Unless I need to say it out loud, I don't actually "say" my head in English or Hungarian or whatnot that "I'm hungry, I'll go get a sandwich". I just get a feeling of emptiness in the stomach and have some vague image of a sandwich and my fridge appear in my head etc...
This is a preverbal thought (inasfar as it even classifies as a thought). No wonder you don't need to verbalize it inside your head. If you don't hold monologues with yourself and don't form verbal thoughts when you are listening to someone (even when you have not formed an intention to reply to them) your mind apparently does not work the same as mine.
I think in abstract constructs with images, sounds etc (it's way more efficient and natural). If I need to express those verbally, it will become whichever language I need to use in that situation.
A simple case study: my native language -- Dutch -- does not have an accurate translation for 'mind'. Since I have an AI background I encounter this word regularly in English. I do use the construct occasionally in my English language publications, so its meaning is apparently stored in my mind as an abstract construct. I have however never felt a need to invent a Dutch circumlocution for it, since the word has no added value to me outside the context of the English language. In my mind, this abstract construct is clearly inextricably bound to the language I use it with. What images, sounds, etc does the concept of a mind evoke with you? What is the correct circumlocution for mind? Is the circumlocution as likely to be used as the single word?
There is a difference between a mind and a fridge: I can directly interact with a fridge but minds are just the elusive referents of a intentional concept I only use in verbal expressions. Minds exist only because there is a linguistic community that recognizes their existence. It makes sense that you can have preverbal thoughts about a fridge. When you lose languages you presumably lose mindlike concepts and not fridgelike ones.
Any multi-lingual person will tell you that if you thought in one native language and then "translated" it to another, it would be way to slow and awkward.
I do think in English in settings where communication in English is involved. When I sit in an English language meeting I think in English, and in a Dutch language meeting in Dutch. In a German or French language meeting I think in English if English would be the backup language for expressing my opinion when my German/French fails me, and if the other participants don't understand English well enough I would just think in Dutch and be frustrated and more silent than usual because I have no way to accurately express my opinions. Thinking in one language and then translating when the moment to speak comes is not only slow: you may not be saying what you want to say at all.
When speakers of a language on the verge of extintion switch to a new, more universal language, they will carry with them those concepts and eventually the new language will be able to express them too.
Considering that the language went extinct because of a lack of native speakers there is very little likelyhood that they will be able to succesfully introduce concepts from the original language into, for instance, general English. They will only be succesful if they live in relative isolation from the larger language community, but if they do they will also start modifying English immediately into a new language of their own, just like Latin split up into different Romance languages when the empire fell apart. If they keep being exposed to a larger community that doesn't understand the concept, they will forget eventually.
I don't take this language extinction tragedy very seriously, but I definitely don't believe in a survival of the fittest concepts.
Or http://finance.google.com/finance?q=CADEUR to compare against the euro: it is exactly where it was last year at the end of the summer. This shows us two things: 1) it is the US that is sinking, and 2) Canada is valued highest in the summer, which makes complete sense to me.
It seems to me that the sword is a compromise between stabbing and slashing. If you are happy with only slashing you use an axe, which also works well for catching behind shields, and for stabbing you use the greater reach of a lance. The sword is a battlefield compromise, used for slashing when you have the space, and for stabbing at close quarters when shield walls are pushing into eachother (which is also why they where in general not very long).
The figure of 234 makes me think that he's counting things that are not wars but looking at this it does seem that the US was involved in some kind of war for a large percentage of its existence.
Just looked at that list of 234: using this way of accounting we in the Netherlands also "used our military forces abroad" over 50 times since WWII according to the defence website. In reality we have been in three engagements without a UN mandate since WWII as far as I know: the bloody attempt at "pacification" of our colony of Indonesia (1945-1949), another minor engagement at sea with Indonesia over Dutch New Guinea (1962), and another more recent "stabilization" operation in a province of Iraq (2003-2005) to please the US (and presumably to win the US vote for a Dutch secretary general of NATO).
It wouldn't surprise me if we rival or surpass the 234 number in the 1783-1993 time frame if we count our numerous small "Indian wars" (in Dutch jargon usually "pacification" and "law enforcement" operations) in the colonies in the 19th and early 20th century. The armed forces definitely want to be involved in some operation at all times, for training and testing purposes.
In the period 1568-1815 (after which we turned isolationist) we were basically continually at war in Europe (mostly with Spain, France, England, Sweden, Portugal, the Austrian empire, and various polities in "Barbary"). And then there were the colonies too.
