Many providers in the UK at least now offer free evening and weekend local calls. It's becoming increasingly common as part of the default package, and often with no extra cost (the cost may be hidden in other charges, but then the same goes for the USA). It does depend on the particular supplier you choose, though. Also some suppliers in the UK that offer free local calls specify ISPs are not included, but it probably depends on supplier - there are a lot of them now.
In the UK, at least, you can pick a light call scheme for your normal phone and then get broadband for anything as low as UKP10 per month for 512k download, which probably makes it very competitive compared to the cost of a phone and dialup in the USA for better bandwidth. However I don't know what the current proportion of UK households with broadband is - the uptake has been complicated by the BT 'triggering' system for exchanges.
"The reason the US lags behind these other nations in access to high speed internet is because more Americans don't want high speed internet access."
That's possible, but in last week's Economist (or might have been the week before) it showed that in terms of number of hours of use the average US household now uses the internet more than it watches TV. Whilst this is not the same as high demand for broadband it would suggest there might be an interest in it.
It could be that the price point is wrong to encourage more take up and that people are spending a long time on the internet because they are waiting for things to download over dialup!
" The US has unlimited local calling and unlimited-use dialup internet,"
As do many other countries. You can get unlimited-use dialup plans in the UK, even unlimited local calling plans, and I would presume this is the case in more nations than just the UK and USA.
Walmart is the biggest retailer in the world. Walmart sells preconfigured Linux boxes. Ok, Walmart is perhaps not the most prevalent PC reseller and probably does not sell that many Linux PCs, but it does suggest that there is movement in the market, at least.
The software of interest isn't going to be comparatively low value items such as that, but more in things like business process engineering, grid, data mining, etc. Thus stuff that keeps governments and large businesses working.
With a sufficient level of physical infrastructure (goods) there are still a number of different value adds (services) that can be offered.
An example might be that your internet experience is dependent on goods (modem, computer) but is enhanced by the existence of services such as google (which is currently free).
In complex organisations the opportunity for services is greater.
In addition some of those things that have previously been considered to be goods will become services. Going back to the PC example above, I could either buy a PC and upgrade components over time, or buy a PC service which might specify that the PC I have in my house is able to provide some specified level of service (which may vary as hardware demands vary). I might specifiy "Play the latest games" at one price point, with the PC being upgraded or replaced every 6 months, or "Light internet browsing and word processing and you handle the software".
Looking at things from a GNU/Linux perspective this actually creates some interesting possibilities that can also tie nicely into technologies such as Grid and also recycling and regulations on disposal of electronic equipment (the light internet browsers might be happy with the machines the power users no longer want, which gives the hardware a longer shelf life and reduces hardware costs to the service provider).
The land speed record for an electric car is 271 mph. In fact the land speed record was held by electric vehicles a number of times in 1888-89, topping out at 65 mph which isn't too far short of 88mph, and that was 106 years ago!
When things happen my first suspicion is that the cock up theory is often the best explanation, even more so when complex software is involved, rather than assume a conspiracy.
If Windows Media was tightly coupled to the OS then removing it might break other software not tightly coupled to it, but the code base of which uses those tightly coupled bindings within the US. Word seems to fit perfectly into this sort of scenario.
Alternatively it may be that there were mistakes made in the process of removing all references to Windows Media due to issues with the design of Windows. Again no need for a conspiracy theory, just an issue with implementation.
I am not a Microsoft apologist, but people sometimes need to slow down before assuming that a conspiracy is operating and examine the facts and the possible explanations.
If you do not allow a company to be in the standards body then unless the standard has sufficient critical mass as to be impossible to avoid then the company will probably go and create a competing set of protocols that may become the defacto standard, meaning the standards body has no effective control or role.
The internet was a privatisation of ARPANET. Whilst we can argue about the finer semantics of what Gore said, as a 16 word summary of what he did, it is fairly accurate. Anyone wishing to delve deeper into exactly what he did should easily be able to access the additional information. Not also that he said that he took the initiative, not that he actually created it himself directly.
He was spinning the minor part of writing legislation supporting the Internet
And this is how he took the initiative. The legislation was an important part of ensuring that the internet occured in a timely manner. It would have happened anyway, but it might have taken longer, or might have damaged US economic development if it had meant that the USA was behind the curve on using the technology.
If he had said something wildly inaccurate like "I was responsible for ARPANET funding" or "I wrote the first implementation of TCP/IP" then fair enough, jump all over him.
but fails to remark that it was large compared to any other engineering project ever developed.
In terms of funding I would be surprised if the funding in 1986 was of the level of engineering project like Apollo in real terms.
As others have noted, typically these days research projects are collaborative, and researchers in most disciplines, and especially the sciences, are encourage to partner with a wide range of other bodies including academic and commercial organisations. With commercial funding there sometimes come licencing and disclosure requirements that prevent full public disclosure of some source code. However digital curation is important to allow code to be preserved even if not public.
