Before Bush became President, I was feeling that way as well. We'd had 40 years of Cold War Mutually Assured Destruction terrorism with lots of people threatening to blow up the world, and it was finally over, with the Evil Empire gone, a bunch of little wars to remind everybody that _we_ still had a military-industrial complex mostly over with, and economic boom that was promising to turn into The Long Boom, people were starting to leave nationalism behind and have fun building a global economy, and things were starting to look like we might _almost_ be civilized for a while.
And then Bush gets himself into office and starts bringing in all his Cold War and Big Oil buddies into his administration, and it's like "Oh, no, are we going to have to do the 60s activism thing and 70s environmental activism thing over again? At least nobody's threatening to blow up their enemies and take the whole world down with it this time.". And then there's September 11th, and we discover that we've _always_ been at war with Osama bin Laden, and that the secretary of defense thinks this will be a permanent state of war against terrorism, and Ashcroft reveals that he's more interested in peeking into _your_ bedroom now that he's got those nekkid statues in his own building covered up, and the economic manipulation that Greenspan did to pull the rug out of the economy 9 monhts before the election has helped trigger the instabilities that were fundamental to the bubble anyway, and basically things are starting to look like maybe they do suck after all.
Star Wars didn't just rip off Kurosawa
on
David Brin On LOTR
·
· Score: 2
Star Wars borrowed from *all kinds of things*. That was one of the fun things about it, and it added some character of its own. I also like "Troops"...
On the other hand, it does irk me that it got re-edited to become "Episode 4 - A New Hope" and you just can't find the original, even if you mainly just want to look at the differences. (... these aren't the videotape versions you're looking for...)
That was one of the reasons we had to go to Grateful Dead shows every night. They were always different, not only playing different songs every night, but playing each one differently every time. Sometimes it flopped, but sometimes it was pure magic. It wasn't just the performers on stage, it was also the interaction of the performers and the crowd. Recordings are nice, but they're not the same thing as being there, and the shows were always recorded for posterity - not necessarily on tape, but in the thousands of different recordings in the memories of the individual audience members. Also, while some of the songs started out good, what really happened was that there would be a basic structure that would evolve as they'd get more experience with performing it, and with how the crowd reacted to it, and with what their emotions were at the different times they were performing.
There was a piece on US Nationalized Public Radio the other week about the call center business in India. In the last two years, it's grown to about a $5B/year business, and is still on a steep growth curve. So it's not surprising that there are people in the government saying "Me Too! I invented the Call Center right after I helped Al Gore invent the Internet!" One of the big things that made it possible was telecom liberalization - the VSNL monopoly has been a drag on India's economic growth for years, and as they're gradually getting out of the way, people are starting to be able to get the communications tools they need to open up new business opportunities.
Other countries have been doing call center outsourcing for a long time - the Caribbean has a lot of it, and while C&W was a monopoly in much of the area, it was much more competent than VSNL, and the area has some level of integration with the US telecom networks.
I haven't followed the computer development trends in India for almost a decade, but in the late 80s - early 90s, Unix was quite popular over there, with the IITs doing a lot of teaching about it and US companies opening offices in Bangalore and starting to do development there. UNIX and Open Source are much different business models, of course, but access to source, and decent operating systems that let you actually build things that work reliably, and tool-based development approaches are consistent between them, and obviously open-source environments mix better with the academic world over there than closed-source, and environments that let you do real work with modern software on older machines are a good match for third-world economies. It doesn't surprise me to see Linux taking hold.
Of course, back then, while Microsoft was definitely one of the competitors, so was IBM's mainframe world, and to some extent other proprietary operating systems like VMS, since DEC machines were in the right price ranges.
A long time ago, when the Internet was still the Arpanet, there was a backbone, because that was the easiest way for different routers to find each other, though there was sometimes other connectivity in local areas - not the kind of thing that could actually survive a nuclear war or even a well-planned collection of car bombs, despite all the theory about being able to route around damage. The current commercially-run internet doesn't have a backbone, and there's vastly more diversity. Depending on who's gone Chapter 11 this week, there are one or two dozen big "Tier 1" ISPs that carry the bulk of the traffic in the US and from the US to Europe and Asia. Most people are familiar with the big peering points like MAE-West and MAE-East, but in practice somewhere between 95-99% of the traffic between the Tier 1 ISPs is carried on private peering connections, though most of those are in the same cities as the big exchange points. I'm not sure how much of Europe's traffic is dependent on LINX and AMSIX, and while KPN-Qwest may have carried about 1/3 of Europe's traffic before its bankruptcy, it's dead now, with the traffic moved to other carriers. Asia seems to be a lot less centralized, except for the Great Firewall of China.