It makes more sense to distinguish 1) who started, and 2) what kind of mandate for going to war a country has when one wants to make the argument some country is aggressive.
He only proposes to legislate that LiIon batteries must use *some* standardized battery format and be consumer changeable IMHO.
Standard sizes like AA, AAA, C, D are IEC standards, so that's a form of self-regulation by the industry. This is what usually happens in a market for a product if there are no market distortions like a near-monopolist, or bundling of the product with another, more expensive, product. If some new battery technology or application warrants a new design incompatible with existing standards, the IEC can adopt a new standard that makes the design possible.
The point of legislating standardization would be to protect consumers from market-distorting tactics like patenting a specific interface so that competitors cannot reproduce it or simply deviating from standards with a hard to reverse engineer design only for the purpose of cornering the market for batteries compatible with your product. I can think of several examples (mostly from construction; I am not American so neither are my examples) where the legislator requires that certain products must meet some industry standard or certification without specifying which one it should be: it is up to the court to decide whether some claimed standard or standardization body is bogus or irrelevant. Think for instance of Microsoft's open standards activities or PEFC certification as an example of standards a court could reject as bogus, or claims on products that they meet EC or ASTM standards even though there are no specific EC or ASTM standards for that type of product.
The alternative for the legislator is just to prohibit market distorting behaviour and fine companies to hell if they are deemed to violate it. This isn't ideal either.
Americans who believe mainstream christian churches are equally laidback everywhere should read about pillarisation (I am Dutch), our local, rustic form of religious terrorism. It may shed some light on why only half the population claims a christian denomination in some European countries.
The US is a bit typical (from my point of view) in having a sort of crypto-protestant pseudo-state-religion that is inclusive of everyone who sort of believes there is something out there, and that makes it OK for elected state officials to mention god and god's blessing and stuff like that, to organize state marriages in churches, even to organize religious ceremonies (the 911 funeral), etc. All of those things are unthinkable here, even under a christian-democrat government. In parliament you can talk about god if you like; When you become a minister you represent the Crown which "speaks with one mouth".
I suppose the path of least resistance in the US for people who don't actually go to church is to feel sort-of christian if they believe there is something out there. In some other countries people are less forgiving to the christian god when they leave church.
bibles written only in Latin so the vulger people couldn't read them for themselves
Attacks on religion are so much more convincing if they are historically accurate. In fact almost nothing was written in vernacular languages before the rise of the (educated) middle class and the invention of bookprinting. What point would there be in writing books by hand in a language that has no standard orthography and, most importantly, no potential readership besides the few that already read Latin? The Roman Catholic church reacted arrogantly and stupidly in the 15th and 16th century when they should have taken the initiative in spreading the good word among the newly literate middle class, and lost the initiative to protestant heretics, but it goes too far to say that they intentionally kept the contents of the bible secret in the centuries before that. It's not some kind of conspiracy.
Or are they simply a very vocal minority, owing to the fact that they have prescribed to a simple ideology that gives them the illusion to have easy answers even to complex problems?
One thing is obvious: Libertarian expository writing very clearly stands out. Libertarians have a proselytizing style of writing, just like Communists. So in that sense they are a vocal minority.
Moderates' opinions are obviously harder to classify, and moderates are less likely to let doctrinal patellar reflexes stand in the way of proper argumentation. Proselytes immediately know of which dogma the case at hand is an example, and then steer the discussion towards discussion of the dogma itself. Moderates generally stay on-topic, and divide their attention beteen pro and con arguments for the case at hand.
Counting libertarians and moderates on Slashdot is a bit fruitless, though. Maybe the real question is: where are the proselytes for other political ideologies? Maybe libertarianism is the kind of political extremism geeks are most likely to fall for? Maybe Internet fora simply have a natural tendency to become platforms for a single kind of proselytism because one group drives the competitors out?
Same for me. Most geeks I know happen to be social democrats, registered ones even, like me. Some are socialists. Of course I am older than most people here and have a family, and so do most people I know. And I have a social democratic background: my parents are registered social democrats too.
Some younger colleagues are what we call conservative liberals. Conservative liberalism seems to appeal to young, single, above average income men, regardless of profession. Fundamental tenets of the ideology seem to be: 1) they don't want to pay taxes because they get little in return for it, and 2) they cherish their freedom to collect pron.
It also would create problem to do the "fast to your house, slow to the world" thing since even if the high speed lasted all around your state, you'd find a majority of sites you browse to go much slower, and thus would say you were being ripped off in terms of the connection.
