I agree. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it isn't the books themselves that cause the kids to do better in school. Instead it's being in a household where knowledge and learning are valued. Until the Internet came along, the number of books in one's home was probably the best way to measure the amount of reading that went on in that house.
Sorry, but a company is not require to responsibly price things according to their cost. If you want texting prices to go down, then texting needs to become less popular or more competition needs to come in that offers cheaper or included texting.
Of course it is not required, but it is an obvious sign that there is not enough competition in the industry (or it is too hard for people to switch carriers) if carriers can charge significantly above cost for this sort of thing.
I second this. If this were a "free" market, I would simply switch away from Comcast because I don't like having my traffic restricted. Thus they would be motivated not to do this because they would almost certainly lose customers. But in fact I can't switch away from Comcast because they have no competitors in my neighborhood, so the market isn't really "free" at all.
I think the real role of government here should be to prevent companies like Comcast from building this kind of horizontal monopoly in the first place and thus encourage the kind of competition that would make it impossible for companies like Comcast to pull crap like this.
But in our current system, all of that 20% comes away from the major party candidate whose views are the most similar to the one you actually voted for. The more like your ideal candidate the major candidate is, the fewer percentage points they get.
Think about it this way: Assuming that half the population leans generally left (greater government spending, health care for everyone, more spending on the environment, etc.), and the other half leans generally right (less government spending, everyone pays for their own health care, etc.), If Ralph Nader and Al Gore were both equally popular, each would have gotten 25 percent of the vote and the republican candidate would get 50 percent of the vote.
In a three party system the winner is the one who appeals to the widest possible number of voters, and in this country that tends to a be the candidate who is both anti gay marriage and pro choice or vice-versa.
The point is, if a third party candidate were ever going to have a meaningful chance at success, their appeal would have to be wider than either of the mainstream candidates, rather than further to the end of one political extreme or another. Otherwise, you are just hurting the prospects of *either* of the people likely to vote for the largest number of pieces of legislation that you favor and instead giving the election to someone whose policies you will probably never agree with.
I suppose the more prescient question would be why would I want to use up multiple bookshelves in my tiny Boston apartment to hold hundreds of boxes containing "bits on plastic" when I could store many times this many movies on a single, re-usable hard disk.
And of course this says nothing to the savings of petroleum/carbon from not paying for all of this plastic in the first place.
To say the least it actually makes me angry every time I have to pay to have data delivered to my house *in a box*. It's dumb and old-fashioned and most of all entirely pointless.
I have to agree with this assessment. I live in Cambridge, MA, less than 500 feet from MIT's big, new computer science building, and the absolute fastest connection I can get to my apartment (and the only connection over 1.5 mbps down) is Comcast's 6m/768k cable service. As far as population density goes, we are pretty far up there with about 15,766 people per square mile (NYC is about 26,710/sq mile).
Compare this to my parents' house in the wealthy suburb of Newton, MA where the population density is only 4,644 people per square mile, but the median income is nearly twice as much, at $86,052. There, RCN, Comcast, and Verizon all offer services of at least 20M down and 5M up. This is still pretty meager compared to the offerings in South Korea and Japan, but it's definitely way better than you can get in the city.
I'd like to think this is an isolated incident, but in my personal experience it is mirrored all across the country. My service offerings in Chicago were similarly poor, while my girlfriends' parents offerings in the far off and fairly sparsely populated Tinley Park were both better and cheaper. People tell me that things in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston (median income: $29,825, density: 21,507 people/mi^2) are not significantly better than they are in Cambridge.
Related to denisty? Probably not.
Related to income? Probably.
Fair? Not at all.
Over the years the bells have been given about $200 billion in subsidies to bring fiber optics to everyone and close the "digital divide" by bringing broadband to the inner cities. Instead they've worsened the divide and a substantial portion of us *still* don't have access.
They're still one of the only major portable music player manufacturers out there with no ties to the content creation industry. If any company were going to beat them out with a better, sleeker, CHEAPER product, it would be Sony, but Sony has thus far been more concerned with protecting the copyrights of its music and movies than creating a portable device that people actually want to use. There are many, many obvious ways that the iPod could be improved upon: cost, battery life, interchangeable batteries, the ability to transfer music directly to other iPods (wirelessly), to name a few. But no one is even trying because improving on the iPod would make people more likely to "steal" music. And apple isn't trying because they already have a monopoly on this market, why should they bother rushing to innovate?
