It's not the 285 million people that are the problem (once you have solved the problem for 58 million people, the rest is probably mostly a lot of extra hardware), it's the 50 states, zillions of counties, and dozens of federal agencies that would rather die than talk to each other.
And that profusion of governmental entities in the US seems deliberate. In the US, limiting the power of government through disorder, confusion, and lack of integration is a way of life. The French believe in bureaucracy and at least superficial order and rationality. I can't really say which is "better", but it does explain some of the differences.
But the real question is: if the government allowed a free market to flourish in air travel vis-a-vis security issues (personal and airline, but not, e.g., turning planes into missiles), would the general populace choose safety and security, e.g. via demonstrated record, over low price? My guess is, they'd tend to choose low price, since that appears to be exactly what they've done for the past 20 years or so.
The notion that much in the airline industry is driven by buyer preferences operating in a free market is silly: there are far too few sellers, the choices are far too limited, and the information a buyer has is far too limited. Buyers simply have no way of ascertaining that they get what they pay for when it comes to security (or even something as simple as legroom or service). If a buyer can't have some reasonable assurances that he gets something for the premium he pays, he might as well buy the cheapest ticket. That's the reason why you see a race to the bottom when it comes to service or security standards.
My point here is that just because the rich and powerful in the West (and the USA in particular) happen to be for a thing does not mean the thing is bad in general, [...] So, argument by invoking the phrase "the rich and powerful" does not work, at least not for me -
I didn't make such an argument. It's just an observation that the people who drive corporate policy are wealthy individuals and people in position of power. If you let your emotional reactions to such phrases get in the way of an economic argument, well, what can one do?
Okay, hmm, so you believe some 50% or more of the American public -- the percentage of stockholders -- constitute "the rich and powerful"?
That's highly misleading. If you hold stock in a company through a mutual fund or a pension plan, you may be a "stockholder" in some sense, but there are few if any choices you can exercise or influence you can have on the companies whose stock you supposedly "hold". Most such stockholders don't usually even have the choice of divesting themselves of any particular stock easily. The people who set the agenda are the tiny fraction of wealthy, individual stockholders with sufficiently large holdings to be heard, portfolio managers, and the government who occasionally chimes in.
Another serious setback for Linux is the lack of a journalling file system. This makes data storage unreliable, and backup and recovery a dicey proposition. SGI said they would port the IRIX file system to Linux, but I haven't heard anything about this yet. However, when you look at the major commercial NOS's, they all have journalling file systems, including Sun, SCO, Windows NT, Banyan Vines, HP/UX, AIX, and Novell. Windows has cleary beaten Linux to the punch here.
Actually, Linux offers several journaling file systems that give you a choice of journaling either structure or structure+data. NTFS, in contrast, does not even support journaling in the traditional sense: while it may guarantee that the file system is in a self-consistent state after rebooting after a crash, it makes no guarantees about the data and it doesn't even guarantee that the state is logically consistent, i.e., that it corresponds to any state that the file system was in before the crash. Sorry, but Windows NT just doesn't cut it when it comes to file systems. Nice glossies, though.
I'll leave it to someone else to debunk your other erroneous claims.
Check pricewatch.com: you can get PCI modems for under $15, PCMCIA modems for under $20, an external USB modem goes for under $25, and an external serial port modem goes for under $30. Those kinds of modems usually conform to standard interfaces and make minimal use of the CPU (other than for the serial interrupts, of course).
WinModems, in contrast, are just a big hassle: they consume oodles of CPU time, they have non-standard drivers, and you have to worry about them with every OS. If your laptop has one built-in, complain to its manufacturer (it probably would have cost nothing to add a real modem) and don't bother using it.
Let me get this straight: you're saying the rich and powerful prefer spending $200 instead of $450 for a round-trip flight to Florida,
No, they are concerned with the value of their stock portfolio. Companies and stockholders believe, rightly or wrongly, that their profits and stocks go down when labor costs rise.
And that the ordinary citizen prefers "security done right" if it means a much greater cost of living?
If the airline industry becomes more labor intensive, it creates more jobs even if air travel becomes somewhat less affordable. I think on the whole, that may be a tradeoff many people prefer. After all, even cheap airline tickets don't do you any good if you don't have a job. (The point at which price increases through additional labor costs result in a net loss of jobs depends on elasticity of demand for the particular product.)
This cut-throat race to cut costs on labor has led to poor service and poor security in many areas, as well as eliminated many good jobs. I would like to see that trend reversed, even if it means somewhat more expensive airline tickets and other services.
The FTC has an address where they accept spam ("unsolicited commercial e-mail") in order to take action on it. The address is uce@ftc.gov (yup, no cloaking here: spammers--do your worst). In fact, according to this press release, the FTC has been accepting UCE at that address for a couple of years.
Do you have better ideas on how to keep malicious people from harming our nation?
Burning books isn't being done because there are no alternatives, but because it's cheap.
It's quite simple to make power plants, air traffic, and other vital infrastructure secure. However, industry isn't willing to pay the cost. It's so much easier to run to politicians and say "ban this information" and "ban that information" and "outlaw this or that device".