Also the same would be true of doing your taxes. You can do it yourself, for free, or hire an accountant to help you to save you time, or offer some form of added value (potential tax savings).
Indeed, an example of this is Linux distributions. You could roll your own from source, but convenience can have a value to a customer, and the customer may be willing to pay for this if they are cash rich and time poor (or lack the skills or knowledge to do it themselves).
" record companies can pull support for online downloads altogether if they want"
It isn't in their financial interests to do so. They can make money from offering downloads, and if they do not offer downloads then the chances are that people are going to resort to illegal downloads. Whilst DRM and copyright can, at any point in time, make offering files difficult or unattractive, in the end the DRM will be broken, and the legal system cannot cope with large numbers of law suits.
So record companies will complain (and I can understand why - they are in the business of maximising profits) and users will complain (as they are in the business of listening to music and maximising their freedom to listen to it in as many ways as possible as cheaply as possible).
One thing does seem clear is that when asked many people want artists to get royalties, but not the record companies, but illegal downloads can mean a loss of revenue to artists ultimately, or the inability for an artist, due to lack of flow of funds into their account at the record company, to pay off recording costs.
Part of the problem we are having here is that worth can mean more than one thing.
One meaning is 'monetary value' the other is 'intrinsic value'.
A good is worth (monetarily) to a producer the difference between the cost of its production and what a consumer is willing to pay.
The worth to a consumer is hard to quantify since different things mean different things to people. What consumers are willing to pay is that, what they are willing to pay, and is only tangentially related to the worth of the good to the consumer since consumers have different priorities, disposable incomes, and so on. In other words what consumers are, on average, willing to pay, is an conglomeration of a whole series of decisions.
" If you reverse engineer - no restrictions apply."
Reverse engineering is not universally legal, which means the options are either pay the fee, or do something which in some jurisdictions may be illegal.
It's a tax that occurs after death, but it is imposed as a result of accruing assets, some of which have not already been taxed, e.g. dividends on stocks and shares, some of which have now been exempted from taxation. In any case double taxation is common, e.g. sales taxes on purchases made with already taxed income. AFAIK the IRS doesn't allow you to discount the sales tax paid on every item purchased against your federal taxes. Also you could argue that things such as hunting licences are a form of tax on hunting, etc.
"...the BBC is publicly funded and so doesn't need to make a profit. "
The BBC is required to show a return on investment, however. And the BBC does care what is downloaded and how it is used, but has more liberal availability than some organisations. However if you go to the BBC radio website you will see that not all shows are available as 'listen again' and those that are available are only available for 1 week.
There may be a lot of spare compute cycles about, but what is critical is the ability to process XML in a timely manner on the CPU power that happens to be available at that precise instant in time at the appropriate location. Looking at the average CPU cycles used is like sitting in a traffic jam at 8am and noting that, on average, the road you are on is only used at 10% capacity. It being free at 4am is not much good if you are trying to get to work for 9am.
They may wish google to index the site so google searches can be aware of the existence of the site, but do not wish to have their actual copyrighted content searchable for some reason. I would think that it would be better for them to have the entire site indexed for search purposes, but just disagree with google using the content verbatim.
Whether or not a profit or loss is made on a particular service is irrelevant. If I go and photocopy a book without permission and hand photocopies out to people in the street, at my expense, I would still potentially be violating copyright laws.
However, if I take a news report and create a precis of it and photocopy it and hand it out to people in the street, I am in the clear as I am using my personal knowledge after reading the article, to create a new article.
There are text tools begining to come into existence which will precis documents. A tool of this sort would allow Google to take news feeds and produce their own rewritten digest of these, with possibly no copyright implications, unless there is further legal precedent set or if organisations can place additional restrictions on documents via some sort of licensing agreement (Creative Commons licences can place restrictions on the recipient or user over and above standard copyright restrictions).
Yes, I'd rather he redo Episodes I-III with a decent plot and directorial flair and rather less hammy acting-by-numbers-with-muppets than rehash IV-VI again. I mean, Ewan MacGregor and Samuel L Jackson can both turn in great performances when pushed, but they are just not trying in I-III. But at least IV-VI have pace and are worth watching.
Also officially Germany is up to 11.6%, but it changed its reporting methods, and by the old methods is would be still be nearer 10%.
In any case the ILO would be a better source of figures as the ILO calculates them on a more consistent set of criteria.
Also high unemployment, whilst bad in some ways for a country, is potentially good for business as it tends to depress increases in wages. So currently we see labour costs rising in the USA but in Germany they are essentially static. In terms of GDP PPP production per capita per hour worked Germany outstrips the USA, but there are more hours worked in the USA due to longer worker hours and lower unemployment. In both countries productivity is improving. What the longer term trend will be (will US productivity gains outstrip increasing producer prices?) I don't know. Currently Germany is the world's largest exporter, although the relatively low value of the dollar may mean that the USA and Germany may swap places yet again before the end of the year.
