Laptops could use Micro-USB chargers as a power supply standard... if you didn't mind connecting at least 6-12 1.7-Amp (RMS, not peak) chargers to achieve it.
A single max-powered USB charger (with data pins shorted together) can supply 1.7 amperes at 5v, or 8.5 watts.
A typical laptop needs ~85 watts (10-20 watts less for some subnotebooks and netbooks, quite a bit more for a 17" Alienware/Clevo with desktop xeon and three drives doing RAID5). Do the math, then add a bit more because 10 USB chargers electronically switched into series and parallel to convert the power to something else aren't going to be anywhere near 100% efficient. And this ASSUMES high-powered micro-USB *chargers*, not wimpy unpowered USB ports drooling out a measly 100mA (a.k.a., 1/2 watt)
> You realize that all laptop power supplies out there currently handle 120 to 240w already?
I have a Thinkpad T61. It can huff and wheeze with a 65-watt supply, but NEEDS a 95-watt supply in order to charge the battery at normal speed while it's powered up. Otherwise, it will basically tread water, and barely treat the battery like a built-in UPS. I know this for a fact, because it came with the 95-watt supply, but I've been agonizing over Lenovo's new 65-watt PowerHub with built in powered USB hub (damn, why can't they make a 95-watt version of THAT?!?) which is technically compatible, if you can live with having to actually shut down the computer to actually CHARGE the battery.
Other manufacturers make laptop power supplies that can supply 5v USB power for charging, but Lenovo's is the only one that's actually a real, honest to god powered USB hub.
The interest rates might be low, but if costs -- including wages -- are following deflation, your own salary will be decreasing in bitcoins-per-year as well. Buying a 50,000 bitcoin house you can barely afford at 30 is semi sane if there's a reasonable expectation that you'll be making at least as much money 20 years later. Buying a 50,000-bitcoin house you can barely afford at 30 would be financial suicide if you were likely to be making half as many bitcoins per year when you're 50 as you are now. Even if a meal at McDonalds that costs.5 bitcoin today costs.1 bitcoin then, you'd still be paying off a 50,000-bitcoin debt.
That's the big reason why deflation is so deadly -- it utterly destroys the financial viability of anything that involves long-term financing. Taking on any kind of debt that extends more than a year or two into the future borders upon financial suicide. If the dollar were to inflate 50% over the next 10 years, and wages generally kept pace (not an unreasonable expectation, at least among middle-class employees with college degrees), that would be awesome for quite a few people, because it would mean the homes that are hopelessly underwater now would be affordable at their original mortgaged prices (restoring mobility to America's labor force... if you can't sell your house because it's underwater, you're less likely to relocate regardless of promised benefit), and their student loan payments would go from consuming 20% of net income to 10% or 5% (since student loan interest rates are fixed after refinancing, and usually pretty low).
It sounds nice to cry for poor, thrifty savers who struggle to save, but the fact is, just about everyone in America who isn't a multi- multi- millionaire (or living in a cardboard box) owes way more money on things like student loans, a mortgage, and and car loan than they'll earn in several years. The loss in value to a few thousand dollars in savings is nothing compared to the net reduction in debt they'd enjoy if their income doubled while their debt payments remained relatively constant (of course, anyone whose debt was primarily infinitely-variable credit card debt would be screwed, but they're screwed under just about any scenario, anyway). And those who DO save can still come out OK, as long as they make smart investments instead of sticking their life savings in a coffee can in the kitchen or under the mattress.
High inflation is bad, if only because it forces people to spend unproductive time managing their money and endlessly banking, but even small amounts of deflation are dangerous, and significant amounts are absolutely deadly to any modern economy. When the most profitable thing you can do with a million dollars is lock it in a safe and forget about it for a year, because anything you could possibly invest in today will be worth less money a year from now, economies collapse.
> Unless someone perfects alchemy and turns lead into gold or synthesizes gold.
I don't have a reference handy, but I recall one of my college professors telling us point blank that sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, scientists in both the US and Soviet Union DID successfully (and independently) synthesize gold (Sandia & Dubna, I believe). Unfortunately, as the byproduct of a nuclear fission, it was a) radioactive, and b) if done commercially, would have cost several orders of magnitude more to make (as an intentional byproduct of nuclear fission, then separate out the non-radioactive isotopes) than it was literally worth.
You know what's really interesting? If you read the bitcoin forums, you can read post after post by grumpy Americans who angrily swear the Dollar is going to collapse and be trampled upon by China... then read even MORE replies by people FROM China who tell them they're completely insane, and that Chinese investors view US Dollars as the safest stores of value you can buy. The fact is, if the Dollar goes down the toilet, it's going to take most of the world's economy with it. Why? Network effects and nearly infinite liquidity. You can spend US Dollars on real goods and services just about anywhere in the world. That ALONE adds staggering amounts of value, REGARDLESS of what the Fed might or might not do.
Somebody in Latin America doesn't really care whether the value of the Dollar changes by 1% or 5% relative to the Peso or whatever their local currency might be, because the exchange rate is largely *irrelevant*. When they want to buy a new imported top of the line Android phone, they're going to pay WAY less if they show up at the store with US dollars, or if they pay for it with a dollar-denominated credit card, than they'll pay if they insist on purchasing it with their own currency. Why? Because the store paid for it in Dollars. If customers pay in Pesos, the store has to factor the exchange rate and currency-conversion fees into the price and profit margin. If customers pay in Dollars, the accounting ends up being easier, and most of those Dollars can go right back to Asia to pay for the NEXT batch of high-end Android phones. The manufacturers in Asia put those dollars into the bank, so others can borrow them and buy oil from the Saudis (once again, for Dollars). The Saudis turn around, take the dollars, and buy skyscapers in Asia, and the cycle repeats. For businesses that import things like electronic goods, it's cheaper to just trade in Dollars as much as possible than to screw with currency conversions between arbitrary currencies.
Put another way, the value of the Dollar has very little to do with academic concepts of economic theory, and everything to do with the fact that you can pretty much spend them anywhere on anything, and buy things at a discount when you do. The dollar is genuinely (and almost universally) useful as a medium of exchange. If it loses 80% of its value against the Euro over the next decade or two, and it costs $10 to buy one Euro, people will still be walking around with pockets full of dollars... they'll just be carrying 5-10 times as many.
> At least a token lets me play Skee-ball. Are there any skee-ball machines that take bitcoins?
There's probably one somewhere in Silicon Valley, existing mainly for the amusement and satisfaction of a dotcom billionaire, but you can only play it if you have an Android phone with the proper app installed, already spent a week getting funds from your checking account to Dwolla to MtGox to buy the bitcoins, and you're willing to wait 20-40 minutes for the transaction to be published and verified before the machine releases the balls and allows you to actually play;-)
Well... actually, it's anybody's guess what it's worth right now, or what they'll be worth 24 hours after MtGox is back online. My guess is that they'll end up somewhere around $5-10. The only reason the price dropped to 1c was because someone basically stole a half-million bitcoins and dumped them all simultaneously on a market that normally would only have enough buyers (at its recent trading prices) to buy a tiny fraction of that amount.
If you showed up at a flea market (far from the nearest ATM), set up a table, and proceeded to liquidate a million $1 bills at whatever price people were willing and able to pay in order to liquidate every single one of them within 20 minutes, with a rule that people could only buy them with crisp $20 bills that were devoid of external markings, tears, folds, or other signs of use (roughly simulating the difficulty of getting funds into and out of MtGox, starting with the week it takes to get your checking account verified with Dwolla and for the funds to make the trip from your checkign account to Dwolla to Mtgox), after a while THEIR price would probably fall to a penny or two per dollar bill, too. You'd have lots of people who WANTED to buy them at 80 or 90 cents apiece, but because you were determined to sell them instantly, at any price, and only to buyers able to pay immediately with money they had on hand in a specific form, the price would crash to almost nothing.
