AM stereo is a commercial broadcast medium. Where is the market for 802.xx cards? Hmmm? Is that "failing?" Personal communications is an entirely different animal; if you could add a card to your PC and a reasonable antenna that would enable you to have a relatively high speed, personal network, would you not buy that card? Once you're able to communicate on HF with "digital" there's no mandate that signal couldn't carry something other than audio information.
In the US most cellphone proviers will give you a phone because they want you to sign up for a plan. They cannot afford to give away those phones if they were not cheap. In india many people cannot afford a cellphone, but most villages have at least one "community" phone and can communicate (for the first time since the telephone, in fact). In eastern euroupe cellphones that accept "minute cards" (which can be bought at the grocer's) are very popular. In a country where a month's salary might be fifty bucks, cellphones in the cities are even more common than here.
The point is: cellphone technology is cheap. Damn cheap, in fact. You can buy a complete front end on a chip for about three bucks in quantity - that includes RF, LO, AND D/A and A/D convertors. Just add equally cheap DSP and you got a radio. You don't pay a couple hundred bucks for those cool new phones because they cost a couple hundred bucks to make - you pay that because they have new feaures you need to keep up with the Joneses. The basic technology for this kind of communications is damn cheap. Not as cheap as a transistor portable, but hardly an order of magnitude more than that, either.
If there is something you want or need to listen to there and you live in some third world country, chances are you're not going to be able to afford some nice new digital receiver
Dude.... how much is a cellphone now? Aren't they giving them away in blister packs at the grocers?
It's just another digitial radio. The only thing hindering this is a standard; if there were a WARC approved standard and a few broadcasters using it there would be twenty dollar receivers being sold at ratshack - and handed out in the third world by peace corps volunteers.
Not exactly. By "wideband" I mean post I-F but before audio filtering. This is fairly common even on those "world radio" sets you buy at consumer goods stores (I want to say wal-mart but I'm not sure if wallyworld has one. I'm confident, however, radio shack has more than one model like this). The "wideband" output will be something like 100-100khz instead of 100-10khz, and this can be sampled by a soundcard. back when FM stereo was new many FM radios were retrofitted just this way: take the IF output and run it into an external decoder. Only now a PC with a cheapo soundcard and can handle the bandwidth of an HF transmission.
Actually, it's never occurred to me until now that this same technique could (as another person here suggested) be applied to p2p communications. The FCC pretty much abandoned 11 metres long ago; there are several folks around here who still dabble in CB and not one of them is strictly "legal" - sliders, amplifiers, and even FM gear are all the norm on the band. It's awash in noise and crap but might actually be usable if some modern DSP methods were applied to communications. And, because it is (unofficially) unregulated, there is an opportunity for pretty much anyone with a CB and a PC with a soundcard to get involved.
In an area where 802. gear is pretty much useless because of line of sight issues, this might be just the ticket. There is more bandwidth in an HF carrier than in a phone line, and using low cost DSP tx/rx front ends it would even be possible to utilize two or three channels at once.
Hmmmm.... I think I need to go visit the neighbor.
A receiver with a wideband IF output (ie just about any ham receiver), a PC, and a soundcard. That ain't so special; some of you need to free your minds, much less
free your radios.
Eventually covered rear wheels will become the norm? You mean Detroit will finally discover why those lead sled '49 mercs are so cool? If someone sold an aero AEV that looked like a channeled '49 merc I bet lots of people who wouldn't otherwise consider one would have their noses pressed at the dealer's window.
But... I don't think those square-eyed monsters that were born at cadillac will ever be attractive. Shame that japan seems to be jumping on that bandwagon... ick. Ptooey. How foul.
Uh, did you rtfa? Ford sponsored this competition, but they are not the only company to do so. Last year it was apparently a Subrurban, and I don't believe you'll find a Ford badge near one of those.
Every one of these modifications involved replacing the bigass oil burner with a smaller oil burner, then tacking on an electric APU and a bunch of composite body replacements to make up for the added weight. IOW the new propulsion systems are heavier AND generally lower power than those they replace, and the bodies considerably more expensive because of all the carbon fiber, kevlar, whatever.
It seems like a fun competition, but really more about teaching students than teaching auto engineers. None of this stuff is new (none I saw - if anyone came up with something unique and problem solving I'd love to see a link to it) and, with a new explorer already running more than $30,000 I doubt you'll see many people lining up for one made out of carbon fiber and hauling around a 300V battery pack.
Stick the "Made in _____" on the front of every product, and I'd be willing to bet you'll immediately see buying habbits change...
You lose. Apparently you've never shopped at wal-mart, where thousands of pieces of merchandise have "made in the USA" labels on them. It means nothing because the only thing "made in the USA" is the goddamn tag. This is not even "news" - it was well proven years ago. No one believes it any more, so no one cares - simple as that.
