Not necessarily. There are some windows that just don't have draggable title bars, and there's no way to move them. Splash popups, etc. It can be especially bad with TWAIN software, where an immobile progress-bar window blocks the screen for as long as you're scanning.
where all the capable ones (IBM, EDS, what have you)
Uhm, Lockheed Martin Information Technology and Lockheed Martin Enterprise Information Systems frequently find themselves bidding against IBM and EDS for government contracts...
Methinks this'll be a DIY project, if only for prestige value.
PS. And of course, like any defense contractor, Lockheed is allergic to offshoring. Look what happened the last time!
Licences are usually nothing more than comeptition control.
Correct. Existing lawyers are allowed to decide how many new lawyers can be created. Supposedly this is for quality control, but they really do it to keep prices high.
US dentists do the same thing. Medical doctors do it too, but to a much lesser extent, because their field involves instant life-and-death where the quality control aspect is dominant.
I would of at least expect to see it on Lockheed's Press releases.
News of this level would be totally inconsistent with the rest of their press releases, which all focus on the award or completion of some government contract.
Why would they feel a need to make a public announcement every time they buy a few thousand more software licenses? Did they alert the press when upgrading NT4.0 to Win2k?
(Lockheed has already been a Red Hat customer for years, including delivering products on that platform. Linux is not new to them)
I mean, there are no units in which you can quantify the symphonies' quality
Total ticket sales. Ratio of first-time to repeat audience. Days of theatrical run. Public opinion surveys. Number of "stars" from newspaper reviewers.
With baseball you can very accurately estimate a player's contribution to scoring runs and thus winning ballgames.
Which still doesn't tell you who's a better player, unless they somehow had the same sets of opponents and teammates. (And equipment, and weather conditions, and everything else that matters)
For example, Freeda Foreman has a better winning record than Mike Tyson. Does that make her a better boxer? Imagine what would happen if they fought...
for lexmark, the toner cartridges are the lifeblood of the company, so they _have_ to be able to defend their revenue stream.
The law doesn't owe anybody a revenue stream.
If printers are a loss-leader for cartridges, and competitors are undercutting your cartridge sales, then go back and jack up printer prices. Make the price of an item more correctly reflect the work that went into it.
That's how capitalism is supposed to function- in a mature market, competition is high, margins are low, and consumers benefit.
I'm curious, can you explain a little to me about that business model and the similarities between them?
What the AC probably meant isn't as grandiose as you seem to think.
Back around the year 1980, the PC market was technically diverse one. You had the Apple ][, the Commodore 64, the Adam, the Sinclair, the TI-994a, some Atari thing, and probably more I've forgotten. Each system was totally incompatible with the others.
The the IBM PC joined the market, and everything changed. IBM, oddly, did not own the coyright to the OS on the machine, allowing Microsoft to tell it to manufacturers of clones- first Compaq, then Radio Shack, then everybody.
Apple is the only remaining survivor from the olden days of technically incompatible PCs. (Commodore held out for almost 10 years, but their Amiga line finally succumbed).
Leave it to Apple when the unique selling point of the iTunes service is duplicated, forcing them to compete on price or selection. Darn these decreased iTunes sales!
There's a little analogy here:
Microsoft : X-Box:: Apple : iPod
The judge in the SCC/Lexmark case read this very narrowly and said that since the algorithm came on a chip, it was non-exempt hardware instead of software.
An iPod resembles the common conception of a "computer" much more than a printer cartridge does. Just like a desktop PC, it has a display screen on top showing the output of software, buttons on the bottom sending input to the software, etc. Most importantly, that software can be replaced without replacing the hardware. (Unpaid hackers have demonstrated this)
In fact, Apple has already threatened to "upgrade" iPod software to break Real Harmony compatibility. The fact that the vendor treats the software as an independent entity gives a good opening to argue that Harmony establishes compatibilty with iPod software, not hardware.
But when you start producing batches of big block chevy v8's in your garage and start selling them, sad to say it but then you have crossed the line...
Only if they were covered by patents- otherwise your duplicates ("3rd party aftermarket parts") are perfectly legal.
