While your points are all valid, I think the single biggest factor standing in the way of Thunderbolt is simply this: backwards compatibility. There's a huge number of USB devices of all speeds out there, and exactly zero of them will plug into a thunderbolt port.
The advantages of Thunderbolt over USB3 aren't significant enough to overcome that obstacle. The number of people for whom 6Gbps is insufficient but 10Gbps is enough is a small slice indeed. The same goes for the 10W vs. 4.5W power availability.
This sounds like the kind of thing that should be decided by Congress and the President, rather than by an unaccountable political appointee. We're talking an awful lot of money here, and I'm quite leery of letting a government agency decide more-or-less arbitrarily to redirect billions of dollars in such a manner.
What's also interesting is that the coverage coming out of the protests is rather one-sided. It's all coming from the protesters. And there's little interest in posting any non-controversial/non-sensational footage, or even to post footage in context. What we get instead is the video equivalent of sound-bytes--enough to get a non-cynical viewer riled up about something.
That was precisely my thought. While my cumulative time spent in the bathroom may reach an hour per day, I would estimate that less than five minutes of that is spent "in front of" the mirror, and the time spent *looking* at the mirror is some fraction of even that.
And I would guess that those people who *do* spend a lot of time looking at the mirror already have something holding their attention--themselves.
And this is a prime example of why government subsidies of production are a bad idea. I haven't firmly settled on a position with regards to federal funding for R&D (although certain examples, like sick shrimp running on treadmills, should be an obvious choice for budget cuts...), but trying to force adoption through subsidies only distorts the market, without adding any value.
In this case, the US Government effectively forced every US citizen to invest $1.60 in a company that had never been profitable and showed no prospects for profitability. The investment was not for development of technology that would make solar power economically viable, but rather it was for purchasing capital equipment for existing, uneconomic technology. The results were perfectly predictable. If no private investors see the value in the company, we should be thinking awful hard about whether it's a good idea to force them to invest in it anyway.
I would love to see solar power prove profitable, but such a goal will come as a result of research and development, not as a result of government subsidies for production of inefficient technology.
It really comes down to what you call "subsidies." Tax deductions for capital investments, which the anti-fossil-fuel crowd incorrectly call a subsidy, is not unique to the oil/gas business, and similar deductions commonly available to *all* businesses in all industries. Tax *credits*, however (without which we wouldn't see much, if any, solar installations), certainly are a subsidy, and are very generous for renewable energy. You also need to take into account the volume of production from each source. If there's 10x as much subsidies (if you want to call it that) to oil/gas as there are to solar, but there's 100x as much oil/gas production, then it stands to reason that the rate of subsidies to solar is 10x that given to oil/gas.
There's also the minor question of "are we paying for the right thing?" Subsidies/grants/investments for research into renewables is one thing--they have the potential to produce improvements in the efficiency and cost of such systems. But subsidies for production and installation of renewables (as the US gov't currently does) is absolute futility--by doing so, the government is distorting the value of those products, actually providing a disincentive for producers to make those systems more economical on their own.
Well, if you heavily subsidize (ethanol, wind) and/or mandate the use of renewables (again ethanol), and create a regulatory environment that makes nuclear more or less impossible, of course you'll see a greater use of renewables.
There's a key difference. When people post on facebook/foursquare/twitter/etc, they are willingly divulging the details of their own personal lives. When your electric company does the same thing with its customers' information, it will likely be done without their knowledge or consent, and not at the customers' initiative.
You suggest that cars come equipped with GPS units which report mileage. For the sake of taxation, is not a gasoline tax equivalent? Heck, it's a lot simpler and more effective than a mileage tax--and here's why: a mileage tax would also need to take into account the weight of the vehicle, since heavier vehicles cause more degradation in the roads. It just so happens, however, that those heavier vehicles also consume more gasoline, so they end up paying more tax per mile than lighter vehicles. You end up with roughly the same tax distribution as before, without having to set up (and maintain) rate schedules for different types of vehicles.
For the insurance question, however, you make a good point.
Another thing nobody likes to mention: Who's gonna pay for these electric cars? If the government has to become involved in order for them to sell, that means that people don't want them, at least at their current cost. The natural response is to institute a subsidy--but now you're forcing people to pay (via taxes) for an electric car they wouldn't buy themselves.
It's been thought of. Time and time again. "Thinking of it" is not, and never has been, the issue. The issue has been "how do we harness this in a way that is at least as economic and effective as fossil fuels?" And that's where every solution has failed so far. Because even though the sun produces a tremendous amount of energy, collection thereof is unreliable down on the ground, and the technology to do so is expensive.
Putting stuff into space resolves the reliability issue, but only multiplies the cost.
