Except that some random employee could just as easily post it there as somewhere else, assuming he had access to the source and the website farm. Right? The point being AOL can claim that Nullsoft division had no right to distribute that, and bingo, thats it.
They'd have difficulty pulling that one off; as their employer, AOL is subject to vicarious liability - within certain limits, it doesn't matter whether it was authorized or not, AOL are still stuck with it. So, if (for example) a Microsoft guy gives me a free copy of Visual Studio, they can't come after me for license fees later. IIRC, the limit is whether or not it was "reasonable" (to the court) for that employee to be doing so: a PR guy handing out free samples is OK, claiming to give me authorization to post it on Usenet is not;-)
In this case, I'm pretty sure any court would uphold the Nullsoft action: assuming it wasn't a case of their website being cracked, the software was developed and released in the usual way, as they've released other programs in the past. AOL would have great difficulty getting past that. (Of course, they're free to delete the files from their own website - they just can't retract the GPLed copies already out there...)
With the cost of bandwidth on an unending downward spiral the cost of calls will basically drop to zero, it really won't make sense to meter them because the metering will cost more than the connection.
According to AT&T, that happened more than 20 years ago: even before the 1984 breakup into Baby Bells, they were saying the most expensive element of a long distance call was timing and billing it. They may have been exaggerating, but once you factor in the need to audit and log everything, keeping clocks synchronized, all the extra CPU load on the exchanges, and most significantly the extra software requirements (instead of "patch line X to line Y", it becomes "log start time, patch line X to line Y, keep track of time until the line is dropped again") and customer support (people querying charges - "I didn't call Wisconsin that day, I was in hospital!", "But 281-555-1234 should be a local call from here"...) - just charge $x per month and make sure the calls get through. Much simpler, hence cheaper. (Just compare a telco's billing department to an ISP's...)
A few years ago, a FAQ for ISPs was "why don't you offer a pay-per-minute option, as an alternative to flat-rate subscriptions?" - the answer was that all the extra overhead would make the per-minute billing more expensive than flat-rate.
For that matter, MCI now offer flat-rate calls through the US (and Canada, for an extra $4/month) on landlines.
It's not like ambulance crews get a checklist of what does and doesn't qualify as emergency work with rushing to an accident on one list and delivering vital transplant organs on the other.
I'd like to hear the Chief Superintendant of the force concerned tell a court, in his professional, medical opinion what difference there is between moving a patient between one hospital and another to have heart transplant surgery and moving the organ between one hospital and another for use in that very same patient.
A transplant organ isn't a bag of shopping. The difference between delivering it quickly and delivering it leisurely can be the difference between life and death. Hopefully, the courts will reinforce that and decide accordingly.
Unfortunately, the law is very clear on this: an ambulance is a vehicle used "exclusively for the transport of patients". Transporting organs does not count under the current rules - should, but doesn't. Legally, I very much doubt the court is able to throw the case out: they have to interpret the law as written, rather than trying to decide what the law should be!
The trouble is, the law in question was written before organ transplants existed. A specific amendment was made to allow these vehicles to carry flashing blue lights - but Parliament didn't alter the rules governing speeding and other traffic rules. As it stands, legally this guy wasn't a member of the emergency services - just a delivery driver. Dumb law, but still the law unless and until someone changes it...
This is true, but (correct me if I'm wrong here) aren't the telcos demanding an end to this arrangement as a condition for the expense of improving the infrastructure?
Unlikely: apart from anything else, they can't "demand" it from the FCC - there's no FCC involvement!
That's the "big news" you're talking about and it's what I'm afraid the FCC will give them.
The FCC can't, because they're already free from FCC control in that respect - and always have been.
That's a pretty wimpy requirement and one that will mean a whole lot less if the FCC does its expected deregulation on Monday. Right now, we get effectively no choice of channels, which is mostly merely inconvenient, but has the potential to be much worse. How likely is it that a cable company, would continue to carry a channel that ran documentaries critical of their sponsors for instance?
If it's a "local" channel (i.e. one you receive via antenna) they can't do anything else. Nor would they have much reason to: their customers can all access such a channel with just an ordinary antenna anyway!
Ugh, yes! No argument here. And the television tax? Who came up with that one? I guess we should count our blessings, eh?;-)
Dead right; the UK government is currently trying to remove the double jeopardy rule, and reduce the right to jury trials (in "complex" cases, which appears to be government-speak for "we don't trust the jury to reach the right verdict"). OTOH, there are three big court cases challenging the legality of the TV tax being heard in September, so at least there's light at the end of the tunnel...
It's not exactly a tax. The government has no control over how it's spent for one thing, and changing it is very hard.
The government created it, the government defines how much it is, and the government decides how the BBC operates (setting quotas for outsourced production, domestic content etc). The BBC also receives several hundred million per year in additional funding directly from the Treasury, from general taxation revenue.
The government have no control over it, short of a somewhat mythical (and in the Dyke era almost certainly dead) old-boys network. Rather, the BBC is controlled by its Director General,
Who is appointed by the government, under government rules.
