I don't know if this still holds true, but in my experience AMD has produced crappier CPUs than Intel. I've had AMD boards die on me much sooner than my Intel boards. And while I'm sure this video isn't as true anymore, it does give something to think about in AMD vs Intel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIsr1R1qy1Y . Myself, if I want a cheap rig to last for 2-3 years, I buy AMD. If I want something to last any longer its generally got Intel parts.
The problem is AMD is using an outdated architecture. More cores != more speed for general use. Yeah, if you are compiling your own software you can get things to work really fast with 6 cores but how many applications really take advantage of multiple cores? Very, very few. A single fast core can outperform a few slow cores in general usage and AMD seems only concerned with getting more and more cores on a single CPU die which really doesn't translate to great performance in the real world for general use.
For many criminals, they are not withholding information. They say exactly what they believe so it isn't 'lying' according to the scans. Just like if you asked someone 10 years ago if Pluto was a planet, they would all say yes because they weren't lying even though that information wasn't correct. Same thing with criminals, if they believe it strong enough it isn't a lie and if it gets verified as the truth they can manipulate the lie detector tests and if they are the only witness they will get off the hook easier.
why prefer human prejudice/error over machine error.
Because humans are more accurate than machines in a lot of tasks. No human exists in a vacuum, a machine does. Feed a decently educated person false facts and they will reject them. Feed a machine false facts and it will believe them.
Also, brain-scans and lie detector tests should not be used because they also subvert the 5th amendment. The constitution says
"nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself"
Because of that, one should have the right to withhold information that may harm them. With a human jury that is easy enough to do, but with a machine, it isn't. And many times the end result is the same just without the witness being harmed for victimless crimes. For example, if the person says I was studying for a test, when they were really smoking pot, it is a lie, but the end result is the same, they were at home, but a true lie detector could call the entire true story into question.
All that lie detectors will do is encourage criminals to 'game' the system. Every system has flaws, lawyers make a living out of exploiting the flaws of the legal system, politicians careers exploiting the loopholes of the constitution, etc. All a lie detector test does, is encourage people who lie well. Some, if not most true criminals will replace the 'real' version of the crime in their mind with their invented version which if it solid enough will pass every lie detector test because the criminal thinks its true. So in the end, we have criminals gaming the system and innocent people who are stressed out or protecting their rights under the 5th amendment being considered lairs.
Ok, really "Lax IT policies" and "record keeping"? How is that even an excuse? Yeah, if perhaps like 30 pictures were taken it could be blamed on that. But seriously? 58,000 pictures? There is more than lax IT policies. Yeah, perhaps someone might do it once to get a laugh, but no (sane) person is going to do it 58,000 times.
How hard is it not to activate software unless the laptop has been stolen? It it isn't like its too hard to determine if it has been stolen or not...
Ok, looking at what the US DMCA has done, can you really say its improved the US in any way? Lets see here, thanks to the DMCA we now have judges wasting their time on victimless crimes, record companies still screwing artists and a rush of high-tech jobs out of the US.
The DMCA hinders education, harms jobs and makes developing in China and India even better. Why Canada would even consider such a terrible piece of legislation is beyond me.
However, for both Android and Chrome, you can easily roll your own version without much trouble. Yeah, Google applications are nice on Android, but you can use alternates.
So even when they're taking great advantage of open source, like Apple, they can't resist making sure the full kaboodle is closed. And these are just just their minor projects.
However, Google does a lot more to foster openness than Apple. Google doesn't like locked-down Android phones (otherwise why would they release the Nexus One?), Apple however seems to love having a closed platform.
Their major search thing is as closed as they promised it wouldn't be (though no-one remembers that any more).
Well of course it is closed. It is more or less a trade secret. If PageRank was open source, Google would be no more. However, unlike closed source programs, it doesn't hinder usability and it works better than competitors.
Essentially they both just detect if other cores can be powered down, power them down and then crank up the clock speed on the single cores because heat/power doesn't matter if the other cores are turned off or in the low megahertz. AMD's solution is like an afterthought because their architecture is older than Intel's while Intel's was built in to the architecture.
This has simply NEVER been the case. 'Lest we forget the days of rampant laissez faire in the 19th century, where the the rugged self-relliant individualist had the government round up the natives, and then give them subsidies so that they could make a profit on a railroad.
How can you call that Laissez Faire? The government was handing out land left and right. It was the -government- who created railroad monopolies, not the people. It was -government- regulation and such that created the railroad. It wasn't the free market.
