AT&T was the only carrier that would let Apple retain a degree of control over the phone. Given the crap that, say, Verizon tends to load their phones up with, and their tendency to nickel and dime you to death with fees for everything, I can't say I'm sorry about how things worked out.
Because, of course, you can do all that stuff on an iPhone too. Rooting an iPhone is just jailbreaking, which is free, easy, and legal. Then you can install any app you want no matter where it comes from. And you don't even have to jailbreak to change your ring tones - I'm not sure where that idea is coming from.
Seriously, although I agree that Apple goes way to far with the control freakery, the practical effect of it is minimal. There's actually very little difference between iPhone and Android in terms of what you can do with the platform.
I'm not sure which iPhone you're talking about, but mine has thousands of tracks on it, only (count 'em) 2 of which came from iTMS, the rest being from CDs I own or other music stores (mostly Amazon or AllofMP3, back when you could still do that). I recorded and uploaded my own ring tone. Cost: $0. While I share your disgust about Apple's App Store policies, dude... jailbreak. It's not that hard and has been ruled perfectly legal.
So I'm having a hard time understanding what the problem is here.
... so why did they need to impose NDA's on everyone who makes these things? Yes, I understand there's a technical reason to build them this way, but why all the secrecy about it? It's hard to imagine any answer other than "we want to make more profit on cables by limiting competition".
Yes, but the situations are still sort of reversed. Having access to good, cheap broadband, mass transit, etc, etc... is still pretty common in Europe. It's all but non-existent in the US. This is not the same thing as saying that EVERYWHERE in Europe is a paradise, but still.
High speed compared to POTS? No, not really. Even ISDN BRI has a minimum speed that's much higher, to say nothing of PRI.
A couple things: 1) ISDN isn't POTS. 2) ISDN BRI doesn't come close to 1500kbps down - it's 2 64kbps channels, plus like a 14kbps signaling channel. Even PRI is only about 2Mbps.
Geez, don't even get me started on ISDN. I tried to have it installed in the mid-90's, before cable/DSL became widespread. It took like 5-6 weeks of intermittent trying to find someone at the phone company (GTE, part of the corporate family tree of Sprint and Verizon) who even knew what it was. When I finally got in touch with the correct office, it took at least a month to get an appointment scheduled. Took the whole day off work, installers never showed. After berating the scheduling office, I was able to get a rescheduled appointment in two weeks. The guys show up, install the equipment and leave without testing it. Of course, the "modem" didn't work. More weeks of screwing around, until finally I told them to just cancel it. Trying to get it was a nightmare that took months and never was successful - I'm (obviously) still suffering from post-traumatic ISDN syndrome.
The entire point of having a national broadband system would be to make sure that the areas in the middle of nowhere get fast access because some don't think that the private enterprise can do it
Ok, I'll bite. If private enterprise can do it, why haven't they? Here's a hint: the same reason it took the government to electrify rural areas. It's not profitable for private companies to do it.
In my neighborhood, we're wired for all three of DSL, cable, and fiber (FiOS) internet. Can't speak to the DSL, but Cox and Verizon are really duking it out - Cox service got markedly faster, and their pricing and customer service better, once Verizon started digging up all the neighborhoods around her for FiOS. To no avail, though - we switched from Cox to FiOS and never looked back - Verizon is actually delivering (per Speedtest) 15MB up/5 down, and I could get up to 25 up if I wanted, but I haven't seen the need.
Texas was admitted to the union via a joint resolution of Congress. The resolution did say that Texas might be divided into up to five states if that was convenient to all concerned, but that wouldn't supercede the US Constitution, which states that no state can be divided into parts or merged with another state without the permission of both the state(s) in question and Congress.
The flag thing isn't true either. The US Flag code states that the US flag must fly above all other flags it's displayed on the same staff with. When displayed on separate staves, the US flag and (any) state flag can fly at the same level, but the national flag gets the honored position on its own right. There's no "Texas exemption".
Do you seriously mean to say that fewer than 1% of internet users upload big files? 2007 called - they want to tell you about this thing called YouTube.
As an exercise of rhetoric, it is all very fine and dandy that the developing countries say that their present day pollution should not count towards negotiated limits in the way that England didn't have such limits during the XIX century... but now if the damage is visible in the medium turn and directly in the territories and population of India and China, then let's see if they will take the driver's seat in negotiations and mitigating the effects of their pollution.
