Of course, you have to consider that the market is also about 40 times bigger in the US.
I still think that disposible income in the US is stretched too thin, right now, for broadband to move significantly past where it is. Even further, imagine what would happen if people stopped carrying balances on their credit cards...I'd bet we hit another recession from the disappearance of the "magic plastic money." For most of middle class America, it is still a matter of giving something up to get something else or set one's self up for future disaster with cash loans and credit cards. It just isn't win-win for broadband.
Frankly, this blows your argument out of the water.
No, the GP argument still stands, IMO. For a single fixed sum of money put into Sweden, they can equip their whole country and say "Hey, we beat you! Nyah!" For the same amount of money, the USA can equip only, say, Ohio. Capital doesn't grow on trees, so what are the odds that US companies can source 50 times the capital to bring everyone in the country up to Sweden's broadband? Compound that with competition among cable/satellite TV, cell phones, video games, home computers, and buying bread for our children, coupled with a tight economy, and broadband is still viewed as a luxury in much of the USA.
...because of FCC regs. But then again, so is localized monopoly of cable service (again, blame the FCC).
Another way to blame the FCC: the 29% tax on each of my phone bills. Last week I got an advertisement from my phone company, and their price was unreal...way too low. And, then, I remembered all the taxes they don't mention. At 29%, not mentioning the taxes is false advertising, IMO.
This will also decrease the price of cable TV (note that satellite has already helped with this, but more competition is always good).
If they can get satellite Internet access anywhere near affordable, then I'm on board, because my county has no other broadband option (apparently more rural than your mother, even).
It is an order of magnitude easier to develop a fairly high quality game due to OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL, Blender, Gimp, etc., all of which are either entirely open source or significantly so (e.g., Mesa and DRI). With these tools, better games on a lower budget are inevitable.
Agreed, as long as we exclude most of the 1970s and the 1980s in the US, when US automakers made genius decisions like putting 100HP engines in 4000lb trucks and making sure every emissions control would break repeatedly causing absolutely terrible emissions and very expensive repairs. Jumping straight from the 60s to 2004...actually, we're getting back to muscle cars but with modern safety and fuel economy, so a fantastic car to you r likeing just might be at a local dealer this year.
In the age of the Internet this is a shallow useless act that only shows a repressive nature of somebody or some group.
Given that most information in human history has been created only recently and is not in the public domain leaves me wondering if you are too optimistic about the Internet. The public domain (IIRC) exists mostly for stuff created over 75 years ago or, more clearly, stuff before 1923, which, while important, is a small fraction of the information that should be on the Internet. In another 75 years, will we have access to the great creators from our time, or will their work be locked away in someone's vault for no one to see?
Changing the US Constitution on grounds of morality.
The most successful amendments (e.g., Sufferage, Slavery) added legal rights; the least successful (Prohibition) took them away. All had moral basis, but only the "additive" ones work. The marriage amendment is not additive by any measure. I think the authors of the US Constitution really had adding rights in mind for the Constitutions amendment mechanism, but, perhaps, they felt a need to not be so explicit about it leading to much debate over things like alcohol and marriage.
Probably not, as so much unburnt fuel and oil goes straight through a two-stroke engine out the exhaust and into the atmosphere. Two-strokes win in simplicity but are just plain dirty to run. Anyone who operates a model airplane engine and sees all the oil coating the airplane after a flight knows what I mean.
I am purposefully buying four-stroke engines for things like lawn mowers and weed eaters, not only because they are cleaner, but they are quieter, too.
Over the course of Windows history, it was a largely non-networked OS. Only fairly recently has every person and their mother-in-law connected their home PC directly to the Internet.
Your analogy is analogous to: cars haven't been all that bulletproof since, well, forever, so why is the latest trend of everyone driving through crime-infested neighborhoods at 3am resulting in so many shootings? (the Internet is the crime-infested neighborhood of the computing world)
My mom recently got a call with what is apparently George Bush's recorded voice saying she is getting an absentee ballot in the mail soon. Since she did not request the ballot and literally lives around the corner from the place she would normally vote, the phone call sounds suspect. Anyone know about these things? I already warned her that it could be a scam.
Why is it that entertainment producers work so hard to make their products not entertaining? To me, it seems pretty retarded, but, perhaps, I'm just not as wise and all-seeing as they are.
Star Wars has Jedi and the Force. Dune has the Bene Gesserit and Muaddib. Foundation has Hari Seldon and his legacy. Ender's Game (including sequels) has telepathy, at least.
