Do they actually prefer it, or do they prefer it because they have this massive investment in equipment, software, licensing and people skills to support BlackBerry?
I sometimes wonder if it's not that they want or even use all the stuff BlackBerry offers, but they bought into it big and it would be painful to have to support something else.
AFAICT, abandoning BlackBerry means ditching BES and all the bullshoot associated with BES installs, and using ActiveSync instead (since it's a 99.99% certainty we're talking MS Exchange here).
Perhaps some portion of corporate installs actually need/want the BES infrastructure, but in my experience most of the places I've worked (smaller installs, 25-100 handhelds) don't use them and are constantly hammered for requests to support ActiveSync devices.
Except that a 30 year stretch in Pelican Bay (where all the guys who are too violent for the _rest_ of the prison system) go, under a new name and with a conviction for child molestation, isn't just a "slightly higher" penalty. It's six months of savagery until you commit suicide or get shanked for being short eyes.
And it won't be some guy making idle threats, it'll be someone who pushed the limits offering you a testimonial -- "I thought I could get away with it. The next time I woke up, I was in a van entering a state prison in California, under a different name charged with a crime I didn't commit."
And "too good to get caught"? Yeah, right. Stealing from some shitty corporation too cheap or lazy to upgrade there systems in one thing, stealing out from under the nose of the military when they already know you're someone to watch? The only hole deep enough to escape from these people is called a grave.
I'm sure during the "orientation" session it was made clear that if they fucked up, there were some scenarios to consider -- like suddenly finding yourself in Pelican Bay State Prison under a new name, starting a 30 year stretch for multiple child molestation convictions.
Yeah, look where they are. Stuck in a deflationary spiral, with high unemployment and a ticking demographic timebomb.
What's so funny about that is I can clearly remember when Japan was a "threat" and there was all kinds of hoopla about them buying US industries and real estate.
While you and all your friends are raging against Fox news (and presumably swallowing all the pro-Democrat propaganda), the real powers that be are wetting themselves, knowing they have you exactly where they want you, caught up in an empty shouting match.
These TV shows are about entertainment, not about issues or anything else.
I'm pretty sure I've read that buying a new refrigerator every N years pays for itself in energy efficiency, which leads me to question whether it's even a good idea to keep an appliance for 20+ years. Advances in materials, components and engineering can make appliances that use less power, water, refrigerant, etc.
We replaced a 10 year old dishwasher a few years ago and I was pretty amazed at how well it works. It has a water cleanliness sensor that monitors wash water for particulates and it has a noticably shorter wash cycle when the dishes aren't very dirty, thus saving water, electricity and natural gas (hot water input).
Stolen product is one thing that comes to mind. There's got to be a half-dozen ways to crack into the distribution networks of pharmaceuticals, either through armed robbery, burglary, hijacking, extortion or other methods. Pills aren't teleported to the thousands of pharmacies in the US and not everyone involved in that supply chain is honest or beyond influence.
It wouldn't also surprise me if more organized efforts hadn't been made to "get into" the wholesaling business whereby you'd have legal access to manufacturers or first-tier distributors, with a portion of the product diverted.
The other option is re-importation from places like Mexico -- my Dad buys medicine down there, and a lot of it requires no prescription and from what I've seen, appears to be no different than the drugs sold here in terms of packaging, etc, and Dad says most of it is dramatically less expensive.
But even though some of it may look legitimate, counterfeiting is getting much better. "Good" counterfeits may be the real drug, but packaged to appear to be from a major pharmaceutical supplier -- and may actually BE from there, as "after hours" runs or production overruns/seconds, etc. "Bad" counterfeits may be good packaging but bad product, anything from just expired ingredients, to tainted ingredients, to cheap ingredients that produce similar secondary effects as the real drug, to inert ingredients that do nothing (I wonder how many men get better erections on the placebo principal alone!).
That's an interesting angle, although most of our clients are small enough and the projects as well -- if we're taking their raise money, they're better off quitting and looking for another job because they're not going to be happy with our fees. But I do get where they think we're taking away from their job/career.
Where DOES that ego come from? I really make an effort to be gracious and understanding when I work with other IT people (I work as a SMB consultant, usually solo) but to this day when you walk into a room with other IT people you can almost feel the ego battle growing, like two magnets pushing the same pole together.
Even while trying to avoid the ego trap, I do occasionally fall into but it seems to be almost a defense-mechanism -- if you don't put up some front, you get walked on, and usually there it's down to the gutter.
