Awesome post. The Dell Venue 11 Pro looks like a promising option. Another post mentioned this: http://www.fit-pc.com/web/prod... which might work ok with a zotac or intel NUC. I also really like the kangaroo but I wish they would come out with a little more powerful version. I'm still probably leaning towards a dell XPS 13 or an alienware 13 system as they are small enough to carry but still powerful but the dell venue 11 pro although not quite as powerful is probably good enough for my needs and considerably cheaper.
Just look at the pay disparities from the Sony leaks. Shitty male stars making as much or more than top drawer women. There is no way in hell that Adam Sandler was worth $20 million for Jack and Jill.
So assuming that your statement is true. Why do you think a company would pay one actor more than a different actor? Are they doing it out of the goodness of their heart? Do they need the male actor more? Is the male actor better at negotiating? Is the male actor demanding more? In Hollywood, top name male and female actors are free agents. They negotiate their contracts and decide whether they want to work a particular job. Even more so than google employees, top name actors can easily say no to anyone they want so if males are getting paid more than females it's likely because the females are not demanding more or aren't walking when their demands are not being met. There are other reasons like there is a larger pool of good female actors so they are easily replaced, etc... but nowhere is it sexism. Supply/demand is actually a lot of the pay disparity that you see combined with men being willing to optimize their career for money while women tend to optimize their career more for work/life balance and less for money.
Another tech guy afraid of getting numbers. The numbers will show what the numbers will show. What's the matter - stats scare you in school? Or was it girls?
Yes, the numbers will show that they didn't discriminate and as the original poster stated no one will care and still not believe the numbers.
OR
The numbers will show that there is some descrepency and they will get raked over the fires even if there are legitimate reasons behind the difference.
So basically by giving away their data, it can not possibly help them and could possibly hurt them. There is no win here for google.
Most of the problems for VR isn't resolution, even if it's good to have a good resolution. It's latency that causes problems where the users are suffering from vertigo due to the lag it creates.
It's not just resolution or latency. There is a missing quality somewhere that is hard to quantify. It's the quality that allows you to instantly tell the difference between a window, a mirror, and a monitor on the wall. I'm still waiting for the day that I can install a monitor in my wall that allows me to look out my fake window and look like I'm seeing the ocean or the grand canyon. Lake view or ocean view property becomes a lot less valuable once we have perfected fake windows.
The handful of people that actually have any kind of requirement above and beyond that simply don't count.
Exactly. I use firefox for firebug and pocket. I use chrome for hangouts because google dropped support for firefox. For general browsing, I have no preference. Generally people will use the stock browser unless there is some plugin or feature they want.
If you own a Chevy, Dodge, or Ford and the airbag is defective and recalled it won't matter if you are out of warranty. The device will be fixed free of charge by your local dealer. Any safety recall would be handled the same way.
Not true. Every recall I've received not only was specific to my year and model but also generally had a certain mileage where they wouldn't honor it as well as a limited time that you had to bring it in to get fixed. If you missed either window you were out of luck. They would still fix it but not for free.
It seems Microsoft has dropped all pretense of even trying to make a good desktop OS but instead is just doing anything it can that might make their stock price go up.
A dominate player doesn't automatically stay dominant when the environment shifts. My office has converted to openoffice. I've given out several dozen ubuntu live cds to people with older systems that just want to get on the web without worrying about viruses. Many of them when I check in with them later are still using these CDs. Desktop purchases have fallen off the cliff. Many people now only have a non-windows smartphone as their only form of internet. Laptops now are just as likely to have android or chromeOS as windows. On the server side, Linux is now basically the default. Microsoft still dominates in certain circles but they don't really hold a strong monopoly anywhere and virtually everywhere there is a free solution that is "good enough" for most people. "Good enough" tends to be the downfall of many monopolies that never thought some sub-optimal solution would ever overtake them.
It doesn't matter. AI is still pretty much a magic show. No real intelligence.
Define "real intelligence". Can we agree that Ke Jie, the #1 Go player in the world, is a very intelligent person?
