what's the "value" of a name? Certainly nothing objectively quantifiable
The value of a name is very quantifiable. It's the price the highest bidder is willing to pay for it. You can ask the same question, and get the same answer, when you ask what the value of real estate is. The fact that we have very limited insight into the mechanism by which people judge the value of things doesn't change the fact that they can and do, and we can measure that value quite precisely merely by noting the price they bid for them.
There are two difficulties with your counterexample.
(1) It's totally theoretical. That is, you've constructed an example out of your imagination, and in your imagined world, it works. Problem is, most things we can imagine and which seem plausible don't actually work in the real world. This is why you measure twice and cut once. This is why cars and airplanes still crash, and folks get their houses foreclosed on, and why businesses go bankrupt. Now if you'd been able to cite an actual example of a chemistry student doing just what you say there'd be something to consider. (And how is he able to synthesize drugs indefinitely? Doesn't he have to graduate? "Indefinitely" doesn't mean "for a year or two.")
(2) It just so happens that I've been a graduate student in chemistry, and on a chemistry faculty at a big university, and from that practical perspective I'd say your theory is wildly implausible. A chemistry lab may look chaotic to the ignorant eye, just the way the Linux kernel code looks like so much gobbledegook to the nonprogrammer, but it's not. To a trained chemist -- to the faculty member in charge of that lab, say -- it's quite orderly, and anything peculiar stands out quite clearly. That's not to say a grad student couldn't do a small synthesis and get away with it, for a little while. But sooner or later, within weeks, the faculty supervisor or a fellow grad student is going to want to know what this set-up is for, if for no other reason than because he wants the space, or some of the glassware. Then the jig's up.
Plus...where's he getting the starting material? The FDA and DEA are not stupid you know, or ignorant of chemistry. Everything that is a starting material for a simple illegal drug synthesis is itself a controlled substance, and you can't buy it without some pretty strict scrutiny being applied to your purchase, plus lots of damning records being generated. I doubt you can buy them at all with cash or check or credit card, institutional POs signed off on by a dean are probably de rigeur. So how is J. Random Gradstudent going to get them? He might steal them, I suppose, but...from where? And the legitimate owner, who had to jump through all these damn flaming hoops to get the stuff, is not going to notice?!
Now turn to the marketing end of things. How's this guy going to set up his delivery pipeline and have no one ever know? Where do you go to sell 1 kg of pure heroin? Can't just put an ad in Craigslist, can you? And once you start sniffing around, trying to get into the culture, letting people know you've got the Good Stuff for sale, how long is it before someone rats you out, or threatens to in order to blackmail you, and then all hell breaks loose? You'd be dealing with criminals and addicts, not an especially reliable class of people from which to build a smoothly-functioning secret enterprise. I predict trouble pretty quickly.
Finally, what about the money? You can't get paid in checks, you know. So now you've got big lumps of cash to deal with. Funny thing, it turns out the banks and police have a habit of watching out for people who suddenly start moving a lot of cash in and out of accounts. When chemistry graduate student Craig starts dumping $15,000 in 20s and 50s into his account every week, it won't be long before the bank starts getting twitchy and lets the DA know. You could use many banks, of course, but...it's starting to get complicated, isn't it? And on top of all this, you've got to be making progress in your open, above-board research, so you don't get fired from your convenient job. It's so much work, it almost seems -- it fact it is -- just easier and more profitable to finish the PhD in the normal way and get a job as a synthetic organic chemist for Pfizer making $110,000 in your first year.
And so that is, actually, what the smart students -- the ones who can actually get admitted to chemistry PhD programs -- do. Like I said, if you're smart enough to prosper in crime, you're smart enough to do much better following more socially acceptable channels.
Uh oh, sounds like you're trapped in that geeky "a word means what it says in the dictionary, no more and no less, gosh darn it!" mindset about which I spoke. Conversation over. So it goes.
But sometime talk to an intelligent liberal arts graduate, a linguist say, or an anthropologist or social psychologist. Talk to them about the meaning of words and the use of language. You may find it very interesting. I have.
Boy you're telling me. I remember when Wolfram was the wunderkind of the 1980s and 1990s, who was going to Change The World(TM) with his brilliance. Ha. Jeff Bezos or Linus Torvalds have done far more with computers to Change The World in interesting and useful ways.
Oh I don't know about that. Seems to me the Chinese are merely proving they can do in 2007 what the Americans and Soviets did in 1966. Indeed, the Chinese are having it way easier, since (1) they don't have to invent the ideas and technology, it already exists, and (2) one of the biggest problems in early space shots was the immense amount of calculation that couldn't be done quickly and in a small machine. That problem has been solved by the development of microprocessors.
Furthermore, you're overlooking many other "technology fronts" that are arguably more exciting. What about networked computing software? Hear of any killer Internet apps (other than viruses) that have come out of China lately? What about biotech? Have the Chinese come up with any novel AIDS or cancer drugs? (Or any AIDS or cancer drugs at all, for that matter.) Where do you expect breakthroughs in treating Alzheimer's to come from? Or how about materials? Boeing is building a composite airplane (the 787 'Dreamliner') that will be 20% more fuel efficient than any other passenger plane in its class. Can the Chinese do that? Nope. Lockheed-Martin is building an air superiority fighter (the F-22) which is fast and stealthy, due in significant part to clever computer-assisted design and new materials. Can the Chinese do that? Nope, not even close.
Even in the space-related front, the Americans have a probe on its way to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt (New Horizons) and another on its way to Mercury orbit (Messenger). They've got 2 spacecraft in orbit around Mars, 2 rovers driving around, a lander on its way, and a bigger rover in the works. Cassini is still sending back marvelous pictures of Saturn. The Space Shuttle is delivering another chunk of ISS this week. NASA is busy with a new crew exploration vehicle (Orion) for lunar or possibly even Martian manned trips. The Americans even now have a private space industry. Virgin Galactic is taking reservations for suborbital flights on Spaceship Two, and Bigelow has put up prototypes of inflatable orbital hotels.
If you compare China and the US in terms of population or GDP, the Chinese ought to be behind the US by at least a bit. But they are way behind. I know it's popular to think they're "catching up," but they're not. They're certainly moving, catching up to where they might have been, had they not indulged in the spectacularly suicidal folly of Communism for 50 years. But you can't forget the US is moving, too, and generally faster. Maybe it's not moving as fast as you'd like it to, but that's a different story.
It's called an "operationally accurate" definition, my friend. What's important to understand -- what geeky people often don't fully understand -- is that language serves multiple purposes. To be sure, it's a method for the codification of information and ideas so that they can be exchanged. A Intermind protocol, so to speak. That function programmers and other such left-brain folk usually understand well. Unfortunately, they tend to think that's all language is, and get bogged down in the dead end illusion of thinking that if only words were as precisely defined as C language reserved keywords, there would be no more misunderstandings. Ha.
Because on the other hand language is also a signaling pathway used to enforce social myths. Like pheromones, or secondary sexual characteristics (tits and beards). And in that role, the way in which we speak quite often serves to conceal the reality we live in, in order to encourage certain useful social behaviours.
