I'll be waiting for my 1 Terabits per second connection any day now, and even then I don't think 20 households would generate more traffic than the infrastructure we have today.
Well let's see, 720p requires 37 Mhz over the air, so let's call it 247 Mbps and an assumption of a 10 room house is pretty generous for and average, times 20 houses with an HD camera in every room equals 49.3 Gbps. Well there it is folks we now have it on good authority, Jim Cicconi- vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, that the sum total traffic of the internet today is 49.3 Gbps.
With the Dollar getting so low (I won't go into the politics of it) even Walmart is getting expensive.
I think what is happening is goods from China are price correcting. If you think Wal-mart is getting expensive, maybe you should try shopping there on the pay scale of the people who make the clothes you are buying. For many years now the Yuan has been kept artificially low, giving China a strong advantage in international trading. They kept their currency values (read labor cost) low by buying up US debt, which kept the dollar high, Japan may have done the same thing. In effect, Asia has been subsidizing US consumerism for decades. So the western world moved a huge amount of their manufacturing to China. In 2005 China stopped their policy of keeping the Yuan fixed at 8.28 yuan to the dollar, now it's up to 7 yuan to the dollar so everything made in China costs 18% more. China still maintains some trade advantage as they now have a much better manufacturing infrastructure and labor pool, but the now rising yuan is going to slingshot the standard of living in China up to that of the western world in short order. That means that "Made in China" is soon going to cost just as much as "Made in the USA". Which really just means that the people making it are getting paid a fair living wage, and the item actually costs what it is worth.
What's worse, it seems these plans will give the brands involved an unprecedented level of influence over the content. From TFA:
[It will be] a unique way of giving brands a seat at the table with writers and producers in developing episodic programming that ties directly to brand needs
I'm not sure how that is so different from magazines with "product reviews" that are directly funded by the producers of the products they are "reviewing". As long as they don't marketing start producing the Evening News or writing content taught in schoolrooms, it won't be any worse than most of the mass market tripe that passes for entertainment. I find it far more disturbing when marketing is presented as a factual news program than when presented as a key part of a fictional storyline.
I fail to see how you can assert that there is an objective, absolute morality unless you can show me some physical thing from whence it derives.
OK here is where our moral authority comes from. It's the same damn place that any other human ultimately gets their authority over another human. The power to beat your ass. That is where your parent's got their authority from, that's where the police get their authority from, that's where the US gets it's authority from. How that authority is used is a matter of the morality of the ones in power, in the case of the US most commonly held moralities are (at least on the surface) an outgrowth of Judeo-Christian principles.
Too bad it conflicts with the US way of policing the world.
It also conflicts with one of the supposed strengths of capitalism, that consumers can be informed of the ethics of the companies they do business with. Now Americans are shitty shitty capitalists, we protest the sweatshops but we still buy the shoes. But the basic idea still stands, if China wants to isolate it's ethics then they need to be isolated in every other way as well, economically, scientifically, and politically. If they don't want to meet human rights standards, then they don't need to have a seat on the UN security council or the right to trade with the other nations of the UN. Not being allowed to participate,let alone host, the Olympics should be a minor fraction of their exclusion if they don't want to bring their governance up to modern standards.
I guess what they really want is everyone to live a year without China. I have to wonder how many consumer items that all those protesters use every day come from China. It's hard for their government to take our protests seriously when we are handing them our money as fast as we can.
I don't think WMDs like neutron bombs or poison gas get any use in war because they do too much damage to the resources being fought over, but I don't buy for a second that it's some kind of honour or respect for humanity that stops any world leaders from using WMDs for their nation building. I don't particularly like the idea of armed robots either, but I have to question whether we can actually "decide not to build them". Sure we as a nation can decide not to build them, but I don't think that will stop anyone else from building them. I'm sure that in the next fifty years there will be a firefight somewhere in the world where both sides have attack robots. As technology allows for more and more power to be concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, the dangers of Despotism grow worse. The only counter to Despotism that I know of is a well informed, well armed public. Do not doubt for a second that there will eventually be semi-autonomous killer robots at the disposal of most government leaders. It is going to happen. Maybe in ten years maybe in fifty years, but it will happen. Now go out there and demand that private citizens be allowed to have a means to stop those robots. Please won't someone think of the children.
One of the more interesting (perhaps only) chances modern science has had to watch the development of a new language is the birth of Nicaraguan Sign Language.
