One Very important point you missed, is the US is the "saudi arabia" of food.
- only because it's subsidized... guess with whose money at this point?
Because we're corrupt, its our money. For now.
The economics of why you have barges full of wheat, is not as important as the result of foreigners who must eat that wheat or starve.
You can play games with the cause, maybe it'll be dollar trade, maybe we'll go to euro trade, maybe we'll barter for oil or gold, or really far fetched ideas of foreign military conquest of the USA. Regardless of the cause, the effect must be that the barges flow downriver; else the foreign masses starve.
There's no use raising prices. Apple will demand 30% of the new price and so will the publishers.
I'll parse that as every 100 cents they raise the price, apple will demand 30 cents and the publishers will demand 30 cents. Leaving them with an extra 40 cents.
May as well try that, the difference between no sales because you're closed and no sales because your prices are too high is not too much, but the payoff if it somehow works out is high.
Quirky non-conformity is NOT the same as social retardation.
From the way I see it, most "non-conformists" conform quite well to their smaller, alternative cliques.
Then theres the even weirder concept of conforming to group norms that are the majority, but claim to be a small alternative clique. Think of teenagers who are all supposed to rebel against authority by conforming to the same cruddy clothing and music.
I was unpopular in High School, but I question whether that was because I was unwilling to conform, or because I had absolutely no idea how to do so.
Too binary. My choice was simply to not care about high school beyond academics. Before illegal aliens and the economic collapse, a teenage kid could pretty easily get a job, so my social group was partly my coworkers. Also all the kids in my city that were 'pre-military' hung out together, regardless of artificial "school rivalry", so another part of my social group was kids who mostly went to other high schools. Then the non-age segregated social activities like ham radio club and on the radio nets and stuff. Finally, of course, online, including a couple of people I still keep in touch with, so many years later...
High school reunion came around a couple years back, I couldn't bother going, because frankly I didn't hang out with any of those kids.
Ah what a load of left wing reactionary crap. Schools don't train , they educate
Where? All I've ever experienced is demand for training from K-12 and also higher level.
Lots of making fun of people who get an education; that french literature degree sure will be helpful at McDonalds ha ha. No interest in computer science, only in being trained on the latest language or tool set.
I think you made a typo and intended to write that schools don't educate, they train. Sure, they should educate, and back when no one went to university unless they had a multimillion dollar net worth, they did.
Unless I've missed something big, it looks more like "three students, a case of mountain dew and a few all-nighters" territory to me, albeit a fairly well polished example.
That might explain why they apparently have not thought of the idea of "raising prices". If they tried that, they might even make a profit...
They have demonstrated a great ability to produce but little in the way of useful original ideas when it comes to those gadgets and geegaws.
... little in the way of quality control.
There is huge variation. Some of their industries like consumer electronics can give the legendary Japanese a run for their money, some industries like Chinese machine tools and especially related consumables are pretty much a laughingstock.
USA doesn't produce anything of any value except for the raw materials, that Chinese would want to buy.
From a consumer point of view, yes, absolutely. Aside from plastic trash from walmart, we vary from complete utter domination to merely being major players in aerospace, heavy construction, and especially weapons. There are still plenty of plants that OSHA and EPA and NAFTA have not managed to shut down yet, although our govt is trying their hardest to destroy our middle class.
One Very important point you missed, is the US is the "saudi arabia" of food... we stop exporting and hundreds of millions will starve, probably mostly in Africa rather than China, but still... practically every nation either directly eats our food, or benefits secondarily from other folks eating our food instead of us. Its a simplification, but block the Mississippi river, or do the same thing by screwing up the economy so we can't export, and about 2 billion of the world's poorest will pretty much starve to death as a result... How that benefits China is not entirely clear, it might even be mostly neutral.
"We all know by now that Test Driven Development is a best practice."
No, TDD is a painful waste of time that at best serves as a crutch for unskilled or insecure coders and at worst a smokescreen behind which serious bugs remain unfixed because they aren't picked up by any test cases.
Failures of TDD I've seen, censored for NDA reasons:
Neutering the tests by reviewing/paying/promoting people on a metric of test success rate graphs, etc, leading to purposefully idiotic tests, basically subverting the technique and actually using a different dev methodology (usually waterfall) with the TDD overhead as a millstone around everyones necks. Basically everyone gets a great review as the project fails.