Major changes, like launching new channels, have to get the approval of the media/culture secretary iirc.
And the media/culture secretary would be part of... the government?
That they are sending a message that disobeying ambulance rules (allowing 20 mph leeway over standard speed limits) is dangerous, and that the risk of a 10 car pile up at 104 mph is not worth the possible saving of one life?
Seems to me that if you have a reasoned rule about how fast emergency vehicles may travel to balance the risk of the patient's health with the risk of harming other road users, the driver in question should be arguing to have it modified, not taking everyone else's life into his own hands by driving so recklessly.
That would be reasonable. However, the explanation given for this prosecution has nothing to do with emergency vehicle guidelines - rather, the police claim a car transporting organs does not qualify as an "ambulance", hence is not permitted to speed at all. Nothing to do with "ambulance rules": they are arguing the speed limit applies to these vehicles in the same way as to normal (non-emergency service) vehicles.
Another option is to set up a compulsory licensure for the lines. Anyone is allowed to use the fiber that Verizon lays, but they must pay Verizon (for some *limited* time, mind you) for access. That way, Verizon is not allowed to lock out their competitors to establish a monopoly and the public interest is served because anyone is free to develop new and better uses for the lines, but Verizon still gets some compensation for the expense of laying the fiber.
You get most of that already. The services will be telephone+Internet+TV, right?
For telephone, Verizon are already required to interconnect with other telcos, at regulated rates: the only monopoly element would be line rental/local calls.
Internet/data traffic: Not regulated per se, but if Verizon change their peering arrangements it'll be big news. Until then, you're free to access anything you want over it.
TV: Cable and satellite companies are required to carry all the local channels, as well as carrying "community access" programming.
So, the only element Verizon really gain a monopoly over is local service - which they already have (with very few exceptions) with the existing setup. The gain is more competition for cable companies (on TV) and better Net access, the loss... potentially, some ISPs which already depend on non-mandated Verizon services? (The DSL ISPs who resell Verizon service are only there as long as they can pay Verizon enough to keep them.)
Verizon isn't likely to agree to this though, nor (sadly) is butt kissing Powell at the FCC. That's why the public (i.e. you and me) must hold their feet to the fire.
If you want to see a truly failed regulator, look at the FCC's UK counterpart, Oftel - who spent years defending per-minute charging for local calls, delaying the launch of broadband, and fighting against local loop unbundling. After a few years of intense lobbying by angry Net users, broadband happened, LLU technically happens (to a couple of hundred lines, so far!) and flat-rate dialup. Flat-rate voice calls, too, but only evenings and weekends.
Your local corrupt city council, who has been greased quite well by Verizon (or whoever) to somehow assure that the needed permits for company #2 never get issued.
That's exactly what went wrong last time round; local governments basically said "OK, rape the customers all you like, as long as we get a cut..." Hopefully this time round, people will push hard enough to avoid repeating that mistake!
There is a similar system here in the US on phones. The baby bells own the lines but then lease them at wholesale (regulated rate) to other telcos to provide local phone service.
And on electricity, in a lot of areas! As well as price competition, it gives you some interesting options - like Green Mountain, who offer 'clean' power (depending on the area, usually generated entirely from wind, sometimes with some hydro or similar) for a slightly higher price.
Unfortunately, SBC just got our legislature here in Illinois to let them double our rate, because... it's... err... good for campaign contributions I guess.
I think their reasoning was something about DSL - if they got the rate hike, they could offer DSL to more people?
Doesn't the problem then become that Verizon can charge whatever they want becaus eno other company can then also lay wiring to said houses?
Why not? With the existing infrastructure - electricity, cable TV, telephone - the government prohibited competition. This, obviously, created a monopoly for each utility; all the regulatory effort of the last decade or two has gone into reversing the damage from that. With fiber, however, who is prohibiting some other company from laying fiber just like Verizon?
If you have someone right where you want them, would you trust a company whose primary objective is to make profits and become larger to do what's right for their customers or for themselves?
The answer is not to let the government (or their favored company) get you right where they want you. Don't let Verizon be given a monopoly in the first place!
If the infrastructure is too expensive for one company to afford, let them group together to build a shared local network - much the same way Internet peering points work: each ISP wanting to hook up has to pay their chunk of the running costs. That way, nobody gets screwed.
It will difficult to exercise democracy when the ubiquitous national oracle propagates only those biases that four or five multinational conglomerates wish to see propagated, and which are backed up by co-owned newspapers and radio stations.
Compared to the UK situation, where 2 of the 5 analogue broadcast channels are part of the tax-funded BBC? (Along with 5 or more national radio stations, a couple of magazines, a serious web presence, and a newspaper with a very similar agenda).
I really don't think having "only" four or five different TV companies available (to non-cable/satellite subscribers) is a problem - especially when so many people have cable or satellite, giving them literally hundreds of different channels to choose from. Not to mention a huge number of newspapers and magazines, and of course the Internet!
