We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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In April, a Chinese government minister proudly announced that there are now 152m people using 3G mobile phone services in China.
An ongoing story in the Apple world is that the world’s largest mobile phone company, China Mobile (which has about 650 million customers and 70% of the mainland Chinese market), does not offer the iPhone to its customers. There has been much speculation as to when Apple and China Mobile will “do a deal” in order to offer the iPhone to its customers, many stories written by financial analysts (many working for large equities houses) expressing their puzzlement about the lack of such a deal and pressuring the two companies to get on with it. There has been much discussion as to what the business reasons for the lack of such a deal might be – possibly the two companies are at odds about shares of revenues when they sell Apps and music and movies to iPhones over their networks. Such arguments have long characterised arguments between handset vendors and mobile networks elsewhere in the world, although generally Apple has won the argument outside China.
This seems puzzling, however. There is a great deal of money to be made, right now, and this money is simply not being made by anyone at the moment. It requires parties to be very stupid indeed to concede that two parties will have 100% of nothing, rather than undecided shares of many billions of dollars, which is apparently happening here. Neither Apple nor China Mobile are stupid.
This isn’t it. There is more going on here. Or possibly less.
Last week, another piece of information came out of China. The real number of 3G users in China was in fact only half this – between 75 million and 80 million. China Mobile had “mistakenly” provided the whole number of devices sold using its TD-SCDMA technology rather than the number using 3G data services. As well as using this technology for 3G data services, China Mobile also uses it for cordless (but fixed) telephone services. The vast bulk of devices sold had been very simple essentially fixed telephones that could just be used for simple voice and text services.
So how many 3G customers does China Mobile have? Well, there are two other mobile networks in China. China Unicom operates a 3G network using W-CDMA (people who refer to “UMTS” or “HS(D)PA” are generally also talking about this technology, although the terms actually mean slightly different things), the technology used exclusively in Europe, by AT&T and T-Mobile in the US, by NTT in Japan, and by the majority of carriers elsewhere in the world. China Telecom operates a 3G network using the CDMA2000 (often referred to simply as “CDMA” in the US), used by Verizon and Sprint in the US, KDDI in Japan, and by many carriers elsewhere in the world, although far fewer than the number that use W-CDMA. China Unicom apparently had 51 million 3G customers in April. China Telecom claimed 45.56 million.
China Telecom’s number is easier to exaggerate than is China Unicom’s number, as the CDMA2000 technology was developed as a gradual evolution of the (2G) CDMAOne technology, and where you draw the line between “2G” and “3G” is somewhat arbitrary for this technology. W-CDMA was an all new air interface compared to its 2G predecessor, so (if you are being at least reasonably honest, which is never guaranteed in China) it is harder to fudge the numbers than it is for CDMA2000. Assuming that the 51 million number for China Unicom is relatively sound, and bearing in mind that China Telecom has around half the overall market share of China Unicom, a fair estimate might be that China Telecom really has around 25 million 3G customers, assuming that “3G” means people achieving similar data speeds to what is being achieved on China Unicom’s network. (China Telecom clearly do have a significant number of 3G customers. 3G devices bearing their brand were readily available and being sold aggressively in the electronics markets of Beijing when I visited last November, as were those of China Unicom. China Mobile, much less so). So that would mean that the two smaller carriers, China Unicom and China Telecom, have around 75 million 3G customers in all. Which would suggest that China Mobile, the largest mobile phone operator in the world, has, as a first order estimate, none.
This might help explain why they are unable to offer the iPhone.
So, it appears that the largest Mobile carrier in the world, in a country perceived as being rapidly advancing technologically, may have no 3G customers. Why is this?
To answer this question, we need to go back around 20 years. → Continue reading: How the Chinese screwed up their 3G mobile phone networks
One of the things I most admire about capitalism is its willingness to pay attention to what for many are utterly extraneous details, details that many would consider far too insignificant to be concentrating on – even morally rather degraded, but which many others have been begging for someone to sort out. In among solving world peace, imperialism, poverty, AIDS, blah blah blah.