Whether or not it's fair for developing countries to be exempted from carbon limits, from the perspective of a 1st world person, is kind of beside the point. Whether we can get China onboard is one issue, and getting our own house in order is another. We shouldn't link one to the other - the idea that no one can do anything until everyone is ready to do something is a recipe for stasis.
Do you believe that the current environmental "stasis" (however incredibly brief it is, by any measure of geologic time) is somehow "good" and any deviation from this stasis is "bad"?
Our society has grown up under the climactic conditions that have been prevailing since the retreat of the last glaciation. By definition, changes in our current environmental conditions are going to result in things like changes in rainfall patterns (affecting crops), changes in sea level (as Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets melt), and the resulting human migrations and social changes. So, in answer to your question: yes, deviation from the current conditions are bad. This is not a hard concept to understand.
Switching to green energy would be worthwhile even in the absence of global warming. We could avoid all sorts of air and water pollution (with attendant cost savings), avoid sending money by the supertanker load to the middle east, achieve significant defense savings by not having to police the middle east (the region's importance is largely driven by our need to secure oil resources), remove our need to knock down entire mountains for coal (with attendant safety hazards for miners), eliminate hugely costly environmental disasters like Deepwater Horizon, etc, etc. The bottom line here is economic: we'd save a lot of money in the long run if we'd get our ass in gear and started the switch to clean energy now.
Now this is an interesting question. In the long term the most effective means would likely be to control the amount of sunlight that reaches Earth with space-based sunshades and mirors, but right now we don't really have many tools besides controlling the levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
There are a lot of problems with sunshade methods of climate control. The most realistic methods involve putting reflective particles (sulfates or water droplets) into the stratosphere.
These methods reduce the earth's average temperature, but (per modeling) still result in significant warmups in polar regions (they work by slowing down warming in equatorial regions). Problem: ocean currents are driven mainly by temperature differences between the warm equator and cold poles. If this temperature differential continues to be reduced, do the currents slow down or stop? If that happens, do the oceans become stagnant? Do they continue to produce sufficient O2, etc? No one knows.
This does nothing to address another problem with high CO2 in the atmosphere: ocean acidification (sulfates might even make the problem worse, as they're acidic). We know that molluscs can't build their shells below a certain pH... if there's a massive mollusc die-off, what does that mean for the ocean ecosystem? No one knows. Are there other bad effects? No one knows.
These methods worsen a less remarked-upon phenomenon: global dimming. Sounds funny, but the amount of light reaching the earth's surface has been gradually decreasing since measurements started to be taken in the 50's. There are real concerns that crops that require intense light (example: tomatoes) may suffer productivity losses. Are there other ecological effects? No one knows.
Once you start with these methods, you're stuck: if you ever stop, all the warming you were holding at bay comes back with a vengeance, in a period of a few years. Catastrophic doesn't begin to describe it. There's also the danger that people will act as if the problem is solved and go back to profligate use of fossil fuel, causing warming to worsen again.
I won't even bother discussing space umbrellas and the like. If we can't afford to switch to green energy, we really can't afford these. It's pretty much pie-in-the-sky.
Bottom line: the whole idea of geoengineering on this scale is a giant exercise in "what could possibly go wrong?" Trying to do this on the only planet you have to live on is not much short of crazy. We know the cause of global warming, and we know how to mitigate it - burn less carbon. So why don't we just get started?
Half your post is pretty much an off-topic, protectionist rant - I'm not sure what it has to do with the topic of global warming. But this:
So if someone comes up with a real plan, like closing down all coal fired plants and replacing them with a combination of nuclear, wind, molten salt solar, and other long term zero carbon energy sources? I'll be the first one on the bandwagon. But carbon trading is nothing but a scam, a Catholic indulgences scheme cooked up by the same folks that gave you credit default swaps to yet again bleed cash from what little the American people have.
I'm sorry, dude, but this is freaking ridiculous. There's two ways you can get the results you're talking about: 1) Soviet-style command economy measures, where the gov't just orders the coal plants shut down and new green plants built, or 2) market-driven measures (yes, cap & trade) which essentially prices carbon based fuel out of the market. 1) has the advantage of being quick, but it's politically impossible, probably illegal, and this kind of thing frequently results in distortions of the energy market - plants are built in powerful lawmakers' jurisdictions rather than where they're needed, and using technology built in powerful lawmakers' districts rather than the most effective technology.
2) avoids all that, by just using pricing mechanisms to make coal fired plants uneconomical to continue operating. It's unquestionably legal (similar plans are in place to reduce other pollutants) and more efficient because it doesn't pick favorite sites or technologies.
