Actually, you have to understand the situation here in Chicago. Even in the semi rural and isolated 10th Congressional district (Waukegan), there are literally hundreds of gang members in the area. Any edge the police can get helps protect students. It is a lot worse in the city proper.
The demo is in California. Most technical demos and convention are in California. Doesn't anybody think that Chicago residents are interested in more technical stuff than advanced cow tipping? Unlike California, Chicago has not had a major disaster in over a century (unless you count the Democratic conventions).
Common technical exhibitors, there are three million people here starved for advanced technology conventions and a major financial center as a source of investors.
(noto bene: I am only an amateur new institutional economist, so take this with a grain of mustard seed.)
There is a very good review of the actual problem at http://www.iisg.nl/hpw/papers/law-ma.pdf "LAW AND ECONOMIC GROWTH: THE CASE OF TRADITIONAL CHINA - A REVIEW WITH SOME PRELIMINARY HYPOTHESES"
In a nutshell (may O'reilley forgive me) is that the Chinese have never had a rule based legal system for civil law, but one that was based on adjudication by social networks (common called gang or small town justice here in America)
In my opinion, at least, the reason is that Chinese has never engaged in much foreign trade, and foreign trade is the impetus for developing such institutions (Grief has a seminal paper contrasting Italian and Magrebhi traders in the middle ages illustrating the mechanism...see "Readings in New Institutional Economics")
You see, the two approaches to civil law are equivalent as long as you are dealing with your own territory. One you extend beyond that territory (as Italian and Mahgrabi traders did when they started operating in the far east) social network based civil law breaks down. It is not corruption, exactly, but rather the fact that it is a little difficult for social network interaction to adjudicate matters when there IS no direct social interaction. Rules, however, due not attenuate with distance. (For technogeeks, think distributed, long term transactions with no compensation spheres)
The Chinese have been expanding their economy worldwide, but they have not yet developed the institutions to make that happen viably, and, in another year or so, they are going to pay a terrible price for that. Unfortunately, so are the rest of us. We are starting to see the effects now.
Though it is hard for American (or anyone else, apparently) to understand, the one great benefit of the rise of Western capitalism has had is the establish of the institution of rule based civil law throughout the world trading communities. Granted, it is pretty weak in a lot of areas (You can't even get real mortgages in many third world countries, there is no guarantee you hold on to the property) but it is taking hold. Whatever you feel about Western economic imperialism, it is the only reason a global economy is possible.
Until the Chinese started getting adventurous in their search for access to foreign resources such as oil, and started eroding the institution of rule based law in those areas a side effect, replacing it with their own social network based civil law. You see this everywhere, from the export quality issues in China to the neoconservative social network regime issues with rule based law we face here in the United States. (Neoconservatives use a social network based civil law as a guiding principle, i.e. rule of law only applies to those NOT in their social network)
As I said, in the local areas, both basis's for civil law are roughly equivalent. When you get to long range interactions, however, social network based civil law breaks down. That why the Iraq war went bad, and why the subprime market went south. It is not corruption, it is the face that the compensating mechanism, the balance of the checks and balances, is missing.
For example We had the check (congressional permission, contract law) but we did not have the balance (congressional oversight, proper auditing, investigative journalism). Instead, social networks acted as the balance, but in both cases there was no opposing social network to PROVIDE a balance. (The "Dixie chicks" don't really count as a balance for the Iraq war. Not their fault, the Democrats didn't even count as much as the Dixie chicks did. Neither group has a significant social network support them.) Instead of having a rule of civil law emerge as a balance, an anti war social network emerged as a balance few years later. That is a very worrisome thing from an institutional economics point of view.
Actually, a smaller goal for starting, ending and everything inbetween.
You keep on assuming a municipal wifi as a standard world wide web. Thats not necessarily a valid assumption.
Lets examine that assumption.
The question, of course, is why do you need worldwide? The fact of the matter is, there are many small communities with a large municipality that would LOVE to have a limited internet.
There are lots of reasons, but basically, it comes down to one thing. A community is only useful if it is a limited size. Basic cognitive science 101, that's built into the physical nature of being human.
People want to build communities, they want to be isolated from outsiders for certain activities. It's called privacy, and it applies to groups as well as individuals.
The World Wide Web is this nice, great gigantic place, and while I enjoy electronically hanging around with a small pig farmer in Sichuan (they have amazing DSL there) or practicing my Telegu and Kannada with a landlord in Banglore, most people just want a nice connection with people like themselves, and don't want even the chance of outsiders joining in.
So the Orthodox Jewish community here wants a private internet, with restricted access and a limited selection of information sources, under thier full control, in other words, a walled community in the virtual world. You can't blame them, in the real world, every hate crime against Jews in a city of three million happens in a few square miles that they have their houses. They don't feel SAFE in the World Wide Web.
And many black parents want their own virtual "walled garden", they don't want their kids to have even the slightest chance of seeing "Read a book" on BET, or exposed to the antiintellectualism it represents.
And the Indian community has its own area's it wants private, and the Chinese, the Koreans, and God knows, probably the Trobiand Islanders if there are any in the area.
Consider the word "polis". It means city, used in such words as metropolis (mother city). Polis is a greek word, and ancient Greeks believed in getting their moneys worth out of words, polis also is the root word for polite. Cities are about getting people to live together, to be polite to each other. And in all the thousands of years of civilization, the only way that has ever succeeded has been for cities to be a collection of communities, with limited interaction between them.
Even here in Chicago, people naturally form neighborhoods, in spite of almost unlimited land to expand and the best public transportation in the country.
Consider even technology. Why is there a Silicon Valley in California when the whole basis of the culture is distance destroying technology? Why does Congresspersons live in Washington DC when it has been over a century since that was necessary; they could telecommute and have far more time with the communities they represent.
Now lets examine the consequence of invalidating that assumption. Lets assume that the evidence shows that there is a pace for a a neighborhood internet, instead of a world wide one.
We can realize it easily enough, thats what Google's Meraki based MANS, internet phones and some precision targeted network management and software were designed to do. Apparently Google believes it can make a lot of money with the Google internet phone, it is hard to see why unless they believe thsre is a need for it/
That's Googles reasons. Of course, that leaves some questions as to exactly what their Googles partners believe they will get out of it.
Some business plans are more about positioning than profit. Especially ideological positioning, especially in democracies, where ideology is reflected in voting, governance, and allocation of resources.
Consider, a few months ago, Purdue University held the "Ackermann Colloquium on Technology and Citizenship Education: Educating for Citizenship in Digital and Synthetic Worlds" Here in the US, everybody talks about the influen
*Sigh* Six years (or 13, or 22, depending) , and still not a simple lesson learned.
I have already said everything I intended to say on this subject in a previous thread, and I pray that I will not have a bunch of "I told you so's" to say in a future thread.
Umm, actually, as I understand it, the biggest single category of customers of cellphone jammers are law enforcement officials.
I dunno, it doesn't seem like rocket science to me. Cellphone jamming is vigilante justice, and if you are asking if vigilante justice is ever justified, the answer is a categorical no.
Basically, the rules are simple. Its illegal. If you use a jammer, or even are caught in deliberate possession of one, you broke the law and you ought to be punished. You will be esstopped from using absolute tort immunity, performance of public duty, corporate shield or any other automatic defense if you possess those rights and attempt to assert those rights in court. If you have a legitimate reason for using a jammer, and are authorized to do so by proper authorization, the case will be dismissed. It is up to the judicial branch, and only the judicial branch, to determine the penalties for breaking a law.
If anyone is injured or harmed by your illegal act, you will face further charges and extended penalties and sentences, depending on the nature of the harm inflicted.
Comon slashdotters, you don't get to pick what laws you wish to obey, even if you are a law enforcement officer. Your only option is to campaign to get the law changed.