Tail wagging the dog where the spec and the testsuite diverge fatally and permanently. "I don't care if your real world application fails, this code passed the test suite and it will be released as is!".
Test authors have no idea what the application is, and cannot even remotely guess what a sensible test would be, so they test the code they are planning to write instead of a "real world test" (obviously a problem in classified projects, but also big orgs where all the depts hate each other)
Everyone agrees idiot coders write idiot code. The insight is they ALSO generally they write idiot tests. Guess what, idiot tests often miss detection of idiot code and occasionally fail good code. Your tests / test authors have to be more sophisticated than the code / code authors, not just in theory or on an org chart, but in reality, and unfortunately they more or less come from the same pool.
This is why I left development. After 5 years working at a software company I found that only 10% of my time or so was spent writing new code, which is the only thing I really liked about the job.
Something I've never understood, even after being in the game for three decades this year, is the proprietary field demands the majority of your time be spent doing all manner of foolishness. In the open source field, the programmers pretty much program 100% of the time they're "working". And the market has shown that any serious OS project absolutely crushes any proprietary project in reliability, featureset, security, documentation (At least in the internet / google / blogs / mailing list era).
Even the densest bean count-er-y management should be able to trivially see what I do at home "works better" than what is tried at the office. Yet they generally insist on doing it "wrong" despite staggering costs to the company. You'd think Darwin would apply, but the herd-like mentality of "everyone" copying whatever fad they read in a magazine prevents Darwin from weeding them out.
My question is, do any of you work in a place where you think you've struck the right balance? What are you doing?
Think of the brilliance of the parental strategy of having once kid cut the cake and the other kid select the slice? The way that cuts down on squabbling about who got the bigger piece of the pie? Application of this principle to coding/coders vs testing/testers seems obvious... Doesn't it?
An inherently self stabilizing and self balancing system always works better than one managers best (possibly misguided) attempt at neo-authoritarianism.
Also for gods sakes make everyone in management read Fred Brooks book and fire anyone who disagrees. Absolutely timeless meta-advice to frame the problem.
That is the type of scenario that we need discipline, not creativity.
Its a mistake to think discipline and creativity must be bipolar exclusive opposites. Anecdotes from all parts of that venn diagram claimed as "universals" are not really insightful, either. The best solution will maximize both within constraints and specs, assuming you have the discipline to provide any, and enforce them.
I think you mean best expressed as inches per second or even better, cm/s. If you were moving seconds per foot then you'd be in some kind of Braid style dreamworld where motion in a given direction affected the flow of time.
Seconds per foot is just the reciprocal of feet per second. Useful when the numbers are much less than 1. Think of ancient bipolar transistor alpha vs beta, once alphas got too high making all transistors 0.99-something the industry pretty much switched to reporting betas. For example an old person might climb at 0.14286 feet per second but its easier to say 7 seconds per foot.
How much energy do the motion sensors and computer use compared to the lights? I applaud the geekiness, but it doesn't seem as energy efficient (assuming that is the goal).
No, that's not the goal at all. Energy efficiency would be intelligent rather than traditional architecture, and sleeping whenever its dark. Then no lights are needed.
The computer use is zero. Its a server that must remain powered for file server use and email server use and DHCP ... etc etc etc. I suppose theoretically the microscopic computational load is equivalent to milliwatts of added heat, which is actually a year-round net bonus in this climate.
The sensors round down to zero, compared to the energy cost of manufacture, etc.
Oh of course they do. You just have to use more than one, in parallel / striping mode. Think of a "real" NAS or an IBM DASD with dozens of drives in parallel.
Probably this will be used mostly for DWDM style stunts... Find the fastest system and its press release. Insert two in a box twice as big. Issue press release to the mass media, and sadly,/., reporting "new world record of twice the libraries of congress per second". The general public responds with "who cares" because that kind of press release is issued seemingly daily or weekly because its so easy to put more copies in a box or a rack or a couple racks. The techies respond with "who cares" because solving the power and thermal problems of "put two in a box instead of one" isn't very impressive, and its about as dumb as putting two AM radios in a box and calling it "AM stereo".
