Couldn't find a better place to comment on this, but it kind of fits here.
The interesting thing is that "socialism" is more a political view than an economic one. The economic theory is communism (which everyone always confuses wtih socialism). Socialism is mostly characterized by state ownership of capital, where communism is all about shared ownership of capital by everyone (which is different than capitalism where individuals own capital).
That said, I'm not sure exactly how the anti-IP movement is socialist; I'd say it's closer to being communist: each produce to his ability, each consume based on his need*. The anti-IP movement is nowhere close to a state-controlled body of IP, so I'm not sure if people are just missing something in the translation or they just like throwing out "scary" buzzwords.
*This is the fatal flaw of communism, because humans rarely only take what they need, and they generally don't produce according to their ability.
Hey, well written article there. Thanks for the links...
That said, I think you could do well to delve deeper into some of the things you said. Incidentally, you pointed out how most people misuse many of the "standard" excuses for believing something. But what about rationally sensible reasons? For instance, what about "There is this holy book, and I believe it because things written in the book agree with what I observe about the world and the people around me"? That's subtly different than "because my religion told me to".
Also, #1 in that article touches on the fundamental question of if there is something in the universe called "Truth" or not; discounting the case you illustrated where beliefs differ because observations differ, if there are two confliting interpretations about a common observation that means that at most one of them can be fundamentally true (and by 'conflicting' I mean something like "The temperature of that object is 10 degrees" versus "The temperature of that object is 15 degrees" at the same point in time, not things like "it is hot today"). That's the one tricky point about most religions; generally there is something in one or several of them that fundamentally conflicts. For instance, the view that the universe was created by a god or gods is fundamentally incompatible with the view that the universe was not created but simply always "was" or the view that the universe spontaneously came into existence. In this example, only one of those three views can be true given that there is a universe, and no two of them can be true simultaneously. You cannot hold that all the views are equally valid (you can, perhaps, hold that they are all equally invalid), but the point you concluded with, that the choice to hold any view should be respected, is important to recognize. I think the bigger issue is how to manage what actions people are allowed to take on their views, because that's quite a different matter than "mere" belief.
Anyway, I could easily go on discussing the rational aspects of relgion, but I think I've quite used up my 'offtopic' disclaimer as it is;)
It depends on what the goal is. If the goal is to provide known technologies at the lowest cost or highest value to the general population, then you don't have to come up with new ideas, you just have to come up with ways to produce / deliver the desired product at a lower cost or with higher value. It's a variant of commoditization. For instance, how much better would it be for the population if every car company could manufacture any other company's design? You could get the style you want and the competition would have to be on quality and cost. Right now, people compromise on quality/cost in favor of design or vice-versa.
Rather than being the first to market, Microsoft might be the one that takes advantage of the mass adoption phase; there are many studies out there about the benefits and detriments to being first to market and the adoption cycles of new technologies.
So, it really does depend on what your goals as an organization are. It takes a bit of swallowing one's pride, but despite the things that we can complain about regarding any corporation, think about the ancillary benefits that arise and how to effectively, smoothly change the operating philosophies of the companies rather than calling for disruptive sudden changes in philosophy. (Of course, sometimes a culling is necessary, but that's another issue entirely.)
I think I just realised that "vendor lock-in" is not the thing to fear - that's just a symptom of something more ominous. For instance, what do you really mean by "vendor lock-in"? I think the issue here is "we want to be sure we can always access the information without having to [pay tribute] to a specific individual/organisation". If the latter is indeed the case, then the idea will never be realised. Granted, having "closed source" tools make it difficult to keep information readily available. However - what do I care about what format the goverment uses internally? I'm under the impression that governments that are more open in general will, upon request, send you a printed copy of requested information. If you can get the printed copy, a hard, physical copy, what does it matter what format the document is in? Or, alternatively, the government should convert its documents to your requested format if you don't want a hard copy. It should be on the shoulders of the government to conform to the people, not the other way around.
If the issue is that the government is starting to make printed material unavailable, the thing to do would be to start putting political pressure to make it available again. After all, saying "you can have information but only in the form we want to give you" is subtly controlling.
Ah, you're only moderated '1' and I've got no mod points today! At least I searched for 'calibration' before posting an identical comment. Basically, you're exactly right when it comes to devices which measure physical quantities.
Oh, my. That has to be the worst grammar in any post I've yet posted, and I even previewed. I think it's time to go home.
Corrections:
Second to last paragraph: Ignore the hideous redundancy in the last statement. Consider "Apparently other things in the US factor in, resulting in the current equilibrium between broadband adoption and its price."
The last paragraph should read "...is also a bit odd, because it's not the speed, but how that speed is used (sic)..."
