Think about it practically: scientists have HUGE incentive to discover some big fundamental change in the current thinking (superstar status, Nobel Prize, really cool things named after you, etc.) finding out new things is their JOB. Tons of scientists do what they do because they love it--they dedicate their lives to it--and it's very common for a researcher to work over 80 hours a week.
Unfortunately it seems the public at large does not realize how creative science is. Scientists are trained to do things that have never been done before--to discover new things--and so far they've done an unbelievably good job at it. If you study physics, and you understand it, and you understand how accurate it's predictions are--there's no way you won't be in awe of it. Who is more likely to make a huge discovery like this, some guy in a shed on the weekends who doesn't know what he's doing or ten people who dedicate their lives to science? I know who I'd bet on.
Einstein worked at the patent office because he couldn't find a job teaching. He worked at the patent office as a physicist; as you said he had a degree in physics. I'm not sure calling him an outsider is really valid in this context.
Re:not so much pricing of the unit, as the content
on
Hands-On With The Kindle
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Supposedly the reason Amazon is selling new releases at $10 is because that's their cost from the publishers. Apparently Amazon actually loses money (or makes an unbelievably thin profit) on the sale of new releases when you consider their overhead and costs to Sprint. The idea is that new releases serve as a loss leader and Amazon can generate profits (small ones) on older books and other media. Now you may argue that it's Amazon's fault that they didn't negotiate a price more palatable to you, but in any case it seems that it's really the publishers forcing these prices.
What I would really love to see is a kindle with a color e-ink screen (touch screen would be fantastic) and a store for textbooks. Textbooks are expensive for a lot of reasons, but I think a kindle type device could really bring that cost down significantly for at least some books. For instance, apparently one of my professors (David Griffiths, author of Introduction to Electrodynamics, a standard text in the field of physics) has been fighting with the publisher of his books to bring the cost down. As of now they sell for around $100 each--the publishers apparently wanted to sell them at ~$200 each--with almost no royalties going to him. He has also had big problems with the quality of the books; the third edition of his electro book tends to pretty much fall apart, something he's furious about. I think he would love the idea of eTextbooks. A lot of textbook authors are people too (though some are the evil, sadistic spawn of the flying spaghetti monster), and want to see their books made more affordable for their students. I'd like to see Amazon do the following things:
1. Make textbooks available on a kindle (v2)
2. Sell textbooks for less than their used price. I'd love it if they were under $50 each (textbook prices vary for so many reasons...books with many, large, color images for instance cost more to produce).
3. Sell textbook "upgrades" for a small fee (if the new ebook is $50, something like $15 seems reasonable so long as it doesn't get out of control and major revisions only happen every five years or so. There's no reason why I should have to shell out big bucks for a new version of what I already have.
4. Allow authors to correct errata for free.
5. Forget the publishers--set up publishing services in-house and bring authors closer to their customers (students) and bring down prices further while increasing Amazon's profits!
6. Eliminate sales taxes on textbooks. (Ok I know Amazon can't really do this; it's the fault of government) Sure, 7.75% sales tax doesn't sound like a lot, but when you're buying thousands of dollars worth of books it adds up fast.
If Amazon could do this, even at $400 each kindles would sell like crazy and then they'd really have the book-tech of the future.
What you say is wrong. They did get rid of late fees, and it's a lot cheaper for the consumer. Instead of charging you the price to rent the item if you exceed the rental period ($5 on a two day rental, so if you keep it for a week you pay $5 to rent it and then $15 in late fees) what they do is after the rental period, and a grace period (of at least 6 days on everything) they charge the price of the item to your account (which means it charges to whatever credit card you have linked to your account). If you then bring it back in time (within 30 days of the charge date) they refund the price of the item up to $1.25 which they call a "restocking fee".
Now you can bitch and moan about restocking fees all you want, but to say that $1.25 for an extra 30 days costs you more than $5 for an extra 2 days is completely ridiculous. Yes, the old draconian LackLuster late fee model was pure evil; they were afraid of losing a huge chunk of their business due to Netflix (and a general hatred of Blockbuster), and as a result they replaced it.
The one thing that might still be pure evil about their new model is that if you don't return a disc from a TV series, they charge you for the price of the whole series. For example if you don't return disc 1 of "Band of Brothers" they charge you a ridiculous $80, which to be fair is the actual price of the band of brothers box set. However, recently they seem to have shifted away even from this...it seems now the most they will charge you for a disc not returned for a TV show is $10 (although I think this only applies to TV shows they got on DVD in the last few months, so heroes will only cost you $10, but BoB will still be $80).
Blockbuster's real problem though, is that its inventory system was designed by a 3 year old, and their computer system was designed in the '80s (literally). The new CEO promised that he would fix the inventory system so that stores in the Midwest wouldn't get 500 copies of "Brokeback Mountain" while a store in San Fransisco would get only 50 copies. When you ask the guy behind the counter at Blockbuster if they have a movie...he can't tell you with any reasonable certainty. Once he finally navigates the computer system that is older than he is to find what you were asking for, only to see that his store doesn't carry it, he has absolutely no way to find out if a nearby store has it without calling them and having them repeat the process. He also can't tell you if they carry it online. What can he do if they "might" have it? Help you look...and a good portion of the time he wont be able to find it even if it should be in stock. There are so many other things wrong with Blockbuster it's amazing, but the summary was right on when it said they seem unlikely to change significantly.
Michelson won the 1907 Nobel Prize, basically, due to the very famous null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887. The Michelson interferometer, and Michelson's experiments with them, served as a foundation to the theory of relativity. Michelson had some incorrect hypotheses as to why he got the results he did, but he still got a Nobel.
morgan_greywolf
The problem with most GUTs is that they make assumptions that certain things, like the Standard Model of particle physics, are true. Additionally, all GUTs make assumptions. Not only that, but all of science and mathematics are based on assumptions. You see, at some point assumptions are required. These assumptions aren't exactly outlandish, far from it! You would have an extremely hard time proving that the assumptions they are using are wrong, or incomplete and coming up with new and better ones. It has happened quite a few times (Copernicus for example), but it isn't very often, and it can result in unbelievable fame. Einstein was one of those guys who challenged assumptions and conclusions. Einstein was, partially of course, responsible for the birth of quantum mechanics.