I can't speak for corporate income tax, but for personal income tax, the deal is this: you get a tax credit for taxes paid overseas. If you still owe US taxes after that, then you pay US taxes. If the foreign tax credit eliminates your US tax bill, then you don't pay any US income tax. The problem is that it effectively ensures that you get taxed at the highest rate applicable.
Sure, they have an excuse for leaving off the upstream greenhouse gas emissions, due to varying sources. That omission also makes the car seem more environmentally friendly.
Another convenient omission from the sticker is recharge time. Of all the different metrics they're using on these cars, recharge time would be the easiest to calculate and/or test. And yet it is left off.
It's really a matter of tradeoffs. Stricter regulation means higher costs, which get passed on to the rest of the economy. Sure, safety can be increased, but at what cost? And how much damage would we prevent? We're really bumping up against the law of diminishing returns.
Think of it this way: does one major disaster every thirty years (if you take Exxon Valdez plus BP Deepwater Horizon and extrapolate) outweigh thirty years of economic growth made possible by cheap energy? Considering the sheer quantity of oil/gas that is produced worldwide, the fact that so few accidents of this nature occur is really a tribute to how safe the industry (generally) operates.
Hydrates require both high pressure and low temperature to form, along with the proper composition of water and methane. Take away any of the three, and hydrates disappear. Typically the gas/water/oil is warm enough when it reaches the surface that hydrates do not form, and by the time it cools down enough, it has already been processed so that the water and methane are no longer mixed.
Actually, AIG won last year, owing to their spectacular performance on the economy, and Countrywide won in 2008. In both cases, though, Comcast was the runner-up.
Current satellites use solar panels for power. If you beam power up from earth, you're going to need....solar panels to collect it. If the solar panels can handle more light than they currently get from direct solar radiation, you might be onto something. Considering that most of the diffraction/refraction/scattering of light happens in the first few miles of atmosphere, it seems to me that light beamed up from earth would be scattered far more than light beamed to earth from space.
And just like he did, you entirely missed the underlying meaning. The other party in that not-so-hypothetical conversation isn't a real man, precisely because that other party is female.
Several years ago, I heard of a similar experiment being performed for airplane emergency exits. Survivors of real plane crashes, when observing such tests, pointed out that the results seen in tests were very different from what they had experienced during a real emergency.
So the researchers made a tweak: for the next test, they offered 5 GBP to the first 50 people off the plane. The result? An evacuation that observers recognized as being very similar to a real emergency--people shoving each other out of the way, climbing over seats, trampling each other, etc.
You bring up a good point, which is this: don't store incriminating files on your local computer in the first place.
Use some sort of online encrypted storage. Or hide a file server in the walls of your house, with a wireless card and a watchdog timer. If it loses contact with your "main" computer (because the feds are seizing it as evidence), it shuts down. No power draw, no wireless signals to track, and your data remains safely hidden.
As others have stated further down in the thread, your options are drastically limited if law enforcement have installed a screen reader or key logger or have been monitoring your internet traffic, but you can at least claim that someone was leeching off your wireless.
A friend of my brother's actually set up a private social network precisely for the purpose of batting around ideas. Each member contributes a number of ideas each month, and the members discuss it, pointing out flaws or opportunities. The ideas may be business ideas or invention ideas or ideas for writing a book.
One of the conditions of joining the club is that each member agree that any idea belongs with its originator, and that nobody commercialize anyone else's idea without prior permission. I don't know how well such an agreement would hold up in court, but it's a start.
Another approach is to bounce the idea off someone who might be in the target market, but who isn't an expert in your field. Several times, I've bounced a gadget idea off my brother, who will respond with a question like "but why would I use that instead of product x?"
We already have AmTrak, which has been losing money for decades and only exists because of federal (read: taxpayer-funded) subsidies. And that's considering that AmTrak runs on existing rails.
Building a new high-speed rail network is going to be expensive. Enormously so. And it'll be expensive to operate as well. In order for it to make sense, it has to give a return to match or exceed the cost of investment. That return could be in terms of fares paid by riders, or by reduced wear and tear on roads, or lower emissions (although it'll also have to compensate for lost gas taxes).
I highly doubt it's a feasible idea, at least here in the US. It works in European nations because distances are smaller and populations are more concentrated. In the US, with suburban sprawl, the practical utility of it is highly questionable.
If someone can convince me that it makes economic sense, I'll get on board. But not until then.
