The UIs might work better, but you can get a whole lot more done with a real OS than a dumbed-down one. Yes, Android is nice, yes I run it on my phone but I wouldn't ever think of putting it on something bigger than a phone because then you can't really -do- anything with it. Yes, Android has a lot of great applications, but my productivity is going to be a lot higher being able to use real programs than Android ones. For example, Open Office, I'm not going to get that on Android because there would be too much to rewrite, I'm not going to get a really, really great browser on Android that supports all the features Firefox does, etc.
I used my 7 inch EEE with Xubuntu on it for my primary laptop for about half a year, the biggest problem wasn't the software I had running it, but rather simply limitations of the hardware (small keyboard, small screen, slow CPU, not much RAM) and putting Android, iOS, Windows Phone 7, etc. on it wouldn't have made it any better.
The Zune could have been a success if MS hadn't decided to basically be late to the iPod revolution. I don't think there is a single person who looks at the Zune and doesn't see it just as an MS branded iPod in poo colors. Yes, the Zune's hardware was nice, but the average person sees it as a crappy rip-off of an Apple product, not to mention MS has tried to do things similar to the Zune with "Plays For Sure" except for the fact that the Zune can't even play that content.
The Zune was dead on arrival, had it come before the iPod and done everything it would have been a modest success, but how can you look at the Zune and -not- see that this is just an MS branded iPod?
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
If the constitution would have meant what you seem to think it mean, it wouldn't have read that way, it would have read: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of militiamen to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Had the constitution meant what you said, then one would think that the founding fathers, who wrote a lot about their philosophy about it, would have backed up your claims, however, they do not.
No Free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.
Thomas Jefferson in the Jeffersonian Papers
The right of the people to keep and bear...arms shall not be infringed. A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country.
James Madison, in 1788
Madison was saying in effect, that it is only through the universal right to bear arms that a well regulated militia can be formed.
A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves... and include all men capable of bearing arms.
Richard Henry Lee in Additional Letters from the Federal Farmer in 1788.
But if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people, while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in discipline and use of arms, who stand ready to defend their rights
Alexander Hamilton
As you can see, it is only through the universal right to bear arms that a well regulated militia can be formed,
without the universal right to bear arms, there can be not militia.
Why not simply reduce taxes to the bare minimum for basic police/fire/military expenditures and have the rest be paid on a usage basis? It simply makes sense, when you get your drivers license, you pay a sum which pays for infrastructure, when you get a library card, you pay a modest fee to pay for the upkeep of the library, if you wish you can pay into social security/medicare and receive it when you retire, but you could also spend it on whatever else you wished. Welfare would given without an initial fee, but once you found a job your wages would be garnished until you paid back the amount taken. If you choose to have your child enrolled in public schools, you pay a fee until your child no longer attends that school, if you choose to send your child to public school or homeschool your child, you wouldn't have to pay for that.
Once we end a few imperialistic wars, defense would be a small expenditure and police/fire expenses are rather small, so in reality you get an actually fair tax.
Not this tired thing again. Areas in Europe such as Finland places which have same or lower population density than USA still have better broadband service and cheaper compared to USA. In actual fact, the system *works better* in Europe. The measurable fact. Your system is a full decade behind first world countries.
Finland has a lower population density, but its populated areas are all very close together. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Finnish_municipalities_by_population and look at where the top ones are on the map, all of them are very close together. Compare that to a US state of a similar size such as California where people are scattered all across the state ( http://media.maps.com/magellan/Images/capop.gif ) Nearly all the major areas of Finland are close to their southern coast with no major cities in the northern half of the country. Now look at that all across the US, there is no major coast that has the majority of the population. Major cities aren't located really close to each other as in Finland, while the East and to a lesser extent the West coast of the US is pretty well populated, there are still huge gaps between the major cities in the Midwest. The major centers of the Midwest, Denver, Kansas City, Chicago, Dallas, St. Louis, Etc. are all quite spread out from each other. Unlike in Finland where they are all concentrated in a very small area. Finland has a lower population density because they have a huge northern part of their country where almost no one lives, in the US we have huge gaps where no one lives between the major cities making cable a whole lot harder to lay.
That's rich coming from the county that pushes its laws down the throat of people who don't want them, and that started several wars of aggression in just the past 10 years. Please listen to the rest of the world, who considers the USA one of the top few tyrannical countries in the world based on its behaviour.
