If all they have is a picture of your license plate, that doesn't prove you were driving. We should use this ruling as precedent to get out of automated tickets when there is no clear picture of your face.
In places where photo enforcement is used, the laws are generally adjusted to implicate the person who registers the vehicle, and the license plate does tie directly to the vehicle registration. Your crime is not "running a red light", it is "allowing your vehicle to be used by some unknown person to run a red light". If your car was stolen, you can defend yourself using the police report to that effect. Otherwise you are SOL.
This is why rail works in the DC/Baltimore/Philly/NYC/Boston corridor. Regional rail is perfectly reasonable. I don't expect to see NY to LA anytime soon.
Aside from regional intercity rail, however, there still exists the problem of what to do once one gets there. I live in metro-NYC and frequently work in metro-DC, but I drive. I can get to Penn Station in NY very easily, and then get to Union Station in DC, but I can't get from Union Station to Northern Virginia beyond the beltway easily at all. Rail doesn't help me until I can get from Union Station to Herndon or Reston efficiently. In all these areas that developed after 1950 or so, the business destinations were spread out on the periphery - probably to avoid the taxes of the cities. It is really difficult to serve an area like Houston with subways/buses/light rail.
You are correct to a point. The Windows OS family has had a lot of attack vectors that don't require user intervention - worms and such - as well as many many vulnerabilities in tools like the default browser and email client. Mac and Linux systems have had far fewer of these vulnerabilities. A reasonably hardened XP system with the firewall turned on, various services turned off, and using Mozilla products instead of IE and Outlook Express is reasonably secure.
Start with the iPhone/iPod Touch's design, and scale it up to about 10x7, the same size as a typical large format paperback like an O'Reilly book. Aside from built in WiFi and BlueTooth, he device includes an Express Card slot and several USB ports, so that it can accommodate the broadband network cards offered by both the HSDPA and EvDO providers. The underlying specs will be closer to a MacBook or MacBook Air.
In iTouch mode, it will be able to do all the things the iTouch does, as well as connect to the 3G cell phone networks with the appropriate adapter. Email, web browsing, etc. are all there. This mode will operate in a low power mode.
One of the "applications" available in the iTouch interface will be an option to boot a full os, which can be some combination of Mac OS X and Windows via bootcamp. Now it becomes a full laptop. A keyboard and mouse can be connected via USB or BlueTooth. An external monitor can be connected via a mini-DVI adapter.
In my view, this would work very well for digital nomads and road warriors. The small device would fit easily into almost any bag, and wouldn't require a true laptop bag. It could be used on a plane or a park bench. It could be whipped out at a moments notice and immediately be useful. At the same time, it is easy to throw a keyboard and mouse into a bag with clothing for a business trip, and have a nice environment to work on documents and presentations at the hotel. When visiting a client, it could be plugged into a projector and run the presentation just as well as a typical laptop.
The problem with this scheme is that the price point wouldn't be anywhere close to the netbooks. This would be a $1,500 machine that would compete with ultra-portables, potentially remaking that segment. I can imagine that the technology could quickly trickle down, however.
Not only is it the death penalty, it will drive other corps out of the United States. The economic impact would be far far greater than the damage caused by the underlying crime.
Imagine, if you would, that a mid sized wall street bank was subject to this law. Say Credit Suisse is shut down because of a breach. That might be 20,000 or 30,000 jobs lost directly right there.
How long would it take before Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Goldman Sachs all flee to London and Tokyo? That is probably another million jobs right there.
Then consider the people who are indirectly affected. The construction workers who were about to put an addition on the home of a now unemployed worker. The people who serve lunch near the corporate headquarters of these companies. etc. All told we are now looking at 6 million jobs total.
Next consider the fact that it will be very hard for a business to get a loan or sell stock in the United States, since there is a very high risk that the company could be shut down. Tens of thousands of businesses dry up. Now we are talking a loss of thirty to forty million jobs.
No. Prosecuting a company for anything but the most egregious acts doesn't make any sense at all. That isn't to say that making executive more liable doesn't make sense, but prosecuting companies willy nilly is a bad idea.
