The Rational Mind

Virgin America is trying to become the nation’s newest low cost air carrier (complete with touch screen displays, vod, satellite tv, broadband Internet and then some), but has been denied by the Department of Transportation. Virgin makes their case in the video seen in this story and asks for the publics help in lobbying support.

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Is it reasonable to expect all high-tech products coming out today to be cheaply available in the future?

Of course it’s a truism nowadays that electronics are getting better and cheaper all the time, but I wonder if we can generalize to the following argument:

Consumer electronic products (I am speaking mostly about audio/video/computer products) have three somewhat unique properties. First, they are relatively low bandwidth and low power, due to the hardware limitations of homes and consumption by a few people. Second, they are mass-produced. Third, they are mostly information products, which means that are not limited to any particular form of material.

These properties are especially suitable to rapid innovation and a trend towards automation of production. The trend has accelerated with the shift from analog to digital, which makes data integrity much easier. The key to the process is that increasing automation shifts production costs from manufacturing and materials to design. More and more of a products retail costs becomes intellectual property. For example, low-end DVD players can be found for under $30. I read somewhere that the licensing required to decode DVDs alone costs about $20. (This is also about the cost of a DVD plug-in for Windows Media Player.)

Are the any inherent cost factors I’m overlooking?

Let me put the question another way: today or soon, a $3,000 LCD TV might cost $30 in raw materials and $30 in labor, and the rest in intellectual property. (Those numbers are WAGs.) Is there any reason to think that it would not be $60 in 15 years, when the IP has expired and/or been reverse-engineered?

Discuss here.

More on this film here.

This would be funny if it weren’t true.

I’ve uploaded some new photos to Flickr.

While playing with my new HP Photosmart R927 camera, I noticed some that it had some interesting built-in effects, such as the comparison of original to result below. Other effects include watercolor, borders, color adjustments, retro, vintage, and even a slimming control. But the coolest feature is the built in photo adviser, which analyzes your photo and offers advice for better shots in-camera.

No doubt all of this is made possible by the exponential growth in memory and processing power. Increasingly, even the most mundane devices are getting processing capabilities that rival the desktop computers of a few years back. My TV has a USB port to upgrade the operating system, my cell phone runs Java, my router runs Linux, my short-lived Epson printer repaired old photos and spit out shiny new ones with a single click. The focus of current development is making devices more functional and independent. What’s next? I think the next great challenge will be to make them all talk to each other, seamlessly and without wires.

From the Center for Consumer Freedom:

Wired writes about Americans who “outsource” their medical procedures to India. Luxurious treatment abroad used to be only available to the rich – now ordinary Americans can save 2/3 of the cost of operations by going abroad. Besides the difference in wage rates, why do you think medical procedures are so much cheaper in India? Could medical liability laws and the FDA have something to do with it?

Learn more on how to start a rehab center from scratch here at this site. Help as many people as you can by starting a rehab center.

Bruce Bawer writes in the New York Sun about Sweden’s “soft dictatorship:”

. …the official view was neatly captured in a post-September 11 editorial in the nation’s largest newspaper, Aftonbladet, which assured readers that the terrorists who attacked New York and Washington weren’t Sweden’s enemies but simply hated ” U.S. imperialism,” a reasonable position given that “the U.S. is the greatest mass murderer of our time.” Such views, taught in Sweden’s classrooms and enshrined in Sweden’s state-approved schoolbooks, are reiterated daily by Sweden’s mainstream press organizations, all of which are either government-owned or government-subsidized.

In Sweden, whose murder rate is currently twice that of America and where Muslims now constitute over 10% of the population and are disproportionately unemployed and prone to violence, the Swedish press routinely depicts America as crime-ridden. Polls show that the majority of Swedes are deeply disturbed by their country’s dramatic social changes and highly critical of the policies that brought them about. Yet the crime and violence generally go unreported, so only rarely does any of the criticism seep into the press.

Recently, the city of Stockholm carried out a survey of ninth-grade boys in the predominantly Muslim suburb of Rinkeby. The survey showed that in the last year, 17% of the boys had forced someone to have sex, 31% had hurt someone so badly that the victim required medical care, and 24% had committed burglary or broken into a car. Sensational statistics — but in all of Sweden, they appear to have been published only in a daily newssheet that is distributed free on the subways.

When voices of dissent do break through in Sweden, they’re often punished. During the runup to the Iraq war, the Swedish government censured the independent TV channel TV4 for running an “Oprah” episode that presented both pro- and anti-war arguments. TV4 was charged with violating press-balance guidelines when in fact its offense was being too balanced — it had exposed Swedish viewers to ideas from which journalists had otherwise shielded them.

Earlier this year, for example, the government closed down the Sweden Democrats’ Web site because it had published a cartoon of Muhammad… If the Bush administration had closed down a Democratic Party Web site¸ there would be scare headlines and editorials thundering about dictatorship — and rightly so. But when Sweden’s rulers did it, it was apparently acceptable — because they did it in the name of political correctness.

Sweden (along with Cuba) has long been the darling welfare state of leftists everywhere. Do you think they would find the above facts shocking, or just brush them off, just as they have brushed off the millions of starving serfs and thousands of dissents murdered and imprisoned in Cuba?

Edit: I looked up some economic statistics for Sweden:

Sweden had a de facto unemployment rate of 20–25 percent…. Sweden has gone from being the fourth richest country in the world in 1970 to being the fourteenth richest in 2002. Today the average American has 37 percent higher purchasing power and almost twice as high private consumption as the average Swede… More than 30 percent of the Swedish population falls below the American poverty line.

I installed Windows Vista and Office 2007 last week. If you’re also eager to try out a next gen OS, my experience might be useful:

Office 2007 looks great. The new Ribbon UI is very intuitive. My favorite new features were the PDF export and Outlook’s ability to auto-magically configure your mail based on your email address and password.

My Vista experience wasn’t so smooth. When I installed Vista Ultimate x64, I ran into a major issue: it requires all the drivers to be signed. The only reason I want to use the 64 bit version is that 32 bit XP and Vista fail to recognize that I have 3GB of RAM, not 2. Unfortunately, I use lots of home-brew/open source applications that aren’t signed, such as SpeedFan and TrueCrypt, which are not even eligible for the $500/year commercial software certificate.

This effectively locks out a lot of non-commercial software that works with hardware. Vista does provide a very inconvenient workaround – you can press F8 at boot every time to disable signed driver checking. After I installed SpeedFan, I have to do this every time, since Vista will not even boot, and helpfully suggests that I reinstall Windows.
Now, I understand that there are legitimate reasons for requiring drivers to be signed, but I wish that Microsoft would have left that choice up to me. Much as I love Microsoft products, I have to wonder whether some executive is gleeful at having banned all those nasty open-source projects.

The other two issues I had were with my sound card and mouse. Neither of my 5.1 surround cards supports anything other than stereo, and only one of them has a signed 64-bit driver. The other issue is apparently a common bug with Microsoft Wireless mice – the default driver disables the power management. A driver update fixed it – though I don’t know how the average user is expected to figure that out. I also noticed that my hard drive is grinding away nearly 24/7. I have no idea what it’s doing – I suspect Windows is indexing some file or other, though Google Desktop never made so much noise.

Anyway, the OS looks great, and I especially like flip 3D view (Press Win+Tab). There’s much more to be said, but you can read about it from someone who’s more obsessed than me.