One of the many disagreeable features of tyranny, on the other hand, is that everyone has to obsess about whatever happens to be the dominant obsession, such as world peace, imperialism, poverty, AIDS, blah blah blah. People aren’t allowed to concentrate entirely on their own thing and ignore whatever public mood has been officially decided upon. With the result that very little actually gets accomplished. Progress, which usually takes the form of a large succession of small steps, just does not happen. While everyone is shouting about world peace, imperialism, poverty, AIDS, blah blah blah, nobody is taking care of it, by doing little bits of it.
So, all hail to the team of super-geeks who may (probably a bit early to say for sure yet) have cracked (which is the opposite of the right word) the problem of tomato ketchup getting stuck in the tomato ketchup bottle.
David Thompson has details:
Because the world has been waiting for a low-friction ketchup bottle.
Indeed it has. Not all of it, mind. But, a lot of it.
Intel is keeping up the pace established many decades ago in Gordon MooreŠ› eponymous law:
The chips are the first to become available from any company with features as small as 22 nanometers (the finest details on today’s chips are 32 nanometers), allowing transistors to be smaller and packed more densely. Ivy Bridge chips offer 37 percent more processing speed than the previous generation of chips, and can match their performance while using just half the energy.
I personally believe it is one of the reasons why Socialist efforts at Global Domination have been spiked. It is damned difficult to control the flow of information when individuals have this kind of power in their hands.
I am on the email list about new technologies that “Mr Singularity”, Ray Kurzweil, puts out. And this one caught my eye:
The onslaught of ultra-tiny technology is giving rise to the idea of “printable spacecraft” consisting of electronic circuits, power generation, sensing, fluid handling, propulsion, telecommunications and mobility subsystems — all integrated onto a single substrate, Leonard David at Innovation News Daily reports. The project, if successful, could allow scientists to one day pepper other worlds with atmospheric “flutterflyers” as well as “flutterlanders” — devices the size of postage stamps or confetti that reach a surface imbued with sensor smarts.
Research on the notion of printable spacecraft is being scoped out under the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program — one of many novel space initiatives detailed late last month at a NIAC symposium in Pasadena, Calif.
“Flat-sheet spacecraft” with printed chemical sensors can be deployed high above a target world and flutter to the surface like a leaf, eliminating the need for large and complex landing systems. The spacecraft would see a low-G impact at touchdown.
From the Radio Times, about a programme this evening on BBC3 TV, entitled I Woke Up Gay:
Documentary about Chris Birch, who used to be a rugby-playing lad with a girlfriend and a job in a bank. However, his life was radically changed by a stroke when he was just 21, and he is now a gay hairdresser with an interest in fashion and interior décor.
The question I ask with my title is of course an attempt to get a smile, if not a lol, but it is also serious. Has anyone gay suffered a stroke and emerged from it straight, with the overwhelming desire to ditch the hairdressing and instead to get a girlfriend and a job in a bank and to take up rugby? Either way, I think the answer would be interesting. Seriously, is this kind of thing a one way street, or can it work in both directions?
Neither answer would obey the gods of Political Correctness. If a stroke can turn you gay, but not make you straight, that would suggest that gays are, at least in some sense, the result of something a lot like brain damage. They are, sort of, a mistake. If a stroke can turn you straight, then maybe those crazy Christians who say that they can straighten out gays may after all be onto something.
A relative of mine recently had a stroke. He lost his peripheral vision and can no longer drive, but otherwise no change. Still no interest in fashion, or not that anyone in the family has heard about.
All this reminds me of that Woody Allen movie (I can’t recall which – they’re all a blur) where someone gets a smack on the head and wakes up right wing.
I entirely realise that strokes are frequently very unfunny. I’m sure we all know about friends or relatives who were not as lucky as my relative, or as Chris Birch was, kind of. I certainly do.
The programme airs at 9pm, and is repeated at 12.30pm in the very small hours of tomorrow morning. I will record it.
Fin out more here.
Although, all it does is solve Rubik Cubes faster.
Does something that can do that have any real world uses?
