Unfortunately, I still feel obligated to cast my votes for the most freedom-oriented Republicans (or Democrats), until the Libertarian Party has a chance of winning
It's precisely that attitude that prevents us from winning. You do see the catch 22, don't you? If you really feel that way, don't make excuses, do the Right Thing, and vote Libertarian.
Over time, the cost of reproduction goes down, and thus so does the value of the individual unit of media.
I'm sorry, this just doesn't follow. Cost is an objective financial measure, value is a subjective personal measure. Remember the old saw, "One man's meat is another man's poison"? The meat has the same cost to both, but its value is markedly different.
Give you another example. How much does it cost to make a bicycle lock key vs a house key? About the same. How much value does each key have? Big difference. You probably wouldn't worry too much about who has the bicycle key you lost.
I would venture to say that the value of the "individual unit of media" has stayed relatively constant for the past few decades, ever since mass-produced music was available.
In other words, an hour of music is no longer worth $15 - $20
The worth of an hour of music is still whatever price the market will bear. It has been, and always will be, unless we turn into a Fascist police state. So what do people think music is worth? That's a question that depends a lot on perception. If a lot of people didn't think an hour of music was worth $20, don't you think the RIAA's members, to whom this question is worth $billions, would change the price of their music?
Used to be that music was expensive to make, and you could only get it from one source, a big distributor. Hence, the perception was that music should be expensive. Now, technology has changed that perception, in certain technologically-savvy crowds, to the point where some people want music to be completely free.
The key concept to take away is this:
New technology has altered the music consumer's idea of how much music should be worth by giving them alternatives to expensive music.
If you want music to be inexpensive, the logical conclusion is that you need to change people's perspective. To do that, you need to educate them. Ranting here isn't going to do that, we already 'get it'. You've got to tell everyone else.
Financing for the venture has come from an anonymous individual. Even stranger, nobody on the NewCode team has met the benefactor.
"We know he's a man, and we think he's got a moustache," jokes Jones. "He insisted that we make him an account on the development machines so that he can keep an eye on progress, but other than that, we never hear from him."
Is it a coincidence that Darrell Issa is the rep from the 49th district in California which is home to CDMA developer Qualcomm? I THINK NOT.
This is just another example of politics being influenced by corporate desires and lobbying.
Actually, this is just another example of the American political system of writing your Rep and asking for new laws working perfectly. That's the way the system was designed, after all.
FUD. Innuendo, theories, and proclamations without any evidence or compelling, detailed solutions to the so-called problems he enumerates. 'When will programmers take responsibility'... 'Programmers aren't like jet pilots'... whine, whine. Completely content-free.
Sorry, I have to disagree. I think you have some very good ideas about what could possibly be automated, but the devil is in the details. One of the biggest pitfalls is assuming that a computer would somehow be 'smarter' than a human, just because it can perform fast calculations. For instance, you claim that an AI could turn a book into a movie. Great idea, but I know I can't do that myself, and I like to think I'm pretty sharp. I'm also pretty sure that most of the people developing AI can't either, or they would have been screenwriters for a living. Who exactly will train this AI to write movies, and what kind of skills will they require to do so? These questions have pretty vague answers, and computers don't tolerate ambiguity very well.
I also think that your claim of progress toward hard AI because of vision advancements is a little misleading. A true AI will gather perceptual input from a variety of sources in order to get the most accurate representation of concepts. For instance, a rose isn't really a rose if you've never smelled one; instead, it has the same emotional impact as a strawberry, a pile of vomit, and a face -- it's just another hard, lifeless image. Of course, if you can build me a machine that generates a good, emotional screenplay from some words on a page, I'll buy it from you for $100,000,000 and consider it a good deal. Heck, I'll turn out blockbuster movie remakes of classic literature by the thousands and make that figure 100 times over.
Game advancements don't really help out AI either. What they do help is expert systems, which is a related field, and one which many people confuse for hard AI. The basic difference is that the input model for an expert system is generally limited to a single topic, whereas a general AI trains on any input it can perceive. There are many "AI" projects out there which train to recognize faces, and similar tasks. These projects are really expert systems, since they'll never be good for anything beyond face recognition, or for whatever limited task they train. You wouldn't ask a face rec program why good-looking people succeed in politics, now would you? But you would ask your Marketing major buddy.
To wrap up, I think expert systems is a thriving field, and that for many problems an expert system will be good enough. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a real AI, though.