Not only that, but people constantly challenge and check these assumptions as technology progresses. For example, physicists as recently as 2003 (and probably even more recently than that) used an astronomical technique to experimentally determine the weak equivalence principle, an idea originating to Newton way back in 1687 with Principia, to an accuracy of 1 + or - 10^-18. Astonishing!
(The weak equivalence principle is the assumption that when you write F=ma=-G[(M*m)/(r^2)] the little "m" in the middle equals the little "m" on the right.)
These are things that ZombieWomble pointed out when he tried to explain why popular GUTs assume that the Standard Model is true, as I have reproduced below.
ZombieWomble
While it's technically true to state that [the Standard Model is] "unproven" (as are all physical theories, pretty much by definition), it is among the most thoroughly tested scientific theories in history, and has been validated to extremely high degrees of precision. This gives most people some degree of confidence in the theory, even if it may not be fully fleshed out yet.
I would like to add to this. The reason that physicists pursuing a GUT (such as string theory) assume that the Standard Model is correct, is because it is, Higgs boson or no*. A GUT must "reduce to" the predictions of the Standard Model in its limit just as The Special Theory of Relativity (relativistic kinetic energy) reduces to (or does not conflict with) the Newtonian formulation in the classical limit. *The predictions made by the Standard Model, to the limits explored thus far by the Tevatron, agree with experiment.
You responded to ZombieWomble with:
morgan_greywolf
Einstein once criticized quantum physicists for building unproven theories on top of other unproven theories, and I believe the Standard Model was one of them. To this I just have to ask, what's your point? Remember ZombieWomble talking about how all physical theories are unprovable "pretty much by definition"? Einstein publicly criticized a lot of things. To me this criticism is not very interesting, or insightful. Physics is about building the best model we can to describe the universe. If talking about particles being points, strings, or even tiny little Jesus dolls makes the math work out awesomely, who cares that our awesome new GUT that makes novel and accurate predictions says that a photon is actually a little Jesus doll? I sure don't.
One more thing that might interest you: physics is circular. How do you like that?
That's already taken care of. There are multiple independent teams working at the LHC, independently designing and building detectors. At the L.H.C. there are two detectors that are designed to detect the Higgs (or whatever ends up popping out); Atlas, and the Compact Muon Solenoid (C.M.S.). These teams even have independently developed and implemented computer and data systems to sort through the insane amount of data that will pour out of the detectors. On top of this, there's Fermilab which itself may find the Higgs. Also the idea is that these detectors will find evidence of the Higgs multiple times.
So no, they won't necessarily have to spend another $8 billion on new accelerators, detectors etc.
No, the article does not approach the topic from a superstitious angle. In fact, it wouldn't be unreasonable to conclude that the author himself does not believe in the ideas the museum promotes. For example, the section you quoted, "... For the believer, it seems, this museum provides a kind of relief: Finally the world is being shown as it really is, without the distortions of secularism and natural selection." the author does not approach from a superstitious angle. Instead he approaches as an outsider, trying to understand what fundamentalists must feel when they are in the museum. He supposes that they feel some sort of relief as they believe the museum presents is what actually happened.
He talks about what a "visitor steeped in the scientific world view..." would experience without supposition, "...the impact of the museum is a disorienting mix of faith and reason, the exotic and the familiar. Nature here is not "red in tooth and claw," as Tennyson asserted. In fact at first it seems almost as genteel as Eden's dinosaurs. We learn that chameleons, for example, change colors not because that serves as a survival mechanism, but "to 'talk' to other chameleons, to show off their mood, and to adjust to heat and light."
The author is trying to come off as being objective, but he does not try very hard hide his personal beliefs. He even pokes fun, somewhat subtly, at the museum, at first asking if the museum is a "reproduction of a childhood fantasy in which dinosaurs are friends of inquisitive youngsters?" In the sentence after the one which you quoted he also attacks, rather harshly, the museum as a place where reason has been abandoned, "The Creation Museum actually stands the natural history museum on its head. Natural history museums developed out of the Enlightenment: encyclopedic collections of natural objects were made subject to ever more searching forms of inquiry and organization. The natural history museum gave order to the natural world, taming its seeming chaos with the principles of human reason."
The question is, what laws are you going to amend/allow NASA to break? While it might be a great idea to send exclusively homosexuals, swingers, monogamists, seniors, republicans, or whatever discrimination is illegal. Some of you might think that this issue is trivial, that once we decide that we should send just group X we can easily change the law or make an exception but I doubt it would actually work out smoothly.
It's not a fabrication of news, it is a direct response by several journalists to a pseudo-science article that because of its sensationalist nature received a large readership. If it had not been for the ridiculous unsubstantiated claims in the original article, the scientists who have been researching CCD since October (according to the NYT article) would have just continued to do so in quiet until they had real results. Instead, journalists contacted these researches who responded as you should expect them to.
You talk of the media as if it's merely a single individual. Theres a reason certain elements of the media have better reputations than others.
Yours is a complete fabrication of a "post" based on something that's widely known and in the summary.
The New York Times article is also really amusing and funny if you read the article in the Independent. There seem to be a bunch of articles popping up in response to the obviously misleading, fraudulent and otherwise completely unsubstantiated claims made by the sensationalist authors of the Independent article.
From The New York Times article, "Bees vanish, and Scientists Race for Reasons" by ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO:
a number of theories have been posed, and many seem to researchers to be more science fiction than science. People have blamed genetically modified crops, cellular phone towers and high-voltage transmission lines for the disappearances. Or was it a secret plot by Russia or Osama bin Laden to bring down American agriculture? Or, as some blogs have asserted, the rapture of the bees, in which God recalled them to heaven? Researchers have heard it all. See the part in there about cell phones? Hilarious. Way to go NYT.
Worse yet that science writers often mix together vernacular and scientific usage of the word "theory" in their articles, perpetuating this confusion amongst readers who in some cases may come to think of real, major, scientific theories as mere guesses or generalizations.
Like most people, I'm left to try to judge based on my guess at the credibility of various aggregators [sic] and second-hand sources. This is the unfortunate case for most of us. It can be very difficult to identify and weigh the information presented to us; largely due to how we are presented with it. Most of the time outlandish claims or issues that are controversial arise, say on TV or even in certain print publications, no one cites sources properly. Take the original article from the independent as an example, the authors never say what their source is so there is no way to refute their claim*...or substantiate it. The idea, insofar as it is presented in the article, is thereby worthless. Personally I would have stopped reading at the second or third paragraph because of this.
