I dunno. Maybe the ability to transmit atomic states? If it is possible to deliver a state to the other site of the galaxy.
You would have to deal with the initial delivery time but it should be instantaneous communication there after as long as it does not collapse.
I remember when it was said that if you were downloading more that a Megabyte a day you were a heavy user. Probably one of those bandwidth hogs that is transferring bmp files. Lol I mean who freaking sends bmp files, what losers. Get a clue and use Jpeg or Gif.
The problem with a cap is that you may see it as being more than you would ever need, but progress does not care for where a bar is set or how inconceivable of a cap it is. Todays heavy users are tomorrow's casual web surfers. And when the cap is set now you will have to fight to have it raised in the future.
Let me tell you, don't count on Comcast being generous and lifting the caps for you in 10-20 years. As more and more casual users start to consume more and more bandwidth Comcast is going to see their revenues grow in proportion. Do you honestly think they will just give away the money?
The public utility market is heavily regulated and the costs you pay to your public utility is for maintenance not accelerating growth. When heavily regulated markets come up against free markets they do not mesh well. Supply does not keep up with demand and unless regulation is removed the result is a lock up of supply to only a select few. You bring up the big names in the cable industry but how do you think they got there? On the backs of all the smaller cable companies that blew up on the way up that could not keep up with the demand and who were regulated to keeping prices low by their municipalities they gave them the license to provide cable tv to that zone. Politicians do not like their constituents complaining about prices when they know the municipalities have to approve price increases. Comcast and Time Warner are he survivors that bought up all the smaller markets after they completely imploded, picking them up in a fire sale upgrading them while doing closed door meetings with local politicians to get the rates up. They recouped their cost to upgrade quickly and then kept rates high to fund more firesale buy ups, rinse and repeat. The big boys all had the same business model. That is why they are the top of the heap.
And you are bringing up the Y2K bug as support for your argument that we were proactive? Was it the bug that did it or was it the sensationalism of the media that fuels the fire of the end of the world, a digital economy in ruins. Build bomb shelters, sell everything and prepare for the Thunderdome! Lol I'm not spelling the doom of anything I'm simple telling you to expect your electric bill to soon track the price of gasoline. As to my evidence go check the price of ethanol before it was mandated to replace MTBE. Under 1.50, after... right up to the price of gasoline. Tracked it for a while before the supply crunch when farmers couldn't get enough corn converted into ethanol fast enough. Raised the price of corn, more farmers planted it. Guess what they stopped planting as much of? Wheat, soybeans, barley. US products most of the world's wheat. Most of that goes to Africa. Africa is in a food shortage. Result = riots. They try to compensate, buy up tons of rice off the open market. Rice producing countries freak out and cut exports fearing internal shortages. More food shortages = riots. Rice prices skyrocketed. And if you bought into some of the soft commodity hedge funds back during the GWB State of the Union Ethanol economy bullshit you could have make a killing. Yeah there are the things we should do and the things we shouldn't do. People who can't think more than one step ahead shouldn't be making decisions, and honestly shouldn't have an opinion on the matter.
When you buy home appliances you are buying them at an expected rate. People either buy them all at once if they are moving to an existing house (which is already wired expecting a typical load on the grid) or as replacement for older ones (which are less efficient technology and usually not energy saving compliant). So there is no surprise burden on the grid. If performance begins to match that of existing fossil fuel vehicles then demand accelerates which increases production and competition which pressures prices to come down, hence the continued acceleration in demand until a saturation point is hit where there is excess supply vs demand. As prices come down demand accelerates. Utilities do not have a free market model. They have a very costly high maintenance infrastructure that has to provide equal quality and reliability to all its customers not just those who can afford it. Because they are pressured by municipalities to keep prices contained it becomes very difficult for them to save for rapid infrastructure change. The result will be frequent brown outs as they can't afford to buy electricity from other utilities and will have difficulty to keep up with demand. That results in forced brownouts. You think a hot summe
I'll remember that the next time the police attempt to force an entry without a warrant, or haven't met their traffic violation quota for the month. I mean why train a police officer if first Aid and CPR then? What purpose does that serve?
I think the police over the years have designed a nice little niche for themselves that absolves them of any responsibility for their actions and the ability to wield exacting and selective enforcement of enough complicated laws that they can justify ensnaring any individual in.
