If you add iSight, Airport and a bit of scripting to automatically connect to a dynamic URL service, you could have a mobile webcam. That way we can see where you are going.
Or you could point it backwards. Not only would it be a cool rear-vision monitor, but you could have a bumper sticker that reads "You're on the web right now."
Many environmentalists and not a few posters to this thread noted the hidden costs of cars -- pollution, asphalt wastelands, and urban sprawl are real problems not bundled into the price of cars and gasoline. But nobody talked about the hidden benefits of cars to society. High-speed time-efficient personal transportation both reduces the personal cost of consumer goods and provides a better workforce to companies.
Driving gives employers access to a much larger pool of potential applicants and people acccess to a much larger pool of employers. An article a few years ago in Sci. Am. noted that the average daily commute for people is remarkably the same across time and cultures. Its usually about 15 min to 1 hour each way whether you walk, ride a horse, take a bus, or drive. With a constant commute-time, a doubling of the speed gives a 4X increase in area (and a car is usually twice as fast as mass transit in most, but not all, locations). This greater pool of applicants and job opportunities means that employers find better people and people find better jobs. Imagine if you had to find a job within walking distance of your house -- it would probably suck.
Driving also lets people buy a much wider selection of low-cost consumer goods. Rather than be forced to pay high prices at cramped neighborhood stores, people can find a wider selection of goods at low prices at the big-box stores built on low-cost land at the edge of town. As much as people hate the big corporate retailers on a spiritual level, they love to shop at them. The car makes that possible.
Cars may suck at energy efficiency, but they are vastly superior at time-efficiency -- taking people, their kids, and cargo from any point to any point in the least time. In this day and age, it is labor costs that dominate the equation on both a personal and global-economic level. Until they invent a scheme that lets someone go from work to the store to the kid's school to the kid's after school activities and to home in one fast, easy, wait-free process, the car will continue to dominate.
I'm not even sure how to estimate the economic benefits of 4 times the worker pool or access to low-cost goods, but I'd bet that some economist has estimated it someplace. So whether car and gas are underpriced or overpriced in the bigger scheme of things is unknown.
BTW, for the record, I'm not some assUVhole in the lane next to any of you. I don't own a car and my commute the less than 30 seconds.
Additionally, making plans that go beyond the next quarter would not seem like such a bad idea anymore.
Yes, people's priorities would change and some of the impacts might be rather strange. For example, would retirement ages be pushed to 400. Since no company or government pension plan could afford to give someone 440 years of retirement in exchange for 40 years work, these polices would need to shift. Yet, anyone who abuses their body would probably not be able to work til 400 and be force to retire before the new "normal" retirement age.
Funding for health would also shift. Inexorable demands to help people get their full 500 years would mean less funding for diseases of the young and more funding for diseases of the middle age. I also wonder if society would either regulate or further ostrasize unhealthy habits like over eating, smoking, drinking, etc. Damages in "wrongful-detah" lawsuits would skyrocket -- compensating for 450 years of lost earnings.
Yes, the cost of the salesperson/volume-of-sales issue drives the economics of haggling and makes fixed-price consumer retail the norm. What is interesting, if offtopic, is the role of technology in dropping the cost of haggling. Currently it takes a skilled salesperson to eyeball the customer and try to hold the price at a high level if the customer looks well dressed and acts unconcerned about price. But in the future more companies might tap into face recognition/callerID and past purchasing records or credit reports to automatically decide how to treat each customer (some call centers already do this).
I did not mean to suggest that airlines haggle. But airlines are the posterchild for the type of same-product different price schemes that this thread seems to be talking about. The entire 14-day advance purchase, non-refundable, Saturday night stay stuff is all about trying to segment price-sensitive holiday travellers from deep-pocketted business travellers. Although not as bad now, in the past there was as much as a 10:1 ratio in the pricing of otherwise indentical sets in coach.
Re: Who profits more.
Imagine two for-profit woodworking companies, a 3 person one and a 30-person one. Both need one of these jigs, yet the 30-person shop gets 10-times the use from it. Looking at profitability, the 3-person shop has to take the cost of the jig out of a much smaller number of sold products and is less profitable as a result.
I guess what I am try to say is that the profit associated with an item is the difference between its cost and its value. If it costs $100 to make a jig that is worth $200 (I can sell it for that), then I get $100 profit. If a $200 jig lets me make a bunch of furniture that is profitable, then I would ascribe part of the profit to that jig. A bigger workshop gets more value from the jig and thus it ascribes greater total profit to buying that well-used jig.
Re: buyer vs. seller issue.