There's nothing inherently fraudulent about Bitcoins themselves. If I sold you 10 Bitcoins on the premise that they were the cash equivalent of $200, it would be fraud, because there's no guarantee you could convert them into $200, $100, or even a penny at any specific moment in time. On the other hand, if you think a bitcoin is a fair exchange for a large pizza, and you're happy to accept one from me in exchange for it, that's a private matter entirely between two consenting adults.
That said, I've become less enthused about them over the past couple of weeks. Originally, I thought they were a cool way for anyone with a web site to accept micropayments without the cost and ceremony of dealing with credit cards, but now I'm inclined to say most people would be better off just using Dwolla and skipping the Bitcoins. In fact, Dwolla is likely to end up as the big Bitcoin winner, simply BECAUSE lots of people are going to use them to get dollars into and out of MtGox, and realize at some point along the way that Dwolla itself is a perfectly good alternative to Paypal that solves most of the complaints people have had about Paypal that motivated them to look at Bitcoins in the first place.
AFAIK, if you're doing development involving Java tag libraries and designers who aren't directly involved with the development of those taglibs, there's exactly one application that can deal with them nicely: Dreamweaver. With Dreamweaver, the taglib developer can create renderers for Dreamweaver that will allow the designer to use them interactively and seamlessly. Dreamweaver allows you to thunk and fake dynamic content so those designers can deal with it as though it were a native part of HTML/CSS itself. Of course, the consequence is that the developer will end up spending twice as much time creating the renderers for Dreamweaver, and there's no guarantee that the output of the renderers will actually be in sync with reality, but in the grand scheme of things, if what you want is a seamless partnership between a creative designer who's not necessarily a programmer, and J2EE developer who's not necessarily a designer, and enable them to work as a team without constantly stepping on each other's feet, there's basically one choice: Dreamweaver. With custom extensions and a really fast PC, it can do incredible things. The main problems are the fact that it's ungodly expensive, and the partnership I just described requires programming talent that few organizations are likely to have (you aren't going to hire someone just out of college, or a consultant from India, to cheaply implement that kind of development environment).
> Inflation itself has been the means of stealing from the poor to give to the rich.
I'd argue it's the exact opposite. Poor people spend money within days of getting it out of necessity, so they have no savings to lose value. Extremely wealthy people, on the other hand, potentially stand to lose staggering amounts of money when inflation diminishes its buying power. It could be argued that inflation is what forces extremely wealthy individuals to put their money to work by lending it out and investing it, instead of simply locking it in a safe and forgetting about it for 40 years.
The biggest problem with deflation is the fact that it absolutely destroys the economic viability of anything with a supply chain measured in years, or possibly even months. If currency deflates by more in 12 months than you could earn by purchasing raw materials and labor now, and making products that will be sold 12 months from now, you're better off not investing it and manufacturing those products at all. That's why inflation in moderation is a tolerable evil, but deflation to just about any significant degree is absolutely deadly. When putting money in a mattress and forgetting about it for a year becomes more profitable than just about any alternative, you no longer have an economy.
> You're more delusional than I am if you think the phone carriers will allow VOIP to replace their calling service on their cell networks.
Maybe I've been a Sprint customer with "Unlimited Everything" service for too long, but honestly, why would a carrier like Sprint even *care* if you wanted to use Skype for voice calls if, as a practical matter, their incremental profit from one minute of voice call use from 99.999% of their customers is negative (because the customer already paid for 450 or unlimited airtime minutes between 7am and 7pm, and each actual minute of voice-call time made to a phone on a different network requires payment of termination fees by Sprint)?
If anything, a carrier like Sprint would stand to benefit financially by PARTNERING with Skype and selling them a few bits of the control data that gets sent every time the phone polls the tower for incoming calls or text messages, so Skype could THEN politely sleep in the background and wait to be told there's an incoming call (by Sprint) instead of having to actively poll for it on top of the phone's existing activity.
Keep in mind that China is a country with 4x the population of the US, and has at least the same percentage of corrupt politicians with ties into organized crime who can get the police, firewall-maintainers, and everyone else to look the other way when necessary.
Are there lots of attacks coming from China? Absolutely. Do the flourish there because the government is unwilling or unable to meaningfully fight them? Sure. Does China have its own government espionage agency with more or less the same goals as the CIA? Of course. Is there actually an official division of China's government tasked with waging cyber warfare against the US? I doubt it. Cash and corruption are perfectly good explanations.
A favorite scenario thrown around Slashdot is China using the internet to sabotage America's financial system... totally overlooking the fact that Chinese investors *own* an increasingly huge chunk of America's financial system, and their hands go as deeply into the pockets of China's leaders as those of their counterparts in the US.
This doesn't mean that the US should passively tolerate it, but rather illustrates that calls for a military department of cyber warfare is totally the wrong approach because it assumes the wrong reasons, the wrong motives, and would ultimately be gearing up to fight the wrong war against the wrong people (while the ones really causing problems slip under the radar and keep doing it).
> Why the hell would anyone who knows enough to DIY pay $4 for a 5 cent part?
Because paying $4 means you can have it NOW, on Friday night, Saturday, or Sunday, instead of having to wait at least a day or two for it to arrive. If it's Friday night and you just fried something, that $4 5-cent part just saved your weekend.
One sensible inventory compromise: instead of spreading out a thin inventory across hundreds of stores, designate a few stores per metro area as regional parts superstores that stock "everything" a hardcore Arduino enthusiast or bot-builder would be likely to need on short notice over the course of a weekend. Using South Florida as an example, I'd start with store #1 at Sawgrass Mills (less than an hour away from ~90% of Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties as long as it's not rush hour). I'd put stores #2 and #3 at Dolphin Mall (~6 miles west of Miami International Airport, roughly 20-30 minutes from most of Dade County) and near I-95 & Palm Beach International Airport. (ok, those are actually the locations where I'd put hypothetical Fry's stores, but it's the same market). Later, if I could add one or two more stores, I'd put #4 at Aventura, and #5 somewhere off I-95 between Pompano Beach and Oakland Park (at which point most of South Florida would have a store within a 15-20 minute drive).
Of course, there's my wet-dream fantasy: a PC board milling machine at those stores where you could swipe your credit card, plug in a USB drive, select the Eagle CAD files, and watch it mill your board (say, $10 for a 2" x 4" board, $20 for a 3" x 5" board, and $25 for a 4" x 6" board) on the spot.
One thing Radio shack needs to do, and do NOW: start selling Circuit Cellar, Nuts & Volts, Servo, and every magazine like them that it can get its hands on... and work closely with all of them to get them to publish projects built from parts available at the local Radio Shack store (working both ways... adding inventory to accommodate upcoming projects likely to be popular, and encouraging them to use the parts they already sell when possible). Then, hire Joe Pardue to walk in the footsteps of Forrest Mims, and write his own series of books full of projects that can be built entirely from parts available at Radio Shack.
The truth is, the group that used to be into ham radio never really went away... it's just that Radio Shack didn't notice that TODAY, that group builds robots and projects based on microcontrollers & FPGAs. Robots, in particular, are a goldmine for store like Radio Shack. I can't think of any single hobby that gives 20/30/40-something guys more of an excuse to burn through cash like there's no tomorrow. PC components might be cutthroat, with negative retail profit margins, but check out the markup on something like a Robotis AX-12 digital servo... ~$45 mail order. For each one. A decent 'bot is going to have at least a half dozen. A biped? About a dozen. A stair-climbing hexapod? Good god, I think the credit card machine just melted;-)
With a CDMA phone, you aren't connected to "a" tower. CDMA users all of its towers as a regionally-distributed diversity-tuning network It's a tiny detail that's caused no small amount of grief to Android developers circa 1.5 who were tasked with trying to make CDMA "look" like a fake GSM phone to Android. From what I recall, most algorithms just picked the towerid with the highest SNR and called it a day, occasionally throwing in some extra logic to smooth out moment-to-moment variance and add some inertia.