Right. I have a 100mbit connection at work in Amsterdam, which is connected via a 1gbit connection to the AMS-IX internet exchange point, which is the biggest in the world. I am actually in the middle of it: between its four hub-spokes on the edges of Amsterdam. The Netherlands happens to be one of those small countries in a great geographical locations, between the UK/US and Eurasia. The majority of sites in the world do go much slower than 100 mbit/s from this vantage point.
Obviously not all connections between two points need to be equally fast. If you look at Internet topology you see that the US backbone is basically in the middle: a Dutch request for a Japanese web site would go through the US 90% of the time. This makes perfect sense since both Japan-US and US-Netherlands traffic is normally much bigger than Netherlands-Japan traffic. Small countries (just like small US states), unless they happen to be in a great geographical location, tend to be dead ends for the backbone and will be sized accordingly. You don't build a personal highway for everyone either: traffic jams are inevitable.
Let me as a Dutchman point out that - although we have superior broadband and hooker access - we are far behind the US in access to Giant Sequoias and deserts, and the government takes no responsibility at all for this problem.
Right. I really don't know why people fail to categorize the Internet as "infrastructure". Roads, bridges, sewers, water, electricity, and the Internet are all the same sort of thing.
Easily verifiable in Google Earth: Even in Denmark and the Netherlands, the number #1 and #2 in broadband access, not everyone has a bridge to their island. That's too expensive even for the taxpayer.
Depends on demand. I once read about a survey here in the Netherlands which showed that the vast majority of Internet users never leave the Dutch language Internet, which basically means that most traffic never goes further away than the Amsterdam hub. Major software English language downloading sites and news sites are all cached locally with ISPs, obviously. It makes sense for ISPs to throttle use of transcontinental pipelines, causing occasional congestion for people who don't belong to the completely predictable 80%.
The situation probably isn't very different in the US: most people will not miss the rest of the world if they are disconnected from it.
People often seem to forget that for instance moving around coal or petrol in trucks to generate electricity at the point of use isn't exactly free either, so the grid isn't that bad.
Generation at the point of use is only interesting if it cuts down on the number of conversions. Solar already has a widely (but intermittently) available distribution system: it is often available "for free" at the point of use.
Solar heating, cooking, and maybe even refrigeration do reduce conversion and distribution losses significantly. Solar is also a perfect source of (intermittently available) light. The potential of solar stirling engines for washing machines etc. appears to be largely unexplored, but a pedal-operated one is perfect for the daily workout. The case for PV systems is far less convincing.
At least until China realizes that all they're getting for those plasma screens are IOUs that will never be paid off. I don't see any reason why we can't just sink the Chinese ships trying to cross our borders [..]
That's what I always say: just sink those ships with Microsoft EULAs trying to cross our borders, and make our own copies! (I am a European.)
The race for cheap labor is a race to the bottom, not to the top.
Well, until labour demand outstrips labour supply again. You're being too pessimistic. But this will of course not happen in our lifetime given that we still have a potential labor supply of billions of poor people to go, unless WWIII or some other cataclysm kills of (preferably the inferior) half the world population instantly. The WWIII solution however only works if means of production remain available, so there is no reason to be too enthusiastic about that option: controlled cataclysms are notoriously hard to manage. You can for instance try to nuke part of the world based on GDP/capita, but this can get out of hand if other countries don't appreciate your good intentions and join in nuking the wrong people and lands. The black death pandemic in Europe in medieval times is for instance often credited with improving living conditions and making the Renaissance possible in Europe, but the positive effects set in more than a century after, which isn't very helpful.
So basically we have a goose that lays golden eggs, one a day. This is great, because everyone wants golden eggs. But there is a problem: the goose hands out IOUs for golden eggs all the time, and by now everybody has a big hoard of IOUs, much more than can reasonably be converted into golden eggs. As long as we don't question the proposition 1 egg = 1 IOU we can all feel rich, and the goose will continue to convert one IOU into one golden egg for someone every day.
The problem is to make the goose stop issuing IOUs at will, while still converting golden eggs.
Two constraints on the solution: 1) It cannot depend on fooling the goose, because the goose is very shrewd. We wouldn't be stuck with the IOUs if it wasn't. 2) It cannot depend on using or threatening force, because it is a mean monster goose out of hell that eats babies for breakfast.
I fail to understand why China would be the first to break the status quo, except out of sheer malice. China will wait at least several decades until most Americans and Europeans with engineering skills are dead before it pulls a stunt like that. For now it will be content sending hordes of PhD students to the US and Europe.
