The vote-reciept has a drawback, though: It enables vote buying (actually vote reciept buying). A possible alternative is a random 10-digit number you write down yourself in the booth. Any voter can check against the public (so anonymized) log of all the votes. Voters get reciepts that are only trustworthy to themselves but easily forged to everyone else.
If we must have electronic voting, I suppose it could be done properly. Have an auditor supervise the process of randomly grabbing a machine off Dell's assembly line, code defensively to the point of paranoia and then test the crap out of the software, use read-only media, seal the cases with tamper-evident tape, and store them in a perpetually supervised environment. After the election, randomly examine the machines for tampering, and so on. All this because the workings of an electronic computer, unlike a manual or electromechanical system, cannot be observed without special equipment.
It does seem easier, though, to use electronic systems to print a paper ballot, so that you have much less complexity that you have to trust.
Do you have a source for that? When I saw him in 1994, the guy in the audience next to me (who always votes LP) asked what him what he thought of the capital-L Libertarians. His relpy was along the lines that he was sympathetic to libertarian ideas, but he couldn't resist taking some jabs at the LP (Who wants to look up a sewer service in the yellow pages? Would a citizen army require MX missiles in our backyards? and so on.)
Of course, from Dave Barry, that could be a ringing endorsement.
Close but not quite. It is not so much population density as much as it is population mobility. The lowest crime rates are in economically static places like eastern Ohio and the highest are in tourist commuinities like coastal Florida (where people are always moving in & out). Small towns have low population mobility because most of the people have strong roots to that particular place; everyone else has already left for economic opportunity.
To understand what crime rates are and why they vary from place to place, from someone who is not pushing a political agenda, get a copy of Places Rated. (Includes Canada!)
At the risk of inciting a flame war, I mention my hypothesis that language barriers in Europe, because they reduce population mobility, are a major reason crime rates are lower there, and one of the downsides of the unified currency will be increased population mobility and rates of crime. Canada's dollar, however, floats relative to the US dollar so when Canada's economy slows down the whole economy can adjust its prices downward (when the exchange rate drops) instead of having people migrate to the US for jobs (or vice versa). Hence lower population mobility and therefore lower crime.
Prison time for white collar crime has been the norm since at least the 60's when GE & Westinghouse executives were imprisoned for price-fixing. Granted, enforcement is uneven, and particularly powerful & wily characters like Bill Gates/Clinton can scrape out of perjury that would put you or me in jail for 6 months. Conversely, some white collar crimes are over-prosecuted; Martha Stewart's ham-fisted legal defense got her a sentence way out of proportion to the crime, and technical bookkeeping infractions got Michael Milken years of prison time because his business was unpopular (the nature of his business put lots of people out of work).
But none of that is peculiar to white collar crime. The average murder defendant doesn't get OJ Simpson's legal team.
The people who personally benefitted from GE's business using PCB's, the stockholders of the 50's & 60's, are not the same as the stockholders of today. Many of them are dead. The problem here is that the hazards of PCBs were unknown and GE's actions were legal at the time, so a long period of time has elapsed. It has nothing to do with corporate personhood. We don't tolerate illegal activity by corporations, and those who use otherwise legitimate corporations as a screen for committing crimes are prosecuted as individuals (despite depictions to the contrary in Hollywood movies).
And in a hypothetical plutocracy, who is going to put Bill Gates (and his private army) in jail? To suggest such a thing is naive. Without the freedom to coordinate as corporations, and vote with their wallet for above-board businesses, the regular folk are simply out of the game.
If there are PCBs in the Hudson, I believe the GE stockholders are personally responsible to clean them up.
You are skipping over the step of proving that dredging is the appropriate remedy & that GE (who never made PCB's but used them in capacitor and transformer manufacture) is the appropriate entitiy to pay for it, as compared to, say, Monsanto, who made PCB's, utility companies who bought the products, or local governments who required the use of PCB's in their building codes. GE's claim is that the discharge levels were within legal levels of the time and that a much cheaper motitor-and-spot-clean-as-necessary approach is more appropriate. But my point here is not to defend GE, but to say that GE is acting perfectly within the normal charter of its business to engage in a political debate which affects the company's interest. To expect over a million separate shareholders to spontaneously organize into PACs every time a political issue impacts a $350 billion company is ridiculus.