Thus it is with "crime." Most people speak of it as if it is some odd infection delivered to us from Mars, and with the right vaccine (the right government, justice for all, equality, education, blah blah) or the right medicine (enough jails and police, strong and certain enough punishment, blah blah) then we could eradicate the "disease" once and for all, and there would be no such thing as "crime."
This is nonsense, if you think carefully about what "crime" really means, from a strictly anthropological point of view, as if you were studying some alien animal species. The only definition of "crime" that can serve in any culture, in any period of history, is that it's social behaviour which is not tolerated by the bulk of society. (Since a quick definition of behaviour that "pays" -- by which you can prosper -- is behaviour which is tolerated by the bulk of society, you immediately get the logical conclusion that "crime" cannot "pay," by definition.)
But thinking of "crime" as a fixable disease is useful nonsense, because the (false) hope it gives us of eradicating crime makes us work harder at keeping it down, among many other complicated results, and this makes our society more peaceful and constructive.
We do the same thing, by the way, with the word "poor." If you think about it, "poor" is strictly a relative term: there's no way to define it in objective terms that are valid across all cultures and all of history. So that means there will always be "poor" people and they'll always make up just about the same fraction of the population. "Fighting poverty," from a strictly logical point of view, makes about as much sense as saying you want to educate all children so that they score above average on standardized tests (which a few people in education actually say, by the way). Nevertheless, we "fight poverty" all the time, because we suffer from the (useful!) delusion that it's possible to make progress. We don't, not strictly, but in the meantime we do act more humanely to our fellow men, and that helps society hold together.
C'mon, think more expansively. There's no reason you can't implement the same idea automatically for those services, too. Essentially he's just saying to give up on the dream of worldwide uniformity in DNS service. Everyone picks out his favorite private DNS server(s), and goes with the translations it (or they) provide(s). The most successful private server will probably be the one that provides the translations that most people want, which solves the problem of squatting.
But I can easily imagine a lot of frustrating chaos during and to some extent even after the switchover!
Of course it exists. What I'm saying can very roughly be caricaturized as this:
(1) If it pays well and steadily and indefinitely, it's not crime. Inducing people to buy products they don't really need by appealing in sneaky ways to their greed, need for emotional support in a time of crisis, sexual hunger or fear of death pays well and steadily. But it's not a crime, it's a respectable career in advertising (or politics).
(2) If it's crime, it doesn't pay well and steadily and indefinitely. Beating up children to steal their lunch money is without doubt a crime, and people will punish it with or without laws against it. But for that reason it doesn't pay in the long run.
In other words, what people savagely and instinctively punish is what we should call "crime," and, pretty much by definition, it can't pay in the long run.
This doesn't stop people from claiming that there's some small (sometimes secret, sometimes not) cabal of criminal masterminds who, through a lack of conscience, are able to laugh at us with impunity while they scoop in the wealth. But that's just a variant of the usual timeless paranoid myth of a secret society with some secret trick -- here, criminality, but in other myths a superior technology, knowledge of ancient secrets, belonging to a secret club, et cetera. The fact that this meme is so persistent throughout history would tell a Martian anthropologist many interesting facts about how the human mind operates.
Well, since as a fairly libertarian person I don't give a damn what the lawyers and other amoral bottom-feeders care to define as right and wrong, I don't even unconsciously use the word "crime" to mean strictly what the law forbids. So I at least am stuck with the practical definition, not the legal definition.
How can a CEO or other corporate type make huge amounts of money without needing to fear the consequences? That makes zero sense to me, and I've known a few. Contrary to what you say, they tend to be very fearful of consequences, very sensitive to perception and reputation among people at large. They know better than anyone that you can be totally killed in the marketplace if people in general start thinking you're a shithead whether or not you can be convicted of a legal crime. Furthermore, the bigger the company, the more the heads of it fear the public perception, because they can do less and less about it. If the CEO of Ford hears that some customers are being treated like dirt by dealers in Alabama, what's he going to do? He'll never meet those customers personally, and he would have a devil of a time finding out exactly who the bad apples are in a company that employs 50,000 people. About all he can do is write a strong memo, and that isn't a very useful option. He doesn't have the ability of the CEO of a small company to make amends directly to customers, or keep a careful eye on all his employees.
Maybe what you're saying is that the CEOs of some companies you and I don't like -- telemarketers, say, or certain real-estate developers, or whatever -- can make lots and lots of money, and do what you and I think is evil without consequence from either the law or the market.
But all that proves is that no one's morals are universal, that there are activities which most people approve of, or will at least tolerate, but which deeply offend a few, for example you and I, or any random collection of a dozen people. Nothing we can do about that, at least until Christ comes again and appoints you (or I) as Lord God King of the Earth, and we can arrange things so that no one ever does anything we think is wrong.
That's just because you're overloading the "crime" operator. You are taking stuff that is more reasonably characterized as "being a public nuisance" like driving 45 in a school zone and lumping it in with stuff that your neighbors would kill you immediately for, laws or no laws, like child rape. It's only in the sense that this is all "crime," technically, that lets you make such a broad statement.
As for your larger point: the "crimes" you can commit without (ever) going to jail, or suffering some other such serious negative social pressure from your friends and neighbors, are basically not really crimes at all. They may well be technically illegal, but that just shows that what is right and wrong is more subtle than what is legal and not.
I suppose it's important to distinguish between "crime" meaning something that is against the law and "crime" (as in "crime against humanity") meaning that which is widely believed to be evil and which people will instinctively resent and punish, laws or no laws.
Not if you subtract the penalties. For example, running 10 kg of coke at a time across the Mexican border pays very well. At first. But you'd very quickly come to the attention of the relevant authorities (the existing Mexican drug gangs) and be flayed alive and fed to dogs as an example to others. Intelligent people realize making $10 million with a day's work doesn't compensate for the risk of being eaten by dogs before you celebrate your 25th birthday.
You won't be able to think of a good counterexample, by the way, because society is so constructed that any activity which is highly profitable, can be engaged in by most anyone, and is insufficiently noxious to really piss people off is legal or at least quasi-legal (meaning perhaps only technically illegal). Why would it be otherwise? You think our ancestors were not able to dream up pretty much every conceivable scam and method of gathering power and influence (which is all money is)? The basic questions of what fundamental activities are and are not tolerable have been settled for centuries, if not millenia.
All that happens is that technology changes, and briefly enables old scams to surface under new disguises. It takes a little while for people to figure out how to categorize the new activity, but they do, and then it gets filed either under legitimate (if sometimes unsavory) business or crime that gets seriously punished. No doubt the length of time this takes enables a few lucky (?) entrepreneurs to retire rich while the issue is still in flux, but they won't be leaving the business to their children. So it's a dead end, if you're at all intelligent.
Many IT people know a great deal about identity theft...
And so what stops them from becoming identity thieves...? Their Christian consciences? The good of the many outweighs the good of the one? Please. I realize this is/. and all, where we venerate the geek, but don't make me laugh coffee out my nose.
The reason IT people don't become identity thieves is because they can make a better living as IT managers. Not just in terms of plain salary but in terms of the pleasure of good work-related company (it's hard to get invited to parties with pleasant looking, sweet-natured, single women if you're a sneak and a thief), and in not having to look over your shoulder all the time.