Slashdot Mirror
Many providers in the UK at least now offer free evening and weekend local calls. It's becoming increasingly common as part of the default package, and often with no extra cost (the cost may be hidden in other charges, but then the same goes for the USA). It does depend on the particular supplier you choose, though. Also some suppliers in the UK that offer free local calls specify ISPs are not included, but it probably depends on supplier - there are a lot of them now. In the UK, at least, you can pick a light call scheme for your normal phone and then get broadband for anything as low as UKP10 per month for 512k download, which probably makes it very competitive compared to the cost of a phone and dialup in the USA for better bandwidth. However I don't know what the current proportion of UK households with broadband is - the uptake has been complicated by the BT 'triggering' system for exchanges.
That's possible, but in last week's Economist (or might have been the week before) it showed that in terms of number of hours of use the average US household now uses the internet more than it watches TV. Whilst this is not the same as high demand for broadband it would suggest there might be an interest in it.
It could be that the price point is wrong to encourage more take up and that people are spending a long time on the internet because they are waiting for things to download over dialup!
As do many other countries. You can get unlimited-use dialup plans in the UK, even unlimited local calling plans, and I would presume this is the case in more nations than just the UK and USA.
Walmart is the biggest retailer in the world. Walmart sells preconfigured Linux boxes. Ok, Walmart is perhaps not the most prevalent PC reseller and probably does not sell that many Linux PCs, but it does suggest that there is movement in the market, at least.
The software of interest isn't going to be comparatively low value items such as that, but more in things like business process engineering, grid, data mining, etc. Thus stuff that keeps governments and large businesses working.
With a sufficient level of physical infrastructure (goods) there are still a number of different value adds (services) that can be offered.
An example might be that your internet experience is dependent on goods (modem, computer) but is enhanced by the existence of services such as google (which is currently free).
In complex organisations the opportunity for services is greater.
In addition some of those things that have previously been considered to be goods will become services. Going back to the PC example above, I could either buy a PC and upgrade components over time, or buy a PC service which might specify that the PC I have in my house is able to provide some specified level of service (which may vary as hardware demands vary). I might specifiy "Play the latest games" at one price point, with the PC being upgraded or replaced every 6 months, or "Light internet browsing and word processing and you handle the software".
Looking at things from a GNU/Linux perspective this actually creates some interesting possibilities that can also tie nicely into technologies such as Grid and also recycling and regulations on disposal of electronic equipment (the light internet browsers might be happy with the machines the power users no longer want, which gives the hardware a longer shelf life and reduces hardware costs to the service provider).
The land speed record for an electric car is 271 mph. In fact the land speed record was held by electric vehicles a number of times in 1888-89, topping out at 65 mph which isn't too far short of 88mph, and that was 106 years ago!
If Windows Media was tightly coupled to the OS then removing it might break other software not tightly coupled to it, but the code base of which uses those tightly coupled bindings within the US. Word seems to fit perfectly into this sort of scenario.
Alternatively it may be that there were mistakes made in the process of removing all references to Windows Media due to issues with the design of Windows. Again no need for a conspiracy theory, just an issue with implementation.
I am not a Microsoft apologist, but people sometimes need to slow down before assuming that a conspiracy is operating and examine the facts and the possible explanations.
Also Meucci and Bell.
If you do not allow a company to be in the standards body then unless the standard has sufficient critical mass as to be impossible to avoid then the company will probably go and create a competing set of protocols that may become the defacto standard, meaning the standards body has no effective control or role.
The internet was a privatisation of ARPANET. Whilst we can argue about the finer semantics of what Gore said, as a 16 word summary of what he did, it is fairly accurate. Anyone wishing to delve deeper into exactly what he did should easily be able to access the additional information. Not also that he said that he took the initiative, not that he actually created it himself directly.
He was spinning the minor part of writing legislation supporting the Internet
And this is how he took the initiative. The legislation was an important part of ensuring that the internet occured in a timely manner. It would have happened anyway, but it might have taken longer, or might have damaged US economic development if it had meant that the USA was behind the curve on using the technology.
If he had said something wildly inaccurate like "I was responsible for ARPANET funding" or "I wrote the first implementation of TCP/IP" then fair enough, jump all over him.
but fails to remark that it was large compared to any other engineering project ever developed.
In terms of funding I would be surprised if the funding in 1986 was of the level of engineering project like Apollo in real terms.
As others have noted, typically these days research projects are collaborative, and researchers in most disciplines, and especially the sciences, are encourage to partner with a wide range of other bodies including academic and commercial organisations. With commercial funding there sometimes come licencing and disclosure requirements that prevent full public disclosure of some source code. However digital curation is important to allow code to be preserved even if not public.
