Our monthly fees have been slowly creeping up instead of dropping (you'd think I could get high speed internet for cheaper now than I did 10 years ago, but you'd be wrong, for the same level of service).
Funny you'd say that. I have the same experience in Silicon Valley. 8 years ago, I got a 1.5Mb/384Kb connection for about $50. Now I'm getting the same exact line for $20 more (though it's naked instead of coupled with a phone), but line noise is so bad that I'm throttled down to half speed up and down. So I'm essentially paying more for less. Why? Because everything runs through SBC/ATT copper, and they're trying to sell their own limited stuff.
I doubt it that it would work the same way. For one, material cost is non-zero. For two, most objects are made of several non-plastic components. I certainly will not be able to print a mouse with that technology. Not even a stapler or scissors would work (and that's just from looking around my desk).
What would work, however, is printing out objects with basic shapes that can be made from plastics: garden chairs, book shelves, plastic containers (I'd buy a 3-d printer just for those), etc. Yes, these industries would up shit-creek without a paddle. But it would spawn a whole new industry of 3-d printer makers, designers and shippers of raw material.
As for the example with currency, that's nonsense. Such printers already exist, and they cannot - and are not - used to print currency.
Material goods will always be scarce because they need material to be built. Digital goods have no such restriction.
But that's the point though, isn't it? When do you know that it is a terrorist sitting in a house, firing on the US military? Not just a lunatic who forgot his meds? Even your extreme case can be easily constructed in such a way that no terrorism is involved.
Here's the problem with the war on terrorists (I won't even talk about the war on Terror): by definition, terrorists look like someone from the general population. Terrorists just have the goal of instilling terror, as opposed to just living their lives. As a result, arguing that someone is or could be a terrorist is the same as arguing that someone is doing something that makes people afraid. People are afraid when there's a crazy person badgering them on the street. They're afraid of people who look different. They're afraid of all kinds of things that really have nothing to do with Al-Qaeda. But conflate the two, and suddenly everyone is a terrorist suspect.
The danger is really in how terrorism can be applied to damn near anything, especially before anything has actually happened.
Here's the problem with enforcing existing laws: it requires a politician to do nothing, which means that he/she cannot profit from the current situation. Passing a law - any law - will allow them to claim "I'm doing something!", regardless of whether that something is actually useful.
This is exploiting cyber to achieve our objectives.
I'm sorry, what? All I can picture is a pimply teenager sitting in front a flickering screen, typing "Wanna cyber????" into his chat field. I have no idea how to exploit cybering to achieve military objectives. Maybe they want to paralyze the target's networks by getting all lonely teenagers to respond to mass cyber requests?
I think all comments after the parent are pretty much redundant. It took me a while to figure out why this new site bothered me, but the parent summarized it quite nicely: the distinction between left/right and liberal/conservative are completely artificial in this country, and largely defined by opposition of the other side, not support of an idea or platform. Sites like skewz do nothing more than perpetuate the idea that there is a right/left dichotomy that has clearly definable boundaries. In my opinion (and I think Jon Stewart is a hero for calling out the Crossfire hosts for this), this is one of the single biggest problems in the American political scene. Sites like Skewz.com merely reinforce this problem, and do nothing to resolve it.
Absolutely. I consider nationalizations the very last resort, and only when we're already facing monopolies. But judging from your description of the current state of the electrical grid, I'd say that'd be both an improvement over my suggestion, as well as an improvement over the current situation. Now we just need to emulate how the transition worked for the electrical grid....
Absolutely. The telecoms got themselves into this mess, and now they're trying to weasel their way out of it. Personally, I see similarities to how the sub-prime mess is playing out: profits are privatized, but losses are socialized. Similarly, profits stemming from misleading advertising are privatized, but any losses are being mitigated by legislation (see attacks on net neutrality) and customer abuse (forging of TCP packets with RST flag set).
Here's the main problem I have with your question: there is no answer to it that includes both profits for the corporation and a status quo for the industry as a whole. At least none that I can see. To me, the fundamental problem with internet access in the US is that the market for it is almost completely controlled by monopolies. Yes, there are CLECs, but they are minor players and completely dependent on the good will of the ILEC. The only way we're gonna see what you ask for is if the ISP landscape becomes an actual free market (or at least a reasonable impersonation thereof).
Here's what I don't understand: I have a 24-inch iMac at home. I remember how movies (and games!) looked like when you had less than 24-bit color-depth: lotsa gradients, dithering, all kinds of ugliness. And I see none of that on my current iMac. Is this only a case with the more recent iMacs? Or is this a joke story people missed?
