(1) The "up and coming" generation -- i.e., those under 18 -- are a small fraction of the population, and, more importantly, they don't make the buying decisions -- mom or dad does -- so they don't have any influence on business decisions.
(2) When they do grow up and have money of their own to spend, they turn into old fogies and have different priorities. Like getting promoted at work, or attracting hot chicks. Not, usually, downloading music videos faster and getting super framerates out of WoW. (There are exceptions, of course, but they tend not to get into high-paying jobs and have enough spending money to influence business decisions.)
Fact is, most users want a fairly modest average bandwidth, with rare bouts of high-bandwidth usage. It's only the few rare addicts and power users that want a big pipe open to their PC all the time. That's why cable has succeeded as well as it has so far -- because the basic bandwidth-sharing paradigm works for most customers, who usually just write e-mail and every two weeks or so download some MP3s from iTunes or watch a video preview of some movie. The fact that jacking the price up for the average-bandwidth power users might drive some of them away (to surely more expensive options) is not going to be a bad business decision for the cable companies, any more than it's a bad business decision for an HMO to drive its sickest patients to other insurers.
The other thing most people want is for their Internet connection to be dirt cheap. Hence the pressure on cable companies from their customers has not been towards higher and higher average capacity, but towards reliability and cheapness. My cable connection costs the same in nominal dollars now, in 2007, as it did the first day I got it, in 1997. That means its real price has fallen steeply. But the bandwidth hasn't budged. If anything, it's worse. That's not because the cable company is stupid, contra this naive article, but because those have been the priorities of my neighbors signing up for the service. The fact that the cable company has made a huge pile of money operating as they have is the surest evidence that they know what they're doing, business-wise.
Will that change in the future? Will people start wanting to stream HD movies over the Internet? Got me. Maybe. But the demand for enormous bandwidth has been predicted to be Right Around The Corner(TM) every year for the last 12 years in my experience. That wouldn't inspire me to invest my retirement funds in any big pipe to every desktop tech.
So why re-invent the wheel? I'd say you're better off learning how to "reprogram" flies by fiddling with their DNA than trying to re-invent the whole mechanism with silicon and aluminum.
The best benefit is that the tricky and expensive process of initial manufacture is taken care of for you, at very minimal cost (a warm box with water and sticky disgusting stuff to eat is all you need).
Yeah, but isn't your inverse square law going to kill you? I mean, unless you're sitting 100 meters away from your flybot, aiming a 6-inch microwave dish antenna at it, trying to look innocent...
I'm sorry, you see a difference between stuff being done in public and the "record" of their being done being public? So there's a big difference between inviting people into you bathroom to watch you wipe your ass after you take a shit, in person, and putting a webcam in there so people can watch it (but not in person)?
Boy, that really pegs the illogic meter for me.
The issue here is that an important matter of public record, one that affects many millions of people, is being hidden from us using a flimsy excuse and a misuse of "executive privilege.
No, that's just a bunch of PC buzzword bullshit picked off the evening news. The issue here, as always, is how to have the most effective and efficient government at the lowest cost, both in terms of upfront (e.g. tax) cost, and ultimate (e.g. the risk of tyranny or anarchy) cost. It's your opinion that putting their every action under the public microscope will result in better government. I think you're nuts, since in my daily life people do not do their best on stage, and I assume people in government are not robots from Mars, but people very much like those I meet in my daily life.
Maybe you should think this through a little bit more. Have you ever tried to negotiate something important in public? For example, had a difficult discussion with your girlfriend in front of her or your friends? Debated with your child whether he could or could not do something in front of his friends? Talked with him about TV or computer rules in front of his teacher? Been divorced and tried to negotiate with your ex-spouse in open court? Tried to get you boss to understand something tricky -- embarassing to you, or him, or both -- in front of everyone at the annual company meeting?
It's hard, isn't it? Negotation and discussion under the bright lights of public scrutiny tends to be stagy, fake, and not very productive. Everyone is more interested in avoiding the least possibility of a mistake than in really understanding each other, or giving a frank opinion.
Now if that's true in your affairs, why would it not be in government affairs? We the public can certainly demand of our elected and appointed officials that they do everything out in the bright lights of the evening news. But you know what? We'll get preening, CYA-focussed, and completely ineffectual government.
When you speak of your freedoms you are speaking of consumer freedoms. These are freedoms you have as a consumer, a wage-earner, an employee, an average citizen who simply inherits his social setting and wants to enjoy it, not particularly change it.
In the United States you have more producer freedoms. More freedom to change the world around you to make it suit you. You can start a new business more easily. You can start a new line of business (e.g. Amazon.com) more easily. You can live in an eccentric way that would annoy or appall most of your right-thinking neighbors more easily. You can get a peculiar education that suits your own desires, and which most of your neighbors would find crazy, more easily. You can be elected to leadership positions with outlandish ideas more easily, and it's easier to change the dominant paradigms. The United States is far more heterogeneous than Europe (which I say having traveled and lived extensively in both). That means it's easier to find a little corner that thinks like you, and to try to expand it. (most of the time you won't, of course, but certain crazy people -- Americans -- really value the chance to try.)
Which kind of freedom you prefer is a matter of individual taste, not a question of right or wrong. As a rule, those who prefer consumer-citizen freedoms do indeed prefer Europe. Those who prefer producer-revolutionary freedoms prefer the US.
Actually the USSR did lead the world in a number of areas for some time
Can you name any major technological or scientific innovation used today that was developed in the USSR? Any major drug or medical therapy? Any computer, car, airplane, consumer electronic device, building, tool, engine or power plant that uses some major idea developed by the Soviets?
The list for the United States in the same period (1920-1991) is enormous.
but there was plenty of home grown advancement as well.
Well...I'm agreeing with your argument, but I wouldn't say on the basis of any evidence at all. I've just pointed out that, logically, a steep heirarchy of achievement -- with the best far above the average -- is just what you'd expect from a system that does well at encouraging its best and its brightest to achieve their full potential.