It's occasionally amusing in meeting with prospective clients, though. You can tell that the boss wants consulting assistance on some projects and the lead geek doesn't want any outside interference; the in-house guy ALWAYS knows everything and challenges us on things we've done dozens of times. You know those jobs either never happen or if they do, they will be short and unpleasant.
That's such a straw man argument -- were both Bezos and Ballmer planning on:
1)...using the money they would otherwise be taxed on to give their employees raises? 2)...bringing jobs sent to low-cost overseas work centers back to the US? 3)...repatriating H1B visa workers, allowing demand to increase wages and allow greater work opportunity for Washington residents?
I'll take a wild guess and assume "none of the above" and that both men are merely parroting vague anti-tax sentiments, following the advice of paid consultants & lobbyists, or, perhaps, merely greedy and have no plans to pay higher wages or offer greater work opportunity.
I've always wondered if air dropped drones with man-portable field controls would ever be practical.
I'd see them as disposable, capable of low-level surveillance, and armed with lighter armaments (7.62 machine gun, or RPGs, or maybe a pair of dumb rockets) and have all of them packed with high explosive so they could also be flown kamikaze when their primary armaments were used up or their useful life was completed and detonated in emeny areas as a bomb.
Control would be via field-portable briefcase type connection to either the drone itself and the plane that dropped it as a backup.
They'd be loaded onto a B-52 or other heavy bomber capable of loitering at high altitude and would be dropped when requested. You could almost make them modular enough that the primary armament could be selected by the requester; the high explosive would be included by default at least for self-destruction purposes.
This would provide a kind of on-demand close air support and intelligence at the company or maybe even platoon level that would be difficult to provide on a right now basis to every company.
The autocannon! The Centurian, land-based Phalanx model that can fire at ground targets sounds pretty scary, especially if made mobile and well camouflaged.
In the US, mandating that all traffic citation monies go to the state's general fund would go a long way towards eliminating most of the bullshit speed traps. Given the general scarcity of resources, it would be impossible to justify speed traps as a good use of law enforcement and we'd probably see little of it.
There may actually be some speed enforcement that makes sense (ie, design flaws in some places along some roads where there have been high accident rates) and possibly places where citizens might demand it (roads through residential areas where people complain about speeding), but overall I'd suspect it would be far diminished.
A brave legislator tried to introduce a bill to do this here in Minnesota, and naturally all the small town & suburban cops lined up to oppose it.
Their primary argument was pretty bold, basically "we need to get paid to enforce these laws or we won't do them because they cost too much to enforce" -- as if they only enforce laws that are money makers ("Murder? Sorry, too expensive.").
I also think that outside of some edge cases, VMware's biggest target market is Windows consolidation as IMHO, Windows server proliferation is a "feature" of Windows apps/services not playing well in the same machine.
If MS could ever come up with some kind of per-application on-demand virtualization that didn't require copying the entire OS environment into RAM but provided total insulation from the OS, it'd eliminate a big chunk of the need for virtualization.
Obviously not all, as CPU/resource utilization is an issue, too with most servers.
Many of my relatives live in small town North Dakota (when you look up rural, it says "See North Dakota") and the ones that live "in town" have good broadband and have had it for many years. So yes, you can get high speed internet at home, at school, in business and any other place where you'd realistically expect to have economic development, telemedicine or any of the other things that rural American "needs".
It should be beyond obvious that some amenities are made economically viable by a large concentration of people, and broadband is one of them.
If it made economic sense (ie, was profitable) to provide those services in rural areas, someone would be doing it. Usually someone *will* provide those services, but not at a cost the end-user will like for casual entertainment use.
Almost always these "rural broadband blows" stories involve around wanting the government to "do something" which usually amounts to a subsidy (my tax money for your service). I generally object to this -- either we end up with a "Universal Service Fee" which is like free money to the telecom providers, as it never goes away, overall higher prices so some mandate can be fulfilled, or some never-ending government bureaucracy like the TVA.
And I think some of this "demand" isn't from 1920s, sepia-tinted people living in rural poverty, but from city people who have made a conscious choice to live in the "country" (thanks to cheap gas) who also want all the amenities of city living but aren't willing to pay for them.
When I first moved into my house in 1999, there was no broadband -- it was dialup or a T1.
A year later, DSL, $80/month, 768k bidirectional, 1 static IP.