On the other side, CDMA phones in most metro areas have a tower radius of about 2km, and few people would regard the warning of a tornado on the ground 5 miles away as a "false alarm". In fact, one could almost argue that the likelihood of recipients being annoyed if the danger being warned about isn't literally 500 feet away is probably a good litmus test for whether or not the message should be sent via the system. Tornado warnings? Absolutely, this is the gold standard for a system like this (tornadoes can be difficult to spot at night or in driving rain, fast-moving, and are enormously dangerous to the public when they occur). Earthquakes? Even if the message were sent the moment a shockwave were confirmed 10 miles away, you'd barely have time to pick up the phone before it hit anyway. The only real benefit of it in that situation is that you'd be more likely to have the phone in your hand as you got buried under rubble, so you could use it to call for help. Hurricanes? Total, complete waste of time. Even in a pre-technological era, people knew a hurricane was nearby more than a day before landfall. A hurricane "looks" very different from a regular thunderstorm as it approaches, and the prequel is unmistakable to anybody who's been through more than 2 or 3 of them. I'd personally be pissed as hell if I lived on the mainland and got a 2am "Emergency Evacuation" warning for a hurricane making landfall in 24 hours (and only slightly less pissed if I got it at 9am instead). Amber alerts? It's a good thing they can be disabled, because otherwise I'd be voiding the warranty with a soldering iron or hot air rework tool as my first task after buying the phone.
> Without government the Internet would have been anyway, just like telegraph was and telephone was and radio was and TV was.
Yes... the internet today would be like Viewtron was, but faster.
I personally use Pendaflex 5394 legal-size hanging tri-way folders. Basically, it has a folded paperboard divider attached that divides it into three expandable sections.
I use one folder per 'genre', with sections for "this year", "last year" and "anytime else".
My genres can basically be divided into two categories: "dead" and "useful", with two or more sub-categories per genre. The folders are all the same color (green), but the labels are color-coded.
"Dead" are things I'm filing because my parents told me I should, but I'm unlikely to ever look at or care about again. Bills in general fall into this category. I used to have one folder, but recently split the category into two: things specifically related to credit cards, and everything else (mainly because credit cards were accounting for 2/3 the volume, and everything else was getting lost in the clutter)
"Useful" things are papers I might actually need to look at again over the next year or so. Things related to insurance, tax-preparation, etc. Right now, I have 4 such folders: tax-preparation, house/car/insurance, cats (one of my cats has asthma) and "everything else".
Elsewhere, I have hanging folders with the same genre names for each past year. Sometime around January 1, I move everything from the "last year" section into its own folder in the big filing cabinet, move everything from the "this year" section to the "last year" section, and might dig through the "some other time" section if I'm feeling like it.
Why this works for me:
My old filing method can loosely be described as two boxes: "stuff" and "old stuff", I'd open bills, deal with them, and throw them in the "stuff to file" box... where they'd stay forever. Every couple of years, the "stuff to file" box would get full. I'd start digging through it planning to weed out everything but the latest stuff, then get bored halfway through and just throw it all in the "really old stuff" box. About 10 years after college, I had about 5 such bankers' boxes full of stuff that was technically supposed to be filed, organized roughly by year. It worked surprisingly well, but once I bought a house and started getting torrents of papers that had to be filed, I accumulated almost an entire box of papers in less than a year (previously, it took 2-3 years to get to that point). Worse, I was starting to spend lots of time digging through the boxes. So, I came up with a better idea.
Plan B entailed having two boxes for "current" stuff -- one for things I knew I'd probably never look at again, and one for things I thought I might need again. This strategy worked surprisingly well for a year, but became unwieldy early in year 2 because I THEN had to deal with five banker's boxes of papers: this year's dead and useful papers, last year's dead and useful papers, and a box to throw everything else into (because I knew, deep down, that I would never, ever file them properly, and the alternative was a pile on my desk that would sit forever). So, I spent some time thinking of ways to distill its essence and still keep my filing minimal and manageable, but a little more portable than five boxes that were all mostly empty.
That was how I came up with my current system. Everything still gets filed by "this year", "last year", or "anytime", but I now have a place to explicitly put things that previously fell through the cracks... things that were kind of "timeless" go in "anytime" as well. The "anytime" category actually ended up being useful in another way. Even though it means I technically have to look in two places to find something I think might be related to a specific year, it also means that the few papers I really, truly DID need to access again tend to stay in the main filing area (where I can get at them easily).
The biggest problem I had was switching to legal-size folders. Why legal-size? Because 99% of the bills I get are legal size. I can barely even remember the last time I got a bill that was small enough to fit in a letter-sized folder without having to
The problem in China is partly one of overzealous (cough) "value-engineering", but it's also one of safety margins. For the most part, the trains and tracks run at 300+mph in China are identical to trains and tracks run at 186-220mph. The difference is, the trains in China have almost no margin for error. If something goes even slightly wrong, Very Very Bad Things Will Happen. The same thing happening in Europe (with slower trains) would barely be noticed, because it would be well within the safety margins. Trackside debris that would be knocked away or unceremoniously crushed at 180-220mph could tear a gash through the underside of a 300mph train, or even derail it. One reason why Japan has so few accidents is because JR is absolutely neurotic about inspecting, and re-inspecting its tracks throughout the day, all day, every day. If you want 300mph trains, you should probably have robot scouts running a couple of miles ahead of every train scanning the tracks for debris and damage (actually, I'm surprised such things DON'T exist; it seems like a fairly straightforward engineering exercise to build a robot that runs on the same tracks, and is basically a big scanner that compares what's there now with what used to be there, and gets humans to visually make a judgment call when necessary).
It depends how far you want to travel. High-speed rail's niche of awesomeness is trips that are ~200-400 miles for suburbanites, maybe as few as ~70-100 miles for urban residents. It's the distance we all hate -- farther than anybody sane wants to drive, but not far enough to be worth the misery of air travel.
Trains have a few huge advantages over planes for regional travel. For a plane, landing at an airport to drop off and pick up passengers is a huge, time-consuming ceremony that might be 15 minutes under the most ideal circumstances imaginable (small-town airport where plane can land, taxi directly to terminal, spend 2 minutes getting passengers on and off, and be heading back to the runway), and easily kills 2 hours at any major airport. So, a city pair with insane amounts of travel (like New York-Miami) might average a flight or two per hour, but a lesser pair (say, Atlanta and Fort Lauderdale) might have to make do with 3 or 4 flights per day, max. In contrast, a train only needs a minute or two for a stop at a secondary station, and the whole act of stopping at a station somewhere like Fort Lauderdale or West Palm Beach might add 3-4 minutes total to the travel time (if you count time lost accelerating and decelerating). As a result, you can have a train depart northbound from Miami every 20 minutes, stop in Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Port St. Lucie/Fort Pierce, Melbourne, then hit Orlando Airport, International Drive, Disney, Lakeland, and Tampa.
The time to get from Miami to Tampa would be about 2 hours more than flying, but (at least during peak times of the day), you could have a train departing every 20 minutes, and at least hourly the remainder of the day. Instead of having to plan your day around a half-dozen flights between Miami and Tampa, you could just show up at the station "whenever" (if you were willing to buy a more expensive ticket that wasn't tied to a specific time, with surcharge if you missed it) and get on the next train. With a departure every 30 minutes, that means there would statistically be a train leaving about 15 minutes after you arrived at the station -- whenever that happened to be. In the grand scheme of things, you'd probably get from Miami to Tampa in the same overall time, but without the stress and delay of having to arrive early and actively wait the entire trip (vs "just show up, get some food, and kick back with your laptop for 2-3 hours"). THAT is why high-speed rail has pretty much destroyed the market for regional air travel in every country where it exists. It doesn't necessarily save time or money over flying or driving, but it eliminates a huge amount of stress and uncertainty from travel.
