But US phones are mostly frequency locked to carriers.
Kinda sorta used to be more but not so much now.
Part of the confusion comes from the fact that, unlike pretty much the rest of the world, US carriers did not standardize on the GSM technology family. Back in the day, AT&T and T-Mobile chose GSM, while Verizon and Sprint chose the CDMA technology family. So right there you had incompatible technologies between carriers that didn't exist most anywhere else in the world (except for Japan and Korea, mainly).
Phones built to run on the GSM family of technologies use SIM cards and are generally "SIM-swappable." Some phones, typically the ones bought on a contract for a discount, are "SIM-locked" to a carrier meaning that the phone has to be unlocked by the original carrier before the phone can be used with a SIM from another carrier. However, pretty much all cheap/prepaid phones are not SIM locked and can be swapped easily. Phones built to run on CDMA family of technologies do not use SIM cards so are a moot point for "SIM swapping."
Oh, and don't forget this in your research - there are at least three popular SIM card sizes roaming (no pun intended) in the wild these days, and they are mutually incompatible. So don't expect to take the full-sized SIM out of your feature phone and transfer it to the micro SIM slot of a Galaxy S4 or the nano SIM slot of an iPhone 5s... although of course you can buy adapters that will make smaller SIMs fit into larger slots.
In case you're wondering, the fact that all four major US carriers are using LTE nowadays should make the situation less complicated, but it really doesn't. That's because there are virtually no phones out there that use LTE exclusively. Unless your carrier has VoLTE deployed, your "LTE" phone is just using LTE for data but is falling back to 3G CDMA or GSM/HSPA to make your voice calls. So even though every LTE phone has a SIM, phones on legacy CDMA carriers aren't full "SIM-swappable."
Long story short - SIM swappability these days is far less about carrier locking and more about SIM sizes and which network you're trying to use. Good luck!
I'm not a lawyer, I don't know the details of libel laws, but I was relatively sure that good faith belief is all that is required.
At least in the United States, the rules for libel are different based on whether or not the libeled party is a "public figure" or not. If someone is Joe Average, the only requirement is to prove that you said something incorrect about them which caused quantifiable damages. "Public figures," however, are expected to have good and bad things said about them as part of normal discourse. (Otherwise Ke$ha could sue someone for saying her album sucked.) So for public figures, the libeled party must prove that not only is the thing you said wrong, you must also have known it was wrong and had malicious intent in doing so. It's a high bar to meet, and that's why you see so few celebrities or politicians suing for libel - there's usually only provable malice in a few cases where a tabloid is printing knowingly false information in order to boost sales, etc.
All treaties are negotiated in secret. Furthermore, at least in the US, no treaty is in effect until it is ratified by the Senate, at which point all the elements of the treaty will be public and heavily debated down to the last comma.
It's great that Wikileaks is giving the world a heads-up view into what is being negotiated, but I don't understand why every Slashdot story about international treaties harps on "negotiated in secret" like that's unusual, or that a treaty can somehow take effect silently and invisibly.
There's no evidence that the provider of music or video actually suffered a loss.
Okay, here's some evidence for you. I will freely admit that if I could not have downloaded Season 3 of Game of Thrones, I would have shelled out $40 to get it on BluRay. HBO and/or the makers of the show and/or whatever retailer I would have bought the set from lost $40. I liked the shows enough to watch them but I really don't feel like paying $40 after having watched them all just to ease my commercial equivalent of a conscience. True fact and actual value lost.
So what now? Can we be done with the "nobody lost anything because of downloading" argument once and for all and move on to something more substantial as a reason for both copyright reform and ethical Internet usage?
They do dilute the holdings of the existing shareholders. However, when you do an IPO you have the option of making only a minority of your shares public. You can start a business that you own 100% of and then go IPO but only sell 49% of the stock and still retain majority voting rights. Or, like Mark Zuckerberg, sell a majority of the company but keep most of the "special" shares that carry 10x voting rights.
The reason most companies don't do this is that investors generally don't trust a company that they can't have a strong say in keeping or ousting the management team. (Which is a pretty reasonable concern.) If you retain majority control, just understand that you will make less money per share on your IPO due to those investor concerns... and if you aren't doing an IPO to make money, why are you doing it in the first place?
Steve Jobs was not creative. At all. Name one thing he ever invented.
Typical engineering mindset - "inventions" are not the only yardstick of creativity. Pablo Picasso never invented anything either, but I hope you're not going to argue that he wasn't creative.