There are very few shows that I've seen that I can even think of watching in english.
Cowboy Bebop. I've been watching subbed (and unsubbed) anime for years, and I speak enough Japanese to find my way around Tokyo without a map. I can't tell Spike and Jet apart in the Japanese dub, and I don't like Hayashibara's Faye either. The English dub is excellent: well-synched, well-articulated, and I just like the people they used. It's so good in fact that I have the feeling the voice actors actually did a character study before voicing their roles.
On the flip side, I wouldn't dream of watching Trigun, Ranma, Tenchi Muyo, or pretty much any other anime dubbed. I get the impression that the actors they find don't have any idea about the Japanese lifestyle, and don't really understand their characters' motivations. So they end up reading too much of their own (Western) experience into their parts, making a lot of the characters seem one-dimensional. For example: Milly Thompson may be a Western character, but her naive, bouncy persona hides an inner sadness and strength which doesn't come out in the English dub. Ranma's English voice actor was actually an actress. I could go on, but I think you get the point.
Remember: SKIPJACK was the NSA's effort at making a safe, strong cipher. They swore before Congressional intelligence subcommittees that SKIPJACK didn't have back doors, and they allowed a small number of outside experts (incl. Dorothy Denning, who's a crypto luminary) to review major portions of the classified cipher.
So either you've got to believe the NSA lied to Congress, deliberately deceived Denning, and that Denning wasn't smart enough to know she was being deceived... or you can believe the civilian cryptanalytic community is getting good enough to challenge the NSA on the NSA's own terms.
Biham's cryptanalysis, if you actually read it, shows how to get an attack on a 31-round SKIPJACK in 1/4 the time of brute force exhaustion. This attack is hardly a complete break of the algorithm, and doesn't prove anything about back doors. This paper makes me respect Biham (his application of impossible differentials was a brilliant insight, even if the concept predates him, as he cites in the paper). On the other hand, I don't think it allows you to accuse the NSA of any wrongdoing.
By default the majority just pick up the phone and call me. This is an absolute disaster when I am in the middle of debugging some complex problem.
[engaging soapbox trolling mode]
This is precisely the reason why companies who actually care about such things should deploy a solid development -- testing -- operations infrastructure, with each component black-boxed. If operations has to call a developer, it means that there was a breakdown in both development and QA. Operations should file the bug ticket that QA should have filed, and a phone call may be necessary if the situation is critical.
On the flip side, in no event should operations or QA ever touch code. Yes, you heard me. QA shouldn't touch code. If they find a bug, I don't expect my QA guy to dig into the code, that's not what I look for when I hire for QA. I look for someone who knows how to break things, not someone who knows how to fix things in a specific language / build environment, although there is generally substantial overlap.
Operations, OTOH, shouldn't even really see code, if at all possible. It's not operations' problem if your code doesn't install or upgrade cleanly, they've got better things to worry about (like bringing in $$ and keeping customers happy). Same goes for QA; in fact, one of the first things any good QA tester will do is insist on clean upgrades so they don't ever test stale code (this is easy with CVS). With this system in place, developers can hack and debug with abandon, as long as they allocate at least some time during the day to check their downstream bug reports.
[/troll]
Of course, it's a painful elaboration of the obvious to point out that most small businesses don't do any of the above. Instead of trolling about business processes, I'll let you draw your own conclusions about why this is the case.
Microsoft has scheduled a teleconference regarding this announcement for 11:00 a.m. Eastern time on March 11, 2003. Press and analysts who are interested in participating in this announcement should call:
Within North America: (888) 428-4480 International Callers: (612) 332-0718 Please ask for the Microsoft conference. Callers are encouraged to dial in 5 to 10 minutes before the teleconference is to start.
Microsoft will offer an audio recording of this teleconference within two hours following the call. This recording will be available for 30 days, both by phone and via the Web.
To access the audio recording by phone, dial: Within North America: (800) 475-6701 International Callers: (320) 365-3844 Participants will need to enter the following passcode: 645654 To access the audio recording via the Web, go to the following URL: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass
Telephone/. effect, anyone? I'd love to see 1e6 geeks barge in on some boring MS technical meeting, only to ask OT questions about a non-existant, frivolous lawsuit against SCO for being too Evil.
Since the attention span here seems to be about 5 minutes, I will reiterate a basic argument about spam (and many other problems plaguing us):
Just as you can't solve a technology problem with laws, you can't solve a social problem with technology.