Interestingly enough, you cannot compare things based merely on price. You have to look at the relative price of that thing. If we use some numbers about GDP per capita in various countries we find that (in 2004):
country broadband/per-capitaGDP = per-capita relative cost of broadband
The US: $600 / $40100 = 1.50%
France: $38 x 12 = $456 / $28700 = 1.59%
S.Korea: $360 / $19200 = 1.875%
So, we see that the US really isn't that far off in terms of cost of broadband when you scale it to average income Yes, these numbers might change if you use median income versus GDP per capita, but my point is that you have to actually compare relative costs of things, not nominal dollars. There's also things like exchange rates that muddy the water.
Additionally, in the US the companies will charge what the market bears; the excuse that "there is no alternative" is false since, despite what many people believe, the Internet is not a core utility as it has too many competitors in the "transfer of information" industry (for that is all the Internet is). Note that it's not even in the shipping industry, because that's transfer of material goods.
So, in the US, the problem isn't the price, it's the relative importance the people using the service put on it. Apparently other things in the US factor in to where the current equilibrium between broadband adoption and price is at its current point.
Comparing speeds of connections is also a bit odd, because it's the speed of the connection, but what is used with that speed. For instance, having more bandwidth used by games or video doesn't fundamentally mean the network with the higher capactiy is performing a more valuable function; it just means it has that capability.
You know, I just watched Willow again the other day and it's full of "small" people. How are these "ancient" remains different from modern small folk (other than being old, of course)? None of the articles say anything about that. For instance, we don't classify folks with dwarfism as nonhuman, so why would an ancient instance of dwarfism indicate a different species?
Shouldn't the first thing in studying these remains to be to eliminate this possibility (along with full explanations as to why). I admit I've not delved too deep into this, but it is something which has always bothered me in the back of my mind.
Well, the hope is that technology will get us to a point where the cost of food/shelter/etc is so cheap that it's negligable.
Ah, I knew this was going to come up. My response is:
This is true that perhaps someday you can drop the cost of these things to "almost nothing" meaning "almost zero human labor required". The problem is, how do you get through the transition stages to make it happen? This isn't so much a technical issue as it is getting enough people with resources to simply "donate" large amounts of food, shelter, etc. to the people that some new technology displaces: basically, to pay them to quit their jobs.
Also, don't forget to try and think of what "cheap food and housing" and such means; there will always be problems like "There are enough houses on the planet for each person to have two. However, everybody wants the ones with a view, and there are only 5 of those" - so how do you decide who gets what resources, even if there are enough resources to go around? Remember, value and cost are not often the same thing!
In general, it boils down to social issues rather than technological, and it's a tough sell to the public to say "we're going to force all these people to quit their jobs and replace them with robots, we're not going to force them to find new work, but we're going to take some of the stuff you work to produce to feed them and give them houses". It's a hard enough sell to say, "Hey, work super hard now so we can store up a stockpile of stuff so when we lay everone off they will have stuff to eat" - people, in general, don't like to work harder than they have to to benefit themselves; it's not a normal thing for people to donate regularly and generously, though I and some others have made this a part of their lives without thinking it a hardship.
The only way things can "cost almost nothing" is if people give to others with no requiring anything in exchange. I would love to entertain thoughts on how this might come to pass.
I don't think anybody's personal utopia involves spending all day out in the sun building roads, but we require that a whole lot of people do that, and other crappy jobs, because it's the only way we have to get it done.
So what happens to the folks whose job it is to build roads at the time we develop the machinery to build roads without human labor? Their skillset, training, and interest might be such that they cannot easily do something else for which others will give them food, let them keep their house, etc. This is the big argument that you get by folks everywhere when their vocation is usurped by technology, be it directly by machines or indirectly through things like outsourcing (technology allowing geographical distance to not be a factor). It's not that most people think advance is not a good thing, but they don't know what they can do during or after the transition to continue to support themselves and their families. If you told me that my job was being made obsolete without giving me lots of warning and helping me develop skills or a windfall to account for that, I'm going to be quite upset, and I will for a time operate as a non-contributor to society as I use up by reserves and have to find a new place to contribute (if I am able). The labor issue isn't so much about needing people to work (we could quite easily, with current technology, automate just about every manual task there is - forgetting about liability issues, of course), but what to do with all the people we no longer need to work. Yes, they will be "free to do other things", but they will need to eat in the meantime!
There's also the strange thing that humans appear to be creatures who have problems surviving if they don't have anything to keep them occupied. So, even if we didn't have to work to eat, or stay healthy, or anything of that nature, we'd still try and find something to do, and it won't all be entertainment; I think mankind cannot be satisfied without adventure and discovering new things and stretching himself to the limits. Of course, there are those who will revel in escapism instead, but what is escapism but looking for a different adventure?
I include "other people trying to kill you" as part of the environment from which one needs protection. I would agree that much of Africa has the resources to support its population, but they are unavailable for reasons other than "they don't exist".
There's also other differences, such as climate and geographic distribution of things like water.