Keep this in mind: For years, the UK had just three different TV companies - the largest one state-owned, and the smallest subsidised. No cable (that came in the 80s), no satellite (same). With or without these changes, US viewers without cable/satellite will have more choice than UK viewers. I'm not holding the UK up as some sort of media Utopia, but it's hardly the disaster area these guys seem to predict!
Stuff speed cameras and stuff this as well. Now if PC Plod actually sees me speeding and comes acroos to my stopped car, at least i have the hope he'll show some common sense, show a bit of discretion when i show him the transplant kidney and the pregnant ladies in the back seat, maybe send me on my way with a telling off, then it's a fair cop.
The kidney won't help you: the police in England are currently prosecuting an ambulance driver for speeding while transporting a liver for transplant. Insane, but there's nothing to stop them doing it...
That is not the correct analogy, though it certainly is a popular one. He said that monitoring the roads in this fashion does not catch criminals, nor does it prevent them from using the road. What if the car is stolen? What if the license plates are stolen? This monitoring system would have largely no effect in these situations. Its only usefulness is in keeping track of law abiding citizens, and as such it is not useful.
Actually, it could be useful for tracking stolen cars. (Give them your number, they tell the computer to alert them if it's spotted.) Likewise the getaway car from a crime. Of course, it's useless as soon as the criminals has a chance to swap the plates (as is already being done to avoid the GBP 5 [c. $8] per day 'congestion charge'), but useful in the first minutes after a robbery... (Of course, a Lo-Jack system is much better for the stolen car scenario, but not in the bank robbery.)
Overall, I don't like it. Too instrusive (WTF - they want to track everybody, everywhere they go?!) for too little gain (very little you can't achieve with OnStar or LoJack), and too much risk of abuse (cops tracking the SO's car, harassing people they don't like).
The trouble is, it is useful - for all the wrong things. Lots of potential abuses, very little legitimate use!
I don't know why they treat Korea with kid gloves, they can't have enough nukes to worry the US if it really came to it.
That's the trouble: even a single nuke is enough to worry the US. Look at the impact Al Queda had on 9/11, and ask yourself what impact a single nuke, or even a "dirty bomb" would have.
MAD worked well against the USSR during the Cold War: the USSR's leaders knew they would lose WWIII (both sides would: as WOPR would put it, "the only winning move is not to play"). That deterrent doesn't work against suicide bombers...
they oughta float some above Iraq, Baghdad as a stopgap measure until communications infrastructure is mended. come to think of it, would come in very handy in desaster stricken places, like Algeria, where earthquakes destroyed a lot of the infrastructure.
Or NYC, on 9/11; since cellphone base units need to be high up, a lot of them were mounted on top of one of the two towers, knocking out cellphone service. Add the power outage, damaged landline trunks, a load of Verizon telco switches and the huge surge in network usage, and communication was several degraded - an 802.16 (WiMax) base station on one of these things could have made a big difference. (An extra thousand voice channels, for example, or several dozen T-1s worth of data bandwidth.)
Any kind of disaster, really, natural or otherwise, could benefit - one of the biggest difficulties is coordinating rescue teams and resources, as well as collating survivor lists, especially when the communications infrastructure just collapsed! IIRC the US government bought a load of Iridium satellite phones for exactly this kind of contingency, but those are very expensive and take time to issue: much quicker to launch one big hot air balloon and use existing cellphones and laptops...
im pretty confused by your last paragraph, i was under the assuption that in the UK it was a user pays system, where you get charged for your usage of the telco network, unless your talking about local calls (i have no idea about those)..
For any call (including local) the whole lot gets charged to the caller. At up to about 50 cents/minute, when you're calling a cellphone. The recipient doesn't pay anything for incoming calls.
and i thought the us used that wacky screw-them-at-both-ends(tm) method of charging for mobile calls? you know where both the caller and callee (i love these terms) are billed for the call..
Depends entirely on the tariff; pick the right one, and neither end pays anything per minute, as long as both parties are within the US or Canada. (e.g. Nextel for the cellphone, MCI 'Neighborhood' for the landline.) The wacky screw-neither-end method! The US system is flexible enough you can get a totally flat-rate tariff: no per-minute charges to call any phone, anywhere - mobile or landline. You can't get that in the UK: whatever tariff, you're stuck paying per-minute to call a cellphone. Yes, this means line rental is higher; I'd call that a fair price for not getting ass-raped with charges you can't control, if you ever want to call a cellphone...
Boy do I wish I did not live in the pro corporate states. This is more proof that the baby bells just keep monopolizing and overcharging for everything.
Uh, the post you replied to was quoting Australian rates. Nothing to do with Baby Bells, or the "pro corporate states"! (In the US - where the Baby Bells are fixed line operators, and don't determine mobile rates - data plans are rather better than AUS$50/Mbyte, which is about US$25-30/Mbyte.)
GSM = Cheap!! Not in Australia!! Average cost of calls here is 1c / second!