Giving everyone some retirement plan may be a better idea. If I was a third world subsistence farmer and had no way to accumulate wealth for my old age I would also want to have many children, hoping at least one or two survive into adulthood and are successful enough to provide for me.
Your medieval peasant-in-the-field may have thought that it was flat, if he thought about it at all, but the Bible would have had very little affect on him [..]
On the other hand, the non-literary symbol of the globus cruciger probably was familiar to the medieval peasant-in-the-field, and it is a strong hint to the peasant that the literate authorities think of the world as a globe.
The 19th century myth of the flat earth is probably so tenacious because average Joe likes to believe he knows more than a medieval peasant-in-the-field, which is actually quite unlikely in matters of astronomy since the medieval peasant-in-the-field was a farmer and didn't carry around equipment to tell him the current date and time.
It works both ways. The US Army Corps of Engineers has contracted many Dutch hydraulic engineering companies with experience of and specialized equipment for building storm surge barriers to reconstruct the Louisiana coastline as soon as possible. This obviously robs us of our own "strategic capacity" to undertake major new hydraulic works for some time, but on the other hand we wouldn't be able to afford the "free" overcapacity of hydraulic engineering equipment and skills with our own taxpayer's money alone. This is economy of scale in action.
Same with emergency management: this is a resource that is most cost-effective if reserves are pooled worldwide, and in use all the time. The US already has an advantage over much of the world by virtue of its size, but it turned out to be arrogant to foreigners that offer help.
The Dutch government had directed a navy command ship from the Netherlands Antilles in the direction of Louisiana already before Katrina hit to coordinate assistance, and very quickly after contacted the US to obtain a wish list for emergency relief services and pumping teams, but they were told that nothing was needed. Only days later the US requested some pumping teams. If disaster suddenly strikes then you are excused for not having a wish list ready, but in this case it was clear more than a day before that fairly likely to be hit and the disaster scenario of a major Hurricane hitting New Orleans should have been known in the first place. So the missing component was apparently a realistic estimation of what resources the US would be able to provide for by itself, or maybe simply the psychological preparedness for asking the rest of the world to help.
The USA appears to be a clear net beneficiary of cordial relations with the rest of the world. It's record on providing food, medicine, etc. to the rest of the world is not all that convincing in the first place, and what the rest of the world would gain by US isolationism is for instance the liberty to ignore US pharmaceutical patents, which immediately makes a billion in US medical aid replacable by a million of the same aid by a country that produces cheap copies of US pharmaceuticals. This is just an example: the price a country pays for participating in the international beauty contest for assistance and investment is respecting the rules of the game wrt. to property, IPR, patents, import tariffs, etc. The US normally buys the loyalty of most of the rest of the world for a very modest amount. Occasionally the US makes a costly mistake like Iraq (= invest a lot of money to lose goodwill in the international arena), but on the whole it is worth every penny.
Good summary. The costs of upgrading wiring are not very well correlated to population density in the first place.
Dragging optical fibre to some lone hut on the top of a mountain, as you put it, is not cost effective, but neither is opening up the streets of a European town centre with streets just wide enough for cars: the indirect costs for traffic and retail are huge. The sweet spot is in the middle: cheapest is wiring up apartment buildings and suburban neighbourhoods with wide streets, and the US has lots of those while many European countries have more townhouses in narrow streets proportionally.
Population density maps are not finegrained enough to make the distinction in the first place. Even this USDA definition of rural misclassifies walled towns in the Netherlands consisting solely of townhouses that I know of as "rural", while it classifies much bigger sprawled villages nearby as "urban" even though these "urban" areas actually depend on the "rural" town for services. (That the villages grow in population and the town does not is typically an effect of the wall.) Wiring up the walled town with its narrow streets and busy traffic is going to be more expensive than wiring up the villages.
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Unless I need to say it out loud, I don't actually "say" my head in English or Hungarian or whatnot that "I'm hungry, I'll go get a sandwich". I just get a feeling of emptiness in the stomach and have some vague image of a sandwich and my fridge appear in my head etc...
This is a preverbal thought (inasfar as it even classifies as a thought). No wonder you don't need to verbalize it inside your head. If you don't hold monologues with yourself and don't form verbal thoughts when you are listening to someone (even when you have not formed an intention to reply to them) your mind apparently does not work the same as mine.
