There were estimates early in Tiger Woods' career that his earnings would eventually hit a billion. So might JK Rowling. Whether they do or not, you take the point. Modern technology does allow a single person to entertain literally billions of people, and they only have to pay a nominal sum to return the favour with a billion dollars. The net itself can basically eliminate all entertainment middlemen.
I'm still discovering what my 1998 vintage, 21" Compaq P1210 can do. The last version of Mint, I discovered it doesn't top out at 1600x1200 - a new resolution of 1792x1344 came up in the drivers, and it seems to work. I think the phosphor can show that many pixels, because fonts got smaller but still readable.
Now, in 1998 when it was made, I don't think you could get 1600x1200; quite the futureproofed product.
Also, I have to keep it; it doubles as a catwarmer
He's still good for entertainment some days. And he's got this one nailed: "Cyber War? Bring It On! : The so-called imminent threat of cyber-attack by U.S. enemies is another in a long line of fear-mongering propaganda lines."
>Compared to repairing existing roads, new road construction is the cheaper option, even with the costs of additional steps such as planning and grading. Repairs are incredibly expensive
...just not remotely true. As TFA indicates, "road repairs" (these days, we say "pavement management") can be effected for a quarter the cost of repairs that are needed if the pavement is allowed to deteriorate drastically, and a twentieth of the cost of full-on road replacement. I first ran across the diagram in the article in papers by Dr. Ralph Haas (now in his eighties, he's still a faculty member at U.Waterloo, and his *son* is another professor there, a first) back in the late 1970's.
Almost all new road construction is to upgrade capacity; in the case of suburbs, it's a free gift to the suburb, allowing them to have a near-to-nature dwelling but work in the Big City, which has the jobs that allow you to own a big house and a big SUV. That isn't some inherent evil; it can be strategic for the Big City and the State it's in. But it reaches a point of diminishing returns where greater public utility would come from spending the same amount on 20X as many lane-kilometres being repaired *before* they deteriorate enough to reduce safety and drastically increase repair costs.
Not necessarily. Suppose you use the "tax" revenue to fill a special fund that may ONLY be used to alleviate the same problem. Suppose you taxed the emission of fossil carbon into the air at $50/tonne. That would raise the cost of coal-generated electricity by about 5 cents per kWh, a sharp increase that would strongly push electricity generation towards non-carbon sources: nuclear, wind, hydro, etc.
But you fill the fund with the money and you also pay 50 dollars per tonne of atmospheric carbon *buried* in the ground: they estimate 50 bucks a tonne would make some "biochar" operations financially workable: they make electricity by burning trees and burying the charcoal.
The fund eventually reaches a steady state where as much carbon is being re-buried as extracted.
and $190/mo for "unlimited" though you'll want to check the fine print on that word. And speaking of loopholes, for this you get "up to" 250 Mb/s...where "up to" includes the number zero, not to mention every number lower than 250.
This isn't bad, but whatever is decent in Canadian services are due to regulation as the competition is pretty thin. There are perhaps two services in any large city, which amazingly have about the same prices and services.
As somebody who watches the costs on maintaining municipal networks of big heavy water and sewer pipes we have to expensively bury 10 feet down to stay below the frost line, it's painfully obvious what a bonanza providing Internet has been for these companies. The big bucks aren't in the little black boxes at the ends of wires that get upgraded every few years anyway; the big bucks are keeping all those thousands of miles of line maintained. And since we never got fibre-to-the-home out of the commercial world, they've been able to supply this whole new service down the same wires that paid for themselves in the 50's (for POTS copper wires) and the 80's (for TV coax cable).
Every city on the continent should have just declared Internet to be a municipal network, too important to the public to leave to private hands, and built FTTH that way a decade ago. There are private water/sewer utilities (many very good), but in most places, voters get very nervous at the very suggestion of privatizing water - because you gotta have it and privatized utilities in various places have doubled and tripled rates in the past.
A public utility is basically owned by its own customers and has no interest of its own, just theirs. Private utilities love gaming the pricing model. Every utility network has fixed costs (maintaining those lines cost the same whether more or less product is flowing through) and product-relative costs: the amount of water or power or gas or bytes. Netflix figures have shown that the real incremental cost of bandwidth in large bulk is only about 2-3 cents per gigabyte. Keeping a set of lines to you house running that are lightweight and do not have to be deeply buried costs maybe $25/month in most large cities. And if it's fibre you chose to bury rather than a 40 or 70 year-old network for a different kind of communication, everybody gets hundreds of MB/s. Then your cost is all about the number of gigabytes you care to buy - at a quarter or so per Blu-Ray grade movie. $25+ two movies a day = $40/month.
Instead, you get the fixed and product costs blended together into $110 per month and a bandwidth cap. Note the healthy profit.
It's a very clear article about the one course he took. At no point does he claim it a general critique of the medium. That's being propagated by the/. headline on the article.
I'm not sure what the larger lesson, if any, is at all - except the old standard, "Content is King". Cool new technology and celebrity professor alike are worthless if not presented with a well-written, well-rehearsed, well-produced content. Combine the production values of, not so much million-dollar-a-minute national TV ads, but just the production values of local TV news - where a team of several work all day on each half-hour produced - and it would be a whole different experience.
What bewilders me about most teaching is that it isn't ALL at least that good - what other content in our world is tested on live audiences so repetitively? There should by now be wide agreement on what kinds of topics and approaches and sequences work best for something like basic stats.
The question is asked in isolation, as if you could make me The Highlander or something. (My favourite line on that is from the last of those movies, where one 400-year-old lady complains about "the unending sameness of it all" - not bored enough for suicide, but still, pretty bored).