Exactly right! What I would add is that sometimes (more often than one might think) it is the buyers who are competing. This is a competition based on value - the buyer who can find the most value for a scare commodity is willing to pay the highest price. Its usually a great system (in the invisible hand sense) for allocating resources to uses. The only sucky sides are that sometimes rich SOBs buy up all of a public resource (e.g., the tickets to cultural events) and that sometimes the dynamics of price setting get screwed up by emotion and we get nasty price bubbles or hyperinflation.
All in all, I think that you and I agree on many of the issues. As a matter of good customer service, these EULAs don't seem like a winner. Unilateral restrictions on a product that I have bought and consider mine seem more likely to enrage customers that create loyal customers. Perhaps we only disagree on the rights of a sellers to sell a given products on different contractual terms that differentiate among buyers who ascribe different value to the product.
How about an auction system that offers the green light to the highest collection of bidders. The bid is paid through a micropayments system (tied to a car-mounted RFID) which divides the money among the people who were kept waiting (maybe the traffic department gets a nice cut of the bid money, too). If you value your time (and you are rich) then you bid high. If you don't mind waiting, bid low and rake in the dough.
I could even imagine poor people joy riding (joy stopping???) for dollars in wealthy suburbs at rush hour.
I need this invention to help me remember people. But what I really want is Google built into the glasses so I can quickly search/see info related to the stuff around me. I would set the glasses to constantly flash search-hit fragments related to whatever object or words I was seeing at the time. I can even imagine the Googly-Glasses logo for the service.
I've no doubt that we can cleverly shift the pace of the aging clock, but can we tweak the biochemical algorithms of the brain to handle life and learning over a 500 year span. If a person takes this drug when they are young, do they need to learn (or can they learn as easily as children learn) until they are 50 or 100? Will having too many 400 year-olds in the population hold back progess because they will veiw all the inventions of the last 380 years with suspicion? What about having 500 years of accumulated heartbreaks, lost friends, daily frustrations, etc?
Its one thing to physically live for 500 years, its another thing to mentally thrive for that long. Even if our bodies can be tweaked to last, its not clear that our minds can.
Think of all the lost long-distance telephone revenues if you can just agree to meet your friend "at the wall' and talk all you want. I wonder if fights will break out over people who are wall hogs.
Of course, if the wall crowd is too noisy, then people will just get on their cellphones to talk to their wall-buddies. And with those cellphone cameras, you can take a picture of your remote friend on the wall who is taking a picture of you on the their wall and exchange pictures.
All we need now is N-doped ink and P-doped ink to print semiconductors on to the paper. Add a higher resistance ink (for resistors), couple of grades of insulator ink (one for creating capacitors and the other for cross-overs), and a magnetic ink (for creating inductors) and you can create all manner of circuits. While we are at it, we might as well use inks that lead to OLEDs for nice light-emitting properties.
The only problem: our printed semicondutors will be exposed to light and so the circuit may change behavior in sunlight.... better add a basic black ink to the system (or make the insulator ink also be opaque).
Since modifying people has such a high level of ethical and PR baggage, I'd bet that it will be easier and cheaper to modify machines. Nobody has any qualms about trying out new hardware, software, and robotics concepts -- if it doesn't work, throw it out. In contrast, anything to do with people requires such high levels of oversight and ethical review as to make true experimentation impossible.
I'm not advocating unfettered human experimentation. I'm only pointing out that the stiff, but reasonable, restrictions on it mean that borgification should be approached from the machine side.
Actually, the license makes this untrue to the extent that the license is a binding contract. It is said that nobody "wants to buy a drill, they want to buy a set of holes" In the case of this product, the seller is selling the right for one person to make certain wood products for their own use. Perhaps the company should offer two versions of the product, a cheap "single user" model and a more expensive "neighborhood" model. Then people could choose which license made sense and not feel they were unilaterally prohibited from lending the product to their friends.
Re: advocating subsidies or making more money of some people
Yes, those are two ways to look at it. You could also look at it as the high-paying group paying for the up-front capital costs, and the low-paying group only paying the recurring costs (this is what happens in airline revenue management systems). The variable price model seems to create unfair opportunities for the seller to profit. But the fixed price model creates unfair opportunities for customers to profit. I would argue that a professional cabinet-making shop profits more from a jig than does a weekend hobbyist. The difference between the retail price and the value (the higher price one would be willing to pay) is the extra profit the buyer gets if they get it for less.
Re: most products sold at a fixed price:
This is only seems true in the world of consumer retail goods. It is not true with EBay, car dealers, airlines, stock markets, commodities markets, or in industrial sales. It's not even that true around the world -- haggling is still alive and well. Now that I think of it, its not even as true in retail anymore since retailers can quickly change the prices of goods to differentiate between customers willing buy now or wait til later (just watch how gasoline prices vary across the weekdays if you don't believe me). Worldwide and across the economy, I would argue that most products are sold with some value-of-usage differentiation in the final stages of pricing.