So yeah, this is a pretty big deal -- not so much for spammers, but as a privacy violation. You can't do a name lookup for an arbitrary e-mail address, and you shouldn't be able to do it for a GMail address. Someone should get an ass-kicking for this.
You know what else... Someone left a thick softcover book on my doorstep the other day that listed the names, addresses, and phone numbers of everyone in my region. Hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions. I called the police about this, but they seemed unconcerned.
Well now I've got FiOS and Verizon Wireless and so far have been happy. My expectations of horrifically screwed-up billing never did come true, so I can say that right now, at this moment, I'm a happy customer. I make no claims or prognostications concerning next week. I've been using Verizon for a while. In terms of coverage, speed, and service reliability they really can't be beat. This merger makes a lot of sense because Verizon and Alltel run compatible systems but their markets don't overlap a lot. In this way one company can offer nationwide service on their own network.
I expect the market to consolidate into two players over the next few years. The costs of enhancing the infrastructure are so high that, like many quasi-utilities, it doesn't make sense to have too many players.
The interesting angle to this is that Verizon has already committed to moving to LTE, the network technology evolved from and slated to replace UMTS/HSPDA. That means that CDMA2000 is effectively dead, only Sprint will remain (and how long will that last). When the iPhone 4G is released, it should be technically capable of running on Verizon's network. The world is converging on a single system merging the software stack derived from GSM, and the radio technology derived from CDMA.
That was a nice troll. GSM is TDMA!
For those playing at home, TDMA/CDMA are descriptions of schemes by which several radios can communicate on the same band space. GSM is a spec for operating a mobile phone system utilizing TDMA radios. UMTS is a spec that evolved from GSM but uses CDMA radios.
When talking about TDMA/CDMA, you are really talking about Ethernet vs. Token Ring. When talking GSM, you are talking about TCP/IP on Ethernet.
Except that they are claiming that mp3s outside your shared folder are yours, but they are no longer authorized copies once they enter your shared folder?
That's a step beyond claiming that "making available" is piracy, which is a step beyond what most of us accept as piracy.
In this case the "Shared Folder" in question is the shared folder of the P2P software, the place where you put stuff you intend to distribute. That certainly counts as "make available". In addition, according to the plaintiff the defendant destroyed some log files after they were subpoenaed, logs that would have shown that the files were indeed distributed. Destroying evidence has the effect of the evidence being construed against you.
And it continued throughout the 20'th century, with some of the most brutal third world dictators installed or helped by the USA. If you happen to be on our side, here, let us teach you how to torture and terrorize dissidents. And god forbid if you happen to _not_ be on our side. Then we'll stage a coup and replace you with some puppet that's on our side. And teach _him_ how to torture and terrorize disidents.
You're essentially correct, though I think the tide has turned on that. The US is spending lots of treasure and lots of lots of lives in an attempt to build real democratic institutions in Afghanistan and Iraq. We'll see in 20 years or so if that did us any better.
don't know what software you install, but until recently, part of my on-site job included installing large software packages with a footprint of 1-2 Gigs. At 2-3 customers a month, I can easily breach that. Include the fact that a lot of customers won't just let me plug in my laptop into their network, and that we release a new version pretty much every couple of weeks, and I'm basically forced to download at least 2-3G a month.
So you go to a client site, set up your laptop, and spend the next 20 hours downloading software to your laptop? Ten, since you can't plug your laptop into the client network you need to write a DVD to get the software to the client?
Personally, I do my best to do my big downloading before I get on-site when I have access to a real broadband connection. Alternately I'll use a client PC to download from my company's web site directly to a client computer over the company's internet connection.
Lots of people were buying up this service when the terms were less strict expecting to use it as a wireless data service for their laptops. Why else do they even sell those EVDO cards for laptops?
If they are using bt, they are violating the terms of service anyway - and not some new ToS that Verizon amended, but the original ToS. Verizon spelled out the types of usage that were allowed, and it would be difficult to exceed 5 GB with that usage.
shouldn't that be 30 hrs? [snipped] Still a lot of time, but definitely less than you had originally stated.
