But we have nothing else to give. It's not that we understand our own culture, it's that we don't understand other cultures (by definition, whatever we understand as a culture would get incorporated into our own). We might not be able to introduce a western style, liberty-loving, republican government (or keep one of our own...), but we have no hope of introducing anything else.
We don't have the will to do colonization, proper, Puerto Rico is evidence that we don't have the skill to, and we don't have the resources to do it writ large. But everything short of that is just a toy to soothe guilty consciences.
Well the problem in most of these places is their government. They don't have one. Or.. they do, but it's more like a conglomeration of mafia like organizations. It's a cycle, and the only way we can break it is through expensive, long-term military intervention.
Much longer than was proposed for Iraq. Something on the order of colonization, really, because they need western governance, western infrastructure, and most importantly, western culture.* But we've shown that we're unwilling to put forth that kind of effort, so a lot of focus gets put on these high-profile feel-good projects, that to be fair probably will help a few people, but won't do anything substantive for the population at large.
*other successful cultures and governance could be substituted, but we don't have the ability to give them anything but western, because that's what we understand.
We already have centitech suits that make diving as safe as a submarine. Actually probably a bit safer, considering they're rated for over three times the depth of a typical submarine. Not quite as fun though, since it's more like diving in your own personal submarine.
"Then they will have to trust Sound Exchange to give them what was really collected, less fees"
Ok, that's really a raw deal. If SE can just start collecing fees on their behalf without the artists consent, and thereby force the artist's consent, they don't really have a right to the fees. (moral right, i mean, legal rights are screwy)
If the artists are getting fees subtracted, they're already getting screwed, blatantly. In addition to the unspoken usurpation issue.
I mean, imagine this conversation with a coworker, "Oh, hey, I picked up your paycheck for you." "Um.. thanks..That explains why it wasn't there when I went to pick it up." "No problem. Here's what's left after my 'picking up fee'"
A quick back-o-the envelope calculation suggested that only about 23 femtowatts are emitted in the 2.4 GHz band used by wifi. It'd take about 4 billion light bulbs to match a single 100 mW access point.
Of course, this ignores the remains 59.999... W of "radiation" the light bulb emits. I'm sure the anti-device ninnies will also fail to notice the millions of Amateur Radio operators exposed to much higher power radiation over almost a century at many frequencies, including the ones in question, without being at measurably greater risk of well... anything than the rest of the population.
You never said there'd be an absence of professional artists. Instead, you hand waved this concern away while declaring copyright universally bad for society. You just want free movies and art, so you propose untenable solutions like complete copyright abolition. Whether or not copyright is a "natural right," it is a useful one, and any flaws in its implementation should be corrected, not used as a bludgeon with which to destroy it.
There may be many reasons that authors and artists create their work, but If they can't feed themselves with it, they stop or scale down their art to hobby level. This happens out of necessity: artists who don't stop or scale down upon failing to fetch food from the fruits of their labor cease very quickly to do anything at all, let alone art.
If you think that the quality of art would be improved by the complete absence of professional artists, I have to wonder what you're basing this idea on. It doesn't work that way in any other industry. Professional athletes perform better than their amateur counterparts, professional engineers design buildings that are more likely to stay up than amateurs. Arm-chair Generals actually make pretty lousy leaders. In any field you care to mention, you can find amateurs doing work that pales in comparison to what people who are able to do the thing for a living are able to accomplish.
Now I'm off to read some Dave Barry. His professional commentary is much more pleasant to read and far more insightful than anything I've ever posted to slashdot.
Well a conventional power system with the same precautions would be equally hard to take down, but without the expense of topping off cryogenic coolant or the hassle of cooling-related downtime.
If only there were some way to convince people to share their good ideas, so that others might benefit from them, too. Some way which makes having and distributing them profitable, rewarding them somehow for the benefit their idea has had for others, so they'll want to do it. And have the rewards be proportionate to the number of people helped and how useful the idea is to them, to encourage people to try to have good ideas.
Now you're just being obtuse. We were talking about bit transport channels and the prices thereof. To the shipping business, mass is mass, but that doesn't mean that a kilogram of platinum is worth the same as a kilogram of gravel.
It's too late to do anything BUT hope on that count. The oil is there, and we know it's there. Same for the coal. It's going to get pumped or drilled out. Even if every country agrees to a ban, there will be a few that just signed to create a strategic advantage and the rest will either complicitly or covertly violate the agreement given enough time (and probably not much time will be needed.) The reason there hasn't been an Antarctic land grab for instance is not the international agreements. It's the fact that no one really wants to go there anyway.
