Handsets probably require a large investment for set up costs, but besides some outsourced components the variable costs would be cheap, yes. But the one thing I really don't get is how you're confusing the cell phone manufacturers with the cell phone service companies. Unless Nokia is a service provider somewhere, they didn't purchase any broadcast monopoly, though they might have had to pay to have their device certified to use the spectrum. But that's different. Official partnerships: Sign up with Carrier X, get free or discounted hardware Brand Y, Model Z. A few manufacturers have that established relationship with the few service providers who in turn are able to dominate their markets through coercive monopoly, so to a free market advocate the discount that hardware manufacturers deliver to service providers is a euphemism for their share of the bribe to Congress to maintain that coercive monopoly in statute.
Why should the answer be "very complex?"
The answer, I think, is very complex, and must include incentives for healthy behavior (as opposed to punishment for unhealthy behavior -- two sides of the same coin), a tiered healthcare system, and the assignment of cost to the people who make the costly decisions. It's as simple as this: pay your own way. I appreciate that several of your comments boil down to that point. I'm just wondering why you choose to describe this subject as "complex," which I'm most accustomed to seeing in arguments for "interdependence," as a wedge for full-blown collectivism.
OK, when you own a company I guess you can run it that way, for as long as it's profitable. I hope you find that the strategy you plan is more expensive than employing competent people and staying out of their personal lives.
If a company sees you as a liability risk through your credit then they should do anything to prevent you from working there. Wow! "anything"? Merely because "a company sees you as a liability risk through your credit"?? And if an employee sees a company "as a liability risk"?
I only wished more companies did this. If i ran a company you better believe that a credit check from all 3 credit reporting agencies would be done along with a criminal background check and a piss test for drug/alcohol use. It seems like you're considering only the perspectives of the employee and the employer, meaning the boss, president or owner of the company. But you have not commented on the employees in HR who will have all that personal information available to them about their peers, some of whom they will undoubtedly dislike. Various abuses of access to personal data can be prosecuted as slander, libel, wire fraud and identity theft, to name a few. If employers could be held liable as accomplices to such crimes, when committed by their employees who they have granted access to other employees' private information, would you pursue that information so aggressively?
Excellent!
Is 1984 the only book that teaches the importance of free information, free speech and free thinking? No. Is 1984 the only way to teach people to be wary of government surveillance, oppressive techniques, and totalitarian control? No. Is Orwell the only person who has the insight to be wary of these things? No. No, and the hegemony of references to that work of fiction as the first, last and only commentary on abuse of privacy rights indicates that most Americans are more than sufficiently brainwashed that when they are relieved of their rights officially, they won't notice.
One is very safe walking around, even late at night. Try that in Philly, or Miami, or any large American city. Admirable, but I don't believe that you've put the danger of a US city at night into its proper context. I believe you skipped a more fundamental logical fallacy lurking in the comparison [which you nevertheless rejected for other, perfectly valid reasons]. I agree with you that "safe walking around, even late at night" is not the only measure of the value of any theory or practice of government, but more basically, it is also false to argue any merit for one police state by comparison to the mayhem caused by partial implementation of another police state.
The cost of the pursuit of happiness, for an arbitrary set of chemical intoxicants, has been increased astronomically by our elected government as a matter of policy for nearly 40 years. To borrow from Ron Paul, the enforcement of drug laws has directly increased crime by inflating the retail price of addictive substances far above "their pharmaceutical value." [YouTube, original program unknown -- sorry] The reason it's no longer safe to walk around any large American city at night is not because we have too little police state. It's because we have too much. That police states are safer than free states is not a conclusion that can be logically supported by the comparison of Chinese to American cities. A reasoned argument might be made that China's all-out police state is safer than our namby-pamby, half-assed police state where "liberty" is the cornerstone of the propaganda for wars of aggression and rights are still recognized by the supreme law of the land, but inconsistently upheld. That argument might be made consistent, but I won't do it.
I'm a United States citizen, and the noise about Iran being a "threat" makes me sick.
You tell me why Iran needs nuclear energy for power generation? No, you tell me why Iran's development of nuclear energy is our business. They've signed the NNPT, have offered to exceed their requirements to the IAEA in order to normalize relations with Washington, and have invited inspections, an invitation which Condi Rice, despite her professional duty to know such things, didn't observe until it was printed in the Washington Post!Horton: And now let's talk about the peace offers. There's been various attempts. It's been in the news lately about the April 2003 peace offer that Condoleezza Rice is now saying that she never even saw or heard of until the Washington Post reported it last summer.