Also, a lot of people don't realize that putting a high-speed rail station within ~25 miles of 80% of America's population doesn't mean running tracks to 80% of the land area. Build a mainline from Seattle to San Diego, then extend the Northeast Corridor south through Virginia and the Carolinas to Florida (through Jacksonville, ending up in Miami). Add spurs to Tampa through Orlando, to Birmingham through Atlanta, and to the NEC from Buffalo & Syracuse. Connect Dallas, Austin, and Houston. Guess what... you've just put a station within 25 miles of roughly 60% of America's population. Extend southward from Chicago to St. Louis, Birmingham, and New Orleans, continue west to Texas, and you're up to roughly 75%. Throw down a new 110mph single track with grade crossings dedicated to passenger trains connecting the Chicago line to California through Colorado, and you're up to 80%. I've simplified a bit, but that's pretty much the gist of it. The overwhelming majority of Americans actually live in a few well-defined bands that are only ~20-50 miles wide. Even cities like Los Angeles and Dallas-Ft. Worth are a lot more linear when you look ONLY at population distribution than most people realize. Check out nighttime pics of big cities taken from the ISS, and even cities like Los Angeles start to look shockingly linear (LA looks kind of like a lowercase 'y', f
It depends how you define "original things". I'd say Chinese companies have an *enormous* advantage over pretty much everyone on earth when it comes to highly-integrated value-engineered electronics. Partly, because they've spent lots of money acquiring the resources to do it, and partly because their domestic home market is so staggeringly huge, it's a lot easier for Chinese companies to spread around up-front tooling costs that would sink comparable projects in the US and Europe for all but the largest, most vertically-integrated companies (Apple, Siemens, etc).
Case in point: you can buy an entire media player on the street in Shenzhen for less than you'd pay for the LCD *alone* from any source in the US. Part of the reason is that some company in China will build a LCD whose on-glass silicon doesn't just contain a generic LCD controller... it contains the entire media player (google "Rockchip" if you need a specific example of such a company). If you needed a LCD for a one-off project, it's actually cheaper to buy one and repurpose it than to buy the bare LCD. The catch (and reason why there's still a market for things like a LCD that costs more than an entire media player) is that you can't assume that 25,000 identical media players are going to be available to buy next month, let alone 2 years from now. If you can't stockpile enough in advance to use for whatever purpose you have in mind and run out, you're SOL. In contrast, the bare LCDs will probably still be available a year or two from now (though the price of that specific LCD module will probably spike and stay high a few months down the road, until either the supply or demand for that specific module collapses and it either runs out or gets liquidated and is gone forever in any real quantity).
Where China shines is mass-produced highly-integrated electronic goodness. Where Japan, the US, and Europe still dominate is coture, smaller-quantity electronics for more adhoc purposes. In theory, China could soak up most of that market by making products a tiny bit less purpose-specific... but then, that media player some company will produce 25 million units of would cost 6 cents more, and nobody in China would buy it because a nearly-identical model would sell for a Yuan less at the store. Eliminate the 25 million Chinese consumers who'd have otherwise subsidized its costs and drive its economy of scale, and you're back to what it would cost to make it at a fab in the US, Taiwan, or Japan.
Interestingly, China has an entire semi-amateur industry that's sprung up around buying mass-produced electronic items and customizing them for aftermarket resale (a practice that would get you sued in the West, because it would be classified as patent infringement. I believe in China, patent licensing is treated as recursive in practice if not statute. In other words, in China, if you buy something whose patents were properly licensed, you can use it as a component to make something else, and all the patent licenses paid by the original manufacturer are still valid. In the US, you could be sued for infringement for buying a patented knife, removing it from its cheap plastic handle, mounting it in a new wood handle, and re-selling it (because in the US, patent licenses don't "pass through").
One difference: today, you're NAT'ing a real public IP address with a router over which you have direct control and can forward ports at will. If the NAT is being done by your ISP, and you're stuck NAT'ing a NAT'ed private IP address whose public IP is totally under the control of your ISP, things become enormously more complicated.
On the other hand, insofar as mobile devices go, NAT is almost a moot point, anyway. As far as I know, every EVDO and UMTS mobile phone on earth is effectively firewalled by carriers who won't forward inbound traffic anyway, so mobile phones might as *well* be NAT'ed since having a public IP address does them no good, anyway.
> Why would "every" site suddenly start requiring an advanced form of identity checking?
Because their lawyers told them it was an industry best-practice, and they'd be unreasonably exposed to risk from lawsuits if they didn't comply. With similar logic percolating down the chain, until anyone with a $9.95/month hosting account has to demand the same ID because the hosting companies TOS (dictated by the same band of lawyers) requires it.
Untrue. Plenty of people are life-long members of one party or another, and peer pressure and self-identity play no small part in it. If votes were a matter of public record, it would be nearly impossible for anyone with friends partly associated with politics to ever cross party lines. If the partisan lunacy in Florida (where even the Republicans are a half step away from a household revolution in Tallahassee) has taught us anything, it's that everyone suffers when parties are allowed to become more than ad-aggregators and a brand name that suggests a general bundle of beliefs, but is powerless to actually dictate *anything*.
I really, really hope Atlantis ends up inside a structure that's at least as strong as my house (confession: reinforced concrete, including the roof and second floor suspended slab, with 80mph large-missile impact-glass windows), and not on a display stand like a statue out in the open. In case anybody's forgotten, about 12 years ago (give or take) the entire east coast of Florida almost got shredded like grass under a weedeater by Hurricane Floyd (a huge category 4 hurricane whose strongest winds missed Florida by about 50 miles).
Really, we can all blame Mao. There's no glory in being #2, but people will still try their best to avoid ending up as #3. Thanks to the mess Mao created with "the Great Leap Forward" (which stopped China in its tracks for an entire generation), the Soviet Union had no real incentive to get to the moon once it was obvious that the US would beat them to it, and the US had no real incentive to keep going to the moon once it was obvious that the Soviet Union wasn't even going to waste its time or money bothering.
The (mainly US-influenced) doctrine that "nobody" can "own the moon" (or even legitimately own a small, well-defined and populated part of it) is part of the problem, too. Had the US staked a claim to a 100km area surrounding each landing site, and pledged to respect similar claims from other nations, the late 70s and 80s would have seen a mad international space race to plant flags on the moon -- a race that would have almost certainly included countries like Britain (most likely forming its own Commonwealth Space Agency that included Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries), France (probably being the dominant member of what ended up being the European Space Agency, but without Britain), India, Pakistan (possibly as a part of Britain's CSA), China, and everyone else.
The point when things started getting ugly would have been the late 80s/90s, when there were thousands of flags planted, but the main defenders of those claims were lawyers rather than armed soldiers on the moon. The US, Soviet Union, Britain/CSA, and France/ESA would have probably never challenged each other's claims in public, but you can bet there would have been lots of screaming and angry speeches at the UN if someone like Indonesia staked a claim for 100 square miles of land claimed by one of them in the late 70s, then never looked at again once the claim formalities were taken care of.At that point, the UN would have probably settled on a policy that required demonstration of active settlement and use to challenge adverse possession, and automatically allowed intruders to keep a small chunk of any claim that was undefended when they arrived.
Would it have been a good thing? Maybe, maybe not. But there would almost certainly have been a lot more people living and working on the moon than there are today (zero).
Dude, I hate to break it to you, but Google knows more about you, what you like, buy, are interested in, and do, than you do. It's a damn good thing they try to not be evil (even if in reality, the occasionally end up being like the US in Team America: World Police), because they'd have the Devil himself running scared if they were ever bought out by a Wall Street hedge fund, or went bankrupt and had their data purchased by companies like Experian.
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Laptops could use Micro-USB chargers as a power supply standard... if you didn't mind connecting at least 6-12 1.7-Amp (RMS, not peak) chargers to achieve it.
