CS/CDMA is not dialing a modem at 14kbps. It is sending data instead of voice over individual "slot" and then using a modem on the cellular->POTS transition, which is the same way that GPS data worked before GPRS came out. Running a modem over digital speach compression is a very Bad Thing.
I'm not sure if you'd call the FCC breaking up spectrum a bad idea. Sure, it's lead to some standards clash, but it also means that there's more of an incentive to roll out new technology. Remember, CDMA is from Qualcom and was first rolled out in the US, because GSM wasn't the legislated standard.
Nope. Completely different protocol stacks, slightly different modulation format.
Europe uses GSM and now UMTS, and there's no option to use something better, because GSM/UMTS is The Law.
America lets you use whatever the heck you want to. So Verizon uses CDMA.
Although, Vodaphone owns a chunk of Verizon Wireless. I'm glad it has the Verizon name and not the Vodaphone name. My friends would get tired of me referring to my "Bone-A-Phone" all of the time.
Ummm... Verizon has a EV-DO card that can get in the megabit range. And it downgrades to lower grades of CDMA if you are out of EV-DO range. So there *is* a card just like that already out here.
Also remember that the phones available are targeted at individual markets. It's not like there's some brand new extra-cool battery technology that they've got in Europe, it may just be that the average American consumer wants different features than a Japanese or European consumer. It's either that Americans want different features, better battery life, less cost, etc.
I mean, really. Does the lack of state-of-the-art Japanese toilets with sophisticated controls in America mean that we're behind or something? No, it just means that we prefer a simpler way to take a crap!
Think about it this way. Microsoft sees Google as a competitor, not as a partner now.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Google is primarily interested in making sure that Mozilla/Firefox does well, simply because Mozilla/Firefox can't be used against Google in the same way that IE can. Which fits into their world-domination-without-being-evil thing because nobody's going to pay them for a web browser anyway.
See, that's a meaningless platitude. Of course, there's always money to be made as a last-mile provider.
The problem is, the ILECs (that's the technical term for the local phone company) aren't always allowed to roll out cable and WiMAX how they would like. Furthermore, if they did try to roll it out, they know very little about it, so it's not a guarantee that they'd end up losing the market anyway. Think of the online book market. Sure, the incumbent bookstores managed to have some web presence, but the real company that ended up as the online bookstore people tend to think about wasn't one of the incumbent providers.
Or think about AOL Time Warner. Time Warner spent a bunch of money to pick up AOL and look where that's gotten them!
The thing you need to remember is that VoIP has very little to do with where the ILECs want to go, and the article points this out. The phone company was dragged kicking-and-screaming into the Internet-DSL market mostly because they wanted to preserve their frame-relay/ISDN/Modem-line market and because the CLECs that they grudingly let into the market were using it. DSL wasn't even invented necessarily to do IP traffic, they wanted to be able to do streaming phone services with it.
So, in the end, the phone companies are generally interested in the data-providers they compete with, not with innovation. If the phone company just provides bandwidth and no value-added services, that just means that the cable/WiMAX/etc. providers have won and they have lost.
See, most people fall into the trap where they expect companies to act logically, as viewed by an external observer. And this is a logical fallicy, because they do act logically, but only when viewed as an insider.
So, yes, it's very clear that the ultimate result *should* be two competing last-mile providers, representing pieces of the phone and cable companies respectively, plus wireless providers, plus companies offering layered phone, data, and video connectivity to your connection. But none of the incumbent providers with wire in the ground are interested at all in this, except to take out their competition.
Because, you are requiring a company that has been making money for the past hundered years on the PSTN network suddenly drop everything and go towards something that may or may not actually make them money.
Remember, the more VoIP comes out, the more able you are to write off your current provider. With VoIP, you can just have a cable modem or WiMAX service and no phone line at all. That's not good for the incumbent PSTN providers.
Uhh... If you want to create a massive boom, it's easy. Just get enough drums of explosive, pile them into a nice stack, and set them off. The whole MOAB thing is making it so that it is compact enough to mount on a bomber and with guidance systems.
I mean, really. Amonium Nitrate and Fuel Oil is easy for any government to get ahold of in large enough quantities to set off a pretty big boom if you want to make a point.