"it doesn't seem fair to fight a war that doesn't put your troops at risk."
Only a fool wants war to be "fair". There are two basic reasons for this: 1. To be fighting a war necessitates that you hold the lives of your countrymen and the ways of your country as superior to those of the country you are fighting. It is impossible to "value everyone equally" and be fighting a war, because there is no reason to preserve your culture or life in preference to that of the enemy. In that light it is impossible to reduce the vulnerabilities of your own soldiers too much. 2. The more equally balanced the sides of a war the longer it will last and the higher the death toll will be before a true victor can emerge. A "fair" war would have the highest possible causalities and damage to both sides, an overwhelming force and decisive victory has the fewest causalities and the least collateral damage.
Advertising and marketing are a complete waste of human energy at best, evil mind control black magic at worst.
Advertising in Most first world countries is anti-happiness. As explained by Professor Richard Layard:
"once people's basic economic needs are met additional income and wealth contributes little to an individual's happiness. What's more a society which encourages a focus on the self and its wants, and heightened individualism, tends to undermine the very things which psychological research now shows are crucial to feelings of happiness: close personal relationships, trust, and security. On top of this consumerism, advertising and the effects of the mass media heightens human beings' natural interest in 'status' and social comparisions. This means that in contemporary society people's lives are overly concerned with work, money, and how they are doing in 'the rat race'. Such a life focus is not intrinsically satisfying and so we have the prosperity paradox that for all the increased wealth in modern society people do not feel happier.
For each example you have given on how the US government has not provided adaquit service (schools, roads and the like), please provide an alternative private sector alternative
Some of those things, like roads are not widely available as a private sector business. So let's look at retirement, Social Security costs 15.3% of every paycheck. From everything I've seen, it won't actually be there for me to live off of when I reach retirement age. However, if I save only $500 a month at 4% interest for my 40 year career life span, at 65 I will have $590,980.66. Granted that's not huge, but it's a nice bit better than the nothing I will be getting from Social Security. And that's only if I save $500 a month, if I could save $1250 a month (15% of a $100,000 a year job) then my retirement fund would be $1,477,451.67. Which in a 4% yield savings account would give me $59,098.04 a year to live on in my retirement. So retirement, as managed my the US government sucks worse than a lemonparty link. Now let's look at schools, I think the Washington Post has already explained this one nicely. There is a Snopes discussion of this very topic, but the main point made there is that private schools are selective, they send back the troublemakers and under performers, but that is not true of all private schools. I would like to point out that the second boarding school I linked to costs less for one year room, board, and education than what DC spends per student on education only.
treadmills and trackballs aren't exactly new or special either. it's all about making their use intuitive and fun. which is something the makers of the wii seem to have succeeded at while the ps2 add-on faded into obscurity.
"You young whippersnappers think you have it tough? Back in my day, we couldn't just go out and buy unleaded gasoline. No sir! We had to scrape the lead out with our bare hands!"
I would hope that 20 years from now, the higher end portable computers would have a direct retinal link or contact lens screen, and use sub-vocals for input. Why look at a screen when you could look at augmented reality? As you said, we are at least half way to the mobile computer you describe with the next generation of the iPhone, I expect that tech to arrive in the next five to ten years. I expect twenty years from now for computer interfaces to be integrated in an almost cyborg like fashion.
Some aspects of this will probably remain optional, but as storage gets smaller and ID programs gain steam, the two are bound to converge. Maybe you won't be able to see photos of various events throughout your life but your: GPS location, website history, purchase history, known associates, employment record, legal history, medical records, etc. will all be recorded. Ten years from now it will all fit in your federal ID that you have to carry in order to travel or make any purchases. Regardless of who wins the next election, it will happen.
I can't fathom why someone would travel 2 hours each way, every day, just to get to the place where you work. Maybe it's cheaper, but aren't the minutes of your life worth more than saving a few bucks? Even if you worked in NY you could find a reasonable (relative to the payscale and market) place to live that's 30 minutes away.
Speaking as someone who lives in NYC, yes you can find a reasonable place to live in town on a middle class paycheck. If you don't mind renting forever (median apartment prices are over $900k) and you don't have kids. As soon as you actually care about the schools and neighborhood cultural ideals, acceptable places to live become amazingly scarce. Most of the towns around NYC where the soccer mom lifestyle exists also are priced that $200k a year salary is the entry level. The median housing prices are around $600K and property taxes are high. So anyone who makes less than the requisite $200K lives farther away, and your don't have to get all that far away for a rush hour commute to take two hours or more. Minutes of your life may be worth more than a few bucks, but your family's standard of living is worth more than a few minutes. This is where the jobs are, so millions of people make the daily trek.
