If they have nothing to sell to their customers, then they won't make very much money, will they.
But that's not how things work when you're a monopoly. Or even a company with only eighty percent of the market. Your product doesn't have to be ideal, just good enough to keep competitors from spending the billions of dollars and years of coding to even try to catch up. Google is now so big that their energy usage alone affects the budgets of entire counties. Looks to me like you're assuming that somehow if they don't do the best possible job, competition will somehow magically take care of it. That it's a choice between "nothing to sell" as you put it, and putting out a flawless product. Well, first of all, there's a huge range between "nothing" and "best". Secondly, when the barriers to entry are measured in billions of dollars and tens of thousands of programmer years of work, it's not realistic to expect that somebody will somehow just step in and supercede Google if they do something wrong.
Now, maybe you're thinking as you read this about Yahoo, MSN, and so on. Well, have you ever used their search engines in the past five years? I run web sites so I have to. They suck. I'm not even going to bother to explain why Microsoft would f*ck up a programming job; anybody posting here should get that already. But if you look at the others, they're somewhere between bush league and simply not built as general purpose search engines. Ask Jeeves and Yahoo are built for ignorant, clueless lumps who want everything explained to them in small words. Search on anything there and you'll reliably end up at sites with a fifth grade vocabulary and lots of "for dummies" style handholding.
What's my point? That their engines aren't even built to do what Google's does. To say that they still compete head to head with Google is like saying that Cliff Notes is competing with Encyclopedia Britannica. This means that in some ways, Google is already a monopoly and I'm willing to bet that the programmers in those companies who study how each other's code works would agree with me. They offer, superficially, the same product, but not to the same markets and not for quite the same uses.
Make no mistake; I use Google,too. Their results are fantastic. But just as I avoid posting links to Wikipedia, I go out of my way to find things in other ways than Google. As the article points out, power corrupts, monopoly power especially. And whether the folks in Google still believe after their cooperation with the Chinese government and their retention of personal data and so on that they are free from "evil" to use their own term, they will become a problem, a censoring, privacy infringing, overcharging danger to, quite literally, the entire human race if they keep going the way that they're going now.
I'm guessing most. From the sensor grids along the Ho Chi Minh trail to the Sargent York gun, our military has a long and embarrassing history of promoting assorted, "can't tell you because that's a secret" crap, most of which turns out to be a combination of defense contractor welfare and those contractors acting out the fantasies of tech-illiterate military and political decisionmakers. (See SDI, aka "Star Wars".)
And remember the source here. Whatever he was in 1972, Woodward has been the asshole buddy of the Bush administration for a very long time now, who, whatever his attempts to make himself look good now may be, played a key role in sabotaging the career of CIA agent Valerie Plame to back Bush administration policy. Not to mention having helped the Reagan administration use Casey as cover for many of their most egregious crimes. Frankly, anybody getting repeated positive endorsements from folks like Peggy Noonan isn't somebody whose word I'm going to trust.
If this were just about fiber to private homes, then maybe I would agree with you. But first of all, this system is planned to start out with fiber for schools and other municipal users. Secondly, what about commercial users? 25 million for 12,000 private homes is Sarah Palin territory. Huge debt for minimal gain. But since Monticello is home to quite a few office parks, we're talking about, at the least, several hundred business users, each of whom should and hopefully would bear some of the tax burden of this as well as getting much of the gain.
Now, if we're thinking about this as a business, which is a distortion but I'll run with it, it's normal for telecom companies to spend as much as a couple thousand dollars to acquire business customers. So if we assume five hundred businesses, then we're talking about just acquiring that business being worth about a million of that money. If we assume 700 children of school age who would use that service, well, buying computers for that many kids would last nowhere near as long and would cost over a million bucks, all things considered. It all comes down to numbers, though, doesn't it? Do we compare this to a sewage system, which will deliver value for a hundred years or more, or do we compare it to a wireless network which will need to be rebuilt every five years or so? How many years of service would this proposal provide? How much of this money goes for short-term equipment like routers and how much for long-term infrastructure like fiber and putting in channels? Who will own that city-provided infrastructure?
How many customers will use this? Of what types? Will they billed for this and if so, how?
I don't know. And afaict, neither do you. You've got interesting and useful things to say about the contract type and such, for which I thank you. But as for total net value, unless you've got answers to most or all of the questions above, you might want to get off your high horse a bit and cut them a little more slack.
