There are some cases where a regulated monopoly can deliver services more efficiently and cheaper than a free market system can, particularly when there are high infrastructure costs. Consider the water company - the distribution system just doesn't lend itself to a competitive structure. Imagine if you have several competing water companies in your town. They have the choice of creating a massively duplicitous distribution system or cooperating to create a single system, sharing the capacity. In the first case, the distribution system is amortized over a much smaller customer base than a single system and in the second case, the companies effectively create a monopoly.

With a public utility, the company exists in a non-competitive environment in exchange for subjecting itself to strict pricing regulations that limit the company's profits.

I guess that a case could be made for a telephone service-like system, where one water company would own the infrastructure and sell the water to another company who would resell it to the end user, but, like the telephone system, that just seems to introduce a new cost layer into the system. At some point, the product, whether it's water, sewer, telephone or whatever, is provided by a regulated monopoly.

That makes sense for a technology-type service, where the competition from the service providers drives innovation in terms of new services (call waiting and caller ID did not used to be ubiquitous). In other cases, there's only so much that competition can do to make the faucets run and the toilets flush.

As it happens, in my town, the water, sewer and trash are all small companies that service just my town. They've got monopolies, but they're not big corporations. And where my folks live, even the cable company is a small outfit. Not all monopolies are big corporations. And not all monopolies are bad.

Yes! Everybody get off the Internet. That way there will be more room for me!

Just to let you know, high schools don't grant degrees.

And never underestimate the value of (social) networking.

And all this time I thought that spam was going to cause the Internet to melt down. Maybe we need new terminology. Instead of "melt down", it should be "Global Internet Change".

I've got a CD-RW in my safe deposit box at the bank. Whenever enough stuff changes, I just take a new one down and bring the old one back. There are instructions on the disc for what to do with the information - who to contact, what passwords go to which accounts, all that stuff. My mom and dad have done the same thing.

One of the best things that you can do for those that you leave behind is to make your passing as easy as possible. Don't die and take the secrets that your family needs to get on with life to your grave. Unless you were a heartless bastard, they'll probably be upset enough that you're gone. No need to make it worse.

I'll second that. I graduated from Boise State University, where Jake Baker teaches. I was lucky enough to take a few classes from him before he became chair of the EE department. He's a hell of a professor and wrote some very good books. Appropo to nothing, he was in the Marines - the GI bill paid for his undergrad degree. You can definitely tell when you're around him.

All we are saying is give Pease a chance.

Shampoo is for posers. I use Realpoo.

My question is, "Does it come with nutty scientific theories included?"

I guess it depends upon what you're surfing. If it's nothing but text, yes, it would be about twice as fast. Add in .png or .jpg and it's most definitely slower. Add in any noise on the phone line and performance drops even more. And if the phone system is digital or if there are any coils or multiplexing systems, you're completely out of luck.

I'm not gonna get into paranoia issues. I'm just saying that you're not going to get the performance that you think you are out of a dialup compression scheme.

v.44 works great for easily compressed data such as text files. Not so much for already-compressed data like...mp3s. Binary data might see 50%-60% increased throughput over regular old 53Kb uncompressed speed. The only way that you're going to see 300Kb/s transfer rates is on a plain old text file. Sorry.

You're exactly right - undergrad DiffEQ is more of a "Survey of Differential Equations". It's an overview of "safe" equations - most all of the work has answers that are trivial to find. My M410 professor always joked that his job was to protect us from differential equations. That being said, 300 or 400 level DiffEQ serves as a good foundation for more advanced classes in the subject.

My area of expertise is in three-dimensional electric field modeling. It's very frustrating and enlightening at the same time. And difficult to craft mathematical models that can converge on a solution. My feeling, from a non math major (my degrees are in electrical engineering), is that a career involving differential equations will be one that requires tenacity and perseverance.

If you have to explain the joke...

I wonder if it would be just as easy to take them out?

At my company, interns who are freshmen and sophomores are paid at 50% of the salary of the position that they are filling. Juniors are paid at 60% and seniors are paid at 75%. We hire interns to fill "real" engineering positions. For example, in my area, if we have an open simulation engineer req and we hire an (usually a senior) intern to fill it for the summer, that intern will actually do the job of a simulation engineer. And, if the intern is from our local university, the job will usually continue through the school year.

I started as an intern, kept interning through my senior year and continued as a full time employee after I graduated. For most of our engineers, that's almost the only way to get hired in this department - turnover is extraordinarily low. The last time somebody quit was maybe five years ago and she'd been here for ten years. We've had some internal promotions, but all the openings were filled with interns who then came back to work full time when they graduated.

As an aside (well, this whole post is almost an aside), that's a question for you to ask during your intervew: "What is the turnover rate here?" It might give you a little insight on how things are going in the company that you're considering working for.

Oh, as for my wife, when she interned in a social services job, she got paid nothing, which was typical for interns in her field of work.