If there are no safety issues involved, then the FCC and the FAA have no place in the discussions.
Sometime when people are forced to stay in close proximity to very annoying people, safety becomes a concern. I've seen tensions escalate very quickly when someone on a subway tells another passenger to turn down their headphones, and subway rides usually last less than half an hour. However, as the repercussions for getting into a fistfight on an airplane are more severe, so too must the regulations on other behaviors be more severe, since the normal coarse for the societal correction of unacceptable behavior is being artificially suppressed.
While many passengers would be grateful for the first person to punch out some cell phone screamer an hour into the flight, that person would still be facing serious legal trouble upon landing. As a fistfight between passengers is not a danger to the airplane's ability to complete it's flight, that would have to be unregulated along side the no cell phones rule.
I wonder if this is the beginning of MS splitting into two different wings to meet different needs. The heavily patented and closed software, which might be appropriate for some clients; and a new open source branch to sell products to clients that will be better by open software.
I know a number of people who ride the commuter trains, and more and more of them are starting to carry these handy little devices. No, no one cares about how legal these are or are not. Turn them on just long enough for the offending phone to lose the call, and they are undetectable.
the amount of people who won't even notice when MS buys out Yahoo.
That number of people is steadily shrinking as Yahoo fights for independence. i think they should have a marketing campaign boasting about their fight against a MS buyout. They will automatically be the good guy because everyone knows that a corporate takeover, lots of people loose their jobs, and the job market is already so shaky that MS can't help but look like greedy evil bastards in the public eye.
Wow, I hadn't realized that crop production could be that agile to respond to announcements so quickly. On the upside, with a market that active and profitable maybe we can end farm subsidies. I just wish they would make the biofuel out of switchgrass instead of corn.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll be waiting for my 1 Terabits per second connection any day now, and even then I don't think 20 households would generate more traffic than the infrastructure we have today.
Well let's see, 720p requires 37 Mhz over the air, so let's call it 247 Mbps and an assumption of a 10 room house is pretty generous for and average, times 20 houses with an HD camera in every room equals 49.3 Gbps. Well there it is folks we now have it on good authority, Jim Cicconi- vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, that the sum total traffic of the internet today is 49.3 Gbps.
We all know how well NASA handles metric conversion.
With the Dollar getting so low (I won't go into the politics of it) even Walmart is getting expensive.
I think what is happening is goods from China are price correcting. If you think Wal-mart is getting expensive, maybe you should try shopping there on the pay scale of the people who make the clothes you are buying. For many years now the Yuan has been kept artificially low, giving China a strong advantage in international trading. They kept their currency values (read labor cost) low by buying up US debt, which kept the dollar high, Japan may have done the same thing. In effect, Asia has been subsidizing US consumerism for decades. So the western world moved a huge amount of their manufacturing to China. In 2005 China stopped their policy of keeping the Yuan fixed at 8.28 yuan to the dollar, now it's up to 7 yuan to the dollar so everything made in China costs 18% more. China still maintains some trade advantage as they now have a much better manufacturing infrastructure and labor pool, but the now rising yuan is going to slingshot the standard of living in China up to that of the western world in short order. That means that "Made in China" is soon going to cost just as much as "Made in the USA". Which really just means that the people making it are getting paid a fair living wage, and the item actually costs what it is worth.
What's worse, it seems these plans will give the brands involved an unprecedented level of influence over the content. From TFA: [It will be] a unique way of giving brands a seat at the table with writers and producers in developing episodic programming that ties directly to brand needs
I'm not sure how that is so different from magazines with "product reviews" that are directly funded by the producers of the products they are "reviewing". As long as they don't marketing start producing the Evening News or writing content taught in schoolrooms, it won't be any worse than most of the mass market tripe that passes for entertainment. I find it far more disturbing when marketing is presented as a factual news program than when presented as a key part of a fictional storyline.
I fail to see how you can assert that there is an objective, absolute morality unless you can show me some physical thing from whence it derives.
OK here is where our moral authority comes from. It's the same damn place that any other human ultimately gets their authority over another human. The power to beat your ass. That is where your parent's got their authority from, that's where the police get their authority from, that's where the US gets it's authority from. How that authority is used is a matter of the morality of the ones in power, in the case of the US most commonly held moralities are (at least on the surface) an outgrowth of Judeo-Christian principles.