A single max-powered USB charger (with data pins shorted together) can supply 1.7 amperes at 5v, or 8.5 watts.
A typical laptop needs ~85 watts (10-20 watts less for some subnotebooks and netbooks, quite a bit more for a 17" Alienware/Clevo with desktop xeon and three drives doing RAID5). Do the math, then add a bit more because 10 USB chargers electronically switched into series and parallel to convert the power to something else aren't going to be anywhere near 100% efficient. And this ASSUMES high-powered micro-USB *chargers*, not wimpy unpowered USB ports drooling out a measly 100mA (a.k.a., 1/2 watt)
> You realize that all laptop power supplies out there currently handle 120 to 240w already?
I have a Thinkpad T61. It can huff and wheeze with a 65-watt supply, but NEEDS a 95-watt supply in order to charge the battery at normal speed while it's powered up. Otherwise, it will basically tread water, and barely treat the battery like a built-in UPS. I know this for a fact, because it came with the 95-watt supply, but I've been agonizing over Lenovo's new 65-watt PowerHub with built in powered USB hub (damn, why can't they make a 95-watt version of THAT?!?) which is technically compatible, if you can live with having to actually shut down the computer to actually CHARGE the battery.
Note: this is Lenovo's work of art: http://www.amazon.com/ThinkPad-65W-Adapter-USB-Hub/dp/tech-data/B0044KR91U
Other manufacturers make laptop power supplies that can supply 5v USB power for charging, but Lenovo's is the only one that's actually a real, honest to god powered USB hub.
The interest rates might be low, but if costs -- including wages -- are following deflation, your own salary will be decreasing in bitcoins-per-year as well. Buying a 50,000 bitcoin house you can barely afford at 30 is semi sane if there's a reasonable expectation that you'll be making at least as much money 20 years later. Buying a 50,000-bitcoin house you can barely afford at 30 would be financial suicide if you were likely to be making half as many bitcoins per year when you're 50 as you are now. Even if a meal at McDonalds that costs .5 bitcoin today costs .1 bitcoin then, you'd still be paying off a 50,000-bitcoin debt.
That's the big reason why deflation is so deadly -- it utterly destroys the financial viability of anything that involves long-term financing. Taking on any kind of debt that extends more than a year or two into the future borders upon financial suicide. If the dollar were to inflate 50% over the next 10 years, and wages generally kept pace (not an unreasonable expectation, at least among middle-class employees with college degrees), that would be awesome for quite a few people, because it would mean the homes that are hopelessly underwater now would be affordable at their original mortgaged prices (restoring mobility to America's labor force... if you can't sell your house because it's underwater, you're less likely to relocate regardless of promised benefit), and their student loan payments would go from consuming 20% of net income to 10% or 5% (since student loan interest rates are fixed after refinancing, and usually pretty low).
It sounds nice to cry for poor, thrifty savers who struggle to save, but the fact is, just about everyone in America who isn't a multi- multi- millionaire (or living in a cardboard box) owes way more money on things like student loans, a mortgage, and and car loan than they'll earn in several years. The loss in value to a few thousand dollars in savings is nothing compared to the net reduction in debt they'd enjoy if their income doubled while their debt payments remained relatively constant (of course, anyone whose debt was primarily infinitely-variable credit card debt would be screwed, but they're screwed under just about any scenario, anyway). And those who DO save can still come out OK, as long as they make smart investments instead of sticking their life savings in a coffee can in the kitchen or under the mattress.
High inflation is bad, if only because it forces people to spend unproductive time managing their money and endlessly banking, but even small amounts of deflation are dangerous, and significant amounts are absolutely deadly to any modern economy. When the most profitable thing you can do with a million dollars is lock it in a safe and forget about it for a year, because anything you could possibly invest in today will be worth less money a year from now, economies collapse.
> Unless someone perfects alchemy and turns lead into gold or synthesizes gold.
I don't have a reference handy, but I recall one of my college professors telling us point blank that sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, scientists in both the US and Soviet Union DID successfully (and independently) synthesize gold (Sandia & Dubna, I believe). Unfortunately, as the byproduct of a nuclear fission, it was a) radioactive, and b) if done commercially, would have cost several orders of magnitude more to make (as an intentional byproduct of nuclear fission, then separate out the non-radioactive isotopes) than it was literally worth.
You know what's really interesting? If you read the bitcoin forums, you can read post after post by grumpy Americans who angrily swear the Dollar is going to collapse and be trampled upon by China... then read even MORE replies by people FROM China who tell them they're completely insane, and that Chinese investors view US Dollars as the safest stores of value you can buy. The fact is, if the Dollar goes down the toilet, it's going to take most of the world's economy with it. Why? Network effects and nearly infinite liquidity. You can spend US Dollars on real goods and services just about anywhere in the world. That ALONE adds staggering amounts of value, REGARDLESS of what the Fed might or might not do.
Somebody in Latin America doesn't really care whether the value of the Dollar changes by 1% or 5% relative to the Peso or whatever their local currency might be, because the exchange rate is largely *irrelevant*. When they want to buy a new imported top of the line Android phone, they're going to pay WAY less if they show up at the store with US dollars, or if they pay for it with a dollar-denominated credit card, than they'll pay if they insist on purchasing it with their own currency. Why? Because the store paid for it in Dollars. If customers pay in Pesos, the store has to factor the exchange rate and currency-conversion fees into the price and profit margin. If customers pay in Dollars, the accounting ends up being easier, and most of those Dollars can go right back to Asia to pay for the NEXT batch of high-end Android phones. The manufacturers in Asia put those dollars into the bank, so others can borrow them and buy oil from the Saudis (once again, for Dollars). The Saudis turn around, take the dollars, and buy skyscapers in Asia, and the cycle repeats. For businesses that import things like electronic goods, it's cheaper to just trade in Dollars as much as possible than to screw with currency conversions between arbitrary currencies.
Put another way, the value of the Dollar has very little to do with academic concepts of economic theory, and everything to do with the fact that you can pretty much spend them anywhere on anything, and buy things at a discount when you do. The dollar is genuinely (and almost universally) useful as a medium of exchange. If it loses 80% of its value against the Euro over the next decade or two, and it costs $10 to buy one Euro, people will still be walking around with pockets full of dollars... they'll just be carrying 5-10 times as many.
> At least a token lets me play Skee-ball. Are there any skee-ball machines that take bitcoins?
There's probably one somewhere in Silicon Valley, existing mainly for the amusement and satisfaction of a dotcom billionaire, but you can only play it if you have an Android phone with the proper app installed, already spent a week getting funds from your checking account to Dwolla to MtGox to buy the bitcoins, and you're willing to wait 20-40 minutes for the transaction to be published and verified before the machine releases the balls and allows you to actually play ;-)
Well... actually, it's anybody's guess what it's worth right now, or what they'll be worth 24 hours after MtGox is back online. My guess is that they'll end up somewhere around $5-10. The only reason the price dropped to 1c was because someone basically stole a half-million bitcoins and dumped them all simultaneously on a market that normally would only have enough buyers (at its recent trading prices) to buy a tiny fraction of that amount.
If you showed up at a flea market (far from the nearest ATM), set up a table, and proceeded to liquidate a million $1 bills at whatever price people were willing and able to pay in order to liquidate every single one of them within 20 minutes, with a rule that people could only buy them with crisp $20 bills that were devoid of external markings, tears, folds, or other signs of use (roughly simulating the difficulty of getting funds into and out of MtGox, starting with the week it takes to get your checking account verified with Dwolla and for the funds to make the trip from your checkign account to Dwolla to Mtgox), after a while THEIR price would probably fall to a penny or two per dollar bill, too. You'd have lots of people who WANTED to buy them at 80 or 90 cents apiece, but because you were determined to sell them instantly, at any price, and only to buyers able to pay immediately with money they had on hand in a specific form, the price would crash to almost nothing.