Re: scalpers
I have no problem with scalpers since they seem to be an artifact of the flawed fixed-price system. Worse, the illegality of scalping creates a lack of transparency in the market that actually conspires to create those outrageous prices. Personally, I'd advocate a periodic Dutch auction process for primary sales with a bid-ask secondary market, but that's just me.
The real issue is: should prices be determined by the cost-of-production (i.e. fixed profit margins for the seller) or the value-of-usage (i.e. fixed profit margins for the buyer)?
I'd bet the AOL licensing agreement (among others) basically says this.
The bigger problem is that the act of changing the configuration to block these ads is both benign and sinister. On the one hand it can be construed as a valuable customer service -- use AOL and we automatically update your computer to minimize spam/ads/etc. On the the otherhand unannounced reconfigurations could interfere with normal PC operations or uninstalling AOL. I'm not sure how a company can both provide tweaks like this one and explain all the implications of the tweaks to customers and not piss-off customers with to many "read this important message" notices.
The bigger trend is a declining importance of physical energy to the economy. Even the U.S., profilgate user of energy that it is, is less dependent on oil than it was back in the 1970s. When the first oil crisis occured, energy costs consumed about 8% of U.S. GDP, as of about 2001, energy costs were down to 3% of U.S. GDP. The U.S. may use more energy than it did in past, but GPD has grow even faster than has energy consumption. Moreover, I'd bet that a greater fraction of U.S. energy consumption is now discretionary -- we use energy (drive SUVs & have lots of home appliances) because it is fun, not because we have to.
The end of oil is inevitable because the importance of energy is declining.
Why shouldn't companies be able to charge different amounts for different licensing terms? If I am selling a product to a wide range of customers -- from weekend hobbyists to wealthy Fortune 500 companies -- I would like to create a price structure that matches the price to the product's value for each customer. I would like to charge a lower price to the hobbyists and a higher price to the Fortune 500 professionals. Unless I make a low-quality version, the difference between the products sold to these polar-opposite customers will be in the licensing terms. The amateur gets a product with a restrictive "non-professional use only" terms and the big company gets an "unrestricted" or "royalty-per-use" license. In both cases, the customers pay a different price because they get something of different value.
The "everyone-pays-the-same-price-no-restrictions" model is not that good an idea, especialy for the hobbyists. People may gripe about having to pay a different price for what they consider the same product or gripe about stupid licensing terms, but a differentiated price structure provide benefits to the low-end. Without some way to differentiate the product between amateur and professional use, the company would need to charge the same price to everyone. This price would be higher than that charged to the "restricted-use" customers and would make the product less affordable to hobbyists.
I may not like that some products come with restrictions, but I understand why companies do this and how it maximizes the number of people that can afford to buy the product.
It would be interesting to estimate the total number of species of fish based on the trajectory of species counts. The trajectory probably follows some x% of remaining species are discovered on a yearly basis. A bit of linear regression on a transform of the species counts by year and a bit of calculus should provide a reasonable extrapolation.
Of course a simple analytic model would probably not be accurate for a number of reasons. I am sure there are wastersheds that have not been adequately explored that harbor substantive numbers of unknown species (e.g., Burma). There's also the problem of duplicates. Then there are extinctions of both previously discovered and never-to-be discovered species.
I know, I know, there's probably several papers in the academic literature on this and I'm just too lazy to look them up. But its fun to think about.
AC costs are not that high and where included in the parent-post estimates.
Large air conditioning systems run a Coefficient Of Performance of about 3 -- meaning you only need about 333 W of power to remove 1000 W of heat. The magical thermodynamics of freon mean you can pump the heat from the computer room to the outside without that much cost. So, a 300 W computer means you have a 400 W installation (AC + computer). And in the winter in Viginia, you need only open the window for free, zero-power cooling.;)
I think that magazine article must be wrong. If 1100 Macs use as much power as 3000 homes, then each mac is using about 3 houses worth of power. That seems excessive unless the home is in a 3rd world country or those 9 fans are really really running full blast. More likely, each G5 (with networking and cooling equipment) uses a few hundred watts. Even at 500 W/Mac, 1100 Macs, $0.15/kWH, 24 Hr/day, 365 day/year the cluster costs about $722,700/year. More likely, each Mac probably only consumes an average of 300 W max and is not running full tilt 24x7, so the cost is maybe around $300-$400k/year.
But your point is a good one. I often wonder about the environmental economics of people running SETI, Folding@Home, etc. on older machines. Most of those older "spare" CPU-cycles are quite costly in terms of electricity relative to newer faster machines that do an order of magnitude more computing with the same amount of electricity.
The rise of using cellphones as a personal data store, financial access, and micropayment scheme would seem to spell the death of smart cards. Why invest in all those card readers, when you can simply accept payments via the already ubiquitous cellphone network. Add a bit of encryption/passwords and a cellphone is just as secure (or insecure) as carrying a bunch of smartcards. Add built-in location/tracking features and you can find your lost cellphone (try that with a lost smartcard.)
