If you discard the "crippleware" remark at the end, it could almost make sense form a monopoly point of view. (and no, I did not RTFA)
- The iPod is the leading player on the market - The iPod only plays Apple's flavor of DRM'ed music files - Apple is the only one providing this particular file format from its own music store ergo Apple is trying to build a monopoly for its music store through its iPod players.
Now that could barely make sense to me ONLY if the iPod had supported WMA and Apple decided to remove it later on, to enforce some kind of shady monopoly afterwards, where people are enslaved to the iPod and you force them to use iTunes-provided AAC. As it stands, the player never played anything else than what it plays today, and it won on its own merits (or on the media hype around it, take your pick). Their was no illegal maneuvers that I can see in that. The only thing you might say is that Apple should open up its DRM format for the sake of compatibility, so that other players can play the same files (and I don't know if there is any legal backing to that kind of demand, IANAL).
Jane Fonda was a fucking treasonous cunt that deserved to be sent to Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for what she did
I'm sorry, but *no one* deserves to be raped, and the very idea of using such a thing as punishment is disgusting and abhorent. But, I would like to believe you didn't actually intend to advocate such a thing.
As far as I can tell, the "federal-pound-me-in-the-ass prison" is a reference to Office Space (content of the post notwithstanding).
We've had about the same thing in France. State owned telco monopoly. Opened up to competition a few year ago. Today ? An ISP named free pioneered the "triple play" offers with a 30 EUR DSL offer (up to 25 Mb/s if you actually happen to dwell in the DSLAM), and all others are following. The same ISP is now beginning to roll out fiber in some cities for the same exact price. It's not all perfect (hot lines have been less than stellar, to stay the least), but it's pretty nice.
This explains why they were able to strike a deal with them.
Majors (Universal for example) are actually not happy about that site and are menacing to sue them (the deals are not signed yet, but the site is already up and running).
I'm just saying that what/. people usually yell about is companies that try to sell you something as "goods" (I bought a song) when it really is only a "service" (I bought the right to listen to a song).
It was a rental service. When you rent a movie, you clearly have no right to make a copy or whatever, and neither do you have any right to keep the tape if the store chooses to close. Not a DRM issue in my book.
What Google sold was clearly a service. If from what Google sold people thought they would be able to watch it "indefinitely" then they deserve what happened. It was a stupid move in the first place.
The content wasn't sold and locked out. What was sold was clearly an access right. You were never supposed to have any possibility of accessing it otherwise (which is what most people think they can do with DRM'd files, up to the point where it explodes in their face).
I agree, the business model was shitty from a customer point of view. And I agree that you could tie that into the whole DRM stuff somehow as far as educating the customer and so on. I was just pointing out that it's different from companies selling you files and THEN trying to lock the content out of your reach and sue you when you use it as intended.
It would not bother me if Google was to reimburse its customers in a proper way, because people in that case got what they actually bought, which is not a DRM'd file. On this board it is enough to say DRM to see people going up in arms, without even bothering to read TFA to see what really happened.
If you happen to read TFA, you will notice that there is no mention of DRM. Simply because this is not a DRM issue. This service offered to WATCH video on demand, not download it. Once the service stops, there is no way to continue watching information you don't have (you might call that the ultimate DRM...)
In the end, it's about people who have been drawn to an service which cannot guarantee them what hey might think it does. It is not a DRM issue, it's a "customer thinking before he buys" issue. Google has every right to close its store and people should have thought about that.
Now, the fact that Google will provide refunds only through Google Checkout, now that seems pretty unfair to me.
Ah OK, sorry I did not notice that part of your question. My habit being of using tabs, I did not notice that. It indeed opens a dwarfed window for no good reason:/
If every story, every day, was Apple centered I could go along with you. Now today is "anouncement day" and there is indeed a lot to comment on.
If those stories bother you, don't read them. They will be gone tomorrow anyway. Some people coming on this site want that information and having several submissions allows for separate comment threads.
As far as I know, there is no "cap" on the number of article per day on slashdot, so it's not as if those articles were preventing other stories to show up.
if anyone knows how to FORCE safari for windows to open maximised new windows ( no I can't just use tabs, i often flip windows between 3 monitors so i can have several different pages at a time for research) please feel free to post them here.
Errr....
I don't know, first thing I did was maximize the window. I then proceeded to use the application and close it when finished. Now it opens maximized. As do any other window opened through ctrl-N.