I think in abstract constructs with images, sounds etc (it's way more efficient and natural). If I need to express those verbally, it will become whichever language I need to use in that situation.
A simple case study: my native language -- Dutch -- does not have an accurate translation for 'mind'. Since I have an AI background I encounter this word regularly in English. I do use the construct occasionally in my English language publications, so its meaning is apparently stored in my mind as an abstract construct. I have however never felt a need to invent a Dutch circumlocution for it, since the word has no added value to me outside the context of the English language. In my mind, this abstract construct is clearly inextricably bound to the language I use it with. What images, sounds, etc does the concept of a mind evoke with you? What is the correct circumlocution for mind? Is the circumlocution as likely to be used as the single word?
There is a difference between a mind and a fridge: I can directly interact with a fridge but minds are just the elusive referents of a intentional concept I only use in verbal expressions. Minds exist only because there is a linguistic community that recognizes their existence. It makes sense that you can have preverbal thoughts about a fridge. When you lose languages you presumably lose mindlike concepts and not fridgelike ones.
Any multi-lingual person will tell you that if you thought in one native language and then "translated" it to another, it would be way to slow and awkward.
I do think in English in settings where communication in English is involved. When I sit in an English language meeting I think in English, and in a Dutch language meeting in Dutch. In a German or French language meeting I think in English if English would be the backup language for expressing my opinion when my German/French fails me, and if the other participants don't understand English well enough I would just think in Dutch and be frustrated and more silent than usual because I have no way to accurately express my opinions. Thinking in one language and then translating when the moment to speak comes is not only slow: you may not be saying what you want to say at all.
When speakers of a language on the verge of extintion switch to a new, more universal language, they will carry with them those concepts and eventually the new language will be able to express them too.
Considering that the language went extinct because of a lack of native speakers there is very little likelyhood that they will be able to succesfully introduce concepts from the original language into, for instance, general English. They will only be succesful if they live in relative isolation from the larger language community, but if they do they will also start modifying English immediately into a new language of their own, just like Latin split up into different Romance languages when the empire fell apart. If they keep being exposed to a larger community that doesn't understand the concept, they will forget eventually.
I don't take this language extinction tragedy very seriously, but I definitely don't believe in a survival of the fittest concepts.
Or, perhaps, the technology isn't that great and they want to test it out on Canada first.
Blurry satellite imagery is not new technology or anything. Large parts of the world already have blurryness in Google Earth. It's highly overrated.
Or http://finance.google.com/finance?q=CADEUR to compare against the euro: it is exactly where it was last year at the end of the summer. This shows us two things: 1) it is the US that is sinking, and 2) Canada is valued highest in the summer, which makes complete sense to me.
It seems to me that the sword is a compromise between stabbing and slashing. If you are happy with only slashing you use an axe, which also works well for catching behind shields, and for stabbing you use the greater reach of a lance. The sword is a battlefield compromise, used for slashing when you have the space, and for stabbing at close quarters when shield walls are pushing into eachother (which is also why they where in general not very long).
The figure of 234 makes me think that he's counting things that are not wars but looking at this it does seem that the US was involved in some kind of war for a large percentage of its existence.
Just looked at that list of 234: using this way of accounting we in the Netherlands also "used our military forces abroad" over 50 times since WWII according to the defence website. In reality we have been in three engagements without a UN mandate since WWII as far as I know: the bloody attempt at "pacification" of our colony of Indonesia (1945-1949), another minor engagement at sea with Indonesia over Dutch New Guinea (1962), and another more recent "stabilization" operation in a province of Iraq (2003-2005) to please the US (and presumably to win the US vote for a Dutch secretary general of NATO).
It wouldn't surprise me if we rival or surpass the 234 number in the 1783-1993 time frame if we count our numerous small "Indian wars" (in Dutch jargon usually "pacification" and "law enforcement" operations) in the colonies in the 19th and early 20th century. The armed forces definitely want to be involved in some operation at all times, for training and testing purposes.
In the period 1568-1815 (after which we turned isolationist) we were basically continually at war in Europe (mostly with Spain, France, England, Sweden, Portugal, the Austrian empire, and various polities in "Barbary"). And then there were the colonies too.
It makes more sense to distinguish 1) who started, and 2) what kind of mandate for going to war a country has when one wants to make the argument some country is aggressive.
The shiny side should obviously always face the open space, or the radiant barrier will not work at all.
He only proposes to legislate that LiIon batteries must use *some* standardized battery format and be consumer changeable IMHO.