With the climate change issue, people often claim that there exists a consensus among scientists that indeed climate change is real and is a result of human activities, however again you almost never get any citation or way to verify these claims.
Not is all lost though! It can be very easy to find out the facts for yourself, unfortunately very few people realize this in large part because of the inadequate education provided in the mandatory science classes in high school...but that's another matter. In the case of the bees, and the public health risks of cell phones that the article assures us are real and very scary, you can go to a website like http://aps.org/, click on "Policy and Advocacy" and then, "APS Statements" where you will see a statement titled, "Electric and Magnetic Fields and Public Health" (http://aps.org/policy/statements/05_3.cfm) click on it and you'll get a very clear, concise, nontechnical, authoritative stance on the issue at hand. Statements like these, by societies such as the APS, define scientific consensus. You aren't likely to get much better or more satisfying or useful answers than that unless you spend 10 or so years getting a PhD in the field and then a few more years after that researching the topic.
I know this wasn't exactly a short post, but I hope it is clear and helpful for you. Finding out the facts on your own is the best way to go about things dealing with science. In this case it took me about 30 seconds to find what I was looking for to make this post (the APS statement) so it isn't like there is a big time investment to find out for sure. You can probably find statements like this in less time than you would otherwise spend thinking "who should I believe?" Remember, journalists usually aren't scientists, they usually have no idea what they are writing about but even so some do an excellent job; don't trust articles that don't back up claims with verifiable sources. The New York Times generally does a pretty good job (even though their journalists need to learn to stop using the word "theory" in the vernacular).
We will be able to get the funding to build fusion power plants (ITER is going to cost 10billion euros)...will they be commercially viable is another matter entirely.
I guess it's safe to say that before you dropped out of college, and sense then, you never realize that the reason people go to college (or at least the reason why tons of people would love to fork over 40k a year to attend Harvard instead of paying ~2k a year to attend Berkeley, or University of Minor Prestige X) is that they aren't there just to learn. College isn't a big conspiracy, or some big huge artificial thing. I don't think anyone is fooling themselves into thinking that the only way they could learn the material presented in college classes is by taking college classes. The realization that you can learn the course material by going to the public library and just studying books is not new, or interesting. What people pay for, doesn't come from books. The environment (that people pay so much for) is key, you can get so much more out of just being at a college rather than the library that it's unbelievable. On top of that college serves as a certification, reference process, and provides guidance.
As an example, an employer gets a bunch of applications for a job. One of the applications is from a dude who managed a 3.2 in high school and says he spent the last few years at the public library learning all the things he thought college students paid for. On the other hand this guy has some references from managers at local fast food joints that are positively glowing. A lot of the other applications are from a bunch of 4.0GPA "drones" who went to those damned colleges to learn their book things, and they have proof that they learned it in the form of a diploma and grades. They also have good references from their professors...but thats just useless grades stuff, nothing real. A bunch of these people also seem to have documentation and references in regard to some pretty damned impressive and cool internships in the scary and mysterious real world where they produced real things, not mere grades. The rest are from people who have a few years of good work experience (i.e. more than you), did well enough in college, and are otherwise pretty good. So, whose application do you think will be first to be placed in the circular file (trash can = circular file)? Wouldn't be that weird guy who lived in the library would it?
Perhaps you were banking on an interview, if so I just have to ask, what about your application makes it so that it doesn't get immediately chucked? How is your application so impressive that they give you an interview? Also have you ever heard about how companies discriminate based on age? It's crazy, there are tons of cases where a company replaces their aging, very experienced executives with young kids fresh out of the country's MBA programs. Wonder why that is?
Yeah, there are a lot of people who never completed college and have gone on to be very successful (hell, Bill Gates, richest dude ever dropped out of college too! Then again, he dropped out of Harvard...not exactly a place you can easily get to with a 3.2GPA) but I'd love for you to try to show that successful people are more often college dropouts than graduates.
I guess I just don't understand your point.
By the way, as far as world changing people go, check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notable_non-graduat e_alumni_of_Harvard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Harvard_Uni versity_people
The first link is a list of notable people who have attended Harvard but have yet to or did not graduate. Dropouts I guess you could call them. It's a pretty impressive list, but it gets dwarfed by the list of notable graduates, professors and administrators affiliated with Harvard University, I'd say more "world changing people" fall in the second list than the first. Among the Harvard graduates, 7 US presidents. The president gets called the most powerful man alive, You don't get much more world changing than that.
I'm not all bad though Reality Master (very fitting name, very impressive). I agree with o
Exactly, people need to be essentially forced to take classes like math and history despite their objections that at least for their preferential career path the class is "useless". High level math is an amazing thing, even just calculus is amazing in its power and applications. While home from college last summer, for extra cash I tutored the father of one of my friends in calculus. The guy is a brilliant businessman, he has two PhDs and millions in the bank but it had been something like 30 years since he last took calculus and he needed it again because the position he was looking at required him to brush up on his useless abstract mathy skills that have no applications in the real world.
I'm very glad that the show Numb3rs is still on the air, and popular. Hopefully as a result more people will begin to realize the awesome power and usefulness of mathematics.
Also, just as how throwing money at the educational system isn't going to solve the problem, cutting funding to public schools where students preform poorly on a standardized test wont solve the problem either. The latter "solution" seems to be popular today in the US...to my disbelief.
I'm sorry, I was commenting on the AC you replied to than to you. I didn't think you were bashing teachers, but the AC certainly was.
I agree with you, the answer isn't simply that we need to throw money at the problem; something I feel I addressed, at least indirectly. There will always be those who don't want to learn. As I explained, if you don't want to learn you're not going to. Get enough people who don't want to learn or are apathetic to learning and give them even the best teachers with incredible funding...over time, even the ideal teacher will likewise become apathetic and lose the motivation required to be a good teacher, and that can have a hugely negative effect on the other students, however small a percentage are willing and even eager to learn.
Wake up folks, bad apples exist, they really do spoil the whole barrel, and it's high time we do something about it rather than sit around crying about how kids in [developed country x] don't have the necessary [subject Y] skills to compete with kids from [developing country Z] who at the same age are years ahead of the rich kids in [developed country x]. The system should identify the bad apples, and segregate them out. This can be done several ways, and currently is being done in a handful of districts on a small scale. The idea of one size fits all education is ridiculous.