Switched ISPs, the price stayed the same, but the speed went up to 1.5/1; in essence, a price decrease per kb of bandwidth. Thanks to a kludge in routing, I managed to "steal" 2 more static IPs (broadcast and network) by changing my netmask on my router one bit wider.
This spring I switched to Comcast Business Class -- 5 real static IPs, $69/month, 12 down/2 up. This is an actual price decrease, but if you look over the past 10 years, the "real" price has gone down, along with the actual dollar denominated cost, *and* the per kb cost, too.
But I've already shown how a mouse is better. The fact that people don't recognize that is irrelevant.
It must be frustrating being you, having all the right answers -- hell, proving them yourself! -- and having all those idiot people refuse to see your infinite wisdom.
IMHO, if a mouse was somehow better, chances are they would be much more widespread than they are now. Because despite your 10+ years of HTPC expertise, my guess is that the people who work at all the various consumer electronics and computer companies know a thing or two about home theater and have probably concluded that a mouse has some fatal flaw or other that prevents them from adopting it.
Personally, while I can see some of the wisdom of a mouse for very menu-heavy stuff, I don't really feel like I'm missing one. An actual keyboard (or a slide-out one like some phones) would make more sense, but the basic remote works very well for Tivo even if spelling stuff out is tedious.
Politicians are all about PR, and politicians have gotten ahold of the idea that the problems with radical Islam are PR problems, not ideological/cultural problems or apparently intractable geopolitical problems (Israel, etc).
Thus, the philosophy of "If We Can Only Make Them Like Us They'll Stop Hating Us". It's kindergarten simple and ties in with the enduring pacifist philosophies of appeasement and conflict avoidance.
However, I think it's entirely too simple and fails to account for the broader geopolitical agendas of governments and the actual agendas of what appears to be a very real, global Islamic fundamentalist religious/political/military conspiracy (known variously as Al Queda, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, etc).
What mystifies me, though, is the fairly broad support and acceptance that an extremely conservative religious movement has among Western liberals, at least in the U.S. (I think European liberals may have lost some of their enthusiasm after the Danish cartoon incident and Theo Van Gogh's murder).
Mainstream Islam is generally hostile to women's civil rights, homosexuality, freedom of the press, and the separation of church and state. All of these are issues American liberals fought tooth and nail for over the 20th century and continue to fight for in the 21st century (particularly gay rights).
Yet liberals NEVER openly criticize Islam or make any effort to only back a "Reform" Islam that acknowledges the above. It's almost as if they support it only because *some* conservatives attack it without looking at what they're supporting.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
For those of you that skipped history, the Founders' view (consistent with Enlightenment political philosophy) was that these rights are inherent to man -- "endowed by their Creator" -- and that they are not *granted* these rights by a king or government; in fact, the power of the government is derived from the consent of the governed.
The one failing the Founders had, and it's hard to blame them for it, was not seeing the rise of the corporation and the government-like power which it is endowed with, it's ability to constrain the rights of man, and the lack of redress for grievances one has with them. They had seen the aristocracy but assumed that without a monarchy it could not be reconstituted, without assuming that an economic aristocracy would rise in its place.
I suspect if Jefferson, et al could have seen this they would have structured the constitution to limit the size and power of corporations.
My big falling out with Conservatives is over this and related issues; restraint of government, private property and the efficiency of market economies are necessary for liberty, but they are not alone sufficient; without constraints on the power of private property, restraint of government is an inadequate guarantee of liberty.
Roads, water & sewer are state owned, but electricity is mostly private although many rural areas are served by co-ops which are nominally non-profit (or minimally capitalist, depending on how you look at it).
I'm not so sure that the US has a "poor backbone" -- obviously there is a lot of bandwidth if you want to pay for it. Even at the consumer level, I think it's gotten better fairly quickly.
I moved into my house in 1999, and there was *no* broadband. In 2000, I finally got DSL -- 768k/768k for $80 month. It went 1.5M/800k about two years later. Last year I jumped ship to Comcast (cable) Business Class. For $69/month I get 12M/2M.
So in about 10 years, my download speed has gone up about 150%, my cost has gone down in both absolute dollars and inflation-adjusted dollars. I can think of very few services that actually deliver 15x more product for less money.
Slashdot Mirror
They're really deceiving.
Do they actually prefer it, or do they prefer it because they have this massive investment in equipment, software, licensing and people skills to support BlackBerry?
I sometimes wonder if it's not that they want or even use all the stuff BlackBerry offers, but they bought into it big and it would be painful to have to support something else.