I've taught science to college students, and I'm a little tired of all the Chicken Little ignorant busybodies who think there's something wrong with them because they don't all excel in science. That's bullshit. Science isn't everybody's cup of tea. In fact, it's really only the cup of a tea of a small minority of people who are unusually masochistic. Science is immensely frustrating to do (as opposed to read about), inasmuch as being on the leading edge means, by definition, that 90% of your ideas and experiments don't work out.
But that is as it should be. If we all spent our days trying to come up with quantum gravity and explain what happens when you fall into a black hole, who would drive the busses, pick up the trash, deliver the mail, bolt the wheels onto the new trucks, grow wheat and potatoes, and do the other zillion things required to make the wheels of the modern world go around? Or, more precisely, if we all wanted to do science, then since the world needs only a few Merlins per 1000 ordinary knights of the Round Table, most of us would be doomed to a lifetime of unhappiness. Fortunately, our mental programming is not so inflexible and dysfunctional. That is, fortunately only a few of us want to be scientists, and roughly speaking the few who want to be correspond to the few who can be, by virtue of their natural abilities. (It's an obvious truism that people tend to want to do what they're good at.)
Hence the genuinely useful function of a general education system is not to teach everyone to be an expert in everything (which is impossible and stupid), but to sort people into the right career tracks based on their natural abilities and motivations. We should expect a student to test poorly in all fields except the one or two where he's destined to excel, and we should not treat this as his (or the system's) failure, but as merely a neutral datum that tells him (and us) where his career interests should lie.
It's not a paradox. Look, do we imagine that everybody is capable of being a first class brilliant scientist or engineer? Clearly not. Therefore, if you have a system where the difference between the best and the worst (in any field) is small, then you have a system which fails to promote the best. You have a system where everyone is at the "average" level, and the people who ought to stand out, don't, for whatever reason.
On the other hand, if you have a system where the difference between the best and the average is high, what does that tell you? It tells you the system works well to promote the best and give them the tools they need to produce. Fact is, there is a natural heirarchy of ability among human beings in any field. Most are at some ordinary level, and only a few are very good. If you don't see the natural ability heirarchy reflected in the accomplishment heirarchy, then something is wrong. Since it's impossible to bring ordinary folk up to the extraordinary level, what must be happening is that the extraordinary folks are being held down (which is fairly easy to do).
Compare to sports. The difference between your average high-school athlete and Olympic or world-class athletes has never been greater, and the very few at the very top are amazing. Do we look at this pyramid of accomplishment and say, gee, there must be something wrong with how we promote and train people in sports, because there are so few at the top? Because the average 35-year-old pick-up basketball player, measured on the same scale that includes the championship Los Angeles Lakers, sucks? Not if we have any brains, we don't. We realize that the better a system is at sifting and placing people according to their abilities and motivation, the more pronounced the heirarchy, the greater the difference between the best and all the rest. Only in some doofus Lake Wobegon mode of (non)thinking do we imagine that a successful system would look non-heirarchical, with everyone above average.
The fact that heirarchies of accomplishment are more evident in the United States than elsewhere is no proof that the mass of people are being held down. It may well be evidence that in the United States the best are better able to rise to the top, to find their natural level of achievement, whereas in other places considerations of social class, restrictive groupthink education, or cultural barriers to personal ambition and radical innovation tend to keep the best from ever showing their stuff and emerging above the sea of average folk.
I doubt it. The QA bug fixing et cetera involved in figuring out how to convert from number of months to years (hint: divide by 12, inasmuch as there's no such thing as "leap months") is going to be dwarfed by any number of other difficulties in making sure your financial software works and (more relevant) can't be diddled by idiots at the other end of the GUI.
I suspect anyone writing a loan software program is just going to do all the calculations in months, with months an integer, and then, if necessary, convert month #X to a calendar month by adding X to the month and year of the start date of the loan. As mentioned, since a year always equals a duodecimonth, exactly, this conversion is trivial. Your mind-boggling nest of special case rules only occurs when you need things like the date of the month or the day of the week. Months and years are perfectly regular.
It's a dumfuk comment in the summary. If you're calculating payments on a thirty-year loan, you sure as heck don't convert all your dates to seconds since the epoch ("Unix time"). What would be the point? You don't compound your interest by the second, and if a payment is due on such-and-such a date, you don't specify the exact second it's due.
I expect loan software converts dates and lengths of time if at all to months, that being the typical interval when you compound interest. So even on 32-bit Unix you're not going to have trouble until your loan period exceeds 4294967295 months.
I can't imagine why I, a consumer, would support what I've heard about "net neutrality." It seems to be all about restricting my freedom to buy the service I want in the service of a dubious and cynical goal that, practically, boils down to making sure freeloaders don't have to pay any more per packet than the rest of us. More or less a guarantee of some kind of Tragedy of the Commons on the Internet.
For example, it sounds like if I happen to want a massive pipe to my door, and lightning service to various IP addresses of my choice, then Big Momma a.k.a. the government isn't going to allow me to cut a deal with my ISP for speedier treatment of my packets in exchange for more money. Likewise, if my aged parent wants only some de minimis service for reading e-mail, and is perfectly willing to accept 4th class parcel-post service for her packets if the price is in the basement, then she, too, is up a creek, because it's a one-size-fits-all price and service level set by some doofus bureaucrat in Washington.
Well, screw that. I trust my ability to cut a deal with Verizon over my ability to cut a deal with a Federal agency any day. You think Dell's customer service is crappy? Try getting a government agency to change its mind, make a reasonable exception to the rules, see you as a person instead of set of numbers in a computer record. At least with Verizon I can threaten to withhold my money from them, which of course I can't do with the government, and if I piss Verizon off the worst they can do is refuse to sell me their service, while the goverment can and will put me in jail.
Furthermore, using the ol' retrospectoscope and checking out the record of innovation and efficiency growth in industries that have been heavily regulated in the past -- in the interests of fairness to the consumer of course -- such as airlines, telephone service, broadcast radio, power generation and distribution, public education, public health -- then alas any one with half a brain comes to the unpleasant conclusion that such interference always increases the price and decreases the efficiency of the service. Inasmuch as I'd like to see the spectacular gains in efficiency and innovation in networked computing continue, and not sink into the torpid sludge of the standard government-dominated project, then I'd also have to conclude that nearly any kind of top-down regulation other than that required to keep everything above board and open is the kind of clever-sounding but ultimately dumfuk idea that occurs to all of us when we've had a few too many beers during a college bull session.