There's nothing inherently fraudulent about Bitcoins themselves. If I sold you 10 Bitcoins on the premise that they were the cash equivalent of $200, it would be fraud, because there's no guarantee you could convert them into $200, $100, or even a penny at any specific moment in time. On the other hand, if you think a bitcoin is a fair exchange for a large pizza, and you're happy to accept one from me in exchange for it, that's a private matter entirely between two consenting adults.
That said, I've become less enthused about them over the past couple of weeks. Originally, I thought they were a cool way for anyone with a web site to accept micropayments without the cost and ceremony of dealing with credit cards, but now I'm inclined to say most people would be better off just using Dwolla and skipping the Bitcoins. In fact, Dwolla is likely to end up as the big Bitcoin winner, simply BECAUSE lots of people are going to use them to get dollars into and out of MtGox, and realize at some point along the way that Dwolla itself is a perfectly good alternative to Paypal that solves most of the complaints people have had about Paypal that motivated them to look at Bitcoins in the first place.
AFAIK, if you're doing development involving Java tag libraries and designers who aren't directly involved with the development of those taglibs, there's exactly one application that can deal with them nicely: Dreamweaver. With Dreamweaver, the taglib developer can create renderers for Dreamweaver that will allow the designer to use them interactively and seamlessly. Dreamweaver allows you to thunk and fake dynamic content so those designers can deal with it as though it were a native part of HTML/CSS itself. Of course, the consequence is that the developer will end up spending twice as much time creating the renderers for Dreamweaver, and there's no guarantee that the output of the renderers will actually be in sync with reality, but in the grand scheme of things, if what you want is a seamless partnership between a creative designer who's not necessarily a programmer, and J2EE developer who's not necessarily a designer, and enable them to work as a team without constantly stepping on each other's feet, there's basically one choice: Dreamweaver. With custom extensions and a really fast PC, it can do incredible things. The main problems are the fact that it's ungodly expensive, and the partnership I just described requires programming talent that few organizations are likely to have (you aren't going to hire someone just out of college, or a consultant from India, to cheaply implement that kind of development environment).
> Inflation itself has been the means of stealing from the poor to give to the rich.
I'd argue it's the exact opposite. Poor people spend money within days of getting it out of necessity, so they have no savings to lose value. Extremely wealthy people, on the other hand, potentially stand to lose staggering amounts of money when inflation diminishes its buying power. It could be argued that inflation is what forces extremely wealthy individuals to put their money to work by lending it out and investing it, instead of simply locking it in a safe and forgetting about it for 40 years.
The biggest problem with deflation is the fact that it absolutely destroys the economic viability of anything with a supply chain measured in years, or possibly even months. If currency deflates by more in 12 months than you could earn by purchasing raw materials and labor now, and making products that will be sold 12 months from now, you're better off not investing it and manufacturing those products at all. That's why inflation in moderation is a tolerable evil, but deflation to just about any significant degree is absolutely deadly. When putting money in a mattress and forgetting about it for a year becomes more profitable than just about any alternative, you no longer have an economy.
> You're more delusional than I am if you think the phone carriers will allow VOIP to replace their calling service on their cell networks.
Maybe I've been a Sprint customer with "Unlimited Everything" service for too long, but honestly, why would a carrier like Sprint even *care* if you wanted to use Skype for voice calls if, as a practical matter, their incremental profit from one minute of voice call use from 99.999% of their customers is negative (because the customer already paid for 450 or unlimited airtime minutes between 7am and 7pm, and each actual minute of voice-call time made to a phone on a different network requires payment of termination fees by Sprint)?
If anything, a carrier like Sprint would stand to benefit financially by PARTNERING with Skype and selling them a few bits of the control data that gets sent every time the phone polls the tower for incoming calls or text messages, so Skype could THEN politely sleep in the background and wait to be told there's an incoming call (by Sprint) instead of having to actively poll for it on top of the phone's existing activity.
Keep in mind that China is a country with 4x the population of the US, and has at least the same percentage of corrupt politicians with ties into organized crime who can get the police, firewall-maintainers, and everyone else to look the other way when necessary.
Are there lots of attacks coming from China? Absolutely. Do the flourish there because the government is unwilling or unable to meaningfully fight them? Sure. Does China have its own government espionage agency with more or less the same goals as the CIA? Of course. Is there actually an official division of China's government tasked with waging cyber warfare against the US? I doubt it. Cash and corruption are perfectly good explanations.
A favorite scenario thrown around Slashdot is China using the internet to sabotage America's financial system... totally overlooking the fact that Chinese investors *own* an increasingly huge chunk of America's financial system, and their hands go as deeply into the pockets of China's leaders as those of their counterparts in the US.
This doesn't mean that the US should passively tolerate it, but rather illustrates that calls for a military department of cyber warfare is totally the wrong approach because it assumes the wrong reasons, the wrong motives, and would ultimately be gearing up to fight the wrong war against the wrong people (while the ones really causing problems slip under the radar and keep doing it).
> Why the hell would anyone who knows enough to DIY pay $4 for a 5 cent part?
Because paying $4 means you can have it NOW, on Friday night, Saturday, or Sunday, instead of having to wait at least a day or two for it to arrive. If it's Friday night and you just fried something, that $4 5-cent part just saved your weekend.
One sensible inventory compromise: instead of spreading out a thin inventory across hundreds of stores, designate a few stores per metro area as regional parts superstores that stock "everything" a hardcore Arduino enthusiast or bot-builder would be likely to need on short notice over the course of a weekend. Using South Florida as an example, I'd start with store #1 at Sawgrass Mills (less than an hour away from ~90% of Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties as long as it's not rush hour). I'd put stores #2 and #3 at Dolphin Mall (~6 miles west of Miami International Airport, roughly 20-30 minutes from most of Dade County) and near I-95 & Palm Beach International Airport. (ok, those are actually the locations where I'd put hypothetical Fry's stores, but it's the same market). Later, if I could add one or two more stores, I'd put #4 at Aventura, and #5 somewhere off I-95 between Pompano Beach and Oakland Park (at which point most of South Florida would have a store within a 15-20 minute drive).
Of course, there's my wet-dream fantasy: a PC board milling machine at those stores where you could swipe your credit card, plug in a USB drive, select the Eagle CAD files, and watch it mill your board (say, $10 for a 2" x 4" board, $20 for a 3" x 5" board, and $25 for a 4" x 6" board) on the spot.
One thing Radio shack needs to do, and do NOW: start selling Circuit Cellar, Nuts & Volts, Servo, and every magazine like them that it can get its hands on... and work closely with all of them to get them to publish projects built from parts available at the local Radio Shack store (working both ways... adding inventory to accommodate upcoming projects likely to be popular, and encouraging them to use the parts they already sell when possible). Then, hire Joe Pardue to walk in the footsteps of Forrest Mims, and write his own series of books full of projects that can be built entirely from parts available at Radio Shack.
