Here on Slashdot many of us have been championing Internet freedom for years, except that we call it net neutrality. Oh wait; Ron Paul is AGAINST net neutrality regulation. Labeling this pig as the opposite of what it really is doesn't change the fact that it's a pig.
I agree with you on one and a half points.
The government should certainly stop intruding into people's personal lives. Among other things, that means calling off the foolish war on drugs. We've been waging that war forever; drugs won, let's move on.
We should reduce spending. The prime candidate for reduction is military spending. We need to stop waging wars in places we have no business being.
I disagree on reducing the size of government overall. My biggest problem with Obamacare is that it doesn't go far enough; what we really need is a single payer system. Yes, that would mean more government spending, but it would mean no more spending overall. The current system of multiple private insurance carriers, most of them for-profit, is horribly inefficient; we could provide health care for EVERY American for no more money than we are spending now by eliminating the waste of the status quo.
I also disagree on reducing regulations. Recent history has shown that we desperately need more financial regulation, not less. We need more environmental regulation, not less. And we somehow need to rein in the current uncontrolled political spending, though it appears that we will need a constitutional amendment to do it.
Health insurance in Massachusetts is not obscenely expensive compared to other similar states where incomes and the cost of living are high. Fair comparisons would be places like New York and California, not the Midwest or the deep South. You have to be careful to compare apples to apples; the Romneycare act in Massachusetts (not its official name but it's nice to remind people where it came from) sets minimum standards for what qualifies as a suitable insurance policy, and many of the cheap policies you see elsewhere would not make the cut.
The other thing about that $1000 cost is that if you are poor, the state will help you pay it. And the bar for "poor" is higher in Massachusetts than in states with a lower cost of living.
First, it's difficult to make anything that's 100% US-made; if nothing else, raw materials such as metals are likely to come from elsewhere. Making anything electronic is pretty much impossible; there are no remaining US suppliers for many components, and even if there were the rare earths used in semiconductor manufacturing would have to be imported.
Google could go farther in the direction of US manufacturing. Notably, they could have the circuit boards made and populated here. But that complicates manufacturing because it means that the supply chain is stretched, as most of the important component sources are in the Far East, so choosing not to do that is understandable.
... just a shortage of infrastructure. One of the basic principles of cellular networks is that you can increase capacity by building more cells and reusing spectrum in the spatial dimension. You can repeat the process almost infinitely; when you reach the point where walking around a room would switch you to a different cell you have gone too far. And for moving vehicles the limit is reached a bit sooner because the handoffs have overhead; a cell handoff every second would probably bring the network to a standstill. But the vehicles are probably using less bandwidth than the stationary users (even if you ARE watching a movie in your car you're probably not watching it in HD), so you could built a mixed network with high-bandwidth, high-density cells for stationary users and larger-range, lower-bandwidth cells for mobile.
Before anybody says "but that would cost too much!", I'm only talking about TECHNOLOGICAL feasibility. It might cost too much to build the additional cells and/or be politically infeasible to build them. But note that RF exposure from the new smaller cells isn't as serious a problem as it might seem; they will be closer to your house (bad) but operate at lower power levels (good).
I see a huge potential problem lurking with whitespace devices. What happens when additional licensed broadcasters come along and the whitespaces that these devices are counting on are no longer available? There will be a large installed base of users who will suddenly be very unhappy...
In many organizations these days (including just about any tech company) it's the landlines that are the luxury, people use their cell phones for just about everything. Brown's actions may require a major cultural change in some state offices and inconvenience workers; perhaps he should consider decommissioning the landlines in those offices instead.
First, some people might be buying 3D sets because they are top of the line sets that offer good performance in other ways, and the 3D capability is just coming along for the ride. Second, some might be buying them to use as 120Hz displays for computer gaming. Third, some might plan to buy glasses in the future but are waiting for more compelling 3D titles - Avatar anyone? (Frankly, given the timing of the release of 3D TV, I was shocked when Avatar wasn't the flagship release for it.)