Goodness, of course not. If I made a careful list of those thousand books, I could gather together nearly all of what's great and useful and inspiring about Western Civilization for the past two thousand years. Anyone who read them all would be magnificently educated.
The available online electronic resources are pathetic by comparison. I mean, Wikipedia is great for pop culture references, and handy for facts 'n' figures that everyone knows exists but would be a pain to go look up somewhere. But you can't learn chemistry or general relativity from it (at least not at anything more than a casual amateur level), nor plumb the causes for the decline of the Roman Empire, or follow along with Madison's arguments for the Constitution, or understand from contemporary poetry and fiction the lure the American West exerted on early 19th century Americans, and how that has affected us today.
I suspect you're just taking for granted a whole crapload of culture and education that you soaked up from your environment, and in school, that was generally conveyed by the hundreds of books you've read. Reading is so ubiquitous, like breathing, that you forget how much of it you do in the modern world. A child raising with nothing but the Wikipedia (or some such) would make a most incomplete, weird adult.
I'm sorry, but your economic argument suggesting that laptops trump paper books for cheap delivery of information is while clever wildly delusional. No way, no how. We'll start with the fact that the marginal cost of a book is way less than $20 -- probably less than 25 cents -- that, with moderate care in its printing and use, it will easily last a century, and that it draws zero watts and can be repaired with Scotch tape by unskilled operators.
how about you can't have or use a computer ever again, but you can use pencil and paper and get a book from the nearby library once a week instead?
You're describing how I lived all through college and graduate school, and most of my post-doc training. The first computer I had on my own desk came with my first faculty appointment when I was 32 years old.
Happy?
Obviously I would be. Maybe it's a generational thing. Since widely-networked computers didn't appear in my life until I was already middle-aged, I tend to use them strictly for work purposes, and they just more or less speed up what I would ordinarily do by trotting on down to the library or doing some phoning around. To be sure, my work would probably slow down, but since everyone else's work would, too, I wouldn't be at any competitive disadvantage, so I wouldn't be very upset. I wouldn't be reading blogs, but then I'd just go back to reading the newspaper. I wouldn't be posting to/. but then probably both you and I, as well as my family and employer, would consider that a good thing...
But I think for a younger generation -- like my teenagers -- networked computers serve a profoundly important social purpose, and they, indeed, would be miserable without them.
All this proves is that we get very used to what we know, and can't imagine doing without it. But it's a grave mistake to project your expectations of "normal" and "necessary" onto someone -- like a kid in a poor Andes mountain village -- who has utterly different experiences. If you really want to help him, you need to first understand him, and that means clearing your mind of the unconscious prejudices you have about what is "normal" and "necessary" because of the way you have lived.
I'm not criticizing you per se. I doubt I could do any better, figuring out how best to help out some poor kid in Nigeria. It's damn hard to get into someone else's head and see out through his eyes.
Or why not just make sure they all get their vaccinations, a good supply of pencils and paper, and an interesting book to read from the nearby library each week? Doubt that would cost more than $75 per child in desperately-poor Thirdworldistan.
E. F. Schumacher wrote an interesting and provocative book (Small is Beautiful) several decades ago about the routinely inappropriate "help" the First World often sends the Third. To grossly oversummarize, it's like we see someone painfully hauling a load of firewood down a dirt road in a poor country and decide to "help" by giving him a hybrid-electric pick-up truck. Of course, he has no good supply of gas, no way to maintain such a complex machine, no good roads to drive it on...and a mule would be a lot more appropriate and helpful.
It's hard not to wonder whether a focus on supplying cheap laptop computers is fully appropriate for kids whose principal problems probably lie more in the areas of crappy public hygiene, rampant preventable infectious childhood disease, AIDS and its consequences (e.g. becoming an orphan), civil unrest and insecurity, not to mention oppression in many places, and their parents not being able to get decent jobs close to home.
Maybe a Linux laptop at the right price point is a silver bullet for some of this nasty stuff, somehow, although I don't quite see it. I guess we'll find out.
Dude, I would be the first to agree with you that the method by which the United States secures its borders and appropriately inspects passage through them is well and truly fucked. I've never dealt with US border agents and not come away loathing the entire bunch and wanting to have each and every one of their pinheaded arrogant asses fired and sent to clean pit toilets out for the rest of their incompetent, arrogant, futile, tax-eating Federal career. To think that these shitheads are supposed to be working for me makes me grind my teeth in rage. That the system needs some kind of serious reform is totally obvious.
But I still agree very strongly with the principle that borders can and ought to be effectively controlled. That was my point.
If you want to grant the proposition that borders should be controlled, and argue about methods for doing so much better, maximizing both effectiveness, courtesy, and a respect for individual freedom -- then we're on the same page. I'm only arguing against the vague childish -- dangerous -- We Are The World notion that international borders don't really matter.
You've got a pretty incoherent response here, which is not surprising, given that you accuse me of incoherence. (Folks quite often project their own deficiencies, as you probably know.)
Only two responses:
(1) First, your vague inability to distinguish between types of borders ("Obviously, people who are destined to do bad things cross all kinds of borders") doesn't even pass the laugh test. You've forgotten, apparently, that borders are not merely painted arbitrary lines that separate this patch of ground from that. The real meaning of a border is that it groups together people, and borders separate different groups of people. That the borders are very often fixed lines on a map simply reflects the obvious fact that groups of people tend to live together.
Hence, the "border" around your family is your house. You naturally trust and understand people within that border -- your spouse, your children -- much more than anybody who generally lives outside of that border. And that's why, in law and tradition, you have the right to control that border. That's why you can say who comes in and who doesn't, and under what conditions, and even the police have to have a warrant and so forth to come in without your permission. The "border" around the people you work with is your company building and the various legal "walls" around the firm. Obviously, folks within that border -- your colleagues -- have a different level of mutual trust and understanding than people outside the border. That's why the company controls the border, by, e.g. giving only employees accounts on company computers and locking the general public out with a firewall.