I wouldn't even want to automate the lights or the coffee pot. It's trivially easy to flick a switch when you enter/leave a room, and it's also easy to prepare the coffee, and do something else (fix a sandwich, use the bathroom, comb your hair), while it is busy. The advantage is that the coffee is guaranteed to be fresh and hot, exactly when you need it, even when I decide to snooze for an extra 15 minutes.
That's why I use MisterHouse, to turn the lights off when the kids leave the room and forget. The way snoozing is handled is motion sensors. The motion sensing is also adaptive based on time (get a signal at 1am? Stay dark until switch is hit; on the other hand, get a signal within an hour after "wake up time" and then...)
Also my motion sensing security lights, and a few other things, adapt their schedule to the changing sunrise / sunset times. Its not as trivial to flick lights on and off when carrying stuff, and MisterHouse just automates all of that away for me...
All of this is like 10 lines of Perl... well MisterHouse overall is probably multi-megs, but my customization work was pretty easy. Don't remember if MisterHouse is GPL or BSD, but its basically free, anyway.
What I mean is the human body has easily enough power to raise itself up a vertical ladder or rock face so presumably a huge amount of this power must be lost just moving air around when that power is used inside a human powered helicopter. But how much power is wasted , or to put it another way , how much power put into the system is actually used to raise the mass of the helicopter?
You're mixing mass, power, and impulse all together. impulse = F * delta t = m * delta v
So the force is pushing down with the combined weight of the vehicle for a certain time in order to hover in place, which is equivalent to accelerating a mass (lets say, the vehicle) to a certain velocity. So hovering for 10 minutes takes the same impulse as accelerating (lets say, horizontally) to some absolutely ridiculous velocity. I forget the crossover but, hovering a copter for X minutes is equivalent to pushing a car 0 to 60.
The power level is in the low single digit horsepower for a good athlete for a minute or two. Good luck dissipating even one horsepower for a "long time".
Also note that people climb extremely slowly. Over a long term, best expressed as seconds per foot rather than ft/sec. Classic high school physics problem is having the strongest track athlete try to climb a flight of stairs as quickly as possible, with the horsepower result usually being pretty depressing.
"The basic idea is that consumers are harmed by being forced to buy an undesired good (the tied good) in order to purchase a good they actually want (the tying good), and so would prefer that the goods be sold separately"
Basically, once skype is carefully accidentally closed to all but win7, and MS is the monopoly provider of win7, skype will be tied to it.
Not every country is like the US where only a tiny proportion of people have a passport.
Very tired old urban legend. Its closer to 1/3. If you play games with "lifetime ownership" vs current and up to date the number is much higher. Mine has expired, and I don't want a RFID tracking device, and I don't want to be molested by the TSA agents who apparently got their soft skills training by watching movie portrayals of SS agents, and I don't have the vacation time available to travel anyway. I'm healthy and have a stack of money.
The other 2/3 probably don't even have the basics like decent housing, decent food, decent health insurance, so expecting them to travel the world is kind of irrational. Maybe they should, you know, buy food to eat, or medical care, first.
Also USA people have approximately zero vacation time compared to anywhere else in the civilized world, I literally don't have time to go to Europe even though I could quite easily afford it (and when I was younger, I somehow did, and had a blast, even if it was only a "long weekend"). I don't have much vacation time, and most of it gets used one day at a time on family events, etc. I haven't had more than seven consecutive days away from work since... fall of '91?
The odds are in the USA you'll either have the money to travel, or the time to travel, or the health to travel, but rarely all three simultaneously.
The other aspect is, in Europe, at least before the EU, it was hard to travel 100 miles in any direction without needing a passport and maybe a visa. In the US 100 miles is just a boring weekend drive. At one point in the past, US citizens only needed a drivers license to visit Canada and Mexico (maybe still true?) so for at least some of us, we would need to travel many thousands of miles to reach a country to use a our passports.../. automotive analogy is pretty much anywhere other than the US or USSR, you need a passport if you drive your car more than one hour, but in the USA you could possibly drive in one direction for the better part of a week before either hitting water or a customs station.