First, a thermonuclear bomb will create a double pulse. A regular old nuclear bomb only creates a single pulse of light. The double pulse is because the fission explosion that is required to set off the fusion blast.
Doesn't matter. The planet is wired with detectors at this point to catch any "anomolous" explosions, through a variety of methods, in order to ensure compliance with the test ban treaty.
And second, you are using a poor rip of the wikipedia. Remember, just because one *can* fork and republish the content of a GFDL-protected work, doesn't make it a good idea.
Actually, that's the funny part about police cars. They are very careful about which cars are allowed to do pursuit. It's the Crown Vic and one other.
The problem is that, until very recently, a police car *must* be rear wheel drive. To change that requires a lot of retraining of police officers because all of the RWD stunts don't work anymore.
And, of course, all of the newer cars are front wheel drive, so it's awfully hard in general to convince a car company to make a hotrod RWD sedan *just* for the police market.
Would you accept a pacemaker that was made by a "good company" that wasn't "necessarily adequately tested"?
Is a voting machine any different than a pacemaker? If a pacemaker fails, you die. Consider that every election features some real whacko candidates. What if voting machines conspired to elect a whacko to presidental office? Do you really want to think how many people would be killed if we a madman in the Whitehouse?
The problem is that Diebold assured the technically inept California voting folks that they were perfectly able to build a good system. And then lied. And have been knowingly breaking the law. And are trying to still profit from this by charging as much as possible for printers so that there is a verifiable paper record of the votes, to fix *their* decided security holes.
I mean, really, do you *know* that they haven't been inserting loopholes? Of course not. There's a variety of ways that they can mess with the machines. We just don't know and, since each voter has neither the ability nor the knowlege to dissassemble their voting machine to ensure that it is properly recording votes, we *can't* know.
I mean, HDTV is great stuff, don't get me wrong, but it's *differen't*. It's incredibly incredibly incredibly *sharp* in ways that film and NTSC are not.
Which drives production crews up the wall, because all of the usual stunts used to make people look good on screen don't work anymore. Local newscasters get hit with this one hard because all of the pastey makeup and wigs and whatnot that they've been using since the early days look really wretched and fake on HD.
I imagine that this will be even worse with your average porn princess.
Really, the revolution came with decent semi-pro 16:9 DV camcorders; HD isn't necessarily going to do much more for the underground cinema market. In the end, it's the crew that makes the difference, not the camera. About the only thing that can be done is making cameras with larger image sensors so that it will have depth of field like a real camera.
Well, the central assumption is that without some sort of a state-wide standard, there's no way of knowing that somebody's not going to have huge knowlege gaps.
It's really a nasty, tricky problem that you can't simplify. One one hand, bad teachers slip through the cracks with no way of knowing for sure that they are bad teachers. On the other hand, most teachers teach to the test. Oh yeah, and if you let the superintendant decide if a teacher is properly good, you can have a bad superintendent fire good teachers instead of bad teachers.
And, at the same time, trying to change too much stuff too fast also ends up ending political careers. Because you just know that if they were to say tomorrow "OK, we'll get rid of *all* standardized testing for students" it makes a great soundbite for somebody's political opponent.
Oh yeah, and if we privatized all schooling, you'd have a new set of problems, too. There was a lovely little case out in California of some sort of outside-of-school board-oversight school was found to be teaching all kinds of clearly incorrect crap.
My point? Well, there's no simple solutions, no simple answers, and trying to think that there are some will just cause new and different problems.
See, the problem is that everybody always says, "Hey, let's cut XXXXX and give the money we spent on it to YYYYYYY", where XXXX is something they feel is not necessary, and YYYYYY is something they wish there was more money for.
It doesn't work out so well in practice and often causes weird problems. If they were to halve the military budget tomorrow, cancel the F-22, etc. all of the sudden, you'd have a bunch of GIs, who made the military their career, out of a job, and you'd end up shutting down a lot of industries. All of the sudden, nobody wants to enter the aerospace engineering field because there aren't any jobs anymore. All of the sudden, all of the military-related research and stuff that usually ends up crossing over into civilian-related industries (Remember that the Boeing jet airliners are out because the Air Force bankrolled parts of their development) Ten years later, the last of the baby boomer engineers are retired and there's nobody to design any sort of aircraft at all. And a bunch of well-educated engineers suddenly don't have a big income because there's too many engineers and not enough projects and it's effecting the rest of the economy because various parts of the upper, middle, and lower classes are suddenly broke and not spending anything.