Food for thought: AlphaGo learned (literally) Go by playing itself over and over, millions of times.
Pick another random game. Chess, checkers, texas holdem, or some made up game. Give both AlphaGo and Ke Jie one hour to study the rules and then let's see who wins. AlphaGo won because it brute forced millions of games and saw the outcome not because it has any innate intelligence. I expect that Ke Jie could easily win a random game against AlphaGo but games in general with their strict rule set still set an artificially low bar for intelligence. It's easy to see who wins and who loses so a computer can run through millions of combinations to brute force the solution. Something like natural language processing is not nearly so clean cut because there is no way for the computer to know the correct answer without something with "real intelligence" telling it beforehand.
I don't think you fully grasp how intractable Go is as a problem. "Strict rules" or not.
It doesn't matter. AI is still pretty much a magic show. No real intelligence. A human can fold laundry one second, chop wood the next second, and then sit down and play checkers. Even if you remove the physical part, a human still trounces a computer at general intelligence. Personal AI assistants are still annoyingly primitive. AI assistants are unable to understand all but the most basic commands. Simple phrases like "What is the second closest six flags to my house?" or "Remind me to take medicine at 7am for the next 7 days." are easy for a human assistant but next to impossible for current AI. I'm waiting for the day that AI can also do things like reschedule an appointment for me or search the web and do basic research like "find me a beach resort for july 30th that has internet and boat rentals and a nearby tennis court and an onsite bar". These are things that a human assistant could easy do with the help of search engines but no AI is even close to being able to do.
Because: If you administer a non-clinically approved dose and the person dies then you are automatically at fault. This would result in both criminal and civil action.
But this is ridiculous. They should at least be able to give the patient the choice. Would you rather have the surgery/chemo and risk dying from impure drugs or would you like to go home and be guaranteed to die when the cancer kills you?
Especially in the case of poison, store bought baking soda is already food grade and not taking it and you are going to die, then it makes perfect sense that administering an "unapproved" drug is the safer option than not administering it and any lawyer that says otherwise should be shot on the spot.
Arm&Hammer should be approved for oral ingestion and shouldn't carry any additional liability.
Arm and Hammer is approved for oral ingestion. It's food grade. I agree that they should probably switch to store baking soda for oral application but I'm assuming that some of the shortage is for injection quality ingredients.
I think that they look similar enough to be confusing given the similar letter style and colors. My thought is that Pandora just needs to change the color of their logo to some other color than blue. That would be enough for me to distinguish between the two.
Paypal's Logo is an actual distinguishable logo. Pandora's is a single letter without a hole. Changing the color isn't going to fix it. If you want a logo, you need to make it unique enough to be distinct. Lots of companies like Google and Facebook use a single letter but they also do something to make it truly unique. There is nothing unique about Pandora's current or previous letter P. I'm undecided whether Paypal has any grounds but I don't think Pandora should be able to trademark a blue letter.
There is specifically a separation of church and state.
Yeah this is why MP keeps telling us that he is "...a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican—in that order"
Mike Pence is christian but that's the point of separation of church and state. He can be christian all he wants, he can even vote for laws favored by christians but he still can't explicitly pass a law for or against a religion. That's the reason Trump's muslim ban was overturned. Because Trump had specifically stated he was going to target muslims, it was found unconstitutional. Separation of church and state doesn't mean you can't be religious, it means there shouldn't be any laws about religion. We violate this a little when we do stuff like banning prayer in school but for the most part the USA does a pretty good job of keeping religion and politics separate.
Basically just triple whatever estimate we come up with.
This is basically what we do too. The problem I see with this approach is it prevents you from getting better at estimating. If you as a developer triple your estimate to compensate and the manager then triples that number, the number is artificially tripled twice. I've tried slowly increasing my estimates so that they are more accurate but then people balk because when they take my more realistic number and triple it, it looks to be too much compared to previous projects even though everyone knows the previous project estimates were wrong.