Spam is a social problem. Scam artists have been around for millenia, 'spamming' you with unwanted and unsolicited communications. The Internet is only the latest communication tool that they use to peddle their wares. Previous tools have been faxes, TV, radio, telegraph, snail mail, courier, and shouting at you from the next hill over. Don't think for one second that the 'let's DDoS them out of existence' or 'let's make email expensive to send through some complicated protocol' arguments will work. They won't.
Here are three easy steps to stop spam:
Don't buy anything you get from spammers. Yes, that 24" penis must be really tempting, and I know you're dying to lose 10^6 pounds, but don't do it.
Encourage other people to restrain themselves. The indiscriminant spam approach only works if the percentage of buyers (a.k.a. suckers, marks) is high enough to justify the cost of spamming (which is very low for email). If you can knock down that percentage, spamming won't be as successful.
Educate people you meet about spam. Let them know that not every email they read is for real. Let them know that responding to spam encourages spammers. Let them know that if you catch them replying to spam, you will give Indian burns to their entire family.
In short, technology isn't the problem here. The problem is that too many people keep falling for the spam. If you do your part, we can make it more expensive for scammers to use the Internet for their schemes.
Oh great, now not only do I have to worry about some crook stealing my eyeball, but my circulatory system too. I might as well go live in a safety deposit box.
The solution is simple: compulsory RAND licensing for any technology which has been proven to heal people. Let them make their money, but force them to share the benefits with everyone. Given the choice between compulsory licensing and denial of patent protectect, I think most companies would choose the licensing.
Congress only has the authority to pass laws, not to enforce them. That's the job of the Executive branch (from the FBI down to your local police). If the FBI wants to deputize campus administrators as official agents of the United States for the purpose of investigating felonious interstate commerce, fine. Congress, however, has no right to ask that this happen. Any attempt to do so is a blatant violation of the system of checks and balances established at the founding of this country. Furthermore, quotes from the article demonstrate that they are publicly telling the FBI how to do their job, which will piss off the FBI to no end, I'm sure.
Of course, I'd like to believe that members of Congress actually do know better, and that they're simply being used as puppets by big corporations. On second thought, that's just as scary as believing that they're clueless idiots. I have more faith in the FBI, who know better than to chase after copyright infringers when there are domestic terrorists to hunt down, regardless of how many redundant copyright laws Congress passes. (Not that I think there are that many terrorists, but as long as the FBI is chasing them and not me, it's in my best interest to convince them otherwise.)
500 million sure isn't much.. over here in Southern California, USA, it is not surprising to see something like a high class home go for something like that.
Are you sure you don't mean, here in Southern Syria Planum, Mars? I've never heard of a $500M house, and I live in San Diego.
The Bill of Rights will never get amended because the freaks on the Left would rather die than see freedom of speech/assembly/the press impinged upon, and the freaks on the Right would rather die than see the Right to Bear Arms/Freedom of Religion touched.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. -- Amendment IX
If you're going to bring up the issue of trampling the Bill of Rights, you might at least mention how said trampling of rights is supposed to take place. Just because a right isn't listed (Right to Privacy, Right to Free Movement, etc) doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Even if someone did manage to get the First or Second repealed, that doesn't mean those rights suddenly vanish.
This technology should never be called anti-piracy technology; it's very strange to see Slashdot use such a deceptive term. It prevents fair use as well as piracy.
So tell me again who's using deceptive terms, Mr. We-don't-need-no-stinking-Navy-to-prevent-piracy?
You bring up very good points. However, I'd like to draw something to your attention.
I have Comcast cable here. It's digital cable. For $5 a month, I'm renting a box that decodes the HDTV signal for my TV. I recently switched (involuntarily) from Dish Network. I would have had to spend about $500 to get set up with a HDTV receiver and a new dish (all their HD programming is on a different satellite), but the monthly fee would be only marginally higher. My TV is a Pioneer SD-582-HD5 58" HDTV-Ready Projection TV. I spent only $3000 for it, not $5000, and that was over a year ago. It has PIP and 4 inputs (plus an antenna), two of which have component video.
Your points about Tivo and DVD are compelling. I have the first season B5 DVD box set, and the low DVD resolution is glaring, especially in the CG scenes, which weren't transferred properly. When they come out with DVD players with HD output, I'll be first in line. (It won't help my B5, but hopefully other DVDs will be better.)