I agree that government should play a role in infrastructure but if they're going to do it at all, then they should spend the additional money to make those channels as large as possible. If they need an eighteen inch channel, then maybe they should do a twenty-four inch one, and so on. If they're planning to spend the money to dig up streets, create utility vaults, and so forth, then let them spend the money to do it right the first time and create a right of way that will then be available for other services. The more space they put in now, the less money they'll have to spend later on and the easier it gets to do maintenance without digging up the streets again.
If it were up to me, municipalities all over the place would be putting in precast, modular component tunnels under major streets that would be big enough to stand inside and to carry telecom lines, electrical lines, gas lines, and so on, all on top of water and sewage lines. This would cut monopoly power waaay down and massively decrease the cost, likelihood, and problems related to breakdowns, not to mention make things like greywater processing much more practical.
/. is supposed to be a place for the innovative (or so we like to pretend). Show us something new. Shock from generic offensiveness is boring. It's old hat. Might as well try to impress us with your Pentium III. If you're going to be one of the FP obsessives, prepare something better to cut and paste in.
How about personal revelations? "I'm having sex with my brother" would do. "I buy all of my software at Target and I buy whatever they suggest" would do even better.
Or rude haiku about, say, Cowboy Neal. That might propagate.
Or blasts from the past. "I"M TYPING THIS IN MY NEW ACCOUNT ON AOL. HI THERE."
Ya see, some of us still have this silly idea THAT THREADS SHOULD BE ABOUT DISCUSSING THE FUCKING ISSUE BROUGHT UP IN THE GODDAMN INITIAL POST.
So if you insist on engaging in your adolescent crap, at least try to make it amusing.
For as long as they've been a national chain, they've managed to become a sort of first geek job for countless of our tribe. I can tell you that I've been walking into Radio Shacks since at least the early eighties and thinking each time, "I wonder if I'll run into anybody cool working here."
Now, admittedly, those people are about one in fifteen among their staff, but they still pop up. Makes sense. If you're the kind of person who wants discounts on protoboards and power supplies and soon and you're from a non-geek family/social circle, a job at Radio Shack can be the only evident option for going from being a user to being, at the least, somebody who builds from components, or even somebody who is soldering, figuring out resistances, and so on.
Does this get me to buy their crappy consumer electronics? No. But I'm always glad to go there for mini screwdrivers on Xacto-style knives and that kind of thing and see if anything else worth my time and cash turns up.
I know that he talked about scaling up. Put that down to usual inventor exuberance. All of us who've gotten an invention working have experienced that. What matters is that is entire apparatus of about ten parts can be built of scrap, in a couple of hours.
Yeah, sure, he's using optimized materials. But anything thin and flexible could be tested, have its optimal shape for flutter in a given environment determined, and used to make these. I knew some guys who did the sensors for their thesis using strips of mylar from potato chip bags.
Magnets are the one hard part and even those can be pulled from dead speakers or whatever.
Wound wire? We've all built our own generators as kids, yes? Winding enough for an electromagnet like that is no big deal. And wire turns up in waste streams all over the place. That's why so many baskets and such from rural craftspeople are made of it.
Rigid frame? Whatever's around. I'm not entirely sure just how rigid that frame needs to be but worst case scenario we're talking about a chunk of iron cut out of a dead car.
And so on.
What this does is enable illiterate people with a few hours of training to make a device from things they don't have to pay for that can power basic things like lights. And from what I'm seeing, it's the kind of thing that will propagate. UNESCO staffer teaches Jose. Jose's brother comes by and asks about it; Jose teaches his brother. Brother's wife wants one to sew better; she makes one for herself. The wife's friends drop by . ..
Excellent. All we need to do is provide superbright LEDs and whatever parts turn out to most be in demand and soon, count on it, there will be innovations by the dozens turning up that the inventors and NGO folks never even knew about.
I couldn't agree with you more. I would like to think that out here in Oregon we send some pretty good folks to D.C. but Wisconsin has definitely got a pair of winners.
Interesting. I didn't know that. It's sad that sexuality, which I assume is what you're implying, should be such a factor but you're probably right. I'll look into that.