Now whether or not those laws should exist is another matter. Frankly, I am in favor of them. The benefit to the public afforded by a universally available communications network far outwieghs minor annoyances. There are already laws on the books (such as public nuisance, disturbing the peace and verbal assualt) to deal with such annoyances, all a jammer does is allow individuals to take the law into their own hands. That is never a wise decision.
If you have a problem with someone using a cellphone, contact someone whose has the authority and experience to deal with the problem legally. If the public places don't allow cellphone conversations, the managers have the legal right to ask the individual using the phone to cease and desist or leave, or summon the authorities if the cellphone user refuses the request. If those managers are unwilling to do so, and/or the use of a cellphone is not illegal at that place and time, then there has been no legal cause established and there is not legal justification for interfering in the communication.
Guinness World Records has recognised folding@home (FAH) as the world's most powerful distributed computing network FAH has signed up nearly 700,000 PS3s t. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7074547.stm
Anyone happen to know exactly what those COTS components are? I mean, not only would using PS3s help battlefield communications, it would reduce training, and increase recruitment, our warfighters woud be pretrained before enlistment.
Tend to agree with you. Something is not ringing right in that article. Even ruggedized, the units should cost about $50-100 dollars each. Physically, there really is not much to them, and the COTS parts are cheap and plentiful (or will be in the near future).
Although I should point out the structure of war is hierarchical only before execution. During execution, it is more network shaped when you get to the operations level. In your plan, take out the back haul unit and crippple communications to that group of warfighters.
I really don't think power is that much an issue, using various space/time and Mimo techniques it can be minimized. Depending on what protocols and hard they use, overhead might not be a problem either.
You said:..."Where did I say the customer does? I was pointing out the fact that having to build all that infrastructure is a barrier to entry."... and I pointed out that it was not necessarily a barrier to entry either.
you said:..."So basically your whole theory to China Telecom destroying the big four in the US boils down to them deploying a nationwide unlicensed mesh network that's somehow going to compete with and provide a more reliable product then the dozens of megahertz of dedicated spectrum that the existing carriers have? Are you serious?"..
NO that's YOU saying that. What I am saying is that if CMCC wanted to enter this market, they have many different ways of developing the infrastructure to do so. One of those ways(and one that would make a lot of sense for a number of reasons, would be a Merakit style solar powered mesh network. Check some of the better commmunity network business plans, or some of the Slashdot discussions on community networking, there is some very good possibilities in community networking, with the right set of sponsors.
Which does bring up a secondary point I don't think I made very well. Telco's by themselves, are not very profitable or useful anymore. It is the telco's PLUS the various anciliary ecosystems, their clients and customers, that are valuable. And ever since MICOM, that ecosystem has been diversifying. 40 years later, I am not at all certain that it will even exist as a distinct entity for much longer. While US Telco individual firms, CMCC is actually the old China Telecom, which is actually the Chinese government. It is a government, with vast resources, great influence, and very little checks on its power, that the US telco's will be facing, not a company.
You said:...The problem is getting spectrum, affording all of that equipment and marketing your product to customers...
CMCC is the worlds largest mobile phone company, as I said, I think the first two are nonissues. What money CMCC needs that they don't have, they can easily raise on the worlds capital markets, though god knows that China, and the Hong Kong/Singapore/Macao triangle CMCC is part of, is practically awash in money, currently. Sure, "theres a problem with "Not in my backyard" with wireless infrastructure, but that was not what I was referring to, either. Its the PR possibilities that I was referring to, which I guess, is similar to your point about marketing your product to customers.
Its a lagging indicator, but residential housing and the consumers that live in them, are soon going to be in desperate need of income due to the subprime crisis. If CMCC decided to build out it's infrastructure using a mesh network, they could buy an enormous amount of good will and political influence by using those residences for the mesh nodes and overpaying for them. Enough political influence to override legislative or executive branch opposition.
You said:...And just how are you going to go about making this "mass cancellation" happen?..
I never said anything about me making it happen. What I said was that if CMCC (or any organization with reasonably deep pockets) decided to assume the debt for termination fees (and in this case, it is economically viable for CMCC to do so) that organization would probably never have to pay the majority of those fees, and in the meantime, the fees would cease to be a barrier to entry.
You said:...Jesus Christ, your dreaming! Verizon's market cap is 130 billion dollars, AT&T is 248 billion, Sprint is 47.5 billion and Deutsche Telekom is 87.8 billion. Besides which, hostile takeovers haven't been popular or effective since the 80s. And it's a pretty big assumption to assume that the US Government would allow major telecommunications companies to be bought out by a company that is controlled/owned by by a foreign government...
And thats a small fraction of China's resources, a small fraction of the money that flows th
You said:..."The Japanese slaughtered Detroit because Detroit was putting one one crap car after another (gas guzzling boats during the first energy crisis) and banking on their reputation and entrenched market position to protect them."...
Well, that precisely the point I was making about the US telco's. The US telco's are depending on exactly the same strategy.
You said:..."While anybody with half a brain would agree that the current state of the wireless industry in the United States sucks, it's a far cry from Detroit in the 70s/80s. The product that they are selling doesn't suck -- the policies and customer service behind the product is what the problem is."...
If the policies and services aren't the Telco's product, what is? The US Telco's don't make handsets, they label ones made by Nokia, Motorola, Apple, etc. And by your own statements, those products and service are inferior. I can't really count any infrastruture as even being visible externally, customer don't really care how well the infrastruture is managed (THough, as someone who once managed AT&T phone networks, I can testify that it's not something to brag about)
You said:..."How the hell are they "extremely vulnerable"? They have hundreds of millions of customers, many of whom are locked into long term contracts. AT&T, Verizon and Sprint all own assets (landline businesses and Tier 1 internet backbones) worth billions of dollars. T-Mobile USA is backed by a company partially owned by the German Government with billions of dollars in the bank (look at how much they spent during the AWS auction)."...
"CMCC, is the largest mobile phone operator in China. It is the world's largest mobile phone operator ranked by number of subscribers, with over 349.66 million customers [1] (as of end of September, 2007). By turnover it is second to Vodafone, which owns 3.3% of China Mobile. It is now the largest market capital company listed in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, which exceeds that of HSBC.
A state-owned enterprise of the People's Republic of China government, it was spun off from former monopoly China Telecom in 2000"...
I really think they are not going to have any problems raising cash, even if they did not have the entire foreign reserve of China, the Chinese government, and most of the Pacific Rim countries backing them. The only real issue is wether they consolidate the Pacific Rim control first, or tackle America. For various reasons I will explain later, they are likely to advance the American agenda to a higher priority next year.
You said:..."tell me if you seriously think that T-Mobile is in any danger of losing it's best people to an upstart wireless carrier backed by a Pacific Rim telco."...
Since I never said that, of course I don't believe it either. But who said that CMCC is even interested in hiring current US telco employees? They have much better strategies avaialbe. For example, Many of the ABC and green card cChinese that working working for the telco's went back to China during the recent recession. They provide a deep enough pool of expertise to facilitate any such infrastruture adventure CMCC wants to undertake. But there is another strategy CMCC is likely to take. It is hardly a secret that US based call/care/mediacenters are hurting badly from outsourcing. One of the selling points of a CMCC US penetration is that the tens of thousands of US call Centers would gain a great deal in value if CMC employed the. That could be a powerful legislative lever, almost every elected official in the US has some callcenter in their constituency, and more importantly, in their campaign next year.
You said:..."To get coverage, you need to invest billions upon billions of dollars
Deutsch Telecom? Perhaps not the best counterexample. We all know how much effect European carmakers had on US auto industry.
But I am not just pulling this out of thin air. Actually, I am basing it on the generalities I learned from decades of studying the competitive strategy of nations, and the specific nature of the Pacific Rim cultures regarding advanced mobile telecom services.