Don't look at the railroad companies and see a flaw in unregulated markets, see it as a major flaw in government regulation of the economy. The more the regulate it the more monopolies start popping up.
You've failed to support either statement. Furthermore, you seem to be lamenting the fact that the world is much more complicated than it was 50 years ago. Before that, an elementary education was enough for most people to earn a living. Before that, no formal education was required. Today's world is no different.
Ok, look at it this way. If 80% of the people in the US have a GED or high school diploma does it really mean anything? No. If we increased education standards, made it harder for students to pass high school and say now 60% of people in the US have a GED or high school diploma, it becomes a qualification. Because high school is free for everyone, this helps the poor because now they can work hard in school and get free qualifications.
You have to pay for college unless you are good at absolutely everything and can get very high scores on the ACT/SAT. GPAs don't hardly even matter anymore because, again, standards are so lax that it gives no qualifications. Someone who is poor is more likely to do well in high school where they can specialize on what they are good at. Someone might be absolute crap in math but great in English, however their test scores won't reflect that because of the low scores in Math and science. While they will probably get -some- scholarships, if your choice is between eating a meal every night or going off to college, many of the poor are content to simply work minimum wage and stay poor to stay fed.
The problem isn't that things have changed, it is the fact we seem to think that everyone 'deserves' a high school diploma or GED. While it is true that every reasonably intelligent human out there should be able to earn a GED/High School Diploma, if they don't apply themselves or do poorly, they should not receive it because if they do it cheapens the diploma.
Also, your job and education are completely different. Many of the things requiring a college degree really only should require a high school education and some on the job training. University level education is quite honestly useless for many jobs. However, again it is the qualifications and if you get a degree from a university generally you are reasonably intelligent because a high school diploma or GED doesn't prove that anymore since it is cheapened.
Law & Order/Military - protect the resources of the rich
...No, they protect everyone. Our country is pretty much safe from attack. Any major threat would affect -everyone- rich and poor. As for law and order, they again protect everyone. However, generally you've screwed something up in your life if you need to use lots and lots of police force.
Social Security - proactive law & order
How does social security benefit the rich at all? They don't use the money. Heck, I don't think many of them can get the money they just pay it and it goes into oblivion. The rich have better plans than crappy government sponsorships.
Infrastructure - pooling resources on infrastructure so those with property (the rich) can make more money.
No, infrastructure helps the poor far more often than the rich. The rich can afford their own infrastructure and generally do. It is the poor and middle class that need public infrastructure.
Education - create low level employees that can make money for the rich.
Our current education helps no one and harms everyone. Because GEDs mean nothing, public education is not a qualification and thus someone reasonably bright graduates with the same qualifications as a complete moron. Which means that university-level degrees are the only thing that matters.
Our education system needs to flunk out those not bright enough so a high school education counts. This will help the poor because they get free paperwork for a decent job if they are qualified.
No it doesn't. If you look at how much government people use, it is the poor who end up sapping the most. It only makes sense for people to pay for what they use. A flat tax does that in a fair way because the poor still get to have taxpayer funded breaks and the rich don't have to pay for people who make stupid decisions. Why are the poor in poverty? Most of the time they made bad decisions (when the economy is relativity healthy, today a lot of the poor are victims of bad luck, but once the economy improves they will get jobs).
it makes a mockery of any sense of fairness.
Fair is paying what you use. The only fair form of government is that which you pay a small fee for the maintenance of the army per household (after all, in this day and age if you have a household of 1 or 10 the same ICBM or drone will protect you), you pay a fee for the police, fire service, etc. If you have school age kids in public schooling you pay a fee for schools, pay a fee when you get your drivers license for road use, etc. Such things are fair.
If you look at the rich, they generally use less government, so why are they paying more? It is the poor that drain our tax dollars not the rich (individuals that is, corporations are different story...)
Only for your private definition of internet service. Now, I might actually like that definition, but there isn't a similar definition in U.S. law where it counts, or this would not be nearly so much of an issue.
True, however, since fraud is the misrepresentation of services, one needs to use the commonly accepted definition since I don't think that the US provides a specific definition (however, I'm not a lawyer)
So, you're talking about the pole plant, and the radio airwaves. But this applies to 1) how the right to build a pole plant or operate on a radio frequency is granted and 2) what right you have to operate a channel on a partially publicly supported pole plant before we get to 3) how a particular private network - and if there's more than one of them they will tend to be treated as private - is operated. I think you might better direct your efforts to 1 and 2.