One thing many people (even iPod owners) keep pointing out about the iPod is that every product that has ever been invented to compete with it is only at best "just as good." This seems rather pathetic considering all of its shortfalls that have yet to be addressed.
This isn't a very good comparison. Ford didn't start installing radios in their cars to drive a rival radio manufacturer out of business. Furthermore, car manufacturers frequently install radios from other manufacturers in their cars (Bose anyone?). Not to mention that installing multiple radios from many manufacturers in a single car is substantially more impractical than doing the same with media players on a computer.
A better analogy would be if Ford designed a car that only accepted Ford-brand gasoline (which you could, of course, buy anywhere) unless you installed an adaptor.
Of course all of these analogies are somewhat invalidated by the fact that the car industry is far more competitive than the software industry (if you're Microsoft).
Also of note: The only digital cameras that really compare in image quality (not just resolution, but color reproduction as well) to any film camera are the digital SLRs, and they are still priced way out of the average user's price range.
According to people in Baghdad, much as they don't like Saddam Hussein and his regime, they regard any occupying army (i.e. The US and Britain) as equally bad if not worse. Most people around the world, including me, have very little faith in the US's ability to set up a democratic government in Iraq, or their commitment to doing so. Our track record in that department speaks for us.
I was a little disturbed when this article stated that "Major acts like Radiohead have flatly refused to make their music available online." This was very much contrary to everything I knew about Radiohead. I decided to pay their web site a visit just to check. Sure enough, while their site does not contain MP3s of actual album songs, they have several music videos and dozens of bootleg mp3s. I've always thought of Radiohead of the kind of band that thinks it's really cool when they do a show and the audience already knows the words to their unreleased songs. Everything I've read suggests that they are one of the few bands that have fully embraced the online music trading trend.
I agree with most of what you said about the mechanics of cars, but there's one fundamental principal that hasn't been pointed out here: Car theft often doesn't have anything to do with the "stylishness" of your car. The most commonly stolen car in the United States for years has been the Honda Civic (or some similar class of car) because the parts are easilly sold on the black market. Almost all BMW owners are going to buy their parts exclusively from the dealer, it's only the owners of the cheapest cars that are going to look toward less "well established" sources for their replacement and modification parts.
About OBD-II (it's OBD, not ODB): while the diagnostic system seems prohibitively expensive in the short term (from $200 - $500 depending on the number of vehicles it will work with and the complexity of the information you can retrieve) does actually give out quite a bit of information about your car. If it's failing emissions tests because of a faulty O2 sensor, that will definitely show up (in fact, a faulty O2 sensor on a 1997 Neon, and most other cars, will light up the Check Engine light).
Eric
P.S. I highly recommend that you and your wife join the Neon mailing list. I have found the folks on there to be quite car savvy and indeed very helpful in solving mechanical problems without spending too much (usually any) money.
Personally I think it's up to the home user to make their network or computer secure. There's little difference between what companies like Excite@Home provide and what UUnet and Genuity (or any T1/T3 service providor) provides. I like that, it means that my broadband connection to the internet is more direct and if I don't want to block a port, I don't have to. I don't want to see AT&T blocking ports left and right just because Joe User has no password on his computer. Suppose I have a secure way to open up port 80 or 139? What if I *want* to run a web server. The responsibility of making a computer secure has always been in the hands of it's administrator, and it should stay that way.
It kind of makes you wonder how the prosecution can argue that he caused millions of dollars in "damage" when not only did he not cause the companies "losses" by selling the information to others, but since he did everything electronically, how do they figure they can get away with saying that he broke something? When he was done the systems worked *exactly* the same way that they had when he got there, but if anything, he introduced the companies to security holes that they SHOULD patch before someone does actually come along and blackmail them for their source codes.
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I agree. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it isn't the books themselves that cause the kids to do better in school. Instead it's being in a household where knowledge and learning are valued. Until the Internet came along, the number of books in one's home was probably the best way to measure the amount of reading that went on in that house.
