Turn it around, my friend. Right now, Congressman Joe pays consultants and staff lawyers lots of money to tell him the temperature of his political waters, keep him in touch with what is selling, and not, amongst the voters.
Well, with micropayments, why not hire you the actual voter instead? In other words, how about Joe fires his consultants and instead just pays you some small amount to fill out some survey, respond to his e-mail, tell him what you and your co-workers talked about yesterday around the water cooler? You won't get much money, sure, because your opinion by itself is of low value -- only in combination with thousands of others does it matter. But money is money, and even a little tidbit for nothing more than what's on your mind is nice, and Joe will better represent you to boot.
Not to mention that, if it just happens to turn out that you are some kind of wizard who understands very, very well how people in your community see Joe -- if your information is unusually useful -- then Joe will be willing to pay more and more for it. (Not just Joe, of course -- his competitors will also want it, and you can sell to the highest bidder.)
See, the interesting aspect of micropayment for communication is that, at some time and in some circumstances, practically everyone's attention is highly desirable for a few minutes or an hour, but at present, there is no way to buy and sell that attention at the appropriate value, because you can only buy attention at all if you buy it in large lotsizes, days to weeks.
But I still fundamentally disagree that free things are worthless.
Well, I'm not saying that! Air and sunlight and life itself are free, but hardly anything is worth more. What I'm saying is that when people insist on receiving the labor of others without paying for it, the value of the labor offered eventually drops to zero. How can this, in itself, be controversial? I suspect indeed we would be reduced to agreeing that many labor exchanges are very complicated and do not necessarily involve cash changing hands. But I hope you would agree that the introduction of cash sometimes simplifies things greatly and makes for a more efficient exchange, with benefits for all. Which is all I'm saying about micropayments.
Church services are truly free only to a minority of people, who are subsidized by the majority. If most people truly paid nothing for church services, they would go away or become worthless. I think some of your other examples fall in that category as well.
Again, I'm not saying that labor exchanges between humans can't become very much more complicated than buying a sandwich from a street vendor. For example, consider the exchanges between generations. Why would an 80-year-old agree to have his tax money invested in biomedical research that won't pay off for 40 years? Why do I pay for my -- and your -- childrens' education? Somehow there is an exchange of value which motivates all this. But it's very complicated to figure out how it works.
Well, EB has been making money for three and a half centuries. Wikipedia has yet to prove it can sustain itself over a single decade, and the fate of other freely shared commodities -- think "Tragedy of the Commons" -- is not especially encouraging.
If I were a Wikipediast enthusiast I would be thinking about this carefully. Do I have a sustainable model, or are we going to be a merely marvelously fun flash in the pan?
My impression is that people are worrying already about the weaknesses in their model for incentive and reward, when they regret the flames and trolls and general unruliness. There seems no way to easily and reliably sort out value from trash, reward the former and punish the latter. There are worries that the quality may be diluted by noise, and that, once that happens, the incentive to contribute quality will diminish.
You're absolutely right that money is not the only unit of reciprocation -- otherwise marriages and families would never work out. But, alas, in a large community of relative strangers no one has yet found a workable substitute. Perhaps the Wiki wookies will prove that one exists. I hope they do. But I wouldn't bet on it.
Many folks have tried this, but the problem is, like birth control, it's the kind of thing you don't realize you want until, er, the need is rather urgent. It's hard to plan ahead and have the thingies in the bed-side table when the Right Moment unexpectedly occurs, and equally it's hard to have funds available in the banks of all the information sources I might, someday, suddenly want to use.
What I want -- what we can't yet get -- what the world is waiting for some entrepreneur to provide -- is the ability to decide on the spot, at the time, bang, just like that, that I want this information, and the ability to spend almost zero time and effort transferring some tiny payment to the author for it. One click and I'm done, that kind of thing.
Of course not. But you have mistaken the argument, which goes like this:
A handsome young cardiologist has convinced all other cardiologists that they ought to provide help to men who scream, clutch their chests, et cetera, free and without charge. After all, they will be "paid" in respect and attention from the community, as well as the ardent thanks of the wives, some of whom are still young and good-looking, har de har har... "Medical skill wants to be be free!" they chant enthusiastically as they fan out, compressing chests, injecting ephinephrine, doing good deeds. Wives in crowded theaters all over the land huzzah lustily...
But then, alas, the cardiologists' mortgages come due, and the kids need braces. Unfortunately the theater work doesn't pay except in self-respect and the occasional "tip" from the wives (wink wink), so they need to take on other jobs, e.g. transplanting hearts for big bux at St. Evil Exploiter of the Masses Enormously Expensive Hospital and Whorehouse. Leaves them less time to patrol the theaters. But that's OK, because other people step in, people who have fewer opportunities to earn the big bux doing heart transplants at St. EEMEEH and W, and wouldn't mind at all the warm feeling of being the heroic "doctor in the house" and the ardent thank-you. First, it's nurses and EMTs who fill the cardiologists' shoes.
Crucial point: surely the wives would prefer a cardiologist to an EMT. But how can they enforce that preference? They have no incentive to offer the cardiologist, to induce him back to the theater.
Not surprisingly, more men clutching their chests don't make it, since the skill of the responder is less. Not surprisingly, the providers are seen less often as heros, and the thanks of the wives becomes, well, cooler.
By and by, even the nurses and EMTs find they have bills to pay and the cooling thanks and diminished heroic stature are not enough even for them. But that's OK, because random strangers with no skill at cardiology at all are perfectly happy to step in, because even the reduced stature of playing a doctor in the theater and the lukewarm thanks of the wives (or more often widows) are better than what they get stuffing envelopes and walking dogs.
And, again, there is no way the wives can enforce their preference for a higher level of skill. Not paying for labor gives them zero leverage over the kind of labor they get.
Eventually, the heroic stature goes entirely away, because it's rare that when a man clutches his chest, et cetera, and his wife cries out for a "doctor" in the house that they get a real doctor, and not some charlatan pretending to be one. No one can expect warm thanks from wives. And the only people still jumping up when wives cry out for a doctor in the house are wretches for whom the modest attention and rare thanks from addled wives who don't realize when they're being scammed are better than what they can get spamming millions from Mom's basement with Enhance Your Manhood ads. That is, the labor the wives can get has fallen in value to exactly what they were willing to pay for it: zero.
That's my point. The fundamental capitalist rule is simple: Only when you insist on paying for what you get, will you routinely get what you pay for.
Why would the marginal cost of production of information be zero? First of all, even if you focus on the pure labor cost in the present, the cost of someone's time and effort to convey the information is not zero. You have to pay to get the expert's attention, have him formulate the data, transmit it, and so on. It might be a small cost, but it wouldn't be zero.
Secondly, what about the cost of "capital" replacement, i.e. developing new information? The cost of your car reflects not just Toyota's expenses for steel and plastic and labor, but also some small amount put towards research into building the cars of the future, building new factories, et cetera -- i.e. the costs to replace their capital investment as it wears out.
Same with information. You can expect the eventual marginal cost to include some small amount that pays for continued improvement in the information, or development of new information. Since these costs are spread out over the lifetime of the information, they would be small, to be sure. But not zero. Consider the pricing of medicines as a model: the cost of your drugs includes some small amount of money that will be devoted by the firm to research into new drugs, because they know, being survivors in a tough market, that any given drug will only be profitable for a finite time.
The fact that the free market eventually drives the profit margin on anything to nearly zero is not new. And people are not stupid. Every good businessman since King Nebuchadnezzar knows that he who fails to continually innovate goes under, and this is why free economies always end up being highly innovative and dynamic.
