for programmers. (I thought the original certification was called the Certified Data Professional or CDP, but see below.)
Of course the certification required extensive knowlege of the languages of the time. Such languages as Cobol and JCL.
This would be convenient for someone in a large corporation's personnel department when hiring for the accounting departments IT operation. (Except when setting salary, of course, since the shortage of "qualified" programmers would drive up the price.)
But can you IMAGINE what effect such a law would have had on the computing revolution?
Would there even BE a Unix, an Apple OS, a Linux, a gnu project, emacs, gcc, Perl, Bison, Java, C++, etc. if everyone had to learn Cobol and enough other stuff to do accounting apps, and get a cert, before they could be paid to hack in C or sell any software they'd written?
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Interestingly, what appears to be the same organization is still around, as a private-enterprise certification vendor. The web site says its current offering is "Certified Computing Professional" (CCP), and that it still maintains earlier certifications called "Certified Data Processor" (CDP), "Certified Systems Professional" (CSP) and "Certified Computer Programmer" (another CCP).
They're a decidedly technophobic bunch. You'd be surprised to see how many agencies in sizable cities still do their dispatching via cue cards and a bulletin board.
Cue cards and bulletin boards never crash.
(Well, maybe in a 7.1 earthquake. But one guy on each end can reboot a bulletin board in a couple seconds.)
What you need to do is put the electronic version online before or concurrently with the print version. See [several examples]
I like this scheme - for a while, as an experiment. Just think...
If you see a sudden jump in sales of the hardcopy book when the e-version comes out, it immediately discredits the theory that free softcopies (or even so-called "piracy") REDUCE the total sales of the hardcopy version by replacing more hardcopy sales than they generate.
So if we and Jim Baen are right, that free softcopy availablity INCREASES hardcopy sales, Bruce and Prentice Hall are doing us all a GREAT service by foregoing a little profit to prove it.
I pulled a similar stunt over a decade ago.
Had an Altos 68000 Unix box. Made a very good space heater. Heat came out a 4" exhaust fan in the back.
So I got a couple drier vents, which use a 4" hose. Mounted one on a board that replaced a window, cut the other down to make a fan-to-hose adapter. Really cooled the room down.
Got one of those drier-heat-saver valves to switch it to exhausting into the room during the winter, too. B-)
I should think hearing voices would be the least of her problems. Wouldn't it get a little warm in there?
We're talking roughly the amount of power emitted by an 802.11 card, coming from an antenna miles away, not sitting next to a major radar antenna (or inside a microwave oven).
Does your lap get hot when you're Wi-Fiing on your laptop? Maybe you need an aluminum foil jockstrap. B-)
The oldest microwave-mind-control-ish item I recall is an original series twilight-zone episode.
Young lady (heiress?) living in a penthouse appartment is hearing voices. About to be dumped into the loony-bin - involuntarily. Turns out her penthouse apt is on the path of a new phone-company or something microwave link and she's picking up the traffic. A little shielding saves the day.
Interestingly, this sort of thing would be entirely plausible with a non-multiplexed AM link. Something similar once happened quite a lot (and may still happen): A bit of corrosion on defective metal dental work will sometimes demodulate broadcast AM signals and pass enough of the current through the auditory nerve to stimulate it (or otherwise couple it to the hearing system somehow). Result: an untuned crystal set. In an area with a single strong AM station - hearing the program material (or at least the lower-frequency portions of it, which is good enough to recognize voices). In an area with multiple strong AM stations, a cacophony - like being in a crowd with everybody talking (or playing a transistor radio tuned to a different station) at once.
And, yes, sometimes people with such a problem end up under medical supervision for paranoia, rather than (or until) having their dental work fixed.
While there may have been a few one-channel AM microwave links in the early days, things quickly evolved. Phone company links were digital and multiplexed by the '60s (and I'm not sure they were EVER unmultiplexed AM), and studio-to-transmitter links were FM ditto.
I have often wondered how much of the tinfoil-hat mind-control mythos got started by the broadcast of that Twilight Zone episode. (See! The media ARE controlling people's minds with hidden broadcast signals...)
Have you ever tried to remove someone from a tree? As the older brother of five avid tree-climbers, let me assure you that it is QUITE difficult. Especially when they don't want to co-operate with the removal.
If someone opposed to the tree sitters were to girdle any tree with a tree-sitter in it, or drive a few copper nails into it, the tree dies.