Similarly, at last, the borders around states and nations group together people with similar shared ambitions and ideas, and the level of trust and understanding between people inside the border -- in the same group -- is higher than it is between people who are outside the border. That's why the group inside controls the border. That's why the group inside controls the border between them and the rest of the world much more tightly than they would any internal borders, which do not involve such large changes in trust level. Kind of like how you might control the border between your family and the outside world (your front door) a lot more strictly than you control the borders within your house -- say, between the family room and your study. Any rules you promulgate about when and how the children can bounce around in your study are liable to be a lot less serious to you than rules you set about when and how strangers can enter the front door.
You getting all this? Trying to make it simple, so you can reflect on your own life and realize how extremely important borders actually are. I realize I have to push through your 21st century slacker PC 'borders don' matter, man' ignorance, however. The crap you get loaded up on in school about how we're all just the same, really, underneath. Here's a clue: we're not.
(2) Your final comment about freedom in the United States betrays a deep ignorance of American history and tradition. If you live in the US, as I do, you should take some time to read up on your heritage. You'll find it's certainly about liberty, but certainly not about license, or (worse), about liberty in silly inconsequential things (like "freedom" from having your laptop examined at a border) to keep you distracted from the fact that liberty in important things (like whether you can choose how you get medical care, or save for retirement, or educate yourself or your children) is being taken away.
In that respect, I sure wish folks in the younger generation would realize how much a Potemkin village distraction these debates about "freedom" are. Your real, important freedoms are the freedom to work in the profession you like, and spend the results of your labor in any way you choose -- to buy top-quality medical care for your children, to blow on ten th
Don't be silly. I live in California, and I've crossed the California border bazillions of times. Yes, indeed, California reserves the right to inspect your car and contents for fruit and stuff, and about 1 time out of 5 in my experience they actually do. But it's the most casual inspection you might imagine. You got any fruits and vegetables, sir? No? Okay, have a nice day.
If I were seriously trying to import pests to do harm to California, this wouldn't be the slightest bit of a barrier. The reason California can get away with that is because nearly everybody who does cross the California barrier is a reasonable person who understands and agrees with the proposition that importation of fruits, vegetables and trees should be carefully monitored lest a new pest get loose and devastate California's agriculture -- which means devastating California's economy. Despite appearances, it's not Hollywood but the Imperial and Central Valleys (where they grow rice, almonds, oranges, etc.) that are the engine of California's wealth.
Hence the only reason for the trivial "inspection" at California borders is more or less just to remind people who are willing to cooperate that they should check to be sure they're not carrying any possible pest vector in. It's useful. More than once I've come to the border and realized I had a banana or something in the car from somewhere else, and remembered only then that one should be careful about these things.
The contrast with an international border, where the people coming in may have no shared goal of keeping the US prosperous -- may even want to destroy it -- couldn't be greater.
I think you have a good question. See, here on Earth when we go somewhere through a trackless waste -- e.g. we sail somewhere on a ship -- we can figure out where we are simply by knowing our orientation (attitude) with respect to the fixed stars, which we do with sextant and chronometer. Since we live on the surface of a sphere, attitude (e.g. latitude and longitude) is all we need to know to know where we are.
In space, it's equally easy to figure your attitude from the fixed (i.e. distant) stars. So attitude is no problem. However, what you also want to know in deep space is the translational distance of your coordinate origin from, e.g. that of your starting point, e.g. Earth. That's pretty important stuff! That is, it's not enough to know that galactic North is this way, and if you look over there you're looking at the Sun. You'd also want to know -- probably very much! -- how far away the Sun is in that direction. If nothing else, that's going to determine how long you accelerate and when you plan to start decelerating. Don't want to overshoot or undershoot, right? Probably pretty expensive, even if it doesn't leave you fuel-less and marooned in interstellar space...
Now if you go large distances, a few thousand light-years or so, then of course the pattern of stars will shift around you, and if you have a good 3D map of the galaxy, you can triangulate and determine where you are. This would be like ship navigation by triangulating on landmarks when you are close to shore.
But what if you don't? What if, as seems more likely, you go 5-10 light years? Over that distance, the pattern of stars is going to change very little, if at all, simply because stars are so bloody far apart on average. So how good is your triangulation navigation going to be? Especially if, as happens to be the case presently, our knowledge of the exact 3D location of nearby stars is a bit spotty. It would be like navigating at sea by trying to measure the changes in how the surface of the Moon looks from different positions, made worse by not having a terribly good map of the Moon's surface to begin with.
I suppose one answer is just inertial navigation. Your trajectory in deep space is likely to be affected only by your own self-acceleration (which you can measure very accurately) plus the gravity of your source and destination stars, which you hopefully have measured before you set out, plus the average gravity of the galaxy in your neighborhood, which is hopefully pretty constant. God help you if you pass too close to an uncharted brown dwarf, however, and it's worth noting that there are probably thousands of these "hidden reefs" still undetected in the Sun's immediate neighborhood.
I sure get tired of the fools who think international borders should be treated as carelessly as the border between Nevada and California. I can only think they've lived so long in a world that seems totally harmless, like trust-fund babies who've never left the crime-free gated community, that they now naively think there's just no more evil left in the world. So they can't see all this fuss about actually, you know, making sure that folks coming into the country are not up to seriously bad things.
They remind me a bit of the similar folks who fuss about the dangers of vaccines or chlorine in the water supply, because they've lived in a world with powerful antibiotics so long they no longer really believe that deadly bacteria exist and can kill you dead without some basic precautions at the similar "border" between one's body and the outside world.
I think almost every substance absorbs UV strongly, since it's at the right frequency to excite atomic and molecular electrons. From the graph here, about halfway down, it would seem water absorbs in the near UV about as well as it absorbs red light (and significantly better than it does in the blue visible region). In the far UV water seems to absorbs as well as it does in the infrared.
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Sad facts for you:
(1) The "up and coming" generation -- i.e., those under 18 -- are a small fraction of the population, and, more importantly, they don't make the buying decisions -- mom or dad does -- so they don't have any influence on business decisions.