If we strictly define the police officer's role to containment and enforcement then we could say the same thing about the fire department. Their mission is to contain a fire and keep it from spreading. They don't have to enter a building to save anyone that may or may not be alive. Leave that to the paramedics, right?
You think that utilities can build power plants as fast or faster than people can consume electric vehicle? "My Capitalism, let me show them to you." You did use the word "should" so I will give you the benefit of the doubt. We never do what we should and is why we are going to fail when we go to an electric car economy. The ethanol fiasco is nothing other than a harbinger of what will happen when we start going electric en mass.
You are also forgetting that infrastructure is not limited to just the power source. There are millions of miles of power lines that need to be replaced across the country. Remember the cable companies and what they had to go through replacing their coaxial. And how are your cable TV rates holding up? How much tax money was used to assist conversions? How many companies went bankrupt before they had a digital infrastructure. And of course denser markets will get first dibs, good luck if you like in rural America where you travel the furthest and fuel cost hurt you the most. Of course because electricity can be traded rural America will no be spared, their utilities will sell it tot he open market for higher prices.
You can't just keep slapping on more nuclear power plants on the gird and think you solved the problem. When housing goes up cities and towns zone for it. They have weeks sometimes even months of planning the preparation. But when capitalism means government bureaucracy, they clash. People will consumer faster than the government can replace powerlines.
Consumers will tax the grids and the utilities will up the price to compensate for it.
I'm not going to get into a debate on the off topic of global warming but you did hit the nail on the head. When a discussion on a scientific data is taken out of context because it supports some other groups agenda they will take it to the most illogical conclusions. You have to be careful where you get your support from. You would be well warned if you started looking for VC funding for a start up or to grow a business, sure they are supporting it and want to see you do well but be careful on the amount of control you give them, otherwise you will not be in charge.
The product sells itself in a controlled environment. Taser brings their product out and 'tasers' a few people that should be in fairly good shape. Disregarding the stereotypes of fat donut eating cops, the average police officer is relatively fit compared to the population at hand.
Taser does not bring out people who potential may die from a hit with a taser. People who may have a heart arrhythmia, palpitations, or some other nervous tissue damage. I don't fault the Taser product. I fault the company and its practices of aggressive growth and I fault the few police departments and their employees who disregard public safety over their own. If fire fighters were more like some police officers they would wait for the building to burn down to look for survivors.
Only to tax the electric power grid when 150 million people plug 1-2 of these in every night. How quickly do you think the public utilities will act when they see the increased usage? The burden on the gird will require power stantions to invest heavily to support it. That means rising prices for electricity. What used to be 150-200 mpg will quickly fall to within the 50 mpg gasoline range very quickly.
Not to mention that most of our grid is running off of coal. Environmentally friendly people say? I think not. If you put enough separation between the consumer and the source they become ignorant of it. Like of like buying and eating hamburgers.
When you understand what the true motive of an entity is you can better understand their actions in the future. It should come as no surprise that they would try to support studies that would favor their product and the continued use of it. That is a corruption of the system.
Tazer is a For Profit company their role is to market and sell a product that is an alternative to firearms.
In order to do that they need to market their products as a better alternative that the use of guns. Their marketing campaign tries to encite fear in law enforcement and political officals of the problems that go along with using more lethal firearms. They state their products are less lethal and safer reducing the paperwork and lawsuits police will be invovled in.
Because Tazer training touts the safety fot ehir products and how littl eharm it does to the individual they are trying to restrain, police have been given the impression that if one shot with a Tazer is not enough then they can discharge several of them on the same individual with not additional complications.
More importantly that tracking your protest records is the tracking of financial and lifestyle records. There are many economic systems that rely on party being able to keep insider information secret. And not just publically trading companies, but John Smith who has a high risk of colon cancer or is being treated for it while he is shopping for health insurance. Insurance companies rely on you not understanding the formulas they use to rate what they will cover and what they won't, how much they charge you compared to someone else. This way individuals cannot game the system. The insurance consumer relies on protecting his health record from the insurance company which would easily try to increase the rates on more sickly individuals if they could. If insider information is protected then money is distributed from the relatively health to support the relatively sickly. The health individuals accept this system because they know at some point in their lives they will become relatively ill and will require the same kind of treatment.