It may very well be that you are right, and such an attempt will have little effect. The long time dominance of Japan was due, in part, to the energizing effect of the book "The Japan that can say No". There really isn't an equivalent "The China that could say 'Bu'; but there is the galvanizing effect of the corruption scandals, which has hurt Chinese pride immensely.
But, there are two points you should keep in mind. As you say, US telco's are extremely vulnerable ( due to teir bad practices). Consider your example, T-Mobile. T-Mobile has some people (especially in customer service) that would be stars in any company. Thats seems to be mostly because they have some good people in as management in their first tier customer services. If you deal with their second tier customer services, the lack of good managers or a C4I structure that can mitigate management problems becomes glaringly apparent.
Coverage isn't a single criteria for measuring strength or vulnerability. US cellular, does not have much coverage, but coverage is not one of the issues they are vulnerable on; they do very well with the coverage they have
But it is hard to deny that US telco's are very vulnerable. More importantly, it is hard to see how legislation could affect that. It is not that U.S. telco's are deliberately not trying to do better, many of their own employees are just as frustrated as their customers.
And, on the flip side of the argument, for whatever reason, Pacific Rim telco's tend to provide a much better experience to their customers than US telco's. Whether that translates when they assume an American presence has yet to be determined. However, if you study how Pacific Rim countries have approached the problem of penetrating markets in the past, combined with how they developed their own markets, leads me to believe that they would be very successful in such a venture unless there is some serious reform of US telco management.
Traditionally, US telco's responded to such competitive pressures via erecting legislative barriers to entry, much as Detroit carmakers used to do. But "What is good for GM is good for the country" eventually failed as a protective mantra, and, I fear, the same will happen in the US Telco industry. The world is too interconnected, too flat for that to be an effective strategy, it can be bypassed as easily as the Maginot line. And if it is, what's the fallback plan?
Hoping the foreign telco's fail in execution isn't a viable strategy, it is a desperate, last ditch prayer for a miracle.
The Pacific Rim telco's do not have that same bad reputation as the Chinese manufacturers, even before the current scandals. The corrupt manufacturing industries of China were well known long before the current scandals, nearby countries like Japan have long had controls in place, but here, in America, those same firms penetrated and dominated the market easily. Their major problem will be cultural dissonance, and with the aid of ABC's and the Guanxi networks, it should not be much of a problem. The only viable defense for the Telco's is to tighten their management structures, get a decent C4I capability, and maintain a tight enough control over the user experience and their own agility to respond to challenges. People don't change carriers because of features (usually, ask Amp'd) but negative experiences are a horse of a different color.
In any case, all this is speculation. We will find out what the actuality will be soon enough.
Wait a little while. It seems likely China Mobile and China Sat will be making a serious semi direct attempt on the US telco market soon. Judging from the example of Japan and Detroit carmakers, it should not take too long for the competitive landscape to change drastically when that happens.
The sad thing is, you can't really blame Chinese anticompetitive practices and vast internal markets for this, the carriers horrific customer service and price gouging has significantly lowered their competitive advantage and nearly completely destroyed any barriers to entry by foreign entities.
And, to preanswer the inevitable, no, the US telco's are not going not be able to answer this with political maneuverings; they have been completely forked. The perfect storm of "low margins", globalization, customer dissatisfaction, the credit crunch, an election year and technological advances have left the US telco's more vulnerable than anytime in the past century.
For some time now, I have been praying that US telco's would rise to the challenge, but internal baronial wars, apathy, corruption, and general lack of motivation have left them paralyzed in the face of impending disaster. The potential is there, much of the US telco's employees are much more capable and dedicated than might be suggested by their public image. The problem is, US Telco's lack the C4I and leadership/management to take advantage of their internal strengths.
For the most part, US telco's haven't needed effective management in the past, political lobbying and national interests served to protect them enough that such capabilities were not needed, and therefore never developed. That world is gone, and is never coming back, no matter how isolationist the US becomes, or the political instability outside the country.
I wish I had an answer, but I don't. I just know that I am upset that the US telco's are not putting up much more of a fight than they are. How, I dunno. The only thing I can think of is a phrase from an old story that keeps repeating in my mind; "nibbled to death by ducks". I have never been quite certain what it meant, but somehow, it seems a potential appropriate epitaph for the future of the US telco industry anyways.
You may say, well, all the telco's are multinational globalized firms anyways. For most industries, that would be true, but Telco's are somewhat unique due to their inherent localization and contribution to national economies. Even in a flat world, they represent a national competitive advantage.
A quiz or debate won't reveal anything except how good someone is at quizes or debates.
Lets go right to the heart of the issue and run a nerd (i.e. slashdotter) for President.
Hmmm, what sort of talking points should a Slashdot candidate have?
1) The candidate will issue an executive order declaring Microsoft and terrorist as synonyms.
2) Like Moses, the candidate will approach Apple and tell Job's "Let my Iphones go!"
3) The First Lady will probably BE the candidates first lady. The candidate is, after all, a nerd.
4) The candidate will promote a law requiring the producers of Stargate Atlantis to figure out how to get Samantha Carter of Stargate Atlantis into a bikini. I mean, 11 years of her character and practically no eye candy until the last season of SG-1. The writers apparently ENJOY torturing nerds.
5) In deference to America's security forces, the telco's will be allowed to continue wiretapping. However, the telco's must open source the wiretapping code and publish a sdk so users can extend it (Common, lets face it, slasshdotters, do you really think anything you say is of any interest to anybody except another nerd? )
6) If elected, the candidate will insist that our police forces will immediately be equipped with Star Trek Phasers and SG-1 Zat guns. Yes, I know those weapons are fictional, but if you listen to CSPAN, they are no more fictional than some of the real proposals that come up before the congress.
7) The candidate will demand a 1 year moratorium on new IT technology so everyone can catch up. And a significant proportion of the US budget will be devoted to providing decent, READABLE documentation for open source code.
8) Free Merakit broadband for everyone in America!
9) VC's have to register under the local leash laws.
10) Trolling and cyberbullying is a capital offense if you are not a nerd.
11) Free Safari subscriptions for everyone, and Safari has to add some better books. (especially in the area of algorithms. Yeesh. )
12) There will be at least 3 Major tech conventions a year in Chicago. Do you think every nerd lives on the West Coast? Besides, after the fires, the air quality is better there.
13) Meigs field will be reopened. It really ruins my enjoyment of Google Earth flight simulator to know it does not exist in the real world anymore.
14) To solve global warming, if it gets hot enough, the US will promise to bomb volcanoes until there is a new ice age. (If they miss St Helens and take out Microsoft instead, so much the better. These are slashdotters we are talking about, after all.)
15) The Sci Fi channel will be basic cable, not premium.
That's all I can think of. Anyone have any more idea's for demands the slashdot crowd might want?
A prediction:
Somewhere near the beginnning of next year, China Mobile and China Satcom start offering an iphone lookalike that runs over the internet to third party Music and video providers inside China and has full connectivity to all the US telco networks.
A short while later, Apple and AT&T's IPhone cash cow is beef tournedo's.
Apple needs to make whatever money it can now.
Very few people have more reason to be upset with Microsoft than I do, but you have to give them credit where they have earned it.
Yes, Microsoft has been pretty reprehensible in the past; I know, I was there and I was on the front lines for a lot of it. That was then. Here and now, if you define open source a bit more generically; as facilitating the ability to create open source products as well as creating open source products yourself, Microsoft has make a valid and considerable effort to aid the community.
Consider their "Express" (free) editions of Visual Studio, which have done more to allow open source to work on Windows effectively than almost anyone. For example, the most common open source product is the Windows Version of the Apache Foundations httpd server; its compiled using Visual Studio C++.
Thing is, the power of these "free" versions of Visual Studio is enough that a large open source community COULD evolve around them, were it not Microsoft offering them. (Well, and MS got some usability experts to fix the VS user interface, Eclipse is SO much superior) These aren't "toy" versions, you can produce quite a bit of good software with them.