OK, after reading your replies it seems I have misunderstood what they're doing. There won't be an asteroid anchoring the line, they're going to use another 40k miles of ribbon. Regardless, the mass of the extra ribbon will have to be such that the center of mass is out at around 30k miles. Also, the ribbon will bend in such a way that the shear forces per unit length are manageable. I hadn't thought that such a flexible structure would be strong enough, but you learn something new every day.
Whether or I still remain skeptical that this thing will ever be built.
Three things. Keep in mind that Perth is situated at roughly 31.95 degrees South.
One, if the elevator is to remain in a fixed place above the Earth, the radial force (tension) must balance the inertia. For this to happen, a quick calculation shows that at that latitude, the center of mass of the elevator must be 18% higher than the geosync height over the equator. You'll have to put a massive asteroid into orbit at roughly 30k miles up going thousands of miles an hour to anchor this sucker.
Two, that asteroid will orbit with a 32 degree angle of inclination until it's actually connected to the elevator. I pity the poor fool that has to play catch with that thing in orbit and actually link it to the elevator. If anything goes wrong, the asteroid drops to Earth, bringing devastation on a global scale. All of the previous discussion assumes that the elevator remains perfectly vertical, which brings me to...
Three, if you anchor a space elevator to the Earth at any latitude but 0 degrees (the equator), you're going to have a lateral inertial component, perpendicular to the radial, that'll bend that rope like a taut bow string. Another calculation shows that the shear force on that rope will be almost 53% of the tension. (This is simple trig.) Carbon nanotubes may have a hella strong tensile strength, but has anyone looked at their shear strength? I wouldn't want the thing to snap like a twig just after they get Mr. Doomsday Rock into position to fuck us worse than the dinosaurs...
I see a day coming when every appliance has an IP (_not_ NATed), and every person is a content provider. That's what the 'net promises and they better deliver.
I see a day coming when someone DDoSes your cable modem, your hot water heater, AND your Ron Jeremy(R) dildo.
If God had wanted us all to have IPs, He wouldn't have given them a 32-bit address space. Instead, we invent NATting, and call ourselves clever. Alas, it is all vanity. Bend your will to His, grasshopper, and great will be your enlightenment.
Slashdot Mirror
It's precisely that attitude that prevents us from winning. You do see the catch 22, don't you? If you really feel that way, don't make excuses, do the Right Thing, and vote Libertarian.
I'm sorry, this just doesn't follow. Cost is an objective financial measure, value is a subjective personal measure. Remember the old saw, "One man's meat is another man's poison"? The meat has the same cost to both, but its value is markedly different.
Give you another example. How much does it cost to make a bicycle lock key vs a house key? About the same. How much value does each key have? Big difference. You probably wouldn't worry too much about who has the bicycle key you lost.
I would venture to say that the value of the "individual unit of media" has stayed relatively constant for the past few decades, ever since mass-produced music was available.
In other words, an hour of music is no longer worth $15 - $20
The worth of an hour of music is still whatever price the market will bear. It has been, and always will be, unless we turn into a Fascist police state. So what do people think music is worth? That's a question that depends a lot on perception. If a lot of people didn't think an hour of music was worth $20, don't you think the RIAA's members, to whom this question is worth $billions, would change the price of their music?
Used to be that music was expensive to make, and you could only get it from one source, a big distributor. Hence, the perception was that music should be expensive. Now, technology has changed that perception, in certain technologically-savvy crowds, to the point where some people want music to be completely free.
The key concept to take away is this:
If you want music to be inexpensive, the logical conclusion is that you need to change people's perspective. To do that, you need to educate them. Ranting here isn't going to do that, we already 'get it'. You've got to tell everyone else."We know he's a man, and we think he's got a moustache," jokes Jones. "He insisted that we make him an account on the development machines so that he can keep an eye on progress, but other than that, we never hear from him."
ESR, J'accuse!
This is just another example of politics being influenced by corporate desires and lobbying.
Actually, this is just another example of the American political system of writing your Rep and asking for new laws working perfectly. That's the way the system was designed, after all.
FUD. Innuendo, theories, and proclamations without any evidence or compelling, detailed solutions to the so-called problems he enumerates. 'When will programmers take responsibility'... 'Programmers aren't like jet pilots'... whine, whine. Completely content-free.