In practice, it's hard to see how it could happen for me without happening to everybody. And THAT presents some problems:
- growing up micromanaged by your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great grandparents...ad infinitum. Or at least, ad nauseam.
- financial system has to be completely reworked. As it is, you can work for as little as 30 years and, if diligent and cheap, save up enough that the interest alone can provide food/clothing/shelter at least. So, without changes, everybody works for 30 years and loafs for 300...or 3000? Less than 1% of society at work? We'll need the Singularity to turn us into Iain Banks' "Culture" first so AI does everything and nobody really has to work.
- Speaking of culture, it would never change. How exactly would you bump aside those multi-centurians from positions of power in which they would constantly oppose all change? And science is part of culture - remember Niels Bohr's opinion that new ideas don't really defeat the old, the proponents of the old ideas just die off. Change would become glacial as kids are raised by the nine generations before them, with very old values...and go on to propagate those centuries-old values for centuries more.
Speaking of The Culture, there's a moving scene in Bank's Culture novel, "Look to Windward" of a citizen choosing to, if not die, become a disembodied and unconscious mind in storage with instructions to wake him up in time for the Heat Death of the Universe....or reincarnate him as an especially nubile cheerleader if his ball team ever wins the big Cup. (The host of the ceremony remarks that the Heat Death is more likely to happen first). An astonished tourist is surprised to see a citizen who could be kept young and healthy in a fantastically diverse and rich Culture forever choosing to fade away. His response is that, after 400 years, he's done all he can enjoy, that even seeing new and amazing things has gotten routine.
Having toured a lot of Europe and reached the stage where one more goddam Bourbon palace or one more goddam mighty cathedral mostly makes my feet hurt at the thought of trudging through them....the variances between them being fairly minor unless you're really into history and architecture...I can at least imagine that happening with everything once you're talking about a number of really well-filled-in centuries.
Between that factor, and the societal issues I mention at top, I think "a few centuries" - leaving the definition of "a few" up to the individual taste, is probably it for individuals and certainly for human society. Both were designed around a certain environment, and while there's lots of give and overdesign in both systems, there is not an infinite amount of stretch in the designs. At some point, most people would realize one day that they were *trying* to think up new travels, new relationships, new hobbies, new fields of study...and had been doing so for as long as they could remember; and a sense of desperation would set in.
My most cherished possessions are books that have come down through three generations from a great-grandfather.
I wouldn't count on any e-publisher catering to your desire to pass your "possessions" on; indeed, they may finally come out and state it plainly that you're just renting the content. If prodded on the issue that you'd value the ability to pass them on, they'll probably say something to the effect that that this would create real problems for them - since people would use the mechanism to pass books from person to person weeks apart, letting 10 kids in a classroom all read one copy of The Hunger Games - whereas the "legitimate" usage of passing them on at death is not valued by most buyers, as its just too far in the future.
Ironic, that viewpoint, since they also claim that authors need 100 years of copyright AFTER their own death, as they value that so terribly much, without it, they'll never write the book.
Remember the movie (or remember the references to it in "Throw Momma From the Train") where two strangers agree to kill each other's targets? No connection between victim and killer.
If you can have ONE buddy that NOBODY else knows about, you just go stay at his house. You agree to do the same for him. Since both your odds of needing the service are about a zillion to one, it's a cheap promise to make. You just have to pick the right guy who will actually come through for you - and not squeal when doing so.
This creates the problem of making that good a friend without ever corresponding with each other over any electronic network, now that it seems prudent to assume that "Total Information Awareness" has actually been implemented and that giant NSA data centre is hoovering up all e-mail. It would be better to never even phone each other.
For the true paranoid, add the problem that just joking about it over beers with another soccer dad during the kids practice and exchanging addresses and promises might not be distant enough.
I'm reverting to fiction here, but it's conceivable that the "Memoirs of an Invisible Man" scenario could happen to you, since you're being very paranoid to start with. In the book (not the Chevy Chase movie), the Invisible Man has a well-funded and relentless secret organization spending months and years trying to find him. He methodically thinks of the least-connected-to-him person possible, whom he can still find. He calls this guy he spent part of a summer working with in high school and hasn't seen in over 10 years - and, yes, that guy had been called by the government. Called upon physically, they poked around a bit while doing a "security check for a sensitive job offer".
So to find your Paranoia Buddy, you'd want to go through a couple of "degrees of separation" - ask that other soccer dad to recommend a friend *he* knows only a little, and not through electronics - and then maybe ask THAT guy for a recommendation. Or just do your buddy-shopping on the web, through whatever level of anonymizer you imagine trustworthy.
You can also have "paranoia buddies" that ARE connected to you, but only for resources, not a place to stay. You could trade copies of car keys with a friend and basically steal his car. Yes, by a few days later, your government tormentors would find him and be told that his car did disappear, but he didn't see you and has no idea where you are. That gives you a car for perhaps a day - long enough to be a thousand miles away in some random direction. If your unfindable buddy has a garage, they can't even find the car. Indeed, you could actually see him - he can cheerfully tell police that, yes, he stopped by, borrowed my car, gave me a cheque in return for $1000 cash, because you were a victim of identity theft and lost your keys and cards in the bargain - nothing illegal about him doing that, and he really does know nothing more.
These scenarios in movies are generally about a Man Alone - much more dramatic - but real spy stories emphasize that building up a network of (quiet) friends is a spy's best set of resources.