You can make the exact same argument about a lot of stuff. In the end, there's no magical wand that you can wave on the budget to make problems go away.
The one thing you have to remember about European socialism is that it doesn't work out as well as you'd think. As you travel farther towards socialism, your economic efficency goes way down. Granted, a laisez-faire economy where there are no government services at all is going to be very unhappy, but I've never been entirely convinced that using the Europeans as a model is the world's greatest idea. Sure there's great stuff to emulate, but there's a lot of stuff that sounds like a great idea but isn't.
My big point? The world and it's functioning is very complex and interdependent and there's a consistent bunch of evidence that points to decisions made with the best of intentions where the cure is worse than the disease.
I think the real problem is that if you do require some sort of uniform, it's almost guaranteed that people will try to make money off of it. Which means that parents complain because they are spending far too much money on uniforms that could be spent elsewhere.
Gangs shooting people because they wear the wrong colors is just stupid. If you want to help people not get shot by gang members, get rid of gangs, don't think that preventing them from having a color to fixate upon means that the problem is solved.
See, I don't think that you can treat your experience at a particular Jesuit high school as the solution for everything.
I've been to private, religious, and public schooling, so I figure that I can talk about it intelligently.
I've been to a catholic grade school where I feel, 20 years later, where they were trying to brainwash us into thinking *their* views. We all feared what would happen had Regan not been re-elected in 84, because the Democrats were in the league with the commies.
I've been to a Jesuit high school where the Catholic position was presented, yet it was clearly noted that these things were between us and God. And where I got what I felt was a very balanced view on history in places. But even there, there was some really questionable and wrong teachings.
Really, is it the suit that makes the good student, or is it the school that just happens to require pressed pants, starched shirts, etc. that makes the good student? It may have very well been that your school was able to produce such good graduates simply because only people who cared about having their kids well educated sent their kids there and the outward signs have absolutely nothing to do with it.
The problem with the "best" way to do education is that kids spend a *lot* of time in school. It may have been that the only thing that made the difference between a senator and a bum is that some teacher in the third grade did something completely inconsequential that changed everything that nobody in question remembers. But how do you figure out exactly why a student turns out the way that they did in this case? There's no way to do it, so people think that all you need to do is require a uniform, or allow the teachers to assault the students, or some package of items like that. The fun bit about these sorts of psychological projects is that everybody's unique therefore there's no really good way to be sure that you are actually measuring something or not. It may be something as simple as the placebo effect and if there were two schools with equally good teaching, but one of them was presented as a "Smart kid's school" that one would turn out consistently better students.
It's also interesting to note (This is how I found about this) that Russia also self insures.
Which had a lot of folks biting their nails when the Russian Service Module was launched, because the prevaling opinion was that if it didn't make it up into orbit, Russia wasn't going to be able to have a replacement any time soon. The US Owned/Russian built-and-launched FGB module at least had the FGB-2 as backup.
At any rate, it's never a good idea to actively wish for disaster. Bad karma and stuff. If it does blow the crap out of the cape and destroy the shuttle program, it *might* be a blessing in disguise because it will finally free up that chunk of the budget. Or it could end up with the US having no non-military space program and the ISS and any dreams of Moon or Mars exploration gone like shooting stars -- literally in the case of the ISS.
See, the problem is that you either can have subsidy locks allowed and therefore have cheap phones, or you can't. About the only thing that could be done is to force all providers to make available non-subsidy-locked phones and/or provide an explicit date at which you can request to have your phone unlocked.
You can't just wave a legal "magic wand" and take away all of the problems of the world. Cell phones will be $200-300 more if they were sold without a subsidy-lock.
Verizon, albeit selfishly, has actually been very much *for* people switching cariers, being the only provider that was saying that local number portability was OK. They, of course, are only doing it because they figured they could use it to make a buck off their really good coverage area.