I think you underestimate the good effects of having limited liability corporations. Before the corporate form was introduced, capital intensive businesss like canal bulding, banking, and insurance were the domain of super-wealthy patricians. (In the case of banking, it was a tight-knit group of Jews because Thomistic Christian theology prohibited collecting interest; we are still stuck with lingering conspiracy theories from that). In Roman times these patiricans would hire private armies, intimidate courts, and take over provincial governments. Limited liability corps permitted the middle class to pool resources and give these aristocrats some competition, and as such consititute a great progressive political reform. Would you prefer that Bill Gates personally owned Microsoft? Would you want to buy fire insurance from Marcus Crassus?
No they are not...that is simply a convenient legal shorthand. But stockholders are, and do, so the rights of corporations should not be so cavalierly dismissed. To a certain extent stockholders have a right to exercise their rights through a corporate entity.
Let me give examples of what I consider appropriate and inappropriate corporate political speech.
Stockholders in the big media companies have an interest in getting good return on their investment, but they are consumers of recorded music as well. Therefore, stockholders have a dilute (or even negative) interest in copyright extensions and such. The company managements, however, have a much stonger vested interest in copyright extension so they lobby toward that goal with great zeal. This form of corporate politcal speech is inappropriate because it constitutes a breach of fiduciary duty to spend money counter to the interest of the stockholders.
Now consider this case. The Federal government has been attempting to dredge the Hudson River for PCB's at GE's (enormous) expense. GE disputes the scientific merit of such an endeavor and has fought the case not only in court, but in public opinion with a PR campaign. Few of GE's stockholders are dredging companies so no breach of fiduciary duty is present here. In this case, GE's behavior is no different than that of a local restauranteur (either a proprietor or a corporation) pushing for favorable zoning. To claim that a corporation cannot even present its case is an anethema to stockholders' freedom of association.
In the end, it seems that the cure for inappropriate corporate political speech is not campaign finance law, but better enforcement of stockholder interests.
He appears to be pointing up a moderator abuse. It appears that someone went through and modded down a several anti-Kerry posts (or at least non-defending-Kerry...my post got modded down and I never even said I agreed with the Swifties).
But getting back to the Swifties, some of their complaints are more legitimate than others. To try to impugne the brave things he apparently did in 'Nam is a stretch; even if the vetting process for military decorations wasn't as thorough as it should have been, you can't blame that on Kerry. But to call his anti-war activities irresponsible is fair. Even if everything he said was true, that doesn't make it a good idea to associate with radical anti-war groups and testify in Congress with poorly-checked facts. A true reformer would have carefully collated interviews, cross-checked facts, built his case, and suggested paths to reform. Kerry's behavior seemed more calculated to launch his politcal career on anti-war sentiment than actually improving the situation. Like I said before, it goes to intent.
Now, none of this would matter a hill of beans if Kerry simply said, "Hey, I was young and stupid, shot my mouth off, blah blah blah." Be he has, and continues to, claim that what he did in 'Nam qualifies him today for high public office. He placates the Democrat base by touting his anti-war history.
So all the rest of us are stuck here debating the merits of what happened decades ago.
I think the end of the movie has some dialogue to the effect that Rose is going to see Jack again, which I took as her dying as an old lady, as Jack predicted. But it has been years so I could be wrong on that. My comment about their deaths being a bonus is a jab; I found the lead parts to be unrealistically over-done (can't say if it was the script, direction, or the actors, but by the end, I wanted Jack to freeze). But the historical backdrop was nicely done and made the movie entertaining despite shortcomings in the lead parts...which complemented my main point there.
Quickly now....name a functioning national democracy that doesn't have political parties. None in modern history. We have ancient Athens, but that was small: Socrates was convicted 280 to 221 for example. Ancient Rome had a republican form of gov't for a while. But both of those democracies failed. Athens fell to the Spartans, whose small population should have been easily defeated. And Rome after the Punic wars slipped into oligarchy, then monarchy, then autocracy, then anarchy.
I'm not thrilled with how parties behave either, but they do seem necessary for democracy to scale beyond a thousand people or so.
Take a look at post 10189822, (not my own post) above. It links to Scalia's dissent on McCain-Fiengold. His remarks on the history of restrictions on advertising used to squelch political dissent, mere decades before the First Amendment, are particularly damning.
