The government should change the rules for subsidies so that corn farmers can switch to growing alternative biofuels without loosing the subsidy that they currently enjoy for growing corn. In fact, offer them incentives to grow something better than corn (more to the point, something that doesn't require truckloads of chemicals to grow it and hasn't been genetically modified by Monsanto). Offer them a way to get out of growing corn and into growing something else with no loss of income.
Solution: Drop all the channels above the basic tier from analog cable. Every channel you drop from analog cable also means more bandwidth for more digital channels (good when the cable companies want to offer more HD channels) On analog cable only keep: Channels you are required to have by law (broadcast networks like ABC, public access, etc) Channels where the license with the owner of the channel requires them to be on analog cable Channels where the channel is paying the cable company (i.e. home shopping etc) and where that revenue would drop if they were not on analog. and maybe a few others like weather channel which are in the "everyone gets this channel" tier. Everything else would go. Analog would have just one tier that everyone gets.
Essentially, you are paying Cox for 3 things. A cable into your house. Cable TV (i.e. the channels and the decoder box) and Cable Internet (the bandwidth etc). When you buy TV, you are paying for Item 1 and Item 2 (cable into your house and the TV channels). When you then buy Internet on top of that TV, you are paying for Item 3 (bandwidth). So, if you stop paying for TV, you are no longer paying for item 1 (the cable into your house which has a non zero cost to do with maintenance of the network etc) hence the extra $10.
If your app has information (e.g. stats etc) about a "giant battleaxe of doom" (or whatever), no matter where YOU got it from, ultimately the source of the info has to be from the game itself.
The #1 thing that needs to be done is to eliminate seniority based pay. Stop paying teachers more money just because they have been there longer and a big swath of the problem goes away IMO. Teachers who are just in it so they can make tenure and earn the big $$$ wont hang around and only the teachers who actually WANT to teach will stay in the system.
The #2 thing is to eliminate all these government mandated standard tests that cause teachers to "teach to the test". Or where DO need standardized testing (e.g. SAT), design the tests so that they change every year and so that the teachers have no idea which bits of the curriculum the test will cover and cant simply "teach to the test".
Oh and get rid of crap like "no child left behind" and give teachers the power to actually FAIL kids who aren't doing the work and passing the assessments.
If only IBM hadn't been so short sighted and gone with the 68000 for the PC, a lot of the crap that still clutters up the PC architecture to this day may not have ever come into being.
If I was to walk into a bank and rob it and walk out with $600, it would be headline news with a big police man-hunt and I would go to pound me in the ass prison for a long time
But if I was to hack into the computers at the same bank and steal $600,000, it would likely be hushed up by the bank with the only indication that it happened being a "misc expenses" line item in the next annual report or so. And no-one would bother spending any resources trying to catch me.
I think the #1 reason its so hard to find a phone with no camera is that the carriers would rather you bought one with a camera (since they can up sell stuff to go with that camera)
I cant believe that there isn't enough demand for camera phones from consumers for manufacturers to continue to include cameras (being that cameras have a non-zero cost)
There should be rules in place for hospitals that prohibit FDA certified equipment from being connected to a network in a way that would allow this kind of crap to infect it. (or for that matter allow general purpose internet stuff to be done on it)
That may be true but its far from the norm based on what I have seen. I bet if you looked at the stats for a site most commonly accessed by people from work PCs (and not something accessed by geeks using those installs of Firefox the IT guys are turning a blind eye to) you would see IE6 being the most popular.
Corporate users wont be switching away from IE6 anytime soon. Not whilst PHBs continue to be worried about some tiny little funky feature that no-one uses on some corporate intranet site breaks as a result of the switch.
Here is just one example of content on Geocities that has value. http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/8682/ These old documents are still of value to people modding the old games.
You must have some funny rules in the postal system over there, here in Australia, we get catalogs and junk (from everyone from supermarkets to pizza shops to to real estate agents) in our mailboxes delivered by people directly without going through the post office at all. We also get various free weekly local papers in the same way.
No way will Verizon be willing to give up control over app approval for phones on its network (look at the BREW crap they have on their phones now). No way will Verizon be willing to give up the Verizon music/ringtones/movies/tv/content store for the ITMS No way will Verizon be willing to allow GPS and other things without taking its cut.
When you vote in these elections mentioned in the summary, vote for someone who does not support censorship
Of course the problem with most modern "democracies" is that on many issues (including censorship, ridiculous IP laws, increased powers for the police etc) there is no-one to vote for who doesn't support it.
Oh and with all the crap the German government is trying to pull, it sounds like the German police may end up being Gestapo MK II in all but name.