Standard sizes like AA, AAA, C, D are IEC standards, so that's a form of self-regulation by the industry. This is what usually happens in a market for a product if there are no market distortions like a near-monopolist, or bundling of the product with another, more expensive, product. If some new battery technology or application warrants a new design incompatible with existing standards, the IEC can adopt a new standard that makes the design possible.
The point of legislating standardization would be to protect consumers from market-distorting tactics like patenting a specific interface so that competitors cannot reproduce it or simply deviating from standards with a hard to reverse engineer design only for the purpose of cornering the market for batteries compatible with your product. I can think of several examples (mostly from construction; I am not American so neither are my examples) where the legislator requires that certain products must meet some industry standard or certification without specifying which one it should be: it is up to the court to decide whether some claimed standard or standardization body is bogus or irrelevant. Think for instance of Microsoft's open standards activities or PEFC certification as an example of standards a court could reject as bogus, or claims on products that they meet EC or ASTM standards even though there are no specific EC or ASTM standards for that type of product.
The alternative for the legislator is just to prohibit market distorting behaviour and fine companies to hell if they are deemed to violate it. This isn't ideal either.
Americans who believe mainstream christian churches are equally laidback everywhere should read about pillarisation (I am Dutch), our local, rustic form of religious terrorism. It may shed some light on why only half the population claims a christian denomination in some European countries.
The US is a bit typical (from my point of view) in having a sort of crypto-protestant pseudo-state-religion that is inclusive of everyone who sort of believes there is something out there, and that makes it OK for elected state officials to mention god and god's blessing and stuff like that, to organize state marriages in churches, even to organize religious ceremonies (the 911 funeral), etc. All of those things are unthinkable here, even under a christian-democrat government. In parliament you can talk about god if you like; When you become a minister you represent the Crown which "speaks with one mouth".
I suppose the path of least resistance in the US for people who don't actually go to church is to feel sort-of christian if they believe there is something out there. In some other countries people are less forgiving to the christian god when they leave church.
bibles written only in Latin so the vulger people couldn't read them for themselves
Attacks on religion are so much more convincing if they are historically accurate. In fact almost nothing was written in vernacular languages before the rise of the (educated) middle class and the invention of bookprinting. What point would there be in writing books by hand in a language that has no standard orthography and, most importantly, no potential readership besides the few that already read Latin? The Roman Catholic church reacted arrogantly and stupidly in the 15th and 16th century when they should have taken the initiative in spreading the good word among the newly literate middle class, and lost the initiative to protestant heretics, but it goes too far to say that they intentionally kept the contents of the bible secret in the centuries before that. It's not some kind of conspiracy.
Or are they simply a very vocal minority, owing to the fact that they have prescribed to a simple ideology that gives them the illusion to have easy answers even to complex problems?
One thing is obvious: Libertarian expository writing very clearly stands out. Libertarians have a proselytizing style of writing, just like Communists. So in that sense they are a vocal minority.
Moderates' opinions are obviously harder to classify, and moderates are less likely to let doctrinal patellar reflexes stand in the way of proper argumentation. Proselytes immediately know of which dogma the case at hand is an example, and then steer the discussion towards discussion of the dogma itself. Moderates generally stay on-topic, and divide their attention beteen pro and con arguments for the case at hand.
Counting libertarians and moderates on Slashdot is a bit fruitless, though. Maybe the real question is: where are the proselytes for other political ideologies? Maybe libertarianism is the kind of political extremism geeks are most likely to fall for? Maybe Internet fora simply have a natural tendency to become platforms for a single kind of proselytism because one group drives the competitors out?
Same for me. Most geeks I know happen to be social democrats, registered ones even, like me. Some are socialists. Of course I am older than most people here and have a family, and so do most people I know. And I have a social democratic background: my parents are registered social democrats too.
Some younger colleagues are what we call conservative liberals. Conservative liberalism seems to appeal to young, single, above average income men, regardless of profession. Fundamental tenets of the ideology seem to be: 1) they don't want to pay taxes because they get little in return for it, and 2) they cherish their freedom to collect pron.
It also would create problem to do the "fast to your house, slow to the world" thing since even if the high speed lasted all around your state, you'd find a majority of sites you browse to go much slower, and thus would say you were being ripped off in terms of the connection.
Right. I have a 100mbit connection at work in Amsterdam, which is connected via a 1gbit connection to the AMS-IX internet exchange point, which is the biggest in the world. I am actually in the middle of it: between its four hub-spokes on the edges of Amsterdam. The Netherlands happens to be one of those small countries in a great geographical locations, between the UK/US and Eurasia. The majority of sites in the world do go much slower than 100 mbit/s from this vantage point.