If we don't learn from history we are doomed to repeat it.
Well, the power to spend money is also commanded by every citizen.
But The Rich have more, you say? True, but the power of speech is every bit as unevenly distributed as the money is. If Tom Hanks speaks out on an issue it gets heard much more than if you or I did. And consider this: Barbara Streisand can speak (or sing) at a fundraiser for free instead of insisting on the $500,000 (or whatever) she would ordinarily be paid. That constitutes a very valuable donation to a political campaign that you or I cannot match. Anyone proposing banning that?
Someone who makes money in a non-media business can't draw an audience like that, so they have to hire publicity, but they are limited by law how much and where they can spend. Therefore the effect of current campaign finance law is to shift power from flinty patricians to trendy entertainers. How is that an improvement?
Face it. The only may for average joes to make a political impact is for groups to pool resources and/or find a sympathetic sponsor (like the Swifties did). Campaign finance laws, if anything, impede that process.
The Sino-Russian alliance of convenience is a good analogy for the Iraq-Qaeda connection, but I prefer to use an example from the Dukes of Hazzard. When a particularly heinous criminal came to Hazzard County, Sheriff Roscoe proposed an alliance with the Dukes against their common foe. "This is strictly temporary," he said to the puzzled Dukes. Once the bad guys were driven out, Roscoe could go back to chasing them around for speeding tickets.
Maybe I can help out here...
I think it is fair to say that the Swifties' (Viet-Vets' generally) real beef with Kerry goes to a perception of intent. Right or wrong, it is perceived in that group that Kerry went to Vietnam with a chip on his shoulder, glory-hounded while he was there, and made political hay (at his peers' expense) in war protests afterward. Group loyalty is highly valued among military types, as would be expected since group cohesion is often a matter of life & death in combat. The perceived betrayal sticks in their craw; to tout his Vietnam experience as campaign propoganda is just too much for them to take.
This is why Bush, who appears to have been, at best, aloof at the time, is more favored among vets. To be a 20-something party dude is forgivable 30 years hence. But betrayal will never be forgotten.
A simpler suggestion to the Slashdot masses...don't bother with any of it, the film, the critique, the counter-critique, the counter-counter-critique, the whole lot of it. Your time is better spent finding better sources of political analysis than a Hollywood-style movie.
Watching Winslet & DeCaprio cavorting around is entertaining and all (and the fact that both characters die by the end of the film is an extra bonus), and attention to historical detail makes a film seem more immediate and "puts you in the story," but if you want to know why Titanic sank, you should look elsewhere. Even if every detail is scrupulously correct, that doesn't make it useful. Why treat contemporary politics differently?
hmmm...
My experience is limited to wedgie-case Amigas: the A1200 I stil use and 3 or so A500's over the years. I also have one of those slim 1.44 drives Dell made back in '95, which I consider to be PC hardware. (Apparently Dell had some leftover stock so they made some converter cables and sold them on the Amiga market.) Amiga-format floppies will flag disk errors sometimes (apparently the filesystem checks data integrity more than FAT12), but you can almost always recover the data with DiskSalv. The only data loss from many hundreds of Amiga format floppies I have had was a DCTV software distribution disk, which was probably made by a commercial duplication service.
But anyhow, everything I've seen so far seems consistent with my hypothesis that floppy reliability is a matter of quality mechanical components. (File systems that are more paranoid than FAT12 help though.) Systems that needed good floppy reliability put in better drives.
You see a similar phenomenon in the automotive world. The sign for a railroad crossing shows the outline of a steam locomotive, the icon on a headlamp switch could heve come from a Model T, the low oil light shows a 19th-century oilcan, and so on. The shapes of things change, and the shape of things to come is unknown, but the shape of the first thing of its kind is unchanging and iconic.
Floppies have NEVER been reliable for use amoung multiple computer.
For sufficiently small values of "never", or suficiently narrow definitions of "computer". My experience is that poor floppy reliability is strictly an x86 PC phenomenon.