Microsoft really wants that to happen, Google is not only eating their lunch with it's mindshare, it's eating their access to talent and their momentum as a company.
Which means that Google has proven the open source model works, albeit in a way that nobody really expected. It's the people, the community that counts, not whether the code is free (as in beer or speech), most open source users never look at internals, let alone modify them. (To be honest, thats just as well. I DO look at internals, and I am constantly amazed that O'Reilley managed to find enough "beautiful code" to write a book about it.)
Microsofts best strategy right now is to build an open source community around a set of products/infrastructure they buy, and use that to penetrate the Enterprise market. As a legitimate initiative, not an "embrace and extinguish" tactic.
Open Source has made it's point (sorta) to the industry, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft all offer "free" versions of their databases, due solely to the need to combat MySQL's mindshare. Heck, Oracle 10g Express is far better and more usable than regular Oracle. )90 % of Oracles problems in the marketplace can be traced to the confusing istallation procedures) The free version of those databases aren't particularly crippled, they are adequate for any purpose that might occur in a small or medium sized business. A large business would not go with the free products anyways, it would prefer to pay for a product from a large company, just to minimize it's exposure to risk.
By now, Microsoft understands that can't trash open source (it's tried and failed) but also that it can use the movement to make money. It is not going to cost them money or future profits, companies of the size Microsoft wants to bother dealing with aren't going to risk their business with small company support that is common among open source. Consider IBM, for example, their open source and "developerworks" initiatives played a major role in why Websphere dominates in the large enterprise market.
Like it or not, Microsoft represent a part of the IT universe. If they are willing to toss some resources into the community, I can't see how it would be contrary to the open source values in accepting them, i am old enough to remember when IBM was as reviled as Microsoft. Open source is supposed to be a meritocracy, after all. How can we make that claim if we restrict some companies from competing on the basis of merit alone?
I have been wavering about whether I approve of REALID, but I finally had to decide that, no, it is not a wise idea, not at this time, at least.
Whatever the merits that can be attributed to it, or the potential consequences that we project, here and now, there are real consequences to this act that we cannot ignore.
here and now, we, the citizens of the United States, are a partisan nation, riven in two as almost never before in our entire history. There is little denying that this partisanship is damaging us, reducing our ability to act on global issues and on the local stage. We cannot afford this weakness, we are entering a time of great challenges, to us, as a nation, as an economy, and, as a culture.
For even one state, however small, to act in this manner is a warning sign of how seriously dividing this issue is. For many states to consider it, let alone act, brings it from a matter of concern to an urgent issue that must be addressed immediately.
None of the benefits accorded to this act, and none of the other concerns about it, fall into this class of urgency. Whatever you feel about immigration, it is obvious from our lack of political action that other issues are more pressing. The same is true of terrorism and any other social ills this act may be deemed as a potential solution.
It has been said that a nation divided against itself cannot stand. That is a warning well worth listening to, all of history testifies to it's validity. We, as a people, need to draw together, to unite in order to maintain and build our place in this world. This act has only served to drive us further apart.
Let us put it aside for now, and revisit it at some time when we, as a people, have bonds of trust binding us together that are strong enough to withstand the strains this act puts on that trust. We cannot afford to have that trust eroded further, or even break completely, what use will a REALID be to a nation which exists in name only, even if that name is verifiable?
Among all the myriad responsibilities accorded to all who hold office in the United States, there is one that stands primary to them all, and that is to preserve the union; of the States to form a federal government, and of the residents of those states to support that goal.
It is the federal government responsibility to repeal this act, not because of it's potential benefits and or worrisome consequences, but because doing so will build the trust of residents in the strength of that union. Once we rebuild that trust, this partisanship, this seemingly eternal confrontation that has us paralyzed and deadlocked in all but the most minor issues, will ebb. Then we, as a people, can address some of these issues that have so far eluded resolution. Perhaps REALID will be the solution then, perhaps we will find other ways.
But it is not part of the solution now. It is part of the problem. And it is part of the problem we can solve, here and now.
Besides nerds and rich people, what you really need for a Silicon Valley are nucleii, people whose expertise causes a cluster of competance to crystalize within their geographic area.
Utah is a thriving "second silicon valley", in no small part thanks to a group of nucleii, including Phil Windley (http://www.windley.com) that worked hard to make it happen.
In Nebraska (which has just as smart a group of people), there was no nucleii, and Nebraska is pretty much dead as far as tech innovation goes.
The other thing you need is a supportive local government. For example, in Chicago, if you follow things like eprarie(http://www.eprarie.com/) or the May Report, (http://www.tmronline.com), you can see that you have everything you need to have a second Silicon Valley, but the local government just isn't supportive of that happening.
Drupals "Book" module, along with TinyMCE and perhaps Microsoft Word, is a great way to write in that style. You can rearrange paragraphs as you want, manage revisions, add multi comments (including hidden comments), and all sorts of other goodies that make that multi pass writing technique work wonderfully.
It would especially useful in a class environment...you could give everyone their own space to write, and let everyone else comment. Contact me if you want further details.
I am currently working on a four book series on Open Source Enterprise and Technical Architecture using it.
American programmer. Been in this business since the 1970's. Happy to debate you on any aspect of theoretical computer science from Category Theory to Process Algebra's and algorithm design. Or we can debate on Spring Framework applications or Eclipse RCP's.
American programmers are not any less capable than other nations. It is just that skills like theoretical CS are needed by only a small fraction of the jobs. How many nanotech jobs do you think there are, anyhow?
Yeah, it is nice to know that category theory undelies the type system used in a CMS, or that various sorts of process algebras underlying BPEL applications, but they aren't necessary.
In a few areas, like OS design, yes, you might need those skills How many people you know who have designed an OS?
There are some areas where you need math, such as financial modeling. The math there is actually fairly easy to learn, once you get past the arcane greek terminology.
And it isn't that common for anyone to create new basic algorithms anymore, almost all the useful ones are available in libraries, coded and tuned to the nth degree. No siingle programmer is ever going to produce such things on their own, whatever their conceits, it takes man years of work to produce a decent algorithm implementation.
Take garbage collection, for instance. Programmers routinely used to product their own. Now any JVM comes with multiple tunable garbage collectors, and not one in a humdred Java programmers could write a garbage collector. Doesn't matter, tuning a application is easy without knowing the theory.
Not really. I have been tracking the Chinese Microsoft guanxi since 1984, about a half a year after it first started. Hu is visiting Gates as a show of respect and gratitude for all that Gates has done for China over the past quarter century. There is no snub, or even outside politics of any kind intended. The guanxi are integral to Chinese society, and meeting first with foreign leaders of a guanxi you belong to when you come to their land is just a part of being a member.
Actually, for about a month now, China has been, technically, a democracy.
Hu ordered that all political officials must maintain a positive poluplarity rating among their subjects or face immediate dismissal. That is essentially identical to an election.
China has a bicameral legislature, a legal and an executive branch. It even has multiple parties, though only one party controls everything, just like in America. What exactly more do you need to be a democracy? Voting elections are a practical impossibility with a population that size.
Or they could be simply letting Comcast waste their resources building out fiber to the home, then announce a wireless high speed connection to anywhere in the home using a PAN from the outside at more than twice the rate. If,say, they put little caching miniservers/Tivo's at the HFC connection, they could serve 20-200 or so houses at a LOT less cost than what it cost Comcast to put in a more limited fiber connection....and COmcast will have all that money invested in outdated physical plant
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you have to understand the situation here in Chicago. Even in the semi rural and isolated 10th Congressional district (Waukegan), there are literally hundreds of gang members in the area. Any edge the police can get helps protect students. It is a lot worse in the city proper.
The demo is in California. Most technical demos and convention are in California. Doesn't anybody think that Chicago residents are interested in more technical stuff than advanced cow tipping? Unlike California, Chicago has not had a major disaster in over a century (unless you count the Democratic conventions).