Of course, I don't deny many of them might not have Walter Mitty daydreams of running up the Jolly Roger and turning piratical, slitting a couple of throats over in marketing and force sundry managers to walk the plank. Who doesn't?
This sort of speculation is not a new phenomenon. It's been true for centuries in real estate: you buy some property not because it's useful to you, but just to charge whomever it is useful to a hefty price. At some level, this is just an inevitable feature of an open market, and must be tolerated (unless you lack a brain and like the idea of some Big Brother Tsar handing out domain names to whomever "deserves" them most).
But real estate speculation also provides an interesting possible solution: real estate taxes. Since real estate taxes are usually some percentage of the market value, they become very high on property that has a high market value -- so high that you can't afford them unless you are using the property to generate the maximum possible income. Speculators tend to be squeezed out of the market, since they can't afford the taxes required to "park" the property until the price is bid up high enough to suit their taste. So, one solution is to tax internet domains, with the tax reflecting the market value of the domain. That would certainly cut down on speculation, but, like all asset taxes, it's bound to depress creativity and economic growth.
Another solution comes from compulsory licenses in patent law, where the idea is that if you patent an invention and then fail to work the patent, or license it on reasonable terms -- where, alas, a court has to interpret what "reasonable" means -- then other folks can just use your patent without coming to any licensing agreement with you. I suppose the equivalent here would be that if you sit on a domain and don't use it yourself and won't sell it at a "reasonable" cost, then DNS service would be switchable to someone who will use it, even if you don't agree. I suspect this is most likely to become widespread, and I think it's already happening to some extent.
Finally, the classic libertarian idea would be to break the concept that there must be a single, worldwide, one-to-one mapping between DNS name and IP address, i.e. more or less abandon the idea of domain name registration entirely. In this strange anarchic world, you, an aspiring domain-name user, would simply start using the domain name and publish your associated IP address on some DNS server. Presumably you'd have to pay, at first, to get some servers to list your IP address.
But if your particular IP becomes the preferred association with that domain name, something the market would quickly decide, then it becomes advantageous for more and more DNS servers e.g. run by ISPs to list your IP address block for the domain name without charging you. Indeed, you might be able to charge them at some point for the privilege. To some extent this model already exists in the world of business-speak, which is why a Mac is not a "PC," even though "PC" stands for "personal computer." IBM's product named "PC" so dominated the 80s market for microcomputers that it became impossible to say "PC" without meaning "IBM-compatible microcomputer." Good thing IBM was not able to file for trademark protection on the phrase "personal computer" . . .
Of course, the fact that trademark law exists at all says that the completely free-market solution is not likely to work. Still, it would be interesting to develop some system where the preference of the global market of users has influence on who "owns" a particular domain name. The present gold-rush first come first served system has obvious disadvantages, and little other than simplicity to recommend it.
Well that would be true if, as shown on TV and movies, criminals are fiendishly clever Snidely Whiplashes, twirling their thin mustaches slowly as they ponder deeply the implications of their next criminal caper.
But they're not. Pretty much anyone with an IQ above 90 figures out before he's 12 that crime does not pay, in the long run, and he goes into other lines of business as an adult. That doesn't mean he has to give up being antisocial or deploying his uglier personality traits to advantage, of course. Would-be rapists and contract murderers can become divorce lawyers, bullshit artists and con-men can go into subprime lending or telemarketing, and so forth. You can be a very successful legitimate businessman instead of a crook with some fairly small adjustments in your choice of victim and methodology.
So as a rule those we have left in the actual criminal class tend to be irredeemably stupid, the kind who pull stunts like this -- and who would not learn anything useful by reading the story, since they lack the ability to generalize the lesson.
I thought the whole-plane parachute thingy was selling well?
Anyway, it's not an argument for the impossibility of making an airplane even idiots can fly safely. It just says it's trickier than it seems at first, which is pretty much true of any technological development.
Heck, it's happened with cars, I'd say. When I learned to drive it was a given you had to master a clutch, and manual steering (which in a moderately heavy car means you can't really turn the wheel when the car isn't moving, so you have to think ahead a bit). I even had one car with a manual choke, which had to be used at various times during winter driving. Go back a little further and you don't have synchromeshes in your gearbox, so you have to listen to match engine and gear speed pretty well if you don't want to grind your gears when you shift. Then there was maintenance: you had to know at least to check the oil, radiator and battery water regularly, and if you weren't rich you knew how to change the oil, bleed and adjust the brakes, replace the air and fuel filters, replace and gap the sparkplugs, adjust the idle, and time the engine.
All that's gone now. No one thinks about changing the mix on the carburetor depending on outside temp, altitude, and whether the engine is warm. You can change gears pretty much anywhere, even assuming you have a gearshift at all, and so on. Your power-assist steering very nicely adapts to car speed, so at low or zero speed you get plenty of hydraulic assist, and at highway speed you get very little for good road feel. Cars are pretty much point and press (accelerator or brake) devices. Traction control, ABS brakes, tensioning belts and airbags make them amazingly safe, too -- all without driver knowledge or involvement. As for maintenance, the modern car hardly needs any before it hits 100,000 miles.
I can imagine the same thing happening in airplanes, if people want it to. Yes, it would take some of the skill out of flying, and I imagine skilled pilots might regret that, figuring very reasonably that the most failure-prone device on the vehicle is always the nut behind the wheel. But if you think about it, or apply the Peter Principle, pretty much all technology evolves and improves until its major failure mode is user error.
Mmm, doubt it. Notice that there's still only one TGV line even in France. That suggests it's more of a showpiece than a paying proposition, even in Europe where population densities are so dense.
There are a few place in the US where high-speed rail makes sense, but they already have it, like the Metro between DC and New York. A good case can be made for SF to LA, too, and the proof of this is that this is one of the few Amtrak lines that actually makes money and is routinely booked up, even though the line stops in Bakersfield and you have to take a fucking bus over the mountains to get to LA itself. Spend $1 billion to dig tunnels and put up bridges so you can ride the train from LA downtown to SF downtown in three hours (that's only averaging about 150 miles/hour) and you would get tons of traffic. The airplane flight is nominally an hour, but you have to tack on at least two more hours of airport hassle.
Probably there are a few other places, too. But most of the US is actually best served by what it's got, which is Interstates and airports and airplanes. There's a reason we have all that infrastructure, and it isn't because our fathers were too stupid to see the obviously better solution, or were all in thrall to a vast secret conspiracy. It's because when you have a lightly populated enormous country, it's more economical to ship people around in small, lightweight, self-propelled vehicles that need little to no roadway and which operate either on-demand or nearly on-demand. Shoehorning in a system with enormous fixed costs per mile for its roadway, and cursed with relatively inflexible scheduling and routing to boot, sounds pretty dumb.
Yes, the technology is cool. But being cool doesn't make it sensible.
I think I'll just take down the court decision and post a different one, and call anyone who claims to have seen anything else a leftwing moveon retard.