AFAICT, abandoning BlackBerry means ditching BES and all the bullshoot associated with BES installs, and using ActiveSync instead (since it's a 99.99% certainty we're talking MS Exchange here).
Perhaps some portion of corporate installs actually need/want the BES infrastructure, but in my experience most of the places I've worked (smaller installs, 25-100 handhelds) don't use them and are constantly hammered for requests to support ActiveSync devices.
Except that a 30 year stretch in Pelican Bay (where all the guys who are too violent for the _rest_ of the prison system) go, under a new name and with a conviction for child molestation, isn't just a "slightly higher" penalty. It's six months of savagery until you commit suicide or get shanked for being short eyes.
And it won't be some guy making idle threats, it'll be someone who pushed the limits offering you a testimonial -- "I thought I could get away with it. The next time I woke up, I was in a van entering a state prison in California, under a different name charged with a crime I didn't commit."
And "too good to get caught"? Yeah, right. Stealing from some shitty corporation too cheap or lazy to upgrade there systems in one thing, stealing out from under the nose of the military when they already know you're someone to watch? The only hole deep enough to escape from these people is called a grave.
Why should they fear criminal hackers?
I'm sure during the "orientation" session it was made clear that if they fucked up, there were some scenarios to consider -- like suddenly finding yourself in Pelican Bay State Prison under a new name, starting a 30 year stretch for multiple child molestation convictions.
Yeah, look where they are. Stuck in a deflationary spiral, with high unemployment and a ticking demographic timebomb.
What's so funny about that is I can clearly remember when Japan was a "threat" and there was all kinds of hoopla about them buying US industries and real estate.
While you and all your friends are raging against Fox news (and presumably swallowing all the pro-Democrat propaganda), the real powers that be are wetting themselves, knowing they have you exactly where they want you, caught up in an empty shouting match.
These TV shows are about entertainment, not about issues or anything else.
Banning the hijab makes sense as does the gypsy expulsion.
I'm pretty sure I've read that buying a new refrigerator every N years pays for itself in energy efficiency, which leads me to question whether it's even a good idea to keep an appliance for 20+ years. Advances in materials, components and engineering can make appliances that use less power, water, refrigerant, etc.
We replaced a 10 year old dishwasher a few years ago and I was pretty amazed at how well it works. It has a water cleanliness sensor that monitors wash water for particulates and it has a noticably shorter wash cycle when the dishes aren't very dirty, thus saving water, electricity and natural gas (hot water input).
Stolen product is one thing that comes to mind. There's got to be a half-dozen ways to crack into the distribution networks of pharmaceuticals, either through armed robbery, burglary, hijacking, extortion or other methods. Pills aren't teleported to the thousands of pharmacies in the US and not everyone involved in that supply chain is honest or beyond influence.
It wouldn't also surprise me if more organized efforts hadn't been made to "get into" the wholesaling business whereby you'd have legal access to manufacturers or first-tier distributors, with a portion of the product diverted.
The other option is re-importation from places like Mexico -- my Dad buys medicine down there, and a lot of it requires no prescription and from what I've seen, appears to be no different than the drugs sold here in terms of packaging, etc, and Dad says most of it is dramatically less expensive.
But even though some of it may look legitimate, counterfeiting is getting much better. "Good" counterfeits may be the real drug, but packaged to appear to be from a major pharmaceutical supplier -- and may actually BE from there, as "after hours" runs or production overruns/seconds, etc. "Bad" counterfeits may be good packaging but bad product, anything from just expired ingredients, to tainted ingredients, to cheap ingredients that produce similar secondary effects as the real drug, to inert ingredients that do nothing (I wonder how many men get better erections on the placebo principal alone!).
It's funny, but I'd swear when I first got my iPhone 3G I felt like I ran into more sites that used Flash or didn't render right on my iPhone.
Since I've gotten an iPad and do even more browsing on Safari than ever, it seems like I seldom run into sites that use Flash or require it.
I don't know if it's part of a general trend towards site simplicity, ajax-type functionality, or a desire to ride the iPhone/iPad trend.
Either way, I don't miss it.
That's an interesting angle, although most of our clients are small enough and the projects as well -- if we're taking their raise money, they're better off quitting and looking for another job because they're not going to be happy with our fees. But I do get where they think we're taking away from their job/career.
Where DOES that ego come from? I really make an effort to be gracious and understanding when I work with other IT people (I work as a SMB consultant, usually solo) but to this day when you walk into a room with other IT people you can almost feel the ego battle growing, like two magnets pushing the same pole together.