(2) When they do grow up and have money of their own to spend, they turn into old fogies and have different priorities. Like getting promoted at work, or attracting hot chicks. Not, usually, downloading music videos faster and getting super framerates out of WoW. (There are exceptions, of course, but they tend not to get into high-paying jobs and have enough spending money to influence business decisions.)
Fact is, most users want a fairly modest average bandwidth, with rare bouts of high-bandwidth usage. It's only the few rare addicts and power users that want a big pipe open to their PC all the time. That's why cable has succeeded as well as it has so far -- because the basic bandwidth-sharing paradigm works for most customers, who usually just write e-mail and every two weeks or so download some MP3s from iTunes or watch a video preview of some movie. The fact that jacking the price up for the average-bandwidth power users might drive some of them away (to surely more expensive options) is not going to be a bad business decision for the cable companies, any more than it's a bad business decision for an HMO to drive its sickest patients to other insurers.
The other thing most people want is for their Internet connection to be dirt cheap. Hence the pressure on cable companies from their customers has not been towards higher and higher average capacity, but towards reliability and cheapness. My cable connection costs the same in nominal dollars now, in 2007, as it did the first day I got it, in 1997. That means its real price has fallen steeply. But the bandwidth hasn't budged. If anything, it's worse. That's not because the cable company is stupid, contra this naive article, but because those have been the priorities of my neighbors signing up for the service. The fact that the cable company has made a huge pile of money operating as they have is the surest evidence that they know what they're doing, business-wise.
Will that change in the future? Will people start wanting to stream HD movies over the Internet? Got me. Maybe. But the demand for enormous bandwidth has been predicted to be Right Around The Corner(TM) every year for the last 12 years in my experience. That wouldn't inspire me to invest my retirement funds in any big pipe to every desktop tech.
So why re-invent the wheel? I'd say you're better off learning how to "reprogram" flies by fiddling with their DNA than trying to re-invent the whole mechanism with silicon and aluminum.
The best benefit is that the tricky and expensive process of initial manufacture is taken care of for you, at very minimal cost (a warm box with water and sticky disgusting stuff to eat is all you need).
Yeah, but isn't your inverse square law going to kill you? I mean, unless you're sitting 100 meters away from your flybot, aiming a 6-inch microwave dish antenna at it, trying to look innocent...
I'm sorry, you see a difference between stuff being done in public and the "record" of their being done being public? So there's a big difference between inviting people into you bathroom to watch you wipe your ass after you take a shit, in person, and putting a webcam in there so people can watch it (but not in person)?
Boy, that really pegs the illogic meter for me.
The issue here is that an important matter of public record, one that affects many millions of people, is being hidden from us using a flimsy excuse and a misuse of "executive privilege.
No, that's just a bunch of PC buzzword bullshit picked off the evening news. The issue here, as always, is how to have the most effective and efficient government at the lowest cost, both in terms of upfront (e.g. tax) cost, and ultimate (e.g. the risk of tyranny or anarchy) cost. It's your opinion that putting their every action under the public microscope will result in better government. I think you're nuts, since in my daily life people do not do their best on stage, and I assume people in government are not robots from Mars, but people very much like those I meet in my daily life.
Maybe you should think this through a little bit more. Have you ever tried to negotiate something important in public? For example, had a difficult discussion with your girlfriend in front of her or your friends? Debated with your child whether he could or could not do something in front of his friends? Talked with him about TV or computer rules in front of his teacher? Been divorced and tried to negotiate with your ex-spouse in open court? Tried to get you boss to understand something tricky -- embarassing to you, or him, or both -- in front of everyone at the annual company meeting?
It's hard, isn't it? Negotation and discussion under the bright lights of public scrutiny tends to be stagy, fake, and not very productive. Everyone is more interested in avoiding the least possibility of a mistake than in really understanding each other, or giving a frank opinion.
Now if that's true in your affairs, why would it not be in government affairs? We the public can certainly demand of our elected and appointed officials that they do everything out in the bright lights of the evening news. But you know what? We'll get preening, CYA-focussed, and completely ineffectual government.
When you speak of your freedoms you are speaking of consumer freedoms. These are freedoms you have as a consumer, a wage-earner, an employee, an average citizen who simply inherits his social setting and wants to enjoy it, not particularly change it.
In the United States you have more producer freedoms. More freedom to change the world around you to make it suit you. You can start a new business more easily. You can start a new line of business (e.g. Amazon.com) more easily. You can live in an eccentric way that would annoy or appall most of your right-thinking neighbors more easily. You can get a peculiar education that suits your own desires, and which most of your neighbors would find crazy, more easily. You can be elected to leadership positions with outlandish ideas more easily, and it's easier to change the dominant paradigms. The United States is far more heterogeneous than Europe (which I say having traveled and lived extensively in both). That means it's easier to find a little corner that thinks like you, and to try to expand it. (most of the time you won't, of course, but certain crazy people -- Americans -- really value the chance to try.)
Which kind of freedom you prefer is a matter of individual taste, not a question of right or wrong. As a rule, those who prefer consumer-citizen freedoms do indeed prefer Europe. Those who prefer producer-revolutionary freedoms prefer the US.
Actually the USSR did lead the world in a number of areas for some time
Can you name any major technological or scientific innovation used today that was developed in the USSR? Any major drug or medical therapy? Any computer, car, airplane, consumer electronic device, building, tool, engine or power plant that uses some major idea developed by the Soviets?
The list for the United States in the same period (1920-1991) is enormous.
but there was plenty of home grown advancement as well.
Such as what?
Well...I'm agreeing with your argument, but I wouldn't say on the basis of any evidence at all. I've just pointed out that, logically, a steep heirarchy of achievement -- with the best far above the average -- is just what you'd expect from a system that does well at encouraging its best and its brightest to achieve their full potential.
I've taught science to college students, and I'm a little tired of all the Chicken Little ignorant busybodies who think there's something wrong with them because they don't all excel in science. That's bullshit. Science isn't everybody's cup of tea. In fact, it's really only the cup of a tea of a small minority of people who are unusually masochistic. Science is immensely frustrating to do (as opposed to read about), inasmuch as being on the leading edge means, by definition, that 90% of your ideas and experiments don't work out.