You have hit my point here - having plans to build these isn't worth anything if you don't have the physical resources to build them (I don't know about you, but it's hard to find usable steel lying around, and the tools to use any scrap that might be around effectively). Generally you can't get physical resources to build these things if you don't have either other resources to trade for them or the ability to provide some service for which people are willing to trade the resources. Generally the really poor cannot afford to sacrifice what little material goods they have or the time to provide a service.
I'm not saying (as I think some that responded to my original post) that these devices are useless and have no value, it's just that their value is a little far removed from the core needs. Of course, as other posters suggested, perhaps the target audience is not those who don't have any resources at all, but who have some base resources but just can't get out of the hole their in. I'm still not sure how these can get them out of their hole, because the only way to typically get out of a hole is to either suddenly have a glut of resources so time is freed up to invest in something else, or the willingness to take a risk and forego what resources one does have to journey somewhere else. Of course, the possibility to perhaps communicate with someone willing to donate resources to get someone out of their situation makes the analysis more complex.
Anyway, education doesn't do much if one cannot do something with that education; that was my point. Knowledge in and of itself isn't useful, it's the application of that knowledge that comes in handy. Now, the tricky part comes in where some knowledge is where to go to use other types of knowledge.;)
Anyway, after taking a minute to think about it, if these things are distributed along with a plan to help those who get them understand how they are supposed to be used, I'd be more accepting of the resources (after all, 15 million units x $100 is $1.5 billion, which is still a lot of resources) required for this program.
And for those other posters who feel I'm trolling, I'd challenge them to try subsistence farming (when I was a young child, my family grew about 30% of our food ourselves. That was hard enough on good land, not to mention storing all that food, chopping wood for the furnace, etc...) on marginally arable land without a machine shop or hardware store around for a year and see just how much free time you have to poke around on the internet, or find/make the materials and tools required the makeshift water purifier for which you provided a link.
Why not figure out how to make $100 water purifiers or A/C units that run of wind or solar? Or things that help make land arable?
The reason that "disadvantaged children" are "disadvantaged" is not because they don't have computers, but because it's hard to get food, hard to get clean water (for drinking and for cleaning - a huge factor for being healthy is hygeine), and hard to be protected from the environment.
Computers are great, but they aren't very useful for growing food or anything. You need different technologies for that, and different skill sets that aren't "intellectual".
Until I see how something like this can actually reduce the cost of living for these folks, I don't see that it's worth putting my support behind. I'm also not sure it's the best use of resources to help educational efforts either, but that's about the only area in which I'm not quite sure of the cost/benefit analysis. After all, the costly part of textbooks and the like isn't the printing, but paying for the content, so unless there are lots of "free" e-textbooks out there, this won't save much in that front. There's also the hidden aspect of supporting technology out there.
I bet there will still be a market for "local" applications. This is actually what caused the computer industry to explode - the "locality" of computational resources. This is also similar to why mass transit doesn't catch on in some areas. Think about it - if I have to rely on a central service for something, I'm dependent on it and lose a little bit of freedom, even if it's more efficient. If I choose to use mass transit, I don't have the capability to use it whenever I want, and I'm constrained to its routes. If I have a vehicle of my own, my constraints are far less (even though some constraints still exist - my vehicle doesn't do well off road, so I'm constrained to roads, there are legal restrictions, it requires gasoline, etc.).
For certain things, consumers will not care about having "distributed" computing power, such as email or media services. Tools, however, are things that people like to have "local" without depending on someone else. Fuzzy areas are things like "utilities", but utilities are generally things tools use to work rather than the actual tool itself (for instance, a drill press could work by hand, electricity just makes it simpler).
My guess is that some things will be turned into "mass transit" like resources, and there will still be a market for "local tools".
As for your comment about having local storage for your data meaning you still control it, I'd have to disagree, because if you don't have local tools to use your data, you don't control it all. Full control means you have the means to control access to it as well as the means to access it yourself. I think this is a subtle thing that will sneak up on certain folks; it already hits a lot of areas where the tools to access a certain file format no longer exist. This problem won't even be solved by "open" document standards if those standards, over time, are lost and no tools exist to decode the data. For instance, in 1000 years, if there are no hard-coded documents about ASCII, and the instructions on ASCII are written in ASCII, how will you decode the document if there are no tools left that use ASCII? (Highly subjunctive, but it is illustrative.)
when his rain forecast probabilities match the actual probabilities of rain.
Does anyone know what meteorologists mean when they say "x% chance of weather event"? Does this just mean "given current circumstances, we have seen x% chance of said event occurring in the past" or is it some other silliness? For instance, I love the NHTSA star-rating system which says "this vehicle has an x% chance of a rollover in an accident" which is meaningless without ancillary information about accidents (for instance, in any particular accident the vehicle will either roll or not roll). In any weather event, the event will either happen or not happen. In the vehicle instances, I'd be more pleased with "these conditions will make this vehicle roll over, and those conditions occur x% of the time in all the accidents we've measured"; For instance, "If your vehicle is subject to lateral accelerations of 1.7g, it will roll" and "out of all the accidents we see, 1.7g is experienced x% of the time"; the difference between accident statistics and weather statistics, though, is that accident statistics are descriptive while weather statistics are predictive.