Ditto the UK: handsets are cheap on pay-as-you-go plans, or 'free' with a 1 year contract - but outgoing calls are often expensive, especially during "peak" times (roughly M-F, 8-6) - and anyone wanting to call you from a landline or a mobile from another network might as well just hand their wallet to your telco.
The situation is very slowly improving, though; outgoing calls have dropped quite a bit, and the rates charged to anyone calling you are being forced down over the next couple of years. The huge 3G license fees may reverse some of this progress though...
The scam of caller-pays (with hugely inflated rates) makes mobiles look cheap here - it Enrons the cost onto other people, who often get a nasty shock when their bill arrives, and think they're being ripped off by their own telco. IMHO, the US system is much fairer: whoever I call, whenever and wherever they are, the price is determined by my telco's tariff, not the recipient's telco!
On the issue of punishing companies for unsafe practices like this, sometimes it's 50/50. Depends how much sway they have. I'm not anti-capitalist über-left cynical jaded moron, but after reading Fast Food Nation recently, I don't have a whole lot of faith in the government's ability to control this kind of activity on a large scale. The government used to have a lot more power over companies since Theodore Roosevelt's time, but the book seems to point the finger at the Reagon era for the change.
Is the government's ability to "control this kind of activity" in question? According to the article: "The company weathered an investigation by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which had inquired about the computer at the end of 1998 but dropped the proceedings many months later without announcing findings. Gilliam and other former Uwatec employees say the company misled the commission by sending it Aladins altered to remove the defect, but Johnson denies the charge." The government investigated - but presumably decided not to proceed. Perhaps because they were fooled by modified units (dumb: for the investigation, they should have bought units from stores like any customer!) No lack of authority or awareness - just a lack of ability on the investigator's part. My mother was legal advisor to the local Environmental and Consumer Protection Division; whenever they suspected anything, their first step was to buy the product in question, posing as ordinary customers. Simple government incompetence/indifference, rather than any structural problem...
Anyway, it wouldn't have been bad PR to admit a mistake, hell it's only human to make mistakes, even when something is as serious as this. The problem shouldn't have been there at all, but it was caught before anyone was hurt, so they should have just apologised and fixed it. Cover-ups make me sick.
According to the article, the coverup certainly made some divers sick:
The computers said they had plenty of time.
But the next day, about an hour into the flight, both men grew nauseous. Iazdi threw up and his fingers went numb. Skaggs' head and shoulder throbbed. They had the bends.
When the plane landed on a stopover in Charlotte, N.C., they rushed to the nearest recompression chamber, in Durham, more than 100 miles away. Shaking, terrified, they spent six hours in the high-oxygen, high-pressure atmosphere that forced deadly nitrogen bubbles from their bodies.
They survived, but the headaches, fatigue and numbness would never go away -
and they would never work again as divers.
Admitting to this fault would have been much worse than just PR; the compensation bill just from these two ex-divers, apparently crippled by this bug, would damage the company severely - and who would ever trust them again, knowing their products have crippled people without warning?!
No, Quartz is what replaced "Display Postscript" in Mac OS X 10.0 and onwards.
It replaced Display Postscript with Display PDF. (To quote Apple about Quartz Extreme: "...Quartz, the revolutionary composited windowing system in Mac OS X that uses the Portable Document Format (PDF) as the basis of its imaging model.")
The NeXT often had programmers more familiar with Objective C (an OO version of C) bending their minds around PostScript to get the window server to display their new widget correctly.
The usage of Postscript did seem pretty weird; using vector rather than bitmap based widgets has advantages, but Postscript seems like overkill to me. I suppose decent caching (as done for vector fonts) should eliminate almost all the performance penalty, but still...
By law, you can always obtain a copy of any publicly-regulated utility's tariff. Contact the utility or your state's PSC, PUC, or other regulator. If not available online, you should be able to receive information through the mail. Since when has "online" become the yardstick of availability?
It's much easier to access information online. Technically, yes, I could get a copy by mail-order; the FCC seem to think this isn't good enough, however:
Under the FCC's detariffing rules, each long distance company is required to post a schedule of its rates, terms, and conditions on its Web site, if it has one. If you do not have access to the Internet, but want to use it to compare long distance prices, you can use the computer at your local library to get access. (From this FCC page.)
So, the FCC does now insist on tariff information being available online (unless the company has no web site; I suspect this is an unusual situation for a telco...)
I'm actually in the UK at present, too, which makes accessing non-online information rather more difficult. Anything online, however, is no harder than if I were still in Houston.
Yeah, but Apple dropped it in Mac OS X v10.0 (and later). It only appeared in Mac OS X Server 1.0 - 1.2 (Crazy numbering there from Apple's marketing department!)
Programming PostScript is a similar mind bending experience to programming Forth.
Yes, programming it's a pretty tough job; bear in mind it's not really supposed to be used like that - when you use it as a printer control language, it seems a lot nicer. Genuinely programming it, like the Postscript webserver, is a neat hack, but not really the normal use;-)
Well, I still do not know why you used Touring completness for your example...
Example? Turing completeness is pretty significant.
I assume you are just reading about it in school, eh?
Then you assume wrongly.