Sure, you could do that. That would stop...uh...pretty much only leftwing moveon retards, I'd say. Any serious adult concerned with his own liberty would laugh at the idea that being called names is an effective form of political oppression. Might work on the grade-school playground, but not on the men who struck the Gdansk shipyard, or stood in front of the tanks in Tianenman Square. Really, if this is all American sons of liberty have to complain about, they might as well hang up the tricorn and go have a beer. If they're old enough.
what exactly did your hysteric screed have to do with the original assertion that putting everything in computers and on the internet opens up more possibilities for the removal of information from the public sphere?
Well, we'll take it slow. I realize the Internet generation has an attention span measured in microseconds, so that an argument that takes more than forty words to state risks passing through the cerebral cortex without effecting the slightest change in neural proteins, but let's give it a whirl.
First of all, When you put "everything" on computers, that doesn't mean you throw away all the paper files, magnetic tapes, photographs, et cetera and so forth. That's what I meant by pointing out that in the "old" days, a mere 10-20 years ago, we kept data on paper and pencil -- and pretty much everyone keeping important data still does.
All you do when you put stuff that exists on paper onto Web sites is you increase the ease with which it's available. You certainly don't increase the amount of information that exists, and you don't usually change whether it's available or not at all. Take Court decisions, for example. They're all written down on paper and filed in big (fireproof) cabinets in the Courthouse. Whether or not they're secret is a matter of law and tradition. If you wanted to read them for the past two centuries, you trotted on down to the Courthouse and spent several hours (or days) thumbing through the files. Nowadays, you can often get it as a PDF with a few seconds googling.
Well that's nice, and if someone takes it off the Web, I guess you can say that's a step backwards in terms of access, but arguing that it takes us right back to some Stalinist dark ages is just way over the top. At worst it takes us back to 1980, when you had to go to the Courthouse to get the actual paper, that's all. That would be point #2.
Finally, think carefully through what you said. Copying stuff to the Internet increases the chance that information will be suppressed? That makes no logical sense. There's no way increasing the bandwidth for information flow can make information disappear, you know.
By the way, it wasn't a hysterical screed, it was a nastily sarcastic and contemptuous screed. Hysteria is when you shriek about the sky falling when it isn't. You can look the word up right on the internet, assuming The Man hasn't corrupted all the online dictionaries in a scary Stalinist plot to suck information out of your brain and turn you into an ignorant peasant slave.
The web is wonderful. But it has more opportunities to be "corrected"...
And the web is the only important and reliable source of information about the world?
Dude, how did you function in the 70s and 80s? You are aware that vast swathes of the world (e.g. most folks over age 35) still operate on the basis of exchanging information via little black marks on paper? And that, for them, the fact that foo.pdf is no longer accessible at http://bar.baz.gov/ means pretty much squat? Defining the "memory hole" as "I can't get it via the Web anymore!" is defining cultural amnesia way, way down.
than the Soviet Union did during the Stalin's purges of the 30s and 40s.
Now this is mere post-modernist hysteria. Those purges which you so carelessly compare to someone taking a PDF file off a public web server involved the systematic murder or imprisonment of millions of people and a state security apparatus of horrifying dimensions. Comparing on the one hand the trivial barrier of having to go to the public library to look up a document, instead of having it dumped electronically into your lap with a mouse click, to on the other hand wholescale murder and terror on a scale unprecedented since the Romans crucified every 50th man at the end of the Jewish War bespeaks appalling historical ignorance or an amazing lack of perspective. What do they teach in schools these days, anyway?
I would have thought that PSUs draw a constant amount.
Goodness, no. The current the power supply draws from the wall varies with the amount of power it's being asked to supply. You can easily verify this yourself by noticing how much hotter your laptop gets when you're making it do a lot of work. The heat it puts out is the final form of the energy the power supply draws from the wall (or the battery).
Good point, and with the increasing annoyance of commercial travel in this nannystate fraidypants state into which we've worked yourself -- bending over and spreading your cheeks for a cavity search in the boarding area is only a matter of time, I'm afraid -- more and more folks are going to be doing just that.
Probably for way less than the cost of building magical maglev trains operating through vacuum tunnels, it would be possible to design and build and deploy a monster fleet of ultrasafe highly computer-assisted air taxis that anyone competent enough to drive a car could use to "drive" himself through the air from city to city, whenever he needed to go more than 500 miles in a day. Which completely eliminates the threat of hijacking or holding an airliner hostage or even using an airplane as a manned missile (assuming the little air taxis don't weigh much more than an SUV or so).
Oh come on. Are you imagining magical room-temperature superconductors? All practical superconducting wire at present needs to be cooled with liquid helium, which is exceedingly expensive stuff. Even if you imagine the high Tc ceramic superconductors so ballyhooed twenty years ago can -- finally -- be made into wire, you've still got to cool it with liquid nitrogen, which ain't cheap, not on a continent-wide scale.
the jetliner and maglev do not share the same shape.
They don't? From the point of view of air resistance to forward motion, what matters is what they look like from the front, not from the top. If I stand in front of a train and a jetliner, they look remarkably similar, I'd say.
If the wings contributed substantially to the air resistance of an airplane, then supersonic airplanes would have similar fuselages as subsonic airplanes, but very different wings. That's not the case. If you look at a supersonic plane, you will see they take enormous pains to reduce the frontal area of the fuselage, and do pretty much zip to reduce the frontal area of the wings.
No, a maglev train can't be made indefinitely long and narrow. People won't ride in something only 1 seat wide with a 10-inch wide aisle and 6 inches of headroom. And how are you going to get it around a corner, without making the corner incredibly wide, or breaking the train into a zillion cars? Ugh. I would be quite surprised if you could make a train any narrower than an airplane, which is about as narrow as people are generally willing to sit in.
Rocks can't fall on maglev tracks? Because....? There won't be rocks located above the tracks? The tracks will never go through or under mountains? Armies of illegal immigrants will be hired to police the tracks? The tracks will be in bulletproof tunnels that never crack or drop piece of concrete? I'm missing something here.
I can sure imagine switches that work with magnetic levitation tracks and let your train go through them at 300-500 MPH. I just can't imagine them costing less than, say, a round $1 billion each.
Who said that maglev magnets need to be superconducting?
Er...anyone who proposes a system that doesn't cost a bazillion dollars to operate? What would you say it costs to operate 10,000 miles of powerful electromagnets continuously? Or are you going to carefully start and stop them as the trains go by? Imagine the hysteresis losses with gigahenries of inductance!
If the train levitates, there is no interaction between rail and train, and thus no noise except for the wind.
Imagine how much noise a tornado makes. And that's a mere 300 MPH wind. Now imagine a 600 MPH tornado. How close could you stand without losing your hearing?
Also this:
Subterrenean infrastructure usually costs a magnitude (if that is enough)
Not even a hair's breadth of a smidgen of close enough, when you are talking subterranean evacuated infrastructure. You might as well be talking about constructing stuff in orbit. At least as a starting point, imagine the cost of building tunnels underwater, where your tunnel only has to be water-tight, not gas-tight. The tunnel under the English Channel cost about $15 billion for 32 miles, or about $0.5 billion per mile. That's probably a good starting estimate.
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Some very interesting comments.
