There's a slim chance that it could push both big content and the consumer electronics industry to push ISP's to push for higher bandwidth due to the money making opportunities.
Wishful thinking on my part perhaps, but you never know.
The anti-firearms hysteria needs to stop. This reminds me of when Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray, so a bunch of dead stingrays started showing up everywhere because people suddenly thought of them as being too dangerous to have around. Yeah, firearms can kill people. So can a bunch of other things.
There are three times as many automobile related fatalities each year as firearms related fatalities:
So why the fuck are we going after people who own firearms?
First they came for the NRA, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't an NRA member.
(Yeah, I invoked Godwin's Law, so what.)
Also, in Afghanistan it is not unheard of for "enemy combatants" (we can't call them terrorists anymore) to carry kids while they are on the battlefield, either for the purpose of preventing themselves from being shot at, or propaganda ("Look at these baby killers! They must die in the name of allah!") That goes to show you what people are capable of. If firearms were disabled in a similar manner in domestic situations, only it happened automatically, I imagine that would come home as well.
If you look at the classical distinctions between a confederation, a federation, and an empire, I think Australia would better fit what you'd call an empire.
I know people associate the word "empire" with something evil, but it isn't, it just explains the relationship between the smaller regional governments and the central government. The US fits somewhere between empire and federation, though in most respects it is indeed a federation.
That's why the meter is no longer defined by a distance of a physical object - it was defined as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum, until 1983 when it was defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1299,792,458 of a second. (more info here)
And how do we define a second? Remember, time is relative. Here on earth, cesium doesn't decay at the same rate as it does in space. Or when the object is moving slower. And since our galaxy is in a constant state of movement, and its rate of movement is constantly changing, it's hard to determine the exact decay rate of it when it isn't moving.
Unless you're a scientist, you generally don't need to account for the small change in density over temperature. If you are a scientist, then you know it's 4 degrees C and you're already using the metric system.
That isn't true, engineers need to account for it as well.
Anyways that is neither here nor there. What is going on is we're arbitrarily picking something to base it upon. We could have just as easily based it the second on the decay of carbon 14 for example.
It already does that, mostly. There are exceptions though to fields that aren't in metric anywhere. As is pointed out elsewhere, PCB designs used in all technology everybody uses everywhere are measured in imperial units. Aeronautical parts are measured in imperial units worldwide as well. It would be kind of hard for the US government to demand its contractors snub the global standards just to stick to its own.
Well, why water? Why not nitrogen? We encounter a lot more of that in our daily lives than water, and it is simpler than water (binary atom rather than an odd shaped dipole molecule with two different atoms in it.)
Well, the reverse is also true, or at least France is known for being very resistant to US technologies and standards. I remember Jacques Chirac making a big stink about how the internet basically ruined Minitel, and he tried to one up Google by making a French originated replacement search engine called Qaero (which their government spent millions on and it never went anywhere.)
Simple would be relative. In the west, we use Arabic numerals, which are base 10, or powers of 10. Systems such as binary are base 2, or powers of 2, and after working with it for a while you can figure those numbers in your head as easily as anything else. We divide those into nibbles, bytes, words, dwords, qwords, etc. A kilobyte is 10 bits, which doesn't fit into those divisions, but we stick that label on it anyways.
Imperial lengths work in a similarly awkward way, and are countable in powers of 3. For example, 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, 1780 yards to a mile. Mass appears to go into powers of 14. I don't think that was by design, but it is one way to look at it.
There's an old saying (I'm paraphrasing) that you can't grow the economy by going around breaking windows and then hiring people to repair them. The CARS program is a great example of that - destroying working capital to replace it with working capital doesn't help anything. The environmentalists weren't exactly impressed with it either (the program itself required cars that were made after emissions control computer systems and catalytic converters had long since been in use - the older pre-emissions standards cars weren't eligible) and the cost to implement the program (4 billion IIRC) could have better been spent on other environmental projects.
Anyways, the same thing applies in this case. "Make work" projects only provide temporary employment and end up costing the economy more than the GDP it generated. That and requiring jobs for tasks that don't really need employees (see Oregon's requirement to have gas pump operators) don't help with unemployment either due to the expenses they put elsewhere on the economy.