An important part of network design is understanding what traffic is going to "nearby" locations, and designing things so most traffic stays local and doesn't use expensive or scarce facilities - things like putting big hulking routers in San Francisco and San Jose so traffic between Silicon Valley companies stays in the South Bay and Multimedia Gulch companies stays in the City without needing to use too much bandwidth around the Bay, much less sending copies of all of it on three-part-carbon forms to NSA's Fort Meade, Ashcroft's J. Edgar Hoover building, and Dick Cheney's stockbroker before delivering it.
That doesn't mean that there weren't rumors from reputable sources a few years ago about active wiretaps on MAE-West sending extra copies of some packets to somebody else, or that the Russian renamed-KGB's 1998ish SORM (another URL) project didn't try to force Russian ISPs to build a full-sized wiretap feed to them (at the ISPs' expense, of course) or that there aren't Eurocrats trying to do the same thing in their countries today. And then there's the whole Echelon Wiretapping System. But it's still impractical for them to force ISPs to deliver everything everybody's reading or emailing, though I'll be happy to send them copies of most of my spam if they'd like.
On the other hand, the publicly-accessible parts of the web aren't all that big. The Wayback Machine has a copy of all of it, with reasonable samples going back a long time, and Google and the other search engines crawl it periodically, and AllTheWeb.com presumably claims to have All The Web.
I missed this while I was catching up from vacation, so probably almost nobody will see it; I only saw it because it came up in meta-moderation. Oh, well.
The Web was designed to work well with caching, particularly at organizational firewalls and peering points. It scales really well, and if you work inside a big company, or use a medium-sized ISP that has one, the first time somebody retrieves a given page, it's there for the next N users, and the bigger N is, the more chance that the first person got the page before Slashdot killed it. I've generally had much better success reading slashdotted sites from work, where I catch a cached version at the proxy, than from home. It requires a bit of computing horsepower at the firewall or gateway, but that's surprisingly cheap, and if bandwidth still costs you money, it can cut down significantly on costs when lots of people look at the same static content. It's obviously less useful for dynamic content, unless there's an easy way to tell if the dynamic content is the same for multiple viewers, but most web sites have content that's mostly static most of the time.
Akamai built a model that sells caching to content providers rather than viewers, which was technically interesting, and similar things have been done by their competitors such as AT&T, Digital Island, and Speedera, but if you're not doing a high-volume commercial site, and didn't expect to be slashdotted, it's the wrong model. Google's caching is fine, if Google catches it before Slashdot does and Slashdot actually points to it, but that's pretty rare. BitTorrent does a nice job of P2P caching and distribution of large files (its target application is things like CDs and big software distributions, and you'll find it used by some of the ETree Jam Band Music Download people - Bram's tested it for respectably-sized numbers of simultaneous downloaders (I think a few hundred, which is pretty big for CDs.)
If you look up "cache" in Google, the first entry you get is for Squid, which is also the first entry you get if you look up "squid".
If everybody has equal skills at everything, sure, whether you're doing creative work and the other guy is digging ditches or the other way around is a zero-sum game. But if both of you can be productively doing creative work, there's more interesting stuff in the world, though fewer ditches. Usually that's a good thing, and if both of you work on designing more efficient backhoes, or better shovel-sharpeners, you'll cut down on the number of days people have to work to get their ditches dug. On the other hand, if you spend your creative energy designing nukes, that's a negative sum for everybody, and if you spend your time designing video games, more teenage boys will spend their time fragging their friends and less time kicking soccer balls at them, but they'll be having a good time.:-)
The Internet means that anybody can do anything from anywhere in the world - so sending those H1-Bs back to India or China won't stop them from competing with you - it just means they'll have a lower cost of living at home than your rent in Silicon Valley, and they're finally starting to liberalize telecoms and get some infrastructure.
Some guy from Ensenada or Tecate moves here and starts working for a guy his brother knows, eventually works his way up, starts a business running a taco truck, starts sending money home to his mom, brings in his cousin to drive the truck while he gets another one, has some kids, it's the same story everywhere; that's also how they got off the farm and into the big city in Mexico before they moved here. New York City's the same way, only the people moved from somewhere else, or all those Slavs and Germans in Chicago.