3.5" floppies, particularly 720k density, are very reliable on non-PC systems (well, leave out early Macs, which weren't reliable in any way). Certainly better than CD-R's. Amigas have been particularly good in this regard; their native format trades speed for reliability. However, hooking PC-type drives and reading PC formatted floppies on an Amiga delivers the same disappointing reliability as a PC, while Amiga drives can read/write PC format with good reliabilty, so it is not just the extra redundancy in the Amiga Filesystem; the drive hardware also plays a part. It seems to me that when software started coming on CD's about 10 yrs. ago, PC floppy drives got hit by excessive cost-reduction and their reliability tanked.
Now that floppies are becoming yet-another USB peripheral, people can shop on perceived quality vs. price, rather than having some PC OEM decide for them. People who actually use them will pay extra to get something decent, and the majority who don't won't buy them at all. So the floppy's reputation for reliability should improve in its fading twilight.
Take a look at my posts #10142005 #10143786 above. A tube design would require insanely strong magnetic fields to get good conversion effiency. A CF card seems too small to get a long throw or much weight, so there is less mechanical energy to tap into. Considering the complexity of the required mechanics, it seems to me that such a scheme would have to be designed in from the the start.
Well, nobody else is checking my math. Including the strength of Earth's gravity...
Power=m*g*h*sin(30)/Delta_T = 696 microwatts
However, after thinking about it some more (instead of working like I should be), even with rare earth magnets, the magnetic field will be too weak to get good conversion efficiency without a mulitplying gear. So the mechanism will require a ratchet mechanism on a spring to capture energy on reverse rotation, a multiplying gear, a permanent magnet, and a stator winding. You will also need a freewheeling ratchet on the high-speed wheel. The resulting assembly can be made reasonably thin but I doubt you can get sub $5 cheap.
But the power should be pretty generous if you do all that.
Hmmm, since we are wasting time on/. anyway....
Say we put a 2 oz. weight in a PDA (more than that will make the PDA lopsided) and its centroid can fall 2 inches, along an incline that may typically be 30 degrees. Guessing wildly, that may happen 3 times a minute in an ordinary pants-pocket environment.
Power=m*h*sin(30)/delta_T = 70 microwatts
A rare-earth magnet and properly implemented power conversion circuit should be able capture about half that energy to deliver 35 uW of usable power.
A solar cell is harder to estimate becuase it is hard to say how much light will fall on it, but this amorphous solar panel delivers 41 mW per square inch. If room light is 1% of full sunlight, at a typical incident angle of 45 degrees on 4 squre inches, I get 290 uW. So solar wins out if you can run on 290 uW. But an oscillating weight looks competitive for maintaining standby charge, or you can shake it up to get a minute of operation, just long enough to retrieve a contact or jot a note.
Perhaps a more promising approach is to borrow a technique from self-winding wristwatches: an off-center weight that spins around as an energy source. That way your PDA recharges in your pocket whenever you move.
The law of Supply & Demand work in the short term. Over longer terms, the means of economic production can grow, shift around, or, in the case of fossil fuels for example, shrink. The history of electonics in the last few decades has been one of growing markets suppporting ever larger capital investment, and accumulating technical know-how, bringing us declining per-byte costs for memory and storage.
In the absence of growing markets (if tarrif wars were to isolate national economies from foreign trade for example) nobody could afford to build those billion dollar fabs, but we would still have advancing technology. So the OP got it half-right.
And of course the yet-undiscovered low-cost future technology has to exist. Fields outside electronics have had growing markets drive technological and capital investment, but they haven't advanced as fast.
Slashdot Mirror
The vote-reciept has a drawback, though: It enables vote buying (actually vote reciept buying). A possible alternative is a random 10-digit number you write down yourself in the booth. Any voter can check against the public (so anonymized) log of all the votes. Voters get reciepts that are only trustworthy to themselves but easily forged to everyone else.
It does seem easier, though, to use electronic systems to print a paper ballot, so that you have much less complexity that you have to trust.
Of course, from Dave Barry, that could be a ringing endorsement.
To understand what crime rates are and why they vary from place to place, from someone who is not pushing a political agenda, get a copy of Places Rated. (Includes Canada!)
At the risk of inciting a flame war, I mention my hypothesis that language barriers in Europe, because they reduce population mobility, are a major reason crime rates are lower there, and one of the downsides of the unified currency will be increased population mobility and rates of crime. Canada's dollar, however, floats relative to the US dollar so when Canada's economy slows down the whole economy can adjust its prices downward (when the exchange rate drops) instead of having people migrate to the US for jobs (or vice versa). Hence lower population mobility and therefore lower crime.
