Having children is a sociopathic act when we're overpopulated. At our current level of behavior, Earth is over its carrying capacity.
And we boomers have heard all that before. Back in the '60s and '70s the ruling class told us that we were about to be buried in a population explosion that would have us all starving in a toxic waste dump by the '90s and that technological improvements would only make it worse.
They even formed an organization called "The Club of Rome", which put together a computer model that cranked out these predictions.
So lots of responsible people held off on having kids - many until it was too late, even with major medical intervention. Enormous resources were diverted from production of material wealth to reduction of pollution. Costs went up, quality went down, resources were locked up, movement was restricted. Government power over everything, and the amount of money/value they pulled out of the economy grew and grew and grew. Anyone criticizing the paradigm or expressing a different view (especially a pro-technology view) was demonized - by activists, "leaders", and both the "establishment" and "underground" press.)
In the '50s, coming out of a depression and a World War, a family could live well supporting itself on a single income. Now it struggles with two or more full-time employed parents, or survives on a government dole. "There's a labor shortage!" - so the government imports more voters^H^H^H^H^H^H people from the more southern American countries to fill the blue collar jobs and from India, Aisia, and other places for the white-collar positions - and pretty much all of them from cultures where big families are the norm. So much for responsible self-population-limitation. (Think of it as evolution in action.)
But they made the mistake of publishing their software model. Computers got cheap, and programming became less of an arcane ritual practiced only by a tiny clique. Eventually skilled programmers took a look at the model - and found both flaws and gimmicks apparently designed to make it produce the gloom-and-doom, empower-governments, we're all going to freeze in the dark but that's better than extinction, predictions.
And the time came and went. And the disaster didn't happen. And technological improvements made things better, not worse. (And not just because of pollution controls: It turns out that pollution is INEFFICIENT, and as the cost of process control technology comes down and capabilities go up, reducing it can INCREASE PROFIT!)
So the "population bomb" turned out to be a dud. (But a convenient one for the rich and powerful, making them more rich and powerful.) And looking back at history we saw that this was just the latest in a long string of such operations:
1. Predict disaster.
2. Get everyone panicked.
3. Increase power and control to "take action to head off the disaster".
4. PROFIT! Over and over and over again.
And then came "global warming" (replacing "here comes the next ice age".) Complete with computer models and lots of "scientific data" - from government scientists funded by billions from agencies that somehow only gave follow-on grants to scientists who predicted doom (or made some tie-in to global warming in research on non-climate-related subjects).
THIS time, though, they kept the raw data and models to themselves, handing out only conclusions and "adjusted" data. And after YEARS of digging, some outside the peer-review cliques found some evidence that the adjustments always seemed to increase the signal of warming, possibly by enough to create it out of nothing (or even out of measurements indicating global COOLING), and that this may have been deliberate.
But instead of opening the data to all, it was (and is) STILL kept largely hidden (or claimed to be lost), while a propaganda effort is raised against anyone questioning the conclusions, or the race to take over resources and wealth, and increase control of the general
I.e. if your clocks are good for one part per million you have a tiny fraction of a millisecond before your pattern comes apart.
Their trick is to resynchronize at the start of every packet, to a reference transmitted by one of the transmitters, so they can get the packet squirted out (or received) while the pattern still holds together, rather than trying to keep the radios in sync constantly despite not being able to wire them together.
What you're missing is that:
- MIMO works better, over longer distances, when the antennas are more separated. The more the separation, the greater the distance, for a given accuracy of phase.
- But it also requires the radios to be synchronized to within a tiny fraction of a single cycle, so the patterns add up correctly. At 2.5 GHz an entire cycle is one quarter part per BILLION and MIMO reqires more than an order of magnitude better accuracy than that.
When the radios are all in one box, that's easy: You drive them from the same oscillators, and watch your wiring and components.
When they're in different boxes, separated by hundreds of feet or by miles, it's a whole different can of worms. VERY fancy equipment to generate VERY stable signals, extra stuff to estimate their drift (which varies from moment to moment), and it's still a massive pain. You don't get that kind of synchronization between boxes, even in a house, when they're connected by inexpensive commodity cabling.
