Bollocks. Try watching some programmes from then rather than relying on memory;
I do... Almost daily. Often more than one each day, in fact. Between Hulu, Netflix, and low-budget HDTV sub-channels, there's a plethora of old content easily available.
you'll quickly find nostalgia is exactly what it is.
CD-Rs are cheap, but the use-case is a PITA. You can't just drag and drop files, rename them, modify folder structure, add more files, delete some files, etc, etc. Multisession support was always iffy, both on the writing-software side, and on the reading OS.
As for USB sticks, removing the 1 cent worth of metal doesn't make it any cheaper... In fact "slim" USB thumb-drives tend to be more expensive. The casing costs, what, 10 cents? The electronics inside is where the cost lies, and often, spending a few cents more on a bigger, stronger case allows the expensive innards to get a bit cheaper.
There is something significantly different, right between MySQL and Oracle. Postgres is widely recognized as scaling far better than MySQL, the documentation is great, and it's even more free, being both $0 and BSD-licensed.
I'd hate to have the job of scaling-up MySQL, but I wouldn't mind doing so with Postgres... In fact I usually prefer Postgres over Oracle, even where initial purchase cost isn't a concern.
I agree that Postgres is vastly superior to MySQL and competitive with enterprise-class databases. We're using Postgres for databases in excess of a terabyte ourselves, for large-scale production purposes, so I know it works... HOWEVER, I think the XID issue is significant, not getting any developer attention, and is something you're just about guaranteed to run-into with terabyte databases.
You see, even if you run Postgres on a 64-bit platform, you're limited to XIDs of 2^31, or 2 billion rows. Now, to prevent this causing a problem, Postgres' VACUUM process will start running when you get close to 1 billion, killing your performance. Of course there are a dozen possible ways to workaround this, but none are trivial or work perfectly and consistently. This is postgres' biggest scalability limitation, ahead of even the imperfect replication options available.
That said, Postgres is still a great choice for an enterprise application. In fact EnterpriseDB simply added PL/SQL to Postgres so that it's a drop-in replacement for Oracle. Postgres' XID and replication limitation are notable, but the price of something like Oracle is so astronomical that working-around this limitations of Postgres is vastly more cost-effective in all cases I can think of.
What's the cheapest SD card you can find? $5? Far more expensive than a floppy disk.
And the installed base isn't there. "Most netbooks" certainly don't have SD slots, though plenty do. Laptops don't, desktops don't, etc. You can't count on anyone having an SD card reader, so it's nothing like floppies.
Right now it's divided into Optical (CD-R/DVD-R) for large read-only access, and USB thumb-drives for smaller, far more expensive, but read-write access.
I'd love for optical discs to go away. Actually on-topic this time, the big problem with CDs and DVDs is their size, and unprotected nature. The form factor of MiniDiscs was superb. You could swap discs blindfolded, with one hand, in no time at all. There was no fragility at all, and I've never seen a single disc in ~100 die.
When I just recently transferred as many CD-Rs to my computer, I found failure rates on good media (TDK) in the double-digits. What a nightmare. Of course I planned for such problems, and lost no data as a result, but the extra time consumed was astronomical. The world would look very differently if CDs were introduced exclusively with (compact) caddies, and about the same size as floppies.
Those of us born before 1985 or so can remember we LIVED WITHOUT INTERNET. We got by just fine. [...] We survived, we liked it, we didn't notice much missing.
To be fair, the world has changed as the internet has grown.
The internet has greatly helped to shut down stores all over the place, has severely reduced the choices provided in the big-box-stores that remain, etc.
Before the internet, I'd drive to Blockbuster and rent a game or a movie a couple times each week.. Blockbuster is doing poorly, it's small competitors are nearly gone, and now even it's big competitors like Redbox don't have new movies for months.
Both Broadcast TV and Cable TV was much higher quality. Though we had fewer channels, there was far more worth watching. No, this isn't just nostalga.