There is always some overhead that needs to be taken into account on top of the raw transfer rate. TCP transfers, delays due to handshakes, packet resends, etc. I discounted the real throughput a bit. I may have been too pessimistic with 40hrs, but if we split the difference at 35hrs that would probably be pretty close.
It doesn't matter if it doesn't affect 99.99% of their customers. It's still not unlimited, which is what they're advertising. It is a Big Deal for that 0.001% (higher really) of people who DO go over the value. One of my friends just got kicked off Verizon's service a couple weeks ago. He's a software developer, works at home a lot, and livs in an RV. This service SHOULD have been good for him, but after downloading a few TV shows from iTunes (NOT P2P, notice) and a couple Linux ISOs or whatever, he suddenly got booted. They didn't even give him an option to pay more and stay on the service.
I'm not trying to defend Verizon Wireless's business practice here, and agree that it may constitute some sort of fraud. I was just countering the parent poster's assertion that the limit was absurdly low and that one could go over that limit in 20 minutes.
I feel bad for your friend, and he is justified in being annoyed at Verizon Wireless. I'm a little surprised that one could reasonably hit the limit. To an extent I'm a digital nomad myself, and I wouldn't want to try to download ISOs via EvDO. When I'm traveling and I have issues like that I usually go to someplace with WiFi or even a wired connection.
Now for the 5GB limit. Get real. 1 DVD ISO for a linux distro is 4GB alone. I could easily reach this limit in about 20 minutes without even trying, just setting up a new machine.
I think you probably missed an important point. This is not a limit on Verizon's wired DSL or FIOS services, this is VerizonWireless' (a different company) 3G wireless data services.
With an average download speed of about 400kbs, 5GB represents about 40 hours of continuous download. EvDO is simply not practical for moving about large amounts of data.
I'm not a great fan of Verizon's business practices, but from a practical perspective the 5 GB limit is unlikely to affect 99.99% of their users. I'm traveling to client sites quite a bit for my job doing software implementations. I use the service extensively, mostly for web access, replicating email, and some Remote Desktop/VNC usage, and I rarely break 1GB in a month.
Hybrid locomotives seem to be quite a winner since there's already the conversion cycle, and adding 2000 pounds of batteries isn't really significant in the scope of a train weighing 5 million pounds or more.
Actually, the additional weight is a benefit. Locomotives need to be pretty much as heavy as possible in order to increase the traction of the drive wheels. Frequently locomotives have substantial amounts of ballast in order reduce slippage.
I'm tired of companies and individuals of claiming that they'll go "somewhere else" if there's a tax hike in their country. In the US we have a very low tax rate over-all, so I'm not exactly sure where these companies or individuals would go.
There is more to this than it may seem. Under US tax law, a US company can be taxed on all its operations, both those in the US and those outside. Many other countries, however, only tax a multinational on its domestic operations. Why should a company like Ford or GM have to pay taxes twice - to the US and the local jurisdiction - on its operations in Europe and Asia while Daimler Chrysler only has to pay taxes once to the local jurisdiction?
Any multinational with significant operations outside the US would be silly to not create a foreign holding company and a US subsidiary.
Historically, Unix has put a lot of binaries in/etc, which certainly lends support to the "et cetera" explanation.
As the/bin and/or/usr/bin directories grew in size, it became important to move those directories to other partitions. Therefore, the root partition need to have a subset of tools available, sufficient to bring the environment up to at least the point where the bin directory could be mounted as well as sufficient tools to troubleshoot and repair if the bin directory didn't mount.
Since/etc (I pronounce it et-see BTW) was already part of the root partition it was expedient to put the initial utilities here. As systems got more complex and the number of utilities rose, they got broken out to/sbin, also part of the root partition.
Nowadays,/etc really should contain only system-wide config data, and it should be editable with a plain text editor. Data files generated from plain test config files are a reasonable exception, as well. We can be pragmatic.
First of all, the parent deserves to be mod'ed up. This type of discourse is all too rare on the dot.
On the first part of your argument, I can't fault your reasoning, and you might be right.