What these guys did is tweak the protocol to add a tiny synchronizing burst from the designated master transmitter just before each packet. Combined with estimates of the moment-by-moment ongoing drift (computed from reception of the synchronizing bursts from previous packets) they were able to get current commodity-quality hardware to stay adequately synchronized to hold the pattern together for at least the duration of the packet. (I'm betting they can do the same sort of thing with the receivers, too, working off the sync burst from the master transmitter.)
The result is being able to do MIMO with radio/antenna assemblies in different, disconnected, well-separated, boxes, using only packet-quality interconnects and doing synchronization via a small bit of air bandwidth.
That got MIMO over a major hump, in equipment cost, antenna separation, and utility.
Yes, more transceivers are better than less, thank you MIT.
But only if they're really tightly synchronized.
MIT got them to be tightly synchronized despite being in different boxes in different rooms, rather than all being in the same box, WITHOUT a lot of extra, extra-special, extra-fancy, extra-cost, hardware. This can be built with a bit more off the shelf stuff (maybe the SAME amount of the same off the shelf stuff but with a bit better firmware) and easily folded into the next generation's chips.
Also: You could relay between one device and another out of range with it about as fast as they could talk if they were in range of each other, rather than cutting that rate in half as each talks to a router and the router repeats what it heard.
Since they are talking about many devices connecting to multiple routers it's not going to do much for the average home user then. I may have a couple of devices but only the one router.
Actually:
- If you got a second router, put it some distance away from the first, and hooked them together with a network cable, you could use two devices about as fast as you could one with one router.
- If you had three wired routers you could use three devices close to as fast as you could use one with one router. And so on.
Note that I'm not talking about using the devices with each near a particular router. I'm talking about the routers spread out around the room or the house and the devices also somewhat spread out - but differently (even just at different spots in the same room) and with no particular relation between the device and the router locations.
There is some possibility that the sun may, at some time in the future, enter another sunspot minimum similar to the Maunder minimum of 1645 to about 1715. But we're not in one now.
Actually, there was a recent development in modelling the sun, which (if I recall correctly) resulted in a model of the sunspot cycle that has a high-90s percentage match to the historical data. (The key was to model it as TWO dynamos rather than one.)
Also (again, if I recall correctly) the new model predicted that we were going into something that looked like a new Maunder Minimum, with this cycle being weak and the next one nearly nonexistent.
(Sorry I can't dig up the reference right now. Only got a couple minutes left to post.)
Combine that with orbital forcing (which has been gradually, but progressively more steeply, pushing us toward another BIG ice age since about the time humans started using agriculture and settled down to dig up stuff, including coal), and the expected exhaustion of practically-extractable fossil carbon reserves in something like four more centuries, and warming might not be our long-range climate-change issue at all.
A Maunder minimum might only cover a half-century or so. But if it brought on another "little ice age", that (at about three centuries duration) might be about right to cover the period before global freezing is more of a concern than global warming.
On the other hand, an electric motor can easily produce its maximum torque at stall.
Then drop off like a cliff.
Not necessarily. You're thinking of older, more basic, motor designs, connected directly to a supply (such as a series-wound motor), not a modern electrical machines with winding currents controlled by switching regulators.
Torque is proportional to the product of the stator and rotor magnetic fields, which in turn for wound magnets) are proportional to current.
In a simple motor the current is limited by the fixed voltage applied across the winding resistance, which drops as the machine speeds up due to back-EMF generated by the motor's motion.
In a switching regulator controlled winding the resistance is very low (to reduce I-squared-R losses) and the current is controlled by the switching regulator. The current at stall is potentially astronomical as a result, limited by the regulator's dwell time, not the raw supply voltage. As the motor speeds up the current (and thus the torque) can be maintained at a desired (and high) value despite the rising back-EMF, up to an RPM and back-EMF where the switch would have to be on full-time (or full half-cycle time for AC-excited windings) to push the desired current through the winding resistance.
Porsche 918 Spyder is 0-60 in 2.3s. Elon has a ways to go still.
On the other hand, an electric motor can easily produce its maximum torque at stall.
An electric car, with adequately sized motors, controllers, and batteries (or other power sources) should be able to drive the tires to the traction limit from a standing start to the speed where the available power will no longer sustain that level of acceleration - well over 60 MPH. This means the acceleration is limited solely by the coefficient of friction of the tire/road contact surface - a critical parameter that can be tightly tracked, during acceleration, by drive electronics akin to non-skid brake controllers.