In my case, instead of moving 500 miles to work in a restaurant, I moved 2500 miles from New Jersey to work in the computer / telecom business, and I've been working at big companies rather than starting my own like a lot of my friends did, but it's really no different. I also got here during the post-computer-boom slump, when Silicon Valley seemed a bit past its prime, before the Internet Marketing boom hit, back when Ross Perot was ranting about the Great Sucking Sound of that era.
But I'm an American, so the only people who wanted to see my citizenship papers were the Motor Vehicle Goons (because California's governor didn't think it was safe for people to drive if they spoke Spanish), and I could already speak Computer Guru (Geekish wasn't around yet) as well as speaking some Businessdroid and lots of Bellhead, so I had some of the important languages down. (I could also speak Ada, Algol,.. C,... X Windows, Yacc, but nothing starting with Z.)
The Internet boom was a bit different - because the Internet means that anybody can work with you from anywhere in the world that they wanted to, everybody moved here to Silicon Valley, driving the cost of real estate to silly levels, forcing us all to get higher salaries and work in little cubicles, and the pace of the boom forced lots of people to work 16-hour days, staying inside instead of enjoying the great weather and scenery that was half the reason for moving here. Now that it's over, and all those telecom companies built infinite-capacity fiber optic networks before going bankrupt and selling them for pennies on the dollar, maybe we really _will_ be able to catalyze world economic development a bit more. Hiring thugs like La Migra to tell people they have to live somewhere else other than here won't let you steal their jobs - it'll just mean they'll export them to Bangalore or Shanghai.
Unions can do well in a stable economy, but we don't have one here. They can affect who gets how much of the pie, but they don't help you make the pie bigger or keep the pie from getting smaller, and they presume a slow-moving class stratification where some people are Workers and some people are Bosses, rather than an environment where everybody's got stock options and is trying to make the enterprise succeed, or at least get their 15 minutes of fame before it collapses and they find the next gig to see if it'll get 30 minutes of fame instead. They'd be much more likely to respond fast enough to not trip over themselves at Sun or Intel than at dogfood-online.net or little-hardware-widget.com ; perhaps at Oracle, probably not at HP. Typical union policies that give heavy weight to seniority are surprisingly well matched to typical startup stock option policies that give early participants lots more of the pie, though a union environment usually has a lot less variability - and the early-hire office manager in a union shop will never become a Mozillionaire. Unions _can_ help you deal with individual bad managers, which engineering and startup companies have randomly scattered around them, but they don't fix a company's business plan if it's broken.
Perhaps they would have been successful for call-center tech support jobs at big ISPs, but 7x24 shops have a real incentive to outsource to non-US companies, because it's easier to train someone to work day shift at your branch in India or the UK than to get someone to work night shift in California, especially in a boom economy where anybody who was halfway competent at a night-shift job got an extra resume line when they tried for a day-shift job at their next employer if you didn't have one. In general, unions can't prevent outsourcing or even get significant membership unless they're really offering added value both to businesses and to employees, which in environments like this they might have been able to do, like providing stability and better training for employees. But they weren't fast enough to build unions during the boom of the late 90s, and they didn't do it during the slump of the early 90s either, or the computer boom of the 80s either, so I'm skeptical it'll take this time either.
Government workers are almost never doing something productive, and they're getting paid tax money to do it, which means that people who are working and businesses that are still hiring people are getting dragged down to pay them - most of it's like better-paid welfare, and much of it's much worse. There are some government workers doing productive work - medical clinics, public defenders, firefighters, emergency-response people, college professors and other university employees. Schoolteachers can be productive, but the current monopoly-structured system means that huge numbers of kids get mass-produced education-substitutes instead of good educations that are structured better for their individual needs, and schools have a lot more bureaucracy than they should.
Lots of government workers are negatively productive for the economy - their main jobs are interfering with business, regulating things that shouldn't be regulated (like who can be a barber or what color you can paint your house, as opposed to what you can pour in the river), or their jobs are collecting taxes from businesses, which is an economically bad decision if you've got progressive income taxes, because you're forcing businesses to make decisions that are driven by tax policy, not market needs, and forcing them to hire huge numbers of people to handle their tax issues (I've seen estimates that businesses spend about 40% as much keeping track of taxable activities as the US Federal government collects in business taxes.)
Then there's the serious opportunity cost of having otherwise-productive people working for the government - every engineer who's designing military aircraft isn't designing civilian aircraft or more efficient automobiles (which if you want to be nationalistic about it, helps your country's automobile industry and helps cut the need for imported oil, and therefore the need for military aircraft), and isn't designing better refrigerators or wall-sized televisions or solar energy generators or cleaner oil refineries or computer keyboards that don't cause carpal tunnel problems. Even things that look productive, like medical research, are often making up for the damaged caused by other government activities, like the FDA regulations that bring the cost of a new drug in the US to over half a billion dollars, which restricts the development of less profitable drugs, makes medical marketers more important than medical researchers, and raises everybody's cost of health care significantly.