Jobs demonstrated a highly creative approach to business, acting intuitively and often flouting the rules of "what businesses should do." He transformed Pixar from a software company to an entertainment company. He change Apple from an also-ran PC manufacturer into a provider of an ecosystem of mobile and desktop devices with seamless software, entertainment and marketplace integration. He imagined what customers would want and took the gamble of building it, and had no fear of cannibalizing his existing products to do so. And, in the world of business, that is creativity.
It is illegal to expose illegalities performed by US officials
No. No it is not. You may wish to read up on something called Watergate, for example, and recall that no reporters were ever charged with a crime for exposing it. Or the Iran-Contra Affair. In fact, the exposure of illegal and unethical government activities by journalists, police and whistleblowers goes on at a brisk pace every day. It is not illegal.
What is illegal is sharing classified materials without authorization from the government to do so. cf The Pentagon Papers. Those by the way weren't even exposing illegal acts, they were exposing incompetence and poor decision-making. But Daniel Ellsberg was prosecuted because he didn't have the legal right to share them with newspapers and by extension the public.
I'm not espousing a stance on Snowden either way. I'm just saying it's important to distinguish which activities are illegal and which are not. It is fair to say that it is illegal to expose any kind of classified information - relating to anything, legal or not - without explicit authorization from the government. But exposing corruption and illegal activities by the US government is definitely not illegal in and of itself.
My guess would be maintaining a credible ability to deter Russia from claiming disputedly Canadian Arctic territories and their associated mineral and gas resources. Russia has shown no compunctions about annexing new territories from countries which are unable to project force into them.
Now, if they had to give back both spectrum and exclusive rights to some of their infrastructure so that competitors can come in, that would be a fix that might work.
This is the thing I think people don't understand about the US cellular industry - you can't try to "create" a new competitor because it will fail. The reason is that cellular business is all about scale - precisely the thing that is driving the T-Mo/Sprint acquistion. Fundamentally, you need to have the same 30-40K+ cell towers to cover most of the population centers in the US whether you have one million users, 10 million, or 100 million. When you are distributing that same infrastructure costs across fewer users, your economics are far worse than the big guys and it's very very difficult to compete. Additionally, size brings additional benefits such as more clout when negotiating device costs from Apple or Samsung, better deals with network infrastructure providers, etc. Scale is everything.
So the problem with bringing in a new competitor is that it will take them many years to even get to a point equivalent to today's T-Mobile, which is struggling to make ends meet with a national network supporting 25 million users. Even if you subsidized out of taxpayer pockets the spectrum and some of the infrastructure, you'd just be propping up a company for the sake of competition that would have to merge/get bought by someone else eventually or remain uncompetitive on pricing and probably go out of business.
It's unfortunate for a variety of reasons... but when you have businesses with a high financial barrier to entry and a model that grows efficiency with scale, economically speaking you will always see a trend towards consolidation to the minimum number of viable players.
i think my record is 3 years no porn and of course no masturbation. but then again i am not typical and haven't even had sex, despite being 36 years old.
Correct. You are not typical. Your experience may be very normal in a community you would identify with such as asexuality, or it could potentially be associated with a disorder, such as hyposexuality.
Your situation may be entirely healthy and rewarding for you, and that's great. And, frankly, you have probably saved a lot of money, time and heartache compared to many of us on the other side of that spectrum! I would just caution you not to use it as a yardstick for most other people in judging questions of sexuality.
Perhaps a more ideal solution would be for end-users to own the last mile of fiber
If it costs $2,000 to run the fiber from your neighborhood DSLAM-equivalent to your home NID - which in the US is a pretty common price - do you still think that would be worthwhile to you?
As it is, Verizon et. al. are paying that cost now and you are paying for it in inflated monthly connection fees but not in direct upfront costs. If most households had to pay for that upfront but got lower monthly bills, how many do you think would accept? Would it be enough for telcos to have a critical mass of customers in any given area? Probably not.
Think of how many US households in dense urban areas - the prime customers for fiber rollouts - cheat themselves out of their own money getting payday loans because they can't spare an extra couple hundred dollars, let alone "investing" a couple thousand in order to get lower bills or better service over the next several years to follow. Or think of how many people buy cellphones for free with a two-year contract that they could have saved money on if they had more cash upfront.
Moral of the story: buying and owning your own "local loop" would work for the 1% but not - at least in the US - for most of the population. And having the government own the last mile isn't free, it just means that the 100% pay higher taxes for it somehow, and there is probably a better way to serve the needy with those dollars than last mile ownership.
FIOS and its kin will be maintained where they exist already, a pathetic fraction of the country, but not expanded.