Here's a truly alternate business model: screw the incumbent telecom carriers. Nationalize the grid that was built out with the help of public funds, and where the public has seen close to no returns. Turn everyone into a CLEC. Everyone plugs into an existing grid that is officially tax-payer funded with zero restrictions on what passes through. All the intelligence - traffic shaping, filtering, content - will be at the edges. Carriers compete based on service, what kind of pipe they can put into the home/condo/dorm and how much traffic they can exchange with the national grid.
Far-fetched? Not really. It's similar to what's going on with the electric grid already. Considering how much the economy is impacted if/when major trunks or local exchange points go down, the internet is also a similarly critical infrastructure. I don't see why lessons learned from the electric grid can't be applied to solving the mess that is the telecom industry.
Essentially you pay about $60-70 for a connection that you only squeeze maybe $35-45 worth of usage out of it./blockquote. From my understanding, you actually pay $60 for a connection that ought to cost you about $600. For what real usage costs, compare the home pricing with business pricing. Speakeasy offers symmetric T1 for $400. That gets you 1.5 Mbit both ways. Get a home connection, and they charge you $50 for a basic DSL connection of 1.5 Mbit down, 384Kbit up. And that's if your connection is good and noise free.
This idea that the actual cost of a connection is $60 is ludicrous. Yes, companies played a dangerous numbers game that didn't account for all the new ways that end users can saturate connections, and they're trying to play catch-up now through questionable methods. But some end-users are also using far more than what they're paying for.
That said, this is no excuse for the sorry state that broadband is in. Monopolies (or, at best, duopolies) are killing the American broadband market. My connection has stagnated at 1.5Mbit (actually ~800 Kbit due to line noise) for the last 8 years, with prices regularly going up for unfettered access. When looking at how connections improved in the rest of the world, I can only believe that a complete lack of market forces could lead to this stagnation.
You're kidding, right? In the run up to Iraq II, damn near every publication, elected official and patriotic blogger wrote pro-war pieces. My favorite imagery from those pieces was the thought to turn Iraq into a glass parking lot - a not so subtle reference to nuking every square inch of the country.
It is easy to write anything. Much more difficult is to support your argument with appeals to reason, rather than appeals to emotion.
I think others said it already, but I also think it's worthwhile to point it out again: what makes you think this is a first? This is propaganda at its most basic: get people who are supposed to be independent to make speeches for you. This is the same thing as an unnamed Clinton campaign staffer saying things that Clinton does not want to be associated with, but which she thinks will harm her opponents (substitute campaign of your choosing). This is the same thing as paying people to demonstrate for you, paying people to state how great you are (Romans were very good at that)... propaganda is as old as civilization.
Again - our great leaders have often stooped to paying others to lie to their constituents and their flock. Propaganda is nothing but a tool for them to achieve their goals.
And in the meantime, you forget that the most critical part of a camera is the lens. All of your settings are completely irrelevant when the lens is incapable of capturing a clean image to begin with. If you want great-looking pictures, you'll want a dedicated camera. The physics just don't work out in a cell-phone camera.
Talk to me again when you travel every week to a new city in a new state. Maps on my cell phone have been a godsend for this situation, and paper maps are completely unable to even approximate the usefulness of google maps on my blackberry.
The only thing that's feckless in your scenario is the assumption that 90% of all people never travel outside of their hometown.
And for that, the cell-tower based positioning system works just fine and dandy. Google rolled it out on its latest googlemaps iteration, and its approximation is all I need to find where I am and where I need to go. The only time I actually need GPS is when I'm so far out in the boonies that there is no cell-phone coverage. And at that point, I really just need accurate GPS locations.
Quite frankly, I don't see the need anymore to pay monthly fees for GPS systems. The cost does not justify the marginal increase in utility over cell-tower location systems.
Interesting article, but it didn't answer one question I've had for a while: what controls the color of lightning? I was recently in the Caribbean, and was dumbstruck to find out that lightning there was a beautiful shade of pink. Not blue, not white, but pink. I've since then seen multiple references to pink lightning, but no explanation for what is causing it. I've seen some theories around distance (atmosphere absorbs blue light more than red light) and particle content, but none of them seemed to apply to what I saw in the Caribbean: distances where well within what I was used to, and particle content, due to rain and lack of industry, should have been close to zero.
Anyone have any ideas?
In other words, it's the "Wikipedia can't work" argument all over again. Seriously, you're about 10 years late to the discussion. The question's been settled. The answer is that there will be crap there, that you can't trust it blindly, and that you're required to do your own research if you want to use the place as a resource - but it still works largely as intended.
