Perhaps it's time to consider a new line of work. Someone suggested telecom... try hitting up one of the *Bells around and see if they need techs.
In case you didn't notice, the telecom industry imploded about the same time the dot-com industry did.
The big companies, both network gear as well as network operators, have been shedding jobs ever since.
The remaining Baby Bells, at least in the US, have been trying to sell their rural operations.
There may be opportunities with some of the smaller companies that are purchasing those operations and are focused on serving rural areas.
Interestingly, those companies may need to remain small in order to be profitable -- rural service providers get Federal government subsidies, unless the company is too big.
It may be useful to look at rural power companies as well -- some of those are starting to look seriously at broadband over the power distribution network and will need to add quite a bit of network management and other technical expertise in order to make a go of that.
Except that they only need one or two of the cases to settle in SCO's favor... and they become ammo to help win the remaining cases.
IANAL, but I think you're wrong here.
The fact that other companies have settled with SCO would have no bearing on the results of a case when someone decided to stand up to the SCO claims.
The court's opinion on the facts and the law matter, but not the opinions of those other companies that decided it was cheaper to settle.
I believe that attempts to introduce such settlements as "evidence" of the validity of the SCO claims would be laughed at by the court -- unless they were the result of a judgement reached by another court, as you mention.
I think SCO's going to get their heads handed back to them in court later this year.
At that point, I sincerely hope that enough people who received these threatening letters file complaints so that the government can prosecute SCO's officers on criminal charges for attempted extortion.
The real outcome here is not that MS will be forced to bundle these other apps with Windows, but that they will no longer be able to prevent (European) OEMs from doing so.
Even more important -- if the descriptions of the remedies are accurate, MS will be forced to make it possible for those OEMs to exclude the MS applications (WMP at least) from the bundle.
Allowing bundling doesn't force MS to change any of their code -- but making the apps truly removable does!
I don't suppose we could get the EU authorities to go back and impose the same requirement on IE, but at least there will be a precedent going forward that should keep MS from migrating more and more application code over the line into the OS itself.
I think MS should have a baseline windows, for like 50% off retail price maybe, that a user can pick if they want. Unless the user asks for it, I think most people will be willing to pay extra to have everything preinstalled and ready to go. Its all about ease of use, If you know how to use it on your computer you can go just about anywhere else and use it on another, thats what MS provides.
I'm saying that you don't need sarcasm because what you've proposed is almost a viable competitive solution to the MS monopoly problem.
Make that baseline Windows available at 50% off the price for whatever class of customer is buying it: 50% off retail for an end user, 50% of the "wholesale" for an OEM, and create a new category of buyer, the software packagers and resellers (give them the OEM price probably).
As you point out, most users don't want to have to choose and install all the usual apps.
This way they can still buy the bundle -- the only difference is that MS isn't the one deciding which apps to bundle, the individual resellers (and in some cases the end user) are.
The consumer still gets complete bundles, but now has a choice between bundles.
But I say why stop with MS and Media Player, I say NO OS's should bundle any Apps, No quicktime on Mac's, no Notepad in Windows, no OS's can't have any application pre-installed if their is a 3rd party version out there.
While you said this with sarcasm tags, why not consider it more seriously?
Let the company assembling the package to sell at retail -- Dell, Gateway, HP being the dominant firms in the US -- assemble the complete software package to ship.
Make it possible for other firms to resell Windows-based packages, much the way that Red Hat and SuSE and others do with Linux-based packages.
When Mike's Software puts together a Windows-based package, I'll decide which apps to bundle on the CD -- not Microsoft.
I compete with other packagers on the basis of ease of installation, price, quality of support, etc.
Consumers, the large majority of which buy their computers with the OS and application packages already installed, would be no worse off in terms of convenience.
They would presumably also get the benefits of competition in the application space -- more usable features and lower prices.
When I was about 16, I had the opportunity to walk across a section of open prairie towards a small herd of American bison.
At some point -- about the time that one of the bulls has clearly noticed your presence -- you realize that these are very large, very dangerous animals and that what you are doing is NOT smart.
Whether you have a pointy stick, or something more sophisticated, it's NOT smart to approach them.
I don't even want to THINK about getting close to a Cape Buffalo.
Excellent point about the muzzle.
Clearly, we evolved eating small things, and branched out later.
The problem is now, there isn't a reasonable tech saavy person around who can argue that Windows still has a monopoly hold on any market.
What about economics savvy?
Not that I'm claiming to have much of that, but name one Windows competitor that has successfully entered the market in the past ten years without the donation of $2B+ of free, highly-skilled labor (my own guess at what's gone into Linux).
