Of course it was fraud. That is only to be expected. No matter how hard we try, what lengths we are willing to go to, we will never be truly secure from cheating. I think that, if anyone could accept that, it would be technologists. We don't let viruses stop us from using the Internet, or computers in general, even though the damage they can cause is palpable.
So it does not matter if there is cheating in the primaries.
There is a bigger issue here. On one side, there is Obama, honest, decent, moral, a character right out of a Frank Capra film running the cleanest campaign in US history.
On the other side is the amoral, ruthless, old style politicians that will do literally anything to seize and hold power, characters straight out of a soap opera.
The American people have a clear choice here, the politics of hope and integrity, or the politics of fear and treachery. Let them cheat; cheat in every way they can. It is important that they do so. We Americans have to make a choice, at a national level, as to what our national character is, what it means to be an American, what our national values are.
For most of our history, up until the 1950's, we Americans have lived in fear of attack of one kind or another, and occasionally done some terrible things (like the American Japanese concentration camps in WWII), justified by "expediency". Not nearly as bad as what the rest of the world has done, but still, we let our terror lead us to some darks paths indeed.
It took a few years after the development of the atom bomb. but once we no longer lived in fear of attack, we set out to correct our mistakes of the past. The civil rights movement, environmentalism, a whole panoply of "moral" initiatives that lead us to be far more advanced ethically than most cultures. Not perfect, no, thats impossible to achieve, but we have come a very long way in two short generations.
And finally, we have come to a crossroads. With the whole world watching, with the future uncertain and fraught with challenges, we as a people, as a culture, as a republic are about to make a historic choice.
Do we return to the safe, old ways, where no action is unthinkable as long as we are guaranteed success, even if those fears that prompted us to those actions are imagined? Once we accept that cheating in the "little" things, like primaries, is acceptable, it is not so big a step to believe that that torture, and imprisonment without benefit of trial, is justified. And it is not much bigger a step to throw out the rule of law, let social connections determine what rights you possess.
That is the one future that is being offered in this election. It is attractive, in it's own way. As long as you are a member of a social group that is on top. you have little to fear. Of course, as the neoconservatives discovered, there is no guarantee you will always be the king of the hill. And it is safe, we have a much better chance of success, though what we will be like afterwards, is debatable.
Or do we decide that we have confidence in our abilities, as a culture, as a people, as a republic, to face the future proud and confident of our ability to handle whatever the challenges the future holds for us, to state that we know what we are, and that there are things we will NOT do, not out of fear that we might be punished, but out of belief in that our values are correct, that there is a difference between right and wrong, and that the choice is not all that hard to make.
As for me, I have never been one to hide, fearful of any noise from the outside. Win or lose, I, as an American, choose to face the future with hope, not fear, and believe that we Americans will succeed by our own merits, not by what depths we are willing to stoop to. I choose the rule of law, not privilege. There are many other Americans like me, from recent immigrants to families that have been here for generations. Obama is not our leader, he is just the representative of the choices we made about what we value, and how we wan
Since Blu Ray has already been cracked, what will happen is that the pirate industry starts transferring Blu Ray movies to HD-DVD, and without studio competition, there will be a MAJOR loss in revenue to those studios that support only Blu Ray.
Aw comon...did you think the piracy markets wouldn't notice this opportunity? There is a market, cheap production costs, cheap distribution costs (i.e. internet iso's) and one more major factor.
The Chinese HATE the Japanese for their atrocities in World War 2, one of which, the Rape of Nanjing, stirs incredibly strong emotions in Chinese worldwide even today. Because of Sony, Blu ray is perceived as Japanese. Screwing over a Japanese corporation would be widely popular in those provinces. A pirating operation in Nanjing would be effectively immune to government intervention, it is doubtful the government could even find enough officials willing to speak against it, let alone take action which would spark a major riot. In addition, most overseas Chinese would support a distribution channel.
Uhuh. It is pretty much a given that this will be a disaster for the studios. Piracy right now is just about convenience, once it become a political statement for a billion Chinese, however...
Of course, a major studio that supported HD-DVD, were to release a movie about the Rape of Nanjing, well, they would gain an enormous amount of good will with the billion plus moviegoers in the Chinese movie market, which would establish the dominance of HD-DVD regardles of what the west does. More importantly the Chinese might actually BUY rather than pirate the movie, just to make a point to the Japanese. Since it also would probably be the single most funded production in cinematic history, it is pretty much a given that it will happen sooner or later. The Chinese government has been trying to downplay this festering abcess in sino japanese relations, it has not been noticeably successful.
P.S. The Chinese suffering of World War 2 atrocities is not very well known in the west, which concentrated on the Nazi's. Among the Chinese, the memories are still fresh, the Japanese still treat the matter with denial (visiting the Yasukuni Shrine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasukuni_Shrine) and, if you are a westerner, you should read something about it, because it is going to be a major force in China's dealings with the world.
Can't say I am happy about such a destabilizing force in world politics, but ignoring it is like ignoring cancer, it is just going to make it a lot worse later.
One of Microsofts problems is that, for most users, there is no reason to upgrade from Office 2000 and WIndows XP. It is understandable that they would want to provide a reason. This, however, is exactly NOT it.
Given record retention laws, and the recency of documents in earlier formats, I think Microsoft has now made it ILLEGAL to upgrade, since the records will be effectively lost if they are unreadable.
More importantly, many third party providers of documents, for example, small businesses, only HAVE the earlier formats. Is Microsoft really expecting large companies to cut off tens of thousands of thier suppliers and millions of thier customers in order to upgrade?
And, of course, Adobe has this golden opportunity. Microsoft and Adobe are at war as much as Microsoft and Google, if not more. Google is just a threat to expansion, with one move, Adobe threatens to turn Microsofts cash cow into hamburger patties.
Here is what they should do. Adobe should help openoffice.org come up with a true, full PDF importer so businesses can then replace Microsoft Word with PDF as the storage format of choice.
This will strike at the heart of Microsoft in a way anything Google could do would not. It will also give an enormous boost to their Acrobat family of backend servers, and, with the proper tie ins, their Creative Studio line, as well.
More importantly, it will hit Microsoft share prices like an atomic bomb, as analysts start worrying about Microsoft's cash flow with limited new sales of Office. Added to the Vista woes, and something more than chairs will thrown in the Microsoft executive offices.
I have been following Microsoft closely from the very beginning. Right now, their dominance comes from their control of the desktop.
Google, which is trying to make the web browser replace the desktop, is a threat only to the extent they can achieve that goal. The problem with the web browser replacing the desktop is not technological, in this era of broadband, it is an achievable goal.
It is not, however, culturally or psychologically, achievable. In this era of "dirty tricks" replacing ethical behavior for even the most minor issues, people feel a lot better with their programs and data under their personal control.
Online mail from Yahoo and GMail is perfectly good if you don't about spying or tampering, but I run an hmailserver on my local machine for anything important, and I only keep it up when I am monitoring it. Same thing for office suites or any other programs where an office rival or personal enemy could gain an advantage by snooping or tampering. It is just common sense not to leave yourself vulnerable.