I also think that your claim of progress toward hard AI because of vision advancements is a little misleading. A true AI will gather perceptual input from a variety of sources in order to get the most accurate representation of concepts. For instance, a rose isn't really a rose if you've never smelled one; instead, it has the same emotional impact as a strawberry, a pile of vomit, and a face -- it's just another hard, lifeless image. Of course, if you can build me a machine that generates a good, emotional screenplay from some words on a page, I'll buy it from you for $100,000,000 and consider it a good deal. Heck, I'll turn out blockbuster movie remakes of classic literature by the thousands and make that figure 100 times over.
Game advancements don't really help out AI either. What they do help is expert systems, which is a related field, and one which many people confuse for hard AI. The basic difference is that the input model for an expert system is generally limited to a single topic, whereas a general AI trains on any input it can perceive. There are many "AI" projects out there which train to recognize faces, and similar tasks. These projects are really expert systems, since they'll never be good for anything beyond face recognition, or for whatever limited task they train. You wouldn't ask a face rec program why good-looking people succeed in politics, now would you? But you would ask your Marketing major buddy.
To wrap up, I think expert systems is a thriving field, and that for many problems an expert system will be good enough. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a real AI, though.
Cowboy Bebop. I've been watching subbed (and unsubbed) anime for years, and I speak enough Japanese to find my way around Tokyo without a map. I can't tell Spike and Jet apart in the Japanese dub, and I don't like Hayashibara's Faye either. The English dub is excellent: well-synched, well-articulated, and I just like the people they used. It's so good in fact that I have the feeling the voice actors actually did a character study before voicing their roles.
On the flip side, I wouldn't dream of watching Trigun, Ranma, Tenchi Muyo, or pretty much any other anime dubbed. I get the impression that the actors they find don't have any idea about the Japanese lifestyle, and don't really understand their characters' motivations. So they end up reading too much of their own (Western) experience into their parts, making a lot of the characters seem one-dimensional. For example: Milly Thompson may be a Western character, but her naive, bouncy persona hides an inner sadness and strength which doesn't come out in the English dub. Ranma's English voice actor was actually an actress. I could go on, but I think you get the point.
Oh, really?
So either you've got to believe the NSA lied to Congress, deliberately deceived Denning, and that Denning wasn't smart enough to know she was being deceived... or you can believe the civilian cryptanalytic community is getting good enough to challenge the NSA on the NSA's own terms.
Biham's cryptanalysis, if you actually read it, shows how to get an attack on a 31-round SKIPJACK in 1/4 the time of brute force exhaustion. This attack is hardly a complete break of the algorithm, and doesn't prove anything about back doors. This paper makes me respect Biham (his application of impossible differentials was a brilliant insight, even if the concept predates him, as he cites in the paper). On the other hand, I don't think it allows you to accuse the NSA of any wrongdoing.
[engaging soapbox trolling mode]
This is precisely the reason why companies who actually care about such things should deploy a solid development -- testing -- operations infrastructure, with each component black-boxed. If operations has to call a developer, it means that there was a breakdown in both development and QA. Operations should file the bug ticket that QA should have filed, and a phone call may be necessary if the situation is critical.
On the flip side, in no event should operations or QA ever touch code. Yes, you heard me. QA shouldn't touch code. If they find a bug, I don't expect my QA guy to dig into the code, that's not what I look for when I hire for QA. I look for someone who knows how to break things, not someone who knows how to fix things in a specific language / build environment, although there is generally substantial overlap.
Operations, OTOH, shouldn't even really see code, if at all possible. It's not operations' problem if your code doesn't install or upgrade cleanly, they've got better things to worry about (like bringing in $$ and keeping customers happy). Same goes for QA; in fact, one of the first things any good QA tester will do is insist on clean upgrades so they don't ever test stale code (this is easy with CVS). With this system in place, developers can hack and debug with abandon, as long as they allocate at least some time during the day to check their downstream bug reports.
[/troll]
Of course, it's a painful elaboration of the obvious to point out that most small businesses don't do any of the above. Instead of trolling about business processes, I'll let you draw your own conclusions about why this is the case.
Here are three easy steps to stop spam:
- Don't buy anything you get from spammers. Yes, that 24" penis must be really tempting, and I know you're dying to lose 10^6 pounds, but don't do it.
- Encourage other people to restrain themselves. The indiscriminant spam approach only works if the percentage of buyers (a.k.a. suckers, marks) is high enough to justify the cost of spamming (which is very low for email). If you can knock down that percentage, spamming won't be as successful.