Well, Star Wars is sci-fi as much as Dune, Foundation, and Ender's Game are. Star Wars was always geared a little more for the mass market, but it is still quite an epic tale spanning generations and civilizations.
One of the few movies where the intervening TV commercials were just enough to keep viewers from gouging their eyes out and driving pencils into their ears.
2001 is a masterpiece depicting the humanity, beauty, and reality of space travel and the genuine incomprehensibility of intelligent extra-terrestrial life. 2001 is as uninvolved as Beethoven's symphonies are cold and heartless.
Probably the only conclusion that can be made about the desktop debate is that nearly everyone on all sides of the argument is living in denial. For every inconsistency in a UNIX/X Windows desktop there is one in MS Windows, for every compatibility problem in a UNIX/X Windows based desktop there is one in MS Windows, for every administrative problem in UNIX/X Windows there is a problem in MS Windows. It's a global case of one's own farts not stinking, one's own kids not being jerks, etc. I think the desktop debate has decomposed down to the point of Ford vs. Chevy, complete with those stickers of Calvin peeing on stuff.
A much more important debate is open standards in MS Windows and MS Office. Let people live with their own problems in their desktop of choice, but at least let them communicate.
UNIX still has better compartmentalization. A sendmail worm is a sendmail worm, a hole in rsh is a hole in rsh, etc. These problems can be hunted down and fixed one by one. With Internet Explorer and Windows...who knows? I've read about a "cut-n-paste" programmer culture at Microsoft, so there's a good chance that one problem might need 100 fixes.
Another thought: Nike|Reebok|Adidas-brand armor boots would actually be a big hit among certain gamers...the ones that buy Nike|Reebok|Adidas-brand shoes because [favorite athlete just out on parole signed for another 15 million] wears them. Pretty lame, but this sort of product placement would work among the insecure adolescents out there who are seeking their place in the world of empty fashion.
The only people that will see the ads are people watching someone play.
I'm not sure about this. RPGs, where the character spends most of his/her time just walking around talking to people, the people could say things like "Oooh, this [brand] cola sure hits the spot and it's a chrome cleaner, too!" or "Hey, kids, [brand] sardines are high in calcium for strong bones and teeth!". In games like Doom, I wouldn't be surpised if the gamer could read 1000 ads at once plastered all over the walls and ceilings while looking for imps.
Regardless, given that games are already a time sink, I, ironically, become angry when the game starts wasting my time. Ads are essentially a waste of time in a paid-for game. Add 30-second ads to the process of "leveling up" in an RPG (use your Nike|Reebok|Adidas-brand armor boots to defeat a boss and get to see an ad...tons of fun), and heads would start exploding the world over.
I would bet that ads in games would be percieved as 100 times worse than product placement in movies.
when considering how few people can design a good database schema! Sadly, the same college newbies hired for the Java skills get stuck looking like deer in the headlights when dealing with storing their darn data. Remember, kids, when you see fields like email1 and email2 in your design, sit back and think about the pain you will cause when someone needs email3 (i.e., you need a different solution entirely).
When a patent regarding, say, computing comes out.. why doesn't it end up in PC Magazine, or on Slashdot, for peer review?
What about things like ACM or IEEE? Also, the old fogies in the academic associations might be more likely to say "sudo? No, we even did that in 1749 on our thermo-mechanical wafflinferometrix. Here's the wood cut of the design!"
It's bizarre for electronics to fail that often. I keep stuff for years and it doesn't break. In fact, the only thing to break recently was an answering machine that got zapped by a power surge. Everything else runs until it wears out or is completely obselete.
The PSPs are not a good investment. Your example is not representative of most people's experience with electronics. Best Buy knows this very well, which is the only reason they sell them (many many $$$ for Best Buy). For a typical set of electronics purchases, simply not buying PSPs will more than cover the cost of replacements (i.e., why buy insurance when you can be completely self-insured?).
Yes, for example the SC income tax form has a "use tax" blank for mail-order and on-line purchases. It's an honor system tax. LOL. Like people would ever volunteer to pay tax. Probably the only real use of this stuff to the government is to trap suspected criminals on tax evasion when there isn't enough other evidence.
There are over 30,000,000 functional illiterates here in the United States.
Last night, on The News Hour on PBS, they had two women discussing charter schools vs. public schools in the US. Students at both types of schools scored less than 30% of students being competent at math and reading, so I really couldn't figure out the purpose of their debate at all (i.e., schools basically suck, please please let them stop buying craploads of computers and stadiums and start making "teacher" a real profession, again).
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, you have to consider that the market is also about 40 times bigger in the US.