Doesn't seem to be causing us any issues. Our top exports are capital goods like earth movers and jumbo jets, which rely heavily on measurement, as well as various forms of technology (cisco, google, microsoft, vmware, netapp, intel, nvidia, and apple tend to dominate in their respective fields) which do the same to a lesser degree.
Well, certain standards that "the rest of the world" (ironically, usually I find that when somebody says "the rest of the world" they are just talking about Europe) uses aren't necessarily better. GSM is a great example. GSM relies upon TDMA for voice, which is badly outdated. TDMA is analogous to a system where the guy with the feather can speak, and he gets x amount of time to speak, which is an immense waste of bandwidth, not to mention limited range. CDMA allows them to talk over one another in a sense, and gets much greater range.
The nice thing about GSM is thhttp://politics.slashdot.org/story/13/01/07/0143242/petition-for-metric-in-us-halfway-to-requiring-response-from-the-white-house#e SIM card, but other than that it is actually rather dated. When GSM adopted 3G, they picked up CDMA for data. Unfortunately that means they use two separate radios, which means more cost and more battery consumption (although there's a side benefit of simultaneous voice and data, and CDMA also has this capability while using a single radio, just most carriers don't implement it.) Also CDMA isn't proprietary.
And would you know it, the US is adopting LTE faster than most of the world, which uses an even newer and better modulation standard called OFDMA. The nice thing is we don't have to wait for a government body to go through a long process give us the OK, we can just do it willy nilly.
That is true in various forms. California has a population size slightly larger than Canada. California is also the 8th largest economy in the world. Alaska is larger geographically than Europe. Arizona is larger than England, and I'd imagine has about as many numeric road signs.
No, we just use it because it's what we're used to. Sometimes change is necessary in some things in order to overcome technological barriers. A measurement standard isn't one of them.
Well who decides what is badly designed and what isn't? Look at the English language for example, any linguist will tell you how much of a mess it is, how there is inconsistency after inconsistency (take for example the oo sound in the words floor, blood, or goose.) Yet as time goes by, more and more people go out of their way to learn it.
Is it because it is better? No, it's just because it's what the more advanced economies happen to use, and it's what we're used to so we don't change to something else. The US is a very advanced economy, and we happen to use imperial.
We're a federation, such is the nature of the beast. Some of us prefer right to work states (such as myself) whereas some do not. Different strokes for different people, one man's junk is another man's treasure, etc.
The weights and measures system you use doesn't make you more advanced or retarded (yes, retarded literally means the opposite as advanced) any more than say Chinese glyphs make them more primitive than using an alphabet. Metric is every bit as arbitrary as imperial, it's just a bit easier to do unit conversions with them.
There are many things that almost everybody does which are harder than other ways (the English language is full of all sorts of inconsistencies and things that just plain don't make sense,) but we just keep doing them because it's what we're used to.
As a more libertarian society (yes, we are, like it or not) the government can't just tell us or any private entity what standards we will use, which was the barrier to entry it had the first time we tried to adopt it. Right now the USDA mandates that food and drug labels use metric, and various government organizations internally use metric (we used it exclusively when I was in the Army) but that's about as far as you can go. Things like road signs are also up to the individual states, and given that most of them are bankrupt, it would be hard to convince them to add that to their budget.
Personally, I prefer that day to day decisions like that remain ones that individuals make for themselves (or who knows what else the government can tell us what "thou shalt do") but it's just something that you need to consider.
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Multicast IPTV over google fiber IMO.
There's a slim chance that it could push both big content and the consumer electronics industry to push ISP's to push for higher bandwidth due to the money making opportunities.
Wishful thinking on my part perhaps, but you never know.
The anti-firearms hysteria needs to stop. This reminds me of when Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray, so a bunch of dead stingrays started showing up everywhere because people suddenly thought of them as being too dangerous to have around. Yeah, firearms can kill people. So can a bunch of other things.