Too bad it conflicts with the US way of policing the world.
,let alone host, the Olympics should be a minor fraction of their exclusion if they don't want to bring their governance up to modern standards.
It also conflicts with one of the supposed strengths of capitalism, that consumers can be informed of the ethics of the companies they do business with. Now Americans are shitty shitty capitalists, we protest the sweatshops but we still buy the shoes. But the basic idea still stands, if China wants to isolate it's ethics then they need to be isolated in every other way as well, economically, scientifically, and politically. If they don't want to meet human rights standards, then they don't need to have a seat on the UN security council or the right to trade with the other nations of the UN. Not being allowed to participate
I guess what they really want is everyone to live a year without China. I have to wonder how many consumer items that all those protesters use every day come from China. It's hard for their government to take our protests seriously when we are handing them our money as fast as we can.
I don't think WMDs like neutron bombs or poison gas get any use in war because they do too much damage to the resources being fought over, but I don't buy for a second that it's some kind of honour or respect for humanity that stops any world leaders from using WMDs for their nation building.
I don't particularly like the idea of armed robots either, but I have to question whether we can actually "decide not to build them". Sure we as a nation can decide not to build them, but I don't think that will stop anyone else from building them. I'm sure that in the next fifty years there will be a firefight somewhere in the world where both sides have attack robots. As technology allows for more and more power to be concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, the dangers of Despotism grow worse. The only counter to Despotism that I know of is a well informed, well armed public. Do not doubt for a second that there will eventually be semi-autonomous killer robots at the disposal of most government leaders. It is going to happen. Maybe in ten years maybe in fifty years, but it will happen. Now go out there and demand that private citizens be allowed to have a means to stop those robots. Please won't someone think of the children.
One of the more interesting (perhaps only) chances modern science has had to watch the development of a new language is the birth of Nicaraguan Sign Language.
"it doesn't seem fair to fight a war that doesn't put your troops at risk."
Only a fool wants war to be "fair". There are two basic reasons for this:
1. To be fighting a war necessitates that you hold the lives of your countrymen and the ways of your country as superior to those of the country you are fighting. It is impossible to "value everyone equally" and be fighting a war, because there is no reason to preserve your culture or life in preference to that of the enemy. In that light it is impossible to reduce the vulnerabilities of your own soldiers too much.
2. The more equally balanced the sides of a war the longer it will last and the higher the death toll will be before a true victor can emerge. A "fair" war would have the highest possible causalities and damage to both sides, an overwhelming force and decisive victory has the fewest causalities and the least collateral damage.
On the other hand, if I were being terrorized by a robot I(t) wouldn't be worried about (my) family when I(t) blew (me) away.
Advertising in Most first world countries is anti-happiness. As explained by Professor Richard Layard:
For each example you have given on how the US government has not provided adaquit service (schools, roads and the like), please provide an alternative private sector alternative
Some of those things, like roads are not widely available as a private sector business. So let's look at retirement, Social Security costs 15.3% of every paycheck. From everything I've seen, it won't actually be there for me to live off of when I reach retirement age. However, if I save only $500 a month at 4% interest for my 40 year career life span, at 65 I will have $590,980.66. Granted that's not huge, but it's a nice bit better than the nothing I will be getting from Social Security. And that's only if I save $500 a month, if I could save $1250 a month (15% of a $100,000 a year job) then my retirement fund would be $1,477,451.67. Which in a 4% yield savings account would give me $59,098.04 a year to live on in my retirement. So retirement, as managed my the US government sucks worse than a lemonparty link.
Now let's look at schools, I think the Washington Post has already explained this one nicely. There is a Snopes discussion of this very topic, but the main point made there is that private schools are selective, they send back the troublemakers and under performers, but that is not true of all private schools. I would like to point out that the second boarding school I linked to costs less for one year room, board, and education than what DC spends per student on education only.
treadmills and trackballs aren't exactly new or special either. it's all about making their use intuitive and fun. which is something the makers of the wii seem to have succeeded at while the ps2 add-on faded into obscurity.
if you really want to make sure your pet never runs away try this service.
"You young whippersnappers think you have it tough? Back in my day, we couldn't just go out and buy unleaded gasoline. No sir! We had to scrape the lead out with our bare hands!"
What's gasoline, Grandma?
