Geez, you guys are slowpokes. I am downloading at 1 MB and uploading at 2 MB (bytes, not bits) right now and I consider that being slow and that's why when I move into a new apartment next week I'll have a fiber optic cable to my computer with 500 Mb (bit) connection for 100$ (price includes: premium VIP service, full cable TV package, phone with a VIP number and unlimited national calls, a security camera with off-site backup of motion detected security captures) that is available to a large (200k) and rapidly growing number of homes. Oh, that's in Latvia in Eastern Europe. The one that had the deepest economic crisis of the EU countries last year (thanks for that transatlantic goose egg).
So really, the fact that mighty USA can't get even 1 Mbit to every and each household in the nation, possibly even for free... it is laughable.
There is a certain problem with 'get out and play' if your outside is a ghetto ridden with gangs, drug dealers and gun violence. Better to stay inside then.
A "stealth creationist" is a creationist, but does not confess in being such. Instead he tries to provide a basis for the creationists by selectively ignoring parts of the science that disagrees with creationism and embellishing parts of the science which could look to be proving creationism, if you don't actually understand the more complex mechanics that are working underneath.
How about "government-signed (and revokable, such as in case of theft/loss) physical tokens" also know as PASSPORTS!!! And then you go to a bank and show your passport to get a physical token to allow you to get access to your account in that bank! It is a fantastic idea, right!
Or move to EU, where the information on your ID is not enough to do you any kind of damage. It is just a login name, and the physical ID document with your real world face next to it is the password.
It is much safer to refuse all checks and all credit cards and use only one debit card with overdraft explicitly forbidden. At least it is so in the EU where government regulations actually protect the consumers against lazy banks.
It is pretty retarded to trust a digital document without a digital signature verification or a trust chain. Either you are in the bank in person with your photo-id in hand, or the document can be used for information purposes only and is not legally binding.
The problem is that organisations with the write privileges to the system do not bother to check if the person is who he claims to be. If the SSN was printed in your passport and everyone was required to show the passport (with the SSN and a photo inside) for any action that would require a credit check, then all these identity theft problems would simply disappear.
Basically the same is true in Latvia - the only true root document is your government-issue passport. Only after the bank teller has seen you with you passport in hand and matched your face to the photo in the passport (and verified the passport as valid and also taken a photocopy of the passport for long term records), only then the bank can consider you to be the person you claim to be. Only then you can sign contracts, open accounts or withdraw money.
For the electronic transactions the banks issue you a random numeric ID, a password (that you can change) and a physical ID token - the token is either a simple card with 30 numbers where the system asks you to enter one specific number from your card, or a 'calculator' device where you enter your PIN and it will generate a one-time password.
And the same thing as in Sweden - each bank has their own device. And to get the device you first need to prove your identity using a passport in the bank.
Well, there would be if the government had more regulatory will and power - you could easily tax all mining activities at the exact level that they are harming the environment and use those tax incomes to foster green environments (plant trees, clean up old dump sites,...). A company can pillage and leave, a country, where its happening can not. So it is for the government of the country where mining is happening to impose taxes and regulations that must ensure that environment actually benefits from the mining overall. That is the role of the government - insure that in the long term, the country benefits and not just the companies.
And they don't bottle it, because the government has been keeping the price of the strategic reserves of helium too low for that to be profitable, which is the whole point of the article - if you raise the prices (or allow the prices to rise naturally, given the shortages on the market) capture from natural gas will become profitable again and the shortage will be solved for some time (like 20-50 years).
I don't think so - they sold all the 1000 cars they offered. And they sold them out in days.
An electric car with electricity from coal will still pollute far less than a gas powered car. Electric cars recharge overnight - when base load is lower, thus this electricity is much easier on the environment than the peak hour electricity. And now you can actually choose what kind of energy you want, so if you choose a green electricity supplier and have an electric car, then you will not pollute the environment. You can't force the rest of the US change, but you can always to the best you can yourself.
Government loan is not expenditure. They are expected to pay it back.
The CNN article you quote has no mention of the things you claim. Also you should know that expanding a business into new market comes with costs. For example, Sony PS3 *and* both XBox'es cost much more in parts than their sales price. However, once they started manufacturing then in large numbers and technology matured and defect rates went down, the costs went down as well. For example PS3 is now finally costing Sony less money to make than they sell it for.