Although the cellphone vs. smartcard battle is far from over (and you will never use your cellphone to pay at a payphone), its always interesting to watch how very different technologies converge on similar applications and supplant each other.
I don't think Nielsen looks at timeshifting in its viewership stats, but I know that TiVo collects data on it. Timeshifting does mess with advertisers because even if the timeshifter watches the ads, they may be inappropriate. We are always amused to see "will there be snow" ads for the late night news when we watch a old recorded show in the middle of summer. Likewise, ads for long-past sales at local and national retailers fall on dead ears if they are watched past their intended broadcast date. Brand-building ads have the longest VCR/PVR shelflife, but even these can become inappropriate if the brand shifts strategy.
As a creator (co-creator at least) of all the data about me, I'd like to think that I own (or co-own) the copyright on it. If so, I would like to share in the profits made by those that sell and market this data. If a credit bureau wants to sell my data to a credit card company so they can decide to stuff my mailbox with exciting "new low APR rate" offers, fine. But they should pay me a little for selling a copy of _MY_ data.
This idea would not stifle the valuble use of information in the economy or put all telemarketers out of business, only ensure that the consumer individuals who the ultimate source of the data can share in the profits. People could decide how much their data is worth - some might ask for a few pennies per copy of their "private" data, other might ask for a few dollars. An extra charge on copying or sharing consumer's data would reduce frivolous use of data. For example, if I charge just a few pennies a copy for my e-mail address, then spammers would become much more selective in sending me offers.
As a veteran timeshifter (we still have programs recorded from 10 years ago that we have not watched yet), I am appalled at the notion that I might be forced to watch in realtime. I guess I'll still be using my trusty old analog VCR (or maybe older gen DVR) for some years to come. Hmmm... I wonder if broadcaster's video storage equipment will ignore this odious bit and let me record HDTV?
Re:Evil is in the watchers, not the watching
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Watching You
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Although government does hold a monopoly on legal use of physical force, it is still subject to civil litigation, criminal prosecution, and political forces that stay its hand. Admittedly, these limits on government power can vary between countries and wax and wane in countries that purport to support civil liberties. The extent that private citizens, watchdog groups and political parties can rein in the abuses of government is the extent that transparency ensures that abuses are caught and dealt with.
It would seem that patching is becoming the biggest source of downtime for MS-based systems. How can any hosting place claim a bazzilion-9s uptime when they need to patch'n'reboot for the security flaw of the week? I suppose all OS types have this issue. Anyone have comparitive data on patches-per-year for different OS species and the associated downtime to install and reboot for each patch?
On the other hand, I suppose a hosting company could maintain seemlingly high uptime by never patching -- a great strategy until they get hit by a big exploit.
I think we agree on this one (Gleick's book is a good intro). I never got into _why_ we can't introspect, but nonlinearity is a part of that. The funny thing about so many chaotic systems is that they are both deterministic and unpredictable over time. I don't know the Lyapunov exponent for people, but I'd bet that the divergence doubling time is in the seconds or subseconds. This certainly makes it hard to predict people's behavior.
But the more severe constraint is the inability of any system to encode a statespace bigger than itself (at least in anything approaching realtime). This is why I used the analogy of the Pentium computer having a hard time understanding itself. Only a bigger, faster computer can successfully model or simulate or predict how a Pentium computer will behave. My mind simply isn't big enough to contain a fine-grain model of my mind.
Hmmm.... I wonder if ants think they have free will.......
First, I would argue that introspection is needed and that introspection is akin to simulation -- running over the tape of one's life in detail to uncover the hidden, but deterministic, processes that lead to a given example of what seems, to a person, an act of free will. Perhaps the closest we come to high-quality introspection is if we go to therapy (with a good therapist.) If I could rapidly (near-realtime) uncover the exact rationale and rules that preceded all my actions, I would never claim to have free will.
Second, I think we agree that something is going on in people's head that make their behavior hard to predict. Complexity and nonlinearity are certainly in there and are an excellent nonquantum mechanical mechanisms for having unpredictability in a deterministic system. In fact, I argue that complexity, nonlinearity, chaos, etc. are sufficient to explain freewill without the need for quantum mechanical effects.
As for predicting a person's mood 27 days in advance, you are right that this does devolve into predicting the dynamics of the local environment over that impossiblly long time scale. Chaos theory would suggest that people (or people + environment) have a large magnitude Lyapunov exponent that quantifies how quickly predictions of their behavior diverge from reality. But if more people could successfully introspect quickly about why they did what they did in the last 5 minutes, fewer people would believe in free will.