What about the costs? Ask fisherman on the Gulf Coast what Deepwater Horizon is costing them. Or hotel operators along the beaches. Ask the families of dead coal miners in Appalachia, and the people whose entire landscapes have been destroyed in mountain-leveling operations. Ask the people suffering from various pollution-related illnesses. Ask the people who can't eat fish more than once a week because it's poisoned with mercury (from burning coal). The point: there are costs no matter what we do. Green power is cheaper in the long run, and if we don't do cap & trade, what? A magic wand? And while there are substantial change-over costs to get there, it's a lot cheaper than, say, invading random countries in the Middle East and occupying them for decades so as to ensure a steady oil supply.
These arguments are always presented the same way: our choices are 1) keep doing what we're doing, regardless of the resulting environmental devastation, or 2) go back to the Stone Age. But of course, in reality we have the third option of better energy conservation + non-polluting energy generation, which not only are pretty much solved problems, but actually save everyone a bunch of money in the long run. But they're not so good for the bottom line of outfits like ExxonMobil... so with the aid of a bunch of bought-off lawmakers and vast quantities of FUD, nothing gets done.
The NIPRNET (sort of an oversimplification, but the same thing as the internet) is multiplexed with all sorts of other voice, data, teletype, POTS, etc, and sent over dedicated satellite links in the EHF/SHF/UHF bands. Bigger ships get it 24/7. Smaller ships only get it at certain times when they can get an antenna brought to bear on it. There's also some recreational access to the Internet via Inmarsat, but that's really limited.
Taking sun/star lines and reducing them is complicated and difficult to do correctly. You don't want to try to figure it out for the first time when you're at sea with a dead GPS. It takes practice.
When I was first in the Navy we were kind of in this boat (so to speak). GPS hadn't been invented yet, so you were left with Loran (which didn't have worldwide coverage), Omega (which practically never actually worked), or Transit (an earlier SATNAV system). Transit gave you a fix every few hours if it felt like it, but you could go for pretty long periods of time without one. I vividly remember getting ourselves from Pearl Harbor to American Samoa on nothing but the sextant. Very cool.
The internet was around, but no one had ever heard of it, and we certainly didn't have it. INMARSAT voice/fax comms started showing up on ships soon thereafter, but it was really expensive and we almost never used it.
There's no way the legal expenses cost $16M in *REAL* money. RIAA uses internal lawyers
That's some real interesting economics there. Dude, I can promise you that internal lawyers are not free. There are only a couple of possibilities: 1) the RIAA contracted with some legal firm for services. And paid them $16M real dollars. 2) RIAA looked at their staff, realized they didn't have a big enough legal staff to handle this, and hired a bunch of lawyers. And paid them $16M real dollars (some in the form of benefits). Or 3) they had sufficient slack in their internal legal department to just absorb this work (which seems highly unlikely), but even in this case, they still got a bunch of lawyers to do this work, and paid them $16M in exchange for it.
The bottom line is that when people do work for an organization, they charge to some charge code, and expenses get posted against that charge code. Whether they're internal or external (well, external types do it via invoice, but it's the same thing). It's not like internal people are working for free.
Getting Photoshop via a torrent is actually illegal. Jailbreaking your iPhone is against Apple policy. The one can result in big fines. The other can (at worst) result in voiding your warranty. The two are not comparable.
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AT&T was the only carrier that would let Apple retain a degree of control over the phone. Given the crap that, say, Verizon tends to load their phones up with, and their tendency to nickel and dime you to death with fees for everything, I can't say I'm sorry about how things worked out.
Because, of course, you can do all that stuff on an iPhone too. Rooting an iPhone is just jailbreaking, which is free, easy, and legal. Then you can install any app you want no matter where it comes from. And you don't even have to jailbreak to change your ring tones - I'm not sure where that idea is coming from.
Seriously, although I agree that Apple goes way to far with the control freakery, the practical effect of it is minimal. There's actually very little difference between iPhone and Android in terms of what you can do with the platform.
I'm not sure which iPhone you're talking about, but mine has thousands of tracks on it, only (count 'em) 2 of which came from iTMS, the rest being from CDs I own or other music stores (mostly Amazon or AllofMP3, back when you could still do that). I recorded and uploaded my own ring tone. Cost: $0. While I share your disgust about Apple's App Store policies, dude... jailbreak. It's not that hard and has been ruled perfectly legal.