Anyhow, not only NeXT, but the old NEWS distributed windows systems proposed by SUN did infact used postscrip. I believe SGI also implemented a NEWS server... it was overshadowed by X. Although I believe both SGI and SUN did merge X and NEWS together in their display servers....
NeXT is the nearest to a mainstream example; while NeWS was derived from Postscript (predating Display Postscript), it was never a compliant Postscript implementation, ruling out the big screen<->printer WYSIWYG advantage. Irix 4 introduced Display Postscript support, used by Impressario, but NeWS was dropped after Irix 3.
The key difference is, IMO, NeWS was a dead-end, replaced entirely by X - NeXT's Display Postscript lives on, as Display PDF in Quartz.
Postscript is a programming language - so you can 'program' in it... whatever you want. Even something like the game of life. Crazy huh? That's technology for you.
Since it's Turing-complete, technically you could port an x86 emulator to it, and boot Windows in Postscript. In practice, of course, it would be insanely slow, but on a fast enough machine you could play Doom or Quake. 60ppm printer -> 1 fps;-)
Postscript isn't just used for printers, either. NeXT used Display Postscript for the GUI, so applications were truly WYSIWG: the printer and the screen were rendering precisely the same source! Apparently this was one of the NeXT features which was inherited by Mac OS X, in modified form: parts of the GUI use Display PDF in much the same way.
Well, in politics it's all about power, money, and relationships. A politician getting into bed with one company for a "long-term, monogamous relationship" is going to yield him a lot more leverage (favors owed him) than if that company knows they're gonna have to woo him all over again in 3 years' time. And when the company knows they've got "a man on the inside," they in turn can leverage their resources to make sure he stays in office.
On a less cynical note, a lot of companies give significant discounts for long-term commitment. Provision a big (150+Mbps) connection from British Telecom in the UK, for example, and they'll reduce the charge by 20% for a 4 year contract. (Since the prices start at over $1m/yr, that 20% is quite significant...) Of course, this can look like a lousy deal two years down the road...
(Being a former state-owned monopoly - until 1984, it was illegal to compete with them - BT are required by the regulator to publish every price they offer. In the US, this obligation applies to every telco anyway, under FCC regs, but the filed tariffs aren't online, only displayed in the FCC library IIRC.)
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They'd have difficulty pulling that one off; as their employer, AOL is subject to vicarious liability - within certain limits, it doesn't matter whether it was authorized or not, AOL are still stuck with it. So, if (for example) a Microsoft guy gives me a free copy of Visual Studio, they can't come after me for license fees later. IIRC, the limit is whether or not it was "reasonable" (to the court) for that employee to be doing so: a PR guy handing out free samples is OK, claiming to give me authorization to post it on Usenet is not ;-)
In this case, I'm pretty sure any court would uphold the Nullsoft action: assuming it wasn't a case of their website being cracked, the software was developed and released in the usual way, as they've released other programs in the past. AOL would have great difficulty getting past that. (Of course, they're free to delete the files from their own website - they just can't retract the GPLed copies already out there...)
According to AT&T, that happened more than 20 years ago: even before the 1984 breakup into Baby Bells, they were saying the most expensive element of a long distance call was timing and billing it. They may have been exaggerating, but once you factor in the need to audit and log everything, keeping clocks synchronized, all the extra CPU load on the exchanges, and most significantly the extra software requirements (instead of "patch line X to line Y", it becomes "log start time, patch line X to line Y, keep track of time until the line is dropped again") and customer support (people querying charges - "I didn't call Wisconsin that day, I was in hospital!", "But 281-555-1234 should be a local call from here"...) - just charge $x per month and make sure the calls get through. Much simpler, hence cheaper. (Just compare a telco's billing department to an ISP's...)
A few years ago, a FAQ for ISPs was "why don't you offer a pay-per-minute option, as an alternative to flat-rate subscriptions?" - the answer was that all the extra overhead would make the per-minute billing more expensive than flat-rate.
For that matter, MCI now offer flat-rate calls through the US (and Canada, for an extra $4/month) on landlines.
I'd like to hear the Chief Superintendant of the force concerned tell a court, in his professional, medical opinion what difference there is between moving a patient between one hospital and another to have heart transplant surgery and moving the organ between one hospital and another for use in that very same patient.
A transplant organ isn't a bag of shopping. The difference between delivering it quickly and delivering it leisurely can be the difference between life and death. Hopefully, the courts will reinforce that and decide accordingly.
Unfortunately, the law is very clear on this: an ambulance is a vehicle used "exclusively for the transport of patients". Transporting organs does not count under the current rules - should, but doesn't. Legally, I very much doubt the court is able to throw the case out: they have to interpret the law as written, rather than trying to decide what the law should be!
The trouble is, the law in question was written before organ transplants existed. A specific amendment was made to allow these vehicles to carry flashing blue lights - but Parliament didn't alter the rules governing speeding and other traffic rules. As it stands, legally this guy wasn't a member of the emergency services - just a delivery driver. Dumb law, but still the law unless and until someone changes it...
