Slashdot Mirror

It's interesting how fast some of us forget the facts.

First, in the release of Department of State memos a year ago, we read of several countries and the US government admitting to a belief in the existence of an Iranian nuclear program. While the Arab Spring protests have probably trumped it for a time, it's worth noting that several countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, viewed Iran's nuclear program as their most pressing foreign policy issue (over such things as Israel). They have since threatened to develop their own nuclear weapons.

' Second, Iran does indeed have sites that were built at great expense to resist known conventional weapons of the time. No civilian nuclear program justifies this expense.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has assembled evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Finally, we have acts of sabotage and murder against Iranian infrastructure and personnel associated with this program. Nobody does that for a hobby. An easy counter for Iran would be to throw open its entire nuclear infrastructure to show it wasn't developing nuclear weapons. Didn't happen.

I can't help but notice that the story you link to has a mind-numbing fallacy in it. Because the US had overflown Iranian space for four years and the author chooses to ignore the copious evidence in support of the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, then Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program. That makes no sense.

This has always been an argument that is badly contended, the data people (Americans) use for these comparisons is definitely flawed just to keep their nationalistic pride. The reason you get those numbers is 1) you are taking Western Europe and Eastern Europe together - the latter has only in the last couple of years been able to afford to pick up the pace. The Russian Federation and China have the same issue - you're adding both poor and rich together while the US is in general considered, very rich throughout.

This chart is more detailed: http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Images/commentarynews/broadbandspeedchart.jpg and while the density of those countries has something to do with it (Japan and some European countries) other European countries are far less dense than the US. The difference (through history) is who invested in the infrastructure.

You also have to consider the cost. Look here: http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2010/01/us-broadband-still-lagging-in-speed-and-penetration.ars our average speed is 3.9Mbps and costs $40.

Well, that's not too hard, a sizable portion of the rest of the world is faster than America.

Where is Japan and its 1gbps broadband on that list? I call a load of BS and according to this graph the US isn't second.

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Images/commentarynews/broadbandspeedchart.jpg

According to speed test the US isn't second either and their numbers are probably more accurate.

http://www.speedtest.net/global.php#0

Even though north america comes out on top as a continent most asian countries are above it. There are just a lot of poor countries that drag down the average.

Where are you getting these numbers? Where is Japan and Korea on this chart? Because they always top the other charts

Anyway, average total bandwidth is wrong metric to be using. What you want is average home bandwidth available, and average home bandwidth per dollar, or some other way of measuring how evenly distributed the bandwidth is among the population. Average is astupid because it makes no distinction between the apartment complex in Seoul, and the bums sleeping in Akamai's dumpster, since both groups have an average bandwidth of 45 Mb/s. So what if in one case it's 10 people each with 45 Mb/s and in the other it's 1 person with 450 Mb/s and 9 people with 0 Mb/s?

It's transparent that average bandwidth is being used to whitewash over the inefficiencies in the American market when every other study places the oh about 33rd in the world, and all the ads are touting "super fast" 3 Mb/s links that rarely reach 2.5 Mb/s in practice.

It certainly appears that the free market has failed America once again. (And no one even start with rant that problem is too much regulation, when "socialist" Scandinavia kicks your ass, it ain't that.)

I did my research in approximately 5 minutes.

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Images/commentarynews/broadbandspeedchart.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density

USA Average Broadband Speed less than 10MB/s and Population Density of 32 People/Km squared.
Finland Average Broadband Speed greater than 20MB/s and Population Density of 16 People/Km squared.

So stop the "Awww wahhh we are a big country and spread out" excuses already"!

Finland has a population that is TWICE as sparse as the USA, yet has average broadband speeds that are TWICE as fast.

You suck.

"We're so far ahead of everyone else, it's "not even close."

Oh wait...

You have a smaller landmass than us and 10 times the amount of people.

The FCC's definition of broadband and most of the rest of the world's definition of broadband are not connected. Further, that only measures sustained transfer rate... fine if you're uploading files over FTP, but can have extremely inconsistent performance for simple HTML. The linked article goes into how that 1/2 second gap can add up to a full minute to load a single web page. To me, that sounds comparable to ISDN performance, which is not generally considered broadband.

Even if you go by their own estimates, HughesNet basic home satellite network service loads an idealized 100K web page in 5 seconds, approximately 3 times faster than 56k dialup. That puts it in the realm of 168kbps, or nowhere near the federal government's paultry definition of Broadband.

You might be happy with it. That's great. I'm glad if your Satellite connection meets your needs, especially since it fits a niche nicely for rural areas without viable alternative options. And yay for that: dial up throughput is terrible. But you're not going to realize the advantages of Skype over that. You'll spend more time waiting for pages to load, interactive conferences are right out, video conferencing with your kids while they're at college is not possible. Online gaming is out, which excises a lot of online communities. And for the kind of remote interactive work of a lot of IT professionals, the latency kills any advantages of working from home. For my grandmother it would be fine. For people transitioning from intermittent-on dial-up service, it's fine. For the rest of us, used to interacting with work files from home as if they were local, or streaming music between devices on disparate networks, or just getting stuff done remotely, satellite provides just a subset of the advantages of a full broadband connection.

Sure?

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Images/commentarynews/broadbandspeedchart.jpg

Debate this one as you will, but, PLEASE, just this once, don't anybody write, "Of course Korea and Japan and Europe have better broadband than the US, they're all a big urban beehive, we're all rural and spread out."