Or you could, ya know, vote for someone that supports a neutral uncensored Internet. Oh wait, cant do that, a bunch of people who follow a guy who supposedly died on a cross 20000 years ago and some kind of "God", seem to think they have the right to be the moral police and tell normal citizens what they can and cant do.
Not that I support child pornography, I just don't think ANY content (no matter HOW bad) justifies any kind of Internet censorship.
The idea is that the high speed rail could go right into the central stations of the big cities. So it could run right into grand central terminal in New York. And it could run right into union station in downtown DC. Might not be able to go really really fast on the legs inside the cities but it can certainly do it (after all, the European and Japanese high speed trains go into fairly centrally located stations in these cities)
The airlines get just as much government aid if not more than the railways do. (look at how much money was thrown at the airline industry after 9/11)
IMO the right thing is to deregulate the aviation market. Stop giving subsidies to the dinosaur legacy carriers like United, American etc and let them fail if they cant survive. Allow any airlines to start flying (including foriegn carriers). The market will shift to newer carriers with a lower cost base and lower ticket prices (Southwest, Virgin America etc) and thats a good thing for the market.
You do want to keep the rules about maintenance etc. But get rid of the rules limiting competition (like all the rules limiting who can fly to what airports and the ones limiting foriegn airlines from flying inside the US) and let the market sort itself out. Throw the high speed rail plan into the mix and it can have economic benefits all around.
I am paying AU$50 per month and getting 25GB (10GB peak and 15GB off peak) per month with no excess usage charges ever. If I exceed the 25GB, I get shaped back down to 64kbps for the rest of the month. Only idiots who sign up with Tel$tra BigPond or Optarse get hit with crap like that, there are options available (no matter what bit of gear your phone line is hooked up to) that have no excess usage fees ever. (pretty much all of them do have the "you get x amount per month and then get shaped down to 64k or 128k for the rest of the month" though)
No wholesale provider here in Australia could impose such charges on 3rd party ISPs in this way, if they did, the ACCC would put a stop to that. (at least as far as fixed line DSL goes)
No since that would create huge chaos for NYC in the time between "taxi drivers find out about robot cabs and walk off the job" and "enough robot cabs exist to replace every driver who has walked off the job"
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The government should change the rules for subsidies so that corn farmers can switch to growing alternative biofuels without loosing the subsidy that they currently enjoy for growing corn. In fact, offer them incentives to grow something better than corn (more to the point, something that doesn't require truckloads of chemicals to grow it and hasn't been genetically modified by Monsanto). Offer them a way to get out of growing corn and into growing something else with no loss of income.
90% of Motorola's linux products (including the EZX and MOTOMAGX phone platforms) use glibc.
Turbo Pascal was my first serious development tool too.
I think I even have some of my old Turbo Pascal code around somewhere.
Solution: Drop all the channels above the basic tier from analog cable. Every channel you drop from analog cable also means more bandwidth for more digital channels (good when the cable companies want to offer more HD channels)
On analog cable only keep:
Channels you are required to have by law (broadcast networks like ABC, public access, etc)
Channels where the license with the owner of the channel requires them to be on analog cable
Channels where the channel is paying the cable company (i.e. home shopping etc) and where that revenue would drop if they were not on analog.
and maybe a few others like weather channel which are in the "everyone gets this channel" tier.
Everything else would go. Analog would have just one tier that everyone gets.
Essentially, you are paying Cox for 3 things. A cable into your house. Cable TV (i.e. the channels and the decoder box) and Cable Internet (the bandwidth etc). When you buy TV, you are paying for Item 1 and Item 2 (cable into your house and the TV channels). When you then buy Internet on top of that TV, you are paying for Item 3 (bandwidth). So, if you stop paying for TV, you are no longer paying for item 1 (the cable into your house which has a non zero cost to do with maintenance of the network etc) hence the extra $10.
If your app has information (e.g. stats etc) about a "giant battleaxe of doom" (or whatever), no matter where YOU got it from, ultimately the source of the info has to be from the game itself.
The #1 thing that needs to be done is to eliminate seniority based pay.
Stop paying teachers more money just because they have been there longer and a big swath of the problem goes away IMO.
Teachers who are just in it so they can make tenure and earn the big $$$ wont hang around and only the teachers who actually WANT to teach will stay in the system.
The #2 thing is to eliminate all these government mandated standard tests that cause teachers to "teach to the test". Or where DO need standardized testing (e.g. SAT), design the tests so that they change every year and so that the teachers have no idea which bits of the curriculum the test will cover and cant simply "teach to the test".
Oh and get rid of crap like "no child left behind" and give teachers the power to actually FAIL kids who aren't doing the work and passing the assessments.