It is not not surprising that Google has experienced phenomenal growth, web advertising is profitable and is rapidly increasing in importance, and it fits in well with their web as desktop strategy. However, there is a very low barrier to entry, and Microsoft could crush them anytime it wants. All it had to do is offer more for advertising dollars than Google does, and with four times the revenue, they could outbid Google easily. If they were to buy, say, Ask.com, and throw some real advertising dollars behind it, Google would be at a tremendous disadvantage.
You see, the problem is that Google does NOT own the web browser, it just owns search. And it owns it only because people have no incentive to change. If Microsoft engaged a GOOD ad agency, one with a Tversky or a Lakoff mentality driving it, people could be easily convinced to change.
I really don't see what the fuss is about, The Internet and the World Wide Web has obviously changed distribution channels significantly. Many TV shows are now distributed at web sites within hours of their broadcast, legally.
There is no particular reason to believe that distribution function requires special entertainment skills anymore, and thus is highly devalued in terms of what portion of the revenue stream the distribution companies are entitled to.
This means that the production side of the business has a larger revenue stream which enables some new business models. One can easily envision a community based approach to studios, which is something like this:
Take a standard FOSS product like Drupal, and use one of the many "prediction market" modules (it seems like every college student writes one as a class project) to set up a site for a proposed movie and solicit internet "stock" to pay for creating it. In other words, the public "prevotes" the popularity of the movie. If the site doesn't raise enough capital to finance the movie, well, it probably woudl not have done well at the Box Office anyhow. For those traditional entertainment investors who like more risk, they could easily purchase more stock in a movie they think would exceed expectations.
If enough money is raised, the movie is produced, and everyone who bought the stock gets signon to see the movie at the site (Again, you could do this with Drupal modules. I have always wanted to do an Asset Management module for Internet multimedia distribution). Anyone ELSE who wants the movie has to buy access at the site to see it, and the money generated is distributed to the stock holders. Add in shares of the revenue stream from merchandise and advertising, and you have the potential of a VERY viable business model where studios are no longer necessary. DRM is minimal, and, in case, since potential pirates are also shareholders, why would they hurt their own revenue streams? ANyone still pirating at that price point would never have contributed to the revenue stream anyhow.
This really isn't very different from how movies are produced now, especially indies. The only real difference is that the risk of a badly performing movie is minimized, since the stock now has activist shareholders who are also the consumer market for the end product. Nothing gets green lighted unless the markets has already been precommited. The other difference is that, since the risk is minimized, the risk premium is also, and more value is returned to the small investors and the production staff.
I mean, how many Joss Whedon fans out there would not commit to say, $5 to finance another Firefly movie, especially if it guaranteed them free access to it when it came out? (Not that that would be a good thing, Firefly was his worst effort, in my opinion. I am waiting for Joss to remake "I Dream of Jeannie" as a BTVS prequel. Now THAT would be a movie I would invest in, if just to see how Joss pulled it off.)
There is plenty of great writers out there, the ones behind "Chuck" and "Joan of Arcadia" come to mind. There are a lot of people who would feel more comfortable investing in that then in some stock just because a CNBC elf promoted it.
And it is not just writers. You can use this method to securitize any large community base. One can easily see, say, popular right or left wing website s easily producing movies to fit their readership's interests. I mean, Fox News has a whole business model based on just that, and they do not even have good production values (or any kind of values, for that matter of fact).
We know that you can tap some real money from the internet, look at the US presidential campaign candidate funding, for example. And, judging by the voter turnout, a lot less people care about who is the next president than about the next Salma Hayek or Will Smith movie.
Anyone who believes that either Microsoft or Google are serious bad guys has little knowledge of what goes on in the real world, even in the tech sector. There are vast numbers of companies that are far more evil.
However, in this case, It doesn't matter whether Google gets Doubleclick or not.
There is a basic principle in economics, that states the natural order of things is a duopoly, with one company with 60% and the other with 40& of the market.
The reason for this is a basic American institution. ( An institution is the laws or social norms that govern the behavior of members of a culture)
The institution is this:
"Nobody can be trusted with all the power. In other words, it is in our best interest not to let anyone or any company accumulate too much power. As long as they are fighting each other, they are too busy to do anything bad to us. "
Google gets more than a 60% market share, customers will start pressuring for a alternative. They can't help it, institutions rule how they react en mass.
The only result of this is that Google shareholders are going to be might upset in a few years when this doesn't give Google dominance over the market. On the other hand,, I bet right now Microsoft is reframing (a la Lakoff) thier advertising strategy to take advantage of this.
A prediction. You are going to see Microsoft due some real damage to Google over the next year. In the past few months, Google has gone from "Do no Evil" to suspicion of being very evil. While part of this seems to be Google's fault, a lot of it seems to be due to Microsoft competitive Intelligence operations setting up Google for fall after fall. This doubleclick issue is just one of many pieces of rope that are coming together to form a noose around Googles ambitions.
And no, I am not in favor of Microsoft. Few people have more reason to hate Microsoft than me. But it is that I just wish Google leadership hired someone who had some idea of how to execute a strategy in the face of competitive intelligence operations, it is embarrassing how easily Google is being trashed.
Purely as a curiosity, isn't this a one shot weapon?
I mean, you fire it once, and every enemy battery in the immediate area locks onto this incredibly bright energy source in the sky and a couple of a seconds later, thousands of heat/light seeking AA drones obliterate the laser carrier plane... I mean, the enemy target has to be line of sight, by definition, which means the enemy has line of sight on the plane carrying the weapon as well.
More important question. Are they acting on behalf of a third party (say, a foreign telecomm) that would normally not be allowed to bid, or at least would generate serious public debate.
For example, Google is getting their butt kicked up around their ears in China by Baidu. I wonder if, say, a government sponsored access to the market along, say, the Yangtse tiver might be worth trading some spectrum rights in the US for. After all, what investor want to see is growth in market share, and Google would not have to actually legally assign the rights, just some quid pro quo deal that would give China access to most of the residential networks in the US, and the telecommuting traffic on them. Think of it as the obverse of the AT&T-NSA deal
*Sigh* Actually it is a lot more complicated than that.
Currently, there is an economic war going over China's industry and, while the US is currently winning (as near as anyone can tell), it is not very obvious. As part of that war, you are going to see a lot more reports like this in the next few months showing up as a runup to a McCarthy like campaign next year, with Chinese replacing Communists. That's doesn't mean it is not true, even "Tailgunner Joe" actually nailed lots of real communists along with the innocents.
On the other hand, that does not mean this is what it seems on face value. Google has a lot of "side deals" with China on various areas, which means, if this incident is not some individual entrepreneur (the question is why would anyone bother, China would not really care, and Baidu is hardly threatened by Google) then the PRC was applying some pressure against Google for some reason, and I am fairly certain it was NOT about internet sites.
I have absolutely no evidence except my intuition (and decades of studying Chinese institutional economics) on this, but I really think it is something involving that 700 mhz spectrum Google is bidding on. Either one of their competitors wants them out of the bidding if they win, or Google is bidding on behalf of some third party. Or maybe they just want to hurt Google, big time.
Whatever the cause, the plot twist is that it is probably part of a corporate espionage "boobytrap" set up by one of Googles competitors, I recognize the MO. It will be real interesting to see how it plays out. Bet it blows up in Googles face (figuratively speaking), and Google ends up in very hostile Senate hearings next year.