Slashdot Mirror
If you add iSight, Airport and a bit of scripting to automatically connect to a dynamic URL service, you could have a mobile webcam. That way we can see where you are going.
Or you could point it backwards. Not only would it be a cool rear-vision monitor, but you could have a bumper sticker that reads "You're on the web right now."
Many environmentalists and not a few posters to this thread noted the hidden costs of cars -- pollution, asphalt wastelands, and urban sprawl are real problems not bundled into the price of cars and gasoline. But nobody talked about the hidden benefits of cars to society. High-speed time-efficient personal transportation both reduces the personal cost of consumer goods and provides a better workforce to companies.
Driving gives employers access to a much larger pool of potential applicants and people acccess to a much larger pool of employers. An article a few years ago in Sci. Am. noted that the average daily commute for people is remarkably the same across time and cultures. Its usually about 15 min to 1 hour each way whether you walk, ride a horse, take a bus, or drive. With a constant commute-time, a doubling of the speed gives a 4X increase in area (and a car is usually twice as fast as mass transit in most, but not all, locations). This greater pool of applicants and job opportunities means that employers find better people and people find better jobs. Imagine if you had to find a job within walking distance of your house -- it would probably suck.
Driving also lets people buy a much wider selection of low-cost consumer goods. Rather than be forced to pay high prices at cramped neighborhood stores, people can find a wider selection of goods at low prices at the big-box stores built on low-cost land at the edge of town. As much as people hate the big corporate retailers on a spiritual level, they love to shop at them. The car makes that possible.
Cars may suck at energy efficiency, but they are vastly superior at time-efficiency -- taking people, their kids, and cargo from any point to any point in the least time. In this day and age, it is labor costs that dominate the equation on both a personal and global-economic level. Until they invent a scheme that lets someone go from work to the store to the kid's school to the kid's after school activities and to home in one fast, easy, wait-free process, the car will continue to dominate.
I'm not even sure how to estimate the economic benefits of 4 times the worker pool or access to low-cost goods, but I'd bet that some economist has estimated it someplace. So whether car and gas are underpriced or overpriced in the bigger scheme of things is unknown.
BTW, for the record, I'm not some assUVhole in the lane next to any of you. I don't own a car and my commute the less than 30 seconds.
Additionally, making plans that go beyond the next quarter would not seem like such a bad idea anymore.
Yes, people's priorities would change and some of the impacts might be rather strange. For example, would retirement ages be pushed to 400. Since no company or government pension plan could afford to give someone 440 years of retirement in exchange for 40 years work, these polices would need to shift. Yet, anyone who abuses their body would probably not be able to work til 400 and be force to retire before the new "normal" retirement age.
Funding for health would also shift. Inexorable demands to help people get their full 500 years would mean less funding for diseases of the young and more funding for diseases of the middle age. I also wonder if society would either regulate or further ostrasize unhealthy habits like over eating, smoking, drinking, etc. Damages in "wrongful-detah" lawsuits would skyrocket -- compensating for 450 years of lost earnings.
You, too, raise very good points.
Yes, the cost of the salesperson/volume-of-sales issue drives the economics of haggling and makes fixed-price consumer retail the norm. What is interesting, if offtopic, is the role of technology in dropping the cost of haggling. Currently it takes a skilled salesperson to eyeball the customer and try to hold the price at a high level if the customer looks well dressed and acts unconcerned about price. But in the future more companies might tap into face recognition/callerID and past purchasing records or credit reports to automatically decide how to treat each customer (some call centers already do this).
I did not mean to suggest that airlines haggle. But airlines are the posterchild for the type of same-product different price schemes that this thread seems to be talking about. The entire 14-day advance purchase, non-refundable, Saturday night stay stuff is all about trying to segment price-sensitive holiday travellers from deep-pocketted business travellers. Although not as bad now, in the past there was as much as a 10:1 ratio in the pricing of otherwise indentical sets in coach.
Re: Who profits more.
Imagine two for-profit woodworking companies, a 3 person one and a 30-person one. Both need one of these jigs, yet the 30-person shop gets 10-times the use from it. Looking at profitability, the 3-person shop has to take the cost of the jig out of a much smaller number of sold products and is less profitable as a result.
I guess what I am try to say is that the profit associated with an item is the difference between its cost and its value. If it costs $100 to make a jig that is worth $200 (I can sell it for that), then I get $100 profit. If a $200 jig lets me make a bunch of furniture that is profitable, then I would ascribe part of the profit to that jig. A bigger workshop gets more value from the jig and thus it ascribes greater total profit to buying that well-used jig.
Re: buyer vs. seller issue.