I paid nothing to get the tranny in my car rebuilt because it was (believe it or not) still under warranty. I did pay about $300 for extra work - like putting in a high-perf clutch and throw out bearing while he had the tranny out. And yes, for a car with that many miles - and the way they were put on the car (it is, after all, a Mustang) - a transmission rebuild is not only understandable, but expected. What amazes me is how it went another 200,000 without another one.
I also used to work on them myself, but I quit because being a mechanic is not my idea of a good way to make a living. Shops charge way too much for what they pay the average (or even above average) mechanic.
Aside from your very limited view of the world seeming to relate to computer peripherals and cars, I'll introduce this bit of retort:
My Mustang (the only new car I ever bought) was still winning street races with over 250,000 miles on the clock. It had been rebuilt a bit - a transmission overhaul at 100,000 or so - but aside from that (and the mods I made to the top of engine) it was stock right down to the camshaft and roller lifters. A man I used to chauffer around (I came to think of him as sort of an adopted grandpa, even 'tho he was younger than my dad) bought a "new" Lincoln TC with 60,000 miles on the odo. It was still running like a new car when his sister sold it after he died, when there was nearly 150,000. In our driveway right now sits another with the same "modular" engine and over 150,000 on the odo - and it runs better than the '87 with the old 5.0 "tank engine" (and barely 120,000 on the clock). The suspension system is also better built, as are the steering and ventilation systems. A few years ago I sold an '85 Subaru given to me by a friend; it ran like shit because it was down to pretty much two working cylinders in its flat-four. But even with terrible performance it was still reliable enough I never worried about it starting or getting me where I wanted to go. It had nearly 300,000 miles on the odo when I sold it to a friend (who collects subarus) for parts.
If anything, even fairly cheap cars last far longer today than they did thirty years ago. And you don't have to spend a fortune, because you don't really need a new car. Many people want one, and some people "need" the tax write-off. But, in the end, a car is a terrible, terrible investment - even worse than buying a mobile home. And yet most folks seem to think little of signing a letter of credit to pay back a year's worth of their salary over a three, four or five year loan. Which is fine if you make 150K a year, but downright stupid when you make a fifth of that. And, because they're so deeply in debt and earning barely enough to pay rent and energy and insurance and loan payments, every penny matters. So instead of buying thirty dollar shirts that last for years, they go to wallyworld and buy cheap shit that might last six months before it's thread-worn. But that doesn't matter because it'll be "out of fashion" by then, anyway.
I see three pairs of shoes right now over in my closet. Two are skechers, purchased at the store on Melrose; the other is a pair of Cole-Hahns, purchased a couple of years before. The Cole-Hahns have been through three soles, but I think nothing of paying thirty bucks every year or two to get them reworked; they're soft as butter and worn but far from tattered. The skechers are long since dead, separating at the seams, dried out, and brittle (In fact, I really should toss them). The skechers were decent shoes (and the sandals are still OK) but they cost me about $60 a pair. And the skechers these replaced also cost me about $60. The cole-hahns costs me nearly $200, but have easily outlasted at least for pairs of skechers. And my father, who cringes at the thought of spending twenty dollars on a damn shirt, goes through at least two pairs of cheap shit wal-mart shoes every year. In fact, when he buys them he usually buys a couple of pairs at a time! How is that, in any way, logical? How do these twenty dollar shoes represent "value?"
They don't. In fact, they are devoid of value. They are overproduced in sweatshops by exploited people who live a miserable existence - and everything about them reflects this heritage. And yet "we" buy them... by the Millions. If there is such a thing as karma, these products are physical manifestations of the very worse of it.
"Made in USA" stickers are pretty much meaningless because they're so poorly policed and the vast majority of folk simply don't give a fuck so long as they get a low price on the shit they want. Speaking from personal experience, this attitude seems almost universal eve
Prophetic words from potter George Ohr. What we are seeing is a cycle we are doomed to until we get over this mass consumerist mindset. Sure, you can go to wallyworld and buy tons of crap you couldn't afford before - but for what? I'm willing to bet 70% of everything that comes out of that place ends up in a landfill within three years.
If you look around you'll see some people still doing just fine - or even better than last year. $40,000 cars still sell and automakers are coming out with $100,000 cars. People I know who make high end home entertainment systems are still doing just fine. Why? Because the people who can afford that stuff aren't the ones whose jobs are being shipped overseas.
I hate how this sounds, but it all comes down to values. Not family values but simple common sense values - like spending twice as much on an article that will last five times as long. Like buying something that represents craftsmanship and community instead of a cheap chinese trinket you had to get in order to keep up with the neighbor.