MacOS is older than that,
OS/2 and BeOS are gone,
Solaris, HP/UX, AIX and the other UNIX variants are not marketed as mass market desktop products, and the BSD variants were also heavily dependent on donated labor.
MS's profit margins on Windows are the envy of every business in the world -- there should be dozens of new competitors.
The fact that there are not indicates the scale of the barriers to entry:
few software companies could afford the development bill for a competing OS;
few software companies could be successful due to the lack of applications for their new platform;
few companies could continue to compete if MS introduced copies of any innovative features that differentiated the product from Windows.
It may turn out that Linux will eventually be a successful competitor on the desktop.
Successful, in this case, meaning sufficient penetration that MS is forced to reduce their prices.
It has happened in some places -- eg, Thailand -- but the cases I know of required government intervention of some sort.
During the last antitrust trial, evidence was introduced that suggested MS could sell Windows for $50 (quantity one at retail) and still make a profit --
Linux is successfully competing when MS's prices begin to approach that level.
Teachers don't get the respect and remuneration they deserve.
Teachers in a modern industrialized society are caught in an unfortunate economic bind.
Teachers today are roughly as productive as they were 30 years ago.
For example, my kids' high-school classes are about the same size and they learn approximately the same material in the same number of years as when I was in high school.
Over the same 30 years, many (most?) other jobs have become much more productive -- steel workers produce more steel per hour of labor, engineers produce designs with far fewer hours of human labor (consider the savings from replacing most of the support staff with computers), a ditch-digger with a backhoe instead of a dozen with shovels, etc.
As a result, teachers' pay tends to fall behind relative to other skilled fields.
I wish I knew an answer.
...suppliment starchy plants with fish, insects and the odd rodent or two and you have the nearly perfect human diet, so far as I can determine. Without turning to fairly advanced tools you'll have a hard time catching and making a meal from a cow.
I agree with you that people seem well-suited to roots and other starchy plant products, nuts, berries, bugs and the occasional odd fish or rodent.
Just looking at our teeth, we're clearly not designed to eat too much meat, or grains that are too hard.
Cow ancestors would indeed have been difficult for people without technology, but mainly because of their approach to defense -- circle the herd with the bulls on the outside and challenge the predators.
OTOH, a human in excellent physical condition can run down a North American deer (that will flee rather than fight) in less than a day.
Two people can do it with considerably less effort by chasing it in circles.
Relatively hairless skin and profuse sweat glands that combine for very efficient cooling make it possible.
Killing the deer once it is sufficiently exhausted requires nothing more complicated than a rock to hit it in the head with.
I'm sure that there are corresponding prey animals in other parts of the world.
The most interesting flat-panel antennas -- where the structure is literally a thin, flat panel rather than depending on a parabolic dish -- are phased-array designs.
I always thought that phased arrays were a really neat concept.
Explained badly, they consist of a collection of small individual antennas and the signal from each runs through a very precise time-delay element.
By adjusting the delay elements, it is possible to use constructive interference to "point" the antenna in a particular direction.
The result is a steerable antenna that has no moving parts.
If I remember correctly, much of the original work in making them practical was paid for by the US Air Force -- because radar antennas with moving parts tended to freeze up badly in the Arctic.
I believe that the big application in consumer electronics is going to be with Ka-band satellites.
The FCC is going to allow those birds to be spaced much closer together than the older Ku-band satellites, and the stamped-metal dishes are not selective enough.
Real experts should chime in here and correct my errors.
Regular incandescents are a little "yellow" to me... I like my light sources to be a little on the blue side.
Have you tried the various compact florescent bulbs?
I recently went through a few, looking for one that was the "right" color.
Incandescents are about 2750K, a good approximation of sunrise/sunset lighting.
Some of the compact florescents are about 6000K, a reasonable approximation of high-noon sunlight.
Those were too white for me -- seemed odd to have that color light inside the house, and made the whites on my LCD screen look a bit yellow by comparison -- but might be good if you like things more towards the blue.
I ended up with a Philips bulb listed at 3000K.
But there's no area code 101 (I think...) so the 10-10 prefix still uniquely identifies that type of call.
Correct.
There are currently
no area codes that start with 1.
There are
plans in progress
to add an 11th and possibly 12th digit to the North American numbering plan by 2030.
If I live that long I'll be 77, and probably find it to be incredibly confusing.
They may be optimistic about needing those extra digits, of course, since there's a chance that most useful devices will reside on IP-based networks by that time.