Does he? How does he stay rich, then? Considering that if it's useful millions of people are wanting the information and will pay to get it?
Think it all the way through: Mr. Rich Bastard pays Mr. Clever Dick $1 to keep information Z secret. But 10 ordinary people now offer Mr. Dick 25 cents each for Z. Mr. Dick goes back to Mr. Bastard: Dude, they're offering me $2.50 to sell out, I'm going to do it...so Mr. Bastard says wait, I'll meet their price. His bribe goes up to $3. Now Mr. Clever Copycat realizes there's a market for Z and sets about reproducing it. Mr. Bastard must bribe him, too. Ugh! Expenses are mounting....so, by and by, the market demand increases, Mr. Bastard's bribes increases, he has to buy off more and more copycats...and soon enough, I surmise, Mr. Bastard is just going to run out of money and see his whole nefarious scheme collapse. See, Mr. Bastard's evil system's fatal weakness is that he is spending money in this market but not earning money by providing any service that people want. His position is therefore unsustainable, however obnoxious he can make himself in the short run.
In fact, seems to me what you're describing is a very good aspect of the market. What you're saying is that the (false) lure of controlling information permanently will seduce an antisocial person into behaviour that will rapidly and efficiently siphon off all his wealth and render him powerless.
Come on, let's not be mystical. Just because information is a different sort of commodity from sprockets doesn't make it so alien that conventional economics can't deal with it.
How about the water rights, mortgages, patents, health care, or music? None of these things is exactly like a sprocket, and you could list many interesting and curious differences between trading in them and trading in sprockets, but that doesn't mean people don't, in fact, trade in them just like they do in corn or steel, and it doesn't prevent a free market from setting an accurate price on them.
I'm not saying it doesn't take some thought and cleverness to figure out how to sell information profitably. No doubt it does. But so? I've no doubt people clever enough to figure out how to do it exist.
Well, I understand the argument, and I understand its persuasiveness, but the historical record forces me to regretfully conclude that your beautiful, compelling theory about human motivation is, alas, simply wrong.
It's not a new argument. You are repeating the excited theories of intellectual socialists in the early part of the 20th century. They argued powerfully that the pleasure of serving your community well, of stature and respect from your comrades -- of being paid in "human attention" as you put it -- would serve to motivate people's best efforts far better than mere grubby money.
Alas, the experiment set up to confirm this theory -- the Soviet Union -- started off very promising (there were glowing reports of the accomplishments of communism in the 20s and early 30s) but collapsed 70 years later in a horrifying welter of human misery from which Russia has still not emerged. Clearly the theory, however lovely and compelling in the mind, is a flat-out disaster when put into operation.
Now, bear in mind that I agree with you that "human attention" should be the most valued commodity, and that in theory a "market" based on that as the medium of exchange rather than money should flourish. But it just doesn't, not in the long term. I don't know why. Maybe no one does.
This is not to say that socialist utopias with "markets" that exchange social stature and respect cannot flourish in the short run, like Shaker communities* or kibbutzim. Often they do very well for a while, while the pioneering impulse lasts. But there are zero historical examples of long-term success. That should be a very sobering thought for OSS proponents -- and I say that as one of them -- and a cheering thought for those wretches in Redmond, damn them.
----------- * Shaker communities were highly socialist 19th century American utopias that, curiously enough, emphasized celibacy, which helps account for their almost complete disappearance.
Micropayments simply haven't worked for anyone yet...
Exactly so. And the problems you mention are fierce. So the situation is just completely ripe for some fiendishly clever entrepreneur to come along and snarf the whole market. Some Jeff Bezos kind of fellow who sees how it can be done where the rest of us just shrug our shoulders and say, well, this is just the way it's always worked...if man were meant to fly he'd have wings...640k is enough for anybody...mutter mutter...
A potential profit of billions is, I think, an understatement if anything.
...but the feedback loop from customer to producer is poor. Google doesn't allow the Researcher fee structure to be set by the market. They have this simple system where Researchers just get canned if they get too many poor reviews. That's very crude. For one thing, a good market needs crappy vendors who sell their wares cheaply, because sometimes a crappy answer is Good Enough -- sometimes you want to rent a limo to impress your date, but sometimes you want to rent a wreck to move your crap from one apartment to another.
Also, the price you set for your question probably only affects the speed of the answer. To make it affect the quality of your answer -- which is probably a lot more important! -- Google should provide some way for you to "hire" a Researcher with a quality you prefer (e.g. a degree in the field), or at least a Researcher with a better Google Answer track record.
Actually, the best system is clearly just an auction. You post a question, and Researchers bid on the right to answer it, with stated deadlines for doing so. You accept whatever bid you like, or none of them, pay your money, get your answer. Depending on how you like it, you attach a positive or negative comment to the Researcher's growing "reputation" file. A Researcher with a large and glowing reputation can, of course, post far higher bids for his services than a newbie or person with a mixed reputation.
A fascinating social experiment would emerge if Google kept everything about the Researchers except their Google-Answer-earned reputation secret: would the "conventional" measures of authority be reflected in the actual fees commanded by Researchers, after a while? For example, would people with PhDs from top schools actually end up with market-set fees that are a lot higher than the fees the market sets for lowly college students or/. denizens posting from Mom's basement? Hmmm.
A large system like this, supported by micropayment, would also revolutionize how many of us work. Suppose I'm very good at programming in general, but the absolute world's expert on some tiny corner of it, say certain types of machine vision algorithms. Now, I can't really make a living consulting on the tiny sliver where I'm absolutely top, because people rarely need that level of expertise in this narrow field, and they don't need it for long. So I have to make a living using my broader, less high talents, and be paid accordingly less.
But...what if I can collect micropayments for answering questions on my narrow topic of superb expertise from all over the world? Among a pool of 2 billion workers, there might very well be enough questions in my micro-discipline to support me. Which means two interesting things: first, I have a better average pay rate, because I am being hired mostly for that in which I am the world's top expert rather than for that in which I am only pretty knowledgeable. Secondly, people have a better chance of getting very good answers to their questions, because they have the chance to hire the world's top expert for 10 minutes instead of hiring someone merely pretty knowledgeable for two months.
In fact, ever had a question which you just know an expert could answer instantly, but on which you also just know you'll beat your head for four weeks? I sure have. What a great deal it would be if you could hire the expert for 60 seconds! I'd gladly pay $50 for 60 seconds of certain expert's time from time to time. It's a good deal for me -- I save weeks of my own time -- and it's a good deal for the expert -- at $50/minute he's earning money awfully fast. If there's a way to collect and process zillions of $50 microtransactions from all over the world...
Well...in the first place, not a few of the things you mention aren't free even in the superficial accounting sense that Wikipedia and/. might be considered free.
For example Google is paid for by advertising which adds a small cost to the products you buy. Public parks are paid for by your taxes. Church services: even if you never put something in the collection plate, you dog, you're still subsidizing it by the higher real estate taxes you have to pay because they don't pay any at all. And so on.
Some of the things you mention are exceptions that prove the rule, too: I doubt anyone thinks music recitals for which you pay are, as a rule, no better than those for which you do not. Occasionally the best artists play for free, but usually they don't, and the better they are the more their tickets cost. The only artists who play for free all the time and even at the top of their "career" are those in subway stations.