It's everywhere - even on those "home improvment" type shows. Every week I laugh in disgust as Steve Thomas and the boys tell us how great this new styrafoam and plastic POS they are gluing to the front of their project of the month is when compared to the old, outdated plaster and woodwork that it's replacing - never mind it's a hundred fucking years old and just now in need of replacment - this new same-as-ten-thousand-others piece of crap is "just as good"... yeah, right.
You don't have to be a millionaire to buy good shit - you just have to learn to not drive yourself into debt buying truckloads of cheap crap. Until the people of the US can accept this most basic bit of common sense, it's all downhill.
But don't worry... all that infrastructure - the roads, the abandoned factories, the empty offices - will still be here, and all those jobs will come back... in twenty years, when the US economy has finally and completely hit the shitter and the people of the US will once again willingly work 12 hour days in sweatshops for peanuts - producing cheap american trinkets for the up-and-coming EU market and all those freshly minted eurotrash capitalists from the FSU.
GTK is just more ugly crap. Why not make a windows.forms widget set that departs enough from both to allow writing "fat cient" code for either platform? Make it something better than the MS version instead of just making it something almost as good as.
So it's another GPL project tied to WINE and the MonSter that ate Redmond?
I wish I had the skills to craft a better deskptop for linux, because it sadly needs it. And every time I see some neat new desktop I look carefully, hoping to find it uses some wonderful new system that does away with the hideous kludge that has become of both Gnome and KDE and X11 in general. I hope because I want a *nix desktop that will carry me into the new millenia feeling like an astronaut and not a WWI aviator held in the sky with toothpicks and rubber bands. I keep hoping that I won't have to switch form one proprietary system (windows) to another (apple) just to get all this.
I have the will to switch, but I don't have the skills to craft a better desktop. And, apparently, neither does anyone else in the open source community.
How can you "waste" something when you have all you need? If you have more bandwidth than you need where is the incentive to "pirate" a box that doesn't share?
More importantly, when routing and participating in "the mesh" is in your best interest, why would you want to "opt out?" If your box isn't participating in the routing of information then the cache to your node will always be lagging - why would you want that? And there would surely be a means of identifying nodes that were in need of repair, and a node that wasn't routing traffic would, in such a system, be identified as "faulty." Given that such a mesh could also serve as a means of helping preserve anonymity, why would you want to draw attention to yourself by intentionally operating a faulty node?
It may take 2 days to get a DNS routed across the globe, but there aren't a few hundred million DNS servers sharing that information through multiply redundant connections, either.
Keep in mind I'm not arguing that we don't need any worldwide infrastructure - but I am making the argument that most of what we rely on locally (the "last 10 miles") could be done with meshes and collective data pooling agreements. Until just a few years ago our own phone company was still operating as a co-op, and there are hundreds of power co-ops operating across the country to this day. Our water is a community operated co-op and, except for occasional outages when the power to the pump fails, it works just fine. No reason at all a communications infrastructure couldn't be run the same way. Communities would get a valuable resource, and some unemployed IT workers would get a means of contributing to their community while earning a reasonable living.
1) If a routing technology made efficient use of a "mesh" system, then there would be no freeloader problem. In fact, it would be the very opposite - that is, it's unlikely any single user would occupy tens of mb of bandwidth on a continuous basis, but every node would be able to contribute that much. So, it would actually be in the community's interest to ensure there were as many nodes (and therefore as many possibel routes) for the raffic as possible. So, ironically, the solution to the "freeloader" problem would be to chip in and make sure everyone had a node of their own.
2) Now, let's add a couple hundred gigs to each node for caching. This will absolutely not take care of any initial requests, but it will allow data to flow across the net like synapses. And once a few requests have gone out and the data begins to flow toward the source, those further requests would have multiple routes to the data in increasingly localized cache stores.
Yeah, there's a lot of if in there, but so what? There's also a lot of effort going into p2p routing issues and it's not at all unreasonable to expect some significant advances in mesh and swarm routing structures. In fact, I would argue this type of technology is the next natural step in the evolution of the 'net.
But the way that needs to be answered is at the grass roots level. And one great way you ensure that is through civil disobedience - that is, lots of small communities making use of new technology in their local infrastructure and proving it works. Once you have a critical mass of support at that level, state representatives have no choice but to lobby in their behalf.
Is there any GPL software, fairly widely used, that supports an open standard for voice communications? Sure, I know there are plenty of standards for VOIP, but what's being used, now? If I went to my neighbors and told them we could "unwire" the neighborhood using cheap PCs and have not only local phone service but also faster internet connectivity than we get now, half the people in this very rural "town" of 200 would pony up tomorrow.
But, so far as I know, that technology doesn't yet exist. And until it does - until "broadband" means reliable, versatile connection to your neighbors rather than just really fast porn access, you can hang pervasive broadband on a hatrack.