On that note, can someone please explain to me what the heck the point of 11 digit dialing is? Isn't the semantic content of the leading 1 exactly null?
No.
Among other things, it indicates the possibility that you may be dialing a number that will include a long-distance company identifier -- for example, 10-10-220-303-555-1212.
The dialing plan in the US carries an enormous amount of historical baggage.
Choosing a long-distance carrier, as well as the additions to the dialing plan to allow you to specify the carrier on a per-call basis, were added in 1984 when the Bell System was broken up.
I don't believe the cell-phone companies are required to allow you to specify the long-distance carrier.
Given the number of plans that don't make any distinction between local and long-distance, it seems unlikely that you would ever want to specify a different carrier.
Several changes have to be made before your local cable company (or more likely, the local branch of your national cable company) can do this.
Here are two.
Cable company billing systems are, in general, not very flexible.
Major changes would be needed to handle a la carte channel selection.
The same problem exists for the customer care systems used by service reps.
I've heard lots of people ask "How hard can it be to build/modify those systems?"
Building a system to track millions of subscribers, provide access for hundreds of service reps, interface to the cable systems themselves, and meet all the uptime requirements is a non-trivial task.
Cable networks set their prices, in many cases, based on bundles of channels.
This whole part of the business would have to change in order to allow customers to get one of (for example) the ABC/Disney channels without getting the others.
Those networks set advertising rates at least in part based on the number of households in which the channel is available -- if it's in the bundle, they can charge the cable company less because they charge the advertisers more.
Expensive content is not the only reason that HBO and Showtime cost $10/month -- no advertising revenue is also a factor.
A la carte channels will greatly reduce the revenue potential of advertising, and will have to be made up somehow.
The reason many unethical businesses fail is that they are fleeced by unethical executives.
Of course, it's not like some companies don't deserve it.
Suppose I set up the CEO's compensation scheme like this:
(1) you get $1M per year to run the business,
(2) if there's a change of ownership and you lose your job, you get $20M, and
(3) you get these risk free stock options and if the share price goes up $10, you get $30M.
What's the CEO's motivation?
Polish the chrome up and sell that sucker!
If the board of directors didn't intend for that to be the outcome, why did they set up the compensation scheme that encouraged it?
Have you ever noticed how many board members of large companies are CEOs of other large corporations?
I think it's a conspiracy!
Why is it that the (currently) most controversial method of broadband internet access gets symmetric speeds by default?
Many of the devices used for this type of service use the transmission medium like an Ethernet -- there's no separate upstream and downstream, it's one chunk of spectrum shared by all the devices on a time-division basis.
DSL and cable modems both use separate pieces of spectrum for downstream and upstream.
Cable plant is particularly asymmetric even in analog terms -- a typical modern build has ~700 MHz of downstream bandwidth but often <30 MHz of usable upstream.
Splitting the spectrum more equally is unfortunately impractical due to the placement of analog channel 2, FCC rules about must-carry, and the realities of broadband analog filters and amplifiers.
One really ugly possibility with BPL is that in some cases the 1 Mbit/sec upstream and downstream will represent the total bandwidth available.
You can get it if there's no one else active, and if you're doing something that doesn't require ack'ing in the other direction, etc.
Assuming it's popular, there may be some unpleasant surprises when 100 subscribers discover they're all sharing a very limited resource during the peak hours.
With Java you can do this. Just run the code in a sandbox.
Java is a good example, although it's feasible with most any decent interpreted language.
The interpreter can (and should) enforce whatever restrictions are necessary to reflect the degree of trust.
I have a software patent
(I know, that makes me a bad person:^))
for an architecture for consumer devices attached to the cable network to execute device-specific proxy code on a headend server in a secure fashion in order to allow users access to their devices from the Internet.
I did the proof-of-concept system in Java.
Manufacturing in the US (save automotives) is all but dead as those get outsourced to other nations where labor is cheaper
The total real value of goods manufactured in the US is higner now than it was 20 years ago -- hardly a sign of a "dead" business.
It's true that we let China manufacture DVD players and stuffed animals for us, but that doesn't mean domestic manufacturing has died.
It's also true that manufacturing employs fewer people while producing more goods -- productivity increases have eliminated far more manufacturing jobs than offshoring.
By your argument, farming is a "dead" industry because it employs so few -- but that dead industry still feeds us all.
Information management (programming) is outsourced off to India
Jobs in IT are suffering from a two-way whammy just now.
Yes, some jobs are being shipped to other countries.
However, in the late 1990s, hundreds of billions of dollars were "misallocated" in the dot-com and telecom bubbles.
Some of that misallocation was spent on thousands of miles of interstate fiber that may never be lit.