Secondly, I said things that are free end up worth their price (i.e. nothing). That's not to say that they can't start off being quite valuable, when there are significant barriers (of novelty, if nothing else, but often of technical knowledge) to participation, and only highly motivated and interested people participate. Remember when Usenet was mostly inhabited by people with PhDs, and a highly technical question on, say, operating system design could get a half-dozen answers in a few hours? Remember when folks put their real e-mail address -- sometimes their phone numbers -- at the bottom of Usenet posts? Or when your mail server got 5 e-mails a day for you, and each one was from a real person and worth reading? I'm guessing you know well enough that the demolishment of Usenet as a solid technical resources -- its replacement with, e.g. moderated fora like/. or private mailing lists -- and the degeneration of the e-mail system are linked to the very low cost of their use and the fact that there is, as I say, no other obvious and reliable way to sift meaning from amongst the garbage.
And while perhaps/. is indeed free but worthwhile now, the question is: how much longer will this be true? Indefinitely? Not, I suggest, if it continues to be of value but has no reliable way to sort noise from value. The moderation system is a crude attempt at a toy market with tokens ("mod points") instead of cash (and I think someone mentioned that Wikipedia has some crude market analogue also). The very fact that these things were found necessary suggests the recognition that, sooner or later, a better "pricing" model for contributions must be found if the system is not to drown in parasitic trash.
Finally, simply because things work OK is no reason to believe they couldn't work better with a better transaction model. Communicating by telegraph and Pony Express worked well enough in 1850, but that hardly means the Internet wasn't a big improvement. Just because we currently pay for things like roads, bridges and clean air through taxes and such, instead of figuring out a way to collect and distribute bazillions of micro-user fees all the time does not mean that things wouldn't improve, possibly dramatically, if we could.
Case in point: several communities with stifling traffic are struggling to find ways to implement some kind of micropayment scheme for use of roads, such as the FastTrak transponders used on the Bay Bridge and on certain Southern California roads. Experience has shown that a market (or in this case pseudo-market, since the price is rather artificially set) will allocate resources far more efficiently than any top-down one-size-fits-all solution. Once upon a time, when the population was lower and the traffic was lighter, these places could afford to just let folks use the roads for free once they'd been built. But zero cost meant people made unwise decisions, such as building sprawly communities where it was necessary for 150,000 people to drive
It's only top-down designers who face this perennial conundrum, you know. If you free yourself from the narrow confines of socialist thinking this problem is easy to solve: let a free market assign the appropriate value of Wikipedia information, just as it successfully assigns the appropriate value of bazillions of commodities from 1/8" copper tubing to expertise in brain surgery.
How could that work? Simple, if Wikipedia could figure out a way to let users bid to pay for information, and let experts (or random wannabes) bid to sell information, and connect them up. The ol' invisible hand would rapidly solve the problem of assigning an appropriate value to every article and every author in the Wikipedia.
Users for whom information is mission-critical, e.g. who will be testing the truth of that information most severely, would end up offering the highest price for it. So, information that consistently proves reliable and accurate in actual use (and not just in some academical opinion) would fetch the highest price. Similarly, experts who really are expert, who can easily provide the high quality information, are going to end up commanding the highest fees, fees which will encourage them to provide more of those tasty nuggets. Lonely groupies who merely browse and argue without actually using the information in the real world won't be paying high prices, so they will have little effect on the nature of the supply. Flamers who supply plausible-sounding but useless or misleading garbage will quickly find the price of their product falling to peanuts.
In other words, I think the essential flaw in Wikipedia is that it is free, because in the real world things that are free usually end up being worth the price (i.e. nothing), because there is, indeed, as you point out, no clearly reliable way to ensure that noise and froth do not swamp what's actually valuable.
That being said, it's hard to know how Wikipedia could change this. Aside from its philosophical blinders, which probably prevent it from understanding the nature of its dilemma and the solution, it is difficult to make appropriate micropayments. No Wikipedia article is worth, say, $2 for a look, or $50/year for a subscription. But would I pay a nickel for a look, if I could pay instantly with just a single mouse click? I might indeed. Especially if I knew that the price was set by market demand from people who had to put up their own money to get the information, which goes far to guarantee that the information has proven worth the price when actually used.
Right you are! They've just started an arms race, is all, and one they can't win, if they'd only studied a little evolutionary biology instead of entertainment law or how to get ahead by giving head. Nature teaches there are always more hungry parasites than fat hosts, and the only long-term winning strategy for a potential host is to reach a cooperative agreement with the parasites, co-opt them, draw them into defending you or servicing you in exchange for the blood they suck.
You're not in a hurry?! Have you looked at European demographics lately? Calculated what a 1.2 children/woman birthrate does for your population, long-term? Figured out how many 55-year-old full-medical-benefits retirees each European worker is expected to support in 15 years (after 15 more years of 1% annual economic growth rate, I might add)? Or thought fully through the implications of that burgeoning and wholly unassimilated Islamic subculture?
I find it actually plausible that the Eurozone and the EU Constitution referenda this year will prove to be the high-water mark of classical European governance. That is, I think there's a good chance it's now too late for a pan-European government within traditional post-war European secular socialist values. It's going to be either Balkanization and lifeboat-running-out-of-food mutual cannibalism or the Islamic deluge.
Either way, good luck. Got a feeling y'all are going to need it.
The way I could concieve two neutron stars coming together would be stars A and B travelling on roughly parallel paths through the galaxy, and gravity pulls them together.
Not possible! If they are not aimed squarely at each other -- which is damn unlikely -- then they are in a mutual orbit. Could be a closed orbit, circle or ellipse, or it could be an open orbit, e.g. one executes a parabola or hyperbola about the other. But the important point is that every possible orbit is perfectly symmetrical about periastron (point of closest approach). If star A comes from light-years away to pass near star B, then star A must fly away to light-years away after the passage. There's no way that Newtonian gravity by itself can turn an open orbit into a closed orbit, i.e. for star A to fly in from far away and "spiral into" star B.
See, this happens on Earth because friction can slow one object down, and cause one object to spiral into another. I suspect you're unconsciously assuming friction. But there isn't friction in outer space. Except for -- and this is what we're talking about -- gravitational waves, which indeed are a form of "friction" associated with orbital motion.
It's not that people trust the US Government so much as they distrust the EU and the UN. For several excellent reasons:
(1) The UN at least has committed appalling deeds of omission and commission over the past decades in their core mission of keeping the peace. Rwanda, anyone? Srebenica? The sex-for-food deals between peacekeepers in Africa and the local 12-year-old girls? And so forth. Simply put, the UN record on their core functions is abysmal. With rare exception (WHO comes to mind), the UN in the past 60 years has succeeded at nothing and failed at many things (Korea in the 50s, N. Korea in the 90s, Iraq, Africa, the former Yugoslavia -- ach, the list goes on and on).
So, based on their historical record of spectacular incompetence, one could be forgiven for suspecting it would not be wise to trust the UN to manage a taco stand, let alone anything as mission-critical as the Internet.
(2) The EU is an unknown agency in rapid flux. No one really knows whether the EU as a quasi-government is going to be effective, because no one really knows what the heck it is, yet. This is purely the fault of the folks in Europe who have set up (or tried to set up) the beast, and who not only can't make a plain statement of what the EU government is, and is not, but also can't even convince their own citizens to vote for it in referenda. Not what I'd call a very encouraging sign.
(3) Both the UN and EU are highly undemocratic. No population directly elects representatives to the UN. Representatives aren't subject to recall, they don't have a fixed term of office, and there is no constitutional check on their powers, enforced by some kind of judiciary. (On the bright side, they also don't have much of an executive to enforce their will.) People aren't represented in the UN in proportion to their numbers (e.g. Iceland has just as many votes in the General Assembly as does the United States). And so on. Hence people very reasonably fear that the UN is too insulated from the will of the people to be trusted not to exercise any power it is given tyrannically.