- Educate people you meet about spam. Let them know that not every email they read is for real. Let them know that responding to spam encourages spammers. Let them know that if you catch them replying to spam, you will give Indian burns to their entire family.
In short, technology isn't the problem here. The problem is that too many people keep falling for the spam. If you do your part, we can make it more expensive for scammers to use the Internet for their schemes.Uh, yeah. Give me a prime and I'll factor it, in my head, in real time. Oh, and 31337 is prime. Was that quick enough for ya? Where's my $1,000,000?
Oh great, now not only do I have to worry about some crook stealing my eyeball, but my circulatory system too. I might as well go live in a safety deposit box.
The solution is simple: compulsory RAND licensing for any technology which has been proven to heal people. Let them make their money, but force them to share the benefits with everyone. Given the choice between compulsory licensing and denial of patent protectect, I think most companies would choose the licensing.
Of course, I'd like to believe that members of Congress actually do know better, and that they're simply being used as puppets by big corporations. On second thought, that's just as scary as believing that they're clueless idiots. I have more faith in the FBI, who know better than to chase after copyright infringers when there are domestic terrorists to hunt down, regardless of how many redundant copyright laws Congress passes. (Not that I think there are that many terrorists, but as long as the FBI is chasing them and not me, it's in my best interest to convince them otherwise.)
Are you sure you don't mean, here in Southern Syria Planum, Mars? I've never heard of a $500M house, and I live in San Diego.
If you're going to bring up the issue of trampling the Bill of Rights, you might at least mention how said trampling of rights is supposed to take place. Just because a right isn't listed (Right to Privacy, Right to Free Movement, etc) doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Even if someone did manage to get the First or Second repealed, that doesn't mean those rights suddenly vanish.
Too often, people posting here forget the Ninth.
I sympathize with your pain, but a bad law is a bad law. No one should profit from it.
So tell me again who's using deceptive terms, Mr. We-don't-need-no-stinking-Navy-to-prevent-piracy?
Rhetorical comment, comment requiring further explanation, and comment unsupported by evidence, in that order. Please don't feed the trolls.
I have Comcast cable here. It's digital cable. For $5 a month, I'm renting a box that decodes the HDTV signal for my TV. I recently switched (involuntarily) from Dish Network. I would have had to spend about $500 to get set up with a HDTV receiver and a new dish (all their HD programming is on a different satellite), but the monthly fee would be only marginally higher. My TV is a Pioneer SD-582-HD5 58" HDTV-Ready Projection TV. I spent only $3000 for it, not $5000, and that was over a year ago. It has PIP and 4 inputs (plus an antenna), two of which have component video.
Your points about Tivo and DVD are compelling. I have the first season B5 DVD box set, and the low DVD resolution is glaring, especially in the CG scenes, which weren't transferred properly. When they come out with DVD players with HD output, I'll be first in line. (It won't help my B5, but hopefully other DVDs will be better.)
Whether or I still remain skeptical that this thing will ever be built.
One, if the elevator is to remain in a fixed place above the Earth, the radial force (tension) must balance the inertia. For this to happen, a quick calculation shows that at that latitude, the center of mass of the elevator must be 18% higher than the geosync height over the equator. You'll have to put a massive asteroid into orbit at roughly 30k miles up going thousands of miles an hour to anchor this sucker.
Two, that asteroid will orbit with a 32 degree angle of inclination until it's actually connected to the elevator. I pity the poor fool that has to play catch with that thing in orbit and actually link it to the elevator. If anything goes wrong, the asteroid drops to Earth, bringing devastation on a global scale. All of the previous discussion assumes that the elevator remains perfectly vertical, which brings me to...
Three, if you anchor a space elevator to the Earth at any latitude but 0 degrees (the equator), you're going to have a lateral inertial component, perpendicular to the radial, that'll bend that rope like a taut bow string. Another calculation shows that the shear force on that rope will be almost 53% of the tension. (This is simple trig.) Carbon nanotubes may have a hella strong tensile strength, but has anyone looked at their shear strength? I wouldn't want the thing to snap like a twig just after they get Mr. Doomsday Rock into position to fuck us worse than the dinosaurs...
I see a day coming when someone DDoSes your cable modem, your hot water heater, AND your Ron Jeremy(R) dildo.
If God had wanted us all to have IPs, He wouldn't have given them a 32-bit address space. Instead, we invent NATting, and call ourselves clever. Alas, it is all vanity. Bend your will to His, grasshopper, and great will be your enlightenment.