Establish the precedent that sitting in a tree guarantees its death (while the ones around it are logged anyhow) and it makes the exercise counter-productive: If you negotiate, you MIGHT save it. If you sit in it, it dies.
I'm not advocating the strategy. But I notice that it has already been done to at least one famous old tree that someone sat in for years to save. (I believe it happened after the people who owned the tree agreed to let it live, too.) So I wonder if someone may already be using this approach.
For myself, I prefer tree sitters to tree spikers. The former just cause an island of obstruction (while keeping themselves out of other mischef for months). The latter plant boobytraps that maim and kill rank-and-file lumber workers. (Seems to fit the definition of "terrorist".)
Does anyone know if the Justice Department has already started anti-terrorist prosecutions against a tree-spiking environmental group and/or its contributors?
B-)
Eventually you will reach a limit on the size of the individual swtiches. The one the article gripes about appears to be the sloppy wave function of the electrons letting them tunnel across the junction. But matter is lumpy (quantized) and eventually you'll hit a just-a-few-atoms wall.
... Keep this up until you are done. Laying out your gates for minimum signal run length means you end up with a cube, or something close to it.
But there's more that can be done - in terms of geometry and organization.
Current chips are a single two-dimensional array of components (or sometimes a small number of layers). But build your gates and interconnects in 3-D and you can go farther on two fronts:
- Speeding up the individual functions a bit further. (The more complex, the more improvement).
- Combining a LARGE nubmer of parallel elements into a small space (so they can talk to each other quickly).
Back in the '70s I had a rap I'd do called "preposterous scale integration". Basic idea:
- Use diamond for the semiconducting material (because it conducts heat VERY well).
- Grow a LARGE sheet of it, writing the domain doping and interconnects with ion beams as you go.
- TEST the components as you go:
- Negative power lead is a slow (low accelleration voltage) electron beam.
- Positive power lead is a fast (high accelleration voltage beam) electron beam, causing secondary emission of more electrons than are in the beam.
- Test injection probes are smaller versions of the power leads.
- Test probe is a very slow electron beam, where the electrons turn around at the surface, and a positively-charged region will suck 'em to the chip.
(These are all variants of electron microscope imaging hacks that were in use as far back as the 70s.)
- If a component fails, turn up the current, vaporize it, and deposit it again. Repeat until you have a good one.
- When you're done with the layer, don't stop. Deposit another layer, and another,
- Apply power to two opposite faces of the cube. Use bus bars the size of the cube face - at least near the contact point - to minimize IR drop. Use a good conductor, like copper or silver.
- You need a LOT of cooling. So circulate cooling liquid in the buss bars. (Copper and silver are also good heat conductors, and water is a terrific heat carrier.)
- The other four faces are for I/O. Use semiconductor lasers, photodiodes, and fiber optics light-pipes. You can COVER the faces with fibers. Put your drive electronics and SerDeses in the layer just under the pipes - or dope the index of refraction of the diamond to make a light-pipe into the depths and distribute them throughout the volume.
- Diamond is stable up to very high temperatures, but you need to protect it from air when it gets hot (or it will burn). So put it in a bottle with an inert gas just in case. Limitiing temperature structurally is about where it starts going over into graphite, so you can let it get up to a dull red glow (if your I/O is at some bluer color and that temperature doesn't create too much thermal noise).
- How big can you get? Square-cube law limits your I/O-to-computation ratio, since the I/O is on four faces that go with the square of the linear dimension, the computation goes (approximately) with the volume, or the cube of the dimension. The cooling-to-gate ratio suffers a similar square-cube issue (plus a linear penalty for power losses from the internal distribution busses). You also have an interconnect penalty - as you get bigger you have to give a higher fraction of your volume to power and signal lines (or signal repeaters), but this actually improves the square-cube problems. Finally, construction time is about proportional to number of computational elements. So let's pull a number out of nowhere and say two meters on a side.
Of course the punch line is what the device would look like:
- A six-foot cube of diamond.
- Glowing cherry red.
- In a glass bottle of inert gas.
- Supported by water-cooled silver bus bars.
- And connected to everything else by an enormous number of glass fiber light-pipes.
In other words, the kind of thing you'd expect to be the ship's brain in a late model Sklyark spacecraft, from one of George O. Smith's golden-age science fiction novels. B-)
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This rap was always entertainment rather than a serious proposal, and is no doubt buggy. For instance: I hear doping diamond is a bit problematic. And these days I'd suggest doing chip-under-construction powering and testing using physical contacts and JTAG fullscan or a variant of the CrossCheck array, rather than (or to suplement) the electron beams.