Actually, you can't give up your right to vote, because not voting is a type of voting; you are voting for the status quo.
In effect, by not voting, you are saying, "I am happy with the status quo", there are no issues I really care about. In a way, that is a testimony to the wonderful job the government is doing; most of the population considers the government "background noise", irrelevant to their daily lives, which is an excellent place for a democratic government to be.
In this thread, we hear a lot about differences between leaders, either in Congress, or in the Executive branch. But the leaders are not the ones who really decide what laws get enforced, and what direction society goes in.
Kennedy Kasselbaum (HIPPA) or Sarbanes Oxley? The first spawned a nice black market in medical records for debt collectors looking to locate people, and the second was just another way for accounting and consulting firms to siphon money from stockholders. The fact is, Congress passes laws and the bureaucracy and the private sector ignore, them, or interpret them to do the exact opposite. Even if someone in congress wanted to make a real change in society, by the time it got past the hundreds of others, it would be watered down to a meaningless gesture. Look at the records of the number of bills that die before getting voted on, for example.
The same is true for the leaders in the Executive branch. Do you really think that Bush is continuing the Iraq war all by himself? Look at his approval rating. he doesn't have that kind of personal support. It isn't even Bush plus the Senators that are blocking the Iraq withdrawal bill passed yesterday. It is the infrastructure, the social network behind them that pushing the war (for entirely different reasons than the ones stated publicly, by the way). That social network is not voters, with voting percentages so low, voters are ignorable. As long as you can buy enough media time, the job is yours, is the current thinking. No, that social network is members of the bureaucracy (mostly State and Defense) and the complex network of obligations and favors they are embedded in that are the real force behind the decisions.
And, counterintuitive as it may seem, that is the system working exactly as it was designed to do, to resist short term fads but adapt to long term trends. It is obvious by now, that the US will get out of Iraq, although the exact date is uncertain. That is because it is obvious that the majority of the American public wants it, not because of a one time vote, however nationwide.
When I was young, a half century ago, many minorities did not have full citizenship; I remember how Blacks were treated, and gangs hunting Jews for sport in my neighborhood. Now we have Barack Obama as a legitimate candidate for president, and I have run into only two serious antisemites in many years.
That took decades of Americans working toward the world they wanted to become, not instantaneously upon the passage of Title 7.
And that is why votes are not important. They have no real power. The real vote is the one you make every day, to strive in your everyday behaviour as though you were living in the world you would vote to create. Because that is the only way that world is ever going to materialize, just look at prohibition for an example of what happens when a vote doesn't match what people want.
And, in the end, thats why America works, and why we should be so proud of it. Because we do not need to pull a lever in order to make a dream of a better world come true. We don't need revolutions to make changes to what we are. All we really need to do is want to make it happen, and those levers pull themselves, sooner or later.
There is no denying we, as a people, still have many flaws and inequities. But when you look at how far we have come, in so short a time, you cannot deny that we must be doing something right.
So don't worry about whether those students would give up the right to vote, worry about what sort of world they want to live in, because voting or not, thats the world they (and us) WILL be living in.
Oh, don't be silly. There is over a million Taiwanese businessmen in China, Taiwan could easily cause as much disruption and rioting in China as China could to Taiwan militarily. Not that there isn't a Taiwan issue, but everyone expects in 50 years it will be like the US an the UK, everyone will have forgotten about it. Mostly they are just saving face and keeping the old folks who still remember happy.
As for now, even if China was serious about attacking Taiwan, well, Taiwan may be protected by the US military (and their own forces) but, economically, the Hong Kong/Singapore/Macao Triangle of financial centers protects them, and the Chinese government is a long way from being able to take them on, China's economic bubble is going to burst next year and the last thing the Chinese government wants is any further ulcers to worry about.
What China's military wants, if anything, militarily, is to destroy Japan. The Japanese treatment of Chinese in previous wars is a major issue in the country (Think Jews and Nazi's), attacking Japan would be the most internally popular war China ever fought. I suspect the Chinese Government spends a lot of time worrying elements in,say, Fujian province, might actually go rogue terrorist against Japan with Chinese military equipment.
But I would not seriously worry about their military for about 25 years, the Chinese military is getting most of what it really wants, which is a greatly increased budget to skim profits off of and to buy new toys from their friends (and get kickbacks). Think military industrial complex taken far beyond Eisenhowers worst nightmare. They are not going to start a war anytime soon, it would interfere with profits.
As I understand it (and this is not an area I am all that familiar with) the main goal of the Chinese military is to form a sort of Pacific Rim/MidEast/African equivalent of NATO. They do an awful lot of joint training with any country that will let them. That is not for the purpose of physical confrontation, what they are trying to do is control foreign resources economically, and the military portion is sort of a bribe to the governments that let them in. If you are an unpopular military junta, well, you might sleep better with a few Chinese forces around to make sure you are safe from a coup by your own people. Think of it as 21st century economic warfare.
If that sub popping up was deliberate, the most logical explanation is that it was a demo to a prospective buyer. Which is of real concern, because there are few prospective buyers that want to pop up close to American forces that wish us well. My guess (no real evidence) is the buyer is Venezuela, this sounds like something Chavez would want to do. Protection against another coup, show of strength to his allies, yet plausible deniability and threat is implied, not stated. He would probably love the publicity of a Venezuelan sub popping up and escorting an American Naval vessel into port.
I don't think the buyer is ordinary terrorists, they can achieve the same effect a lot cheaper with suicide bombers. Might be Iran, but they can't be seriously worried about the US invading, and trying to control passage of ships in nearby waters with subs would do them more harm than good.
On the other hand, there is one other possibility. there is a lot of issues regarding what countries have control of northern passages opened up by global warming. I wonder if some of the smaller northern countries is thinking of using subs to enforce their maritime rights.
It is a little more complicated than everyone seems to think.
The basic fact of the matter is Yahoo is an American company, operating multinationally. As an American company, or, as any non governmental individual or organization, Yahoo does not have the right, let alone the obligation, to act unilaterally in any matter concerning a foreign entity, state or otherwise. That is the responsibility of the State department.
Obviously, the State department does not have the resources to respond to every issue that a multinational encounters, but, in this case, there were guidelines as to proper procedures to follow when such a request from a foreign entity was made. Procedures that Yahoo did not follow.
It would be nice if the issues were a simple good versus evil type, but they are not. The US's relations with China are incredibly complicated, and they are all intertwined. It is not as if morality always takes the last place in considerations, when the moral issues are big enough, the US has a long history of overriding economic issues in favor of morality, ranging from Northern mills giving up southern cotton in the American civil war to the smoking and global warming initiatives of the next administration.
In this case, the State department would have had to weigh the welfare of one foreign national against that of a large number of American citizens. I do not know what State would have decided, but I do know the State department is really not obligated to consider the welfare of non Americans; the whole point of a government is that it is responsible to and for it's own citizens, only. The proper decision on how to handle the request was the one that was in the best interests of America, not of Yahoo, Yahoo stockholders, or any other parties involved, foreign or domestic. It would be a tough call, even without Yahoo deciding to get into the game without knowing all the rules.