This I think is wrong, however:
what's the "value" of a name? Certainly nothing objectively quantifiable
The value of a name is very quantifiable. It's the price the highest bidder is willing to pay for it. You can ask the same question, and get the same answer, when you ask what the value of real estate is. The fact that we have very limited insight into the mechanism by which people judge the value of things doesn't change the fact that they can and do, and we can measure that value quite precisely merely by noting the price they bid for them.
There are two difficulties with your counterexample.
(1) It's totally theoretical. That is, you've constructed an example out of your imagination, and in your imagined world, it works. Problem is, most things we can imagine and which seem plausible don't actually work in the real world. This is why you measure twice and cut once. This is why cars and airplanes still crash, and folks get their houses foreclosed on, and why businesses go bankrupt. Now if you'd been able to cite an actual example of a chemistry student doing just what you say there'd be something to consider. (And how is he able to synthesize drugs indefinitely? Doesn't he have to graduate? "Indefinitely" doesn't mean "for a year or two.")
(2) It just so happens that I've been a graduate student in chemistry, and on a chemistry faculty at a big university, and from that practical perspective I'd say your theory is wildly implausible. A chemistry lab may look chaotic to the ignorant eye, just the way the Linux kernel code looks like so much gobbledegook to the nonprogrammer, but it's not. To a trained chemist -- to the faculty member in charge of that lab, say -- it's quite orderly, and anything peculiar stands out quite clearly. That's not to say a grad student couldn't do a small synthesis and get away with it, for a little while. But sooner or later, within weeks, the faculty supervisor or a fellow grad student is going to want to know what this set-up is for, if for no other reason than because he wants the space, or some of the glassware. Then the jig's up.
Plus...where's he getting the starting material? The FDA and DEA are not stupid you know, or ignorant of chemistry. Everything that is a starting material for a simple illegal drug synthesis is itself a controlled substance, and you can't buy it without some pretty strict scrutiny being applied to your purchase, plus lots of damning records being generated. I doubt you can buy them at all with cash or check or credit card, institutional POs signed off on by a dean are probably de rigeur. So how is J. Random Gradstudent going to get them? He might steal them, I suppose, but...from where? And the legitimate owner, who had to jump through all these damn flaming hoops to get the stuff, is not going to notice?!
Now turn to the marketing end of things. How's this guy going to set up his delivery pipeline and have no one ever know? Where do you go to sell 1 kg of pure heroin? Can't just put an ad in Craigslist, can you? And once you start sniffing around, trying to get into the culture, letting people know you've got the Good Stuff for sale, how long is it before someone rats you out, or threatens to in order to blackmail you, and then all hell breaks loose? You'd be dealing with criminals and addicts, not an especially reliable class of people from which to build a smoothly-functioning secret enterprise. I predict trouble pretty quickly.
Finally, what about the money? You can't get paid in checks, you know. So now you've got big lumps of cash to deal with. Funny thing, it turns out the banks and police have a habit of watching out for people who suddenly start moving a lot of cash in and out of accounts. When chemistry graduate student Craig starts dumping $15,000 in 20s and 50s into his account every week, it won't be long before the bank starts getting twitchy and lets the DA know. You could use many banks, of course, but...it's starting to get complicated, isn't it? And on top of all this, you've got to be making progress in your open, above-board research, so you don't get fired from your convenient job. It's so much work, it almost seems -- it fact it is -- just easier and more profitable to finish the PhD in the normal way and get a job as a synthetic organic chemist for Pfizer making $110,000 in your first year.
And so that is, actually, what the smart students -- the ones who can actually get admitted to chemistry PhD programs -- do. Like I said, if you're smart enough to prosper in crime, you're smart enough to do much better following more socially acceptable channels.
Uh oh, sounds like you're trapped in that geeky "a word means what it says in the dictionary, no more and no less, gosh darn it!" mindset about which I spoke. Conversation over. So it goes.
But sometime talk to an intelligent liberal arts graduate, a linguist say, or an anthropologist or social psychologist. Talk to them about the meaning of words and the use of language. You may find it very interesting. I have.
Boy you're telling me. I remember when Wolfram was the wunderkind of the 1980s and 1990s, who was going to Change The World(TM) with his brilliance. Ha. Jeff Bezos or Linus Torvalds have done far more with computers to Change The World in interesting and useful ways.
Oh I don't know about that. Seems to me the Chinese are merely proving they can do in 2007 what the Americans and Soviets did in 1966. Indeed, the Chinese are having it way easier, since (1) they don't have to invent the ideas and technology, it already exists, and (2) one of the biggest problems in early space shots was the immense amount of calculation that couldn't be done quickly and in a small machine. That problem has been solved by the development of microprocessors.
Furthermore, you're overlooking many other "technology fronts" that are arguably more exciting. What about networked computing software? Hear of any killer Internet apps (other than viruses) that have come out of China lately? What about biotech? Have the Chinese come up with any novel AIDS or cancer drugs? (Or any AIDS or cancer drugs at all, for that matter.) Where do you expect breakthroughs in treating Alzheimer's to come from? Or how about materials? Boeing is building a composite airplane (the 787 'Dreamliner') that will be 20% more fuel efficient than any other passenger plane in its class. Can the Chinese do that? Nope. Lockheed-Martin is building an air superiority fighter (the F-22) which is fast and stealthy, due in significant part to clever computer-assisted design and new materials. Can the Chinese do that? Nope, not even close.
Even in the space-related front, the Americans have a probe on its way to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt (New Horizons) and another on its way to Mercury orbit (Messenger). They've got 2 spacecraft in orbit around Mars, 2 rovers driving around, a lander on its way, and a bigger rover in the works. Cassini is still sending back marvelous pictures of Saturn. The Space Shuttle is delivering another chunk of ISS this week. NASA is busy with a new crew exploration vehicle (Orion) for lunar or possibly even Martian manned trips. The Americans even now have a private space industry. Virgin Galactic is taking reservations for suborbital flights on Spaceship Two, and Bigelow has put up prototypes of inflatable orbital hotels.
If you compare China and the US in terms of population or GDP, the Chinese ought to be behind the US by at least a bit. But they are way behind. I know it's popular to think they're "catching up," but they're not. They're certainly moving, catching up to where they might have been, had they not indulged in the spectacularly suicidal folly of Communism for 50 years. But you can't forget the US is moving, too, and generally faster. Maybe it's not moving as fast as you'd like it to, but that's a different story.
It's called an "operationally accurate" definition, my friend. What's important to understand -- what geeky people often don't fully understand -- is that language serves multiple purposes. To be sure, it's a method for the codification of information and ideas so that they can be exchanged. A Intermind protocol, so to speak. That function programmers and other such left-brain folk usually understand well. Unfortunately, they tend to think that's all language is, and get bogged down in the dead end illusion of thinking that if only words were as precisely defined as C language reserved keywords, there would be no more misunderstandings. Ha.
Because on the other hand language is also a signaling pathway used to enforce social myths. Like pheromones, or secondary sexual characteristics (tits and beards). And in that role, the way in which we speak quite often serves to conceal the reality we live in, in order to encourage certain useful social behaviours.
Thus it is with "crime." Most people speak of it as if it is some odd infection delivered to us from Mars, and with the right vaccine (the right government, justice for all, equality, education, blah blah) or the right medicine (enough jails and police, strong and certain enough punishment, blah blah) then we could eradicate the "disease" once and for all, and there would be no such thing as "crime."
