Slashdot Mirror

ROFLMAO, you beat me to it. I was just wondering what service would be like. Just what can you steal? There are probably not too many Brits laughing. They have to register their bloody televisions.

Mind you, they get a nice return on that, or used to. Not sure how good BBC programming is these days but I'm willing to wager that it has any of the major American networks beat hands down. I know there are those that like to watch television commercials, but then again, there are people that like reality television too. Go figure.

When I was growing up (rumor has it that I have not done so yet) I read all kinds of Science Fiction books. This was before the intarwebnets and WiFi. Now, more and more, I find that I am living in one of those worlds that were known only science fiction fans.

This sounds like an attempt to sell Russian made equipment, or the beginnings of it. Ahhhh government regulation: an attempt by the ruling to create criminals of those who are not.

Fortunately, in most of the rest of the world WiFi devices have been given rather loose regulation to allow the development of Wireless services and functionality.

In countries where there is no major wired infrastructure it builds revenue streams if you have to be licensed and regulated to do the work. No PC/WiFi entrepreneurs for Russia... sigh! God forbid that Russians actually communicate easily with the rest of the world.

Personally, this makes me sad. Check http://www.englishrussia.com/ and have a peer inside what the rest of us have only just begun to appreciate and understand. The Internet is fucking awesome. I'm sad that there are restrictions on it for Russians, and Chinese for that matter.

You pick some really poor countries for your examples. You could still move subsidies down from the federal to state level, except for interstate and national railroads and get more control, while still having enough rich people to tax to help the poor people. The best way to explain my views is to link to my favorite article from my favorite angry libertarian quaker..

How much more fair does that make things, at the cost of a lot of privacy? There are road sensors and other methods of determining which roads are getting used and should get the money. Fuel is consumed relative to vehicle weight and mileage. Also the extra weight of heavy cargo and more passengers is taken into account with fuel consumption. I assume your determining vehicle weight by yearly weighing at inspection stations.

I'd love a company dorm. There is a trailer park in waking distance of my job and that would be the place I would live had I not had cheap rent at the parents. I'd have to live in Suffolk county, but I could easily sell my car at that point. Under your idea of travel being totally wasteful, everyone would end up living in company towns anyway.

As far as subsidizing the buses. Yes I realize that all public transportation gets subsidies of some kind from the government. However, why does that subsidy have to be from the government, most especially the federal? Why can a town be in charge of its roads. Depending on the size, wealth, etc of the town it can determine how to pay for roads. In a rich suburban area each block can directly pay for its road. Poorer areas can look to those that own the storefronts to help subsidize costs. Most neighborhoods could not afford this, but they would be fine with dirt, gravel, or cobblestone, all of which require less maintenance and would force people like me to slow down when driving through neighborhoods.

Mainly because the cost of maintaining even a gravel road is such that the grand majority of US towns would end up with impassable mud roads 9 months out of every year, or with incredibly dangerous rock based cliffside roadcuts, like Bolivia & Peru for the mountains, or for the plains states, Russia's Lena Freeway. That's what locally affordable roads look like.

I'm not necessarily for private roads, public roads allow commerce, so its necessary for market economics until the transporter gets invented. I'm also for fairer subsidy. We can make vehicle registration costs about 10-100x the price since there generally based on weight under the idea that you have to pay proportionally to your wear on the road (at leas in NYC where it will cost you about $40 for a car currently.) I'm also ok with a luxury/sin tax, where car owners subsidize people that take the bus. I believe this happens in NYC right now, I have to pay $9 to cross the Verizano bridge and its only $2 to take the subway or a bus. Capital expenses can be paid for via sale of bonds as they are now.

I work for Oregon Department of Transportation. We're trying to make this sort of thing more fair, by switching everybody to a GPS based weight/mile fee system instead of the current, which is fuel taxes. But there's a huge outcry against it- if for no other reason than what do you do at the borders of the state?

The problem with subsidies is they lead to undesirable behavior. Generally its agreed that more people should take public transportation and we should travel less. Well the best way to achieve that is to make people pay the full cost of doing so. Then tell big business "if you want your people to be able to go to work, introduce telecommuting or pay there tolls."

Big business will probably respond by forcing all workers to live in the building where they work....

No, those were army people trying to stop people who did http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre . Ask thousands who were deported and managed to not lose their lives in Siberia both before and after German occupation.

Germans and Soviets always found collaborators in occupied countries, scum has no nationality. Even the "liberator" Russia had collaborators, read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Vlasov. And since Soviets did so much history "retouching" (see http://www.englishrussia.com/?p=710 just for a photo editing example) we probably know just a tip of the iceberg of the Soviet crimes.

> I want to see DOM 2 support

DOM-2?
I really hope it will never be supported!

Who needs all this newfangled stuff when you can have AWESOME cold-war era Russian playgrounds!

Well, Russia is the worlds largest nation and has the largest natural resources of any nation. With less than 120 million people they are well on their way to wealth. Living next door to Russia it is quite obvious they are both rich and poor - and what nation does not have both groups of people? It is all about the distribution of course - just like in the US.

Russia ended 2005 with its seventh straight year of growth. Strong oil export earnings have allowed Russia to increase its foreign reserves from only $12 billion to some $180 billion at yearend 2005. During this time, poverty has declined steadily and the middle class has continued to expand. Nevertheless, serious problems persist. Taken from the CIA World Fact Book

An interesting comparison might be to look at the GDP of the US, Russia and the two largest economies in Europe:
US $12.31 trillion
Germany $2.48 trillion
France $1.794 trillion
Russia $1.584 trillion

http://englishrussia.com/?p=250

They gave him a new dress...