Intel has recently managed to squeeze 80 cores onto a single chip, resulting in up to 2 TFlops per socket. That's about 700 times as much as a single 700 MHz BlueGene/L processor or 350 times as fast as a BlueGene processing node. 250 (500) of those chips could take on LLNL's BlueGene at a mere 66 (31) kW of power consumption. (Values in brackets are for the slower, more power-efficient version).
Back in the real world I don't know how real the TeraScale chips are. Yield probably is as low as it gets, I wouldn't know of any solution incorporating them. Way more real than Intel's research experiments is IBM's planned BlueGene/Q, going for the 10 PF in 2010-2012, so by their standards your timeframe fits snugly.
To make it quick: I wouldn't recommend the switch.
I have been using a swiss provider's HSPA network for several months now and am not quite satisfied. The latency is bad (500~2000 ms ping rtt compared to 10-30 ms via ADSL1), availability isn't that great (often I can only get mediocre GPRS/EDGE speeds around 80-150 kbps) and the price's definately higher than a landline.
On the other hand, when HSPA works, it's great. An RTT of somewhere around 300 ms is possible and a sustained transfer rate of around 1 mbps is realistic (most of the network's 1.8 mbps HSDPA, being upgraded to 3.6; so I expect 2 mbps real bandwidth in the near future). Also, I've got this nice subscription where you pay a monthly flat fee (some 20% of an average 3 mbps landline or 2 GB WWan plan) plus a small fee per day of usage (some 7% of said landline or 2 GB WWan plan). Whenever possible I'll use public WLans and my private VPN server, limiting my WWan use to some 5-10 days per month.
Is that "width of the text" as in font-size or as in width of the element containing said text?
In both cases, I disagree. The former would render the text far too small to be comfortably read on (windowed) SVGA while producing huge letters on (fullscreen) WSXGA. The latter also has it's share of problems, think rasterized images that ought to stretch the text's width, think ads embedded besides the text (requiring a given width in pixels).
Also, to be pedantic: Any markup specifing the width of text is bad. Information and presentation should be seperated, no matter if we're talking about HTML4 or XHTML. Following that, CSS isn't HTML and therefore no markup. Code may not be a better description, but as long as you don't mix up "program code" and "markup-style code", it fits (imo).
If by "resize" you're referring to the browser window or tab, you could be interested in the Ctrl + MWheel combo. A lot faster than manually adjusting window width to your likings.
Also, in Opera, the "7" and "8" number keys allow you to to instantly zoom +/-100%. Even faster than the other way round and it's quickly back to normal ("Ctrl + 0" resets to 100% if you forget how many ticks you're in or out).
TFA says classifieds, them digging through their data on request, subscriptions for them monitoring projects/devs.
I imagine they might make quite nice head hunter "equipment". Think company x wanting to incorporate SMB connectivity to their closed source product (and requiring a developer to do so). Instead of digging thru or placing classifieds, Ohloh would hook them up with the top 10 contributers to smbfs. This could turn out to be a great deal for both sides. Company X gets a dev really skilled in the task he's going to work on, Developer Y gets paid better for a gig in a field he's interested in.
If Ohloh should succeed, a few hundred commits in their database could be a great independent point in anyone's CV.
Your assertion that sensibly-implemented Javascript is no security threat hasn't really been tested, as there hasn't been a sensible implementation yet.
As strange as this may sound, IE7's JavaScript implementation does not seem to have any known security flaws. Firefox, Safari and Opera seem to all be plagued by recent problems.
Anyways, JavaScript may not be the biggest of the web's security problems. Cross-site-scripting can be accomplished almost as easy with pure html (e.g. instead of redirecting victims, a full-screen IFrame is laid over the whole affected page. Additional benefit: address bar still shows the correct domain); CSRF is a bit more limited (to GET requests, to be precise) but certainly still possible.
such as the lack of threading
I hope you're kidding. We're talking about a language to enhance the web surfing experience, not the language you're going to write your next huge application in. Also, JavaScript does provide enough possibility of asynchronous operations; Prototype.js and the like make them easy to use. Adding a threading framework could very well introduce huge gaps between browsers. Again.
