The airwaves belong to the people of the United States and we *lease* spectrum to those that provide the citizens and our country with the best value. It is a natural resource which is managed on our behalf by our government. Don't for a minute think of the RF spectrum as anything but that. It is not "the government's to begin with" -- it is the peoples to begin with, and we delegate to our government the right to grant exclusive or shared use for a limited time to other entities.
There is *no* mobile contract in the US priced anything close to that. I know. I just looked. I came back from a couple weeks in the UK. I spent about USD30 on a 3 network SIM + top-up. Had phone and internet service for my stay. A month of unlimited internet on 3 is about USD25. It's even cheaper for reasonably limited data (i.e. more than you get in the US on average).
The closest I could get in the US was on T-Mobile and that was USD65/mo for phone/data.
The US does not do much for keeping our telecom services competitive. Our free markets are not exactly filled with robust competition.
You could just leave the SIM card at home and take the phone with you. The wi-fi capability is all you need to maintain communications with the outside world in most urban environments, and doing encrypted, TORed VOIP over a wifi connection shouldn't identify you like the SIM would.
That works only if you know how to spoof your device's MAC address. Otherwise, you are just as uniquely identified as your SIM.
That money is being spent in the USA, it is going to our own citizens to advance our own science.
With your reasoning, just about EVERY SINGLE project this government has EVER undertaken:
I'm sorry, but this is a very real failure. I'm a total space geek at heart, but the cost overruns completely change the cost/benefit analysis of the project. Sure, if there is no other research or project to spend the money on, your argument might make sense. But there are tons of these project that all compete for funding. The value we, as citizens and taxpayers, receive for that money is incredibly important. There are a ton of other very worthy projects that could have done more with that amount of money.
Hell, for that amount of money, how many New Horizons type missions could we have paid for?
Very funny, but the avionics industry is based on real specs. As in, non-junk specs from people who actually know what they're talking about. In a perfect world, business software would have that too.
Exactly. First, imagine a typical American MBA. Now imagine the requirement specs from that MBA.
I had the same problem with United Airlines about a decade ago. Just about every company I deal with gets their own email address. I started getting spam to the account I used for United. They were actually pretty good about responding when the abuse was brought to their attention. IIRC they traced it back to an email service vendor.
The mathematicians are suppressing my brilliant papers proving that 2 + 2 = Chocolate. Help, I'm being repressed!
As a fellow 4 denier, I welcome this ground-breaking research. The important question now is just "how dark is the chocolate?" And "is it tasty enough to get peer reviewed?"
I *do* think that people *intend* to serve their own best interests. I also think that people are intensely manipulated while pursuing that goal. My wording is less precise than I would have preferred. People fail to serve their own best interests because of information manipulation. The FDA exists in order to prevent the most egregious abuses against the most vulnerable of us -- those that are sick and dying.
I wonder it Friedman remembers why the FDA was needed in the first place? The FDA *was a response* to an imperfect market. If it's doing what Milton says it's doing, then the FDA is doing exactly what it is supposed to do!
You know that economics as a science is fundamentally flawed when it expects that people are out to serve their best interests.
People are idiots. A person may be smart, but people are stupid and have no idea what is in their best interest. People's rational and irrational fears and impulses can be preyed upon. Marketing is all about making people make *stupid economic choices* with limited and biased information. Economics might actually work if marketing didn't exist to exploit humanity's fundamental frailties. Until then, pardon me if I don't listen to the likes of Friedman when it comes to government policy on this topic. Our must fundamental fear is fear of death. And the FDA exists to prevent that natural fear from being preyed upon by the unscrupulous.
It's the headline that is insightful. Most companies backup all desktops and have those backups stored off-site, sometimes for years.
All this BS about DBAN, dd and re-imaging the machines are kinda silly from that perspective. Just talk to the IT group and let them know your concerns. They have access to the desktop anyway. If they wanted this stuff, they would have it already.
I do agree with your post though -- most people conduct personal business from work computers. The GP's question was silly. Though I will admit that I don't do *any* personal stuff through my current employer's network. *Everything* is monitored and recorded for compliance.
You measure success in new services. Your grandparents (assuming you are an American and your family not recent immigrants) measured success as universal access to telephone service (and water, and electricity). That universal access to mobile devices and internet exists in a country as vast as the U.S. is precisely because that early telephone infrastructure existed. That "crapola" is what made this country great and gives us access to resources in even the most sparsely populated areas.
Regulated monopolies exist to balance the needs of both business and the state. It helps us as citizens, even if we don't get the full benefit as consumers. I consider myself a citizen first and foremost.