There are three times as many automobile related fatalities each year as firearms related fatalities:
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/01/05/Federal-Gov-Annual-Auto-Related-Deaths-Three-Times-Higher-Than-Gun-Related-Deaths
Even better, there are more people killed with hammers and clubs than with firearms:
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/01/03/FBI-More-People-Killed-With-Hammers-and-Clubs-Each-Year-Than-With-Rifles
So why the fuck are we going after people who own firearms?
First they came for the NRA,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't an NRA member.
(Yeah, I invoked Godwin's Law, so what.)
Also, in Afghanistan it is not unheard of for "enemy combatants" (we can't call them terrorists anymore) to carry kids while they are on the battlefield, either for the purpose of preventing themselves from being shot at, or propaganda ("Look at these baby killers! They must die in the name of allah!") That goes to show you what people are capable of. If firearms were disabled in a similar manner in domestic situations, only it happened automatically, I imagine that would come home as well.
I'm wondering if somebody pocketed the money, or perhaps paid their wife and uncle $5,000 an hour each to wave a sign around on a street somewhere.
But see that's the point: although it is an easy definition to follow, it is still arbitrary.
If you look at the classical distinctions between a confederation, a federation, and an empire, I think Australia would better fit what you'd call an empire.
I know people associate the word "empire" with something evil, but it isn't, it just explains the relationship between the smaller regional governments and the central government. The US fits somewhere between empire and federation, though in most respects it is indeed a federation.
That's why the meter is no longer defined by a distance of a physical object - it was defined as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum, until 1983 when it was defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1299,792,458 of a second. (more info here)
And how do we define a second? Remember, time is relative. Here on earth, cesium doesn't decay at the same rate as it does in space. Or when the object is moving slower. And since our galaxy is in a constant state of movement, and its rate of movement is constantly changing, it's hard to determine the exact decay rate of it when it isn't moving.
Unless you're a scientist, you generally don't need to account for the small change in density over temperature. If you are a scientist, then you know it's 4 degrees C and you're already using the metric system.
That isn't true, engineers need to account for it as well.
Anyways that is neither here nor there. What is going on is we're arbitrarily picking something to base it upon. We could have just as easily based it the second on the decay of carbon 14 for example.
Yeah I fumbled that one, I mean 10 bits is what you use to enumerate a kilobyte.
It already does that, mostly. There are exceptions though to fields that aren't in metric anywhere. As is pointed out elsewhere, PCB designs used in all technology everybody uses everywhere are measured in imperial units. Aeronautical parts are measured in imperial units worldwide as well. It would be kind of hard for the US government to demand its contractors snub the global standards just to stick to its own.
By that definition, we'd all speak Esperanto.
Aside from the earth not being spherical, its size isn't static either.
And water at what temperature?
Actually let me add to that, at what altitude shall we pick for that water to melt and to boil? How much salt content does that water have?
Well, why water? Why not nitrogen? We encounter a lot more of that in our daily lives than water, and it is simpler than water (binary atom rather than an odd shaped dipole molecule with two different atoms in it.)
Well, the reverse is also true, or at least France is known for being very resistant to US technologies and standards. I remember Jacques Chirac making a big stink about how the internet basically ruined Minitel, and he tried to one up Google by making a French originated replacement search engine called Qaero (which their government spent millions on and it never went anywhere.)
Simple would be relative. In the west, we use Arabic numerals, which are base 10, or powers of 10. Systems such as binary are base 2, or powers of 2, and after working with it for a while you can figure those numbers in your head as easily as anything else. We divide those into nibbles, bytes, words, dwords, qwords, etc. A kilobyte is 10 bits, which doesn't fit into those divisions, but we stick that label on it anyways.
Imperial lengths work in a similarly awkward way, and are countable in powers of 3. For example, 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, 1780 yards to a mile. Mass appears to go into powers of 14. I don't think that was by design, but it is one way to look at it.
There's an old saying (I'm paraphrasing) that you can't grow the economy by going around breaking windows and then hiring people to repair them. The CARS program is a great example of that - destroying working capital to replace it with working capital doesn't help anything. The environmentalists weren't exactly impressed with it either (the program itself required cars that were made after emissions control computer systems and catalytic converters had long since been in use - the older pre-emissions standards cars weren't eligible) and the cost to implement the program (4 billion IIRC) could have better been spent on other environmental projects.