(4) Neither the UN nor the EU is (yet) chartered as a regulatory body. The UN is charged essentially with keeping international peace and with voluntary efforts at promoting international welfare (like WHO and UNESCO). It was never imagined as a regulatory body, and it just isn't set up to do it at present. The EU is a better case, but only within the confines of Europe, because, of course, no one imagined it would be a regulatory body for the world. Furthermore, vide supra, the EU has not yet managed to convince Europeans that it can function as a European regulatory body. Why on Earth should Americans or Asians be convinced it can be a world regulatory body??
(5) One can be rightly suspicious that this is merely a grandstanding effort by the UN and EU and their apologists to distract the world -- or more importantly their own constituents -- from their rather substantial failures at their existing chartered missions. The UN royally upgefuckt in Iraq, and is presently doing so in the Sudan and former Yugoslavia. They have failed and continue to fail in their core mission -- keeping international peace -- with which they have been charged since 1945. Naturally they would love to see debate about the UN refocussed away from those hideous pratfalls and onto the question of whether they should manage the 'Net. Especially if the basis of the argument is "moral authority" as opposed to "competence."
Similarly, the EU is in deep doo-doo over the core missions it has already accepted from the European governments. It can't convince Europeans it should function as a government. It can't convince Britons that the Eurozone is a better deal than the pound, even with years of empirical experience to mine for evidence. It can't convince the Eastern European developing nations that its position on tax structure and investment incentives makes any damn sense fo
I'd think the loss from gravitational waves would be miniscule unless they were very close to each other. Which, granted, NS can do, being small and dense and all -- but how do they get that close to begin with?? Are we thinking some hideously close binary where the two stars start out mere dozens of AU apart? Inquiring minds want to know...
Fair enough. I won't confuse a single -- or even multiple -- recent incidents of government screwing up with a general incapability, so long as you don't confuse their occasional recent successes with a general capability.
There's nothing inherently wrong with enforcing minimum standards of service. I'm just pointing out it's inherently expensive, so if you want guaranteed service, you're going to have to pay for it, one way or another. You can pay yourself, directly to the ISP. Or you can pay the government every April 15, and then they'll take care of the ISP's cost to provide the service.
Where I see your argument as loopy is, first, that when you hire Uncle Sam as a middleman you always increase your own ultimate costs, because all those government employees working as a buffer between you and the ISP need their salaries and retirement benefits. Second, you lose a lot of flexibility. Your idea of a "reasonable" minimum level of service may not -- indeed probably does not -- match mine, or that of the guy down the block. In the free market, we can each hope to strike a deal we like with a provider who thinks as we do. We can each buy whatever minimum standard of service we individually find reasonable and for which we're willing to pay.
But with Uncle Sam doing the negotiating for everybody, all that goes away. It's a one-size-fits-all solution, crafted by a bunch of largely tech-ignorant lawyers in Congress. You really want to live with (and pay for) Congressman Windoze 95's idea of a universal "reasonable" minimum standard of service? Blech.
Note that I assume you weren't overcome by temporary insanity and hallucinating that you could get a nice new and higher minimum standard of service for free just by having Congress write a law that demands it. TANSTAAFL, you know.
Dude, like all engineering solutions, it works this way:
Reliable, cheap, or high quality: pick two.
The Internet is renowned for providing cheap and high-quality (read: high bandwidth) communications. If you want it to prioritize reliability, you're going to have to give up one of the other two qualities.
Count me out. If I want reliable communication, I'll pick up the phone or radio. And it will cost me a hell of a lot more per megabyte than videoconferencing over the 'net, ayup. But it will get through.
As for "regulation" (by the government, I'm assuming) ensuring a much higher reliability of the 'ne...er...catch any of the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina, did you?
...if each "pro" only gets one shot in his career -- because 2 seconds after his first shot he's lit up with a strobe and 15 seconds after that he's an expanding cloud of pink gas -- then (1) the supply of "pros" will be rapidly depleted, and (2) amateurs will have a very hard time turning "pro." No practice shots, you see...
[W]hy not simply make a material that is opaque from the outside and transparent from the inside, which lets light in but not out.
I'm going to assume by "light" you mean "electromagnetic radiation." Such a material would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics and allow you to build a perpetual motion machine, as follows:
(1) Construct two boxes of the material, and put them side by side. In the first box, let the transparent "side" of the material face outward, and in the second, let the opaque "side" face outward.
(2) Put a bulb of water in the first box, and connect it by steam tubes to a condenser in the second. Install a turbine and generator in the steam tubes.
(3) Connect a light bulb to the output of the generator.
(4) Now, give the thing a little push, say by shining a bit of sunlight on it. You can take it out of the sun after it gets going.
(5) Light goes into the first box but can't escape. So that box gets hotter without limit when light falls on it. Eventually the water boils, generating steam, which proceeds to turn the generator, generating electricity, and then to the condenser box. Light escapes the condenser box but can't get in, so it cools without limit whatever enters it. So the steam condenses back to water, and is returned to the boiling box to repeat the cycle. Meanwhile, the electricity powers the lightbulb, which serves to heat up the boiling box. Once you get the machine going, it goes on forever.
(6) So far, we've just got a widget that buzzes forever. But we can easily do useful work with it by replacing the light bulb with some other load, so long as we take the waste heat from the load (emitted as infrared light) and make sure to shine it on the boiling box. The end result is a source of free energy. On the grounds of TANSTAAFL, a.k.a. the Second Law, this device is forbidden in our Universe. If you try and build one in your garage, the Thermodynamics Police pop out of n-space, kill you, confiscate your machine, and alter records and memories such that you appear never to have been born at all.
Not quite, I think. The wires in the wall will function as antennae, with a terrible SWR, to be sure. They will radiate radio waves at 60 Hz, just like this fellow's worrisome transformer does even when the trains aren't running. So there will be a very small current all the time to supply the energy emitted as radio waves.
On the other hand, as you point out, when he fires up (say) his electric range and gets 10 to 20 amps flowing through those coils on top -- look out! Not only does he have strong EMF fields right near his (or the wife's) face, but he's irradiating his food with them.
Hopefully he's got a gas range. (We needn't consider the folly of a microwave, of course.)
Hmm, I wonder why this person is worrying about high voltage particularly? I mean, 60 Hz EM fields saturate his house already because of the electricity running all through the walls and ceilings. The fields are exactly the same frequency, photon energy, et cetera.
Now, a 6000-volt (say) transformer has a field strength right next to it about 60 times higher than the field strength right next to a wall socket. But, thanks to the inverse square law, the field strength 10 feet away from such a transformer would be less than the field strength 1 foot away from a wall socket.
And...he probably spends hours and hours within 1 foot of a wall socket, and isn't likely to be within 10 feet of the transformer very often at all...I mean, unless the transformer fascinates him strangely or something...
*All* of Titan isn't likely to be as low as 100K...
Agreed. But I hope you admit it's hard to imagine a significant area of Titan that has stayed three times hotter than the planetary average over geological time spans, long enough for life to spontaneously arise. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it seems unlikely.
My understanding is that Terrestrial life that exists now in inhospitable niches did not spontaneously arise there de novo, but gradually evolved to cope with the niche, as the niche changed, or by migration from more hospitable places.