...And I never said that I supported that. I support a -very- limited government with a small army to defend itself from outside aggression and only two duties, to protect its citizens from force and fraud both domestic and foreign, a government which does not expand beyond those two duties. A government that protects its citizens natural rights including complete and full freedom of expression and religion, a government which does not restrain its citizens rights to protect themselves against force both from their government or from its people, a government which only taxes citizens for what each individual citizen uses, a government which seeks to expand trade with all and entangles itself with none. That is the government I support. No, the US is not that government, but neither are the governments of Europe. However, the government of the US has not stepped so far as to increase taxation to the levels of Europe nor sought to remove from its people their right to defend themselves against the abuses of others or the government, it has, to a small extent, supported the freedom of expression for all without cherry picking which rights to protect and which rights to forsake. No, the US isn't perfect, but I much prefer the abuses of the current US government to the abuses of European government.
Well, as far as I know, pretty well. Myself I live in a rural area so I get VDSL at about 24 Mbits/Sec but according to various sites, Verizon ViOS is doing pretty well in getting it to the coasts.
I can assure you, none of my tax-money goes to subsidizing internet providers. Governments supporting private companies is extremely regulated in the EU, and mostly forbidden by anti-competitive laws.
So your tax money instead goes to the government effectively masquerading as a private company. Same thing only less freedom (with a corporation you can choose to explicitly -not- support them, yet you can't legally stop paying taxes).
And I pay 55Eur/month for phone + cable-tv + 20mbit down/1mbit up cable internet. I do have a 50gb/month limit, but for 99eur, I can have 100mbit down / 5mbit up with no limits with the same company. Compared to what they offer in the surrounding countries here, that's both actually pretty expensive...
Look at your population density though, you don't -have- miles and miles between towns with only a few thousand people. In the US its pretty easy to drive for an hour out west and not see a single reminder of human civilization except for a few road signs and if your lucky a few people in a car.
Of course increased population densities are going to give you better service for cheap.
I hate it when uninformed Americans think "their system" is better when they have absolutely no clue about the "other systems". For me as a European citizen, it almost seems like "freedom" has become a marketing term for US companies as a scapegoat for higher prices. I don't think my freedom is in any way limited by our expensive taxation systems, and seeing what this system gives back to me, I pay them with a smile, knowing that I live in a relatively peaceful country which won't spend my tax-money on mind-bogglingly expensive wars abroad, and that our army will mostly be used for humanitarian and (mine) cleanup missions.
I don't really care about higher prices as long as I get to spend -my- money how I feel like. Freedom doesn't mean that everything gets handed to you on a plate and everything is happy. Freedom is being able to choose. While yes, our government has decided to fuck us over with expensive, pointless wars, it doesn't mean that we are all in favor of it. However I do have some constitutional rights that you lack, namely the right to bear arms and the right to -full- freedom of speech and increased freedom of trade. Want to deny the holocaust (not that I'm advocating it, I'm just saying its a possible viewpoint) you can't do that legally in most of Europe. Want to display a swastika (again, not that I'm defending the Nazis or anything, its just an example), you can't do that. Whenever you allow a government to restrict basic, human rights such as freedom of expression and the freedom to oppose a government using armed force if needed, you are inviting tyranny. Any time you cherry pick rights to keep, you end up with an oppressive government in time.
Ok, so I save some money on internet access, but how much more of my taxes will be wasted on other things that I don't use? Things like welfare, college assistance for minorities (which I'm not a member of), social "security" which will most likely be bankrupt by the time I'm of retiring age, etc.
If you see beyond the small benefits that you might get, you see that taxation usually is a net loss for the majority and a net gain for the minority. All taxation can do is redistribute wealth, yeah, I might get lucky and win a few times, but its like playing the slot machine, its designed to give money to the house (government).
And really, when you eliminate all trade barriers which are government imposed such as laws forbidding competition in ISPs in order to get the town some crap connection for cheap, you end up with multiple options in time.
What I was meaning is that the greatest growth has to come from the rural area because the people there have fewer options and thus we should concentrate almost exclusively on the rural area because even a doubling of broadband speeds would result in an insignificant amount of output when compared with going from dial-up to broadband. I mean, there are few applications that you -can't- do with 7 Mbits/sec that you can do with 14 Mbits/sec, on the other hand 56 KB/sec speeds are pretty much unacceptable for anything other than light text-based reading and really unacceptable for any type of "e-commerce".