Common technical exhibitors, there are three million people here starved for advanced technology conventions and a major financial center as a source of investors.
It is controversial, but fairly well researched (within the bounds of the controversy). Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Mathematics_Comes_From for a good explanation of the issues involved.
Umm, corruption is probably the wrong word.
(noto bene: I am only an amateur new institutional economist, so take this with a grain of mustard seed.)
There is a very good review of the actual problem at http://www.iisg.nl/hpw/papers/law-ma.pdf "LAW AND ECONOMIC GROWTH: THE CASE OF TRADITIONAL CHINA
- A REVIEW WITH SOME PRELIMINARY HYPOTHESES"
In a nutshell (may O'reilley forgive me) is that the Chinese have never had a rule based legal system for civil law, but one that was based on adjudication by social networks (common called gang or small town justice here in America)
In my opinion, at least, the reason is that Chinese has never engaged in much foreign trade, and foreign trade is the impetus for developing such institutions (Grief has a seminal paper contrasting Italian and Magrebhi traders in the middle ages illustrating the mechanism...see "Readings in New Institutional Economics")
You see, the two approaches to civil law are equivalent as long as you are dealing with your own territory. One you extend beyond that territory (as Italian and Mahgrabi traders did when they started operating in the far east) social network based civil law breaks down. It is not corruption, exactly, but rather the fact that it is a little difficult for social network interaction to adjudicate matters when there IS no direct social interaction. Rules, however, due not attenuate with distance. (For technogeeks, think distributed, long term transactions with no compensation spheres)
The Chinese have been expanding their economy worldwide, but they have not yet developed the institutions to make that happen viably, and, in another year or so, they are going to pay a terrible price for that. Unfortunately, so are the rest of us. We are starting to see the effects now.
Though it is hard for American (or anyone else, apparently) to understand, the one great benefit of the rise of Western capitalism has had is the establish of the institution of rule based civil law throughout the world trading communities. Granted, it is pretty weak in a lot of areas (You can't even get real mortgages in many third world countries, there is no guarantee you hold on to the property) but it is taking hold. Whatever you feel about Western economic imperialism, it is the only reason a global economy is possible.
Until the Chinese started getting adventurous in their search for access to foreign resources such as oil, and started eroding the institution of rule based law in those areas a side effect, replacing it with their own social network based civil law. You see this everywhere, from the export quality issues in China to the neoconservative social network regime issues with rule based law we face here in the United States. (Neoconservatives use a social network based civil law as a guiding principle, i.e. rule of law only applies to those NOT in their social network)
As I said, in the local areas, both basis's for civil law are roughly equivalent. When you get to long range interactions, however, social network based civil law breaks down. That why the Iraq war went bad, and why the subprime market went south. It is not corruption, it is the face that the compensating mechanism, the balance of the checks and balances, is missing.
For example We had the check (congressional permission, contract law) but we did not have the balance (congressional oversight, proper auditing, investigative journalism). Instead, social networks acted as the balance, but in both cases there was no opposing social network to PROVIDE a balance. (The "Dixie chicks" don't really count as a balance for the Iraq war. Not their fault, the Democrats didn't even count as much as the Dixie chicks did. Neither group has a significant social network support them.) Instead of having a rule of civil law emerge as a balance, an anti war social network emerged as a balance few years later. That is a very worrisome thing from an institutional economics point of view.
Actually, a smaller goal for starting, ending and everything inbetween.
You keep on assuming a municipal wifi as a standard world wide web. Thats not necessarily a valid assumption.
Lets examine that assumption.
The question, of course, is why do you need worldwide? The fact of the matter is, there are many small communities with a large municipality that would LOVE to have a limited internet.
There are lots of reasons, but basically, it comes down to one thing. A community is only useful if it is a limited size. Basic cognitive science 101, that's built into the physical nature of being human.
People want to build communities, they want to be isolated from outsiders for certain activities. It's called privacy, and it applies to groups as well as individuals.
The World Wide Web is this nice, great gigantic place, and while I enjoy electronically hanging around with a small pig farmer in Sichuan (they have amazing DSL there) or practicing my Telegu and Kannada with a landlord in Banglore, most people just want a nice connection with people like themselves, and don't want even the chance of outsiders joining in.
So the Orthodox Jewish community here wants a private internet, with restricted access and a limited selection of information sources, under thier full control, in other words, a walled community in the virtual world. You can't blame them, in the real world, every hate crime against Jews in a city of three million happens in a few square miles that they have their houses. They don't feel SAFE in the World Wide Web.
And many black parents want their own virtual "walled garden", they don't want their kids to have even the slightest chance of seeing "Read a book" on BET, or exposed to the antiintellectualism it represents.
And the Indian community has its own area's it wants private, and the Chinese, the Koreans, and God knows, probably the Trobiand Islanders if there are any in the area.
Consider the word "polis". It means city, used in such words as metropolis (mother city). Polis is a greek word, and ancient Greeks believed in getting their moneys worth out of words, polis also is the root word for polite. Cities are about getting people to live together, to be polite to each other. And in all the thousands of years of civilization, the only way that has ever succeeded has been for cities to be a collection of communities, with limited interaction between them.
Even here in Chicago, people naturally form neighborhoods, in spite of almost unlimited land to expand and the best public transportation in the country.
Consider even technology. Why is there a Silicon Valley in California when the whole basis of the culture is distance destroying technology? Why does Congresspersons live in Washington DC when it has been over a century since that was necessary; they could telecommute and have far more time with the communities they represent.
Now lets examine the consequence of invalidating that assumption. Lets assume that the evidence shows that there is a pace for a a neighborhood internet, instead of a world wide one.
We can realize it easily enough, thats what Google's Meraki based MANS, internet phones and some precision targeted network management and software were designed to do. Apparently Google believes it can make a lot of money with the Google internet phone, it is hard to see why unless they believe thsre is a need for it/
That's Googles reasons. Of course, that leaves some questions as to exactly what their Googles partners believe they will get out of it.
Some business plans are more about positioning than profit. Especially ideological positioning, especially in democracies, where ideology is reflected in voting, governance, and allocation of resources.
Consider, a few months ago, Purdue University held the "Ackermann Colloquium on Technology and Citizenship Education: Educating for Citizenship in Digital and Synthetic Worlds" Here in the US, everybody talks about the influen
*Sigh* Six years (or 13, or 22, depending) , and still not a simple lesson learned.
I have already said everything I intended to say on this subject in a previous thread, and I pray that I will not have a bunch of "I told you so's" to say in a future thread.
This is not going to turn out well, for anybody.
Umm, actually, as I understand it, the biggest single category of customers of cellphone jammers are law enforcement officials.
I dunno, it doesn't seem like rocket science to me. Cellphone jamming is vigilante justice, and if you are asking if vigilante justice is ever justified, the answer is a categorical no.
Basically, the rules are simple. Its illegal. If you use a jammer, or even are caught in deliberate possession of one, you broke the law and you ought to be punished. You will be esstopped from using absolute tort immunity, performance of public duty, corporate shield or any other automatic defense if you possess those rights and attempt to assert those rights in court. If you have a legitimate reason for using a jammer, and are authorized to do so by proper authorization, the case will be dismissed. It is up to the judicial branch, and only the judicial branch, to determine the penalties for breaking a law.
If anyone is injured or harmed by your illegal act, you will face further charges and extended penalties and sentences, depending on the nature of the harm inflicted.
Comon slashdotters, you don't get to pick what laws you wish to obey, even if you are a law enforcement officer. Your only option is to campaign to get the law changed.
Now whether or not those laws should exist is another matter. Frankly, I am in favor of them. The benefit to the public afforded by a universally available communications network far outwieghs minor annoyances. There are already laws on the books (such as public nuisance, disturbing the peace and verbal assualt) to deal with such annoyances, all a jammer does is allow individuals to take the law into their own hands. That is never a wise decision.
