Depends. Like I said, girls don't have sex with every decent guy they meet. Guys are like, "Eh, she's okay, would hit it." Girls are either in SUPER SUPER HORNY MODE or they're... available, if you push the right buttons. That guy at the bar, in the wife beater, the one that acts like he doesn't HAVE to give a shit? Somehow, that hits the right buttons, and he's bouncing girls off his lap like quarters off a cheerleader's ass, and then tossing them aside and never calling. You? You're nice, and totally in the friend zone; if you wanna fuck, you need to either be someone else or start playing for dating... girls generally go for commitment faster than one night stands (there are exceptions).
Friend zone suddenly becomes hunting grounds when there's nothing to fucking do. Seriously, boredom is evil and sex is something to do.
It's different, yeah, but routing around it is not different.
Essentially, China has this thing where they've gone, "If people get these funny ideas about freedom or about how the world works or what we've been lying about, things get hard for us to govern here." North Korea had the same thing going on--Kim Jong-Il was the beloved father of North Korea because he told them all the evil was outside. If these people get a good look outside en masse, dissention sets in and compromises stability of the tyrant regime.
That kind of compromise is even bigger than just sending an army marching into the country with its path cleared by carpet bombing air strikes. It's ridiculously hard to fight your own people--you can't recruit new soldiers because you can't convince people to fight for you to protect their families. The enemy of the state is YOU, your people won't fight for you.
Thus, such dissemination is an act of war. It compromises national security. Very much we feel justified--perhaps we are--but let's call a spade a fucking shovel here. If you shoot a man for constantly beating his wife and kids near to death, you're still a murderer; that doesn't make it wrong, but you did kill a man in cold blood.
It's not so much that as pool size and opportunity. The whole "nice guys finish last" thing has a subversion: those guys hanging out with extremely bored, cute girls might not have the easiest time getting laid, but when there's fuck-all to do they just start snuggling up on anyone they're fairly comfortable with. You don't need to push the right buttons anymore; you just need to not push the wrong ones.
In other words, bored girls are a heck of a lot looser than occupied girls. Girls generally don't have sex every chance they get; courtship is hard.
The thing is, with so much less boredom, people dive to their iPhones all the time. There's no sitting around college in the dorm, staring at the ceiling with an 18 year old freshman, "Wanna go somewhere?" "Maybe... where?" "I dunno, it's boring here." "Yeah, but there's nothing to do on a Thursday night." "Bah..." ".... wanna have sex?"
No, it's more like, "Bah..." "...*starts playing Angry Birds*"
What's funny is I've been telling people for years that all these efforts to "help people in oppressive countries get around The Great Firewall" (via TOR etc) are technically an "act of war," and people keep telling me it's not an "act of war" because they're just "restoring basic human rights." Well here we have a man "restoring basic human rights" for us, giving us access to information -that- -the- -government- -doesn't- -want- -us- -to- -have-, and... it's an act of war!
Part of state security is keeping information out of the hands of its own people so they don't turn against the state. In China, they have site filters to keep news about bad shit their government does or political opinions they don't favor out of the public mind. In the US, we have all this classified information that we don't see a strategic reason for classifying. In both cases, the strategic reasoning is that the government doesn't want its people to know!
Not that that's a good thing, but it's still an act of war to disseminate information against the national security interests of the state.
2 previous bomb attempts on the WTC, also the Oklahoma City Bombing, some other random crap from here or afar.
You make my point for me though. There was terrorism before 9/11. There is terrorism after 9/11. 9/11 wasn't special, it wasn't the beginning of a trend, it wasn't a new thing; it was the exercised probability that you'll get hit by lightning. Yeah, okay, maybe somebody dropped the ball; eventually somebody always drops the ball.
In this case it looks like they were dropping the ball so hard they should have got nuked. WTC didn't come down because the FBI was dealing with 350,000 terrorist attacks and ONE slipped through; at worst, it happened because it was the only thing going on, and so much of the crap that goes on is such a non-starter that everyone dozed right through it until it got rammed up their ass.
Look around you: nobody in government is taking anything seriously? Well shit, nothing's happening, When something does happen, it's just part of the routine, the one crazy guy that didn't get shot out there or didn't get stopped coming in or didn't get caught smuggling bomb materials through customs. The guy we dozed on because nothing ever really happens and so much small shit gets stopped--and not by TSA and post-9/11 handjobs, but by actual military intelligence and border patrol. The world is just mundane.