I'm a bit confused about your use of pole plant, all Google comes up with is references to skiing...
However, my basic stance is that if you use public funds, you are accountable to the public. If you use solely private funds you are accountable simply to not to violate the rights of others. While it is true that we have a limited amount of frequencies, we have a large enough selection of them for use of all different forms of data use that it shouldn't be a huge problem who has what just as long as the FCC does its primary (and should be only) job of making sure signals don't interfere with others.
If there are too many people wanting a specific frequency that hasn't been leased by the FCC yet, the different companies or individuals would just bid and the highest bidder would win.
However, if frequencies are very limited, the FCC should allow for reasonable caps of frequencies aquired. If they want to exceed the number of frequencies they must submit to the public will in regards to what they use it for.
I can't imagine how many trillions of dollars GM has had in subsidies through the construction of the interstate highway system, etc.
The answer to that would be $0 from the highway system (unless GM was one of the contractors...) because GM along with any other car manufacturer can use them. If the government gives $500 million to AT&T, only AT&T can make use of that. If the government spends $500 million on roads it benefits GM, Ford, Toyota, Audi, BMW, Dodge, Harley-Davidson, UPS, Fed-Ex, you and me.
And we get to say precious little about GM's operation, even now that we own it temporarily.
True, and I believe that we should be able to control GM's operation because of the bail-out until they pay it back. (not that I agree with the bail-outs...)
you are not going to win any of these arguments while using a plutocratic channel to communicate with the electorate.
The problem isn't really the communication with the electorate it is the fact we have a lack of competition in US politics and few parties of principle who win seats. And until we have party-list proportional representation, that is not going to change no matter if we have net neutrality or not.
I just happen to think that how you get information that you will vote upon is a lot more important than your right to distribute an illegitimate copy of American Idiot.
Yes, and that is a valid opinion. However, it confuses the two issues so much the tech-illiterate public will not be able to tell the difference and will think it is the fairness doctrine and be against it. Just look at Rush Limbaugh who confused the two and mislead the public. Separating the two issues let people see that net neutrality is a -good thing- even if they opposed the fairness doctrine.
Flat taxation is just one of the very many things that will never happen in America because we have a political system that restricts political views. We have two parties who are parties of money, not parties of principle. Can you -really- define a true party-wide stance of the Republicans and Democrats? No. Their stances change based on money. They are not parties of principle. Until we have a true democratic system such as Proportional Representation ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation ) such things will be useless unless someone has enough money to buy congress which won't happen because flat taxation among many other issues help the working class and the poor and will help the rich too but they see the loss of special tax breaks, etc. as a net loss when in reality it would be a net gain.
Can you show me just one major example of a (US) ISP restricting political views based solely on political viewpoint without having a simi-valid 'legal' reason?
And whenever you have governmental control over communication (such as the BBC) smaller viewpoints get left out even more than with our current system. Look at the debates that were publicly funded and left out major parties such as the Scottish Nationalist Party and Plaid Camru.
Net Neutrality should be politically desirable because of several reasons.
A) It is fraud to offer 'internet' access and cut off or slow down access to the internet you are paying for.
B) Taxpayers have a fundamental right to be able to control what happens on public land. If it is your own private land you should have the freedom to do whatever the heck you want so long as it doesn't violate the rights of others, but on public land it is every taxpayer's land.
C) Most ISPs have received large tax payer 'donations' to 'modernize' America. And taxpayers have a fundamental right to use their tax dollars, net neutrality allows taxpayers to receive the services they pay for.
As for your point, whenever you confuse it with the 'fairness' doctrine you lose people because many people are smart enough to realize that the fairness doctrine is damaging. Net neutrality is an issue because the ISPs have been messing with public land and public funds and the public has the right to use those funds/land the way they choose.
I think the difference is what people call fun and up to date. Back in the day, you could re-create Pac-Man and that was a large achievement because Pac-Man was -the- game out there. Today people expect to make Pac-Man in less than a day their first try. Back in the day, an NES game was considered to be a large and deep game. Today though, people will look at SNES and even N64 games and think that there isn't enough content in them.
Essentially anything with less content than Ocarina of Time is looked at as obsolete. No one is impressed with coding Pac-Man anymore and no one is going to take the time to learn everything to make a modern game.
The 'fairness' doctrine is complete BS. It leads to straw man-type arguments and too much liability for broadcasters.