So, Yahoo screwed up. It happens. They are trying to do their best to at least take responsibility and clean up as much of the mess they caused as they can, I am so very proud of them for that. If Yahoo gets some good publicity from that, so much the better, encouraging companies not to hide behind lawyers when they make a mistake is probably one of America's most important social goals.
P.S. As an amateur institutional economist and sinologist, I do feel obligated to point out that there are several misconceptions about China in the responses here.
First of all China does not repress dissent at a village level; it can't, the population is far too large for that. Heck, they can't even keep a lid on corrupt manufacturers, and thats a lot easier task. What China does is something slightly different. Chinese are allowed to dissent at a village level, all they want. The Chinese are not a particularly tame people, their contempt for their leadership is traditional, just like here in America. The Chinese people can even organize (which is NOT the same as dissent), up to a village level. The Chinese government considers that a harmless (relatively) way of releasing the tensions that are inherent in any political situation. It is also one less group of people they have to micromanage. It is not like anyone is going to listen and obey without the use of force, anyways, the Chinese traditionally ignore their government's wishes as much as they can, again, just like here in America.
Beyond that, however, China suppresses organized dissent, very hard. When you consider that, even at that small level of freedom, riots involving 80,000 or more Chinese are common, you can pretty much understand China's reasons for those policies; those riots, historically, have been very destructive. As a matter of fact, in Chinese history, many times those riots have spread, and millions of Chinese have died. Right now, practically everyone is predicting a major set of riots next September, after the 2008 Olympics. A lot of what you are seeing right now is the Chinese government trying to make sure it doesn't happen e
THere is plenty of highly effective interference mitigation techniques, time domain correlation and transform domain excision, for example. I have no idea why current wifi doesn't use these techniques to their fullest. Still, interference is an issue only because it is not being adressed, not because it is insoluable.
As for ISP bandwidth, technically, if you have a CDN (via satellite downlink) the amount of bandwidth actually needed is minimal. Thats because if you are dealing with these neighborhood internets, most of the bandwidth would be carried between local nodes, and never hit the wider, carrier based internet.
The curent interest in neighborhood internets had been considerably stoked by the collapse of major municipal internet deals, and whats happening in WIMAX. THere is a lot of (clandestine) political support for this, many elected officials are seriously concerned at Comcast's hold over communications with their constituents, and, in many communities, a little less exposire to outsiders is something they would prefer.
NBC is currently available over the internet, and soon, all major channels will be. With the advent of Vongo, Itunes, Vonage, Skype, etc etc, there will be little need for a Comcast (or any telco's) presence in these neightborhood internets, Comcasts role (and business revenues) will be subsumed by the neighborhood internet itself...and the immense revenues associated with it. For about $15-$20 a month, you can get the equivalent of comcasts $100 triple play (phone, TV, Internet) and all that money STAYS in the neightborhood, provideing an enormous increse in the efficiencies of local economies and lowered taxes.
For example, the one of the first shopping centers ever built, Lincoln Village, in Chicago, has 941,262 residents with an average income of $69,362 within a five mile radius. That same five mile radius could be covered by a single neighborhood internet easily. Lets do the calculation.
Lets see how much the hardware cost would be. (God, I hope there are no mistakes, I am doing this math in my head as I type)
Circle packing problems are difficult, and in the presence of unreliability, rather imprecise; the ad hoc networks research is full of articles on how to calculate this. So lets just assume a fudge factor, and that a Meraki minikit can handle 250 square foot area, or about the size of a two large ranch homea in the area with 20% overlap onto neighbors. It is also about the distance between three street lights in the area, so, even if residents won't cooperate, it is known that the city will make any infrastructure available for free (Chicago has already put that on the table for Sprint, etc. They would do far more for a 501(c) with revenue sharing and local employment and business development like I am planning.)
And lets assume, instead of a five mile radius, we have a square ten miles on a side, or about a hundred square miles. With 5280 feet in a mile that is 528,000 square feet 528000/250 = 2112 mini merakits, at $50 each (presumably, for that amount, we could get them a lot cheaper... Some far east manufacturers could produce them for about $5 each, if you didn't mind killing a lot of child laborers in the process) Lets assume we have a significant failure rate, so lets say, 2500 mini merakits. SO, roughly, $20,00 dollars and since it takes less than an hour to install a Merakit (more like 5 minutes, plug it in an let er run) 2500 man hours at $50/hour. (Yeah, I know it's overpaying, but its money FOR THE NEIGHBORHOOD. If you let each homeow
Strictly speaking, I am probably wrong in calling mobile WiMax a UWB technology, but there really isn't any overarching term for these type of spread spectrum technologies that I know of.
Thing is, these technologies are in their infancy, and highly disruptive. The big gamble with Sprints efforts is that there are other companies that can do it far more cheaply. Nodes are so cheap ($50.00/node, retail) that Google is sponsoring it for the third world (see Meraki http://meraki.com/) just to get the advertising revenue and audience. China Sat and China Com can do it even cheaper (the units are made in CHina, and, many people have speculated that Google and China have some sort of agreement about this (And, yes, there is only circumstantial evidence, but there is a LOT of circumstantial evidence.)
It does not even need to be a government or a company, there is also the healthy grass roots community networking movement as well, the whole picocell/ mesh network thing is working out quite well in a number of areas, both rural and big city for metropolitan area networks. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region.)
And yes, the telco's are profitable, for example, AT&T has been hiring a lot. But they have been hiring consultants for serving their customers business applications needs, not for telecomm. I have always been disappointed by AT&T, AT&T would have been able to make Google look like amateurs, if they had the sense to retain Hurd or a similar talented leader as president. Like I said, C4i and management control is where all the US telco's fail.
I really don't see how the US government could prevent it. The US is part of a worldwide telecommunications network, and if you think physical borders are problematical, try handling electronic. I can't think of any way to formulate a law that would provide that sort of protection without completely cutting off US businesses from the world. It's like the oil embargo's, except oil, at least, has to be physically shipped.
The other thing I should point out is business models. Except for CDN's, you really don't need much in the way of worldwide internet connectivity for business. Yes, I know that's somewhat heretical, but think about it. Just because the world is flat, doesn't mean it isn't immense as well.
And more importantly, people are not concerned about the world, they are concerned about their local area's, and most especially, themselves.
That point is best illustrated by your insistence that the US will somehow magically protect the US telco's by protectionist tactics. It is not that the US government does not want to, it's that it is impossible...by protectionist tactics. (Bear with me, this isn't going to be easy to explain, I am trying to stuff a graduate degree in economics onto a single post)
In my studies of the competitive strategy of nations, I have been incredibly impressed, awed even, in the tactics that the US has used. Although to the naive, it may seem as though America is losing an economic war with the rest of the world badly, in actuality, in most areas, the US has made impressive conquests. The US telcos are a rare exception, not a rule. And the US government did it without even going near real protectionism. I wish I could explain it in detail, but the readings I might suggest you look at are either incredibly dry( some of Angus Maddisson's work http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/) or popularized and only true in a general sense
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The movie glorifies rats. In Kitchens. Does anyone else but me see this as extremely sick?
I mean, what kind of parent would want their children to think of rats as friendly?
Of course it was fraud. That is only to be expected. No matter how hard we try, what lengths we are willing to go to, we will never be truly secure from cheating. I think that, if anyone could accept that, it would be technologists. We don't let viruses stop us from using the Internet, or computers in general, even though the damage they can cause is palpable.