Wanting to live in a cave doesn't always mean one wants to turn his back on knowledge and information.
So what's the big deal with broadband? So you get to view Slashdot 2 seconds faster.
Apparently you live in a different kind of "wilderness." Sorry for you, but being a hermit doesn't have to mean being a luddite. Nor does choosing to live in a "green ecosystem." Modern technology presents all sorts of new opportunities - even to those who choose to separate themselves from the greater of "society." In fact, that's the best part of it.
I'm amazed at the reception this discussion topic has been given. I wonder how many slashdotters would have said, fifty years ago, how ridiculous the idea was that oneday we could all be publishers in our own homes, able to, in an instant, sell anything we could invent anywhere around the world! given what I've read so far, it seems likely most would have scoffed at that notion as well.
If metropolitan areas were linked by a peer system - where the "price" of having a telephone or a being able to view the popular media of that culture (in whatever form, whether written or not) were to buy a box for a couple hundred bucks and pay the energy bill on its use, then that would become the fair unit of exchange. We would no longer value "bandwidth" because it would no longer be a limited resource (just like the printing press - duh). And if these metro areas wanted to communicate with other areas at higher speed, they could pool resources (ie taxes) to a national agency that would maintain such a high speed infrastructure for their use.
Of course, that would put the individual metro areas at the mercy of this national organization - not a good thing. So the sensible thing would be to contract with many providers and let them compete with one another for their share of that aggregated bandwidth.
Which is really pretty much what we have - or could have - right now. Nothing at all preventing you from forming a community network and accepting a monthly fee to pool for the connection to the world. Individuals could even participate for free in the local community (ie local phone service and local TV) for nothing, but would contribute to the pool if they wanted to access the greater network.
What's most limiting this right now is the lack of standardized hardware that people feel comfortable with - ie a telephone, a radio receiver, a TV set. If we could buy an 802.xxx telephone at wal-mart for twenty bucks, or a radio, or a completely plug and play box that could act as a bridge to our existing telephones and TVs, then such community networks would likely explode in number.
300 foot wireless range is abysmal? As a rural dweller I agree it ain't gonna do much to help me pull in broadband from the nearest town, but - how many houses do you presently have wired together with cat5?
Belushi (the later) and Ackroyd are on Carson Daily right now and Danny boy just said "we want folks to share this, burn it, download it - have fun. We're a small label now - if I was still on Universal I'd get in real trouble for sayin' that..."
That's it exactly. Even Jack Valente - ever notice how when anyone asks a question about ethics or hitorical precedent they avoid the issue entirely, simply saying "it's the law and this is our position?" Well duh - that's because you bought the fucking laws. Apparently they don't realize that, while they claim to be "trying to reach the young people" they don't realize that they basically sound exactly like any parent saying "you can't do that because I say so and I'm the parent." Yes, we all know how well that psychology works with people in every other walk of life. Very sharp cookies, these folks.
It's not even a fun show anymore... they've become complete bores; the tribe has spoken by the millions: it's time for the men in the sharkskin suits to leave the island.
Ever heard of ALS? Not the disease - the porn company. It started out as a shady amateur outfit populating the newsgroups with pics of barely (well, most likely not even barely) legal girls in (and out of) cheerleader outfits. They setup a website and are most likely the pioneers in one form of "gonzo" porn (in the niche involving speculums, large object insertions, gaping holes.. you get the idea).
their work became so popular (and a few pretty well known starlets got their start with these people) it spawned a newsgroup of it's own - a newsgroup that is pretty much dead now, because ALS sued the major carriers of that newsgroup, forcing them to police it or just remove it entirely. They've ALSo (har) been known to go after individuals who post their material. Occasionally you'll find some of their material in a newsgroup, usually either encrypted or renamed.
Ever heard of Suze Randall? Amateur & Teen Kingdom? Both these websites are (or at the very least were) enormously popular and they WILL go after individuals who infringe upon their material. One or two posts might not get one a DMCA complaint, but they produce prodigious volumes of porn and even a flood of three year old stuff (that's not even on their own website anymore) can land a poster in hot water.
This talk about the porn industry embracing p2p is only a half truth propogated, no doubt, by the industry itself as PR move to keep it in favor among its consumers. It's one thing in the public eye to steal from Mickey Mouse and the Olsen Twins - but another thing entirely when you're stealing from "lowlife pornographers." IOW they need to keep all the friends they can. Their "embracing" of the internet is largely in the form of limited collections with large banners and Microsoft (proprietary) format video and audio files that contain embedded links and scripts - basically just another form of popup ad (at least for the majority who don't disable such scripted security holes - er, I mean "features").