Because paper was invented after industrialisation, am I right?
Because the average citizen being able to afford more than one book (probably just a religious text) was invented after industrialization, you are correct.
There was time when "owning many books" was considered conspicuous consumption for rich people, not just "being weird or nerdy" like it would be considered now.
I would assume in the "post oil era" book ownership and reading would drop back to "pre oil era" levels, in other words, for 99% of the population, it would not be financially possible.
Maybe society would revert to paper, since it requires no energy to use a book.
LOL good luck reading paper books without gas for the chainsaws, diesel for the cranes and trucks to the mill, hundreds of megawatts of electricity for the paper mills, diesel for the trucks to the printers, oil for the printing press ink, propane for the pallet forklifts, diesel for the trucks to the store, gasoline to drive to and from the store...
Would be easier and probably more ecologically sound to stick to wireless kindles.
Also I find it unlikely a kindle charge would require $50 at present value... That would imply the food to keep a bicyclist pedaling very hard for about six minutes would cost over $50... In the inevitable hyperinflation scenario, a single M and M candy might sell for $50 when a starbucks coffee is a million bucks.
I'm guessing a kindle has a single cell battery so figure 2 volts and at most lets say 5 amp hours of capacity. That's a whopping 10 watthours. So, a bicyclist can pedal a good 100 watts for quite awhile, so estimate you could theoretically charge a kindle using 6 minutes of bicycle pedal power. Most likely someone pedals very hard for an hour to charge a big battery, which slowly trickle charges the Kindle over the course of hours. Another way to estimate is a USB port can charge a kindle in a couple hours, and USB ports struggle to output much more than a watt, so it can't be more than a couple watthours.
Slashdot Mirror
One Very important point you missed, is the US is the "saudi arabia" of food.
- only because it's subsidized... guess with whose money at this point?
Because we're corrupt, its our money. For now.
The economics of why you have barges full of wheat, is not as important as the result of foreigners who must eat that wheat or starve.
You can play games with the cause, maybe it'll be dollar trade, maybe we'll go to euro trade, maybe we'll barter for oil or gold, or really far fetched ideas of foreign military conquest of the USA. Regardless of the cause, the effect must be that the barges flow downriver; else the foreign masses starve.
There's no use raising prices. Apple will demand 30% of the new price and so will the publishers.
I'll parse that as every 100 cents they raise the price, apple will demand 30 cents and the publishers will demand 30 cents. Leaving them with an extra 40 cents.
May as well try that, the difference between no sales because you're closed and no sales because your prices are too high is not too much, but the payoff if it somehow works out is high.
Quirky non-conformity is NOT the same as social retardation.
From the way I see it, most "non-conformists" conform quite well to their smaller, alternative cliques.
Then theres the even weirder concept of conforming to group norms that are the majority, but claim to be a small alternative clique. Think of teenagers who are all supposed to rebel against authority by conforming to the same cruddy clothing and music.
I was unpopular in High School, but I question whether that was because I was unwilling to conform, or because I had absolutely no idea how to do so.
Too binary. My choice was simply to not care about high school beyond academics. Before illegal aliens and the economic collapse, a teenage kid could pretty easily get a job, so my social group was partly my coworkers. Also all the kids in my city that were 'pre-military' hung out together, regardless of artificial "school rivalry", so another part of my social group was kids who mostly went to other high schools. Then the non-age segregated social activities like ham radio club and on the radio nets and stuff. Finally, of course, online, including a couple of people I still keep in touch with, so many years later...
High school reunion came around a couple years back, I couldn't bother going, because frankly I didn't hang out with any of those kids.
WTF is a "class-c" geek? Is there some designation hierarchy I'm unaware of?
I've been a geek for almost my entire life, and I have no idea what you're talking about.
C doesn't have classes. He meant to write "C++ geek" or something like that.
Ah what a load of left wing reactionary crap. Schools don't train , they educate
Where? All I've ever experienced is demand for training from K-12 and also higher level.
Lots of making fun of people who get an education; that french literature degree sure will be helpful at McDonalds ha ha. No interest in computer science, only in being trained on the latest language or tool set.
I think you made a typo and intended to write that schools don't educate, they train. Sure, they should educate, and back when no one went to university unless they had a multimillion dollar net worth, they did.