Thanks. I didn't mean coal was safe, just that if you can stand coal, you can definitely stand uranium.
Coal is so bad, it's incredible anybody puts up any fuss about the poisonousness of nuclear waste - an estimated 24,000 lives lost in America per year from breathing issues alone...that's before you get into the tons of mercury dumped into the air every year by coal plants.
I'm not sure what 2 even means; "hard to mine?" Lots of things are hard - try raising kids. In economic terms, "hard" just means "expensive". It's either affordable or it isn't.
In context of the total cost of nuclear power, it's been getting expensive and rare lately because of soaring *construction* costs, not fuel costs, since fuel costs are a single-digit percentage of the whole; it's almost all about paying off the multi-billion-dollar mortgage on the plant. Even before this discovery, the Japanese believed they could extract uranium from seawater for a few hundred dollars per kg - that's several times the current price, but should we "run out of uranium" (i.e. nothing but "hard" places left), then a ceiling will be put on the price, since it would take many centuries of "mining the sea" for the concentration to decline.
Before that happens, of course, it'll become affordable to re-process spent nuclear fuel, which means 97% of what is currently regarded as "waste" will become fuel again, because reprocessing costs 3X as much as mining new stuff. That 30:1 ratio will stretch out the supply a ways.
As for "dangerous", your own link to radon notes that new standards for mining procedure were enacted back in 1971. Most of the data on higher lung cancers and so forth come from those exposed some time ago, particularly Navaho uranium miners, where there were many allegations that racism prevented a more serious response to their concerns.
More recently you can run across comments like this one:
On June 18, 2004, the Saskatchewan Uranium Miners' Cohort Study Group released its report on a feasiblity study it had begun in 2002: "It concludes that it is not scientifically feasible to conduct a study of present and future miners who work in modern Saskatchewan uranium mines (1975 onward). Today’s Saskatchewan uranium miners have radon exposures that are between 100 and 1000 times lower than those of past uranium miners, such as miners from Beaverlodge, because of dose limits, improved mining techniques, and other radiation protection practices. Any higher-than-normal rates of lung cancer from such workplace exposures would be virtually impossible to measure. The feasibility study was completed in October 2003 and it was then reviewed by three internationally respected radiation researchers." [ http://www.wise-uranium.org/uhm.html ]
Simply, this is an engineering and economic issue. Proper safety procedure lowers the risks of mining hazardous materials (where do you think things like arsenic and mercury come from? Somebody has to extract and purify them...), and make the risks tolerable - at least as tolerable as coal mining, your only practical alternative...and they also increase the cost of the extraction, which is then either affordable or it isn't. In the case of the nuclear industry, it would probably only a a tenth-cent per kWh to pay double or triple for uranium, so it's always going to be affordable to mine it - and dispose of it - safely.
The industry doesn't WANT to, any more than slaughterhouses want to pay a decent wage and up the cost of your hamburger by a nickel; but that's a "mere" matter of regulating the activities of very wealthy investors. Hard, (sorry) but possible.
1) Naomi Wolf has been following this case since 2010: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/post_1435_b_797188.html...long enough to look up all the Swedish law and case histories she doesn't already have, particularly since the article above contains the news: "Well, I was in Denmark in March of this year at a global gathering for women leaders on International Women's Day, and heard extensively from specialists in sex crime and victims' rights in Sweden."...that's March of 2010, nearly 30 months ago.
2) Unusual case, indeed, but nothing about its unusual-ness relates to whether the original complaint merited charges, not after the original prosecutor declined to charge and a prosecutor clear across Sweden took the very, ahem, unusual step of deciding to re-start a case from outside their normal jurisdiction (it's federal, so they *could*, but it's very...unusual).
3) She is hardly accusing "the entire Swedish political elite", she just notes the Rove connection without drawing conclusions. The Rove story has been very hot in Sweden, because Rove is considered by many to have won elections in his past by abuses of the legal system, including, it is said, planting a bug in his own office and getting an investigation of his client's opponent started on the basis of it; and involvement in the framing of an Alabama politician for corruption, as reported by 60 minutes: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/21/60minutes/main3859830.shtml
It's quite normal for Karl Rove to have no provable connection at all to things that happen when he's around - like his old law partner starting the swift boat organization. People have generally started to regard him as smoke and start looking for fire.
I might add - it's funny for you to regard Naomi Wolf as unable to comment on Swedish law because she's American, but regard as obvious that Swedish politicians would look to an American for electoral advice in their very different system (no state-level, no third branch of government, no electoral college - it's a constitutional monarchy with a parliament).
Sweden is a democracy, can't argue with that one. It's just a democracy that helped with extraordinary rendition of suspects to where they were tortured - so you can kind of understand somebody's reluctance to hand themselves over to their tender mercies; the rendered guys never got that day in court of which you speak.
Thank you all - fascinating, I'll have to re-read "Bill" to spot those "potshots". And now I have to find an obscure Czech novel, too.
But none of that makes it a "parody" which was my only point - I quite agree that it was a critical response to ST (among many, MANY other military-glorifying SF novels - it's a whole genre).
To be a parody of Starship Troopers, it would have to follow the plot, have equivalent characters, be a mirror to some extent. There's none of that.
Starship Troopers unabashedly glorifies military service - given that it is entirely voluntary at all times except mid-combat. Bill, with a totally different plot and characters, tells a story where it is not voluntary even if the teenage volunteer falls for a tricky sales job; is anything but glorious when, as usual, based on lies and blunders. It's up to the audience to see that the Bill story is much the more familiar.