Some of it was spent on $80K annual salaries for people to design and implement worthless Web sites.
Correction of those misallocations has eliminated far more IT positions than offshoring has.
Improvements in productivity continue as well -- when two banks merge, and one Web site is eliminated, one set of Web site maintenance jobs is also eliminated.
This idea that a corporation should have rights - such as free speech - as if it were a person strikes me as being quite spectacularly daft.
At least in the US, there's well over 100 years of case law establishing that corporations are indeed "persons".
Traditionally, the first such ruling is attributed to a judge with a serious conflict of interest who wanted the railroad in which he owned stock to be able to claim some sort of land grant that Congress had enabled for "persons".
The concept is embedded firmly enough now that new laws sometimes refer to "natural persons" to indicate that companies are specifically excluded.
At some point, I expect that this body of case law will make it much easier to recognize an AI as a person in the US than in some other places.
Re:Open Source Energy Initiatives
on
DIY HVAC
·
· Score: 1
Those laws, as limiting as they are to you now, back in the day helped make your area of the US livable and less chaotic.
No argument about that.
I lived on the Nebraska side of the Colorado-Nebraska border for several years.
The 1923 South Platte River Compact is still binding and sets a schedule for how much water Colorado must deliver to Nebraska, in the river bed (not by pipe!), for each day of the year.
Prior to the compact, Colorado was diverting the entire river and putting the Nebraska farmers out of business.
It was not unheard of for there to be "raids" across the border to blow up diversion facilities.
However...
How much sense does it make to preserve the same laws today?
Agriculture is less than 5% of the gross state product in Colorado, is barely less expensive than buying food from wetter areas, but accounts for almost 95% of the water use in the state.
Because the farmers hold the most senior rights, they are not required to change their practices and conserve during dry years -- even though a 10% decrease in agricultural use (quite feasible through improved techniques) would save more water than used by all the cities in the state!
Using that water on lawns to attract people who work at IBM or Liberty Media or any of the new biotech firms in Boulder is a much more "efficient" use of the resource.
At the time that most of the water laws were put in place,
interracial marriage was illegal in most places and many states did not allow women to vote (Colorado was an exception there).
The fact that something made sense 100 years ago does not mean that it makes sense today.
Re:Open Source Energy Initiatives
on
DIY HVAC
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Depends on where you live.
If you live in a "wet" climate, I'm sure there's little stopping you from collecting your own rainwater, which wold be suitable for just about everything short of drinking. (A distiller or neutralizer/filter might be adequate for potble water, though... I wouldn't trust it for drinking myself without some kind of treatment!)
And around where I live, we don't give out sewage to anyone - the whole area is private cesspools. Not necessarily better or worse than municipal sewers, though. Just a different way to handle it.
Depends very much on where you live.
Here, in one of the Denver suburbs, semi-arid climate, the following rules come into play:
No new cesspools or septic fields allowed.
Inside the city limits, developers are required to connect to city services.
If you have an existing septic field, and want to subdivide a portion of your property, you won't be given permission until you shut down the field and connect to city services.
No new wells allowed.
If you decide the septic field is not worth the trouble and want to connect to city sewage, you'll have to shut down an existing well and connect to city water also.
Outside the city, wells have a different set of problems.
Shallow wells are not reliable.
Deep wells into some aquifers are regulated by the state now.
Up in the foothills, it is not unusual to have to drill 10K feet in order to establish a reliable well.
Pumping water that far is expensive.
Collecting rainfall and storing it is, in general, illegal.
Senior water rights to runoff from your property are held by someone downstream.
Trust me on this one, buying water from the city is cheaper than trying to find all of the people that might have rights to your runoff.
Since some of those rights will be held by the local municipal government, who will not be shy about taking you to court when you try to install a cistern of any size.
Water law in the western US is bizarre, to say the least.
[NOTE: This is not a recommendation since I have never used their products]
You could check out:
INTERNET PHONEJACK
Not particularly relevant to the fax issue, but their echo cancellation used to be spectacularly good.
When I was doing applied research work at a large phone company, we tested an early version of the hardware that we picked up at a trade show using our prototype voice-over-IP software and open-air microphones and speakers.
In full-duplex mode, we could place a microphone within a couple inches of the speaker cone without getting echoes or feedback --
a test that commercial echo cancellers costing hundreds of dollars routinely failed.
For at least a couple of years we used this as part of a demo for senior executives intended to show just how good voice-over-IP could be.
What are the licensing terms for MS's VC-9 codec? Is it free, or is every HD-DVD player manufacturer going to be required to pay MS a licensing fee?