Well, frankly, yes. Verizon has said for several years that the cost of rolling out FTTH for FiOS was so high, and the adoption rate low enough, that they are done with expanding it for the foreseeable future. Verizon is a business, and FiOS just isn't making much profit. And that is with Verizon having no obligation to share its fiber with other providers, unlike the copper TDM network sharing requirements for UNE-P and DSL. If Verizon had to treat FiOS like a utility and/or line share, it would have been deployed in even fewer places or not at all. It sucks, but it's true.
To be treated as a utility generally means to be compensated in a "cost-plus" environment. You are allowed to charge consumers what it costs you, plus a little margin. Fair enough for water and electric, say, but those are industries where the infrastructure was built a long time ago and a need to upgrade customer-facing physical plant is not really an issue. Bu if you want to build a new power plant, or a sewage treatment plant, you have to go to a state/local Public Utilities Commission and ask permission to raise your rates to cover it, which can take a long time for review and approval. Imagine doing this every time you want to buy a new OC-3, refresh your CPE/modems, or install new wireless towers! Network upgrades will slow to a crawl. Being a regulated utility is good for steady state maintenance and uptime but bad for capital-heavy upgrades and investment.
People forget that even though the old "Ma Bell" phone network was regularly upgraded, that wasn't because of regulation. Ma Bell was actually a business with a regulated/utility portion (local phone service) and an unregulated portion (long distance and other services). For decades, the unregulated part of their business made enough money that it effectively subsidized the regulated local phone service infrastructure and upgrades. When Ma Bell was broken up, local phone service rates actually went up because the ILECs no longer had the unregulated, profit-making businesses to subsidize them. And it is entirely possible that the same thing would happen if ISPs were treated as utilities and were not using TV, phone or other high-profit services to subsidize Internet access.
No, not unless you would like your Internet access technologies refreshed and upgraded about as often as your water pipes or electric lines are. Which is to say approximately never.
The story is "slow news day" Slashdot click bait (see also Snowden, Assange, Android vs. iOS fanboy wars) that has been hashed and re-hashed endlessly. Some people think Comcast is right not to give free peering bandwidth to non-peers like Level3 and Netflix. Other people think it is incumbent upon Comcast to give free peering to Netflix or Level3 anyway because it will improve the experience of their paying subscribers. Both sides argue vociferously and neither convinces the other of anything. Move along, nothing to see here.
Your brain cells will thank you for reading just about anything else on the Internet, with the exception of foxnews.com or pitchfork media.
Like we'll be able to afford popcorn when the only two suppliers of it are WalMart and Amazon.
Yes, you will. In fact, that's the whole point - people shop at Amazon and Wal-Mart because it saves them money. Both are known widely for leveraging their scale and supply chain efficiencies to sell goods for much lower costs than any competitors.
If you're trying to suggest that eventually Amazon and Wal-Mart will be the only two employers in the US, then that's a different argument. Wal-Mart is well-known for low wages, but Amazon's employees are typically paid in a range that is high vs. the US median, but low vs. other high tech companies. Living in Seattle, I know some of my Amazon employee friends seem underpaid at $100-$120K/year around here, but I doubt that figure would get them much sympathy in most of the country.
GSM phones will not talk to VoLTE phone with the current LTE revisions. A T-Mobile VoLTE phone cannot talk to an AT&T VoLTE phone
Kinda sorta correct but only in a very narrow sense of "talk to." True, you can't currently roam across VoLTE carriers - which is why all these phones will still carry 3G chips for a long time to come. HOWEVER, when you make a VoLTE call, the carrier routes it back to their PSTN switches, and where it goes from there is immaterial - to a land line, to another carrier, to a data-less feature phone, wherever. So it's not like having a VoLTE phone means you can only call other VoLTE users on the same carrier - you can call whomever you want, wherever. It's just the VoLTE capability itself on that phone that is restricted to where you can use it.
You are correct and I mis-spoke... what I meant to say was that the XB-70 never entered service. How much was the 2707 really based on the XB-70? I would be surprised if North American had shared much of their XB-70 knowledge with a competitor (Boeing).
How about worst for the money? It could be the best plane ever made and still qualify.
At least it will eventually fly. All the "worst ever" list would consist of massively expensive R&D efforts that never produced a flying aircraft, like the XB-70 Valkyrie, the Boeing 2707, or to a lesser extent ones that were cancelled but had some of their R&D incorporated into a different aircraft like the B-1A. Aircraft that were expensive to develop and saw only a few flights would also top that list, like the Tupolev Tu-144 SST or the Hughes "Spruce Goose".
The F35 has been a huge clusterf**k - largely because it had some wholly unrealistic goals to start out with (*cough* V/STOL *cough*) - but aviation history is full of clusterf**ks that out-clusterf**k it by a significant margin.