Unless I've missed something big, it looks more like "three students, a case of mountain dew and a few all-nighters" territory to me, albeit a fairly well polished example.
That might explain why they apparently have not thought of the idea of "raising prices". If they tried that, they might even make a profit...
Why not allow rsync to work (via ssh for security)?
Don't know The Answer, but rsync is legendary for using lots of memory during the sync process (and CPU)
US not being able to fund their government defecit and either having to print money the more old fashioned way
What exactly do you think the recent "quantitative easing" programs have been, if not that?
They have demonstrated a great ability to produce but little in the way of useful original ideas when it comes to those gadgets and geegaws.
... little in the way of quality control.
There is huge variation. Some of their industries like consumer electronics can give the legendary Japanese a run for their money, some industries like Chinese machine tools and especially related consumables are pretty much a laughingstock.
USA doesn't produce anything of any value except for the raw materials, that Chinese would want to buy.
From a consumer point of view, yes, absolutely. Aside from plastic trash from walmart, we vary from complete utter domination to merely being major players in aerospace, heavy construction, and especially weapons. There are still plenty of plants that OSHA and EPA and NAFTA have not managed to shut down yet, although our govt is trying their hardest to destroy our middle class.
One Very important point you missed, is the US is the "saudi arabia" of food... we stop exporting and hundreds of millions will starve, probably mostly in Africa rather than China, but still... practically every nation either directly eats our food, or benefits secondarily from other folks eating our food instead of us. Its a simplification, but block the Mississippi river, or do the same thing by screwing up the economy so we can't export, and about 2 billion of the world's poorest will pretty much starve to death as a result... How that benefits China is not entirely clear, it might even be mostly neutral.
"We all know by now that Test Driven Development is a best practice."
No, TDD is a painful waste of time that at best serves as a crutch for unskilled or insecure coders and at worst a smokescreen behind which serious bugs remain unfixed because they aren't picked up by any test cases.
Failures of TDD I've seen, censored for NDA reasons:
Neutering the tests by reviewing/paying/promoting people on a metric of test success rate graphs, etc, leading to purposefully idiotic tests, basically subverting the technique and actually using a different dev methodology (usually waterfall) with the TDD overhead as a millstone around everyones necks. Basically everyone gets a great review as the project fails.
Tail wagging the dog where the spec and the testsuite diverge fatally and permanently. "I don't care if your real world application fails, this code passed the test suite and it will be released as is!".
Test authors have no idea what the application is, and cannot even remotely guess what a sensible test would be, so they test the code they are planning to write instead of a "real world test" (obviously a problem in classified projects, but also big orgs where all the depts hate each other)
Everyone agrees idiot coders write idiot code. The insight is they ALSO generally they write idiot tests. Guess what, idiot tests often miss detection of idiot code and occasionally fail good code. Your tests / test authors have to be more sophisticated than the code / code authors, not just in theory or on an org chart, but in reality, and unfortunately they more or less come from the same pool.
This is why I left development. After 5 years working at a software company I found that only 10% of my time or so was spent writing new code, which is the only thing I really liked about the job.
Something I've never understood, even after being in the game for three decades this year, is the proprietary field demands the majority of your time be spent doing all manner of foolishness. In the open source field, the programmers pretty much program 100% of the time they're "working". And the market has shown that any serious OS project absolutely crushes any proprietary project in reliability, featureset, security, documentation (At least in the internet / google / blogs / mailing list era).
Even the densest bean count-er-y management should be able to trivially see what I do at home "works better" than what is tried at the office. Yet they generally insist on doing it "wrong" despite staggering costs to the company. You'd think Darwin would apply, but the herd-like mentality of "everyone" copying whatever fad they read in a magazine prevents Darwin from weeding them out.
I've always found that puzzling.
My question is, do any of you work in a place where you think you've struck the right balance? What are you doing?
Think of the brilliance of the parental strategy of having once kid cut the cake and the other kid select the slice? The way that cuts down on squabbling about who got the bigger piece of the pie? Application of this principle to coding/coders vs testing/testers seems obvious... Doesn't it?