Also the same would be true of doing your taxes. You can do it yourself, for free, or hire an accountant to help you to save you time, or offer some form of added value (potential tax savings).
Indeed, an example of this is Linux distributions. You could roll your own from source, but convenience can have a value to a customer, and the customer may be willing to pay for this if they are cash rich and time poor (or lack the skills or knowledge to do it themselves).
It isn't in their financial interests to do so. They can make money from offering downloads, and if they do not offer downloads then the chances are that people are going to resort to illegal downloads. Whilst DRM and copyright can, at any point in time, make offering files difficult or unattractive, in the end the DRM will be broken, and the legal system cannot cope with large numbers of law suits.
So record companies will complain (and I can understand why - they are in the business of maximising profits) and users will complain (as they are in the business of listening to music and maximising their freedom to listen to it in as many ways as possible as cheaply as possible).
One thing does seem clear is that when asked many people want artists to get royalties, but not the record companies, but illegal downloads can mean a loss of revenue to artists ultimately, or the inability for an artist, due to lack of flow of funds into their account at the record company, to pay off recording costs.
One meaning is 'monetary value' the other is 'intrinsic value'.
A good is worth (monetarily) to a producer the difference between the cost of its production and what a consumer is willing to pay.
The worth to a consumer is hard to quantify since different things mean different things to people. What consumers are willing to pay is that, what they are willing to pay, and is only tangentially related to the worth of the good to the consumer since consumers have different priorities, disposable incomes, and so on. In other words what consumers are, on average, willing to pay, is an conglomeration of a whole series of decisions.
" If you reverse engineer - no restrictions apply." Reverse engineering is not universally legal, which means the options are either pay the fee, or do something which in some jurisdictions may be illegal.
It's a tax that occurs after death, but it is imposed as a result of accruing assets, some of which have not already been taxed, e.g. dividends on stocks and shares, some of which have now been exempted from taxation. In any case double taxation is common, e.g. sales taxes on purchases made with already taxed income. AFAIK the IRS doesn't allow you to discount the sales tax paid on every item purchased against your federal taxes. Also you could argue that things such as hunting licences are a form of tax on hunting, etc.
The BBC is required to show a return on investment, however. And the BBC does care what is downloaded and how it is used, but has more liberal availability than some organisations. However if you go to the BBC radio website you will see that not all shows are available as 'listen again' and those that are available are only available for 1 week.
In principle I think this is a good idea, but the devil will be in the detail of the implementation: it must be robust and secure.
There may be a lot of spare compute cycles about, but what is critical is the ability to process XML in a timely manner on the CPU power that happens to be available at that precise instant in time at the appropriate location. Looking at the average CPU cycles used is like sitting in a traffic jam at 8am and noting that, on average, the road you are on is only used at 10% capacity. It being free at 4am is not much good if you are trying to get to work for 9am.
They may wish google to index the site so google searches can be aware of the existence of the site, but do not wish to have their actual copyrighted content searchable for some reason. I would think that it would be better for them to have the entire site indexed for search purposes, but just disagree with google using the content verbatim.
However, if I take a news report and create a precis of it and photocopy it and hand it out to people in the street, I am in the clear as I am using my personal knowledge after reading the article, to create a new article.
There are text tools begining to come into existence which will precis documents. A tool of this sort would allow Google to take news feeds and produce their own rewritten digest of these, with possibly no copyright implications, unless there is further legal precedent set or if organisations can place additional restrictions on documents via some sort of licensing agreement (Creative Commons licences can place restrictions on the recipient or user over and above standard copyright restrictions).
Yes, I'd rather he redo Episodes I-III with a decent plot and directorial flair and rather less hammy acting-by-numbers-with-muppets than rehash IV-VI again. I mean, Ewan MacGregor and Samuel L Jackson can both turn in great performances when pushed, but they are just not trying in I-III. But at least IV-VI have pace and are worth watching.
"United Kingdom: 5% (2003 est.)"
Now down to approx 3% officially, AFAIK.
Also officially Germany is up to 11.6%, but it changed its reporting methods, and by the old methods is would be still be nearer 10%.
In any case the ILO would be a better source of figures as the ILO calculates them on a more consistent set of criteria.
Also high unemployment, whilst bad in some ways for a country, is potentially good for business as it tends to depress increases in wages. So currently we see labour costs rising in the USA but in Germany they are essentially static. In terms of GDP PPP production per capita per hour worked Germany outstrips the USA, but there are more hours worked in the USA due to longer worker hours and lower unemployment. In both countries productivity is improving. What the longer term trend will be (will US productivity gains outstrip increasing producer prices?) I don't know. Currently Germany is the world's largest exporter, although the relatively low value of the dollar may mean that the USA and Germany may swap places yet again before the end of the year.