See also: Thoughtcrime!
Sorry, but a company is not require to responsibly price things according to their cost. If you want texting prices to go down, then texting needs to become less popular or more competition needs to come in that offers cheaper or included texting.
Of course it is not required, but it is an obvious sign that there is not enough competition in the industry (or it is too hard for people to switch carriers) if carriers can charge significantly above cost for this sort of thing.
I second this. If this were a "free" market, I would simply switch away from Comcast because I don't like having my traffic restricted. Thus they would be motivated not to do this because they would almost certainly lose customers. But in fact I can't switch away from Comcast because they have no competitors in my neighborhood, so the market isn't really "free" at all.
I think the real role of government here should be to prevent companies like Comcast from building this kind of horizontal monopoly in the first place and thus encourage the kind of competition that would make it impossible for companies like Comcast to pull crap like this.
But in our current system, all of that 20% comes away from the major party candidate whose views are the most similar to the one you actually voted for. The more like your ideal candidate the major candidate is, the fewer percentage points they get.
Think about it this way: Assuming that half the population leans generally left (greater government spending, health care for everyone, more spending on the environment, etc.), and the other half leans generally right (less government spending, everyone pays for their own health care, etc.), If Ralph Nader and Al Gore were both equally popular, each would have gotten 25 percent of the vote and the republican candidate would get 50 percent of the vote.
In a three party system the winner is the one who appeals to the widest possible number of voters, and in this country that tends to a be the candidate who is both anti gay marriage and pro choice or vice-versa.
The point is, if a third party candidate were ever going to have a meaningful chance at success, their appeal would have to be wider than either of the mainstream candidates, rather than further to the end of one political extreme or another. Otherwise, you are just hurting the prospects of *either* of the people likely to vote for the largest number of pieces of legislation that you favor and instead giving the election to someone whose policies you will probably never agree with.
Funny. When they wanted to put the fence along the Mexican border on the fast-track to completion, they managed to find a way around environmental regulations for that.
I suppose the more prescient question would be why would I want to use up multiple bookshelves in my tiny Boston apartment to hold hundreds of boxes containing "bits on plastic" when I could store many times this many movies on a single, re-usable hard disk. And of course this says nothing to the savings of petroleum/carbon from not paying for all of this plastic in the first place. To say the least it actually makes me angry every time I have to pay to have data delivered to my house *in a box*. It's dumb and old-fashioned and most of all entirely pointless.
I have to agree with this assessment. I live in Cambridge, MA, less than 500 feet from MIT's big, new computer science building, and the absolute fastest connection I can get to my apartment (and the only connection over 1.5 mbps down) is Comcast's 6m/768k cable service. As far as population density goes, we are pretty far up there with about 15,766 people per square mile (NYC is about 26,710/sq mile).
Compare this to my parents' house in the wealthy suburb of Newton, MA where the population density is only 4,644 people per square mile, but the median income is nearly twice as much, at $86,052. There, RCN, Comcast, and Verizon all offer services of at least 20M down and 5M up. This is still pretty meager compared to the offerings in South Korea and Japan, but it's definitely way better than you can get in the city.
I'd like to think this is an isolated incident, but in my personal experience it is mirrored all across the country. My service offerings in Chicago were similarly poor, while my girlfriends' parents offerings in the far off and fairly sparsely populated Tinley Park were both better and cheaper. People tell me that things in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston (median income: $29,825, density: 21,507 people/mi^2) are not significantly better than they are in Cambridge.
Related to denisty? Probably not.
Related to income? Probably.
Fair? Not at all.
Over the years the bells have been given about $200 billion in subsidies to bring fiber optics to everyone and close the "digital divide" by bringing broadband to the inner cities. Instead they've worsened the divide and a substantial portion of us *still* don't have access.
Oh and lets not forget Ogg-Vorbis support, of course.