However, you did say that you were unhappy about one of the wealthier areas building additional schools to, as you put it, "just to keep the riff-raff (that is, black and Hispanics) from going to school with their kids. It's insane." What do you think is insane, that the wealthy area is allowed an expenditure you deem unnecessary while there are nearby areas that can hardly afford to keep their overcrowded schools open? Unless we all become financially equal communists tomorrow morning, there really isn't going to be way to keep people from building schools such that the majority of the the poor kids (e.g. minority Hispanics) will not attend the same school as the rich kids (e.g. majority white kids).
We don't want to go back to Plessy v. Ferguson style segregation, but what some people fail to realize, in part because it gets hammered into them that "prejudice, discrimination, and segregation is universally wrong and bad and you're an idiot if you think otherwise," is that there is a difference between being a racist that segregates (even if it is effective, which it often is not) based only on something as superficial as skin color, which is essentially a failure to discriminate effectively, and effective discrimination and segregation without prejudice.
Then again, maybe I'm wrong, but I am unlikely to change my mind until someone can prove me wrong, and until then I will continue to advocate more segregation in our schools, and teaching math and science at a rate that isn't as glacial as it is today. For me things worked out that way in high school merely due to luck...luck that my class had far fewer bad apples than usual, and we were able to avoid many of the problems that people I knew in a different grade faced...at the same school, with the same exact teachers.
In public high schools today, good teachers are likely to rapidly lose motivation as a result of dealing with the students of today. Being a good teacher has more to do with how much effort you put into teaching than how well you did in college or grad school or even as a post doc. Very few people, even very successful people can do a good job teaching off the cuff.
Not all teachers are essentially failures, as you assume. Some teachers are failures who have started teaching high school classes because of the insane job security which makes it nearly impossible to fire even awful teachers. As a result you get people who put in almost no effort but because they are in the teachers union, and haven't sexually assaulted any students yet, keep their job and keep getting raises.
Quite a few teachers started teaching high school because they wanted to. I've seen people who did very well, started teaching and were great teachers for a few years, and then they dropped off and just became another teacher. Students in todays high schools are awful brats. Teaching calculus to most students in high school these days to kids who are more worried about if their drug dealer ran out of pot before friday's party is nigh impossible.
Interestingly when I was in high school, my graduating class was by far better than any class previous or since (for example it would be more typical for my high school to send 3, and on a good year 7 students to top universities or colleges (Ivy league and equivalent) of 300 graduating seniors, my year the number was probably more like 30+...everyone I knew, myself included, got into an amazing school.) The teachers I had constantly, to let off steam, would talk about how much better we were than everyone else. There were a bunch of teachers who postponed their retirement to teach us. They loved us because, for the most part, we were respectful, intelligent, curious, interested in the material, and above all we challenged and inspired our teachers intellectually. In my last few classes in senior year, some of my teachers were literally crying...it was sort of ridiculous and awesome. Since then those who postponed their retirement did retire, others who had no previous plans to retire, did because they said they couldn't go back to teaching awful students. I think maybe around 80% of my teachers had retired two years after I graduated.
The vast majority of my teachers in high school were excellent. The handful of classes I took with the normal students at my HS, stupid required classes, were a joke. Teaching is as much about the effort, participation, willingness and interest of the student as it is about the effort of the teacher. We should segregate public schools so that those who essentially have no interest in being there don't ruin it for everyone else. Even if you don't take classes with those people, and don't associate with them, they can have a negative affect your education.
I'm not sure when you graduated from high school, but as of a few years ago there is a required section on all the applications I submitted that has to be filled out by an administrator at your school (in my case a counselor) where they ask the administrator to evaluate the difficulty of the course load of the student relative to what is offered. For example, if your high school offers no honors, and only a handful of APs and you take all the AP classes (maybe its only 2 or 3) and do well, thus doing well in the most difficult classes available to you, that can look better to admissions people than a kid at a prep school taking nothing but honors and AP classes, but avoiding the more difficult ones. Challenging yourself and then succeeding is the idea, not succeeding at taking it easy.
I'm sorry, but mathematics is useless as a defense mechanism: if someone has a gun on you, you can't put a Riemannian Manifold or anything like that in the way of the bullet, can you?
Only a lazy mathematician would ever allow himself to fall into such a circumstance. Personally I use mathematics to devlop economic models which allow me to effect changes that make it nearly impossible for anyone with even a slight probability of harming me to procure weapons they might use against me. Also before I walk down dark alley ways I employ physical models that calculate the probability of my falling into peril and avoid as necessary. These are things that are relatively effortless for those like myself, and have been proven to be a far more effective and efficient means of self defence than a black belt in tiger-yoda-kung-jujutsu-fu
Also, who said we can't employ techniques to shrink the bullets fired at us to nothing? I've never heard of bullets with holes in them!
The irony is that so far ISPs in the US have been trying to squeeze customers for every penny they can by charging high prices for slow connections but the strategy backfired big time. The big ISPs thought that the internet would grow incredibly rapidly (even faster than it has so far!), and bandwidth demands would increase exponentially thus increasing their profits as they experienced rapid growth and became quite powerful. They prepared for this, they spent a lot of money installing infrastructure (laying fiber etc) to be in position to take advantage of the expected growth and other emerging opportunities (like delivering on demand HD content over their pipes (or are they tubes? I'm so confused, Ted Stevens save me!)).
However as all the dark fiber, busted, sold or merged ISPs, and those who nearly went bankrupt (level 3) makes evident, things didn't work out exactly how they planned. The reason? The high prices they charged for "broadband" choked not only the growth of the internet but stalled the demand for bandwidth--which is how they make money. The US, by far the wealthiest country isn't even in the top 10 of the list of countries according to broadband subscribers per capita; the reason? As any geek will tell you, countries like Japan, South Korea, Sweeden and others which have higher broadband adoption rates per capita have access to the internet at speeds and prices almost unfathomable to those of us in the US paying almost $50/month for sub 1Mb/s DSL that doesn't even work half the time.
The ISPs are now realizing that they can't charge as much as they would like. The ISPs NEED to make very fast broadband (10Mb+, which is still, very slow compared to Japan etc) cheap and easy to get. Charging high prices for broadband makes access to the internet very exclusive, so instead of netflix being a company that, from the start, offered on demand movies, they just offered a list and sent you DVDs on loan through the MAIL, bypassing the ISPs tube thingys and a HUGE potential source of revenue. $25/month for 56k was neat, but in the end it's useless, bad for buisness and worse for ISPs.