Slashdot Mirror
Turn it around, my friend. Right now, Congressman Joe pays consultants and staff lawyers lots of money to tell him the temperature of his political waters, keep him in touch with what is selling, and not, amongst the voters.
Well, with micropayments, why not hire you the actual voter instead? In other words, how about Joe fires his consultants and instead just pays you some small amount to fill out some survey, respond to his e-mail, tell him what you and your co-workers talked about yesterday around the water cooler? You won't get much money, sure, because your opinion by itself is of low value -- only in combination with thousands of others does it matter. But money is money, and even a little tidbit for nothing more than what's on your mind is nice, and Joe will better represent you to boot.
Not to mention that, if it just happens to turn out that you are some kind of wizard who understands very, very well how people in your community see Joe -- if your information is unusually useful -- then Joe will be willing to pay more and more for it. (Not just Joe, of course -- his competitors will also want it, and you can sell to the highest bidder.)
See, the interesting aspect of micropayment for communication is that, at some time and in some circumstances, practically everyone's attention is highly desirable for a few minutes or an hour, but at present, there is no way to buy and sell that attention at the appropriate value, because you can only buy attention at all if you buy it in large lotsizes, days to weeks.
But I still fundamentally disagree that free things are worthless.
Well, I'm not saying that! Air and sunlight and life itself are free, but hardly anything is worth more. What I'm saying is that when people insist on receiving the labor of others without paying for it, the value of the labor offered eventually drops to zero. How can this, in itself, be controversial? I suspect indeed we would be reduced to agreeing that many labor exchanges are very complicated and do not necessarily involve cash changing hands. But I hope you would agree that the introduction of cash sometimes simplifies things greatly and makes for a more efficient exchange, with benefits for all. Which is all I'm saying about micropayments.
Church services are truly free only to a minority of people, who are subsidized by the majority. If most people truly paid nothing for church services, they would go away or become worthless. I think some of your other examples fall in that category as well.
Again, I'm not saying that labor exchanges between humans can't become very much more complicated than buying a sandwich from a street vendor. For example, consider the exchanges between generations. Why would an 80-year-old agree to have his tax money invested in biomedical research that won't pay off for 40 years? Why do I pay for my -- and your -- childrens' education? Somehow there is an exchange of value which motivates all this. But it's very complicated to figure out how it works.
Well, EB has been making money for three and a half centuries. Wikipedia has yet to prove it can sustain itself over a single decade, and the fate of other freely shared commodities -- think "Tragedy of the Commons" -- is not especially encouraging.
If I were a Wikipediast enthusiast I would be thinking about this carefully. Do I have a sustainable model, or are we going to be a merely marvelously fun flash in the pan?
My impression is that people are worrying already about the weaknesses in their model for incentive and reward, when they regret the flames and trolls and general unruliness. There seems no way to easily and reliably sort out value from trash, reward the former and punish the latter. There are worries that the quality may be diluted by noise, and that, once that happens, the incentive to contribute quality will diminish.
You're absolutely right that money is not the only unit of reciprocation -- otherwise marriages and families would never work out. But, alas, in a large community of relative strangers no one has yet found a workable substitute. Perhaps the Wiki wookies will prove that one exists. I hope they do. But I wouldn't bet on it.
Many folks have tried this, but the problem is, like birth control, it's the kind of thing you don't realize you want until, er, the need is rather urgent. It's hard to plan ahead and have the thingies in the bed-side table when the Right Moment unexpectedly occurs, and equally it's hard to have funds available in the banks of all the information sources I might, someday, suddenly want to use.
What I want -- what we can't yet get -- what the world is waiting for some entrepreneur to provide -- is the ability to decide on the spot, at the time, bang, just like that, that I want this information, and the ability to spend almost zero time and effort transferring some tiny payment to the author for it. One click and I'm done, that kind of thing.
Of course not. But you have mistaken the argument, which goes like this:
A handsome young cardiologist has convinced all other cardiologists that they ought to provide help to men who scream, clutch their chests, et cetera, free and without charge. After all, they will be "paid" in respect and attention from the community, as well as the ardent thanks of the wives, some of whom are still young and good-looking, har de har har... "Medical skill wants to be be free!" they chant enthusiastically as they fan out, compressing chests, injecting ephinephrine, doing good deeds. Wives in crowded theaters all over the land huzzah lustily...
But then, alas, the cardiologists' mortgages come due, and the kids need braces. Unfortunately the theater work doesn't pay except in self-respect and the occasional "tip" from the wives (wink wink), so they need to take on other jobs, e.g. transplanting hearts for big bux at St. Evil Exploiter of the Masses Enormously Expensive Hospital and Whorehouse. Leaves them less time to patrol the theaters. But that's OK, because other people step in, people who have fewer opportunities to earn the big bux doing heart transplants at St. EEMEEH and W, and wouldn't mind at all the warm feeling of being the heroic "doctor in the house" and the ardent thank-you. First, it's nurses and EMTs who fill the cardiologists' shoes.
Crucial point: surely the wives would prefer a cardiologist to an EMT. But how can they enforce that preference? They have no incentive to offer the cardiologist, to induce him back to the theater.
Not surprisingly, more men clutching their chests don't make it, since the skill of the responder is less. Not surprisingly, the providers are seen less often as heros, and the thanks of the wives becomes, well, cooler.
By and by, even the nurses and EMTs find they have bills to pay and the cooling thanks and diminished heroic stature are not enough even for them. But that's OK, because random strangers with no skill at cardiology at all are perfectly happy to step in, because even the reduced stature of playing a doctor in the theater and the lukewarm thanks of the wives (or more often widows) are better than what they get stuffing envelopes and walking dogs.
And, again, there is no way the wives can enforce their preference for a higher level of skill. Not paying for labor gives them zero leverage over the kind of labor they get.
Eventually, the heroic stature goes entirely away, because it's rare that when a man clutches his chest, et cetera, and his wife cries out for a "doctor" in the house that they get a real doctor, and not some charlatan pretending to be one. No one can expect warm thanks from wives. And the only people still jumping up when wives cry out for a doctor in the house are wretches for whom the modest attention and rare thanks from addled wives who don't realize when they're being scammed are better than what they can get spamming millions from Mom's basement with Enhance Your Manhood ads. That is, the labor the wives can get has fallen in value to exactly what they were willing to pay for it: zero.
That's my point. The fundamental capitalist rule is simple: Only when you insist on paying for what you get, will you routinely get what you pay for.
Why would the marginal cost of production of information be zero? First of all, even if you focus on the pure labor cost in the present, the cost of someone's time and effort to convey the information is not zero. You have to pay to get the expert's attention, have him formulate the data, transmit it, and so on. It might be a small cost, but it wouldn't be zero.
Secondly, what about the cost of "capital" replacement, i.e. developing new information? The cost of your car reflects not just Toyota's expenses for steel and plastic and labor, but also some small amount put towards research into building the cars of the future, building new factories, et cetera -- i.e. the costs to replace their capital investment as it wears out.
Same with information. You can expect the eventual marginal cost to include some small amount that pays for continued improvement in the information, or development of new information. Since these costs are spread out over the lifetime of the information, they would be small, to be sure. But not zero. Consider the pricing of medicines as a model: the cost of your drugs includes some small amount of money that will be devoted by the firm to research into new drugs, because they know, being survivors in a tough market, that any given drug will only be profitable for a finite time.
The fact that the free market eventually drives the profit margin on anything to nearly zero is not new. And people are not stupid. Every good businessman since King Nebuchadnezzar knows that he who fails to continually innovate goes under, and this is why free economies always end up being highly innovative and dynamic.