Yes, but I still enjoy the freedom to spend my money how I feel like it. While I might enjoy cheaper internet access, it is still a loss of economic freedom unacceptable in a free society because there may be those who don't wish to "purchase" internet but are forced to because it is in a tax. That is the fundamental flaw of taxation-based services is that in general there is no distinction made between those who wish to use the service and those who do not, thus taking out any choice of what to spend your money on. And generally, with the increase of tax-subsidized services, private competitors get pushed out of business because you -have- to pay for the "free" service even if you want to or not, meaning that the tax-subsidized service can become more and more abusive to customers because there are no real other options. You can already see this happening in public schools around the US where sub-par public schools are the norm because people still have to pay taxes to fund public schools meaning that private, better schools generally are restricted to niches.
I don't really think it is cherry-picking because those countries are in the main categories of the US, large countries with variation between tightly packed metropolitan areas and some areas with only a few human beings within a square mile. Of course countries like Japan and Korea are going to be ahead of the US because they have high population densities. Just look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density for an example. For every mile of fiber you lay in Japan, many, many more people can use it than in the US where not even a single person might be able to use it. Take a drive through the midwest, there are many areas where you won't see hardly a single sign of humanity other than the roadsigns and the occasional billboard. For an added bonus try driving in the Dakotas or Wyoming. The USA is ranked 178th in population density, now compare that to 36th for Japan, and 22ndfor South Korea. The higher the population density the easier it is to justify the laying of cables because more and more people can use it for the amount you lay. At the moment, there is little benefit to laying 5 miles of fiber to reach a little town that has a population of 300. The density of some Asian countries mean that there rarely is that situation.
Exactly, I'd rather have money in my pocket to spend on whatever I wish than to have a tax system like in Europe. Yes, I might have to pay a bit more for internet, but at least I choose to spend it on that rather than to have VAT or other hideous taxation systems to fund whatever.
but the United States is predominantly urban and suburban these days, and we should be leading in broadband speeds, not following.
Not really, and a few extra megabits don't make a huge difference. The entire point of having a national broadband system would be to make sure that the areas in the middle of nowhere get fast access because some don't think that the private enterprise can do it (which I disagree, which is a subject of an entirely different post why nationalized anything will harm economic development and jeopardize liberties...).
No one can efficiently run an internet-based company on dial-up (in 2010 anyways...). This ends up crippling economic development for that area. And in a lot of areas that can't get broadband, you either have spotty or no cell-phone coverage meaning that 3/4G Modems aren't an option.
When you are going from 54KB/sec to 1 Mbit/sec that is a huge leap forward. Going from 7 Mbit/sec to 14 Mbit/sec isn't too much of a real increase in noticeable speeds. There are few applications that need top-of-the-line internet access, on the other hand there are many applications where having latency-encumbered and capped satellite internet or slow dial-up is going to be a huge problem.
I know! I've been wanting to get these free kitten screensavers and family guy cursors and they aren't working! And I can't get sexyladies4324aefe.exe to run either! Man, Linux doesn't run anything good...
Well developed open projects however allow for greater mindshare leading to more people using their commercial offerings. Look at Red Hat, because RHL was well used on people's personal desktops, it made sense for them to push a company towards Red Hat's commercial products. Same thing with Ubuntu, because many people who use Linux are comfortable with Ubuntu, when a small business looks to consider Linux, Ubuntu is their first choice. Solaris has a lot of features that could be very handy for businesses, but without experience, most tech people are going to recommend BSD or Linux because it is what they have worked with.
Support a community well and it will pay you back. Alienate a community and you are suddenly competing against better entrenched products.
But the RIAA can use that to their favor, the average person has been so bombarded with Lady Gaga that everyone in the RIAA's target market can identify it, but lets say for a moment that all the free channels of Lady Gaga never existed, no radio airtime, no YouTube videos, and no free downloads. Lady Gaga would be known to only a few, it is only through flooding the world through -free- music that stars that make money for the RIAA can be born. Its just like Microsoft, had Microsoft been really aggressive at combating "piracy" chances are they wouldn't have even close to the marketshare they have today, the RIAA has done and can do the same thing if they really want profits. Flood the world with free product and it becomes a status symbol and more of a commodity that can be bought and sold giving profits to the RIAA.