The problem is when the OS take hours to re-page the stuff in memory after minimizing the window. Try that with Firefox on Windows XP, it sometimes is excruciatingly long to get it to work. In the end, it might not be an application problem, but the problem is still there...
So before that you did not care about Safari users?
OK, I can understand that, just looking at the market share:)
Don't worry anyway. My guess is that Safari on Windows has more to do with iPhone SDK than with "we want our browser everywhere". iPhone apps being safari based AJAX apps, Apple wants Windows devs to be able to code/test it as well as Mac devs. They definitely have their eyes on the business market (just look at the "salesforce" remark), and they know they *have* to make iPhone dev possible from windows machine.
I guess you are right. I was not trying to make any calculation (mostly because I have no clue as to how much that could be), but if your numbers are right it does not seem like much of an impact on the property tax (for example). I was merely commenting on the automatic "WHAT, more taxes ?" (pointing out this SHOULD not be more taxes, bu a way to recoup tax "dodging").
That just goes to show that, as long as we don't know how much they are talking about, there is no way to decide what's fair or even useful (if you factor in the amount of money they will have to spend on finding a way to make that work across various states, I'm pretty sure that will be burnt out, because hey, that's what administration does).
As for other "out of state" purchases, you make a good point. Why go after those specific sales if they never tried to go after the others (unless the amount of loss is gigantically different).
I see your point about simplification (always a noble goal when talking taxes, which are usually so muddy that you can't know how much you pay overall).
BUT, I'm not sure people who do not purchase online goods would agree with you. I you do that, in essence, you just shifted part of what YOU owe (provided we agree that sales tax is OK in itself) to other people who do not benefit from it. This is a zero sum game, yes, but not for you, and not for Joe who does not use it because he has nothing to order online (usually goods purchased online are rarely necessity items and a good portion of the population has no interest in them, I would imagine). In that case, that does not seem fair to them.
"Explain to me why a state must find money vs. cutting its costs? Eliminate all the waste then we can talk about raising taxes."
I'm not talking about raising taxes. I'm talking about balancing the loss that comes from vasts amounts of people trying to dodge taxes by ordering over the internet (and I agree that the first thing is to PROVE their is a loss). IF there is a proven diminution in "state income", AND they cannot cannot make up for it by cutting costs (again, I agree there must be ways to do just that), then it makes sense to me to tax those sales.
Taxes are not inherently bad, they serve a purpose. But I admit that, at some point, it seems like any state needs to increase their taxes by any mean possible without proper justification.
I can understand paying a sales tax on an item purchased online. That only makes sense to me. 1) State budget has to find the money no coming in sales tax from somewhere, and I sure as hell think that people are not ready to see their property tax being raised, for example. 2) In the interest of fairness: brick and mortar shops in a state have to collect sales tax. Why would a shop out of the state not have to? That's unfair to the local shop. The main problem with that is the vastly different tax rules across various states. THat will be a very complicated issue for online shops... (time to get into the Website consulting business I guess, if that works they will have work!)
But I can't understand why in hell there should be an "access tax". This is just a new way of getting money, which is not lost anywhere else (as long as sales tax is collected). If someone can explain to me what that "access tax" would be, I'd be happy. Cause TFA does not seem to dwell on it, and that is the problematic part AFAIC.
Free speech is the right do say what you believe without fear of (pretty broadly) being stripped of your freedom because of it (meaning incarceration, death...)
If you guys are going to argue that anybody who owns a medium should have no control over its editorial line, you are seriously wrong, IMO. Granted, you cannot expect to be able to speak up without *any* form of consequence, but that's a private citizen issue. The only thing the first amendment assures you is that the government will not prevent you from speaking (and should protect your life from the results of such speech I guess).
As some pointed out here, the issue here is what XM promised to deliver and if it held up to it. If not, then paying customers are gonna leave them and that's the end of it. Opie and Anthony were hired because of that kind of stunts, and XM knew what to expect from them. Nobody here has any idea of what limitations XM gave to them and if they went over them. If there is a breach of contract or whatever issue of that kind, let them deal with that in court.
But please do not start saying that a news-paper/TV station/radio should publish anything without control over their own publication, because it's not true.
Please, proof your links when posting. the "discovered by Frank Boldewin" link takes you to http://www.reconstruction.org/, a "christian reconstruction" website instead of the proper http://www.reconstructer.org/ (Frank Boldewin website).