And net neutrality is -completely- different than the fairness doctrine. All net neutrality does it make sure that broadband providers can't give preferential treatment or throttle connections.
What needs to happen is taxpayers must rise against ISPs taking public land without giving the public what it wants. Want to throttle? Don't use public land. If you don't use public land, you don't have to follow what the public wants. But most if not all ISPs do use public land and so the public needs to have a say on what goes on there.
I can't help but look at the old tech ads and see how they were catered to a tech-illiterate population. Compare the iPhone and the 1984 commercials. For being a revolutionary product the Mac ads didn't -say- much about the Mac while the iPhone shows what all it can do.
...He is simply saying that T-Mobile doesn't have service and presumably Verizon works. He is saying why don't they have a CDMA N900 because then he could use it.
Which really I don't think I will ever understand. Why would Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, etc. really care what my phone has on it? If people are using too much data, don't advertise unlimited and spend some time upgrading your towers (I'm looking at you AT&T who would rather battle on maps with Verizon than add some more 3G towers).
Also, is it really worth pissing off a few of your most influential customers? How many people are going to re-flash their firmware to a custom update? Not many. How many people get their reviews from the people who would do that? A lot.
If its to promote certain services there is a really simple way they can do that. By being the best. If AT&T music was the best music player out on Android, people would get it and perhaps buy it if they were on Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, etc. giving AT&T income.
Up until recently, there was *no* way to get compiled apps on the phone. You were stuck with web "apps". Apparently that was fine, but allowing apps and restricting the development language is not ?
A web app though is more or less platform neutral though. The entire point of this inquiry is that when you develop an app for the iPhone you have to almost completely re-write it for every other platform discouraging developers to port to other OSes.
Most (not all) antitrust legislation is aimed at preventing monopoly exploitation of alternate markets. There is little evidence that Apple has any sort of monopoly unless the category is defined so narrowly as to be useless.
The point of the investigation is to investigate if the point of Apple's restrictions is to create more or less an app store monopoly by preventing the approval of apps that would work on multiple platforms.
For example, lets say I just made the game Zombie Attack. If I made it in a platform neutral language like what Adobe has I would be able to ship the game on PC, Mac, iPhone OS, Android, BlackBerry OS, Linux, etc. with minimal changes. On the other hand, if I wrote it for the iPhone with the iPhone SDK, I would have to completely re-write the game to get it to run on any of the other platforms.
This, in essence allows Apple with a large percentage of smartphone sales to dominate the market by effectivly "blocking" their apps from appearing in competitor's stores because of the pain it takes to recode the program.
I still don't see why Apple aren't allowed to set the terms of participation in their program. If you sign up as an iphone/ipod/ipad developer, you know what you're getting into, and you know they can change their rules at any time. Don't come whining when you don't like it any more
Because their terms of participation is blocking free competition for most users who don't jailbreak.
The problem isn't that Apple can set the terms, it is that Apple is setting the terms -only- to prevent people from coding the same app and running it other places, so Apple can have the app exclusively and keeping people tied into the iPhone rather than the cheaper, diverse and more feature filled Android, BlackBerry, and other phones.
Quite honestly, Android needs to be -far- more open to end users. For example, take a look at the Motorola BackFlip. It has an interesting hardware design, runs on AT&T, is pretty cheap on contract, but fails in a few main areas.
A) Uses Yahoo search.
Ok, if you want to make Yahoo the default and get a few bucks, fine. But let me change it to Google or whatever I want. Really, I think Yahoo is a crap search engine. I don't want it on my phone. I prefer Google to Yahoo/Ask/Bing/Live/AltaVista/whatever.
B) Doesn't let you use non-market apps by default
If I want to use non-market apps I should be able to without having to download the SDK and load them on that way.
C) Has crap software.
If you are going to ship a phone, computer, etc. use the most recent OS version. Android 2.1 has -many- advantages over 1.5 and many say it runs -faster- than 1.5. This isn't like Vista, this is a true upgrade. Don't screw customers by offering the equivalent of Windows 98 in 2010.
Google should make their software and require members of the Open Handset Alliance friendly to OSS developers and power-users. Let us change the OS, let us install what we want, etc. Perhaps make it kind of hard, but just let us do what we want with our devices and in exchange Android will get multitudes of innovation, new applications, and more marketshare.
Multitasking, like using an app while using another app. Such things are impossible without jailbreaking.