I don't know how to determine if social polls are descriptive or predictive; it probably depends on the subject matter in question (weight of an ox is predictive, chance of social event Q is descriptive).
The only thing to stop piracy is market forces. And, the odd thing is, market forces won't even stop piracy. Here's what has to happen for folks to be happy (and this just won't happen, folks!), even though I've said it several times now.
Ignore pirates completely. If the amount of revenue you get from your product from paying customers isn't enough to produce more product, you stop producing the product and people don't have it. People aren't entitled to always have someone producing a product, and you're not required to always produce it.
If, however, pirates exist and you have enough paying customers to cover your costs, keep going and be fine; if you want to increase your profits, you can be like any other industry and cut your costs or try to make new product for which more people are willing to pay. Simple as that, and they are all market forces, and don't rely at all on legislation.
Contrary to all the analyses you read, the value of pirated product is not (current sales price)x(number pirated), it is actually (price of unit required to make volume current volume plus pirated volume)x(current volume plus pirated volume) - (current revenue), and those are totally different numbers. It may even turn out that, in order to get everyone to purchase a legal copy, that the price would drop such that the total revenue would be less than the current revenue - and that's an analysis you won't see in any report anywhere.
Hrm. I think I ought to try and get that last paragraph published somewhere, but I'm going to bet that it's not an original thought. If it is, that explains a lot...
You can keep going at 10 m/s, but gravity is pulling down on you so you need something to "push up" on you. For an elevator, you can use motors or something to grab onto the cable.
For a railgun, you don't have a motor or rocket or a cable to keep pulling yourself up, so you have to have all the speed you need to get to your desired height at the start. As an example, to throw a ball to a height of h meters, you need to throw it at some speed v when it leaves your hand. If you throw it faster it can go higher. To get something up to 200km, neglecting air resistance, you'd need to throw it at about 1951 m/s.
Well, you're almost right, but I'm not sure what you mean by "balance". Fundamentally the entire structure is "balanced" because it's in a stable configuration. Note that the following discussion assumes a structure of constant density and area for simplicity.
What is special about geosynchronous altitude is that geosynchronous altitude is the point of maximum tensile stress in any configuration (that reaches that high or higher). For any length structure, the tensile stress will increase up to geosynchronous orbit, then start to decrease again. Note that if you just built a tower up to geosynchronous orbit, the entire structure would be in compression with stress decreasing with altitude up to a minimum of zero stress at geosynchronous orbit. If you went higher, the tensile stress would be maximum at geosynch and then taper off to zero as you went further out (tensile stress at the unanchored end of a cable must be zero).
To put the entire structure in tension (suitable for a cable because cables cannot support compressive stresses), the thing has to be some 144,255km long with a maximum tension at geosynchronous orbit altitude. To minimize the absolute stresses in the structure, it's actually better to have a compressive anchor at earth that's pretty high, which switches over to tension at some point far lower than geosynchronous altitude. However, the maximim tension will still be at geosynchronous altitude.
The engineering challenge is that the tensile load for a cable with zero anchor stress at earth has a maximum tensile stress of 48.5 MPa per unit density (in kg/m3) of the material; even with a "light" density of 1000 kg/m3, this puts a tensile strength requirement of at least 48.5 GPa on the materials. Note that if the cables are lengthened, tensile stresses simply continue to rise.
For a fun random facts, the total length for minimum maximum stresses (say that five times fast) is at an altitude of about 108,500 km, with an earth-anchor compressive stress of 24.3 MPa per unit density and a geosyncrhonous tensile stress of the same magnitude at 24.3 MPa per unit density.
Even worse than you suggested. You don't even need to worry about time, if you use v^2 = 2*a*d formula. If you want an altitude of 200 km, you need a velocity of 1951 m/s to get up to that altitude (kinetic equivalent of gravitational potential at 200 km), and another 7786 m/s to reach orbital velocity. Add another 1000 m/s to account for drag effects (probably high, but it's a good estimate) and you see that a total delta-V of about 10700 m/s is required. Over 10km, this would require an average acceleration of a whopping 5724 m/s2, or about 585g. This kind of explains why the space shuttle averages its acceleration over about 8 minutes, which is only an average acceleration of 22.3 m/s2 (less than 3 g).
Suffice it to say I don't want to ride in your mass driver unless someone comes up with an artifical gravity field to compensate for the G-loads. (Even at 1000 km long, that's still 5.8 g, not 2.4).