I don't agree about ATSC being better; in fact I think the FCC should have adopted the proposal circa 2000 to abandon it and switch to DVB-T. (At the time there were few ATSC transmitters or receivers, so even if manufacturers had been forced to buy them all back the cost would have been low.) Although it offers a bit more range than DVB-T at the same power level, it has much worse multipath behavior. So you pick up a few distant rural viewers (who can put up better antennas or switch to satellite TV) but lose a lot of urban viewers (who have fewer options; they can't put up antennas because they don't own their property).and development of mobile ATSC receivers is impossible (at least with current technology; it's possible that some future system incorporating advanced multipath elimination could fix that.)
NTSC vs PAL was a wash; each had advantages and disadvantages. HD Radio on FM is technically superior (but marred by the onerous licensing) because it has multichannel capability; on AM both systems in hybrid mode are fundamentally flawed and I don't see digital-only AM broadcasting happening here in the US. CDMA is also technically superior to GSM, so much so that all the 3G standards worldwide are based on it -- but the US cell phone market has probably been hurt more by the lack of a single standard than helped by the superiority of CDMA. (Similarly, the use of 850 and 1900MHz bands is technically better than the 900 and 1800MHz bands used in Europe -- using two bands that are not harmonically related makes it much easier to collocate cell sites for both.)
Let's see... if I have an internet-connected phone I have a choice of at least 10,000 internet radio stations, plus other ways to get music. Adding an FM tuner gives me another 20 radio stations, some of which are probably also available on the internet. That's a statistically insignificant additional amount of choice.
FM tuners are nice if device manufacturers want to include them. But I just can't see the case for a mandate.
This post is somewhat inaccurate; Linden Lab has not open sourced the Second Life server. There is, however, an open source project called OpenSim that is developing a server that implements the Second Life protocols and which can be used with an SL viewer.
The restrictions that Linden Lab has announced actually sound reasonable to me. Basically they're saying that you can't break the system, you can't mask your identity (which would make it impossible for them to enforce bans), and if you steal content they can ask you to delete it.
The devil will be in the details; now that they are starting up a program of approved third party viewers, will they approve them in a timely manner? Will they approve all viewers that comply with the reasonable restrictions announced so far, or will they ban viewers for other reasons? Time will tell.
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Sadly, Michael Palin is ineligible; he's not a native born US citizen.
Here on Slashdot many of us have been championing Internet freedom for years, except that we call it net neutrality. Oh wait; Ron Paul is AGAINST net neutrality regulation. Labeling this pig as the opposite of what it really is doesn't change the fact that it's a pig.
I agree with you on one and a half points. The government should certainly stop intruding into people's personal lives. Among other things, that means calling off the foolish war on drugs. We've been waging that war forever; drugs won, let's move on. We should reduce spending. The prime candidate for reduction is military spending. We need to stop waging wars in places we have no business being. I disagree on reducing the size of government overall. My biggest problem with Obamacare is that it doesn't go far enough; what we really need is a single payer system. Yes, that would mean more government spending, but it would mean no more spending overall. The current system of multiple private insurance carriers, most of them for-profit, is horribly inefficient; we could provide health care for EVERY American for no more money than we are spending now by eliminating the waste of the status quo. I also disagree on reducing regulations. Recent history has shown that we desperately need more financial regulation, not less. We need more environmental regulation, not less. And we somehow need to rein in the current uncontrolled political spending, though it appears that we will need a constitutional amendment to do it.
Health insurance in Massachusetts is not obscenely expensive compared to other similar states where incomes and the cost of living are high. Fair comparisons would be places like New York and California, not the Midwest or the deep South. You have to be careful to compare apples to apples; the Romneycare act in Massachusetts (not its official name but it's nice to remind people where it came from) sets minimum standards for what qualifies as a suitable insurance policy, and many of the cheap policies you see elsewhere would not make the cut. The other thing about that $1000 cost is that if you are poor, the state will help you pay it. And the bar for "poor" is higher in Massachusetts than in states with a lower cost of living.
First, it's difficult to make anything that's 100% US-made; if nothing else, raw materials such as metals are likely to come from elsewhere. Making anything electronic is pretty much impossible; there are no remaining US suppliers for many components, and even if there were the rare earths used in semiconductor manufacturing would have to be imported. Google could go farther in the direction of US manufacturing. Notably, they could have the circuit boards made and populated here. But that complicates manufacturing because it means that the supply chain is stretched, as most of the important component sources are in the Far East, so choosing not to do that is understandable.