Furthermore, how can you fully subscribe to a bias like "This nation doesn't elect Senators.." and NOT accept the bias of "This nation has never elected an Hispanic?"
This, I have to bite back on. How many Hispanics have run legitimate campaigns, even simply to be nominated by a major party? How many Senators? I'm sure if looked at all the races between 1860 and 2004, we'd find over a hundred cases where a Senator was a legitimate candidate for a major party nomination. In only three cases did that bid succeed. Hispanics as group have neither the long negative track record of Senators, nor the long positive track record of State Governors.
One simply cannot minimize the power of the Clinton campaign. Seriously. They are very formidable and they could win a national election. I honestly believe that. I don't WANT it to happen, but it could.
Agreed. Hillary has her hand on the wheel of the finest political operation since LBJ. The problem with Hillary in a general election is that she is a strongly polarizing figure. She is likely to energize her own base, but also energize the Republican right as well.
[BTW, I'm taking some of these points out of the order that you presented them]
And for what it's worth, my candidate is Obama.
Obama at 2yr 2mo. Much fewer time bombs.
Obama is a really interesting candidate. I think that the "Black" issue won't really hurt him. I think the number of people who would have voted for the Democrat and either stay home or vote Republican due to his race won't be a major factor. I'm not sure yet how he'll do in the long run, however. Like Dean, he may run out of steam. He has a long way to run, and he has made himself someone who everyone wants to take pot shots at. Plus, he hasn't made any policy statements yet. Will the bloom be off the rose once he starts doing so?
In short, Obama has huge hurdles ahead of him.
And, to further muddy the political calculus, if Obama is rejected do minority voters stay home, or do they throw their support behind the white candidate? I've seen it happen in NYC mayoral races.
Rudy, for example, would take a General election in a walk. His values really do align with those of an average American. He his socially liberal and fiscally conservative. These are American values.
At any rate, it's a very good year to be a Democrat. This nation showed in 2006 that they're ready for some new ideas. And Obama, Clinton, Edwards, and even Al Gore are all fully capable, top-tier candidates that could win the big prize. I really don't believe Al Gore will enter the race, but the point is that we've got a very deep bench this go around.
By your own statement the electorate is moderate, centrist. Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi need to be real careful, because both have the potential to be viewed by the country as a whole as left wing nut jobs. The jury is still out on whether the country moved left in 2006, or whether the electorate was fed up with corruption. If the Democrats take their victory as a mandate which might not be there, and the Republicans nominate a moderate, the advantage might be squandered.
Any particular reason you say that? (though I will be pleased if you are right)
Only three Senators have been elected President since before the Civil War (though countless Senators have lost general elections after winning a nomination). History indicates that Americans choose VPs and successful governors as President. That is a handicap to all the current front runners on the Democrat side as well as McCain.
While I personally like Giuliani, I have my doubts about his ability to win a general election. New Englanders generally don't fare well in general elections either.
If you look at the combined content of the separate companies, there is a lot of duplication of effort. Each provider has some exclusive content, but the majority of content is duplicated. There is also 2x the infrastructure, 2x the personnel, 2x the billing systems, etc. Well, it may not be exactly 2x but you get the idea. By combining the two, you combine the customer base yet cut the overall operational budget. Thus the bottom line is improved. There could also conceivably be some added advantages of freeing up bandwidth. Or they could sell of the radio spectrum too.
The big deal is the satellite infrastructure. It is really really really expensive to maintain satellites.
Back when satellite radio first started to get some traction, I remember hearing that 11 million subscribers was the magic number where they could maintain the satellite cloud and break even. Over the long term they'll be migrating to a single platform with only a single set of satellites. Together they currently claim about 13 or 14 million subscribers, so it is reasonable to think that the combined entity has very good prospects of being sustainable.
What will prevent piracy? The same thing that made phone phreaking obsolete: Music, like long distance phone service, will become too cheap to steal. $0.10 to get a high quality digital recording vs. swapping sketchy rips with sketchy people - the choice is easy. The other side of the coin is that $0.10 is too little money to support the customer service required when people migrate a DRM'ed music collection from one computer to another or one player to another.