I run into the same problem. The funny thing is my manager knows my estimates are off. My manager told me once that when I give him an estimate, he takes it and multiplies it by 2.5 so a 2 day projects becomes one week and a one week project becomes one month. The problem with this is if I give him a realistic estimate, he multiplies it by 2.5 and balks so I'm stuck basically giving him low ball estimates with us both knowing it will really take 2.5 times longer. So in a weird way, My estimate is actually pretty accurate.
That's pretty close to what I've found too. Something that will take 2 days really takes a week. (2.5) Something that will take 2 weeks really takes a month. (Also 2.5) Even short projects seem to fit this 2.5 number where something that is suppose to take 2 hours generally takes half a day. The job itself actually only takes 2 hours but the debugging, testing, feature creep, and making it live always seems to more than double the time.
as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of automation and to fund other types of employment.
What the hell for? Let's get everything fully automated as soon as possible so we can get the basic income uprising out of the way and we can all do whatever we want instead of what we feel we have to do.
I agree. Ignoring the fact that it's impossible to draw the line between a robot and a machine (is a calculator a robot?, what about a self service checkout?), I think the best solution for excess labor is probably to just start reducing hours worked per week in lockstep. If we reduced hours worked from 40 to 30 then we would instantly create 25% more jobs. As jobs get automated away, we could continue to reduce hours worked until people were only working a few hours per week. It's really the supply versus demand that is the problem. There are a ton of crappy jobs right now because the supply of "unskilled" human labor is greater than the demand. For the foreseeable future though, there will still be jobs that only humans can do so if we want wages to go up, the best way to do this is to either decrease the supply or increase the demand. Increasing the demand is going to be hard. Decreasing the supply is much easier. Death or population control would be one gruesome way. Another solution is to cap the hours worked per week. Companies would still need those jobs filled and would have to pay more per hour for people to be willing to work them and also need to hire more people to fill the same number of hours.
Well for one, ICE vehicles don't come with a shitload of radioactive byproducts being spewed into the air.
Dirty Coal can be placed hundreds of miles away from people. We could even put it inside of a giant glass bubble where nothing escapes. Besides efficiency of scale, it's much easier to monitor, filter, purify, etc... a small handful of power plants than it is thousands upon thousands of tiny little power plants. We also have the option of doing renewable, biowaste, or even off planet power generation once everything uses electricity.
Without even reading the $500 billion plan, I can tell that there is no way they have though of all the consequences of using 10 million wind powered pumps to bring water to the top for it to freeze.
And isn't the Arctic ice mostly fresh water? Even if you can get the salt water to freeze, it's going to melt at a much warmer temperature and will do drastically different things to the environment than slowly melting fresh water ice.
* Hovering will always require more energy than driving.
A personal Zeppelin would be a good solution to solve this problem.
* Hovering will always be more sensitive to weather conditions than driving.
Maybe but having 200 lanes of traffic versus 4 lanes of traffic means that even if you have to travel a little slower, you never get into a traffic jam.
* Hovering will always have more dangerous consequences to equipment failure or operator error than driving.
Computerized flight in the air has limited obstacles. You don't have to worry about deer, road closures, children playing ball, etc... Much easier than a self driving car.
* Hovering won't solve end-point congestion, since we're all rushing to the same places. (Check out your average parking lot!)
Sure it will. Vertical takeoff and landing in a parking lot eliminate most of the end-point congestion.
I had some visiting back in the 2000's that were amazed phones had caller ID and could send pictures !
They also couldnt understand why a phone could receive texts/calls even when disconnected.
Still, its to be expected considering the punitive system they live under.
A lot of our problems come from our shear size and our low population density in some areas and even though people rarely leave their home town, they expect their phone to work flawlessly in an area larger than Europe. Our 911 system for instance are all mostly independent system in each city. Our carriers have to spend a tremendous amount of money building out towers and then upgrading those towers and interfacing with the local system. Our other issue is that our landline system was so good. A lot of countries skipped over landlines and went straight to cellular and in many cases even skipped over first generation technologies like cdma and went straight to gsm. You combine those and you have a lot more cost per customer than most countries do.