Anyways, the same thing applies in this case. "Make work" projects only provide temporary employment and end up costing the economy more than the GDP it generated. That and requiring jobs for tasks that don't really need employees (see Oregon's requirement to have gas pump operators) don't help with unemployment either due to the expenses they put elsewhere on the economy.
Doesn't seem to be causing us any issues. Our top exports are capital goods like earth movers and jumbo jets, which rely heavily on measurement, as well as various forms of technology (cisco, google, microsoft, vmware, netapp, intel, nvidia, and apple tend to dominate in their respective fields) which do the same to a lesser degree.
Hmm...not sure how that url got placed in there, it wasn't in the preview...
Well, certain standards that "the rest of the world" (ironically, usually I find that when somebody says "the rest of the world" they are just talking about Europe) uses aren't necessarily better. GSM is a great example. GSM relies upon TDMA for voice, which is badly outdated. TDMA is analogous to a system where the guy with the feather can speak, and he gets x amount of time to speak, which is an immense waste of bandwidth, not to mention limited range. CDMA allows them to talk over one another in a sense, and gets much greater range.
The nice thing about GSM is thhttp://politics.slashdot.org/story/13/01/07/0143242/petition-for-metric-in-us-halfway-to-requiring-response-from-the-white-house#e SIM card, but other than that it is actually rather dated. When GSM adopted 3G, they picked up CDMA for data. Unfortunately that means they use two separate radios, which means more cost and more battery consumption (although there's a side benefit of simultaneous voice and data, and CDMA also has this capability while using a single radio, just most carriers don't implement it.) Also CDMA isn't proprietary.
And would you know it, the US is adopting LTE faster than most of the world, which uses an even newer and better modulation standard called OFDMA. The nice thing is we don't have to wait for a government body to go through a long process give us the OK, we can just do it willy nilly.
Would you say the same about certain fields then? Almost universally (that is, worldwide) aeronautical parts are done in Imperial.
That is true in various forms. California has a population size slightly larger than Canada. California is also the 8th largest economy in the world. Alaska is larger geographically than Europe. Arizona is larger than England, and I'd imagine has about as many numeric road signs.
No, we just use it because it's what we're used to. Sometimes change is necessary in some things in order to overcome technological barriers. A measurement standard isn't one of them.
Well who decides what is badly designed and what isn't? Look at the English language for example, any linguist will tell you how much of a mess it is, how there is inconsistency after inconsistency (take for example the oo sound in the words floor, blood, or goose.) Yet as time goes by, more and more people go out of their way to learn it.
Is it because it is better? No, it's just because it's what the more advanced economies happen to use, and it's what we're used to so we don't change to something else. The US is a very advanced economy, and we happen to use imperial.
We're a federation, such is the nature of the beast. Some of us prefer right to work states (such as myself) whereas some do not. Different strokes for different people, one man's junk is another man's treasure, etc.
The weights and measures system you use doesn't make you more advanced or retarded (yes, retarded literally means the opposite as advanced) any more than say Chinese glyphs make them more primitive than using an alphabet. Metric is every bit as arbitrary as imperial, it's just a bit easier to do unit conversions with them.
There are many things that almost everybody does which are harder than other ways (the English language is full of all sorts of inconsistencies and things that just plain don't make sense,) but we just keep doing them because it's what we're used to.
As a more libertarian society (yes, we are, like it or not) the government can't just tell us or any private entity what standards we will use, which was the barrier to entry it had the first time we tried to adopt it. Right now the USDA mandates that food and drug labels use metric, and various government organizations internally use metric (we used it exclusively when I was in the Army) but that's about as far as you can go. Things like road signs are also up to the individual states, and given that most of them are bankrupt, it would be hard to convince them to add that to their budget.
Personally, I prefer that day to day decisions like that remain ones that individuals make for themselves (or who knows what else the government can tell us what "thou shalt do") but it's just something that you need to consider.