Radio has become a wasteland precisely because things like Shoutcast and Pandora are so very superior.
You'll have a hard time finding a record store these days. Maybe Walmart or Target has a CD you want, maybe it doesn't. It probably doesn't...
When your computers need replacement parts, well, I hope your boss doesn't mind you wasting a lot of time shopping, because you're not going to find that stuff in stores these days.
To be fair, the numbers are very different this time around, if only because of population sizes.
Admitedly, China has a big bubble going, which will have to burst, but it's quite possible they'll outgrow the US economy anyhow.
The question for the US is, will better manufacturing technologies, which require much less labor (3D printing comes to mind) reach economic viability in the near future.
I'm sure I'm not the only one here who currently works in a position where I'm called all hours of the night to support the IT infrastructure for large groups in China. I think it's safe to say we'll be the last industry to feel the pain.
it's a way for the rich to destroy the meritocracy: they have the benefit of not needing money to survive, and they can use this to extend an unfair competitive advantage over equally qualified or even more qualified poorer candidates
I really don't follow...
Working for free will indeed drop the going rate for a job. It will undermind the job prospects of more capable candidates, etc. But that doesn't have any kind of hook or lock-in, so it's no kind of strategy. You're rich, you can work for free. How does that translate into you getting richer? You've devalued the job, not the other way around. And if you're not the most capable, the company can certainly throw you out at any point, and hire the guy who is going to make more money for them. They aren't obligated. So where's the evil plan? Poor people can't work for free, so they'll skip the internship and go get the well-paid jobs?
I'm sure there was lots of cheap labor, and that may have contributed indirectly. But actually building the pyramids was just a few thousand skilled craftsman. The slave labor didn't enter into it, at least not directly.
There is an unfortunate tendency to believe any technology tried and abandoned centuries ago represents a lost art, knowledge of the ancients, somehow lost to modern man due to the collapse of a particular society. When in fact those technologies were never cost effective even when they were in use,
There may be some truth to that, but there are a number of counter-examples. The contrary belief, that little or nothing of value has been lost to history is absolutely and provably wrong.
and required the enslavement of huge numbers of people. Surviving examples such as the Pyramids, the Colosseum, are pointed to as examples of every day miracles of the ancients, when in fact much of roman architecture simply fell down due to bad mortar and was incorporate into other buildings, or used as rubble fill.
The Pyramids most certainly weren't the work of a large number of slaves. In fact it's merely a persistent myth, completely unsupported by evidence.
And I fail to follow your logic either. How does the fact that some buildings were substandard, take anything away from the Pyramids or the Colosseum?
I'd throw the Parthenon in there as well, again as an example where we can't comprehend how it could have been constructed in the time-frame it was, or for the modest price we know was paid. Today, even with modern technology at hand, we've spent vastly longer and vastly more money just restoring problematic bits of it. There are plenty of unanswered questions in history.
I never said they were right. Only that you will have bigger problems than restoring backups,
Steve Jackson's biggest problem was indeed that he didn't have a backup of his manuscript, and had to lay off half his staff and nearly went out of business because of it (missed deadlines).
His mix-up with the FBI was not a "bigger problem" than his lack of backups, it was indeed a far smaller problem.
and that doing so will likely cause them to get you in further trouble
His manuscript was never the object of the seizure, and of course not at all illegal, or even on shaky ground. He did not risk any further trouble, he just didn't have a "backup", and could not get the FBI to return it.
Societies and governments have collapsed, but civilization persisted, machines still ran, farmers still planted, and clock makers still made clocks. Nothing was un-invented.
That's certainly not true. There are a great many discoveries, tools, machines, and more, which were known to ancient societies and lost to time. Some of which have been rediscovered and become central to us in modern times. Others were obsoleted by modern instruments before they were rediscovered, etc, etc.