The Chicago Tribune does a Sunday-only subscription. I just want the paper delivered by 6AM. My wife and I are early morning people -- get up early, read the paper with breakfast, and get out.of the house by 7:30AM. Our paper was typically delivered somewhere between 9-10AM on Sunday morning. That's completely useless to us. We no longer pay for a subscription. The Tribune won't stop delivering the paper though.
We would be disappointed if the newspaper had decent Sunday Funnies. They are the worst of the lot. (I suppose they might be humorous to the geriatric crowd.)
I get my Sunday news fix from Google News on a tablet.
Slashdot is linking to a climate denier's website in order to increase the hype factor. I'm sure they got plenty of submissions for this story that linked to more mainstream sites. But that would not provoke the masses. This site is morphing into HuffPo since CmdrTaco left.
Yeah, it is obvious the power company in intent on stealing secrets about your laundry habits rather than trying to balance infrastructure cost and capability.
If you think that information will stay with the power company, I've got some land to sell you in South Florida.
That data will be sold to everyone that wants it in the blink of an eye. Advertisers/marketers have no shame. And it will be subpoenaed by the authorities when when anyone in your block is under surveillance.
If there were roaming bands of people looking to do such things, they could already do them. A chainsaw is cheaper than a computer if you want to kill the electricity for a whole branch of people. For an individual, all you have to do is pull the meter.
I don't see roving bands of people attempting to break into military facilities, the NRO or NASA. Foreign hackers on the other hand...
Wow -- get rid of algorithms? You, sir, have not been paying attention to C++ lately. Half of Boost is yet more algorithms -- range adapters, string algorithms, RNG algorithms, statistical algorithms, graph algorithms, and numerical algorithms. Far from making the code unreadable, done right it makes the code more beautiful and concise.
One near certainty when looking at C++ code is that if the code does not "#include <algorithm>", it is invariably slow and/or buggy.
Slashdot Mirror
The airwaves belong to the people of the United States and we *lease* spectrum to those that provide the citizens and our country with the best value. It is a natural resource which is managed on our behalf by our government. Don't for a minute think of the RF spectrum as anything but that. It is not "the government's to begin with" -- it is the peoples to begin with, and we delegate to our government the right to grant exclusive or shared use for a limited time to other entities.
There is *no* mobile contract in the US priced anything close to that. I know. I just looked. I came back from a couple weeks in the UK. I spent about USD30 on a 3 network SIM + top-up. Had phone and internet service for my stay. A month of unlimited internet on 3 is about USD25. It's even cheaper for reasonably limited data (i.e. more than you get in the US on average).
The closest I could get in the US was on T-Mobile and that was USD65/mo for phone/data.
The US does not do much for keeping our telecom services competitive. Our free markets are not exactly filled with robust competition.
You could just leave the SIM card at home and take the phone with you. The wi-fi capability is all you need to maintain communications with the outside world in most urban environments, and doing encrypted, TORed VOIP over a wifi connection shouldn't identify you like the SIM would.
That works only if you know how to spoof your device's MAC address. Otherwise, you are just as uniquely identified as your SIM.
Huh? I don't get it.
That money is being spent in the USA, it is going to our own citizens to advance our own science.
With your reasoning, just about EVERY SINGLE project this government has EVER undertaken:
I'm sorry, but this is a very real failure. I'm a total space geek at heart, but the cost overruns completely change the cost/benefit analysis of the project. Sure, if there is no other research or project to spend the money on, your argument might make sense. But there are tons of these project that all compete for funding. The value we, as citizens and taxpayers, receive for that money is incredibly important. There are a ton of other very worthy projects that could have done more with that amount of money.
Hell, for that amount of money, how many New Horizons type missions could we have paid for?
They're using the 70cm Amateur Radio band for this stuff? Thanks for posting this. I never would have guessed.
We've got plenty of satellites around here that can be updated remotely, and which don't required massive, high-gain antennas to reach.
Very funny, but the avionics industry is based on real specs. As in, non-junk specs from people who actually know what they're talking about. In a perfect world, business software would have that too.
Exactly. First, imagine a typical American MBA. Now imagine the requirement specs from that MBA.
If you imagined written specs, you failed.
Now this is going to be fun! Part of me would rather remain blissfully ignorant on this...
I had the same problem with United Airlines about a decade ago. Just about every company I deal with gets their own email address. I started getting spam to the account I used for United. They were actually pretty good about responding when the abuse was brought to their attention. IIRC they traced it back to an email service vendor.
The mathematicians are suppressing my brilliant papers proving that 2 + 2 = Chocolate. Help, I'm being repressed!