So it does not matter if there is cheating in the primaries.
There is a bigger issue here. On one side, there is Obama, honest, decent, moral, a character right out of a Frank Capra film running the cleanest campaign in US history.
On the other side is the amoral, ruthless, old style politicians that will do literally anything to seize and hold power, characters straight out of a soap opera.
The American people have a clear choice here, the politics of hope and integrity, or the politics of fear and treachery. Let them cheat; cheat in every way they can. It is important that they do so. We Americans have to make a choice, at a national level, as to what our national character is, what it means to be an American, what our national values are.
For most of our history, up until the 1950's, we Americans have lived in fear of attack of one kind or another, and occasionally done some terrible things (like the American Japanese concentration camps in WWII), justified by "expediency". Not nearly as bad as what the rest of the world has done, but still, we let our terror lead us to some darks paths indeed.
It took a few years after the development of the atom bomb. but once we no longer lived in fear of attack, we set out to correct our mistakes of the past. The civil rights movement, environmentalism, a whole panoply of "moral" initiatives that lead us to be far more advanced ethically than most cultures. Not perfect, no, thats impossible to achieve, but we have come a very long way in two short generations.
And finally, we have come to a crossroads. With the whole world watching, with the future uncertain and fraught with challenges, we as a people, as a culture, as a republic are about to make a historic choice.
Do we return to the safe, old ways, where no action is unthinkable as long as we are guaranteed success, even if those fears that prompted us to those actions are imagined? Once we accept that cheating in the "little" things, like primaries, is acceptable, it is not so big a step to believe that that torture, and imprisonment without benefit of trial, is justified. And it is not much bigger a step to throw out the rule of law, let social connections determine what rights you possess.
That is the one future that is being offered in this election. It is attractive, in it's own way. As long as you are a member of a social group that is on top. you have little to fear. Of course, as the neoconservatives discovered, there is no guarantee you will always be the king of the hill. And it is safe, we have a much better chance of success, though what we will be like afterwards, is debatable.
Or do we decide that we have confidence in our abilities, as a culture, as a people, as a republic, to face the future proud and confident of our ability to handle whatever the challenges the future holds for us, to state that we know what we are, and that there are things we will NOT do, not out of fear that we might be punished, but out of belief in that our values are correct, that there is a difference between right and wrong, and that the choice is not all that hard to make.
As for me, I have never been one to hide, fearful of any noise from the outside. Win or lose, I, as an American, choose to face the future with hope, not fear, and believe that we Americans will succeed by our own merits, not by what depths we are willing to stoop to. I choose the rule of law, not privilege. There are many other Americans like me, from recent immigrants to families that have been here for generations. Obama is not our leader, he is just the representative of the choices we made about what we value, and how we wan
Since Blu Ray has already been cracked, what will happen is that the pirate industry starts transferring Blu Ray movies to HD-DVD, and without studio competition, there will be a MAJOR loss in revenue to those studios that support only Blu Ray.
Aw comon...did you think the piracy markets wouldn't notice this opportunity? There is a market, cheap production costs, cheap distribution costs (i.e. internet iso's) and one more major factor.
The Chinese HATE the Japanese for their atrocities in World War 2, one of which, the Rape of Nanjing, stirs incredibly strong emotions in Chinese worldwide even today. Because of Sony, Blu ray is perceived as Japanese. Screwing over a Japanese corporation would be widely popular in those provinces. A pirating operation in Nanjing would be effectively immune to government intervention, it is doubtful the government could even find enough officials willing to speak against it, let alone take action which would spark a major riot. In addition, most overseas Chinese would support a distribution channel.
Uhuh. It is pretty much a given that this will be a disaster for the studios. Piracy right now is just about convenience, once it become a political statement for a billion Chinese, however...
Of course, a major studio that supported HD-DVD, were to release a movie about the Rape of Nanjing, well, they would gain an enormous amount of good will with the billion plus moviegoers in the Chinese movie market, which would establish the dominance of HD-DVD regardles of what the west does. More importantly the Chinese might actually BUY rather than pirate the movie, just to make a point to the Japanese. Since it also would probably be the single most funded production in cinematic history, it is pretty much a given that it will happen sooner or later. The Chinese government has been trying to downplay this festering abcess in sino japanese relations, it has not been noticeably successful.
P.S. The Chinese suffering of World War 2 atrocities is not very well known in the west, which concentrated on the Nazi's. Among the Chinese, the memories are still fresh, the Japanese still treat the matter with denial (visiting the Yasukuni Shrine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasukuni_Shrine)
and, if you are a westerner, you should read something about it, because it is going to be a major force in China's dealings with the world.
Can't say I am happy about such a destabilizing force in world politics, but ignoring it is like ignoring cancer, it is just going to make it a lot worse later.
One of Microsofts problems is that, for most users, there is no reason to upgrade from Office 2000 and WIndows XP. It is understandable that they would want to provide a reason. This, however, is exactly NOT it.
Given record retention laws, and the recency of documents in earlier formats, I think Microsoft has now made it ILLEGAL to upgrade, since the records will be effectively lost if they are unreadable.
More importantly, many third party providers of documents, for example, small businesses, only HAVE the earlier formats. Is Microsoft really expecting large companies to cut off tens of thousands of thier suppliers and millions of thier customers in order to upgrade?
And, of course, Adobe has this golden opportunity. Microsoft and Adobe are at war as much as Microsoft and Google, if not more. Google is just a threat to expansion, with one move, Adobe threatens to turn Microsofts cash cow into hamburger patties.
Here is what they should do. Adobe should help openoffice.org come up with a true, full PDF importer so businesses can then replace Microsoft Word with PDF as the storage format of choice.
This will strike at the heart of Microsoft in a way anything Google could do would not. It will also give an enormous boost to their Acrobat family of backend servers, and, with the proper tie ins, their Creative Studio line, as well.
More importantly, it will hit Microsoft share prices like an atomic bomb, as analysts start worrying about Microsoft's cash flow with limited new sales of Office. Added to the Vista woes, and something more than chairs will thrown in the Microsoft executive offices.
I have been following Microsoft closely from the very beginning. Right now, their dominance comes from their control of the desktop.
Google, which is trying to make the web browser replace the desktop, is a threat only to the extent they can achieve that goal. The problem with the web browser replacing the desktop is not technological, in this era of broadband, it is an achievable goal.
It is not, however, culturally or psychologically, achievable. In this era of "dirty tricks" replacing ethical behavior for even the most minor issues, people feel a lot better with their programs and data under their personal control.
Online mail from Yahoo and GMail is perfectly good if you don't about spying or tampering, but I run an hmailserver on my local machine for anything important, and I only keep it up when I am monitoring it. Same thing for office suites or any other programs where an office rival or personal enemy could gain an advantage by snooping or tampering. It is just common sense not to leave yourself vulnerable.
It is not not surprising that Google has experienced phenomenal growth, web advertising is profitable and is rapidly increasing in importance, and it fits in well with their web as desktop strategy. However, there is a very low barrier to entry, and Microsoft could crush them anytime it wants. All it had to do is offer more for advertising dollars than Google does, and with four times the revenue, they could outbid Google easily. If they were to buy, say, Ask.com, and throw some real advertising dollars behind it, Google would be at a tremendous disadvantage.