For example, 725k miles for any incident, but if we look at only "fatal" crashes it skyrockets to 300M? There's a disconnect here: if we look at only "fatal" crashes, I'm pretty sure we can smash up Google cars every 30k without killing anyone and make it to 300M.
If you say, "well it has to be 1 in 300M because that's how often a fatal crash occurs and we want to reduce fatal crashes," you're talking about something completely different. 1 crash in 300M miles isn't likely to be 100% fatal; beating 1 in 725k miles reduces the number of actual incidents, which reduces the number of incidents with a likelihood of being fatal, which theoretically should reduce fatal crashes.
Further, if the car handles better than a human, it may reduce damage and injury in crashes. That means if it crashes more often than a human, it may still cause less total injury and less economic costs--a $300 scuffed bumper rather than a $3000 smashed in side panel, a gashed and mashed-in door on a sideswipe rather than a car's front end smashing straight through and crippling the driver on a T-bone, plain old reduced impact speeds due to better braking and faster brake reaction, etc.
I'm sure Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, and Google can all work something out. Benz has those pre-crash systems (best in the industry); Volvo has reactive braking (alerts the driver, pre-charges the brakes, but doesn't apply braking force until a crash is unavoidable; in a self-driving car, it'd react by suggesting braking to avoid collision to the driving program, which in theory should acknowledge that a likely collision is about to occur and apply brakes along with all other proper maneuvering). If the car is reasonably capable of driving itself, there's no reason it can't reduce incidence and reduce damage in incidents with all these collision prediction systems and automatic pre-crash systems that can brake, steer, and do all kinds of other shit for you.
The threat of terrorist attacks before 9/11--I'll interpret that to mean "the impending threat leading up to 9/11"--is nothing. It's akin to the threat of getting hit by a meteor, or lightning. It'll happen -eventually-, for sure; there's always been terrorists, lightning, and meteors. Here's the thing: Terrorists hit shit with the planes because of dumb luck. They've been in and out and tried this stuff for decades, finally got one through, and haven't since. TSA is ineffective as hell, but locked cockpit doors are a step up. Thing is, they're a step up when there's not suddenly The Brown Spy wandering around on every plane trying to get into the cockpit; the whole of Southeast Asia didn't become our enemy overnight, they're not all out to get us, and the people trying are still insane and stupid and relatively sparse (there's hundreds of them? On a planet with 7 billion people? Our country has 300 million people?).
The threat just isn't there. The internet is rough, it'll get rougher, but it's a nasty shitpipe for the bottom dregs of society as-is.
My point is they're not a battery replacement. Now, as far as capacitors go, they're really high-density capacitors. If your usage is erratic over the scale of, say, 5% of your storage--which is probably deep cycle lead-acid--you can have a big bank of supercaps that smooths that out. This prevents cycling on the batteries, which wears them out QUICKLY, whereas supercaps don't give a shit (very few thousands of cycles versus millions or tens of millions of cycles). On the down side,as supercaps supply 10% of the storage of lead acid, you need a supercap bank HALF THE PHYSICAL SIZE of your lead-acid bank. Using expensive Li+? Your supercap bank will be huge compared to your Li+ bank.
Supercaps are basically a flawed design. They don't actually use a dielectric; two conductors are placed together, but the voltage is so low it doesn't jump across the nanoscale gap between them. That means a high voltage bank theoretically needs a bunch in series; in practice, they're damn high output, so really just use a DC-DC converter.
Cannot keep up with the... what the fuck are you talking about? I haven't had cable TV, satellite TV (by the way, if you have satellite, you have streaming video...), NetFlix, or anything in like. A decade.
Backwater hicks that can't fucking read don't need to keep up with the news. Seriously if you can't use Fark or Wikinews or Slashdot or Google News or Yahoo News or El Reg, you don't need news. What you need is ED-U-CA-TION because why the fuck can't you get the news without some brain-dead bitch reading it to you aloud?!
I use 4G WiMax internet at home from Clear Wireless. This is the same technology that municipal wifi installations are based on. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than running cables. In the worst case (I'd actually like to try this), the phone line could supply dial-up to send/get e-mail and news. Most of these sites have RSS, then there's Mobile versions of sites and filters that could recode all images to desaturated greyscale 8 bit to get them across a slow connection. More likely, WiMax/cell with a demarc into a cabled network, or some sort of method of filtering high-frequency signals over phone lines to implement a kind of digital subscriber line.