There's a vast difference in "stuff is out there somewhere" and something being created under the umbrella of the educational establishment specifically for use in schools. Of course, there has been plenty of inexpensive or free excellent material out there on any number of subjects for years. As it happens, I publish some of it. But having it available for the small minority who will look and having something created for the explicit purpose of supplanting the crap that dominates the field now are very different. Especially since this is a step towards schools not requiring students to buy said overpriced, blanded out crap, which since textbooks now cost many college students over a thousand dollars a year, is also an important step towards lowering the barriers to education and reducing government costs and student debt.
And, again, speaking as a publisher, I welcome this with open arms. I'm quite secure in my stuff being unique and worth the money and I *know* that the same can't be said of much of what's out there. I've done work on the stuff from folks like McGraw-Hill and the sooner it gets forced to be more competitive, the happier I'll be.
I'd rather see government do something to encourage free-market competition among the carriers...
So, what would you suggest? We've already *had* three full rounds of anti-monopoly/trust legislation and each time it gets subverted. What do you suggest that:
A.) can get passed (by both houses) (and not get vetoed)
B.) is comprehensible to the average voter
C.) can be defended against the inevitable several hundred million dollar disinformation campaign that the affected corporations will wage against it
D.) provides a clear path of responsibility for an agency that is tasked to enforce it in a transparent and persistent way.
E.) has a clear and consistent metric for penalties and/or requirements for disbandment that are proportional to the problem and enforceable and give judges and/or regulators some degree of leeway for special cases
F.) Won't then be utterly subverted in a decade or so?
Make no mistake. I would love to see something like that. But it's a just a wee bit more complicated than "somebody should, ya know, do something."
Actually, he's got all the money he needs. If Herb Kohl wants "a brand new BMW" he can buy one with the weekly interest from his bank account. And that is why he's willing to stand up to them. Now if we could only get him clued enough to not do chowderheaded things like voting for FISA.
Which, let me note, is exactly the kind of thing that we geeks need to pay attention to. Legislators like Kohl who *do* frequently do the right thing should be so overloaded with capable, free advice on technical issues that those advisors could create their own baseball league. Me? I've gone over tech issues with our new mayor, some members of the city council, and several dozen other legislators over the years. Try it, folks. You might be surprised how many will listen if you're calm, specific, informed, explain why they should care, and don't ramble.
Unfortunately, I'm sure we're all aware this is just a senator trying to make it look like he's rattling a few cages
Actually, afaic, Herb Kohl is one of the few good guys left in Congress. And fwiw, since he's got his own millions of bucks from the Kohl's department store chain, he doesn't need money from anybody. Got his own stash, thank you very much. So while I wouldn't deny that he's a publicity whore (duh! he's a politician!) I would say that it's a safe bet that, oddly enough, he's pushing this in part simply because he's disgusted with the telecom companies.
When I was about thirteen I went on a two-day peace march. Something like ten miles a day along hilly Vermont roads. At the start of the second day John Kenneth Galbraith gave a speech before we set out. I, being me, didn't really care who he was nor did I like what he was saying, so I just sat where I was, right under the podium zoning out. When we got back to camp after the march I was handed the paper by various people who insisted that the kid vaguely visible in the picture of his speech was me.
Well, now, twenty-eight years later or so, I would love to have that pic if it is what I remember. Would I be willing to go to Vermont and dig through archives for hours finding it? No. But, hell, if it's on Google, I'm up for looking now and again until it turns up. I suspect that there are millions of us with such things that we will now do now that the barriers to entry have so decreased.
The more important issue, afaic, is what will happen with all of the major political events that have been "disappeared" from our collective memory with disinformation now that original accounts will need to either selectively not be available or far more expensively be suppressed? My guess is that, for example, stories about General Motors streetcar fraud will slip through and that within a year or so any number of big political issues will start to be sen differently by the chattering classes.
And you define "world's biggest manufacturer" how?
Have you looked inside a car recently? Or a computer? A hell of a lot of "American made" is actually "kinda American assembled" with a lot of the "American" part meaning assembled by starving, illiterate, low skill workers in U.S. territories like Saipan. So, yes, I know more than a little bit about this and I would be curious to see an example of an "American-made" car you can point me to that actually was made in the United States, from the minerals up. And speaking as a Pacific Northwesterner who has been watching Boeing's slow phaseout of their Seattle shops (officially they're now an Illinois company), I've had almost as much fun on this front as I did watching my suppliers on the Jericho Turnpike shut down as the Long Island aerospace companies phased out their manufacturing in the eighties. Fwiw, I moved to Wisconsin, since a few places still existed there to buy things like non-standard fasteners or drive components but, hell, they're all long-gone too. Of course the tooling guys I knew in central Vermont seem to be doing okay still, but they're not too thrilled about GM shutting down so many lines.