What standardizing on a single id card does is centralizes all data involved the activity of individuals. Since the data is centralized it can be mined for behaviors that can predict the likelihood of an event in someone's life.
The reality is that it is going to happen and any protest will only delay the inevitable. This is the information age after all, if we were really adamant about not getting Real Ids we would rebuff our leaders.
This is the problem with the modern age. People still have the concept the technology solves problems. That they can correct crime and corruption with cameras, identifications systems, more advanced security. But in reality what is does is increases the complexity of the system itself. The more complex the system the easier it is to find a loophole, broken logic, and even game the system. Idealists and simpletons think they can just throw money and technology at it and the world will be a safer place. The reality is that it will make them feel safe, while providing another layer of credibility to someone who is trying to act in a malicious way.
The fear of more observation is not the result of me doing something illegal. It comes from the fear that I could be convicted of something illegal because the data is wrong or falsified. When people trust the technology over anything else they leave the decision to computer and now I have to prove my innocence when it used to be that they had to prove my guilt.
Until you have to prove that you are who the card says you are. The system will be flawed because it will involve some kind of human interaction. I several people who have had the unfortunate luck of having a very common name. John Smith, Robert Anderson, etc. Imaging when something results in the merging of two records or the incorrect assignment of a traffic incident to the wrong person. You then have to prove your innocence to something that you have not been involved in. One of my friends is going on 12 years fighting his credit record because of a mismanagement of his driving record and social security record with someone of the same name.
Considering that the batmobiles from the movies and tv show had a rocket built into them you'd think that going to an SUV would be cheaper.
After all how much is jet feul going for these days?
Well, if 99% of alleys were filled with drug pushers, and 99% of the people who used the alleys were drug pushers, then yes, i'd be supporting shutting down alleys
I love this logic. Let me try.
Hmmm... if 99% of filesharers are human and 99% of downloaders are human, then lets gas the whole lot of them.
On a side note, it would also cure over population, end all wars, and a stop pollution.
But it has always been for profit. Exploration was always a means of trying to corner the market on goods that no one else sold. You can be another cobbller trying to sell his wares competing with all the other cobblers.
On the other hand you could go to a far off land and bring back rolls of silk, or exotic fruits and set your own price.
The New World was inidially explored to find shorter routes to South East Asia, since exotic merchandise from this area of the world was all the rage in Europe at the time.
This race to Mar is just nationalism at its worst. Everyone is trying to show off ho big their rockets are. Once someone land a mission on Mars it will only take a few more missions before the global population looses interest.
Now if they found some amazing material, organism that cures cancer, or alien civilization this will probably be the last big space race, until we discover a life supporting planet in another solar system. Then we will start again.
Yeah but most gyms work on a good Samaritan system, and the people rotate on the machines. If someone is hogging one for too long you can complain to management.
This model doesn't work for gaming centers because unlike gyms, gamers will stay on machines for more than an hour. Hell, I've started a game of Civ on a Sunday morning, only to stop when I heard my alarm clock go off 6AM on Monday.
What makes you think that gamers will so easily climb off of a station when he is charged for unlimited playing for one month? This reeks of Cable broadband pricing, and won't go over well. Most gamers will assume that one month equals 720+ hours of play time. And if they can figure out a way to survive without food, sleep, and a job, they would play 720+ hours, to get their money's worth.
I recommend sticking with the hourly charges. Players are charged in advanced, with special advantages for club members (credit card required), like running a tab.
You could run competitions, in lue of prize money provide x number of free pay time to the winners.
Also if you can get some large screens or small TVs strategically situated around the center so that people can watch some of the more exiting matched, they would help foster the feel of hanging out.
Maybe I'm a little paranoid, but I'd like to stay as far away from this as possible.
My dad used to say the same thing about computers, ATM machines, credit cards, etc. Its a natural reaction to fear technological leaps like this. But the next generation of people will be more willing to accept it.
The 12-30 years old will dictate if the next 20-30 years will be dubbed the cybernetic age. After all they are the early adopters, more willing to take risks to get ahead in live.
I want to know when, in that future, will society not only accept cybernetic implants but demand them. How well will you fair at a job interview against a cyborg who codes at the speed of thought. Today's blobbing in boardrooms could foreshadow a time when employees think-chat their brainstorm sessions. The un-enhanced employee will be left behind the 8-ball. Eventually he will be looked at as a second-class citizen who is becoming more and more difficult to interact with.