But I hope the point is made that, for parallizable tasks at least, we still have a LONG way to go with improved geometry before we finally hit the wall.
... if the cable modem/DSL providers ... [built] secure WiFi routers into all of their cable modems, and offer[ed] wireless access anywhere within their service area.
GREAT idea!
It would also serve as a firewalled wireless hub for the home network, with no additional hardware.
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Of course that's almost exactly what the volunteers are putting together at this very moment, but without requiring passing users to be subscribers (much to the consternation of the ISPs). B-)
I can imagine a similar volunteer-based system, where a cheap home hub comes stock with a firewall and a traffic shaper, so the owner's machines get their fill and passers-by can use the remainder. Plug it into the DSL or Cable modem, SHTTP to its configuration page and tell it which machines are yours, and you're up.
Isn't the range on ethernet only a couple hundred feet?
The later variants of ethernet (including gigabit and WiFi) have hacks to expand the range (which was limited in the 10 and 100 Mbit versions by an interaction of packet size, inter-packet gap, and clocking variations).
As for WiFi's radio range (due to power and antenna limits), you can easily get >10 miles in a point-to-point link by using a directional antenna at one or both ends.
This is not STRICTLY legal, because the directional antenna concentrates the power in a tight beam, which is thus more intense, and one of the limits is on the intensity (rather than the overall power). The focussed beam can thus interfere with other stations farther away in the preferred direction.
But the Fed has shown no sign of trying to actually enforce that limit - despite the appearance of commercial operations selling equipment for the purpose and/or setting up commercial ISPs with links based on the hack.
And it's probably appropriate to allow it: While the directional antenna lets you compete with stations farther away in the preferred direction, it does so by weakening your signal (and your reception) in other directions. The two effects approximately balance out, and you're left making significant bandwidth competition in about the same area with a directional antenna as with an omnidirectional.
Even better: Directional antennas tend to be more heavily used in the boonies, where the spaces-between tend to be empty of users, and where wired ISPs are too expensive to be practical.
The internet would have grow 10x per year if end users can get 10Mbits up and down for $20 a month. Just think what people will do if they can download and upload at 10Mbits
The current bandwith and price actually slow down the economy and telecom
Quite. And that's what we call the "last mile" problem.
Running a bundle of fibers thousands of miles across forests, streams, deserts, and mountains is expensive.
But running A HUNDRED MILLION fibers, coaxes, or high-quality twisted pair bundles a hundred to two thousand feet, through some of the most expensive and built up real-estate in the world, to a hundred million separate endpoints, costs an ASTRONOMICAL amount of money. And then you have to undersell a competitor who ALREADY HAS a copper pair or coax INSTALLED to most of homes in question. That's copper that was already paid for, back when he was running a regulated monopoly (or bought the bankrupt cable company).
The backbones were built at least partly on the assumption that the a cheap last-mile broadband connection would be available. It seemed reasonable at the time: DSL and digital cable were already working. Local phone service was being deregulated and competition was expected. Killer apps were already being developed that would result in mass demand for broadband: Digital broadcasting, digital audio and video content distribution, audio- and video-on-demand (central archive "movie rental", "jukebox", and time-shifted broadcasts), internet telephony.
But the regulatory regime created an incentive structure that broke it all:
1) The ILECs (Incumbent Local {phone} Exchange Carriers) were simultaneously allowed to provide DSL and required to lease cheap copper to their own competition (both DSL and phone) at price-capped levels.
2) The cable companies ended up in the hands of a couple media conglomerates.
3) Copyright was expanded.
1) is why DSL is nearly a phone-company monopoly, with monopoly-style service and prices.
The ILECs had, decades ago, installed copper to service the number of phones they expected to be installed - assuming the pair would be used for phones and they would remain a monopoly carrier. The copper wasn't all suitable for even 1Mbps downstream ADSL, while the stocks were already running low (with everybody installing extra phones for modems, FAX machines, and the teenage kids...) even before they had to rent 'em to the competition at below replacement cost.
So as the good pairs ran out, guess whether the ILEC would rent the remainder to a CLEC or give it to one of its own DSL customers. And if they have
to install new ones and are required to rent them to their own competition at less than cost (making up the difference from their own customers' bills), of COURSE they won't install any more.