So I'm having a hard time understanding what the problem is here.
... so why did they need to impose NDA's on everyone who makes these things? Yes, I understand there's a technical reason to build them this way, but why all the secrecy about it? It's hard to imagine any answer other than "we want to make more profit on cables by limiting competition".
The freedom to not even be able to GET true high speed internet in many parts of the country. Where do I sign up?
Yes, but the situations are still sort of reversed. Having access to good, cheap broadband, mass transit, etc, etc... is still pretty common in Europe. It's all but non-existent in the US. This is not the same thing as saying that EVERYWHERE in Europe is a paradise, but still.
A couple things: 1) ISDN isn't POTS. 2) ISDN BRI doesn't come close to 1500kbps down - it's 2 64kbps channels, plus like a 14kbps signaling channel. Even PRI is only about 2Mbps.
Geez, don't even get me started on ISDN. I tried to have it installed in the mid-90's, before cable/DSL became widespread. It took like 5-6 weeks of intermittent trying to find someone at the phone company (GTE, part of the corporate family tree of Sprint and Verizon) who even knew what it was. When I finally got in touch with the correct office, it took at least a month to get an appointment scheduled. Took the whole day off work, installers never showed. After berating the scheduling office, I was able to get a rescheduled appointment in two weeks. The guys show up, install the equipment and leave without testing it. Of course, the "modem" didn't work. More weeks of screwing around, until finally I told them to just cancel it. Trying to get it was a nightmare that took months and never was successful - I'm (obviously) still suffering from post-traumatic ISDN syndrome.
Ok, I'll bite. If private enterprise can do it, why haven't they? Here's a hint: the same reason it took the government to electrify rural areas. It's not profitable for private companies to do it.
In my neighborhood, we're wired for all three of DSL, cable, and fiber (FiOS) internet. Can't speak to the DSL, but Cox and Verizon are really duking it out - Cox service got markedly faster, and their pricing and customer service better, once Verizon started digging up all the neighborhoods around her for FiOS. To no avail, though - we switched from Cox to FiOS and never looked back - Verizon is actually delivering (per Speedtest) 15MB up/5 down, and I could get up to 25 up if I wanted, but I haven't seen the need.
Texas was admitted to the union via a joint resolution of Congress. The resolution did say that Texas might be divided into up to five states if that was convenient to all concerned, but that wouldn't supercede the US Constitution, which states that no state can be divided into parts or merged with another state without the permission of both the state(s) in question and Congress.
The flag thing isn't true either. The US Flag code states that the US flag must fly above all other flags it's displayed on the same staff with. When displayed on separate staves, the US flag and (any) state flag can fly at the same level, but the national flag gets the honored position on its own right. There's no "Texas exemption".
Do you seriously mean to say that fewer than 1% of internet users upload big files? 2007 called - they want to tell you about this thing called YouTube.
Whether or not it's fair for developing countries to be exempted from carbon limits, from the perspective of a 1st world person, is kind of beside the point. Whether we can get China onboard is one issue, and getting our own house in order is another. We shouldn't link one to the other - the idea that no one can do anything until everyone is ready to do something is a recipe for stasis.
Our society has grown up under the climactic conditions that have been prevailing since the retreat of the last glaciation. By definition, changes in our current environmental conditions are going to result in things like changes in rainfall patterns (affecting crops), changes in sea level (as Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets melt), and the resulting human migrations and social changes. So, in answer to your question: yes, deviation from the current conditions are bad. This is not a hard concept to understand.
Switching to green energy would be worthwhile even in the absence of global warming. We could avoid all sorts of air and water pollution (with attendant cost savings), avoid sending money by the supertanker load to the middle east, achieve significant defense savings by not having to police the middle east (the region's importance is largely driven by our need to secure oil resources), remove our need to knock down entire mountains for coal (with attendant safety hazards for miners), eliminate hugely costly environmental disasters like Deepwater Horizon, etc, etc. The bottom line here is economic: we'd save a lot of money in the long run if we'd get our ass in gear and started the switch to clean energy now.
There are a lot of problems with sunshade methods of climate control. The most realistic methods involve putting reflective particles (sulfates or water droplets) into the stratosphere.
I won't even bother discussing space umbrellas and the like. If we can't afford to switch to green energy, we really can't afford these. It's pretty much pie-in-the-sky.
Bottom line: the whole idea of geoengineering on this scale is a giant exercise in "what could possibly go wrong?" Trying to do this on the only planet you have to live on is not much short of crazy. We know the cause of global warming, and we know how to mitigate it - burn less carbon. So why don't we just get started?