Hit a well maintained usenet server and globally search the binaries groups for PGP containers. If you look deeply enough (well, it doesn't take too much if you bother to read the peripheral discussions) you will find most of these PGP containers relate to the exchange of one of two forms: child porn, and commercial websites - like Suze Randall, ATK, and ALS. You do the math...
Friends doesn't cost so much to produce because the cast of friends make so much money - the cast of friends make so much money because the cast of friends is what makes the show, and because friends makes NBC 1000 times that - not just in weekly ads, but in syndication rights, ancilliary rights, derivative rights...
If NBC told Matt LeBlanc they weren't going to pay him what he wants I'm quite sure he'd take a walk and leave NBC to figure out how to sweep up his dust. After all, central, popular stars have left shows before, and it sure didn't hurt Three's Company or Roseanne or even Bonanza... oh, wait.
What I find missing from all these discussions is any mention at all of the fact we aren't talking about a loss of money here. It's not that these people are losing money - it's just that they can't figure out how to use this technology to make even more money!
Any popular TV show can now be downloaded within hours of its original broadcast - it's not as if no one is going to tune in to watch "Buffy" because they would rather spend an hour (or a day) downloading it from the net. Look at Survivor; like it or not, the show is incredibly popular. And it's not terribly cheap to produce despite the fact they have only a single "star" to pay. But it makes assloads of money because it's timely - no one wants to tune in tomorrow to see what everyone else sees tonight. Networks will simply have to learn to do what TV was meant to do from the start - provide compelling, timely broadcasts to grab the eyeballs. Instead of running fifteen nonstop minutes of ads (anyone tried to watch The Late Show with David Letterman lately?) they'll have to figure out how to incorporate sponsorships into the show itself. Because I'll tell ya: I don't even have a Tivo anymore (yeah, I gave it up) but - tivo or not - there's no fucking way I'm going to sit through all those ads no matter how much I like Letterman. It doesn't take a Tivo to change the channel.
Slashdot Mirror
In the US most cellphone proviers will give you a phone because they want you to sign up for a plan. They cannot afford to give away those phones if they were not cheap. In india many people cannot afford a cellphone, but most villages have at least one "community" phone and can communicate (for the first time since the telephone, in fact). In eastern euroupe cellphones that accept "minute cards" (which can be bought at the grocer's) are very popular. In a country where a month's salary might be fifty bucks, cellphones in the cities are even more common than here.
The point is: cellphone technology is cheap. Damn cheap, in fact. You can buy a complete front end on a chip for about three bucks in quantity - that includes RF, LO, AND D/A and A/D convertors. Just add equally cheap DSP and you got a radio. You don't pay a couple hundred bucks for those cool new phones because they cost a couple hundred bucks to make - you pay that because they have new feaures you need to keep up with the Joneses. The basic technology for this kind of communications is damn cheap. Not as cheap as a transistor portable, but hardly an order of magnitude more than that, either.
Dude.... how much is a cellphone now? Aren't they giving them away in blister packs at the grocers?
It's just another digitial radio. The only thing hindering this is a standard; if there were a WARC approved standard and a few broadcasters using it there would be twenty dollar receivers being sold at ratshack - and handed out in the third world by peace corps volunteers.
Not exactly. By "wideband" I mean post I-F but before audio filtering. This is fairly common even on those "world radio" sets you buy at consumer goods stores (I want to say wal-mart but I'm not sure if wallyworld has one. I'm confident, however, radio shack has more than one model like this). The "wideband" output will be something like 100-100khz instead of 100-10khz, and this can be sampled by a soundcard. back when FM stereo was new many FM radios were retrofitted just this way: take the IF output and run it into an external decoder. Only now a PC with a cheapo soundcard and can handle the bandwidth of an HF transmission.
In an area where 802. gear is pretty much useless because of line of sight issues, this might be just the ticket. There is more bandwidth in an HF carrier than in a phone line, and using low cost DSP tx/rx front ends it would even be possible to utilize two or three channels at once.
Hmmmm.... I think I need to go visit the neighbor.
A receiver with a wideband IF output (ie just about any ham receiver), a PC, and a soundcard. That ain't so special; some of you need to free your minds, much less free your radios.
But... I don't think those square-eyed monsters that were born at cadillac will ever be attractive. Shame that japan seems to be jumping on that bandwagon... ick. Ptooey. How foul.
Every one of these modifications involved replacing the bigass oil burner with a smaller oil burner, then tacking on an electric APU and a bunch of composite body replacements to make up for the added weight. IOW the new propulsion systems are heavier AND generally lower power than those they replace, and the bodies considerably more expensive because of all the carbon fiber, kevlar, whatever.