If there's too much carbon, then there are only a few options remaining.
One is to poison the well. You'd have to set up dirty-nukes everywhere that these resources exist to contaminate the area enough that no one sane would be willing to work there and the rest would die before extracting very much anyway. Since the resources in question aren't conveniently located solely in the middle of some unpopulated, out of the way desert, this involves poisoning a significant fraction of the earth's habitable area and possibly much of the atmosphere as well. This cure is worse than the disease.
Another is to find some alternative means of sequesteration. Seeding algal blooms in the pacific at one time seemed a possibility, though the impact on millions of square kilometers of sea life would not be unnoticed. There may be other ways to do this as well, but they're all large scale projects, and so either aren't acceptable or NIMBYs will portray them that way.
A third way is to actually produce energy that's as close to "too cheap to meter" as you can get. The price has to be so low that people will think of petroleum the way we used to think of bottled water. But it'd have to be really, really, exceedingly, astoundingly cheap energy to compete with sticking a straw in the ground and letting the land bleed its vital black fluid into a tank.
Nothing that's been proposed will work. Whether it's because the proponents don't really believe there's really a problem, or they've failed to account for human nature in their plans, I can't say.
Heh heh.. wait.. iron is easier to smelt than aluminum and only twice as heavy (per mole). If you can make an aluminum alloy that "rusts" super fast, why not iron?
Everyone else is going to realize that bits are bits eventually. Then they'll be commoditized like everything else. It's not a question of if. It's a question of when. You don't even have to convince everyone. You just need to convince one billionaire and his five or six congressmen that there's a market inefficiency just waiting to be exploited.
It could be YOUR company benefiting from your idea. Or perhaps it took you time to come up with that idea, during which you could've been earning money some other way. Now, after having combined the contents of your stomach with a large quantity of corrosive plant waste to produce that idea, you'd like to refill that stomach and work on something else.
The canonical example is the book store. There are many different books in many different subjects. Some of which I will buy and read, and others I will avoid like the plague. The difference, I can assure you, has very little to do with the quality of the paper, or the skill with which it was assembled. Those are important things, but the valuable part of a book is its contents. And that's the part that takes the most effort to produce.
This is true, but it ignores what most geeks who buy a cell phone really want to do: Buy a device for which the data has some known cost. Use that device to send messages, make calls, download movies, listen to internet radio, have interactive maps, or whatever else we can figure out to do with it.
We'd like the price per bit to be either constant, or depend on various factors, like availability. In short, phone calls should cost slightly more than texting or anything else where latency doesn't matter. Time-of-day pricing is also accepted as it's a method of shaping the demand through market forces, allowing the providers to size the network closer to the average.
Anyway, that's the ideal. It'd be nice if someone did that, but none of the companies seem to have any desire to. I think it's an opportunity here that someone with deep pockets is probably missing. In the future, there will be communications companies, and it will be very much like this, but how long it will take is a mystery.
What's weird is that the cell providers' rates are like the post office giving away first-class almost for free and charging the big bucks for the bulk mail.
But it's not one of the major hurdles that needs to be overcome to use hydrocarbons. Regarding the "hydrogen economy," Hydrogen is actually pretty far from ideal as a storage mechanism. Liquid hydrocarbons turns out to be one of the best ways to store hydrogen all around, and the infrastructure's already in place to handle it.
The way to get off "foreign oil" is to produce synthetic octane/diesel fuel. Since it's already possible to do this in a number of ways, the thing holding us back from kicking the oil habit is that oil is freakin' cheap. It's already made, all you have to do is pump it out of the ground. And maybe a little fractional distillation, but that's peanuts compared to the energy needed to synthesize liquid hydrocarbon fuel (or any easily transportable fuel, really.)
We'd all better hope that the carbon trapped in easy-to-get spots is pretty much insignificant atmosphere-wise, 'cause the cat's out of the bag, and it's not going to stop being pumped till it's gone.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that that irony is actually part of the joke. Everywhere outside NY is "the boonies" to the people who live there...
But he gave up on it in 1990 after using it for 15 years So I think he's probably got a pretty good handle on how the whole thing works.
Why all the man-hating. I bet those greedy guys would be less grabby if their wives weren't shrews.
But we have nothing else to give. It's not that we understand our own culture, it's that we don't understand other cultures (by definition, whatever we understand as a culture would get incorporated into our own). We might not be able to introduce a western style, liberty-loving, republican government (or keep one of our own...), but we have no hope of introducing anything else.