If you have a problem with someone using a cellphone, contact someone whose has the authority and experience to deal with the problem legally. If the public places don't allow cellphone conversations, the managers have the legal right to ask the individual using the phone to cease and desist or leave, or summon the authorities if the cellphone user refuses the request. If those managers are unwilling to do so, and/or the use of a cellphone is not illegal at that place and time, then there has been no legal cause established and there is not legal justification for interfering in the communication.
What is so hard to understand about that?
Guinness World Records has recognised folding@home (FAH) as the world's most powerful distributed computing network FAH has signed up nearly 700,000 PS3s t. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7074547.stm
Anyone happen to know exactly what those COTS components are? I mean, not only would using PS3s help battlefield communications, it would reduce training, and increase recruitment, our warfighters woud be pretrained before enlistment.
Tend to agree with you. Something is not ringing right in that article. Even ruggedized, the units should cost about $50-100 dollars each. Physically, there really is not much to them, and the COTS parts are cheap and plentiful (or will be in the near future).
Although I should point out the structure of war is hierarchical only before execution. During execution, it is more network shaped when you get to the operations level. In your plan, take out the back haul unit and crippple communications to that group of warfighters.
I really don't think power is that much an issue, using various space/time and Mimo techniques it can be minimized. Depending on what protocols and hard they use, overhead might not be a problem either.
You said: ..."Where did I say the customer does? I was pointing out the fact that having to build all that infrastructure is a barrier to entry."...
..."So basically your whole theory to China Telecom destroying the big four in the US boils down to them deploying a nationwide unlicensed mesh network that's somehow going to compete with and provide a more reliable product then the dozens of megahertz of dedicated spectrum that the existing carriers have? Are you serious?"..
...The problem is getting spectrum, affording all of that equipment and marketing your product to customers...
...And just how are you going to go about making this "mass cancellation" happen?..
...Jesus Christ, your dreaming! Verizon's market cap is 130 billion dollars, AT&T is 248 billion, Sprint is 47.5 billion and Deutsche Telekom is 87.8 billion. Besides which, hostile takeovers haven't been popular or effective since the 80s. And it's a pretty big assumption to assume that the US Government would allow major telecommunications companies to be bought out by a company that is controlled/owned by by a foreign government...
and I pointed out that it was not necessarily a barrier to entry either.
you said:
NO that's YOU saying that. What I am saying is that if CMCC wanted to enter this market, they have many different ways of developing the infrastructure to do so. One of those ways(and one that would make a lot of sense for a number of reasons, would be a Merakit style solar powered mesh network. Check some of the better commmunity network business plans, or some of the Slashdot discussions on community networking, there is some very good possibilities in community networking, with the right set of sponsors.
Which does bring up a secondary point I don't think I made very well. Telco's by themselves, are not very profitable or useful anymore. It is the telco's PLUS the various anciliary ecosystems, their clients and customers, that are valuable. And ever since MICOM, that ecosystem has been diversifying. 40 years later, I am not at all certain that it will even exist as a distinct entity for much longer. While US Telco individual firms, CMCC is actually the old China Telecom, which is actually the Chinese government. It is a government, with vast resources, great influence, and very little checks on its power, that the US telco's will be facing, not a company.
You said:
CMCC is the worlds largest mobile phone company, as I said, I think the first two are nonissues. What money CMCC needs that they don't have, they can easily raise on the worlds capital markets, though god knows that China, and the Hong Kong/Singapore/Macao triangle CMCC is part of, is practically awash in money, currently. Sure, "theres a problem with "Not in my backyard" with wireless infrastructure, but that was not what I was referring to, either. Its the PR possibilities that I was referring to, which I guess, is similar to your point about marketing your product to customers.
Its a lagging indicator, but residential housing and the consumers that live in them, are soon going to be in desperate need of income due to the subprime crisis. If CMCC decided to build out it's infrastructure using a mesh network, they could buy an enormous amount of good will and political influence by using those residences for the mesh nodes and overpaying for them. Enough political influence to override legislative or executive branch opposition.
You said:
I never said anything about me making it happen. What I said was that if CMCC (or any organization with reasonably deep pockets) decided to assume the debt for termination fees (and in this case, it is economically viable for CMCC to do so) that organization would probably never have to pay the majority of those fees, and in the meantime, the fees would cease to be a barrier to entry.
You said:
And thats a small fraction of China's resources, a small fraction of the money that flows th
Hmm. A few more points you ought to consider.
..."The Japanese slaughtered Detroit because Detroit was putting one one crap car after another (gas guzzling boats during the first energy crisis) and banking on their reputation and entrenched market position to protect them."...
..."While anybody with half a brain would agree that the current state of the wireless industry in the United States sucks, it's a far cry from Detroit in the 70s/80s. The product that they are selling doesn't suck -- the policies and customer service behind the product is what the problem is."...
..."How the hell are they "extremely vulnerable"? They have hundreds of millions of customers, many of whom are locked into long term contracts. AT&T, Verizon and Sprint all own assets (landline businesses and Tier 1 internet backbones) worth billions of dollars. T-Mobile USA is backed by a company partially owned by the German Government with billions of dollars in the bank (look at how much they spent during the AWS auction)."...
..."tell me if you seriously think that T-Mobile is in any danger of losing it's best people to an upstart wireless carrier backed by a Pacific Rim telco."...
..."To get coverage, you need to invest billions upon billions of dollars
You said:
Well, that precisely the point I was making about the US telco's. The US telco's are depending on exactly the same strategy.
You said:
If the policies and services aren't the Telco's product, what is? The US Telco's don't make handsets, they label ones made by Nokia, Motorola, Apple, etc. And by your own statements, those products and service are inferior. I can't really count any infrastruture as even being visible externally, customer don't really care how well the infrastruture is managed (THough, as someone who once managed AT&T phone networks, I can testify that it's not something to brag about)
You said:
And China Mobile is (from the Wikipedia article) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Mobile
"CMCC, is the largest mobile phone operator in China. It is the world's largest mobile phone operator ranked by number of subscribers, with over 349.66 million customers [1] (as of end of September, 2007). By turnover it is second to Vodafone, which owns 3.3% of China Mobile. It is now the largest market capital company listed in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, which exceeds that of HSBC.
A state-owned enterprise of the People's Republic of China government, it was spun off from former monopoly China Telecom in 2000"...
I really think they are not going to have any problems raising cash, even if they did not have the entire foreign reserve of China, the Chinese government, and most of the Pacific Rim countries backing them. The only real issue is wether they consolidate the Pacific Rim control first, or tackle America. For various reasons I will explain later, they are likely to advance the American agenda to a higher priority next year.
You said:
Since I never said that, of course I don't believe it either. But who said that CMCC is even interested in hiring current US telco employees? They have much better strategies avaialbe. For example, Many of the ABC and green card cChinese that working working for the telco's went back to China during the recent recession. They provide a deep enough pool of expertise to facilitate any such infrastruture adventure CMCC wants to undertake. But there is another strategy CMCC is likely to take. It is hardly a secret that US based call/care/mediacenters are hurting badly from outsourcing. One of the selling points of a CMCC US penetration is that the tens of thousands of US call Centers would gain a great deal in value if CMC employed the. That could be a powerful legislative lever, almost every elected official in the US has some callcenter in their constituency, and more importantly, in their campaign next year.
You said:
Deutsch Telecom? Perhaps not the best counterexample. We all know how much effect European carmakers had on US auto industry.
But I am not just pulling this out of thin air. Actually, I am basing it on the generalities I learned from decades of studying the competitive strategy of nations, and the specific nature of the Pacific Rim cultures regarding advanced mobile telecom services.