It seems like a fun competition, but really more about teaching students than teaching auto engineers. None of this stuff is new (none I saw - if anyone came up with something unique and problem solving I'd love to see a link to it) and, with a new explorer already running more than $30,000 I doubt you'll see many people lining up for one made out of carbon fiber and hauling around a 300V battery pack.
You lose. Apparently you've never shopped at wal-mart, where thousands of pieces of merchandise have "made in the USA" labels on them. It means nothing because the only thing "made in the USA" is the goddamn tag. This is not even "news" - it was well proven years ago. No one believes it any more, so no one cares - simple as that.
I paid nothing to get the tranny in my car rebuilt because it was (believe it or not) still under warranty. I did pay about $300 for extra work - like putting in a high-perf clutch and throw out bearing while he had the tranny out. And yes, for a car with that many miles - and the way they were put on the car (it is, after all, a Mustang) - a transmission rebuild is not only understandable, but expected. What amazes me is how it went another 200,000 without another one.
I also used to work on them myself, but I quit because being a mechanic is not my idea of a good way to make a living. Shops charge way too much for what they pay the average (or even above average) mechanic.
And yes, virginia, cars last longer now than thirty years ago.
Interestingly, the number of old vehicles - those 13 years of age or older - increased by an average rate of 7.8 per cent between 1994 and '99, showing that vehicles are lasting longer. The report predicts that by 2004 the fastest growing segment of the fleet will be vehicles over the age of 13.
My Mustang (the only new car I ever bought) was still winning street races with over 250,000 miles on the clock. It had been rebuilt a bit - a transmission overhaul at 100,000 or so - but aside from that (and the mods I made to the top of engine) it was stock right down to the camshaft and roller lifters. A man I used to chauffer around (I came to think of him as sort of an adopted grandpa, even 'tho he was younger than my dad) bought a "new" Lincoln TC with 60,000 miles on the odo. It was still running like a new car when his sister sold it after he died, when there was nearly 150,000. In our driveway right now sits another with the same "modular" engine and over 150,000 on the odo - and it runs better than the '87 with the old 5.0 "tank engine" (and barely 120,000 on the clock). The suspension system is also better built, as are the steering and ventilation systems. A few years ago I sold an '85 Subaru given to me by a friend; it ran like shit because it was down to pretty much two working cylinders in its flat-four. But even with terrible performance it was still reliable enough I never worried about it starting or getting me where I wanted to go. It had nearly 300,000 miles on the odo when I sold it to a friend (who collects subarus) for parts.
If anything, even fairly cheap cars last far longer today than they did thirty years ago. And you don't have to spend a fortune, because you don't really need a new car. Many people want one, and some people "need" the tax write-off. But, in the end, a car is a terrible, terrible investment - even worse than buying a mobile home. And yet most folks seem to think little of signing a letter of credit to pay back a year's worth of their salary over a three, four or five year loan. Which is fine if you make 150K a year, but downright stupid when you make a fifth of that. And, because they're so deeply in debt and earning barely enough to pay rent and energy and insurance and loan payments, every penny matters. So instead of buying thirty dollar shirts that last for years, they go to wallyworld and buy cheap shit that might last six months before it's thread-worn. But that doesn't matter because it'll be "out of fashion" by then, anyway.
I see three pairs of shoes right now over in my closet. Two are skechers, purchased at the store on Melrose; the other is a pair of Cole-Hahns, purchased a couple of years before. The Cole-Hahns have been through three soles, but I think nothing of paying thirty bucks every year or two to get them reworked; they're soft as butter and worn but far from tattered. The skechers are long since dead, separating at the seams, dried out, and brittle (In fact, I really should toss them). The skechers were decent shoes (and the sandals are still OK) but they cost me about $60 a pair. And the skechers these replaced also cost me about $60. The cole-hahns costs me nearly $200, but have easily outlasted at least for pairs of skechers. And my father, who cringes at the thought of spending twenty dollars on a damn shirt, goes through at least two pairs of cheap shit wal-mart shoes every year. In fact, when he buys them he usually buys a couple of pairs at a time! How is that, in any way, logical? How do these twenty dollar shoes represent "value?"
They don't. In fact, they are devoid of value. They are overproduced in sweatshops by exploited people who live a miserable existence - and everything about them reflects this heritage. And yet "we" buy them... by the Millions. If there is such a thing as karma, these products are physical manifestations of the very worse of it.
"Made in USA" stickers are pretty much meaningless because they're so poorly policed and the vast majority of folk simply don't give a fuck so long as they get a low price on the shit they want. Speaking from personal experience, this attitude seems almost universal eve
Prophetic words from potter George Ohr. What we are seeing is a cycle we are doomed to until we get over this mass consumerist mindset. Sure, you can go to wallyworld and buy tons of crap you couldn't afford before - but for what? I'm willing to bet 70% of everything that comes out of that place ends up in a landfill within three years.