I would hope that 20 years from now, the higher end portable computers would have a direct retinal link or contact lens screen, and use sub-vocals for input. Why look at a screen when you could look at augmented reality? As you said, we are at least half way to the mobile computer you describe with the next generation of the iPhone, I expect that tech to arrive in the next five to ten years. I expect twenty years from now for computer interfaces to be integrated in an almost cyborg like fashion.
Some aspects of this will probably remain optional, but as storage gets smaller and ID programs gain steam, the two are bound to converge. Maybe you won't be able to see photos of various events throughout your life but your: GPS location, website history, purchase history, known associates, employment record, legal history, medical records, etc. will all be recorded. Ten years from now it will all fit in your federal ID that you have to carry in order to travel or make any purchases. Regardless of who wins the next election, it will happen.
I can't fathom why someone would travel 2 hours each way, every day, just to get to the place where you work. Maybe it's cheaper, but aren't the minutes of your life worth more than saving a few bucks? Even if you worked in NY you could find a reasonable (relative to the payscale and market) place to live that's 30 minutes away.
Speaking as someone who lives in NYC, yes you can find a reasonable place to live in town on a middle class paycheck. If you don't mind renting forever (median apartment prices are over $900k) and you don't have kids. As soon as you actually care about the schools and neighborhood cultural ideals, acceptable places to live become amazingly scarce. Most of the towns around NYC where the soccer mom lifestyle exists also are priced that $200k a year salary is the entry level. The median housing prices are around $600K and property taxes are high. So anyone who makes less than the requisite $200K lives farther away, and your don't have to get all that far away for a rush hour commute to take two hours or more. Minutes of your life may be worth more than a few bucks, but your family's standard of living is worth more than a few minutes. This is where the jobs are, so millions of people make the daily trek.
If there are no safety issues involved, then the FCC and the FAA have no place in the discussions.
Sometime when people are forced to stay in close proximity to very annoying people, safety becomes a concern. I've seen tensions escalate very quickly when someone on a subway tells another passenger to turn down their headphones, and subway rides usually last less than half an hour. However, as the repercussions for getting into a fistfight on an airplane are more severe, so too must the regulations on other behaviors be more severe, since the normal coarse for the societal correction of unacceptable behavior is being artificially suppressed.
While many passengers would be grateful for the first person to punch out some cell phone screamer an hour into the flight, that person would still be facing serious legal trouble upon landing. As a fistfight between passengers is not a danger to the airplane's ability to complete it's flight, that would have to be unregulated along side the no cell phones rule.
I wonder if this is the beginning of MS splitting into two different wings to meet different needs. The heavily patented and closed software, which might be appropriate for some clients; and a new open source branch to sell products to clients that will be better by open software.
I know a number of people who ride the commuter trains, and more and more of them are starting to carry these handy little devices. No, no one cares about how legal these are or are not. Turn them on just long enough for the offending phone to lose the call, and they are undetectable.
the amount of people who won't even notice when MS buys out Yahoo.
That number of people is steadily shrinking as Yahoo fights for independence. i think they should have a marketing campaign boasting about their fight against a MS buyout. They will automatically be the good guy because everyone knows that a corporate takeover, lots of people loose their jobs, and the job market is already so shaky that MS can't help but look like greedy evil bastards in the public eye.
Wow, I hadn't realized that crop production could be that agile to respond to announcements so quickly.
On the upside, with a market that active and profitable maybe we can end farm subsidies. I just wish they would make the biofuel out of switchgrass instead of corn.
When corn prices go up for ethanol, more farmers switch from whatever they were growing to corn, because it makes more money.
Corn production is up, and yes that is effecting other food costs, however:"The USDA reports that farmers intend to plant 8 percent fewer acres of corn this year than last. In 2007, farmers planted the highest number of corn acres since World War II....The USDA's report looks at other grains as well. Oat plantings are expected to fall. Sorghum, too. And barley acreage could grow this year " So I guess we should still have some beer supplies coming out of America, the farmers are actually backing off corn production this year. But I don't think Australia's problem isn't corn,it's a drought that has lasted several years. "This lack of rainfall, combined with hotter than average daytime temperatures and strong winds, has led to the rapid deterioration of crop yield potential and in many areas has resulted in total crop failure," ABARE executive director Phillip Glyde said. The three major crops of wheat, barley and canola will amount to 18.0 million tonnes for the year -- about 42 percent below the five-year average but still 4.0 million tonnes above the previous year's output"