Unlikely: apart from anything else, they can't "demand" it from the FCC - there's no FCC involvement!
That's the "big news" you're talking about and it's what I'm afraid the FCC will give them.
The FCC can't, because they're already free from FCC control in that respect - and always have been.
That's a pretty wimpy requirement and one that will mean a whole lot less if the FCC does its expected deregulation on Monday. Right now, we get effectively no choice of channels, which is mostly merely inconvenient, but has the potential to be much worse. How likely is it that a cable company, would continue to carry a channel that ran documentaries critical of their sponsors for instance?
If it's a "local" channel (i.e. one you receive via antenna) they can't do anything else. Nor would they have much reason to: their customers can all access such a channel with just an ordinary antenna anyway!
Ugh, yes! No argument here. And the television tax? Who came up with that one? I guess we should count our blessings, eh? ;-)
Dead right; the UK government is currently trying to remove the double jeopardy rule, and reduce the right to jury trials (in "complex" cases, which appears to be government-speak for "we don't trust the jury to reach the right verdict"). OTOH, there are three big court cases challenging the legality of the TV tax being heard in September, so at least there's light at the end of the tunnel...
The government created it, the government defines how much it is, and the government decides how the BBC operates (setting quotas for outsourced production, domestic content etc). The BBC also receives several hundred million per year in additional funding directly from the Treasury, from general taxation revenue.
The government have no control over it, short of a somewhat mythical (and in the Dyke era almost certainly dead) old-boys network. Rather, the BBC is controlled by its Director General,
Who is appointed by the government, under government rules.
Major changes, like launching new channels, have to get the approval of the media/culture secretary iirc.
And the media/culture secretary would be part of ... the government?
Seems to me that if you have a reasoned rule about how fast emergency vehicles may travel to balance the risk of the patient's health with the risk of harming other road users, the driver in question should be arguing to have it modified, not taking everyone else's life into his own hands by driving so recklessly.
That would be reasonable. However, the explanation given for this prosecution has nothing to do with emergency vehicle guidelines - rather, the police claim a car transporting organs does not qualify as an "ambulance", hence is not permitted to speed at all. Nothing to do with "ambulance rules": they are arguing the speed limit applies to these vehicles in the same way as to normal (non-emergency service) vehicles.
You get most of that already. The services will be telephone+Internet+TV, right?
For telephone, Verizon are already required to interconnect with other telcos, at regulated rates: the only monopoly element would be line rental/local calls.
Internet/data traffic: Not regulated per se, but if Verizon change their peering arrangements it'll be big news. Until then, you're free to access anything you want over it.
TV: Cable and satellite companies are required to carry all the local channels, as well as carrying "community access" programming.
So, the only element Verizon really gain a monopoly over is local service - which they already have (with very few exceptions) with the existing setup. The gain is more competition for cable companies (on TV) and better Net access, the loss... potentially, some ISPs which already depend on non-mandated Verizon services? (The DSL ISPs who resell Verizon service are only there as long as they can pay Verizon enough to keep them.)
Verizon isn't likely to agree to this though, nor (sadly) is butt kissing Powell at the FCC. That's why the public (i.e. you and me) must hold their feet to the fire.
If you want to see a truly failed regulator, look at the FCC's UK counterpart, Oftel - who spent years defending per-minute charging for local calls, delaying the launch of broadband, and fighting against local loop unbundling. After a few years of intense lobbying by angry Net users, broadband happened, LLU technically happens (to a couple of hundred lines, so far!) and flat-rate dialup. Flat-rate voice calls, too, but only evenings and weekends.
That's exactly what went wrong last time round; local governments basically said "OK, rape the customers all you like, as long as we get a cut..." Hopefully this time round, people will push hard enough to avoid repeating that mistake!
And on electricity, in a lot of areas! As well as price competition, it gives you some interesting options - like Green Mountain, who offer 'clean' power (depending on the area, usually generated entirely from wind, sometimes with some hydro or similar) for a slightly higher price.
Unfortunately, SBC just got our legislature here in Illinois to let them double our rate, because... it's... err... good for campaign contributions I guess.
I think their reasoning was something about DSL - if they got the rate hike, they could offer DSL to more people?
Why not? With the existing infrastructure - electricity, cable TV, telephone - the government prohibited competition. This, obviously, created a monopoly for each utility; all the regulatory effort of the last decade or two has gone into reversing the damage from that. With fiber, however, who is prohibiting some other company from laying fiber just like Verizon?
If you have someone right where you want them, would you trust a company whose primary objective is to make profits and become larger to do what's right for their customers or for themselves?
The answer is not to let the government (or their favored company) get you right where they want you. Don't let Verizon be given a monopoly in the first place!
If the infrastructure is too expensive for one company to afford, let them group together to build a shared local network - much the same way Internet peering points work: each ISP wanting to hook up has to pay their chunk of the running costs. That way, nobody gets screwed.