In other news Ford is blamed for the United States' foreign policy (If they hadn't built that stupid model T, nobody would be driving cars today not burning all the oil not making raiding middle eastern countries for their oil necessary) while Xerox is being accused for global warming as a whole (THEY started all that copying and printing. If it weren't for them, we wouldn't have had to chop down rainforests for paper which in turn would have photosynthized all that CO2 back to O2.)
Please, get a grip. Microsoft has done their share of bad design decisions (ActiveX, anyone?), but they're not the only ones. After having grown to about a quarter of IE's market share, Mozilla Firefox is already surpassing it on vulnerabilities. As they grow more popular and/or feature-rich all bigger projects are broken.
The GoogleBot doesn't execute JavaScript. Google listing any content from a given site means it does, to a certain point, degrade gracefully.
Also, what's your problem with JavaScript? If you ever used the Google front page (instead of your browser's quick search function or/search?q=your+query), you probably didn't mind not having to click into that textbox, now did you? JavaScript can cause some problems, but implemented sensibly (by the browser devs) it is no security threat and used responsibly (by web devs) has great benefits.
What you describe is a vulnerability of the rather new, cheap domain-certificates. Instead of verifying whatever entity requested it and issuing accordingly, these certificates will be given out happily to anybody with the matching domain.
The classic flavour of certificates were issued only to verified companies and people. Check, for example, PayPal vs. a cheapskate ISP's web interface. Any good browser will display "PayPal Inc. (US)" or "*.ngz-server.de (DE)" in the status or address bar. With the former, a quick glance allows me to clearly identify that I am, indeed, talking to a company called PayPal, incorporated in the U.S. The latter doesn't tell me more than looking at the address bar would. Typosquatting becomes as easy as it is for domain names (some $10 of extra cost required). Creating a typosquat company, OTOH, is much more difficult, takes way longer, usually requires participation of at least one lawyer.
Unfortunately both IE6 (I don't have IE7 here, anybody care to check that?) and Firefox 2 go great lengths to hide this crucial information from their users. (Firefox turns the web into green meadows with BUNNIES and makes browsing veryvery SECURE!) Also, over 80% (according to a recent study to which I can't seem to find TFS; will get back if I do) of users will get fooled by padlock icons within the page they're visiting, ignoring indicators in the browser chrome.
Lemme get this straight. The British economy ($2.4t p.a.) would collapse because a few million Britons' home internet access gets cut off (say $30/mo on average for 20m (33%) people -- 7.2b p.a.; 0.3% of the total GDP)?
Most cutoff victims would probably just do whatever online business they have online (that's e-banking, shopping, eBay) at their workplace. Caused by this, they might work for an additional 90 seconds per day, totally compensating the 0.3% GDP loss from ISPs. Also, the $30/mo saved on internet access might be spent on a nice dinner, thus not leaving the country to multinational backbone providers and boosting the economy some more.
In a later step, the BPI would claim to have caused all this economic growth and take over the leadership of the UK. They'd introduce new anti-thought-piracy legislation with huge fines for everyone who'd dare to even think of a copyrighted song. The UK national debt would vanish in but hours by citizens being fined for hearing, thinking of and in some cases even humming songs.
Along with tax income and anything else they'd get their greedy hands on, all of those fines would be gobbled up by BPI execs. The infrastructure would start to crumble because nobody'd be maintaining it, but the cameras would be fine.
In the end, after the BPI had sucked everything out of the UK, citizens would move back into caves and watch their cities fall apart, fight-club style. Only weeks after being put into office, the BPI would have completed it's quest and move on to destroy other civilizations.
Nah. All you have to do is fire off an email to the Buckingham Palace's ISP (though a signed letter may be necessary), repeat twice and the Queen's offline. Won't work 'cause the royal ISP won't kill the connection, but it'd be funny as hell anyways.