You seem to think that someone's skill is based on how much they tell you it's worth, while in most of the world that is not the case. Only in a large corporate environment do you have such a discerning talent pool available. In bumfuck, USA, there is nothing but small developers, even the ones that charge 6 figures.
You can't magically make someone a better employee by paying them more. What you can do though is get better people applying if you pay better. If you pay high enough and advertise sufficiently then qualified people will be willing to move there to take that position. You see this a lot in school teachers especially in school computer teachers. School teachers fall into 1 (or more) of 3 categories: #1 they really enjoy teaching, #2 they don't need the money, or #3 this is the best paying job they can find. The ones in category #1 and #2 tend to be ok teachers but a *good* computer teacher can easily make double what most schools pay so if they fall into category #3, then they are almost by definition awful. If on the other hand, a school paid above average wages then they would likely get hundreds of applicants and can have their pick of them.
The cheapest we have in the USA from a major carrier (t-mobile) is $36 a year and includes 30 minutes a month. There are a few cheaper options from resellers if you never actually use your phone. We also have an interesting feature that even a "disconnected" phone can still call 911, our police/fire/emergency number. Not sure if other countries do something like that or not.
A dumb phone with 4G wifi hotspot functionality may be my ideal device. It's not clear from the article if that'll be supported, but I'd be pleasantly surprised if it was.
I asked for this years ago. When they first started coming out with smart phones, I was annoyed that I couldn't just pick my tablet/ipod of choice and tether it to my phone of choice. A smartphone is still inferior to a dumb phone for placing calls. There are obviously people that want an all in one so they don't have to carry two devices but having the flexibility of detaching your cellular service from your screen of choice would be awesome.
I do miss the $15 prepaid candybar Nokia phone. Only did basic texts and phone... but it worked well, and Nokia's UI for the feature phones is unmatched.
Slashdot Mirror
Awesome post. The Dell Venue 11 Pro looks like a promising option.
Another post mentioned this: http://www.fit-pc.com/web/prod... which might work ok with a zotac or intel NUC.
I also really like the kangaroo but I wish they would come out with a little more powerful version.
I'm still probably leaning towards a dell XPS 13 or an alienware 13 system as they are small enough to carry but still powerful
but the dell venue 11 pro although not quite as powerful is probably good enough for my needs and considerably cheaper.
Just look at the pay disparities from the Sony leaks. Shitty male stars making as much or more than top drawer women. There is no way in hell that Adam Sandler was worth $20 million for Jack and Jill.
So assuming that your statement is true. Why do you think a company would pay one actor more than a different actor? Are they doing it out of the goodness of their heart? Do they need the male actor more? Is the male actor better at negotiating? Is the male actor demanding more? In Hollywood, top name male and female actors are free agents. They negotiate their contracts and decide whether they want to work a particular job. Even more so than google employees, top name actors can easily say no to anyone they want so if males are getting paid more than females it's likely because the females are not demanding more or aren't walking when their demands are not being met. There are other reasons like there is a larger pool of good female actors so they are easily replaced, etc... but nowhere is it sexism. Supply/demand is actually a lot of the pay disparity that you see combined with men being willing to optimize their career for money while women tend to optimize their career more for work/life balance and less for money.
Another tech guy afraid of getting numbers. The numbers will show what the numbers will show. What's the matter - stats scare you in school? Or was it girls?
Yes, the numbers will show that they didn't discriminate and as the original poster stated no one will care and still not believe the numbers.
OR
The numbers will show that there is some descrepency and they will get raked over the fires even if there are legitimate reasons behind the difference.
So basically by giving away their data, it can not possibly help them and could possibly hurt them. There is no win here for google.
Most of the problems for VR isn't resolution, even if it's good to have a good resolution. It's latency that causes problems where the users are suffering from vertigo due to the lag it creates.