Think about it this way, want to use Pandora while checking your e-mail? You can't. Want to surf the web while listening to a YouTube video? You can't. Etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if this still holds true, but in my experience AMD has produced crappier CPUs than Intel. I've had AMD boards die on me much sooner than my Intel boards. And while I'm sure this video isn't as true anymore, it does give something to think about in AMD vs Intel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIsr1R1qy1Y . Myself, if I want a cheap rig to last for 2-3 years, I buy AMD. If I want something to last any longer its generally got Intel parts.
The problem is AMD is using an outdated architecture. More cores != more speed for general use. Yeah, if you are compiling your own software you can get things to work really fast with 6 cores but how many applications really take advantage of multiple cores? Very, very few. A single fast core can outperform a few slow cores in general usage and AMD seems only concerned with getting more and more cores on a single CPU die which really doesn't translate to great performance in the real world for general use.
For many criminals, they are not withholding information. They say exactly what they believe so it isn't 'lying' according to the scans. Just like if you asked someone 10 years ago if Pluto was a planet, they would all say yes because they weren't lying even though that information wasn't correct. Same thing with criminals, if they believe it strong enough it isn't a lie and if it gets verified as the truth they can manipulate the lie detector tests and if they are the only witness they will get off the hook easier.
why prefer human prejudice/error over machine error.
Because humans are more accurate than machines in a lot of tasks. No human exists in a vacuum, a machine does. Feed a decently educated person false facts and they will reject them. Feed a machine false facts and it will believe them.
Also, brain-scans and lie detector tests should not be used because they also subvert the 5th amendment. The constitution says
"nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself"
Because of that, one should have the right to withhold information that may harm them. With a human jury that is easy enough to do, but with a machine, it isn't. And many times the end result is the same just without the witness being harmed for victimless crimes. For example, if the person says I was studying for a test, when they were really smoking pot, it is a lie, but the end result is the same, they were at home, but a true lie detector could call the entire true story into question.
All that lie detectors will do is encourage criminals to 'game' the system. Every system has flaws, lawyers make a living out of exploiting the flaws of the legal system, politicians careers exploiting the loopholes of the constitution, etc. All a lie detector test does, is encourage people who lie well. Some, if not most true criminals will replace the 'real' version of the crime in their mind with their invented version which if it solid enough will pass every lie detector test because the criminal thinks its true. So in the end, we have criminals gaming the system and innocent people who are stressed out or protecting their rights under the 5th amendment being considered lairs.
Ok, really "Lax IT policies" and "record keeping"? How is that even an excuse? Yeah, if perhaps like 30 pictures were taken it could be blamed on that. But seriously? 58,000 pictures? There is more than lax IT policies. Yeah, perhaps someone might do it once to get a laugh, but no (sane) person is going to do it 58,000 times.
How hard is it not to activate software unless the laptop has been stolen? It it isn't like its too hard to determine if it has been stolen or not...
Exactly! We need to protect everyone from the horrors of Nickleback. Perhaps we should give them 300 year copyright?
Ok, looking at what the US DMCA has done, can you really say its improved the US in any way? Lets see here, thanks to the DMCA we now have judges wasting their time on victimless crimes, record companies still screwing artists and a rush of high-tech jobs out of the US.
The DMCA hinders education, harms jobs and makes developing in China and India even better. Why Canada would even consider such a terrible piece of legislation is beyond me.
So even when they're taking great advantage of open source, like Apple, they can't resist making sure the full kaboodle is closed. And these are just just their minor projects.
However, Google does a lot more to foster openness than Apple. Google doesn't like locked-down Android phones (otherwise why would they release the Nexus One?), Apple however seems to love having a closed platform.
Their major search thing is as closed as they promised it wouldn't be (though no-one remembers that any more).
Well of course it is closed. It is more or less a trade secret. If PageRank was open source, Google would be no more. However, unlike closed source programs, it doesn't hinder usability and it works better than competitors.
Essentially they both just detect if other cores can be powered down, power them down and then crank up the clock speed on the single cores because heat/power doesn't matter if the other cores are turned off or in the low megahertz. AMD's solution is like an afterthought because their architecture is older than Intel's while Intel's was built in to the architecture.
This has simply NEVER been the case. 'Lest we forget the days of rampant laissez faire in the 19th century, where the the rugged self-relliant individualist had the government round up the natives, and then give them subsidies so that they could make a profit on a railroad.
How can you call that Laissez Faire? The government was handing out land left and right. It was the -government- who created railroad monopolies, not the people. It was -government- regulation and such that created the railroad. It wasn't the free market.