But that is as it should be. If we all spent our days trying to come up with quantum gravity and explain what happens when you fall into a black hole, who would drive the busses, pick up the trash, deliver the mail, bolt the wheels onto the new trucks, grow wheat and potatoes, and do the other zillion things required to make the wheels of the modern world go around? Or, more precisely, if we all wanted to do science, then since the world needs only a few Merlins per 1000 ordinary knights of the Round Table, most of us would be doomed to a lifetime of unhappiness. Fortunately, our mental programming is not so inflexible and dysfunctional. That is, fortunately only a few of us want to be scientists, and roughly speaking the few who want to be correspond to the few who can be, by virtue of their natural abilities. (It's an obvious truism that people tend to want to do what they're good at.)
Hence the genuinely useful function of a general education system is not to teach everyone to be an expert in everything (which is impossible and stupid), but to sort people into the right career tracks based on their natural abilities and motivations. We should expect a student to test poorly in all fields except the one or two where he's destined to excel, and we should not treat this as his (or the system's) failure, but as merely a neutral datum that tells him (and us) where his career interests should lie.
It's not a paradox. Look, do we imagine that everybody is capable of being a first class brilliant scientist or engineer? Clearly not. Therefore, if you have a system where the difference between the best and the worst (in any field) is small, then you have a system which fails to promote the best. You have a system where everyone is at the "average" level, and the people who ought to stand out, don't, for whatever reason.
On the other hand, if you have a system where the difference between the best and the average is high, what does that tell you? It tells you the system works well to promote the best and give them the tools they need to produce. Fact is, there is a natural heirarchy of ability among human beings in any field. Most are at some ordinary level, and only a few are very good. If you don't see the natural ability heirarchy reflected in the accomplishment heirarchy, then something is wrong. Since it's impossible to bring ordinary folk up to the extraordinary level, what must be happening is that the extraordinary folks are being held down (which is fairly easy to do).
Compare to sports. The difference between your average high-school athlete and Olympic or world-class athletes has never been greater, and the very few at the very top are amazing. Do we look at this pyramid of accomplishment and say, gee, there must be something wrong with how we promote and train people in sports, because there are so few at the top? Because the average 35-year-old pick-up basketball player, measured on the same scale that includes the championship Los Angeles Lakers, sucks? Not if we have any brains, we don't. We realize that the better a system is at sifting and placing people according to their abilities and motivation, the more pronounced the heirarchy, the greater the difference between the best and all the rest. Only in some doofus Lake Wobegon mode of (non)thinking do we imagine that a successful system would look non-heirarchical, with everyone above average.
The fact that heirarchies of accomplishment are more evident in the United States than elsewhere is no proof that the mass of people are being held down. It may well be evidence that in the United States the best are better able to rise to the top, to find their natural level of achievement, whereas in other places considerations of social class, restrictive groupthink education, or cultural barriers to personal ambition and radical innovation tend to keep the best from ever showing their stuff and emerging above the sea of average folk.
I doubt it. The QA bug fixing et cetera involved in figuring out how to convert from number of months to years (hint: divide by 12, inasmuch as there's no such thing as "leap months") is going to be dwarfed by any number of other difficulties in making sure your financial software works and (more relevant) can't be diddled by idiots at the other end of the GUI.
I suspect anyone writing a loan software program is just going to do all the calculations in months, with months an integer, and then, if necessary, convert month #X to a calendar month by adding X to the month and year of the start date of the loan. As mentioned, since a year always equals a duodecimonth, exactly, this conversion is trivial. Your mind-boggling nest of special case rules only occurs when you need things like the date of the month or the day of the week. Months and years are perfectly regular.
It's a dumfuk comment in the summary. If you're calculating payments on a thirty-year loan, you sure as heck don't convert all your dates to seconds since the epoch ("Unix time"). What would be the point? You don't compound your interest by the second, and if a payment is due on such-and-such a date, you don't specify the exact second it's due.
I expect loan software converts dates and lengths of time if at all to months, that being the typical interval when you compound interest. So even on 32-bit Unix you're not going to have trouble until your loan period exceeds 4294967295 months.
I can't imagine why I, a consumer, would support what I've heard about "net neutrality." It seems to be all about restricting my freedom to buy the service I want in the service of a dubious and cynical goal that, practically, boils down to making sure freeloaders don't have to pay any more per packet than the rest of us. More or less a guarantee of some kind of Tragedy of the Commons on the Internet.
For example, it sounds like if I happen to want a massive pipe to my door, and lightning service to various IP addresses of my choice, then Big Momma a.k.a. the government isn't going to allow me to cut a deal with my ISP for speedier treatment of my packets in exchange for more money. Likewise, if my aged parent wants only some de minimis service for reading e-mail, and is perfectly willing to accept 4th class parcel-post service for her packets if the price is in the basement, then she, too, is up a creek, because it's a one-size-fits-all price and service level set by some doofus bureaucrat in Washington.
Well, screw that. I trust my ability to cut a deal with Verizon over my ability to cut a deal with a Federal agency any day. You think Dell's customer service is crappy? Try getting a government agency to change its mind, make a reasonable exception to the rules, see you as a person instead of set of numbers in a computer record. At least with Verizon I can threaten to withhold my money from them, which of course I can't do with the government, and if I piss Verizon off the worst they can do is refuse to sell me their service, while the goverment can and will put me in jail.
Furthermore, using the ol' retrospectoscope and checking out the record of innovation and efficiency growth in industries that have been heavily regulated in the past -- in the interests of fairness to the consumer of course -- such as airlines, telephone service, broadcast radio, power generation and distribution, public education, public health -- then alas any one with half a brain comes to the unpleasant conclusion that such interference always increases the price and decreases the efficiency of the service. Inasmuch as I'd like to see the spectacular gains in efficiency and innovation in networked computing continue, and not sink into the torpid sludge of the standard government-dominated project, then I'd also have to conclude that nearly any kind of top-down regulation other than that required to keep everything above board and open is the kind of clever-sounding but ultimately dumfuk idea that occurs to all of us when we've had a few too many beers during a college bull session.