Some government activities are acceptably non-productive - people who do disaster response training and hanging out when there aren't disasters, legitimate national defense requires a lot of training to look intimidating so people don't invade you (but tempts the military to invade other people), legitimate police work involves a lot of cruising around looking visible and a lot of time finding people who did bad things to other people.
Then there are the evil folks in government - the people who run the Drug War in all its aspects, the people who develop nuclear and chemical and biological weapons and their delivery systems, the people who extend militarism around the world, whether it's US or Pan-Arab or Ex-Soviet or Chinese, the people who run secret police departments in their countries, the people who provide military and financial aid to foreign dictators or to governments with death squads. The last time the US military protected the actual US states against foreign invaders in any major action was the War of 1812 - Pearl Harbor was in a colony we'd conquered for some big agribusinesses, the Confederate invasions of Pennsylvania were in response to the US attempt to reconquer the Confederacy, and Pancho Villa was arguably not a major war (though I'll let you win that argument if you want to push it.) All of the US invasions of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines were colonialism, and while US support for England in World War II may have been justified, World War I was definitely not.
I'm not blameless here - I used to work in the military-industrial complex with the government as my main customer. I didn't do weapons systems, air traffic control was theoretically produtive (we didn't win many of those projects, and I've ranted elsewhere about the FAA's incompetence at managing projects of that scope:-), some of the disaster recovery planning was potentially productive and I rationalized that most of the bureaucratic-communications projects would be built by somebody so it might as well be done well and efficiently by us rather than less efficiently by somebody else, but a lot of that was just bullshit rationalization, and eventually I transitioned over to doing honest work. That didn't mean that some of it wasn't cool.... Some of it really was. But nobody should have been doing it. And it's surprising how easily you can get dragged into supporting the Dark Side.
If you're a lawyer or doctor, you can always say you're "in private practice", just as technical people can say they're "consultants", or journalists can say they're "freelancing". Sometimes that really means you _are_ in private practice, while sometimes it's a more cheerful-sounding term for unemployed. On the other hand, if they're not getting paid work, lawyers can be doing pro-bono work, and computer programmers can be working on open source. US medical malpractice laws make it much tougher for doctors to do volunteer work if they're not also doing paid work, though perhaps there are government clinic opportunities.
The engineers and people like us are not unionized, but we're professionals and we used to be treated professionally (:-) Now our middle management treat us professionally, but it's not only not the job-for-life mentality of big companies 25 years ago, it's a lot more market-focused, which means sometimes we get treated like sales people.
The sales people are not unionized, and some of the management can't tell the difference between a good sales person in a down market and a bad sales person in a good market, so depending on their organization they're getting treated fairly but badly or unfairly and worse. During the boom years, they were able to blow out their commissions, but lots of them are also short-timers - there's been a lot of movement of sales people between different telecom and high-tech companies, especially here in Silicon Valley.
The craft workers - installers and other people who handle real stuff and talk to machines that aren't just computers or routers - are union, but the equipment is increasingly becoming more automated and more integrated, though that's somewhat made up for because they're always getting new equipment.
The clerks in the offices are union - they have pretty strict seniority rules about who gets hit during layoffs, so there's nobody left with less than 25 years at the company, or maybe it's 29 years by now, and if we're still in business in 5 years they'll all retire.
I'm not sure about the order-processing parts of the company, who mainly handle data entry into the provisioning and billing systems and fix mistakes and do corrections and some lightweight design. Years ago they would have been mostly unionized, but different parts of those organizations keep getting outsourced so I don't know (plus there seems to be a conspiracy that any time a provisioning group really understands what they're doing, they either replace the database system they know or move the provisioning center across the country to some group that doesn't have a clue about it yet.)
When the Nokia phones came out a few years ago, it really irked me that I could pick one of 35 annoying ringtones, but I couldn't key in my own. I don't want my ringtone to be five minutes of symphonies or even "Mini-Songs"* - I just want a couple of short notes that don't sound identical to the phones of the nearest five other people. It doesn't require much memory for an input program (probably less than a program to download ringtones), and no more to store the tune than any of the existing ones. A web-based system that lets you give them your ringtones to send your phone for a small fee is just silly; it's still a closed interface (either deliberately or just cluelessly.)