So DSL is pretty much stuck with the existing pairs until the rules change. The ILECs get the good pairs while the CLECs get maintainence trouble (including "disappearing pairs" when an ILEC installer steals one for a new ILEC customer - then the ILEC repairman steals a DIFFERENT one to complete the repair call on the first, and loop forever). Thus almost all the CLECs are dead (a notable exception is Covad, which renegotiated its debt and is still limping along), leaving the old "phone company" ILECs running the DSL show.
And the ILECs really didn't want to sell DSL in the first place. It was a low-profit service they had to offer as part of a deregulation deal, in order to be allowed back into the long-distance business. At the time long-distance was where the money was.
But then several competing long-haul fiber carriers finished their networks and started competing for the same customers - leading to a price war that sucked all the profit out of long distance, killed off many of the new upstarts (who didn't get the revenue to pay off their investors), and crashed the telecom equipment market. (This is the "telecom crash".) Meanwhile, el-cheapo carriers started selling compressed packet phone service, over either their own fat pipes or the internet, and the price tanked even worse.
So the ILECs aren't getting the long-distance profits that were supposed to pay for the DSL rollout. And once you've got your DSL line, maybe you'll use internet phone calls to cut your regional long-distance bill. And if they ever DO put in more copper they have to rent it to their competitors at a loss. Is it any wonder they're in no hurry to get you a DSL line?
2) Cable is a cute system when you only have a few customers. You can serve them cheaply from the head-end. But the bandwidth is shared. Add more customers, the quality of service for each drops. (And one customer who actually USES the bandwidth he bought can wreck it for everybody else on his branch.)
You can fix it, at least somewhat, by splitting up the big tree into a bunch of branches, running fiber to the cutpoints, and treating each branch as a separate tree for the digital service. (Like putting in more, smaller, cells in a cellphone network.) And you can deal with the "power users" by throttling the users (if you can get away with such consumer fraud), then moving the hogs to a different channel (with better QOS and a higher price). And you can sick the FBI onto the uncappers...
Fiber to the splitter and cable to the home is a nice compromise. (Like "fiber to the curb" and copper to the home for longer-range or higher speed DSL.) But it's a lot more expensive than the original almost-free-money service they had been counting on.
Meanwhile, they're MEDIA conglomerates. They're REALLY in this business to sell you network TV, cable premium channels, and pay-per-view, then turn around and sell your "eyeball time" to the advertisers. The LAST thing they want is for you to shift those eyeballs to a broadcast medium they DON'T control, which doesn't pay them as much as your current viewing habits, and which might be selling the very product they created without paying them their fees.
So they have little incentive to provide cheap broadband. They only have to do better than the ILEC's DSL operation to make SOME money. But why push hard on a service that may end up costing them more money than it generates - either in problem-solving buildouts or loss of revenue elsewhere in the empire?
3) Meanwhile, the content providers are in a panic. They have the idea that digital distribution means perfect cheap copies, and to them that means piracy. So they don't want their stuff available digitally AT ALL unless they have a stranglehold on it. Thus they're not interested in rolling out a digital distribution network of their own.
They're also parts of the media conglomerates, who get major bux from broadcast outlets. Broadcast media has THE highest return-on-investment of ANY industry. The LAST thing they want (as a media conglomerate) is competition from low-budget upstarts enabled by the new technology.
With the Napster case and DMCA and CARP and the like, they've put the spike in both pirate and legal internet content distribution that's outside their control. And they have no incentive to roll out their own operations.
So the content-distribution bandwidth demand didn't happen. The internet has degenerated into the equivalent of commercial catalogs, billboards, and bulk mail, and while nerds may still want it, joe-middle-america is NOT chomping at the bit for bandwidth and waving money at the first guy to provide it.
Without demand for the last mile you don't get the cycle of expansion of supply, economy of scale, competition, and price drops. And the last mile remains a bottleneck.
For the big cities and towns, is there any reason not to pull fiber through the sewer system?
They're doing it even as we post. The fibers themselves are perfectly happy to run through sewers. (Splices, and the people who make them, are a bit more problematic.)
Of course you'd PREFER to run it thorugh a conduit where you don't have to be hip-deep in running shit to work on it.
And most homeowners would PREFER to have somebody string his fiber-to-the-home in a new conduit-to-the-curbside-box or down from a pole and through the wall than up the 30-years-of-shit sewer pipe and out a floor drain...