But, frankly, all of that is a sideshow. The infrastructure needed to make something like a Saturn V is not the same as what is needed to make anything else. And as Beal Aerospace found, when they tried to get a facility running that could work on that scale, not only do we not even have the tooling anymore to do that kind of thing, the "usual suspects" among the government contractors and their federal moneysources don't care that this is the case. Nor does Congress. In other words, I'm not basing my conclusions on some vague impression I got from not being able to find American made pants at the GAP but from having been following the specific issue of infrastructure to build just these kinds of systems for over ten years. A thing you would have known better if you had read what I linked to but, hell, this is/.; why would I think you would do a thing like that?
Well, whether we put new vehicles into service or not, we can be damned sure that other countries will keep on motoring along. A few people in this thread have mentioned the Chinese space program. I would have *thought* that somebody would remember that the ESA has been launching craft for years now. But, for that matter, so have the Japanese. And India's program is going nicely. The Brazilian space program is a bit gunshy these days, but, make no mistake, they'll be launching more rockets some time soon. Though we have to wonder how they feel about the Guyanese launch capability, which has been a pretty serious thing for over ten years now.
Folks, there are more governments with space programs then there are well-known Linux distros these days. And plenty of them have or are well on the way to developing their own launch vehicles and facilities. And that doesn't even begin to address all the possible private actors. How many of y'all know how many organizations were vying for the original X Prize? A hell of a lot more than the three or four that most media outlets are aware of. And even that doesn't include some relevant players.
We're entering a world where many space programs are becoming more like seventies Silicon Valley startups than like NASA. For anybody to think that they understand what will be available in three or four years and how just shows that they either haven't looked into it, that they're very warped by Big Company Think, or that they've got their head so far up their ass that they're seeing daylight up their throat.
I certainly agree that we should be more interested in reviving Apollo-era technologies. And, along with people inside NASA I certainly agree that they've got a real clusterfuck going by now and really could do lot better.
But, oddly enough, we're actually far less capable of doing things like building Apollo-scale systems than we were back in the seventies. Ya see, that's what happens when a country outsources all of its manufacturing for an entire generation. The manufacturing infrastructure gets torn out to make room for condos and nail salons.
Truth is, we're screwed, We simply don't have the industrial base to build that kind of thing anymore. Not to weld tanks that are big enough. Not to move cargos by rail through as many places. Not to even have the population of machinists and glassblowers and chemical plant technicians to populate the assembly systems.
Should this be a call to arms? Yet another reason to require that kids take industrial arts (as I had to) and that government agencies buy American-made-products? Yes. But for now, we're S.O.L.
Sounds like you're talking about what's known as "a chilling effect" and if it is, then you'll LOVE schoolbook adoptions. Just about all textbooks in American schools come from a handful of publishers and those publishers won't publish any textbook that has been rejected by what are called "textbook adoption committees", which are committees in a handful of states, most notably Texas and California, whose decisions determine all public school purchases for their state's public schools. These committees, btw, always have representatives of the hardcore religious right and one or two "political correctness" a**wads on them, which lets them veto anything like, say, discussion of evolution.
If you ever wondered why textbooks are so reliably foul, well, this is a large part of why. These adoption techniques can be counted on to weed out anything interesting and to reward bland, endless crrrrap. And just as you suspected, publishers remove anything from their textbooks that might not appeal to those committees even before submitting them.
Yet another reason that Americans can't think their way out of a paper bag (or in a voting booth).
Part of how Abby Hoffman evaded the FBI for years was by doing exactly that. Worked, too. He only got caught when he got back into politics.
Anyway, for most cases, there's a much easier hack. As plenty of people have pointed out, just put a pebble in your shoe and that multi-million dollar, high tech system will just pass you by. I suspect that taping one ankle or things like that would work in most cases, too.
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If they have nothing to sell to their customers, then they won't make very much money, will they.