But the RIAA has a net loss on their hands. It is a lot better for someone to be getting their product for free than it is for people not to use it. If I don't hear the music, how am I supposed to buy it? Every single song I've (legally) downloaded I've heard before, usually on YouTube, Pandora, or even through illegitimate downloads. I'm not going to buy a CD based on the cover art unless I've heard it before. If the RIAA gains one sale for every 10 songs download, it is a profit when compared to gaining no sales for no songs downloaded. Without a physical good, it doesn't really cost the RIAA any more if 1 person buys a song than it does if 1,000,000 people do, and it is a net profit for the RIAA if 10,000 people buy the album and 100,000 people download it when compared to 1,000 people buying it and no one downloaded it.
But they won't. Instead of "losing" money to piracy, they lose mindshare because people won't buy. Its a lot worse deal for the RIAA to have 10 million people not listening to their music than to have 10 million people listening to music without buying.
If a person isn't listening to music, the RIAA has no chance of making any money, if a person is, if they like the music a lot, the RIAA will eventually get money by them buying records eventually.
Between the MPAA's style of Hollywood accounting and the RIAA doing things like this, their statistics are losing credibility fast. How about using that 16 million to pay those artists that have been "wronged" by those evil "pirates".
If the *AA want to really convince people that they are losing money and the "pirates" are in the wrong, they need to get their finances straight before they blame "pirates". If it costs you $16 million to collect $400K-ish, you are running at an extreme loss, chances are that "pirate" didn't cause $16 million in real damages, (or even $10 in damages...) and if the RIAA keeps shooting itself in the foot, eventually people will realize that the real thing harming artists isn't "pirates" but the record companies.
Ah yes, and apparently this is the same company that is censoring discussions on the iPhone 4. http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/07/13/1330252 but of course after all I'm just a troll if I say that Consumer Reports isn't impartial...
Right because I'm sure we all carry large bags with us at all times... If it was parked in a university parking lot think of all of the reasons why you wouldn't want to take it in.
Oddly enough not everyone can really lug a 20 pound bag around with all their possible valuables in it. While its true that a car isn't exactly safe, one would think that people wouldn't break into a car simply to get a $600 piece of technology...
Right "impartial"... Lets face it, when consumer reports bashes or praises an item, it generates publicity (look at this/. article for example). While I agree that the iPhone issue is a real issue and is a pretty big one, saying that any magazine can be "impartial" is a joke.
Slashdot Mirror
The UIs might work better, but you can get a whole lot more done with a real OS than a dumbed-down one. Yes, Android is nice, yes I run it on my phone but I wouldn't ever think of putting it on something bigger than a phone because then you can't really -do- anything with it. Yes, Android has a lot of great applications, but my productivity is going to be a lot higher being able to use real programs than Android ones. For example, Open Office, I'm not going to get that on Android because there would be too much to rewrite, I'm not going to get a really, really great browser on Android that supports all the features Firefox does, etc.
I used my 7 inch EEE with Xubuntu on it for my primary laptop for about half a year, the biggest problem wasn't the software I had running it, but rather simply limitations of the hardware (small keyboard, small screen, slow CPU, not much RAM) and putting Android, iOS, Windows Phone 7, etc. on it wouldn't have made it any better.
The Zune could have been a success if MS hadn't decided to basically be late to the iPod revolution. I don't think there is a single person who looks at the Zune and doesn't see it just as an MS branded iPod in poo colors. Yes, the Zune's hardware was nice, but the average person sees it as a crappy rip-off of an Apple product, not to mention MS has tried to do things similar to the Zune with "Plays For Sure" except for the fact that the Zune can't even play that content.
The Zune was dead on arrival, had it come before the iPod and done everything it would have been a modest success, but how can you look at the Zune and -not- see that this is just an MS branded iPod?
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
If the constitution would have meant what you seem to think it mean, it wouldn't have read that way, it would have read: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of militiamen to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Had the constitution meant what you said, then one would think that the founding fathers, who wrote a lot about their philosophy about it, would have backed up your claims, however, they do not.
No Free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.
Thomas Jefferson in the Jeffersonian Papers
The right of the people to keep and bear...arms shall not be infringed. A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country.
James Madison, in 1788
Madison was saying in effect, that it is only through the universal right to bear arms that a well regulated militia can be formed.
A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves... and include all men capable of bearing arms.