An inherently self stabilizing and self balancing system always works better than one managers best (possibly misguided) attempt at neo-authoritarianism.
Also for gods sakes make everyone in management read Fred Brooks book and fire anyone who disagrees. Absolutely timeless meta-advice to frame the problem.
That is the type of scenario that we need discipline, not creativity.
Its a mistake to think discipline and creativity must be bipolar exclusive opposites. Anecdotes from all parts of that venn diagram claimed as "universals" are not really insightful, either. The best solution will maximize both within constraints and specs, assuming you have the discipline to provide any, and enforce them.
I think you mean best expressed as inches per second or even better, cm/s. If you were moving seconds per foot then you'd be in some kind of Braid style dreamworld where motion in a given direction affected the flow of time.
Seconds per foot is just the reciprocal of feet per second. Useful when the numbers are much less than 1. Think of ancient bipolar transistor alpha vs beta, once alphas got too high making all transistors 0.99-something the industry pretty much switched to reporting betas. For example an old person might climb at 0.14286 feet per second but its easier to say 7 seconds per foot.
How much energy do the motion sensors and computer use compared to the lights? I applaud the geekiness, but it doesn't seem as energy efficient (assuming that is the goal).
No, that's not the goal at all. Energy efficiency would be intelligent rather than traditional architecture, and sleeping whenever its dark. Then no lights are needed.
The computer use is zero. Its a server that must remain powered for file server use and email server use and DHCP . .. etc etc etc. I suppose theoretically the microscopic computational load is equivalent to milliwatts of added heat, which is actually a year-round net bonus in this climate.
The sensors round down to zero, compared to the energy cost of manufacture, etc.
And specially storage speeds. SSDs don't cut it.
Oh of course they do. You just have to use more than one, in parallel / striping mode. Think of a "real" NAS or an IBM DASD with dozens of drives in parallel.
Probably this will be used mostly for DWDM style stunts... Find the fastest system and its press release. Insert two in a box twice as big. Issue press release to the mass media, and sadly, /., reporting "new world record of twice the libraries of congress per second". The general public responds with "who cares" because that kind of press release is issued seemingly daily or weekly because its so easy to put more copies in a box or a rack or a couple racks. The techies respond with "who cares" because solving the power and thermal problems of "put two in a box instead of one" isn't very impressive, and its about as dumb as putting two AM radios in a box and calling it "AM stereo".
I wouldn't even want to automate the lights or the coffee pot. It's trivially easy to flick a switch when you enter/leave a room, and it's also easy to prepare the coffee, and do something else (fix a sandwich, use the bathroom, comb your hair), while it is busy. The advantage is that the coffee is guaranteed to be fresh and hot, exactly when you need it, even when I decide to snooze for an extra 15 minutes.
That's why I use MisterHouse, to turn the lights off when the kids leave the room and forget. The way snoozing is handled is motion sensors. The motion sensing is also adaptive based on time (get a signal at 1am? Stay dark until switch is hit; on the other hand, get a signal within an hour after "wake up time" and then ...)
Also my motion sensing security lights, and a few other things, adapt their schedule to the changing sunrise / sunset times. Its not as trivial to flick lights on and off when carrying stuff, and MisterHouse just automates all of that away for me...
All of this is like 10 lines of Perl... well MisterHouse overall is probably multi-megs, but my customization work was pretty easy. Don't remember if MisterHouse is GPL or BSD, but its basically free, anyway.
...compared to just climbing up a ladder?
What I mean is the human body has easily enough power to raise itself up a vertical ladder or rock face so presumably a huge amount of this power must be lost just moving air around when that power is used inside a human powered helicopter. But how much power is wasted , or to put it another way , how much power put into the system is actually used to raise the mass of the helicopter?
You're mixing mass, power, and impulse all together. impulse = F * delta t = m * delta v
So the force is pushing down with the combined weight of the vehicle for a certain time in order to hover in place, which is equivalent to accelerating a mass (lets say, the vehicle) to a certain velocity. So hovering for 10 minutes takes the same impulse as accelerating (lets say, horizontally) to some absolutely ridiculous velocity. I forget the crossover but, hovering a copter for X minutes is equivalent to pushing a car 0 to 60.