It's not just resolution or latency. There is a missing quality somewhere that is hard to quantify. It's the quality that allows you to instantly tell the difference between a window, a mirror, and a monitor on the wall. I'm still waiting for the day that I can install a monitor in my wall that allows me to look out my fake window and look like I'm seeing the ocean or the grand canyon. Lake view or ocean view property becomes a lot less valuable once we have perfected fake windows.
The handful of people that actually have any kind of requirement above and beyond that simply don't count.
Exactly. I use firefox for firebug and pocket. I use chrome for hangouts because google dropped support for firefox. For general browsing, I have no preference. Generally people will use the stock browser unless there is some plugin or feature they want.
If you own a Chevy, Dodge, or Ford and the airbag is defective and recalled it won't matter if you are out of warranty. The device will be fixed free of charge by your local dealer. Any safety recall would be handled the same way.
Not true. Every recall I've received not only was specific to my year and model but also generally had a certain mileage where they wouldn't honor it as well as a limited time that you had to bring it in to get fixed. If you missed either window you were out of luck. They would still fix it but not for free.
It seems Microsoft has dropped all pretense of even trying to make a good desktop OS but instead is just doing anything it can that might make their stock price go up.
A dominate player doesn't automatically stay dominant when the environment shifts. My office has converted to openoffice. I've given out several dozen ubuntu live cds to people with older systems that just want to get on the web without worrying about viruses. Many of them when I check in with them later are still using these CDs. Desktop purchases have fallen off the cliff. Many people now only have a non-windows smartphone as their only form of internet. Laptops now are just as likely to have android or chromeOS as windows. On the server side, Linux is now basically the default. Microsoft still dominates in certain circles but they don't really hold a strong monopoly anywhere and virtually everywhere there is a free solution that is "good enough" for most people. "Good enough" tends to be the downfall of many monopolies that never thought some sub-optimal solution would ever overtake them.
It doesn't matter. AI is still pretty much a magic show. No real intelligence.
Define "real intelligence". Can we agree that Ke Jie, the #1 Go player in the world, is a very intelligent person?
Food for thought: AlphaGo learned (literally) Go by playing itself over and over, millions of times.
Pick another random game. Chess, checkers, texas holdem, or some made up game. Give both AlphaGo and Ke Jie one hour to study the rules
and then let's see who wins. AlphaGo won because it brute forced millions of games and saw the outcome not because it has any innate intelligence.
I expect that Ke Jie could easily win a random game against AlphaGo but games in general with their strict rule set still set an artificially low bar for
intelligence. It's easy to see who wins and who loses so a computer can run through millions of combinations to brute force the solution. Something
like natural language processing is not nearly so clean cut because there is no way for the computer to know the correct answer without something
with "real intelligence" telling it beforehand.
I don't think you fully grasp how intractable Go is as a problem. "Strict rules" or not.
It doesn't matter. AI is still pretty much a magic show. No real intelligence. A human can fold laundry one second, chop wood the next second, and then sit down and play checkers. Even if you remove the physical part, a human still trounces a computer at general intelligence. Personal AI assistants are still annoyingly primitive. AI assistants are unable to understand all but the most basic commands. Simple phrases like "What is the second closest six flags to my house?" or "Remind me to take medicine at 7am for the next 7 days." are easy for a human assistant but next to impossible for current AI. I'm waiting for the day that AI can also do things like reschedule an appointment for me or search the web and do basic research like "find me a beach resort for july 30th that has internet and boat rentals and a nearby tennis court and an onsite bar". These are things that a human assistant could easy do with the help of search engines but no AI is even close to being able to do.
Because:
If you administer a non-clinically approved dose and the person dies then you are automatically at fault.
This would result in both criminal and civil action.
But this is ridiculous. They should at least be able to give the patient the choice. Would you rather have the surgery/chemo and risk dying from impure drugs or would you like to go home and be guaranteed to die when the cancer kills you?
Especially in the case of poison, store bought baking soda is already food grade and not taking it and you are going to die, then it makes perfect sense that administering an "unapproved" drug is the safer option than not administering it and any lawyer that says otherwise should be shot on the spot.
Arm&Hammer should be approved for oral ingestion and shouldn't carry any additional liability.