Does he? How does he stay rich, then? Considering that if it's useful millions of people are wanting the information and will pay to get it?
Think it all the way through: Mr. Rich Bastard pays Mr. Clever Dick $1 to keep information Z secret. But 10 ordinary people now offer Mr. Dick 25 cents each for Z. Mr. Dick goes back to Mr. Bastard: Dude, they're offering me $2.50 to sell out, I'm going to do it...so Mr. Bastard says wait, I'll meet their price. His bribe goes up to $3. Now Mr. Clever Copycat realizes there's a market for Z and sets about reproducing it. Mr. Bastard must bribe him, too. Ugh! Expenses are mounting....so, by and by, the market demand increases, Mr. Bastard's bribes increases, he has to buy off more and more copycats...and soon enough, I surmise, Mr. Bastard is just going to run out of money and see his whole nefarious scheme collapse. See, Mr. Bastard's evil system's fatal weakness is that he is spending money in this market but not earning money by providing any service that people want. His position is therefore unsustainable, however obnoxious he can make himself in the short run.
In fact, seems to me what you're describing is a very good aspect of the market. What you're saying is that the (false) lure of controlling information permanently will seduce an antisocial person into behaviour that will rapidly and efficiently siphon off all his wealth and render him powerless.
Information is not a commodity like any other...
Come on, let's not be mystical. Just because information is a different sort of commodity from sprockets doesn't make it so alien that conventional economics can't deal with it.
How about the water rights, mortgages, patents, health care, or music? None of these things is exactly like a sprocket, and you could list many interesting and curious differences between trading in them and trading in sprockets, but that doesn't mean people don't, in fact, trade in them just like they do in corn or steel, and it doesn't prevent a free market from setting an accurate price on them.
I'm not saying it doesn't take some thought and cleverness to figure out how to sell information profitably. No doubt it does. But so? I've no doubt people clever enough to figure out how to do it exist.
Well, I understand the argument, and I understand its persuasiveness, but the historical record forces me to regretfully conclude that your beautiful, compelling theory about human motivation is, alas, simply wrong.
It's not a new argument. You are repeating the excited theories of intellectual socialists in the early part of the 20th century. They argued powerfully that the pleasure of serving your community well, of stature and respect from your comrades -- of being paid in "human attention" as you put it -- would serve to motivate people's best efforts far better than mere grubby money.
Alas, the experiment set up to confirm this theory -- the Soviet Union -- started off very promising (there were glowing reports of the accomplishments of communism in the 20s and early 30s) but collapsed 70 years later in a horrifying welter of human misery from which Russia has still not emerged. Clearly the theory, however lovely and compelling in the mind, is a flat-out disaster when put into operation.
Now, bear in mind that I agree with you that "human attention" should be the most valued commodity, and that in theory a "market" based on that as the medium of exchange rather than money should flourish. But it just doesn't, not in the long term. I don't know why. Maybe no one does.
This is not to say that socialist utopias with "markets" that exchange social stature and respect cannot flourish in the short run, like Shaker communities* or kibbutzim. Often they do very well for a while, while the pioneering impulse lasts. But there are zero historical examples of long-term success. That should be a very sobering thought for OSS proponents -- and I say that as one of them -- and a cheering thought for those wretches in Redmond, damn them.
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* Shaker communities were highly socialist 19th century American utopias that, curiously enough, emphasized celibacy, which helps account for their almost complete disappearance.
Micropayments simply haven't worked for anyone yet...
Exactly so. And the problems you mention are fierce. So the situation is just completely ripe for some fiendishly clever entrepreneur to come along and snarf the whole market. Some Jeff Bezos kind of fellow who sees how it can be done where the rest of us just shrug our shoulders and say, well, this is just the way it's always worked...if man were meant to fly he'd have wings...640k is enough for anybody...mutter mutter...
A potential profit of billions is, I think, an understatement if anything.
...but the feedback loop from customer to producer is poor. Google doesn't allow the Researcher fee structure to be set by the market. They have this simple system where Researchers just get canned if they get too many poor reviews. That's very crude. For one thing, a good market needs crappy vendors who sell their wares cheaply, because sometimes a crappy answer is Good Enough -- sometimes you want to rent a limo to impress your date, but sometimes you want to rent a wreck to move your crap from one apartment to another.
/. denizens posting from Mom's basement? Hmmm.
Also, the price you set for your question probably only affects the speed of the answer. To make it affect the quality of your answer -- which is probably a lot more important! -- Google should provide some way for you to "hire" a Researcher with a quality you prefer (e.g. a degree in the field), or at least a Researcher with a better Google Answer track record.
Actually, the best system is clearly just an auction. You post a question, and Researchers bid on the right to answer it, with stated deadlines for doing so. You accept whatever bid you like, or none of them, pay your money, get your answer. Depending on how you like it, you attach a positive or negative comment to the Researcher's growing "reputation" file. A Researcher with a large and glowing reputation can, of course, post far higher bids for his services than a newbie or person with a mixed reputation.
A fascinating social experiment would emerge if Google kept everything about the Researchers except their Google-Answer-earned reputation secret: would the "conventional" measures of authority be reflected in the actual fees commanded by Researchers, after a while? For example, would people with PhDs from top schools actually end up with market-set fees that are a lot higher than the fees the market sets for lowly college students or
A large system like this, supported by micropayment, would also revolutionize how many of us work. Suppose I'm very good at programming in general, but the absolute world's expert on some tiny corner of it, say certain types of machine vision algorithms. Now, I can't really make a living consulting on the tiny sliver where I'm absolutely top, because people rarely need that level of expertise in this narrow field, and they don't need it for long. So I have to make a living using my broader, less high talents, and be paid accordingly less.
But...what if I can collect micropayments for answering questions on my narrow topic of superb expertise from all over the world? Among a pool of 2 billion workers, there might very well be enough questions in my micro-discipline to support me. Which means two interesting things: first, I have a better average pay rate, because I am being hired mostly for that in which I am the world's top expert rather than for that in which I am only pretty knowledgeable. Secondly, people have a better chance of getting very good answers to their questions, because they have the chance to hire the world's top expert for 10 minutes instead of hiring someone merely pretty knowledgeable for two months.
In fact, ever had a question which you just know an expert could answer instantly, but on which you also just know you'll beat your head for four weeks? I sure have. What a great deal it would be if you could hire the expert for 60 seconds! I'd gladly pay $50 for 60 seconds of certain expert's time from time to time. It's a good deal for me -- I save weeks of my own time -- and it's a good deal for the expert -- at $50/minute he's earning money awfully fast. If there's a way to collect and process zillions of $50 microtransactions from all over the world...
Well...in the first place, not a few of the things you mention aren't free even in the superficial accounting sense that Wikipedia and /. might be considered free.
/. or private mailing lists -- and the degeneration of the e-mail system are linked to the very low cost of their use and the fact that there is, as I say, no other obvious and reliable way to sift meaning from amongst the garbage.
/. is indeed free but worthwhile now, the question is: how much longer will this be true? Indefinitely? Not, I suggest, if it continues to be of value but has no reliable way to sort noise from value. The moderation system is a crude attempt at a toy market with tokens ("mod points") instead of cash (and I think someone mentioned that Wikipedia has some crude market analogue also). The very fact that these things were found necessary suggests the recognition that, sooner or later, a better "pricing" model for contributions must be found if the system is not to drown in parasitic trash.