Ultra-capacitors are 10 times bigger than lead-acid for the same storage; 30 times bigger than Li+. It takes 15000 farads to match a 2700mAh 1.5V AA battery's storage capacity; the capacitor charges and discharges faster and can do so millions of times instead of thousands. A large supercapacitor could push 5000F at 2.7V, so three car battery sized things to match a AA battery.
"case in point pornography is recognized as to be limited to certain class of ages, and various type of media are limited by ages"
That doesn't mean any of this is actually good though.
It's actually wrong, too. We have pornography for 12 year old girls. Go to your local Barnes & Noble and you will find books like Twilight and Fifty Shades of Sucking Huge Werewolf Dong.
And yet the phone lines are already there, so the phone isn't really important over the Internet--the hardline has better clarity and you can use it for fax (my parents have a hardline, cell phones, and XFinity VOIP)
Your argument is silly. Everyone who can get satellite has infrastructure to get Internet--they can't get low-ping for twitch-games, but that's hardly 'second class citizen'. A lot of the disconnected places won't give us an economic gain to run fiber to, and we're quickly moving to high-speed wifi and partitioned cellular data to get around cost inefficiency in wide deployment--the decade delay to get high-speed internet to a small population of citizens with little to no demand for it is giving a big return.
These 'second-class citizens' who 'can't participate in society' don't need fiber lines run to their house to use Facebook or read Slashdot. What is it they're missing out on? Fast-twitch online Tetris and ultra-HD NetFlix?
Well no the problem is the guy who comes up with how to make a transistor that lets unmodified x86 run at 17.6 watts instead of 176 watts (yeah some of those Pentium 4 designs used to run at 180W TDP...) without squeezing down a tiny, tiny process doesn't have the ability to raise a fab to actually do it. He can tell Intel how to do it, but why would they give him shit? Just start making chips and run away with the cash.
This is what patents are for. Sometimes you can't build the shit you invented unless you're already rich.
Well it depends, really. Everything isn't a net gain--for example, an extremely light population density area of mostly farmers and backwater hicks doesn't need a highly responsive, 99.95% reliability high-speed data pipe to play 3D games while streaming 1080p video to 4 TVs per household. Let's set this up as our example--not everything is equivalent to this, but it's good to exemplify (assuming everything is equivalent is a strawman).
Your assertion about consumer suffering is probably based on lack of access--that's the observable common grief. I can't get FIOS here, we only got DSL there, etc. This is because the market notices--correctly--that there's no market in an area, and can't justify the expense. A government monopoly would run cables there anyway, wastefully, costing everyone money (in taxes) for little benefit.
The open market, on the other hand, finds other ways. High-speed services like WiMax are less reliable (I have it, I can watch streaming video about 60%-80% of the time). Satellite has high latency. These things mess with high coordination: online twitch gaming (FPS etc), coordinated online tournaments, streaming video on scheduled family movie night (there's a good chance if it's raining your WiMax will not work well for streaming), telecommuting, etc. These aren't big demand markets, and the impact is often minimal: WiMax and satellite are reliable enough for partial telecommute and for casual movie watching (WiMax works for online games, too, often). You wouldn't want to day trade on this stuff.
Note that the "Open Market" is a flexible term. For example, the Federal Government doesn't mandate broadband coverage; however some municipal wifi has gone WiMax. So individual governments are acting as a market consumer and a market provider, altering the market--but it's behaving more like an "open market." The dirty secret here is that the Federal Government supplying nationwide broadband makes us a single-payer system, which means there's one customer buying all this broadband access. States would be smaller, more like an open market: each state government is a customer looking for the best way to implement broadband for its population. Municipalities--cities--are smaller. Eventually you have what we call "consumers," in which case each individual person living in a city in a state in the nation is the customer.
Just as every "consumer" decides if DSL, Cable, or WiMax (Clear etc) is right for them, so thus does each municipality decide if they want to allow a free market or supply municipal broadband, and decide if they're going to run cables or do WiMax or what. So thus do entire states, if they decide to supply the broadband system. So thus does the entire Federal Government, if they decide to supply nationwide broadband. It's just the size of the consumer's household that changes--is Daddy Obama buying broadband service for 300 million Americans, or is each American paying for their own hookup from a provider they select (of course we hate monopoly markets because the only provider we can buy HERE is Verizon etc).