This is nonsense, if you think carefully about what "crime" really means, from a strictly anthropological point of view, as if you were studying some alien animal species. The only definition of "crime" that can serve in any culture, in any period of history, is that it's social behaviour which is not tolerated by the bulk of society. (Since a quick definition of behaviour that "pays" -- by which you can prosper -- is behaviour which is tolerated by the bulk of society, you immediately get the logical conclusion that "crime" cannot "pay," by definition.)
But thinking of "crime" as a fixable disease is useful nonsense, because the (false) hope it gives us of eradicating crime makes us work harder at keeping it down, among many other complicated results, and this makes our society more peaceful and constructive.
We do the same thing, by the way, with the word "poor." If you think about it, "poor" is strictly a relative term: there's no way to define it in objective terms that are valid across all cultures and all of history. So that means there will always be "poor" people and they'll always make up just about the same fraction of the population. "Fighting poverty," from a strictly logical point of view, makes about as much sense as saying you want to educate all children so that they score above average on standardized tests (which a few people in education actually say, by the way). Nevertheless, we "fight poverty" all the time, because we suffer from the (useful!) delusion that it's possible to make progress. We don't, not strictly, but in the meantime we do act more humanely to our fellow men, and that helps society hold together.
C'mon, think more expansively. There's no reason you can't implement the same idea automatically for those services, too. Essentially he's just saying to give up on the dream of worldwide uniformity in DNS service. Everyone picks out his favorite private DNS server(s), and goes with the translations it (or they) provide(s). The most successful private server will probably be the one that provides the translations that most people want, which solves the problem of squatting.
But I can easily imagine a lot of frustrating chaos during and to some extent even after the switchover!
Of course it exists. What I'm saying can very roughly be caricaturized as this:
(1) If it pays well and steadily and indefinitely, it's not crime. Inducing people to buy products they don't really need by appealing in sneaky ways to their greed, need for emotional support in a time of crisis, sexual hunger or fear of death pays well and steadily. But it's not a crime, it's a respectable career in advertising (or politics).
(2) If it's crime, it doesn't pay well and steadily and indefinitely. Beating up children to steal their lunch money is without doubt a crime, and people will punish it with or without laws against it. But for that reason it doesn't pay in the long run.
In other words, what people savagely and instinctively punish is what we should call "crime," and, pretty much by definition, it can't pay in the long run.
This doesn't stop people from claiming that there's some small (sometimes secret, sometimes not) cabal of criminal masterminds who, through a lack of conscience, are able to laugh at us with impunity while they scoop in the wealth. But that's just a variant of the usual timeless paranoid myth of a secret society with some secret trick -- here, criminality, but in other myths a superior technology, knowledge of ancient secrets, belonging to a secret club, et cetera. The fact that this meme is so persistent throughout history would tell a Martian anthropologist many interesting facts about how the human mind operates.
Well, since as a fairly libertarian person I don't give a damn what the lawyers and other amoral bottom-feeders care to define as right and wrong, I don't even unconsciously use the word "crime" to mean strictly what the law forbids. So I at least am stuck with the practical definition, not the legal definition.
How can a CEO or other corporate type make huge amounts of money without needing to fear the consequences? That makes zero sense to me, and I've known a few. Contrary to what you say, they tend to be very fearful of consequences, very sensitive to perception and reputation among people at large. They know better than anyone that you can be totally killed in the marketplace if people in general start thinking you're a shithead whether or not you can be convicted of a legal crime. Furthermore, the bigger the company, the more the heads of it fear the public perception, because they can do less and less about it. If the CEO of Ford hears that some customers are being treated like dirt by dealers in Alabama, what's he going to do? He'll never meet those customers personally, and he would have a devil of a time finding out exactly who the bad apples are in a company that employs 50,000 people. About all he can do is write a strong memo, and that isn't a very useful option. He doesn't have the ability of the CEO of a small company to make amends directly to customers, or keep a careful eye on all his employees.
Maybe what you're saying is that the CEOs of some companies you and I don't like -- telemarketers, say, or certain real-estate developers, or whatever -- can make lots and lots of money, and do what you and I think is evil without consequence from either the law or the market.
But all that proves is that no one's morals are universal, that there are activities which most people approve of, or will at least tolerate, but which deeply offend a few, for example you and I, or any random collection of a dozen people. Nothing we can do about that, at least until Christ comes again and appoints you (or I) as Lord God King of the Earth, and we can arrange things so that no one ever does anything we think is wrong.
That's just because you're overloading the "crime" operator. You are taking stuff that is more reasonably characterized as "being a public nuisance" like driving 45 in a school zone and lumping it in with stuff that your neighbors would kill you immediately for, laws or no laws, like child rape. It's only in the sense that this is all "crime," technically, that lets you make such a broad statement.
As for your larger point: the "crimes" you can commit without (ever) going to jail, or suffering some other such serious negative social pressure from your friends and neighbors, are basically not really crimes at all. They may well be technically illegal, but that just shows that what is right and wrong is more subtle than what is legal and not.
I suppose it's important to distinguish between "crime" meaning something that is against the law and "crime" (as in "crime against humanity") meaning that which is widely believed to be evil and which people will instinctively resent and punish, laws or no laws.
Many forms of crime do pay well.
/. and all, where we venerate the geek, but don't make me laugh coffee out my nose.
Not if you subtract the penalties. For example, running 10 kg of coke at a time across the Mexican border pays very well. At first. But you'd very quickly come to the attention of the relevant authorities (the existing Mexican drug gangs) and be flayed alive and fed to dogs as an example to others. Intelligent people realize making $10 million with a day's work doesn't compensate for the risk of being eaten by dogs before you celebrate your 25th birthday.
You won't be able to think of a good counterexample, by the way, because society is so constructed that any activity which is highly profitable, can be engaged in by most anyone, and is insufficiently noxious to really piss people off is legal or at least quasi-legal (meaning perhaps only technically illegal). Why would it be otherwise? You think our ancestors were not able to dream up pretty much every conceivable scam and method of gathering power and influence (which is all money is)? The basic questions of what fundamental activities are and are not tolerable have been settled for centuries, if not millenia.
All that happens is that technology changes, and briefly enables old scams to surface under new disguises. It takes a little while for people to figure out how to categorize the new activity, but they do, and then it gets filed either under legitimate (if sometimes unsavory) business or crime that gets seriously punished. No doubt the length of time this takes enables a few lucky (?) entrepreneurs to retire rich while the issue is still in flux, but they won't be leaving the business to their children. So it's a dead end, if you're at all intelligent.
Many IT people know a great deal about identity theft...
And so what stops them from becoming identity thieves...? Their Christian consciences? The good of the many outweighs the good of the one? Please. I realize this is
The reason IT people don't become identity thieves is because they can make a better living as IT managers. Not just in terms of plain salary but in terms of the pleasure of good work-related company (it's hard to get invited to parties with pleasant looking, sweet-natured, single women if you're a sneak and a thief), and in not having to look over your shoulder all the time.