Granted, TFA links to the proper website while displaying "reconstruction.org". Still...
From what I understand, any Common Rail High Pressure Diesel Injection engine do at least some kind of VVT.
In those engines, diesel in sent to solenoid valves under high pressure, and the engine ECU injects them into the combustion chamber at the optimum rate and ratio for the current conditions. It seems to me this is some kind of VVT.
Those engines have been in use by european cars for several years. In France, the 3 main manufacturers (Renaul, Peugeot and Citroen) have offerings based on this and achieve 40 to 47 mpg without too much problem (granted, I'm not talking about huge SUVs here, more about reasonable cars that allow you to go from A to B and that you can actually park somewhere in a city. But enough with the free rant).
Anyway, just my 2 cents.
Actually, the person who said that was R J Mical, (co-inventor of the Lynx and several other major machines, including the 3DO and the Amiga), and the interview in which this was mentioned was linked in another of my posts in this thread.
Unless you believe that the interview was faked, or that Mical was distorting the truth (intentionally or otherwise), I'd say that was pretty reliable.
My apologies. I read your comment way after posting mine. I honestly did not know who said that, just what a friend of mine had reported. Granted, I could have done a quick search on the topic... And now that I re-read what I wrote I see my post should have said "I have " [absolutely no proof] and not "there is". I should now better.
I thought it was some legend built on the Lynx's unwieldy size, thus illustrating it was resented because of it (original question of the post I was answering to).
Anyway, I stand corrected and will write 10000 times "I will proof-read my Slashdot posts before hitting submit" with my own blood.
I have one and I play it regularly. I'm not sure why the article slams it so much.
Maybe because it was way too big?
The original gameboy already looks massive, blocky and heavy by today's standards...
A friend of mine told me that he read somewhere (a friend of a friend of the postman's friend's cousin of the original guy...) that the original lynx design was smaller, but that the focus group came up with a somtething along the lines of "it's too small, we want something bigger, show us what we pay for!".
There is absolutely no proof about that AFAIK, but I have no problem believing it (focus groups are lame, and people in that time had no idea what "portable" might mean). Anyway, another urban tech legend.
Moreover, since it did not fare so well, it can not compete on the games department compared to a venerable GB, or even a GameGear.
Between this one and the Jaguar (another failed attempt by the original Atari), that makes for another nice museum entry of forgotten (or fondly remembered, YMMV) failures.
OK, here are few fact about the TGV: 1) It's electric. It does not run on fuel. 76% (IIRC) of the electricity produced in France being nuclear, this did not burn fuel to produce either (although nuclear power has its drawbacks as well that I won't comment on) 2) Nobody has ever been killed in a TGV. At most a few minor injuries. The way the cars are linked on a TGV makes it pretty resistant to twisting. When the first cars come out, they can't fall on their side because the ones still on the rails hold them (at least that's what I understood). The few times such a train has derailed showed what happens: the first cars just get out of the rails. The tracks themselves (and that's the expensive part) are a dedicated system with
- No roads crossing them (every road goes over or under the rails)
- No access (most of them have barriers around to prevent people and animals from going on the track)
- Specific limits on the bend radius
- An electronic signaling system that sends the maximum attainable speed to the train for each portion
That makes it pretty fast and secure indeed (although it has its price).
On the application to the US, you have to take certain thing into account. The longest TGV track in France must be about 500 miles (Paris to Marseille). In the US, I'm not sure what distances would have to be spanned, but remember that it's ELECTRIC. You need to be able to line those electric cables reliably from end to end. France does not enjoy the same kind of weather as the US. There is no hurricane and the minimum temperature is usually quite higher than in the US.
France enjoyed (and still does) a state monopoly on the rail, Just as with the Telecoms, this brought a very good infrastructure (no need to be profitable, so let's spend !), and a very shitty consumer service (you would not believe what French people put up with from the guy handling their requests...) Getting such an infrastructure, especially in the states where it would need to be massive, would have a prohibitive cost. And getting it slowly is not really an option. You need lots of tracks to be meaningful and have a chance to become profitable.
I'm not sure it would work in the US. Then again, it might, who knows.