So an electric car should be able to get the best possible standing-start rating out of any given tire technology - and be literally unbeatable in such a contest.
IMHO the only reason (pre-Tesla) electric cars had a reputation for being underpowered creampuffs rather than unbeatable sprint sports cars, is that the automobile manufacturers thought the purchasers would all be eco-freaks, more interested in mileage and ideology than performance, and designed lower-manufacturing-cost, underpowered, cars for this market.
Earth is in the throws of a Nanotech Grey Goo scenario. The microscopic self-replicating robots have converted about half the planet to more of themselves. And then they stop. The few surviving humans, observing from space, are puzzled.
Zoom in. Thought balloon from the mass of Grey Goo: "Damn! We shouldn't have stuck with IPV6. We've run out of addresses!"
... airframes still can't match pilots. An aircraft on a mission may need to execute some spectacular maneuvers, and the pilot can often survive quite well, especially with active flight suits. However, the airframe is still damaged by the maneuver, and might not be usable again.
Which just means that they didn't throw extra weight and strength (a constant cost) into insuring that the meat-sack-carrying vehicle would take no damage in ANY extreme, momentary, corner case that the meat-sack COULD survive.
Remove the meat-sack-guidance-computer, its support systems, emergency ejection systems, and that big space in the middle for it, and the design potential is drastically altered.
So there's no conflict between your point and the predecessor's claim.
There are plenty of jobs for [this, that, and the other thing]
There are plenty of job ADS.
This is because, in order to hire an H1-B, the employer must first advertise the job to US persons.
But there are whole classes given on how to gimmick the hiring process so that anyone who applies, other than the desired H1-B, can be plausibly turned down as unqualified. The US applicants waste their time, and the H1-Bs get the positions.
Give us a call when there are plenty of HIRES of US citizens for these, or any, positions.
Last time we had unlimited data plans, there were people who would tether hundreds of gigabytes a month...
If, when the network became congested, the available bandwidth were fairly divided among the competing users, such usage would not be an issue. Everyone asking for less than their share would get all their data through at line rate, everyone asking for more would evenly divide the remainder. At times when the pipes were too clogged to handle it all, the "data hogs" would get the same data rate as everyone else trying to use the "Information Superhighway". They wouldn't degrade the other users' experience any more than any other user's traffic did. (It's just like the way a driver who likes to cruise flat-out at night doesn't end up going any faster than the rest of the traffic at rush hour.)
I used to wonder why it wasn't done that way. Then I get a job designing router chips, including the special-purpose coprocessors to handle bandwidth division.
It turns out that actually making fair division happen in real time requires enormous amounts of sideways communication between the states of the (otherwise independent) throttling mechanisms for each user, flow, etc. It's much easier to preset the limits and only adjust them occasionally. But that means the "data hogs" either get throttled or, when rush hour comes and they're still trying to pump lots of data, they clog the pipes. So the ISPs identify customers who use a lot of data in off hours and turn down their limits, to keep them from degrading things for everybody else. It's not good. It's not fair to those who are just trying to use the service that was advertised, or those who carefully do their data-hogging on off hours only. But it's about the best ISPs can do with the available tools.
I was starting to look into practical ways to "do it right". But the network equipment company downsized me before I'd gotten rolling on it. Now I'm fully employed doing other stuff. So somebody else will have to figure this out, and get it designed and deployed in a future equipment generation, or we'll keep having this problem.
"...such as a key member who doesn't do process text well..."
I read that a dozen times wondering if I was one of those members...
Nah. More like I'm one of those people who doesn't final-edit text well before hitting "submit" when the boss appears over my sholuder, while I'm in mid posting during a coffee break, with an emergency that needs immediate handling. B-b
you can read faster than you can listen to someone talking
And you can process it even faster, by non-sequentially jumping your attention to the meat of the matter. I'd estimate you can process AT LEAST ten short text or email messages in the time it takes to handle one. That's an entire order of magnitude. For many people and situations it will be far more.
There are a number of other problems, but this alone kills the idea (except, perhaps, for a few special - and small - groups and situations where some other advantage, such as a key member who doesn't do process text well or when voice side-channel information (such as emotional state) are key).
Think about it: A company using voice rather than text messages might need ten times as many people to do the same work. Try that in a competitive market and see how long your company survives.
they really can't just "quit" copper, because all the old people with Landlines would freak out.