If you look around you'll see some people still doing just fine - or even better than last year. $40,000 cars still sell and automakers are coming out with $100,000 cars. People I know who make high end home entertainment systems are still doing just fine. Why? Because the people who can afford that stuff aren't the ones whose jobs are being shipped overseas.
I hate how this sounds, but it all comes down to values. Not family values but simple common sense values - like spending twice as much on an article that will last five times as long. Like buying something that represents craftsmanship and community instead of a cheap chinese trinket you had to get in order to keep up with the neighbor.
It's everywhere - even on those "home improvment" type shows. Every week I laugh in disgust as Steve Thomas and the boys tell us how great this new styrafoam and plastic POS they are gluing to the front of their project of the month is when compared to the old, outdated plaster and woodwork that it's replacing - never mind it's a hundred fucking years old and just now in need of replacment - this new same-as-ten-thousand-others piece of crap is "just as good"... yeah, right.
You don't have to be a millionaire to buy good shit - you just have to learn to not drive yourself into debt buying truckloads of cheap crap. Until the people of the US can accept this most basic bit of common sense, it's all downhill.
But don't worry... all that infrastructure - the roads, the abandoned factories, the empty offices - will still be here, and all those jobs will come back... in twenty years, when the US economy has finally and completely hit the shitter and the people of the US will once again willingly work 12 hour days in sweatshops for peanuts - producing cheap american trinkets for the up-and-coming EU market and all those freshly minted eurotrash capitalists from the FSU.
I wish I had the skills to craft a better deskptop for linux, because it sadly needs it. And every time I see some neat new desktop I look carefully, hoping to find it uses some wonderful new system that does away with the hideous kludge that has become of both Gnome and KDE and X11 in general. I hope because I want a *nix desktop that will carry me into the new millenia feeling like an astronaut and not a WWI aviator held in the sky with toothpicks and rubber bands. I keep hoping that I won't have to switch form one proprietary system (windows) to another (apple) just to get all this.
I have the will to switch, but I don't have the skills to craft a better desktop. And, apparently, neither does anyone else in the open source community.
More importantly, when routing and participating in "the mesh" is in your best interest, why would you want to "opt out?" If your box isn't participating in the routing of information then the cache to your node will always be lagging - why would you want that? And there would surely be a means of identifying nodes that were in need of repair, and a node that wasn't routing traffic would, in such a system, be identified as "faulty." Given that such a mesh could also serve as a means of helping preserve anonymity, why would you want to draw attention to yourself by intentionally operating a faulty node?
It may take 2 days to get a DNS routed across the globe, but there aren't a few hundred million DNS servers sharing that information through multiply redundant connections, either.
Keep in mind I'm not arguing that we don't need any worldwide infrastructure - but I am making the argument that most of what we rely on locally (the "last 10 miles") could be done with meshes and collective data pooling agreements. Until just a few years ago our own phone company was still operating as a co-op, and there are hundreds of power co-ops operating across the country to this day. Our water is a community operated co-op and, except for occasional outages when the power to the pump fails, it works just fine. No reason at all a communications infrastructure couldn't be run the same way. Communities would get a valuable resource, and some unemployed IT workers would get a means of contributing to their community while earning a reasonable living.
2) Now, let's add a couple hundred gigs to each node for caching. This will absolutely not take care of any initial requests, but it will allow data to flow across the net like synapses. And once a few requests have gone out and the data begins to flow toward the source, those further requests would have multiple routes to the data in increasingly localized cache stores.
Yeah, there's a lot of if in there, but so what? There's also a lot of effort going into p2p routing issues and it's not at all unreasonable to expect some significant advances in mesh and swarm routing structures. In fact, I would argue this type of technology is the next natural step in the evolution of the 'net.
Is there any GPL software, fairly widely used, that supports an open standard for voice communications? Sure, I know there are plenty of standards for VOIP, but what's being used, now? If I went to my neighbors and told them we could "unwire" the neighborhood using cheap PCs and have not only local phone service but also faster internet connectivity than we get now, half the people in this very rural "town" of 200 would pony up tomorrow.
But, so far as I know, that technology doesn't yet exist. And until it does - until "broadband" means reliable, versatile connection to your neighbors rather than just really fast porn access, you can hang pervasive broadband on a hatrack.
Wanting to live in a cave doesn't always mean one wants to turn his back on knowledge and information.
So what's the big deal with broadband? So you get to view Slashdot 2 seconds faster.
Apparently you live in a different kind of "wilderness." Sorry for you, but being a hermit doesn't have to mean being a luddite. Nor does choosing to live in a "green ecosystem." Modern technology presents all sorts of new opportunities - even to those who choose to separate themselves from the greater of "society." In fact, that's the best part of it.