As a fellow 4 denier, I welcome this ground-breaking research. The important question now is just "how dark is the chocolate?" And "is it tasty enough to get peer reviewed?"
I *do* think that people *intend* to serve their own best interests. I also think that people are intensely manipulated while pursuing that goal. My wording is less precise than I would have preferred. People fail to serve their own best interests because of information manipulation. The FDA exists in order to prevent the most egregious abuses against the most vulnerable of us -- those that are sick and dying.
I wonder it Friedman remembers why the FDA was needed in the first place? The FDA *was a response* to an imperfect market. If it's doing what Milton says it's doing, then the FDA is doing exactly what it is supposed to do!
You know that economics as a science is fundamentally flawed when it expects that people are out to serve their best interests.
People are idiots. A person may be smart, but people are stupid and have no idea what is in their best interest. People's rational and irrational fears and impulses can be preyed upon. Marketing is all about making people make *stupid economic choices* with limited and biased information. Economics might actually work if marketing didn't exist to exploit humanity's fundamental frailties. Until then, pardon me if I don't listen to the likes of Friedman when it comes to government policy on this topic. Our must fundamental fear is fear of death. And the FDA exists to prevent that natural fear from being preyed upon by the unscrupulous.
It's the headline that is insightful. Most companies backup all desktops and have those backups stored off-site, sometimes for years.
All this BS about DBAN, dd and re-imaging the machines are kinda silly from that perspective. Just talk to the IT group and let them know your concerns. They have access to the desktop anyway. If they wanted this stuff, they would have it already.
I do agree with your post though -- most people conduct personal business from work computers. The GP's question was silly. Though I will admit that I don't do *any* personal stuff through my current employer's network. *Everything* is monitored and recorded for compliance.
You measure success in new services. Your grandparents (assuming you are an American and your family not recent immigrants) measured success as universal access to telephone service (and water, and electricity). That universal access to mobile devices and internet exists in a country as vast as the U.S. is precisely because that early telephone infrastructure existed. That "crapola" is what made this country great and gives us access to resources in even the most sparsely populated areas.
Regulated monopolies exist to balance the needs of both business and the state. It helps us as citizens, even if we don't get the full benefit as consumers. I consider myself a citizen first and foremost.
- Newton invented the outhouse (let's face it, outhouses would suck without gravity)
Outhouses do suck without gravity.
The Chicago Tribune does a Sunday-only subscription. I just want the paper delivered by 6AM. My wife and I are early morning people -- get up early, read the paper with breakfast, and get out.of the house by 7:30AM. Our paper was typically delivered somewhere between 9-10AM on Sunday morning. That's completely useless to us. We no longer pay for a subscription. The Tribune won't stop delivering the paper though.
We would be disappointed if the newspaper had decent Sunday Funnies. They are the worst of the lot. (I suppose they might be humorous to the geriatric crowd.)
I get my Sunday news fix from Google News on a tablet.
Wikipedia is beautiful! Besides, do you really want non-geeks editing an encyclopedia?
Wtf have you been smoking??
My guess: java beans.
Slashdot is linking to a climate denier's website in order to increase the hype factor. I'm sure they got plenty of submissions for this story that linked to more mainstream sites. But that would not provoke the masses. This site is morphing into HuffPo since CmdrTaco left.
Yeah, it is obvious the power company in intent on stealing secrets about your laundry habits rather than trying to balance infrastructure cost and capability.
If you think that information will stay with the power company, I've got some land to sell you in South Florida.
That data will be sold to everyone that wants it in the blink of an eye. Advertisers/marketers have no shame. And it will be subpoenaed by the authorities when when anyone in your block is under surveillance.
If there were roaming bands of people looking to do such things, they could already do them. A chainsaw is cheaper than a computer if you want to kill the electricity for a whole branch of people. For an individual, all you have to do is pull the meter.
I don't see roving bands of people attempting to break into military facilities, the NRO or NASA. Foreign hackers on the other hand...
Wow -- get rid of algorithms? You, sir, have not been paying attention to C++ lately. Half of Boost is yet more algorithms -- range adapters, string algorithms, RNG algorithms, statistical algorithms, graph algorithms, and numerical algorithms. Far from making the code unreadable, done right it makes the code more beautiful and concise.
One near certainty when looking at C++ code is that if the code does not "#include <algorithm>", it is invariably slow and/or buggy.
The ASF seems to have become the dumping ground of unloved commercial software.
"Harvested" -- I love it!
"Bernie Madoff harvested money from his investors."
"H.I. harvested diapers from the convenience store."
"LinkedIn harvested private data from my phone."
They're doing you a favor by "harvesting". Because it's not doing anyone any good if it remains "unharvested".