More importantly, how do MS's licensing terms compare to the terms for technology currently in DVD players?
Each player built today pays at least a few dollars in technology licensing fees.
The last time this came up on Slashdot, estimates were in the range of $3-9 per DVD player.
Many people speculate that the real motivation for China to put together a domestic DVD standard is to avoid having to pay those fees to Japan, Europe and the US.
The standards bodies will generally require that MS make their technology available for "reasonable and nondiscriminatory" fees -- but that just means licensing to all comers at the same rate, and that the rate can't be excessive.
For a company selling a million DVD players per year, $1M per year and no redistribution rights IS a reasonable fee.
But it keeps the free software people out of the game pretty effectively.
That said, I think the dangers of this are exaggerated. No doubt it would be a catastrophe if it were to escape the lab, but life is a lot more resilient than it is usually given credit for. Creating "a virus that could kill tens of millions if it got out of the lab" is a catchy line in an article (or a cheesy plot for a movie), but there is absolutely no basis for it. I think any benefit that comes from this sort of research far outweighs the hypothetical dangers.
Life may be resilient, and even human life may be resilient, but civilization is somewhat more fragile.
Postulate a death rate from an engineered organism similar to the Black Death in Europe: one-third of the population killed in five years.
In the US, that's almost 100M deaths, 20M per year.
The current US death rate is about 2.4M per year.
Disposing of the bodies is going to be a large, but probably managable, task.
How much of the rest of the infrastructure will we be able to keep going?
Or at least, at what level will we keep it going?
Here's another scenario that you might consider.
Suppose it's just the US that gets hit.
The US economy would have BIG dislocations -- consider what happens in the housing industry as an example.
New construction essentially halts, since we would have an enormous oversupply.
Some number (probably large) of banks and other holders of mortgages would fail, since a third or so of their mortgages are now worthless.
The fallout is not just domestic.
At the present time, US consumption of goods and services is driving the world economy (the Economist bemoans this situation on a regular basis).
If the US suffers an epidemic that kills a third of the population, US consumption falls drastically, probably by an even bigger factor.
The result would be a world-wide depression as enormous numbers of workers whose jobs depend on sales in the US become unemployed.
Taking a long view, engineered bioweapons scare me more than nukes do.
Today building such a bug is still a difficult task, but it's getting easier.
At the current rate of progress,
how hard/expensive will it be in 20 years?
Will a lunatic with the resources of a small country (even a poor one) at his/her disposal be able to do it?
There are still going to be a lot of poor countries in 20 years, many with a grudge against the rich countries, and at least a few controlled by lunatics.
OTOH, I don't lose sleep over the issue, since (a) there's not much I can do about the risk and (b) the options for trying to protect myself (say by becoming an isolated subsistence farmer somewhere) are unpalatable.
Slashdot Mirror
In case you didn't notice, the telecom industry imploded about the same time the dot-com industry did. The big companies, both network gear as well as network operators, have been shedding jobs ever since. The remaining Baby Bells, at least in the US, have been trying to sell their rural operations. There may be opportunities with some of the smaller companies that are purchasing those operations and are focused on serving rural areas. Interestingly, those companies may need to remain small in order to be profitable -- rural service providers get Federal government subsidies, unless the company is too big. It may be useful to look at rural power companies as well -- some of those are starting to look seriously at broadband over the power distribution network and will need to add quite a bit of network management and other technical expertise in order to make a go of that.
IANAL, but I think you're wrong here. The fact that other companies have settled with SCO would have no bearing on the results of a case when someone decided to stand up to the SCO claims. The court's opinion on the facts and the law matter, but not the opinions of those other companies that decided it was cheaper to settle. I believe that attempts to introduce such settlements as "evidence" of the validity of the SCO claims would be laughed at by the court -- unless they were the result of a judgement reached by another court, as you mention.
I think SCO's going to get their heads handed back to them in court later this year. At that point, I sincerely hope that enough people who received these threatening letters file complaints so that the government can prosecute SCO's officers on criminal charges for attempted extortion.
Even more important -- if the descriptions of the remedies are accurate, MS will be forced to make it possible for those OEMs to exclude the MS applications (WMP at least) from the bundle. Allowing bundling doesn't force MS to change any of their code -- but making the apps truly removable does! I don't suppose we could get the EU authorities to go back and impose the same requirement on IE, but at least there will be a precedent going forward that should keep MS from migrating more and more application code over the line into the OS itself.