Exactly: hurricanes are really good at dumping a lot of surface energy into the upper atmosphere where it's likely radiated off into space. Hurricanes just happen to be one of the atmosphere's dynamic responses to temperature differences between layers of the atmosphere.
From a strange point of view, you might want to try and increase hurricanes to counter global warming.
Interesting - the article doesn't talk about automatic cars at all - it just talks about an updated form of adaptive cruise control that works at low speeds and also incorporates a lane-departure warning system. Adaptive cruise is already available on many models of high-end cars, some low-end cars, and even some semi trucks. Lane-departure is a little more difficult because it's more difficult to discern a lane than it is an obstruction in front of you, and it's difficult to get a driver to acknowledge a warning (after all, how many turn signals do you see going randomly?), but lane-departure is almost here.
Adaptive cruise is a far cry from automatic cars, and a lane-departure warning system is the first step in making cars that will be allowed to steer themselves.
But, like the summary and article say, the more difficult aspects are sociological, not technical.
Ah - perhaps my use of the word "humanist" isn't the common usage; perhaps my explanation of what I meant wasn't clear? At any rate, I'm not aware of any other word for the philosophy I described. What you describe sounds more like what I know as materialism - that is, looking at everything from a purely physical (and discoverable through the scientific method) standpoint. Incidentally, there is actually work in the materialist philosophy to describe how things like morality may evolve, but I would lump this in with the "subject to physics" category I described.
Perhaps folks want a discussion* on what that might actually mean (considering most are too lazy to Wiki or Google for it). Incidentally, from the Wikipedia at least, some of my understanding of humanism is correct, but considering the page cites that humanism includes things as opposed as Christianity (which I'm confused to see how it fits into humanism according to the Wikipedia) and relativism, it seems that humanism isn't a very restrictive term. That could account for the "mischaracterization" of which you spoke.
* We got a Politics section - any chance we can get a Philosophy section?
I couldn't decide if I wanted to moderate this post or reply. Replying always wins for me, though:
They can be fags as long as they love each other.
This is a very interesting statement. It looks, on the surface, like you're trying to be open minded and not judgemental, but you have put in an interesting judgement: the stipulation of "as long as they love each other."
So what is the moral concept that you believe in this particular instance? That is, is the important thing in a relationship merely the sentiment behind it or the way in which the sentiment is effected? Also, which meaning of the word "love" do you mean in your statement? What happens if we replace 'fags' with 'racists' or 'alcoholics' or 'atheists' or any other term you might want to put in there?
I have to say I don't have answers to any of these things, but the way you phrased your statement just puts this strange little feeling that something's not right in my gut. I'll even posit that the thing "not right" is actually my viewpoint, but in either case I'm not sure in what way.
*pause to think*
Hrm. Now that I've thought about it: What gets me is that it appears (I note that this may not be the case; the following is based on that assumption) your statement is humanist: it places humans at the top of the 'reverence' scale. That is, humans and their feelings and well-being and their endeavors are the thing of utmost importance. Oddly enough, I think this falls into the same category as most environmentalism, politics, and sociology which is focused on "people will suffer (mentally or physically)!" rather than some other standard. Regardless of which "flavor" turns out to be correct, I believe there is a standard outside humanity; be it some "god" or just the pure physical mechanics of the universe, humanity is subject to something outside ourselves, and I think the humanist view denies this truth.
Slashdot Mirror
The interesting thing is that "socialism" is more a political view than an economic one. The economic theory is communism (which everyone always confuses wtih socialism). Socialism is mostly characterized by state ownership of capital, where communism is all about shared ownership of capital by everyone (which is different than capitalism where individuals own capital).
That said, I'm not sure exactly how the anti-IP movement is socialist; I'd say it's closer to being communist: each produce to his ability, each consume based on his need*. The anti-IP movement is nowhere close to a state-controlled body of IP, so I'm not sure if people are just missing something in the translation or they just like throwing out "scary" buzzwords.
*This is the fatal flaw of communism, because humans rarely only take what they need, and they generally don't produce according to their ability.
Woah!
When I read "give me all your items and gold" I heard it in my head to the tune of "Buy all our playsets and toys!"
Scary.
Hey, well written article there. Thanks for the links...
That said, I think you could do well to delve deeper into some of the things you said. Incidentally, you pointed out how most people misuse many of the "standard" excuses for believing something. But what about rationally sensible reasons? For instance, what about "There is this holy book, and I believe it because things written in the book agree with what I observe about the world and the people around me"? That's subtly different than "because my religion told me to".