The truth is, the group that used to be into ham radio never really went away... it's just that Radio Shack didn't notice that TODAY, that group builds robots and projects based on microcontrollers & FPGAs. Robots, in particular, are a goldmine for store like Radio Shack. I can't think of any single hobby that gives 20/30/40-something guys more of an excuse to burn through cash like there's no tomorrow. PC components might be cutthroat, with negative retail profit margins, but check out the markup on something like a Robotis AX-12 digital servo... ~$45 mail order. For each one. A decent 'bot is going to have at least a half dozen. A biped? About a dozen. A stair-climbing hexapod? Good god, I think the credit card machine just melted ;-)
With a CDMA phone, you aren't connected to "a" tower. CDMA users all of its towers as a regionally-distributed diversity-tuning network It's a tiny detail that's caused no small amount of grief to Android developers circa 1.5 who were tasked with trying to make CDMA "look" like a fake GSM phone to Android. From what I recall, most algorithms just picked the towerid with the highest SNR and called it a day, occasionally throwing in some extra logic to smooth out moment-to-moment variance and add some inertia. On the other side, CDMA phones in most metro areas have a tower radius of about 2km, and few people would regard the warning of a tornado on the ground 5 miles away as a "false alarm". In fact, one could almost argue that the likelihood of recipients being annoyed if the danger being warned about isn't literally 500 feet away is probably a good litmus test for whether or not the message should be sent via the system. Tornado warnings? Absolutely, this is the gold standard for a system like this (tornadoes can be difficult to spot at night or in driving rain, fast-moving, and are enormously dangerous to the public when they occur). Earthquakes? Even if the message were sent the moment a shockwave were confirmed 10 miles away, you'd barely have time to pick up the phone before it hit anyway. The only real benefit of it in that situation is that you'd be more likely to have the phone in your hand as you got buried under rubble, so you could use it to call for help. Hurricanes? Total, complete waste of time. Even in a pre-technological era, people knew a hurricane was nearby more than a day before landfall. A hurricane "looks" very different from a regular thunderstorm as it approaches, and the prequel is unmistakable to anybody who's been through more than 2 or 3 of them. I'd personally be pissed as hell if I lived on the mainland and got a 2am "Emergency Evacuation" warning for a hurricane making landfall in 24 hours (and only slightly less pissed if I got it at 9am instead). Amber alerts? It's a good thing they can be disabled, because otherwise I'd be voiding the warranty with a soldering iron or hot air rework tool as my first task after buying the phone.
> Without government the Internet would have been anyway, just like telegraph was and telephone was and radio was and TV was. Yes... the internet today would be like Viewtron was, but faster.
I personally use Pendaflex 5394 legal-size hanging tri-way folders. Basically, it has a folded paperboard divider attached that divides it into three expandable sections.
I use one folder per 'genre', with sections for "this year", "last year" and "anytime else".
My genres can basically be divided into two categories: "dead" and "useful", with two or more sub-categories per genre. The folders are all the same color (green), but the labels are color-coded.
"Dead" are things I'm filing because my parents told me I should, but I'm unlikely to ever look at or care about again. Bills in general fall into this category. I used to have one folder, but recently split the category into two: things specifically related to credit cards, and everything else (mainly because credit cards were accounting for 2/3 the volume, and everything else was getting lost in the clutter)
"Useful" things are papers I might actually need to look at again over the next year or so. Things related to insurance, tax-preparation, etc. Right now, I have 4 such folders: tax-preparation, house/car/insurance, cats (one of my cats has asthma) and "everything else".
Elsewhere, I have hanging folders with the same genre names for each past year. Sometime around January 1, I move everything from the "last year" section into its own folder in the big filing cabinet, move everything from the "this year" section to the "last year" section, and might dig through the "some other time" section if I'm feeling like it.
Why this works for me:
My old filing method can loosely be described as two boxes: "stuff" and "old stuff", I'd open bills, deal with them, and throw them in the "stuff to file" box... where they'd stay forever. Every couple of years, the "stuff to file" box would get full. I'd start digging through it planning to weed out everything but the latest stuff, then get bored halfway through and just throw it all in the "really old stuff" box. About 10 years after college, I had about 5 such bankers' boxes full of stuff that was technically supposed to be filed, organized roughly by year. It worked surprisingly well, but once I bought a house and started getting torrents of papers that had to be filed, I accumulated almost an entire box of papers in less than a year (previously, it took 2-3 years to get to that point). Worse, I was starting to spend lots of time digging through the boxes. So, I came up with a better idea.
Plan B entailed having two boxes for "current" stuff -- one for things I knew I'd probably never look at again, and one for things I thought I might need again. This strategy worked surprisingly well for a year, but became unwieldy early in year 2 because I THEN had to deal with five banker's boxes of papers: this year's dead and useful papers, last year's dead and useful papers, and a box to throw everything else into (because I knew, deep down, that I would never, ever file them properly, and the alternative was a pile on my desk that would sit forever). So, I spent some time thinking of ways to distill its essence and still keep my filing minimal and manageable, but a little more portable than five boxes that were all mostly empty.
That was how I came up with my current system. Everything still gets filed by "this year", "last year", or "anytime", but I now have a place to explicitly put things that previously fell through the cracks... things that were kind of "timeless" go in "anytime" as well. The "anytime" category actually ended up being useful in another way. Even though it means I technically have to look in two places to find something I think might be related to a specific year, it also means that the few papers I really, truly DID need to access again tend to stay in the main filing area (where I can get at them easily).
The biggest problem I had was switching to legal-size folders. Why legal-size? Because 99% of the bills I get are legal size. I can barely even remember the last time I got a bill that was small enough to fit in a letter-sized folder without having to
The problem in China is partly one of overzealous (cough) "value-engineering", but it's also one of safety margins. For the most part, the trains and tracks run at 300+mph in China are identical to trains and tracks run at 186-220mph. The difference is, the trains in China have almost no margin for error. If something goes even slightly wrong, Very Very Bad Things Will Happen. The same thing happening in Europe (with slower trains) would barely be noticed, because it would be well within the safety margins. Trackside debris that would be knocked away or unceremoniously crushed at 180-220mph could tear a gash through the underside of a 300mph train, or even derail it. One reason why Japan has so few accidents is because JR is absolutely neurotic about inspecting, and re-inspecting its tracks throughout the day, all day, every day. If you want 300mph trains, you should probably have robot scouts running a couple of miles ahead of every train scanning the tracks for debris and damage (actually, I'm surprised such things DON'T exist; it seems like a fairly straightforward engineering exercise to build a robot that runs on the same tracks, and is basically a big scanner that compares what's there now with what used to be there, and gets humans to visually make a judgment call when necessary).
It depends how far you want to travel. High-speed rail's niche of awesomeness is trips that are ~200-400 miles for suburbanites, maybe as few as ~70-100 miles for urban residents. It's the distance we all hate -- farther than anybody sane wants to drive, but not far enough to be worth the misery of air travel.
Trains have a few huge advantages over planes for regional travel. For a plane, landing at an airport to drop off and pick up passengers is a huge, time-consuming ceremony that might be 15 minutes under the most ideal circumstances imaginable (small-town airport where plane can land, taxi directly to terminal, spend 2 minutes getting passengers on and off, and be heading back to the runway), and easily kills 2 hours at any major airport. So, a city pair with insane amounts of travel (like New York-Miami) might average a flight or two per hour, but a lesser pair (say, Atlanta and Fort Lauderdale) might have to make do with 3 or 4 flights per day, max. In contrast, a train only needs a minute or two for a stop at a secondary station, and the whole act of stopping at a station somewhere like Fort Lauderdale or West Palm Beach might add 3-4 minutes total to the travel time (if you count time lost accelerating and decelerating). As a result, you can have a train depart northbound from Miami every 20 minutes, stop in Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Port St. Lucie/Fort Pierce, Melbourne, then hit Orlando Airport, International Drive, Disney, Lakeland, and Tampa.
The time to get from Miami to Tampa would be about 2 hours more than flying, but (at least during peak times of the day), you could have a train departing every 20 minutes, and at least hourly the remainder of the day. Instead of having to plan your day around a half-dozen flights between Miami and Tampa, you could just show up at the station "whenever" (if you were willing to buy a more expensive ticket that wasn't tied to a specific time, with surcharge if you missed it) and get on the next train. With a departure every 30 minutes, that means there would statistically be a train leaving about 15 minutes after you arrived at the station -- whenever that happened to be. In the grand scheme of things, you'd probably get from Miami to Tampa in the same overall time, but without the stress and delay of having to arrive early and actively wait the entire trip (vs "just show up, get some food, and kick back with your laptop for 2-3 hours"). THAT is why high-speed rail has pretty much destroyed the market for regional air travel in every country where it exists. It doesn't necessarily save time or money over flying or driving, but it eliminates a huge amount of stress and uncertainty from travel.