It may very well be that you are right, and such an attempt will have little effect. The long time dominance of Japan was due, in part, to the energizing effect of the book "The Japan that can say No". There really isn't an equivalent "The China that could say 'Bu'; but there is the galvanizing effect of the corruption scandals, which has hurt Chinese pride immensely.
But, there are two points you should keep in mind. As you say, US telco's are extremely vulnerable ( due to teir bad practices). Consider your example, T-Mobile. T-Mobile has some people (especially in customer service) that would be stars in any company. Thats seems to be mostly because they have some good people in as management in their first tier customer services. If you deal with their second tier customer services, the lack of good managers or a C4I structure that can mitigate management problems becomes glaringly apparent.
Coverage isn't a single criteria for measuring strength or vulnerability. US cellular, does not have much coverage, but coverage is not one of the issues they are vulnerable on; they do very well with the coverage they have
But it is hard to deny that US telco's are very vulnerable. More importantly, it is hard to see how legislation could affect that. It is not that U.S. telco's are deliberately not trying to do better, many of their own employees are just as frustrated as their customers.
And, on the flip side of the argument, for whatever reason, Pacific Rim telco's tend to provide a much better experience to their customers than US telco's. Whether that translates when they assume an American presence has yet to be determined. However, if you study how Pacific Rim countries have approached the problem of penetrating markets in the past, combined with how they developed their own markets, leads me to believe that they would be very successful in such a venture unless there is some serious reform of US telco management.
Traditionally, US telco's responded to such competitive pressures via erecting legislative barriers to entry, much as Detroit carmakers used to do. But "What is good for GM is good for the country" eventually failed as a protective mantra, and, I fear, the same will happen in the US Telco industry. The world is too interconnected, too flat for that to be an effective strategy, it can be bypassed as easily as the Maginot line. And if it is, what's the fallback plan?
Hoping the foreign telco's fail in execution isn't a viable strategy, it is a desperate, last ditch prayer for a miracle.
The Pacific Rim telco's do not have that same bad reputation as the Chinese manufacturers, even before the current scandals. The corrupt manufacturing industries of China were well known long before the current scandals, nearby countries like Japan have long had controls in place, but here, in America, those same firms penetrated and dominated the market easily. Their major problem will be cultural dissonance, and with the aid of ABC's and the Guanxi networks, it should not be much of a problem. The only viable defense for the Telco's is to tighten their management structures, get a decent C4I capability, and maintain a tight enough control over the user experience and their own agility to respond to challenges. People don't change carriers because of features (usually, ask Amp'd) but negative experiences are a horse of a different color.
In any case, all this is speculation. We will find out what the actuality will be soon enough.
Wait a little while. It seems likely China Mobile and China Sat will be making a serious semi direct attempt on the US telco market soon. Judging from the example of Japan and Detroit carmakers, it should not take too long for the competitive landscape to change drastically when that happens.
The sad thing is, you can't really blame Chinese anticompetitive practices and vast internal markets for this, the carriers horrific customer service and price gouging has significantly lowered their competitive advantage and nearly completely destroyed any barriers to entry by foreign entities.
And, to preanswer the inevitable, no, the US telco's are not going not be able to answer this with political maneuverings; they have been completely forked. The perfect storm of "low margins", globalization, customer dissatisfaction, the credit crunch, an election year and technological advances have left the US telco's more vulnerable than anytime in the past century.
For some time now, I have been praying that US telco's would rise to the challenge, but internal baronial wars, apathy, corruption, and general lack of motivation have left them paralyzed in the face of impending disaster. The potential is there, much of the US telco's employees are much more capable and dedicated than might be suggested by their public image. The problem is, US Telco's lack the C4I and leadership/management to take advantage of their internal strengths.
For the most part, US telco's haven't needed effective management in the past, political lobbying and national interests served to protect them enough that such capabilities were not needed, and therefore never developed. That world is gone, and is never coming back, no matter how isolationist the US becomes, or the political instability outside the country.
I wish I had an answer, but I don't. I just know that I am upset that the US telco's are not putting up much more of a fight than they are. How, I dunno. The only thing I can think of is a phrase from an old story that keeps repeating in my mind; "nibbled to death by ducks". I have never been quite certain what it meant, but somehow, it seems a potential appropriate epitaph for the future of the US telco industry anyways.
You may say, well, all the telco's are multinational globalized firms anyways. For most industries, that would be true, but Telco's are somewhat unique due to their inherent localization and contribution to national economies. Even in a flat world, they represent a national competitive advantage.
A quiz or debate won't reveal anything except how good someone is at quizes or debates.
Lets go right to the heart of the issue and run a nerd (i.e. slashdotter) for President.
Hmmm, what sort of talking points should a Slashdot candidate have?
1) The candidate will issue an executive order declaring Microsoft and terrorist as synonyms.
2) Like Moses, the candidate will approach Apple and tell Job's "Let my Iphones go!"
3) The First Lady will probably BE the candidates first lady. The candidate is, after all, a nerd.
4) The candidate will promote a law requiring the producers of Stargate Atlantis to figure out how to get Samantha Carter of Stargate Atlantis into a bikini. I mean, 11 years of her character and practically no eye candy until the last season of SG-1. The writers apparently ENJOY torturing nerds.
5) In deference to America's security forces, the telco's will be allowed to continue wiretapping. However, the telco's must open source the wiretapping code and publish a sdk so users can extend it (Common, lets face it, slasshdotters, do you really think anything you say is of any interest to anybody except another nerd? )
6) If elected, the candidate will insist that our police forces will immediately be equipped with Star Trek Phasers and SG-1 Zat guns. Yes, I know those weapons are fictional, but if you listen to CSPAN, they are no more fictional than some of the real proposals that come up before the congress.
7) The candidate will demand a 1 year moratorium on new IT technology so everyone can catch up. And a significant proportion of the US budget will be devoted to providing decent, READABLE documentation for open source code.
8) Free Merakit broadband for everyone in America!
9) VC's have to register under the local leash laws.
10) Trolling and cyberbullying is a capital offense if you are not a nerd.
11) Free Safari subscriptions for everyone, and Safari has to add some better books. (especially in the area of algorithms. Yeesh. )
12) There will be at least 3 Major tech conventions a year in Chicago. Do you think every nerd lives on the West Coast? Besides, after the fires, the air quality is better there.
13) Meigs field will be reopened. It really ruins my enjoyment of Google Earth flight simulator to know it does not exist in the real world anymore.
14) To solve global warming, if it gets hot enough, the US will promise to bomb volcanoes until there is a new ice age. (If they miss St Helens and take out Microsoft instead, so much the better. These are slashdotters we are talking about, after all.)
15) The Sci Fi channel will be basic cable, not premium.
That's all I can think of. Anyone have any more idea's for demands the slashdot crowd might want?
A prediction: Somewhere near the beginnning of next year, China Mobile and China Satcom start offering an iphone lookalike that runs over the internet to third party Music and video providers inside China and has full connectivity to all the US telco networks. A short while later, Apple and AT&T's IPhone cash cow is beef tournedo's. Apple needs to make whatever money it can now.
Very few people have more reason to be upset with Microsoft than I do, but you have to give them credit where they have earned it.
Yes, Microsoft has been pretty reprehensible in the past; I know, I was there and I was on the front lines for a lot of it. That was then. Here and now, if you define open source a bit more generically; as facilitating the ability to create open source products as well as creating open source products yourself, Microsoft has make a valid and considerable effort to aid the community.
Consider their "Express" (free) editions of Visual Studio, which have done more to allow open source to work on Windows effectively than almost anyone. For example, the most common open source product is the Windows Version of the Apache Foundations httpd server; its compiled using Visual Studio C++.
Thing is, the power of these "free" versions of Visual Studio is enough that a large open source community COULD evolve around them, were it not Microsoft offering them. (Well, and MS got some usability experts to fix the VS user interface, Eclipse is SO much superior) These aren't "toy" versions, you can produce quite a bit of good software with them.