Don't look at the railroad companies and see a flaw in unregulated markets, see it as a major flaw in government regulation of the economy. The more the regulate it the more monopolies start popping up.
You've failed to support either statement. Furthermore, you seem to be lamenting the fact that the world is much more complicated than it was 50 years ago. Before that, an elementary education was enough for most people to earn a living. Before that, no formal education was required. Today's world is no different.
Ok, look at it this way. If 80% of the people in the US have a GED or high school diploma does it really mean anything? No. If we increased education standards, made it harder for students to pass high school and say now 60% of people in the US have a GED or high school diploma, it becomes a qualification. Because high school is free for everyone, this helps the poor because now they can work hard in school and get free qualifications.
You have to pay for college unless you are good at absolutely everything and can get very high scores on the ACT/SAT. GPAs don't hardly even matter anymore because, again, standards are so lax that it gives no qualifications. Someone who is poor is more likely to do well in high school where they can specialize on what they are good at. Someone might be absolute crap in math but great in English, however their test scores won't reflect that because of the low scores in Math and science. While they will probably get -some- scholarships, if your choice is between eating a meal every night or going off to college, many of the poor are content to simply work minimum wage and stay poor to stay fed.
The problem isn't that things have changed, it is the fact we seem to think that everyone 'deserves' a high school diploma or GED. While it is true that every reasonably intelligent human out there should be able to earn a GED/High School Diploma, if they don't apply themselves or do poorly, they should not receive it because if they do it cheapens the diploma.
Also, your job and education are completely different. Many of the things requiring a college degree really only should require a high school education and some on the job training. University level education is quite honestly useless for many jobs. However, again it is the qualifications and if you get a degree from a university generally you are reasonably intelligent because a high school diploma or GED doesn't prove that anymore since it is cheapened.
Law & Order/Military - protect the resources of the rich
Social Security - proactive law & order
How does social security benefit the rich at all? They don't use the money. Heck, I don't think many of them can get the money they just pay it and it goes into oblivion. The rich have better plans than crappy government sponsorships.
Infrastructure - pooling resources on infrastructure so those with property (the rich) can make more money.
No, infrastructure helps the poor far more often than the rich. The rich can afford their own infrastructure and generally do. It is the poor and middle class that need public infrastructure.
Education - create low level employees that can make money for the rich.
Our current education helps no one and harms everyone. Because GEDs mean nothing, public education is not a qualification and thus someone reasonably bright graduates with the same qualifications as a complete moron. Which means that university-level degrees are the only thing that matters.
Our education system needs to flunk out those not bright enough so a high school education counts. This will help the poor because they get free paperwork for a decent job if they are qualified.
Flat tax RAPES the poor.
No it doesn't. If you look at how much government people use, it is the poor who end up sapping the most. It only makes sense for people to pay for what they use. A flat tax does that in a fair way because the poor still get to have taxpayer funded breaks and the rich don't have to pay for people who make stupid decisions. Why are the poor in poverty? Most of the time they made bad decisions (when the economy is relativity healthy, today a lot of the poor are victims of bad luck, but once the economy improves they will get jobs).
it makes a mockery of any sense of fairness.
Fair is paying what you use. The only fair form of government is that which you pay a small fee for the maintenance of the army per household (after all, in this day and age if you have a household of 1 or 10 the same ICBM or drone will protect you), you pay a fee for the police, fire service, etc. If you have school age kids in public schooling you pay a fee for schools, pay a fee when you get your drivers license for road use, etc. Such things are fair.
If you look at the rich, they generally use less government, so why are they paying more? It is the poor that drain our tax dollars not the rich (individuals that is, corporations are different story...)
Only for your private definition of internet service. Now, I might actually like that definition, but there isn't a similar definition in U.S. law where it counts, or this would not be nearly so much of an issue.
True, however, since fraud is the misrepresentation of services, one needs to use the commonly accepted definition since I don't think that the US provides a specific definition (however, I'm not a lawyer)
So, you're talking about the pole plant, and the radio airwaves. But this applies to 1) how the right to build a pole plant or operate on a radio frequency is granted and 2) what right you have to operate a channel on a partially publicly supported pole plant before we get to 3) how a particular private network - and if there's more than one of them they will tend to be treated as private - is operated. I think you might better direct your efforts to 1 and 2.
I'm a bit confused about your use of pole plant, all Google comes up with is references to skiing...