Compared to the UK situation, where 2 of the 5 analogue broadcast channels are part of the tax-funded BBC? (Along with 5 or more national radio stations, a couple of magazines, a serious web presence, and a newspaper with a very similar agenda).
I really don't think having "only" four or five different TV companies available (to non-cable/satellite subscribers) is a problem - especially when so many people have cable or satellite, giving them literally hundreds of different channels to choose from. Not to mention a huge number of newspapers and magazines, and of course the Internet!
Keep this in mind: For years, the UK had just three different TV companies - the largest one state-owned, and the smallest subsidised. No cable (that came in the 80s), no satellite (same). With or without these changes, US viewers without cable/satellite will have more choice than UK viewers. I'm not holding the UK up as some sort of media Utopia, but it's hardly the disaster area these guys seem to predict!
The kidney won't help you: the police in England are currently prosecuting an ambulance driver for speeding while transporting a liver for transplant. Insane, but there's nothing to stop them doing it...
Actually, it could be useful for tracking stolen cars. (Give them your number, they tell the computer to alert them if it's spotted.) Likewise the getaway car from a crime. Of course, it's useless as soon as the criminals has a chance to swap the plates (as is already being done to avoid the GBP 5 [c. $8] per day 'congestion charge'), but useful in the first minutes after a robbery... (Of course, a Lo-Jack system is much better for the stolen car scenario, but not in the bank robbery.)
Overall, I don't like it. Too instrusive (WTF - they want to track everybody, everywhere they go?!) for too little gain (very little you can't achieve with OnStar or LoJack), and too much risk of abuse (cops tracking the SO's car, harassing people they don't like).
The trouble is, it is useful - for all the wrong things. Lots of potential abuses, very little legitimate use!
That's the trouble: even a single nuke is enough to worry the US. Look at the impact Al Queda had on 9/11, and ask yourself what impact a single nuke, or even a "dirty bomb" would have.
MAD worked well against the USSR during the Cold War: the USSR's leaders knew they would lose WWIII (both sides would: as WOPR would put it, "the only winning move is not to play"). That deterrent doesn't work against suicide bombers...
Or NYC, on 9/11; since cellphone base units need to be high up, a lot of them were mounted on top of one of the two towers, knocking out cellphone service. Add the power outage, damaged landline trunks, a load of Verizon telco switches and the huge surge in network usage, and communication was several degraded - an 802.16 (WiMax) base station on one of these things could have made a big difference. (An extra thousand voice channels, for example, or several dozen T-1s worth of data bandwidth.)
Any kind of disaster, really, natural or otherwise, could benefit - one of the biggest difficulties is coordinating rescue teams and resources, as well as collating survivor lists, especially when the communications infrastructure just collapsed! IIRC the US government bought a load of Iridium satellite phones for exactly this kind of contingency, but those are very expensive and take time to issue: much quicker to launch one big hot air balloon and use existing cellphones and laptops...
For any call (including local) the whole lot gets charged to the caller. At up to about 50 cents/minute, when you're calling a cellphone. The recipient doesn't pay anything for incoming calls.
and i thought the us used that wacky screw-them-at-both-ends(tm) method of charging for mobile calls? you know where both the caller and callee (i love these terms) are billed for the call..
Depends entirely on the tariff; pick the right one, and neither end pays anything per minute, as long as both parties are within the US or Canada. (e.g. Nextel for the cellphone, MCI 'Neighborhood' for the landline.) The wacky screw-neither-end method! The US system is flexible enough you can get a totally flat-rate tariff: no per-minute charges to call any phone, anywhere - mobile or landline. You can't get that in the UK: whatever tariff, you're stuck paying per-minute to call a cellphone. Yes, this means line rental is higher; I'd call that a fair price for not getting ass-raped with charges you can't control, if you ever want to call a cellphone...
Uh, the post you replied to was quoting Australian rates. Nothing to do with Baby Bells, or the "pro corporate states"! (In the US - where the Baby Bells are fixed line operators, and don't determine mobile rates - data plans are rather better than AUS$50/Mbyte, which is about US$25-30/Mbyte.)
Ditto the UK: handsets are cheap on pay-as-you-go plans, or 'free' with a 1 year contract - but outgoing calls are often expensive, especially during "peak" times (roughly M-F, 8-6) - and anyone wanting to call you from a landline or a mobile from another network might as well just hand their wallet to your telco.
The situation is very slowly improving, though; outgoing calls have dropped quite a bit, and the rates charged to anyone calling you are being forced down over the next couple of years. The huge 3G license fees may reverse some of this progress though...
The scam of caller-pays (with hugely inflated rates) makes mobiles look cheap here - it Enrons the cost onto other people, who often get a nasty shock when their bill arrives, and think they're being ripped off by their own telco. IMHO, the US system is much fairer: whoever I call, whenever and wherever they are, the price is determined by my telco's tariff, not the recipient's telco!