There was also another peace offer that was to Internationalize Iran's nuclear program where they said, let's go ahead and bring in French and German companies and we'll make it an international consortium. That way it is all perfectly above board, because it is America's allies helping them do it.
Ritter: But the bottom line again is that we are talking about genuine efforts at diplomacy on the part of Iran to resolve a difficult situation. To me this screams intent; the Intent of the Iranians not to pursue nuclear weapons. If you were going to pursue a nuclear weapons program, why would you agree to these things? Why would you put them on the table? Why would you go down this path?
I call your bluff.
If you are against helping people in other countries then I suggest you also should be against all the medical and food aid we provide to 3rd world countries whether related or unrelated to natural disasters (e.g. 2004 asian tsunami). Fine, let's pull the United States government out of foreign military and foreign humanitarian projects immediately, on the condition that the funds are returned to US taxpayers on the same schedule. The US people do want to help people in other countries, and not to invade entire countries for neo-con agendas. Give us back our money, and you'll see that.
I think the last 6 months has accelerated the devaluation of the dollar due to the Fed thinking it needs to get involved not only by decreasing interest rates but also injecting millions and billions of dollars to bail out companies who don't know how to run themselves and expect help from the government. That's a contributing factor, indeed. It's also an example of the same general problem. Government favoritism to corporate interests over citizen interests are very expensive to citizens, and very lucrative to the small percentage of the population with controlling interest in large corporations. A few Americans have benefitted financially during the Iraq war. Do you wonder how they managed that, while all the rest of us are getting squeezed, like a Lou Dobbs nightmare?
I think I understand your point, that a soft reboot includes, and will still include a command to clear the allocation tables. But the purported ability to retain info after a hard reboot, as advertised in the article, does pose a problem, and I don't understand how you can assume that the allocation tables are cleared with each reboot, if memory is also protected from power loss, ie hard reboot. "In contrast, a memristor-based computer would retain its information [presumably meaning allocated memory, not hard discs, which are already not normally affected by mere power outage, except in the unfortunate case of write operations in progress] after losing power and would not require the boot-up process, resulting in the consumption of less power and wasted time." To fulfill that claim requires excluding any allocation table clear commands from startup, and from hard power down. I believe an operating system written to take full advantage of this new technology could very well cause a "permanent" high ratio of memory allocation in error states that are now only solvable by a hard reboot, unless some new workaround to this condition is also built in.
When the OS reboots, it will rebuild its allocation tables and the CPU's page tables from scratch, without regard to whether the physical memory currently contains 0s, 1s, or some random combination thereof. Would that be on the startup or shutdown portion of rebooting?
Slashdot Mirror
... whether to a thumb drive or an Internet server? Who needs a company the size of Google, just for that?
OK, when you own a company I guess you can run it that way, for as long as it's profitable. I hope you find that the strategy you plan is more expensive than employing competent people and staying out of their personal lives.
The cost of the pursuit of happiness, for an arbitrary set of chemical intoxicants, has been increased astronomically by our elected government as a matter of policy for nearly 40 years. To borrow from Ron Paul, the enforcement of drug laws has directly increased crime by inflating the retail price of addictive substances far above "their pharmaceutical value." [YouTube, original program unknown -- sorry] The reason it's no longer safe to walk around any large American city at night is not because we have too little police state. It's because we have too much. That police states are safer than free states is not a conclusion that can be logically supported by the comparison of Chinese to American cities. A reasoned argument might be made that China's all-out police state is safer than our namby-pamby, half-assed police state where "liberty" is the cornerstone of the propaganda for wars of aggression and rights are still recognized by the supreme law of the land, but inconsistently upheld. That argument might be made consistent, but I won't do it.
There was also another peace offer that was to Internationalize Iran's nuclear program where they said, let's go ahead and bring in French and German companies and we'll make it an international consortium. That way it is all perfectly above board, because it is America's allies helping them do it.
Ritter: But the bottom line again is that we are talking about genuine efforts at diplomacy on the part of Iran to resolve a difficult situation. To me this screams intent; the Intent of the Iranians not to pursue nuclear weapons. If you were going to pursue a nuclear weapons program, why would you agree to these things? Why would you put them on the table? Why would you go down this path?