However, my basic stance is that if you use public funds, you are accountable to the public. If you use solely private funds you are accountable simply to not to violate the rights of others. While it is true that we have a limited amount of frequencies, we have a large enough selection of them for use of all different forms of data use that it shouldn't be a huge problem who has what just as long as the FCC does its primary (and should be only) job of making sure signals don't interfere with others.
If there are too many people wanting a specific frequency that hasn't been leased by the FCC yet, the different companies or individuals would just bid and the highest bidder would win.
However, if frequencies are very limited, the FCC should allow for reasonable caps of frequencies aquired. If they want to exceed the number of frequencies they must submit to the public will in regards to what they use it for.
I can't imagine how many trillions of dollars GM has had in subsidies through the construction of the interstate highway system, etc.
The answer to that would be $0 from the highway system (unless GM was one of the contractors...) because GM along with any other car manufacturer can use them. If the government gives $500 million to AT&T, only AT&T can make use of that. If the government spends $500 million on roads it benefits GM, Ford, Toyota, Audi, BMW, Dodge, Harley-Davidson, UPS, Fed-Ex, you and me.
And we get to say precious little about GM's operation, even now that we own it temporarily.
True, and I believe that we should be able to control GM's operation because of the bail-out until they pay it back. (not that I agree with the bail-outs...)
you are not going to win any of these arguments while using a plutocratic channel to communicate with the electorate.
The problem isn't really the communication with the electorate it is the fact we have a lack of competition in US politics and few parties of principle who win seats. And until we have party-list proportional representation, that is not going to change no matter if we have net neutrality or not.
I just happen to think that how you get information that you will vote upon is a lot more important than your right to distribute an illegitimate copy of American Idiot.
Yes, and that is a valid opinion. However, it confuses the two issues so much the tech-illiterate public will not be able to tell the difference and will think it is the fairness doctrine and be against it. Just look at Rush Limbaugh who confused the two and mislead the public. Separating the two issues let people see that net neutrality is a -good thing- even if they opposed the fairness doctrine.
Flat taxation is just one of the very many things that will never happen in America because we have a political system that restricts political views. We have two parties who are parties of money, not parties of principle. Can you -really- define a true party-wide stance of the Republicans and Democrats? No. Their stances change based on money. They are not parties of principle. Until we have a true democratic system such as Proportional Representation ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation ) such things will be useless unless someone has enough money to buy congress which won't happen because flat taxation among many other issues help the working class and the poor and will help the rich too but they see the loss of special tax breaks, etc. as a net loss when in reality it would be a net gain.
Can you show me just one major example of a (US) ISP restricting political views based solely on political viewpoint without having a simi-valid 'legal' reason?
And whenever you have governmental control over communication (such as the BBC) smaller viewpoints get left out even more than with our current system. Look at the debates that were publicly funded and left out major parties such as the Scottish Nationalist Party and Plaid Camru.
Net Neutrality should be politically desirable because of several reasons.
A) It is fraud to offer 'internet' access and cut off or slow down access to the internet you are paying for.
B) Taxpayers have a fundamental right to be able to control what happens on public land. If it is your own private land you should have the freedom to do whatever the heck you want so long as it doesn't violate the rights of others, but on public land it is every taxpayer's land.
C) Most ISPs have received large tax payer 'donations' to 'modernize' America. And taxpayers have a fundamental right to use their tax dollars, net neutrality allows taxpayers to receive the services they pay for.
As for your point, whenever you confuse it with the 'fairness' doctrine you lose people because many people are smart enough to realize that the fairness doctrine is damaging. Net neutrality is an issue because the ISPs have been messing with public land and public funds and the public has the right to use those funds/land the way they choose.
I think the difference is what people call fun and up to date. Back in the day, you could re-create Pac-Man and that was a large achievement because Pac-Man was -the- game out there. Today people expect to make Pac-Man in less than a day their first try. Back in the day, an NES game was considered to be a large and deep game. Today though, people will look at SNES and even N64 games and think that there isn't enough content in them.
Essentially anything with less content than Ocarina of Time is looked at as obsolete. No one is impressed with coding Pac-Man anymore and no one is going to take the time to learn everything to make a modern game.
The 'fairness' doctrine is complete BS. It leads to straw man-type arguments and too much liability for broadcasters.
And net neutrality is -completely- different than the fairness doctrine. All net neutrality does it make sure that broadband providers can't give preferential treatment or throttle connections.