Which is why they have an army of sales people trying to switch everybody to "u-verse". Yes, it's copper for the "last mile". But then it switches to fiber at a curbside box.
AT&T tried to migrate their DSL customers to their next generation "U-verse" fiber-to-the-curb technology...
If you're forced to move to a new service anyhow (incurring the extra expense, outages, hassle, etc. of a move), it's a good time to examine the competitive landscape and see if a change to a different carrier now makes sense.
Of course the companies that rely heavily on DSL lost customers to faster connections.
Not just that:
- AT&T tried to migrate their DSL customers to their next generation "U-verse" fiber-to-the-curb technology - but only with new contract terms of service, "triple-play" bundling, tarbaby can't-go-back contracts, no third-party equipment available, a special locally-powered (i.e. phone out in power failure) long-reach box at my slightly-longer-than-standard distance from the fiber-copper transition box, and almost daily sales contacts. Then:
- They screwed up the "partial decommissioning" of the legacy DSL lines when they had some of their customers migrated to the new stuff.
For instance: I had a ONE MONTH outage, thanks to their changes - and errors configuring them. They wouldn't even admit they'd moved me to a new DSLAM that didn't support my legacy modem, until I'd bought, not one, but TWO, replacements for the supposedly "broken" one. (The one they recommended wasn't available, and it turned out they "didn't support" the first model I was able to find, despite the prominent AT&T compatibility label claims.) Then it turns out they hamoved me to a box that didn't hook to the backbone. So they moved me again, but this time didn't configure it so packets came to me. Then...
I STILL only have one of my eight (five usable) fixed I.P. addresses working...
Isn't that for the ones where the battery pack has died and replacing it costs about as much as a new car (i.e. turning the vehicle into a $10k, one-ton, lawn ornament)?
Or have I got that confused with the early models of another brand?
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Having children is a sociopathic act when we're overpopulated. At our current level of behavior, Earth is over its carrying capacity.
And we boomers have heard all that before. Back in the '60s and '70s the ruling class told us that we were about to be buried in a population explosion that would have us all starving in a toxic waste dump by the '90s and that technological improvements would only make it worse.
They even formed an organization called "The Club of Rome", which put together a computer model that cranked out these predictions.
So lots of responsible people held off on having kids - many until it was too late, even with major medical intervention. Enormous resources were diverted from production of material wealth to reduction of pollution. Costs went up, quality went down, resources were locked up, movement was restricted. Government power over everything, and the amount of money/value they pulled out of the economy grew and grew and grew. Anyone criticizing the paradigm or expressing a different view (especially a pro-technology view) was demonized - by activists, "leaders", and both the "establishment" and "underground" press.)
In the '50s, coming out of a depression and a World War, a family could live well supporting itself on a single income. Now it struggles with two or more full-time employed parents, or survives on a government dole. "There's a labor shortage!" - so the government imports more voters^H^H^H^H^H^H people from the more southern American countries to fill the blue collar jobs and from India, Aisia, and other places for the white-collar positions - and pretty much all of them from cultures where big families are the norm. So much for responsible self-population-limitation. (Think of it as evolution in action.)
But they made the mistake of publishing their software model. Computers got cheap, and programming became less of an arcane ritual practiced only by a tiny clique. Eventually skilled programmers took a look at the model - and found both flaws and gimmicks apparently designed to make it produce the gloom-and-doom, empower-governments, we're all going to freeze in the dark but that's better than extinction, predictions.
And the time came and went. And the disaster didn't happen. And technological improvements made things better, not worse. (And not just because of pollution controls: It turns out that pollution is INEFFICIENT, and as the cost of process control technology comes down and capabilities go up, reducing it can INCREASE PROFIT!)
So the "population bomb" turned out to be a dud. (But a convenient one for the rich and powerful, making them more rich and powerful.) And looking back at history we saw that this was just the latest in a long string of such operations:
1. Predict disaster.
2. Get everyone panicked.
3. Increase power and control to "take action to head off the disaster".
4. PROFIT!
Over and over and over again.
And then came "global warming" (replacing "here comes the next ice age".) Complete with computer models and lots of "scientific data" - from government scientists funded by billions from agencies that somehow only gave follow-on grants to scientists who predicted doom (or made some tie-in to global warming in research on non-climate-related subjects).