Mostly. I seem to recall my T41 being a bit more sturdy than the T60 (which is still better than the X21). Also, the X61t's build quality is awesome with a few flaws; after some high drops onto stone floor the battery's bent a bit and the display hinge cut a few millimeters into the palm rest. Apart from the display not properly "clicking" to locked anymore, it works like a charm.
In other news, handing the masters of anything to unqualified clerks who probably even make you sign an agreement about not being liable for any loss of data is far beyond stupid, probably somewhere in the range of criminal negligence.
Should she get the laptop's purchase price refunded? Of course.
Should she get an apology for the inconvenience caused? Pretty much.
Should she get some kind of compensation (three months is quite some time, maybe $3k-$5k, maybe a badass gift cert., maybe best buy's current top-of-the-line laptop offering? Would be a nice gesture and they'd probably keep her as a customer.
Should Best Buy be investigated and probably fined for lack of protection of their customers' devices and data? Yeah!
Should she get $54m (equivalent to some 1'200 average american annual incomes!) for some inconveniences during three months? No!
Wrong. Scientology was all about money and lies all along. Try reading some inside accounts from back when LRH was alive, outrageous prices, billion-year sea org contracts, forced labour were all there. Did you know Hubbard made some $600m off his little Scientology project?
I mentioned lies. Bear with me for a few lines, let me elaborate: In 1934 LRH (*1911) had, according to his own account, spent 7 years in the U.S. marine corps, 6 as a civil engineer, 4 in brazil, 3 in africa, 6 enroute with his flying circus, graduated from college plus a slew of other activities summing up to eighty-four years of life experience.
You seem to be referring to some "light" free-zoning/squirreling. I respect that as a way of handling life for people in need of some spiritual guidance, but please keep in mind it's background. LRH was but a science-fiction writer. Dianetics, E-Meter auditing, Xenu and Man's evolution along the Seaweed - Jellyfish - Clam - Sloth - Ape - Man path are stories thought of by the same person.
Switzerland has ID cards, too. It does, however, not have any death vans roaming around towns. Also, while violating some privacy safeguards, it's citizens are protected way better than the U.S.', it's HDI is higher than the U.S.', it's GDP is higher than the U.S.', it's currency is more stable than the U.S. dollar and it's Gini coefficient is smaller.
For the example you provided, it does seem like a good idea. OTOH I do like to know as much as possible about my rights and duties as a citizen and memorizing fifty sets of different laws plus federal law where applicable isn't something I'd look quite forward to. Of course knowing what applies to my current state of residence should usually suffice, but I somewhat prefer the peace of mind to know my rights when travelling nationally. A country, to me, should mean a(n as) unified (as possible) set of laws.
Seems I like the European way of handling this (lots of smaller, discrete countries) in favour of the American one (huge but somewhat loose federation of independent states).
Nah. I'd prefer to live in a country with one set of rules. One government telling me wheter or not I may smoke cannabis, one government telling me the speed limits and one set of laws to memorize. Also, one educational standard to simplify portability of qualifications to whatever extent possible. In my (limited) experience, chances of a state of 20 million representing your opinions and desires are roughly similar to chances of a federation of 250 million. To me, the latter appears as a logical way to simplify legislation while cherry-picking a pool of the greatest authorities on whatever field's being discussed out of a pool of 250 instead of (on average) 5 million.
Thanks to some experience with local and a few years of working for a federal government, I fully concur with the libertarian ideal of a minimal government, but replacing a minimal federal government with lots of local govt's seems about as good an idea as breaking up the U.S. into fifty countries with border passport checks and different currencies.
What's up with Dr. Paul wanting to abolish all federal laws anyways? Am I the only one who finds diversity (i.e. confusion) among the laws of a single country a bad idea? What'd be so bad about federal gov't universally (well countrywide, but the US of A tend to be somewhat universal for most citizens of 'em;)) regulating matters that affect more than, say, 3 states and the states sticking to their local business?