I'm saying that you don't need sarcasm because what you've proposed is almost a viable competitive solution to the MS monopoly problem. Make that baseline Windows available at 50% off the price for whatever class of customer is buying it: 50% off retail for an end user, 50% of the "wholesale" for an OEM, and create a new category of buyer, the software packagers and resellers (give them the OEM price probably). As you point out, most users don't want to have to choose and install all the usual apps. This way they can still buy the bundle -- the only difference is that MS isn't the one deciding which apps to bundle, the individual resellers (and in some cases the end user) are. The consumer still gets complete bundles, but now has a choice between bundles.
While you said this with sarcasm tags, why not consider it more seriously? Let the company assembling the package to sell at retail -- Dell, Gateway, HP being the dominant firms in the US -- assemble the complete software package to ship. Make it possible for other firms to resell Windows-based packages, much the way that Red Hat and SuSE and others do with Linux-based packages. When Mike's Software puts together a Windows-based package, I'll decide which apps to bundle on the CD -- not Microsoft. I compete with other packagers on the basis of ease of installation, price, quality of support, etc. Consumers, the large majority of which buy their computers with the OS and application packages already installed, would be no worse off in terms of convenience. They would presumably also get the benefits of competition in the application space -- more usable features and lower prices.
Excellent point about the muzzle. Clearly, we evolved eating small things, and branched out later.
What about economics savvy? Not that I'm claiming to have much of that, but name one Windows competitor that has successfully entered the market in the past ten years without the donation of $2B+ of free, highly-skilled labor (my own guess at what's gone into Linux). MacOS is older than that, OS/2 and BeOS are gone, Solaris, HP/UX, AIX and the other UNIX variants are not marketed as mass market desktop products, and the BSD variants were also heavily dependent on donated labor. MS's profit margins on Windows are the envy of every business in the world -- there should be dozens of new competitors. The fact that there are not indicates the scale of the barriers to entry: few software companies could afford the development bill for a competing OS; few software companies could be successful due to the lack of applications for their new platform; few companies could continue to compete if MS introduced copies of any innovative features that differentiated the product from Windows.
It may turn out that Linux will eventually be a successful competitor on the desktop. Successful, in this case, meaning sufficient penetration that MS is forced to reduce their prices. It has happened in some places -- eg, Thailand -- but the cases I know of required government intervention of some sort. During the last antitrust trial, evidence was introduced that suggested MS could sell Windows for $50 (quantity one at retail) and still make a profit -- Linux is successfully competing when MS's prices begin to approach that level.
Teachers in a modern industrialized society are caught in an unfortunate economic bind. Teachers today are roughly as productive as they were 30 years ago. For example, my kids' high-school classes are about the same size and they learn approximately the same material in the same number of years as when I was in high school. Over the same 30 years, many (most?) other jobs have become much more productive -- steel workers produce more steel per hour of labor, engineers produce designs with far fewer hours of human labor (consider the savings from replacing most of the support staff with computers), a ditch-digger with a backhoe instead of a dozen with shovels, etc. As a result, teachers' pay tends to fall behind relative to other skilled fields. I wish I knew an answer.
I agree with you that people seem well-suited to roots and other starchy plant products, nuts, berries, bugs and the occasional odd fish or rodent. Just looking at our teeth, we're clearly not designed to eat too much meat, or grains that are too hard.
Cow ancestors would indeed have been difficult for people without technology, but mainly because of their approach to defense -- circle the herd with the bulls on the outside and challenge the predators. OTOH, a human in excellent physical condition can run down a North American deer (that will flee rather than fight) in less than a day. Two people can do it with considerably less effort by chasing it in circles. Relatively hairless skin and profuse sweat glands that combine for very efficient cooling make it possible. Killing the deer once it is sufficiently exhausted requires nothing more complicated than a rock to hit it in the head with. I'm sure that there are corresponding prey animals in other parts of the world.
Real experts should chime in here and correct my errors.
Have you tried the various compact florescent bulbs? I recently went through a few, looking for one that was the "right" color. Incandescents are about 2750K, a good approximation of sunrise/sunset lighting. Some of the compact florescents are about 6000K, a reasonable approximation of high-noon sunlight. Those were too white for me -- seemed odd to have that color light inside the house, and made the whites on my LCD screen look a bit yellow by comparison -- but might be good if you like things more towards the blue. I ended up with a Philips bulb listed at 3000K.
Correct. There are currently no area codes that start with 1. There are plans in progress to add an 11th and possibly 12th digit to the North American numbering plan by 2030. If I live that long I'll be 77, and probably find it to be incredibly confusing. They may be optimistic about needing those extra digits, of course, since there's a chance that most useful devices will reside on IP-based networks by that time.