WUWT has a posting about how Jim Hansen of NASA says that the skeptics are winning the argument, i.e. the argument against him and his fellow CAGW-ers. In the midst of the largely agreeing comments at WUWT (yes you are losing you jackass, and it serves you right, etc.), there was, on the other hand, this from Peter Donaldson (April 10, 3.19am):
I disagree with Hansen, he might believe not enough is being done to reduce CO2 but the global warming concept has been accepted globally, it is rarely challenged in the media it is accepted generally by the media and “saving the planet” and “reducing carbon footprint” are bandied about everywhere, and are foremost in the design of all new product be they cars, buildings, airplanes whatever. There is a huge global industry of solar energy devices and it is expanding rapidly.
The skeptical view is sidelined, reserved for oddballs, at least that is the public conception. It seems to me that this is now a bandwagon rolling on and nothing will stop it, even if warming has stopped or if there was cooling.
The punctuation is a bit sketchy, but the point is a good one. There are times when I suspect that Donaldson will be proved right, and that although winning the argument at the merely intellectual level is totally necessary to overthrowing the vested interests excused by the CAGW scare, these interests may just prove to be too firmly entrenched.
And then I read this, also at WUWT, about how many of Hansen’s colleagues (and not just any old colleagues) at NASA have come out publicly in favour of climate skepticism, and against the bogus certainties of the CAGW tribe:
49 former NASA scientists and astronauts sent a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden last week admonishing the agency for it’s role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change while neglecting empirical evidence that calls the theory into question.
The group, which includes seven Apollo astronauts and two former directors of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, are dismayed over the failure of NASA, and specifically the Goddard Institute For Space Studies (GISS), to make an objective assessment of all available scientific data on climate change. They charge that NASA is relying too heavily on complex climate models that have proven scientifically inadequate in predicting climate only one or two decades in advance.
If NASA changes its public tune, that has to be big.
It’s Hansen who is now starting to look like a sidelined oddball. As Instapundit (that’s him linking to the same WUWT story) would say: well, good.
Let’s hope the political decisions and the money decisions now start to tell the pessimistic Peter Donaldson that he is being too pessimistic. I’m sure he would be delighted if that happened.
EMC2, the company founded to advance Dr. Bussard’s fusion technology to a practical state, has been flying so under the radar that you really have to hunt to find out what is going on. They are still moving ahead and the technology has not hit any major road blocks that I have been able to find out about. The US Navy ONR is still funding them and is the reason for keeping the profile low. This bit on Wikipedia is the only bit of really current news I have been able to find:
During 4Q of 2011, EMC2 modified the electron injectors to increase the plasma heating. The higher plasma density in WB-8 prompted the need for higher heating power. They plan to operate WB-8 in high beta regime with the modified electron injectors during 1Q of 2012.
This game is still afoot.
Have any of us mentioned here that Friedrich Hayek died exactly twenty years plus one week ago, i.e. on Friday March 23rd 1992? I believe not.
Sam Bowman, in a posting on March 23rd 2012, ensured that the ASI Blog was responsible for no such omission. He marked the occasion with a couple of Hayek quotes, from The Constitution of Liberty.
I particularly liked the second one:
It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.
One of the contrasts in the contemporary world that I keep banging on about here is how different the designing and making of high tech gadgetry (which still benefits – and almost miraculously so – from exactly the sort of dispersed knowledge and dispersed intelligence that Hayek was talking about) is from the management of the world’s financial system (the higher reaches of which are notorious for depending on the good judgement of a tiny few supposedly wise but actually all too fallible political appointees).
As Sam Bowman said, a week ago:
Hayek died twenty years ago today. His profound insights into economics and social philosophy might be more important than ever.
Indeed they might.
Two weeks before the next election, turn off all coal-fired power stations and give the American public a good hard look at their long bleak future.
– commenter “old44” (March 28 5.14am) on a posting at WUWT entitled New EPA rule will block all new coal-electric generation
Last year, physicists discovered that red wine can turn certain materials into superconductors. Now they’ve found that Beaujolais works best and think they know why.
– The Physics arXiv Blog (with thanks to the ever alert Instapundit – how does he keep doing it?)
“To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine – despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide.”
– Matt Ridley
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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