Concrete is perhaps the most striking example, used extensively until the fall of Rome, lost to time, and only (independently) rediscovered in the 18th century, and which is again, a fundamental building block of nearly all modern buildings, and very, very extensively used.
Among the others, the Baghdad Battery, The Antikythera Mechanism, and innumerable other machines, formulations, stone-mason tools, etc. Some of the most persistent mysteries about ancient people are how they A) Built large, complex stone structures more quickly than we would be able to even with modern tools, and B) Moved and manipulated into-place very large objects significant distances without more modern technology we don't believe they had, and with far fewer people than we believe they could have had available. So there are likely still many technologies out there yet to be rediscovered. These all may, in narrow instances, in fact be superior to our modern alternatives which perform similar tasks.
Will future archaeologists interpret this as a sign that there was a cult based around timekeeping in Texas in the 2000's?
We don't interpret the great pyramids at Giza as having been built by a "cult". The scale and expense is far too massive for either the pyramids or this (giant Seiko watch) to be so misunderstood.
So, if lost to time and rediscovered, archaeologists will likely interpret this as a large governmental project, built by a large, relatively technologically advanced nation... which worshiped accurate time-keeping...
Truth be told, that's not too far off the mark. Whether you realize it or not, we are a society relentlessly obsessed and governed by clocks. And in the modern age, extremely precise time-keeping is also of central importance to everything we do, from computers, to GPS, to millisecond stock trades. We are a society obsessed with time-keeping.
[...] have dreams of vertical integration of products, where they control the content creation, distribution, and consumption, and the profits that come with each.
The gaping flaw with your theory, is that Verizon is eliminating their own competitive advantage, at the same time they change the rate structure.
Previously, the data consumed with a Verizon-branded app was NOT counted against your data plan. However, it's in the works to change all that, so you DO get data charges from using Verizon-branded applications, in addition to whatever monthly fee you have to pay for the app in the first place. It was mostly in-place with the iPhone at launch, but the plan is to roll this change out to all smartphones, an I expect that to happen within a few months.
So, what Verizon is trying to do is double-dip, charging you for an application subscription, then the data on top of that. However, this is TAKING AWAY their "vertical integration" advantage in it's entirety. There's just no longer going to be any anti-competitive benefit to buying a service from Verizon, over the same service from one of their competitors.
If you are the true target of the FBI raid, you probably have bigger problems than the lost data, and in fact restoring the data may in fact cause you to be in even more legal trouble as they likely seized the servers specifically to stop you from continuing what you were doing.
On the contrary. You assume the FBI WAS RIGHT to target you. In fact with their near immunity from prosecution, the FBI screws-up plenty, and doesn't care.
False accusations of copyright infringement, DRM circumvention, leaked top-secret documents, etc. All things that could make you a target, yet perfectly legal, irreplaceable, and important to get restored as quickly as possible.
A tidal wave won't simultaneously take out your backup datacenter, and off-site backups in another state. The FBI most likely will, if that information is known in advance. You may actually have to keep your off-site backups a secret to avoid them being seized in the same unnatural disaster.
Look up recission. Company provided health care is more expensive because the law is iron clad...
Private insurance is unregulated, so when you start costing them serious money, there's a 50% chance (that's not an exaggeration) they'll find some excuse to invalidate your contract, and leave you without insurance, when you need it. And when you look for alternatives, you'll find they will all decline to cover someone with an expensive illness.
If you can get a job, however, you can sign up for their insurance plan right away, and thanks to said iron clad laws, your medical bills will be covered, no matter what.
In fact the insurance you described is clearly just meant to be so abused... Getting those routine checkups, preventative medicine, and early treatment is VASTLY CHEAPER. A plan that doesn't specifically encourage you to go for that, is clearly putting themselves in a highly untenable position, and obviously a scheme to ensure they extract the most money from healthy people, presumably because they think they'll be able to weasel their way out of paying for the sick people.
carbs can be cleaned, rebuilt with a needle and gasket kit, and put back into service as if new
My point wasn't that a carb can't be fixed. It's that it's design is as much a mystery to you as a PCM is. And if it really breaks, you're just as SOL as if it was the PCM that failed.