Even while trying to avoid the ego trap, I do occasionally fall into but it seems to be almost a defense-mechanism -- if you don't put up some front, you get walked on, and usually there it's down to the gutter.
It's occasionally amusing in meeting with prospective clients, though. You can tell that the boss wants consulting assistance on some projects and the lead geek doesn't want any outside interference; the in-house guy ALWAYS knows everything and challenges us on things we've done dozens of times. You know those jobs either never happen or if they do, they will be short and unpleasant.
That's such a straw man argument -- were both Bezos and Ballmer planning on:
1) ...using the money they would otherwise be taxed on to give their employees raises? ...bringing jobs sent to low-cost overseas work centers back to the US? ...repatriating H1B visa workers, allowing demand to increase wages and allow greater work opportunity for Washington residents?
2)
3)
I'll take a wild guess and assume "none of the above" and that both men are merely parroting vague anti-tax sentiments, following the advice of paid consultants & lobbyists, or, perhaps, merely greedy and have no plans to pay higher wages or offer greater work opportunity.
I've always wondered if air dropped drones with man-portable field controls would ever be practical.
I'd see them as disposable, capable of low-level surveillance, and armed with lighter armaments (7.62 machine gun, or RPGs, or maybe a pair of dumb rockets) and have all of them packed with high explosive so they could also be flown kamikaze when their primary armaments were used up or their useful life was completed and detonated in emeny areas as a bomb.
Control would be via field-portable briefcase type connection to either the drone itself and the plane that dropped it as a backup.
They'd be loaded onto a B-52 or other heavy bomber capable of loitering at high altitude and would be dropped when requested. You could almost make them modular enough that the primary armament could be selected by the requester; the high explosive would be included by default at least for self-destruction purposes.
This would provide a kind of on-demand close air support and intelligence at the company or maybe even platoon level that would be difficult to provide on a right now basis to every company.
The autocannon! The Centurian, land-based Phalanx model that can fire at ground targets sounds pretty scary, especially if made mobile and well camouflaged.
In the US, mandating that all traffic citation monies go to the state's general fund would go a long way towards eliminating most of the bullshit speed traps. Given the general scarcity of resources, it would be impossible to justify speed traps as a good use of law enforcement and we'd probably see little of it.
There may actually be some speed enforcement that makes sense (ie, design flaws in some places along some roads where there have been high accident rates) and possibly places where citizens might demand it (roads through residential areas where people complain about speeding), but overall I'd suspect it would be far diminished.
A brave legislator tried to introduce a bill to do this here in Minnesota, and naturally all the small town & suburban cops lined up to oppose it.
Their primary argument was pretty bold, basically "we need to get paid to enforce these laws or we won't do them because they cost too much to enforce" -- as if they only enforce laws that are money makers ("Murder? Sorry, too expensive.").
I can't help but agree with all of this.
I also think that outside of some edge cases, VMware's biggest target market is Windows consolidation as IMHO, Windows server proliferation is a "feature" of Windows apps/services not playing well in the same machine.
If MS could ever come up with some kind of per-application on-demand virtualization that didn't require copying the entire OS environment into RAM but provided total insulation from the OS, it'd eliminate a big chunk of the need for virtualization.
Obviously not all, as CPU/resource utilization is an issue, too with most servers.
Many of my relatives live in small town North Dakota (when you look up rural, it says "See North Dakota") and the ones that live "in town" have good broadband and have had it for many years. So yes, you can get high speed internet at home, at school, in business and any other place where you'd realistically expect to have economic development, telemedicine or any of the other things that rural American "needs".
It should be beyond obvious that some amenities are made economically viable by a large concentration of people, and broadband is one of them.
If it made economic sense (ie, was profitable) to provide those services in rural areas, someone would be doing it. Usually someone *will* provide those services, but not at a cost the end-user will like for casual entertainment use.
Almost always these "rural broadband blows" stories involve around wanting the government to "do something" which usually amounts to a subsidy (my tax money for your service). I generally object to this -- either we end up with a "Universal Service Fee" which is like free money to the telecom providers, as it never goes away, overall higher prices so some mandate can be fulfilled, or some never-ending government bureaucracy like the TVA.
And I think some of this "demand" isn't from 1920s, sepia-tinted people living in rural poverty, but from city people who have made a conscious choice to live in the "country" (thanks to cheap gas) who also want all the amenities of city living but aren't willing to pay for them.