For example Google is paid for by advertising which adds a small cost to the products you buy. Public parks are paid for by your taxes. Church services: even if you never put something in the collection plate, you dog, you're still subsidizing it by the higher real estate taxes you have to pay because they don't pay any at all. And so on.
Some of the things you mention are exceptions that prove the rule, too: I doubt anyone thinks music recitals for which you pay are, as a rule, no better than those for which you do not. Occasionally the best artists play for free, but usually they don't, and the better they are the more their tickets cost. The only artists who play for free all the time and even at the top of their "career" are those in subway stations.
Secondly, I said things that are free end up worth their price (i.e. nothing). That's not to say that they can't start off being quite valuable, when there are significant barriers (of novelty, if nothing else, but often of technical knowledge) to participation, and only highly motivated and interested people participate. Remember when Usenet was mostly inhabited by people with PhDs, and a highly technical question on, say, operating system design could get a half-dozen answers in a few hours? Remember when folks put their real e-mail address -- sometimes their phone numbers -- at the bottom of Usenet posts? Or when your mail server got 5 e-mails a day for you, and each one was from a real person and worth reading? I'm guessing you know well enough that the demolishment of Usenet as a solid technical resources -- its replacement with, e.g. moderated fora like
And while perhaps
Finally, simply because things work OK is no reason to believe they couldn't work better with a better transaction model. Communicating by telegraph and Pony Express worked well enough in 1850, but that hardly means the Internet wasn't a big improvement. Just because we currently pay for things like roads, bridges and clean air through taxes and such, instead of figuring out a way to collect and distribute bazillions of micro-user fees all the time does not mean that things wouldn't improve, possibly dramatically, if we could.
Case in point: several communities with stifling traffic are struggling to find ways to implement some kind of micropayment scheme for use of roads, such as the FastTrak transponders used on the Bay Bridge and on certain Southern California roads. Experience has shown that a market (or in this case pseudo-market, since the price is rather artificially set) will allocate resources far more efficiently than any top-down one-size-fits-all solution. Once upon a time, when the population was lower and the traffic was lighter, these places could afford to just let folks use the roads for free once they'd been built. But zero cost meant people made unwise decisions, such as building sprawly communities where it was necessary for 150,000 people to drive
The only thing is, who certifies?
It's only top-down designers who face this perennial conundrum, you know. If you free yourself from the narrow confines of socialist thinking this problem is easy to solve: let a free market assign the appropriate value of Wikipedia information, just as it successfully assigns the appropriate value of bazillions of commodities from 1/8" copper tubing to expertise in brain surgery.
How could that work? Simple, if Wikipedia could figure out a way to let users bid to pay for information, and let experts (or random wannabes) bid to sell information, and connect them up. The ol' invisible hand would rapidly solve the problem of assigning an appropriate value to every article and every author in the Wikipedia.
Users for whom information is mission-critical, e.g. who will be testing the truth of that information most severely, would end up offering the highest price for it. So, information that consistently proves reliable and accurate in actual use (and not just in some academical opinion) would fetch the highest price. Similarly, experts who really are expert, who can easily provide the high quality information, are going to end up commanding the highest fees, fees which will encourage them to provide more of those tasty nuggets. Lonely groupies who merely browse and argue without actually using the information in the real world won't be paying high prices, so they will have little effect on the nature of the supply. Flamers who supply plausible-sounding but useless or misleading garbage will quickly find the price of their product falling to peanuts.
In other words, I think the essential flaw in Wikipedia is that it is free, because in the real world things that are free usually end up being worth the price (i.e. nothing), because there is, indeed, as you point out, no clearly reliable way to ensure that noise and froth do not swamp what's actually valuable.
That being said, it's hard to know how Wikipedia could change this. Aside from its philosophical blinders, which probably prevent it from understanding the nature of its dilemma and the solution, it is difficult to make appropriate micropayments. No Wikipedia article is worth, say, $2 for a look, or $50/year for a subscription. But would I pay a nickel for a look, if I could pay instantly with just a single mouse click? I might indeed. Especially if I knew that the price was set by market demand from people who had to put up their own money to get the information, which goes far to guarantee that the information has proven worth the price when actually used.
Right you are! They've just started an arms race, is all, and one they can't win, if they'd only studied a little evolutionary biology instead of entertainment law or how to get ahead by giving head. Nature teaches there are always more hungry parasites than fat hosts, and the only long-term winning strategy for a potential host is to reach a cooperative agreement with the parasites, co-opt them, draw them into defending you or servicing you in exchange for the blood they suck.
Well, whatever.
But....
You're not in a hurry?! Have you looked at European demographics lately? Calculated what a 1.2 children/woman birthrate does for your population, long-term? Figured out how many 55-year-old full-medical-benefits retirees each European worker is expected to support in 15 years (after 15 more years of 1% annual economic growth rate, I might add)? Or thought fully through the implications of that burgeoning and wholly unassimilated Islamic subculture?
I find it actually plausible that the Eurozone and the EU Constitution referenda this year will prove to be the high-water mark of classical European governance. That is, I think there's a good chance it's now too late for a pan-European government within traditional post-war European secular socialist values. It's going to be either Balkanization and lifeboat-running-out-of-food mutual cannibalism or the Islamic deluge.
Either way, good luck. Got a feeling y'all are going to need it.
The way I could concieve two neutron stars coming together would be stars A and B travelling on roughly parallel paths through the galaxy, and gravity pulls them together.
Not possible! If they are not aimed squarely at each other -- which is damn unlikely -- then they are in a mutual orbit. Could be a closed orbit, circle or ellipse, or it could be an open orbit, e.g. one executes a parabola or hyperbola about the other. But the important point is that every possible orbit is perfectly symmetrical about periastron (point of closest approach). If star A comes from light-years away to pass near star B, then star A must fly away to light-years away after the passage. There's no way that Newtonian gravity by itself can turn an open orbit into a closed orbit, i.e. for star A to fly in from far away and "spiral into" star B.
See, this happens on Earth because friction can slow one object down, and cause one object to spiral into another. I suspect you're unconsciously assuming friction. But there isn't friction in outer space. Except for -- and this is what we're talking about -- gravitational waves, which indeed are a form of "friction" associated with orbital motion.
It's not that people trust the US Government so much as they distrust the EU and the UN. For several excellent reasons:
(1) The UN at least has committed appalling deeds of omission and commission over the past decades in their core mission of keeping the peace. Rwanda, anyone? Srebenica? The sex-for-food deals between peacekeepers in Africa and the local 12-year-old girls? And so forth. Simply put, the UN record on their core functions is abysmal. With rare exception (WHO comes to mind), the UN in the past 60 years has succeeded at nothing and failed at many things (Korea in the 50s, N. Korea in the 90s, Iraq, Africa, the former Yugoslavia -- ach, the list goes on and on).
So, based on their historical record of spectacular incompetence, one could be forgiven for suspecting it would not be wise to trust the UN to manage a taco stand, let alone anything as mission-critical as the Internet.
(2) The EU is an unknown agency in rapid flux. No one really knows whether the EU as a quasi-government is going to be effective, because no one really knows what the heck it is, yet. This is purely the fault of the folks in Europe who have set up (or tried to set up) the beast, and who not only can't make a plain statement of what the EU government is, and is not, but also can't even convince their own citizens to vote for it in referenda. Not what I'd call a very encouraging sign.