That a carb can be cleaned and rebuilt is NOT an advantage... it's a huge disadvantage that it develops such problems in the first place. PCMs are also easy to clean... Why haven't you ever cleaned one and put it back into service? The answer is obvious.
From your entire post, I can tell you've never even looked at a carb
You are oh-so-very wrong.
And if you think those electronically controlled cars are somehow better, just wait until they start rusting and sending the wrong voltages to the computer. Or your crank position sensor goes, stalling the car at every stop sign.
I've gone through all of that. Pre-1996, so I just grab a short piece of wire, jump pins 1&3 under the dash, count the number of flashes on the service engine light, and look-up the error in the manual (it's a couple pages, and pretty universal, so you could print it out, too). It reports exactly which sensor is not providing sane values. Usually something as simple as a wire pulled loose, shorted, corroded, etc. Usually around 15 minutes and I'm on my way. Post-1996 cars just require you keep a $30 code reader on-hand, instead of a paperclip.
If that makes you a "prisioner," the bar is pretty damn low...
I don't think PCMs are better... I know, unarguably, that they are. The entire industry switched over, for good reason. It's only that you insist on never learning anything new that you assume older is somehow better.
You either pay through the nose month-month, or you risk 2 years of hell dealing with a contract
Pay through the nose for what? To who?
Boost Mobile is $50/mo for everything, unlimited, and then every 6 months they drop it $5/mo until you bottom out at $35/mo. That's right, $35/mo for "unlimited talk, text, web, 411, IM & email.".
What are you paying through the nose for? Sure, you have to buy the phones up front, but they're coinsures of inexpensive phones people want. From the $30 dumb phones (which do a pretty good job for everything but web browsing on their tiny screen), to the < $200 Android and Blackberry phones.
And if you can't find the phone you want with Boost, try Virgin Mobile, they're Sprint pre-paid as well. You might even be able to just swap SIMs and use the phones on either service (iDEN phones notwithstanding).
The main reason he was so into it was precisely because he could fix everything on it --and he did, too. He had a lot to say about why people shouldn't own anything they couldn't fix,
It's all a matter of degree, though, isn't it? There aren't many people out there who could design and machine their own carburetor from a block of steel, so A) you don't really understand it, and B) you can't really fix it, but only replace it. In both cases, you are no better off than you would be if the vehicle was electronically controlled. In fact you're worse off because it's unlikely your PCM will ever have a problem.
There is tremendous abuse of software patents, just as there is of traditional patents.
Let's turn the question around... Why should your innovative and novel idea be patentable when designed in a purely mechanical system, but NOT when it is upgraded to do most of the work in software?
Should it be okay that the rom drive in your dvd player has a dozen patents on it, but the video and audio codecs have to be given away for free? If so, say goodbye to open audio and video formats like h.264 and he-aac+, because they'll be the last of their kind. The next round will be 100% proprietary and obfuscated, ala Cinepak and good old RealPlayer. And don't mention Theora or Web M, as both were developed closed source, patented, and only opened when there was no money to be made... It won't happen again.
China would have as much of an issue with attacking North Korea as we would have attacking Mexico if Mexico began invading all the Caribbean islands.
Even if China doesn't give a damn about North Korea, war with a major military is very expensive, and difficult to get support for. So yes, there is always "much of an issue" when starting a war.
That's only relevant if you assert that it wouldn't have happened without the US
I don't assert it. I direct your attention to all the times other western nations have had the opportunity to do similar, often on a tiny scale, and utterly fail to do so. That basically nobody else (China is a notable exception) has the determination to do so is a provable fact. Your implication that some nebulous alternative would spring up is the baseless assertion here. I'll look at any evidence you can provide to indicate that, TODAY, the US pulling out of all of it's military obligations would suddenly cause other world powers to grow a spine they so obviously don't have now. And I'm making it easy on you, completely ignoring the question of military competency...