* oh, come on, you remember Demolition Man. All restaurant jingles are for Taco Bell...
What? Is this only rush hour, or all the time? All lanes? The Washington DC area has a highway that's carpool-only for all lanes at rush hour, which was not at all obvious from the Avis map, much to my annoyance, though of course there was no sign in English indicating it, only a thing that said "HOV-3"...
I didn't drive into lower Manhattan very often back when I lived in central New Jersey - the train was usually easier, except sometimes when I was going to a show in the evening in the Village, which was pretty seldom. There was a nice parking lot just on the Manhattan side of the Lincoln tunnel, which was what I'd normally do if I was driving into Manhattan.
Most cable modem service in the US is 3Mbps or faster downstream unless the service provider decides to be lame and cap it at 1.5Mbps. Upstream bandwidth is usually 128kbps, because most of the service providers *are* lame about that. Older cable systems tended to be 768kbps upstream. The only person I've met with slower cable modem service is somebody whose apartment building runs the cable system instead of the local cable TV provider, so they cap the service at something like 512 or 768 and provide a wimpy 1 or 2 T1s to feed the building.
You've got dumb friends:-) New York City has had the Holland since the 1927 and the Lincoln Tunnel since 1937, and traffic jams on both since probably 1947. Hong Kong's tunnel didn't look substantially bigger. It may not be as much fun as the Star Ferry or the little hovercraft taxis, but the real question about it is why anybody would bother having their own car in Hong Kong when there's no place to park. (Though I suppose that's not much different from Manhattan...)
Back in the late 80s, when Burroughs and Sperry were merging, one of them, I think Burroughs, made a PC that had a somewhat toaster-like form factor. It was a set of flat squares, maybe 8 inches / 20cm per side, about 1.5-2 inches thick, that you stacked with the square sides together, standing on the narrow side. A fairly basic model had a CPU module and a floppy disk module, and we usually put them with the floppy disk slot on top like a toaster. Dual floppies? Sure. (More commonly, there'd be more than two blocks, so this was more the size of a 4-6-slice toaster:-)
The proposed law is facially invalid - not for Second Amendment reasons but for Interstate Commerce Clause reasons - that sort of thing is Federal jurisdiction, not state. That won't bother the state legislature, of course, and the "three years after some nebulous event" part of the law makes it a bit difficult for somebody to contest in court before everybody forgets about the law's existence:-)
Also, of course, the law won't eliminate New Jersey's share of the ~100 million guns in the US - it will just make it a bit harder for people to legally get new ones, mainly because it will make things much more difficult for gun stores to operate profitably selling the one or two brands of state-approved guns, but that will just push more business to the black market. If the law does try to address ownership of existing guns, it's also a "taking" under the Seventh Amendment, which therefore requires compensation.
Back in 1990, when I lived in New Jersey, there was a pro-gun rally at the State Capitol in Trenton, because newly-elected Gov. Jim Florio was trying to ban some kind of guns. The front page of the local paper had a picture of a black grandmother from Elizabeth or Newark, holding a pistol, who was quoted as saying something like "You think the police are going to show up in *my* neighborhood at night?" Maybe in your neighborhood, the police will show up 10 seconds after you dial 911, but it's not real common.
Slashdot Mirror
No, he's talking about optimism like "On The Beach"....
And then Bush gets himself into office and starts bringing in all his Cold War and Big Oil buddies into his administration, and it's like "Oh, no, are we going to have to do the 60s activism thing and 70s environmental activism thing over again? At least nobody's threatening to blow up their enemies and take the whole world down with it this time.". And then there's September 11th, and we discover that we've _always_ been at war with Osama bin Laden, and that the secretary of defense thinks this will be a permanent state of war against terrorism, and Ashcroft reveals that he's more interested in peeking into _your_ bedroom now that he's got those nekkid statues in his own building covered up, and the economic manipulation that Greenspan did to pull the rug out of the economy 9 monhts before the election has helped trigger the instabilities that were fundamental to the bubble anyway, and basically things are starting to look like maybe they do suck after all.
On the other hand, it does irk me that it got re-edited to become "Episode 4 - A New Hope" and you just can't find the original, even if you mainly just want to look at the differences. (... these aren't the videotape versions you're looking for ...)