When I first moved into my house in 1999, there was no broadband -- it was dialup or a T1.
A year later, DSL, $80/month, 768k bidirectional, 1 static IP.
Switched ISPs, the price stayed the same, but the speed went up to 1.5/1; in essence, a price decrease per kb of bandwidth. Thanks to a kludge in routing, I managed to "steal" 2 more static IPs (broadcast and network) by changing my netmask on my router one bit wider.
This spring I switched to Comcast Business Class -- 5 real static IPs, $69/month, 12 down/2 up. This is an actual price decrease, but if you look over the past 10 years, the "real" price has gone down, along with the actual dollar denominated cost, *and* the per kb cost, too.
But I've already shown how a mouse is better. The fact that people don't recognize that is irrelevant.
It must be frustrating being you, having all the right answers -- hell, proving them yourself! -- and having all those idiot people refuse to see your infinite wisdom.
IMHO, if a mouse was somehow better, chances are they would be much more widespread than they are now. Because despite your 10+ years of HTPC expertise, my guess is that the people who work at all the various consumer electronics and computer companies know a thing or two about home theater and have probably concluded that a mouse has some fatal flaw or other that prevents them from adopting it.
Personally, while I can see some of the wisdom of a mouse for very menu-heavy stuff, I don't really feel like I'm missing one. An actual keyboard (or a slide-out one like some phones) would make more sense, but the basic remote works very well for Tivo even if spelling stuff out is tedious.
Why isn't this the default setting?
Wouldn't they save themselves a fair amount of bad PR by making users turn it on for JS features?
Politicians are all about PR, and politicians have gotten ahold of the idea that the problems with radical Islam are PR problems, not ideological/cultural problems or apparently intractable geopolitical problems (Israel, etc).
Thus, the philosophy of "If We Can Only Make Them Like Us They'll Stop Hating Us". It's kindergarten simple and ties in with the enduring pacifist philosophies of appeasement and conflict avoidance.
However, I think it's entirely too simple and fails to account for the broader geopolitical agendas of governments and the actual agendas of what appears to be a very real, global Islamic fundamentalist religious/political/military conspiracy (known variously as Al Queda, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, etc).
What mystifies me, though, is the fairly broad support and acceptance that an extremely conservative religious movement has among Western liberals, at least in the U.S. (I think European liberals may have lost some of their enthusiasm after the Danish cartoon incident and Theo Van Gogh's murder).
Mainstream Islam is generally hostile to women's civil rights, homosexuality, freedom of the press, and the separation of church and state. All of these are issues American liberals fought tooth and nail for over the 20th century and continue to fight for in the 21st century (particularly gay rights).
Yet liberals NEVER openly criticize Islam or make any effort to only back a "Reform" Islam that acknowledges the above. It's almost as if they support it only because *some* conservatives attack it without looking at what they're supporting.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
For those of you that skipped history, the Founders' view (consistent with Enlightenment political philosophy) was that these rights are inherent to man -- "endowed by their Creator" -- and that they are not *granted* these rights by a king or government; in fact, the power of the government is derived from the consent of the governed.
The one failing the Founders had, and it's hard to blame them for it, was not seeing the rise of the corporation and the government-like power which it is endowed with, it's ability to constrain the rights of man, and the lack of redress for grievances one has with them. They had seen the aristocracy but assumed that without a monarchy it could not be reconstituted, without assuming that an economic aristocracy would rise in its place.
I suspect if Jefferson, et al could have seen this they would have structured the constitution to limit the size and power of corporations.
My big falling out with Conservatives is over this and related issues; restraint of government, private property and the efficiency of market economies are necessary for liberty, but they are not alone sufficient; without constraints on the power of private property, restraint of government is an inadequate guarantee of liberty.
Roads, water & sewer are state owned, but electricity is mostly private although many rural areas are served by co-ops which are nominally non-profit (or minimally capitalist, depending on how you look at it).
I'm not so sure that the US has a "poor backbone" -- obviously there is a lot of bandwidth if you want to pay for it. Even at the consumer level, I think it's gotten better fairly quickly.
I moved into my house in 1999, and there was *no* broadband. In 2000, I finally got DSL -- 768k/768k for $80 month. It went 1.5M/800k about two years later. Last year I jumped ship to Comcast (cable) Business Class. For $69/month I get 12M/2M.
So in about 10 years, my download speed has gone up about 150%, my cost has gone down in both absolute dollars and inflation-adjusted dollars. I can think of very few services that actually deliver 15x more product for less money.