It's not all bad though, the ISPs at least seem to have realized this and in many cases have decreased prices drastically. Cox used to charge $50/month for 3Mb/s cable, recently they bumped up the speed (for a second time) to 12Mb/s for the same price, despite inflation, despite increased demand, despite the weak dollar. Verizon is rolling out FioS at even higher speeds. The internet is responding in kind...just as the ISPs predicted so long ago. Netflix now offers streaming DVDs, so does itunes. Youtube is a huge success. These are things that never would have happened a few years ago, because they would have failed. All that fiber ISPs planted so long ago is finally starting to get used, companies like level 3 are much healthier and I can't wait for even faster speeds.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Think about it practically: scientists have HUGE incentive to discover some big fundamental change in the current thinking (superstar status, Nobel Prize, really cool things named after you, etc.) finding out new things is their JOB. Tons of scientists do what they do because they love it--they dedicate their lives to it--and it's very common for a researcher to work over 80 hours a week.
Unfortunately it seems the public at large does not realize how creative science is. Scientists are trained to do things that have never been done before--to discover new things--and so far they've done an unbelievably good job at it. If you study physics, and you understand it, and you understand how accurate it's predictions are--there's no way you won't be in awe of it. Who is more likely to make a huge discovery like this, some guy in a shed on the weekends who doesn't know what he's doing or ten people who dedicate their lives to science? I know who I'd bet on.
Einstein worked at the patent office because he couldn't find a job teaching. He worked at the patent office as a physicist; as you said he had a degree in physics. I'm not sure calling him an outsider is really valid in this context.
Supposedly the reason Amazon is selling new releases at $10 is because that's their cost from the publishers. Apparently Amazon actually loses money (or makes an unbelievably thin profit) on the sale of new releases when you consider their overhead and costs to Sprint. The idea is that new releases serve as a loss leader and Amazon can generate profits (small ones) on older books and other media. Now you may argue that it's Amazon's fault that they didn't negotiate a price more palatable to you, but in any case it seems that it's really the publishers forcing these prices.
What I would really love to see is a kindle with a color e-ink screen (touch screen would be fantastic) and a store for textbooks. Textbooks are expensive for a lot of reasons, but I think a kindle type device could really bring that cost down significantly for at least some books. For instance, apparently one of my professors (David Griffiths, author of Introduction to Electrodynamics, a standard text in the field of physics) has been fighting with the publisher of his books to bring the cost down. As of now they sell for around $100 each--the publishers apparently wanted to sell them at ~$200 each--with almost no royalties going to him. He has also had big problems with the quality of the books; the third edition of his electro book tends to pretty much fall apart, something he's furious about. I think he would love the idea of eTextbooks. A lot of textbook authors are people too (though some are the evil, sadistic spawn of the flying spaghetti monster), and want to see their books made more affordable for their students. I'd like to see Amazon do the following things:
1. Make textbooks available on a kindle (v2)
2. Sell textbooks for less than their used price. I'd love it if they were under $50 each (textbook prices vary for so many reasons...books with many, large, color images for instance cost more to produce).
3. Sell textbook "upgrades" for a small fee (if the new ebook is $50, something like $15 seems reasonable so long as it doesn't get out of control and major revisions only happen every five years or so. There's no reason why I should have to shell out big bucks for a new version of what I already have.
4. Allow authors to correct errata for free.
5. Forget the publishers--set up publishing services in-house and bring authors closer to their customers (students) and bring down prices further while increasing Amazon's profits!
6. Eliminate sales taxes on textbooks. (Ok I know Amazon can't really do this; it's the fault of government) Sure, 7.75% sales tax doesn't sound like a lot, but when you're buying thousands of dollars worth of books it adds up fast.
If Amazon could do this, even at $400 each kindles would sell like crazy and then they'd really have the book-tech of the future.
What you say is wrong. They did get rid of late fees, and it's a lot cheaper for the consumer. Instead of charging you the price to rent the item if you exceed the rental period ($5 on a two day rental, so if you keep it for a week you pay $5 to rent it and then $15 in late fees) what they do is after the rental period, and a grace period (of at least 6 days on everything) they charge the price of the item to your account (which means it charges to whatever credit card you have linked to your account). If you then bring it back in time (within 30 days of the charge date) they refund the price of the item up to $1.25 which they call a "restocking fee".
Now you can bitch and moan about restocking fees all you want, but to say that $1.25 for an extra 30 days costs you more than $5 for an extra 2 days is completely ridiculous. Yes, the old draconian LackLuster late fee model was pure evil; they were afraid of losing a huge chunk of their business due to Netflix (and a general hatred of Blockbuster), and as a result they replaced it.
The one thing that might still be pure evil about their new model is that if you don't return a disc from a TV series, they charge you for the price of the whole series. For example if you don't return disc 1 of "Band of Brothers" they charge you a ridiculous $80, which to be fair is the actual price of the band of brothers box set. However, recently they seem to have shifted away even from this...it seems now the most they will charge you for a disc not returned for a TV show is $10 (although I think this only applies to TV shows they got on DVD in the last few months, so heroes will only cost you $10, but BoB will still be $80).
Blockbuster's real problem though, is that its inventory system was designed by a 3 year old, and their computer system was designed in the '80s (literally). The new CEO promised that he would fix the inventory system so that stores in the Midwest wouldn't get 500 copies of "Brokeback Mountain" while a store in San Fransisco would get only 50 copies. When you ask the guy behind the counter at Blockbuster if they have a movie...he can't tell you with any reasonable certainty. Once he finally navigates the computer system that is older than he is to find what you were asking for, only to see that his store doesn't carry it, he has absolutely no way to find out if a nearby store has it without calling them and having them repeat the process. He also can't tell you if they carry it online. What can he do if they "might" have it? Help you look...and a good portion of the time he wont be able to find it even if it should be in stock. There are so many other things wrong with Blockbuster it's amazing, but the summary was right on when it said they seem unlikely to change significantly.
Michelson won the 1907 Nobel Prize, basically, due to the very famous null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887. The Michelson interferometer, and Michelson's experiments with them, served as a foundation to the theory of relativity. Michelson had some incorrect hypotheses as to why he got the results he did, but he still got a Nobel.
Sorry if my sarcasm meter is too damaged.
Not only that, but people constantly challenge and check these assumptions as technology progresses. For example, physicists as recently as 2003 (and probably even more recently than that) used an astronomical technique to experimentally determine the weak equivalence principle, an idea originating to Newton way back in 1687 with Principia, to an accuracy of 1 + or - 10^-18. Astonishing!