So then it comes down to a very complex model. Does the benefit of laying fiber runs outweigh the cost? Do we get any economic value from running fiber to backwater towns and inaccessible dumps, to houses that each have 47 acres of land, and so on? Does the productivity of the nation improve? There was a time that the same questions were asked of electricity--many places didn't get electricity, a few still don't have it. Mayhaps eventually we'll deploy broadband naturally as wide as electricity, without a government monopoly. Or maybe we'll figure on wireless, or data-over-power. Maybe deploying fiber will wind up with underutilized fiber runs to people who only need something that can take 50k/s down, and then we come up with new tech that would suffice for 500k/s down and would save us the run of fiber--but we've spent it already, and so the nation suffers an economic loss and more crushing federal debt and higher ta
I'd still prefer Linux (Ubuntu or similar 6-month cycle) + VirtualBox with Windows in VirtualBox and the VirtualBox USB 2.0 extension. Data on a shared media drive (like/home/User/vmshared/)
Patents are supposed to be non-obvious. What happens when you come up with a non-obvious way to make a low energy transistor, which is cheaper than current process, but costs multi-hundred-millions to get started up?
What I found more amusing was that he doesn't want to deal with a "monopoly," but he wants the government to supply a [government monopoly] national broadband network. Also that there's "one set of wires," but he wants inefficient waste with excessive wires just so that Provider A's customers aren't on Provider B's wires.
Yeah, all those zips and tarballs are why I cringe when installing enterprise software. The upgrade cycle is vicious and spotty, and when the dependencies change things break in unpredictable ways.
If the developers don't dogfood it, they won't understand wtf is the problem. Make them install that shit themselves, make them watch the end user install it, make them fix it when the end user fucks it up because they don't know the formula for the secret sauce. Get that secret sauce shit out of there and give me something straight forward.
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Alcohol rape isn't legitimate rape, right? You can tell 'cause the body doesn't shut all that stuff down and the female gets pregnant.
Depends. Like I said, girls don't have sex with every decent guy they meet. Guys are like, "Eh, she's okay, would hit it." Girls are either in SUPER SUPER HORNY MODE or they're ... available, if you push the right buttons. That guy at the bar, in the wife beater, the one that acts like he doesn't HAVE to give a shit? Somehow, that hits the right buttons, and he's bouncing girls off his lap like quarters off a cheerleader's ass, and then tossing them aside and never calling. You? You're nice, and totally in the friend zone; if you wanna fuck, you need to either be someone else or start playing for dating... girls generally go for commitment faster than one night stands (there are exceptions).
Friend zone suddenly becomes hunting grounds when there's nothing to fucking do. Seriously, boredom is evil and sex is something to do.
It's different, yeah, but routing around it is not different.
Essentially, China has this thing where they've gone, "If people get these funny ideas about freedom or about how the world works or what we've been lying about, things get hard for us to govern here." North Korea had the same thing going on--Kim Jong-Il was the beloved father of North Korea because he told them all the evil was outside. If these people get a good look outside en masse, dissention sets in and compromises stability of the tyrant regime.
That kind of compromise is even bigger than just sending an army marching into the country with its path cleared by carpet bombing air strikes. It's ridiculously hard to fight your own people--you can't recruit new soldiers because you can't convince people to fight for you to protect their families. The enemy of the state is YOU, your people won't fight for you.
Thus, such dissemination is an act of war. It compromises national security. Very much we feel justified--perhaps we are--but let's call a spade a fucking shovel here. If you shoot a man for constantly beating his wife and kids near to death, you're still a murderer; that doesn't make it wrong, but you did kill a man in cold blood.
It's not so much that as pool size and opportunity. The whole "nice guys finish last" thing has a subversion: those guys hanging out with extremely bored, cute girls might not have the easiest time getting laid, but when there's fuck-all to do they just start snuggling up on anyone they're fairly comfortable with. You don't need to push the right buttons anymore; you just need to not push the wrong ones.
In other words, bored girls are a heck of a lot looser than occupied girls. Girls generally don't have sex every chance they get; courtship is hard.