No. Among other things, it indicates the possibility that you may be dialing a number that will include a long-distance company identifier -- for example, 10-10-220-303-555-1212. The dialing plan in the US carries an enormous amount of historical baggage. Choosing a long-distance carrier, as well as the additions to the dialing plan to allow you to specify the carrier on a per-call basis, were added in 1984 when the Bell System was broken up. I don't believe the cell-phone companies are required to allow you to specify the long-distance carrier. Given the number of plans that don't make any distinction between local and long-distance, it seems unlikely that you would ever want to specify a different carrier.
Several changes have to be made before your local cable company (or more likely, the local branch of your national cable company) can do this. Here are two.
Of course, it's not like some companies don't deserve it. Suppose I set up the CEO's compensation scheme like this: (1) you get $1M per year to run the business, (2) if there's a change of ownership and you lose your job, you get $20M, and (3) you get these risk free stock options and if the share price goes up $10, you get $30M. What's the CEO's motivation? Polish the chrome up and sell that sucker! If the board of directors didn't intend for that to be the outcome, why did they set up the compensation scheme that encouraged it?
Have you ever noticed how many board members of large companies are CEOs of other large corporations? I think it's a conspiracy!
Many of the devices used for this type of service use the transmission medium like an Ethernet -- there's no separate upstream and downstream, it's one chunk of spectrum shared by all the devices on a time-division basis. DSL and cable modems both use separate pieces of spectrum for downstream and upstream. Cable plant is particularly asymmetric even in analog terms -- a typical modern build has ~700 MHz of downstream bandwidth but often <30 MHz of usable upstream. Splitting the spectrum more equally is unfortunately impractical due to the placement of analog channel 2, FCC rules about must-carry, and the realities of broadband analog filters and amplifiers.
One really ugly possibility with BPL is that in some cases the 1 Mbit/sec upstream and downstream will represent the total bandwidth available. You can get it if there's no one else active, and if you're doing something that doesn't require ack'ing in the other direction, etc. Assuming it's popular, there may be some unpleasant surprises when 100 subscribers discover they're all sharing a very limited resource during the peak hours.
Java is a good example, although it's feasible with most any decent interpreted language. The interpreter can (and should) enforce whatever restrictions are necessary to reflect the degree of trust. I have a software patent (I know, that makes me a bad person :^))
for an architecture for consumer devices attached to the cable network to execute device-specific proxy code on a headend server in a secure fashion in order to allow users access to their devices from the Internet.
I did the proof-of-concept system in Java.
The total real value of goods manufactured in the US is higner now than it was 20 years ago -- hardly a sign of a "dead" business. It's true that we let China manufacture DVD players and stuffed animals for us, but that doesn't mean domestic manufacturing has died. It's also true that manufacturing employs fewer people while producing more goods -- productivity increases have eliminated far more manufacturing jobs than offshoring. By your argument, farming is a "dead" industry because it employs so few -- but that dead industry still feeds us all.
Jobs in IT are suffering from a two-way whammy just now. Yes, some jobs are being shipped to other countries. However, in the late 1990s, hundreds of billions of dollars were "misallocated" in the dot-com and telecom bubbles. Some of that misallocation was spent on thousands of miles of interstate fiber that may never be lit. Some of it was spent on $80K annual salaries for people to design and implement worthless Web sites. Correction of those misallocations has eliminated far more IT positions than offshoring has. Improvements in productivity continue as well -- when two banks merge, and one Web site is eliminated, one set of Web site maintenance jobs is also eliminated.
At least in the US, there's well over 100 years of case law establishing that corporations are indeed "persons". Traditionally, the first such ruling is attributed to a judge with a serious conflict of interest who wanted the railroad in which he owned stock to be able to claim some sort of land grant that Congress had enabled for "persons". The concept is embedded firmly enough now that new laws sometimes refer to "natural persons" to indicate that companies are specifically excluded. At some point, I expect that this body of case law will make it much easier to recognize an AI as a person in the US than in some other places.
No argument about that. I lived on the Nebraska side of the Colorado-Nebraska border for several years. The 1923 South Platte River Compact is still binding and sets a schedule for how much water Colorado must deliver to Nebraska, in the river bed (not by pipe!), for each day of the year. Prior to the compact, Colorado was diverting the entire river and putting the Nebraska farmers out of business. It was not unheard of for there to be "raids" across the border to blow up diversion facilities. However...