Slashdot Mirror
If you discard the "crippleware" remark at the end, it could almost make sense form a monopoly point of view. (and no, I did not RTFA)
- The iPod is the leading player on the market
- The iPod only plays Apple's flavor of DRM'ed music files
- Apple is the only one providing this particular file format from its own music store
ergo Apple is trying to build a monopoly for its music store through its iPod players.
Now that could barely make sense to me ONLY if the iPod had supported WMA and Apple decided to remove it later on, to enforce some kind of shady monopoly afterwards, where people are enslaved to the iPod and you force them to use iTunes-provided AAC. As it stands, the player never played anything else than what it plays today, and it won on its own merits (or on the media hype around it, take your pick). Their was no illegal maneuvers that I can see in that.
The only thing you might say is that Apple should open up its DRM format for the sake of compatibility, so that other players can play the same files (and I don't know if there is any legal backing to that kind of demand, IANAL).
They will need a mighty dose of that RDF to convice american consumers that they actually want a small economic car.
If His Steveness was able to turn the tables between powerPC and Intel, he shoul be able to do the same for SUVs...
As far as I can tell, the "federal-pound-me-in-the-ass prison" is a reference to Office Space (content of the post notwithstanding).
I wonder why this makes me think of
- Do you want to play Chess?
- No, I want to play global thermonuclear war.
Yep, apparently it does work.
We've had about the same thing in France. State owned telco monopoly. Opened up to competition a few year ago.
Today ? An ISP named free pioneered the "triple play" offers with a 30 EUR DSL offer (up to 25 Mb/s if you actually happen to dwell in the DSLAM), and all others are following.
The same ISP is now beginning to roll out fiber in some cities for the same exact price.
It's not all perfect (hot lines have been less than stellar, to stay the least), but it's pretty nice.
That IS one thing I miss now I'm here in the US.
The article itself even points to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column-oriented_DBMS that states that Row storage and Column Storage are two technologies for RDBMS.
You might have read it in a novel.
I think Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio (http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Radio-Greg-Bear/dp/ 0345459814/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-9184374-4734362?ie= UTF8&s=books&qid=1188518531&sr=8-1 novel is based on that premise.
The SACEM ("Societe des Auteurs Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soci%C3%A9t%C3%A9_des _auteurs%2C_compositeurs_et_%C3%A9diteurs_de_musiq ue) is the organisation that takes care of collecting and managing artists' fees.
Everytime you use a song from someone else (play it with your band, use it as a DJ...), this is where you have to pay in order for the artist to be rewarded.
This explains why they were able to strike a deal with them. Majors (Universal for example) are actually not happy about that site and are menacing to sue them (the deals are not signed yet, but the site is already up and running).
I'm just saying that what /. people usually yell about is companies that try to sell you something as "goods" (I bought a song) when it really is only a "service" (I bought the right to listen to a song).
It was a rental service. When you rent a movie, you clearly have no right to make a copy or whatever, and neither do you have any right to keep the tape if the store chooses to close. Not a DRM issue in my book.
What Google sold was clearly a service. If from what Google sold people thought they would be able to watch it "indefinitely" then they deserve what happened. It was a stupid move in the first place.
The content wasn't sold and locked out. What was sold was clearly an access right. You were never supposed to have any possibility of accessing it otherwise (which is what most people think they can do with DRM'd files, up to the point where it explodes in their face).
I agree, the business model was shitty from a customer point of view. And I agree that you could tie that into the whole DRM stuff somehow as far as educating the customer and so on. I was just pointing out that it's different from companies selling you files and THEN trying to lock the content out of your reach and sue you when you use it as intended.
It would not bother me if Google was to reimburse its customers in a proper way, because people in that case got what they actually bought, which is not a DRM'd file.
On this board it is enough to say DRM to see people going up in arms, without even bothering to read TFA to see what really happened.
If you happen to read TFA, you will notice that there is no mention of DRM.
Simply because this is not a DRM issue. This service offered to WATCH video on demand, not download it.
Once the service stops, there is no way to continue watching information you don't have (you might call that the ultimate DRM...)
In the end, it's about people who have been drawn to an service which cannot guarantee them what hey might think it does. It is not a DRM issue, it's a "customer thinking before he buys" issue. Google has every right to close its store and people should have thought about that.
Now, the fact that Google will provide refunds only through Google Checkout, now that seems pretty unfair to me.
Ah OK, sorry I did not notice that part of your question. My habit being of using tabs, I did not notice that. :/
It indeed opens a dwarfed window for no good reason
Apple: Bad developper, no twinkie!