If you'd check the news, you'd note that, in fact, Cingular/AT&T *will* be eliminating the old IS-136 TDMA networks entirely and moving to GSM in the 800/850 MHz band right now and also are rolling out UMTS in the 1900 MHz bands. This is the exact same WCDMA/UMTS/3GSM/whateverthehelltheywanttocallit standard as Europe is rolling out in the 2100 MHz bands, except it's in the 1900 MHz bands instead. In a few years, they will probably start moving UMTS down to the 800/850 MHz bands, at which point both Cingular/AT&T and Verizon will have CDMA-based service (which is the current performance leader) on the 800/850 MHz bands (which tend to have better range and go through walls better).
The problem is, just like with power, telephone service, and cable, there is no way to do a truly free market. There's only so much spectrum available, there's only so many cables that can be run through a particular area, etc. So, on some level or another, there has to be restrictions on the market. A truly free market is a Liberetarian myth.
The problem is that it really *didn't* work. Qualcom came up with CDMA, which is so far superior to the GSM air interface that the GSM folks licensed CDMA From Qualcom.
The problem is that government mandated standards create stagnation, not progress, here. Sure, when things are stabalized, eventually there needs to be a shakeout and most of the "also rans" need to be put to bed. But you need to do that at the right point in time.
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CS/CDMA is not dialing a modem at 14kbps. It is sending data instead of voice over individual "slot" and then using a modem on the cellular->POTS transition, which is the same way that GPS data worked before GPRS came out. Running a modem over digital speach compression is a very Bad Thing.
I'm not sure if you'd call the FCC breaking up spectrum a bad idea. Sure, it's lead to some standards clash, but it also means that there's more of an incentive to roll out new technology. Remember, CDMA is from Qualcom and was first rolled out in the US, because GSM wasn't the legislated standard.
Nope. Completely different protocol stacks, slightly different modulation format.
Europe uses GSM and now UMTS, and there's no option to use something better, because GSM/UMTS is The Law.
America lets you use whatever the heck you want to. So Verizon uses CDMA.
Although, Vodaphone owns a chunk of Verizon Wireless. I'm glad it has the Verizon name and not the Vodaphone name. My friends would get tired of me referring to my "Bone-A-Phone" all of the time.
Ummm... Verizon has a EV-DO card that can get in the megabit range. And it downgrades to lower grades of CDMA if you are out of EV-DO range. So there *is* a card just like that already out here.
Also remember that the phones available are targeted at individual markets. It's not like there's some brand new extra-cool battery technology that they've got in Europe, it may just be that the average American consumer wants different features than a Japanese or European consumer. It's either that Americans want different features, better battery life, less cost, etc.
I mean, really. Does the lack of state-of-the-art Japanese toilets with sophisticated controls in America mean that we're behind or something? No, it just means that we prefer a simpler way to take a crap!
Interesting, but you do have to remember that history doesn't repeat itself. We mess things up in new and different ways every time.
;)
Remember, Microsoft never tried to be a "good guy" company, they've always been young and ruthless.
So if Google does pull off a coup and become the "next" Microsoft, they may be bad, but they will definately be bad in a different way.
Or, of course, IBM could be a new evil enemy, instead.
It could be a lot of hype over nothing.
My personal suspicion is that they are going to just boost the Mozilla project. Or maybe just what I'd do if I ran the company.
I mean, think about it...
Cost of a team of 20 browser engineers: $2,000,000/yr
Not being able to be strongarmed by Microsoft IE: Priceless.
IE bug-for-bug compatability.
Think about it this way. Microsoft sees Google as a competitor, not as a partner now.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Google is primarily interested in making sure that Mozilla/Firefox does well, simply because Mozilla/Firefox can't be used against Google in the same way that IE can. Which fits into their world-domination-without-being-evil thing because nobody's going to pay them for a web browser anyway.
See, that's a meaningless platitude. Of course, there's always money to be made as a last-mile provider.