I remember there was an Outer Limits, or new Twilight Zone episode where 99% of humans were implanted and connected to a global network. The few that weren't had a brain abnormality that did not allow the enhancement. All interaction was done through the implants. All media was electronic. One scene shows an cyborg girl and un-enhanced boy go into an outdoor cafe, and the waitress is already their with her plate before she even sits down, and the waitress looks at him puzzled as to why she only got 1 order. The girl says something, sympathetically, to the effect of "Oh! I'm sorry I would have orders for both of us, but I keep forgetting you're not implanted."
I did 4 years (95-99) in the USMC in an Information Systems Management Office (ISMO) before they started consolidating all the Communication Occupations with the Computer Operators.
Back then the ISMO was a new animal and they pulled officers from all the other fields to staff the place. They opened up the computer field and sorted out the recruits based on good math skills, and logic to fill those positions. The peons really knew what they were doing. We were technically proficient, even though the tech was obsolete. Back then there was no budget for this stuff and the brass though we should be fine with the desktops they bought 5 years ago.
What really drove military IT into the ground was that you were paying a low ranking private first class about $800 a month to do what equally skills civilians where doing in the real world for $50-75k.
Everyone I knew that had any competence would leave the service after their first 4 years, grabbing jobs with major Telcos, Fortune 500's. These corporations didn't even try to hide it. They would spam our office, send headhunters on base, and negotiate salaries with you in front of your staff officers.
The ones that couldn't get the civilian jobs, loved the corps like it was an Elvis fan club, or were too dumb to make it in the real world. They would re-enlist and eventually become your superiors. Still making dumb mistakes and still having a poor grasp of technology. And it killed all of us to know what had to be done, knew what was technically feasible and what wasn't, and you couldn't make any kind of statement or suggestion without someone saying it was insubordination!!!
I don't know how it is now, but my guess is that they are doing a little better. Sure the budgets are still getting cut, and you can't speak unless spoke to, but the brass is more tech savy now, and with the economy in the toilet, just have a job is a luxury. Having one that can't fire you or lay you off is where its at. Hell, I'm probably making as much as they are now with the paycuts I took.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno. Maybe the ability to transmit atomic states? If it is possible to deliver a state to the other site of the galaxy. You would have to deal with the initial delivery time but it should be instantaneous communication there after as long as it does not collapse.
I remember when it was said that if you were downloading more that a Megabyte a day you were a heavy user. Probably one of those bandwidth hogs that is transferring bmp files. Lol I mean who freaking sends bmp files, what losers. Get a clue and use Jpeg or Gif. The problem with a cap is that you may see it as being more than you would ever need, but progress does not care for where a bar is set or how inconceivable of a cap it is. Todays heavy users are tomorrow's casual web surfers. And when the cap is set now you will have to fight to have it raised in the future. Let me tell you, don't count on Comcast being generous and lifting the caps for you in 10-20 years. As more and more casual users start to consume more and more bandwidth Comcast is going to see their revenues grow in proportion. Do you honestly think they will just give away the money?
The public utility market is heavily regulated and the costs you pay to your public utility is for maintenance not accelerating growth. When heavily regulated markets come up against free markets they do not mesh well. Supply does not keep up with demand and unless regulation is removed the result is a lock up of supply to only a select few. You bring up the big names in the cable industry but how do you think they got there? On the backs of all the smaller cable companies that blew up on the way up that could not keep up with the demand and who were regulated to keeping prices low by their municipalities they gave them the license to provide cable tv to that zone. Politicians do not like their constituents complaining about prices when they know the municipalities have to approve price increases. Comcast and Time Warner are he survivors that bought up all the smaller markets after they completely imploded, picking them up in a fire sale upgrading them while doing closed door meetings with local politicians to get the rates up. They recouped their cost to upgrade quickly and then kept rates high to fund more firesale buy ups, rinse and repeat. The big boys all had the same business model. That is why they are the top of the heap.