Exactly right! What I would add is that sometimes (more often than one might think) it is the buyers who are competing. This is a competition based on value - the buyer who can find the most value for a scare commodity is willing to pay the highest price. Its usually a great system (in the invisible hand sense) for allocating resources to uses. The only sucky sides are that sometimes rich SOBs buy up all of a public resource (e.g., the tickets to cultural events) and that sometimes the dynamics of price setting get screwed up by emotion and we get nasty price bubbles or hyperinflation.
All in all, I think that you and I agree on many of the issues. As a matter of good customer service, these EULAs don't seem like a winner. Unilateral restrictions on a product that I have bought and consider mine seem more likely to enrage customers that create loyal customers. Perhaps we only disagree on the rights of a sellers to sell a given products on different contractual terms that differentiate among buyers who ascribe different value to the product.
Thanks for the thought-provoking discussion!
How about an auction system that offers the green light to the highest collection of bidders. The bid is paid through a micropayments system (tied to a car-mounted RFID) which divides the money among the people who were kept waiting (maybe the traffic department gets a nice cut of the bid money, too). If you value your time (and you are rich) then you bid high. If you don't mind waiting, bid low and rake in the dough.
I could even imagine poor people joy riding (joy stopping???) for dollars in wealthy suburbs at rush hour.
I need this invention to help me remember people. But what I really want is Google built into the glasses so I can quickly search/see info related to the stuff around me. I would set the glasses to constantly flash search-hit fragments related to whatever object or words I was seeing at the time. I can even imagine the Googly-Glasses logo for the service.
I've no doubt that we can cleverly shift the pace of the aging clock, but can we tweak the biochemical algorithms of the brain to handle life and learning over a 500 year span. If a person takes this drug when they are young, do they need to learn (or can they learn as easily as children learn) until they are 50 or 100? Will having too many 400 year-olds in the population hold back progess because they will veiw all the inventions of the last 380 years with suspicion? What about having 500 years of accumulated heartbreaks, lost friends, daily frustrations, etc?
Its one thing to physically live for 500 years, its another thing to mentally thrive for that long. Even if our bodies can be tweaked to last, its not clear that our minds can.
Think of all the lost long-distance telephone revenues if you can just agree to meet your friend "at the wall' and talk all you want. I wonder if fights will break out over people who are wall hogs.
Of course, if the wall crowd is too noisy, then people will just get on their cellphones to talk to their wall-buddies. And with those cellphone cameras, you can take a picture of your remote friend on the wall who is taking a picture of you on the their wall and exchange pictures.
All we need now is N-doped ink and P-doped ink to print semiconductors on to the paper. Add a higher resistance ink (for resistors), couple of grades of insulator ink (one for creating capacitors and the other for cross-overs), and a magnetic ink (for creating inductors) and you can create all manner of circuits. While we are at it, we might as well use inks that lead to OLEDs for nice light-emitting properties.
The only problem: our printed semicondutors will be exposed to light and so the circuit may change behavior in sunlight.... better add a basic black ink to the system (or make the insulator ink also be opaque).
Since modifying people has such a high level of ethical and PR baggage, I'd bet that it will be easier and cheaper to modify machines. Nobody has any qualms about trying out new hardware, software, and robotics concepts -- if it doesn't work, throw it out. In contrast, anything to do with people requires such high levels of oversight and ethical review as to make true experimentation impossible.
I'm not advocating unfettered human experimentation. I'm only pointing out that the stiff, but reasonable, restrictions on it mean that borgification should be approached from the machine side.
Re: still the same product:
Actually, the license makes this untrue to the extent that the license is a binding contract. It is said that nobody "wants to buy a drill, they want to buy a set of holes" In the case of this product, the seller is selling the right for one person to make certain wood products for their own use. Perhaps the company should offer two versions of the product, a cheap "single user" model and a more expensive "neighborhood" model. Then people could choose which license made sense and not feel they were unilaterally prohibited from lending the product to their friends.
Re: advocating subsidies or making more money of some people
Yes, those are two ways to look at it. You could also look at it as the high-paying group paying for the up-front capital costs, and the low-paying group only paying the recurring costs (this is what happens in airline revenue management systems). The variable price model seems to create unfair opportunities for the seller to profit. But the fixed price model creates unfair opportunities for customers to profit. I would argue that a professional cabinet-making shop profits more from a jig than does a weekend hobbyist. The difference between the retail price and the value (the higher price one would be willing to pay) is the extra profit the buyer gets if they get it for less.
Re: most products sold at a fixed price:
This is only seems true in the world of consumer retail goods. It is not true with EBay, car dealers, airlines, stock markets, commodities markets, or in industrial sales. It's not even that true around the world -- haggling is still alive and well. Now that I think of it, its not even as true in retail anymore since retailers can quickly change the prices of goods to differentiate between customers willing buy now or wait til later (just watch how gasoline prices vary across the weekdays if you don't believe me). Worldwide and across the economy, I would argue that most products are sold with some value-of-usage differentiation in the final stages of pricing.