It's a lot like saying you can cancel cable to save money
No, your analogy is massively flawed. The military is tangible, and we've made lots of big and long-term investments in it, towards a goal. We've also established that the military is something that provides real benefits... economic, political, and humanitarian. It's definitely not some trivial entertainment service.
You actually can loosely compare the US military to cable if you insist, but in this case, WE ARE the cable company... We've got the infrastructure, currently providing service, and returning benefits to us. And yes, we could make some money by pawning off big chunks of that infrastructure, and the employees that make the service possible. But taking that route involves throwing away what we built, and while you'll certainly get short-term cash bonus, you're also going to be paying far more when you've got the money again, and decide you need to rebuild it...
Slashdot Mirror
I do... Almost daily. Often more than one each day, in fact. Between Hulu, Netflix, and low-budget HDTV sub-channels, there's a plethora of old content easily available.
You don't read too well do you?
"No, this isn't just nostalga."
Seems about as clear as I could possibly put it.
It's a shame there's no way to link-up people with similar interests, spanning the globe... Wish we had something that could do that...
CD-Rs are cheap, but the use-case is a PITA. You can't just drag and drop files, rename them, modify folder structure, add more files, delete some files, etc, etc. Multisession support was always iffy, both on the writing-software side, and on the reading OS.
As for USB sticks, removing the 1 cent worth of metal doesn't make it any cheaper... In fact "slim" USB thumb-drives tend to be more expensive. The casing costs, what, 10 cents? The electronics inside is where the cost lies, and often, spending a few cents more on a bigger, stronger case allows the expensive innards to get a bit cheaper.
I don't believe 2.5" floppies were EVER $10, EACH...
There is something significantly different, right between MySQL and Oracle. Postgres is widely recognized as scaling far better than MySQL, the documentation is great, and it's even more free, being both $0 and BSD-licensed.
I'd hate to have the job of scaling-up MySQL, but I wouldn't mind doing so with Postgres... In fact I usually prefer Postgres over Oracle, even where initial purchase cost isn't a concern.
I agree that Postgres is vastly superior to MySQL and competitive with enterprise-class databases. We're using Postgres for databases in excess of a terabyte ourselves, for large-scale production purposes, so I know it works... HOWEVER, I think the XID issue is significant, not getting any developer attention, and is something you're just about guaranteed to run-into with terabyte databases.
You see, even if you run Postgres on a 64-bit platform, you're limited to XIDs of 2^31, or 2 billion rows. Now, to prevent this causing a problem, Postgres' VACUUM process will start running when you get close to 1 billion, killing your performance. Of course there are a dozen possible ways to workaround this, but none are trivial or work perfectly and consistently. This is postgres' biggest scalability limitation, ahead of even the imperfect replication options available.
That said, Postgres is still a great choice for an enterprise application. In fact EnterpriseDB simply added PL/SQL to Postgres so that it's a drop-in replacement for Oracle. Postgres' XID and replication limitation are notable, but the price of something like Oracle is so astronomical that working-around this limitations of Postgres is vastly more cost-effective in all cases I can think of.
To be fair, e-mail is the replacement for the floppy. 20MB e-mails are no big deal these days, and everybody has an e-mail address.
USB and Optical serves an important purpose, but one that floppies NEVER filled... We've had CD-ROMs nearly as long as we've had 3.5" floppies...
Wrong on many levels.
What's the cheapest SD card you can find? $5? Far more expensive than a floppy disk.
And the installed base isn't there. "Most netbooks" certainly don't have SD slots, though plenty do. Laptops don't, desktops don't, etc. You can't count on anyone having an SD card reader, so it's nothing like floppies.
Right now it's divided into Optical (CD-R/DVD-R) for large read-only access, and USB thumb-drives for smaller, far more expensive, but read-write access.