That makes it a strong reply to ST, but not a parody; and doesn't skewer Heinlein so much as say "nice theoretical world, but you're dreaming".
No doubt this will be deluged with "that's why not" replies, but let me toss it out there: I've long thought we needed USB 4 or whatever to offer charging power at more serious wattage and also 12V. There's this whole existing eco-system of 12V appliances created by the RV/Boat industry. Quite a lot of your average household *could* soon run at more like 12V, because so much power (outside the kitchen) is just for lighting - and lighting is on the brink of going LED as they are solving the color-rendering-index problem to make it closer to sunlight.
Whole rooms of many houses might need no more than USB wall plugs...and all those lights and fans would then be "smart" appliances with network connections to tell them to turn off when power prices spike or there's been nobody in the room for 10 minutes.
SF and S-fact author Bruce Sterling did a fine little "short history" essay back in 1993. It was not only "not just Xerox" or "not just government" or "not just private industry", it was "not just America".
Note that 'Packet' is a very British term - and one of the really, really crucial developments was thinking of communications with packet-switching, not "opening a continuous line between sender and receiver".
It's a classic Wall Street Journal piece: reasonable research and fact-finding, but then they have to put the spin on it. That predates Rupert Murdoch by quite a bit.
The best way to eliminate terrorists was actually invented by Yasser Arafat and some of his advisors, who themselves had invented Black September, the terrorist group that murdered Israeli athletes at the 72 Olympics in Munich:
When they weren't needed any more...they married them off. Told them to go into deep cover in Jordan, found pretty Palestinian girls to marry the "heroes", have kids, be "sleeper agents"...and never gave them a mission. Interviewed years later, few were willing to accept one any more.
It's only "double taxation" if they double the tax rate. Government has to take in enough money to provide the services people democratically asked for (maybe they shouldn't have, but that's a different argument). Whether they tap the economy at one location, or two, or three, is just spreading around where the "damage" is done - income taxes, sales taxes (general, on all sales, or special taxes on gasoline, etc), user fees, inheritance taxes, financial-transaction taxes... it all has to add up to the total money needed. Some get hit with more - progressive income tax hits on higher incomes more; sales taxes hit on people who buy more stuff rather than saving, and inheritance taxes hit people with rich Dads. Corporate taxes just hit at the production part of the cycle rather than the income phase; no different than tapping your left arm for blood rather than right.
You can tell that corporate taxes aren't doing much damage, in an economy where almost all economic production is through bodies corporate, because individuals that don't *have* to incorporate to make money, do so anyway... for the tax BENEFITS. Your dentist is probably a "professional corporation", and these days your private electrician is probably losing business to the corporation that employs ten electricians and has one phone number and ad campaign.
Ireland's low corporate taxes made it a conservative darling, the country that was doing everything Right - and it crashed anyway. Now it's had over 2 years of the harshest austerity measures - and hasn't revived. If it gets this head office, yay, but it's still in for years of high unemployment and pain. Clearly, low corporate taxes are no panacea.
That was a whole different era; government was different, indeed, human nature was entirely different.
There is NO chance of another generation looking back at all the surveillance of every Muslim community picnic and shake their heads in wonder at our paranoia. All of our investigations are justified and wise.
The author of "The Paranoid Style of American Politics" spends a few pages at the start of the essay stressing that he just means paranoid Style, not clinical paranoia, and that it is hardly limited to America, but has cropped up all over the world.
Well, it sure seems to be alive and well in Switzerland and Mexico, to name two places that have suffered these attacks. The rhetoric in the Mexican note, about nanotech, from the "ITS" ("Individuals Tending to Savagery", at least they're honest) rings with your standard conspiracy-theory stuff about it ending the world. The anti-nuclear rhetoric in the other is similar towards nuclear armageddon, with the deaths from the "European Fukushima" just around the corner. (Amazing how France has avoided them for 40 years of 77% nuke power generation).
From the original "paranoid style" essay:
"The paranoid spokesman, sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization . . . he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish."...that pretty neatly explains how they can go around blowing up engineers and professors. Since the "paranoid style" essay has become popular again lately because it also jogs memories of some Tea Party fears about Obama taking away all guns or rounding up Christians into camps or whatever, it's worth noting that this is where that kind of thinking eventually takes you if pursued to a logical conclusion. The author also stresses that the "paranoid style" is not a left or right thing, but found on both sides.
Tim Weiner, who did a great book on the CIA, was on Jon Stewart the other day, touting his new book on the FBI. Seems the beginning of the plumbers was when J. Edgar Hoover refused to start tapping the phones of all the friends and relatives of groups like The Weathermen. And now the FBI is being asked to tap even more widely and without warrants. The new Surveillance State is, get this, worse than J.Edgar Hoover would tolerate, because it was so blatantly unconstitutional.
But the FBI tapping is small potatoes. Hit Glenn Greenwald's column at Salon.com for the other day's article on "surveillance state evils"....the NSA, always forbidden to tap Americans, is now tapping, well, everything. Suspicions no longer seem paranoid that the "Total Information Awareness" is indeed being pursued: a new NSA data centre is just hoovering up (pardon the expression) every byte.
The article goes on to detail a great deal more journalist and activist intimidation than this/. item: people who've spoken out for Wikileaks, done journalism, whatever, getting up against the wall every time they pass through customs, lawyer Jesslyn Radack searched EVERY TIME she goes through TSA even domestically, people threatened with jail and jailhouse-rape.
It's just bewildering. Is this really the USA? And are it's citizens just taking it? Some freedom-loving people.