You see, the problem is that Google does NOT own the web browser, it just owns search. And it owns it only because people have no incentive to change. If Microsoft engaged a GOOD ad agency, one with a Tversky or a Lakoff mentality driving it, people could be easily convinced to change.
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I really don't see what the fuss is about, The Internet and the World Wide Web has obviously changed distribution channels significantly. Many TV shows are now distributed at web sites within hours of their broadcast, legally.
There is no particular reason to believe that distribution function requires special entertainment skills anymore, and thus is highly devalued in terms of what portion of the revenue stream the distribution companies are entitled to.
This means that the production side of the business has a larger revenue stream which enables some new business models. One can easily envision a community based approach to studios, which is something like this:
Take a standard FOSS product like Drupal, and use one of the many "prediction market" modules (it seems like every college student writes one as a class project) to set up a site for a proposed movie and solicit internet "stock" to pay for creating it. In other words, the public "prevotes" the popularity of the movie. If the site doesn't raise enough capital to finance the movie, well, it probably woudl not have done well at the Box Office anyhow. For those traditional entertainment investors who like more risk, they could easily purchase more stock in a movie they think would exceed expectations.
If enough money is raised, the movie is produced, and everyone who bought the stock gets signon to see the movie at the site (Again, you could do this with Drupal modules. I have always wanted to do an Asset Management module for Internet multimedia distribution). Anyone ELSE who wants the movie has to buy access at the site to see it, and the money generated is distributed to the stock holders. Add in shares of the revenue stream from merchandise and advertising, and you have the potential of a VERY viable business model where studios are no longer necessary. DRM is minimal, and, in case, since potential pirates are also shareholders, why would they hurt their own revenue streams? ANyone still pirating at that price point would never have contributed to the revenue stream anyhow.
This really isn't very different from how movies are produced now, especially indies. The only real difference is that the risk of a badly performing movie is minimized, since the stock now has activist shareholders who are also the consumer market for the end product. Nothing gets green lighted unless the markets has already been precommited. The other difference is that, since the risk is minimized, the risk premium is also, and more value is returned to the small investors and the production staff.
I mean, how many Joss Whedon fans out there would not commit to say, $5 to finance another Firefly movie, especially if it guaranteed them free access to it when it came out? (Not that that would be a good thing, Firefly was his worst effort, in my opinion. I am waiting for Joss to remake "I Dream of Jeannie" as a BTVS prequel. Now THAT would be a movie I would invest in, if just to see how Joss pulled it off.)
There is plenty of great writers out there, the ones behind "Chuck" and "Joan of Arcadia" come to mind. There are a lot of people who would feel more comfortable investing in that then in some stock just because a CNBC elf promoted it.
And it is not just writers. You can use this method to securitize any large community base. One can easily see, say, popular right or left wing website s easily producing movies to fit their readership's interests. I mean, Fox News has a whole business model based on just that, and they do not even have good production values (or any kind of values, for that matter of fact).
We know that you can tap some real money from the internet, look at the US presidential campaign candidate funding, for example. And, judging by the voter turnout, a lot less people care about who is the next president than about the next Salma Hayek or Will Smith movie.
Anyone who believes that either Microsoft or Google are serious bad guys has little knowledge of what goes on in the real world, even in the tech sector. There are vast numbers of companies that are far more evil.
However, in this case, It doesn't matter whether Google gets Doubleclick or not.
There is a basic principle in economics, that states the natural order of things is a duopoly, with one company with 60% and the other with 40& of the market.
The reason for this is a basic American institution. ( An institution is the laws or social norms that govern the behavior of members of a culture)
The institution is this:
"Nobody can be trusted with all the power. In other words, it is in our best interest not to let anyone or any company accumulate too much power. As long as they are fighting each other, they are too busy to do anything bad to us. "
Google gets more than a 60% market share, customers will start pressuring for a alternative. They can't help it, institutions rule how they react en mass.
The only result of this is that Google shareholders are going to be might upset in a few years when this doesn't give Google dominance over the market.
On the other hand,, I bet right now Microsoft is reframing (a la Lakoff) thier advertising strategy to take advantage of this.
A prediction. You are going to see Microsoft due some real damage to Google over the next year. In the past few months, Google has gone from "Do no Evil" to suspicion of being very evil. While part of this seems to be Google's fault, a lot of it seems to be due to Microsoft competitive Intelligence operations setting up Google for fall after fall. This doubleclick issue is just one of many pieces of rope that are coming together to form a noose around Googles ambitions.
And no, I am not in favor of Microsoft. Few people have more reason to hate Microsoft than me. But it is that I just wish Google leadership hired someone who had some idea of how to execute a strategy in the face of competitive intelligence operations, it is embarrassing how easily Google is being trashed.
Purely as a curiosity, isn't this a one shot weapon?
I mean, you fire it once, and every enemy battery in the immediate area locks onto this incredibly bright energy source in the sky and a couple of a seconds later, thousands of heat/light seeking AA drones obliterate the laser carrier plane... I mean, the enemy target has to be line of sight, by definition, which means the enemy has line of sight on the plane carrying the weapon as well.
Good question.
More important question. Are they acting on behalf of a third party (say, a foreign telecomm) that would normally not be allowed to bid, or at least would generate serious public debate.
For example, Google is getting their butt kicked up around their ears in China by Baidu. I wonder if, say, a government sponsored access to the market along, say, the Yangtse tiver might be worth trading some spectrum rights in the US for. After all, what investor want to see is growth in market share, and Google would not have to actually legally assign the rights, just some quid pro quo deal that would give China access to most of the residential networks in the US, and the telecommuting traffic on them. Think of it as the obverse of the AT&T-NSA deal
*Sigh* Actually it is a lot more complicated than that.
Currently, there is an economic war going over China's industry and, while the US is currently winning (as near as anyone can tell), it is not very obvious. As part of that war, you are going to see a lot more reports like this in the next few months showing up as a runup to a McCarthy like campaign next year, with Chinese replacing Communists. That's doesn't mean it is not true, even "Tailgunner Joe" actually nailed lots of real communists along with the innocents.
On the other hand, that does not mean this is what it seems on face value. Google has a lot of "side deals" with China on various areas, which means, if this incident is not some individual entrepreneur (the question is why would anyone bother, China would not really care, and Baidu is hardly threatened by Google) then the PRC was applying some pressure against Google for some reason, and I am fairly certain it was NOT about internet sites.
I have absolutely no evidence except my intuition (and decades of studying Chinese institutional economics) on this, but I really think it is something involving that 700 mhz spectrum Google is bidding on. Either one of their competitors wants them out of the bidding if they win, or Google is bidding on behalf of some third party. Or maybe they just want to hurt Google, big time.
Whatever the cause, the plot twist is that it is probably part of a corporate espionage "boobytrap" set up by one of Googles competitors, I recognize the MO. It will be real interesting to see how it plays out. Bet it blows up in Googles face (figuratively speaking), and Google ends up in very hostile Senate hearings next year.
Actually, you can't give up your right to vote, because not voting is a type of voting; you are voting for the status quo.