Piracy via P2P is really motivated by three forces: price, convenience, and variety. Many people would happily pay for the music they want. Music download services and P2P provide a degree of convenience, but variety is the real killer. P2P piracy allows users to explore different music, something that prior distribution systems never quite took into account.
The way to beat piracy is to offer free downloads of the entire catalog, but at a relatively low bit rate, perhaps 32 kbs. Then, provide at easy mechanism to buy high fidelity music at a higher price, perhaps 0.75 USD per song.
This kind of system would successfully compete against P2P by offering superior convenience and equivalent variety. This would come at a reasonable price, one that most people would be willing to pay for legal, unencumbered music and one which would allow the labels and artists to profit.
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If all they have is a picture of your
license plate, that doesn't prove you were
driving. We should use this ruling as precedent
to get out of automated tickets when there is
no clear picture of your face.
In places where photo enforcement is used, the laws are generally adjusted to implicate the person who registers the vehicle, and the license plate does tie directly to the vehicle registration. Your crime is not "running a red light", it is "allowing your vehicle to be used by some unknown person to run a red light". If your car was stolen, you can defend yourself using the police report to that effect. Otherwise you are SOL.
This is why rail works in the DC/Baltimore/Philly/NYC/Boston corridor. Regional rail is perfectly reasonable. I don't expect to see NY to LA anytime soon.
Aside from regional intercity rail, however, there still exists the problem of what to do once one gets there. I live in metro-NYC and frequently work in metro-DC, but I drive. I can get to Penn Station in NY very easily, and then get to Union Station in DC, but I can't get from Union Station to Northern Virginia beyond the beltway easily at all. Rail doesn't help me until I can get from Union Station to Herndon or Reston efficiently. In all these areas that developed after 1950 or so, the business destinations were spread out on the periphery - probably to avoid the taxes of the cities. It is really difficult to serve an area like Houston with subways/buses/light rail.
You are correct to a point. The Windows OS family has had a lot of attack vectors that don't require user intervention - worms and such - as well as many many vulnerabilities in tools like the default browser and email client. Mac and Linux systems have had far fewer of these vulnerabilities. A reasonably hardened XP system with the firewall turned on, various services turned off, and using Mozilla products instead of IE and Outlook Express is reasonably secure.
Start with the iPhone/iPod Touch's design, and scale it up to about 10x7, the same size as a typical large format paperback like an O'Reilly book. Aside from built in WiFi and BlueTooth, he device includes an Express Card slot and several USB ports, so that it can accommodate the broadband network cards offered by both the HSDPA and EvDO providers. The underlying specs will be closer to a MacBook or MacBook Air.
In iTouch mode, it will be able to do all the things the iTouch does, as well as connect to the 3G cell phone networks with the appropriate adapter. Email, web browsing, etc. are all there. This mode will operate in a low power mode.
One of the "applications" available in the iTouch interface will be an option to boot a full os, which can be some combination of Mac OS X and Windows via bootcamp. Now it becomes a full laptop. A keyboard and mouse can be connected via USB or BlueTooth. An external monitor can be connected via a mini-DVI adapter.
In my view, this would work very well for digital nomads and road warriors. The small device would fit easily into almost any bag, and wouldn't require a true laptop bag. It could be used on a plane or a park bench. It could be whipped out at a moments notice and immediately be useful. At the same time, it is easy to throw a keyboard and mouse into a bag with clothing for a business trip, and have a nice environment to work on documents and presentations at the hotel. When visiting a client, it could be plugged into a projector and run the presentation just as well as a typical laptop.
The problem with this scheme is that the price point wouldn't be anywhere close to the netbooks. This would be a $1,500 machine that would compete with ultra-portables, potentially remaking that segment. I can imagine that the technology could quickly trickle down, however.
Not only is it the death penalty, it will drive other corps out of the United States. The economic impact would be far far greater than the damage caused by the underlying crime.
Imagine, if you would, that a mid sized wall street bank was subject to this law. Say Credit Suisse is shut down because of a breach. That might be 20,000 or 30,000 jobs lost directly right there.