Doing security right means that we will be paying more for electricity and air travel, and a consequent decrease in what people might count superficially as "standard of living", as you couldn't just dash down to Florida for a couple of hundred dollars. And the diminished profit margins and increased operating costs would be a painful blow to large investors. On the other hand, it would also result in an increase in low-skilled employment and it would preserve our rights to free access to information. To me, it's pretty clear which choice is preferable. It's also pretty clear to me what the rich and powerful prefer.
According to estimates published in the press, Microsoft is probably not making any profit on the Xbox itself, and may be subsidizing it by as much as $120/unit, in the hope of making up for it in games sales.
Wouldn't it be great if people figured out how to port Linux to the Xbox? It would end up being a Microsoft-subsidized Linux server appliance and server farm component. What more can we ask for?
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And that profusion of governmental entities in the US seems deliberate. In the US, limiting the power of government through disorder, confusion, and lack of integration is a way of life. The French believe in bureaucracy and at least superficial order and rationality. I can't really say which is "better", but it does explain some of the differences.
The notion that much in the airline industry is driven by buyer preferences operating in a free market is silly: there are far too few sellers, the choices are far too limited, and the information a buyer has is far too limited. Buyers simply have no way of ascertaining that they get what they pay for when it comes to security (or even something as simple as legroom or service). If a buyer can't have some reasonable assurances that he gets something for the premium he pays, he might as well buy the cheapest ticket. That's the reason why you see a race to the bottom when it comes to service or security standards.
My point here is that just because the rich and powerful in the West (and the USA in particular) happen to be for a thing does not mean the thing is bad in general, [...] So, argument by invoking the phrase "the rich and powerful" does not work, at least not for me -
I didn't make such an argument. It's just an observation that the people who drive corporate policy are wealthy individuals and people in position of power. If you let your emotional reactions to such phrases get in the way of an economic argument, well, what can one do?
Okay, hmm, so you believe some 50% or more of the American public -- the percentage of stockholders -- constitute "the rich and powerful"?
That's highly misleading. If you hold stock in a company through a mutual fund or a pension plan, you may be a "stockholder" in some sense, but there are few if any choices you can exercise or influence you can have on the companies whose stock you supposedly "hold". Most such stockholders don't usually even have the choice of divesting themselves of any particular stock easily. The people who set the agenda are the tiny fraction of wealthy, individual stockholders with sufficiently large holdings to be heard, portfolio managers, and the government who occasionally chimes in.
Actually, Linux offers several journaling file systems that give you a choice of journaling either structure or structure+data. NTFS, in contrast, does not even support journaling in the traditional sense: while it may guarantee that the file system is in a self-consistent state after rebooting after a crash, it makes no guarantees about the data and it doesn't even guarantee that the state is logically consistent, i.e., that it corresponds to any state that the file system was in before the crash. Sorry, but Windows NT just doesn't cut it when it comes to file systems. Nice glossies, though.
I'll leave it to someone else to debunk your other erroneous claims.
WinModems, in contrast, are just a big hassle: they consume oodles of CPU time, they have non-standard drivers, and you have to worry about them with every OS. If your laptop has one built-in, complain to its manufacturer (it probably would have cost nothing to add a real modem) and don't bother using it.
No, they are concerned with the value of their stock portfolio. Companies and stockholders believe, rightly or wrongly, that their profits and stocks go down when labor costs rise.
And that the ordinary citizen prefers "security done right" if it means a much greater cost of living?
If the airline industry becomes more labor intensive, it creates more jobs even if air travel becomes somewhat less affordable. I think on the whole, that may be a tradeoff many people prefer. After all, even cheap airline tickets don't do you any good if you don't have a job. (The point at which price increases through additional labor costs result in a net loss of jobs depends on elasticity of demand for the particular product.)
This cut-throat race to cut costs on labor has led to poor service and poor security in many areas, as well as eliminated many good jobs. I would like to see that trend reversed, even if it means somewhat more expensive airline tickets and other services.
The FTC has an address where they accept spam ("unsolicited commercial e-mail") in order to take action on it. The address is uce@ftc.gov (yup, no cloaking here: spammers--do your worst). In fact, according to this press release, the FTC has been accepting UCE at that address for a couple of years.
Burning books isn't being done because there are no alternatives, but because it's cheap.
It's quite simple to make power plants, air traffic, and other vital infrastructure secure. However, industry isn't willing to pay the cost. It's so much easier to run to politicians and say "ban this information" and "ban that information" and "outlaw this or that device".
Doing security right means that we will be paying more for electricity and air travel, and a consequent decrease in what people might count superficially as "standard of living", as you couldn't just dash down to Florida for a couple of hundred dollars. And the diminished profit margins and increased operating costs would be a painful blow to large investors. On the other hand, it would also result in an increase in low-skilled employment and it would preserve our rights to free access to information. To me, it's pretty clear which choice is preferable. It's also pretty clear to me what the rich and powerful prefer.
Wouldn't it be great if people figured out how to port Linux to the Xbox? It would end up being a Microsoft-subsidized Linux server appliance and server farm component. What more can we ask for?