Arm and Hammer is approved for oral ingestion. It's food grade. I agree that they should probably switch to store baking soda for oral application but I'm assuming that some of the shortage is for injection quality ingredients.
I think that they look similar enough to be confusing given the similar letter style and colors. My thought is that Pandora just needs to change the color of their logo to some other color than blue. That would be enough for me to distinguish between the two.
Paypal's Logo is an actual distinguishable logo. Pandora's is a single letter without a hole. Changing the color isn't going to fix it. If you want a logo, you need to make it unique enough to be distinct. Lots of companies like Google and Facebook use a single letter but they also do something to make it truly unique. There is nothing unique about Pandora's current or previous letter P. I'm undecided whether Paypal has any grounds but I don't think Pandora should be able to trademark a blue letter.
There is specifically a separation of church and state.
Yeah this is why MP keeps telling us that he is "...a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican—in that order"
Mike Pence is christian but that's the point of separation of church and state. He can be christian all he wants, he can even vote for laws favored by christians but he still can't explicitly pass a law for or against a religion. That's the reason Trump's muslim ban was overturned. Because Trump had specifically stated he was going to target muslims, it was found unconstitutional. Separation of church and state doesn't mean you can't be religious, it means there shouldn't be any laws about religion. We violate this a little when we do stuff like banning prayer in school but for the most part the USA does a pretty good job of keeping religion and politics separate.
My company does something similar.
Basically just triple whatever estimate we come up with.
This is basically what we do too. The problem I see with this approach is it prevents you from getting better
at estimating. If you as a developer triple your estimate to compensate and the manager then triples that
number, the number is artificially tripled twice. I've tried slowly increasing my estimates so that they are more
accurate but then people balk because when they take my more realistic number and triple it, it looks to be
too much compared to previous projects even though everyone knows the previous project estimates were
wrong.
I run into the same problem. The funny thing is my manager knows my estimates are off. My manager told me once that when I give him an estimate, he takes it and multiplies it by 2.5 so a 2 day projects becomes one week and a one week project becomes one month. The problem with this is if I give him a realistic estimate, he multiplies it by 2.5 and balks so I'm stuck basically giving him low ball estimates with us both knowing it will really take 2.5 times longer. So in a weird way, My estimate is actually pretty accurate.
That's pretty close to what I've found too.
Something that will take 2 days really takes a week. (2.5)
Something that will take 2 weeks really takes a month. (Also 2.5)
Even short projects seem to fit this 2.5 number where something that is suppose to take 2 hours generally takes half a day.
The job itself actually only takes 2 hours but the debugging, testing, feature creep, and making it live always seems to more than double the time.
as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of automation and to fund other types of employment.
What the hell for? Let's get everything fully automated as soon as possible so we can get the basic income uprising out of the way and we can all do whatever we want instead of what we feel we have to do.
I agree. Ignoring the fact that it's impossible to draw the line between a robot and a machine (is a calculator a robot?, what about a self service checkout?), I think the best solution for excess labor is probably to just start reducing hours worked per week in lockstep. If we reduced hours worked from 40 to 30 then we would instantly create 25% more jobs. As jobs get automated away, we could continue to reduce hours worked until people were only working a few hours per week. It's really the supply versus demand that is the problem. There are a ton of crappy jobs right now because the supply of "unskilled" human labor is greater than the demand. For the foreseeable future though, there will still be jobs that only humans can do so if we want wages to go up, the best way to do this is to either decrease the supply or increase the demand. Increasing the demand is going to be hard. Decreasing the supply is much easier. Death or population control would be one gruesome way. Another solution is to cap the hours worked per week. Companies would still need those jobs filled and would have to pay more per hour for people to be willing to work them and also need to hire more people to fill the same number of hours.
Well for one, ICE vehicles don't come with a shitload of radioactive byproducts being spewed into the air.