Re: scalpers
I have no problem with scalpers since they seem to be an artifact of the flawed fixed-price system. Worse, the illegality of scalping creates a lack of transparency in the market that actually conspires to create those outrageous prices. Personally, I'd advocate a periodic Dutch auction process for primary sales with a bid-ask secondary market, but that's just me.
The real issue is: should prices be determined by the cost-of-production (i.e. fixed profit margins for the seller) or the value-of-usage (i.e. fixed profit margins for the buyer)?
I'd bet the AOL licensing agreement (among others) basically says this.
The bigger problem is that the act of changing the configuration to block these ads is both benign and sinister. On the one hand it can be construed as a valuable customer service -- use AOL and we automatically update your computer to minimize spam/ads/etc. On the the otherhand unannounced reconfigurations could interfere with normal PC operations or uninstalling AOL. I'm not sure how a company can both provide tweaks like this one and explain all the implications of the tweaks to customers and not piss-off customers with to many "read this important message" notices.
The bigger trend is a declining importance of physical energy to the economy. Even the U.S., profilgate user of energy that it is, is less dependent on oil than it was back in the 1970s. When the first oil crisis occured, energy costs consumed about 8% of U.S. GDP, as of about 2001, energy costs were down to 3% of U.S. GDP. The U.S. may use more energy than it did in past, but GPD has grow even faster than has energy consumption. Moreover, I'd bet that a greater fraction of U.S. energy consumption is now discretionary -- we use energy (drive SUVs & have lots of home appliances) because it is fun, not because we have to.
The end of oil is inevitable because the importance of energy is declining.
Why shouldn't companies be able to charge different amounts for different licensing terms? If I am selling a product to a wide range of customers -- from weekend hobbyists to wealthy Fortune 500 companies -- I would like to create a price structure that matches the price to the product's value for each customer. I would like to charge a lower price to the hobbyists and a higher price to the Fortune 500 professionals. Unless I make a low-quality version, the difference between the products sold to these polar-opposite customers will be in the licensing terms. The amateur gets a product with a restrictive "non-professional use only" terms and the big company gets an "unrestricted" or "royalty-per-use" license. In both cases, the customers pay a different price because they get something of different value.
The "everyone-pays-the-same-price-no-restrictions" model is not that good an idea, especialy for the hobbyists. People may gripe about having to pay a different price for what they consider the same product or gripe about stupid licensing terms, but a differentiated price structure provide benefits to the low-end. Without some way to differentiate the product between amateur and professional use, the company would need to charge the same price to everyone. This price would be higher than that charged to the "restricted-use" customers and would make the product less affordable to hobbyists.
I may not like that some products come with restrictions, but I understand why companies do this and how it maximizes the number of people that can afford to buy the product.
It would be interesting to estimate the total number of species of fish based on the trajectory of species counts. The trajectory probably follows some x% of remaining species are discovered on a yearly basis. A bit of linear regression on a transform of the species counts by year and a bit of calculus should provide a reasonable extrapolation.
Of course a simple analytic model would probably not be accurate for a number of reasons. I am sure there are wastersheds that have not been adequately explored that harbor substantive numbers of unknown species (e.g., Burma). There's also the problem of duplicates. Then there are extinctions of both previously discovered and never-to-be discovered species.
I know, I know, there's probably several papers in the academic literature on this and I'm just too lazy to look them up. But its fun to think about.
AC costs are not that high and where included in the parent-post estimates.
Large air conditioning systems run a Coefficient Of Performance of about 3 -- meaning you only need about 333 W of power to remove 1000 W of heat. The magical thermodynamics of freon mean you can pump the heat from the computer room to the outside without that much cost. So, a 300 W computer means you have a 400 W installation (AC + computer). And in the winter in Viginia, you need only open the window for free, zero-power cooling.;)
I think that magazine article must be wrong. If 1100 Macs use as much power as 3000 homes, then each mac is using about 3 houses worth of power. That seems excessive unless the home is in a 3rd world country or those 9 fans are really really running full blast. More likely, each G5 (with networking and cooling equipment) uses a few hundred watts. Even at 500 W/Mac, 1100 Macs, $0.15/kWH, 24 Hr/day, 365 day/year the cluster costs about $722,700/year. More likely, each Mac probably only consumes an average of 300 W max and is not running full tilt 24x7, so the cost is maybe around $300-$400k/year.
But your point is a good one. I often wonder about the environmental economics of people running SETI, Folding@Home, etc. on older machines. Most of those older "spare" CPU-cycles are quite costly in terms of electricity relative to newer faster machines that do an order of magnitude more computing with the same amount of electricity.