Why the over-reaction? Ooh, we have a treaty that has been negotiated in secret for a year. Of course, it tends to ignore that 1.) ALL treaties are negotiated in secret, and 2.) treaties do not take force in the United States unless voted on and ratified by the US Senate, which will certainly take every opportunity to publicly expose and fight over every last detail. Never mind, that's enough reason to have a revolution!
Read up sometime on the spirit of 1789 and how it resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents, shattered the lives of millions and embroiled Europe in a series of wars that would last for 20 years. I'd recommend Citizens by Simon Schama.
They feed you bullshit about "reign of terror"...
WTF are you talking about? Are you seriously denying the existence of the Reign of Terror from the Storming of the Bastille through the Thermidorean Reaction and even after? Why is that bullshit? It was a very, very shameful and terrible time in human history, and is extremely well documented. The same thing tends to happen in many revolutions by the way, where the revolutionaries "eat their own" and make life difficult for everyone in the process - see the USSR after Lenin's death while Stalin consolidated power. Again, try some serious historical reading.
It is very fair to say that it is good that France got rid of its monarchy. It is not a fair or smart thing at all to say that the revolution of 1789 with all its terrible aspects and consequences was a good thing to be emulated or reprised.
As soon as they realise they'll make more money without it, they'll stop using it.
Nice idea, but you could be waiting a very long time.The only two times I'm aware of this happening is in music downloads and old video games (e.g. GOG.com). Why these two markets? Because a song or an ancient game past its prime is a "cheap" asset that there's little for the content provider to lose on. Nothing has happened yet in the higher dollar-purchase value markets of movies, TV, e-books, AAA video games or AAA productivity software titles to convince the content creators that DRM isn't making them more money than if they got rid of it.
Not to say it might not happen someday, but for now content providers appear to have done the math on their more valuable assets (i.e. anything that isn't a $0.99 song or a five-dollar retro videogame) and decided DRM isn't hurting them, it's helping. So don't hold your breath.
The worst thing the cable company ever did was refuse to give me free TV with my internet.
WHY the hell would they do that? They pay lots of money for those TV channels. You would not be paying them any money for them. Why, from their perspective, is that bad?
Maybe did you mean that was the best thing they ever did, since your life is more "productive and lively" with no TV for the last five years?
I'm amazed Americans still pay for them. In most other countries any sort of contract comes with a few thousand free SMS per month. I pay about $15 for 5000 texts, 300 minutes and "unlimited" data. Includes 4G.
I'm very curious. What country are you in? What does "4G" mean to you (LTE, HSPA+, WiMAX)? What are the throughput speeds? Is there any cap?
Perhaps, but my wife is neither a fairy nor a ballerina, and our daughter still latched onto those pretty quickly. All this despite the absolute minimum of exposure to "girly" mass media.
I'm not trying to suggest that all gender traits are inherent rather than socialized. I'm just saying that not all gender traits are socialized rather than inherent.
Also, I would really prefer that my wife not dress like a coal miner.
The problem is all those damn Disney movies parents use as babysitters.
Not necessarily. When we had our first girl, my wife and I deliberately kept her away from all things Disney and princess-y to avoid just this situation.
Guess what happened? By age two, she was already trying to wear mommy's high heels and had firmly decided her future vocation would be fairy ballerina - all without ever having seen a Disney/Barbie/whatever TV show, not having any dress-up dolls, or any of the other stereotypical toys that I had always assumed were what caused the gender role identification in young girls. It turns out that some little girls just love "girly" things because it's baked into their DNA somewhere.
Attrition.org has an excellent summary of all the different smells of bullshit that emanate from this guy.
I have no dog in this fight - I have literally never heard of "Ira Winkler" before today, at least that I remember. But from a quick review, the linked page seems needlessly argumentative and dismissive. Do you really need to take shots at people for saying cliches like "opinions are like a**holes - everybody has one?" Is that a reason to disqualify this guy from having an authoritative voice?
Again, I don't know this guy and there may be dozens of reasons to blow him off as a blowhard douchebag. The linked article, however, seemed very biased and did not appear to provide those reasons conclusively. Can anyone provide a link to something resembling an impartial view of this guy and his work?
No, he means take illicit photos. Not to get in the way of a good conspiracy theory, but there are many highly sensitive areas on a US nuclear submarine that certain foreign powers would love to get pictures of for competitive intelligence purposes. That's what they're worried about, not some coverup of the Navy heartlessly waterboarding harp seals or giving blue whales torpedo enemas.
Slashdot Mirror
But US phones are mostly frequency locked to carriers.