Richard Henry Lee in Additional Letters from the Federal Farmer in 1788.
But if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people, while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in discipline and use of arms, who stand ready to defend their rights
Alexander Hamilton
As you can see, it is only through the universal right to bear arms that a well regulated militia can be formed, without the universal right to bear arms, there can be not militia.
Why not simply reduce taxes to the bare minimum for basic police/fire/military expenditures and have the rest be paid on a usage basis? It simply makes sense, when you get your drivers license, you pay a sum which pays for infrastructure, when you get a library card, you pay a modest fee to pay for the upkeep of the library, if you wish you can pay into social security/medicare and receive it when you retire, but you could also spend it on whatever else you wished. Welfare would given without an initial fee, but once you found a job your wages would be garnished until you paid back the amount taken. If you choose to have your child enrolled in public schools, you pay a fee until your child no longer attends that school, if you choose to send your child to public school or homeschool your child, you wouldn't have to pay for that.
Once we end a few imperialistic wars, defense would be a small expenditure and police/fire expenses are rather small, so in reality you get an actually fair tax.
Not this tired thing again. Areas in Europe such as Finland places which have same or lower population density than USA still have better broadband service and cheaper compared to USA. In actual fact, the system *works better* in Europe. The measurable fact. Your system is a full decade behind first world countries.
Finland has a lower population density, but its populated areas are all very close together. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Finnish_municipalities_by_population and look at where the top ones are on the map, all of them are very close together. Compare that to a US state of a similar size such as California where people are scattered all across the state ( http://media.maps.com/magellan/Images/capop.gif ) Nearly all the major areas of Finland are close to their southern coast with no major cities in the northern half of the country. Now look at that all across the US, there is no major coast that has the majority of the population. Major cities aren't located really close to each other as in Finland, while the East and to a lesser extent the West coast of the US is pretty well populated, there are still huge gaps between the major cities in the Midwest. The major centers of the Midwest, Denver, Kansas City, Chicago, Dallas, St. Louis, Etc. are all quite spread out from each other. Unlike in Finland where they are all concentrated in a very small area. Finland has a lower population density because they have a huge northern part of their country where almost no one lives, in the US we have huge gaps where no one lives between the major cities making cable a whole lot harder to lay.
That's rich coming from the county that pushes its laws down the throat of people who don't want them, and that started several wars of aggression in just the past 10 years. Please listen to the rest of the world, who considers the USA one of the top few tyrannical countries in the world based on its behaviour.
Well, as far as I know, pretty well. Myself I live in a rural area so I get VDSL at about 24 Mbits/Sec but according to various sites, Verizon ViOS is doing pretty well in getting it to the coasts.
I can assure you, none of my tax-money goes to subsidizing internet providers. Governments supporting private companies is extremely regulated in the EU, and mostly forbidden by anti-competitive laws.
So your tax money instead goes to the government effectively masquerading as a private company. Same thing only less freedom (with a corporation you can choose to explicitly -not- support them, yet you can't legally stop paying taxes).
And I pay 55Eur/month for phone + cable-tv + 20mbit down/1mbit up cable internet. I do have a 50gb/month limit, but for 99eur, I can have 100mbit down / 5mbit up with no limits with the same company. Compared to what they offer in the surrounding countries here, that's both actually pretty expensive...
Look at your population density though, you don't -have- miles and miles between towns with only a few thousand people. In the US its pretty easy to drive for an hour out west and not see a single reminder of human civilization except for a few road signs and if your lucky a few people in a car.
Of course increased population densities are going to give you better service for cheap.
I hate it when uninformed Americans think "their system" is better when they have absolutely no clue about the "other systems". For me as a European citizen, it almost seems like "freedom" has become a marketing term for US companies as a scapegoat for higher prices. I don't think my freedom is in any way limited by our expensive taxation systems, and seeing what this system gives back to me, I pay them with a smile, knowing that I live in a relatively peaceful country which won't spend my tax-money on mind-bogglingly expensive wars abroad, and that our army will mostly be used for humanitarian and (mine) cleanup missions.