I'd love for optical discs to go away. Actually on-topic this time, the big problem with CDs and DVDs is their size, and unprotected nature. The form factor of MiniDiscs was superb. You could swap discs blindfolded, with one hand, in no time at all. There was no fragility at all, and I've never seen a single disc in ~100 die.
When I just recently transferred as many CD-Rs to my computer, I found failure rates on good media (TDK) in the double-digits. What a nightmare. Of course I planned for such problems, and lost no data as a result, but the extra time consumed was astronomical. The world would look very differently if CDs were introduced exclusively with (compact) caddies, and about the same size as floppies.
To be fair, the world has changed as the internet has grown.
The internet has greatly helped to shut down stores all over the place, has severely reduced the choices provided in the big-box-stores that remain, etc.
Before the internet, I'd drive to Blockbuster and rent a game or a movie a couple times each week.. Blockbuster is doing poorly, it's small competitors are nearly gone, and now even it's big competitors like Redbox don't have new movies for months.
Both Broadcast TV and Cable TV was much higher quality. Though we had fewer channels, there was far more worth watching. No, this isn't just nostalga.
Radio has become a wasteland precisely because things like Shoutcast and Pandora are so very superior.
You'll have a hard time finding a record store these days. Maybe Walmart or Target has a CD you want, maybe it doesn't. It probably doesn't...
When your computers need replacement parts, well, I hope your boss doesn't mind you wasting a lot of time shopping, because you're not going to find that stuff in stores these days.
To be fair, the numbers are very different this time around, if only because of population sizes.
Admitedly, China has a big bubble going, which will have to burst, but it's quite possible they'll outgrow the US economy anyhow.
The question for the US is, will better manufacturing technologies, which require much less labor (3D printing comes to mind) reach economic viability in the near future.
I'm sure I'm not the only one here who currently works in a position where I'm called all hours of the night to support the IT infrastructure for large groups in China. I think it's safe to say we'll be the last industry to feel the pain.
I really don't follow...
Working for free will indeed drop the going rate for a job. It will undermind the job prospects of more capable candidates, etc. But that doesn't have any kind of hook or lock-in, so it's no kind of strategy. You're rich, you can work for free. How does that translate into you getting richer? You've devalued the job, not the other way around. And if you're not the most capable, the company can certainly throw you out at any point, and hire the guy who is going to make more money for them. They aren't obligated. So where's the evil plan? Poor people can't work for free, so they'll skip the internship and go get the well-paid jobs?
No.
I'm sure there was lots of cheap labor, and that may have contributed indirectly. But actually building the pyramids was just a few thousand skilled craftsman. The slave labor didn't enter into it, at least not directly.
There may be some truth to that, but there are a number of counter-examples. The contrary belief, that little or nothing of value has been lost to history is absolutely and provably wrong.
The Pyramids most certainly weren't the work of a large number of slaves. In fact it's merely a persistent myth, completely unsupported by evidence.
And I fail to follow your logic either. How does the fact that some buildings were substandard, take anything away from the Pyramids or the Colosseum?
I'd throw the Parthenon in there as well, again as an example where we can't comprehend how it could have been constructed in the time-frame it was, or for the modest price we know was paid. Today, even with modern technology at hand, we've spent vastly longer and vastly more money just restoring problematic bits of it. There are plenty of unanswered questions in history.
Steve Jackson's biggest problem was indeed that he didn't have a backup of his manuscript, and had to lay off half his staff and nearly went out of business because of it (missed deadlines).
His mix-up with the FBI was not a "bigger problem" than his lack of backups, it was indeed a far smaller problem.
His manuscript was never the object of the seizure, and of course not at all illegal, or even on shaky ground. He did not risk any further trouble, he just didn't have a "backup", and could not get the FBI to return it.