Microsoft really wants that to happen, Google is not only eating their lunch with it's mindshare, it's eating their access to talent and their momentum as a company.
Which means that Google has proven the open source model works, albeit in a way that nobody really expected. It's the people, the community that counts, not whether the code is free (as in beer or speech), most open source users never look at internals, let alone modify them. (To be honest, thats just as well. I DO look at internals, and I am constantly amazed that O'Reilley managed to find enough "beautiful code" to write a book about it.)
Microsofts best strategy right now is to build an open source community around a set of products/infrastructure they buy, and use that to penetrate the Enterprise market. As a legitimate initiative, not an "embrace and extinguish" tactic.
Open Source has made it's point (sorta) to the industry, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft all offer "free" versions of their databases, due solely to the need to combat MySQL's mindshare. Heck, Oracle 10g Express is far better and more usable than regular Oracle. )90 % of Oracles problems in the marketplace can be traced to the confusing istallation procedures) The free version of those databases aren't particularly crippled, they are adequate for any purpose that might occur in a small or medium sized business. A large business would not go with the free products anyways, it would prefer to pay for a product from a large company, just to minimize it's exposure to risk.
By now, Microsoft understands that can't trash open source (it's tried and failed) but also that it can use the movement to make money. It is not going to cost them money or future profits, companies of the size Microsoft wants to bother dealing with aren't going to risk their business with small company support that is common among open source. Consider IBM, for example, their open source and "developerworks" initiatives played a major role in why Websphere dominates in the large enterprise market.
Like it or not, Microsoft represent a part of the IT universe. If they are willing to toss some resources into the community, I can't see how it would be contrary to the open source values in accepting them, i am old enough to remember when IBM was as reviled as Microsoft. Open source is supposed to be a meritocracy, after all. How can we make that claim if we restrict some companies from competing on the basis of merit alone?
I have been wavering about whether I approve of REALID, but I finally had to decide that, no, it is not a wise idea, not at this time, at least.
Whatever the merits that can be attributed to it, or the potential consequences that we project, here and now, there are real consequences to this act that we cannot ignore.
here and now, we, the citizens of the United States, are a partisan nation, riven in two as almost never before in our entire history. There is little denying that this partisanship is damaging us, reducing our ability to act on global issues and on the local stage. We cannot afford this weakness, we are entering a time of great challenges, to us, as a nation, as an economy, and, as a culture.
For even one state, however small, to act in this manner is a warning sign of how seriously dividing this issue is. For many states to consider it, let alone act, brings it from a matter of concern to an urgent issue that must be addressed immediately.
None of the benefits accorded to this act, and none of the other concerns about it, fall into this class of urgency. Whatever you feel about immigration, it is obvious from our lack of political action that other issues are more pressing. The same is true of terrorism and any other social ills this act may be deemed as a potential solution.
It has been said that a nation divided against itself cannot stand. That is a warning well worth listening to, all of history testifies to it's validity. We, as a people, need to draw together, to unite in order to maintain and build our place in this world. This act has only served to drive us further apart.
Let us put it aside for now, and revisit it at some time when we, as a people, have bonds of trust binding us together that are strong enough to withstand the strains this act puts on that trust. We cannot afford to have that trust eroded further, or even break completely, what use will a REALID be to a nation which exists in name only, even if that name is verifiable?
Among all the myriad responsibilities accorded to all who hold office in the United States, there is one that stands primary to them all, and that is to preserve the union; of the States to form a federal government, and of the residents of those states to support that goal.
It is the federal government responsibility to repeal this act, not because of it's potential benefits and or worrisome consequences, but because doing so will build the trust of residents in the strength of that union. Once we rebuild that trust, this partisanship, this seemingly eternal confrontation that has us paralyzed and deadlocked in all but the most minor issues, will ebb. Then we, as a people, can address some of these issues that have so far eluded resolution. Perhaps REALID will be the solution then, perhaps we will find other ways.
But it is not part of the solution now. It is part of the problem. And it is part of the problem we can solve, here and now.
Besides nerds and rich people, what you really need for a Silicon Valley are nucleii, people whose expertise causes a cluster of competance to crystalize within their geographic area.
Utah is a thriving "second silicon valley", in no small part thanks to a group of nucleii, including Phil Windley (http://www.windley.com) that worked hard to make it happen.
In Nebraska (which has just as smart a group of people), there was no nucleii, and Nebraska is pretty much dead as far as tech innovation goes.
The other thing you need is a supportive local government. For example, in Chicago, if you follow things like eprarie(http://www.eprarie.com/) or the May Report, (http://www.tmronline.com), you can see that you have everything you need to have a second Silicon Valley, but the local government just isn't supportive of that happening.
Drupals "Book" module, along with TinyMCE and perhaps Microsoft Word, is a great way to write in that style. You can rearrange paragraphs as you want, manage revisions, add multi comments (including hidden comments), and all sorts of other goodies that make that multi pass writing technique work wonderfully.
It would especially useful in a class environment...you could give everyone their own space to write, and let everyone else comment. Contact me if you want further details.
I am currently working on a four book series on Open Source Enterprise and Technical Architecture using it.
American programmer. Been in this business since the 1970's. Happy to debate you on any aspect of theoretical computer science from Category Theory to Process Algebra's and algorithm design. Or we can debate on Spring Framework applications or Eclipse RCP's.
American programmers are not any less capable than other nations. It is just that skills like theoretical CS are needed by only a small fraction of the jobs. How many nanotech jobs do you think there are, anyhow?
Yeah, it is nice to know that category theory undelies the type system used in a CMS, or that various sorts of process algebras underlying BPEL applications, but they aren't necessary.
In a few areas, like OS design, yes, you might need those skills How many people you know who have designed an OS?
There are some areas where you need math, such as financial modeling. The math there is actually fairly easy to learn, once you get past the arcane greek terminology.
And it isn't that common for anyone to create new basic algorithms anymore, almost all the useful ones are available in libraries, coded and tuned to the nth degree. No siingle programmer is ever going to produce such things on their own, whatever their conceits, it takes man years of work to produce a decent algorithm implementation.
Take garbage collection, for instance. Programmers routinely used to product their own. Now any JVM comes with multiple tunable garbage collectors, and not one in a humdred Java programmers could write a garbage collector. Doesn't matter, tuning a application is easy without knowing the theory.
Purely as a curiosity, you are aware that most of those rural Chinese are so illiterate they can't even sign their own names?
Not really. I have been tracking the Chinese Microsoft guanxi since 1984, about a half a year after it first started. Hu is visiting Gates as a show of respect and gratitude for all that Gates has done for China over the past quarter century. There is no snub, or even outside politics of any kind intended. The guanxi are integral to Chinese society, and meeting first with foreign leaders of a guanxi you belong to when you come to their land is just a part of being a member.
Actually, for about a month now, China has been, technically, a democracy.
Hu ordered that all political officials must maintain a positive poluplarity rating among their subjects or face immediate dismissal. That is essentially identical to an election.
China has a bicameral legislature, a legal and an executive branch. It even has multiple parties, though only one party controls everything, just like in America. What exactly more do you need to be a democracy? Voting elections are a practical impossibility with a population that size.
Or they could be simply letting Comcast waste their resources building out fiber to the home, then announce a wireless high speed connection to anywhere in the home using a PAN from the outside at more than twice the rate. If,say, they put little caching miniservers/Tivo's at the HFC connection, they could serve 20-200 or so houses at a LOT less cost than what it cost Comcast to put in a more limited fiber connection....and COmcast will have all that money invested in outdated physical plant
Don't count AT&T out just yet, guys.
Centos is definitely one of the top 5 open source projects for developers (along with Eclipse, Sun Java(technically), GCC and KDE.
I can't thank them enough for all their hard work.
Now if they would only put NTFS support in the compiled versions. I always feel guilty running an unsupported kernel, like I am disappointing them.