I don't frequent any of *chans, nor am I part of Anonymous, nor do I have any interest in raiding. I do, however, know that Anonymous has a habit of framing ebaumsworld when it does raid. I'm sure CoS people can find the same information with being just somewhat tuned into internet subculture. This means absolutely nothing.
What the hell? WikiLeaks reports NOTHING. They have no reporters. There is barely any fact-checking - as a matter of fact, due to the nature of the business (leaks of secret documents), it is damn near impossible to do any independent fact checking.
WikiLeaks is awesome as it is - a place where anyone can put up any document, free of any fear that they might be tracked down. Why you think that that makes anything true on there, I have no idea. Seriously. Were you born just yesterday?
But Wikileaks simply succumbed to an overwhelming demand of visitors. This news story is like saying "Look! People are actually reading shit about the Tibetan protests rather than trying to find out who Paris Hilton's new best friend is going to be! Oh my god!"/blockquote Sadly enough, that IS news. I'm glad they're back up as well.
Wow. One statement that is neither related to your quotes nor even true, and two blanket statements of "False". Nice going. Not to mention replying to comments without reading everything. Why am I supposed to take you seriously?
Slashdot Mirror
$0.02 US ($0.01 CDN)
What would work, however, is printing out objects with basic shapes that can be made from plastics: garden chairs, book shelves, plastic containers (I'd buy a 3-d printer just for those), etc. Yes, these industries would up shit-creek without a paddle. But it would spawn a whole new industry of 3-d printer makers, designers and shippers of raw material.
As for the example with currency, that's nonsense. Such printers already exist, and they cannot - and are not - used to print currency.
Material goods will always be scarce because they need material to be built. Digital goods have no such restriction.
Here's the problem with the war on terrorists (I won't even talk about the war on Terror): by definition, terrorists look like someone from the general population. Terrorists just have the goal of instilling terror, as opposed to just living their lives. As a result, arguing that someone is or could be a terrorist is the same as arguing that someone is doing something that makes people afraid. People are afraid when there's a crazy person badgering them on the street. They're afraid of people who look different. They're afraid of all kinds of things that really have nothing to do with Al-Qaeda. But conflate the two, and suddenly everyone is a terrorist suspect.
The danger is really in how terrorism can be applied to damn near anything, especially before anything has actually happened.
Here's the problem with enforcing existing laws: it requires a politician to do nothing, which means that he/she cannot profit from the current situation. Passing a law - any law - will allow them to claim "I'm doing something!", regardless of whether that something is actually useful.
Yeah, I don't like politicians.
I'm sorry, what? All I can picture is a pimply teenager sitting in front a flickering screen, typing "Wanna cyber????" into his chat field. I have no idea how to exploit cybering to achieve military objectives. Maybe they want to paralyze the target's networks by getting all lonely teenagers to respond to mass cyber requests?
I think all comments after the parent are pretty much redundant. It took me a while to figure out why this new site bothered me, but the parent summarized it quite nicely: the distinction between left/right and liberal/conservative are completely artificial in this country, and largely defined by opposition of the other side, not support of an idea or platform. Sites like skewz do nothing more than perpetuate the idea that there is a right/left dichotomy that has clearly definable boundaries. In my opinion (and I think Jon Stewart is a hero for calling out the Crossfire hosts for this), this is one of the single biggest problems in the American political scene. Sites like Skewz.com merely reinforce this problem, and do nothing to resolve it.
Absolutely. I consider nationalizations the very last resort, and only when we're already facing monopolies. But judging from your description of the current state of the electrical grid, I'd say that'd be both an improvement over my suggestion, as well as an improvement over the current situation. Now we just need to emulate how the transition worked for the electrical grid....
Absolutely. The telecoms got themselves into this mess, and now they're trying to weasel their way out of it. Personally, I see similarities to how the sub-prime mess is playing out: profits are privatized, but losses are socialized. Similarly, profits stemming from misleading advertising are privatized, but any losses are being mitigated by legislation (see attacks on net neutrality) and customer abuse (forging of TCP packets with RST flag set).
Here's the main problem I have with your question: there is no answer to it that includes both profits for the corporation and a status quo for the industry as a whole. At least none that I can see. To me, the fundamental problem with internet access in the US is that the market for it is almost completely controlled by monopolies. Yes, there are CLECs, but they are minor players and completely dependent on the good will of the ILEC. The only way we're gonna see what you ask for is if the ISP landscape becomes an actual free market (or at least a reasonable impersonation thereof).
It looks like this is specifically for the new 20-inch iMac model. My bad for not RTFAing.
Here's what I don't understand: I have a 24-inch iMac at home. I remember how movies (and games!) looked like when you had less than 24-bit color-depth: lotsa gradients, dithering, all kinds of ugliness. And I see none of that on my current iMac. Is this only a case with the more recent iMacs? Or is this a joke story people missed?
