Just as a side thought, amidst all this talk of how $900 is an obscene price for a 6-core processor --

It always amazes me how much we have grown to expect the price of amazing things to approach mundane everyday objects. Just think about how little you get for $900 in some of the other things you buy. For $900, you could probably buy a leather couch, a piece of hardware that you yourself could probably build if given a few months, no experience, a hammer and some wood.

Yet we still gripe about we can't believe how a 6-core processor is selling for the extortionate price of $900, a piece of hardware that took trillions of dollars in investment, many hundreds of thousands of people to develop, the great minds of our generations.

By some measures, then, $900 is cheap. But of course, it's all relative to what you come to expect...

sigh. I know it's a bit of an advertising ploy, but still --

It happens so predictably that we try to cut processes to the bare minimum, even when our lives are filled with examples of the rare outlier being not so rare. We assume that because everything is going fine, we can design our control systems/thinking/regulation around the median, and then when the unthinkable happens (more frequently than expected), we're surprised that it turned out so bad.

Let's have one pilot because one pilot only ever lands the plane anyway!

Let's lend to high credit risk borrowers, because ours never default more than one at a time anyway!

etc.

What a great solution, and as always, fixing the wrong problem just because we have a technology to do it. We penalize people for having more than a certain fraction of recyclables in the trash, but do nothing about how much absolute amount of trash there is.

Every kind of recycling incentive program we have is a bandaid to what is really needed -- the prices of things that reflect their true cost to society.

Perhaps someone can explain/frame for me the whole notion of regulating anti-competitive behavior, and how legal authority to regulate is derived/justified from consistent principles, in a nascent industry? Because it seems very case-by-case to me, as well as pick-and-choose based on "what we don't like".

What I mean is that I sometimes don't understand cases like the following:

- Companies making LCD screens are accused of price fixing for charging high prices, yet Apple, which is the only producer of the iPhone, does not count as a monopoly and is not similarly found to be price fixing a (at one point) $600 phone.

- XM radio and Sirius merged, to much scrutiny of the SEC because this would consolidate the industry and "reduce competition". But how was consolidating into one player any different when there was only one player in the industry at the beginning of this technology? Why is government interested now, but not back then?

I guess I'm confused about fundamental questions. When does it become society's right/responsibility to say that a service/product has evolved such that you cannot use your competitive advantage to gain as much as possible from it? Is it when something rises to the level of being a public good / commodity / right?

Wouldn't you be frustrated that if you had a technology you basically created, you were told that you must allow someone else to compete with you and benefit from your work?

Some things are confusing.

This is one issue on which I have to disagree, be unpopular, and say that these kinds of subsidies are necessary. If we leave everything to the cheapest and most affordable existing technology (so that the poor could afford it), we will never get out of being slaves to oil. Having energy/vehicles too cheaply is what is keeping us in all this mess.

In this sense, poor people are the problem (in the sense that most of us non-rich people use gasoline vehicles). Sometimes improving things comes with an upfront cost. And of course rich people buy new technology first. duh.

There's always complexity behind these stories, and it might be interesting for everyone to understand why this development, although a great and useful accomplishment, is not equally useful for all types of astronomy:

Much of astronomy is being pushed by the need to image deeply in the infrared. For example, to discover the most distant objects in the universe, you need to use near- and mid-infrared wavelengths (because objects that are far away are receeding rapidly, hence redshifted). And for this, mostly what you want is raw photon count, not sharpness (although that would be a "nice-to-have" someday).

Unfortunately (for astronomy), the atmosphere absorbs heavily in the infrared wavelengths (aside from a few windows, which give us our passpands), and as a result, a 1 meter telescope in space still beats an 8 meter on the ground, in almost every respect (putting cost aside for a moment...).

At least for infrared work...

I recall that some other cameras, like a Casio I've seen a friend using, also do deblurring, but rather by stacking of rapid subframes (I guess using bright reference points). If I understand correctly, this new method is operated on a single frame. I wonder if anyone has a useful comparison of the hardware requirement/image quality/useability differences between the two methods?