THIS time, though, they kept the raw data and models to themselves, handing out only conclusions and "adjusted" data. And after YEARS of digging, some outside the peer-review cliques found some evidence that the adjustments always seemed to increase the signal of warming, possibly by enough to create it out of nothing (or even out of measurements indicating global COOLING), and that this may have been deliberate.
But instead of opening the data to all, it was (and is) STILL kept largely hidden (or claimed to be lost), while a propaganda effort is raised against anyone questioning the conclusions, or the race to take over resources and wealth, and increase control of the general
Thanks.
(Unfortunately, membership paywall... B-b )
... and "one cycle per second of error".
I.e. if your clocks are good for one part per million you have a tiny fraction of a millisecond before your pattern comes apart.
Their trick is to resynchronize at the start of every packet, to a reference transmitted by one of the transmitters, so they can get the packet squirted out (or received) while the pattern still holds together, rather than trying to keep the radios in sync constantly despite not being able to wire them together.
At 2.5 GHz an entire cycle is one quarter part per BILLION
Make that 2/5 part per billion.
They already did this. It is called MIMO.
We all understand that.
What you're missing is that:
- MIMO works better, over longer distances, when the antennas are more separated. The more the separation, the greater the distance, for a given accuracy of phase.
- But it also requires the radios to be synchronized to within a tiny fraction of a single cycle, so the patterns add up correctly. At 2.5 GHz an entire cycle is one quarter part per BILLION and MIMO reqires more than an order of magnitude better accuracy than that.
When the radios are all in one box, that's easy: You drive them from the same oscillators, and watch your wiring and components.
When they're in different boxes, separated by hundreds of feet or by miles, it's a whole different can of worms. VERY fancy equipment to generate VERY stable signals, extra stuff to estimate their drift (which varies from moment to moment), and it's still a massive pain. You don't get that kind of synchronization between boxes, even in a house, when they're connected by inexpensive commodity cabling.
What these guys did is tweak the protocol to add a tiny synchronizing burst from the designated master transmitter just before each packet. Combined with estimates of the moment-by-moment ongoing drift (computed from reception of the synchronizing bursts from previous packets) they were able to get current commodity-quality hardware to stay adequately synchronized to hold the pattern together for at least the duration of the packet. (I'm betting they can do the same sort of thing with the receivers, too, working off the sync burst from the master transmitter.)
The result is being able to do MIMO with radio/antenna assemblies in different, disconnected, well-separated, boxes, using only packet-quality interconnects and doing synchronization via a small bit of air bandwidth.
That got MIMO over a major hump, in equipment cost, antenna separation, and utility.
Yes, more transceivers are better than less, thank you MIT.
But only if they're really tightly synchronized.
MIT got them to be tightly synchronized despite being in different boxes in different rooms, rather than all being in the same box, WITHOUT a lot of extra, extra-special, extra-fancy, extra-cost, hardware. This can be built with a bit more off the shelf stuff (maybe the SAME amount of the same off the shelf stuff but with a bit better firmware) and easily folded into the next generation's chips.
Also: You could relay between one device and another out of range with it about as fast as they could talk if they were in range of each other, rather than cutting that rate in half as each talks to a router and the router repeats what it heard.
Since they are talking about many devices connecting to multiple routers it's not going to do much for the average home user then. I may have a couple of devices but only the one router.
Actually:
- If you got a second router, put it some distance away from the first, and hooked them together with a network cable, you could use two devices about as fast as you could one with one router.
- If you had three wired routers you could use three devices close to as fast as you could use one with one router.
And so on.
Note that I'm not talking about using the devices with each near a particular router. I'm talking about the routers spread out around the room or the house and the devices also somewhat spread out - but differently (even just at different spots in the same room) and with no particular relation between the device and the router locations.
Here are direct links to the paper's download page and the paper itself.
There is some possibility that the sun may, at some time in the future, enter another sunspot minimum similar to the Maunder minimum of 1645 to about 1715. But we're not in one now.
Actually, there was a recent development in modelling the sun, which (if I recall correctly) resulted in a model of the sunspot cycle that has a high-90s percentage match to the historical data. (The key was to model it as TWO dynamos rather than one.)
Also (again, if I recall correctly) the new model predicted that we were going into something that looked like a new Maunder Minimum, with this cycle being weak and the next one nearly nonexistent.