Somebody says that every time the 3rd-rate US broadband comes up, and every time I or somebody has to point out that Canada is even more spread out than the US and has way higher broadband penetration. Some European countries with spectacular broadband offerings (Finland) have lower persons/sq km than the US has. (US: 30 persons/sq.km, Finland, 14.7, Sweden 20)

Now check out Finland & Sweden vs. the US position on this chart:

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Images/commentarynews/broadbandspeedchart.jpg

Even Canada is way ahead of you, and two countries could hardly be more alike in their respective fractions of population in large cities, small cities, large towns, and small towns. We, too, have privatized, not government-run, phone companies, but we lean on them a little harder to compete with cable and satellite, and to invest profits, not keep them.

Face it: networked infrastructures like water, power and communications are "natural monopolies"; monopolies require either outright government ownership, or at least tight regulation to not exploit their customers for maximum profit at minimum service. For a long list of reasons, the US doesn't do it as well as some.

Korea and Finland in particular have no ideological barriers to large government investments in this particular basic infrastructure, the way the US has no ideological barriers to large government investments in defense. The US is well-defended, Korea is well-networked; get used to it.

Whatever "lobbying" was being done previously, it seems to have been completely effective. Many countries have signed, without dispute, so-called "free" trade agreements which essentially codify every US-corporate-friendly dream that could be devised by the Bushites - including DMCA-ish and software patent provisions, to speak of 2 issues in the IT area. In non-IT areas, similar capitulations are even worse. Pharmaceuticals, agriculture, all get twisted into poisonous American corporatised pretzels, to pave the way for overpriced patent drugs and monstrosities such as GM products (which should be flat-out illegal anywhere). It's as if the "sovereign" countries didn't even read the agreements, let alone take heed of the public outry that always accompanies them.

It must be so easy for them, when the signatories are Bush-puppet governments such as the Howard government in Australia (thankfully rejected at last) and Harper (which malignancy we should pray is thrown out tomorrow, or at least held safely to a minority).

Let's be honest. "Globalisation" never meant anything more or less than "America buys your stuff cheap, you buy America's stuff dear". The world does not need Wal-Mart, Microsoft, McDonald's, or any other substandard, exploitative American brand. The height of absurdity is Wal-Mart selling rice to Indians. What do the Wal-Marts in China sell? Crappy plastic Chinese crap back to the Chinese? The whole concept is absurd. What is Wal-Mart even doing in Canada?

The ultimate irony is that those tilting the playing field towards the USA, and who would most vehemently deny the insuperable insult to sovereignty that these agreements represent, also claim to believe in a "free market" - the Bushites, the Reaganites, the Friedmanites, the corrupt fuckwads, the ignorant lying Sarah and Todd Palins, the criminal Cons and neo-Cons whose chickens, we hope, are coming home to roost at last. If you're wondering why you're having trouble competing - maybe it's because you're not competitive! Top example - Microsoft can't compete on merit. They have to be anti-competitive; and you betcha they love them some FTA help. Pity they got caught at it.

But perhaps as the world wises the hell up, we finally see some logic in Bush's response: More lobbying. "Bring it on", in the Texan moron's famous catchphrase: Just expect more pushback!

But we'd prefer if you'd just Bugger off.

i live in the suburbs of L.A. but my broadband bills are still several times those of similarly dense population centers in other countries.

if you were talking about Australia or Canada, where they have large sparsely populated wilderness and rural communities then that might be a fair excuse. (Canada actually has cheaper broadband than the U.S. in spite of this.) but most Americans live in metropolitan areas or their surrounding suburbs. a relatively small percentage of the population actually lives in places like Wisconsin or rural America.

check out this chart of average broadband speeds to see how far ahead Japan and Korea are. if we want to catch up to those countries, then we need expand infrastructure to meet demand, rather than artificially manipulate demand by putting tight restrictions on consumer broadband usage.

Could be a solution for Japan, but North America, and in particular the United States, I don't think it will work without massive investment in the infrastructure. The entrenched and inefficient monopolists have little interest in investment that won't guarantee improved profit margins.

Here's a handy graph showing the difference in average broadband speeds:
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Images/commentarynews/broadbandspeedchart.jpg

Whether or not the prediciton is statistically shaky, the fact remains that there is a huge gap between the US and many other, quite dissimilar countries. The big question is "Why?" Japan and Korea aren't the only ones that far outclass American broadband speed, though they do have quite a speed lead.

Chart of Broadband Speeds by Country

And sure, in the US you can get FiOS at 30Mbps, but it will cost you $200/month and you have to live in a very limited area. You can get 50Mbps from Comcast only if you live in the Twin Cities (right now), but it's still $150/month.

I could point to the geography of the US, saying how its a much bigger area than the smaller countries at the top of those charts. Sure, Japan and Korea have an incredible population density. But not Finland, Sweden, France, etc. They have population densities several orders of magnitude smaller than even cities like Houston, Miami, Phoenix, or Chicago. Why aren't these cities more like those countries?

I could also try it from the angle of regulation/free market/competition. But I'm pretty sure those countries at the top aren't all the same in that regard.

Is it because our companies tend to each have local monopolies over large areas? That seems less likely considering how just about everyone in a metro area can get cable. So they have two companies, phone and cable, to compete with each other.

Is there something unique about our infrastructure? Did we make some horrible mistake that seemed like a good idea at the time but is now haunting us?

Is the US just in a perfect storm of craptitude where all these factors come into play?

As a government employee she was subject to specific proscriptions in her behavior that are set up to prevent even the appearance of conflict of interest. Government ethics rules are quite extensive and if she was feeding information to Google while a DOJ employee would be subject to severe consequences.
For example Darleen Druyun was sentenced to prison in September 2004 for showing favoritism to Boeing while she was a top Pentagon acquisitions official.
There may be nothing at all to see, but the right to privacy during the time she was employed by the DOJ does not exist.

• Cuba law tightens internet access
  
• Press Freedom Group Tests Cuban Internet Surveillance
  
• Internet access in Cuba