Also, #1 in that article touches on the fundamental question of if there is something in the universe called "Truth" or not; discounting the case you illustrated where beliefs differ because observations differ, if there are two confliting interpretations about a common observation that means that at most one of them can be fundamentally true (and by 'conflicting' I mean something like "The temperature of that object is 10 degrees" versus "The temperature of that object is 15 degrees" at the same point in time, not things like "it is hot today"). That's the one tricky point about most religions; generally there is something in one or several of them that fundamentally conflicts. For instance, the view that the universe was created by a god or gods is fundamentally incompatible with the view that the universe was not created but simply always "was" or the view that the universe spontaneously came into existence. In this example, only one of those three views can be true given that there is a universe, and no two of them can be true simultaneously. You cannot hold that all the views are equally valid (you can, perhaps, hold that they are all equally invalid), but the point you concluded with, that the choice to hold any view should be respected, is important to recognize. I think the bigger issue is how to manage what actions people are allowed to take on their views, because that's quite a different matter than "mere" belief.
Anyway, I could easily go on discussing the rational aspects of relgion, but I think I've quite used up my 'offtopic' disclaimer as it is ;)
Rather than being the first to market, Microsoft might be the one that takes advantage of the mass adoption phase; there are many studies out there about the benefits and detriments to being first to market and the adoption cycles of new technologies.
So, it really does depend on what your goals as an organization are. It takes a bit of swallowing one's pride, but despite the things that we can complain about regarding any corporation, think about the ancillary benefits that arise and how to effectively, smoothly change the operating philosophies of the companies rather than calling for disruptive sudden changes in philosophy. (Of course, sometimes a culling is necessary, but that's another issue entirely.)
If the issue is that the government is starting to make printed material unavailable, the thing to do would be to start putting political pressure to make it available again. After all, saying "you can have information but only in the form we want to give you" is subtly controlling.
Ah, you're only moderated '1' and I've got no mod points today! At least I searched for 'calibration' before posting an identical comment. Basically, you're exactly right when it comes to devices which measure physical quantities.
Corrections:
Second to last paragraph: Ignore the hideous redundancy in the last statement. Consider "Apparently other things in the US factor in, resulting in the current equilibrium between broadband adoption and its price."
The last paragraph should read "...is also a bit odd, because it's not the speed, but how that speed is used (sic)..."
country broadband/per-capitaGDP = per-capita relative cost of broadband
The US: $600 / $40100 = 1.50%
France: $38 x 12 = $456 / $28700 = 1.59%
S.Korea: $360 / $19200 = 1.875%
So, we see that the US really isn't that far off in terms of cost of broadband when you scale it to average income Yes, these numbers might change if you use median income versus GDP per capita, but my point is that you have to actually compare relative costs of things, not nominal dollars. There's also things like exchange rates that muddy the water.
Additionally, in the US the companies will charge what the market bears; the excuse that "there is no alternative" is false since, despite what many people believe, the Internet is not a core utility as it has too many competitors in the "transfer of information" industry (for that is all the Internet is). Note that it's not even in the shipping industry, because that's transfer of material goods.
So, in the US, the problem isn't the price, it's the relative importance the people using the service put on it. Apparently other things in the US factor in to where the current equilibrium between broadband adoption and price is at its current point.
Comparing speeds of connections is also a bit odd, because it's the speed of the connection, but what is used with that speed. For instance, having more bandwidth used by games or video doesn't fundamentally mean the network with the higher capactiy is performing a more valuable function; it just means it has that capability.
Shouldn't the first thing in studying these remains to be to eliminate this possibility (along with full explanations as to why). I admit I've not delved too deep into this, but it is something which has always bothered me in the back of my mind.
This is true that perhaps someday you can drop the cost of these things to "almost nothing" meaning "almost zero human labor required". The problem is, how do you get through the transition stages to make it happen? This isn't so much a technical issue as it is getting enough people with resources to simply "donate" large amounts of food, shelter, etc. to the people that some new technology displaces: basically, to pay them to quit their jobs.
Also, don't forget to try and think of what "cheap food and housing" and such means; there will always be problems like "There are enough houses on the planet for each person to have two. However, everybody wants the ones with a view, and there are only 5 of those" - so how do you decide who gets what resources, even if there are enough resources to go around? Remember, value and cost are not often the same thing!
In general, it boils down to social issues rather than technological, and it's a tough sell to the public to say "we're going to force all these people to quit their jobs and replace them with robots, we're not going to force them to find new work, but we're going to take some of the stuff you work to produce to feed them and give them houses". It's a hard enough sell to say, "Hey, work super hard now so we can store up a stockpile of stuff so when we lay everone off they will have stuff to eat" - people, in general, don't like to work harder than they have to to benefit themselves; it's not a normal thing for people to donate regularly and generously, though I and some others have made this a part of their lives without thinking it a hardship.
The only way things can "cost almost nothing" is if people give to others with no requiring anything in exchange. I would love to entertain thoughts on how this might come to pass.
There's also the strange thing that humans appear to be creatures who have problems surviving if they don't have anything to keep them occupied. So, even if we didn't have to work to eat, or stay healthy, or anything of that nature, we'd still try and find something to do, and it won't all be entertainment; I think mankind cannot be satisfied without adventure and discovering new things and stretching himself to the limits. Of course, there are those who will revel in escapism instead, but what is escapism but looking for a different adventure?