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There were estimates early in Tiger Woods' career that his earnings would eventually hit a billion. So might JK Rowling. Whether they do or not, you take the point. Modern technology does allow a single person to entertain literally billions of people, and they only have to pay a nominal sum to return the favour with a billion dollars. The net itself can basically eliminate all entertainment middlemen.
I'm still discovering what my 1998 vintage, 21" Compaq P1210 can do. The last version of Mint, I discovered it doesn't top out at 1600x1200 - a new resolution of 1792x1344 came up in the drivers, and it seems to work. I think the phosphor can show that many pixels, because fonts got smaller but still readable.
Now, in 1998 when it was made, I don't think you could get 1600x1200; quite the futureproofed product.
Also, I have to keep it; it doubles as a catwarmer
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2410931,00.asp
He's still good for entertainment some days. And he's got this one nailed: "Cyber War? Bring It On! : The so-called imminent threat of cyber-attack by U.S. enemies is another in a long line of fear-mongering propaganda lines."
>Compared to repairing existing roads, new road construction is the cheaper option, even with the costs of additional steps such as planning and grading. Repairs are incredibly expensive
Almost all new road construction is to upgrade capacity; in the case of suburbs, it's a free gift to the suburb, allowing them to have a near-to-nature dwelling but work in the Big City, which has the jobs that allow you to own a big house and a big SUV. That isn't some inherent evil; it can be strategic for the Big City and the State it's in. But it reaches a point of diminishing returns where greater public utility would come from spending the same amount on 20X as many lane-kilometres being repaired *before* they deteriorate enough to reduce safety and drastically increase repair costs.
Not necessarily. Suppose you use the "tax" revenue to fill a special fund that may ONLY be used to alleviate the same problem. Suppose you taxed the emission of fossil carbon into the air at $50/tonne. That would raise the cost of coal-generated electricity by about 5 cents per kWh, a sharp increase that would strongly push electricity generation towards non-carbon sources: nuclear, wind, hydro, etc.
But you fill the fund with the money and you also pay 50 dollars per tonne of atmospheric carbon *buried* in the ground: they estimate 50 bucks a tonne would make some "biochar" operations financially workable: they make electricity by burning trees and burying the charcoal.
The fund eventually reaches a steady state where as much carbon is being re-buried as extracted.
Shaw covers quite a lot of Canada and the prices are the same wherever they cover:
http://shaw.ca/Internet/Broadband-250/
and $190/mo for "unlimited" though you'll want to check the fine print on that word. And speaking of loopholes, for this you get "up to" 250 Mb/s...where "up to" includes the number zero, not to mention every number lower than 250.
This isn't bad, but whatever is decent in Canadian services are due to regulation as the competition is pretty thin. There are perhaps two services in any large city, which amazingly have about the same prices and services.
As somebody who watches the costs on maintaining municipal networks of big heavy water and sewer pipes we have to expensively bury 10 feet down to stay below the frost line, it's painfully obvious what a bonanza providing Internet has been for these companies. The big bucks aren't in the little black boxes at the ends of wires that get upgraded every few years anyway; the big bucks are keeping all those thousands of miles of line maintained. And since we never got fibre-to-the-home out of the commercial world, they've been able to supply this whole new service down the same wires that paid for themselves in the 50's (for POTS copper wires) and the 80's (for TV coax cable).
Every city on the continent should have just declared Internet to be a municipal network, too important to the public to leave to private hands, and built FTTH that way a decade ago. There are private water/sewer utilities (many very good), but in most places, voters get very nervous at the very suggestion of privatizing water - because you gotta have it and privatized utilities in various places have doubled and tripled rates in the past.
A public utility is basically owned by its own customers and has no interest of its own, just theirs. Private utilities love gaming the pricing model. Every utility network has fixed costs (maintaining those lines cost the same whether more or less product is flowing through) and product-relative costs: the amount of water or power or gas or bytes. Netflix figures have shown that the real incremental cost of bandwidth in large bulk is only about 2-3 cents per gigabyte. Keeping a set of lines to you house running that are lightweight and do not have to be deeply buried costs maybe $25/month in most large cities. And if it's fibre you chose to bury rather than a 40 or 70 year-old network for a different kind of communication, everybody gets hundreds of MB/s. Then your cost is all about the number of gigabytes you care to buy - at a quarter or so per Blu-Ray grade movie. $25+ two movies a day = $40/month.
Instead, you get the fixed and product costs blended together into $110 per month and a bandwidth cap. Note the healthy profit.
It's a very clear article about the one course he took. At no point does he claim it a general critique of the medium. That's being propagated by the /. headline on the article.
I'm not sure what the larger lesson, if any, is at all - except the old standard, "Content is King". Cool new technology and celebrity professor alike are worthless if not presented with a well-written, well-rehearsed, well-produced content. Combine the production values of, not so much million-dollar-a-minute national TV ads, but just the production values of local TV news - where a team of several work all day on each half-hour produced - and it would be a whole different experience.
What bewilders me about most teaching is that it isn't ALL at least that good - what other content in our world is tested on live audiences so repetitively? There should by now be wide agreement on what kinds of topics and approaches and sequences work best for something like basic stats.
The question is asked in isolation, as if you could make me The Highlander or something. (My favourite line on that is from the last of those movies, where one 400-year-old lady complains about "the unending sameness of it all" - not bored enough for suicide, but still, pretty bored).
In practice, it's hard to see how it could happen for me without happening to everybody. And THAT presents some problems:
- growing up micromanaged by your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great grandparents...ad infinitum. Or at least, ad nauseam.