(The weak equivalence principle is the assumption that when you write F=ma=-G[(M*m)/(r^2)] the little "m" in the middle equals the little "m" on the right.)
These are things that ZombieWomble pointed out when he tried to explain why popular GUTs assume that the Standard Model is true, as I have reproduced below.
ZombieWomble While it's technically true to state that [the Standard Model is] "unproven" (as are all physical theories, pretty much by definition), it is among the most thoroughly tested scientific theories in history, and has been validated to extremely high degrees of precision. This gives most people some degree of confidence in the theory, even if it may not be fully fleshed out yet.
I would like to add to this. The reason that physicists pursuing a GUT (such as string theory) assume that the Standard Model is correct, is because it is, Higgs boson or no*. A GUT must "reduce to" the predictions of the Standard Model in its limit just as The Special Theory of Relativity (relativistic kinetic energy) reduces to (or does not conflict with) the Newtonian formulation in the classical limit. *The predictions made by the Standard Model, to the limits explored thus far by the Tevatron, agree with experiment.
You responded to ZombieWomble with:
morgan_greywolf Einstein once criticized quantum physicists for building unproven theories on top of other unproven theories, and I believe the Standard Model was one of them. To this I just have to ask, what's your point? Remember ZombieWomble talking about how all physical theories are unprovable "pretty much by definition"? Einstein publicly criticized a lot of things. To me this criticism is not very interesting, or insightful. Physics is about building the best model we can to describe the universe. If talking about particles being points, strings, or even tiny little Jesus dolls makes the math work out awesomely, who cares that our awesome new GUT that makes novel and accurate predictions says that a photon is actually a little Jesus doll? I sure don't.
One more thing that might interest you: physics is circular. How do you like that?
That's already taken care of. There are multiple independent teams working at the LHC, independently designing and building detectors. At the L.H.C. there are two detectors that are designed to detect the Higgs (or whatever ends up popping out); Atlas, and the Compact Muon Solenoid (C.M.S.). These teams even have independently developed and implemented computer and data systems to sort through the insane amount of data that will pour out of the detectors. On top of this, there's Fermilab which itself may find the Higgs. Also the idea is that these detectors will find evidence of the Higgs multiple times.
So no, they won't necessarily have to spend another $8 billion on new accelerators, detectors etc.
No, the article does not approach the topic from a superstitious angle. In fact, it wouldn't be unreasonable to conclude that the author himself does not believe in the ideas the museum promotes. For example, the section you quoted, "... For the believer, it seems, this museum provides a kind of relief: Finally the world is being shown as it really is, without the distortions of secularism and natural selection." the author does not approach from a superstitious angle. Instead he approaches as an outsider, trying to understand what fundamentalists must feel when they are in the museum. He supposes that they feel some sort of relief as they believe the museum presents is what actually happened.
:)
He talks about what a "visitor steeped in the scientific world view..." would experience without supposition, "...the impact of the museum is a disorienting mix of faith and reason, the exotic and the familiar. Nature here is not "red in tooth and claw," as Tennyson asserted. In fact at first it seems almost as genteel as Eden's dinosaurs. We learn that chameleons, for example, change colors not because that serves as a survival mechanism, but "to 'talk' to other chameleons, to show off their mood, and to adjust to heat and light."
The author is trying to come off as being objective, but he does not try very hard hide his personal beliefs. He even pokes fun, somewhat subtly, at the museum, at first asking if the museum is a "reproduction of a childhood fantasy in which dinosaurs are friends of inquisitive youngsters?" In the sentence after the one which you quoted he also attacks, rather harshly, the museum as a place where reason has been abandoned, "The Creation Museum actually stands the natural history museum on its head. Natural history museums developed out of the Enlightenment: encyclopedic collections of natural objects were made subject to ever more searching forms of inquiry and organization. The natural history museum gave order to the natural world, taming its seeming chaos with the principles of human reason."
So then, no need for weeping.
The question is, what laws are you going to amend/allow NASA to break? While it might be a great idea to send exclusively homosexuals, swingers, monogamists, seniors, republicans, or whatever discrimination is illegal. Some of you might think that this issue is trivial, that once we decide that we should send just group X we can easily change the law or make an exception but I doubt it would actually work out smoothly.
Additionally, as far as I can tell, the paper has not been published.
It's not a fabrication of news, it is a direct response by several journalists to a pseudo-science article that because of its sensationalist nature received a large readership. If it had not been for the ridiculous unsubstantiated claims in the original article, the scientists who have been researching CCD since October (according to the NYT article) would have just continued to do so in quiet until they had real results. Instead, journalists contacted these researches who responded as you should expect them to.
You talk of the media as if it's merely a single individual. Theres a reason certain elements of the media have better reputations than others.
Yours is a complete fabrication of a "post" based on something that's widely known and in the summary.
From The New York Times article, "Bees vanish, and Scientists Race for Reasons" by ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO: a number of theories have been posed, and many seem to researchers to be more science fiction than science. People have blamed genetically modified crops, cellular phone towers and high-voltage transmission lines for the disappearances. Or was it a secret plot by Russia or Osama bin Laden to bring down American agriculture? Or, as some blogs have asserted, the rapture of the bees, in which God recalled them to heaven? Researchers have heard it all. See the part in there about cell phones? Hilarious. Way to go NYT.
Worse yet that science writers often mix together vernacular and scientific usage of the word "theory" in their articles, perpetuating this confusion amongst readers who in some cases may come to think of real, major, scientific theories as mere guesses or generalizations.
With the climate change issue, people often claim that there exists a consensus among scientists that indeed climate change is real and is a result of human activities, however again you almost never get any citation or way to verify these claims.
Not is all lost though! It can be very easy to find out the facts for yourself, unfortunately very few people realize this in large part because of the inadequate education provided in the mandatory science classes in high school...but that's another matter. In the case of the bees, and the public health risks of cell phones that the article assures us are real and very scary, you can go to a website like http://aps.org/, click on "Policy and Advocacy" and then, "APS Statements" where you will see a statement titled, "Electric and Magnetic Fields and Public Health" (http://aps.org/policy/statements/05_3.cfm) click on it and you'll get a very clear, concise, nontechnical, authoritative stance on the issue at hand. Statements like these, by societies such as the APS, define scientific consensus. You aren't likely to get much better or more satisfying or useful answers than that unless you spend 10 or so years getting a PhD in the field and then a few more years after that researching the topic.