Obviously not all connections between two points need to be equally fast. If you look at Internet topology you see that the US backbone is basically in the middle: a Dutch request for a Japanese web site would go through the US 90% of the time. This makes perfect sense since both Japan-US and US-Netherlands traffic is normally much bigger than Netherlands-Japan traffic. Small countries (just like small US states), unless they happen to be in a great geographical location, tend to be dead ends for the backbone and will be sized accordingly. You don't build a personal highway for everyone either: traffic jams are inevitable.
Let me as a Dutchman point out that - although we have superior broadband and hooker access - we are far behind the US in access to Giant Sequoias and deserts, and the government takes no responsibility at all for this problem.
Right. I really don't know why people fail to categorize the Internet as "infrastructure". Roads, bridges, sewers, water, electricity, and the Internet are all the same sort of thing.
Easily verifiable in Google Earth: Even in Denmark and the Netherlands, the number #1 and #2 in broadband access, not everyone has a bridge to their island. That's too expensive even for the taxpayer.
I am sure Denmark and the Netherlands beat the US in access to 21st century shitting technology too.
It's a big WAN in effect.
Depends on demand. I once read about a survey here in the Netherlands which showed that the vast majority of Internet users never leave the Dutch language Internet, which basically means that most traffic never goes further away than the Amsterdam hub. Major software English language downloading sites and news sites are all cached locally with ISPs, obviously. It makes sense for ISPs to throttle use of transcontinental pipelines, causing occasional congestion for people who don't belong to the completely predictable 80%.
The situation probably isn't very different in the US: most people will not miss the rest of the world if they are disconnected from it.
People often seem to forget that for instance moving around coal or petrol in trucks to generate electricity at the point of use isn't exactly free either, so the grid isn't that bad.
Generation at the point of use is only interesting if it cuts down on the number of conversions. Solar already has a widely (but intermittently) available distribution system: it is often available "for free" at the point of use.
Solar heating, cooking, and maybe even refrigeration do reduce conversion and distribution losses significantly. Solar is also a perfect source of (intermittently available) light. The potential of solar stirling engines for washing machines etc. appears to be largely unexplored, but a pedal-operated one is perfect for the daily workout. The case for PV systems is far less convincing.
No. To BSOD. It better describes their products.
At least until China realizes that all they're getting for those plasma screens are IOUs that will never be paid off. I don't see any reason why we can't just sink the Chinese ships trying to cross our borders [..]
That's what I always say: just sink those ships with Microsoft EULAs trying to cross our borders, and make our own copies! (I am a European.)
The race for cheap labor is a race to the bottom, not to the top.
Well, until labour demand outstrips labour supply again. You're being too pessimistic. But this will of course not happen in our lifetime given that we still have a potential labor supply of billions of poor people to go, unless WWIII or some other cataclysm kills of (preferably the inferior) half the world population instantly. The WWIII solution however only works if means of production remain available, so there is no reason to be too enthusiastic about that option: controlled cataclysms are notoriously hard to manage. You can for instance try to nuke part of the world based on GDP/capita, but this can get out of hand if other countries don't appreciate your good intentions and join in nuking the wrong people and lands. The black death pandemic in Europe in medieval times is for instance often credited with improving living conditions and making the Renaissance possible in Europe, but the positive effects set in more than a century after, which isn't very helpful.
So basically we have a goose that lays golden eggs, one a day. This is great, because everyone wants golden eggs. But there is a problem: the goose hands out IOUs for golden eggs all the time, and by now everybody has a big hoard of IOUs, much more than can reasonably be converted into golden eggs. As long as we don't question the proposition 1 egg = 1 IOU we can all feel rich, and the goose will continue to convert one IOU into one golden egg for someone every day.
The problem is to make the goose stop issuing IOUs at will, while still converting golden eggs.
Two constraints on the solution:
1) It cannot depend on fooling the goose, because the goose is very shrewd. We wouldn't be stuck with the IOUs if it wasn't.
2) It cannot depend on using or threatening force, because it is a mean monster goose out of hell that eats babies for breakfast.
I fail to understand why China would be the first to break the status quo, except out of sheer malice. China will wait at least several decades until most Americans and Europeans with engineering skills are dead before it pulls a stunt like that. For now it will be content sending hordes of PhD students to the US and Europe.