Kinda sorta used to be more but not so much now.
Part of the confusion comes from the fact that, unlike pretty much the rest of the world, US carriers did not standardize on the GSM technology family. Back in the day, AT&T and T-Mobile chose GSM, while Verizon and Sprint chose the CDMA technology family. So right there you had incompatible technologies between carriers that didn't exist most anywhere else in the world (except for Japan and Korea, mainly).
Phones built to run on the GSM family of technologies use SIM cards and are generally "SIM-swappable." Some phones, typically the ones bought on a contract for a discount, are "SIM-locked" to a carrier meaning that the phone has to be unlocked by the original carrier before the phone can be used with a SIM from another carrier. However, pretty much all cheap/prepaid phones are not SIM locked and can be swapped easily. Phones built to run on CDMA family of technologies do not use SIM cards so are a moot point for "SIM swapping."
Oh, and don't forget this in your research - there are at least three popular SIM card sizes roaming (no pun intended) in the wild these days, and they are mutually incompatible. So don't expect to take the full-sized SIM out of your feature phone and transfer it to the micro SIM slot of a Galaxy S4 or the nano SIM slot of an iPhone 5s ... although of course you can buy adapters that will make smaller SIMs fit into larger slots.
In case you're wondering, the fact that all four major US carriers are using LTE nowadays should make the situation less complicated, but it really doesn't. That's because there are virtually no phones out there that use LTE exclusively. Unless your carrier has VoLTE deployed, your "LTE" phone is just using LTE for data but is falling back to 3G CDMA or GSM/HSPA to make your voice calls. So even though every LTE phone has a SIM, phones on legacy CDMA carriers aren't full "SIM-swappable."
Long story short - SIM swappability these days is far less about carrier locking and more about SIM sizes and which network you're trying to use. Good luck!
I'm not a lawyer, I don't know the details of libel laws, but I was relatively sure that good faith belief is all that is required.
At least in the United States, the rules for libel are different based on whether or not the libeled party is a "public figure" or not. If someone is Joe Average, the only requirement is to prove that you said something incorrect about them which caused quantifiable damages. "Public figures," however, are expected to have good and bad things said about them as part of normal discourse. (Otherwise Ke$ha could sue someone for saying her album sucked.) So for public figures, the libeled party must prove that not only is the thing you said wrong, you must also have known it was wrong and had malicious intent in doing so. It's a high bar to meet, and that's why you see so few celebrities or politicians suing for libel - there's usually only provable malice in a few cases where a tabloid is printing knowingly false information in order to boost sales, etc.
All treaties are negotiated in secret. Furthermore, at least in the US, no treaty is in effect until it is ratified by the Senate, at which point all the elements of the treaty will be public and heavily debated down to the last comma.
It's great that Wikileaks is giving the world a heads-up view into what is being negotiated, but I don't understand why every Slashdot story about international treaties harps on "negotiated in secret" like that's unusual, or that a treaty can somehow take effect silently and invisibly.
There's no evidence that the provider of music or video actually suffered a loss.
Okay, here's some evidence for you. I will freely admit that if I could not have downloaded Season 3 of Game of Thrones, I would have shelled out $40 to get it on BluRay. HBO and/or the makers of the show and/or whatever retailer I would have bought the set from lost $40. I liked the shows enough to watch them but I really don't feel like paying $40 after having watched them all just to ease my commercial equivalent of a conscience. True fact and actual value lost.
So what now? Can we be done with the "nobody lost anything because of downloading" argument once and for all and move on to something more substantial as a reason for both copyright reform and ethical Internet usage?
They do dilute the holdings of the existing shareholders. However, when you do an IPO you have the option of making only a minority of your shares public. You can start a business that you own 100% of and then go IPO but only sell 49% of the stock and still retain majority voting rights. Or, like Mark Zuckerberg, sell a majority of the company but keep most of the "special" shares that carry 10x voting rights.
The reason most companies don't do this is that investors generally don't trust a company that they can't have a strong say in keeping or ousting the management team. (Which is a pretty reasonable concern.) If you retain majority control, just understand that you will make less money per share on your IPO due to those investor concerns... and if you aren't doing an IPO to make money, why are you doing it in the first place?
Steve Jobs was not creative. At all. Name one thing he ever invented.
Typical engineering mindset - "inventions" are not the only yardstick of creativity. Pablo Picasso never invented anything either, but I hope you're not going to argue that he wasn't creative.