And if they WERE patented, then the reverse engineering wasn't really needed, because you can go look it up at the USPTO.
(Of course, you can't reproduce a whole engine without reverse engineering something, but not the specific bits that are patented)
I am guessing that you don't cook much because baking and cooking are two different worlds.
Nobody said anything about "cooking", until you brought it up. The original poster just said "recipe", which could apply to baking, cooking, or even mixing a salad dressing. Then AKAImBatman gave a more detailed example which obviously focused on baking.
Only a meager decade or so ago, we adored him, and Microsoft
The self-professed technical-elite began to harbor widespread Microsoft-hatred in 1987, and it was cemented in their culture by 1994, long before Slashdot ever came online.
Not a year ago everyone here got hard for SCO
SCO was never adored, only tolerated- it was viewed as a company prehaps trying to do the right thing, but too incompetent to amount to much.
beloved Apple has no problem whipping out the DMCA to prevent real competition.
Anyone who thought Apple was pro-competition simply hasn't been paying attention, especially to their old experiment in clone-licensing.
They didn't run it like Enron, he ran it honestly albeit aggressively.
The numerous falsehoods that have supported Microsoft through the years are well known and documented. The very terms "vaporware" and "FUD" were invented to make it simpler to talk about how Microsoft works.
But the route they took to get it there, was frankly, brilliant.
Brilliance is not virtue. There is nothing contradictory about the concept of an "evil genuis" (or an amoral genius) (or a repetentant, evil genius, who dispurses ill-gotten treasure to the world's indigents)
Astrotufing sounds and feels like an internet-myth. Got a real, proven case of it?
Sure. There are many confessed ex-astroturfers. There's a continum from traditional product-sponsorship to non-celebrity product placement (college hotties paid to show off their new camera phones in the top clubs) down through to anonymous, non-copywritten advocacy. To them, it's all just marketing, and there are no qualms to spilling the beans once the contract is over (unless the contract went further, of course)
More interesting to you might be the proven case of Microsoft astroturfing, which was back in 1998, just when they needed the appearance of grateful computer-users to help them out at the Supreme Court. They sponsored the creation of the Freedom to Innovate Network, which back then was not hosted on microsoft.com, nor labelled as professional. That same crew plugged their site on BBSes like this. They were caught doing it then... it's easy to assume that they've continued, but are now too skilled to be easily caught.
Also, this website records falsehoods that were widely considered akin to astroturfing.
Fly the space shuttle to the hubble space telescope without pilots, equip the robot arm on the space shuttle with a toolkit for one last upgrade (better make it count).
That mission would take more years of prep-time than returning a rock from Mars. A lander which scoops a shovel into a return vehicle is fairly easy- the Soviets put them on the moon 40 years ago. It would be a push to build it in 2 years, but borderline possible.
Maybe an automated Hubble-adjustment flight could be attempted, but it would be a big risk. There are unknowns about the state of that satellite, and we don't yet have robot arms flexible enough to handle general-purpose repair work. (Just try getting a robot to change your oil- it can't be done) This ongoing deficiency in robotics is an embarassment, and one that should be corrected. But I estimated it as a 7 year goal, not a 2 year possibility.
Also, from a PR perspective, I don't think the public would accept an unmanned Shuttle flight (they would call it a risk to historically irreplacable artifacts)- and it would be embarrassing to NASA to run one. You see, that would be like an admission that the people who died on Columbia really had no need to be there at all. (Honestly, if the Shuttle landed itself, they wouldn't have been needed. All they really did for "experiments" was unpack them from boxes and turn them on. Without crew in the way, they could've been loaded unpacked, and activated by RC)
Send an iceburg along with the craft as a source of fuel for the landing craft, and sustenance for the humans.
I consider that a far-out proposal, maybe possible in 15 years if everything goes perfectly in the meantime. More modestly, we should start rehearsing the long-term human-survival part here on earth. The Biosphere experiments were huge failures- they should be restarted, until we finally get them to work right. If we can't keep people alive for 5 years in a giant greenhouse at 1g, we shouldn't even try for a small 0g habitat. (Note: the experiments can be mostly conducted without the need for human volunteers to live inside fulltime)
Build death star (2050)
I wanted a Borg Cube!