Half your post is pretty much an off-topic, protectionist rant - I'm not sure what it has to do with the topic of global warming. But this:
I'm sorry, dude, but this is freaking ridiculous. There's two ways you can get the results you're talking about: 1) Soviet-style command economy measures, where the gov't just orders the coal plants shut down and new green plants built, or 2) market-driven measures (yes, cap & trade) which essentially prices carbon based fuel out of the market. 1) has the advantage of being quick, but it's politically impossible, probably illegal, and this kind of thing frequently results in distortions of the energy market - plants are built in powerful lawmakers' jurisdictions rather than where they're needed, and using technology built in powerful lawmakers' districts rather than the most effective technology.
2) avoids all that, by just using pricing mechanisms to make coal fired plants uneconomical to continue operating. It's unquestionably legal (similar plans are in place to reduce other pollutants) and more efficient because it doesn't pick favorite sites or technologies.
What about the costs? Ask fisherman on the Gulf Coast what Deepwater Horizon is costing them. Or hotel operators along the beaches. Ask the families of dead coal miners in Appalachia, and the people whose entire landscapes have been destroyed in mountain-leveling operations. Ask the people suffering from various pollution-related illnesses. Ask the people who can't eat fish more than once a week because it's poisoned with mercury (from burning coal). The point: there are costs no matter what we do. Green power is cheaper in the long run, and if we don't do cap & trade, what? A magic wand? And while there are substantial change-over costs to get there, it's a lot cheaper than, say, invading random countries in the Middle East and occupying them for decades so as to ensure a steady oil supply.
These arguments are always presented the same way: our choices are 1) keep doing what we're doing, regardless of the resulting environmental devastation, or 2) go back to the Stone Age. But of course, in reality we have the third option of better energy conservation + non-polluting energy generation, which not only are pretty much solved problems, but actually save everyone a bunch of money in the long run. But they're not so good for the bottom line of outfits like ExxonMobil... so with the aid of a bunch of bought-off lawmakers and vast quantities of FUD, nothing gets done.
The NIPRNET (sort of an oversimplification, but the same thing as the internet) is multiplexed with all sorts of other voice, data, teletype, POTS, etc, and sent over dedicated satellite links in the EHF/SHF/UHF bands. Bigger ships get it 24/7. Smaller ships only get it at certain times when they can get an antenna brought to bear on it. There's also some recreational access to the Internet via Inmarsat, but that's really limited.
One of the primary ways weather charts get sent to ships at sea is via satellite fax. Crazy, I know, but that's why.
Taking sun/star lines and reducing them is complicated and difficult to do correctly. You don't want to try to figure it out for the first time when you're at sea with a dead GPS. It takes practice.
When I was first in the Navy we were kind of in this boat (so to speak). GPS hadn't been invented yet, so you were left with Loran (which didn't have worldwide coverage), Omega (which practically never actually worked), or Transit (an earlier SATNAV system). Transit gave you a fix every few hours if it felt like it, but you could go for pretty long periods of time without one. I vividly remember getting ourselves from Pearl Harbor to American Samoa on nothing but the sextant. Very cool.
The internet was around, but no one had ever heard of it, and we certainly didn't have it. INMARSAT voice/fax comms started showing up on ships soon thereafter, but it was really expensive and we almost never used it.
That's some real interesting economics there. Dude, I can promise you that internal lawyers are not free. There are only a couple of possibilities: 1) the RIAA contracted with some legal firm for services. And paid them $16M real dollars. 2) RIAA looked at their staff, realized they didn't have a big enough legal staff to handle this, and hired a bunch of lawyers. And paid them $16M real dollars (some in the form of benefits). Or 3) they had sufficient slack in their internal legal department to just absorb this work (which seems highly unlikely), but even in this case, they still got a bunch of lawyers to do this work, and paid them $16M in exchange for it.
The bottom line is that when people do work for an organization, they charge to some charge code, and expenses get posted against that charge code. Whether they're internal or external (well, external types do it via invoice, but it's the same thing). It's not like internal people are working for free.
... it doesn't seem to be parsing the [sarcasm] tag correctly.
Couldn't you just make a car analogy like everyone else?
Getting Photoshop via a torrent is actually illegal. Jailbreaking your iPhone is against Apple policy. The one can result in big fines. The other can (at worst) result in voiding your warranty. The two are not comparable.