Jobs demonstrated a highly creative approach to business, acting intuitively and often flouting the rules of "what businesses should do." He transformed Pixar from a software company to an entertainment company. He change Apple from an also-ran PC manufacturer into a provider of an ecosystem of mobile and desktop devices with seamless software, entertainment and marketplace integration. He imagined what customers would want and took the gamble of building it, and had no fear of cannibalizing his existing products to do so. And, in the world of business, that is creativity.
It is illegal to expose illegalities performed by US officials
No. No it is not. You may wish to read up on something called Watergate, for example, and recall that no reporters were ever charged with a crime for exposing it. Or the Iran-Contra Affair. In fact, the exposure of illegal and unethical government activities by journalists, police and whistleblowers goes on at a brisk pace every day. It is not illegal.
What is illegal is sharing classified materials without authorization from the government to do so. cf The Pentagon Papers. Those by the way weren't even exposing illegal acts, they were exposing incompetence and poor decision-making. But Daniel Ellsberg was prosecuted because he didn't have the legal right to share them with newspapers and by extension the public.
I'm not espousing a stance on Snowden either way. I'm just saying it's important to distinguish which activities are illegal and which are not. It is fair to say that it is illegal to expose any kind of classified information - relating to anything, legal or not - without explicit authorization from the government. But exposing corruption and illegal activities by the US government is definitely not illegal in and of itself.
what need does Canada have for F35s?
My guess would be maintaining a credible ability to deter Russia from claiming disputedly Canadian Arctic territories and their associated mineral and gas resources. Russia has shown no compunctions about annexing new territories from countries which are unable to project force into them.
Or very aggressive moose hunting.
Now, if they had to give back both spectrum and exclusive rights to some of their infrastructure so that competitors can come in, that would be a fix that might work.
This is the thing I think people don't understand about the US cellular industry - you can't try to "create" a new competitor because it will fail. The reason is that cellular business is all about scale - precisely the thing that is driving the T-Mo/Sprint acquistion. Fundamentally, you need to have the same 30-40K+ cell towers to cover most of the population centers in the US whether you have one million users, 10 million, or 100 million. When you are distributing that same infrastructure costs across fewer users, your economics are far worse than the big guys and it's very very difficult to compete. Additionally, size brings additional benefits such as more clout when negotiating device costs from Apple or Samsung, better deals with network infrastructure providers, etc. Scale is everything.
So the problem with bringing in a new competitor is that it will take them many years to even get to a point equivalent to today's T-Mobile, which is struggling to make ends meet with a national network supporting 25 million users. Even if you subsidized out of taxpayer pockets the spectrum and some of the infrastructure, you'd just be propping up a company for the sake of competition that would have to merge/get bought by someone else eventually or remain uncompetitive on pricing and probably go out of business.
It's unfortunate for a variety of reasons... but when you have businesses with a high financial barrier to entry and a model that grows efficiency with scale, economically speaking you will always see a trend towards consolidation to the minimum number of viable players.
i think my record is 3 years no porn and of course no masturbation. but then again i am not typical and haven't even had sex, despite being 36 years old.
Correct. You are not typical. Your experience may be very normal in a community you would identify with such as asexuality, or it could potentially be associated with a disorder, such as hyposexuality.
Your situation may be entirely healthy and rewarding for you, and that's great. And, frankly, you have probably saved a lot of money, time and heartache compared to many of us on the other side of that spectrum! I would just caution you not to use it as a yardstick for most other people in judging questions of sexuality.
Perhaps a more ideal solution would be for end-users to own the last mile of fiber
If it costs $2,000 to run the fiber from your neighborhood DSLAM-equivalent to your home NID - which in the US is a pretty common price - do you still think that would be worthwhile to you?
As it is, Verizon et. al. are paying that cost now and you are paying for it in inflated monthly connection fees but not in direct upfront costs. If most households had to pay for that upfront but got lower monthly bills, how many do you think would accept? Would it be enough for telcos to have a critical mass of customers in any given area? Probably not.
Think of how many US households in dense urban areas - the prime customers for fiber rollouts - cheat themselves out of their own money getting payday loans because they can't spare an extra couple hundred dollars, let alone "investing" a couple thousand in order to get lower bills or better service over the next several years to follow. Or think of how many people buy cellphones for free with a two-year contract that they could have saved money on if they had more cash upfront.
Moral of the story: buying and owning your own "local loop" would work for the 1% but not - at least in the US - for most of the population. And having the government own the last mile isn't free, it just means that the 100% pay higher taxes for it somehow, and there is probably a better way to serve the needy with those dollars than last mile ownership.
FIOS and its kin will be maintained where they exist already, a pathetic fraction of the country, but not expanded.