There's also other differences, such as climate and geographic distribution of things like water.
I'm not saying (as I think some that responded to my original post) that these devices are useless and have no value, it's just that their value is a little far removed from the core needs. Of course, as other posters suggested, perhaps the target audience is not those who don't have any resources at all, but who have some base resources but just can't get out of the hole their in. I'm still not sure how these can get them out of their hole, because the only way to typically get out of a hole is to either suddenly have a glut of resources so time is freed up to invest in something else, or the willingness to take a risk and forego what resources one does have to journey somewhere else. Of course, the possibility to perhaps communicate with someone willing to donate resources to get someone out of their situation makes the analysis more complex.
Anyway, education doesn't do much if one cannot do something with that education; that was my point. Knowledge in and of itself isn't useful, it's the application of that knowledge that comes in handy. Now, the tricky part comes in where some knowledge is where to go to use other types of knowledge. ;)
Anyway, after taking a minute to think about it, if these things are distributed along with a plan to help those who get them understand how they are supposed to be used, I'd be more accepting of the resources (after all, 15 million units x $100 is $1.5 billion, which is still a lot of resources) required for this program.
And for those other posters who feel I'm trolling, I'd challenge them to try subsistence farming (when I was a young child, my family grew about 30% of our food ourselves. That was hard enough on good land, not to mention storing all that food, chopping wood for the furnace, etc...) on marginally arable land without a machine shop or hardware store around for a year and see just how much free time you have to poke around on the internet, or find/make the materials and tools required the makeshift water purifier for which you provided a link.
The reason that "disadvantaged children" are "disadvantaged" is not because they don't have computers, but because it's hard to get food, hard to get clean water (for drinking and for cleaning - a huge factor for being healthy is hygeine), and hard to be protected from the environment.
Computers are great, but they aren't very useful for growing food or anything. You need different technologies for that, and different skill sets that aren't "intellectual".
Until I see how something like this can actually reduce the cost of living for these folks, I don't see that it's worth putting my support behind. I'm also not sure it's the best use of resources to help educational efforts either, but that's about the only area in which I'm not quite sure of the cost/benefit analysis. After all, the costly part of textbooks and the like isn't the printing, but paying for the content, so unless there are lots of "free" e-textbooks out there, this won't save much in that front. There's also the hidden aspect of supporting technology out there.
For certain things, consumers will not care about having "distributed" computing power, such as email or media services. Tools, however, are things that people like to have "local" without depending on someone else. Fuzzy areas are things like "utilities", but utilities are generally things tools use to work rather than the actual tool itself (for instance, a drill press could work by hand, electricity just makes it simpler).
My guess is that some things will be turned into "mass transit" like resources, and there will still be a market for "local tools".
As for your comment about having local storage for your data meaning you still control it, I'd have to disagree, because if you don't have local tools to use your data, you don't control it all. Full control means you have the means to control access to it as well as the means to access it yourself. I think this is a subtle thing that will sneak up on certain folks; it already hits a lot of areas where the tools to access a certain file format no longer exist. This problem won't even be solved by "open" document standards if those standards, over time, are lost and no tools exist to decode the data. For instance, in 1000 years, if there are no hard-coded documents about ASCII, and the instructions on ASCII are written in ASCII, how will you decode the document if there are no tools left that use ASCII? (Highly subjunctive, but it is illustrative.)
Does anyone know what meteorologists mean when they say "x% chance of weather event"? Does this just mean "given current circumstances, we have seen x% chance of said event occurring in the past" or is it some other silliness? For instance, I love the NHTSA star-rating system which says "this vehicle has an x% chance of a rollover in an accident" which is meaningless without ancillary information about accidents (for instance, in any particular accident the vehicle will either roll or not roll). In any weather event, the event will either happen or not happen. In the vehicle instances, I'd be more pleased with "these conditions will make this vehicle roll over, and those conditions occur x% of the time in all the accidents we've measured"; For instance, "If your vehicle is subject to lateral accelerations of 1.7g, it will roll" and "out of all the accidents we see, 1.7g is experienced x% of the time"; the difference between accident statistics and weather statistics, though, is that accident statistics are descriptive while weather statistics are predictive.
I don't know how to determine if social polls are descriptive or predictive; it probably depends on the subject matter in question (weight of an ox is predictive, chance of social event Q is descriptive).
[end off-topic ramblings...]
Ignore pirates completely. If the amount of revenue you get from your product from paying customers isn't enough to produce more product, you stop producing the product and people don't have it. People aren't entitled to always have someone producing a product, and you're not required to always produce it.