What needs to happen is taxpayers must rise against ISPs taking public land without giving the public what it wants. Want to throttle? Don't use public land. If you don't use public land, you don't have to follow what the public wants. But most if not all ISPs do use public land and so the public needs to have a say on what goes on there.
I can't help but look at the old tech ads and see how they were catered to a tech-illiterate population. Compare the iPhone and the 1984 commercials. For being a revolutionary product the Mac ads didn't -say- much about the Mac while the iPhone shows what all it can do.
...He is simply saying that T-Mobile doesn't have service and presumably Verizon works. He is saying why don't they have a CDMA N900 because then he could use it.
Which really I don't think I will ever understand. Why would Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, etc. really care what my phone has on it? If people are using too much data, don't advertise unlimited and spend some time upgrading your towers (I'm looking at you AT&T who would rather battle on maps with Verizon than add some more 3G towers).
Also, is it really worth pissing off a few of your most influential customers? How many people are going to re-flash their firmware to a custom update? Not many. How many people get their reviews from the people who would do that? A lot.
If its to promote certain services there is a really simple way they can do that. By being the best. If AT&T music was the best music player out on Android, people would get it and perhaps buy it if they were on Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, etc. giving AT&T income.
Up until recently, there was *no* way to get compiled apps on the phone. You were stuck with web "apps". Apparently that was fine, but allowing apps and restricting the development language is not ?
A web app though is more or less platform neutral though. The entire point of this inquiry is that when you develop an app for the iPhone you have to almost completely re-write it for every other platform discouraging developers to port to other OSes.
Most (not all) antitrust legislation is aimed at preventing monopoly exploitation of alternate markets. There is little evidence that Apple has any sort of monopoly unless the category is defined so narrowly as to be useless.
The point of the investigation is to investigate if the point of Apple's restrictions is to create more or less an app store monopoly by preventing the approval of apps that would work on multiple platforms.
For example, lets say I just made the game Zombie Attack. If I made it in a platform neutral language like what Adobe has I would be able to ship the game on PC, Mac, iPhone OS, Android, BlackBerry OS, Linux, etc. with minimal changes. On the other hand, if I wrote it for the iPhone with the iPhone SDK, I would have to completely re-write the game to get it to run on any of the other platforms.
This, in essence allows Apple with a large percentage of smartphone sales to dominate the market by effectivly "blocking" their apps from appearing in competitor's stores because of the pain it takes to recode the program.
I still don't see why Apple aren't allowed to set the terms of participation in their program. If you sign up as an iphone/ipod/ipad developer, you know what you're getting into, and you know they can change their rules at any time. Don't come whining when you don't like it any more
Because their terms of participation is blocking free competition for most users who don't jailbreak.
The problem isn't that Apple can set the terms, it is that Apple is setting the terms -only- to prevent people from coding the same app and running it other places, so Apple can have the app exclusively and keeping people tied into the iPhone rather than the cheaper, diverse and more feature filled Android, BlackBerry, and other phones.
Quite honestly, Android needs to be -far- more open to end users. For example, take a look at the Motorola BackFlip. It has an interesting hardware design, runs on AT&T, is pretty cheap on contract, but fails in a few main areas.
A) Uses Yahoo search.
Ok, if you want to make Yahoo the default and get a few bucks, fine. But let me change it to Google or whatever I want. Really, I think Yahoo is a crap search engine. I don't want it on my phone. I prefer Google to Yahoo/Ask/Bing/Live/AltaVista/whatever.
B) Doesn't let you use non-market apps by default
If I want to use non-market apps I should be able to without having to download the SDK and load them on that way.
C) Has crap software.
If you are going to ship a phone, computer, etc. use the most recent OS version. Android 2.1 has -many- advantages over 1.5 and many say it runs -faster- than 1.5. This isn't like Vista, this is a true upgrade. Don't screw customers by offering the equivalent of Windows 98 in 2010.
Google should make their software and require members of the Open Handset Alliance friendly to OSS developers and power-users. Let us change the OS, let us install what we want, etc. Perhaps make it kind of hard, but just let us do what we want with our devices and in exchange Android will get multitudes of innovation, new applications, and more marketshare.
Multitasking, like using an app while using another app. Such things are impossible without jailbreaking.
Think about it this way, want to use Pandora while checking your e-mail? You can't. Want to surf the web while listening to a YouTube video? You can't. Etc.
In 50 years when we realize that all global warming is, is just pure hype can we sue all these people promoting it for lies?