Tesla have the same strategy - they design a new product, that is pushing the technology forward. The first few years the cars might be made at a loss, because of the new technology, but later on these losses will become 'market expansion investments' and they will recover the losses as the market expands and the volumes grow.
Government cann't just throw money at an idea - there needs to be an offer, a company that has the base work and created a viable design and a business plan. It would also be good to have a pilot in place and working. So - go fund a company, get some VC funding, get smart people together, make a design, a business plan and a pilot and THEN go to both banks and government and VCs for the big lump sums for the actual construction funding. That is what the solar companies did.
If they make it and produce electricity, then they will have to repay this loan over the years. So, unless the company screws up very badly or unless the the Sun turns off, in the end this will cost tax payers exactly $0.
The space for the contacts is not bigger - two of these contacts will take up less space than the 'pimple' on the negative contact now and the coil on the positive contact (even when compressed).
Except for the millions that get wasted collecting and redistributing pennies of royalties. And we pay for that anyway. Either with more expensive devices or with less choice in devices (because a manufacturer did not want to bother with licensing) or with more expensive capture equipment (largest per-device royalty).
A recent research of one local RIAA equivalent found that they spend up to 60% of their income on administrative expenses. We pay for that in the end.
Public domain is a copyright concept, which does not work against patents.
There are two solutions a government can do: either single out specific technologies and declare that whatever patents that are out there that might cover this technology are now void and null (which would likely be rule unconstitutional in many countries) or just flat out reject all software and business patents by codifying that only tangible parts of an invention can be considered novel and patentable and that intangible parts of a patentable invention are not granted patents protection on their own and are only protected by copyright.
Free OSes are now comparable in terms of usability to commercial ones, and in technical terms are years AHEAD of commercial OSes
When making such claims, it's worth to be specific. So, pray tell, what technical terms are Free OSes "years ahead", compared to 1) OS X, and 2) Windows 7/2008 R2?
You know that 'AppStore' idea for applications on a computer that iPhone 'invented' 2 years ago and Microsoft is pondering about maybe writing in 5 years for WIndows 8? Debian had that implemented around 15 years ago in APT and dselect, only with shared libraries, deep dependancy resolution, flexible versioning and upgrading, user choice of distributed or centralised PKI based security chain of signed packages, complete uninstall and package suggestions and recommendations. Debian created all this in 1998. Oh and there was a system called dselect before that, which did the core functionality of an appstore (just without the billing part as this is free software) since 1995.
And yet, the same casual gamers want to use the same game to kill hours and hours of their time without becoming 'too repetitive'. Oh and forget about immediate downloads and start thinking about streaming play - there is nothing casual about waiting two hours for a game to download or about ordering a game for tomorrow.
So you need rather simple games that are flashy and easily capture attention, but don't require too much attention to succeed in the game. Games that allow you to sit down, do something for 15 minutes auto-save your progress and leave with a sense of accomplishment. Games where you can't loose things that you already have if you sit down to play drunk and fall asleep with the game running. Games that are free for trial use and download themselves onto you computer while its idle (according to you past preferences and within you pre-set bandwidth quota) and are ready to play the moment you have free time and then once you are hooked to a game, offer you additional level packs for a few bucks each. Different kinds of games for people with different types of thinking and logic - games for spatial thinkers, games for people that think via associations, people with visual thinking,...
Just provide a country wide free WiFi/WiMax service paid for by a federal tax on all computers and devices with WiFi/WiMax receivers. Provide strict QoS on this network so that P2P traffic does not drown out VOIP and Web traffic and... you're done. Now all private companies will need to really stretch their legs to provide a much better service than that if they want to stay in business.
Just make a regulation that all fees for this service must be itemised from this list. Oh and if they are really bad, then the government can actually force a monopolic or duopolic service provider to provide fixed services to fixed regions at fixed costs with fixed service quality levels. I don't know if that has ever been done in US. but it has been done elsewhere. Another alternative is simply for the government to provide their own baseline service, such as city wide WiFi and have the private sector compete to provide something better than that if they want to stay in business.
Emmm, all government programs by definition cost money. It is not a business. It is not supposed to make money. It is there to provide services needed to society in a way that business would not provide, because it would not be profitable. However it does make economic sense, because it gives a greater benefit to the society as aa whole than the money invested into them.