WTF????
If every story, every day, was Apple centered I could go along with you. Now today is "anouncement day" and there is indeed a lot to comment on.
If those stories bother you, don't read them. They will be gone tomorrow anyway. Some people coming on this site want that information and having several submissions allows for separate comment threads.
As far as I know, there is no "cap" on the number of article per day on slashdot, so it's not as if those articles were preventing other stories to show up.
I don't know, first thing I did was maximize the window. I then proceeded to use the application and close it when finished. Now it opens maximized. As do any other window opened through ctrl-N.
Yeah, I agree with the principle.
The problem is when the OS take hours to re-page the stuff in memory after minimizing the window. Try that with Firefox on Windows XP, it sometimes is excruciatingly long to get it to work.
In the end, it might not be an application problem, but the problem is still there...
So before that you did not care about Safari users? OK, I can understand that, just looking at the market share :)
Don't worry anyway. My guess is that Safari on Windows has more to do with iPhone SDK than with "we want our browser everywhere". iPhone apps being safari based AJAX apps, Apple wants Windows devs to be able to code/test it as well as Mac devs. They definitely have their eyes on the business market (just look at the "salesforce" remark), and they know they *have* to make iPhone dev possible from windows machine.
I guess you are right. I was not trying to make any calculation (mostly because I have no clue as to how much that could be), but if your numbers are right it does not seem like much of an impact on the property tax (for example). I was merely commenting on the automatic "WHAT, more taxes ?" (pointing out this SHOULD not be more taxes, bu a way to recoup tax "dodging").
That just goes to show that, as long as we don't know how much they are talking about, there is no way to decide what's fair or even useful (if you factor in the amount of money they will have to spend on finding a way to make that work across various states, I'm pretty sure that will be burnt out, because hey, that's what administration does).
As for other "out of state" purchases, you make a good point. Why go after those specific sales if they never tried to go after the others (unless the amount of loss is gigantically different).
I see your point about simplification (always a noble goal when talking taxes, which are usually so muddy that you can't know how much you pay overall).
BUT, I'm not sure people who do not purchase online goods would agree with you.
I you do that, in essence, you just shifted part of what YOU owe (provided we agree that sales tax is OK in itself) to other people who do not benefit from it. This is a zero sum game, yes, but not for you, and not for Joe who does not use it because he has nothing to order online (usually goods purchased online are rarely necessity items and a good portion of the population has no interest in them, I would imagine). In that case, that does not seem fair to them.
"Explain to me why a state must find money vs. cutting its costs? Eliminate all the waste then we can talk about raising taxes."
I'm not talking about raising taxes. I'm talking about balancing the loss that comes from vasts amounts of people trying to dodge taxes by ordering over the internet (and I agree that the first thing is to PROVE their is a loss). IF there is a proven diminution in "state income", AND they cannot cannot make up for it by cutting costs (again, I agree there must be ways to do just that), then it makes sense to me to tax those sales.
Taxes are not inherently bad, they serve a purpose. But I admit that, at some point, it seems like any state needs to increase their taxes by any mean possible without proper justification.
I can understand paying a sales tax on an item purchased online. That only makes sense to me.
1) State budget has to find the money no coming in sales tax from somewhere, and I sure as hell think that people are not ready to see their property tax being raised, for example.
2) In the interest of fairness: brick and mortar shops in a state have to collect sales tax. Why would a shop out of the state not have to? That's unfair to the local shop.
The main problem with that is the vastly different tax rules across various states. THat will be a very complicated issue for online shops... (time to get into the Website consulting business I guess, if that works they will have work!)
But I can't understand why in hell there should be an "access tax". This is just a new way of getting money, which is not lost anywhere else (as long as sales tax is collected).
If someone can explain to me what that "access tax" would be, I'd be happy. Cause TFA does not seem to dwell on it, and that is the problematic part AFAIC.
Free speech is the right do say what you believe without fear of (pretty broadly) being stripped of your freedom because of it (meaning incarceration, death...)
If you guys are going to argue that anybody who owns a medium should have no control over its editorial line, you are seriously wrong, IMO.
Granted, you cannot expect to be able to speak up without *any* form of consequence, but that's a private citizen issue. The only thing the first amendment assures you is that the government will not prevent you from speaking (and should protect your life from the results of such speech I guess).