But that's not how things work when you're a monopoly. Or even a company with only eighty percent of the market. Your product doesn't have to be ideal, just good enough to keep competitors from spending the billions of dollars and years of coding to even try to catch up. Google is now so big that their energy usage alone affects the budgets of entire counties. Looks to me like you're assuming that somehow if they don't do the best possible job, competition will somehow magically take care of it. That it's a choice between "nothing to sell" as you put it, and putting out a flawless product. Well, first of all, there's a huge range between "nothing" and "best". Secondly, when the barriers to entry are measured in billions of dollars and tens of thousands of programmer years of work, it's not realistic to expect that somebody will somehow just step in and supercede Google if they do something wrong.
Now, maybe you're thinking as you read this about Yahoo, MSN, and so on. Well, have you ever used their search engines in the past five years? I run web sites so I have to. They suck. I'm not even going to bother to explain why Microsoft would f*ck up a programming job; anybody posting here should get that already. But if you look at the others, they're somewhere between bush league and simply not built as general purpose search engines. Ask Jeeves and Yahoo are built for ignorant, clueless lumps who want everything explained to them in small words. Search on anything there and you'll reliably end up at sites with a fifth grade vocabulary and lots of "for dummies" style handholding.
What's my point? That their engines aren't even built to do what Google's does. To say that they still compete head to head with Google is like saying that Cliff Notes is competing with Encyclopedia Britannica. This means that in some ways, Google is already a monopoly and I'm willing to bet that the programmers in those companies who study how each other's code works would agree with me. They offer, superficially, the same product, but not to the same markets and not for quite the same uses.
Make no mistake; I use Google,too. Their results are fantastic. But just as I avoid posting links to Wikipedia, I go out of my way to find things in other ways than Google. As the article points out, power corrupts, monopoly power especially. And whether the folks in Google still believe after their cooperation with the Chinese government and their retention of personal data and so on that they are free from "evil" to use their own term, they will become a problem, a censoring, privacy infringing, overcharging danger to, quite literally, the entire human race if they keep going the way that they're going now.
I'm guessing most. From the sensor grids along the Ho Chi Minh trail to the Sargent York gun, our military has a long and embarrassing history of promoting assorted, "can't tell you because that's a secret" crap, most of which turns out to be a combination of defense contractor welfare and those contractors acting out the fantasies of tech-illiterate military and political decisionmakers. (See SDI, aka "Star Wars".)
And remember the source here. Whatever he was in 1972, Woodward has been the asshole buddy of the Bush administration for a very long time now, who, whatever his attempts to make himself look good now may be, played a key role in sabotaging the career of CIA agent Valerie Plame to back Bush administration policy. Not to mention having helped the Reagan administration use Casey as cover for many of their most egregious crimes. Frankly, anybody getting repeated positive endorsements from folks like Peggy Noonan isn't somebody whose word I'm going to trust.
If this were just about fiber to private homes, then maybe I would agree with you. But first of all, this system is planned to start out with fiber for schools and other municipal users. Secondly, what about commercial users? 25 million for 12,000 private homes is Sarah Palin territory. Huge debt for minimal gain. But since Monticello is home to quite a few office parks, we're talking about, at the least, several hundred business users, each of whom should and hopefully would bear some of the tax burden of this as well as getting much of the gain.
Now, if we're thinking about this as a business, which is a distortion but I'll run with it, it's normal for telecom companies to spend as much as a couple thousand dollars to acquire business customers. So if we assume five hundred businesses, then we're talking about just acquiring that business being worth about a million of that money. If we assume 700 children of school age who would use that service, well, buying computers for that many kids would last nowhere near as long and would cost over a million bucks, all things considered.
It all comes down to numbers, though, doesn't it? Do we compare this to a sewage system, which will deliver value for a hundred years or more, or do we compare it to a wireless network which will need to be rebuilt every five years or so?
How many years of service would this proposal provide?
How much of this money goes for short-term equipment like routers and how much for long-term infrastructure like fiber and putting in channels?
Who will own that city-provided infrastructure?
How many customers will use this?
Of what types?
Will they billed for this and if so, how?
I don't know. And afaict, neither do you. You've got interesting and useful things to say about the contract type and such, for which I thank you. But as for total net value, unless you've got answers to most or all of the questions above, you might want to get off your high horse a bit and cut them a little more slack.
I agree that government should play a role in infrastructure but if they're going to do it at all, then they should spend the additional money to make those channels as large as possible. If they need an eighteen inch channel, then maybe they should do a twenty-four inch one, and so on. If they're planning to spend the money to dig up streets, create utility vaults, and so forth, then let them spend the money to do it right the first time and create a right of way that will then be available for other services. The more space they put in now, the less money they'll have to spend later on and the easier it gets to do maintenance without digging up the streets again.