The other key read is Peopleware — Productive Projects and Teams.
... just a shortage of infrastructure. One of the basic principles of cellular networks is that you can increase capacity by building more cells and reusing spectrum in the spatial dimension. You can repeat the process almost infinitely; when you reach the point where walking around a room would switch you to a different cell you have gone too far. And for moving vehicles the limit is reached a bit sooner because the handoffs have overhead; a cell handoff every second would probably bring the network to a standstill. But the vehicles are probably using less bandwidth than the stationary users (even if you ARE watching a movie in your car you're probably not watching it in HD), so you could built a mixed network with high-bandwidth, high-density cells for stationary users and larger-range, lower-bandwidth cells for mobile. Before anybody says "but that would cost too much!", I'm only talking about TECHNOLOGICAL feasibility. It might cost too much to build the additional cells and/or be politically infeasible to build them. But note that RF exposure from the new smaller cells isn't as serious a problem as it might seem; they will be closer to your house (bad) but operate at lower power levels (good).
I see a huge potential problem lurking with whitespace devices. What happens when additional licensed broadcasters come along and the whitespaces that these devices are counting on are no longer available? There will be a large installed base of users who will suddenly be very unhappy...
In many organizations these days (including just about any tech company) it's the landlines that are the luxury, people use their cell phones for just about everything. Brown's actions may require a major cultural change in some state offices and inconvenience workers; perhaps he should consider decommissioning the landlines in those offices instead.
First, some people might be buying 3D sets because they are top of the line sets that offer good performance in other ways, and the 3D capability is just coming along for the ride. Second, some might be buying them to use as 120Hz displays for computer gaming. Third, some might plan to buy glasses in the future but are waiting for more compelling 3D titles - Avatar anyone? (Frankly, given the timing of the release of 3D TV, I was shocked when Avatar wasn't the flagship release for it.)
No, they bought a chip designer. Sun was fabless; the SPARC chips were manufactured elsewhere.
I don't agree about ATSC being better; in fact I think the FCC should have adopted the proposal circa 2000 to abandon it and switch to DVB-T. (At the time there were few ATSC transmitters or receivers, so even if manufacturers had been forced to buy them all back the cost would have been low.) Although it offers a bit more range than DVB-T at the same power level, it has much worse multipath behavior. So you pick up a few distant rural viewers (who can put up better antennas or switch to satellite TV) but lose a lot of urban viewers (who have fewer options; they can't put up antennas because they don't own their property).and development of mobile ATSC receivers is impossible (at least with current technology; it's possible that some future system incorporating advanced multipath elimination could fix that.) NTSC vs PAL was a wash; each had advantages and disadvantages. HD Radio on FM is technically superior (but marred by the onerous licensing) because it has multichannel capability; on AM both systems in hybrid mode are fundamentally flawed and I don't see digital-only AM broadcasting happening here in the US. CDMA is also technically superior to GSM, so much so that all the 3G standards worldwide are based on it -- but the US cell phone market has probably been hurt more by the lack of a single standard than helped by the superiority of CDMA. (Similarly, the use of 850 and 1900MHz bands is technically better than the 900 and 1800MHz bands used in Europe -- using two bands that are not harmonically related makes it much easier to collocate cell sites for both.)
Let's see... if I have an internet-connected phone I have a choice of at least 10,000 internet radio stations, plus other ways to get music. Adding an FM tuner gives me another 20 radio stations, some of which are probably also available on the internet. That's a statistically insignificant additional amount of choice. FM tuners are nice if device manufacturers want to include them. But I just can't see the case for a mandate.
This post is somewhat inaccurate; Linden Lab has not open sourced the Second Life server. There is, however, an open source project called OpenSim that is developing a server that implements the Second Life protocols and which can be used with an SL viewer. The restrictions that Linden Lab has announced actually sound reasonable to me. Basically they're saying that you can't break the system, you can't mask your identity (which would make it impossible for them to enforce bans), and if you steal content they can ask you to delete it. The devil will be in the details; now that they are starting up a program of approved third party viewers, will they approve them in a timely manner? Will they approve all viewers that comply with the reasonable restrictions announced so far, or will they ban viewers for other reasons? Time will tell.