As some pointed out here, the issue here is what XM promised to deliver and if it held up to it. If not, then paying customers are gonna leave them and that's the end of it.
Opie and Anthony were hired because of that kind of stunts, and XM knew what to expect from them.
Nobody here has any idea of what limitations XM gave to them and if they went over them. If there is a breach of contract or whatever issue of that kind, let them deal with that in court.
But please do not start saying that a news-paper/TV station/radio should publish anything without control over their own publication, because it's not true.
Please, proof your links when posting. the "discovered by Frank Boldewin" link takes you to http://www.reconstruction.org/, a "christian reconstruction" website instead of the proper http://www.reconstructer.org/ (Frank Boldewin website).
Granted, TFA links to the proper website while displaying "reconstruction.org". Still...
From what I understand, any Common Rail High Pressure Diesel Injection engine do at least some kind of VVT. In those engines, diesel in sent to solenoid valves under high pressure, and the engine ECU injects them into the combustion chamber at the optimum rate and ratio for the current conditions. It seems to me this is some kind of VVT. Those engines have been in use by european cars for several years. In France, the 3 main manufacturers (Renaul, Peugeot and Citroen) have offerings based on this and achieve 40 to 47 mpg without too much problem (granted, I'm not talking about huge SUVs here, more about reasonable cars that allow you to go from A to B and that you can actually park somewhere in a city. But enough with the free rant). Anyway, just my 2 cents.
My apologies. I read your comment way after posting mine. I honestly did not know who said that, just what a friend of mine had reported. Granted, I could have done a quick search on the topic... And now that I re-read what I wrote I see my post should have said "I have " [absolutely no proof] and not "there is". I should now better.
I thought it was some legend built on the Lynx's unwieldy size, thus illustrating it was resented because of it (original question of the post I was answering to). Anyway, I stand corrected and will write 10000 times "I will proof-read my Slashdot posts before hitting submit" with my own blood.
Maybe because it was way too big?
The original gameboy already looks massive, blocky and heavy by today's standards...
A friend of mine told me that he read somewhere (a friend of a friend of the postman's friend's cousin of the original guy...) that the original lynx design was smaller, but that the focus group came up with a somtething along the lines of "it's too small, we want something bigger, show us what we pay for!". There is absolutely no proof about that AFAIK, but I have no problem believing it (focus groups are lame, and people in that time had no idea what "portable" might mean). Anyway, another urban tech legend.
Moreover, since it did not fare so well, it can not compete on the games department compared to a venerable GB, or even a GameGear. Between this one and the Jaguar (another failed attempt by the original Atari), that makes for another nice museum entry of forgotten (or fondly remembered, YMMV) failures.
OK, here are few fact about the TGV:
1) It's electric. It does not run on fuel. 76% (IIRC) of the electricity produced in France being nuclear, this did not burn fuel to produce either (although nuclear power has its drawbacks as well that I won't comment on)
2) Nobody has ever been killed in a TGV. At most a few minor injuries. The way the cars are linked on a TGV makes it pretty resistant to twisting. When the first cars come out, they can't fall on their side because the ones still on the rails hold them (at least that's what I understood). The few times such a train has derailed showed what happens: the first cars just get out of the rails.
The tracks themselves (and that's the expensive part) are a dedicated system with
- No roads crossing them (every road goes over or under the rails)
- No access (most of them have barriers around to prevent people and animals from going on the track)
- Specific limits on the bend radius
- An electronic signaling system that sends the maximum attainable speed to the train for each portion
That makes it pretty fast and secure indeed (although it has its price).
On the application to the US, you have to take certain thing into account. The longest TGV track in France must be about 500 miles (Paris to Marseille).
In the US, I'm not sure what distances would have to be spanned, but remember that it's ELECTRIC. You need to be able to line those electric cables reliably from end to end.
France does not enjoy the same kind of weather as the US. There is no hurricane and the minimum temperature is usually quite higher than in the US.
France enjoyed (and still does) a state monopoly on the rail, Just as with the Telecoms, this brought a very good infrastructure (no need to be profitable, so let's spend !), and a very shitty consumer service (you would not believe what French people put up with from the guy handling their requests...)
Getting such an infrastructure, especially in the states where it would need to be massive, would have a prohibitive cost. And getting it slowly is not really an option. You need lots of tracks to be meaningful and have a chance to become profitable.
I'm not sure it would work in the US. Then again, it might, who knows.