Goodness, of course not. If I made a careful list of those thousand books, I could gather together nearly all of what's great and useful and inspiring about Western Civilization for the past two thousand years. Anyone who read them all would be magnificently educated.
The available online electronic resources are pathetic by comparison. I mean, Wikipedia is great for pop culture references, and handy for facts 'n' figures that everyone knows exists but would be a pain to go look up somewhere. But you can't learn chemistry or general relativity from it (at least not at anything more than a casual amateur level), nor plumb the causes for the decline of the Roman Empire, or follow along with Madison's arguments for the Constitution, or understand from contemporary poetry and fiction the lure the American West exerted on early 19th century Americans, and how that has affected us today.
I suspect you're just taking for granted a whole crapload of culture and education that you soaked up from your environment, and in school, that was generally conveyed by the hundreds of books you've read. Reading is so ubiquitous, like breathing, that you forget how much of it you do in the modern world. A child raising with nothing but the Wikipedia (or some such) would make a most incomplete, weird adult.
I'm sorry, but your economic argument suggesting that laptops trump paper books for cheap delivery of information is while clever wildly delusional. No way, no how. We'll start with the fact that the marginal cost of a book is way less than $20 -- probably less than 25 cents -- that, with moderate care in its printing and use, it will easily last a century, and that it draws zero watts and can be repaired with Scotch tape by unskilled operators.
how about you can't have or use a computer ever again, but you can use pencil and paper and get a book from the nearby library once a week instead?
/. but then probably both you and I, as well as my family and employer, would consider that a good thing...
You're describing how I lived all through college and graduate school, and most of my post-doc training. The first computer I had on my own desk came with my first faculty appointment when I was 32 years old.
Happy?
Obviously I would be. Maybe it's a generational thing. Since widely-networked computers didn't appear in my life until I was already middle-aged, I tend to use them strictly for work purposes, and they just more or less speed up what I would ordinarily do by trotting on down to the library or doing some phoning around. To be sure, my work would probably slow down, but since everyone else's work would, too, I wouldn't be at any competitive disadvantage, so I wouldn't be very upset. I wouldn't be reading blogs, but then I'd just go back to reading the newspaper. I wouldn't be posting to
But I think for a younger generation -- like my teenagers -- networked computers serve a profoundly important social purpose, and they, indeed, would be miserable without them.
All this proves is that we get very used to what we know, and can't imagine doing without it. But it's a grave mistake to project your expectations of "normal" and "necessary" onto someone -- like a kid in a poor Andes mountain village -- who has utterly different experiences. If you really want to help him, you need to first understand him, and that means clearing your mind of the unconscious prejudices you have about what is "normal" and "necessary" because of the way you have lived.
I'm not criticizing you per se. I doubt I could do any better, figuring out how best to help out some poor kid in Nigeria. It's damn hard to get into someone else's head and see out through his eyes.
Or why not just make sure they all get their vaccinations, a good supply of pencils and paper, and an interesting book to read from the nearby library each week? Doubt that would cost more than $75 per child in desperately-poor Thirdworldistan.
E. F. Schumacher wrote an interesting and provocative book (Small is Beautiful) several decades ago about the routinely inappropriate "help" the First World often sends the Third. To grossly oversummarize, it's like we see someone painfully hauling a load of firewood down a dirt road in a poor country and decide to "help" by giving him a hybrid-electric pick-up truck. Of course, he has no good supply of gas, no way to maintain such a complex machine, no good roads to drive it on...and a mule would be a lot more appropriate and helpful.
It's hard not to wonder whether a focus on supplying cheap laptop computers is fully appropriate for kids whose principal problems probably lie more in the areas of crappy public hygiene, rampant preventable infectious childhood disease, AIDS and its consequences (e.g. becoming an orphan), civil unrest and insecurity, not to mention oppression in many places, and their parents not being able to get decent jobs close to home.
Maybe a Linux laptop at the right price point is a silver bullet for some of this nasty stuff, somehow, although I don't quite see it. I guess we'll find out.
Uh...there is another meaning than the Motie with the odd judgment? Amazing.
Dude, I would be the first to agree with you that the method by which the United States secures its borders and appropriately inspects passage through them is well and truly fucked. I've never dealt with US border agents and not come away loathing the entire bunch and wanting to have each and every one of their pinheaded arrogant asses fired and sent to clean pit toilets out for the rest of their incompetent, arrogant, futile, tax-eating Federal career. To think that these shitheads are supposed to be working for me makes me grind my teeth in rage. That the system needs some kind of serious reform is totally obvious.
But I still agree very strongly with the principle that borders can and ought to be effectively controlled. That was my point.
If you want to grant the proposition that borders should be controlled, and argue about methods for doing so much better, maximizing both effectiveness, courtesy, and a respect for individual freedom -- then we're on the same page. I'm only arguing against the vague childish -- dangerous -- We Are The World notion that international borders don't really matter.
You've got a pretty incoherent response here, which is not surprising, given that you accuse me of incoherence. (Folks quite often project their own deficiencies, as you probably know.)
Only two responses:
(1) First, your vague inability to distinguish between types of borders ("Obviously, people who are destined to do bad things cross all kinds of borders") doesn't even pass the laugh test. You've forgotten, apparently, that borders are not merely painted arbitrary lines that separate this patch of ground from that. The real meaning of a border is that it groups together people, and borders separate different groups of people. That the borders are very often fixed lines on a map simply reflects the obvious fact that groups of people tend to live together.
Hence, the "border" around your family is your house. You naturally trust and understand people within that border -- your spouse, your children -- much more than anybody who generally lives outside of that border. And that's why, in law and tradition, you have the right to control that border. That's why you can say who comes in and who doesn't, and under what conditions, and even the police have to have a warrant and so forth to come in without your permission. The "border" around the people you work with is your company building and the various legal "walls" around the firm. Obviously, folks within that border -- your colleagues -- have a different level of mutual trust and understanding than people outside the border. That's why the company controls the border, by, e.g. giving only employees accounts on company computers and locking the general public out with a firewall.