- financial system has to be completely reworked. As it is, you can work for as little as 30 years and, if diligent and cheap, save up enough that the interest alone can provide food/clothing/shelter at least. So, without changes, everybody works for 30 years and loafs for 300...or 3000? Less than 1% of society at work? We'll need the Singularity to turn us into Iain Banks' "Culture" first so AI does everything and nobody really has to work.
- Speaking of culture, it would never change. How exactly would you bump aside those multi-centurians from positions of power in which they would constantly oppose all change? And science is part of culture - remember Niels Bohr's opinion that new ideas don't really defeat the old, the proponents of the old ideas just die off. Change would become glacial as kids are raised by the nine generations before them, with very old values...and go on to propagate those centuries-old values for centuries more.
Speaking of The Culture, there's a moving scene in Bank's Culture novel, "Look to Windward" of a citizen choosing to, if not die, become a disembodied and unconscious mind in storage with instructions to wake him up in time for the Heat Death of the Universe....or reincarnate him as an especially nubile cheerleader if his ball team ever wins the big Cup. (The host of the ceremony remarks that the Heat Death is more likely to happen first). An astonished tourist is surprised to see a citizen who could be kept young and healthy in a fantastically diverse and rich Culture forever choosing to fade away. His response is that, after 400 years, he's done all he can enjoy, that even seeing new and amazing things has gotten routine.
Having toured a lot of Europe and reached the stage where one more goddam Bourbon palace or one more goddam mighty cathedral mostly makes my feet hurt at the thought of trudging through them....the variances between them being fairly minor unless you're really into history and architecture...I can at least imagine that happening with everything once you're talking about a number of really well-filled-in centuries.
Between that factor, and the societal issues I mention at top, I think "a few centuries" - leaving the definition of "a few" up to the individual taste, is probably it for individuals and certainly for human society. Both were designed around a certain environment, and while there's lots of give and overdesign in both systems, there is not an infinite amount of stretch in the designs. At some point, most people would realize one day that they were *trying* to think up new travels, new relationships, new hobbies, new fields of study...and had been doing so for as long as they could remember; and a sense of desperation would set in.
My most cherished possessions are books that have come down through three generations from a great-grandfather.
I wouldn't count on any e-publisher catering to your desire to pass your "possessions" on; indeed, they may finally come out and state it plainly that you're just renting the content. If prodded on the issue that you'd value the ability to pass them on, they'll probably say something to the effect that that this would create real problems for them - since people would use the mechanism to pass books from person to person weeks apart, letting 10 kids in a classroom all read one copy of The Hunger Games - whereas the "legitimate" usage of passing them on at death is not valued by most buyers, as its just too far in the future.
Ironic, that viewpoint, since they also claim that authors need 100 years of copyright AFTER their own death, as they value that so terribly much, without it, they'll never write the book.
Remember the movie (or remember the references to it in "Throw Momma From the Train") where two strangers agree to kill each other's targets? No connection between victim and killer.
If you can have ONE buddy that NOBODY else knows about, you just go stay at his house. You agree to do the same for him. Since both your odds of needing the service are about a zillion to one, it's a cheap promise to make. You just have to pick the right guy who will actually come through for you - and not squeal when doing so.
This creates the problem of making that good a friend without ever corresponding with each other over any electronic network, now that it seems prudent to assume that "Total Information Awareness" has actually been implemented and that giant NSA data centre is hoovering up all e-mail. It would be better to never even phone each other.
For the true paranoid, add the problem that just joking about it over beers with another soccer dad during the kids practice and exchanging addresses and promises might not be distant enough.
I'm reverting to fiction here, but it's conceivable that the "Memoirs of an Invisible Man" scenario could happen to you, since you're being very paranoid to start with. In the book (not the Chevy Chase movie), the Invisible Man has a well-funded and relentless secret organization spending months and years trying to find him. He methodically thinks of the least-connected-to-him person possible, whom he can still find. He calls this guy he spent part of a summer working with in high school and hasn't seen in over 10 years - and, yes, that guy had been called by the government. Called upon physically, they poked around a bit while doing a "security check for a sensitive job offer".
So to find your Paranoia Buddy, you'd want to go through a couple of "degrees of separation" - ask that other soccer dad to recommend a friend *he* knows only a little, and not through electronics - and then maybe ask THAT guy for a recommendation. Or just do your buddy-shopping on the web, through whatever level of anonymizer you imagine trustworthy.
You can also have "paranoia buddies" that ARE connected to you, but only for resources, not a place to stay. You could trade copies of car keys with a friend and basically steal his car. Yes, by a few days later, your government tormentors would find him and be told that his car did disappear, but he didn't see you and has no idea where you are. That gives you a car for perhaps a day - long enough to be a thousand miles away in some random direction. If your unfindable buddy has a garage, they can't even find the car. Indeed, you could actually see him - he can cheerfully tell police that, yes, he stopped by, borrowed my car, gave me a cheque in return for $1000 cash, because you were a victim of identity theft and lost your keys and cards in the bargain - nothing illegal about him doing that, and he really does know nothing more.
These scenarios in movies are generally about a Man Alone - much more dramatic - but real spy stories emphasize that building up a network of (quiet) friends is a spy's best set of resources.
Thanks. I didn't mean coal was safe, just that if you can stand coal, you can definitely stand uranium.
Coal is so bad, it's incredible anybody puts up any fuss about the poisonousness of nuclear waste - an estimated 24,000 lives lost in America per year from breathing issues alone...that's before you get into the tons of mercury dumped into the air every year by coal plants.