That was one of the reasons we had to go to Grateful Dead shows every night. They were always different, not only playing different songs every night, but playing each one differently every time. Sometimes it flopped, but sometimes it was pure magic. It wasn't just the performers on stage, it was also the interaction of the performers and the crowd. Recordings are nice, but they're not the same thing as being there, and the shows were always recorded for posterity - not necessarily on tape, but in the thousands of different recordings in the memories of the individual audience members. Also, while some of the songs started out good, what really happened was that there would be a basic structure that would evolve as they'd get more experience with performing it, and with how the crowd reacted to it, and with what their emotions were at the different times they were performing.
Other countries have been doing call center outsourcing for a long time - the Caribbean has a lot of it, and while C&W was a monopoly in much of the area, it was much more competent than VSNL, and the area has some level of integration with the US telecom networks.
Of course, back then, while Microsoft was definitely one of the competitors, so was IBM's mainframe world, and to some extent other proprietary operating systems like VMS, since DEC machines were in the right price ranges.
An important part of network design is understanding what traffic is going to "nearby" locations, and designing things so most traffic stays local and doesn't use expensive or scarce facilities - things like putting big hulking routers in San Francisco and San Jose so traffic between Silicon Valley companies stays in the South Bay and Multimedia Gulch companies stays in the City without needing to use too much bandwidth around the Bay, much less sending copies of all of it on three-part-carbon forms to NSA's Fort Meade, Ashcroft's J. Edgar Hoover building, and Dick Cheney's stockbroker before delivering it.
That doesn't mean that there weren't rumors from reputable sources a few years ago about active wiretaps on MAE-West sending extra copies of some packets to somebody else, or that the Russian renamed-KGB's 1998ish SORM (another URL) project didn't try to force Russian ISPs to build a full-sized wiretap feed to them (at the ISPs' expense, of course) or that there aren't Eurocrats trying to do the same thing in their countries today. And then there's the whole Echelon Wiretapping System. But it's still impractical for them to force ISPs to deliver everything everybody's reading or emailing, though I'll be happy to send them copies of most of my spam if they'd like.
On the other hand, the publicly-accessible parts of the web aren't all that big. The Wayback Machine has a copy of all of it, with reasonable samples going back a long time, and Google and the other search engines crawl it periodically, and AllTheWeb.com presumably claims to have All The Web.
- The Air Force's definition is "Write a purchase order to buy one."
- The Navy's definition is "Tie it down so it doesn't roll or bounce around."
- The Marines' definition is "Machine-gun it and post an armed guard once you're sure they're all dead."
They've already got their own Milnet, so they're not trying for the Air Force approach....The Web was designed to work well with caching, particularly at organizational firewalls and peering points. It scales really well, and if you work inside a big company, or use a medium-sized ISP that has one, the first time somebody retrieves a given page, it's there for the next N users, and the bigger N is, the more chance that the first person got the page before Slashdot killed it. I've generally had much better success reading slashdotted sites from work, where I catch a cached version at the proxy, than from home. It requires a bit of computing horsepower at the firewall or gateway, but that's surprisingly cheap, and if bandwidth still costs you money, it can cut down significantly on costs when lots of people look at the same static content. It's obviously less useful for dynamic content, unless there's an easy way to tell if the dynamic content is the same for multiple viewers, but most web sites have content that's mostly static most of the time.
Akamai built a model that sells caching to content providers rather than viewers, which was technically interesting, and similar things have been done by their competitors such as AT&T, Digital Island, and Speedera, but if you're not doing a high-volume commercial site, and didn't expect to be slashdotted, it's the wrong model. Google's caching is fine, if Google catches it before Slashdot does and Slashdot actually points to it, but that's pretty rare. BitTorrent does a nice job of P2P caching and distribution of large files (its target application is things like CDs and big software distributions, and you'll find it used by some of the ETree Jam Band Music Download people - Bram's tested it for respectably-sized numbers of simultaneous downloaders (I think a few hundred, which is pretty big for CDs.)
If you look up "cache" in Google, the first entry you get is for Squid, which is also the first entry you get if you look up "squid".
If everybody has equal skills at everything, sure, whether you're doing creative work and the other guy is digging ditches or the other way around is a zero-sum game. But if both of you can be productively doing creative work, there's more interesting stuff in the world, though fewer ditches. Usually that's a good thing, and if both of you work on designing more efficient backhoes, or better shovel-sharpeners, you'll cut down on the number of days people have to work to get their ditches dug. On the other hand, if you spend your creative energy designing nukes, that's a negative sum for everybody, and if you spend your time designing video games, more teenage boys will spend their time fragging their friends and less time kicking soccer balls at them, but they'll be having a good time. :-)
Some guy from Ensenada or Tecate moves here and starts working for a guy his brother knows, eventually works his way up, starts a business running a taco truck, starts sending money home to his mom, brings in his cousin to drive the truck while he gets another one, has some kids, it's the same story everywhere; that's also how they got off the farm and into the big city in Mexico before they moved here. New York City's the same way, only the people moved from somewhere else, or all those Slavs and Germans in Chicago.