If it were up to me, municipalities all over the place would be putting in precast, modular component tunnels under major streets that would be big enough to stand inside and to carry telecom lines, electrical lines, gas lines, and so on, all on top of water and sewage lines. This would cut monopoly power waaay down and massively decrease the cost, likelihood, and problems related to breakdowns, not to mention make things like greywater processing much more practical.
Ya know, ROFL is damn near literal in this case. Sweet. Evil but sweet.
"Contact lens code". Very nice.
/. is supposed to be a place for the innovative (or so we like to pretend). Show us something new. Shock from generic offensiveness is boring. It's old hat. Might as well try to impress us with your Pentium III. If you're going to be one of the FP obsessives, prepare something better to cut and paste in.
How about personal revelations? "I'm having sex with my brother" would do. "I buy all of my software at Target and I buy whatever they suggest" would do even better.
Or rude haiku about, say, Cowboy Neal. That might propagate.
Or blasts from the past. "I"M TYPING THIS IN MY NEW ACCOUNT ON AOL. HI THERE."
Ya see, some of us still have this silly idea THAT THREADS SHOULD BE ABOUT DISCUSSING THE FUCKING ISSUE BROUGHT UP IN THE GODDAMN INITIAL POST.
So if you insist on engaging in your adolescent crap, at least try to make it amusing.
Thank you.
For as long as they've been a national chain, they've managed to become a sort of first geek job for countless of our tribe. I can tell you that I've been walking into Radio Shacks since at least the early eighties and thinking each time, "I wonder if I'll run into anybody cool working here."
Now, admittedly, those people are about one in fifteen among their staff, but they still pop up. Makes sense. If you're the kind of person who wants discounts on protoboards and power supplies and soon and you're from a non-geek family/social circle, a job at Radio Shack can be the only evident option for going from being a user to being, at the least, somebody who builds from components, or even somebody who is soldering, figuring out resistances, and so on.
Does this get me to buy their crappy consumer electronics? No. But I'm always glad to go there for mini screwdrivers on Xacto-style knives and that kind of thing and see if anything else worth my time and cash turns up.
I know that he talked about scaling up. Put that down to usual inventor exuberance. All of us who've gotten an invention working have experienced that. What matters is that is entire apparatus of about ten parts can be built of scrap, in a couple of hours.
.
Yeah, sure, he's using optimized materials. But anything thin and flexible could be tested, have its optimal shape for flutter in a given environment determined, and used to make these. I knew some guys who did the sensors for their thesis using strips of mylar from potato chip bags.
Magnets are the one hard part and even those can be pulled from dead speakers or whatever.
Wound wire? We've all built our own generators as kids, yes? Winding enough for an electromagnet like that is no big deal. And wire turns up in waste streams all over the place. That's why so many baskets and such from rural craftspeople are made of it.
Rigid frame? Whatever's around. I'm not entirely sure just how rigid that frame needs to be but worst case scenario we're talking about a chunk of iron cut out of a dead car.
And so on.
What this does is enable illiterate people with a few hours of training to make a device from things they don't have to pay for that can power basic things like lights. And from what I'm seeing, it's the kind of thing that will propagate. UNESCO staffer teaches Jose. Jose's brother comes by and asks about it; Jose teaches his brother. Brother's wife wants one to sew better; she makes one for herself. The wife's friends drop by . .
Excellent. All we need to do is provide superbright LEDs and whatever parts turn out to most be in demand and soon, count on it, there will be innovations by the dozens turning up that the inventors and NGO folks never even knew about.
I couldn't agree with you more. I would like to think that out here in Oregon we send some pretty good folks to D.C. but Wisconsin has definitely got a pair of winners.
Interesting. I didn't know that. It's sad that sexuality, which I assume is what you're implying, should be such a factor but you're probably right. I'll look into that.
There's a vast difference in "stuff is out there somewhere" and something being created under the umbrella of the educational establishment specifically for use in schools. Of course, there has been plenty of inexpensive or free excellent material out there on any number of subjects for years. As it happens, I publish some of it. But having it available for the small minority who will look and having something created for the explicit purpose of supplanting the crap that dominates the field now are very different. Especially since this is a step towards schools not requiring students to buy said overpriced, blanded out crap, which since textbooks now cost many college students over a thousand dollars a year, is also an important step towards lowering the barriers to education and reducing government costs and student debt.