Well, frankly, yes. Verizon has said for several years that the cost of rolling out FTTH for FiOS was so high, and the adoption rate low enough, that they are done with expanding it for the foreseeable future. Verizon is a business, and FiOS just isn't making much profit. And that is with Verizon having no obligation to share its fiber with other providers, unlike the copper TDM network sharing requirements for UNE-P and DSL. If Verizon had to treat FiOS like a utility and/or line share, it would have been deployed in even fewer places or not at all. It sucks, but it's true.
To be treated as a utility generally means to be compensated in a "cost-plus" environment. You are allowed to charge consumers what it costs you, plus a little margin. Fair enough for water and electric, say, but those are industries where the infrastructure was built a long time ago and a need to upgrade customer-facing physical plant is not really an issue. Bu if you want to build a new power plant, or a sewage treatment plant, you have to go to a state/local Public Utilities Commission and ask permission to raise your rates to cover it, which can take a long time for review and approval. Imagine doing this every time you want to buy a new OC-3, refresh your CPE/modems, or install new wireless towers! Network upgrades will slow to a crawl. Being a regulated utility is good for steady state maintenance and uptime but bad for capital-heavy upgrades and investment.
People forget that even though the old "Ma Bell" phone network was regularly upgraded, that wasn't because of regulation. Ma Bell was actually a business with a regulated/utility portion (local phone service) and an unregulated portion (long distance and other services). For decades, the unregulated part of their business made enough money that it effectively subsidized the regulated local phone service infrastructure and upgrades. When Ma Bell was broken up, local phone service rates actually went up because the ILECs no longer had the unregulated, profit-making businesses to subsidize them. And it is entirely possible that the same thing would happen if ISPs were treated as utilities and were not using TV, phone or other high-profit services to subsidize Internet access.
No, not unless you would like your Internet access technologies refreshed and upgraded about as often as your water pipes or electric lines are. Which is to say approximately never.
The story is "slow news day" Slashdot click bait (see also Snowden, Assange, Android vs. iOS fanboy wars) that has been hashed and re-hashed endlessly. Some people think Comcast is right not to give free peering bandwidth to non-peers like Level3 and Netflix. Other people think it is incumbent upon Comcast to give free peering to Netflix or Level3 anyway because it will improve the experience of their paying subscribers. Both sides argue vociferously and neither convinces the other of anything. Move along, nothing to see here.
Your brain cells will thank you for reading just about anything else on the Internet, with the exception of foxnews.com or pitchfork media.
Like we'll be able to afford popcorn when the only two suppliers of it are WalMart and Amazon.
Yes, you will. In fact, that's the whole point - people shop at Amazon and Wal-Mart because it saves them money. Both are known widely for leveraging their scale and supply chain efficiencies to sell goods for much lower costs than any competitors.
If you're trying to suggest that eventually Amazon and Wal-Mart will be the only two employers in the US, then that's a different argument. Wal-Mart is well-known for low wages, but Amazon's employees are typically paid in a range that is high vs. the US median, but low vs. other high tech companies. Living in Seattle, I know some of my Amazon employee friends seem underpaid at $100-$120K/year around here, but I doubt that figure would get them much sympathy in most of the country.
GSM phones will not talk to VoLTE phone with the current LTE revisions. A T-Mobile VoLTE phone cannot talk to an AT&T VoLTE phone
Kinda sorta correct but only in a very narrow sense of "talk to." True, you can't currently roam across VoLTE carriers - which is why all these phones will still carry 3G chips for a long time to come. HOWEVER, when you make a VoLTE call, the carrier routes it back to their PSTN switches, and where it goes from there is immaterial - to a land line, to another carrier, to a data-less feature phone, wherever. So it's not like having a VoLTE phone means you can only call other VoLTE users on the same carrier - you can call whomever you want, wherever. It's just the VoLTE capability itself on that phone that is restricted to where you can use it.
You are correct and I mis-spoke... what I meant to say was that the XB-70 never entered service. How much was the 2707 really based on the XB-70? I would be surprised if North American had shared much of their XB-70 knowledge with a competitor (Boeing).
How about worst for the money? It could be the best plane ever made and still qualify.
At least it will eventually fly. All the "worst ever" list would consist of massively expensive R&D efforts that never produced a flying aircraft, like the XB-70 Valkyrie, the Boeing 2707, or to a lesser extent ones that were cancelled but had some of their R&D incorporated into a different aircraft like the B-1A. Aircraft that were expensive to develop and saw only a few flights would also top that list, like the Tupolev Tu-144 SST or the Hughes "Spruce Goose".
The F35 has been a huge clusterf**k - largely because it had some wholly unrealistic goals to start out with (*cough* V/STOL *cough*) - but aviation history is full of clusterf**ks that out-clusterf**k it by a significant margin.