In my case, instead of moving 500 miles to work in a restaurant, I moved 2500 miles from New Jersey to work in the computer / telecom business, and I've been working at big companies rather than starting my own like a lot of my friends did, but it's really no different. I also got here during the post-computer-boom slump, when Silicon Valley seemed a bit past its prime, before the Internet Marketing boom hit, back when Ross Perot was ranting about the Great Sucking Sound of that era.
But I'm an American, so the only people who wanted to see my citizenship papers were the Motor Vehicle Goons (because California's governor didn't think it was safe for people to drive if they spoke Spanish), and I could already speak Computer Guru (Geekish wasn't around yet) as well as speaking some Businessdroid and lots of Bellhead, so I had some of the important languages down. (I could also speak Ada, Algol, .. C, ... X Windows, Yacc, but nothing starting with Z.)
The Internet boom was a bit different - because the Internet means that anybody can work with you from anywhere in the world that they wanted to, everybody moved here to Silicon Valley, driving the cost of real estate to silly levels, forcing us all to get higher salaries and work in little cubicles, and the pace of the boom forced lots of people to work 16-hour days, staying inside instead of enjoying the great weather and scenery that was half the reason for moving here. Now that it's over, and all those telecom companies built infinite-capacity fiber optic networks before going bankrupt and selling them for pennies on the dollar, maybe we really _will_ be able to catalyze world economic development a bit more. Hiring thugs like La Migra to tell people they have to live somewhere else other than here won't let you steal their jobs - it'll just mean they'll export them to Bangalore or Shanghai.
Perhaps they would have been successful for call-center tech support jobs at big ISPs, but 7x24 shops have a real incentive to outsource to non-US companies, because it's easier to train someone to work day shift at your branch in India or the UK than to get someone to work night shift in California, especially in a boom economy where anybody who was halfway competent at a night-shift job got an extra resume line when they tried for a day-shift job at their next employer if you didn't have one. In general, unions can't prevent outsourcing or even get significant membership unless they're really offering added value both to businesses and to employees, which in environments like this they might have been able to do, like providing stability and better training for employees. But they weren't fast enough to build unions during the boom of the late 90s, and they didn't do it during the slump of the early 90s either, or the computer boom of the 80s either, so I'm skeptical it'll take this time either.
Lots of government workers are negatively productive for the economy - their main jobs are interfering with business, regulating things that shouldn't be regulated (like who can be a barber or what color you can paint your house, as opposed to what you can pour in the river), or their jobs are collecting taxes from businesses, which is an economically bad decision if you've got progressive income taxes, because you're forcing businesses to make decisions that are driven by tax policy, not market needs, and forcing them to hire huge numbers of people to handle their tax issues (I've seen estimates that businesses spend about 40% as much keeping track of taxable activities as the US Federal government collects in business taxes.)
Then there's the serious opportunity cost of having otherwise-productive people working for the government - every engineer who's designing military aircraft isn't designing civilian aircraft or more efficient automobiles (which if you want to be nationalistic about it, helps your country's automobile industry and helps cut the need for imported oil, and therefore the need for military aircraft), and isn't designing better refrigerators or wall-sized televisions or solar energy generators or cleaner oil refineries or computer keyboards that don't cause carpal tunnel problems. Even things that look productive, like medical research, are often making up for the damaged caused by other government activities, like the FDA regulations that bring the cost of a new drug in the US to over half a billion dollars, which restricts the development of less profitable drugs, makes medical marketers more important than medical researchers, and raises everybody's cost of health care significantly.
Some government activities are acceptably non-productive - people who do disaster response training and hanging out when there aren't disasters, legitimate national defense requires a lot of training to look intimidating so people don't invade you (but tempts the military to invade other people), legitimate police work involves a lot of cruising around looking visible and a lot of time finding people who did bad things to other people.