And you are bringing up the Y2K bug as support for your argument that we were proactive? Was it the bug that did it or was it the sensationalism of the media that fuels the fire of the end of the world, a digital economy in ruins. Build bomb shelters, sell everything and prepare for the Thunderdome! Lol I'm not spelling the doom of anything I'm simple telling you to expect your electric bill to soon track the price of gasoline. As to my evidence go check the price of ethanol before it was mandated to replace MTBE. Under 1.50, after... right up to the price of gasoline. Tracked it for a while before the supply crunch when farmers couldn't get enough corn converted into ethanol fast enough. Raised the price of corn, more farmers planted it. Guess what they stopped planting as much of? Wheat, soybeans, barley. US products most of the world's wheat. Most of that goes to Africa. Africa is in a food shortage. Result = riots. They try to compensate, buy up tons of rice off the open market. Rice producing countries freak out and cut exports fearing internal shortages. More food shortages = riots. Rice prices skyrocketed. And if you bought into some of the soft commodity hedge funds back during the GWB State of the Union Ethanol economy bullshit you could have make a killing. Yeah there are the things we should do and the things we shouldn't do. People who can't think more than one step ahead shouldn't be making decisions, and honestly shouldn't have an opinion on the matter.
When you buy home appliances you are buying them at an expected rate. People either buy them all at once if they are moving to an existing house (which is already wired expecting a typical load on the grid) or as replacement for older ones (which are less efficient technology and usually not energy saving compliant). So there is no surprise burden on the grid. If performance begins to match that of existing fossil fuel vehicles then demand accelerates which increases production and competition which pressures prices to come down, hence the continued acceleration in demand until a saturation point is hit where there is excess supply vs demand. As prices come down demand accelerates. Utilities do not have a free market model. They have a very costly high maintenance infrastructure that has to provide equal quality and reliability to all its customers not just those who can afford it. Because they are pressured by municipalities to keep prices contained it becomes very difficult for them to save for rapid infrastructure change. The result will be frequent brown outs as they can't afford to buy electricity from other utilities and will have difficulty to keep up with demand. That results in forced brownouts. You think a hot summe
I'll remember that the next time the police attempt to force an entry without a warrant, or haven't met their traffic violation quota for the month. I mean why train a police officer if first Aid and CPR then? What purpose does that serve? I think the police over the years have designed a nice little niche for themselves that absolves them of any responsibility for their actions and the ability to wield exacting and selective enforcement of enough complicated laws that they can justify ensnaring any individual in. If we strictly define the police officer's role to containment and enforcement then we could say the same thing about the fire department. Their mission is to contain a fire and keep it from spreading. They don't have to enter a building to save anyone that may or may not be alive. Leave that to the paramedics, right?
You think that utilities can build power plants as fast or faster than people can consume electric vehicle? "My Capitalism, let me show them to you." You did use the word "should" so I will give you the benefit of the doubt. We never do what we should and is why we are going to fail when we go to an electric car economy. The ethanol fiasco is nothing other than a harbinger of what will happen when we start going electric en mass. You are also forgetting that infrastructure is not limited to just the power source. There are millions of miles of power lines that need to be replaced across the country. Remember the cable companies and what they had to go through replacing their coaxial. And how are your cable TV rates holding up? How much tax money was used to assist conversions? How many companies went bankrupt before they had a digital infrastructure. And of course denser markets will get first dibs, good luck if you like in rural America where you travel the furthest and fuel cost hurt you the most. Of course because electricity can be traded rural America will no be spared, their utilities will sell it tot he open market for higher prices. You can't just keep slapping on more nuclear power plants on the gird and think you solved the problem. When housing goes up cities and towns zone for it. They have weeks sometimes even months of planning the preparation. But when capitalism means government bureaucracy, they clash. People will consumer faster than the government can replace powerlines. Consumers will tax the grids and the utilities will up the price to compensate for it.
I'm not going to get into a debate on the off topic of global warming but you did hit the nail on the head. When a discussion on a scientific data is taken out of context because it supports some other groups agenda they will take it to the most illogical conclusions. You have to be careful where you get your support from. You would be well warned if you started looking for VC funding for a start up or to grow a business, sure they are supporting it and want to see you do well but be careful on the amount of control you give them, otherwise you will not be in charge. The product sells itself in a controlled environment. Taser brings their product out and 'tasers' a few people that should be in fairly good shape. Disregarding the stereotypes of fat donut eating cops, the average police officer is relatively fit compared to the population at hand. Taser does not bring out people who potential may die from a hit with a taser. People who may have a heart arrhythmia, palpitations, or some other nervous tissue damage. I don't fault the Taser product. I fault the company and its practices of aggressive growth and I fault the few police departments and their employees who disregard public safety over their own. If fire fighters were more like some police officers they would wait for the building to burn down to look for survivors.