It's sure to garner complaints from the old paper ballot advocates (as if paper is tamper proof).
I do agree that it's pretty silly to subject voting to stricter security than we do money. One person stealing your bank account can ruin your life- but someone steals your vote? You'll probably never notice.
Arkham Asylum is outside of Gotham, but was named after a man, not a town.
That's how DC's lawyer's declared it to be, after noticing that HP Lovecraft hadn't actually been dead quite long enough to fall into public domain.
Metropolis and Gotham are both on the eastern seaboard,
Some global-map computer monitors glimpsed in assorted comics (JLA I suppose) have sometimes shown Gotham more inland, or around the Mississippi delta.
I never said anything about Korean being a standard language in other countries.
You said they access foreign-language websites more than Americans do, which is quite irrelevant. (1) US Americans can view a foreign website without using a foreign language, because English IS the standard language in other countries. (2) Korea is smaller than many US states. A domestic packet in the USA can travel further than an international one from Korea.
What is interesting is that the most popular online game, Starcraft, has a huge tolerance for high latency.
No. Starcraft is low-bandwidth, but it still needs low latency (not as much as an FPS, of course). I think gosu players would be disturbed if their RTT was 400 ms.
Doesn't spam + p2p traffic account for most of US internet traffic?
True, p2p is a growing amount of all traffic- but some p2p systems use HTTP. And although spam is the single largest category of email, email itself is a minority. And even if email were a bigger user of total bandwith, that wouldn't matter, because there is probably no other protocol more resilient to bad latency. P2p users, as well, care about latency far less than total bandwidth.
You sound like you are a "space enthusiast" who pays attention to politics, so I'm curious, who are you voting for and why?
I don't live in one of the 17 US states that is allowed to (meaningfully) vote.
Outside of the contested "swing states", it is mathmatically certain that your vote will make no difference. I could pick Nader for all the good it'd do. (Florida is probably the most delicately-balanced swing state, where 500 votes could turn the tide. Massachusetts is surely the most foregone conclusion, because not only is it the most Democratic, but this time the candidate is a local boy)
So I won't tell you who I'll vote for, because I know it doesn't matter. But I can say what I'd like in a candidate.
If I were a Presidential candidate, my space platform would be "Make R2-D2 a reality!". Specific instructions to NASA would be:
Go fly a 3-man Shuttle to Hubble and give it one last tune-up.
Park both Shuttles in museums, forever.
I would promise that by the end of my first term, NASA will have placed a Mars rock in the lobby of the Smithsonian- retrieved by a robotic probe.
I would promise that by the end of my second term, a robot would fly to Hubble and give it yet another tune-up. In 8 years of hard effort, they should be able to build a robot capable of operating wrenches and screwdrivers in zero-gravity. (This robot design will be leased to private companies to run automated 6-minute oil changes... providing a huge economic boost. The wealthy will install them in their home garages)
Next I want a robotic Mars-probe with a 10-year lifespan. That means it needs a nuclear power generator. There will be widespread opposition to sending uranium into orbit, but it'll need to be done. Any eventual human Mars team will need a lot of electricity to stay alive and useful, so we've got to learn how to do this.
Once all those goals are accomplished, only then would planning begin on how human spaceflight should be resumed.
Then explain to me why the cost of internet access is so high in the US in comparision?
I thought VC's bullet points made it pretty clear, but I answered that anyway. Basically: (1) "ignorant single-language speakers"? Yes, but that language is spoken officially on opposite ends of the globe, and is the secondary (internet fallback) language in almost every other country. (2) Even if USians only visit USian sites... even if they ignore Alaska+Hawaii and stay in the contiguous continent... the distance is still 20 times as far (Seattle -> Orlando vs Seoul -> Pusan). That 20x factor makes the infrastructure both more expensive, and slower.
Norway is somewhat similar to South Korea, and that has produced related effects. There is broadband access of more than 25% now, more than most of Europe (but trailing Iceland, I think, which obviously is more like Korea than Norway is).