The problem is, the ILECs (that's the technical term for the local phone company) aren't always allowed to roll out cable and WiMAX how they would like. Furthermore, if they did try to roll it out, they know very little about it, so it's not a guarantee that they'd end up losing the market anyway. Think of the online book market. Sure, the incumbent bookstores managed to have some web presence, but the real company that ended up as the online bookstore people tend to think about wasn't one of the incumbent providers.
Or think about AOL Time Warner. Time Warner spent a bunch of money to pick up AOL and look where that's gotten them!
The thing you need to remember is that VoIP has very little to do with where the ILECs want to go, and the article points this out. The phone company was dragged kicking-and-screaming into the Internet-DSL market mostly because they wanted to preserve their frame-relay/ISDN/Modem-line market and because the CLECs that they grudingly let into the market were using it. DSL wasn't even invented necessarily to do IP traffic, they wanted to be able to do streaming phone services with it.
So, in the end, the phone companies are generally interested in the data-providers they compete with, not with innovation. If the phone company just provides bandwidth and no value-added services, that just means that the cable/WiMAX/etc. providers have won and they have lost.
See, most people fall into the trap where they expect companies to act logically, as viewed by an external observer. And this is a logical fallicy, because they do act logically, but only when viewed as an insider.
So, yes, it's very clear that the ultimate result *should* be two competing last-mile providers, representing pieces of the phone and cable companies respectively, plus wireless providers, plus companies offering layered phone, data, and video connectivity to your connection. But none of the incumbent providers with wire in the ground are interested at all in this, except to take out their competition.
Because, you are requiring a company that has been making money for the past hundered years on the PSTN network suddenly drop everything and go towards something that may or may not actually make them money.
Remember, the more VoIP comes out, the more able you are to write off your current provider. With VoIP, you can just have a cable modem or WiMAX service and no phone line at all. That's not good for the incumbent PSTN providers.
Actually, the US has something even better. Chemical sniffers on the SK-NK border. That's how we know that North Korea's been reprocessing fuel.
Well, that, and the US has the stuff to track any "anomolous" explosions in order to make sure that nobody's violating the test ban treaty.
Uhh... If you want to create a massive boom, it's easy. Just get enough drums of explosive, pile them into a nice stack, and set them off. The whole MOAB thing is making it so that it is compact enough to mount on a bomber and with guidance systems.
I mean, really. Amonium Nitrate and Fuel Oil is easy for any government to get ahold of in large enough quantities to set off a pretty big boom if you want to make a point.
Ummm.. Sorta...
First, a thermonuclear bomb will create a double pulse. A regular old nuclear bomb only creates a single pulse of light. The double pulse is because the fission explosion that is required to set off the fusion blast.
Doesn't matter. The planet is wired with detectors at this point to catch any "anomolous" explosions, through a variety of methods, in order to ensure compliance with the test ban treaty.
And second, you are using a poor rip of the wikipedia. Remember, just because one *can* fork and republish the content of a GFDL-protected work, doesn't make it a good idea.
Yes, and the bloody slot machines in Vegas have better security.
You are quite correct. It isn't fair to call them technically inept. ;)
Dude. The previous 3 messages called. They want their anti-bush party line back. ;)
Offtopic but.....
Actually, that's the funny part about police cars. They are very careful about which cars are allowed to do pursuit. It's the Crown Vic and one other.
The problem is that, until very recently, a police car *must* be rear wheel drive. To change that requires a lot of retraining of police officers because all of the RWD stunts don't work anymore.
And, of course, all of the newer cars are front wheel drive, so it's awfully hard in general to convince a car company to make a hotrod RWD sedan *just* for the police market.
So it is an effective lawsuit deterrent.
Would you accept a pacemaker that was made by a "good company" that wasn't "necessarily adequately tested"?
Is a voting machine any different than a pacemaker? If a pacemaker fails, you die. Consider that every election features some real whacko candidates. What if voting machines conspired to elect a whacko to presidental office? Do you really want to think how many people would be killed if we a madman in the Whitehouse?
The problem is that Diebold assured the technically inept California voting folks that they were perfectly able to build a good system. And then lied. And have been knowingly breaking the law. And are trying to still profit from this by charging as much as possible for printers so that there is a verifiable paper record of the votes, to fix *their* decided security holes.