Before anybody brings forth the "small government" argument, consider this: (Assume x person-hours are spent dealing with a matter of state legislation) Even if thoroughly checking and validating a law going in effect nationwide would take the tenfold amount of time a state spends working, 10x is quite a bit less than 50x (50 states time x).
Federal. This USAnian state and county government idea is stupid anyways. Think about the possibilities. Build some high-speed fiber MANs to which every home is hooked up at Gigabit or faster speeds. For peace of mind, lay multimode fiber and light up a single 1G chan per home. Terminate those connections in local internet exchange points, open those up to local, national and international connectivity providers.
Apart from preventively high cost, this would be an almost perfect solution. Entry barriers for ISPs would be lowered to allow even the smallest of start-ups to join and compete in different markets. A common exchange point would allow geeks to allocate different kinds of traffic to different ISPs. An NY user^Wgeek^Wcompany could use operator A for traffic to the DC MAN, operator B for national and C for international traffic. Swapping your provider could be easy as cake without any changes to your local installations.
Unfortunately, this ain't gonna happen in this reality unless I am elected global emperor. Actually, screw the election stuff. Help me take over the world and I'll hook y'all up with gigabit fiber to the home. 'cept Redmond, WA. A 56k line would need to do for the whole area.
So who's this "typical pirate"? The 17-year-old gamer kid next door? Mr Smith who got his comp built by the neighborhood pc guy? Some swedish (allgeded) millionaires with a website? Some japanese gadget-lover? Or only those semi-poor people in emerging countries?
Because $31 now, for $18 may, according to some, be better than i guess about $38 some time in the near to far future.
To add some real-world numbers: GOOG peaked at almost $750 last november. Even though analysts valued it in the $900-$1000 range, it dropped a tiny bit since then, just some 30%. Also, with valuations ranging from $600-$900 (and a mean valuation of about $725 over some 30 brokers) it managed to lose another 8.5% over the course of the last trading day.
First of all, "poor" applies to people. Natural people, you see? Businesses are legal people. Just like there's no welfare for businesses, there's no "poor" businesses. (Obvious exemption: Gov't-subsidized public services. They're not poor, they're simply not competitive but the government deems them to be important enough not to die.) Either a business makes money, is using up stockpiles (including credits) of money or it's bankrupt. An internet-dependent business unable to afford basic redundancy is, however evil this may sound, badly led.
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Intel has recently managed to squeeze 80 cores onto a single chip, resulting in up to 2 TFlops per socket. That's about 700 times as much as a single 700 MHz BlueGene/L processor or 350 times as fast as a BlueGene processing node. 250 (500) of those chips could take on LLNL's BlueGene at a mere 66 (31) kW of power consumption. (Values in brackets are for the slower, more power-efficient version).
Back in the real world I don't know how real the TeraScale chips are. Yield probably is as low as it gets, I wouldn't know of any solution incorporating them. Way more real than Intel's research experiments is IBM's planned BlueGene/Q, going for the 10 PF in 2010-2012, so by their standards your timeframe fits snugly.
To make it quick: I wouldn't recommend the switch.
I have been using a swiss provider's HSPA network for several months now and am not quite satisfied. The latency is bad (500~2000 ms ping rtt compared to 10-30 ms via ADSL1), availability isn't that great (often I can only get mediocre GPRS/EDGE speeds around 80-150 kbps) and the price's definately higher than a landline.
On the other hand, when HSPA works, it's great. An RTT of somewhere around 300 ms is possible and a sustained transfer rate of around 1 mbps is realistic (most of the network's 1.8 mbps HSDPA, being upgraded to 3.6; so I expect 2 mbps real bandwidth in the near future). Also, I've got this nice subscription where you pay a monthly flat fee (some 20% of an average 3 mbps landline or 2 GB WWan plan) plus a small fee per day of usage (some 7% of said landline or 2 GB WWan plan). Whenever possible I'll use public WLans and my private VPN server, limiting my WWan use to some 5-10 days per month.
Is that "width of the text" as in font-size or as in width of the element containing said text?