Similarly, at last, the borders around states and nations group together people with similar shared ambitions and ideas, and the level of trust and understanding between people inside the border -- in the same group -- is higher than it is between people who are outside the border. That's why the group inside controls the border. That's why the group inside controls the border between them and the rest of the world much more tightly than they would any internal borders, which do not involve such large changes in trust level. Kind of like how you might control the border between your family and the outside world (your front door) a lot more strictly than you control the borders within your house -- say, between the family room and your study. Any rules you promulgate about when and how the children can bounce around in your study are liable to be a lot less serious to you than rules you set about when and how strangers can enter the front door.
You getting all this? Trying to make it simple, so you can reflect on your own life and realize how extremely important borders actually are. I realize I have to push through your 21st century slacker PC 'borders don' matter, man' ignorance, however. The crap you get loaded up on in school about how we're all just the same, really, underneath. Here's a clue: we're not.
(2) Your final comment about freedom in the United States betrays a deep ignorance of American history and tradition. If you live in the US, as I do, you should take some time to read up on your heritage. You'll find it's certainly about liberty, but certainly not about license, or (worse), about liberty in silly inconsequential things (like "freedom" from having your laptop examined at a border) to keep you distracted from the fact that liberty in important things (like whether you can choose how you get medical care, or save for retirement, or educate yourself or your children) is being taken away.
In that respect, I sure wish folks in the younger generation would realize how much a Potemkin village distraction these debates about "freedom" are. Your real, important freedoms are the freedom to work in the profession you like, and spend the results of your labor in any way you choose -- to buy top-quality medical care for your children, to blow on ten th
Don't be silly. I live in California, and I've crossed the California border bazillions of times. Yes, indeed, California reserves the right to inspect your car and contents for fruit and stuff, and about 1 time out of 5 in my experience they actually do. But it's the most casual inspection you might imagine. You got any fruits and vegetables, sir? No? Okay, have a nice day.
If I were seriously trying to import pests to do harm to California, this wouldn't be the slightest bit of a barrier. The reason California can get away with that is because nearly everybody who does cross the California barrier is a reasonable person who understands and agrees with the proposition that importation of fruits, vegetables and trees should be carefully monitored lest a new pest get loose and devastate California's agriculture -- which means devastating California's economy. Despite appearances, it's not Hollywood but the Imperial and Central Valleys (where they grow rice, almonds, oranges, etc.) that are the engine of California's wealth.
Hence the only reason for the trivial "inspection" at California borders is more or less just to remind people who are willing to cooperate that they should check to be sure they're not carrying any possible pest vector in. It's useful. More than once I've come to the border and realized I had a banana or something in the car from somewhere else, and remembered only then that one should be careful about these things.
The contrast with an international border, where the people coming in may have no shared goal of keeping the US prosperous -- may even want to destroy it -- couldn't be greater.
I think you have a good question. See, here on Earth when we go somewhere through a trackless waste -- e.g. we sail somewhere on a ship -- we can figure out where we are simply by knowing our orientation (attitude) with respect to the fixed stars, which we do with sextant and chronometer. Since we live on the surface of a sphere, attitude (e.g. latitude and longitude) is all we need to know to know where we are.
In space, it's equally easy to figure your attitude from the fixed (i.e. distant) stars. So attitude is no problem. However, what you also want to know in deep space is the translational distance of your coordinate origin from, e.g. that of your starting point, e.g. Earth. That's pretty important stuff! That is, it's not enough to know that galactic North is this way, and if you look over there you're looking at the Sun. You'd also want to know -- probably very much! -- how far away the Sun is in that direction. If nothing else, that's going to determine how long you accelerate and when you plan to start decelerating. Don't want to overshoot or undershoot, right? Probably pretty expensive, even if it doesn't leave you fuel-less and marooned in interstellar space...
Now if you go large distances, a few thousand light-years or so, then of course the pattern of stars will shift around you, and if you have a good 3D map of the galaxy, you can triangulate and determine where you are. This would be like ship navigation by triangulating on landmarks when you are close to shore.
But what if you don't? What if, as seems more likely, you go 5-10 light years? Over that distance, the pattern of stars is going to change very little, if at all, simply because stars are so bloody far apart on average. So how good is your triangulation navigation going to be? Especially if, as happens to be the case presently, our knowledge of the exact 3D location of nearby stars is a bit spotty. It would be like navigating at sea by trying to measure the changes in how the surface of the Moon looks from different positions, made worse by not having a terribly good map of the Moon's surface to begin with.
I suppose one answer is just inertial navigation. Your trajectory in deep space is likely to be affected only by your own self-acceleration (which you can measure very accurately) plus the gravity of your source and destination stars, which you hopefully have measured before you set out, plus the average gravity of the galaxy in your neighborhood, which is hopefully pretty constant. God help you if you pass too close to an uncharted brown dwarf, however, and it's worth noting that there are probably thousands of these "hidden reefs" still undetected in the Sun's immediate neighborhood.
I sure get tired of the fools who think international borders should be treated as carelessly as the border between Nevada and California. I can only think they've lived so long in a world that seems totally harmless, like trust-fund babies who've never left the crime-free gated community, that they now naively think there's just no more evil left in the world. So they can't see all this fuss about actually, you know, making sure that folks coming into the country are not up to seriously bad things.
They remind me a bit of the similar folks who fuss about the dangers of vaccines or chlorine in the water supply, because they've lived in a world with powerful antibiotics so long they no longer really believe that deadly bacteria exist and can kill you dead without some basic precautions at the similar "border" between one's body and the outside world.
I think almost every substance absorbs UV strongly, since it's at the right frequency to excite atomic and molecular electrons. From the graph here, about halfway down, it would seem water absorbs in the near UV about as well as it absorbs red light (and significantly better than it does in the blue visible region). In the far UV water seems to absorbs as well as it does in the infrared.
Unfortunately the "grouping user input into a few categories" thing might be the difficult part.
Considering that it combines successful natural language parsing with solving the strong AI problem, I'd say you're quite right about that.