Is the government's ability to "control this kind of activity" in question? According to the article: "The company weathered an investigation by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which had inquired about the computer at the end of 1998 but dropped the proceedings many months later without announcing findings. Gilliam and other former Uwatec employees say the company misled the commission by sending it Aladins altered to remove the defect, but Johnson denies the charge." The government investigated - but presumably decided not to proceed. Perhaps because they were fooled by modified units (dumb: for the investigation, they should have bought units from stores like any customer!) No lack of authority or awareness - just a lack of ability on the investigator's part. My mother was legal advisor to the local Environmental and Consumer Protection Division; whenever they suspected anything, their first step was to buy the product in question, posing as ordinary customers. Simple government incompetence/indifference, rather than any structural problem...
Anyway, it wouldn't have been bad PR to admit a mistake, hell it's only human to make mistakes, even when something is as serious as this. The problem shouldn't have been there at all, but it was caught before anyone was hurt, so they should have just apologised and fixed it. Cover-ups make me sick.
According to the article, the coverup certainly made some divers sick:
The computers said they had plenty of time.
But the next day, about an hour into the flight, both men grew nauseous. Iazdi threw up and his fingers went numb. Skaggs' head and shoulder throbbed. They had the bends.
When the plane landed on a stopover in Charlotte, N.C., they rushed to the nearest recompression chamber, in Durham, more than 100 miles away. Shaking, terrified, they spent six hours in the high-oxygen, high-pressure atmosphere that forced deadly nitrogen bubbles from their bodies.
They survived, but the headaches, fatigue and numbness would never go away -
and they would never work again as divers.
Admitting to this fault would have been much worse than just PR; the compensation bill just from these two ex-divers, apparently crippled by this bug, would damage the company severely - and who would ever trust them again, knowing their products have crippled people without warning?!
It replaced Display Postscript with Display PDF. (To quote Apple about Quartz Extreme: "...Quartz, the revolutionary composited windowing system in Mac OS X that uses the Portable Document Format (PDF) as the basis of its imaging model.")
The NeXT often had programmers more familiar with Objective C (an OO version of C) bending their minds around PostScript to get the window server to display their new widget correctly.
The usage of Postscript did seem pretty weird; using vector rather than bitmap based widgets has advantages, but Postscript seems like overkill to me. I suppose decent caching (as done for vector fonts) should eliminate almost all the performance penalty, but still...
It's much easier to access information online. Technically, yes, I could get a copy by mail-order; the FCC seem to think this isn't good enough, however:
Under the FCC's detariffing rules, each long distance company is required to post a schedule of its rates, terms, and conditions on its Web site, if it has one. If you do not have access to the Internet, but want to use it to compare long distance prices, you can use the computer at your local library to get access. (From this FCC page.)
So, the FCC does now insist on tariff information being available online (unless the company has no web site; I suspect this is an unusual situation for a telco...)
I'm actually in the UK at present, too, which makes accessing non-online information rather more difficult. Anything online, however, is no harder than if I were still in Houston.
Apple dropped Quartz?!
Programming PostScript is a similar mind bending experience to programming Forth.
Yes, programming it's a pretty tough job; bear in mind it's not really supposed to be used like that - when you use it as a printer control language, it seems a lot nicer. Genuinely programming it, like the Postscript webserver, is a neat hack, but not really the normal use ;-)
Example? Turing completeness is pretty significant.
I assume you are just reading about it in school, eh?
Then you assume wrongly.
Anyhow, not only NeXT, but the old NEWS distributed windows systems proposed by SUN did infact used postscrip. I believe SGI also implemented a NEWS server... it was overshadowed by X. Although I believe both SGI and SUN did merge X and NEWS together in their display servers....
NeXT is the nearest to a mainstream example; while NeWS was derived from Postscript (predating Display Postscript), it was never a compliant Postscript implementation, ruling out the big screen<->printer WYSIWYG advantage. Irix 4 introduced Display Postscript support, used by Impressario, but NeWS was dropped after Irix 3.
The key difference is, IMO, NeWS was a dead-end, replaced entirely by X - NeXT's Display Postscript lives on, as Display PDF in Quartz.
Since it's Turing-complete, technically you could port an x86 emulator to it, and boot Windows in Postscript. In practice, of course, it would be insanely slow, but on a fast enough machine you could play Doom or Quake. 60ppm printer -> 1 fps ;-)
Postscript isn't just used for printers, either. NeXT used Display Postscript for the GUI, so applications were truly WYSIWG: the printer and the screen were rendering precisely the same source! Apparently this was one of the NeXT features which was inherited by Mac OS X, in modified form: parts of the GUI use Display PDF in much the same way.
On a less cynical note, a lot of companies give significant discounts for long-term commitment. Provision a big (150+Mbps) connection from British Telecom in the UK, for example, and they'll reduce the charge by 20% for a 4 year contract. (Since the prices start at over $1m/yr, that 20% is quite significant...) Of course, this can look like a lousy deal two years down the road...
(Being a former state-owned monopoly - until 1984, it was illegal to compete with them - BT are required by the regulator to publish every price they offer. In the US, this obligation applies to every telco anyway, under FCC regs, but the filed tariffs aren't online, only displayed in the FCC library IIRC.)