The thing is, with so much less boredom, people dive to their iPhones all the time. There's no sitting around college in the dorm, staring at the ceiling with an 18 year old freshman, "Wanna go somewhere?" "Maybe... where?" "I dunno, it's boring here." "Yeah, but there's nothing to do on a Thursday night." "Bah..." ".... wanna have sex?"
No, it's more like, "Bah..." "...*starts playing Angry Birds*"
What's funny is I've been telling people for years that all these efforts to "help people in oppressive countries get around The Great Firewall" (via TOR etc) are technically an "act of war," and people keep telling me it's not an "act of war" because they're just "restoring basic human rights." Well here we have a man "restoring basic human rights" for us, giving us access to information -that- -the- -government- -doesn't- -want- -us- -to- -have-, and ... it's an act of war!
Part of state security is keeping information out of the hands of its own people so they don't turn against the state. In China, they have site filters to keep news about bad shit their government does or political opinions they don't favor out of the public mind. In the US, we have all this classified information that we don't see a strategic reason for classifying. In both cases, the strategic reasoning is that the government doesn't want its people to know!
Not that that's a good thing, but it's still an act of war to disseminate information against the national security interests of the state.
2 previous bomb attempts on the WTC, also the Oklahoma City Bombing, some other random crap from here or afar.
You make my point for me though. There was terrorism before 9/11. There is terrorism after 9/11. 9/11 wasn't special, it wasn't the beginning of a trend, it wasn't a new thing; it was the exercised probability that you'll get hit by lightning. Yeah, okay, maybe somebody dropped the ball; eventually somebody always drops the ball.
In this case it looks like they were dropping the ball so hard they should have got nuked. WTC didn't come down because the FBI was dealing with 350,000 terrorist attacks and ONE slipped through; at worst, it happened because it was the only thing going on, and so much of the crap that goes on is such a non-starter that everyone dozed right through it until it got rammed up their ass.
Look around you: nobody in government is taking anything seriously? Well shit, nothing's happening, When something does happen, it's just part of the routine, the one crazy guy that didn't get shot out there or didn't get stopped coming in or didn't get caught smuggling bomb materials through customs. The guy we dozed on because nothing ever really happens and so much small shit gets stopped--and not by TSA and post-9/11 handjobs, but by actual military intelligence and border patrol. The world is just mundane.
There's a lot of weirdness here.
For example, 725k miles for any incident, but if we look at only "fatal" crashes it skyrockets to 300M? There's a disconnect here: if we look at only "fatal" crashes, I'm pretty sure we can smash up Google cars every 30k without killing anyone and make it to 300M.
If you say, "well it has to be 1 in 300M because that's how often a fatal crash occurs and we want to reduce fatal crashes," you're talking about something completely different. 1 crash in 300M miles isn't likely to be 100% fatal; beating 1 in 725k miles reduces the number of actual incidents, which reduces the number of incidents with a likelihood of being fatal, which theoretically should reduce fatal crashes.
Further, if the car handles better than a human, it may reduce damage and injury in crashes. That means if it crashes more often than a human, it may still cause less total injury and less economic costs--a $300 scuffed bumper rather than a $3000 smashed in side panel, a gashed and mashed-in door on a sideswipe rather than a car's front end smashing straight through and crippling the driver on a T-bone, plain old reduced impact speeds due to better braking and faster brake reaction, etc.
I'm sure Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, and Google can all work something out. Benz has those pre-crash systems (best in the industry); Volvo has reactive braking (alerts the driver, pre-charges the brakes, but doesn't apply braking force until a crash is unavoidable; in a self-driving car, it'd react by suggesting braking to avoid collision to the driving program, which in theory should acknowledge that a likely collision is about to occur and apply brakes along with all other proper maneuvering). If the car is reasonably capable of driving itself, there's no reason it can't reduce incidence and reduce damage in incidents with all these collision prediction systems and automatic pre-crash systems that can brake, steer, and do all kinds of other shit for you.
The threat of terrorist attacks before 9/11--I'll interpret that to mean "the impending threat leading up to 9/11"--is nothing. It's akin to the threat of getting hit by a meteor, or lightning. It'll happen -eventually-, for sure; there's always been terrorists, lightning, and meteors. Here's the thing: Terrorists hit shit with the planes because of dumb luck. They've been in and out and tried this stuff for decades, finally got one through, and haven't since. TSA is ineffective as hell, but locked cockpit doors are a step up. Thing is, they're a step up when there's not suddenly The Brown Spy wandering around on every plane trying to get into the cockpit; the whole of Southeast Asia didn't become our enemy overnight, they're not all out to get us, and the people trying are still insane and stupid and relatively sparse (there's hundreds of them? On a planet with 7 billion people? Our country has 300 million people?).