Dirty Coal can be placed hundreds of miles away from people. We could even put it inside of a giant glass bubble where nothing escapes. Besides efficiency of scale, it's much easier to monitor, filter, purify, etc... a small handful of power plants than it is thousands upon thousands of tiny little power plants. We also have the option of doing renewable, biowaste, or even off planet power generation once everything uses electricity.
Without even reading the $500 billion plan, I can tell that there is no way they have though of all the consequences of using 10 million wind powered pumps to bring water to the top for it to freeze.
And isn't the Arctic ice mostly fresh water? Even if you can get the salt water to freeze, it's going to melt at a much warmer temperature and will do drastically different things to the environment than slowly melting fresh water ice.
* Hovering will always require more energy than driving.
A personal Zeppelin would be a good solution to solve this problem.
* Hovering will always be more sensitive to weather conditions than driving.
Maybe but having 200 lanes of traffic versus 4 lanes of traffic means that even if you have to travel a little slower, you never get into a traffic jam.
* Hovering will always have more dangerous consequences to equipment failure or operator error than driving.
Computerized flight in the air has limited obstacles. You don't have to worry about deer, road closures, children playing ball, etc... Much easier than a self driving car.
* Hovering won't solve end-point congestion, since we're all rushing to the same places. (Check out your average parking lot!)
Sure it will. Vertical takeoff and landing in a parking lot eliminate most of the end-point congestion.
Americans are so backwards.
I had some visiting back in the 2000's that were amazed phones had caller ID and could send pictures !
They also couldnt understand why a phone could receive texts/calls even when disconnected.
Still, its to be expected considering the punitive system they live under.
A lot of our problems come from our shear size and our low population density in some areas and even though people rarely leave their home town, they expect their phone to work flawlessly in an area larger than Europe. Our 911 system for instance are all mostly independent system in each city. Our carriers have to spend a tremendous amount of money building out towers and then upgrading those towers and interfacing with the local system. Our other issue is that our landline system was so good. A lot of countries skipped over landlines and went straight to cellular and in many cases even skipped over first generation technologies like cdma and went straight to gsm. You combine those and you have a lot more cost per customer than most countries do.
You seem to think that someone's skill is based on how much they tell you it's worth, while in most of the world that is not the case. Only in a large corporate environment do you have such a discerning talent pool available. In bumfuck, USA, there is nothing but small developers, even the ones that charge 6 figures.
You can't magically make someone a better employee by paying them more. What you can do though is get better people applying if you pay better. If you pay high enough and advertise sufficiently then qualified people will be willing to move there to take that position. You see this a lot in school teachers especially in school computer teachers. School teachers fall into 1 (or more) of 3 categories: #1 they really enjoy teaching, #2 they don't need the money, or #3 this is the best paying job they can find. The ones in category #1 and #2 tend to be ok teachers but a *good* computer teacher can easily make double what most schools pay so if they fall into category #3, then they are almost by definition awful. If on the other hand, a school paid above average wages then they would likely get hundreds of applicants and can have their pick of them.
The cheapest we have in the USA from a major carrier (t-mobile) is $36 a year and includes 30 minutes a month. There are a few cheaper options from resellers if you never actually use your phone. We also have an interesting feature that even a "disconnected" phone can still call 911, our police/fire/emergency number. Not sure if other countries do something like that or not.
A dumb phone with 4G wifi hotspot functionality may be my ideal device. It's not clear from the article if that'll be supported, but I'd be pleasantly surprised if it was.
I asked for this years ago. When they first started coming out with smart phones, I was annoyed that I couldn't just pick my tablet/ipod of choice and tether it to my phone of choice. A smartphone is still inferior to a dumb phone for placing calls. There are obviously people that want an all in one so they don't have to carry two devices but having the flexibility of detaching your cellular service from your screen of choice would be awesome.
I do miss the $15 prepaid candybar Nokia phone. Only did basic texts and phone... but it worked well, and Nokia's UI for the feature phones is unmatched.
Cheap prepaid plans at $3/month or less can still be found: http://www.cellguru.net/prepai...
There are even some cheap unlimited plans without data for $20 or less: http://www.prepaidphonenews.co...