But several of the factors that boosted Korea are less in Norway: Korea is only 300km across, Norway is 1000km (although I suppose the population rapidly thins out as you go much north of Trondheim). Norway has an open, drivable border to another country. That means the people there have a more international mindset- and it means that "pipes to the rest of the world" can go overland, not underwater. Norwegians know more English than Koreans (partly because of proximity to Europe & England, partly due to that border). Norway is in Europe, which is full of cool net servers; Korea is in SE Asia, which is mostly China, which has few attractive servers.
One interesting factor that Korea and Norway share, but the USA lacks, is an unpleasant climate: Norway is cold and Korea is hot, but either way, people are more likely to spend time indoors.
I'm not sure why mods gave you a point for being insightful;
I agree it's not very insightful... those facts are old news. It's conventional wisdom in the ISP industry, at least.
The geographical compactness of Korea is one of the main contributors to it's internet ubiquity. The fact that it's simply a dense country helps a lot, but then the fact that most Korean traffic stays in Korea is also important. It means that
less long-haul international routing is needed, reducing infrastructure costs. VC made this point succinctly above.
Round-trip-time for most packets is much less, improving the percieved performance and utility of the internet. More utility -> more demand -> more supply -> increased corporate efficiency and competition, a positive feedback loop
But they are more open to reading foreign language websites than most US citizens are.
That's a minor effect, if even true. The US has a larger number of expats from the rest of the world than does Korea (including a 10% permanent population that reads Spanish). But even pretending American residents only know English, that's the dominant language in points as far apart as Britain and Australia (you can't GET further apart). Plus, servers from Japan to Brazil to Germany use English as their default alternative language. Where do you find significant Korean servers, outside of SK itself?
Anyway, HTTP is no longer the driving protocol in SK. TV, VoIP/video chat, and games outweigh it. Some of those uses depend more on latency than bandwidth- and latency cannot be (meaningfully) improved by infrastructure, only by physical proximity.
The distance from Seoul to Pusan (300 km) is trivial compared to that between NYC and LA (4000 km). The smallness means that latency-dependent applications, from action games to videoconferencing, can be assured of getting the sub-50 ms ping needed to feel snappy. In the USA, it's a toss-up. Nobody in SK thinks "I'd better filter these game servers to somewhere on the East Coast to get a better ping"- it just doesn't matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Seeing as how the terms are up front before you buy the disc,
Those aren't "terms". It's just a reminder of what the US laws happen to be, not a license you agree to by purchase.
Even if the DVD didn't mention it, the law would still apply.
They fixed this in XP.
Not necessarily. There are some windows that just don't have draggable title bars, and there's no way to move them. Splash popups, etc. It can be especially bad with TWAIN software, where an immobile progress-bar window blocks the screen for as long as you're scanning.
where all the capable ones (IBM, EDS, what have you)
Uhm, Lockheed Martin Information Technology and Lockheed Martin Enterprise Information Systems frequently find themselves bidding against IBM and EDS for government contracts...
Methinks this'll be a DIY project, if only for prestige value.
PS. And of course, like any defense contractor, Lockheed is allergic to offshoring. Look what happened the last time!
The inflight entertainment systems on Delta airlines run Linux. (On the touchscreens where you choose your TV programs or music).
But... those planes were built by Boeing, Lockheed's ancient rival.
Licences are usually nothing more than comeptition control.
Correct. Existing lawyers are allowed to decide how many new lawyers can be created. Supposedly this is for quality control, but they really do it to keep prices high.
US dentists do the same thing. Medical doctors do it too, but to a much lesser extent, because their field involves instant life-and-death where the quality control aspect is dominant.
I would of at least expect to see it on Lockheed's Press releases.
News of this level would be totally inconsistent with the rest of their press releases, which all focus on the award or completion of some government contract.
Why would they feel a need to make a public announcement every time they buy a few thousand more software licenses? Did they alert the press when upgrading NT4.0 to Win2k?
(Lockheed has already been a Red Hat customer for years, including delivering products on that platform. Linux is not new to them)
I mean, there are no units in which you can quantify the symphonies' quality
Total ticket sales.
Ratio of first-time to repeat audience.
Days of theatrical run.