That's certainly not true. There are a great many discoveries, tools, machines, and more, which were known to ancient societies and lost to time. Some of which have been rediscovered and become central to us in modern times. Others were obsoleted by modern instruments before they were rediscovered, etc, etc.
Concrete is perhaps the most striking example, used extensively until the fall of Rome, lost to time, and only (independently) rediscovered in the 18th century, and which is again, a fundamental building block of nearly all modern buildings, and very, very extensively used.
Among the others, the Baghdad Battery, The Antikythera Mechanism, and innumerable other machines, formulations, stone-mason tools, etc. Some of the most persistent mysteries about ancient people are how they A) Built large, complex stone structures more quickly than we would be able to even with modern tools, and B) Moved and manipulated into-place very large objects significant distances without more modern technology we don't believe they had, and with far fewer people than we believe they could have had available. So there are likely still many technologies out there yet to be rediscovered. These all may, in narrow instances, in fact be superior to our modern alternatives which perform similar tasks.
We don't interpret the great pyramids at Giza as having been built by a "cult". The scale and expense is far too massive for either the pyramids or this (giant Seiko watch) to be so misunderstood.
So, if lost to time and rediscovered, archaeologists will likely interpret this as a large governmental project, built by a large, relatively technologically advanced nation... which worshiped accurate time-keeping...
Truth be told, that's not too far off the mark. Whether you realize it or not, we are a society relentlessly obsessed and governed by clocks. And in the modern age, extremely precise time-keeping is also of central importance to everything we do, from computers, to GPS, to millisecond stock trades. We are a society obsessed with time-keeping.
The gaping flaw with your theory, is that Verizon is eliminating their own competitive advantage, at the same time they change the rate structure.
Previously, the data consumed with a Verizon-branded app was NOT counted against your data plan. However, it's in the works to change all that, so you DO get data charges from using Verizon-branded applications, in addition to whatever monthly fee you have to pay for the app in the first place. It was mostly in-place with the iPhone at launch, but the plan is to roll this change out to all smartphones, an I expect that to happen within a few months.
So, what Verizon is trying to do is double-dip, charging you for an application subscription, then the data on top of that. However, this is TAKING AWAY their "vertical integration" advantage in it's entirety. There's just no longer going to be any anti-competitive benefit to buying a service from Verizon, over the same service from one of their competitors.
On the contrary. You assume the FBI WAS RIGHT to target you. In fact with their near immunity from prosecution, the FBI screws-up plenty, and doesn't care.
Try the founding EFF case as the canonical exception to everything you just said: http://www.eff.org/about/history
False accusations of copyright infringement, DRM circumvention, leaked top-secret documents, etc. All things that could make you a target, yet perfectly legal, irreplaceable, and important to get restored as quickly as possible.
A tidal wave won't simultaneously take out your backup datacenter, and off-site backups in another state. The FBI most likely will, if that information is known in advance. You may actually have to keep your off-site backups a secret to avoid them being seized in the same unnatural disaster.
Look up recission. Company provided health care is more expensive because the law is iron clad...
Private insurance is unregulated, so when you start costing them serious money, there's a 50% chance (that's not an exaggeration) they'll find some excuse to invalidate your contract, and leave you without insurance, when you need it. And when you look for alternatives, you'll find they will all decline to cover someone with an expensive illness.
If you can get a job, however, you can sign up for their insurance plan right away, and thanks to said iron clad laws, your medical bills will be covered, no matter what.
In fact the insurance you described is clearly just meant to be so abused... Getting those routine checkups, preventative medicine, and early treatment is VASTLY CHEAPER. A plan that doesn't specifically encourage you to go for that, is clearly putting themselves in a highly untenable position, and obviously a scheme to ensure they extract the most money from healthy people, presumably because they think they'll be able to weasel their way out of paying for the sick people.
My point wasn't that a carb can't be fixed. It's that it's design is as much a mystery to you as a PCM is. And if it really breaks, you're just as SOL as if it was the PCM that failed.