I mean, really, do you *know* that they haven't been inserting loopholes? Of course not. There's a variety of ways that they can mess with the machines. We just don't know and, since each voter has neither the ability nor the knowlege to dissassemble their voting machine to ensure that it is properly recording votes, we *can't* know.
I'm not so sure about that...
I mean, HDTV is great stuff, don't get me wrong, but it's *differen't*. It's incredibly incredibly incredibly *sharp* in ways that film and NTSC are not.
Which drives production crews up the wall, because all of the usual stunts used to make people look good on screen don't work anymore. Local newscasters get hit with this one hard because all of the pastey makeup and wigs and whatnot that they've been using since the early days look really wretched and fake on HD.
I imagine that this will be even worse with your average porn princess.
Really, the revolution came with decent semi-pro 16:9 DV camcorders; HD isn't necessarily going to do much more for the underground cinema market. In the end, it's the crew that makes the difference, not the camera. About the only thing that can be done is making cameras with larger image sensors so that it will have depth of field like a real camera.
Well, the central assumption is that without some sort of a state-wide standard, there's no way of knowing that somebody's not going to have huge knowlege gaps.
It's really a nasty, tricky problem that you can't simplify. One one hand, bad teachers slip through the cracks with no way of knowing for sure that they are bad teachers. On the other hand, most teachers teach to the test. Oh yeah, and if you let the superintendant decide if a teacher is properly good, you can have a bad superintendent fire good teachers instead of bad teachers.
And, at the same time, trying to change too much stuff too fast also ends up ending political careers. Because you just know that if they were to say tomorrow "OK, we'll get rid of *all* standardized testing for students" it makes a great soundbite for somebody's political opponent.
Oh yeah, and if we privatized all schooling, you'd have a new set of problems, too. There was a lovely little case out in California of some sort of outside-of-school board-oversight school was found to be teaching all kinds of clearly incorrect crap.
My point? Well, there's no simple solutions, no simple answers, and trying to think that there are some will just cause new and different problems.
See, the problem is that everybody always says, "Hey, let's cut XXXXX and give the money we spent on it to YYYYYYY", where XXXX is something they feel is not necessary, and YYYYYY is something they wish there was more money for.
It doesn't work out so well in practice and often causes weird problems. If they were to halve the military budget tomorrow, cancel the F-22, etc. all of the sudden, you'd have a bunch of GIs, who made the military their career, out of a job, and you'd end up shutting down a lot of industries. All of the sudden, nobody wants to enter the aerospace engineering field because there aren't any jobs anymore. All of the sudden, all of the military-related research and stuff that usually ends up crossing over into civilian-related industries (Remember that the Boeing jet airliners are out because the Air Force bankrolled parts of their development) Ten years later, the last of the baby boomer engineers are retired and there's nobody to design any sort of aircraft at all. And a bunch of well-educated engineers suddenly don't have a big income because there's too many engineers and not enough projects and it's effecting the rest of the economy because various parts of the upper, middle, and lower classes are suddenly broke and not spending anything.
You can make the exact same argument about a lot of stuff. In the end, there's no magical wand that you can wave on the budget to make problems go away.
The one thing you have to remember about European socialism is that it doesn't work out as well as you'd think. As you travel farther towards socialism, your economic efficency goes way down. Granted, a laisez-faire economy where there are no government services at all is going to be very unhappy, but I've never been entirely convinced that using the Europeans as a model is the world's greatest idea. Sure there's great stuff to emulate, but there's a lot of stuff that sounds like a great idea but isn't.
My big point? The world and it's functioning is very complex and interdependent and there's a consistent bunch of evidence that points to decisions made with the best of intentions where the cure is worse than the disease.
They *have* tried school uniforms.
Nothing spectacular happened.
I think the real problem is that if you do require some sort of uniform, it's almost guaranteed that people will try to make money off of it. Which means that parents complain because they are spending far too much money on uniforms that could be spent elsewhere.
Gangs shooting people because they wear the wrong colors is just stupid. If you want to help people not get shot by gang members, get rid of gangs, don't think that preventing them from having a color to fixate upon means that the problem is solved.
See, I don't think that you can treat your experience at a particular Jesuit high school as the solution for everything.