(3) Both the UN and EU are highly undemocratic. No population directly elects representatives to the UN. Representatives aren't subject to recall, they don't have a fixed term of office, and there is no constitutional check on their powers, enforced by some kind of judiciary. (On the bright side, they also don't have much of an executive to enforce their will.) People aren't represented in the UN in proportion to their numbers (e.g. Iceland has just as many votes in the General Assembly as does the United States). And so on. Hence people very reasonably fear that the UN is too insulated from the will of the people to be trusted not to exercise any power it is given tyrannically.
(4) Neither the UN nor the EU is (yet) chartered as a regulatory body. The UN is charged essentially with keeping international peace and with voluntary efforts at promoting international welfare (like WHO and UNESCO). It was never imagined as a regulatory body, and it just isn't set up to do it at present. The EU is a better case, but only within the confines of Europe, because, of course, no one imagined it would be a regulatory body for the world. Furthermore, vide supra, the EU has not yet managed to convince Europeans that it can function as a European regulatory body. Why on Earth should Americans or Asians be convinced it can be a world regulatory body??
(5) One can be rightly suspicious that this is merely a grandstanding effort by the UN and EU and their apologists to distract the world -- or more importantly their own constituents -- from their rather substantial failures at their existing chartered missions. The UN royally upgefuckt in Iraq, and is presently doing so in the Sudan and former Yugoslavia. They have failed and continue to fail in their core mission -- keeping international peace -- with which they have been charged since 1945. Naturally they would love to see debate about the UN refocussed away from those hideous pratfalls and onto the question of whether they should manage the 'Net. Especially if the basis of the argument is "moral authority" as opposed to "competence."
Similarly, the EU is in deep doo-doo over the core missions it has already accepted from the European governments. It can't convince Europeans it should function as a government. It can't convince Britons that the Eurozone is a better deal than the pound, even with years of empirical experience to mine for evidence. It can't convince the Eastern European developing nations that its position on tax structure and investment incentives makes any damn sense fo
I'd think the loss from gravitational waves would be miniscule unless they were very close to each other. Which, granted, NS can do, being small and dense and all -- but how do they get that close to begin with?? Are we thinking some hideously close binary where the two stars start out mere dozens of AU apart? Inquiring minds want to know...
Fair enough. I won't confuse a single -- or even multiple -- recent incidents of government screwing up with a general incapability, so long as you don't confuse their occasional recent successes with a general capability.
There's nothing inherently wrong with enforcing minimum standards of service. I'm just pointing out it's inherently expensive, so if you want guaranteed service, you're going to have to pay for it, one way or another. You can pay yourself, directly to the ISP. Or you can pay the government every April 15, and then they'll take care of the ISP's cost to provide the service.
Where I see your argument as loopy is, first, that when you hire Uncle Sam as a middleman you always increase your own ultimate costs, because all those government employees working as a buffer between you and the ISP need their salaries and retirement benefits. Second, you lose a lot of flexibility. Your idea of a "reasonable" minimum level of service may not -- indeed probably does not -- match mine, or that of the guy down the block. In the free market, we can each hope to strike a deal we like with a provider who thinks as we do. We can each buy whatever minimum standard of service we individually find reasonable and for which we're willing to pay.
But with Uncle Sam doing the negotiating for everybody, all that goes away. It's a one-size-fits-all solution, crafted by a bunch of largely tech-ignorant lawyers in Congress. You really want to live with (and pay for) Congressman Windoze 95's idea of a universal "reasonable" minimum standard of service? Blech.
Note that I assume you weren't overcome by temporary insanity and hallucinating that you could get a nice new and higher minimum standard of service for free just by having Congress write a law that demands it. TANSTAAFL, you know.
Dude, like all engineering solutions, it works this way:
Reliable, cheap, or high quality: pick two.
The Internet is renowned for providing cheap and high-quality (read: high bandwidth) communications. If you want it to prioritize reliability, you're going to have to give up one of the other two qualities.
Count me out. If I want reliable communication, I'll pick up the phone or radio. And it will cost me a hell of a lot more per megabyte than videoconferencing over the 'net, ayup. But it will get through.
As for "regulation" (by the government, I'm assuming) ensuring a much higher reliability of the 'ne...er...catch any of the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina, did you?
...if each "pro" only gets one shot in his career -- because 2 seconds after his first shot he's lit up with a strobe and 15 seconds after that he's an expanding cloud of pink gas -- then (1) the supply of "pros" will be rapidly depleted, and (2) amateurs will have a very hard time turning "pro." No practice shots, you see...
[W]hy not simply make a material that is opaque from the outside and transparent from the inside, which lets light in but not out.
I'm going to assume by "light" you mean "electromagnetic radiation." Such a material would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics and allow you to build a perpetual motion machine, as follows:
(1) Construct two boxes of the material, and put them side by side. In the first box, let the transparent "side" of the material face outward, and in the second, let the opaque "side" face outward.
(2) Put a bulb of water in the first box, and connect it by steam tubes to a condenser in the second. Install a turbine and generator in the steam tubes.
(3) Connect a light bulb to the output of the generator.
(4) Now, give the thing a little push, say by shining a bit of sunlight on it. You can take it out of the sun after it gets going.
(5) Light goes into the first box but can't escape. So that box gets hotter without limit when light falls on it. Eventually the water boils, generating steam, which proceeds to turn the generator, generating electricity, and then to the condenser box. Light escapes the condenser box but can't get in, so it cools without limit whatever enters it. So the steam condenses back to water, and is returned to the boiling box to repeat the cycle. Meanwhile, the electricity powers the lightbulb, which serves to heat up the boiling box. Once you get the machine going, it goes on forever.
(6) So far, we've just got a widget that buzzes forever. But we can easily do useful work with it by replacing the light bulb with some other load, so long as we take the waste heat from the load (emitted as infrared light) and make sure to shine it on the boiling box. The end result is a source of free energy. On the grounds of TANSTAAFL, a.k.a. the Second Law, this device is forbidden in our Universe. If you try and build one in your garage, the Thermodynamics Police pop out of n-space, kill you, confiscate your machine, and alter records and memories such that you appear never to have been born at all.
Not quite, I think. The wires in the wall will function as antennae, with a terrible SWR, to be sure. They will radiate radio waves at 60 Hz, just like this fellow's worrisome transformer does even when the trains aren't running. So there will be a very small current all the time to supply the energy emitted as radio waves.
On the other hand, as you point out, when he fires up (say) his electric range and gets 10 to 20 amps flowing through those coils on top -- look out! Not only does he have strong EMF fields right near his (or the wife's) face, but he's irradiating his food with them.
Hopefully he's got a gas range. (We needn't consider the folly of a microwave, of course.)
Hmm, I wonder why this person is worrying about high voltage particularly? I mean, 60 Hz EM fields saturate his house already because of the electricity running all through the walls and ceilings. The fields are exactly the same frequency, photon energy, et cetera.
Now, a 6000-volt (say) transformer has a field strength right next to it about 60 times higher than the field strength right next to a wall socket. But, thanks to the inverse square law, the field strength 10 feet away from such a transformer would be less than the field strength 1 foot away from a wall socket.
And...he probably spends hours and hours within 1 foot of a wall socket, and isn't likely to be within 10 feet of the transformer very often at all...I mean, unless the transformer fascinates him strangely or something...
*All* of Titan isn't likely to be as low as 100K...
Agreed. But I hope you admit it's hard to imagine a significant area of Titan that has stayed three times hotter than the planetary average over geological time spans, long enough for life to spontaneously arise. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it seems unlikely.
My understanding is that Terrestrial life that exists now in inhospitable niches did not spontaneously arise there de novo, but gradually evolved to cope with the niche, as the niche changed, or by migration from more hospitable places.