That a carb can be cleaned and rebuilt is NOT an advantage... it's a huge disadvantage that it develops such problems in the first place. PCMs are also easy to clean... Why haven't you ever cleaned one and put it back into service? The answer is obvious.
You are oh-so-very wrong.
I've gone through all of that. Pre-1996, so I just grab a short piece of wire, jump pins 1&3 under the dash, count the number of flashes on the service engine light, and look-up the error in the manual (it's a couple pages, and pretty universal, so you could print it out, too). It reports exactly which sensor is not providing sane values. Usually something as simple as a wire pulled loose, shorted, corroded, etc. Usually around 15 minutes and I'm on my way. Post-1996 cars just require you keep a $30 code reader on-hand, instead of a paperclip.
If that makes you a "prisioner," the bar is pretty damn low...
I don't think PCMs are better... I know, unarguably, that they are. The entire industry switched over, for good reason. It's only that you insist on never learning anything new that you assume older is somehow better.
Pay through the nose for what? To who?
Boost Mobile is $50/mo for everything, unlimited, and then every 6 months they drop it $5/mo until you bottom out at $35/mo. That's right, $35/mo for "unlimited talk, text, web, 411, IM & email.".
What are you paying through the nose for? Sure, you have to buy the phones up front, but they're coinsures of inexpensive phones people want. From the $30 dumb phones (which do a pretty good job for everything but web browsing on their tiny screen), to the < $200 Android and Blackberry phones.
And if you can't find the phone you want with Boost, try Virgin Mobile, they're Sprint pre-paid as well. You might even be able to just swap SIMs and use the phones on either service (iDEN phones notwithstanding).
It's all a matter of degree, though, isn't it? There aren't many people out there who could design and machine their own carburetor from a block of steel, so A) you don't really understand it, and B) you can't really fix it, but only replace it. In both cases, you are no better off than you would be if the vehicle was electronically controlled. In fact you're worse off because it's unlikely your PCM will ever have a problem.
There is tremendous abuse of software patents, just as there is of traditional patents.
Let's turn the question around... Why should your innovative and novel idea be patentable when designed in a purely mechanical system, but NOT when it is upgraded to do most of the work in software?
Should it be okay that the rom drive in your dvd player has a dozen patents on it, but the video and audio codecs have to be given away for free? If so, say goodbye to open audio and video formats like h.264 and he-aac+, because they'll be the last of their kind. The next round will be 100% proprietary and obfuscated, ala Cinepak and good old RealPlayer. And don't mention Theora or Web M, as both were developed closed source, patented, and only opened when there was no money to be made... It won't happen again.
Even if China doesn't give a damn about North Korea, war with a major military is very expensive, and difficult to get support for. So yes, there is always "much of an issue" when starting a war.
I don't assert it. I direct your attention to all the times other western nations have had the opportunity to do similar, often on a tiny scale, and utterly fail to do so. That basically nobody else (China is a notable exception) has the determination to do so is a provable fact. Your implication that some nebulous alternative would spring up is the baseless assertion here. I'll look at any evidence you can provide to indicate that, TODAY, the US pulling out of all of it's military obligations would suddenly cause other world powers to grow a spine they so obviously don't have now. And I'm making it easy on you, completely ignoring the question of military competency...
No, your analogy is massively flawed. The military is tangible, and we've made lots of big and long-term investments in it, towards a goal. We've also established that the military is something that provides real benefits... economic, political, and humanitarian. It's definitely not some trivial entertainment service.
You actually can loosely compare the US military to cable if you insist, but in this case, WE ARE the cable company... We've got the infrastructure, currently providing service, and returning benefits to us. And yes, we could make some money by pawning off big chunks of that infrastructure, and the employees that make the service possible. But taking that route involves throwing away what we built, and while you'll certainly get short-term cash bonus, you're also going to be paying far more when you've got the money again, and decide you need to rebuild it...