And, again, speaking as a publisher, I welcome this with open arms. I'm quite secure in my stuff being unique and worth the money and I *know* that the same can't be said of much of what's out there. I've done work on the stuff from folks like McGraw-Hill and the sooner it gets forced to be more competitive, the happier I'll be.
Let's see if I've got this straight. You "can't abhor being LIED to", you hate FUD. So your response is to use a Microsoft product?
I just don't know what to say to that.
*walks away shaking head*
I'd rather see government do something to encourage free-market competition among the carriers...
So, what would you suggest? We've already *had* three full rounds of anti-monopoly/trust legislation and each time it gets subverted. What do you suggest that:
A.) can get passed (by both houses) (and not get vetoed)
B.) is comprehensible to the average voter
C.) can be defended against the inevitable several hundred million dollar disinformation campaign that the affected corporations will wage against it
D.) provides a clear path of responsibility for an agency that is tasked to enforce it in a transparent and persistent way.
E.) has a clear and consistent metric for penalties and/or requirements for disbandment that are proportional to the problem and enforceable and give judges and/or regulators some degree of leeway for special cases
F.) Won't then be utterly subverted in a decade or so?
Make no mistake. I would love to see something like that. But it's a just a wee bit more complicated than "somebody should, ya know, do something."
Actually, he's got all the money he needs. If Herb Kohl wants "a brand new BMW" he can buy one with the weekly interest from his bank account. And that is why he's willing to stand up to them. Now if we could only get him clued enough to not do chowderheaded things like voting for FISA.
Which, let me note, is exactly the kind of thing that we geeks need to pay attention to. Legislators like Kohl who *do* frequently do the right thing should be so overloaded with capable, free advice on technical issues that those advisors could create their own baseball league. Me? I've gone over tech issues with our new mayor, some members of the city council, and several dozen other legislators over the years. Try it, folks. You might be surprised how many will listen if you're calm, specific, informed, explain why they should care, and don't ramble.
Unfortunately, I'm sure we're all aware this is just a senator trying to make it look like he's rattling a few cages
Actually, afaic, Herb Kohl is one of the few good guys left in Congress. And fwiw, since he's got his own millions of bucks from the Kohl's department store chain, he doesn't need money from anybody. Got his own stash, thank you very much. So while I wouldn't deny that he's a publicity whore (duh! he's a politician!) I would say that it's a safe bet that, oddly enough, he's pushing this in part simply because he's disgusted with the telecom companies.
Now if only HE would run for president.
A man's gotta dream; ya know?
When I was about thirteen I went on a two-day peace march. Something like ten miles a day along hilly Vermont roads. At the start of the second day John Kenneth Galbraith gave a speech before we set out. I, being me, didn't really care who he was nor did I like what he was saying, so I just sat where I was, right under the podium zoning out. When we got back to camp after the march I was handed the paper by various people who insisted that the kid vaguely visible in the picture of his speech was me.
Well, now, twenty-eight years later or so, I would love to have that pic if it is what I remember. Would I be willing to go to Vermont and dig through archives for hours finding it? No. But, hell, if it's on Google, I'm up for looking now and again until it turns up. I suspect that there are millions of us with such things that we will now do now that the barriers to entry have so decreased.
The more important issue, afaic, is what will happen with all of the major political events that have been "disappeared" from our collective memory with disinformation now that original accounts will need to either selectively not be available or far more expensively be suppressed? My guess is that, for example, stories about General Motors streetcar fraud will slip through and that within a year or so any number of big political issues will start to be sen differently by the chattering classes.
Dude, read the letter. Griffin specifically addresses this and says that the supposed conflicts for those facilities is so much hogwash. RTFA.
And you define "world's biggest manufacturer" how?
/.; why would I think you would do a thing like that?
Have you looked inside a car recently? Or a computer? A hell of a lot of "American made" is actually "kinda American assembled" with a lot of the "American" part meaning assembled by starving, illiterate, low skill workers in U.S. territories like Saipan. So, yes, I know more than a little bit about this and I would be curious to see an example of an "American-made" car you can point me to that actually was made in the United States, from the minerals up. And speaking as a Pacific Northwesterner who has been watching Boeing's slow phaseout of their Seattle shops (officially they're now an Illinois company), I've had almost as much fun on this front as I did watching my suppliers on the Jericho Turnpike shut down as the Long Island aerospace companies phased out their manufacturing in the eighties. Fwiw, I moved to Wisconsin, since a few places still existed there to buy things like non-standard fasteners or drive components but, hell, they're all long-gone too. Of course the tooling guys I knew in central Vermont seem to be doing okay still, but they're not too thrilled about GM shutting down so many lines.