Here's a truly alternate business model: screw the incumbent telecom carriers. Nationalize the grid that was built out with the help of public funds, and where the public has seen close to no returns. Turn everyone into a CLEC. Everyone plugs into an existing grid that is officially tax-payer funded with zero restrictions on what passes through. All the intelligence - traffic shaping, filtering, content - will be at the edges. Carriers compete based on service, what kind of pipe they can put into the home/condo/dorm and how much traffic they can exchange with the national grid.
Far-fetched? Not really. It's similar to what's going on with the electric grid already. Considering how much the economy is impacted if/when major trunks or local exchange points go down, the internet is also a similarly critical infrastructure. I don't see why lessons learned from the electric grid can't be applied to solving the mess that is the telecom industry.
You're kidding, right? In the run up to Iraq II, damn near every publication, elected official and patriotic blogger wrote pro-war pieces. My favorite imagery from those pieces was the thought to turn Iraq into a glass parking lot - a not so subtle reference to nuking every square inch of the country.
It is easy to write anything. Much more difficult is to support your argument with appeals to reason, rather than appeals to emotion.
I think others said it already, but I also think it's worthwhile to point it out again: what makes you think this is a first? This is propaganda at its most basic: get people who are supposed to be independent to make speeches for you. This is the same thing as an unnamed Clinton campaign staffer saying things that Clinton does not want to be associated with, but which she thinks will harm her opponents (substitute campaign of your choosing). This is the same thing as paying people to demonstrate for you, paying people to state how great you are (Romans were very good at that)... propaganda is as old as civilization.
Again - our great leaders have often stooped to paying others to lie to their constituents and their flock. Propaganda is nothing but a tool for them to achieve their goals.
And in the meantime, you forget that the most critical part of a camera is the lens. All of your settings are completely irrelevant when the lens is incapable of capturing a clean image to begin with. If you want great-looking pictures, you'll want a dedicated camera. The physics just don't work out in a cell-phone camera.
Talk to me again when you travel every week to a new city in a new state. Maps on my cell phone have been a godsend for this situation, and paper maps are completely unable to even approximate the usefulness of google maps on my blackberry.
The only thing that's feckless in your scenario is the assumption that 90% of all people never travel outside of their hometown.
And for that, the cell-tower based positioning system works just fine and dandy. Google rolled it out on its latest googlemaps iteration, and its approximation is all I need to find where I am and where I need to go. The only time I actually need GPS is when I'm so far out in the boonies that there is no cell-phone coverage. And at that point, I really just need accurate GPS locations.
Quite frankly, I don't see the need anymore to pay monthly fees for GPS systems. The cost does not justify the marginal increase in utility over cell-tower location systems.
Interesting article, but it didn't answer one question I've had for a while: what controls the color of lightning? I was recently in the Caribbean, and was dumbstruck to find out that lightning there was a beautiful shade of pink. Not blue, not white, but pink. I've since then seen multiple references to pink lightning, but no explanation for what is causing it. I've seen some theories around distance (atmosphere absorbs blue light more than red light) and particle content, but none of them seemed to apply to what I saw in the Caribbean: distances where well within what I was used to, and particle content, due to rain and lack of industry, should have been close to zero. Anyone have any ideas?
Interesting. Thanks for pointing that out. I'll be looking for that, and see how that correlates with my understanding of her statements.
In other words, it's the "Wikipedia can't work" argument all over again. Seriously, you're about 10 years late to the discussion. The question's been settled. The answer is that there will be crap there, that you can't trust it blindly, and that you're required to do your own research if you want to use the place as a resource - but it still works largely as intended.
I don't frequent any of *chans, nor am I part of Anonymous, nor do I have any interest in raiding. I do, however, know that Anonymous has a habit of framing ebaumsworld when it does raid. I'm sure CoS people can find the same information with being just somewhat tuned into internet subculture. This means absolutely nothing.
What the hell? WikiLeaks reports NOTHING. They have no reporters. There is barely any fact-checking - as a matter of fact, due to the nature of the business (leaks of secret documents), it is damn near impossible to do any independent fact checking.
WikiLeaks is awesome as it is - a place where anyone can put up any document, free of any fear that they might be tracked down. Why you think that that makes anything true on there, I have no idea. Seriously. Were you born just yesterday?
It's not that they are contradictory. One is a lot stronger than the other. One says that if A then B, while the other says A could lead to B.
Wow. One statement that is neither related to your quotes nor even true, and two blanket statements of "False". Nice going. Not to mention replying to comments without reading everything. Why am I supposed to take you seriously?