The power level is in the low single digit horsepower for a good athlete for a minute or two. Good luck dissipating even one horsepower for a "long time".
Also note that people climb extremely slowly. Over a long term, best expressed as seconds per foot rather than ft/sec. Classic high school physics problem is having the strongest track athlete try to climb a flight of stairs as quickly as possible, with the horsepower result usually being pretty depressing.
So... a carnie wearing stilts will look down at you and laugh?
Not is your "ground" is actually a deep body of water...
How? It's not an antitrust case. MS doesn't have any presence in the VoIP arena (at least as far as I know.) There's not much to do about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
"The basic idea is that consumers are harmed by being forced to buy an undesired good (the tied good) in order to purchase a good they actually want (the tying good), and so would prefer that the goods be sold separately"
Basically, once skype is carefully accidentally closed to all but win7, and MS is the monopoly provider of win7, skype will be tied to it.
Not every country is like the US where only a tiny proportion of people have a passport.
Very tired old urban legend. Its closer to 1/3. If you play games with "lifetime ownership" vs current and up to date the number is much higher. Mine has expired, and I don't want a RFID tracking device, and I don't want to be molested by the TSA agents who apparently got their soft skills training by watching movie portrayals of SS agents, and I don't have the vacation time available to travel anyway. I'm healthy and have a stack of money.
The other 2/3 probably don't even have the basics like decent housing, decent food, decent health insurance, so expecting them to travel the world is kind of irrational. Maybe they should, you know, buy food to eat, or medical care, first.
Also USA people have approximately zero vacation time compared to anywhere else in the civilized world, I literally don't have time to go to Europe even though I could quite easily afford it (and when I was younger, I somehow did, and had a blast, even if it was only a "long weekend"). I don't have much vacation time, and most of it gets used one day at a time on family events, etc. I haven't had more than seven consecutive days away from work since... fall of '91?
The odds are in the USA you'll either have the money to travel, or the time to travel, or the health to travel, but rarely all three simultaneously.
The other aspect is, in Europe, at least before the EU, it was hard to travel 100 miles in any direction without needing a passport and maybe a visa. In the US 100 miles is just a boring weekend drive. At one point in the past, US citizens only needed a drivers license to visit Canada and Mexico (maybe still true?) so for at least some of us, we would need to travel many thousands of miles to reach a country to use a our passports... /. automotive analogy is pretty much anywhere other than the US or USSR, you need a passport if you drive your car more than one hour, but in the USA you could possibly drive in one direction for the better part of a week before either hitting water or a customs station.
Because paper was invented after industrialisation, am I right?
Because the average citizen being able to afford more than one book (probably just a religious text) was invented after industrialization, you are correct.
There was time when "owning many books" was considered conspicuous consumption for rich people, not just "being weird or nerdy" like it would be considered now.
I would assume in the "post oil era" book ownership and reading would drop back to "pre oil era" levels, in other words, for 99% of the population, it would not be financially possible.
Maybe society would revert to paper, since it requires no energy to use a book.
LOL good luck reading paper books without gas for the chainsaws, diesel for the cranes and trucks to the mill, hundreds of megawatts of electricity for the paper mills, diesel for the trucks to the printers, oil for the printing press ink, propane for the pallet forklifts, diesel for the trucks to the store, gasoline to drive to and from the store...
Would be easier and probably more ecologically sound to stick to wireless kindles.
Also I find it unlikely a kindle charge would require $50 at present value... That would imply the food to keep a bicyclist pedaling very hard for about six minutes would cost over $50... In the inevitable hyperinflation scenario, a single M and M candy might sell for $50 when a starbucks coffee is a million bucks.
I'm guessing a kindle has a single cell battery so figure 2 volts and at most lets say 5 amp hours of capacity. That's a whopping 10 watthours. So, a bicyclist can pedal a good 100 watts for quite awhile, so estimate you could theoretically charge a kindle using 6 minutes of bicycle pedal power. Most likely someone pedals very hard for an hour to charge a big battery, which slowly trickle charges the Kindle over the course of hours. Another way to estimate is a USB port can charge a kindle in a couple hours, and USB ports struggle to output much more than a watt, so it can't be more than a couple watthours.