I know this wasn't exactly a short post, but I hope it is clear and helpful for you. Finding out the facts on your own is the best way to go about things dealing with science. In this case it took me about 30 seconds to find what I was looking for to make this post (the APS statement) so it isn't like there is a big time investment to find out for sure. You can probably find statements like this in less time than you would otherwise spend thinking "who should I believe?" Remember, journalists usually aren't scientists, they usually have no idea what they are writing about but even so some do an excellent job; don't trust articles that don't back up claims with verifiable sources. The New York Times generally does a pretty good job (even though their journalists need to learn to stop using the word "theory" in the vernacular).
*They do cite some sources in the article, but they make many claims that go without any citation.
Wikipedia article on the APS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Physical_So
You mean reactors like ITER wont get the funding they've been promised already? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
We will be able to get the funding to build fusion power plants (ITER is going to cost 10billion euros)...will they be commercially viable is another matter entirely.
I don't think you understood the GP. The state of inner-city education, and what you call "uniformity" support the GP.
I guess it's safe to say that before you dropped out of college, and sense then, you never realize that the reason people go to college (or at least the reason why tons of people would love to fork over 40k a year to attend Harvard instead of paying ~2k a year to attend Berkeley, or University of Minor Prestige X) is that they aren't there just to learn. College isn't a big conspiracy, or some big huge artificial thing. I don't think anyone is fooling themselves into thinking that the only way they could learn the material presented in college classes is by taking college classes. The realization that you can learn the course material by going to the public library and just studying books is not new, or interesting. What people pay for, doesn't come from books. The environment (that people pay so much for) is key, you can get so much more out of just being at a college rather than the library that it's unbelievable. On top of that college serves as a certification, reference process, and provides guidance.
As an example, an employer gets a bunch of applications for a job. One of the applications is from a dude who managed a 3.2 in high school and says he spent the last few years at the public library learning all the things he thought college students paid for. On the other hand this guy has some references from managers at local fast food joints that are positively glowing. A lot of the other applications are from a bunch of 4.0GPA "drones" who went to those damned colleges to learn their book things, and they have proof that they learned it in the form of a diploma and grades. They also have good references from their professors...but thats just useless grades stuff, nothing real. A bunch of these people also seem to have documentation and references in regard to some pretty damned impressive and cool internships in the scary and mysterious real world where they produced real things, not mere grades. The rest are from people who have a few years of good work experience (i.e. more than you), did well enough in college, and are otherwise pretty good. So, whose application do you think will be first to be placed in the circular file (trash can = circular file)? Wouldn't be that weird guy who lived in the library would it?
Perhaps you were banking on an interview, if so I just have to ask, what about your application makes it so that it doesn't get immediately chucked? How is your application so impressive that they give you an interview? Also have you ever heard about how companies discriminate based on age? It's crazy, there are tons of cases where a company replaces their aging, very experienced executives with young kids fresh out of the country's MBA programs. Wonder why that is?
Yeah, there are a lot of people who never completed college and have gone on to be very successful (hell, Bill Gates, richest dude ever dropped out of college too! Then again, he dropped out of Harvard...not exactly a place you can easily get to with a 3.2GPA) but I'd love for you to try to show that successful people are more often college dropouts than graduates.
I guess I just don't understand your point.
By the way, as far as world changing people go, check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notable_non-graduat e_alumni_of_Harvard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Harvard_Uni versity_people
The first link is a list of notable people who have attended Harvard but have yet to or did not graduate. Dropouts I guess you could call them. It's a pretty impressive list, but it gets dwarfed by the list of notable graduates, professors and administrators affiliated with Harvard University, I'd say more "world changing people" fall in the second list than the first. Among the Harvard graduates, 7 US presidents. The president gets called the most powerful man alive, You don't get much more world changing than that.
I'm not all bad though Reality Master (very fitting name, very impressive). I agree with o
Exactly, people need to be essentially forced to take classes like math and history despite their objections that at least for their preferential career path the class is "useless". High level math is an amazing thing, even just calculus is amazing in its power and applications. While home from college last summer, for extra cash I tutored the father of one of my friends in calculus. The guy is a brilliant businessman, he has two PhDs and millions in the bank but it had been something like 30 years since he last took calculus and he needed it again because the position he was looking at required him to brush up on his useless abstract mathy skills that have no applications in the real world.
I'm very glad that the show Numb3rs is still on the air, and popular. Hopefully as a result more people will begin to realize the awesome power and usefulness of mathematics.
Also, just as how throwing money at the educational system isn't going to solve the problem, cutting funding to public schools where students preform poorly on a standardized test wont solve the problem either. The latter "solution" seems to be popular today in the US...to my disbelief.
I'm sorry, I was commenting on the AC you replied to than to you. I didn't think you were bashing teachers, but the AC certainly was.
I agree with you, the answer isn't simply that we need to throw money at the problem; something I feel I addressed, at least indirectly. There will always be those who don't want to learn. As I explained, if you don't want to learn you're not going to. Get enough people who don't want to learn or are apathetic to learning and give them even the best teachers with incredible funding...over time, even the ideal teacher will likewise become apathetic and lose the motivation required to be a good teacher, and that can have a hugely negative effect on the other students, however small a percentage are willing and even eager to learn.
Wake up folks, bad apples exist, they really do spoil the whole barrel, and it's high time we do something about it rather than sit around crying about how kids in [developed country x] don't have the necessary [subject Y] skills to compete with kids from [developing country Z] who at the same age are years ahead of the rich kids in [developed country x]. The system should identify the bad apples, and segregate them out. This can be done several ways, and currently is being done in a handful of districts on a small scale. The idea of one size fits all education is ridiculous.
However, you did say that you were unhappy about one of the wealthier areas building additional schools to, as you put it, "just to keep the riff-raff (that is, black and Hispanics) from going to school with their kids. It's insane." What do you think is insane, that the wealthy area is allowed an expenditure you deem unnecessary while there are nearby areas that can hardly afford to keep their overcrowded schools open? Unless we all become financially equal communists tomorrow morning, there really isn't going to be way to keep people from building schools such that the majority of the the poor kids (e.g. minority Hispanics) will not attend the same school as the rich kids (e.g. majority white kids).