The rise of using cellphones as a personal data store, financial access, and micropayment scheme would seem to spell the death of smart cards. Why invest in all those card readers, when you can simply accept payments via the already ubiquitous cellphone network. Add a bit of encryption/passwords and a cellphone is just as secure (or insecure) as carrying a bunch of smartcards. Add built-in location/tracking features and you can find your lost cellphone (try that with a lost smartcard.)
Although the cellphone vs. smartcard battle is far from over (and you will never use your cellphone to pay at a payphone), its always interesting to watch how very different technologies converge on similar applications and supplant each other.
I don't think Nielsen looks at timeshifting in its viewership stats, but I know that TiVo collects data on it. Timeshifting does mess with advertisers because even if the timeshifter watches the ads, they may be inappropriate. We are always amused to see "will there be snow" ads for the late night news when we watch a old recorded show in the middle of summer. Likewise, ads for long-past sales at local and national retailers fall on dead ears if they are watched past their intended broadcast date. Brand-building ads have the longest VCR/PVR shelflife, but even these can become inappropriate if the brand shifts strategy.
As a creator (co-creator at least) of all the data about me, I'd like to think that I own (or co-own) the copyright on it. If so, I would like to share in the profits made by those that sell and market this data. If a credit bureau wants to sell my data to a credit card company so they can decide to stuff my mailbox with exciting "new low APR rate" offers, fine. But they should pay me a little for selling a copy of _MY_ data.
This idea would not stifle the valuble use of information in the economy or put all telemarketers out of business, only ensure that the consumer individuals who the ultimate source of the data can share in the profits. People could decide how much their data is worth - some might ask for a few pennies per copy of their "private" data, other might ask for a few dollars. An extra charge on copying or sharing consumer's data would reduce frivolous use of data. For example, if I charge just a few pennies a copy for my e-mail address, then spammers would become much more selective in sending me offers.
As a veteran timeshifter (we still have programs recorded from 10 years ago that we have not watched yet), I am appalled at the notion that I might be forced to watch in realtime. I guess I'll still be using my trusty old analog VCR (or maybe older gen DVR) for some years to come. Hmmm... I wonder if broadcaster's video storage equipment will ignore this odious bit and let me record HDTV?
Although government does hold a monopoly on legal use of physical force, it is still subject to civil litigation, criminal prosecution, and political forces that stay its hand. Admittedly, these limits on government power can vary between countries and wax and wane in countries that purport to support civil liberties. The extent that private citizens, watchdog groups and political parties can rein in the abuses of government is the extent that transparency ensures that abuses are caught and dealt with.
It would seem that patching is becoming the biggest source of downtime for MS-based systems. How can any hosting place claim a bazzilion-9s uptime when they need to patch'n'reboot for the security flaw of the week? I suppose all OS types have this issue. Anyone have comparitive data on patches-per-year for different OS species and the associated downtime to install and reboot for each patch?
On the other hand, I suppose a hosting company could maintain seemlingly high uptime by never patching -- a great strategy until they get hit by a big exploit.
I think we agree on this one (Gleick's book is a good intro). I never got into _why_ we can't introspect, but nonlinearity is a part of that. The funny thing about so many chaotic systems is that they are both deterministic and unpredictable over time. I don't know the Lyapunov exponent for people, but I'd bet that the divergence doubling time is in the seconds or subseconds. This certainly makes it hard to predict people's behavior.
But the more severe constraint is the inability of any system to encode a statespace bigger than itself (at least in anything approaching realtime). This is why I used the analogy of the Pentium computer having a hard time understanding itself. Only a bigger, faster computer can successfully model or simulate or predict how a Pentium computer will behave. My mind simply isn't big enough to contain a fine-grain model of my mind.
Hmmm.... I wonder if ants think they have free will.......
First, I would argue that introspection is needed and that introspection is akin to simulation -- running over the tape of one's life in detail to uncover the hidden, but deterministic, processes that lead to a given example of what seems, to a person, an act of free will. Perhaps the closest we come to high-quality introspection is if we go to therapy (with a good therapist.) If I could rapidly (near-realtime) uncover the exact rationale and rules that preceded all my actions, I would never claim to have free will.
Second, I think we agree that something is going on in people's head that make their behavior hard to predict. Complexity and nonlinearity are certainly in there and are an excellent nonquantum mechanical mechanisms for having unpredictability in a deterministic system. In fact, I argue that complexity, nonlinearity, chaos, etc. are sufficient to explain freewill without the need for quantum mechanical effects.
As for predicting a person's mood 27 days in advance, you are right that this does devolve into predicting the dynamics of the local environment over that impossiblly long time scale. Chaos theory would suggest that people (or people + environment) have a large magnitude Lyapunov exponent that quantifies how quickly predictions of their behavior diverge from reality. But if more people could successfully introspect quickly about why they did what they did in the last 5 minutes, fewer people would believe in free will.