Public opinion surveys.
Number of "stars" from newspaper reviewers.
With baseball you can very accurately estimate a player's contribution to scoring runs and thus winning ballgames.
Which still doesn't tell you who's a better player, unless they somehow had the same sets of opponents and teammates. (And equipment, and weather conditions, and everything else that matters)
For example, Freeda Foreman has a better winning record than Mike Tyson. Does that make her a better boxer? Imagine what would happen if they fought...
for lexmark, the toner cartridges are the lifeblood of the company, so they _have_ to be able to defend their revenue stream.
The law doesn't owe anybody a revenue stream.
If printers are a loss-leader for cartridges, and competitors are undercutting your cartridge sales, then go back and jack up printer prices. Make the price of an item more correctly reflect the work that went into it.
That's how capitalism is supposed to function- in a mature market, competition is high, margins are low, and consumers benefit.
I'm curious, can you explain a little to me about that business model and the similarities between them?
What the AC probably meant isn't as grandiose as you seem to think.
Back around the year 1980, the PC market was technically diverse one. You had the Apple ][, the Commodore 64, the Adam, the Sinclair, the TI-994a, some Atari thing, and probably more I've forgotten. Each system was totally incompatible with the others.
The the IBM PC joined the market, and everything changed. IBM, oddly, did not own the coyright to the OS on the machine, allowing Microsoft to tell it to manufacturers of clones- first Compaq, then Radio Shack, then everybody.
Apple is the only remaining survivor from the olden days of technically incompatible PCs. (Commodore held out for almost 10 years, but their Amiga line finally succumbed).
Darn these increased sales!
:: Apple : iPod
Leave it to Apple when the unique selling point of the iTunes service is duplicated, forcing them to compete on price or selection. Darn these decreased iTunes sales!
There's a little analogy here:
Microsoft : X-Box
The judge in the SCC/Lexmark case read this very narrowly and said that since the algorithm came on a chip, it was non-exempt hardware instead of software.
An iPod resembles the common conception of a "computer" much more than a printer cartridge does. Just like a desktop PC, it has a display screen on top showing the output of software, buttons on the bottom sending input to the software, etc. Most importantly, that software can be replaced without replacing the hardware. (Unpaid hackers have demonstrated this)
In fact, Apple has already threatened to "upgrade" iPod software to break Real Harmony compatibility. The fact that the vendor treats the software as an independent entity gives a good opening to argue that Harmony establishes compatibilty with iPod software, not hardware.
But when you start producing batches of big block chevy v8's in your garage and start selling them, sad to say it but then you have crossed the line...
Only if they were covered by patents- otherwise your duplicates ("3rd party aftermarket parts") are perfectly legal.
And if they WERE patented, then the reverse engineering wasn't really needed, because you can go look it up at the USPTO.
(Of course, you can't reproduce a whole engine without reverse engineering something, but not the specific bits that are patented)
I am guessing that you don't cook much because baking and cooking are two different worlds.
Nobody said anything about "cooking", until you brought it up. The original poster just said "recipe", which could apply to baking, cooking, or even mixing a salad dressing. Then AKAImBatman gave a more detailed example which obviously focused on baking.
Only a meager decade or so ago, we adored him, and Microsoft
The self-professed technical-elite began to harbor widespread Microsoft-hatred in 1987, and it was cemented in their culture by 1994, long before Slashdot ever came online.
Not a year ago everyone here got hard for SCO
SCO was never adored, only tolerated- it was viewed as a company prehaps trying to do the right thing, but too incompetent to amount to much.
beloved Apple has no problem whipping out the DMCA to prevent real competition.
Anyone who thought Apple was pro-competition simply hasn't been paying attention, especially to their old experiment in clone-licensing.
They didn't run it like Enron, he ran it honestly albeit aggressively.
The numerous falsehoods that have supported Microsoft through the years are well known and documented. The very terms "vaporware" and "FUD" were invented to make it simpler to talk about how Microsoft works.
But the route they took to get it there, was frankly, brilliant.