Why the over-reaction? Ooh, we have a treaty that has been negotiated in secret for a year. Of course, it tends to ignore that 1.) ALL treaties are negotiated in secret, and 2.) treaties do not take force in the United States unless voted on and ratified by the US Senate, which will certainly take every opportunity to publicly expose and fight over every last detail. Never mind, that's enough reason to have a revolution!
Read up sometime on the spirit of 1789 and how it resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents, shattered the lives of millions and embroiled Europe in a series of wars that would last for 20 years. I'd recommend Citizens by Simon Schama.
They feed you bullshit about "reign of terror"...
WTF are you talking about? Are you seriously denying the existence of the Reign of Terror from the Storming of the Bastille through the Thermidorean Reaction and even after? Why is that bullshit? It was a very, very shameful and terrible time in human history, and is extremely well documented. The same thing tends to happen in many revolutions by the way, where the revolutionaries "eat their own" and make life difficult for everyone in the process - see the USSR after Lenin's death while Stalin consolidated power. Again, try some serious historical reading.
It is very fair to say that it is good that France got rid of its monarchy. It is not a fair or smart thing at all to say that the revolution of 1789 with all its terrible aspects and consequences was a good thing to be emulated or reprised.
As soon as they realise they'll make more money without it, they'll stop using it.
Nice idea, but you could be waiting a very long time.The only two times I'm aware of this happening is in music downloads and old video games (e.g. GOG.com). Why these two markets? Because a song or an ancient game past its prime is a "cheap" asset that there's little for the content provider to lose on. Nothing has happened yet in the higher dollar-purchase value markets of movies, TV, e-books, AAA video games or AAA productivity software titles to convince the content creators that DRM isn't making them more money than if they got rid of it.
Not to say it might not happen someday, but for now content providers appear to have done the math on their more valuable assets (i.e. anything that isn't a $0.99 song or a five-dollar retro videogame) and decided DRM isn't hurting them, it's helping. So don't hold your breath.
The worst thing the cable company ever did was refuse to give me free TV with my internet.
WHY the hell would they do that? They pay lots of money for those TV channels. You would not be paying them any money for them. Why, from their perspective, is that bad?
Maybe did you mean that was the best thing they ever did, since your life is more "productive and lively" with no TV for the last five years?
I'm amazed Americans still pay for them. In most other countries any sort of contract comes with a few thousand free SMS per month. I pay about $15 for 5000 texts, 300 minutes and "unlimited" data. Includes 4G.
I'm very curious. What country are you in? What does "4G" mean to you (LTE, HSPA+, WiMAX)? What are the throughput speeds? Is there any cap?
Perhaps, but my wife is neither a fairy nor a ballerina, and our daughter still latched onto those pretty quickly. All this despite the absolute minimum of exposure to "girly" mass media.
I'm not trying to suggest that all gender traits are inherent rather than socialized. I'm just saying that not all gender traits are socialized rather than inherent.
Also, I would really prefer that my wife not dress like a coal miner.
The problem is all those damn Disney movies parents use as babysitters.
Not necessarily. When we had our first girl, my wife and I deliberately kept her away from all things Disney and princess-y to avoid just this situation.
Guess what happened? By age two, she was already trying to wear mommy's high heels and had firmly decided her future vocation would be fairy ballerina - all without ever having seen a Disney/Barbie/whatever TV show, not having any dress-up dolls, or any of the other stereotypical toys that I had always assumed were what caused the gender role identification in young girls. It turns out that some little girls just love "girly" things because it's baked into their DNA somewhere.
Attrition.org has an excellent summary of all the different smells of bullshit that emanate from this guy.
I have no dog in this fight - I have literally never heard of "Ira Winkler" before today, at least that I remember. But from a quick review, the linked page seems needlessly argumentative and dismissive. Do you really need to take shots at people for saying cliches like "opinions are like a**holes - everybody has one?" Is that a reason to disqualify this guy from having an authoritative voice?
Again, I don't know this guy and there may be dozens of reasons to blow him off as a blowhard douchebag. The linked article, however, seemed very biased and did not appear to provide those reasons conclusively. Can anyone provide a link to something resembling an impartial view of this guy and his work?
You mean photos of illicit activities.
No, he means take illicit photos. Not to get in the way of a good conspiracy theory, but there are many highly sensitive areas on a US nuclear submarine that certain foreign powers would love to get pictures of for competitive intelligence purposes. That's what they're worried about, not some coverup of the Navy heartlessly waterboarding harp seals or giving blue whales torpedo enemas.