(Sorry I can't dig up the reference right now. Only got a couple minutes left to post.)
Combine that with orbital forcing (which has been gradually, but progressively more steeply, pushing us toward another BIG ice age since about the time humans started using agriculture and settled down to dig up stuff, including coal), and the expected exhaustion of practically-extractable fossil carbon reserves in something like four more centuries, and warming might not be our long-range climate-change issue at all.
A Maunder minimum might only cover a half-century or so. But if it brought on another "little ice age", that (at about three centuries duration) might be about right to cover the period before global freezing is more of a concern than global warming.
Not necessarily. You're thinking of older, more basic, motor designs, connected directly to a supply (such as a series-wound motor), not a modern electrical machines with winding currents controlled by switching regulators.
Torque is proportional to the product of the stator and rotor magnetic fields, which in turn for wound magnets) are proportional to current.
In a simple motor the current is limited by the fixed voltage applied across the winding resistance, which drops as the machine speeds up due to back-EMF generated by the motor's motion.
In a switching regulator controlled winding the resistance is very low (to reduce I-squared-R losses) and the current is controlled by the switching regulator. The current at stall is potentially astronomical as a result, limited by the regulator's dwell time, not the raw supply voltage. As the motor speeds up the current (and thus the torque) can be maintained at a desired (and high) value despite the rising back-EMF, up to an RPM and back-EMF where the switch would have to be on full-time (or full half-cycle time for AC-excited windings) to push the desired current through the winding resistance.
Porsche 918 Spyder is 0-60 in 2.3s. Elon has a ways to go still.
On the other hand, an electric motor can easily produce its maximum torque at stall.
An electric car, with adequately sized motors, controllers, and batteries (or other power sources) should be able to drive the tires to the traction limit from a standing start to the speed where the available power will no longer sustain that level of acceleration - well over 60 MPH. This means the acceleration is limited solely by the coefficient of friction of the tire/road contact surface - a critical parameter that can be tightly tracked, during acceleration, by drive electronics akin to non-skid brake controllers.
So an electric car should be able to get the best possible standing-start rating out of any given tire technology - and be literally unbeatable in such a contest.
IMHO the only reason (pre-Tesla) electric cars had a reputation for being underpowered creampuffs rather than unbeatable sprint sports cars, is that the automobile manufacturers thought the purchasers would all be eco-freaks, more interested in mileage and ideology than performance, and designed lower-manufacturing-cost, underpowered, cars for this market.
You recall xkcd 865.
Yep, that's it. Thanks.
I recall a joke scenario from a couple years ago:
Earth is in the throws of a Nanotech Grey Goo scenario. The microscopic self-replicating robots have converted about half the planet to more of themselves. And then they stop. The few surviving humans, observing from space, are puzzled.
Zoom in. Thought balloon from the mass of Grey Goo: "Damn! We shouldn't have stuck with IPV6. We've run out of addresses!"
It's Vaughn Bode's Ramdove Weapons Platform.
... airframes still can't match pilots. An aircraft on a mission may need to execute some spectacular maneuvers, and the pilot can often survive quite well, especially with active flight suits. However, the airframe is still damaged by the maneuver, and might not be usable again.
Which just means that they didn't throw extra weight and strength (a constant cost) into insuring that the meat-sack-carrying vehicle would take no damage in ANY extreme, momentary, corner case that the meat-sack COULD survive.
Remove the meat-sack-guidance-computer, its support systems, emergency ejection systems, and that big space in the middle for it, and the design potential is drastically altered.
So there's no conflict between your point and the predecessor's claim.
There are plenty of jobs for [this, that, and the other thing]
There are plenty of job ADS.
This is because, in order to hire an H1-B, the employer must first advertise the job to US persons.
But there are whole classes given on how to gimmick the hiring process so that anyone who applies, other than the desired H1-B, can be plausibly turned down as unqualified. The US applicants waste their time, and the H1-Bs get the positions.
Give us a call when there are plenty of HIRES of US citizens for these, or any, positions.
Last time we had unlimited data plans, there were people who would tether hundreds of gigabytes a month ...