I'm not sure what 2 even means; "hard to mine?" Lots of things are hard - try raising kids. In economic terms, "hard" just means "expensive". It's either affordable or it isn't.
In context of the total cost of nuclear power, it's been getting expensive and rare lately because of soaring *construction* costs, not fuel costs, since fuel costs are a single-digit percentage of the whole; it's almost all about paying off the multi-billion-dollar mortgage on the plant. Even before this discovery, the Japanese believed they could extract uranium from seawater for a few hundred dollars per kg - that's several times the current price, but should we "run out of uranium" (i.e. nothing but "hard" places left), then a ceiling will be put on the price, since it would take many centuries of "mining the sea" for the concentration to decline.
Before that happens, of course, it'll become affordable to re-process spent nuclear fuel, which means 97% of what is currently regarded as "waste" will become fuel again, because reprocessing costs 3X as much as mining new stuff. That 30:1 ratio will stretch out the supply a ways.
As for "dangerous", your own link to radon notes that new standards for mining procedure were enacted back in 1971. Most of the data on higher lung cancers and so forth come from those exposed some time ago, particularly Navaho uranium miners, where there were many allegations that racism prevented a more serious response to their concerns.
More recently you can run across comments like this one:
On June 18, 2004, the Saskatchewan Uranium Miners' Cohort Study Group released its report on a feasiblity study it had begun in 2002:
"It concludes that it is not scientifically feasible to conduct a study of present and future miners who work in modern Saskatchewan uranium mines (1975 onward). Today’s Saskatchewan uranium miners have radon exposures that are between 100 and 1000 times lower than those of past uranium miners, such as miners from Beaverlodge, because of dose limits, improved mining techniques, and other radiation protection practices. Any higher-than-normal rates of lung cancer from such workplace exposures would be virtually impossible to measure. The feasibility study was completed in October 2003 and it was then reviewed by three internationally respected radiation researchers." [ http://www.wise-uranium.org/uhm.html ]
Simply, this is an engineering and economic issue. Proper safety procedure lowers the risks of mining hazardous materials (where do you think things like arsenic and mercury come from? Somebody has to extract and purify them...), and make the risks tolerable - at least as tolerable as coal mining, your only practical alternative...and they also increase the cost of the extraction, which is then either affordable or it isn't. In the case of the nuclear industry, it would probably only a a tenth-cent per kWh to pay double or triple for uranium, so it's always going to be affordable to mine it - and dispose of it - safely.
The industry doesn't WANT to, any more than slaughterhouses want to pay a decent wage and up the cost of your hamburger by a nickel; but that's a "mere" matter of regulating the activities of very wealthy investors. Hard, (sorry) but possible.
1) Naomi Wolf has been following this case since 2010: ...long enough to look up all the Swedish law and case histories she doesn't already have, particularly since the article above contains the news: "Well, I was in Denmark in March of this year at a global gathering for women leaders on International Women's Day, and heard extensively from specialists in sex crime and victims' rights in Sweden." ...that's March of 2010, nearly 30 months ago.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/post_1435_b_797188.html
2) Unusual case, indeed, but nothing about its unusual-ness relates to whether the original complaint merited charges, not after the original prosecutor declined to charge and a prosecutor clear across Sweden took the very, ahem, unusual step of deciding to re-start a case from outside their normal jurisdiction (it's federal, so they *could*, but it's very...unusual).
3) She is hardly accusing "the entire Swedish political elite", she just notes the Rove connection without drawing conclusions. The Rove story has been very hot in Sweden, because Rove is considered by many to have won elections in his past by abuses of the legal system, including, it is said, planting a bug in his own office and getting an investigation of his client's opponent started on the basis of it; and involvement in the framing of an Alabama politician for corruption, as reported by 60 minutes:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/21/60minutes/main3859830.shtml
It's quite normal for Karl Rove to have no provable connection at all to things that happen when he's around - like his old law partner starting the swift boat organization. People have generally started to regard him as smoke and start looking for fire.
I might add - it's funny for you to regard Naomi Wolf as unable to comment on Swedish law because she's American, but regard as obvious that Swedish politicians would look to an American for electoral advice in their very different system (no state-level, no third branch of government, no electoral college - it's a constitutional monarchy with a parliament).
Sweden is a democracy, can't argue with that one. It's just a democracy that helped with extraordinary rendition of suspects to where they were tortured - so you can kind of understand somebody's reluctance to hand themselves over to their tender mercies; the rendered guys never got that day in court of which you speak.
Thank you all - fascinating, I'll have to re-read "Bill" to spot those "potshots". And now I have to find an obscure Czech novel, too.
But none of that makes it a "parody" which was my only point - I quite agree that it was a critical response to ST (among many, MANY other military-glorifying SF novels - it's a whole genre).
To be a parody of Starship Troopers, it would have to follow the plot, have equivalent characters, be a mirror to some extent. There's none of that.
Starship Troopers unabashedly glorifies military service - given that it is entirely voluntary at all times except mid-combat. Bill, with a totally different plot and characters, tells a story where it is not voluntary even if the teenage volunteer falls for a tricky sales job; is anything but glorious when, as usual, based on lies and blunders. It's up to the audience to see that the Bill story is much the more familiar.
That makes it a strong reply to ST, but not a parody; and doesn't skewer Heinlein so much as say "nice theoretical world, but you're dreaming".