The threat just isn't there. The internet is rough, it'll get rougher, but it's a nasty shitpipe for the bottom dregs of society as-is.
My point is they're not a battery replacement. Now, as far as capacitors go, they're really high-density capacitors. If your usage is erratic over the scale of, say, 5% of your storage--which is probably deep cycle lead-acid--you can have a big bank of supercaps that smooths that out. This prevents cycling on the batteries, which wears them out QUICKLY, whereas supercaps don't give a shit (very few thousands of cycles versus millions or tens of millions of cycles). On the down side,as supercaps supply 10% of the storage of lead acid, you need a supercap bank HALF THE PHYSICAL SIZE of your lead-acid bank. Using expensive Li+? Your supercap bank will be huge compared to your Li+ bank.
Supercaps are basically a flawed design. They don't actually use a dielectric; two conductors are placed together, but the voltage is so low it doesn't jump across the nanoscale gap between them. That means a high voltage bank theoretically needs a bunch in series; in practice, they're damn high output, so really just use a DC-DC converter.
Cannot keep up with the... what the fuck are you talking about? I haven't had cable TV, satellite TV (by the way, if you have satellite, you have streaming video...), NetFlix, or anything in like. A decade.
Backwater hicks that can't fucking read don't need to keep up with the news. Seriously if you can't use Fark or Wikinews or Slashdot or Google News or Yahoo News or El Reg, you don't need news. What you need is ED-U-CA-TION because why the fuck can't you get the news without some brain-dead bitch reading it to you aloud?!
I use 4G WiMax internet at home from Clear Wireless. This is the same technology that municipal wifi installations are based on. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than running cables. In the worst case (I'd actually like to try this), the phone line could supply dial-up to send/get e-mail and news. Most of these sites have RSS, then there's Mobile versions of sites and filters that could recode all images to desaturated greyscale 8 bit to get them across a slow connection. More likely, WiMax/cell with a demarc into a cabled network, or some sort of method of filtering high-frequency signals over phone lines to implement a kind of digital subscriber line.
Well, if they hadn't used the hydro power, they could have used HVDC to shift it to a coal-powered part of the grid and burned less coal.
Ultra-capacitors are 10 times bigger than lead-acid for the same storage; 30 times bigger than Li+. It takes 15000 farads to match a 2700mAh 1.5V AA battery's storage capacity; the capacitor charges and discharges faster and can do so millions of times instead of thousands. A large supercapacitor could push 5000F at 2.7V, so three car battery sized things to match a AA battery.
Today, we are teaching poodles how to fly!
"case in point pornography is recognized as to be limited to certain class of ages, and various type of media are limited by ages"
That doesn't mean any of this is actually good though.
It's actually wrong, too. We have pornography for 12 year old girls. Go to your local Barnes & Noble and you will find books like Twilight and Fifty Shades of Sucking Huge Werewolf Dong.
And that's the other half of the patent system that needs to be fixed!
And yet the phone lines are already there, so the phone isn't really important over the Internet--the hardline has better clarity and you can use it for fax (my parents have a hardline, cell phones, and XFinity VOIP)
Your argument is silly. Everyone who can get satellite has infrastructure to get Internet--they can't get low-ping for twitch-games, but that's hardly 'second class citizen'. A lot of the disconnected places won't give us an economic gain to run fiber to, and we're quickly moving to high-speed wifi and partitioned cellular data to get around cost inefficiency in wide deployment--the decade delay to get high-speed internet to a small population of citizens with little to no demand for it is giving a big return.
These 'second-class citizens' who 'can't participate in society' don't need fiber lines run to their house to use Facebook or read Slashdot. What is it they're missing out on? Fast-twitch online Tetris and ultra-HD NetFlix?
Well no the problem is the guy who comes up with how to make a transistor that lets unmodified x86 run at 17.6 watts instead of 176 watts (yeah some of those Pentium 4 designs used to run at 180W TDP...) without squeezing down a tiny, tiny process doesn't have the ability to raise a fab to actually do it. He can tell Intel how to do it, but why would they give him shit? Just start making chips and run away with the cash.