Narcotics were first banned in 1914 about the time he was born, but he is old enough to remember alcohol prohibition.
But none of that is peculiar to white collar crime. The average murder defendant doesn't get OJ Simpson's legal team.
The people who personally benefitted from GE's business using PCB's, the stockholders of the 50's & 60's, are not the same as the stockholders of today. Many of them are dead. The problem here is that the hazards of PCBs were unknown and GE's actions were legal at the time, so a long period of time has elapsed. It has nothing to do with corporate personhood. We don't tolerate illegal activity by corporations, and those who use otherwise legitimate corporations as a screen for committing crimes are prosecuted as individuals (despite depictions to the contrary in Hollywood movies).
And in a hypothetical plutocracy, who is going to put Bill Gates (and his private army) in jail? To suggest such a thing is naive. Without the freedom to coordinate as corporations, and vote with their wallet for above-board businesses, the regular folk are simply out of the game.
If there are PCBs in the Hudson, I believe the GE stockholders are personally responsible to clean them up.
You are skipping over the step of proving that dredging is the appropriate remedy & that GE (who never made PCB's but used them in capacitor and transformer manufacture) is the appropriate entitiy to pay for it, as compared to, say, Monsanto, who made PCB's, utility companies who bought the products, or local governments who required the use of PCB's in their building codes. GE's claim is that the discharge levels were within legal levels of the time and that a much cheaper motitor-and-spot-clean-as-necessary approach is more appropriate. But my point here is not to defend GE, but to say that GE is acting perfectly within the normal charter of its business to engage in a political debate which affects the company's interest. To expect over a million separate shareholders to spontaneously organize into PACs every time a political issue impacts a $350 billion company is ridiculus.
I think you underestimate the good effects of having limited liability corporations. Before the corporate form was introduced, capital intensive businesss like canal bulding, banking, and insurance were the domain of super-wealthy patricians. (In the case of banking, it was a tight-knit group of Jews because Thomistic Christian theology prohibited collecting interest; we are still stuck with lingering conspiracy theories from that). In Roman times these patiricans would hire private armies, intimidate courts, and take over provincial governments. Limited liability corps permitted the middle class to pool resources and give these aristocrats some competition, and as such consititute a great progressive political reform. Would you prefer that Bill Gates personally owned Microsoft? Would you want to buy fire insurance from Marcus Crassus?
No they are not...that is simply a convenient legal shorthand. But stockholders are, and do, so the rights of corporations should not be so cavalierly dismissed. To a certain extent stockholders have a right to exercise their rights through a corporate entity.
Let me give examples of what I consider appropriate and inappropriate corporate political speech.
Stockholders in the big media companies have an interest in getting good return on their investment, but they are consumers of recorded music as well. Therefore, stockholders have a dilute (or even negative) interest in copyright extensions and such. The company managements, however, have a much stonger vested interest in copyright extension so they lobby toward that goal with great zeal. This form of corporate politcal speech is inappropriate because it constitutes a breach of fiduciary duty to spend money counter to the interest of the stockholders.
Now consider this case. The Federal government has been attempting to dredge the Hudson River for PCB's at GE's (enormous) expense. GE disputes the scientific merit of such an endeavor and has fought the case not only in court, but in public opinion with a PR campaign. Few of GE's stockholders are dredging companies so no breach of fiduciary duty is present here. In this case, GE's behavior is no different than that of a local restauranteur (either a proprietor or a corporation) pushing for favorable zoning. To claim that a corporation cannot even present its case is an anethema to stockholders' freedom of association.
In the end, it seems that the cure for inappropriate corporate political speech is not campaign finance law, but better enforcement of stockholder interests.
He appears to be pointing up a moderator abuse. It appears that someone went through and modded down a several anti-Kerry posts (or at least non-defending-Kerry...my post got modded down and I never even said I agreed with the Swifties).