If, however, pirates exist and you have enough paying customers to cover your costs, keep going and be fine; if you want to increase your profits, you can be like any other industry and cut your costs or try to make new product for which more people are willing to pay. Simple as that, and they are all market forces, and don't rely at all on legislation.
Contrary to all the analyses you read, the value of pirated product is not (current sales price)x(number pirated), it is actually (price of unit required to make volume current volume plus pirated volume)x(current volume plus pirated volume) - (current revenue), and those are totally different numbers. It may even turn out that, in order to get everyone to purchase a legal copy, that the price would drop such that the total revenue would be less than the current revenue - and that's an analysis you won't see in any report anywhere.
Hrm. I think I ought to try and get that last paragraph published somewhere, but I'm going to bet that it's not an original thought. If it is, that explains a lot...
For a railgun, you don't have a motor or rocket or a cable to keep pulling yourself up, so you have to have all the speed you need to get to your desired height at the start. As an example, to throw a ball to a height of h meters, you need to throw it at some speed v when it leaves your hand. If you throw it faster it can go higher. To get something up to 200km, neglecting air resistance, you'd need to throw it at about 1951 m/s.
What is special about geosynchronous altitude is that geosynchronous altitude is the point of maximum tensile stress in any configuration (that reaches that high or higher). For any length structure, the tensile stress will increase up to geosynchronous orbit, then start to decrease again. Note that if you just built a tower up to geosynchronous orbit, the entire structure would be in compression with stress decreasing with altitude up to a minimum of zero stress at geosynchronous orbit. If you went higher, the tensile stress would be maximum at geosynch and then taper off to zero as you went further out (tensile stress at the unanchored end of a cable must be zero).
To put the entire structure in tension (suitable for a cable because cables cannot support compressive stresses), the thing has to be some 144,255km long with a maximum tension at geosynchronous orbit altitude. To minimize the absolute stresses in the structure, it's actually better to have a compressive anchor at earth that's pretty high, which switches over to tension at some point far lower than geosynchronous altitude. However, the maximim tension will still be at geosynchronous altitude.
The engineering challenge is that the tensile load for a cable with zero anchor stress at earth has a maximum tensile stress of 48.5 MPa per unit density (in kg/m3) of the material; even with a "light" density of 1000 kg/m3, this puts a tensile strength requirement of at least 48.5 GPa on the materials. Note that if the cables are lengthened, tensile stresses simply continue to rise.
For a fun random facts, the total length for minimum maximum stresses (say that five times fast) is at an altitude of about 108,500 km, with an earth-anchor compressive stress of 24.3 MPa per unit density and a geosyncrhonous tensile stress of the same magnitude at 24.3 MPa per unit density.
Suffice it to say I don't want to ride in your mass driver unless someone comes up with an artifical gravity field to compensate for the G-loads. (Even at 1000 km long, that's still 5.8 g, not 2.4).
From a strange point of view, you might want to try and increase hurricanes to counter global warming.
Adaptive cruise is a far cry from automatic cars, and a lane-departure warning system is the first step in making cars that will be allowed to steer themselves.
But, like the summary and article say, the more difficult aspects are sociological, not technical.
grrrrRRRROAR
Perhaps folks want a discussion* on what that might actually mean (considering most are too lazy to Wiki or Google for it). Incidentally, from the Wikipedia at least, some of my understanding of humanism is correct, but considering the page cites that humanism includes things as opposed as Christianity (which I'm confused to see how it fits into humanism according to the Wikipedia) and relativism, it seems that humanism isn't a very restrictive term. That could account for the "mischaracterization" of which you spoke.
* We got a Politics section - any chance we can get a Philosophy section?
This is a very interesting statement. It looks, on the surface, like you're trying to be open minded and not judgemental, but you have put in an interesting judgement: the stipulation of "as long as they love each other."
So what is the moral concept that you believe in this particular instance? That is, is the important thing in a relationship merely the sentiment behind it or the way in which the sentiment is effected? Also, which meaning of the word "love" do you mean in your statement? What happens if we replace 'fags' with 'racists' or 'alcoholics' or 'atheists' or any other term you might want to put in there?
I have to say I don't have answers to any of these things, but the way you phrased your statement just puts this strange little feeling that something's not right in my gut. I'll even posit that the thing "not right" is actually my viewpoint, but in either case I'm not sure in what way.
*pause to think*
Hrm. Now that I've thought about it: What gets me is that it appears (I note that this may not be the case; the following is based on that assumption) your statement is humanist: it places humans at the top of the 'reverence' scale. That is, humans and their feelings and well-being and their endeavors are the thing of utmost importance. Oddly enough, I think this falls into the same category as most environmentalism, politics, and sociology which is focused on "people will suffer (mentally or physically)!" rather than some other standard. Regardless of which "flavor" turns out to be correct, I believe there is a standard outside humanity; be it some "god" or just the pure physical mechanics of the universe, humanity is subject to something outside ourselves, and I think the humanist view denies this truth.