Then on principle, you should be objecting to the fact that child fares on airlines are typically a fraction of the cost of adult fares. How about we raise their fares so that everything is equal, so that we're not penalizing all adults for weighing more than kids?

good luck flying Southwest to London or Japan.

In case you haven't thought about it, there is a structural (as in industry structure) reason that these low cost carriers don't fly internationally.

Two points:

1. The policymakers for an issue like airline/passenger safety should not be forced to pay for their reasonable decisions afterwards. The reason our air travel is safe is because people like pilots and air traffic controllers are independently allowed to make safety calls, without threat of retribution financially or politically directly as a result of their judgments. Everyone in positions of safety administration know the stakes -- it could be much worse if they were made directly accountable for the bill later.

2. But even then, as long as the air traffic stop affected all players, I think no one should be compensated. They all suffer on an equal baseline, and as competitors, no one is unfairly hurt/unhurt by the stoppage. Everyone suffered the same setback, and will have to deal with it. If there are job losses perhaps due to the event, then let the government help through normal channels. But just outright paying for a naturally-caused suspension of operations is ridiculous -- government is about correcting inequity, and there was nothing unequal about this.

well, that's taking it a bit far. I agree they were right to stop the flights, but there definitely is a point at which you consider how much $ you are willing to spend to save a life. We do this every day in insurance decisions, safety decisions, medical decisions, etc. Absolutely we measure lives in dollars.

If it hadn't been millions, but many billions of $ per day, you bet people would be thinking differently about how safe they wanted to be or not.

Maybe they do, in general. But just wait until you have an emergency and need to get somewhere -- I'm sure you'll change your tune and wish that a reasonable solution had been worked on.

I have to add my experience with TimeWarner idiocy here.

About a year ago I called their technical support line on behalf of my aunt in NYC, who had just gotten their HD upgrade or something I don't recall, and the picture was missing the red portion of the signal. (note that your reading that last sentence, there wasn't much room for misunderstanding, was there? You can understand the situation I'm describing, right?)

The conversation began badly, and went downhill from there:

Me: "Hi, we seem to be having a problem with our HD cable signal -- the picture is missing the red channel, so everything looks a little bit blue. I've tested this by swapping out the cables from the RGB (whatever it was), reversing them, so I think it's definitely a problem with your cable box, not our cables or our TV. Can you help me with that?"

Her: "sorry sir, looking in your channel lineup, I don't see any Red Channel."

Me: @#$!%#@

Me: regathering politeness, and for the next 20 minutes: "Sorry, I must not have explained that well -- you know how the tv signal has red/green/blue parts? Well, it seems to be missing the red part, so that the color is off."

Her: "no sir, I don't understand, and please, don't fiddle with the cables, please follow my instruction to turn the unit off and reset it."

after 20 minutes:

Me: "Maam, you don't seem to have the technical knowledge to even understand the problem I'm having -- could you please transfer me to someone who does."

10 more minutes of me getting angry that she won't transfer me. Followed by my filing a complaint with a request to be called back. I get called back, the guy on the line understands the problem immediately, and sends someone out the next day.

I cannot stand incompetence that doesn't recognize itself. And that a customer service assistance unit would staff its helpline with someone of such stupidity.

The other thing I learned -- don't get frustrated with stupidity, just leave. Politely hang up (there's no sense in angering yourself, or offending the moron) and call back until you get someone who knows what they're talking about. And I'm not just talking about with cable companies, I've discovered that this applies about life in general....

can someone explain what the pot is doing? Is it acting as a focusing/collimating device? Because if that were the case, I would expect the signal to be focused in the up direction, which I doubt is where the average wireless signal is coming from. Or is it somehow providing a larger surface area for signal collection in all directions, and focusing it internally to the modem? But I don't understand how that would work. Would love to hear a cogent explanation.

on a side topic, does anyone remember the concept that a Taiwanese engineer showed a few months ago on video, where a neat trick solves the problem of station stops? What was that called?

The train decelerates a little bit coming into a station, and on a parallel track or overhead, a small module containing the new passengers gets up to speed with the train and attaches. Then the passengers can transfer in and out without the train having to slow down much. (And of course, the train dumps the similar module as it enters the station, for disembarking pax).