Then there are the evil folks in government - the people who run the Drug War in all its aspects, the people who develop nuclear and chemical and biological weapons and their delivery systems, the people who extend militarism around the world, whether it's US or Pan-Arab or Ex-Soviet or Chinese, the people who run secret police departments in their countries, the people who provide military and financial aid to foreign dictators or to governments with death squads. The last time the US military protected the actual US states against foreign invaders in any major action was the War of 1812 - Pearl Harbor was in a colony we'd conquered for some big agribusinesses, the Confederate invasions of Pennsylvania were in response to the US attempt to reconquer the Confederacy, and Pancho Villa was arguably not a major war (though I'll let you win that argument if you want to push it.) All of the US invasions of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines were colonialism, and while US support for England in World War II may have been justified, World War I was definitely not.
I'm not blameless here - I used to work in the military-industrial complex with the government as my main customer. I didn't do weapons systems, air traffic control was theoretically produtive (we didn't win many of those projects, and I've ranted elsewhere about the FAA's incompetence at managing projects of that scope :-), some of the disaster recovery planning was potentially productive and I rationalized that most of the bureaucratic-communications projects would be built by somebody so it might as well be done well and efficiently by us rather than less efficiently by somebody else, but a lot of that was just bullshit rationalization, and eventually I transitioned over to doing honest work. That didn't mean that some of it wasn't cool.... Some of it really was. But nobody should have been doing it. And it's surprising how easily you can get dragged into supporting the Dark Side.
If you're a lawyer or doctor, you can always say you're "in private practice", just as technical people can say they're "consultants", or journalists can say they're "freelancing". Sometimes that really means you _are_ in private practice, while sometimes it's a more cheerful-sounding term for unemployed. On the other hand, if they're not getting paid work, lawyers can be doing pro-bono work, and computer programmers can be working on open source. US medical malpractice laws make it much tougher for doctors to do volunteer work if they're not also doing paid work, though perhaps there are government clinic opportunities.
It sounds like their military robots might not, but does the Roomba at least agree not to harm humans?
Cats will vaccuum up most of that if you leave the food bowl empty for a little while. But a ShopVac really is your friend for stuff like that.
* oh, come on, you remember Demolition Man. All restaurant jingles are for Taco Bell...
I didn't drive into lower Manhattan very often back when I lived in central New Jersey - the train was usually easier, except sometimes when I was going to a show in the evening in the Village, which was pretty seldom. There was a nice parking lot just on the Manhattan side of the Lincoln tunnel, which was what I'd normally do if I was driving into Manhattan.
Most cable modem service in the US is 3Mbps or faster downstream unless the service provider decides to be lame and cap it at 1.5Mbps. Upstream bandwidth is usually 128kbps, because most of the service providers *are* lame about that. Older cable systems tended to be 768kbps upstream. The only person I've met with slower cable modem service is somebody whose apartment building runs the cable system instead of the local cable TV provider, so they cap the service at something like 512 or 768 and provide a wimpy 1 or 2 T1s to feed the building.
You've got dumb friends :-) New York City has had the Holland since the 1927 and the Lincoln Tunnel since 1937, and traffic jams on both since probably 1947. Hong Kong's tunnel didn't look substantially bigger. It may not be as much fun as the Star Ferry or the little hovercraft taxis, but the real question about it is why anybody would bother having their own car in Hong Kong when there's no place to park. (Though I suppose that's not much different from Manhattan...)
The articles that the Slashdot article referenced all spelled it correctly.
Back in the late 80s, when Burroughs and Sperry were merging, one of them, I think Burroughs, made a PC that had a somewhat toaster-like form factor. It was a set of flat squares, maybe 8 inches / 20cm per side, about 1.5-2 inches thick, that you stacked with the square sides together, standing on the narrow side. A fairly basic model had a CPU module and a floppy disk module, and we usually put them with the floppy disk slot on top like a toaster. Dual floppies? Sure. (More commonly, there'd be more than two blocks, so this was more the size of a 4-6-slice toaster :-)
Also, of course, the law won't eliminate New Jersey's share of the ~100 million guns in the US - it will just make it a bit harder for people to legally get new ones, mainly because it will make things much more difficult for gun stores to operate profitably selling the one or two brands of state-approved guns, but that will just push more business to the black market. If the law does try to address ownership of existing guns, it's also a "taking" under the Seventh Amendment, which therefore requires compensation.
Back in 1990, when I lived in New Jersey, there was a pro-gun rally at the State Capitol in Trenton, because newly-elected Gov. Jim Florio was trying to ban some kind of guns. The front page of the local paper had a picture of a black grandmother from Elizabeth or Newark, holding a pistol, who was quoted as saying something like "You think the police are going to show up in *my* neighborhood at night?" Maybe in your neighborhood, the police will show up 10 seconds after you dial 911, but it's not real common.