In effect, by not voting, you are saying, "I am happy with the status quo", there are no issues I really care about. In a way, that is a testimony to the wonderful job the government is doing; most of the population considers the government "background noise", irrelevant to their daily lives, which is an excellent place for a democratic government to be.
In this thread, we hear a lot about differences between leaders, either in Congress, or in the Executive branch. But the leaders are not the ones who really decide what laws get enforced, and what direction society goes in.
Kennedy Kasselbaum (HIPPA) or Sarbanes Oxley? The first spawned a nice black market in medical records for debt collectors looking to locate people, and the second was just another way for accounting and consulting firms to siphon money from stockholders. The fact is, Congress passes laws and the bureaucracy and the private sector ignore, them, or interpret them to do the exact opposite. Even if someone in congress wanted to make a real change in society, by the time it got past the hundreds of others, it would be watered down to a meaningless gesture. Look at the records of the number of bills that die before getting voted on, for example.
The same is true for the leaders in the Executive branch. Do you really think that Bush is continuing the Iraq war all by himself? Look at his approval rating. he doesn't have that kind of personal support. It isn't even Bush plus the Senators that are blocking the Iraq withdrawal bill passed yesterday. It is the infrastructure, the social network behind them that pushing the war (for entirely different reasons than the ones stated publicly, by the way). That social network is not voters, with voting percentages so low, voters are ignorable. As long as you can buy enough media time, the job is yours, is the current thinking. No, that social network is members of the bureaucracy (mostly State and Defense) and the complex network of obligations and favors they are embedded in that are the real force behind the decisions.
And, counterintuitive as it may seem, that is the system working exactly as it was designed to do, to resist short term fads but adapt to long term trends. It is obvious by now, that the US will get out of Iraq, although the exact date is uncertain. That is because it is obvious that the majority of the American public wants it, not because of a one time vote, however nationwide.
When I was young, a half century ago, many minorities did not have full citizenship; I remember how Blacks were treated, and gangs hunting Jews for sport in my neighborhood. Now we have Barack Obama as a legitimate candidate for president, and I have run into only two serious antisemites in many years.
That took decades of Americans working toward the world they wanted to become, not instantaneously upon the passage of Title 7.
And that is why votes are not important. They have no real power. The real vote is the one you make every day, to strive in your everyday behaviour as though you were living in the world you would vote to create. Because that is the only way that world is ever going to materialize, just look at prohibition for an example of what happens when a vote doesn't match what people want.
And, in the end, thats why America works, and why we should be so proud of it. Because we do not need to pull a lever in order to make a dream of a better world come true. We don't need revolutions to make changes to what we are. All we really need to do is want to make it happen, and those levers pull themselves, sooner or later.
There is no denying we, as a people, still have many flaws and inequities. But when you look at how far we have come, in so short a time, you cannot deny that we must be doing something right.
So don't worry about whether those students would give up the right to vote, worry about what sort of world they want to live in, because voting or not, thats the world they (and us) WILL be living in.
Oh, don't be silly. There is over a million Taiwanese businessmen in China, Taiwan could easily cause as much disruption and rioting in China as China could to Taiwan militarily. Not that there isn't a Taiwan issue, but everyone expects in 50 years it will be like the US an the UK, everyone will have forgotten about it. Mostly they are just saving face and keeping the old folks who still remember happy.
As for now, even if China was serious about attacking Taiwan, well, Taiwan may be protected by the US military (and their own forces) but, economically, the Hong Kong/Singapore/Macao Triangle of financial centers protects them, and the Chinese government is a long way from being able to take them on, China's economic bubble is going to burst next year and the last thing the Chinese government wants is any further ulcers to worry about.
What China's military wants, if anything, militarily, is to destroy Japan. The Japanese treatment of Chinese in previous wars is a major issue in the country (Think Jews and Nazi's), attacking Japan would be the most internally popular war China ever fought. I suspect the Chinese Government spends a lot of time worrying elements in,say, Fujian province, might actually go rogue terrorist against Japan with Chinese military equipment.
But I would not seriously worry about their military for about 25 years, the Chinese military is getting most of what it really wants, which is a greatly increased budget to skim profits off of and to buy new toys from their friends (and get kickbacks). Think military industrial complex taken far beyond Eisenhowers worst nightmare. They are not going to start a war anytime soon, it would interfere with profits.
As I understand it (and this is not an area I am all that familiar with) the main goal of the Chinese military is to form a sort of Pacific Rim/MidEast/African equivalent of NATO. They do an awful lot of joint training with any country that will let them. That is not for the purpose of physical confrontation, what they are trying to do is control foreign resources economically, and the military portion is sort of a bribe to the governments that let them in. If you are an unpopular military junta, well, you might sleep better with a few Chinese forces around to make sure you are safe from a coup by your own people. Think of it as 21st century economic warfare.
If that sub popping up was deliberate, the most logical explanation is that it was a demo to a prospective buyer. Which is of real concern, because there are few prospective buyers that want to pop up close to American forces that wish us well. My guess (no real evidence) is the buyer is Venezuela, this sounds like something Chavez would want to do. Protection against another coup, show of strength to his allies, yet plausible deniability and threat is implied, not stated. He would probably love the publicity of a Venezuelan sub popping up and escorting an American Naval vessel into port.
I don't think the buyer is ordinary terrorists, they can achieve the same effect a lot cheaper with suicide bombers. Might be Iran, but they can't be seriously worried about the US invading, and trying to control passage of ships in nearby waters with subs would do them more harm than good.
On the other hand, there is one other possibility. there is a lot of issues regarding what countries have control of northern passages opened up by global warming. I wonder if some of the smaller northern countries is thinking of using subs to enforce their maritime rights.
It is a little more complicated than everyone seems to think.
The basic fact of the matter is Yahoo is an American company, operating multinationally. As an American company, or, as any non governmental individual or organization, Yahoo does not have the right, let alone the obligation, to act unilaterally in any matter concerning a foreign entity, state or otherwise. That is the responsibility of the State department.
Obviously, the State department does not have the resources to respond to every issue that a multinational encounters, but, in this case, there were guidelines as to proper procedures to follow when such a request from a foreign entity was made. Procedures that Yahoo did not follow.
It would be nice if the issues were a simple good versus evil type, but they are not. The US's relations with China are incredibly complicated, and they are all intertwined. It is not as if morality always takes the last place in considerations, when the moral issues are big enough, the US has a long history of overriding economic issues in favor of morality, ranging from Northern mills giving up southern cotton in the American civil war to the smoking and global warming initiatives of the next administration.
In this case, the State department would have had to weigh the welfare of one foreign national against that of a large number of American citizens. I do not know what State would have decided, but I do know the State department is really not obligated to consider the welfare of non Americans; the whole point of a government is that it is responsible to and for it's own citizens, only. The proper decision on how to handle the request was the one that was in the best interests of America, not of Yahoo, Yahoo stockholders, or any other parties involved, foreign or domestic. It would be a tough call, even without Yahoo deciding to get into the game without knowing all the rules.
So, Yahoo screwed up. It happens. They are trying to do their best to at least take responsibility and clean up as much of the mess they caused as they can, I am so very proud of them for that. If Yahoo gets some good publicity from that, so much the better, encouraging companies not to hide behind lawyers when they make a mistake is probably one of America's most important social goals.