They're still one of the only major portable music player manufacturers out there with no ties to the content creation industry. If any company were going to beat them out with a better, sleeker, CHEAPER product, it would be Sony, but Sony has thus far been more concerned with protecting the copyrights of its music and movies than creating a portable device that people actually want to use. There are many, many obvious ways that the iPod could be improved upon: cost, battery life, interchangeable batteries, the ability to transfer music directly to other iPods (wirelessly), to name a few. But no one is even trying because improving on the iPod would make people more likely to "steal" music. And apple isn't trying because they already have a monopoly on this market, why should they bother rushing to innovate?
One thing many people (even iPod owners) keep pointing out about the iPod is that every product that has ever been invented to compete with it is only at best "just as good." This seems rather pathetic considering all of its shortfalls that have yet to be addressed.
This isn't a very good comparison. Ford didn't start installing radios in their cars to drive a rival radio manufacturer out of business. Furthermore, car manufacturers frequently install radios from other manufacturers in their cars (Bose anyone?). Not to mention that installing multiple radios from many manufacturers in a single car is substantially more impractical than doing the same with media players on a computer. A better analogy would be if Ford designed a car that only accepted Ford-brand gasoline (which you could, of course, buy anywhere) unless you installed an adaptor. Of course all of these analogies are somewhat invalidated by the fact that the car industry is far more competitive than the software industry (if you're Microsoft).
Yeah, but good luck getting the film itself to work at *those* temperatures.
Also of note: The only digital cameras that really compare in image quality (not just resolution, but color reproduction as well) to any film camera are the digital SLRs, and they are still priced way out of the average user's price range.
According to people in Baghdad, much as they don't like Saddam Hussein and his regime, they regard any occupying army (i.e. The US and Britain) as equally bad if not worse. Most people around the world, including me, have very little faith in the US's ability to set up a democratic government in Iraq, or their commitment to doing so. Our track record in that department speaks for us.
I was a little disturbed when this article stated that "Major acts like Radiohead have flatly refused to make their music available online." This was very much contrary to everything I knew about Radiohead. I decided to pay their web site a visit just to check. Sure enough, while their site does not contain MP3s of actual album songs, they have several music videos and dozens of bootleg mp3s. I've always thought of Radiohead of the kind of band that thinks it's really cool when they do a show and the audience already knows the words to their unreleased songs. Everything I've read suggests that they are one of the few bands that have fully embraced the online music trading trend.
I agree with most of what you said about the mechanics of cars, but there's one fundamental principal that hasn't been pointed out here: Car theft often doesn't have anything to do with the "stylishness" of your car. The most commonly stolen car in the United States for years has been the Honda Civic (or some similar class of car) because the parts are easilly sold on the black market. Almost all BMW owners are going to buy their parts exclusively from the dealer, it's only the owners of the cheapest cars that are going to look toward less "well established" sources for their replacement and modification parts. About OBD-II (it's OBD, not ODB): while the diagnostic system seems prohibitively expensive in the short term (from $200 - $500 depending on the number of vehicles it will work with and the complexity of the information you can retrieve) does actually give out quite a bit of information about your car. If it's failing emissions tests because of a faulty O2 sensor, that will definitely show up (in fact, a faulty O2 sensor on a 1997 Neon, and most other cars, will light up the Check Engine light). Eric P.S. I highly recommend that you and your wife join the Neon mailing list. I have found the folks on there to be quite car savvy and indeed very helpful in solving mechanical problems without spending too much (usually any) money.
Their info isn't as up to date as it claims to be, it still says that Bush won Florida.
Personally I think it's up to the home user to make their network or computer secure. There's little difference between what companies like Excite@Home provide and what UUnet and Genuity (or any T1/T3 service providor) provides. I like that, it means that my broadband connection to the internet is more direct and if I don't want to block a port, I don't have to. I don't want to see AT&T blocking ports left and right just because Joe User has no password on his computer. Suppose I have a secure way to open up port 80 or 139? What if I *want* to run a web server. The responsibility of making a computer secure has always been in the hands of it's administrator, and it should stay that way.
It kind of makes you wonder how the prosecution can argue that he caused millions of dollars in "damage" when not only did he not cause the companies "losses" by selling the information to others, but since he did everything electronically, how do they figure they can get away with saying that he broke something? When he was done the systems worked *exactly* the same way that they had when he got there, but if anything, he introduced the companies to security holes that they SHOULD patch before someone does actually come along and blackmail them for their source codes.