In both cases, I disagree. The former would render the text far too small to be comfortably read on (windowed) SVGA while producing huge letters on (fullscreen) WSXGA. The latter also has it's share of problems, think rasterized images that ought to stretch the text's width, think ads embedded besides the text (requiring a given width in pixels).
Also, to be pedantic: Any markup specifing the width of text is bad. Information and presentation should be seperated, no matter if we're talking about HTML4 or XHTML. Following that, CSS isn't HTML and therefore no markup. Code may not be a better description, but as long as you don't mix up "program code" and "markup-style code", it fits (imo).
If by "resize" you're referring to the browser window or tab, you could be interested in the Ctrl + MWheel combo. A lot faster than manually adjusting window width to your likings.
Also, in Opera, the "7" and "8" number keys allow you to to instantly zoom +/-100%. Even faster than the other way round and it's quickly back to normal ("Ctrl + 0" resets to 100% if you forget how many ticks you're in or out).
A big yay for local laws, the greatest way to obstruct justice for seldomly commited (non-)crimes :)
TFA says classifieds, them digging through their data on request, subscriptions for them monitoring projects/devs.
I imagine they might make quite nice head hunter "equipment". Think company x wanting to incorporate SMB connectivity to their closed source product (and requiring a developer to do so). Instead of digging thru or placing classifieds, Ohloh would hook them up with the top 10 contributers to smbfs. This could turn out to be a great deal for both sides. Company X gets a dev really skilled in the task he's going to work on, Developer Y gets paid better for a gig in a field he's interested in.
If Ohloh should succeed, a few hundred commits in their database could be a great independent point in anyone's CV.
Anyways, JavaScript may not be the biggest of the web's security problems. Cross-site-scripting can be accomplished almost as easy with pure html (e.g. instead of redirecting victims, a full-screen IFrame is laid over the whole affected page. Additional benefit: address bar still shows the correct domain); CSRF is a bit more limited (to GET requests, to be precise) but certainly still possible.
I hope you're kidding. We're talking about a language to enhance the web surfing experience, not the language you're going to write your next huge application in. Also, JavaScript does provide enough possibility of asynchronous operations; Prototype.js and the like make them easy to use. Adding a threading framework could very well introduce huge gaps between browsers. Again.
In other news Ford is blamed for the United States' foreign policy (If they hadn't built that stupid model T, nobody would be driving cars today not burning all the oil not making raiding middle eastern countries for their oil necessary) while Xerox is being accused for global warming as a whole (THEY started all that copying and printing. If it weren't for them, we wouldn't have had to chop down rainforests for paper which in turn would have photosynthized all that CO2 back to O2.)
Please, get a grip. Microsoft has done their share of bad design decisions (ActiveX, anyone?), but they're not the only ones. After having grown to about a quarter of IE's market share, Mozilla Firefox is already surpassing it on vulnerabilities. As they grow more popular and/or feature-rich all bigger projects are broken.
The GoogleBot doesn't execute JavaScript. Google listing any content from a given site means it does, to a certain point, degrade gracefully.
/search?q=your+query), you probably didn't mind not having to click into that textbox, now did you? JavaScript can cause some problems, but implemented sensibly (by the browser devs) it is no security threat and used responsibly (by web devs) has great benefits.
Also, what's your problem with JavaScript? If you ever used the Google front page (instead of your browser's quick search function or
What makes you think Anonymous Coward has the null uid?
What you describe is a vulnerability of the rather new, cheap domain-certificates. Instead of verifying whatever entity requested it and issuing accordingly, these certificates will be given out happily to anybody with the matching domain.
The classic flavour of certificates were issued only to verified companies and people. Check, for example, PayPal vs. a cheapskate ISP's web interface. Any good browser will display "PayPal Inc. (US)" or "*.ngz-server.de (DE)" in the status or address bar. With the former, a quick glance allows me to clearly identify that I am, indeed, talking to a company called PayPal, incorporated in the U.S. The latter doesn't tell me more than looking at the address bar would. Typosquatting becomes as easy as it is for domain names (some $10 of extra cost required). Creating a typosquat company, OTOH, is much more difficult, takes way longer, usually requires participation of at least one lawyer.