Giving everyone some retirement plan may be a better idea. If I was a third world subsistence farmer and had no way to accumulate wealth for my old age I would also want to have many children, hoping at least one or two survive into adulthood and are successful enough to provide for me.
Your medieval peasant-in-the-field may have thought that it was flat, if he thought about it at all, but the Bible would have had very little affect on him [..]
On the other hand, the non-literary symbol of the globus cruciger probably was familiar to the medieval peasant-in-the-field, and it is a strong hint to the peasant that the literate authorities think of the world as a globe.
The 19th century myth of the flat earth is probably so tenacious because average Joe likes to believe he knows more than a medieval peasant-in-the-field, which is actually quite unlikely in matters of astronomy since the medieval peasant-in-the-field was a farmer and didn't carry around equipment to tell him the current date and time.
It works both ways. The US Army Corps of Engineers has contracted many Dutch hydraulic engineering companies with experience of and specialized equipment for building storm surge barriers to reconstruct the Louisiana coastline as soon as possible. This obviously robs us of our own "strategic capacity" to undertake major new hydraulic works for some time, but on the other hand we wouldn't be able to afford the "free" overcapacity of hydraulic engineering equipment and skills with our own taxpayer's money alone. This is economy of scale in action.
Same with emergency management: this is a resource that is most cost-effective if reserves are pooled worldwide, and in use all the time. The US already has an advantage over much of the world by virtue of its size, but it turned out to be arrogant to foreigners that offer help.
The Dutch government had directed a navy command ship from the Netherlands Antilles in the direction of Louisiana already before Katrina hit to coordinate assistance, and very quickly after contacted the US to obtain a wish list for emergency relief services and pumping teams, but they were told that nothing was needed. Only days later the US requested some pumping teams. If disaster suddenly strikes then you are excused for not having a wish list ready, but in this case it was clear more than a day before that fairly likely to be hit and the disaster scenario of a major Hurricane hitting New Orleans should have been known in the first place. So the missing component was apparently a realistic estimation of what resources the US would be able to provide for by itself, or maybe simply the psychological preparedness for asking the rest of the world to help.
The USA appears to be a clear net beneficiary of cordial relations with the rest of the world. It's record on providing food, medicine, etc. to the rest of the world is not all that convincing in the first place, and what the rest of the world would gain by US isolationism is for instance the liberty to ignore US pharmaceutical patents, which immediately makes a billion in US medical aid replacable by a million of the same aid by a country that produces cheap copies of US pharmaceuticals. This is just an example: the price a country pays for participating in the international beauty contest for assistance and investment is respecting the rules of the game wrt. to property, IPR, patents, import tariffs, etc. The US normally buys the loyalty of most of the rest of the world for a very modest amount. Occasionally the US makes a costly mistake like Iraq (= invest a lot of money to lose goodwill in the international arena), but on the whole it is worth every penny.
Also, obviously, other countries will stop trading resources amongst eachother in dollars if the USA takes a less central place in the international arena, so Americans will have to get used to dollars not being very much in demand. The fundamental reason why the US attracts so much foreign investment is that it is perceived as low risk because it is the home market of the dollar, which functions as a kind of international yardstick of wealth. Central banks of other countries hold a major part of US public debt. Foreign direct investment will be targeted elsewhere if the US turns isolationist, which will be a great boon for higher risk developing countries since there is no alternative safe haven for investment capable of absorbing so much money as the US, and will cost the US 5.3 million jobs (41% of manufacturing jobs) which pay 15% higher on average than wages paid by U.S. companies, a steep increase in US interest rates, 12 percent of US corporate tax revenues, etc.
Good summary. The costs of upgrading wiring are not very well correlated to population density in the first place.
Dragging optical fibre to some lone hut on the top of a mountain, as you put it, is not cost effective, but neither is opening up the streets of a European town centre with streets just wide enough for cars: the indirect costs for traffic and retail are huge. The sweet spot is in the middle: cheapest is wiring up apartment buildings and suburban neighbourhoods with wide streets, and the US has lots of those while many European countries have more townhouses in narrow streets proportionally.
Population density maps are not finegrained enough to make the distinction in the first place. Even this USDA definition of rural misclassifies walled towns in the Netherlands consisting solely of townhouses that I know of as "rural", while it classifies much bigger sprawled villages nearby as "urban" even though these "urban" areas actually depend on the "rural" town for services. (That the villages grow in population and the town does not is typically an effect of the wall.) Wiring up the walled town with its narrow streets and busy traffic is going to be more expensive than wiring up the villages.