Slashdot Mirror
While your points are all valid, I think the single biggest factor standing in the way of Thunderbolt is simply this: backwards compatibility. There's a huge number of USB devices of all speeds out there, and exactly zero of them will plug into a thunderbolt port. The advantages of Thunderbolt over USB3 aren't significant enough to overcome that obstacle. The number of people for whom 6Gbps is insufficient but 10Gbps is enough is a small slice indeed. The same goes for the 10W vs. 4.5W power availability.
This sounds like the kind of thing that should be decided by Congress and the President, rather than by an unaccountable political appointee. We're talking an awful lot of money here, and I'm quite leery of letting a government agency decide more-or-less arbitrarily to redirect billions of dollars in such a manner.
What's also interesting is that the coverage coming out of the protests is rather one-sided. It's all coming from the protesters. And there's little interest in posting any non-controversial/non-sensational footage, or even to post footage in context. What we get instead is the video equivalent of sound-bytes--enough to get a non-cynical viewer riled up about something.
That was precisely my thought. While my cumulative time spent in the bathroom may reach an hour per day, I would estimate that less than five minutes of that is spent "in front of" the mirror, and the time spent *looking* at the mirror is some fraction of even that.
And I would guess that those people who *do* spend a lot of time looking at the mirror already have something holding their attention--themselves.
And this is a prime example of why government subsidies of production are a bad idea. I haven't firmly settled on a position with regards to federal funding for R&D (although certain examples, like sick shrimp running on treadmills, should be an obvious choice for budget cuts...), but trying to force adoption through subsidies only distorts the market, without adding any value.
In this case, the US Government effectively forced every US citizen to invest $1.60 in a company that had never been profitable and showed no prospects for profitability. The investment was not for development of technology that would make solar power economically viable, but rather it was for purchasing capital equipment for existing, uneconomic technology. The results were perfectly predictable. If no private investors see the value in the company, we should be thinking awful hard about whether it's a good idea to force them to invest in it anyway.
I would love to see solar power prove profitable, but such a goal will come as a result of research and development, not as a result of government subsidies for production of inefficient technology.
It really comes down to what you call "subsidies." Tax deductions for capital investments, which the anti-fossil-fuel crowd incorrectly call a subsidy, is not unique to the oil/gas business, and similar deductions commonly available to *all* businesses in all industries. Tax *credits*, however (without which we wouldn't see much, if any, solar installations), certainly are a subsidy, and are very generous for renewable energy. You also need to take into account the volume of production from each source. If there's 10x as much subsidies (if you want to call it that) to oil/gas as there are to solar, but there's 100x as much oil/gas production, then it stands to reason that the rate of subsidies to solar is 10x that given to oil/gas.
There's also the minor question of "are we paying for the right thing?" Subsidies/grants/investments for research into renewables is one thing--they have the potential to produce improvements in the efficiency and cost of such systems. But subsidies for production and installation of renewables (as the US gov't currently does) is absolute futility--by doing so, the government is distorting the value of those products, actually providing a disincentive for producers to make those systems more economical on their own.
Well, if you heavily subsidize (ethanol, wind) and/or mandate the use of renewables (again ethanol), and create a regulatory environment that makes nuclear more or less impossible, of course you'll see a greater use of renewables.
There's a key difference. When people post on facebook/foursquare/twitter/etc, they are willingly divulging the details of their own personal lives. When your electric company does the same thing with its customers' information, it will likely be done without their knowledge or consent, and not at the customers' initiative.
It's about who controls the information.
The linked site is down, so here it is on youtube
You suggest that cars come equipped with GPS units which report mileage. For the sake of taxation, is not a gasoline tax equivalent? Heck, it's a lot simpler and more effective than a mileage tax--and here's why: a mileage tax would also need to take into account the weight of the vehicle, since heavier vehicles cause more degradation in the roads. It just so happens, however, that those heavier vehicles also consume more gasoline, so they end up paying more tax per mile than lighter vehicles. You end up with roughly the same tax distribution as before, without having to set up (and maintain) rate schedules for different types of vehicles.
For the insurance question, however, you make a good point.
Another thing nobody likes to mention: Who's gonna pay for these electric cars? If the government has to become involved in order for them to sell, that means that people don't want them, at least at their current cost. The natural response is to institute a subsidy--but now you're forcing people to pay (via taxes) for an electric car they wouldn't buy themselves.
It's been thought of. Time and time again. "Thinking of it" is not, and never has been, the issue. The issue has been "how do we harness this in a way that is at least as economic and effective as fossil fuels?" And that's where every solution has failed so far. Because even though the sun produces a tremendous amount of energy, collection thereof is unreliable down on the ground, and the technology to do so is expensive.
Putting stuff into space resolves the reliability issue, but only multiplies the cost.