Of course, I don't deny many of them might not have Walter Mitty daydreams of running up the Jolly Roger and turning piratical, slitting a couple of throats over in marketing and force sundry managers to walk the plank. Who doesn't?
This sort of speculation is not a new phenomenon. It's been true for centuries in real estate: you buy some property not because it's useful to you, but just to charge whomever it is useful to a hefty price. At some level, this is just an inevitable feature of an open market, and must be tolerated (unless you lack a brain and like the idea of some Big Brother Tsar handing out domain names to whomever "deserves" them most).
But real estate speculation also provides an interesting possible solution: real estate taxes. Since real estate taxes are usually some percentage of the market value, they become very high on property that has a high market value -- so high that you can't afford them unless you are using the property to generate the maximum possible income. Speculators tend to be squeezed out of the market, since they can't afford the taxes required to "park" the property until the price is bid up high enough to suit their taste. So, one solution is to tax internet domains, with the tax reflecting the market value of the domain. That would certainly cut down on speculation, but, like all asset taxes, it's bound to depress creativity and economic growth.
Another solution comes from compulsory licenses in patent law, where the idea is that if you patent an invention and then fail to work the patent, or license it on reasonable terms -- where, alas, a court has to interpret what "reasonable" means -- then other folks can just use your patent without coming to any licensing agreement with you. I suppose the equivalent here would be that if you sit on a domain and don't use it yourself and won't sell it at a "reasonable" cost, then DNS service would be switchable to someone who will use it, even if you don't agree. I suspect this is most likely to become widespread, and I think it's already happening to some extent.
Finally, the classic libertarian idea would be to break the concept that there must be a single, worldwide, one-to-one mapping between DNS name and IP address, i.e. more or less abandon the idea of domain name registration entirely. In this strange anarchic world, you, an aspiring domain-name user, would simply start using the domain name and publish your associated IP address on some DNS server. Presumably you'd have to pay, at first, to get some servers to list your IP address.
But if your particular IP becomes the preferred association with that domain name, something the market would quickly decide, then it becomes advantageous for more and more DNS servers e.g. run by ISPs to list your IP address block for the domain name without charging you. Indeed, you might be able to charge them at some point for the privilege. To some extent this model already exists in the world of business-speak, which is why a Mac is not a "PC," even though "PC" stands for "personal computer." IBM's product named "PC" so dominated the 80s market for microcomputers that it became impossible to say "PC" without meaning "IBM-compatible microcomputer." Good thing IBM was not able to file for trademark protection on the phrase "personal computer" . . .
Of course, the fact that trademark law exists at all says that the completely free-market solution is not likely to work. Still, it would be interesting to develop some system where the preference of the global market of users has influence on who "owns" a particular domain name. The present gold-rush first come first served system has obvious disadvantages, and little other than simplicity to recommend it.
Well that would be true if, as shown on TV and movies, criminals are fiendishly clever Snidely Whiplashes, twirling their thin mustaches slowly as they ponder deeply the implications of their next criminal caper.
But they're not. Pretty much anyone with an IQ above 90 figures out before he's 12 that crime does not pay, in the long run, and he goes into other lines of business as an adult. That doesn't mean he has to give up being antisocial or deploying his uglier personality traits to advantage, of course. Would-be rapists and contract murderers can become divorce lawyers, bullshit artists and con-men can go into subprime lending or telemarketing, and so forth. You can be a very successful legitimate businessman instead of a crook with some fairly small adjustments in your choice of victim and methodology.
So as a rule those we have left in the actual criminal class tend to be irredeemably stupid, the kind who pull stunts like this -- and who would not learn anything useful by reading the story, since they lack the ability to generalize the lesson.
By George, you're right. My recollection was a decade or so out of date. Fascinating.
Thanks!
I thought the whole-plane parachute thingy was selling well?
Anyway, it's not an argument for the impossibility of making an airplane even idiots can fly safely. It just says it's trickier than it seems at first, which is pretty much true of any technological development.
Heck, it's happened with cars, I'd say. When I learned to drive it was a given you had to master a clutch, and manual steering (which in a moderately heavy car means you can't really turn the wheel when the car isn't moving, so you have to think ahead a bit). I even had one car with a manual choke, which had to be used at various times during winter driving. Go back a little further and you don't have synchromeshes in your gearbox, so you have to listen to match engine and gear speed pretty well if you don't want to grind your gears when you shift. Then there was maintenance: you had to know at least to check the oil, radiator and battery water regularly, and if you weren't rich you knew how to change the oil, bleed and adjust the brakes, replace the air and fuel filters, replace and gap the sparkplugs, adjust the idle, and time the engine.
All that's gone now. No one thinks about changing the mix on the carburetor depending on outside temp, altitude, and whether the engine is warm. You can change gears pretty much anywhere, even assuming you have a gearshift at all, and so on. Your power-assist steering very nicely adapts to car speed, so at low or zero speed you get plenty of hydraulic assist, and at highway speed you get very little for good road feel. Cars are pretty much point and press (accelerator or brake) devices. Traction control, ABS brakes, tensioning belts and airbags make them amazingly safe, too -- all without driver knowledge or involvement. As for maintenance, the modern car hardly needs any before it hits 100,000 miles.
I can imagine the same thing happening in airplanes, if people want it to. Yes, it would take some of the skill out of flying, and I imagine skilled pilots might regret that, figuring very reasonably that the most failure-prone device on the vehicle is always the nut behind the wheel. But if you think about it, or apply the Peter Principle, pretty much all technology evolves and improves until its major failure mode is user error.
Mmm, doubt it. Notice that there's still only one TGV line even in France. That suggests it's more of a showpiece than a paying proposition, even in Europe where population densities are so dense.
There are a few place in the US where high-speed rail makes sense, but they already have it, like the Metro between DC and New York. A good case can be made for SF to LA, too, and the proof of this is that this is one of the few Amtrak lines that actually makes money and is routinely booked up, even though the line stops in Bakersfield and you have to take a fucking bus over the mountains to get to LA itself. Spend $1 billion to dig tunnels and put up bridges so you can ride the train from LA downtown to SF downtown in three hours (that's only averaging about 150 miles/hour) and you would get tons of traffic. The airplane flight is nominally an hour, but you have to tack on at least two more hours of airport hassle.
Probably there are a few other places, too. But most of the US is actually best served by what it's got, which is Interstates and airports and airplanes. There's a reason we have all that infrastructure, and it isn't because our fathers were too stupid to see the obviously better solution, or were all in thrall to a vast secret conspiracy. It's because when you have a lightly populated enormous country, it's more economical to ship people around in small, lightweight, self-propelled vehicles that need little to no roadway and which operate either on-demand or nearly on-demand. Shoehorning in a system with enormous fixed costs per mile for its roadway, and cursed with relatively inflexible scheduling and routing to boot, sounds pretty dumb.
Yes, the technology is cool. But being cool doesn't make it sensible.
I think I'll just take down the court decision and post a different one, and call anyone who claims to have seen anything else a leftwing moveon retard.