But getting back to the Swifties, some of their complaints are more legitimate than others. To try to impugne the brave things he apparently did in 'Nam is a stretch; even if the vetting process for military decorations wasn't as thorough as it should have been, you can't blame that on Kerry. But to call his anti-war activities irresponsible is fair. Even if everything he said was true, that doesn't make it a good idea to associate with radical anti-war groups and testify in Congress with poorly-checked facts. A true reformer would have carefully collated interviews, cross-checked facts, built his case, and suggested paths to reform. Kerry's behavior seemed more calculated to launch his politcal career on anti-war sentiment than actually improving the situation. Like I said before, it goes to intent.
Now, none of this would matter a hill of beans if Kerry simply said, "Hey, I was young and stupid, shot my mouth off, blah blah blah." Be he has, and continues to, claim that what he did in 'Nam qualifies him today for high public office. He placates the Democrat base by touting his anti-war history. So all the rest of us are stuck here debating the merits of what happened decades ago.
I think the end of the movie has some dialogue to the effect that Rose is going to see Jack again, which I took as her dying as an old lady, as Jack predicted. But it has been years so I could be wrong on that. My comment about their deaths being a bonus is a jab; I found the lead parts to be unrealistically over-done (can't say if it was the script, direction, or the actors, but by the end, I wanted Jack to freeze). But the historical backdrop was nicely done and made the movie entertaining despite shortcomings in the lead parts...which complemented my main point there.
I'd a) abolish political parties
Quickly now....name a functioning national democracy that doesn't have political parties. None in modern history. We have ancient Athens, but that was small: Socrates was convicted 280 to 221 for example. Ancient Rome had a republican form of gov't for a while. But both of those democracies failed. Athens fell to the Spartans, whose small population should have been easily defeated. And Rome after the Punic wars slipped into oligarchy, then monarchy, then autocracy, then anarchy.
I'm not thrilled with how parties behave either, but they do seem necessary for democracy to scale beyond a thousand people or so.
If we don't learn from history we are doomed to repeat it.
But The Rich have more, you say? True, but the power of speech is every bit as unevenly distributed as the money is. If Tom Hanks speaks out on an issue it gets heard much more than if you or I did. And consider this: Barbara Streisand can speak (or sing) at a fundraiser for free instead of insisting on the $500,000 (or whatever) she would ordinarily be paid. That constitutes a very valuable donation to a political campaign that you or I cannot match. Anyone proposing banning that?
Someone who makes money in a non-media business can't draw an audience like that, so they have to hire publicity, but they are limited by law how much and where they can spend. Therefore the effect of current campaign finance law is to shift power from flinty patricians to trendy entertainers. How is that an improvement?
Face it. The only may for average joes to make a political impact is for groups to pool resources and/or find a sympathetic sponsor (like the Swifties did). Campaign finance laws, if anything, impede that process.
The Sino-Russian alliance of convenience is a good analogy for the Iraq-Qaeda connection, but I prefer to use an example from the Dukes of Hazzard. When a particularly heinous criminal came to Hazzard County, Sheriff Roscoe proposed an alliance with the Dukes against their common foe. "This is strictly temporary," he said to the puzzled Dukes. Once the bad guys were driven out, Roscoe could go back to chasing them around for speeding tickets.
I think it is fair to say that the Swifties' (Viet-Vets' generally) real beef with Kerry goes to a perception of intent. Right or wrong, it is perceived in that group that Kerry went to Vietnam with a chip on his shoulder, glory-hounded while he was there, and made political hay (at his peers' expense) in war protests afterward. Group loyalty is highly valued among military types, as would be expected since group cohesion is often a matter of life & death in combat. The perceived betrayal sticks in their craw; to tout his Vietnam experience as campaign propoganda is just too much for them to take.
This is why Bush, who appears to have been, at best, aloof at the time, is more favored among vets. To be a 20-something party dude is forgivable 30 years hence. But betrayal will never be forgotten.
Watching Winslet & DeCaprio cavorting around is entertaining and all (and the fact that both characters die by the end of the film is an extra bonus), and attention to historical detail makes a film seem more immediate and "puts you in the story," but if you want to know why Titanic sank, you should look elsewhere. Even if every detail is scrupulously correct, that doesn't make it useful. Why treat contemporary politics differently?