How long would it take before Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Goldman Sachs all flee to London and Tokyo? That is probably another million jobs right there.
Then consider the people who are indirectly affected. The construction workers who were about to put an addition on the home of a now unemployed worker. The people who serve lunch near the corporate headquarters of these companies. etc. All told we are now looking at 6 million jobs total.
Next consider the fact that it will be very hard for a business to get a loan or sell stock in the United States, since there is a very high risk that the company could be shut down. Tens of thousands of businesses dry up. Now we are talking a loss of thirty to forty million jobs.
No. Prosecuting a company for anything but the most egregious acts doesn't make any sense at all. That isn't to say that making executive more liable doesn't make sense, but prosecuting companies willy nilly is a bad idea.
So yeah, this is a pretty big deal -- not so much for spammers, but as a privacy violation. You can't do a name lookup for an arbitrary e-mail address, and you shouldn't be able to do it for a GMail address. Someone should get an ass-kicking for this.
You know what else... Someone left a thick softcover book on my doorstep the other day that listed the names, addresses, and phone numbers of everyone in my region. Hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions. I called the police about this, but they seemed unconcerned.
Just in time to fuel the "hydrogen economy"!
That was a nice troll. GSM is TDMA! For those playing at home, TDMA/CDMA are descriptions of schemes by which several radios can communicate on the same band space. GSM is a spec for operating a mobile phone system utilizing TDMA radios. UMTS is a spec that evolved from GSM but uses CDMA radios. When talking about TDMA/CDMA, you are really talking about Ethernet vs. Token Ring. When talking GSM, you are talking about TCP/IP on Ethernet.
You're essentially correct, though I think the tide has turned on that. The US is spending lots of treasure and lots of lots of lives in an attempt to build real democratic institutions in Afghanistan and Iraq. We'll see in 20 years or so if that did us any better.
So you go to a client site, set up your laptop, and spend the next 20 hours downloading software to your laptop? Ten, since you can't plug your laptop into the client network you need to write a DVD to get the software to the client?
Personally, I do my best to do my big downloading before I get on-site when I have access to a real broadband connection. Alternately I'll use a client PC to download from my company's web site directly to a client computer over the company's internet connection.
If they are using bt, they are violating the terms of service anyway - and not some new ToS that Verizon amended, but the original ToS. Verizon spelled out the types of usage that were allowed, and it would be difficult to exceed 5 GB with that usage.
I'm not trying to defend Verizon Wireless's business practice here, and agree that it may constitute some sort of fraud. I was just countering the parent poster's assertion that the limit was absurdly low and that one could go over that limit in 20 minutes.
I feel bad for your friend, and he is justified in being annoyed at Verizon Wireless. I'm a little surprised that one could reasonably hit the limit. To an extent I'm a digital nomad myself, and I wouldn't want to try to download ISOs via EvDO. When I'm traveling and I have issues like that I usually go to someplace with WiFi or even a wired connection.
I think you probably missed an important point. This is not a limit on Verizon's wired DSL or FIOS services, this is VerizonWireless' (a different company) 3G wireless data services.
With an average download speed of about 400kbs, 5GB represents about 40 hours of continuous download. EvDO is simply not practical for moving about large amounts of data.
I'm not a great fan of Verizon's business practices, but from a practical perspective the 5 GB limit is unlikely to affect 99.99% of their users. I'm traveling to client sites quite a bit for my job doing software implementations. I use the service extensively, mostly for web access, replicating email, and some Remote Desktop/VNC usage, and I rarely break 1GB in a month.
Actually, the additional weight is a benefit. Locomotives need to be pretty much as heavy as possible in order to increase the traction of the drive wheels. Frequently locomotives have substantial amounts of ballast in order reduce slippage.
There is more to this than it may seem. Under US tax law, a US company can be taxed on all its operations, both those in the US and those outside. Many other countries, however, only tax a multinational on its domestic operations. Why should a company like Ford or GM have to pay taxes twice - to the US and the local jurisdiction - on its operations in Europe and Asia while Daimler Chrysler only has to pay taxes once to the local jurisdiction?