I've been to private, religious, and public schooling, so I figure that I can talk about it intelligently.
I've been to a catholic grade school where I feel, 20 years later, where they were trying to brainwash us into thinking *their* views. We all feared what would happen had Regan not been re-elected in 84, because the Democrats were in the league with the commies.
I've been to a Jesuit high school where the Catholic position was presented, yet it was clearly noted that these things were between us and God. And where I got what I felt was a very balanced view on history in places. But even there, there was some really questionable and wrong teachings.
Really, is it the suit that makes the good student, or is it the school that just happens to require pressed pants, starched shirts, etc. that makes the good student? It may have very well been that your school was able to produce such good graduates simply because only people who cared about having their kids well educated sent their kids there and the outward signs have absolutely nothing to do with it.
The problem with the "best" way to do education is that kids spend a *lot* of time in school. It may have been that the only thing that made the difference between a senator and a bum is that some teacher in the third grade did something completely inconsequential that changed everything that nobody in question remembers. But how do you figure out exactly why a student turns out the way that they did in this case? There's no way to do it, so people think that all you need to do is require a uniform, or allow the teachers to assault the students, or some package of items like that. The fun bit about these sorts of psychological projects is that everybody's unique therefore there's no really good way to be sure that you are actually measuring something or not. It may be something as simple as the placebo effect and if there were two schools with equally good teaching, but one of them was presented as a "Smart kid's school" that one would turn out consistently better students.
Indeed.
As has been established by my sigfile, I hate my thinkpad.
Why thank you. ;)
It's also interesting to note (This is how I found about this) that Russia also self insures.
Which had a lot of folks biting their nails when the Russian Service Module was launched, because the prevaling opinion was that if it didn't make it up into orbit, Russia wasn't going to be able to have a replacement any time soon. The US Owned/Russian built-and-launched FGB module at least had the FGB-2 as backup.
At any rate, it's never a good idea to actively wish for disaster. Bad karma and stuff. If it does blow the crap out of the cape and destroy the shuttle program, it *might* be a blessing in disguise because it will finally free up that chunk of the budget. Or it could end up with the US having no non-military space program and the ISS and any dreams of Moon or Mars exploration gone like shooting stars -- literally in the case of the ISS.
See, the problem is that you either can have subsidy locks allowed and therefore have cheap phones, or you can't. About the only thing that could be done is to force all providers to make available non-subsidy-locked phones and/or provide an explicit date at which you can request to have your phone unlocked.
You can't just wave a legal "magic wand" and take away all of the problems of the world. Cell phones will be $200-300 more if they were sold without a subsidy-lock.
Verizon, albeit selfishly, has actually been very much *for* people switching cariers, being the only provider that was saying that local number portability was OK. They, of course, are only doing it because they figured they could use it to make a buck off their really good coverage area.
If you'd check the news, you'd note that, in fact, Cingular/AT&T *will* be eliminating the old IS-136 TDMA networks entirely and moving to GSM in the 800/850 MHz band right now and also are rolling out UMTS in the 1900 MHz bands. This is the exact same WCDMA/UMTS/3GSM/whateverthehelltheywanttocallit standard as Europe is rolling out in the 2100 MHz bands, except it's in the 1900 MHz bands instead. In a few years, they will probably start moving UMTS down to the 800/850 MHz bands, at which point both Cingular/AT&T and Verizon will have CDMA-based service (which is the current performance leader) on the 800/850 MHz bands (which tend to have better range and go through walls better).
The problem is, just like with power, telephone service, and cable, there is no way to do a truly free market. There's only so much spectrum available, there's only so many cables that can be run through a particular area, etc. So, on some level or another, there has to be restrictions on the market. A truly free market is a Liberetarian myth.
Well, that's what the Europeans did with GSM.
The problem is that it really *didn't* work. Qualcom came up with CDMA, which is so far superior to the GSM air interface that the GSM folks licensed CDMA From Qualcom.
The problem is that government mandated standards create stagnation, not progress, here. Sure, when things are stabalized, eventually there needs to be a shakeout and most of the "also rans" need to be put to bed. But you need to do that at the right point in time.