We don't have the will to do colonization, proper, Puerto Rico is evidence that we don't have the skill to, and we don't have the resources to do it writ large. But everything short of that is just a toy to soothe guilty consciences.
Well the problem in most of these places is their government. They don't have one. Or.. they do, but it's more like a conglomeration of mafia like organizations. It's a cycle, and the only way we can break it is through expensive, long-term military intervention.
Much longer than was proposed for Iraq. Something on the order of colonization, really, because they need western governance, western infrastructure, and most importantly, western culture.* But we've shown that we're unwilling to put forth that kind of effort, so a lot of focus gets put on these high-profile feel-good projects, that to be fair probably will help a few people, but won't do anything substantive for the population at large.
*other successful cultures and governance could be substituted, but we don't have the ability to give them anything but western, because that's what we understand.
I think you'll find it difficult to obtain the phoenix feathers and unicorn horn required for the manufacture of those manabots.
We already have centitech suits that make diving as safe as a submarine. Actually probably a bit safer, considering they're rated for over three times the depth of a typical submarine. Not quite as fun though, since it's more like diving in your own personal submarine.
Ok, but no genetically engineered super sharks at an impractically remote, improbably designed submersible atoll, please.
"Then they will have to trust Sound Exchange to give them what was really collected, less fees"
Ok, that's really a raw deal. If SE can just start collecing fees on their behalf without the artists consent, and thereby force the artist's consent, they don't really have a right to the fees. (moral right, i mean, legal rights are screwy)
If the artists are getting fees subtracted, they're already getting screwed, blatantly. In addition to the unspoken usurpation issue.
I mean, imagine this conversation with a coworker,
"Oh, hey, I picked up your paycheck for you."
"Um.. thanks..That explains why it wasn't there when I went to pick it up."
"No problem. Here's what's left after my 'picking up fee'"
A quick back-o-the envelope calculation suggested that only about 23 femtowatts are emitted in the 2.4 GHz band used by wifi. It'd take about 4 billion light bulbs to match a single 100 mW access point.
Of course, this ignores the remains 59.999... W of "radiation" the light bulb emits. I'm sure the anti-device ninnies will also fail to notice the millions of Amateur Radio operators exposed to much higher power radiation over almost a century at many frequencies, including the ones in question, without being at measurably greater risk of well... anything than the rest of the population.
You never said there'd be an absence of professional artists. Instead, you hand waved this concern away while declaring copyright universally bad for society. You just want free movies and art, so you propose untenable solutions like complete copyright abolition. Whether or not copyright is a "natural right," it is a useful one, and any flaws in its implementation should be corrected, not used as a bludgeon with which to destroy it.
There may be many reasons that authors and artists create their work, but If they can't feed themselves with it, they stop or scale down their art to hobby level. This happens out of necessity: artists who don't stop or scale down upon failing to fetch food from the fruits of their labor cease very quickly to do anything at all, let alone art.
If you think that the quality of art would be improved by the complete absence of professional artists, I have to wonder what you're basing this idea on. It doesn't work that way in any other industry. Professional athletes perform better than their amateur counterparts, professional engineers design buildings that are more likely to stay up than amateurs. Arm-chair Generals actually make pretty lousy leaders. In any field you care to mention, you can find amateurs doing work that pales in comparison to what people who are able to do the thing for a living are able to accomplish.
Now I'm off to read some Dave Barry. His professional commentary is much more pleasant to read and far more insightful than anything I've ever posted to slashdot.
But.. 240x240 isn't an even division of VGA (640x480 i.e. 4:3) and 320x240 is
Well a conventional power system with the same precautions would be equally hard to take down, but without the expense of topping off cryogenic coolant or the hassle of cooling-related downtime.
If only there were some way to convince people to share their good ideas, so that others might benefit from them, too. Some way which makes having and distributing them profitable, rewarding them somehow for the benefit their idea has had for others, so they'll want to do it. And have the rewards be proportionate to the number of people helped and how useful the idea is to them, to encourage people to try to have good ideas.
Now you're just being obtuse. We were talking about bit transport channels and the prices thereof. To the shipping business, mass is mass, but that doesn't mean that a kilogram of platinum is worth the same as a kilogram of gravel.
Um yes...so? The value of a thing is not equal to its cost to produce.
The premium is what induces new players to get into the market.