I still think that disposible income in the US is stretched too thin, right now, for broadband to move significantly past where it is. Even further, imagine what would happen if people stopped carrying balances on their credit cards...I'd bet we hit another recession from the disappearance of the "magic plastic money." For most of middle class America, it is still a matter of giving something up to get something else or set one's self up for future disaster with cash loans and credit cards. It just isn't win-win for broadband.
Frankly, this blows your argument out of the water.
No, the GP argument still stands, IMO. For a single fixed sum of money put into Sweden, they can equip their whole country and say "Hey, we beat you! Nyah!" For the same amount of money, the USA can equip only, say, Ohio. Capital doesn't grow on trees, so what are the odds that US companies can source 50 times the capital to bring everyone in the country up to Sweden's broadband? Compound that with competition among cable/satellite TV, cell phones, video games, home computers, and buying bread for our children, coupled with a tight economy, and broadband is still viewed as a luxury in much of the USA.
...because of FCC regs. But then again, so is localized monopoly of cable service (again, blame the FCC).
Another way to blame the FCC: the 29% tax on each of my phone bills. Last week I got an advertisement from my phone company, and their price was unreal...way too low. And, then, I remembered all the taxes they don't mention. At 29%, not mentioning the taxes is false advertising, IMO.
This will also decrease the price of cable TV (note that satellite has already helped with this, but more competition is always good).
If they can get satellite Internet access anywhere near affordable, then I'm on board, because my county has no other broadband option (apparently more rural than your mother, even).
It is an order of magnitude easier to develop a fairly high quality game due to OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL, Blender, Gimp, etc., all of which are either entirely open source or significantly so (e.g., Mesa and DRI). With these tools, better games on a lower budget are inevitable.
Cars used to be built much better.
Agreed, as long as we exclude most of the 1970s and the 1980s in the US, when US automakers made genius decisions like putting 100HP engines in 4000lb trucks and making sure every emissions control would break repeatedly causing absolutely terrible emissions and very expensive repairs. Jumping straight from the 60s to 2004...actually, we're getting back to muscle cars but with modern safety and fuel economy, so a fantastic car to you r likeing just might be at a local dealer this year.
In the age of the Internet this is a shallow useless act that only shows a repressive nature of somebody or some group.
Given that most information in human history has been created only recently and is not in the public domain leaves me wondering if you are too optimistic about the Internet. The public domain (IIRC) exists mostly for stuff created over 75 years ago or, more clearly, stuff before 1923, which, while important, is a small fraction of the information that should be on the Internet. In another 75 years, will we have access to the great creators from our time, or will their work be locked away in someone's vault for no one to see?
Changing the US Constitution on grounds of morality.
The most successful amendments (e.g., Sufferage, Slavery) added legal rights; the least successful (Prohibition) took them away. All had moral basis, but only the "additive" ones work. The marriage amendment is not additive by any measure. I think the authors of the US Constitution really had adding rights in mind for the Constitutions amendment mechanism, but, perhaps, they felt a need to not be so explicit about it leading to much debate over things like alcohol and marriage.
Two strokes could make a come back.
Probably not, as so much unburnt fuel and oil goes straight through a two-stroke engine out the exhaust and into the atmosphere. Two-strokes win in simplicity but are just plain dirty to run. Anyone who operates a model airplane engine and sees all the oil coating the airplane after a flight knows what I mean.
I am purposefully buying four-stroke engines for things like lawn mowers and weed eaters, not only because they are cleaner, but they are quieter, too.
Over the course of Windows history, it was a largely non-networked OS. Only fairly recently has every person and their mother-in-law connected their home PC directly to the Internet.
Your analogy is analogous to: cars haven't been all that bulletproof since, well, forever, so why is the latest trend of everyone driving through crime-infested neighborhoods at 3am resulting in so many shootings? (the Internet is the crime-infested neighborhood of the computing world)
My mom recently got a call with what is apparently George Bush's recorded voice saying she is getting an absentee ballot in the mail soon. Since she did not request the ballot and literally lives around the corner from the place she would normally vote, the phone call sounds suspect. Anyone know about these things? I already warned her that it could be a scam.
Why is it that entertainment producers work so hard to make their products not entertaining? To me, it seems pretty retarded, but, perhaps, I'm just not as wise and all-seeing as they are.
Star Wars has Jedi and the Force.
Dune has the Bene Gesserit and Muaddib.
Foundation has Hari Seldon and his legacy.
Ender's Game (including sequels) has telepathy, at least.
Well, Star Wars is sci-fi as much as Dune, Foundation, and Ender's Game are. Star Wars was always geared a little more for the mass market, but it is still quite an epic tale spanning generations and civilizations.