But it can be done. And it may be desirable if the price is right.
This article is just a reminder of how wasteful people were back in the DOT COM boom days. I'm sure that stories like these can be run in many major US cities.
Actually, this article is just another case of the media being sensationalist while either completely misunderstanding the situation or deliberately misconstruing it to hammer it into the current propaganda "template".
Virtually all of the fiber is SUPPOSED to be dark at this point. It's a side-effect of minimizing cost. Consider:
If you're going to do, say, a national fiber backbone network, you have to run a fiber loop around THE WHOLE COUNTRY, plus runs back-and-forth to hit all the major non-edge cities. As you go you lay conduit in the trench, pull fiber through the conduit, and splice it.
The cost of the fiber is NOTHING compared to the cost of the trench. You can put a WHOLE BUNCH of fibers in a single jacket, so the cost of the pull is the same. The cost of the splices is non-trivial and part of it is per-fiber-spliced, but it's STILL tiny compared to the trench.
So, how many fibers are you going to pull and splice?
It takes two fibers to make a section of the link, one for signals each way. That pair of fibers can carry (at the current top-of-the-line rate) about ten billion bits per second. That's 129,024 simultaneous uncompressed phone calls, or over a gigabyte/second of data traffic.
Now suppose you were only planning ahead for a couple years, and figured one pair would be enough. So you only buried one pair. And you got enough customers signed up IN ADVANCE to just about fill it. And you went to hook it up and found that somewhere between SF and LA there was a break. Are you going to dig up a third of the west coast again to fix the break? Of COURSE not! You're going to bury EXTRA FIBERS in the first place, and use a spare fiber. But suppose you have only one spare pair and your main fiber is full - that's 50% dark fiber! CNN Headline News screams "Half the fibers in the country are dark! Oh, the waste! Oh the horror!"
But do you, as the visionary building a network, think that the traffic is NOT going to increase in the future? If it doubles next year, do you want to light up another fiber? Or DIG ANOTHER TRENCH?
So of COURSE you spend a few extra percent up front. You bury a BIG BUNDLE of fibers. (You also bury a few extra conduits, so you can pull more, or rent-or-sell one to some OTHER networking upstart who wants to pull his own fiber, once you're safely established.)
So you're going to have a bunch of extra fibers. But how many do you light up? Answer: As few as possible. The boxes to light them up are NOT cheap. (Repeaters aren't muchFigure 1/8 million for a minimal TDM only box, over a meg for for a fully-loaded router.) But (unlike digging trenches) they are subject to Moore's Law improvements. Wait 18 months and your suppliers can get you twice the bits for the buck. So you buy expandable boxes (again to save costs later) but leave most of the slots empty.
And now you have most of the fibers dark, until the traffic expands enough for you to buy more cards and shove 'em into the boxes to light up the rest of the fibers.
So you have MOST of your fibers dark. And even reserving a few for spares you can light up most of 'em with paying traffic. But HOW MANY should you have?
The common wisdom at the time was that the Internet bandwidth needs were growing by a factor of 10 per year, and would continue that way for a while. If you have 95% dark fiber now, (and the bright fiber is at capacity), in one year you'd have half of it lit, and in another three months you'd hit the wall, and be frantically throttling links, upspeeding them with new technology, and getting out the cable-pullers and trenchers again. The bandwidth glut becomes a bandwidth crunch.
Turns out 10x/year was a myth, based on the explosive growth for the first couple years after the Internet was opened up to general users. The actual number is closer to 2x - which means today's 95% dark fiber means we don't have to get out the pullers and trenchers for a bit over a decade - and maybe longer if we go to higher speed over existing fibers.
Same situation in the metro networks - except that you're talking about digging up ALL THE STREETS OF ALL THE CITIES, TOWNS, AND VILLAGES. Then doing it again in a few years if you didn't lay enough up front.
It just makes you think.... How much stuff is out there that is just undocumented? How much wasted technology is out there that will never be found.
This is well known in the industry. It's just that the media are clueless.
I've been looking hard for evidence of this statistic in my home town of about 100,000 for well over a year. In that time only two reports of defensive brandishing made the papers.
Unfortunately, papers are NOT an unbiased sample. You have both political agendas biasing reportage (sometimes up front and open - like TimeLife's editorial policy that the time for reportage is over and the time for advocacy is at hand) and the "dog bites man is not news, man bites dog IS news" phenomenon.