My experience is limited to wedgie-case Amigas: the A1200 I stil use and 3 or so A500's over the years. I also have one of those slim 1.44 drives Dell made back in '95, which I consider to be PC hardware. (Apparently Dell had some leftover stock so they made some converter cables and sold them on the Amiga market.) Amiga-format floppies will flag disk errors sometimes (apparently the filesystem checks data integrity more than FAT12), but you can almost always recover the data with DiskSalv. The only data loss from many hundreds of Amiga format floppies I have had was a DCTV software distribution disk, which was probably made by a commercial duplication service.
But anyhow, everything I've seen so far seems consistent with my hypothesis that floppy reliability is a matter of quality mechanical components. (File systems that are more paranoid than FAT12 help though.) Systems that needed good floppy reliability put in better drives.
You see a similar phenomenon in the automotive world. The sign for a railroad crossing shows the outline of a steam locomotive, the icon on a headlamp switch could heve come from a Model T, the low oil light shows a 19th-century oilcan, and so on. The shapes of things change, and the shape of things to come is unknown, but the shape of the first thing of its kind is unchanging and iconic.
Floppies have NEVER been reliable for use amoung multiple computer.
For sufficiently small values of "never", or suficiently narrow definitions of "computer". My experience is that poor floppy reliability is strictly an x86 PC phenomenon.
3.5" floppies, particularly 720k density, are very reliable on non-PC systems (well, leave out early Macs, which weren't reliable in any way). Certainly better than CD-R's. Amigas have been particularly good in this regard; their native format trades speed for reliability. However, hooking PC-type drives and reading PC formatted floppies on an Amiga delivers the same disappointing reliability as a PC, while Amiga drives can read/write PC format with good reliabilty, so it is not just the extra redundancy in the Amiga Filesystem; the drive hardware also plays a part. It seems to me that when software started coming on CD's about 10 yrs. ago, PC floppy drives got hit by excessive cost-reduction and their reliability tanked.
Now that floppies are becoming yet-another USB peripheral, people can shop on perceived quality vs. price, rather than having some PC OEM decide for them. People who actually use them will pay extra to get something decent, and the majority who don't won't buy them at all. So the floppy's reputation for reliability should improve in its fading twilight.
Take a look at my posts #10142005 #10143786 above. A tube design would require insanely strong magnetic fields to get good conversion effiency. A CF card seems too small to get a long throw or much weight, so there is less mechanical energy to tap into. Considering the complexity of the required mechanics, it seems to me that such a scheme would have to be designed in from the the start.
Power=m*g*h*sin(30)/Delta_T = 696 microwatts
However, after thinking about it some more (instead of working like I should be), even with rare earth magnets, the magnetic field will be too weak to get good conversion efficiency without a mulitplying gear. So the mechanism will require a ratchet mechanism on a spring to capture energy on reverse rotation, a multiplying gear, a permanent magnet, and a stator winding. You will also need a freewheeling ratchet on the high-speed wheel. The resulting assembly can be made reasonably thin but I doubt you can get sub $5 cheap.
But the power should be pretty generous if you do all that.
Say we put a 2 oz. weight in a PDA (more than that will make the PDA lopsided) and its centroid can fall 2 inches, along an incline that may typically be 30 degrees. Guessing wildly, that may happen 3 times a minute in an ordinary pants-pocket environment.
Power=m*h*sin(30)/delta_T = 70 microwatts
A rare-earth magnet and properly implemented power conversion circuit should be able capture about half that energy to deliver 35 uW of usable power.
A solar cell is harder to estimate becuase it is hard to say how much light will fall on it, but this amorphous solar panel delivers 41 mW per square inch. If room light is 1% of full sunlight, at a typical incident angle of 45 degrees on 4 squre inches, I get 290 uW. So solar wins out if you can run on 290 uW. But an oscillating weight looks competitive for maintaining standby charge, or you can shake it up to get a minute of operation, just long enough to retrieve a contact or jot a note.
I've always wanted solar power on a pda.
Perhaps a more promising approach is to borrow a technique from self-winding wristwatches: an off-center weight that spins around as an energy source. That way your PDA recharges in your pocket whenever you move.
In the absence of growing markets (if tarrif wars were to isolate national economies from foreign trade for example) nobody could afford to build those billion dollar fabs, but we would still have advancing technology. So the OP got it half-right.
And of course the yet-undiscovered low-cost future technology has to exist. Fields outside electronics have had growing markets drive technological and capital investment, but they haven't advanced as fast.