If metropolitan areas were linked by a peer system - where the "price" of having a telephone or a being able to view the popular media of that culture (in whatever form, whether written or not) were to buy a box for a couple hundred bucks and pay the energy bill on its use, then that would become the fair unit of exchange. We would no longer value "bandwidth" because it would no longer be a limited resource (just like the printing press - duh). And if these metro areas wanted to communicate with other areas at higher speed, they could pool resources (ie taxes) to a national agency that would maintain such a high speed infrastructure for their use.
Of course, that would put the individual metro areas at the mercy of this national organization - not a good thing. So the sensible thing would be to contract with many providers and let them compete with one another for their share of that aggregated bandwidth.
Which is really pretty much what we have - or could have - right now. Nothing at all preventing you from forming a community network and accepting a monthly fee to pool for the connection to the world. Individuals could even participate for free in the local community (ie local phone service and local TV) for nothing, but would contribute to the pool if they wanted to access the greater network.
What's most limiting this right now is the lack of standardized hardware that people feel comfortable with - ie a telephone, a radio receiver, a TV set. If we could buy an 802.xxx telephone at wal-mart for twenty bucks, or a radio, or a completely plug and play box that could act as a bridge to our existing telephones and TVs, then such community networks would likely explode in number.
Or perhaps I should say when and will...
Belushi (the later) and Ackroyd are on Carson Daily right now and Danny boy just said "we want folks to share this, burn it, download it - have fun. We're a small label now - if I was still on Universal I'd get in real trouble for sayin' that..."
That was excellently put (put excellently?)
It's not even a fun show anymore... they've become complete bores; the tribe has spoken by the millions: it's time for the men in the sharkskin suits to leave the island.
their work became so popular (and a few pretty well known starlets got their start with these people) it spawned a newsgroup of it's own - a newsgroup that is pretty much dead now, because ALS sued the major carriers of that newsgroup, forcing them to police it or just remove it entirely. They've ALSo (har) been known to go after individuals who post their material. Occasionally you'll find some of their material in a newsgroup, usually either encrypted or renamed.
Ever heard of Suze Randall? Amateur & Teen Kingdom? Both these websites are (or at the very least were) enormously popular and they WILL go after individuals who infringe upon their material. One or two posts might not get one a DMCA complaint, but they produce prodigious volumes of porn and even a flood of three year old stuff (that's not even on their own website anymore) can land a poster in hot water.
This talk about the porn industry embracing p2p is only a half truth propogated, no doubt, by the industry itself as PR move to keep it in favor among its consumers. It's one thing in the public eye to steal from Mickey Mouse and the Olsen Twins - but another thing entirely when you're stealing from "lowlife pornographers." IOW they need to keep all the friends they can. Their "embracing" of the internet is largely in the form of limited collections with large banners and Microsoft (proprietary) format video and audio files that contain embedded links and scripts - basically just another form of popup ad (at least for the majority who don't disable such scripted security holes - er, I mean "features").
Hit a well maintained usenet server and globally search the binaries groups for PGP containers. If you look deeply enough (well, it doesn't take too much if you bother to read the peripheral discussions) you will find most of these PGP containers relate to the exchange of one of two forms: child porn, and commercial websites - like Suze Randall, ATK, and ALS. You do the math...
...make me point at the sign...
This kid really, really needs to get laid.
If NBC told Matt LeBlanc they weren't going to pay him what he wants I'm quite sure he'd take a walk and leave NBC to figure out how to sweep up his dust. After all, central, popular stars have left shows before, and it sure didn't hurt Three's Company or Roseanne or even Bonanza... oh, wait.
What I find missing from all these discussions is any mention at all of the fact we aren't talking about a loss of money here. It's not that these people are losing money - it's just that they can't figure out how to use this technology to make even more money!
Any popular TV show can now be downloaded within hours of its original broadcast - it's not as if no one is going to tune in to watch "Buffy" because they would rather spend an hour (or a day) downloading it from the net. Look at Survivor; like it or not, the show is incredibly popular. And it's not terribly cheap to produce despite the fact they have only a single "star" to pay. But it makes assloads of money because it's timely - no one wants to tune in tomorrow to see what everyone else sees tonight. Networks will simply have to learn to do what TV was meant to do from the start - provide compelling, timely broadcasts to grab the eyeballs. Instead of running fifteen nonstop minutes of ads (anyone tried to watch The Late Show with David Letterman lately?) they'll have to figure out how to incorporate sponsorships into the show itself. Because I'll tell ya: I don't even have a Tivo anymore (yeah, I gave it up) but - tivo or not - there's no fucking way I'm going to sit through all those ads no matter how much I like Letterman. It doesn't take a Tivo to change the channel.