Additionally, even if the newspaper reports it all, a successful self-defense-with-gun usually will not even make the police blotter. Typical scenario (in the 90% range if I recall correctly) is:
- Crook threatens citizen.
- Citizen pulls gun.
- Crook runs away.
- Citizen can now:
a) Report the incident (and probably make trouble for himself)
b) Go on his way.
and typically choses b).
That is why there was so much confusion about the number of self-defenses-with-gun - until researchers (starting with Kleck) actually started ASKING people whether they'd ever defended themselves, got a big surprise, and did additional careful research to confirm the findings (including work that DIDN'T involve just asking).
Interestingly, if you compare shootings by US civilian and police, you'll find that the civilians are MUCH less likely to shoot somebody they shouldn't - by a factor of more than five.
That stat actually refers to shootings where the shooter believed he was legally entitled to shoot. (My post may have made it sould like it included crooks shooting victims.)
[guns carried by police] are considered a "last resort" the idea is that if all other means fail than they can be used.
Same here in the US - both for police and for citizens.
In most states you can only shoot at the bad guy when your life is in immediate threat. (In a few places you can still shoot to stop him from running off with your stuff or to stop an attack on SOMEONE else. On the other hand, in some you must retreat unless you're unable to do so - even in your own home.) And while the rules are sometimes a little different for the police than for the citizens, the basic idea is usually the same.
Interestingly, if you compare shootings by US civilian and police, you'll find that the civilians are MUCH less likely to shoot somebody they shouldn't - by a factor of more than five. This despite the fact that civilians shoot more crooks than cops, by a factor of more than two.
(Which is not to say that US cops are incompetent trigger-happy bunglers. Police arrive on the scene of the dispute and have to figure out which of the combatants is the crook and which the victim, while the citizen under attack already knows. And citizens, once they've pulled the gun and stopped the attack, can (usually must) retreat when police are supposed to advance, subdue, and arrest.)
Wright and Rossi's Under the Gun is also said to be very good.
The original question also asked about funding. Wright and Rossi started out funded by the anti-gunners. Their results convinced them. B-)
... the reactor was built *in* Mathews House, under the bed of one of the builders ... ... the reactor was *not* dismantled ... Fred found it in the back of his truck, still running, a few months later.
Their original material was thorium, from the inside of some old vacuum tubes (although their first plan involved americium from ordinary hardware-store smoke detectors).
I take it the "breeder reactor" was a "reactor" in terms of producing a slow-but-nontrivial nuclear reaction, perhaps a series of decaying chains when excited by ambient neutrons, rather than the usual meaning of "producing a long-term self-sustaining chain reaction"
Communists (Soviets and their fellow travellers worldwide, especially Comintern) used "Fascist" as a broad brush with which to stain any rightist opponents, from actual Fascists (Nazis, Falangists, etc.) to moderates.
Much as members of the western left wing do, even today.
It's particularly ludicrous given that the real NAZIs were self-proclaimed "national socialists". (But it's normal, since the worst fights are typically between different sects of the same ideology.)
Note that "national socialism" wasn't a propaganda distortion like "democratic republic" (which itself would be redundant). Look into the origins of NAZIism and you'll find something eerily similar to the new-age left, right down to natural foods/health fads/vegitarianism, consensus decision-making, green-style environmentalism, animal rights, mysticism (including "crystals"), and so on.
These weren't just extraneous factors, either, but led, by easy steps, to some of the well-known pathologies of the NAZIs. For instance:
Consensus politics (decision-making by near-unanimous consent of the group) led to dictatorship:
The group doesn't do anything as a group except when everybody is onboard. This leads to paralysis if anybody disagrees. So social pressure mechanisms are developed to encourage individuals to consent to, or even support, group activities perceived as popular despite personal reservations.
Once mechanisms to force consensus are in place, a well-perceived and glib "leader" can get his whole group to actively engage in (or avoid) anything he wants, by describing it as good, right, and popular, (or bad/wrong/unpopular) and refusing to consent to any other choice.
(Note that, unlike the strident demagogue of WW II Allied propaganda films, Hitler was perceived, in pre-war Germany, as quite the popular cuddly-bear. As a result, as with Clinton, his followers were willing to ignore, or disbelieve claims of, even blatant misbehavior in either his public actions and policies or persoanl life.)
Add control of the media or support from its decision-makers: Now contrasting views aren't heard (or are smeared when they can't be completely suppressed). This strengthens the perception of consensus - especially among the lawmakers (who are largely cut off from their actual constituents and tend to give excessive weight toe news stories).