No Battllefield Earth?
One of the few movies where the intervening TV commercials were just enough to keep viewers from gouging their eyes out and driving pencils into their ears.
2001 is a masterpiece depicting the humanity, beauty, and reality of space travel and the genuine incomprehensibility of intelligent extra-terrestrial life. 2001 is as uninvolved as Beethoven's symphonies are cold and heartless.
Probably the only conclusion that can be made about the desktop debate is that nearly everyone on all sides of the argument is living in denial. For every inconsistency in a UNIX/X Windows desktop there is one in MS Windows, for every compatibility problem in a UNIX/X Windows based desktop there is one in MS Windows, for every administrative problem in UNIX/X Windows there is a problem in MS Windows. It's a global case of one's own farts not stinking, one's own kids not being jerks, etc. I think the desktop debate has decomposed down to the point of Ford vs. Chevy, complete with those stickers of Calvin peeing on stuff.
A much more important debate is open standards in MS Windows and MS Office. Let people live with their own problems in their desktop of choice, but at least let them communicate.
UNIX still has better compartmentalization. A sendmail worm is a sendmail worm, a hole in rsh is a hole in rsh, etc. These problems can be hunted down and fixed one by one. With Internet Explorer and Windows...who knows? I've read about a "cut-n-paste" programmer culture at Microsoft, so there's a good chance that one problem might need 100 fixes.
Another thought: Nike|Reebok|Adidas-brand armor boots would actually be a big hit among certain gamers...the ones that buy Nike|Reebok|Adidas-brand shoes because [favorite athlete just out on parole signed for another 15 million] wears them. Pretty lame, but this sort of product placement would work among the insecure adolescents out there who are seeking their place in the world of empty fashion.
The only people that will see the ads are people watching someone play.
I'm not sure about this. RPGs, where the character spends most of his/her time just walking around talking to people, the people could say things like "Oooh, this [brand] cola sure hits the spot and it's a chrome cleaner, too!" or "Hey, kids, [brand] sardines are high in calcium for strong bones and teeth!". In games like Doom, I wouldn't be surpised if the gamer could read 1000 ads at once plastered all over the walls and ceilings while looking for imps.
Regardless, given that games are already a time sink, I, ironically, become angry when the game starts wasting my time. Ads are essentially a waste of time in a paid-for game. Add 30-second ads to the process of "leveling up" in an RPG (use your Nike|Reebok|Adidas-brand armor boots to defeat a boss and get to see an ad...tons of fun), and heads would start exploding the world over.
I would bet that ads in games would be percieved as 100 times worse than product placement in movies.
when considering how few people can design a good database schema! Sadly, the same college newbies hired for the Java skills get stuck looking like deer in the headlights when dealing with storing their darn data. Remember, kids, when you see fields like email1 and email2 in your design, sit back and think about the pain you will cause when someone needs email3 (i.e., you need a different solution entirely).
When a patent regarding, say, computing comes out.. why doesn't it end up in PC Magazine, or on Slashdot, for peer review?
What about things like ACM or IEEE? Also, the old fogies in the academic associations might be more likely to say "sudo? No, we even did that in 1749 on our thermo-mechanical wafflinferometrix. Here's the wood cut of the design!"
In one way or another they will pay for it in their tuition fee.
Oh, I thought Duke tuition went towards landscaping.
It's bizarre for electronics to fail that often. I keep stuff for years and it doesn't break. In fact, the only thing to break recently was an answering machine that got zapped by a power surge. Everything else runs until it wears out or is completely obselete.
The PSPs are not a good investment. Your example is not representative of most people's experience with electronics. Best Buy knows this very well, which is the only reason they sell them (many many $$$ for Best Buy). For a typical set of electronics purchases, simply not buying PSPs will more than cover the cost of replacements (i.e., why buy insurance when you can be completely self-insured?).
I'd never heard this before. Has anyone else?
Yes, for example the SC income tax form has a "use tax" blank for mail-order and on-line purchases. It's an honor system tax. LOL. Like people would ever volunteer to pay tax. Probably the only real use of this stuff to the government is to trap suspected criminals on tax evasion when there isn't enough other evidence.
There are over 30,000,000 functional illiterates here in the United States.
Last night, on The News Hour on PBS, they had two women discussing charter schools vs. public schools in the US. Students at both types of schools scored less than 30% of students being competent at math and reading, so I really couldn't figure out the purpose of their debate at all (i.e., schools basically suck, please please let them stop buying craploads of computers and stadiums and start making "teacher" a real profession, again).