I don't really care about higher prices as long as I get to spend -my- money how I feel like. Freedom doesn't mean that everything gets handed to you on a plate and everything is happy. Freedom is being able to choose. While yes, our government has decided to fuck us over with expensive, pointless wars, it doesn't mean that we are all in favor of it. However I do have some constitutional rights that you lack, namely the right to bear arms and the right to -full- freedom of speech and increased freedom of trade. Want to deny the holocaust (not that I'm advocating it, I'm just saying its a possible viewpoint) you can't do that legally in most of Europe. Want to display a swastika (again, not that I'm defending the Nazis or anything, its just an example), you can't do that. Whenever you allow a government to restrict basic, human rights such as freedom of expression and the freedom to oppose a government using armed force if needed, you are inviting tyranny. Any time you cherry pick rights to keep, you end up with an oppressive government in time.
Ok, so I save some money on internet access, but how much more of my taxes will be wasted on other things that I don't use? Things like welfare, college assistance for minorities (which I'm not a member of), social "security" which will most likely be bankrupt by the time I'm of retiring age, etc.
If you see beyond the small benefits that you might get, you see that taxation usually is a net loss for the majority and a net gain for the minority. All taxation can do is redistribute wealth, yeah, I might get lucky and win a few times, but its like playing the slot machine, its designed to give money to the house (government).
And really, when you eliminate all trade barriers which are government imposed such as laws forbidding competition in ISPs in order to get the town some crap connection for cheap, you end up with multiple options in time.
What I was meaning is that the greatest growth has to come from the rural area because the people there have fewer options and thus we should concentrate almost exclusively on the rural area because even a doubling of broadband speeds would result in an insignificant amount of output when compared with going from dial-up to broadband. I mean, there are few applications that you -can't- do with 7 Mbits/sec that you can do with 14 Mbits/sec, on the other hand 56 KB/sec speeds are pretty much unacceptable for anything other than light text-based reading and really unacceptable for any type of "e-commerce".
Yes, but I still enjoy the freedom to spend my money how I feel like it. While I might enjoy cheaper internet access, it is still a loss of economic freedom unacceptable in a free society because there may be those who don't wish to "purchase" internet but are forced to because it is in a tax. That is the fundamental flaw of taxation-based services is that in general there is no distinction made between those who wish to use the service and those who do not, thus taking out any choice of what to spend your money on. And generally, with the increase of tax-subsidized services, private competitors get pushed out of business because you -have- to pay for the "free" service even if you want to or not, meaning that the tax-subsidized service can become more and more abusive to customers because there are no real other options. You can already see this happening in public schools around the US where sub-par public schools are the norm because people still have to pay taxes to fund public schools meaning that private, better schools generally are restricted to niches.
I don't really think it is cherry-picking because those countries are in the main categories of the US, large countries with variation between tightly packed metropolitan areas and some areas with only a few human beings within a square mile. Of course countries like Japan and Korea are going to be ahead of the US because they have high population densities. Just look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density for an example. For every mile of fiber you lay in Japan, many, many more people can use it than in the US where not even a single person might be able to use it. Take a drive through the midwest, there are many areas where you won't see hardly a single sign of humanity other than the roadsigns and the occasional billboard. For an added bonus try driving in the Dakotas or Wyoming. The USA is ranked 178th in population density, now compare that to 36th for Japan, and 22ndfor South Korea. The higher the population density the easier it is to justify the laying of cables because more and more people can use it for the amount you lay. At the moment, there is little benefit to laying 5 miles of fiber to reach a little town that has a population of 300. The density of some Asian countries mean that there rarely is that situation.
Exactly, I'd rather have money in my pocket to spend on whatever I wish than to have a tax system like in Europe. Yes, I might have to pay a bit more for internet, but at least I choose to spend it on that rather than to have VAT or other hideous taxation systems to fund whatever.
but the United States is predominantly urban and suburban these days, and we should be leading in broadband speeds, not following.
Not really, and a few extra megabits don't make a huge difference. The entire point of having a national broadband system would be to make sure that the areas in the middle of nowhere get fast access because some don't think that the private enterprise can do it (which I disagree, which is a subject of an entirely different post why nationalized anything will harm economic development and jeopardize liberties...).
No one can efficiently run an internet-based company on dial-up (in 2010 anyways...). This ends up crippling economic development for that area. And in a lot of areas that can't get broadband, you either have spotty or no cell-phone coverage meaning that 3/4G Modems aren't an option.
When you are going from 54KB/sec to 1 Mbit/sec that is a huge leap forward. Going from 7 Mbit/sec to 14 Mbit/sec isn't too much of a real increase in noticeable speeds. There are few applications that need top-of-the-line internet access, on the other hand there are many applications where having latency-encumbered and capped satellite internet or slow dial-up is going to be a huge problem.