Unfortunately both IE6 (I don't have IE7 here, anybody care to check that?) and Firefox 2 go great lengths to hide this crucial information from their users. (Firefox turns the web into green meadows with BUNNIES and makes browsing veryvery SECURE!) Also, over 80% (according to a recent study to which I can't seem to find TFS; will get back if I do) of users will get fooled by padlock icons within the page they're visiting, ignoring indicators in the browser chrome.
Lemme get this straight. The British economy ($2.4t p.a.) would collapse because a few million Britons' home internet access gets cut off (say $30/mo on average for 20m (33%) people -- 7.2b p.a.; 0.3% of the total GDP)?
Most cutoff victims would probably just do whatever online business they have online (that's e-banking, shopping, eBay) at their workplace. Caused by this, they might work for an additional 90 seconds per day, totally compensating the 0.3% GDP loss from ISPs. Also, the $30/mo saved on internet access might be spent on a nice dinner, thus not leaving the country to multinational backbone providers and boosting the economy some more.
In a later step, the BPI would claim to have caused all this economic growth and take over the leadership of the UK. They'd introduce new anti-thought-piracy legislation with huge fines for everyone who'd dare to even think of a copyrighted song. The UK national debt would vanish in but hours by citizens being fined for hearing, thinking of and in some cases even humming songs.
Along with tax income and anything else they'd get their greedy hands on, all of those fines would be gobbled up by BPI execs. The infrastructure would start to crumble because nobody'd be maintaining it, but the cameras would be fine.
In the end, after the BPI had sucked everything out of the UK, citizens would move back into caves and watch their cities fall apart, fight-club style. Only weeks after being put into office, the BPI would have completed it's quest and move on to destroy other civilizations.
Nah. All you have to do is fire off an email to the Buckingham Palace's ISP (though a signed letter may be necessary), repeat twice and the Queen's offline. Won't work 'cause the royal ISP won't kill the connection, but it'd be funny as hell anyways.
Also, it's usually one of the few CAPS'd points in any open source license, including but not limited to the GPL, the MIT license or the BSD license.
Mostly. I seem to recall my T41 being a bit more sturdy than the T60 (which is still better than the X21). Also, the X61t's build quality is awesome with a few flaws; after some high drops onto stone floor the battery's bent a bit and the display hinge cut a few millimeters into the palm rest. Apart from the display not properly "clicking" to locked anymore, it works like a charm.
In other news, handing the masters of anything to unqualified clerks who probably even make you sign an agreement about not being liable for any loss of data is far beyond stupid, probably somewhere in the range of criminal negligence.
Should she get the laptop's purchase price refunded? Of course.
Should she get an apology for the inconvenience caused? Pretty much. Should she get some kind of compensation (three months is quite some time, maybe $3k-$5k, maybe a badass gift cert., maybe best buy's current top-of-the-line laptop offering? Would be a nice gesture and they'd probably keep her as a customer.
Should Best Buy be investigated and probably fined for lack of protection of their customers' devices and data? Yeah!
Should she get $54m (equivalent to some 1'200 average american annual incomes!) for some inconveniences during three months? No!
Wrong. Scientology was all about money and lies all along. Try reading some inside accounts from back when LRH was alive, outrageous prices, billion-year sea org contracts, forced labour were all there. Did you know Hubbard made some $600m off his little Scientology project?
I mentioned lies. Bear with me for a few lines, let me elaborate: In 1934 LRH (*1911) had, according to his own account, spent 7 years in the U.S. marine corps, 6 as a civil engineer, 4 in brazil, 3 in africa, 6 enroute with his flying circus, graduated from college plus a slew of other activities summing up to eighty-four years of life experience.