If, when the network became congested, the available bandwidth were fairly divided among the competing users, such usage would not be an issue. Everyone asking for less than their share would get all their data through at line rate, everyone asking for more would evenly divide the remainder. At times when the pipes were too clogged to handle it all, the "data hogs" would get the same data rate as everyone else trying to use the "Information Superhighway". They wouldn't degrade the other users' experience any more than any other user's traffic did. (It's just like the way a driver who likes to cruise flat-out at night doesn't end up going any faster than the rest of the traffic at rush hour.)
I used to wonder why it wasn't done that way. Then I get a job designing router chips, including the special-purpose coprocessors to handle bandwidth division.
It turns out that actually making fair division happen in real time requires enormous amounts of sideways communication between the states of the (otherwise independent) throttling mechanisms for each user, flow, etc. It's much easier to preset the limits and only adjust them occasionally. But that means the "data hogs" either get throttled or, when rush hour comes and they're still trying to pump lots of data, they clog the pipes. So the ISPs identify customers who use a lot of data in off hours and turn down their limits, to keep them from degrading things for everybody else. It's not good. It's not fair to those who are just trying to use the service that was advertised, or those who carefully do their data-hogging on off hours only. But it's about the best ISPs can do with the available tools.
I was starting to look into practical ways to "do it right". But the network equipment company downsized me before I'd gotten rolling on it. Now I'm fully employed doing other stuff. So somebody else will have to figure this out, and get it designed and deployed in a future equipment generation, or we'll keep having this problem.
What are people doing on their phones and tablets that's using several GB per month?
Looking at web pages with animated advertisements?
Being pwned into a botnet?
"Unlimited" data means that doesn't cost extra. B-b
"...such as a key member who doesn't do process text well..."
I read that a dozen times wondering if I was one of those members...
Nah. More like I'm one of those people who doesn't final-edit text well before hitting "submit" when the boss appears over my sholuder, while I'm in mid posting during a coffee break, with an emergency that needs immediate handling. B-b
you can read faster than you can listen to someone talking
And you can process it even faster, by non-sequentially jumping your attention to the meat of the matter. I'd estimate you can process AT LEAST ten short text or email messages in the time it takes to handle one. That's an entire order of magnitude. For many people and situations it will be far more.
There are a number of other problems, but this alone kills the idea (except, perhaps, for a few special - and small - groups and situations where some other advantage, such as a key member who doesn't do process text well or when voice side-channel information (such as emotional state) are key).
Think about it: A company using voice rather than text messages might need ten times as many people to do the same work. Try that in a competitive market and see how long your company survives.
they really can't just "quit" copper, because all the old people with Landlines would freak out.
Which is why they have an army of sales people trying to switch everybody to "u-verse". Yes, it's copper for the "last mile". But then it switches to fiber at a curbside box.
AT&T tried to migrate their DSL customers to their next generation "U-verse" fiber-to-the-curb technology ...
If you're forced to move to a new service anyhow (incurring the extra expense, outages, hassle, etc. of a move), it's a good time to examine the competitive landscape and see if a change to a different carrier now makes sense.
Of course the companies that rely heavily on DSL lost customers to faster connections.
Not just that:
- AT&T tried to migrate their DSL customers to their next generation "U-verse" fiber-to-the-curb technology - but only with new contract terms of service, "triple-play" bundling, tarbaby can't-go-back contracts, no third-party equipment available, a special locally-powered (i.e. phone out in power failure) long-reach box at my slightly-longer-than-standard distance from the fiber-copper transition box, and almost daily sales contacts. Then:
- They screwed up the "partial decommissioning" of the legacy DSL lines when they had some of their customers migrated to the new stuff.
For instance: I had a ONE MONTH outage, thanks to their changes - and errors configuring them. They wouldn't even admit they'd moved me to a new DSLAM that didn't support my legacy modem, until I'd bought, not one, but TWO, replacements for the supposedly "broken" one. (The one they recommended wasn't available, and it turned out they "didn't support" the first model I was able to find, despite the prominent AT&T compatibility label claims.) Then it turns out they hamoved me to a box that didn't hook to the backbone. So they moved me again, but this time didn't configure it so packets came to me. Then ...
I STILL only have one of my eight (five usable) fixed I.P. addresses working...
You can buy a used Chevrolet Leaf for under $10k.
Isn't that for the ones where the battery pack has died and replacing it costs about as much as a new car (i.e. turning the vehicle into a $10k, one-ton, lawn ornament)?
Or have I got that confused with the early models of another brand?