Any multinational with significant operations outside the US would be silly to not create a foreign holding company and a US subsidiary.
As the /bin and/or /usr/bin directories grew in size, it became important to move those directories to other partitions. Therefore, the root partition need to have a subset of tools available, sufficient to bring the environment up to at least the point where the bin directory could be mounted as well as sufficient tools to troubleshoot and repair if the bin directory didn't mount.
Since /etc (I pronounce it et-see BTW) was already part of the root partition it was expedient to put the initial utilities here. As systems got more complex and the number of utilities rose, they got broken out to /sbin, also part of the root partition.
Nowadays, /etc really should contain only system-wide config data, and it should be editable with a plain text editor. Data files generated from plain test config files are a reasonable exception, as well. We can be pragmatic.
First of all, the parent deserves to be mod'ed up. This type of discourse is all too rare on the dot.
On the first part of your argument, I can't fault your reasoning, and you might be right.
This, I have to bite back on. How many Hispanics have run legitimate campaigns, even simply to be nominated by a major party? How many Senators? I'm sure if looked at all the races between 1860 and 2004, we'd find over a hundred cases where a Senator was a legitimate candidate for a major party nomination. In only three cases did that bid succeed. Hispanics as group have neither the long negative track record of Senators, nor the long positive track record of State Governors.
Agreed. Hillary has her hand on the wheel of the finest political operation since LBJ. The problem with Hillary in a general election is that she is a strongly polarizing figure. She is likely to energize her own base, but also energize the Republican right as well.
[BTW, I'm taking some of these points out of the order that you presented them]
Obama is a really interesting candidate. I think that the "Black" issue won't really hurt him. I think the number of people who would have voted for the Democrat and either stay home or vote Republican due to his race won't be a major factor. I'm not sure yet how he'll do in the long run, however. Like Dean, he may run out of steam. He has a long way to run, and he has made himself someone who everyone wants to take pot shots at. Plus, he hasn't made any policy statements yet. Will the bloom be off the rose once he starts doing so?
In short, Obama has huge hurdles ahead of him.
And, to further muddy the political calculus, if Obama is rejected do minority voters stay home, or do they throw their support behind the white candidate? I've seen it happen in NYC mayoral races.
By your own statement the electorate is moderate, centrist. Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi need to be real careful, because both have the potential to be viewed by the country as a whole as left wing nut jobs. The jury is still out on whether the country moved left in 2006, or whether the electorate was fed up with corruption. If the Democrats take their victory as a mandate which might not be there, and the Republicans nominate a moderate, the advantage might be squandered.
Only three Senators have been elected President since before the Civil War (though countless Senators have lost general elections after winning a nomination). History indicates that Americans choose VPs and successful governors as President. That is a handicap to all the current front runners on the Democrat side as well as McCain.
While I personally like Giuliani, I have my doubts about his ability to win a general election. New Englanders generally don't fare well in general elections either.
That leaves Richardson.
The big deal is the satellite infrastructure. It is really really really expensive to maintain satellites.
Back when satellite radio first started to get some traction, I remember hearing that 11 million subscribers was the magic number where they could maintain the satellite cloud and break even. Over the long term they'll be migrating to a single platform with only a single set of satellites. Together they currently claim about 13 or 14 million subscribers, so it is reasonable to think that the combined entity has very good prospects of being sustainable.
Piracy via P2P is really motivated by three forces: price, convenience, and variety. Many people would happily pay for the music they want. Music download services and P2P provide a degree of convenience, but variety is the real killer. P2P piracy allows users to explore different music, something that prior distribution systems never quite took into account.
The way to beat piracy is to offer free downloads of the entire catalog, but at a relatively low bit rate, perhaps 32 kbs. Then, provide at easy mechanism to buy high fidelity music at a higher price, perhaps 0.75 USD per song.
This kind of system would successfully compete against P2P by offering superior convenience and equivalent variety. This would come at a reasonable price, one that most people would be willing to pay for legal, unencumbered music and one which would allow the labels and artists to profit.