Only to tax the electric power grid when 150 million people plug 1-2 of these in every night. How quickly do you think the public utilities will act when they see the increased usage? The burden on the gird will require power stantions to invest heavily to support it. That means rising prices for electricity. What used to be 150-200 mpg will quickly fall to within the 50 mpg gasoline range very quickly. Not to mention that most of our grid is running off of coal. Environmentally friendly people say? I think not. If you put enough separation between the consumer and the source they become ignorant of it. Like of like buying and eating hamburgers.
When you understand what the true motive of an entity is you can better understand their actions in the future. It should come as no surprise that they would try to support studies that would favor their product and the continued use of it. That is a corruption of the system.
Tazer is a For Profit company their role is to market and sell a product that is an alternative to firearms. In order to do that they need to market their products as a better alternative that the use of guns. Their marketing campaign tries to encite fear in law enforcement and political officals of the problems that go along with using more lethal firearms. They state their products are less lethal and safer reducing the paperwork and lawsuits police will be invovled in. Because Tazer training touts the safety fot ehir products and how littl eharm it does to the individual they are trying to restrain, police have been given the impression that if one shot with a Tazer is not enough then they can discharge several of them on the same individual with not additional complications.
More importantly that tracking your protest records is the tracking of financial and lifestyle records. There are many economic systems that rely on party being able to keep insider information secret. And not just publically trading companies, but John Smith who has a high risk of colon cancer or is being treated for it while he is shopping for health insurance. Insurance companies rely on you not understanding the formulas they use to rate what they will cover and what they won't, how much they charge you compared to someone else. This way individuals cannot game the system. The insurance consumer relies on protecting his health record from the insurance company which would easily try to increase the rates on more sickly individuals if they could. If insider information is protected then money is distributed from the relatively health to support the relatively sickly. The health individuals accept this system because they know at some point in their lives they will become relatively ill and will require the same kind of treatment. What standardizing on a single id card does is centralizes all data involved the activity of individuals. Since the data is centralized it can be mined for behaviors that can predict the likelihood of an event in someone's life. The reality is that it is going to happen and any protest will only delay the inevitable. This is the information age after all, if we were really adamant about not getting Real Ids we would rebuff our leaders.
This is the problem with the modern age. People still have the concept the technology solves problems. That they can correct crime and corruption with cameras, identifications systems, more advanced security. But in reality what is does is increases the complexity of the system itself. The more complex the system the easier it is to find a loophole, broken logic, and even game the system. Idealists and simpletons think they can just throw money and technology at it and the world will be a safer place. The reality is that it will make them feel safe, while providing another layer of credibility to someone who is trying to act in a malicious way. The fear of more observation is not the result of me doing something illegal. It comes from the fear that I could be convicted of something illegal because the data is wrong or falsified. When people trust the technology over anything else they leave the decision to computer and now I have to prove my innocence when it used to be that they had to prove my guilt.
Until you have to prove that you are who the card says you are. The system will be flawed because it will involve some kind of human interaction. I several people who have had the unfortunate luck of having a very common name. John Smith, Robert Anderson, etc. Imaging when something results in the merging of two records or the incorrect assignment of a traffic incident to the wrong person. You then have to prove your innocence to something that you have not been involved in. One of my friends is going on 12 years fighting his credit record because of a mismanagement of his driving record and social security record with someone of the same name.
Considering that the batmobiles from the movies and tv show had a rocket built into them you'd think that going to an SUV would be cheaper. After all how much is jet feul going for these days?
I love this logic. Let me try.
Hmmm... if 99% of filesharers are human and 99% of downloaders are human, then lets gas the whole lot of them.
On a side note, it would also cure over population, end all wars, and a stop pollution.
Yeah!!! Save the whales, Kill all the humans.
On the other hand you could go to a far off land and bring back rolls of silk, or exotic fruits and set your own price.