Thus the popular, glib, "leader" ends up completely running the show. Once in charge he consolidates by changing the institutions so they answer directly to him and actively suppress his opposition.
Animal rights lead to medical experiments on humans in death camps:
First: Animal research is suppressed.
Second: Medical research is done on retarded humans. The taboo is broken and a precedent established that "subhuman" people are less important that animals and fair game for medical research.
Third: Various outgroups - typically those with a cohesive culture of their own that insulates them from consensus-forcing - are defined as "subhuman". Examples: Homosexuals, Pagans, Labor-unionists, Gypsies, Jews, Communists (and other socialists with a different agenda).
Fourth: The "subhuman" "problems" are excluded from society and their opinions suppressed. Progressively more draconian measures are applied to "solve" the "problem" of their presence.
Fifth: Medical research is done on these allegedly "subhuman" out-group members.
And so on.
For a month of sleepless nights try reading _The Occult Roots of NAZIism_ and _The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich_ in rapid succession. B-(
what are the conciquences of having all these waves being beamed and bounced around the world? Radar.. Radio.. TV.. Microwaves.. Cell Phones.. Wireless Internet.. and God knows what the military is REALLY using up in alaska [fas.org].. ect.. ect.. ect.
With respect to the tinfoil hat, read up on:
- the inverse square law (i.e. they're REAL weak except right near the transmitter - why don't cell phones run the antenna out the BOTTOM of the handset?) and
- the skin effect (high frequency stuff doesn't penetrate well into things that conduct {like skin}, due to canceling currents induced near the surface of the conductor).
Then consider that radio photons are individually too non-energetic to break a chemical bond - so you need to add 'em up to cause damage. That happens in three ways:
- Structures that are conductive (relative to their environment) and somewhere close to half the wavelength.
- Really strong fields (so the resistive heating adds up)
- Really REALLY strong fields (so the electric field from the coherent individual photons adds up to more than the ionization potential of the bond to be broken.
what are the long long term effects to the earth?
Probably about zilch. Strong audio-frequency voltages in the earth might make earthquakes happen a little earlier than without. Maybe a slight effect on weather if really strong microwaves drive the ionosphere non-linear (and cause all sorts of OTHER havoc to communication). A few insects have log-periodic structures that MIGHT be antennas, leading to speculation that they might directly sense extreme microwaves or near infrared as radio signals - so these bugs might get confused. Just about any other effect amounts to a microscopic increase in thermal pollution in whatever structure absorbs the signal.
CALLING ALL SPAMBOTS!!!
I think you meant [his addresses as mailto: URLs]
ROTFL!
For those who didn't catch it:
If Ralsky's email address collection operation includes a bot that sucks down email address from web sites - and doesn't honor robots.txt file entries - the above posting will put Ralsky's lawyer on Ralsky's mailing lists. B-)
It's mail fraud and a Federal Offense.
You're right, it is, and that's a protection that email should enjoy as well.
No, it should not.
Mail fraud is a federal offense because it misuses a FEDERAL SERVICE. That gives the government a nexus to come down on it in a draconian fashion - and also to come down on OTHER uses of the service, like for speech the government doesn't like (i.e. porn). Try to protect email as MAIL and you let the federal censorship camel's nose into the tent.
The way email SHOULD be protected is the same way your fax machine is protected against unsolicted faxes.
The cases are virtually identical: The email and fax spammers both misuse a private interstate communication network to consume your resources (connect time, machine time, fax paper/disk space, eyeball time, etc.) without your permission, reducing its utility and sometimes delaying or causing the loss of other, solicted messages.
This man suffers from a common human ailment. He does not have the ability to see what he does as wrong. Everyone else is a rube for him to exploit. He (in his own mind) can do whatever he wants, but if someone dares try the same stunt on him, they're going DOWN.
It's called a Dogbert [dilbert.com] complex.
Actually, at least according to one of the experts on the subject, if it's inborn it's called "psychopathy" and if it's learned it's called "sociopathy". (Operationally the two are indistinguishable, and other experts use them interchangably or make slightly different distinctions.)
Approximately 1 in 100 (1 in 50 to 1 in 200) are psychopaths - though some of 'em compensate by learning a moral code by rote. Others go on to be crooks, used car salesmen, spammers, crackers, and politicians. B-)