But, frankly, all of that is a sideshow. The infrastructure needed to make something like a Saturn V is not the same as what is needed to make anything else. And as Beal Aerospace found, when they tried to get a facility running that could work on that scale, not only do we not even have the tooling anymore to do that kind of thing, the "usual suspects" among the government contractors and their federal moneysources don't care that this is the case. Nor does Congress. In other words, I'm not basing my conclusions on some vague impression I got from not being able to find American made pants at the GAP but from having been following the specific issue of infrastructure to build just these kinds of systems for over ten years. A thing you would have known better if you had read what I linked to but, hell, this is
Well, whether we put new vehicles into service or not, we can be damned sure that other countries will keep on motoring along. A few people in this thread have mentioned the Chinese space program. I would have *thought* that somebody would remember that the ESA has been launching craft for years now. But, for that matter, so have the Japanese. And India's program is going nicely. The Brazilian space program is a bit gunshy these days, but, make no mistake, they'll be launching more rockets some time soon. Though we have to wonder how they feel about the Guyanese launch capability, which has been a pretty serious thing for over ten years now.
Folks, there are more governments with space programs then there are well-known Linux distros these days. And plenty of them have or are well on the way to developing their own launch vehicles and facilities. And that doesn't even begin to address all the possible private actors. How many of y'all know how many organizations were vying for the original X Prize? A hell of a lot more than the three or four that most media outlets are aware of. And even that doesn't include some relevant players.
We're entering a world where many space programs are becoming more like seventies Silicon Valley startups than like NASA. For anybody to think that they understand what will be available in three or four years and how just shows that they either haven't looked into it, that they're very warped by Big Company Think, or that they've got their head so far up their ass that they're seeing daylight up their throat.
I certainly agree that we should be more interested in reviving Apollo-era technologies. And, along with people inside NASA I certainly agree that they've got a real clusterfuck going by now and really could do lot better.
But, oddly enough, we're actually far less capable of doing things like building Apollo-scale systems than we were back in the seventies. Ya see, that's what happens when a country outsources all of its manufacturing for an entire generation. The manufacturing infrastructure gets torn out to make room for condos and nail salons.
Truth is, we're screwed, We simply don't have the industrial base to build that kind of thing anymore. Not to weld tanks that are big enough. Not to move cargos by rail through as many places. Not to even have the population of machinists and glassblowers and chemical plant technicians to populate the assembly systems.
Should this be a call to arms? Yet another reason to require that kids take industrial arts (as I had to) and that government agencies buy American-made-products? Yes. But for now, we're S.O.L.
Sounds like you're talking about what's known as "a chilling effect" and if it is, then you'll LOVE schoolbook adoptions. Just about all textbooks in American schools come from a handful of publishers and those publishers won't publish any textbook that has been rejected by what are called "textbook adoption committees", which are committees in a handful of states, most notably Texas and California, whose decisions determine all public school purchases for their state's public schools. These committees, btw, always have representatives of the hardcore religious right and one or two "political correctness" a**wads on them, which lets them veto anything like, say, discussion of evolution.
If you ever wondered why textbooks are so reliably foul, well, this is a large part of why. These adoption techniques can be counted on to weed out anything interesting and to reward bland, endless crrrrap. And just as you suspected, publishers remove anything from their textbooks that might not appeal to those committees even before submitting them.
Yet another reason that Americans can't think their way out of a paper bag (or in a voting booth).
No, you should pretend you've modded him up if you pretend that he said something clever.
is that I think we've now found your Indian name.
Greetings, Today I Walk on Grass in the Woods.
It really is a wonderful phrase, fwiw.
Part of how Abby Hoffman evaded the FBI for years was by doing exactly that. Worked, too. He only got caught when he got back into politics.
Anyway, for most cases, there's a much easier hack. As plenty of people have pointed out, just put a pebble in your shoe and that multi-million dollar, high tech system will just pass you by. I suspect that taping one ankle or things like that would work in most cases, too.
Maybe next year, when I'm ready to finally buy a car, I should drop by and pick one up.