Brilliance is not virtue. There is nothing contradictory about the concept of an "evil genuis" (or an amoral genius) (or a repetentant, evil genius, who dispurses ill-gotten treasure to the world's indigents)
Astrotufing sounds and feels like an internet-myth. Got a real, proven case of it?
Sure. There are many confessed ex-astroturfers. There's a continum from traditional product-sponsorship to non-celebrity product placement (college hotties paid to show off their new camera phones in the top clubs) down through to anonymous, non-copywritten advocacy. To them, it's all just marketing, and there are no qualms to spilling the beans once the contract is over (unless the contract went further, of course)
More interesting to you might be the proven case of Microsoft astroturfing, which was back in 1998, just when they needed the appearance of grateful computer-users to help them out at the Supreme Court. They sponsored the creation of the Freedom to Innovate Network, which back then was not hosted on microsoft.com, nor labelled as professional. That same crew plugged their site on BBSes like this. They were caught doing it then... it's easy to assume that they've continued, but are now too skilled to be easily caught.
Also, this website records falsehoods that were widely considered akin to astroturfing.
Fly the space shuttle to the hubble space telescope without pilots, equip the robot arm on the space shuttle with a toolkit for one last upgrade (better make it count).
That mission would take more years of prep-time than returning a rock from Mars. A lander which scoops a shovel into a return vehicle is fairly easy- the Soviets put them on the moon 40 years ago. It would be a push to build it in 2 years, but borderline possible.
Maybe an automated Hubble-adjustment flight could be attempted, but it would be a big risk. There are unknowns about the state of that satellite, and we don't yet have robot arms flexible enough to handle general-purpose repair work. (Just try getting a robot to change your oil- it can't be done) This ongoing deficiency in robotics is an embarassment, and one that should be corrected. But I estimated it as a 7 year goal, not a 2 year possibility.
Also, from a PR perspective, I don't think the public would accept an unmanned Shuttle flight (they would call it a risk to historically irreplacable artifacts)- and it would be embarrassing to NASA to run one. You see, that would be like an admission that the people who died on Columbia really had no need to be there at all. (Honestly, if the Shuttle landed itself, they wouldn't have been needed. All they really did for "experiments" was unpack them from boxes and turn them on. Without crew in the way, they could've been loaded unpacked, and activated by RC)
Send an iceburg along with the craft as a source of fuel for the landing craft, and sustenance for the humans.
I consider that a far-out proposal, maybe possible in 15 years if everything goes perfectly in the meantime. More modestly, we should start rehearsing the long-term human-survival part here on earth. The Biosphere experiments were huge failures- they should be restarted, until we finally get them to work right. If we can't keep people alive for 5 years in a giant greenhouse at 1g, we shouldn't even try for a small 0g habitat. (Note: the experiments can be mostly conducted without the need for human volunteers to live inside fulltime)
Build death star (2050)
I wanted a Borg Cube!
It's sure to garner complaints from the old paper ballot advocates (as if paper is tamper proof).
I do agree that it's pretty silly to subject voting to stricter security than we do money. One person stealing your bank account can ruin your life- but someone steals your vote? You'll probably never notice.
You're not a crazie.
You could be wrong there.
Arkham Asylum is outside of Gotham, but was named after a man, not a town.
That's how DC's lawyer's declared it to be, after noticing that HP Lovecraft hadn't actually been dead quite long enough to fall into public domain.
Metropolis and Gotham are both on the eastern seaboard,
Some global-map computer monitors glimpsed in assorted comics (JLA I suppose) have sometimes shown Gotham more inland, or around the Mississippi delta.
I never said anything about Korean being a standard language in other countries.
You said they access foreign-language websites more than Americans do, which is quite irrelevant.
(1) US Americans can view a foreign website without using a foreign language, because English IS the standard language in other countries.
(2) Korea is smaller than many US states. A domestic packet in the USA can travel further than an international one from Korea.
What is interesting is that the most popular online game, Starcraft, has a huge tolerance for high latency.
No. Starcraft is low-bandwidth, but it still needs low latency (not as much as an FPS, of course). I think gosu players would be disturbed if their RTT was 400 ms.
Doesn't spam + p2p traffic account for most of US internet traffic?