P.S. As an amateur institutional economist and sinologist, I do feel obligated to point out that there are several misconceptions about China in the responses here.
First of all China does not repress dissent at a village level; it can't, the population is far too large for that. Heck, they can't even keep a lid on corrupt manufacturers, and thats a lot easier task. What China does is something slightly different. Chinese are allowed to dissent at a village level, all they want. The Chinese are not a particularly tame people, their contempt for their leadership is traditional, just like here in America. The Chinese people can even organize (which is NOT the same as dissent), up to a village level. The Chinese government considers that a harmless (relatively) way of releasing the tensions that are inherent in any political situation. It is also one less group of people they have to micromanage. It is not like anyone is going to listen and obey without the use of force, anyways, the Chinese traditionally ignore their government's wishes as much as they can, again, just like here in America.
Beyond that, however, China suppresses organized dissent, very hard. When you consider that, even at that small level of freedom, riots involving 80,000 or more Chinese are common, you can pretty much understand China's reasons for those policies; those riots, historically, have been very destructive. As a matter of fact, in Chinese history, many times those riots have spread, and millions of Chinese have died. Right now, practically everyone is predicting a major set of riots next September, after the 2008 Olympics. A lot of what you are seeing right now is the Chinese government trying to make sure it doesn't happen e
THere is plenty of highly effective interference mitigation techniques, time domain correlation and transform domain excision, for example. I have no idea why current wifi doesn't use these techniques to their fullest. Still, interference is an issue only because it is not being adressed, not because it is insoluable.
As for ISP bandwidth, technically, if you have a CDN (via satellite downlink) the amount of bandwidth actually needed is minimal. Thats because if you are dealing with these neighborhood internets, most of the bandwidth would be carried between local nodes, and never hit the wider, carrier based internet.
The curent interest in neighborhood internets had been considerably stoked by the collapse of major municipal internet deals, and whats happening in WIMAX. THere is a lot of (clandestine) political support for this, many elected officials are seriously concerned at Comcast's hold over communications with their constituents, and, in many communities, a little less exposire to outsiders is something they would prefer.
NBC is currently available over the internet, and soon, all major channels will be. With the advent of Vongo, Itunes, Vonage, Skype, etc etc, there will be little need for a Comcast (or any telco's) presence in these neightborhood internets, Comcasts role (and business revenues) will be subsumed by the neighborhood internet itself...and the immense revenues associated with it. For about $15-$20 a month, you can get the equivalent of comcasts $100 triple play (phone, TV, Internet) and all that money STAYS in the neightborhood, provideing an enormous increse in the efficiencies of local economies and lowered taxes.
For example, the one of the first shopping centers ever built, Lincoln Village, in Chicago, has 941,262 residents with an average income of $69,362 within a five mile radius. That same five mile radius could be covered by a single neighborhood internet easily. Lets do the calculation.
Google's Maraki mini's cost $50 and covers a 150 foot radius. http://meraki.com/oursolution/hardware/mini/meraki_mini_guide.pdf
THey have all the desired qualities (interference mitigating, next generation mesh network, Hosted NOC available, etc. http://meraki.com/oursolution/hardware/mini/meraki_mini_guide.pdf
Lets see how much the hardware cost would be. (God, I hope there are no mistakes, I am doing this math in my head as I type)
Circle packing problems are difficult, and in the presence of unreliability, rather imprecise; the ad hoc networks research is full of articles on how to calculate this. So lets just assume a fudge factor, and that a Meraki minikit can handle 250 square foot area, or about the size of a two large ranch homea in the area with 20% overlap onto neighbors. It is also about the distance between three street lights in the area, so, even if residents won't cooperate, it is known that the city will make any infrastructure available for free (Chicago has already put that on the table for Sprint, etc. They would do far more for a 501(c) with revenue sharing and local employment and business development like I am planning.)
And lets assume, instead of a five mile radius, we have a square ten miles on a side, or about a hundred square miles. With 5280 feet in a mile that is 528,000 square feet 528000/250 = 2112 mini merakits, at $50 each (presumably, for that amount, we could get them a lot cheaper... Some far east manufacturers could produce them for about $5 each, if you didn't mind killing a lot of child laborers in the process) Lets assume we have a significant failure rate, so lets say, 2500 mini merakits. SO, roughly, $20,00 dollars and since it takes less than an hour to install a Merakit (more like 5 minutes, plug it in an let er run) 2500 man hours at $50/hour. (Yeah, I know it's overpaying, but its money FOR THE NEIGHBORHOOD. If you let each homeow
Sprint would probably disagree with you, they are building out a WimAX network with Mobile-Wimax using similar thiord + generation mecsh technologies for about a year now. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/080806-sprint-nextel-wimax.html?fsrc=netflash-rss
Strictly speaking, I am probably wrong in calling mobile WiMax a UWB technology, but there really isn't any overarching term for these type of spread spectrum technologies that I know of.
Thing is, these technologies are in their infancy, and highly disruptive. The big gamble with Sprints efforts is that there are other companies that can do it far more cheaply. Nodes are so cheap ($50.00/node, retail) that Google is sponsoring it for the third world (see Meraki http://meraki.com/) just to get the advertising revenue and audience. China Sat and China Com can do it even cheaper (the units are made in CHina, and, many people have speculated that Google and China have some sort of agreement about this (And, yes, there is only circumstantial evidence, but there is a LOT of circumstantial evidence.)
It does not even need to be a government or a company, there is also the healthy grass roots community networking movement as well, the whole picocell/ mesh network thing is working out quite well in a number of areas, both rural and big city for metropolitan area networks. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region.)
And yes, the telco's are profitable, for example, AT&T has been hiring a lot. But they have been hiring consultants for serving their customers business applications needs, not for telecomm. I have always been disappointed by AT&T, AT&T would have been able to make Google look like amateurs, if they had the sense to retain Hurd or a similar talented leader as president. Like I said, C4i and management control is where all the US telco's fail.
I really don't see how the US government could prevent it. The US is part of a worldwide telecommunications network, and if you think physical borders are problematical, try handling electronic. I can't think of any way to formulate a law that would provide that sort of protection without completely cutting off US businesses from the world. It's like the oil embargo's, except oil, at least, has to be physically shipped.
The other thing I should point out is business models. Except for CDN's, you really don't need much in the way of worldwide internet connectivity for business. Yes, I know that's somewhat heretical, but think about it. Just because the world is flat, doesn't mean it isn't immense as well.
And more importantly, people are not concerned about the world, they are concerned about their local area's, and most especially, themselves.
That point is best illustrated by your insistence that the US will somehow magically protect the US telco's by protectionist tactics. It is not that the US government does not want to, it's that it is impossible...by protectionist tactics. (Bear with me, this isn't going to be easy to explain, I am trying to stuff a graduate degree in economics onto a single post)
In my studies of the competitive strategy of nations, I have been incredibly impressed, awed even, in the tactics that the US has used. Although to the naive, it may seem as though America is losing an economic war with the rest of the world badly, in actuality, in most areas, the US has made impressive conquests. The US telcos are a rare exception, not a rule. And the US government did it without even going near real protectionism. I wish I could explain it in detail, but the readings I might suggest you look at are either incredibly dry( some of Angus Maddisson's work http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/) or popularized and only true in a general sense