It's too late to do anything BUT hope on that count. The oil is there, and we know it's there. Same for the coal. It's going to get pumped or drilled out. Even if every country agrees to a ban, there will be a few that just signed to create a strategic advantage and the rest will either complicitly or covertly violate the agreement given enough time (and probably not much time will be needed.) The reason there hasn't been an Antarctic land grab for instance is not the international agreements. It's the fact that no one really wants to go there anyway.
If there's too much carbon, then there are only a few options remaining.
One is to poison the well. You'd have to set up dirty-nukes everywhere that these resources exist to contaminate the area enough that no one sane would be willing to work there and the rest would die before extracting very much anyway. Since the resources in question aren't conveniently located solely in the middle of some unpopulated, out of the way desert, this involves poisoning a significant fraction of the earth's habitable area and possibly much of the atmosphere as well. This cure is worse than the disease.
Another is to find some alternative means of sequesteration. Seeding algal blooms in the pacific at one time seemed a possibility, though the impact on millions of square kilometers of sea life would not be unnoticed. There may be other ways to do this as well, but they're all large scale projects, and so either aren't acceptable or NIMBYs will portray them that way.
A third way is to actually produce energy that's as close to "too cheap to meter" as you can get. The price has to be so low that people will think of petroleum the way we used to think of bottled water. But it'd have to be really, really, exceedingly, astoundingly cheap energy to compete with sticking a straw in the ground and letting the land bleed its vital black fluid into a tank.
Nothing that's been proposed will work. Whether it's because the proponents don't really believe there's really a problem, or they've failed to account for human nature in their plans, I can't say.
Heh heh.. wait.. iron is easier to smelt than aluminum and only twice as heavy (per mole). If you can make an aluminum alloy that "rusts" super fast, why not iron?
Wrong things, but things, nonetheless.
Vote Gridlock, 2008.
Linux is voluntary. It can't fail like communism because if linux fails, millions of deaths aren't part of the failure. Nice troll though.
Everyone else is going to realize that bits are bits eventually. Then they'll be commoditized like everything else. It's not a question of if. It's a question of when. You don't even have to convince everyone. You just need to convince one billionaire and his five or six congressmen that there's a market inefficiency just waiting to be exploited.
It could be YOUR company benefiting from your idea. Or perhaps it took you time to come up with that idea, during which you could've been earning money some other way. Now, after having combined the contents of your stomach with a large quantity of corrosive plant waste to produce that idea, you'd like to refill that stomach and work on something else.
The canonical example is the book store. There are many different books in many different subjects. Some of which I will buy and read, and others I will avoid like the plague. The difference, I can assure you, has very little to do with the quality of the paper, or the skill with which it was assembled. Those are important things, but the valuable part of a book is its contents. And that's the part that takes the most effort to produce.
This is true, but it ignores what most geeks who buy a cell phone really want to do: Buy a device for which the data has some known cost. Use that device to send messages, make calls, download movies, listen to internet radio, have interactive maps, or whatever else we can figure out to do with it.
We'd like the price per bit to be either constant, or depend on various factors, like availability. In short, phone calls should cost slightly more than texting or anything else where latency doesn't matter. Time-of-day pricing is also accepted as it's a method of shaping the demand through market forces, allowing the providers to size the network closer to the average.
Anyway, that's the ideal. It'd be nice if someone did that, but none of the companies seem to have any desire to. I think it's an opportunity here that someone with deep pockets is probably missing. In the future, there will be communications companies, and it will be very much like this, but how long it will take is a mystery.
What's weird is that the cell providers' rates are like the post office giving away first-class almost for free and charging the big bucks for the bulk mail.
But it's not one of the major hurdles that needs to be overcome to use hydrocarbons. Regarding the "hydrogen economy," Hydrogen is actually pretty far from ideal as a storage mechanism. Liquid hydrocarbons turns out to be one of the best ways to store hydrogen all around, and the infrastructure's already in place to handle it.
The way to get off "foreign oil" is to produce synthetic octane/diesel fuel. Since it's already possible to do this in a number of ways, the thing holding us back from kicking the oil habit is that oil is freakin' cheap. It's already made, all you have to do is pump it out of the ground. And maybe a little fractional distillation, but that's peanuts compared to the energy needed to synthesize liquid hydrocarbon fuel (or any easily transportable fuel, really.)
We'd all better hope that the carbon trapped in easy-to-get spots is pretty much insignificant atmosphere-wise, 'cause the cat's out of the bag, and it's not going to stop being pumped till it's gone.