We don't want to go back to Plessy v. Ferguson style segregation, but what some people fail to realize, in part because it gets hammered into them that "prejudice, discrimination, and segregation is universally wrong and bad and you're an idiot if you think otherwise," is that there is a difference between being a racist that segregates (even if it is effective, which it often is not) based only on something as superficial as skin color, which is essentially a failure to discriminate effectively, and effective discrimination and segregation without prejudice.
Then again, maybe I'm wrong, but I am unlikely to change my mind until someone can prove me wrong, and until then I will continue to advocate more segregation in our schools, and teaching math and science at a rate that isn't as glacial as it is today. For me things worked out that way in high school merely due to luck...luck that my class had far fewer bad apples than usual, and we were able to avoid many of the problems that people I knew in a different grade faced...at the same school, with the same exact teachers.
In public high schools today, good teachers are likely to rapidly lose motivation as a result of dealing with the students of today. Being a good teacher has more to do with how much effort you put into teaching than how well you did in college or grad school or even as a post doc. Very few people, even very successful people can do a good job teaching off the cuff.
Not all teachers are essentially failures, as you assume. Some teachers are failures who have started teaching high school classes because of the insane job security which makes it nearly impossible to fire even awful teachers. As a result you get people who put in almost no effort but because they are in the teachers union, and haven't sexually assaulted any students yet, keep their job and keep getting raises.
Quite a few teachers started teaching high school because they wanted to. I've seen people who did very well, started teaching and were great teachers for a few years, and then they dropped off and just became another teacher. Students in todays high schools are awful brats. Teaching calculus to most students in high school these days to kids who are more worried about if their drug dealer ran out of pot before friday's party is nigh impossible.
Interestingly when I was in high school, my graduating class was by far better than any class previous or since (for example it would be more typical for my high school to send 3, and on a good year 7 students to top universities or colleges (Ivy league and equivalent) of 300 graduating seniors, my year the number was probably more like 30+...everyone I knew, myself included, got into an amazing school.) The teachers I had constantly, to let off steam, would talk about how much better we were than everyone else. There were a bunch of teachers who postponed their retirement to teach us. They loved us because, for the most part, we were respectful, intelligent, curious, interested in the material, and above all we challenged and inspired our teachers intellectually. In my last few classes in senior year, some of my teachers were literally crying...it was sort of ridiculous and awesome. Since then those who postponed their retirement did retire, others who had no previous plans to retire, did because they said they couldn't go back to teaching awful students. I think maybe around 80% of my teachers had retired two years after I graduated.
The vast majority of my teachers in high school were excellent. The handful of classes I took with the normal students at my HS, stupid required classes, were a joke. Teaching is as much about the effort, participation, willingness and interest of the student as it is about the effort of the teacher. We should segregate public schools so that those who essentially have no interest in being there don't ruin it for everyone else. Even if you don't take classes with those people, and don't associate with them, they can have a negative affect your education.
I'm not sure when you graduated from high school, but as of a few years ago there is a required section on all the applications I submitted that has to be filled out by an administrator at your school (in my case a counselor) where they ask the administrator to evaluate the difficulty of the course load of the student relative to what is offered. For example, if your high school offers no honors, and only a handful of APs and you take all the AP classes (maybe its only 2 or 3) and do well, thus doing well in the most difficult classes available to you, that can look better to admissions people than a kid at a prep school taking nothing but honors and AP classes, but avoiding the more difficult ones. Challenging yourself and then succeeding is the idea, not succeeding at taking it easy.
Only a lazy mathematician would ever allow himself to fall into such a circumstance. Personally I use mathematics to devlop economic models which allow me to effect changes that make it nearly impossible for anyone with even a slight probability of harming me to procure weapons they might use against me. Also before I walk down dark alley ways I employ physical models that calculate the probability of my falling into peril and avoid as necessary. These are things that are relatively effortless for those like myself, and have been proven to be a far more effective and efficient means of self defence than a black belt in tiger-yoda-kung-jujutsu-fu
Also, who said we can't employ techniques to shrink the bullets fired at us to nothing? I've never heard of bullets with holes in them!
But dealing with five levels of useless monkeys who can't even read the scripts is so much more fun!
The irony is that so far ISPs in the US have been trying to squeeze customers for every penny they can by charging high prices for slow connections but the strategy backfired big time. The big ISPs thought that the internet would grow incredibly rapidly (even faster than it has so far!), and bandwidth demands would increase exponentially thus increasing their profits as they experienced rapid growth and became quite powerful. They prepared for this, they spent a lot of money installing infrastructure (laying fiber etc) to be in position to take advantage of the expected growth and other emerging opportunities (like delivering on demand HD content over their pipes (or are they tubes? I'm so confused, Ted Stevens save me!)).
:)
However as all the dark fiber, busted, sold or merged ISPs, and those who nearly went bankrupt (level 3) makes evident, things didn't work out exactly how they planned. The reason? The high prices they charged for "broadband" choked not only the growth of the internet but stalled the demand for bandwidth--which is how they make money. The US, by far the wealthiest country isn't even in the top 10 of the list of countries according to broadband subscribers per capita; the reason? As any geek will tell you, countries like Japan, South Korea, Sweeden and others which have higher broadband adoption rates per capita have access to the internet at speeds and prices almost unfathomable to those of us in the US paying almost $50/month for sub 1Mb/s DSL that doesn't even work half the time.
The ISPs are now realizing that they can't charge as much as they would like. The ISPs NEED to make very fast broadband (10Mb+, which is still, very slow compared to Japan etc) cheap and easy to get. Charging high prices for broadband makes access to the internet very exclusive, so instead of netflix being a company that, from the start, offered on demand movies, they just offered a list and sent you DVDs on loan through the MAIL, bypassing the ISPs tube thingys and a HUGE potential source of revenue. $25/month for 56k was neat, but in the end it's useless, bad for buisness and worse for ISPs.
It's not all bad though, the ISPs at least seem to have realized this and in many cases have decreased prices drastically. Cox used to charge $50/month for 3Mb/s cable, recently they bumped up the speed (for a second time) to 12Mb/s for the same price, despite inflation, despite increased demand, despite the weak dollar. Verizon is rolling out FioS at even higher speeds. The internet is responding in kind...just as the ISPs predicted so long ago. Netflix now offers streaming DVDs, so does itunes. Youtube is a huge success. These are things that never would have happened a few years ago, because they would have failed. All that fiber ISPs planted so long ago is finally starting to get used, companies like level 3 are much healthier and I can't wait for even faster speeds.