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Geez, you guys are slowpokes. I am downloading at 1 MB and uploading at 2 MB (bytes, not bits) right now and I consider that being slow and that's why when I move into a new apartment next week I'll have a fiber optic cable to my computer with 500 Mb (bit) connection for 100$ (price includes: premium VIP service, full cable TV package, phone with a VIP number and unlimited national calls, a security camera with off-site backup of motion detected security captures) that is available to a large (200k) and rapidly growing number of homes. Oh, that's in Latvia in Eastern Europe. The one that had the deepest economic crisis of the EU countries last year (thanks for that transatlantic goose egg).
So really, the fact that mighty USA can't get even 1 Mbit to every and each household in the nation, possibly even for free ... it is laughable.
There is a certain problem with 'get out and play' if your outside is a ghetto ridden with gangs, drug dealers and gun violence. Better to stay inside then.
A "stealth creationist" is a creationist, but does not confess in being such. Instead he tries to provide a basis for the creationists by selectively ignoring parts of the science that disagrees with creationism and embellishing parts of the science which could look to be proving creationism, if you don't actually understand the more complex mechanics that are working underneath.
How about "government-signed (and revokable, such as in case of theft/loss) physical tokens" also know as PASSPORTS!!! And then you go to a bank and show your passport to get a physical token to allow you to get access to your account in that bank! It is a fantastic idea, right!
Or move to EU, where the information on your ID is not enough to do you any kind of damage. It is just a login name, and the physical ID document with your real world face next to it is the password.
You must have pretty stupid banks.
It is much safer to refuse all checks and all credit cards and use only one debit card with overdraft explicitly forbidden. At least it is so in the EU where government regulations actually protect the consumers against lazy banks.
It is pretty retarded to trust a digital document without a digital signature verification or a trust chain. Either you are in the bank in person with your photo-id in hand, or the document can be used for information purposes only and is not legally binding.
The problem is that organisations with the write privileges to the system do not bother to check if the person is who he claims to be. If the SSN was printed in your passport and everyone was required to show the passport (with the SSN and a photo inside) for any action that would require a credit check, then all these identity theft problems would simply disappear.
Basically the same is true in Latvia - the only true root document is your government-issue passport. Only after the bank teller has seen you with you passport in hand and matched your face to the photo in the passport (and verified the passport as valid and also taken a photocopy of the passport for long term records), only then the bank can consider you to be the person you claim to be. Only then you can sign contracts, open accounts or withdraw money.
For the electronic transactions the banks issue you a random numeric ID, a password (that you can change) and a physical ID token - the token is either a simple card with 30 numbers where the system asks you to enter one specific number from your card, or a 'calculator' device where you enter your PIN and it will generate a one-time password.
And the same thing as in Sweden - each bank has their own device. And to get the device you first need to prove your identity using a passport in the bank.
Well, there would be if the government had more regulatory will and power - you could easily tax all mining activities at the exact level that they are harming the environment and use those tax incomes to foster green environments (plant trees, clean up old dump sites, ...). A company can pillage and leave, a country, where its happening can not. So it is for the government of the country where mining is happening to impose taxes and regulations that must ensure that environment actually benefits from the mining overall. That is the role of the government - insure that in the long term, the country benefits and not just the companies.
And they don't bottle it, because the government has been keeping the price of the strategic reserves of helium too low for that to be profitable, which is the whole point of the article - if you raise the prices (or allow the prices to rise naturally, given the shortages on the market) capture from natural gas will become profitable again and the shortage will be solved for some time (like 20-50 years).
I don't think so - they sold all the 1000 cars they offered. And they sold them out in days.
An electric car with electricity from coal will still pollute far less than a gas powered car. Electric cars recharge overnight - when base load is lower, thus this electricity is much easier on the environment than the peak hour electricity. And now you can actually choose what kind of energy you want, so if you choose a green electricity supplier and have an electric car, then you will not pollute the environment. You can't force the rest of the US change, but you can always to the best you can yourself.
Government loan is not expenditure. They are expected to pay it back.
The CNN article you quote has no mention of the things you claim. Also you should know that expanding a business into new market comes with costs. For example, Sony PS3 *and* both XBox'es cost much more in parts than their sales price. However, once they started manufacturing then in large numbers and technology matured and defect rates went down, the costs went down as well. For example PS3 is now finally costing Sony less money to make than they sell it for.
Tesla have the same strategy - they design a new product, that is pushing the technology forward. The first few years the cars might be made at a loss, because of the new technology, but later on these losses will become 'market expansion investments' and they will recover the losses as the market expands and the volumes grow.