How much sense does it make to preserve the same laws today? Agriculture is less than 5% of the gross state product in Colorado, is barely less expensive than buying food from wetter areas, but accounts for almost 95% of the water use in the state. Because the farmers hold the most senior rights, they are not required to change their practices and conserve during dry years -- even though a 10% decrease in agricultural use (quite feasible through improved techniques) would save more water than used by all the cities in the state! Using that water on lawns to attract people who work at IBM or Liberty Media or any of the new biotech firms in Boulder is a much more "efficient" use of the resource.
At the time that most of the water laws were put in place, interracial marriage was illegal in most places and many states did not allow women to vote (Colorado was an exception there). The fact that something made sense 100 years ago does not mean that it makes sense today.
Depends very much on where you live. Here, in one of the Denver suburbs, semi-arid climate, the following rules come into play:
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No new cesspools or septic fields allowed.
Inside the city limits, developers are required to connect to city services.
If you have an existing septic field, and want to subdivide a portion of your property, you won't be given permission until you shut down the field and connect to city services.
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No new wells allowed.
If you decide the septic field is not worth the trouble and want to connect to city sewage, you'll have to shut down an existing well and connect to city water also.
Outside the city, wells have a different set of problems.
Shallow wells are not reliable.
Deep wells into some aquifers are regulated by the state now.
Up in the foothills, it is not unusual to have to drill 10K feet in order to establish a reliable well.
Pumping water that far is expensive.
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Collecting rainfall and storing it is, in general, illegal.
Senior water rights to runoff from your property are held by someone downstream.
Trust me on this one, buying water from the city is cheaper than trying to find all of the people that might have rights to your runoff.
Since some of those rights will be held by the local municipal government, who will not be shy about taking you to court when you try to install a cistern of any size.
Water law in the western US is bizarre, to say the least.Not particularly relevant to the fax issue, but their echo cancellation used to be spectacularly good. When I was doing applied research work at a large phone company, we tested an early version of the hardware that we picked up at a trade show using our prototype voice-over-IP software and open-air microphones and speakers. In full-duplex mode, we could place a microphone within a couple inches of the speaker cone without getting echoes or feedback -- a test that commercial echo cancellers costing hundreds of dollars routinely failed. For at least a couple of years we used this as part of a demo for senior executives intended to show just how good voice-over-IP could be.
More importantly, how do MS's licensing terms compare to the terms for technology currently in DVD players? Each player built today pays at least a few dollars in technology licensing fees. The last time this came up on Slashdot, estimates were in the range of $3-9 per DVD player. Many people speculate that the real motivation for China to put together a domestic DVD standard is to avoid having to pay those fees to Japan, Europe and the US. The standards bodies will generally require that MS make their technology available for "reasonable and nondiscriminatory" fees -- but that just means licensing to all comers at the same rate, and that the rate can't be excessive. For a company selling a million DVD players per year, $1M per year and no redistribution rights IS a reasonable fee. But it keeps the free software people out of the game pretty effectively.
Life may be resilient, and even human life may be resilient, but civilization is somewhat more fragile. Postulate a death rate from an engineered organism similar to the Black Death in Europe: one-third of the population killed in five years. In the US, that's almost 100M deaths, 20M per year. The current US death rate is about 2.4M per year. Disposing of the bodies is going to be a large, but probably managable, task. How much of the rest of the infrastructure will we be able to keep going? Or at least, at what level will we keep it going?
Here's another scenario that you might consider. Suppose it's just the US that gets hit. The US economy would have BIG dislocations -- consider what happens in the housing industry as an example. New construction essentially halts, since we would have an enormous oversupply. Some number (probably large) of banks and other holders of mortgages would fail, since a third or so of their mortgages are now worthless. The fallout is not just domestic. At the present time, US consumption of goods and services is driving the world economy (the Economist bemoans this situation on a regular basis). If the US suffers an epidemic that kills a third of the population, US consumption falls drastically, probably by an even bigger factor. The result would be a world-wide depression as enormous numbers of workers whose jobs depend on sales in the US become unemployed.
Taking a long view, engineered bioweapons scare me more than nukes do. Today building such a bug is still a difficult task, but it's getting easier. At the current rate of progress, how hard/expensive will it be in 20 years? Will a lunatic with the resources of a small country (even a poor one) at his/her disposal be able to do it? There are still going to be a lot of poor countries in 20 years, many with a grudge against the rich countries, and at least a few controlled by lunatics. OTOH, I don't lose sleep over the issue, since (a) there's not much I can do about the risk and (b) the options for trying to protect myself (say by becoming an isolated subsistence farmer somewhere) are unpalatable.
Wouldn't that technically make it a vivisection? Since it was alive when he started?