If only IBM hadn't been so short sighted and gone with the 68000 for the PC, a lot of the crap that still clutters up the PC architecture to this day may not have ever come into being.
If I was to walk into a bank and rob it and walk out with $600, it would be headline news with a big police man-hunt and I would go to pound me in the ass prison for a long time
But if I was to hack into the computers at the same bank and steal $600,000, it would likely be hushed up by the bank with the only indication that it happened being a "misc expenses" line item in the next annual report or so. And no-one would bother spending any resources trying to catch me.
I think the #1 reason its so hard to find a phone with no camera is that the carriers would rather you bought one with a camera (since they can up sell stuff to go with that camera)
I cant believe that there isn't enough demand for camera phones from consumers for manufacturers to continue to include cameras (being that cameras have a non-zero cost)
There should be rules in place for hospitals that prohibit FDA certified equipment from being connected to a network in a way that would allow this kind of crap to infect it. (or for that matter allow general purpose internet stuff to be done on it)
That may be true but its far from the norm based on what I have seen. I bet if you looked at the stats for a site most commonly accessed by people from work PCs (and not something accessed by geeks using those installs of Firefox the IT guys are turning a blind eye to) you would see IE6 being the most popular.
Corporate users wont be switching away from IE6 anytime soon. Not whilst PHBs continue to be worried about some tiny little funky feature that no-one uses on some corporate intranet site breaks as a result of the switch.
Here is just one example of content on Geocities that has value.
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/8682/
These old documents are still of value to people modding the old games.
You must have some funny rules in the postal system over there, here in Australia, we get catalogs and junk (from everyone from supermarkets to pizza shops to to real estate agents) in our mailboxes delivered by people directly without going through the post office at all.
We also get various free weekly local papers in the same way.
No way will Verizon be willing to give up control over app approval for phones on its network (look at the BREW crap they have on their phones now).
No way will Verizon be willing to give up the Verizon music/ringtones/movies/tv/content store for the ITMS
No way will Verizon be willing to allow GPS and other things without taking its cut.
It may be that they want to disclose things related to CSS that are not in the existing public information.
When you vote in these elections mentioned in the summary, vote for someone who does not support censorship
Of course the problem with most modern "democracies" is that on many issues (including censorship, ridiculous IP laws, increased powers for the police etc) there is no-one to vote for who doesn't support it.
Oh and with all the crap the German government is trying to pull, it sounds like the German police may end up being Gestapo MK II in all but name.
Or you could, ya know, vote for someone that supports a neutral uncensored Internet.
Oh wait, cant do that, a bunch of people who follow a guy who supposedly died on a cross 20000 years ago and some kind of "God", seem to think they have the right to be the moral police and tell normal citizens what they can and cant do.
Not that I support child pornography, I just don't think ANY content (no matter HOW bad) justifies any kind of Internet censorship.
The idea is that the high speed rail could go right into the central stations of the big cities. So it could run right into grand central terminal in New York. And it could run right into union station in downtown DC. Might not be able to go really really fast on the legs inside the cities but it can certainly do it (after all, the European and Japanese high speed trains go into fairly centrally located stations in these cities)
The airlines get just as much government aid if not more than the railways do. (look at how much money was thrown at the airline industry after 9/11)
IMO the right thing is to deregulate the aviation market. Stop giving subsidies to the dinosaur legacy carriers like United, American etc and let them fail if they cant survive. Allow any airlines to start flying (including foriegn carriers). The market will shift to newer carriers with a lower cost base and lower ticket prices (Southwest, Virgin America etc) and thats a good thing for the market.
You do want to keep the rules about maintenance etc. But get rid of the rules limiting competition (like all the rules limiting who can fly to what airports and the ones limiting foriegn airlines from flying inside the US) and let the market sort itself out. Throw the high speed rail plan into the mix and it can have economic benefits all around.
This isn't Telstra, its TPG.
I am paying AU$50 per month and getting 25GB (10GB peak and 15GB off peak) per month with no excess usage charges ever. If I exceed the 25GB, I get shaped back down to 64kbps for the rest of the month. Only idiots who sign up with Tel$tra BigPond or Optarse get hit with crap like that, there are options available (no matter what bit of gear your phone line is hooked up to) that have no excess usage fees ever. (pretty much all of them do have the "you get x amount per month and then get shaped down to 64k or 128k for the rest of the month" though)
No wholesale provider here in Australia could impose such charges on 3rd party ISPs in this way, if they did, the ACCC would put a stop to that. (at least as far as fixed line DSL goes)
No since that would create huge chaos for NYC in the time between "taxi drivers find out about robot cabs and walk off the job" and "enough robot cabs exist to replace every driver who has walked off the job"