I know! I've been wanting to get these free kitten screensavers and family guy cursors and they aren't working! And I can't get sexyladies4324aefe.exe to run either! Man, Linux doesn't run anything good...
Because with Rapidshare you get what? 2 KB/Sec downloads compared to the 200 KB/Sec you can get from a good website and faster for torrents.
And with IRC and Newsgroups it is a lot harder to find what you want for the average user.
Well developed open projects however allow for greater mindshare leading to more people using their commercial offerings. Look at Red Hat, because RHL was well used on people's personal desktops, it made sense for them to push a company towards Red Hat's commercial products. Same thing with Ubuntu, because many people who use Linux are comfortable with Ubuntu, when a small business looks to consider Linux, Ubuntu is their first choice. Solaris has a lot of features that could be very handy for businesses, but without experience, most tech people are going to recommend BSD or Linux because it is what they have worked with.
Support a community well and it will pay you back. Alienate a community and you are suddenly competing against better entrenched products.
But the RIAA can use that to their favor, the average person has been so bombarded with Lady Gaga that everyone in the RIAA's target market can identify it, but lets say for a moment that all the free channels of Lady Gaga never existed, no radio airtime, no YouTube videos, and no free downloads. Lady Gaga would be known to only a few, it is only through flooding the world through -free- music that stars that make money for the RIAA can be born. Its just like Microsoft, had Microsoft been really aggressive at combating "piracy" chances are they wouldn't have even close to the marketshare they have today, the RIAA has done and can do the same thing if they really want profits. Flood the world with free product and it becomes a status symbol and more of a commodity that can be bought and sold giving profits to the RIAA.
But the RIAA has a net loss on their hands. It is a lot better for someone to be getting their product for free than it is for people not to use it. If I don't hear the music, how am I supposed to buy it? Every single song I've (legally) downloaded I've heard before, usually on YouTube, Pandora, or even through illegitimate downloads. I'm not going to buy a CD based on the cover art unless I've heard it before. If the RIAA gains one sale for every 10 songs download, it is a profit when compared to gaining no sales for no songs downloaded. Without a physical good, it doesn't really cost the RIAA any more if 1 person buys a song than it does if 1,000,000 people do, and it is a net profit for the RIAA if 10,000 people buy the album and 100,000 people download it when compared to 1,000 people buying it and no one downloaded it.
But they won't. Instead of "losing" money to piracy, they lose mindshare because people won't buy. Its a lot worse deal for the RIAA to have 10 million people not listening to their music than to have 10 million people listening to music without buying.
If a person isn't listening to music, the RIAA has no chance of making any money, if a person is, if they like the music a lot, the RIAA will eventually get money by them buying records eventually.
Between the MPAA's style of Hollywood accounting and the RIAA doing things like this, their statistics are losing credibility fast. How about using that 16 million to pay those artists that have been "wronged" by those evil "pirates".
If the *AA want to really convince people that they are losing money and the "pirates" are in the wrong, they need to get their finances straight before they blame "pirates". If it costs you $16 million to collect $400K-ish, you are running at an extreme loss, chances are that "pirate" didn't cause $16 million in real damages, (or even $10 in damages...) and if the RIAA keeps shooting itself in the foot, eventually people will realize that the real thing harming artists isn't "pirates" but the record companies.
Ah yes, and apparently this is the same company that is censoring discussions on the iPhone 4. http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/07/13/1330252 but of course after all I'm just a troll if I say that Consumer Reports isn't impartial...
Its California though, chances are they have some regulation preventing power companies from actually producing the power they need...
Right because I'm sure we all carry large bags with us at all times... If it was parked in a university parking lot think of all of the reasons why you wouldn't want to take it in.
Oddly enough not everyone can really lug a 20 pound bag around with all their possible valuables in it. While its true that a car isn't exactly safe, one would think that people wouldn't break into a car simply to get a $600 piece of technology...
No, they depend on subscribers who buy the next issue and keep a cover of "impartiality" and a supposed lack of sensationalism.
Right "impartial"... Lets face it, when consumer reports bashes or praises an item, it generates publicity (look at this /. article for example). While I agree that the iPhone issue is a real issue and is a pretty big one, saying that any magazine can be "impartial" is a joke.