This is what patents are for. Sometimes you can't build the shit you invented unless you're already rich.
Well it depends, really. Everything isn't a net gain--for example, an extremely light population density area of mostly farmers and backwater hicks doesn't need a highly responsive, 99.95% reliability high-speed data pipe to play 3D games while streaming 1080p video to 4 TVs per household. Let's set this up as our example--not everything is equivalent to this, but it's good to exemplify (assuming everything is equivalent is a strawman).
Your assertion about consumer suffering is probably based on lack of access--that's the observable common grief. I can't get FIOS here, we only got DSL there, etc. This is because the market notices--correctly--that there's no market in an area, and can't justify the expense. A government monopoly would run cables there anyway, wastefully, costing everyone money (in taxes) for little benefit.
The open market, on the other hand, finds other ways. High-speed services like WiMax are less reliable (I have it, I can watch streaming video about 60%-80% of the time). Satellite has high latency. These things mess with high coordination: online twitch gaming (FPS etc), coordinated online tournaments, streaming video on scheduled family movie night (there's a good chance if it's raining your WiMax will not work well for streaming), telecommuting, etc. These aren't big demand markets, and the impact is often minimal: WiMax and satellite are reliable enough for partial telecommute and for casual movie watching (WiMax works for online games, too, often). You wouldn't want to day trade on this stuff.
Note that the "Open Market" is a flexible term. For example, the Federal Government doesn't mandate broadband coverage; however some municipal wifi has gone WiMax. So individual governments are acting as a market consumer and a market provider, altering the market--but it's behaving more like an "open market." The dirty secret here is that the Federal Government supplying nationwide broadband makes us a single-payer system, which means there's one customer buying all this broadband access. States would be smaller, more like an open market: each state government is a customer looking for the best way to implement broadband for its population. Municipalities--cities--are smaller. Eventually you have what we call "consumers," in which case each individual person living in a city in a state in the nation is the customer.
Just as every "consumer" decides if DSL, Cable, or WiMax (Clear etc) is right for them, so thus does each municipality decide if they want to allow a free market or supply municipal broadband, and decide if they're going to run cables or do WiMax or what. So thus do entire states, if they decide to supply the broadband system. So thus does the entire Federal Government, if they decide to supply nationwide broadband. It's just the size of the consumer's household that changes--is Daddy Obama buying broadband service for 300 million Americans, or is each American paying for their own hookup from a provider they select (of course we hate monopoly markets because the only provider we can buy HERE is Verizon etc).
So then it comes down to a very complex model. Does the benefit of laying fiber runs outweigh the cost? Do we get any economic value from running fiber to backwater towns and inaccessible dumps, to houses that each have 47 acres of land, and so on? Does the productivity of the nation improve? There was a time that the same questions were asked of electricity--many places didn't get electricity, a few still don't have it. Mayhaps eventually we'll deploy broadband naturally as wide as electricity, without a government monopoly. Or maybe we'll figure on wireless, or data-over-power. Maybe deploying fiber will wind up with underutilized fiber runs to people who only need something that can take 50k/s down, and then we come up with new tech that would suffice for 500k/s down and would save us the run of fiber--but we've spent it already, and so the nation suffers an economic loss and more crushing federal debt and higher ta
I'd still prefer Linux (Ubuntu or similar 6-month cycle) + VirtualBox with Windows in VirtualBox and the VirtualBox USB 2.0 extension. Data on a shared media drive (like /home/User/vmshared/)
Why are there fees for Asian memory? I thought that was genetic and non-patentable.
Patents are supposed to be non-obvious. What happens when you come up with a non-obvious way to make a low energy transistor, which is cheaper than current process, but costs multi-hundred-millions to get started up?
What I found more amusing was that he doesn't want to deal with a "monopoly," but he wants the government to supply a [government monopoly] national broadband network. Also that there's "one set of wires," but he wants inefficient waste with excessive wires just so that Provider A's customers aren't on Provider B's wires.
Yeah, all those zips and tarballs are why I cringe when installing enterprise software. The upgrade cycle is vicious and spotty, and when the dependencies change things break in unpredictable ways.
If the developers don't dogfood it, they won't understand wtf is the problem. Make them install that shit themselves, make them watch the end user install it, make them fix it when the end user fucks it up because they don't know the formula for the secret sauce. Get that secret sauce shit out of there and give me something straight forward.