You seem to be referring to some "light" free-zoning/squirreling. I respect that as a way of handling life for people in need of some spiritual guidance, but please keep in mind it's background. LRH was but a science-fiction writer. Dianetics, E-Meter auditing, Xenu and Man's evolution along the Seaweed - Jellyfish - Clam - Sloth - Ape - Man path are stories thought of by the same person.
Switzerland has ID cards, too. It does, however, not have any death vans roaming around towns. Also, while violating some privacy safeguards, it's citizens are protected way better than the U.S.', it's HDI is higher than the U.S.', it's GDP is higher than the U.S.', it's currency is more stable than the U.S. dollar and it's Gini coefficient is smaller.
For the example you provided, it does seem like a good idea. OTOH I do like to know as much as possible about my rights and duties as a citizen and memorizing fifty sets of different laws plus federal law where applicable isn't something I'd look quite forward to. Of course knowing what applies to my current state of residence should usually suffice, but I somewhat prefer the peace of mind to know my rights when travelling nationally. A country, to me, should mean a(n as) unified (as possible) set of laws.
Seems I like the European way of handling this (lots of smaller, discrete countries) in favour of the American one (huge but somewhat loose federation of independent states).
Thanks to some experience with local and a few years of working for a federal government, I fully concur with the libertarian ideal of a minimal government, but replacing a minimal federal government with lots of local govt's seems about as good an idea as breaking up the U.S. into fifty countries with border passport checks and different currencies.
What's up with Dr. Paul wanting to abolish all federal laws anyways? Am I the only one who finds diversity (i.e. confusion) among the laws of a single country a bad idea? What'd be so bad about federal gov't universally (well countrywide, but the US of A tend to be somewhat universal for most citizens of 'em ;)) regulating matters that affect more than, say, 3 states and the states sticking to their local business?
Before anybody brings forth the "small government" argument, consider this: (Assume x person-hours are spent dealing with a matter of state legislation) Even if thoroughly checking and validating a law going in effect nationwide would take the tenfold amount of time a state spends working, 10x is quite a bit less than 50x (50 states time x).
Federal. This USAnian state and county government idea is stupid anyways. Think about the possibilities. Build some high-speed fiber MANs to which every home is hooked up at Gigabit or faster speeds. For peace of mind, lay multimode fiber and light up a single 1G chan per home. Terminate those connections in local internet exchange points, open those up to local, national and international connectivity providers.
Apart from preventively high cost, this would be an almost perfect solution. Entry barriers for ISPs would be lowered to allow even the smallest of start-ups to join and compete in different markets. A common exchange point would allow geeks to allocate different kinds of traffic to different ISPs. An NY user^Wgeek^Wcompany could use operator A for traffic to the DC MAN, operator B for national and C for international traffic. Swapping your provider could be easy as cake without any changes to your local installations.
Unfortunately, this ain't gonna happen in this reality unless I am elected global emperor. Actually, screw the election stuff. Help me take over the world and I'll hook y'all up with gigabit fiber to the home. 'cept Redmond, WA. A 56k line would need to do for the whole area.
So who's this "typical pirate"? The 17-year-old gamer kid next door? Mr Smith who got his comp built by the neighborhood pc guy? Some swedish (allgeded) millionaires with a website? Some japanese gadget-lover? Or only those semi-poor people in emerging countries?
Because $31 now, for $18 may, according to some, be better than i guess about $38 some time in the near to far future.
To add some real-world numbers: GOOG peaked at almost $750 last november. Even though analysts valued it in the $900-$1000 range, it dropped a tiny bit since then, just some 30%. Also, with valuations ranging from $600-$900 (and a mean valuation of about $725 over some 30 brokers) it managed to lose another 8.5% over the course of the last trading day.
First of all, "poor" applies to people. Natural people, you see? Businesses are legal people. Just like there's no welfare for businesses, there's no "poor" businesses. (Obvious exemption: Gov't-subsidized public services. They're not poor, they're simply not competitive but the government deems them to be important enough not to die.) Either a business makes money, is using up stockpiles (including credits) of money or it's bankrupt. An internet-dependent business unable to afford basic redundancy is, however evil this may sound, badly led.