No doubt this will be deluged with "that's why not" replies, but let me toss it out there: I've long thought we needed USB 4 or whatever to offer charging power at more serious wattage and also 12V. There's this whole existing eco-system of 12V appliances created by the RV/Boat industry. Quite a lot of your average household *could* soon run at more like 12V, because so much power (outside the kitchen) is just for lighting - and lighting is on the brink of going LED as they are solving the color-rendering-index problem to make it closer to sunlight.
Whole rooms of many houses might need no more than USB wall plugs...and all those lights and fans would then be "smart" appliances with network connections to tell them to turn off when power prices spike or there's been nobody in the room for 10 minutes.
http://w2.eff.org/Net_culture/internet_sterling.history.txt
SF and S-fact author Bruce Sterling did a fine little "short history" essay back in 1993. It was not only "not just Xerox" or "not just government" or "not just private industry", it was "not just America".
Note that 'Packet' is a very British term - and one of the really, really crucial developments was thinking of communications with packet-switching, not "opening a continuous line between sender and receiver".
It's a classic Wall Street Journal piece: reasonable research and fact-finding, but then they have to put the spin on it. That predates Rupert Murdoch by quite a bit.
The best way to eliminate terrorists was actually invented by Yasser Arafat and some of his advisors, who themselves had invented Black September, the terrorist group that murdered Israeli athletes at the 72 Olympics in Munich:
http://m.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2001/12/hoffman.htm
When they weren't needed any more...they married them off. Told them to go into deep cover in Jordan, found pretty Palestinian girls to marry the "heroes", have kids, be "sleeper agents"...and never gave them a mission. Interviewed years later, few were willing to accept one any more.
The good news is that people also say that about software. The bad news - only 5% of users pay their shareware fees.
It's only "double taxation" if they double the tax rate. Government has to take in enough money to provide the services people democratically asked for (maybe they shouldn't have, but that's a different argument). Whether they tap the economy at one location, or two, or three, is just spreading around where the "damage" is done - income taxes, sales taxes (general, on all sales, or special taxes on gasoline, etc), user fees, inheritance taxes, financial-transaction taxes ... it all has to add up to the total money needed. Some get hit with more - progressive income tax hits on higher incomes more; sales taxes hit on people who buy more stuff rather than saving, and inheritance taxes hit people with rich Dads. Corporate taxes just hit at the production part of the cycle rather than the income phase; no different than tapping your left arm for blood rather than right.
You can tell that corporate taxes aren't doing much damage, in an economy where almost all economic production is through bodies corporate, because individuals that don't *have* to incorporate to make money, do so anyway ... for the tax BENEFITS. Your dentist is probably a "professional corporation", and these days your private electrician is probably losing business to the corporation that employs ten electricians and has one phone number and ad campaign.
Ireland's low corporate taxes made it a conservative darling, the country that was doing everything Right - and it crashed anyway. Now it's had over 2 years of the harshest austerity measures - and hasn't revived. If it gets this head office, yay, but it's still in for years of high unemployment and pain. Clearly, low corporate taxes are no panacea.
That was a whole different era; government was different, indeed, human nature was entirely different.
There is NO chance of another generation looking back at all the surveillance of every Muslim community picnic and shake their heads in wonder at our paranoia. All of our investigations are justified and wise.
No, youngling. The Dark Side is quicker and easier, but it is not more powerful.
The author of "The Paranoid Style of American Politics" spends a few pages at the start of the essay stressing that he just means paranoid Style, not clinical paranoia, and that it is hardly limited to America, but has cropped up all over the world.
Well, it sure seems to be alive and well in Switzerland and Mexico, to name two places that have suffered these attacks. The rhetoric in the Mexican note, about nanotech, from the "ITS" ("Individuals Tending to Savagery", at least they're honest) rings with your standard conspiracy-theory stuff about it ending the world. The anti-nuclear rhetoric in the other is similar towards nuclear armageddon, with the deaths from the "European Fukushima" just around the corner. (Amazing how France has avoided them for 40 years of 77% nuke power generation).
From the original "paranoid style" essay:
"The paranoid spokesman, sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization . . . he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish." ...that pretty neatly explains how they can go around blowing up engineers and professors. Since the "paranoid style" essay has become popular again lately because it also jogs memories of some Tea Party fears about Obama taking away all guns or rounding up Christians into camps or whatever, it's worth noting that this is where that kind of thinking eventually takes you if pursued to a logical conclusion. The author also stresses that the "paranoid style" is not a left or right thing, but found on both sides.
Tim Weiner, who did a great book on the CIA, was on Jon Stewart the other day, touting his new book on the FBI. Seems the beginning of the plumbers was when J. Edgar Hoover refused to start tapping the phones of all the friends and relatives of groups like The Weathermen. And now the FBI is being asked to tap even more widely and without warrants. The new Surveillance State is, get this, worse than J.Edgar Hoover would tolerate, because it was so blatantly unconstitutional.
But the FBI tapping is small potatoes. Hit Glenn Greenwald's column at Salon.com for the other day's article on "surveillance state evils"....the NSA, always forbidden to tap Americans, is now tapping, well, everything. Suspicions no longer seem paranoid that the "Total Information Awareness" is indeed being pursued: a new NSA data centre is just hoovering up (pardon the expression) every byte.
The article goes on to detail a great deal more journalist and activist intimidation than this /. item: people who've spoken out for Wikileaks, done journalism, whatever, getting up against the wall every time they pass through customs, lawyer Jesslyn Radack searched EVERY TIME she goes through TSA even domestically, people threatened with jail and jailhouse-rape.
It's just bewildering. Is this really the USA? And are it's citizens just taking it? Some freedom-loving people.
Not as laughable as "death panels", the "Lie of the Year". And that had significant effect.