Government cann't just throw money at an idea - there needs to be an offer, a company that has the base work and created a viable design and a business plan. It would also be good to have a pilot in place and working. So - go fund a company, get some VC funding, get smart people together, make a design, a business plan and a pilot and THEN go to both banks and government and VCs for the big lump sums for the actual construction funding. That is what the solar companies did.
If they make it and produce electricity, then they will have to repay this loan over the years. So, unless the company screws up very badly or unless the the Sun turns off, in the end this will cost tax payers exactly $0.
The space for the contacts is not bigger - two of these contacts will take up less space than the 'pimple' on the negative contact now and the coil on the positive contact (even when compressed).
Except for the millions that get wasted collecting and redistributing pennies of royalties. And we pay for that anyway. Either with more expensive devices or with less choice in devices (because a manufacturer did not want to bother with licensing) or with more expensive capture equipment (largest per-device royalty).
A recent research of one local RIAA equivalent found that they spend up to 60% of their income on administrative expenses. We pay for that in the end.
Apparently not a bright as the FFmpeg developers! (And POW! we are back at TFA!)
An open standard doesn't have to be gratis, nor does it have to be patent free.
That depends on which definition of "open" you use ;)
Public domain is a copyright concept, which does not work against patents.
There are two solutions a government can do: either single out specific technologies and declare that whatever patents that are out there that might cover this technology are now void and null (which would likely be rule unconstitutional in many countries) or just flat out reject all software and business patents by codifying that only tangible parts of an invention can be considered novel and patentable and that intangible parts of a patentable invention are not granted patents protection on their own and are only protected by copyright.
Free OSes are now comparable in terms of usability to commercial ones, and in technical terms are years AHEAD of commercial OSes
When making such claims, it's worth to be specific. So, pray tell, what technical terms are Free OSes "years ahead", compared to 1) OS X, and 2) Windows 7/2008 R2?
You know that 'AppStore' idea for applications on a computer that iPhone 'invented' 2 years ago and Microsoft is pondering about maybe writing in 5 years for WIndows 8? Debian had that implemented around 15 years ago in APT and dselect, only with shared libraries, deep dependancy resolution, flexible versioning and upgrading, user choice of distributed or centralised PKI based security chain of signed packages, complete uninstall and package suggestions and recommendations. Debian created all this in 1998. Oh and there was a system called dselect before that, which did the core functionality of an appstore (just without the billing part as this is free software) since 1995.
And yet, the same casual gamers want to use the same game to kill hours and hours of their time without becoming 'too repetitive'. Oh and forget about immediate downloads and start thinking about streaming play - there is nothing casual about waiting two hours for a game to download or about ordering a game for tomorrow.
So you need rather simple games that are flashy and easily capture attention, but don't require too much attention to succeed in the game. Games that allow you to sit down, do something for 15 minutes auto-save your progress and leave with a sense of accomplishment. Games where you can't loose things that you already have if you sit down to play drunk and fall asleep with the game running. Games that are free for trial use and download themselves onto you computer while its idle (according to you past preferences and within you pre-set bandwidth quota) and are ready to play the moment you have free time and then once you are hooked to a game, offer you additional level packs for a few bucks each. Different kinds of games for people with different types of thinking and logic - games for spatial thinkers, games for people that think via associations, people with visual thinking, ...
Just provide a country wide free WiFi/WiMax service paid for by a federal tax on all computers and devices with WiFi/WiMax receivers. Provide strict QoS on this network so that P2P traffic does not drown out VOIP and Web traffic and ... you're done. Now all private companies will need to really stretch their legs to provide a much better service than that if they want to stay in business.
Just make a regulation that all fees for this service must be itemised from this list. Oh and if they are really bad, then the government can actually force a monopolic or duopolic service provider to provide fixed services to fixed regions at fixed costs with fixed service quality levels. I don't know if that has ever been done in US. but it has been done elsewhere. Another alternative is simply for the government to provide their own baseline service, such as city wide WiFi and have the private sector compete to provide something better than that if they want to stay in business.
Emmm, all government programs by definition cost money. It is not a business. It is not supposed to make money. It is there to provide services needed to society in a way that business would not provide, because it would not be profitable. However it does make economic sense, because it gives a greater benefit to the society as aa whole than the money invested into them.
That depends on your definition of football.