Also, a lot of people don't realize that putting a high-speed rail station within ~25 miles of 80% of America's population doesn't mean running tracks to 80% of the land area. Build a mainline from Seattle to San Diego, then extend the Northeast Corridor south through Virginia and the Carolinas to Florida (through Jacksonville, ending up in Miami). Add spurs to Tampa through Orlando, to Birmingham through Atlanta, and to the NEC from Buffalo & Syracuse. Connect Dallas, Austin, and Houston. Guess what... you've just put a station within 25 miles of roughly 60% of America's population. Extend southward from Chicago to St. Louis, Birmingham, and New Orleans, continue west to Texas, and you're up to roughly 75%. Throw down a new 110mph single track with grade crossings dedicated to passenger trains connecting the Chicago line to California through Colorado, and you're up to 80%. I've simplified a bit, but that's pretty much the gist of it. The overwhelming majority of Americans actually live in a few well-defined bands that are only ~20-50 miles wide. Even cities like Los Angeles and Dallas-Ft. Worth are a lot more linear when you look ONLY at population distribution than most people realize. Check out nighttime pics of big cities taken from the ISS, and even cities like Los Angeles start to look shockingly linear (LA looks kind of like a lowercase 'y', f
It depends how you define "original things". I'd say Chinese companies have an *enormous* advantage over pretty much everyone on earth when it comes to highly-integrated value-engineered electronics. Partly, because they've spent lots of money acquiring the resources to do it, and partly because their domestic home market is so staggeringly huge, it's a lot easier for Chinese companies to spread around up-front tooling costs that would sink comparable projects in the US and Europe for all but the largest, most vertically-integrated companies (Apple, Siemens, etc).
Case in point: you can buy an entire media player on the street in Shenzhen for less than you'd pay for the LCD *alone* from any source in the US. Part of the reason is that some company in China will build a LCD whose on-glass silicon doesn't just contain a generic LCD controller... it contains the entire media player (google "Rockchip" if you need a specific example of such a company). If you needed a LCD for a one-off project, it's actually cheaper to buy one and repurpose it than to buy the bare LCD. The catch (and reason why there's still a market for things like a LCD that costs more than an entire media player) is that you can't assume that 25,000 identical media players are going to be available to buy next month, let alone 2 years from now. If you can't stockpile enough in advance to use for whatever purpose you have in mind and run out, you're SOL. In contrast, the bare LCDs will probably still be available a year or two from now (though the price of that specific LCD module will probably spike and stay high a few months down the road, until either the supply or demand for that specific module collapses and it either runs out or gets liquidated and is gone forever in any real quantity).
Where China shines is mass-produced highly-integrated electronic goodness. Where Japan, the US, and Europe still dominate is coture, smaller-quantity electronics for more adhoc purposes. In theory, China could soak up most of that market by making products a tiny bit less purpose-specific... but then, that media player some company will produce 25 million units of would cost 6 cents more, and nobody in China would buy it because a nearly-identical model would sell for a Yuan less at the store. Eliminate the 25 million Chinese consumers who'd have otherwise subsidized its costs and drive its economy of scale, and you're back to what it would cost to make it at a fab in the US, Taiwan, or Japan.
Interestingly, China has an entire semi-amateur industry that's sprung up around buying mass-produced electronic items and customizing them for aftermarket resale (a practice that would get you sued in the West, because it would be classified as patent infringement. I believe in China, patent licensing is treated as recursive in practice if not statute. In other words, in China, if you buy something whose patents were properly licensed, you can use it as a component to make something else, and all the patent licenses paid by the original manufacturer are still valid. In the US, you could be sued for infringement for buying a patented knife, removing it from its cheap plastic handle, mounting it in a new wood handle, and re-selling it (because in the US, patent licenses don't "pass through").
WiiTuu
One difference: today, you're NAT'ing a real public IP address with a router over which you have direct control and can forward ports at will. If the NAT is being done by your ISP, and you're stuck NAT'ing a NAT'ed private IP address whose public IP is totally under the control of your ISP, things become enormously more complicated.
On the other hand, insofar as mobile devices go, NAT is almost a moot point, anyway. As far as I know, every EVDO and UMTS mobile phone on earth is effectively firewalled by carriers who won't forward inbound traffic anyway, so mobile phones might as *well* be NAT'ed since having a public IP address does them no good, anyway.
> Why would "every" site suddenly start requiring an advanced form of identity checking?
Because their lawyers told them it was an industry best-practice, and they'd be unreasonably exposed to risk from lawsuits if they didn't comply. With similar logic percolating down the chain, until anyone with a $9.95/month hosting account has to demand the same ID because the hosting companies TOS (dictated by the same band of lawyers) requires it.
Untrue. Plenty of people are life-long members of one party or another, and peer pressure and self-identity play no small part in it. If votes were a matter of public record, it would be nearly impossible for anyone with friends partly associated with politics to ever cross party lines. If the partisan lunacy in Florida (where even the Republicans are a half step away from a household revolution in Tallahassee) has taught us anything, it's that everyone suffers when parties are allowed to become more than ad-aggregators and a brand name that suggests a general bundle of beliefs, but is powerless to actually dictate *anything*.
I really, really hope Atlantis ends up inside a structure that's at least as strong as my house (confession: reinforced concrete, including the roof and second floor suspended slab, with 80mph large-missile impact-glass windows), and not on a display stand like a statue out in the open. In case anybody's forgotten, about 12 years ago (give or take) the entire east coast of Florida almost got shredded like grass under a weedeater by Hurricane Floyd (a huge category 4 hurricane whose strongest winds missed Florida by about 50 miles).
Really, we can all blame Mao. There's no glory in being #2, but people will still try their best to avoid ending up as #3. Thanks to the mess Mao created with "the Great Leap Forward" (which stopped China in its tracks for an entire generation), the Soviet Union had no real incentive to get to the moon once it was obvious that the US would beat them to it, and the US had no real incentive to keep going to the moon once it was obvious that the Soviet Union wasn't even going to waste its time or money bothering.
The (mainly US-influenced) doctrine that "nobody" can "own the moon" (or even legitimately own a small, well-defined and populated part of it) is part of the problem, too. Had the US staked a claim to a 100km area surrounding each landing site, and pledged to respect similar claims from other nations, the late 70s and 80s would have seen a mad international space race to plant flags on the moon -- a race that would have almost certainly included countries like Britain (most likely forming its own Commonwealth Space Agency that included Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries), France (probably being the dominant member of what ended up being the European Space Agency, but without Britain), India, Pakistan (possibly as a part of Britain's CSA), China, and everyone else.
The point when things started getting ugly would have been the late 80s/90s, when there were thousands of flags planted, but the main defenders of those claims were lawyers rather than armed soldiers on the moon. The US, Soviet Union, Britain/CSA, and France/ESA would have probably never challenged each other's claims in public, but you can bet there would have been lots of screaming and angry speeches at the UN if someone like Indonesia staked a claim for 100 square miles of land claimed by one of them in the late 70s, then never looked at again once the claim formalities were taken care of.At that point, the UN would have probably settled on a policy that required demonstration of active settlement and use to challenge adverse possession, and automatically allowed intruders to keep a small chunk of any claim that was undefended when they arrived.
Would it have been a good thing? Maybe, maybe not. But there would almost certainly have been a lot more people living and working on the moon than there are today (zero).
Dude, I hate to break it to you, but Google knows more about you, what you like, buy, are interested in, and do, than you do. It's a damn good thing they try to not be evil (even if in reality, the occasionally end up being like the US in Team America: World Police), because they'd have the Devil himself running scared if they were ever bought out by a Wall Street hedge fund, or went bankrupt and had their data purchased by companies like Experian.