I can't speak for corporate income tax, but for personal income tax, the deal is this: you get a tax credit for taxes paid overseas. If you still owe US taxes after that, then you pay US taxes. If the foreign tax credit eliminates your US tax bill, then you don't pay any US income tax. The problem is that it effectively ensures that you get taxed at the highest rate applicable.
Sure, they have an excuse for leaving off the upstream greenhouse gas emissions, due to varying sources. That omission also makes the car seem more environmentally friendly.
Another convenient omission from the sticker is recharge time. Of all the different metrics they're using on these cars, recharge time would be the easiest to calculate and/or test. And yet it is left off.
It's really a matter of tradeoffs. Stricter regulation means higher costs, which get passed on to the rest of the economy. Sure, safety can be increased, but at what cost? And how much damage would we prevent? We're really bumping up against the law of diminishing returns.
Think of it this way: does one major disaster every thirty years (if you take Exxon Valdez plus BP Deepwater Horizon and extrapolate) outweigh thirty years of economic growth made possible by cheap energy? Considering the sheer quantity of oil/gas that is produced worldwide, the fact that so few accidents of this nature occur is really a tribute to how safe the industry (generally) operates.
Hydrates require both high pressure and low temperature to form, along with the proper composition of water and methane. Take away any of the three, and hydrates disappear. Typically the gas/water/oil is warm enough when it reaches the surface that hydrates do not form, and by the time it cools down enough, it has already been processed so that the water and methane are no longer mixed.
Actually, AIG won last year, owing to their spectacular performance on the economy, and Countrywide won in 2008. In both cases, though, Comcast was the runner-up.
Then why not put the collector somewhere offshore, and run a high-voltage cable to the onshore grid? Oil platforms already do this.
Current satellites use solar panels for power. If you beam power up from earth, you're going to need....solar panels to collect it. If the solar panels can handle more light than they currently get from direct solar radiation, you might be onto something. Considering that most of the diffraction/refraction/scattering of light happens in the first few miles of atmosphere, it seems to me that light beamed up from earth would be scattered far more than light beamed to earth from space.
And just like he did, you entirely missed the underlying meaning. The other party in that not-so-hypothetical conversation isn't a real man, precisely because that other party is female.
Mod parent up. The use of Limited User Accounts will make a huge impact, more (in my experience) than an anti-virus software package.
Several years ago, I heard of a similar experiment being performed for airplane emergency exits. Survivors of real plane crashes, when observing such tests, pointed out that the results seen in tests were very different from what they had experienced during a real emergency.
So the researchers made a tweak: for the next test, they offered 5 GBP to the first 50 people off the plane. The result? An evacuation that observers recognized as being very similar to a real emergency--people shoving each other out of the way, climbing over seats, trampling each other, etc.
You bring up a good point, which is this: don't store incriminating files on your local computer in the first place.
Use some sort of online encrypted storage. Or hide a file server in the walls of your house, with a wireless card and a watchdog timer. If it loses contact with your "main" computer (because the feds are seizing it as evidence), it shuts down. No power draw, no wireless signals to track, and your data remains safely hidden. As others have stated further down in the thread, your options are drastically limited if law enforcement have installed a screen reader or key logger or have been monitoring your internet traffic, but you can at least claim that someone was leeching off your wireless.
A friend of my brother's actually set up a private social network precisely for the purpose of batting around ideas. Each member contributes a number of ideas each month, and the members discuss it, pointing out flaws or opportunities. The ideas may be business ideas or invention ideas or ideas for writing a book.
One of the conditions of joining the club is that each member agree that any idea belongs with its originator, and that nobody commercialize anyone else's idea without prior permission. I don't know how well such an agreement would hold up in court, but it's a start.
Another approach is to bounce the idea off someone who might be in the target market, but who isn't an expert in your field. Several times, I've bounced a gadget idea off my brother, who will respond with a question like "but why would I use that instead of product x?"
This is an example of competition due to innovation. Cap and Trade is competition through breaking-your-competitors'-kneecaps.
I can't say yes until I know more details.
We already have AmTrak, which has been losing money for decades and only exists because of federal (read: taxpayer-funded) subsidies. And that's considering that AmTrak runs on existing rails.
Building a new high-speed rail network is going to be expensive. Enormously so. And it'll be expensive to operate as well. In order for it to make sense, it has to give a return to match or exceed the cost of investment. That return could be in terms of fares paid by riders, or by reduced wear and tear on roads, or lower emissions (although it'll also have to compensate for lost gas taxes).
I highly doubt it's a feasible idea, at least here in the US. It works in European nations because distances are smaller and populations are more concentrated. In the US, with suburban sprawl, the practical utility of it is highly questionable.
If someone can convince me that it makes economic sense, I'll get on board. But not until then.