True, p2p is a growing amount of all traffic- but some p2p systems use HTTP. And although spam is the single largest category of email, email itself is a minority. And even if email were a bigger user of total bandwith, that wouldn't matter, because there is probably no other protocol more resilient to bad latency. P2p users, as well, care about latency far less than total bandwidth.
So you're half right. In the DC Universe Gotham and Metropolis are both equally New York.
But Batman lives in the USA, and has BEEN to New York city. He punched out Kingpin on top of the Statue of Liberty...
Gotham City must be north of there, because it's only a short drive to Arkham, which is firmly in Massachusetts.
it's an old third-grade joke
Actually, that's derived from a column written by Larry Niven decades ago. Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.
It's full of other insightful scientific inferences. For example, if Superman can fly, then his sperm probably can too!
I don't live in one of the 17 US states that is allowed to (meaningfully) vote.
Outside of the contested "swing states", it is mathmatically certain that your vote will make no difference. I could pick Nader for all the good it'd do. (Florida is probably the most delicately-balanced swing state, where 500 votes could turn the tide. Massachusetts is surely the most foregone conclusion, because not only is it the most Democratic, but this time the candidate is a local boy)
So I won't tell you who I'll vote for, because I know it doesn't matter. But I can say what I'd like in a candidate.
If I were a Presidential candidate, my space platform would be "Make R2-D2 a reality!". Specific instructions to NASA would be:
Then explain to me why the cost of internet access is so high in the US in comparision?
I thought VC's bullet points made it pretty clear, but I answered that anyway. Basically:
(1) "ignorant single-language speakers"? Yes, but that language is spoken officially on opposite ends of the globe, and is the secondary (internet fallback) language in almost every other country.
(2) Even if USians only visit USian sites... even if they ignore Alaska+Hawaii and stay in the contiguous continent... the distance is still 20 times as far (Seattle -> Orlando vs Seoul -> Pusan). That 20x factor makes the infrastructure both more expensive, and slower.
Norway is somewhat similar to South Korea, and that has produced related effects. There is broadband access of more than 25% now, more than most of Europe (but trailing Iceland, I think, which obviously is more like Korea than Norway is).
But several of the factors that boosted Korea are less in Norway: Korea is only 300km across, Norway is 1000km (although I suppose the population rapidly thins out as you go much north of Trondheim). Norway has an open, drivable border to another country. That means the people there have a more international mindset- and it means that "pipes to the rest of the world" can go overland, not underwater. Norwegians know more English than Koreans (partly because of proximity to Europe & England, partly due to that border). Norway is in Europe, which is full of cool net servers; Korea is in SE Asia, which is mostly China, which has few attractive servers.
One interesting factor that Korea and Norway share, but the USA lacks, is an unpleasant climate: Norway is cold and Korea is hot, but either way, people are more likely to spend time indoors.
I agree it's not very insightful... those facts are old news. It's conventional wisdom in the ISP industry, at least.
The geographical compactness of Korea is one of the main contributors to it's internet ubiquity.
The fact that it's simply a dense country helps a lot, but then the fact that most Korean traffic stays in Korea is also important. It means that
But they are more open to reading foreign language websites than most US citizens are.
That's a minor effect, if even true. The US has a larger number of expats from the rest of the world than does Korea (including a 10% permanent population that reads Spanish). But even pretending American residents only know English, that's the dominant language in points as far apart as Britain and Australia (you can't GET further apart). Plus, servers from Japan to Brazil to Germany use English as their default alternative language. Where do you find significant Korean servers, outside of SK itself?
Anyway, HTTP is no longer the driving protocol in SK. TV, VoIP/video chat, and games outweigh it. Some of those uses depend more on latency than bandwidth- and latency cannot be (meaningfully) improved by infrastructure, only by physical proximity.
The distance from Seoul to Pusan (300 km) is trivial compared to that between NYC and LA (4000 km). The smallness means that latency-dependent applications, from action games to videoconferencing, can be assured of getting the sub-50 ms ping needed to feel snappy. In the USA, it's a toss-up. Nobody in SK thinks "I'd better filter these game servers to somewhere on the East Coast to get a better ping"- it just doesn't matter.