Sure, you could do that. That would stop...uh...pretty much only leftwing moveon retards, I'd say. Any serious adult concerned with his own liberty would laugh at the idea that being called names is an effective form of political oppression. Might work on the grade-school playground, but not on the men who struck the Gdansk shipyard, or stood in front of the tanks in Tianenman Square. Really, if this is all American sons of liberty have to complain about, they might as well hang up the tricorn and go have a beer. If they're old enough.
what exactly did your hysteric screed have to do with the original assertion that putting everything in computers and on the internet opens up more possibilities for the removal of information from the public sphere?
Well, we'll take it slow. I realize the Internet generation has an attention span measured in microseconds, so that an argument that takes more than forty words to state risks passing through the cerebral cortex without effecting the slightest change in neural proteins, but let's give it a whirl.
First of all, When you put "everything" on computers, that doesn't mean you throw away all the paper files, magnetic tapes, photographs, et cetera and so forth. That's what I meant by pointing out that in the "old" days, a mere 10-20 years ago, we kept data on paper and pencil -- and pretty much everyone keeping important data still does.
All you do when you put stuff that exists on paper onto Web sites is you increase the ease with which it's available. You certainly don't increase the amount of information that exists, and you don't usually change whether it's available or not at all. Take Court decisions, for example. They're all written down on paper and filed in big (fireproof) cabinets in the Courthouse. Whether or not they're secret is a matter of law and tradition. If you wanted to read them for the past two centuries, you trotted on down to the Courthouse and spent several hours (or days) thumbing through the files. Nowadays, you can often get it as a PDF with a few seconds googling.
Well that's nice, and if someone takes it off the Web, I guess you can say that's a step backwards in terms of access, but arguing that it takes us right back to some Stalinist dark ages is just way over the top. At worst it takes us back to 1980, when you had to go to the Courthouse to get the actual paper, that's all. That would be point #2.
Finally, think carefully through what you said. Copying stuff to the Internet increases the chance that information will be suppressed? That makes no logical sense. There's no way increasing the bandwidth for information flow can make information disappear, you know.
By the way, it wasn't a hysterical screed, it was a nastily sarcastic and contemptuous screed. Hysteria is when you shriek about the sky falling when it isn't. You can look the word up right on the internet, assuming The Man hasn't corrupted all the online dictionaries in a scary Stalinist plot to suck information out of your brain and turn you into an ignorant peasant slave.
Dude, both the Clinton and Giuliani campaigns called. They want their shopworn cliche replacing an actual argument back in time for the election.
The web is wonderful. But it has more opportunities to be "corrected"...
And the web is the only important and reliable source of information about the world?
Dude, how did you function in the 70s and 80s? You are aware that vast swathes of the world (e.g. most folks over age 35) still operate on the basis of exchanging information via little black marks on paper? And that, for them, the fact that foo.pdf is no longer accessible at http://bar.baz.gov/ means pretty much squat? Defining the "memory hole" as "I can't get it via the Web anymore!" is defining cultural amnesia way, way down.
than the Soviet Union did during the Stalin's purges of the 30s and 40s.
Now this is mere post-modernist hysteria. Those purges which you so carelessly compare to someone taking a PDF file off a public web server involved the systematic murder or imprisonment of millions of people and a state security apparatus of horrifying dimensions. Comparing on the one hand the trivial barrier of having to go to the public library to look up a document, instead of having it dumped electronically into your lap with a mouse click, to on the other hand wholescale murder and terror on a scale unprecedented since the Romans crucified every 50th man at the end of the Jewish War bespeaks appalling historical ignorance or an amazing lack of perspective. What do they teach in schools these days, anyway?
I would have thought that PSUs draw a constant amount.
Goodness, no. The current the power supply draws from the wall varies with the amount of power it's being asked to supply. You can easily verify this yourself by noticing how much hotter your laptop gets when you're making it do a lot of work. The heat it puts out is the final form of the energy the power supply draws from the wall (or the battery).
Hey, thanks for the facts. Very interesting stuff.
Good point, and with the increasing annoyance of commercial travel in this nannystate fraidypants state into which we've worked yourself -- bending over and spreading your cheeks for a cavity search in the boarding area is only a matter of time, I'm afraid -- more and more folks are going to be doing just that.
Probably for way less than the cost of building magical maglev trains operating through vacuum tunnels, it would be possible to design and build and deploy a monster fleet of ultrasafe highly computer-assisted air taxis that anyone competent enough to drive a car could use to "drive" himself through the air from city to city, whenever he needed to go more than 500 miles in a day. Which completely eliminates the threat of hijacking or holding an airliner hostage or even using an airplane as a manned missile (assuming the little air taxis don't weigh much more than an SUV or so).
Oh come on. Are you imagining magical room-temperature superconductors? All practical superconducting wire at present needs to be cooled with liquid helium, which is exceedingly expensive stuff. Even if you imagine the high Tc ceramic superconductors so ballyhooed twenty years ago can -- finally -- be made into wire, you've still got to cool it with liquid nitrogen, which ain't cheap, not on a continent-wide scale.
the jetliner and maglev do not share the same shape.
They don't? From the point of view of air resistance to forward motion, what matters is what they look like from the front, not from the top. If I stand in front of a train and a jetliner, they look remarkably similar, I'd say.
If the wings contributed substantially to the air resistance of an airplane, then supersonic airplanes would have similar fuselages as subsonic airplanes, but very different wings. That's not the case. If you look at a supersonic plane, you will see they take enormous pains to reduce the frontal area of the fuselage, and do pretty much zip to reduce the frontal area of the wings.
No, a maglev train can't be made indefinitely long and narrow. People won't ride in something only 1 seat wide with a 10-inch wide aisle and 6 inches of headroom. And how are you going to get it around a corner, without making the corner incredibly wide, or breaking the train into a zillion cars? Ugh. I would be quite surprised if you could make a train any narrower than an airplane, which is about as narrow as people are generally willing to sit in.
Rocks can't fall on maglev tracks? Because....? There won't be rocks located above the tracks? The tracks will never go through or under mountains? Armies of illegal immigrants will be hired to police the tracks? The tracks will be in bulletproof tunnels that never crack or drop piece of concrete? I'm missing something here.
I can sure imagine switches that work with magnetic levitation tracks and let your train go through them at 300-500 MPH. I just can't imagine them costing less than, say, a round $1 billion each.
Who said that maglev magnets need to be superconducting?
Er...anyone who proposes a system that doesn't cost a bazillion dollars to operate? What would you say it costs to operate 10,000 miles of powerful electromagnets continuously? Or are you going to carefully start and stop them as the trains go by? Imagine the hysteresis losses with gigahenries of inductance!
Well...
If the train levitates, there is no interaction between rail and train, and thus no noise except for the wind.
Imagine how much noise a tornado makes. And that's a mere 300 MPH wind. Now imagine a 600 MPH tornado. How close could you stand without losing your hearing?
Also this:
Subterrenean infrastructure usually costs a magnitude (if that is enough)
Not even a hair's breadth of a smidgen of close enough, when you are talking subterranean evacuated infrastructure. You might as well be talking about constructing stuff in orbit. At least as a starting point, imagine the cost of building tunnels underwater, where your tunnel only has to be water-tight, not gas-tight. The tunnel under the English Channel cost about $15 billion for 32 miles, or about $0.5 billion per mile. That's probably a good starting estimate.