The New World was inidially explored to find shorter routes to South East Asia, since exotic merchandise from this area of the world was all the rage in Europe at the time.
This race to Mar is just nationalism at its worst. Everyone is trying to show off ho big their rockets are. Once someone land a mission on Mars it will only take a few more missions before the global population looses interest.
Now if they found some amazing material, organism that cures cancer, or alien civilization this will probably be the last big space race, until we discover a life supporting planet in another solar system. Then we will start again.
Why wait till Tuesday?
Advance your system clock.
Hey I can see my house from here!!!
This model doesn't work for gaming centers because unlike gyms, gamers will stay on machines for more than an hour. Hell, I've started a game of Civ on a Sunday morning, only to stop when I heard my alarm clock go off 6AM on Monday.
What makes you think that gamers will so easily climb off of a station when he is charged for unlimited playing for one month? This reeks of Cable broadband pricing, and won't go over well. Most gamers will assume that one month equals 720+ hours of play time. And if they can figure out a way to survive without food, sleep, and a job, they would play 720+ hours, to get their money's worth.
I recommend sticking with the hourly charges. Players are charged in advanced, with special advantages for club members (credit card required), like running a tab.
You could run competitions, in lue of prize money provide x number of free pay time to the winners.
Also if you can get some large screens or small TVs strategically situated around the center so that people can watch some of the more exiting matched, they would help foster the feel of hanging out.
My dad used to say the same thing about computers, ATM machines, credit cards, etc. Its a natural reaction to fear technological leaps like this. But the next generation of people will be more willing to accept it.
The 12-30 years old will dictate if the next 20-30 years will be dubbed the cybernetic age. After all they are the early adopters, more willing to take risks to get ahead in live.
I want to know when, in that future, will society not only accept cybernetic implants but demand them. How well will you fair at a job interview against a cyborg who codes at the speed of thought. Today's blobbing in boardrooms could foreshadow a time when employees think-chat their brainstorm sessions. The un-enhanced employee will be left behind the 8-ball. Eventually he will be looked at as a second-class citizen who is becoming more and more difficult to interact with.
I remember there was an Outer Limits, or new Twilight Zone episode where 99% of humans were implanted and connected to a global network. The few that weren't had a brain abnormality that did not allow the enhancement. All interaction was done through the implants. All media was electronic. One scene shows an cyborg girl and un-enhanced boy go into an outdoor cafe, and the waitress is already their with her plate before she even sits down, and the waitress looks at him puzzled as to why she only got 1 order. The girl says something, sympathetically, to the effect of "Oh! I'm sorry I would have orders for both of us, but I keep forgetting you're not implanted."
"Your storage capacity is now 160 gigabytes. Warning! Do not exceed capacity!" -Johnny Mnemonic
I did 4 years (95-99) in the USMC in an Information Systems Management Office (ISMO) before they started consolidating all the Communication Occupations with the Computer Operators.
Back then the ISMO was a new animal and they pulled officers from all the other fields to staff the place. They opened up the computer field and sorted out the recruits based on good math skills, and logic to fill those positions. The peons really knew what they were doing. We were technically proficient, even though the tech was obsolete. Back then there was no budget for this stuff and the brass though we should be fine with the desktops they bought 5 years ago.
What really drove military IT into the ground was that you were paying a low ranking private first class about $800 a month to do what equally skills civilians where doing in the real world for $50-75k.
Everyone I knew that had any competence would leave the service after their first 4 years, grabbing jobs with major Telcos, Fortune 500's. These corporations didn't even try to hide it. They would spam our office, send headhunters on base, and negotiate salaries with you in front of your staff officers.
The ones that couldn't get the civilian jobs, loved the corps like it was an Elvis fan club, or were too dumb to make it in the real world. They would re-enlist and eventually become your superiors. Still making dumb mistakes and still having a poor grasp of technology. And it killed all of us to know what had to be done, knew what was technically feasible and what wasn't, and you couldn't make any kind of statement or suggestion without someone saying it was insubordination!!!
I don't know how it is now, but my guess is that they are doing a little better. Sure the budgets are still getting cut, and you can't speak unless spoke to, but the brass is more tech savy now, and with the economy in the toilet, just have a job is a luxury. Having one that can't fire you or lay you off is where its at. Hell, I'm probably making as much as they are now with the paycuts I took.